What did Donald Trump do today?

He caved on Canadian tariffs again (again), with a twist.

Tomorrow is August 1, which was supposedly the last and final deadline for major tariffs to go into effect on goods from America's largest trading partners. Trump has been (accurately) accused of "chickening out" many times before this, and for good reason: the hyper-extreme rates he has been bluffing with would amount to an enormous tax increase on American consumers, and would cripple the U.S. economy if they actually went into full effect.

But Trump, who has been extremely emotionally sensitive to the "chicken" talk, was still rattling his saber as of yesterday: "The August first deadline is the August first deadline — it stands strong, and will not be extended," he wrote on his private microblogging site.

Today, of course, it's a different story: Trump extended the deadline that "will not be extended" on Mexico (the United States' single largest trade partner) for another 90 days—or, at least, that's his story for the next 90 days. 

And for Canada, the country that does the second-most business with the U.S., he set the rate at 35%—but exempted goods covered by the existing USMCA trade agreement, which is virtually all of them.

In other words, Trump is retreating once again to avoid imposing massive taxes on American consumers for the goods they actually need from major trading partners, while inviting huge and much more targeted penalties from foreign countries against vulnerable American export industries.

Trump did offer an interesting variant on his bluff this morning, shortly before he folded: that it would be "very hard" to achieve a trade deal with Canada if its government went through with a plan to formally recognize the state of Palestine.

The two things aren't at all related: it's not like Canada ships lumber to America through the West Bank to avoid tariffs. But the vast majority of the world's countries either already recognize Palestine, or plan to, and "the vast majority of countries" is a pretty good description of who Trump is finding it "very hard" to wage his trade war against.

 

Trump's supposed ability to impose tariffs on a whim, for political reasons or no reasons at all, may not survive a court challenge. Other nations' punitive reciprocal tariffs and the damage done to businesses in the meantime, however, can't be overturned by a court ruling.

Why does this matter?

• The United States literally cannot afford this level of incompetence. 

• Economic security and prosperity for American consumers and businesses is much more important than Donald Trump's ego. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about gas prices, in the best case scenario.

Today, Trump said this about gas prices:

TRUMP: If you look at fuel, uh, $2.35 a gallon. A lot of that, but, uh, we actually had three states, four states, where it's down, $1.99. One dollar and ninety-nine cents, as opposed to three and a half, four dollars.

In reality, there are zero states—and zero individual gas stations—where gas prices are anywhere near that low. The state with the lowest average is Mississippi, at $2.70. The national average is $3.10.

Trump has been making his false $1.99 claim a lot lately, perhaps a dozen separate times since returning to office. It wasn't true then, either: the only time in recent memory when any state's average gas price got anywhere near the $2 mark was during the economic shutdown of the pandemic in summer of 2020. Adjusted for inflation, gas prices are remarkably steady over the years, regardless of what effect Trump may think he personally has on them.

It's not clear why Trump thinks anyone would believe him when he says this. As someone who has quite possibly never purchased gas for himself in his life, he may simply not understand how obvious a lie this is to Americans who do actually have to fill up their own tanks on a regular basis.

Another possibility is that Trump is once again confabulating—that is to say, making things up on the spot out of bits and pieces of information without really knowing he's lying. Elderly people with memory issues often end up repeating the same story elements over and over, because that places a lower cognitive burden on them than directly engaging with the facts that exist in the present day.

Why does this matter?

• There's no practical difference between a president who can't be bothered to stop lying, and one who can't remember the truth. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He promoted one of his golf courses on the taxpayer dime.

Trump golfs almost every weekend, and taxpayers pick up the tab to the tune of at least $4 million for each trip—a figure that doesn't include the cost to local law enforcement, unreimbursed disruption to businesses, and other expenses. And Trump, who stays exclusively at his own properties and forces government employees, including his Secret Service detail, do the same, makes money on each trip.

Trump's golfing this week has been taking place in Scotland, home to two golf courses he owns—and, as of a ribbon-cutting today, a third. The cost to American taxpayers for Trump to promote his new course is estimated to be at least $10 million.

Trump's personal wealth comes from a variety of sources: a nearly half-billion dollar inheritance carefully and illegally hidden from the IRS (including a suspicious last-minute attempt change to his dementia-suffering father's will to benefit himself), tax write-offs from investment "losses" in the casinos he bankrupted that actually came out of the pockets of other investors, and any number of penny-ante product hustles, ranging from a to cheap Trump-branded collectible sneakers. Lately, on paper at least, much of his money comes from cryptocurrency "tokens" that can be used as ways to untraceably put money in Trump's pocket in exchange for whatever goodwill that might get the buyer—like, for example, Trump ordering the SEC to drop civil fraud charges against his biggest buyer.

But the durable value of Trump's real estate holdings are still important to Trump, if only because they represent the business he's found it hardest to lose money in. Property tends to hold its value over the long term no matter who owns it, and for people—or countries—looking to buy Trump's attention without buying fake digital coins, real estate "investments" or simply overpriced club memberships are a straightforward way of doing it.

Officially, the purpose of the trip was to sign a trade agreement with the European Union—even though the golf course opening has been planned for years, and Trump's global trade war has only been going on since he returned to office. But even that excuse doesn't appear to be holding water: the deal Trump announced, and the one the EU says was actually negotiated, are two totally different things. 

This is not the first time that's happened in recent weeks with Trump's hastily announced "deals."

Why does this matter?

• Anyone who needs to be president to make money in business is terrible at both jobs. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He came this close to getting it on Russia.

This morning in Scotland, Trump once again faced questions from an international press corps free to ask direct questions. One was about Trump's repeated failure to bring the Putin regime to any kind of negotiations or even a temporary cease fire in its war on Ukraine. Neither Ukraine nor Russia want the war to end on the current terms, and Putin has made clear through mocking statements in Russian state media that he believes he can conquer Ukraine outright by keeping the United States on the sidelines—a position Trump has embraced.

In his response, Trump—who has been tentatively rattling his saber but has taken no direct or indirect actions to challenge Putin—almost seemed to glimpse the reality of his situation.

REPORTER: Do you think [Putin] has been lying to you about his intentions?

TRUMP: I don't want to use the word lying, all I know is we'd have a good talk, and it seemed on let's say three occasions, it seemed that we were gonna have a, a ceasefire and maybe peace and you'd divide it up and you'd do whatever you have to do that—obviously, to get to the end. And all of the sudden missiles are flying into Kyiv, and other places. And I'd say, "What's that all about?" I spoke to him three, four hours ago, and it looked like we were on our way, and then I'd say "forget it," and "I'm not gonna talk—" you know, this has happened on too many occasions and—I don't like it. I don't like it.

Trump explained away his reluctance to impose meaningful sanctions on Russia by claiming he didn't want to hurt the Russian people—even though any real sanctions would be targeted at the Russian oligarchy and their assets, not ordinary Russian citizens. "I don't want to do that to Russia," he said. "I love the Russian people, they're great people."  

Sympathy for the Russian people is understandable: they have spent most of the twenty-first century under a corrupt authoritarian with a captive legislature, who parcels out state power to billionaire cronies (at least until they displease him), attacks the press politically and physically, treats opposition to his agenda as tantamount to  treason, ignores laws he finds inconvenient, flaunts his immunity for his own lawbreaking and who uses the coercive power of the state to intimidate the opposition.

By contrast, Trump had this to say on the Fourth of July about the clear majority of American citizens who opposed his budget bill: "They wouldn’t vote [for my budget bill] only because they hate Trump, but I hate them too, you know that? I really do hate them, I cannot stand them."

Why does this matter?

• Dictators don't brag about pulling other leaders' puppet strings unless they have those strings to pull on.  

• Anyone who gives a dictator the benefit of the doubt, over and over again, is far too stupid and gullible to be fit for office.

• Past a certain point, it doesn't matter if a president is compromised, mentally incapable of understanding his situation, or simply overmatched.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He ranted about wind turbines in an even less coherent fashion than usual.

Since beginning his second term, Trump has taken extraordinary measures to surround himself with friendly media at the White House, preferentially taking softball questions from media outlets that have been, for all practical purposes, engineered to cash in on his fame.

But Trump does not control the media during trips abroad, like the one he took to Scotland this weekend. This allowed a Scottish reporter to ask a question his preferred outlets never would—one that directly addressed his mental state:

REPORTER: Can I ask why you’re in a bad mood? Was it a bad morning of golf, or why you not in a good mood?

Trump had played golf that morning at his Turnberry course, as part of a long-running campaign to use the power of the presidency to have the British Open hosted there, which would bring him a windfall profit. It's not clear how well the round went for Trump—although it was, incidentally, the source of rare video proof of something that has been known for decades: that Trump cheats at golf.

 

Trump demurred, saying only that the golf had been fine and that a bad day on the links was still a good day.

But other remarks he made today indicated that Trump's sour mood might have been related to his golf game after all, because he was forced to confront something he has an inexplicable but intense hatred for: wind turbines. Trump has long been furious that his view at Turnberry is spoiled by offshore wind turbines in the distance, and today during a meeting with EU President Ursula von der Leyen, he went on a lengthy and unprompted rant about them:

TRUMP: And the other thing I say to Europe: We will will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains—and I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains. The beautiful—areas of the United States, and you look up, and you see windmills all over the place, it's a—it's a horrible thing, it's the most expensive form of energy, it's no good, they're made in China, almost all of them. Uh, when they start to rust and rot in eight years. Uh, you can't really turn 'em off, you can't bury them, they won't let you bury the propellers, you know, the, the props, because—there's a certain type of fiber that doesn't go well with the land, that's what they say. The environmentalists say you can't bury them. Cause the fiber doesn't go well with the land. In other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job. It's very expensive—and in all fairness Germany tried it, and, uh—wind doesn't work, you need subsidy for wind, and energy should not need subsi—with energy you make money, you don't lose money.  It ruins the landscape, it kills the birds, they're noisy. Uh, you know you have a certain place in, uh, the Massachusetts area that—over the last twenty years had one or two whales wash ashore. And over the last short period of time they had eighteen. Okay? Because it's driving them loco, driving them crazy. Now, windmills will not come—not gonna happen in the United States. And, uh, it's a very expensive and, uh—I would love to see—I mean, today, I’m playing the best course I think in the world, Turnberry, even though I own it, it’s probably the best course in the world, right?  And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills, it's like right—at the end of the 18[th hole]. I say, isn’t that a shame? You have the same thing all over, all over Europe in particular, you have windmills all over the place. Some of the countries prohibit it, but—uh—people oughta know. these, these—these windmills are very destructive.

It's not clear how much of Trump's passionate loathing of wind energy comes from his delicate aesthetic sensibilities, and how much is simply imagined or made up on the spot. But as the links above show, almost all of this is—to put it gently—nonsense. (Also, there is no evidence that wind turbines make whales "loco.")

Why does this matter?

• Irrational anger and obsession over windmills might have a certain literary flair, but it's not a sign of good mental health or fitness for office. 

• The presidency of the United States isn't for shilling golf courses.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tiptoed around the idea of clemency for his friend, the child sex trafficker and rapist Ghislaine Maxwell.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite who helped Jeffrey Epstein groom young girls into his child sex trafficking network, and who actively participated in the rape of children herself, has suddenly been receiving a great deal of attention from Trump's Justice Department.

Maxwell has spoken with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for over nine hours this week, and received immunity to do so. This means that she cannot be prosecuted for any crimes she confesses to or implicates herself in by virtue of what she says. It is virtually unheard of for a criminal to be given immunity after they have already been convicted.

There's one other important bit of context here: Maxwell has already been charged with perjury over lies she told to protect Epstein during a 2015 civil trial.

Maxwell's attorneys have stressed in public statements that she would "welcome any relief" in exchange for her "assistance." Asked about the possibility of rewarding Maxwell with clemency—something that would only happen if her statements helped Trump bury the scandal—Trump refused to rule it out. Instead, he would only say that he was allowed to do it, but claimed he hadn't thought about it.

This isn't the first time Trump has shown an extraordinary deference to Maxwell. In 2020, when she was facing trial and eventual conviction on child sex trafficking charges, Trump repeatedly wished her "good luck" and, in an interview, expressed sympathy for her over Epstein's apparent suicide. 

JONATHAN SWAN: Mr. President, the other day a reporter asked you about Ghislaine Maxwell. You said, quote, "I just wish her well, frankly. I've met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is." 

Mr. President, Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested on charges of child sex trafficking. Why would you wish such a person—

TRUMP: Well first of all, I don't know that. But I do know—

SWAN: She has. She's been arrested for that!

TRUMP: Her friend, or boyfriend—

SWAN: Epstein.

TRUMP: Was either killed or committed suicide in jail. She's now in jail. Yeah, I wish you well. I wish a lot of people well. Good luck! …I'm not looking for anything bad for her. I'm not looking bad for anybody.

SWAN: She's an alleged child sex trafficker.

TRUMP: Big deal. 

Trump routinely threatens his enemies with violence or prosecution: just today, he said that Kamala Harris and three other Black celebrities should go to prison because they endorsed her for president. His first real foray into public debate was when he called for the death penalty for five men wrongly accused of raping a woman in Central Park in 1989—and then repeated it on the campaign trail long after DNA evidence had completely exonerated them.

He did not offer any further explanation as to why he would consider leniency toward a woman who, beyond any doubt, has groomed, trafficked, and raped children. 

Why does this matter?

• Of all the people in the world, this is the one who Donald Trump won't slam the jail door on.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He appointed a white supremacist with a soft spot for authoritarians to head the United States Institute for Peace. 

When Trump ceded a broad swath of his authority to Elon Musk at the start of his second term, the United States Institute for Peace was one of Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency's first targets. An independent, Congressionally-chartered organization focused on diplomacy, its headquarters were occupied and vandalized by DOGE employees. A court later found that action unlawful and reversed it. 

Today, Trump announced through the State Department that he was appointing Darren Beattie, currently the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, as its acting president. 

Beattie styles himself an academic, but has spent most of his brief working life as a right-wing political activist. He worked in the State Department during Trump's first term, until he was discovered to have attended a white nationalist conference, after which he was fired.

Beattie has praised the Chinese government for its crackdown on its Uyghur minority. He's also taken its side in its dispute with Taiwan, overtly contradicting longstanding American policy on the matter. Last year, he tweeted  that "competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work." He's also said that "low IQ trash" Americans should be forcibly sterilized.

Beattie's appointment may simply be a slap at the ever-growing number of Americans who disapprove of his dismantling of productive and valuable American institutions. But there is another possible explanation. A number of Trump administration officials now hold multiple roles simply because, as in his first term, there are very few people willing to take on prominent roles in his administration beyond those already a part of it.

Why does this matter?

• Misogynists, eugenicist white nationalists who praise hostile foreign governments for opposing the United States shouldn't be given diplomatic roles. 

• It's a problem if competent people aren't willing to work for the President of the United states.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried and apparently failed to bully Jay Powell.

Trump took a tour of the Federal Reserve Building today, where he lied about the cost of its renovation to harangue Fed Chair Jay Powell about dramatically lowering interest rates. Presented by Trump with false numbers about the cost of the building project, Powell immediately pushed back, pointing out that Trump was counting in "cost overruns" a building that had been finished and paid for five years ago.

Powell's staff also pointed out that the ongoing renovations are suddenly much more expensive because of Trump's tariffs, particularly on steel—as are all building projects in the United States at the moment. That kind of inflationary economic drag is precisely why the Fed has resisted lowering rates, which would make tariff-fueled inflation even worse.

Trump approved the renovations during his first term, as well as expensive changes to the original plan that went beyond what the Fed wanted. He also appointed Powell, who he's called a "numbskull" for not pushing the Federal Reserve to precipitously drop rates.

Trump wants lower rates for two reasons. The first is personal: in spite of massively ballooning paper wealth thanks to his crypto schemes, Trump is still heavily in debt on his properties, owing more than $600 million on them. Refinancing at dramatically lower interest rates would save him hundreds of millions of dollars going forward. It would also likely help Trump's businesses, which were struggling before his re-election, in other ways. Unlike most Americans, paper billionaires like Trump can only borrow money that their income or collateral would let them pay back, so unlike Trump, they can't use near-zero rates to make speculative investments.

The second reason is political: for all his talk of shrinking government, his recently-passed budget bill balloons the amount of money the Treasury will need to borrow to completely unprecedented levels. If U.S. debt can be sold at lower rates—and there's no guarantee that yields on Treasury bonds will follow the Fed funds rate down—then it would take a little bit of the sting out of the massive hit to the national debt.

Interest rates are relatively high at the moment, and the expectation is that the Fed will drop them incrementally once or twice this year. But doing so because Trump or any president demanded it would almost certainly cause investors to lose faith in the Fed's independence—and that would make American debt much more expensive to pay off, and American businesses much less attractive to invest in.

Why does this matter?

• The health of the American economy is much, much more important than Donald Trump getting a cheaper mortgage.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He "lost" a court battle on the Epstein scandal.

As legal experts had predicted, a federal judge today refused the Trump administration's request to unseal the grand jury records relating to Trump's longtime friend and confidant Jeffrey Epstein. Grand jury records are almost never made public, and are among the most closely guarded confidential information in the judicial system. 

Because the purpose of a grand jury is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial, the evidence introduced may only be a tiny fraction of what the prosecution knows at the time, or unrepresentative, or ultimately inadmissible at trial. And because they often include testimony from witnesses who don't want to be a part of the actual trial, releasing them can violate the privacy of victims, too.

In other words, Trump would have known his request to have the records unsealed was extremely unlikely to be granted—and even if it had been, it would have amounted to only a tiny fraction of what Trump's DOJ knows about its own investigation into Epstein.

In other Epstein news, the Wall Street Journal today reported that Attorney General Pamela Bondi told Trump in May that his name was mentioned in the files. In and of itself, that's not surprising: Trump was in office when Epstein was indicted, and he had a close personal relationship with Epstein for well over a decade. It was already known that Trump and Epstein were close friends, that Trump had accepted rides on Epstein's private jet, and that they socialized together frequently among other people and by themselves. The investigative records will necessarily contain the names of hundreds of people who are not in any way suspected of wrongdoing. 

However, that doesn't explain why Bondi saw fit to warn Trump about it, shortly before killing the release of the files that Trump had campaigned on releasing, and that she had publicly promised she was about to release.

Why does this matter?

• The only reason to pretend to try to be transparent is if you want to avoid actually being transparent.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He demanded that his political enemies be prosecuted "right or wrong."

Trump, who a White House aide says has been "on the fucking warpath" as the Epstein scandal widens, continued to lash out at his political opponents today in an overt attempt to change the subject. In particular, he demanded that President Obama and members of his administration be prosecuted for "treason" over their supposed attempts to steal elections: 

TRUMP: Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader. Hillary Clinton was right there with him, and so was, uh, sleepy Joe Biden, and so was—the rest of them, Comey, Clapper. They tried to rig an election and they got caught. And then they did rig the election in 2020. And then because I knew I won that election by a lot, I did it a 3rd time… but I won that all the same way in 2020.  

In other words, Trump's theory of the case is that Presidents Obama and Biden failed to "rig" the elections against him in 2016 and 2024, but succeeded in doing so in 2020 when Trump himself controlled the executive branch. (In reality, Trump attempted to foment an insurrection against the lawfully elected Biden administration, during which Americans died as Trump supporters attacked the Capitol to stop the certification of the vote.)

Trump has been campaigning on weaponizing the Justice Department against his enemies since the 2016 campaign—and complaining bitterly when investigations were commenced into his actual crimes for nearly as long. But today's remarks were extreme even by that standard: at one point, Trump demanded that Obama be prosecuted purely as revenge: "It's time to start, after what they did to me, and whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people."

If there were any doubt that this was an attempt to distract from the Epstein scandal, Trump himself put it to rest in other remarks, explicitly instructing Republicans to respond to questions about his links to Epstein by talking repeating his claims about Obama.

TRUMP: And remember, don't let them forget—it's so important—Obama cheated on the election. …Obama cheated, and—when they give you all the nonsense—Obama cheated, and his people cheated, but he was there, and you ever hear this, they talk about—if they ever even mention it, they never mention his name. Just the opposite with me, they only mention by name, but they don't mention any of you guys, they don't mention Tom, they don't mention Steve, they don't mention our great speaker, they mention Trump all the time. 

…But remember this, Obama cheated on the election, and we have it cold—hard—blue [sic]—and it's getting more so because the stuff that's coming in is not even believable.

Shortly after Trump's remarks today, still more new evidence linking him to Jeffrey Epstein was uncovered, including the revelation that Epstein was a guest at Trump's second wedding.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents need to be able to have literally any priorities other than their own self-preservation. 

• A president who is too busy trying to deflect from scandals to do anything else is unfit for office on that basis alone. 

• Donald Trump is literally the only person in the last 200 years of American history who has attempted a coup. 

• No matter how many times he tries it, using the power of the state to punish your enemies with phony "investigations" is dictator shit.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He released all kinds of files to distract from covering up files.

Trump has been facing deep and bipartisan fury over his stonewalling on releasing the so-called Epstein files. Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender who apparently committed suicide in 2018 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges related to a massive operation involving dozens of minors. He was also a close friend and intimate confidant of Donald Trump for many years—among various other connections between the two men. 

A poll released today show that an astonishing 89% of Americans want the information collected by the federal government released to the public. Those files may contain information about which, if any, of the wide circle of wealthy and politically powerful people who moved in Epstein's orbit were also clients for his child prostitution ring. 

Today, Trump ordered the release of two massive tranches of government investigative material—about Hillary Clinton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously took an illegal campaign donation from Donald Trump and later served as his personal lawyer, announced the release today. On its face, it might seem like a good political distraction for Trump to once again attack Clinton, whose 2016 presidential bid was hampered by a lingering FBI investigation into her supposed insecure e-mail server practices dating to her time as Secretary of State. But the results of that investigation have already been released, and neither Clinton nor anyone associated with her campaign was found to have engaged in any wrongdoing. Bondi did not commit to releasing the entire files. 

The abrupt and previously unscheduled release of the FBI's files on Martin Luther King, Jr's assassination. was sharply opposed by his family and the foundation that carries on his work. In an episode with increasing relevance for the second Trump administration, King was intensely surveilled by the FBI for years in the hope of linking him to criminal or politically unsavory activity. Not only was it an unlawful invasion of King's privacy, it was focused on finding or creating embarrassing information. The King family statement addresses this:

The release of these files must be viewed within their full historical context. During our father’s lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement. These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth – undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.

In 1999, our family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in Shelby County, Tennessee. The jury unanimously concluded that our father was the victim of a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators, including government agencies as a part of a wider scheme. …While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods. We strongly condemn any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy and the significant achievements of the movement. Those who promote the fruit of the FBI’s surveillance will unknowingly align themselves with an ongoing campaign to degrade our father and the Civil Rights Movement. 

The files in question had been under court seal since 1977, and are not believed to contain any substantive information about King not widely known to the public—only the raw work product of the FBI smear campaign led by its longtime director, the overtly white supremacist J. Edgar Hoover.

In other words, Trump stands to benefit from a chaotic dump of unreviewed information on King in two ways: it may distract from the intense public pressure he is under to release files related to a sex trafficker of children that may be personally catastrophic for him, and it may provide raw material that white supremacists sympathetic to his presidency can use to tar King's legacy, and by extension the idea of a multi-racial America.

Also today, the Republican leadership in the House adjourned the Rules Committee for the summer, rather than allow it to act on a petition joined by many House Republicans aimed at forcing the release of the Epstein files.

Why does this matter? 

• The American people have a right to know how deep Trump's connections to Jeffrey Epstein go, no matter how upset that makes him.

• If Donald Trump wants to make a politician look bad for flagrantly breaking the law over classified documents, he can release his own FBI file. 

• This is what weaponizing government looks like.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he'd stop the deportation of Afghan allies to the Taliban, but not the ones living in the United States he could actually help.

In a social media post this morning, Trump said he would help Afghan citizens living in the United Arab Emirates avoid being deported to Afghanistan, where they are likely to face persecution by the Taliban.

On its face, this is a fairly routine diplomatic exercise. Countries often coordinate on how to divide refugee populations amongst themselves. The end of the United States' military involvement in Afghanistan, which Trump committed to in 2020 after negotiating with the Taliban, forced Afghan citizens who had been aiding the United States to flee or face persecution and death. Some, the people Trump is now claiming he will "help," ended up in the United Arab Emirates.

But others came to the United States. These included translators, military and police forces who fought alongside American troops, local political leaders, people who sold supplies to American forces, and others who aided the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. About 200,000 refugees settled in the United States as the Taliban almost immediately deposed the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.

In May, Trump rescinded the protected status of those Afghan refugees, making them liable to deportation back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. A few weeks later, thousands of them received a chilling e-mail: "It is time for you to leave the United States." Most of them cannot legally go anywhere but back to Afghanistan.

Veterans' groups have been desperately trying to secure some kind of protection for these refugees, to whom they entrusted their lives when deployed. Many veterans speak of their obligation to Afghan colleagues as a matter of honor, and that to cast them loose now that the war is over would be an "intentional betrayal." Alarmed by the Trump administration practice of seizing people when they voluntarily appeared at scheduled immigration hearings, veterans are organizing escorts for Afghan refugees, in the hopes that Trump will not target them.

Trump has not explained why Afghan refugees in the UAE are deserving of the United States' help and support, but not those who came to the United States. But the post declaring his support gives a hint: he cited a piece from a Trump-friendly media outlet, Just The News. That piece was an explicit appeal to Trump, couched in Trump-friendly language complete with slurs at his political enemies, and it was written by Lara Logan, a former journalist turned pro-Trump conspiracy theorist.

Trump's language in his social media post even copies the wording of the headline: "I will try to save them."

Trump did not indicate any change in his policy towards the 200,000 Afghan allies he can most easily "save," nor is there any clear indication he's aware they exist.
 

Why does this matter?

• Presidents need to be willing and able to defend America's allies all the time, not just when a supporter asks for a special favor. 

• Many Americans still care about whether we conduct ourselves with honor towards our allies.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about the impact of his airstrikes on Iran.

In the aftermath of airstrikes on several suspected Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities in June, Trump insisted that all of them had been "OBLITERATED LIKE NOBODY'S EVER SEEN BEFORE." He also claimed that the highly enriched uranium had been destroyed, too—which is more or less physically impossible even if the actual stockpiles hadn't been moved in advance of the attack. 

When a Defense Department report released a few days later suggested that the facilities hadn't been destroyed, Trump simply repeated the claim. He issued a statement instructing the public to "take it from those who actually know," citing himself and his political allies—but not the actual experts who were telling him differently. 

But that report was, by its own admission, a low-confidence preliminary assessment. On Thursday, a much more conclusive report was issued. It said that of the three bombed facilities, two survived with only minor damage. Today, in response, Trump once again insisted that all of Iran's nuclear capabilities were "completely destroyed and/or OBLITERATED" and that it would take years to restart a bomb program.

In other words, Trump is either accusing his own military and intelligence experts of lying about a major national security concern, or lying himself, or unable to understand the truth.

Even for non-experts, the holes in Trump's story are obvious. Iran is a nation the size of the all the Rocky Mountain states put together, and with similar terrain. It has a robust nuclear energy program and domestic sources of uranium ore. Eighty years after the Manhattan Project, constructing a uranium fission bomb is not difficult in practice for a country with hundreds of thousands of trained engineers and physicists. 

The only real hurdle is refining the uranium, which is done with special centrifuges. These are small and portable and could easily have been moved from the targeted sites in advance of the attack, which Trump telegraphed. Keeping Iran from acquiring a store of those centrifuges, as well as the surplus of reactor fuel they've been refining, was the purpose of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Iran entered into with the United States and other nations.

Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018, which allowed Iran to turn away international monitors and rebuild its stockpile of centrifuges.
 

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point it doesn't matter if a president can't understand, can't remember, or can't tell the truth about something this important. 

• American national security is more important than Donald Trump's ego.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to change the Epstein narrative by suing journalists for reporting on it.

Trump has been facing a full-scale bipartisan revolt over his sudden refusal to share any details of the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious abuser and sex trafficker of children as young as 14. Trump's campaign was boosted by conspiracy theories about Epstein and his connections to a secret ruling elite. 

But Trump—who may have been the closest thing to a "ruling elite" in Epstein's life, whether or not he had anything to do with Epstein's criminal activities—abruptly changed his story in recent weeks, declaring that the whole thing was old news, and a "SCAM" cooked up by his political enemies. Specifically, he accused Democratic administrations going back to President Obama of having fabricated evidence against him, although for whatever reason not releasing it when they were in power, while simultaneously denying the existence of any evidence in the first place.

Epstein died in jail awaiting trial during Trump's first term. His death was ruled a suicide, but incomplete and edited recordings of his cell area the Trump administration released this week have only added to the intrigue around his death. Also this week, Trump fired the only remaining prosecutor in the Justice Department who had worked on the case. 

With longtime supporters suddenly furious and suspicious, Trump took the battle to social media, outright demanding that his faithful stop talking about the Epstein case as a show of loyalty to him. Some prominent supporters and Trump-aligned media companies fell in line; others, like the otherwise pro-Trump Wall Street Journal, did not. Yesterday, the WSJ published a bombshell story on a previously undisclosed aspect of the Trump-Epstein relationship.

It was already public knowledge that the two men were longtime and intimate friends through the mid-2000s, and that Trump traveled and partied with Epstein. Trump famously joked in public about how well he knew Epstein's taste in "younger" women. In 1992, Trump arranged for 28 young women to participate in a "calendar girl contest," supposedly as entertainment for a Mar-a-Lago members-only party, but Trump and Epstein ended up being the sole audience.

The WSJ story deepens the connection between Trump and Epstein, reporting on Trump's contribution to a bound volume that Epstein's friends and business partners made as a gift for his 50th birthday. Trump's took the form of a sketch of a naked woman, with his own distinct signature in place of pubic hair. The page includes an imagined dialogue between the two alluding to "secrets" the two share:

Voice Over: ‘There must be more to life than having everything,’ the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Trump denied having made any such contribution, claiming that he doesn't draw. That is a lie: not only is Trump a prolific doodler, he's sold his sketches for money.

Today, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal and its corporate owners for libel and the infliction of "billions" in reputational damage to Trump, insisting that the paper had fabricated the story and published it knowing it was false. The Journal responded in a statement: "We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit."

Trump's filing (full text link) was clearly drawn up in haste to gain control of the media narrative. One White House official said that Trump was "on the fucking warpath" in an attempt to kill the story before it was released. (Trump has, in the past, sometimes been able to convince friendly media outlets to "catch and kill" embarrassing stories about him, like the National Enquirer did when it bought the rights to the story of his affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels.) The filing is nonsensical in places, accusing the WSJ of billing the piece as an "exclusive," but also of promoting it to "millions" of readers. ("Exclusive" means that a paper is the first to report something, not that it limits who can read its reporting.)

It is vanishingly unlikely that the WSJ would risk its owners' media empire worth hundreds of billions of dollars on a fraudulent story. It is even less likely that Trump will pursue the case any further, since the defendants would be entitled to legal discovery which could bring much more about the Trump-Epstein relationship to light. 

Relatedly, a federal judge threw out a similar lawsuit today brought by Trump against the journalist Bob Woodward. In his book Rage, Woodward used interviews he conducted with Trump to paint an accurate but embarrassing portrait of Trump's first term, which prompted Trump to sue.

One more plausible outcome is a settlement, if Trump can bring the powers of his office to bear on the Journal's owners. This has been a reliable tactic for him during his second term: he has already essentially blackmailed the owners of ABC and CBS into paying monetary damages and changing their coverage of him. Or, Trump may simply let the threat linger in the air while he remains in office, dismissing it at some point in the future if he feels less endangered by reporting on his Epstein connections.

Trump's extreme reaction to public attention to his Epstein ties stands in marked contrast to his relative disengagement from almost every other aspect of his presidency, and it may not be having the desired effect: he's now fifty-four points underwater in polls about how he's handled it.

Why does this matter?

• If it were harder to believe that Donald Trump could be involved in sexual violations of children, he wouldn't be having such a problem today. 

• Making an example of people who report unflattering things about the leader is what dictators do.  

• Donald Trump is innocent until proven guilty, but it's pretty much impossible to imagine why he'd fight this hard to cover up something he wasn't terrified of coming to light.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to get out ahead of yet another story about his health.

Over the past few days, images have circulated online of Donald Trump's severely swollen ankles. Pooling of fluid in the lower extremities is called edema, and while not dangerous in and of itself, it can a symptom of any number of more serious issues.

 

At the same time, there was renewed attention to Trump's right hand, which was once again caked in thick makeup in an attempt to hide a bruise. This has been a common occurrence during Trump's second term.
 

Trump's often-bruised hand in February (left) and this week

The official White House explanation is that Trump is sustaining repeated bruises from shaking hands. This is almost certainly a lie, as the bruise is exactly where you would expect one if a person were receiving intravenous fluids through the veins on the back of the hand.

The characteristic bruise of an IV, recently sustained by a WTDT contributor after minor surgery (unconcealed by makeup)

Today, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt abruptly changed the story, announcing that Trump had been diagnosed "recently" with chronic venous insufficiency. It, too, is not inherently dangerous, although it can lead to painful and debilitating ulcers and loss of mobility, and is often a symptom of more serious problems like heart disease. Leavitt insisted that Trump was completely healthy otherwise. She brandished a letter from a physician, and reiterated the "handshake" story.

However, Trump has a very, very long history of lying about his health—almost comically so for someone who has lived as long as he has with only one serious bout of illness. He got a last-minute diagnosis of bone spurs from a physician whose landlord was his father, allowing him to escape the Vietnam draft. He dictated his own medical assessment during the 2016 campaign, saying through his private physician that he was "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency" and that his tests yielded "only positive results." (Since one generally wants negative results on diagnostic tests, that was a clue, although the doctor in question only admitted that he'd let Trump write the statement in 2018.)

Trump played that trick again in the White House, making a bargain with his government physician: in exchange for Trump's political backing, Dr. Ronny Jackson claimed that Trump could "live to 200" because of his "great genes." (Jackson, who served in the Navy, was later demoted in rank when an investigation revealed that he dispensed drugs, including amphetamines and fentanyl, in the White House without a prescription or keeping accurate records, and without proper examinations.)

Trump nearly died of COVID in October of 2020—after deliberately going through with a debate with Joe Biden while infected and contagious—but staged photos while in a private suite at Walter Reed in an attempt to look like he was healthy. He forced his Secret Service detail to take a drive around the hospital, in an enclosed space with him while he was still contagious. 

Asked about another troubling health episode for Trump, his drift into a confused reverie about his late uncle that included several historically impossible details, Leavitt deflected by scolding the reporter for not focusing on something more important.
 

Why does this matter?

• It's wrong for the president to lie to the public about his health. 

• It's also pointless and egotistical for the president to lie to the public about his health, unless the truth would make people think he wasn't fit for office.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He was surprised that the "terrible" Jerome Powell was appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve, by him. 

At an event this morning, Donald Trump was asked about Fed Chair Jerome Powell. 

 

REPORTER: Jerome Powell, do you have plans, or are you in fact considering firing Jerome Powell? What's your justification, if you're thinking about this?

TRUMP: He's always been too late, hence his nickname "Too Late," uh, he should have cut interest rates a long time ago, Europe has cut them ten times in the short period of time where we cut them—none, the only time he cut them was just before the election to try to help Kamala, or — Biden, whoever the hell it was, nobody really knew, uh, obviously that didn't work, but he tried to cut 'em for the Democrats, Kamala, and, uh, how did that work out, you tell me, didn't work out to well for him. But he's, he's, uh, I think he does a terrible job, he's costing us a lot of money, and we fight through it, it's almost, the country's become so successful that it doesn't have a big impact, but, uh, it does hurt people wanting to get a mortgage, uh, people wanna buy a house, he's a terrible, he's a terrible Fed Chair, I was surprised he was appointed, I was surprised frankly that, uh, Biden put him in and extended him, but, uh, they did. 

Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, appointed Jerome Powell as Chair of the Federal Reserve in 2018.

Trump's forgetfulness about who appointed Powell and who exactly he was running against in 2024 comes one day after he forgot the name of a longtime aide, forgot which event he was introducing speakers for, fell asleep on stage, and hallucinated a story about the Unabomber and his late uncle.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents need to be able to remember basic facts about important decisions they (supposedly) made in their previous terms, and if they can't, they're not fit for office.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He had a challenging day on the cognitive fitness front.

This morning, Trump used a brief press availability to insult the intelligence of two of his political opponents, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX).

TRUMP: AOC—look. I think she's very nice. But she's very low IQ, and we really don't need low IQ. Between her and Crockett, we're gonna give them both an IQ test to see who comes out best. I took a real test at Walter Reed Medical Center and I aced it. Now it's time for them to take a test. 

The "real test" Trump took as part of his annual physical was the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). It is not an intelligence test, but it does test whether, for example, Trump was able to tell a lion from a camel, or say what bananas and oranges have in common. Since taking it five years ago, Trump has frequently boasted about "acing" it.

 

Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett are 35 and 44 years old, respectively—far too young for age-related cognitive decline to be a concern, so it is extremely unlikely that their routine medical assessments include the MoCA.

After bragging about having passed a cognitive impairment test in 2020, Trump then traveled to Pittsburgh, where he experienced a number of incidents in rapid succession suggesting cognitive impairment or other wellness issues. He dozed off while listening to a speech at the event he was attending. This happens a great deal with Trump—he's nodded off at funerals, diplomatic conferences, and most famously, his own criminal trial. 

He struggled to remember and then pronounce the name of Michael Kratsios, a White House aide currently serving as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and who has worked with Trump since 2017. (Trump occasionally has difficulty speaking clearly, something his staff has variously blamed on a dry throat or technical recording glitches, when they admit it happened at all.) He introduced Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) to speak, who was not present or expect to be in attendence, and had to be corrected. 

Most bizarrely of all, Trump told a rambling story about his uncle, Dr. John Trump, who taught at MIT—although he wasn't, as his 79-year-old nephew claimed, the longest-serving professor in that school's history. Donald Trump's story involved Prof. Trump's student, Theodore Kaczynski, the mathematician better known as the Unabomber. According to Donald Trump, he asked his uncle what Kaczynski was like as a student:

TRUMP: I said, what kind of a student was he Uncle John, Dr. John Trump? Uh, he said: "What kind of a student — seriously, good ... he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn't work out too well for him. Didn't work out too well, but it's interesting in life." 

But Trump was imagining all of it. Kaczynski never attended MIT, so could not have been John Trump's student. And John Trump died in 1985, before the identity of the bomber was known, so the conversation Donald Trump remembers could never have taken place. 

Why does this matter?

• Making up imaginary stories out of bits of other memories without realizing you are doing it is called confabulation, and it is a symptom of cognitive decline. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to "punish" Russia with the same ultra-high taxes on American consumers that he's imposing on our closest allies. 

In recent weeks, Trump has made a show—at least for the cameras—of frustration with the Putin regime's unwillingness to seriously negotiate a peace treaty with Ukraine. Trump promised (fifty-three separate times) that he would resolve the conflict "on Day One," and may actually have believed it would be that simple. 

But neither side is especially interested in a cease-fire. For Ukraine's government to ratify any peace deal that rewards an unprovoked Russian invasion with 20% of its territory is all but unthinkable. And for Russia, as badly as the war has gone relative to its initial expectations, there is every good reason to think it can extend its territorial conquest. That's especially likely to happen if the Trump administration continues to dial back American support for Ukraine, whether or not Trump is aware that that is happening. 

Trump's latest attempt to force at least the appearance of progress has been to threaten to impose tariffs on Russian exports, driving up their cost for American consumers. Notably. the Putin regime has been one of only a handful of countries not subject to new tariffs during Trump's second term.  

There are a few problems with this strategy. First, the United States does very little trade with Russia, importing about $3.3 billion worth of goods in 2024. That's less than 1% of American imports from Canada, the United States' largest trade partner and a close ally, and which is also being threatened with punitive tariffs by Trump.

Second, what is true of the stock markets is increasingly true of world governments: almost nobody thinks he's willing to actually go through with inflation-spiking taxes on Americans, or at least not for more than a token period of time after which he can declare victory. As a result, nations are increasingly calling his bluff, meeting each new proclamation with silence, indifference, or reciprocal tariffs targeted at vulnerable American exporters.

The Putin regime, which has in the past demonstrated extraordinary and direct influence over Trump, has not bothered to respond. But the Moscow stock exchange was up 2.7% today.

Why does this matter?

• Tariffs raise the price of imported goods for American consumers. They don't do any of the other things that Donald Trump thinks they do, like ending wars, stopping drug smuggling, or getting his cronies out of jail. 

• At this point, Trump's belief that tariffs will solve every problem he might face is pathological. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He watched a soccer game and then acted like he'd won it.

Trump had a leisurely Sunday as usual, but swapped playing golf for watching soccer, attending the FIFA Club World Cup. The event was a dress rehearsal for the 2026 World Cup, which will be jointly hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

During the playing of the national anthem, the stadium video screen showed a live shot of Trump, provoking loud boos. In and of itself, that's not so unusual—presidents are polarizing figures even when they're popular, and after almost six months back in office, Trump is anything but popular. In fact, the only time a president had lower approval ratings than Trump does at this point in his term was when it was Trump himself in 2017.

Trump was booed again during the presentation of the trophy to the winning Chelsea team, not so much for his presence on the stage, but for his inexplicable refusal to yield it to the athletes. A FIFA official tried in vain to get Trump to step aside for the announcement of the winners, but he wouldn't budge. Eventually, the official succeeded in herding him to the back of the crowd of athletes he'd been standing in front of, holding the trophy himself.

 

His popularity aside, there are serious doubts about whether Trump will be willing or even able to allow the World Cup to proceed as usual. Normally the World Cup is one of the biggest international tourism events there is, but Trump has made the United States a pariah for foreign visitors, with legal visitors from close U.S. allies experiencing harassment, detention, and summary deportation due to Trump's hyper-paranoid approach to immigration enforcement. Revenues from the tourism sector—normally one of the biggest American industries—have fallen off a cliff as a result. 

In particular, the United States now requires foreign visitors to turn over sensitive social media information for screening, and visa applicants can be rejected for "political activism" or "any hostility towards the government of the United States"—meaning, in practice, criticism of Trump personally.

It's already affecting sports: the Senegalese women's basketball team was denied entry last month because of Trump's "national security" policies. At least one major league baseball team is advising its players—citizens and noncitizens alike—to carry their passports with them, for fear that ICE will detain anyone with a Hispanic surname or accent. When a worried FIFA board raised the question of how to square this with hosting an international tournament at a meeting with Trump last month, he reportedly responded that “tensions are a good thing,” and uncertainty would "make it more exciting."

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point, the need to be the center of attention becomes pathological. 

• It's stupid and self-destructive for the president to kneecap a major American industry for no reason.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to exile an American citizen for criticizing him.

Last Sunday, as she frequently does, the actor Rosie O'Donnell posted a video to TikTok. She mused about the weather in Ireland, where she currently lives, and about her upcoming projects, and TV shows she'd binged recently. She also said this: 

What a horror story in Texas. The flash floods in Texas, the Guadalupe River. Fifty-one dead, more missing. [The death toll currently stands at 129, with 160 more missing.] Children, at a camp. 

And you know, when the president guts all of the early warning systems and the weather forecasting abilities of the government, these are the results that we're going to start to see on a daily basis, because he's put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law, as Republicans cheered. People will die as a result and they've started already. Shame on him. Shame on every GOP sycophant who's listening and following the disastrous decisions of this mentally incapacitated POTUS. 

Hard to believe. Some people on this Tiktok and on Instagram, say "Well you moved, why do you care?" I moved so that I wouldn't have a nervous breakdown. I moved so that I could be away from it and have some type of shield from the intimacy of it, because I don't do well in world crises. I don't, starting with the Vietnam War, when I was a small child. I don't do well, I know myself enough to know, when he got re-elected, it was time to go. And all that you needed to propel your movement, was reading Project 2025, and sadly, not many Americans did that. And if they did, they didn't believe it. Why? Because the president was lying, saying he knew nothing about it, and he wasn't going to follow it. And he's followed every single thing that they said he was going to do. 

In response, Trump threatened to revoke her citizenship. This isn't something he has any legal power to do, but given the tactics that he has encouraged ICE to use against citizens and immigrants alike here in the United States, it still carries weight. 

He made a similar threat against Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York, and against native-born Americans whose parents were not citizens but whose own citizenship is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. (Four of Trump's five known children were born to mothers whose citizenship could be revoked under Trump's policies.) He's also enthusiastically mused about sending Americans to foreign prisons, something he also has no legal authority to do.

Why does this matter?

• The Constitution and the laws of the United States say who is a citizen, not Donald Trump. 

• It's only a crime to criticize the leader's failures in a dictatorship.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said the families of flood victims were "evil" if they questioned whether anything could have been done to prevent their deaths.

The death toll from the flooding of the Guadalupe River last week in Texas has risen to 121, and that number is likely to reach almost 300 with at least 173 people still listed as missing. 

Today, Trump toured some of the damage, and had this exchange with a local reporter:

REPORTER: Several of the families we've heard from are obviously upset because they say that those warnings, those alerts didn't go out in time, and they also say that people could have been saved. What do you say to those families?

TRUMP: Well, I think everyone did an incredible job, under the circumstances, this was, I guess [Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi [Noem] said a one-in-500, one-in-a-thousand-years, and, uh, I just have admiration for the job that everybody did. Uh, there's this admiration, uh, the, uh—only a—bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you, I don't know who you are, but only a very, uh, evil person would ask a question like that, I think this has been—heroism, I think this has been incredible, really, the job you've all done, it's easy to sit back and say "Oh, what could have happened here, there, you know." Maybe we could have done something differently. This was a, a thing that says, uh, [unintelligible] says never happened before.

 Among the question that many "evil" residents and survivors of the flood have been asking are:

• Why was an emergency alert not issued immediately after local first responders specifically asked for one?  

• Why did local officials not act on an urgent flood warning for over three hours?
  
  
• How much did Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's insistence on personally approving all expenses over $100,000—virtually nothing in the case of an emergency like this—delay relief and rescue efforts?
  
  
• Why has the director of FEMA been completely absent, before and during the crisis?
  
  
• Why did Texas state officials deny requests and funds to build a siren warning system for the area known as "Flash Flood Alley," even though everyone was aware of the dangers due to deadly floods in the recent past?
  
  
• Why did Trump wait until two days after the floods to declare a disaster, which would have made more rescue and relief resources available if it had come sooner?
  
  
• Why does Trump say FEMA is unnecessary and should be phased out if he thinks it was so helpful here, and is that still his plan?
  
  
• How much did the massive staff cuts at regional National Weather Service offices impact the accuracy and timeliness of the forecast, and how well it was communicated to local officials?
  
  
• Why were there not enough resources at FEMA to pay for more than one day of the call centers that are normally contracted to deal with disaster relief inquiries?
  
  
• Why does Trump always describe each new flood, hurricane, tornado, wildfire, or other climate-related disaster as some completely unpredictable thing that "nobody's ever seen before," instead of working to prevent or prepare for them?

Trump immediately switched to questions from friendly partisan media, but did not address any of the questions above. He did, however, use some of his time at the disaster relief press conference to complain that people were still upset with him about the price of eggs.

Why does this matter?

• There are more important things here than Donald Trump's political exposure.  

• Americans have a right to ask critical questions of their government. 

• Only cults and dictatorships call people who question the leader "evil."