HEATHER

 

October 3, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 04, 2025

Although President Donald J. Trump has not appeared in public since Tuesday, his social media account has been posting up a storm. Just three weeks ago, administration officials were insisting that Democrats were responsible for hateful political speech. Trump’s account last night posted images of prominent Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, with the heading “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.” It went on to say: “The Democratic Party is Dead! They have no leadership! [N]o message! [N]o hope! [T]heir only message for America is to hate Trump!”

The Trump account posted another AI video last night, as well. Set to the music of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” the video shows Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance as band members—Trump on cowbell and Vance on drums—and features Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper.

As the video shows the U.S. Capitol, changed song lyrics say: “Here the power’s gone.” Under Vought, they say: “Russ Vought is the reaper. He wields the pen, the funds, and the brain… Dems you babies… gonna tie your hands… won’t be able to fly… cry baby end your plan.” The video shows people as zombies walking past an unemployment office, then shows Democratic leaders behind a chorus of “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” before ending with a Halloween-nightmare image of AI ghouls trick-or-treating in MAGA garb.

Veterans of the U.S. national security community posting as The Steady State noted that “a president posting a video depicting his opponents as prey for the Grim Reaper and zombies outside the ‘unemployment office’ is the opposite of what we expect in a healthy democracy.”

Russell Vought is not an elected official. He is best known for his contributions to Project 2025, a plan for gutting the U.S. government and installing a theocratic dictatorship. Project 2025 was so unpopular when it came to light last summer—only 4% of voters who knew about it wanted to see it enacted—that Trump insisted he had nothing to do with it. Trolling the American people with the idea that Congress has no power and Russell Vought is running the government to destroy it is an odd choice for a president who is already deeply unpopular.

But turning the government over to unelected individuals who ignore the law is a theme for this presidency. First, billionaire Elon Musk, who ran the “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) apparently with the help of Vought, impounded congressionally appropriated funds and fired government workers. Then reports surfaced that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller was in charge of deportations, detentions, and the attempt to get rid of diversity programs, while also exercising influence over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Now Trump appears to be turning the reins of the government over to Russell Vought.

Turning the powers of the government over to unelected bureaucrats has not been going terribly well. On September 25, from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), top-ranking Democrat Gary Peters (D-MI) and his staff issued a report on the actions of DOGE, which slashed through government funding and fired employees on a crusade to combat what they called “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The hurried actions of those working for DOGE collapsed vital services, leaving government officials backpedaling. On September 24 the Associated Press examined the effect of DOGE on the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency established in the 1940s to manage the thousands of workplaces used by federal employees. DOGE employees targeted the GSA as a prime example of waste, fraud, and abuse. They abruptly canceled almost half of the leases for government space—without telling the tenants—and called for generating savings by selling off federally owned buildings. They also cut staff at headquarters by 79%, portfolio managers by 65%, and facilities managers by 35%.

The Associated Press reports that 131 leases expired without the government actually leaving the office space, costing the agencies steep fees. Now officials are asking hundreds of GSA workers to come back after what the Associated Press says “amounts to a seven-month paid vacation.” Chad Becker, a former real estate official with the GSA, told the Associated Press: “Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed. They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

The report from Senator Peters suggests that DOGE was efficient in at least one way: individuals associated with DOGE created databases that “contain highly sensitive personally identifiable information on every American” and that “can be manipulated with little to no oversight.” The report found even more concerning that administration officials “were unable or unwilling” to say who was “functionally in charge of significant policy changes at these agencies.”

Some agencies couldn’t say what data DOGE had accessed or what the DOGE teams were doing. Some agency officials would not directly acknowledge they had DOGE teams, although Executive Order 14158 required each agency to have at least four DOGE people. And agency officials refused to show investigators offices or the infrastructure of Starlink, the satellite internet service controlled by Elon Musk.

The report concluded that DOGE has violated the law and created unprecedented privacy and cybersecurity risks, while the secrecy surrounding DOGE prevented congressional oversight and public accountability. The report called for shutting down the accessible database DOGE created, revoking DOGE access to private information, reasserting agency control, identifying DOGE employees, and conducting a comprehensive audit of what sensitive data DOGE compiled.

The escalating raids on undocumented immigrants are also running afoul of the law. Tuesday’s raid on an apartment building in Chicago, in which residents, including U.S. citizens, were detained, has galvanized opposition. Today, after reports that children were zip tied, separated from their parents, and detained for several hours, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker directed state agencies to evaluate the treatment of children during the raid and to “determine any formal steps or investigations that the state should initiate to hold federal agents accountable.”

Today in Nashville, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw rebuked the Justice Department and its top officials for prosecuting Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant, on federal charges in what appears to be a vindictive prosecution. Crenshaw said officials from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security might have prosecuted Abrego for filing a successful lawsuit challenging his unlawful deportation to El Salvador. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes that vindictive prosecution motions are very hard to win, and the fact that the court is even considering it is “a hugely embarrassing blow to the Trump administration.”

A second federal court today rejected the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, saying it is unconstitutional.

On Monday, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Stephen Miller has directed the administration’s strikes on Venezuelan boats, taking precedence over secretary of state and national security advisor Marco Rubio.

Today Defense Secretary Hegseth announced he had ordered a strike on another boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing four people Hegseth called “narcoterrorists.” Both Hegseth and Trump posted a video in which a small speedboat was blown to fragments by a strike. Trump declared that the boat was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE.” The administration declared yesterday that such strikes are justified because it considers the U.S. in an armed conflict with drug cartels. Legal experts reject this assertion.

If Trump’s reliance on unelected bureaucrats to run his administration has led officials astray, another video posted by the Department of Homeland Security today seemed to offer a different window onto what the president is trying to accomplish. The video shows a bar with words in a font that mimics that of early video games, saying: “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED.” Behind the bar runs a series of images of the United States in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. It shows Trump himself as a young man and what appears to be the Trump Tower in New York City in the early 1980s.

The nostalgic hope for reclaiming Trump’s glory days has tucked within it the McDonalds Mac Tonight moon image, an image used by white supremacists.

The world depicted in that video reflects the period before Trump met convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but that story is not going away. The House of Representatives was supposed to be back in session on Monday, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has sent members home until October 14. Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) noted today that Johnson appears to be delaying the swearing-in of newly elected Arizona representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.

Grijalva says she will sign the discharge petition that will require the speaker to bring to the House floor a vote on instructing the Department of Justice to release the files from the investigation into Epstein’s actions, which needs only one more signature to force the vote.

Regarding Johnson’s declaration that the House will take another week away from the Capitol rather than coming back to negotiate a way to end the government shutdown and preserve Americans’ access to healthcare, Pingree asked: “Is this about the shutdown, or is this about the Epstein files?”

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Notes:

 

God, Greed and Groomers The party that preaches "family values" has become a sanctuary for pedophiles. JoJoFromJerz Oct 4 Republicans are anything BUT the party of family values. They are the party that feeds children to wolves and dares to call it virtue. They parade as guardians of innocence while building sanctuaries for abusers. They pound their chests about law and order while handing power to the very men who break it. Every word is a lie. Not spin. Not hypocrisy. A rancid, deliberate lie, forced down the country’s throat like scripture gone rotten. The same men and women who howl about drag queens and rip books from children’s hands are shielding rapists, covering for predators, and watching kids’ lives be torn apart while they strut around pretending they are righteous. They do not guard innocence. They sell it. They dress it up in scripture, wrap it in a flag, and shove it back down the country’s throat while daring anyone to gag. They’re willing to shut the government down to keep their secrets. They will grind the machinery of the country to a halt rather than risk a vote that might expose who they protect. That is not theory. That is not rhetoric. That is the method. They have chosen recess over reckoning. Departure over disclosure. Bagged suitcases over answering to survivors. That decision should be the opening sentence of every headline, the emergency alarm of the nation. Instead it drifts by like static, swallowed by the hum of business as usual. And this is not distant. This is here. This is now. A man who once stood as Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser just pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl. Not just a man invoking God’s name, but a man who had Trump’s ear. A man in the inner circle. Twelve. It should stop this country cold, yet somehow it barely makes a ripple. My own baby girl is twelve. Twelve is crooked handwriting on wide ruled paper. Twelve is bike rides with skinned knees. Twelve is birthday candles burning down too fast. Twelve is posters taped to bedroom walls and secrets whispered at sleepovers. Twelve is sacred. And twelve was desecrated by a man cloaked in God’s name while the so-called party of family values welcomed him into the fold. If Joe Biden’s spiritual adviser had confessed to raping a child, Fox News would play it on a loop until satellites fell from the sky. It would dominate every chyron, become a national emergency, an endless howl about morality and corruption. But because it happened inside Trump’s orbit, because it is just another diseased branch of that poison tree, the story was smothered before it could breathe. No outrage. No reckoning. No wall-to-wall coverage. Only silence. And silence is not neutral. Silence is the permission slip predators count on. This is not an outlier. This is the bloodstream of the Republican Party, poisoned at the source. Donald Trump bragged about assault as if it were his birthright, was found liable, and they crowned him anyway. He spent decades steeped in Epstein’s filth, mugging for photographs, scribbling birthday notes about their beautiful secret, elevating the prosecutor who bent the law to protect him. When the pressure came to release the files he swore he would expose, he buried them. He handed Ghislaine Maxwell immunity, sent his own lawyer to shield her, and placed her in a minimum security retreat while survivors woke again and again in the dark, lungs full of screams that never stop. What the hell are we even watching. How is this real life. How is this not the national emergency that rips away every mask, every excuse, every last shred of denial and force this country to look itself in the eye. A political party has shut the government down to protect abusers, and the people with microphones and platforms treat it like background noise, like just another Tuesday in hell. And I know what carrying that silence means. It means shaping your life around the weight no one else will name. It means learning to smile while something inside you is breaking. It means waking in the middle of the night gasping for air because the scream never really left your throat. It means watching people look straight through you because believing you would cost them too much. I have carried that silence in my body, in my blood, in the hours no one else sees. How do these men and women look their children in the eye. How do they hug their daughters knowing they are protecting men who raped girls their age. How do they tuck their sons into bed knowing they are teaching them that power means immunity, that shame is weakness, that money buys silence. What do they tell themselves in the mirror. What prayer do they mumble to justify serving the devil while holding the cross. They parade as God’s faithful, they strut as guardians of law and order, yet every bow is to predators, every sermon a cover up, every law bent to shield the powerful while the broken are trampled. They do not just baptize rape in politics, they sanctify it, glorify it, and crown it as leadership. And let us be clear. This is not about God. It is about letting the grotesque do whatever they want, and it is about greed. They clutch Bibles while serving corruption. They wave flags while suffocating the Constitution. They preach virtue while protecting abusers. A masquerade of holy words hiding the corruption at their core. And when the silence falls, it is not neutrality. It is abandonment that festers deeper than the wound itself. Because you expect cruelty from the monster. You steel yourself for that. What you do not expect is for the pastors and the lawmakers and the men and women in suits to hold the door open for him, to smile as they wave him through, to lock eyes with you and make it clear your pain is expendable. That is what they do. They paint over the cracks and call it safety. They spray air freshener on the stench and call it clean. Survivors see through it because we have lived in those rooms before and we know the smell. Every time I see that hush paraded by men with gavels and microphones, it rips the scars open all over again. It confirms what survivors already know in our bones. The abuse never ended. It metastasized. It put on pinstripes. It mastered the language of power. It slithered into the halls of government, and now it rules in our name while spitting in our faces. And they dare to call it politics. They dare to call it business as usual. Shutting down the United States government so predators can keep their secrets is not politics. It is atrocity in a navy suit. It is treachery sprayed with Febreze. It is the desecration of a nation’s soul. This is how they do it. They bleach horror until it looks clean. They grind screams into static until the country can barely hear them. They polish crimes until they gleam like trophies. They train the nation to shrug. And survivors see it. We see it because we have lived it in smaller rooms. Behind closed doors. In the suffocating quiet where no one wanted to hear us scream. And now that same quiet has swollen to fill the halls of the United States government. Trump is the idol they worship. They do not bow to God. They do not bow to country. They bow to him. They bow to a predator. This should be the greatest moral scandal of our time. It should split the sky. It should thunder through every headline, crack the marble of Congress, and shake the foundations of power until the walls themselves demand justice. It should end careers, shatter legacies, drag enablers into courtrooms, and stain history with names that can never be washed clean. Instead we get shrugs. Excuses. Erasure. That void is not neutral. It is an accomplice. I refuse to shrug while they desecrate innocence and call it order. If they feel no shame, then we will be their shame. If they stay silent, we will scream until the hush shatters. If they trade truth for lies, then we will not be governed by the fiction they wrote for themselves. Let this poison settle and we are not a nation but a stage for predators with children at their feet, and history will write that we saw it, that we knew it, and that we let it happen. I have carried that forsaking before, and I will be goddamned if I let it swallow this country too. If the legacy media sleeps, fine. Then it is on us to refuse the lie. To drag the silence into the light. To say again and again that this is not normal. This may very well be who they want us to be, but it is not who we are. For all the women and girls who carry the trauma of the truth they are trying to bury, we will drag it out of the shadows and force this nation to see what some very powerful and deeply evil men very much do not want us to see.

 

An Autocracy of Dunces

How stone-faced generals, Wall Street pushback, and a government shutdown may save America’s quickly declining democracy

Paul Krugman Oct 2

If America still had a fully functioning democracy, Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday to the assembled generals would have ended his presidency. Trump treated the event like a political rally and was clearly taken aback by the refusal of the audience to applaud or laugh at his jokes. Delivering a nakedly partisan speech to a mandated assembly of military officers was a gross violation of the Hatch Act. The content —telling the officers to be ready to use force against U.S. citizens — was clearly an impeachable offense. In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25^th Amendment.

But how did this happen?

It’s clear that the decision to summon top officers from around the world to receive a lecture about “warrior ethos” from a man who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon was made by Pete Hegseth. It confirmed publicly what is being whispered within the military, and presumably among our allies and enemies: that Hegseth is an abject incompetent who isn’t remotely up to the job. And this toe-curling performance is a reflection of his underlying panic.

It’s yet another example of Trump being undone by his even more chaotic minions – RFK Jr. and vaccines , Peter Navarro and his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Bill Pulte’s scurrilous use of private mortgage information (which implicated his own family) and Brendan Carr’s own-goal from going after Jimmy Kimmel. I could go on, but I think the point is made.

Back in August I wrote about “hackification,” invoking what I dubbed Arendt’s Law. As I noted, Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian regimes don’t want competent people, who might sometimes take a stand on principle. They prefer

crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

My case in point in that post was E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, who Trump was trying to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous Commissioner because he didn’t like the numbers the agency was reporting.

While there are many competent conservative economists, Antoni isn’t one of them. He is, instead, stunningly, Stephen-Moore-level incompetent, with a toxic history on social media. Trump’s choice of Antoni proved Arendt’s dictum: crackpots and fools are likely to be more loyal than people who actually know something.

The same logic surely explains the appointment of the hapless Hegseth.

Hackification is also an important factor in the government shutdown. Democrats have made their willingness to supply the extra votes needed to keep the government open contingent on an extension of the Biden-era expansion of health insurance subsidies, which will expire at the end of this year.

It’s good ground for them, politically: More than 24 million Americans get health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, almost all of them subsidized. And if the subsidies are allowed to expire, many families will face a disastrous financial hit:

Source: KFF

The political puzzle is why Republicans didn’t see this coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill carefully and cynically delays big cuts to Medicaid until after the midterms. Why didn’t it include a similarly cynical delay to the looming premium apocalypse?

Well, Chuck Schumer, who met with Trump Monday, said that the president appeared to be “not aware” of the impact of expiring subsidies. I just had a conversation with Jonathan Cohn, which will be posted on Saturday, and we agreed that many Republicans, like Trump, simply weren’t aware of the issue. Who would tell them? As far as I can tell there are no competent health analysts working either for Trump or for Republicans in Congress.

So let me return to my opening point: America is no longer a fully functioning democracy. In the good old days of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party had the conscience and backbone to standup to Nixon’s attempt at autocracy. William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, recused himself from US vs Nixon because of his close prior association with Watergate conspirators? Can you imagine Scalia or Thomas having any such sense of fairness and duty?

But like all authoritarian regimes, America’s autocracy is being run by malevolent incompetents. And while our hallowed institutions are utterly failing to rise to the occasion, the sheer incompetence of these hacks is generating pushback that may yet save us.

While it is likely that the top ranks of the US military skew right politically, all of us – liberals included – should applaud their stony reception of Hegseth and Trump. Likewise, while business leaders are also likely to skew right politically, we all should applaud their pushback over tariffs, the appointment of E.J. Antoni, and the attempt to fire Lisa Cook. And let’s give special thanks to the many Disney subscribers who canceled after the abortive attempt to fire Jimmy Kimmel.

Many innocent people — above all, federal employees — will be hurt by the government shutdown. But Democrats needed to take a stand, to show that they will try to hold Republicans accountable for their assault on the welfare of Americans, and Republican incompetence gave them good ground for doing so.

In a perverse way, we can be grateful that Trump and his minions are so incompetent, because that is forcing the dormant parts of our country to push back. Let’s just hope that the pushback is strong enough and fast enough to save us all.