- David Remnick of The New Yorker on Trump the Bully;
- Heather Cox Richardson on Trump promises not kept;
- Trump’s escalating racist attacks on Black Americans;
- How Fox News feeds anti-immigrant propaganda to its audience;
- Trump’s gold kitsch White House;
- More about that pastor, praised by Hegseth, who thinks women shouldn’t have the right to vote.
The New Yorker, David Remnick, 3 Aug 2025: The Politics of Fear, subtitled “As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump made his world view plain: there was “us” and there was “them.” Once he was in the White House, the fear factor would prevail.”
(Which is to say, the most simplistic kind of tribal morality.)
Trump was, from his formative years, a spoiled bully. The Trump family, whose fortune was made in outer-borough real estate, had a cook and a chauffeur, and “Little Donny” was a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York. This was just the sort of place, it was hoped, where Donald would mature into a young man of rectitude and self-regulation.
That, in fact, did not happen. Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him. Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an astute early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”
At home, Trump apprenticed with his father, collecting rents and learning the finer points of discriminatory housing. He eventually came under the tutelage of the attorney and sybarite Roy Cohn. What lessons Trump learned from Cohn were entirely malevolent: Never show weakness. Never apologize, never explain. Attack, never defend. Engender loyalty through intimidation. With his curious coif and self-satisfied expression, Trump made himself a presence in Page Six. Indecency and aggression were his brand. Cruel, narcissistic, duplicitous—the list is long and by now so familiar that even some of Trump’s supporters concede that his most poisonous attributes are, to use the D.C. lingo, baked into the cake.
This is the kind of person nearly half the country think is just fine, even admirable, while not understanding why the other half don’t agree.
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Why does anyone believe any promise Trump ever makes? Some his defenders prattle about the things he’s accomplished, all the promises kept, but really, are they paying attention?
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: August 8, 2025 (Friday)
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed he could stop Russia’s war on Ukraine with a single phone call. Instead, Matt Murphy and Ned Davies of the BBC report that Russian attacks on Ukraine have doubled since Trump took office. Today was the deadline the president had announced for Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in his illegal invasion of Ukraine or face further sanctions. Instead, Trump announced this afternoon that he intends to meet with Putin on August 15 in Alaska.
Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of America.
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And this. What his fans want, apparently.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 9 Aug 2025: Trump escalates his racist attacks on Black Americans, subtitled “Failure to connect his comments to our worsening democratic crisis is an act of complicity”
Donald Trump is not a subtle man. Given his core nature and personality, Trump’s attacks on prominent Black Americans have recently become even more explicit and direct.
First, he accused former President Barack Obama of “treasonous” behavior for launching an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. But that was not the end of it. On Monday, following a criminal referral from Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered federal prosecutors to open a grand jury investigation into the baseless accusations. Multiple investigations, including two led by Republicans, and other reporting have repeatedly shown that Russia did, in fact, seek to meddle in the election in favor of Trump over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by launching a social media disinformation campaign using Russian bot farms, and by hacking the Clinton campaign’s emails.
No such conspiracy on Obama’s part exists. But with Trump’s consolidation of power and lack of traditional guardrails, he has the full power of the state at his command to advance his authoritarian campaign against Obama, Clinton and other people and groups that he has already targeted — or will soon be targeting — for “treason” and other “crimes.”
In the meantime, Trump has placed other prominent Black people in his sights.
With many more examples.
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This speaks for itself.
NY Times, opinion by Maureen Dowd, 9 Aug 2025: President Midas’ Terrible Touch
Following some background about the original design of the White House, and Trump’s recent perambulation around the White House roof to view the recently paved-over rose garden:
Trump has long been a human wrecking ball, but now his chaos has splattered onto the usually serene White House. He’s obsessively terraforming the place to be an extension of his attention-crazed id.
Ever since he escaped what he considered a drab existence in Queens, Trump has bedazzled his life — everything from tweezers to seatbelts to TV remotes were gilt. Even as president, he’s selling gold sneakers, gold watches and gold phones.
Now he has tarted up the Oval; it’s the modern version of worshiping the golden calf and just as profane.
Trump’s tacky rococo gold adornments are growing exponentially. He’s piling on more and more garish features — from cherubs to mantelpiece swirls — and sycophants add to the gold rush by bringing offerings to truckle to King Midas.
… “In one year, we’ll celebrate 250 years of independence from a mad king,” David Axelrod told me. “Would you not give anything to invite Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln back to comment on what they’re seeing? It’s blasphemous.”
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I think many people take the world at face value, believing everything they’re told by parents and other authority figures, understanding everything they perceive with naive intuition. Some people are clever enough to understand the motives of parents and other authority figures, and come to realize that naive intuition can often be misleading. The world is more complex that it seems at face value. But not everyone realizes this.
Media Matters, John Knefel, 8 Aug 2025: This segment exemplifies how Fox feeds garbage anti-immigrant slop to its audience, subtitled “A recent appearance by Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin illustrates how the network pushes bad ‘worst of the worst’ data”
Right-wing media have worked symbiotically with President Donald Trump’s administration to manufacture false media narratives of immigrant criminality and to justify subsequent crackdowns on those communities. A recent segment on Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria Bartiromo perfectly illustrates this dynamic, as guest host Cheryl Casone enabled a Homeland Security spokesperson to uncritically spread a baseless statistic to bolster the administration’s claim that it’s pursuing the so-called “worst of the worst.”
On August 4, Casone introduced Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin by discussing legal challenges Trump has faced in carrying out his mass deportation plans.
“What is the path forward here from the legal side, from the attorneys at DHS, to make sure that these deportations continue to be carried out as the American public had asked for?” Casone said.
(This framing is already misleading — in mid-July, polls from CNN and CBS News both found that a majority of respondents oppose the administration’s increased deportation program.)
After assuring the Fox Business’ audience that Trump’s targeting of immigrants had nothing to do with “racial animus,” McLaughlin moved on to what has become a common administration talking point to claim Trump’s policies “are focused on criminality.”
(Meanwhile, DHS recently asked the Supreme Court to allow ICE agents to use factors like speaking Spanish or working in construction as a partial basis for reasonable suspicion that a person is in the country without authorization.)
Going on about how “Seventy percent of those illegal aliens who have been arrested under the Trump administration either have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.”
As Media Matters previously reported, the statistic appears to be false based on independent sources that collect federal data.
“Follow the money” is a standard term for looking at the motives of whoever wants something. In this case, the obvious motivations of Trump and MAGA and ICE — animus against anyone not white and Christian — are obvious. And that should provide all the rationale for everything they’re doing.
Do the MAGA folk not realize how they’re being manipulated?
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Follow-up articles to previous stories.
Vox, Cameron Peters, 6 Aug 2025: RFK Jr. defunds a medical miracle, subtitled “mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives. RFK Jr. is attacking them anyway.”
A typical Vox “explainer,” in Q&A format.
What is mRNA? mRNA, or messenger RNA, is the reason the US had safe, effective Covid-19 vaccines available as early as it did. A promising but still unproven technology prior to the pandemic, mRNA allowed pharmaceutical companies to develop effective vaccines far more rapidly and more adaptably than was once possible.
Beyond respiratory viruses like Covid, researchers hope mRNA could even be effective in treating cancers.
What’s the context? Kennedy has long made false claims about mRNA vaccines, including describing the Covid-19 vaccine as “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” On Tuesday, he falsely stated that mRNA vaccines “don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,” such as Covid. In fact, by one estimate, the Covid vaccines saved some 2.5 million lives.
And Kennedy is “not a fair ‘skeptic’ but an anti-vaccine advocate who will use his power to impose unscientific beliefs on US public health infrastructure.”
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More about that endorsement by Pete Hegseth…
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 9 Aug 2025: Defense Secretary praises pastor who thinks women shouldn’t have the right to vote, subtitled “Pete Hegseth endorsed the views of Doug Wilson, a Christian Nationalist who openly calls for dismantling women’s suffrage”
I’m posting this mostly because of the hypocrisy of conservatives, spelled out in the opening paragraphs:
When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, he was heavily scrutinized for sermons delivered by his then-pastor Jeremiah Wright. News outlets and plenty of bad-faith commentators demanded he account for why he would attend any church with a pastor who dared criticize America. Obama said he didn’t agree with those comments and plainly denounced them, but critics were eager to equate them with his campaign. Months later, Obama resigned his membership in that church.
Now look at what’s happening with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who attends a church headed up by patriarchal, conspiracy-spewing Christian preacher Doug Wilson—and sends his children to a school affiliated with Wilson.
