Politics

A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Patreon, or at my website. Related | Inside the Trump administration’s deranged push to power AI with dirty energy

PoliticusUSA is independent news that tells it like it is, but we need your support. Please help us by subscribing. Subscribe now Donald Trump blew up after the jobs numbers were released that showed that his policies have killed the jobs market and that summer hiring is at its worst point in a non-COVID time since 2010. Anyone who believed that Trump would look at these numbers and rethink his terrible economic policies has not been paying attention to how Trump operates. Instead of doing something rational, like blaming himself, Trump posted on Truth Social: I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter. By competent and qualified, Trump means someone who will cook the books for him to hide the fact that he is destroying the economy. Read more

If you’re planning a trip to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, make sure to check out “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden,” which will teach you about all the presidents who were impeached or resigned in lieu of impeachment. So there’s Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and … huh, that’s it.  Yes, if you look for information on President Donald Trump’s two first-term impeachments, you won’t find it in this exhibit. The Smithsonian removed them in July. The renowned museum told NPR it would put them back one day. Sometime in the future. It wouldn’t share a timeline. It happened. Twice. Until that day, if it ever comes, the Smithsonian is a part of Trump’s rewriting of history, one that treats his presidency like an unvarnished success, a testament to the greatness of the man himself. Though the administration very likely forced this removal, the Smithsonian spokesperson is still obliged to pretend this is just a normal thing, no big deal, just regular museum stuff where you have to roll back history 18 years, you know?  “Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance,” the museum said in a statement. You see, they can’t include Trump’s impeachments because it’s just so much work to update things, per the administration’s statement to NPR: “A large permanent gallery like The American Presidency that opened in 2000, requires [a] significant amount of time and funding to update and renew. A future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments.”  That explanation might be a little less transparently bullshit if Trump’s twin impeachments hadn’t been included in the exhibit since September 2021.  If you ask the White House, they will explain to you that this is really all about returning America to its former glory and, of course, eradicating forbidden diversity. Per White House spokesperson Davis Ingle, for too long, the Smithsonian “highlighted divisive DEI exhibits which are out of touch with mainstream America,” and that the White House is “fully supportive of updating displays to highlight American greatness.”  It’s not just that the administration wants to remove negative history about Trump, though that is a driving force. It’s also about wanting the Republican Party, the federal government, and everyone else to display constant fealty to Trump. That’s why you see GOP proposals to put him on the $100 bill and on Mount Rushmore, to rename parts of the Kennedy Center after him and his wife, and to rename the Washington subway system the “Trump Train.” But it also extends beyond Trump. They want to rewrite American history more broadly so that it panders to those like Trump and his ilk: white, straight, cis, conservative, rich. Vice President JD Vance has been empowered to purge museums of anything that doesn’t align with Trump’s view of American history as an unbroken success story. Trump’s team has demanded that museums and the national parks remove anything that’s supposedly divisive, which broadly translates to things that make white people sad.  It used to feel like saying Trump wanted to memory-hole the history he doesn’t like was a bit of a stretch. These days, though, if anything, it may be an understatement.

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Thanks, Trump: Stock market tanks amid new tariffs and crappy jobs report So. Much. Winning. Reporter speaks out about why The Washington Post is bleeding talent Yet owner Jeff Bezos keeps bending the knee to Donald Trump. Trump seeks to leave his gold-plated stain on the White House Let them eat cake, indeed. Cartoon: 90 denials in 90 days The president doth protest too much, methinks. Here’s how the Supreme Court is helping Trump put judges at risk The chief justice keeps looking the other way—and the consequences could be deadly. New jobs numbers hint at Great Recession 2.0 The last three jobs reports are the weakest since the COVID-19 crisis Click here to see more cartoons.

Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves come in two flavors. The first is devious plans that help him amass power (say, turning the Departments of Justice and Defense over to lackeys, or using regulatory threats to bully media owners into favorable coverage). The second is foolish impulses that he follows because they make him feel momentarily better. Firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as Trump did via a Truth Social post this afternoon, falls into the second category. McEntarfer’s unpardonable sin was to oversee the routine release of BLS jobs data. This morning’s report showed that job growth last month fell somewhat short of expectations. The more interesting—and, to Trump, unwelcome—information came in its revisions, which found that previous months had much lower job growth than previous estimates. Economists had been puzzling over the economy’s resilience despite Trump’s imposition of staggering tariffs. Now that we have the revised data, that resilience appears to have largely been a mirage. [Rogé Karma: The mystery of the strong economy has finally been solved] Trump went with the familiar “fake news” defense. McEntarfer, he posted, had ginned up fake numbers to make him look bad. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” he wrote. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.” The backdrop to Trump’s move, and the reason observers are shocked but not surprised, is that the suspicion that jobs numbers are faked to help Democrats has circulated on the right for years. When a strong jobs report came out in October 2012, during Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, the former General Electric CEO Jack Welch tweeted, “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.” Welch’s tweet was considered somewhat unhinged at the time, but like many paranoid forms of conservative thought, it gradually made its way into the Republican mainstream. Trump himself has spent years insisting that economic numbers were made up, regularly denouncing every positive jobs report during the Obama era as fake. And so, when this morning’s report came out, his lizard brain was primed to act: Bureaucrat say Trump economy bad. Trump fire bureaucrat. Now economy good. One problem with this move, even from the narrow standpoint of Trump’s self-interest, is that his complaints with economic statistics don’t fit together logically. Revisions of past numbers are a normal part of BLS methodology. Every monthly report is a projection based on limited information, so the Bureau continues to update its findings. Last August, the BLS revised previous months’ job numbers downward. This was obviously a bad thing for the Biden administration, but Republicans decided that it was in fact evidence that the BLS had been cooking the books to make the economy look good. (They did not address the apparent puzzle of why it finally came clean, months before the election.) Now that Trump is president, however, downward revisions prove that the BLS is cooking the books to make the economy look bad. The most prominent exponent of these incoherent theories is, of course, Trump himself. In his post firing the BLS commissioner, Trump cited the downward revisions as evidence that she was faking the numbers to hurt him: “McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months.” In another post an hour and a half later, he cited last year’s revisions as evidence that she had faked the numbers to make Joe Biden look good: “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad — Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were ‘taken away’ on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM.” (The truth, as we’ve seen, is that the downward revisions under Biden were announced last August, not after the election, but never mind.) Trump’s anger with government statisticians also runs headlong into his feud with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Trump has been raging against Powell for being too slow, in Trump’s view, to cut interest rates. But cutting interest rates is what the Fed does when the economy is weak. When the economy is growing fast, it keeps rates high to avoid overheating. Trump is thus simultaneously claiming that the economy is stronger than people think and that Powell should act as if it’s weaker than people think. He also blames Powell for failing to change policy quickly enough, when, according to Trump himself, the most important data Powell would use to make this decision are unreliable. [Jonathan Chait: What Trump’s feud with Jerome Powell is really about] Trump’s deeper confusion is his apparent belief that reported job numbers are what matter to him politically. He is obsessed with propaganda and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies. But, as Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public with fake numbers into thinking the economy is better than it is. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy. The president’s mad rush to subject the macroeconomic policy makers to the same partisan discipline he has imposed on the power ministries is less a coup than a temper tantrum. He thinks he wants loyalists and hacks running those functions. He might not like what happens when he gets his way.

In the summer of 2022, Donald Trump badly needed criminal-defense lawyers. Tim Parlatore, who was already working for the former president on an unrelated civil matter, joined the team defending Trump after an FBI search found classified government documents stored at his Florida estate. Parlatore had represented prominent Trump allies in their interactions with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attacks; that was helpful, because Trump also faced charges stemming from the riot. Parlatore was a star lawyer in Trump world, so it’s more than a little surprising that, in the fall of that year, he hired a close associate of one of the most notorious villains in the extended MAGA universe: Jeffrey Epstein. Before he joined the Parlatore Law Group, Darren Indyke was Epstein’s personal attorney for nearly a quarter century and reportedly among his closest associates and advisers. Parlatore’s decision to hire Indyke appears to have escaped public notice. But Indyke, by his own account, has been working for the firm since October 2022. Indyke is also a co-executor of Epstein’s estate, which has made settlement payments to more than 100 alleged victims of the deceased multimillionaire’s sex trafficking. Two women have sued Indyke, along with Epstein’s former accountant, claiming that they helped administer a network of dozens of bank accounts, corporate entities, and money transfers that enabled Epstein’s crimes. In court filings, Indyke has categorically denied any involvement in or knowledge of Epstein’s alleged crimes.   I called Parlatore earlier this week after I noticed Indyke’s photo and bio on the law firm’s website. “He has skills doing a bunch of stuff that I don’t know how to do, as far as corporate work,” Parlatore told me during a brief conversation. He added that Indyke’s “experience on the legal side of the Epstein business was valuable.” For instance, Indyke knows how to structure financial arrangements and purchase aircraft, Parlatore said. “I hired him because of that.” [Read: Inside the White House’s Epstein strategy] Those kinds of financial skills are what the two women who sued Indyke allege were at the heart of Epstein’s criminal enterprise. In his bio, Indyke touts his experience “as general counsel to family offices, serial entrepreneurs, investors, and other ultra-high-net-worth clientele.” He doesn’t mention Epstein. Among his other capabilities: “Complex business and commercial transactions,” as well as “aviation, marine, and other exotic asset purchases, sales, and operation.”     Indyke “came to me because he was looking for a job,” Parlatore told me. He said he was aware of the allegations in the ongoing civil lawsuit, which was filed in 2024, after Indyke had joined the firm. But he said that Indyke had assured him that “the FBI looked into it, and they didn’t find anything.” Indyke has not been charged with a crime. He did not respond to an email or a text message I sent, or to a voicemail I left at the number listed for him at the firm. When he hired Indyke, Parlatore told me, “the Epstein stuff, as far as I was concerned, was irrelevant to me.” The Epstein stuff is highly relevant, however, and of the utmost political salience to Trump’s base. For many Trump voters, the Epstein story captures how rich and powerful people can use their influence and connections to cover up one another’s dark deeds. It’s the kind of corrupt back-scratching that Trump has long pledged to stamp out. For weeks now, Trump has been at pains to distance himself from Epstein, once a close friend. Parlatore’s work with Indyke seems unlikely to help that effort, particularly because Parlatore is now working closely with a key member of Trump’s Cabinet, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. To describe Parlatore simply as what he is—Hegseth’s personal lawyer and a Pentagon adviser—would overlook the symbiotic relationship that allowed both of them to rise inside Trump’s circle. Parlatore began representing U.S. troops accused of grave misconduct when Hegseth was catching Trump’s attention as a Fox News host, during the president’s first term. Hegseth made defending troops a personal on-air cause, arguing the military court system unfairly prosecuted “warriors” who had made tough decisions in the heat of battle. Parlatore represented Navy Chief Eddie Gallagher, who was charged with premeditated murder following the death of a 17-year-old suspected Islamic State fighter in Iraq in 2017. Two years later, a court acquitted Gallagher on all charges except for taking a photograph with the corpse, and the Navy demoted him. Trump then pardoned Gallagher and reinstated his rank. Parlatore had also become Hegseth’s personal attorney. In 2024, after Trump nominated Hegseth as defense secretary, Parlatore threatened legal action against a woman who had filed a police report seven years earlier saying that Hegseth had assaulted her in a hotel. Parlatore told CNN that Hegseth’s accuser was free to speak publicly, because a confidentiality agreement covering her and the nominee was no longer in effect. But he said he would consider suing her for civil extortion and defamation if she made what Parlatore described as false claims that might jeopardize Hegseth’s chances of Senate confirmation. Parlatore aggressively criticized reporters who questioned Hegseth’s qualifications to run the Defense Department, and he helped his client prepare for a contentious nomination hearing. Hegseth squeaked through, after Vice President J. D. Vance cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm him. Parlatore has been by Hegseth’s side since he entered the Pentagon in January. A former naval surface-warfare officer, Parlatore rejoined the service as a reserve commander in the JAG Corps. Hegseth swore him back into uniform. [Read: When Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon tenure started going sideways] Even as Hegseth has fired or dismissed a number of advisers, Parlatore has survived, and many officials in the Pentagon see him as the key intermediary to reach Hegseth. When journalists call the Pentagon with questions, they’re often directed to Parlatore. Parlatore has also backed up Hegseth’s policy agenda, supporting the removal of hundreds of books flagged for DEI-related content from the library of the U.S. Naval Academy, from which Parlatore graduated. Before

Justin Brannan Or, to put it another way: Stop helping Republicans and back people like Zohran Mamdani. Now! The post Democrats: Let’s Get Our Shit Together! appeared first on The Nation.

Dean Baker When Trump talks of turning the economy around, he speaks the truth—he just gets the direction of change wrong. The post Bringing Back Stagflation, Lower Growth, and Higher Prices appeared first on The Nation.

Jeet Heer If the planet is to survive, the future needs to be green. China seems to get that—but the US is blowing it. The post Trump’s Fossil Fuel Fanaticism Is Surrending the Future to China appeared first on The Nation.

The first draft of the lower chamber’s new redistricting map targets Democratic members of Congress in the Austin, Dallas and Houston metro areas and in South Texas. By Gabby Birenbaum and Eleanor Klibanoff, Graphics by Carla Astudillo, for The Texas Tribune Texas GOP lawmakers released their first draft of the state’s new congressional map Wednesday, proposing revamped district lines that attempt to flip five Democratic seats in next year’s midterm elections. The new map targets Democratic U.S. House members in the Austin, Dallas and Houston metro areas and in South Texas. The draft, unveiled by state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, will likely change before the final map is approved by both chambers and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott. Democrats have said they might try to thwart the process by fleeing the state. This unusual mid-decade redistricting comes after a pressure campaign waged by President Donald Trump’s political team in the hopes of padding Republicans’ narrow majority in the U.S. House. Currently, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’ 38 House seats. Trump carried 27 of those districts in 2024, including those won by Democratic U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen. Under the proposed new lines, 30 districts would have gone to Trump last year, each by at least 10 percentage points. Datawrapper Content The map was immediately panned as racist and illegal by Democrats, who have been raising the alarm about the prospect of voters of color being diluted. The proposed map splits voters of color in Tarrant County among multiple neighboring Republican districts and changes the shape of the 35th District in Central Texas, which was originally created as a result of a court order to protect the voting rights of people of color. Rep. Greg Casar, who represents the 35th District that runs from his hometown of Austin to San Antonio, slammed the map as an insult to Texas voters. “If Trump is allowed to rip the Voting Rights Act to shreds here in Central Texas, his ploy will spread like wildfire across the country,” Casar said in a statement. “Everyone who cares about our democracy must mobilize against this illegal map.” Datawrapper Content The changes would create two more districts in which white residents make up a majority of eligible voters, or citizens who are old enough to vote, hiking the number of such districts from 22 under the current map to 24. It would also add one additional district where Hispanic residents, the state’s largest demographic group, form the majority, bringing the total to eight under the new plan. And it would create two majority Black districts, where previously there were none. The traditional racial politics of redistricting have been scrambled somewhat by Republicans’ increasing reliance on Hispanic voters, among whom they made historic gains in 2024. Four of the five districts that Republicans have drawn with the intention of flipping would be majority Hispanic — though the Hispanic populations in the new seats in Houston and Central Texas are almost exactly 50%. The districts represented by Cuellar and Gonzalez — both of which are overwhelmingly Hispanic and anchored in South Texas — would become slightly more favorable to Republicans. Trump received 53% and 52% in those districts, respectively, in 2024; under the new proposed lines, he would have gotten almost 55% in both districts. Datawrapper Content Also targeted are Democratic U.S. Reps. Julie Johnson of Farmers Branch — whose Dallas-anchored district would be reshaped to favor Republicans — and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, whose nearby district would remain solidly blue but drop all of Fort Worth — Veasey’s hometown and political base. That seat — now solely in Dallas County — contains parts of Johnson’s, Veasey’s and Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s current district, raising the prospect of a primary between Veasey and Johnson. The map’s newly proposed GOP seat in Central Texas also triggers the prospect of Austin Democratic Reps. Casar and Lloyd Doggett facing each other in a primary for the area’s lone remaining blue district. To avoid that scenario, one of the two would have to step aside or run an uphill race for a new Central Texas district, based in San Antonio, that Trump would have won by 10 points. Related | As GOP moves to rig the map in Texas, Democrats gear up for a fight In a statement, Doggett, 78, sidestepped the question of what this means for his political future, saying “the only ‘What if’ that matters is ‘What if this crooked scheme is approved to give Trump a rubber stamp to do whatever he pleases.’” In the Houston area, the proposed map would remake four Democratic districts. The biggest upheaval would be in the 9th Congressional District, a seat represented by Rep. Al Green that currently covers the southern part of Harris County and its direct southern neighbors. It would shift to the eastern parts of Houston, where no current member of Congress lives. Instead of being a seat that former Vice President Kamala Harris won by 44% under the current boundary, Trump would have won it by 15%. Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature last drew these maps in 2021, with an eye toward protecting incumbents by making their seats as safe as possible. Trump won every Republican-held Texas district in 2024 by double-digit margins, as did every GOP incumbent who received a Democratic opponent. Edinburg Rep. Monica De La Cruz’s 14-point victory was the closest of any winning Republican. To pick up new seats, Republicans have proposed to pack more Democratic voters into districts in the state’s blue urban centers, giving Democrats even bigger margins in districts they already control, such as those represented by Crockett, Rep. Joaquin Castro in San Antonio and Rep. Sylvia Garcia in Houston. And they’re looking to disperse Republican voters from safely red districts into several districts currently represented by Democrats, such as the ones held by Johnson and Casar. No Republican incumbents’ districts were made significantly more competitive. The map-drawers managed to move more Republican voters into Democratic districts around Dallas and Houston without imperiling the nearby seats of GOP Reps. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving and Troy Nehls, R-Fort Bend. Both faced competitive races in 2020 before their districts were redrawn in 2021 to become solidly Republican, and neither was made to sacrifice those