| From | Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect <[email protected]> |
| Subject | The smaller Trump outrages |
| Date | August 25, 2025 7:05 PM |
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In Trump’s march to dictatorship, the lesser outrages almost get lost. His presidency signals the cheapening of America.View this email in your browser [link removed]
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****AUGUST 25, 2025****
**On the
**Prospect **website**
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EPA Is ‘100 Percent’ Union-Busting, Workers Say [link removed]
After ending their collective-bargaining agreements, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered employees to seek prior approval for protected union activities on non-duty time.
**BY JAMES BARATTA** [link removed]
[link removed]
A Federal Appellate Court Finds the NLRB to Be Unconstitutional [link removed]
And just like that, it frees Elon Musk—and any fellow employers—to violate whatever rights their workers thought they enjoyed.
**BY HAROLD MEYERSON** [link removed]
[link removed]
How One Teamsters Local Is Striking to Protect Immigrant Workers [link removed]
The union wants bosses to turn away immigration authorities unless they show a signed judicial warrant, but resistance is fierce.
**BY SARAH LAZARE** [link removed]
****Kuttner on TAP****
**The smaller Trump outrages**
**In Trump’s march to dictatorship, the lesser outrages almost get lost. His presidency signals the cheapening of America.**
I.
Foreign visitors to the White House are often surprised at how modest the presidential mansion is, as befits a republic. Trump, obsessed about size, **is adding a 90,000-square-foot meeting hall** [link removed] to the East Wing, dwarfing the original structure.
More egregious still is the fact that Trump ordered the **paving over of the Rose Garden** [link removed]. The new patio where roses once bloomed was unveiled this month. **It has oversized umbrellas** [link removed] like the ones at Mar-a-Lago. Trump treats the White House as his personal property rather than as a national shrine that he gets to occupy temporarily.
Trump doesn’t know much about history. If he did, he would know that Hitler ordered a massive display of swastikas on poles that all but crowded out the linden trees that graced Berlin’s grand boulevard, Unter den Linden. The linden trees were later chopped down for firewood. Plowing under the iconic White House Rose Garden in favor of a Mar-a-Lago plaza is a grotesquerie worthy of Hitler.
On his first day in office, **Trump issued an order** [link removed] titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” The order, with no sense of irony, read in part, “Federal public buildings should … uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Quite so.
II.
This weekend, strolling through Boston Common, a visitor would encounter four massive Marine helicopters. They are part of the national celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps. The anniversary, marking the creation of America’s armed forces in 1775, inspired Trump’s own celebration of the Army in June, which provided the president with a birthday backdrop for his sparsely attended Russian-style military parade.
In Boston, people were lined up to take tours of the helicopters, one of the few advanced products that the U.S. still manufactures and exports, as Trump destroys the renewable-energy economy.
This yearlong celebration was the work of the Marine Corps, not Trump. But the symbolism is creepy. All week, military aircraft have been buzzing downtown Boston, echoing the National Guard patrols of D.C. and portending the occupation of the next cities on Trump’s list.
Beside the helicopter exhibit was a sign. “Pardon our noise. It’s the sound of freedom.”
Uh, no. The sound of freedom is elected officials debating and voting on laws, judges handing down decisions free from partisan taint, ordinary citizens speaking at local meetings and turning out to vote, and the media reporting without fear or favor. Depending on who is ordering copters to do what, they can embody the sound of freedom, or of despotism.
prospect.org/donate
III.
On Friday, the administration just happened to release the transcript of the interviews of convicted sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. By a remarkable coincidence, this release occurred the same day that the Justice Department, under subpoena, turned over to the House Oversight Committee a **first trove of documents** [link removed] from its investigation of Epstein, potentially far more damning to Trump.
In her interviews, Maxwell describes Trump as saintly when it comes to women. “The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects,” Maxwell said **during two days of interviews** [link removed] in Tallahassee, where she was serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Her trial included detailed accounts of sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told **by four women who described being abused as teens** [link removed] in Epstein’s homes.
She added, “President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me … I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him.”
As anyone with an ounce of worldly sophistication must appreciate, Maxwell, who was recently moved to a lower-security prison, is repaying Trump for the favor and angling for a pardon. But this would be very tricky for Trump, since the MAGA base is obsessed with the Epstein case, and obsessed with politicians who are involved with, or soft on, sex trafficking of minors.
Was anybody fooled by the clumsy diversion of the release of the Maxwell transcript? Well, Jeff Bezos’s
**Washington Post** **described the two releases** [link removed] as “unrelated.”
IV.
One day, in the late 1960s, my then-girlfriend was walking up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan carrying a shopping bag with half a kilo of weed. She had scored it from a dealer as a favor to several friends and was en route to make deliveries. She was young and innocent-looking. A kid who couldn’t have been more than 14 tried to take it from her. She handed him a five-dollar bill and told him to get lost. If the cops had happened to get involved, she risked a long prison term.
In that era, we were mainly protesting segregation, the war in Vietnam, widespread poverty, and sex discrimination, to name four. Still, there were hundreds of thousands of people behind bars for simple possession of marijuana, and with Nixon’s war on drugs the incarcerations only got worse. A young crusader named Keith Stroup, with a $5,000 grant from the Playboy Foundation, organized NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
I was ambivalent. Prison sentences for pot were appalling and worth resisting, but I was focused on more consequential issues. I wasn’t wild about the stoner culture either. Weed might help some creative people become more creative. But in my circle, the people who spent half of their time high tended to get way too far into their own heads, and were mainly boring.
**Oh wow**.
This was the era when the Yippies, who were into revolution by giggles, mocked the earnest radicals of SDS.
Fast-forward five decades. We have lost most of the other struggles. Racism is fashionable again. The gap between wealth and poverty has never been wider. The Vietnam War ended, but worse wars persist. But good old Keith Stroup basically won.
Marijuana has been decriminalized in 31 states, though it is still technically illegal under federal law. In most of libertarian America, red as well as blue, nobody gets busted for smoking a joint, or even for dealing small quantities.
However, the result is not quite what my crowd imagined. Rather than small producers growing and selling pot, the stuff has been commercialized. And it’s commercialized but unregulated by the FDA, typically a lot stronger than when I was young, and of varying strengths; so you have no idea what you are getting.
The five largest companies selling weed each bring in over a billion dollars a year and are vertically integrated, beginning with Curaleaf, Trulieve Cannabis, and Green Thumb Industries. Your storefront pot shop with the cute name that drives up rents and crowds out the local bakery is likely to be owned by one of these conglomerates.
In short, the stuff that epitomized the counterculture is now one more big business. A pot reformer circa 1970, who just wanted a few tokes in peace, might say, with T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, that is not what I meant at all.
And because of the legal ambiguity, weed growers and wholesalers are sitting ducks for selective prosecution. And—wouldn’t you know it—Donald Trump to the rescue. **He is in negotiations with the commercial marijuana lobby** [link removed] over how large a payoff it will take for him to press for full federal legalization.
**Groovy, dude**.
**~ ROBERT KUTTNER**
Follow Robert Kuttner on Bluesky [link removed]
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[link removed]
****AUGUST 25, 2025****
**On the
**Prospect **website**
[link removed]
EPA Is ‘100 Percent’ Union-Busting, Workers Say [link removed]
After ending their collective-bargaining agreements, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered employees to seek prior approval for protected union activities on non-duty time.
**BY JAMES BARATTA** [link removed]
[link removed]
A Federal Appellate Court Finds the NLRB to Be Unconstitutional [link removed]
And just like that, it frees Elon Musk—and any fellow employers—to violate whatever rights their workers thought they enjoyed.
**BY HAROLD MEYERSON** [link removed]
[link removed]
How One Teamsters Local Is Striking to Protect Immigrant Workers [link removed]
The union wants bosses to turn away immigration authorities unless they show a signed judicial warrant, but resistance is fierce.
**BY SARAH LAZARE** [link removed]
****Kuttner on TAP****
**The smaller Trump outrages**
**In Trump’s march to dictatorship, the lesser outrages almost get lost. His presidency signals the cheapening of America.**
I.
Foreign visitors to the White House are often surprised at how modest the presidential mansion is, as befits a republic. Trump, obsessed about size, **is adding a 90,000-square-foot meeting hall** [link removed] to the East Wing, dwarfing the original structure.
More egregious still is the fact that Trump ordered the **paving over of the Rose Garden** [link removed]. The new patio where roses once bloomed was unveiled this month. **It has oversized umbrellas** [link removed] like the ones at Mar-a-Lago. Trump treats the White House as his personal property rather than as a national shrine that he gets to occupy temporarily.
Trump doesn’t know much about history. If he did, he would know that Hitler ordered a massive display of swastikas on poles that all but crowded out the linden trees that graced Berlin’s grand boulevard, Unter den Linden. The linden trees were later chopped down for firewood. Plowing under the iconic White House Rose Garden in favor of a Mar-a-Lago plaza is a grotesquerie worthy of Hitler.
On his first day in office, **Trump issued an order** [link removed] titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” The order, with no sense of irony, read in part, “Federal public buildings should … uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Quite so.
II.
This weekend, strolling through Boston Common, a visitor would encounter four massive Marine helicopters. They are part of the national celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps. The anniversary, marking the creation of America’s armed forces in 1775, inspired Trump’s own celebration of the Army in June, which provided the president with a birthday backdrop for his sparsely attended Russian-style military parade.
In Boston, people were lined up to take tours of the helicopters, one of the few advanced products that the U.S. still manufactures and exports, as Trump destroys the renewable-energy economy.
This yearlong celebration was the work of the Marine Corps, not Trump. But the symbolism is creepy. All week, military aircraft have been buzzing downtown Boston, echoing the National Guard patrols of D.C. and portending the occupation of the next cities on Trump’s list.
Beside the helicopter exhibit was a sign. “Pardon our noise. It’s the sound of freedom.”
Uh, no. The sound of freedom is elected officials debating and voting on laws, judges handing down decisions free from partisan taint, ordinary citizens speaking at local meetings and turning out to vote, and the media reporting without fear or favor. Depending on who is ordering copters to do what, they can embody the sound of freedom, or of despotism.
prospect.org/donate
III.
On Friday, the administration just happened to release the transcript of the interviews of convicted sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. By a remarkable coincidence, this release occurred the same day that the Justice Department, under subpoena, turned over to the House Oversight Committee a **first trove of documents** [link removed] from its investigation of Epstein, potentially far more damning to Trump.
In her interviews, Maxwell describes Trump as saintly when it comes to women. “The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects,” Maxwell said **during two days of interviews** [link removed] in Tallahassee, where she was serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Her trial included detailed accounts of sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told **by four women who described being abused as teens** [link removed] in Epstein’s homes.
She added, “President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me … I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him.”
As anyone with an ounce of worldly sophistication must appreciate, Maxwell, who was recently moved to a lower-security prison, is repaying Trump for the favor and angling for a pardon. But this would be very tricky for Trump, since the MAGA base is obsessed with the Epstein case, and obsessed with politicians who are involved with, or soft on, sex trafficking of minors.
Was anybody fooled by the clumsy diversion of the release of the Maxwell transcript? Well, Jeff Bezos’s
**Washington Post** **described the two releases** [link removed] as “unrelated.”
IV.
One day, in the late 1960s, my then-girlfriend was walking up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan carrying a shopping bag with half a kilo of weed. She had scored it from a dealer as a favor to several friends and was en route to make deliveries. She was young and innocent-looking. A kid who couldn’t have been more than 14 tried to take it from her. She handed him a five-dollar bill and told him to get lost. If the cops had happened to get involved, she risked a long prison term.
In that era, we were mainly protesting segregation, the war in Vietnam, widespread poverty, and sex discrimination, to name four. Still, there were hundreds of thousands of people behind bars for simple possession of marijuana, and with Nixon’s war on drugs the incarcerations only got worse. A young crusader named Keith Stroup, with a $5,000 grant from the Playboy Foundation, organized NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
I was ambivalent. Prison sentences for pot were appalling and worth resisting, but I was focused on more consequential issues. I wasn’t wild about the stoner culture either. Weed might help some creative people become more creative. But in my circle, the people who spent half of their time high tended to get way too far into their own heads, and were mainly boring.
**Oh wow**.
This was the era when the Yippies, who were into revolution by giggles, mocked the earnest radicals of SDS.
Fast-forward five decades. We have lost most of the other struggles. Racism is fashionable again. The gap between wealth and poverty has never been wider. The Vietnam War ended, but worse wars persist. But good old Keith Stroup basically won.
Marijuana has been decriminalized in 31 states, though it is still technically illegal under federal law. In most of libertarian America, red as well as blue, nobody gets busted for smoking a joint, or even for dealing small quantities.
However, the result is not quite what my crowd imagined. Rather than small producers growing and selling pot, the stuff has been commercialized. And it’s commercialized but unregulated by the FDA, typically a lot stronger than when I was young, and of varying strengths; so you have no idea what you are getting.
The five largest companies selling weed each bring in over a billion dollars a year and are vertically integrated, beginning with Curaleaf, Trulieve Cannabis, and Green Thumb Industries. Your storefront pot shop with the cute name that drives up rents and crowds out the local bakery is likely to be owned by one of these conglomerates.
In short, the stuff that epitomized the counterculture is now one more big business. A pot reformer circa 1970, who just wanted a few tokes in peace, might say, with T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, that is not what I meant at all.
And because of the legal ambiguity, weed growers and wholesalers are sitting ducks for selective prosecution. And—wouldn’t you know it—Donald Trump to the rescue. **He is in negotiations with the commercial marijuana lobby** [link removed] over how large a payoff it will take for him to press for full federal legalization.
**Groovy, dude**.
**~ ROBERT KUTTNER**
Follow Robert Kuttner on Bluesky [link removed]
[link removed]
To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to subscribe [link removed]
**Click to Share This Newsletter**
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here [link removed].
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, click here [link removed].
Sent to: [email protected]
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