July 12, 2025

The Texas Floods and FEMA

 


In Flooded Texas, Questions About FEMA’s Role and Fate

“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”

Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”

Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.
President Trump wants to shutter the agency and shift responsibility and costs of emergency management to the states. In Texas, that process appears to already be underway.

Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott said that rescuers would continue to search for those affected by the floods: “We will not stop until we identify, recover every single body.” At least 173 people remain missing.

  • Eight-year-old girls at sleep-away camp; families crammed into riverside R.V.s; residents asleep in their beds. These are the lives lost to the Texas floods.
  • The Camp Mystic cabins were in an “extremely hazardous” area for floods. A recent expansion built new cabins in the flood zone. See maps.
  • Along the Guadalupe River, the rising floodwaters quickly engulfed a 60-room inn. Watch a video.

Under fire, Texas officials can’t answer why the Texas Hill Country flood victims didn’t get more notice of the impending catastrophe. The National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m July 4 of a “catastrophic” potential for loss of life, and questions are intensifying about what local officials were doing during those hours after the warning. Kerr County County Sheriff Larry Leitha acknowledged that he wasn’t notified about the flooding until between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m.—by which point the river had already risen as much as 26 feet near Camp Mystic.

On July 5, the day after the Texas floods hit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received 3,027 calls from survivors and answered 3,018 of them, about 99.7%, according to Maxine Joselow of the New York Times. But that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or about 35.8%. On Monday, July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, around 15.9%.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”

Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel notes that one reason Noem has been cutting so ferociously at FEMA is because she has run through the money Congress allocated for HHS with her single-minded focus on immigration.


July 11, 2025

U.S. Inflation Remains Muted, With Limited Effects From Tariffs

 While inflation remained relatively muted through May, consumer spending, which is the primary driver of U.S. economic growth, has started to sputter, as Americans pull back on purchases after months of stockpiling to get ahead of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

David Kelly, the chief global strategist for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, still described the U.S. economy as a “relatively healthy tortoise,” resilient and expanding, slowly but surely. He projected that the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its total output, would grow about 1 percent by the end of 2025 compared with the year prior.

But, he added, the economy has reached a “bit of a diversion in the road,” as some of Mr. Trump’s new policies start to take effect.

Draconian policies toward immigrants create a backlash.

In May, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called out Noem’s expenditure of $200 million on an ad campaign pushing Trump’s agenda and $21 million to transport about 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay only to have many of them transferred back out. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Noem: “You are spending like you don’t have a budget…. You're on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you've been given, or to invent money. And this obsession with spending at the border…has left the country unprotected elsewhere.

Noem responded to Blumenthal that she was fulfilling a mandate. She told him: “The American people overwhelmingly in the last election said, ‘We want a secure border, we want to make sure no longer are the scales of justice tipped in the favor of criminals….’” A recent video posted to Facebook Reels by the Department of Homeland Security makes it clear Noem’s justification was cover for a violent Christian nationalist vision in which ICE and the Border Patrol are enforcing God’s commandments. A dark film invokes Isaiah 6:8, the Bible verse in which God asks, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah answers, “Here am I! Send me.” The exchange is widely interpreted to show volunteers willing to do God’s work.

A poll released Friday makes it clear that the American people do not support such a vision and did not, in fact, expect a Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record and have lived in the U.S. for years. A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that the administration’s draconian policies toward immigrants have created a backlash. A record 79% of adults say immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. That change has been driven primarily by a shift in Republicans, 64% of whom now agree that immigrants are good for the country, up from their low of under 40%. The percentage of American adults who say immigration should be reduced has dropped to 30%, down from 55% in 2024.

Those numbers are unlikely to improve for the administration in light of yesterday’s ICE raids at two licensed cannabis farms in Southern California. Agents used less-lethal ammunition and tear gas in the raids. A number of people were injured, one critically. Agents arrested 200 people, including George Retes, a 25-year-old disabled veteran and U.S. citizen who worked at one of the farms as a security guard. Agents claimed Retes was a protester. His family has been unable to locate him, telling Josh Haskell of the local ABC affiliate that the local sheriff’s office and local police departments all said they do not know where he is.

More information coming about about the conditions of immigrant detention are also unlikely to increase support for the administration's policies. Today, at least five members of Congress and about 20 state legislators toured the new ICE detention center in the Everglades. The tour was planned rather than unexpected, enabling staff to prepare for it. Nonetheless, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said: “These detainees are living in cages. The pictures you've seen don't do it justice. They are essentially packed into cages. Wall to wall humans. Thirty-two detainees per cage…. There are three tiny toilets that…have a sink attached to it, so…they get their drinking water and they brush their teeth where they poop, in the same unit." Nine hundred men are currently in the facility.

July 10, 2025

Supreme Court Clears Way for Mass Firings at Federal Agencies

 The justices announced they were not ruling on the legality of the specific downsizing plans but they allowed the Trump administration to proceed for now with its restructuring efforts.The case represents a key test of the extent of President Trump’s power to reorganize the government without input from Congress. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times


By Abbie VanSickle
Reporting from Washington
Published July 8, 2025Updated July 9, 2025

The Trump administration can move forward with plans to slash the federal work force and dismantle federal agencies, the Supreme Court announced on Tuesday. The decision could result in job losses for tens of thousands of employees at agencies including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury.

The order, which lifted a lower court’s ruling that had blocked mass layoffs, was unsigned and did not include a vote count. That is typical in such emergency applications. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a public dissent.

The case represents a key test of the extent of President Trump’s power to reorganize the government without input from Congress. The justices’ order is technically only temporary, guiding how the administration can proceed while the challenge to Mr. Trump’s plans continues. But in practice, it means he is free to pursue his restructuring plans, even if judges later determine that they exceed presidential power.the United States added 147,000 jobs, beating analysts’ expectations. Yet the sources of that growth also appeared to narrow, evidenced in a continued slump in manufacturing jobs and lackluster hiring across the retail and professional services sectors. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1 percent, but the number of people out of work for more than six months rose.



The Collapse of the F.D.A.:


The Collapse of the F.D.A.: Since R.F.K. Jr. was confirmed as Trump’s health secretary, the Food and Drug Administration has been buffeted by staff cuts that have crippled divisions and gutted the agency. Thousands of scientists and other experts have left or been let go, putting the storied agency’s mission at risk.
The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes "unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.


NYC opioid deaths hit five-year low, latest data shows

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July 9, 2025

For Israel, It Pays to Be a Winner

July 8, 2025

Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist

A core misconception about Israel’s policy since Oct. 7 is that the country has favored military action at the expense of diplomacy. The truth is that it’s Israel’s decisive battlefield victories that have created diplomatic openings that have been out of reach for decades — and would have remained so if Israel hadn’t won.

In Beirut on Monday, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, said he was “unbelievably satisfied” by the response he got from President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon on U.S. proposals to disarm Hezbollah, reportedly in exchange for critical financial aid after a six-year economic crisis. Aoun’s government is the first in the country’s history to make progress in disarming Hezbollah’s strongholds near the Israeli border — a basic condition for Israel to withdraw from five military outposts it still occupies in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah is not a group that will go quietly — not if it has any other option. But it’s because Israel destroyed it as an effective fighting force last year that it’s now possible for the Lebanese state to again possess the most basic form of sovereignty, a monopoly on the use of force within its borders. And it’s only because of Israel’s victory that there’s a realistic prospect of a peace agreement between Jerusalem and Beirut as part of an expanded Abraham Accords.

There’s a similarly hopeful story in Syria, where last week the Trump administration lifted sanctions on the government of President Ahmed al-Shara. The United States has been a step ahead of Israel in warming to al-Shara, who once led a branch of Al Qaeda and whom some Israeli leaders still see as a closet jihadist. Now there are reports of talks between Jerusalem and Damascus aiming at a de facto peace agreement.

Where that goes remains to be seen. But it’s unlikely that al-Shara’s insurgents could have come to power if Israel hadn’t first destroyed Hezbollah, depriving the regime of Bashar al-Assad of one of its most effective military arms. And neither Jerusalem nor Damascus might have been amenable to talks if Israel hadn’t first destroyed many of Syria’s remaining weapon stockpiles in December, giving al-Shara an incentive to seek a diplomatic outcome and Israel confidence that it wouldn’t face another menace to its north.

Then there’s Gaza. After President Trump’s White House dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday, Israeli officials suggested they were close to a deal that would pause the fighting in exchange for Hamas’s release of more hostages. Trump has speculated that an agreement could happen this week.

This is happening not because the Netanyahu government or what remains of the leadership of Hamas has suddenly realized that there’s been far too much devastation and suffering in Gaza. There has been, and it’s in everyone’s interest to see it end. But humanitarian calls, however sincere, or moral hectoring, however loud, have contributed next to nothing to stopping the fighting. Wars don’t end because Greta Thunberg gets on a boat.

What has counted is the calculus of force. On Hamas’s side, its growing diplomatic flexibility is almost entirely a result of its proximity to total defeat. According to the BBC, one Hamas official has privately described a situation in which 95 percent of the leadership is dead and Hamas has lost control of 80 percent of its territory. Many Gazans have turned against Hamas, looting the offices of its security headquarters and increasingly turning to local clans for food and protection. These are the conditions under which Hamas’s remaining members may finally agree to lay down their arms and go into exile, at last creating the possibility for a permanent end to fighting, new governance and badly needed reconstruction.

On Israel’s side, diplomatic flexibility has three authors. The first is the Israeli public’s understandable exhaustion with 21 months of fighting. The second is pressure from Trump to reach a deal — and Netanyahu’s eagerness to please him.

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But neither factor would have been sufficient if Israel hadn’t achieved its military success over Iran, crowned, from an Israeli point of view, by America’s participation in the campaign.

At a stroke, Israel humiliated its most formidable adversary (and Hamas’s principal patron), demonstrating not only its capacity but also its courage to take on the mullahs directly and survive their reprisals intact. It advertised its capabilities to Saudi Arabia, which may now be more amenable to joining the Abraham Accords — not out of a softhearted desire for peace but out of a hardheaded interest in cementing military, economic and technological ties with the Jewish state. It created at least the possibility that Iran might choose to forgo its nuclear ambitions out of fear of seeing them destroyed again. And its victory gave Netanyahu the upper hand over his far-right coalition partners, allowing him to sign a deal that probably wouldn’t cause his government to collapse.

Critics of Israeli policy have argued that the cost of its military victories lies in its isolation on the world stage or in the contempt in which it is held by people like Zohran Mamdani and Tucker Carlson. There’s also no doubt that hatred of Israel has done much to contribute to growing antisemitism, although it’s equally true that antisemitism lies at the root of much of the hatred of Israel.

Then again, Israel doesn’t exist to placate the feelings of its detractors and defamers. It exists to protect Jewish life and uphold Jewish dignity in a world too intent on destroying both.

Lawrence Summers: This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country


July 8, 2025

Credit...Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

By Lawrence H. Summers
Mr. Summers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a former Treasury secretary.


Last week, Robert Rubin and I warned of the many macroeconomic risks created by the domestic policy bill President Trump signed into law on Friday. I stand by our judgment that it will most likely slow growth, risk a financial crisis, exacerbate trade deficits and undermine national security by exhausting the government’s borrowing capacity. This is more than ample reason to regret its passage.

I want to return to the topic after conversations with health professionals, including my daughters, who practice medicine and social work in rural New Hampshire. They made me realize that a focus on macroeconomics, while valid, misses the human brutality that I now see as the most problematic aspect of the legislation. I don’t remember on any past Fourth of July being so ashamed of an action my country had just taken.

Over the holiday weekend, while the president was celebrating tax cuts that over 10 years will deliver an average of more than $1 million to families in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution, medical professionals were considering questions like these:

What should they say to seriously disabled patients, who can live at home only because Medicaid pays for rides to their medical appointments, now that those people could lose that coverage?


What should they recommend to the relatives caring for poor patients at home, who will no longer be able to work when payments for home-health aides are no longer available?


How should they advise the hospital to handle patients who can’t afford rehab or nursing facilities and can’t live at home, but who currently occupy rooms desperately needed by acutely ill patients?


Should they still feel proud of and committed to the work of giving comfort to the lonely, poor and elderly, when their country’s leaders have decided that more money for the most fortunate is a higher priority?


How can they face patients who will be evicted from the hospital with perhaps as little as a cab voucher when their stays end?

After we talked about these questions, it occurred to me to think about precedents in American history — other moments when the social safety net was cut — to see what followed. Did the feared consequences materialize? Were errors corrected?
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I am plenty negative about this president and this moment. Even I was unpleasantly surprised by what I learned.

This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far exceeds any other cut the United States has made in its social safety net. The approximately $1 trillion reduction, over 10 years, represents about 0.3 percent of gross domestic product. Previously, the most draconian cuts came with President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax law. But they were far smaller — $12 billion over 10 years and 0.03 percent of G.D.P. The Trump law will remove more than 11 million people from the rolls, compared with about three million under the Reagan cuts. Other noteworthy reductions to the social safety net, such as the Clinton-era welfare reform, were even smaller.

Because Medicaid is a state-level program and varies widely across the country, economists can evaluate the impact of alternative policies. A number of studies suggest that removing one million people from the rolls for one year could result in about 1,000 additional deaths. It follows that removing more than 11 million people for a decade would probably result in more than 100,000 deaths. Because this figure fails to take account of the degradation of service to those who remain eligible — fewer rides to the hospital, less social support — it could well be an underestimate.

The administration claims its policies, such as adding work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, bear only on the able-bodied. I have supported the general idea of work requirements for cash welfare based on a common-sense idea of fairness. But a careful evaluation of an experiment in Arkansas confirms what common sense also suggests — imposing work requirements on a population in need of health insurance does not increase work and does inhibit necessary care.

The cruelty of these cuts is matched only by their stupidity. Medicaid beneficiaries will lose, but so will the rest of us. The cost of care that is no longer reimbursed by Medicaid will instead be borne by hospitals and passed onto paying patients, only at higher levels, because delayed treatment is more expensive. When rural hospitals close, everyone nearby loses. Hospitals like the one where my daughters practice can no longer accept emergencies by air because those beds are occupied by patients with chronic diseases and no place to go.

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Because of the congressional instinct for political survival, the Medicaid cuts are backloaded beyond the 2026 midterms. Cynicism may have a silver lining. As more people realize what is coming, there is time to alter these policies before grave damage is done. TACO — Trump always chickens out — is a doctrine that should apply well beyond financial markets.


July 3, 2025

Racketeering was a ‘stretch’ in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial, legal experts say



A federal court jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case rejected the government’s theory that he ran a criminal enterprise that helped him carry out serious crimes.
July 2, 2025

By Shayna Jacobs and Salvador Rizzo 


NEW YORK — A federal court jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case rejected the government’s theory that he ran a criminal enterprise that helped him carry out serious crimes including sex trafficking and drug distribution.

Some legal experts following the criminal trial said Wednesday that it was not a surprise that the music mogul beat the racketeering conspiracy count in the indictment. It required prosecutors to establish that Combs led an operation involving employees who facilitated illegal sex and drug-related behavior in an organized manner akin to a mafia crime ring.


“Even reading the indictment, it did seem like a stretch to charge Combs with the RICO statute,” said Anna Cominsky, who heads New York Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic. RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

New York lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, who represented mafia scion John Gotti Jr. and Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, described Combs as “a guy that lived a questionable lifestyle and ran a music empire” but said “the RICO charges were so out of place here.”

Combs also was acquitted of two counts of sex trafficking charged as individual crimes. He was convicted on two counts of transporting his accusers for the purpose of prostitution. On the racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking counts, he faced up to life in prison.

Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Ricky Patel, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations’ New York field office, issued a statement addressing the impact of sex crimes on victims and on society but did not address the outcome of the case specifically.

“Sex crimes deeply scar victims, and the disturbing reality is that sex crimes are all too present in many aspects of our society,” the statement said.

The RICO statute has been used in recent years in other cases that involved allegations of sexual violence. Singer R. Kelly was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in federal court in Brooklyn in 2021 for 30 years’ worth of allegations of abuse related to women and minors. In 2019, NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in a case that involved a minor and forced labor from within the self-help organization he headed.

Those cases differed from Combs’s, according to Lichtman, because the accusers in Combs’s case were adults in consensual relationships with the producer and had the ability to leave and see other partners. While they may have suffered abuse, the evidence did not show they were forced into sex, he said, and they sought out more and more sexual experiences and time with Combs.

Unlike in other RICO cases, the Combs case did not include a witness who testified that a distinct organization was committing crimes.

Prosecutors were required to prove that members of the enterprise agreed to commit two racketeering acts from a list of alleged crimes. In summations, prosecutor Christy Slavik said that crimes such as drug distribution and sex trafficking were easily proved and that his two alleged trafficking victims, singer Cassie Ventura and a woman called Jane, a pseudonym, clearly didn’t want to participate in “freak-offs.”

Federal prosecutors often bring racketeering cases against gangs and gang members, including in recent years against the MS-13 organization.


The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has prosecuted dozens of gang members under the RICO statute in recent years, and it usually uses insiders with deep knowledge of the gang to narrate the case for the jury from the witness stand, often relating gruesome crimes that they committed with others.

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Raj Parekh, a former acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who is now at the firm Sparacino PLLC, said: “RICO can be a powerful storytelling vehicle about structure: who gives the orders, who follows them and how the operation runs as a coordinated system. The strongest cases are those where the story is clear, the enterprise is well-defined, and the criminal acts are tightly woven into the enterprise’s structure and purpose.”

He added: “These [insider] witnesses often come with baggage, such as criminal records, plea deals and inconsistent statements. The key is not only to confront these issues directly, but most critically, to ensure the testimony clearly explains to the jury how the witness’s firsthand knowledge supports the charges in the case.”

Virginia defense lawyer Joseph Flood, who has handled RICO cases, also noted that the government did not have a key witness to walk the jury through operations at the alleged organization — one potentially fatal flaw in the government’s strategy in the Combs case. Witnesses who worked for Combs spoke of involvement in drug deliveries and described their role in setting up their boss’s hotel rooms for sex parties but did not discuss a broad scheme or hierarchy.

“I think they had a real uphill climb. … Maybe crimes were committed, but they were sort of ad hoc and done to serve a sexual purpose. … The primary goal here was to pleasure him, not to make money,” Flood said.
Flood said that while the conduct may have been repulsive, “I was shocked that this was going forward as a RICO conspiracy. They just didn’t seem to have it.”



Twenty-Four Hours of Authoritarianism

Donald Trump had a very busy Tuesday.

By Jonathan Chait
Photo of Donald Trump
Jim Watson / AFP / Getty
Photo of Donald Trump
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Not long ago, I ran into an old friend, a well-regarded Democratic intellectual who recently has moved to my right, but who still holds liberal values and is not a Donald Trump supporter. After we commiserated about the excesses of the far left, I mentioned offhandedly that Trump’s maniacal authoritarianism makes the fact that Democrats can’t get their act together so much worse.

He reacted, to my surprise, with indignation. Trump wasn’t canceling elections, he protested, nor was he calling brownshirts into the streets. So how could I call the president authoritarian?

Many highly educated Americans share my friend’s intuition. They believe that if elections are occurring and criticism of the president is not banned outright, then democracy is not under threat. They fail to see the administration’s slow-moving efforts to break down the norms and institutional barriers that otherwise inhibit the ruling party from asphyxiating its opposition. Political scientists who study democracy have a term that clarifies the phenomenon: democratic backsliding. Backslide far enough, and you end up in something called “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections are still held, but the ruling party has commandeered so many institutions in society and has violated so many laws to enhance its own power that the opposition hardly stands a chance. These are dry phrases, but they capture the way in which democracy and authoritarianism are not binary alternatives, but values that lie on a continuum.

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I thought back to my friend’s comments yesterday, because in a single day, Trump took or was revealed to have taken six shocking new assaults on liberal democracy. They would have been shocking, anyway, before he spent a decade bludgeoning our civic nerve endings to the point where these things now register as mere routine politics.

Yesterday alone:

1. Trump floated the notion of arresting New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The president was responding to a question about Mamdani’s promise to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.” But he proceeded to suggest that he was explicitly targeting Mamdani’s political beliefs—“We don’t need a communist in this country”—and publicly entertained the groundless accusation that Mamdani, a U.S. citizen, is “here illegally.”

2. Trump threatened to prosecute CNN for reporting on the existence of an app that allows users to alert one another to ICE activity and on a Defense Intelligence Agency preliminary analysis suggesting that American air strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. “We’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced, referring to the ICE-app story, “because what they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations and we’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them.” Trump endorsed Noem’s threat, and added, “They may be prosecuted also for giving false reports on the attack on Iran.”

3. The president mused about the prospect of financially punishing Elon Musk for criticizing the Republican megabill. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”

To examples such as these, my friend might reply that Trump doesn’t always deliver on his rhetoric. That is true, but only to a point. Especially in his second term, Trump follows through on quite a lot of his threats. Indeed, yesterday’s litany of authoritarian moves is not limited to words. It includes at least three actions:

4. The New York Times reported that Trump has appointed Jared L. Wise to the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group. In 2023, federal prosecutors had charged Wise, a former FBI agent, for participating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, allegedly egging on fellow rioters to assault police officers with shouts of “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Like the rest of the January 6 defendants, Wise was pardoned on the first day of Trump’s second term. Now he is working under Ed Martin, a fellow supporter of Trump’s efforts to secure an unelected second term in 2021, and who has tried to intimidate various administration targets with a variety of legal and extralegal punishments.

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5. The administration impounded $7 billion of Education Department funding for after-school and summer programs, English learners, teacher training, and other school functions. The funds had been appropriated by Congress, but Trump once again decided to seize the power of the purse from Congress for himself, in violation of the structure laid out by the Constitution.

6. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, settled a groundless nuisance lawsuit Trump had filed against the CBS show 60 Minutes. The suit absurdly claims that Trump suffered mental distress because the show aired an interview with Kamala Harris in 2024 that had been edited for length (which is, in fact, standard practice in television news, as Trump and his lawyers surely know). The only apparent reason Paramount settled was to grease the skids for the Trump administration to approve the company’s bid to buy a Hollywood studio. (The company has denied that this was its motivation.)

None of these moves is a one-off. All follow what has become standard practice in the second Trump term. The president has declared a new order in which the supporters of his insurrection have been vindicated and freed from any consequences for their crimes, the president claims sole authority over the government’s powers of spending and regulation, and these powers are to be used only to punish his enemies and reward his friends.

This new order, if unchecked, will at some point reach a level at which opposition becomes prohibitively dangerous and the commanding heights of business, media, and academia all submit to Trump’s whims. We might not arrive at that end point. But it is very clearly where Trump is trying to take us.

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