Politics

PoliticusUSA is independent because of the support of readers like you. Please consider supporting our work by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Donald Trump is panicking. Nothing that he has tried, not even the threat to prosecute Barack Obama, has distracted his supporters and the media from the Epstein files. Trump has gotten so desperate that he is threatening to block the Washington, D.C. NFL team’s new stadium unless they change their name back to the Redskins. What does this have to do with the presidency or vital national issues? Absolutely nothing, but Trump is looking for anything to take attention away from the Epstein files. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Since everything else has failed, Trump is going to need somebody to take the fall for not releasing the Epstein files, and that person appears to be Attorney General Pam Bondi. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked why Trump hasn’t done more to release the Epstein files. Leavitt answered, “The president has said if the Department of Justice and the FBI want to move forward with releasing any further credible evidence, they should do so as to why they have or have not, or will. You should ask the FBI about that. It’s up to the attorney general.” Video: With the distractions not working, the Trump administration is setting up Pam Bondi on the Epstein files. Once MAGA was no longer being distracted by Trump jangling the shiny car keys in front of their eyes, it was always going to come down to this. Somebody has to take the blame for Trump’s Epstein files cover-up, and since it won’t be Donald Trump, it will have to be someone at the DOJ. It looks like Pam Bondi is being set up to be voted off of Felon Island, as the Trump administration could be starting to turn on itself, as every other option to make the Epstein scandal disappear has failed. What do you think about Karoline Leavitt’s blaming of Bondi? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. “Pretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by the state of Florida on a disused airport runway. The detention center features tents that contain chain-link cages crammed with bunk beds, surrounded by miles of barbed wire. By the end of August, it may have the capacity to hold 4,000 people waiting to hear whether they’ll be deported. On Fox News that night, Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, argued that there was nothing dehumanizing about an immigrant-detention center built in a hot, humid, mosquito-infested, subtropical wetland. “What is dehumanizing is when Democrats let illegal alien rapists into the country to attack our children,” Miller said. Laura Loomer, a Trump adviser, expressed the hope that alligators would eat the immigrants detained in the Everglades. “Alligator lives matter,” she posted on X, along with an implied threat to the Latino population of the United States: “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.” The Everglades detention center, the nationwide roundups of immigrants, the massive increase in spending for ICE, and the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric were foreshadowed during the 2024 presidential campaign. “This is country changing; it’s country threatening; and it’s country wrecking,” Trump said about undocumented immigration at one campaign rally. At another he said, “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.” Trump called immigrants “animals,” accused them of stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and claimed that they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” These claims helped ensure Trump’s election. Last year, an opinion poll commissioned by CBS News found that almost half of all adults in the United States agreed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. More than three-quarters of Republican adults agreed. I’ve been writing about the role of undocumented immigrants in the American economy for 30 years. They are the bedrock of our food, construction, and hospitality industries. They are also some of the nation’s poorest, most vulnerable, most devout, most family-oriented workers in the U.S. They routinely suffer wage theft, minimum-wage violations, sexual harassment on the job, and workplace injuries that go unreported and uncompensated. Most of them have lived here for more than a decade. The lies now being spread about them are too numerous to mention. But one that must be addressed is the falsehood at the heart of Trump’s immigration policy: that undocumented immigrants are likely to be murderers, rapists, and violent criminals who wreak havoc upon law-abiding citizens. [Stephanie McCrummen: The message is ‘we can take your children’] A recent study of 150 years of American incarceration data, from 1870 to 2020, found that immigrant men were far less likely to be sent to prison than men born in the U.S. Since 1990, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has roughly tripled—yet the homicide rate has fallen by almost 50 percent. A 2020 study published in the journal PNAS compared the crime rates of undocumented immigrants in Texas with the crime rates of U.S.-born citizens there. “Relative to undocumented immigrants,” the study found, U.S.-born citizens “are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.” That helps explain why crackdowns on undocumented immigration aren’t the most effective way to improve public safety. Texas would be a much safer place if everyone born in Texas got deported. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are targeting eight terrorist organizations, including six Mexican drug cartels that threaten the foreign policy, the public safety, the national security of the United States,” Miller said during his Fox News appearance, stressing the urgent need to build more ICE detention centers. But ICE isn’t part of the criminal-justice system. The apprehension and deportation of immigrants is conducted under civil law by the executive branch of the federal government. The phrase criminal alien, widely used by the Trump administration, is misleading. It conjures images of a dangerous, perhaps homicidal, stranger. Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, likes to issue grave warnings about the threat posed by “illegal criminal aliens” and “criminal illegal aliens.” That threat is greatly overstated.   A criminal alien is an immigrant who has already been convicted of a crime. Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol arrested about 17,000 criminal aliens. Among the convictions recorded for that group, 29 were for homicide or manslaughter, 221 were for sex offenses—and 10,935 were for unlawful entry or reentry to the U.S. The Trump administration’s harsh, fearmongering rhetoric is contradicted by a simple fact: The overwhelming majority of criminal aliens become criminals by violating immigration laws. And almost three-quarters of the people now being held in ICE detention centers aren’t even criminal aliens. The federal agencies actually devoted to hunting down terrorists and members of Mexican drug cartels—-the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—all face major cuts in Trump’s 2026 budget. The FBI’s budget will be reduced by $545 million; the ATF’s by $418 million; the DEA’s by $112 million. The Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Forces program, created to “disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal networks,” will lose its entire $547 million in funding. The program is being completely shut down. Meanwhile, the omnibus bill that Trump signed on July 4 triples the size of ICE’s budget and allocates about $170 billion to immigration enforcement. Roughly $45 billion will be spent during the next four years to build new ICE detention centers, which will hold mainly people who

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Supreme Court allows Trump to lay off nearly 1,400 Education Department employees

During a press conference on Monday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took time away from failing Texans recovering from deadly floods to throw New York City Mayor Eric Adams under the bus. “I know you guys have got a leadership election in this country, or in this city that’s going to be happening soon,” Noem told reporters. “Boy, start looking at the candidates today and see which one is going to start making the city safer. Because you’ve got a mayor today that could have done better and could have done better—and maybe he’d have more support today if he had, if he’d have put his people first. YouTube Video So much for the former Democrat’s attempts to cozy up to President Donald Trump during a very public corruption case. As Noem’s comments make clear, Trump’s Cabinet members have little interest in loyalty unless it serves their personal political needs. There is no amount of genuflecting that will shield you from being sold down the river in order to deflect blame. Adams’ increasingly desperate bid to remain both in power and out of legal jeopardy has culminated in him leaving the Democratic Party after realizing he had little chance of securing its mayoral nomination. If Adams’ plan was to court moderate Republican voters in the upcoming race against popular progressive mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, Trump’s team of terrorists aren’t going to be much help.

President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal for reporting on his ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has been assigned to a federal judge appointed by former President Barack Obama. The news is unlikely to please Trump, who has already publicly expressed his anger about the continuing controversy surrounding his administration’s handling of the notorious case. Judge Darrin P. Gayles, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, was assigned the case on Monday. Gayles was nominated for his position in 2014 and was unanimously confirmed that year. He was praised by activist groups as the first openly gay Black person to win a seat on the federal court. Trump is suing The Wall Street Journal, owner Rupert Murdoch, and other executives and reporters at the conservative outlet after it published a report stating that Trump was part of a group of friends who sent Epstein sexually suggestive letters for his 50th birthday. The Journal reported that the letter bearing Trump’s name included a drawing of a nude woman with “the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” The publication of the story prompted a public meltdown from Trump, who attacked the Journal and claimed the entire story was “fake.” Trump has frequently described accurate reporting of his statements and actions as “fake.” As evidence, Trump has claimed that “I don’t draw pictures,” but since the story was published, multiple instances of doodles made by Trump in the past have surfaced. In fact, several assertions made by Trump and his defenders, including his son Donald Trump Jr., seeking to sow doubt about the story have fallen flat. These include the claim that he wouldn’t use the word “enigma”—which he has—and that he wouldn’t refer to himself in the third person, which he also has done countless times. Suing Murdoch, who also owns the Journal’s sister media organization Fox News, is a sign of how concerned Trump is about the Epstein story, which has consumed him for weeks. Trump has invoked the unsavory story for years as a cudgel against the left, only to have his administration decide to keep the details of the investigation, and the so-called Epstein client list, under wraps. Trump’s MAGA supporters had assumed he would disclose information they saw as damaging to their ideological enemies, and some have expressed feelings of betrayal. Related: All the worst MAGA guys are mad at Trump’s Epstein cover-up Murdoch’s media empire, which also includes the New York Post, has been the most reliable and visible promoter of pro-Trump propaganda for a long time. Trump’s lawsuit, which seeks a ridiculous $10 billion in damages, has exposed a major fault line in the conservative movement. Trump is apparently so upset that the Journal has been cut off from the press pool scheduled to accompany the president from an upcoming trip to Scotland. And a judge picked by Obama, one of Trump’s most hated enemies, will now oversee the entire proceeding.

Ruben Bolling The thin line, erased. The post Know Your ICE Agent appeared first on The Nation.

President Donald Trump demanded on Sunday that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians return to their old, offensive team names. The complaints about the NFL and MLB teams echo other racist obsessions from Trump, who has integrated bigotry throughout his administration. Trump said he “may put a restriction” on the District of Columbia’s ongoing negotiations to build a new stadium for the team if the old “Washington Redskins” name is not restored. “The Team would be much more valuable, and the Deal would be more exciting for everyone” if the racist team name were restored, Trump wrote. The Commanders changed their name in July 2020, during the global protests against racial injustice following a police officer’s murder of George Floyd. For many years before that, Native American tribes and groups had requested the name change, noting that the team name was an offensive racial slur. For two seasons, the team was known as the Washington Football Team. In early 2022, the team revealed its new name, the Washington Commanders. Workers finish installing the Cleveland Guardians sign above the scoreboard at Progressive Field in March 2022, in Cleveland. On Sunday, Trump also claimed that Matt Dolan, a partial owner of the Cleveland Guardians, should force the team to restore the “Cleveland Indians” name in order to help Dolan’s political ambitions. Dolan ran as a Republican candidate in two failed Senate campaigns in Ohio. However, Trump’s animosity toward Dolan is likely because he did not support Trump. The Guardians announced their decision to change the team name in 2020, around the same time of Washington’s announcement. At the time, Trump was president and lashed out at both teams for “changing their names in order to be politically correct.” The Trump administration has also complained about efforts at the local level to change team names. In June, Education Secretary Linda McMahon threatened to withhold funding from schools in New York after Massapequa High School discussed changing its mascot from “Chiefs.” Trump’s antagonism toward racial reconciliation stems from the fact that he is a racist. Trump has used his second term in the presidency to mount a full-scale assault on anti-racism, and to impose racist policies on American citizens and institutions. Trump has repeatedly elevated white supremacy while simultaneously attempting to undermine and erase the achievements of Blacks, Asians, Latinos, and other racial and ethnic minorities. In one of his Sunday posts, Trump claimed that his crusade to restore racist sports names is about the “heritage and prestige” of Native Americans. But studies show strong Native American opposition to these names. A 2020 study published in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science found that, of people polled on sports mascots, 57% who strongly identified as Native American were deeply offended by these portrayals. Trump’s team-name advocacy is rooted in his long history of white supremacy and is out of touch with the people he is claiming to support.

First, eggs were breaking the bank. Now it’s beef. Egg prices surged earlier this year due to a severe avian flu outbreak, but they eventually stabilized as producers restocked and supply chains normalized. However, that reset has not occurred with beef. Instead, prices continue to rise—just in time for peak grilling season—and there’s no relief in sight. In June, ground beef reached $6.12 a pound, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s nearly a 12% increase since last June, when it was $5.47 a pound. This marks the first time since the Consumer Price Index began tracking the data in the 1980s that ground beef has gone above $6. But it’s not just ground beef. The price of uncooked steak is also soaring. Last month, it hit $11.49 a pound—an 8% increase from last June, when it was $10.64 a pound.  Datawrapper Content What’s worse, it’s not just a seasonal fluctuation. Experts say the worst may still be ahead. “Beef is way more complicated than eggs,” Michael Swanson, the chief agricultural economist at Wells Fargo, told CNN. “The cattle industry is still the ‘Wild West’ of the protein market, whereas the egg market is more ‘Corporate America’ with its supply and demand management.” Patrick Montgomery, CEO of KC Cattle Company, told Axios this is “just the tip of the iceberg,” adding, “Prices for beef will continue to be tumultuous for the next two to four years.” This problem has been years in the making. Droughts, rising costs, shrinking herds, and, more recently, freezes and cuts to various Agriculture Department programs have pushed ranchers out of the industry. U.S. herd sizes are now at their lowest point in decades, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a major lobbying group. The number of farms in the U.S. is also on a slow decline, with roughly 1.9 million in 2024—down 8% since 2017—according to the USDA. Imports have helped fill the gap, especially from Brazil, which now supplies nearly a quarter of all U.S. beef imports. But that supply route is also under threat. President Donald Trump recently ordered for a 50% tariff on Brazilian beef to start on Aug. 1, and according to Reuters, some exporters are reassessing future shipments to the U.S. Cattle graze on a ranch in Lufkin, Texas, in April 2023. The U.S. is Brazil’s second-largest beef market, after China. With domestic production declining, these new tariffs could hit hard, especially on ground beef. American meatpackers often rely on lean beef trimmings from countries like Australia, Brazil, and New Zealand to blend with fattier domestic beef and produce hamburger meat. Now Brazil’s lean cuts are set to become much more expensive—or vanish altogether. U.S. beef importers “will either have to pay the higher cost of Brazilian beef or obtain it from other higher-cost sources,” David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University, told Al-Jazeera. “That could lead to higher prices for certain beef products, particularly ground beef and hamburger meat. This comes at a time when the U.S. cattle herd is at the lowest level in many decades, demand for beef is strong, and as a result, beef prices are up.” Brazil isn’t the only supplier under pressure. Imports from Mexico—another major partner—have been disrupted by an outbreak of the flesh-eating parasite known as the screwworm. In short, the lean-beef pipeline is shrinking just as demand peaks. Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King didn’t hold back on a recent earnings call. “Beef is experiencing the most challenging market conditions we’ve ever seen,” he said. Even if herd numbers recover, it won’t result in immediate price drops. Climate shocks, shrinking ranch land, trade disruptions, and persistent consumer demand are all converging, making the meat aisle increasingly difficult to afford with each passing month.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Supreme Court allows Trump to lay off nearly 1,400 Education Department employees

In the most predictable series of events, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that she feels duped by President Donald Trump for not sticking to the agreement they made in exchange for her cowardly vote for the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.” “I feel cheated. I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else,” she told the Alaska Daily News. Murkowski was referencing the Senate’s changes to the House version of the bill, which protected tax credits for wind and solar projects for 12 months as opposed to their immediate cancellation. But just 6 days after the Senate passed the bill—thanks to Murkowski’s vote—Trump issued an executive order declaring that, within 45 days, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could begin terminating wind and solar tax credits and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum could create new regulations on clean energy projects. U.S. wind turbines Burgum already heeded that directive, making a new rule that requires giving approval for any wind or solar project that is to be built on federal land—which could be an effort to slow those projects beyond the 12-month window to ensure that they are killed. Murkowski said that this “just pulls the rug out from underneath the deal. “I read it as just a total affront to what we had negotiated,” she said. “So now you have an executive order that goes against what the president himself signed into law, in my view.” Of course, anyone with half a brain knows that Trump’s promises are meaningless, and since he has a bizarre and notorious hatred of wind power—making insane false claims that wind turbines make whales “crazy” and cause cancer—it’s not shocking that he’s trying to stop wind energy projects. Aside from the fact that Murkowski feels “cheated,” Trump’s executive order will have negative effects for all Americans, who will see their energy bills skyrocket due to an increasing demand for energy. And of course, people in states that voted for Trump will experience the highest price increases. “The president and Secretary Burgum will then be responsible for raising electricity prices on every state in this country because that will be the end result of that kind of abuse of permitting,” Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico told Politico. “I would warn them if they create this as a precedent and it survives, a future administration could play the same game with oil and gas pipelines and leases.”