Opinion | The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away – The New York Times

Opinion, By Thomas L. Friedman

The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away

Aug. 4, 2025

Credit…Will Matsuda for The New York Times

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By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EditedTruth #FederalGovernment #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Lies #Opinion #PoliticalBias #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCorrupts #UnitedStates

$200 mill on a gold ballroom while Vets lose their health care – VoteVets.org

Paul, Travis here.

You ever see something that instantly gets under your skin?

I’ll admit, it’s happening to me a lot more than usual this year. And yesterday, something happened that really, really set me off.

Trump announced he’s putting in a $200 million gilded ballroom at the White House. Yeah, they’re blowing $200 million on a big room for people to come and bow before Trump.

That’s after Trump already paved over Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden. After he extorted Qatar for a $400 million jet, which is gonna cost $1 billion to get up to code, that he’s going to take personal possession of after he leaves office. After he threw himself a birthday parade at the cost of $45 million at minimum. After he’s taken something like 100 trips to his own golf courses on taxpayer dime — way more already than at this point in his first term.

Napkin math, that’s probably pushing $2 billion right there. And we’re not even getting into his crypto schemes and the global “deals” funnelling billions of dollars into his bank account.

You already know what’s happening back in the real world. The VA’s lost thousands of doctors, nurses, researchers, therapists, and caregivers. He’s selling off public lands to the highest bidder. He’s kicking literally hundreds of millions of people off their health care when they’re already struggling to get by. People can’t afford basic necessities because of his tariffs.

Trump can afford to blow $200 million on a golden ballroom at the White House but he can’t afford to help Veterans, the elderly, sick and hungry kids.

This is Marie Antoinette on steroids.

But that’s why I’m proud I get to work at VoteVets. It’s my job to find and build networks of support for thousands of Veterans around the country who decided to take a really tough step into public service. The only way we get to the other side of this is if people like them continue stepping up to put the country before themselves.

It’s not easy. It takes tons of work, and time away from your family and friends. You don’t get days off. It shouldn’t be this tough, but that’s the world we live in right now.

I’m proud of all of them. And I’m just so grateful I get to help them out.

The reality though, is that this work isn’t cheap. And sometimes it requires us making tough asks of the people who support us. Today is one of those days.

So, I’m humbly asking you: Can you make a donation to VoteVets today and help us lay the groundwork for taking back the House and the Senate next year? It’s our only shot at stopping Trump, and we’ve got to start now if we’re gonna have any chance. 

Thanks so much for the help.

Travis

See Web Site: https://votevets.org (message was email)

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USHouse #USSenate #UnitedStates #Veterans #VeteransOrganization #VoteVets #VoteVetsOrg

Letters from an American – August 2, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, August 2, 2025

By Heather Cox Richardson, Aug 03, 2025

Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislatures normally redraw district lines every ten years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts that tend to vote Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives despite their growing unpopularity.

Trump is urging other Republican-dominated state legislatures—those in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for example—to do the same thing. “We’re going to get another three or four or five, in addition,” Trump said to reporters about House seats. “Texas would be the biggest one, and that’ll be five.”

Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times note that “[v]oters are…reduced almost to bystanders as Republicans essentially admit to trying to determine the outcome of Texas races long before the elections are held.”

A person close to the president told Goldmacher and Corasaniti that the White House strategy is “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to rig the system if they thought they could win a majority of voters.

Carving districts to either “crack” political opponents into different districts or “pack” them into a single district is called “gerrymandering,” after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it). Parties have always engaged in gerrymandering, but computers make it possible to carve up districts with surgical precision.

The extreme gerrymander Texas Republicans are attempting is coming on top of partisan gerrymanders already in place. As journalist David Daley explained in his book Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, after Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Republican operatives worked to make sure he had a hostile Congress that would keep him from passing legislation.

To push a plan they dubbed Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, they raised $30 million, mostly from corporations, to buy ads and circulate literature that would convince voters to elect Republican state legislators in 2010. The legislatures elected in 2010 would get to redistrict their states with maps that would last for a decade.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

August 2, 2025 by Heather Cox Richardson

Read on Substack

Continue/Read Original Article: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-2-2025

Original article: View source

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #GOP #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Republicans #Resistance #Science #Substack #Texas #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Bill Gates reveals the 3 things you should do if you’re interested in AI – Hola

Tech boom

Bill Gates reveals the 3 things you should do if you’re interested in AI

Gates has been monitoring the rise of Artificial Intelligence and understands why the topic is stressful for some

By Maria Loreto, Senior Writer, JULY 30, 2025 2:19 PM EDT

Bill Gates is pretty involved in the world of Artificial Intelligence. As one of the leading figures in technology over the past decades, Gates has been involved in various initiatives like OpenAI and Windows, trying to shape the way in which AI grows and is developed. In an appearance on CNN, he shared three bits of knowledge that everyone who’s interested in AI should embrace. 

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Gates is one of the leading figures in tech

In a chat with Fareed Zakaria, Gates discussed AI and its future, including some advice he has for young people who’d like to learn more about the technology that’s primed to determine our future.

“Embracing this and tracking it will be very important,” said Gates. “That doesn’t guarantee that we’re not gonna have a lot of dislocation, but I really haven’t changed my ‘Be curious, read and use the latest tools,‘ recommendation,” he said.

There are multiple AI services that can be used by everyone, no matter their skill set

Gates provided an example of how he used AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude in his everyday life, emphasizing how fun the process can be. 

“In this transition period, the ability to use these tools is both fun and empowering,” he said. “I used to have an advantage that I had very smart people that I could call up when I got confused about physics, but now I use deep research and then I’ll send that answer to my smart friends and ask ‘Hey, did it get it right?’ and most times they’re like ‘Yeah, you didn’t need me.’ You can really learn so much.” 

Gates also shared his thoughts on whether or not AI will remove job opportunities

Gates and Zakaria also discussed the topic of AI and the risk it poses to jobs across all levels, whether it’s white or blue collar. While Gates didn’t paint a fatalistic outlook of the future, he did make it clear that the rate at which AI is growing is a concern and will likely have an impact on the workforce and on job stability. 

“When you improve productivity, you can make more,” he said. “If you get less productive, that’s bad; if you get more productive, that’s good. It means you can free up these people to have smaller class sizes, have longer vacations. To help do more.”

“It’s not a bad thing. The question is if it comes so fast, then you don’t have time to adjust to it.” 

AI is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, with the Trump administration recently announcing a plan to make America the world leader in AI by scaling down the regulations that are currently imposed.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Bill Gates reveals the 3 things you should do if you’re interested in AI

Original article: View source

#2025 #AI #America #artificialIntelligence #BillGates #DonaldTrump #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Microsoft #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting to shut down following funding cuts – The Washington Post

NPR headquarters in Washington. (Tom Brenner / For The Washington Post)

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting to shut down following funding cuts

Trump’s successful campaign to strip federal money to NPR and PBS effectively ended the public media middleman.

August 1, 2025 at 1:32 p.m. EDT, Yesterday at 1:32 p.m. EDT, 2 min

By Scott Nover

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting said it will close following Congress’s decision to strip its current funding and foreclose on future appropriations.

CPB, established by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, is a nonprofit set up to dole out congressionally appropriated funds to NPR, PBS, and public radio and TV stations around the United States. President Donald Trump launched a successful campaign to claw back the $1.1 billion allocated for the organization for the next two years, a measure he signed into law last month.

At the heart of the campaign was a critique that public media produce news that is biased and too liberal and should not be funded by taxpayer dollars. That argument, long held among many conservatives, finally prevailed thanks to unified Republican government during Trump’s second term.

“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement. “CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care.”

CPB not only served as a funding middleman between Congress and public media stations but also negotiated music rights and procured technical infrastructure on behalf of the stations. That leaves an open question as to what entity, if any, will fill that gap.

The closure was announced one day after the Senate Appropriations Committee released a bill that would zero out funding for CPB.

In a press release, CPB said it told its employees that most positions would be cut on Sept. 30, the final day of the fiscal year, and a small team will stay on to shut down the agency through January, in part because the music licenses they have negotiated expire at the end of December.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/08/01/corporation-for-public-broadcasting-shutdown/

Original article: View source

#2025 #America #CorporationForPublicBroadcasting #CPB #DonaldTrump #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Technology #Television #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Letters from an American – July 31, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

July 31, 2025, by Heather Cox Richardson

On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I’m averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won’t go into it very much, because I don’t know the final numbers yet. I don’t know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They’ve been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”

Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”

Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.

The announcement says that “[f]or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people.

And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room.

It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy.”

Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: July 31, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSClaims #UnitedStates #Wars

The 225-Year-Old Library Of Congress Remains A ‘Library For All’ — So Far – Honolulu Civil Beat

Beyond Hawaiʻi

The 225-Year-Old Library Of Congress Remains A ‘Library For All’ — So Far

Trump fired the head of the library in May saying she put inappropriate books in the library for children.

By Alex H. Poole / About 20 hours ago

Carla Hayden, the 14th librarian of Congress, who has held the position since 2016, received an unexpected email on May 8, 2025.

“Carla, on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” wrote Trent Morse, deputy director of presidential personnel at the White House.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later explained that Hayden, who was the first woman, Black person and professionally trained librarian to oversee the Library of Congress, had done “quite concerning things,” on the job, including “putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

Democratic politicians sharply criticized Hayden’s termination, saying the firing was unjust. It was actually about Trump punishing civil servants “who don’t bend to his every will,” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said.

An information science scholar, I have written extensively about the history of libraries and archives, including the Library of Congress. To fully understand the role Hayden played for the past nine years, I think it is important to understand what the Library of Congress does, and the overlooked and underappreciated role it has played in American life.

The main reading room is seen at the Library of Congress on June 13, 2025, in Washington. (Kevin Carter / Getty Images /via Thae Conversation)

The Library Of Congress’ Work

The Library of Congress is an agency that was first established, by an act of Congress, in 1800. The act provided for “the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress at the said city of Washington, and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them.” Its chief librarian is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The library has six buildings in Washington that hold a print and online collection of nearly 26 million books, as well as more than 136 million other items, including manuscripts, maps, sheet music and prints and photographs.

It also houses historic documents, like Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and James Madison’s notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

The library is the property of the American people. Anyone over the age of 16 with a government-issued photo identification can enter its buildings and read or view its materials on-site. The Library of Congress was partially designed as a research institution to suit the needs of members of Congress, and only Congress members can borrow items from the library and take them home.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The 225-Year-Old Library Of Congress Remains A ‘Library For All’ — So Far – Honolulu Civil Beat

#2025 #America #Books #CarlaHayden #Censorship #DonaldTrump #Hawaii #Health #History #HonoluluCivilBeat #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Kagan criticizes fellow justices over lack of explanation in recent Supreme Court rulings | PBS News

The Supreme Court has handled a flood of appeals from the Trump administration on its emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket. In the first six months of Trump’s term, the conservatives on the court have sided with him on several key policies, but the decisions have come with little to no explanation for their rationale. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Supreme Court analyst Amy Howe.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is urging her colleagues on the bench to be more transparent as they make more emergency decisions, including those involving President Trump.

  At an event in California, Kagan criticized how the court has handled a flood of appeals from the Trump administration on their emergency docket. The emergency docket, also known as the shadow docket, is a process the Supreme Court uses for urgent cases that are decided quickly with no oral arguments.

• Elena Kagan, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice:

  As we have done more and more on this emergency docket, there becomes a real responsibility that I think we didn’t recognize when we first started down this road to explain things better.

  I think that we should hold ourselves sort of on both sides to a standard of explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing.

• Geoff Bennett:

  In the first six months of President Trump’s second term, the conservatives on the court have sided with him on several key policies, including allowing the administration to continue mass firings at multiple government agencies and to cancel certain federal grants. But those decisions have come with little to no explanation for their rationale.

  For more on all this, we’re joined now by SCOTUSblog co-founder and “News Hour” Supreme Court analyst Amy Howe.

  Always great to have you here.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Kagan criticizes fellow justices over lack of explanation in recent Supreme Court rulings | PBS News

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #JusticeKagan #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #PBS #Politics #PublicBroadcastingService #Resistance #Science #SCOTUS #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

The Damage of Two Trump Terms: A Deep Dive into America’s Democratic and Social Erosion – Perplexity

The Damage of Two Trump Terms: A Deep Dive into America’s Democratic and Social Erosion – via Perplexity

From executive missteps to democratic backsliding, a look at how Donald Trump’s time in office has altered America—twice.

Introduction

Donald Trump’s tenure as President—across two non-consecutive terms—has been one of the most polarizing and consequential in modern U.S. history. From controversial executive actions to attacks on democratic institutions, his presidencies have been marked by a blend of disruption, reversals, and, for many, profound harm. This post charts and lists the most significant errors and damages of Trump’s first term and then maps the expanded injuries to America’s democracy and people during his second term.

Part One: First Term (2017–2021) — Errors and Damaging Policies

Key Errors and Harmful Decisions:

• Undermining Democratic Norms:
  • Attempted to pressure Ukraine for political favors, leading to impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
  • Persistent attempts to undermine faith in U.S. elections, especially mail-in voting12.
• Obstruction and Abuse of Power:
  • Fired FBI Director James Comey to allegedly hinder Russia investigation.
  • Frequent use of government for personal enrichment; violated the Hatch Act with partisan activities1.
• Foreign Policy Mistakes and Isolationism:
  • Withdrew from Iran nuclear deal, Paris Climate Agreement, Trans-Pacific Partnership, and abandoned the Syrian Kurds324.
  • Alienated U.S. allies, fostered instability, promoted “America First” at the expense of global cooperation.
• Human Rights Assaults:
  • Family separation policy at the southern border and mass deportations.
  • Executive orders targeting refugees and immigrants, including the “Muslim ban”567.
• Civil Rights Rollbacks:
  • Rolled back protections for LGBTQ+, racial minorities, and weakened enforcement of civil rights law7.
• Pandemic Response Failures:
  • Gross mismanagement of the COVID-19 response—delayed testing, contradictory messaging, and lack of federal coordination8.
• Environmental and Health Reversals:
  • Rolled back over 100 environmental regulations, withdrew from global environment treaties, and weakened climate change response.
• Economic Setbacks:
  • Initiated chaotic trade wars (notably with China), resulting in volatile markets and increased consumer costs.
  • Largest peacetime deficit increases due to tax cuts for the wealthy and spending surges23.

First-Term Summary Chart Example:

CategoryKey Action/ErrorConsequenceDemocratic NormsUkraine scandal, impeachmentErosion of institutional trust, impeachmentHuman RightsFamily separation, travel bansWidespread condemnation, civil rights violationsEnvironmentWithdrawal from Paris AccordIncreased global isolation, environmental rollbackPandemic ResponseDelayed COVID-19 actionHigher infection/death rate, global embarrassmentEconomyTrade wars, deficit expansionMarket volatility, ballooning deficitJustice/System AbuseHatch Act violations, DOJ misuseBlurred legal/political boundaries

Part Two: Second Term (2025– ) — Expanded Damage to America, Its People, and Democracy – It’s Worse!

Escalating Authoritarianism and Harmful Actions:

• Impunity for Insurrection:
  • Pardoned January 6 attackers, signaling tolerance for political violence910.
• Attacks on Checks and Balances:
  • Sweeping firings of inspectors general, independent agency leaders, and career officials investigating Trump or his allies1011.
  • Purged civil servants, targeting disloyalty over expertise or merit.
• Erosion of Civil Rights and Freedoms:
  • Issued executive orders rescinding DEI programs, LGBTQ+ protections, reproductive rights, and racial equity initiatives7.
  • Abolished or undermined federal data collection on marginalized groups, erasing accountability for discrimination.
• Retaliation and Consolidation of Power:
  • Launched Justice Department investigations against critics, withdrawing security and targeting political opponents1011.
  • Weaponized federal agencies to punish opposing state governments, universities, and nonprofit organizations.
• Undermining the Rule of Law:
  • Claimed presidential immunity to skirt legal accountability; moved to unilaterally direct federal funds and policy without Congressional authorization106.
• Civic and Social Consequences:
  • Steep rise in fear and uncertainty for immigrants, LGBTQ+ Americans, racial minorities, and women due to regressive legal changes and administrative chaos.
  • Abruptly shut down crucial health and safety data programs affecting millions7.
• Suppressing Dissent and Press Freedoms:
  • Cracked down on student protestors, threatened journalists, and manipulated federal communications oversight5.
• Socioeconomic Impacts:
  • Cutbacks in Medicaid and social safety nets, disproportionately hurting the poor and underprivileged11.
  • Economic instability from erratic tariffs, worsening inequality, and reduced trust in governance.

Second-Term Summary List:

• Mass pardons for political violence, erasing accountability and emboldening extremist groups
• Expanding executive power while sidelining Congress and the judiciary
• Direct interference in federal and independent agencies to protect allies and punish critics
• Dismantling civil rights enforcement and erasing data on marginalized Americans
• Retaliatory investigations targeting opposition, chilling dissent and free speech
• Aggressive anti-immigrant drives, mass deportations, and family separations resumed
• Economic and social policy favoring the wealthy; increasing burdens on working-class Americans and children
• Heightened polarization, division, and distrust throughout American society

Takeaway

Donald Trump’s cumulative impact over two terms goes far beyond political disagreements—his policies, executive actions, and disregard for democratic norms have fundamentally altered the landscape of American governance, justice, and public life. The ongoing harm to U.S. democracy, civic freedoms, and vulnerable communities underscores an urgent need for accountability, vigilance, and renewal.

Actions: America has long been defined by its resiliency and its ability to self-correct. But with democracy itself under threat, the challenge now is for citizens and institutions to reckon with the fallout—and chart a path back toward accountability and progress.

Sources:

1. https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/analysis/president-trumps-worst-offenses/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_presidency_of_Donald_Trump
3. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/14/trump-foreign-policy-first-term-errors-00189428
4. https://www.cfr.org/timeline/trumps-foreign-policy-moments
5. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/04/president-trumps-first-100-days-attacks-on-human-rights/
6. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/06/us-second-trump-term-threat-rights-us-world
7. https://civilrights.org/trump-rollbacks/
8. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-failed-presidency/
9. https://civilrights.org/blog/chaos-confusion-abuse-of-power-trumps-first-week-back-in-office/
10. https://brightlinewatch.org/accelerated-transgressions-in-the-second-trump-presidency/
11. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/trump-authoritarianism-republican-party-democracy.html
12. http://cohen.house.gov/TrumpAdminTracker
13. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5271938-trump-michigan-mistakes/
14. https://www.democracy2025.org
15. https://www.epi.org/publication/ten-actions-that-hurt-workers-during-trumps-first-year/
16. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-has-reshaped-these-3-major-things-in-his-first-100-days
17. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/threats-to-us-democracy-dangerous-cracks-in-us-democracy-pillars/
18. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-administration-missteps.html
19. https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/the-future-of-the-u-s-presidency/
20. https://newdemocratcoalition.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/100-days-100-disasters-new-dem-leadership-looks-back-on-the-first-chaotic-months-of-the-trump-administration

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What is Congress’s Job? – GovTrack.us

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July 25, 2025 · by Amy West

If you’re over 50 or know someone who is, you may think Congress’s job is as described in the Schoolhouse Rock video “I’m Just a Bill’ from 1975. Except for the way it leaves out lobbying activity, it’s a pretty good description of how Congress is supposed to work. At least, it is if you assume that Congress’s primary job is to pass or repeal laws including laws to fund the government (aka appropriations).

House

In that vein, the House passing six bills by large bipartisan majorities looks like a successful week:

• H.R. 3937: Wabeno Economic Development Act passed 410-1
• H.R. 4275: Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 passed 399-12
• H.R. 3351: Improving Access to Small Business Information Act passed 387-12
• H.R. 3357: Enhancing Multi-Class Share Disclosures Act passed by 381-31
• H.R. 1917: Great Lakes Mass Marking Program Act of 2025 passed 360-57
• H.R. 3095: To direct the United States Postal Service to designate single, unique ZIP Codes for certain communities, and for other purposes passed 278-121

But they were scheduled to vote on 21 bipartisan bills and five Republican priority bills.

What happened?

The ongoing controversy over Jeffrey Epstein and whatever might be in Department of Justice files that includes President Trump is what happened.

Because a purported coverup of a fictional Epstein client list has considerable traction among Republican voters, many Republican members of Congress want to do the opposite of what President Trump wants: they want to force the release of additional information about him that the Department of Justice has. Democrats, sensing an opening to weaken the President have joined the fray and offered amendments of their own on the topic in committees.

Speaker Johnson, forced to choose between pleasing the President or allowing votes that would get support from his own party, decided to shut down the House early for its August recess.

The result? 15 bipartisan bills did not get a vote nor did the five bills ostensibly reflecting Republican priorities.

The evidence of the week suggests that the current leadership of the House believes that the House’s job, and the most important Republican priority, is to please the President. If that involves passing bills, great. But if not, well, then there’s not much point in being in session.

Senate

The Senate does not leave for its August Recess until next week. Next week, like this one, they’ll be working through nominees in need of confirmation. They may not leave at all. With public pressure from the President to stay and confirm nominees and Democrats so far not allowing time saving methods of confirmation, it’s possible the Senate will stay for part or all of August.

Is it likely? Your GovTracker thinks probably not. Democrats have provided some key support for Trump nominees – most recently Sen. Shaheen for Michael Waltz – and many members of both parties already had plans set for August (some personal, but many work related).

Programming note

Whether the Senate stays in session or not, we’ll start our August Recess posts next week. Thanks for all the great suggestions! We’ll do our best to address them. If we don’t get to all of them during August, we’ll hold on to your suggestions and write about them the next time Congress is at a full or partial standstill. Which, for your planning needs, may be in October when the government’s fiscal year ends and a government shutdown might happen.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: What is Congress’s Job? – GovTrack.us

#2025 #America #CongressJob #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USCongress #USHouse #USSenate

The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate – Columbia Journalism Review

AP Photos / Illustration by Katie Kosma

The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate

As Paramount prepares for a merger, the Freedom of the Press Foundation stands to challenge the company for capitulating to Trump. Will it work?

July 25, 2025, By Kyle Paoletta

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Early this month, as soon as the news broke of Paramount’s decision to pay President Donald Trump’s foundation sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit against CBS News, the Freedom of the Press Foundation moved to take legal action. The FPF, as it’s known, tracks and resists government infringement on the news media. It’s also a Paramount shareholder, prepared to push for those interests with corporate muscle. Trump’s case, and the response of Paramount’s board, immediately set off alarm bells, as the company was in the midst of pursuing an eight-billion-dollar merger with Skydance, a Hollywood studio, that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission. “They’re essentially making a handshake deal with Donald Trump,” Seth Stern, the FPF’s advocacy director, told me. He and the FPF’s legal team believed that such a deal could be a violation of federal bribery laws. And, he noted, Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, stands to make two billion dollars from the merger. “I would think that, regardless of what Shari has to offer the rest of the board,” Stern said, “the prospect of potential prosecution for bribery would be something they would think quite hard about.”

Now it’s clear that Paramount’s board has decided the risk of prosecution is well worth a multibillion-dollar payday. On Thursday, the FCC signed off on the Skydance merger, clearing a path for its completion. “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change,” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, announced, praising the deal for its commitment to “unbiased journalism” and assurances that “discriminatory DEI policies” will end. But when I spoke to Brenna Frey, a lawyer for the FPF, in the wake of the settlement announcement, she was incensed. “This is an affront to the shareholders of Paramount, but it’s also an affront to CBS’s reporters and to the First Amendment,” she said. 

In Stern’s view, Paramount’s willingness to settle had been a calculated surrender. The premise of Trump’s lawsuit—that 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with Kamala Harris last fall represented “fraudulent interference with an election”—was unlikely to hold up to legal scrutiny. “The lawsuit was laughable,” David Snyder, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said. “What they were trying to attack here was CBS News’s choices about how they edited footage from an interview. That sort of editorial judgment is at the core of First Amendment protections, generally, but especially if it’s about public figures right in the middle of an election.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate – Columbia Journalism Review

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Inside the Library of Congress’s Collection – Library of Congress

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Photograph of digital display by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress.

Inside the Library of Congress’s Collection

The nation’s library is an ever-expanding temple of knowledge and creativity. Here are a few of its most incredible, unexpected, and otherwise historic jewels.

Written by Ron Cassie | Published on July 24, 2025

During the War of 1812, British troops famously torched the US Capitol, burning down the still-new home of the fledgling country’s legislative body. Also going up in flames? Roughly 3,000 books, largely about law, that made up the Library of Congress’s core collection.

Within a month, former President and noted bibliophile Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. His offer was warmly received by many in the House and Senate, but not by all. Massachusetts representative Cyrus King, an opposition Federalist, argued that Jefferson’s diverse holdings—which included works in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Old English, as well as a translation of the Qur’an—would foster his “infidel philosophy” while being “in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not.”

The bill narrowly passed, along party lines, and Congress paid almost $24,000 for Jefferson’s 6,487 books. On May 8, 1815, as a final wagonload of books left Monticello, Jefferson wrote to Samuel Harrison Smith, who had helped facilitate the sale, that “an interesting treasure is added to . . . the depository of unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the U.S. and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.”

Jefferson eventually got his wish. Today, the Library of Congress is a national jewel. Its main building on Capitol Hill, opened in 1897 and later named for the Founding Father, is home to a domed Main Reading Room that endures as one of Washington’s most elegant spaces. Within the library’s collection of more than 178 million items, the world’s largest, are a number of incredible treasures—and across the following pages, we’ve highlighted some of our favorites.

More incredible still? Most of what the institution has to offer is accessible with a simple library card.

In many ways, the modern library is the brainchild of former Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford, a visionary who lobbied Abraham Lincoln for the job and then stayed on through nine (!) Presidents. Spofford led construction of the Thomas Jefferson Building and a major expansion of the collection, working toward his broader goal of establishing a national library. He succeeded yet never lost sight of the institution’s original mission to serve legislators: For decades, the Jefferson Building and the Capitol were connected by an underground tunnel equipped with an electric book trolley and pneumatic message tubes. Lawmakers (or really, their staffers and pages) could send book requests to librarians via the tubes, and librarians could send books back via the trolley.

In the early 2000s, the book tunnel was demolished to make room for the underground Capitol Visitor Center. A separate, pedestrian-friendly tunnel now links the two buildings, where librarians can still be spotted wheeling book carts from time to time. That’s hardly the only way the library has evolved. Its physical collection is now housed in three Capitol Hill buildings and other facilities in Maryland and Virginia; its digital collection, begun in 1994, contains more than 900 million files; its collections of sounds, music, prints, moving images, and photographs date back more than 100 years and continue to grow alongside audiovisual media and communication.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Inside the Library of Congress’s Collection

#2025 #America #Books #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Monticello #Reading #Science #Technology #ThomasJefferson #ThomasJeffersonLibrary #UnitedStates