Late last night, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted a video full of debunked claims about the 2020 presidential election that included an image of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama with their heads attached to the bodies of apes.
Predictably, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt derided the “fake outrage” over the image, but as Tim Grieve of NOTUS explained, when Republican senators Tim Scott of South Carolina, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi called out the racism behind the post, the president deleted the video and a White House official said that a “staffer erroneously made the post,” as if somehow a staffer could post random racist videos from the president’s account in the middle of the night. As soon as they could blame the post on a staffer, Republicans rushed to condemn the post’s racism.
Later tonight on Air Force One, Trump said that he had posted it himself. When a reporter asked if he would apologize, he said, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”
While the post exhibited both the president’s vile racism and his failing impulse control, it also seems to have been an attempt to use racism to break the growing coalition against him. As when they arrested Black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort as well as Black protesters at a church while leaving white protesters free, Trump and his allies are hammering on racial fault lines. As with the ape trope, the White House went so far as to digitally alter a photograph of church protester and civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who appeared to be quite composed during her arrest, to make her look blacker and as if she is sobbing in terror.
“They couldn’t break me,” Armstrong told Nil Köksal of Canadian news interview show As it Happens. “And so they altered an image showing me broken.” “I thought, am I that much of a threat to the world’s greatest superpower?”
The answer is that the growing coalition of Americans from all walks of life standing against MAGA and defending American democracy is the United States of America at its best, and that coalition is absolutely a threat to the cabal trying to seize the assets of the nation for itself. And American history from Bacon’s Rebellion in the late 1600s forward has established a blueprint for breaking democratic coalitions that threaten those in power along racial lines.
Trump’s doubling down on racism reflects Americans’ growing disillusionment with him and his administration.
Bad news about federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol continues. In emails, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who was removed from his oversight of Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis after agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, said he did not report to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol’s parent agency. Bovino told a courtroom, under oath, that his boss was Secretary Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the department in which Customs and Border Protection is housed.
But in an email, Bovino wrote that when acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told Bovino that he, Lyons, was in charge of the surge into Chicago, Bovino disagreed. “Mr. Lyons said he was in charge, and [I] corrected him saying i reported to Corey Lewandowski. Mr. Lyons seemed intent that CBP conduct targeted operations for at least two weeks before transitioning to full scale immigration enforcement. I declined his suggestion. We ended the conversation shortly thereafter.” Lewandowski is a special government employee who advises Noem and has a history of favoring political theater to project dominance. He has no experience in law enforcement.
A court transcript from Tuesday, February 3, posted online by Minneapolis lawyer Dan Suitor shows that the administration’s sweeps of immigrant communities have stretched the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the breaking point. As Chris Geidner of LawDork explained, U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell dug into why individuals he had ordered released from detention were not being released. “Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect,” he said, “it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it.” The DOJ, DHS, and ICE “wield extraordinary power,” he said, “and that power has to exist within constitutional limits.”
The government had an obligation to make sure that each arrest it made in its dramatic sweeps complies with the Constitution and with court orders for the release of those wrongly imprisoned, he said. “[W]hat you cannot do is to detain first and then sort out lawful authority later.” One of the government’s lawyers responded that the administration’s surge into Minnesota has “outpaced the system’s capacity to ensure that the Constitution is being complied with.” “Detain first, find authority later, this is exactly their strategy, and we’ve seen this from all of our cases where there’s no warrant, there’s no probable cause.” Authorities simply take people “for how they look or for where they are.”
A Marist poll released yesterday shows that 65% of Americans think that ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws.
Even those who are not focused on that issue have increasing concerns about the Trump administration’s policies.
Measles is back in the United States with the biggest outbreak the U.S. has seen in decades. Now news has broken that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to have lied in his Senate confirmation hearings when he said that a trip he took to Samoa in 2019 had “nothing to do with vaccines.”
The Guardian and the Associated Press obtained emails from U.S. Embassy and United Nations staff saying that Kennedy was indeed visiting Samoa to spread his skepticism of vaccines. One email read: “The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view).” After his visit, antivaccine activists gained ground, and vaccination rates dropped. A subsequent measles outbreak sickened thousands of people and killed 83, most of whom were children under the age of five.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told The Guardian: “Lying to Congress about his role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America. He and his allies will be held responsible.”
The sprawling web being exposed by the Epstein files has ensnared not just Trump, but other members of his administration as well. Tonight, Daniel Ruetenik and Graham Kates of CBS News reported that U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was in business with the convicted sex offender as recently as 2014. Lutnick previously claimed he had cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after touring his New York mansion, saying, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
Mike Stunson of Forbes reported today that the U.S. lost 108,435 jobs in January in the biggest cuts since January 2009 during the Great Recession. Despite Trump’s insistence that he would bring back masculine jobs like manufacturing, in 2025 the U.S. lost about 68,000 manufacturing jobs.
On Tuesday, February 3, a bipartisan group of 27 former Agriculture Department officials and leaders from farm and commodity groups wrote to the leaders of the agriculture committees of both chambers with a dire warning about “the damage that is being done to American farmers.”
Linda Qiu of the New York Times highlighted the letter, which noted that “just a few years ago,” farm export surpluses and farm incomes were at record highs. This year, “[f]armer bankruptcies have doubled, barely half of all farms will be profitable this year, and the U.S. is running a historic agriculture trade deficit.” The authors blamed this crisis on the fact that “the current Administration’s actions, along with Congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag[ricultural] research and staffing.”
They warned of “a widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities.” They noted that administration cuts to healthcare will add to the decimation of rural communities, wiping out a way of life. Rural voters tend to be an important part of Trump’s base.
Apparently concerned that even racism won’t help keep Republicans in office, Trump is trying to rig the system.
Yesterday the Office of Personnel Management issued a final rule to strip civil service protections from about 50,000 federal employees, enabling the administration to replace nonpartisan civil servants hired for their skills with loyalists. Trump tried to do this at the end of his first term, but his successor, President Joe Biden, reversed the plan immediately upon taking office. The United States has had a nonpartisan civil service since 1883. When the government proposed the reintroduction of the political system the U.S. had before then, 94% of 40,000 public comments opposed the change. Only 5% supported it.
The Republicans are also trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. Only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have “enhanced” driver’s licenses that would meet the requirement. In all other states, voters would need either a passport or a birth certificate.
Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.
Trump is also trying to guarantee that Americans will remember him differently than they perceive him now. Last fall he withheld money for the $16 billion Gateway tunnel under the Hudson River, connecting New York and New Jersey. This major infrastructure project is important to the entire region. Jonathan Karl of ABC followed up on a story broken by Punchbowl News yesterday, explaining today that Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) last month that he would release the appropriated money if Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station in New York City and Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., after him.
Schumer refused, after which Trump’s social media account accused Schumer of “holding up” the project.
But House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), at least, appears to think the American people have moved too far from Trump for him to recover their loyalty. Now, rather than dividing Americans, Trump’s outrageous behavior is uniting Americans against him. Jeffries leaned into that anger in his own video responding to Trump’s vile image of the Obamas.
“This disgusting video, posted by the so-called president, was done intentionally. F*ck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior. This guy is an unhinged bottom feeder. President Obama and Michelle Obama are brilliant, caring, and patriotic Americans. They represent the best of this country. It’s time for John Thune, Mike Johnson, and Republicans to denounce this serial fraudster, who’s sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue pretending to be the president of the United States.”
