What did Donald Trump do today?

Very, very little—but he did find the energy to praise the "character" of a man fired from the NFL for racism.

Trump apparently returned to his Virginia golf club today, ostensibly to play golf with former NFL football coach Jon Gruden. Bizarrely, and just possibly significantly, neither claim could be independently verified. Press pool reports showed Trump's motorcade going to the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, and the pool reporter did confirm a "brief glimpse" of Trump entering and exiting an SUV in his motorcade. This is the second day in a row that the pooler has not been allowed to approach Trump or do more than what reporters call "proof of life" coverage.

Gruden's presence was not visually confirmed by any independent source, only by a post to Trump's private microblogging site. And that showed only Trump from behind, sitting in a golf cart, shaking hands with Gruden—who was wearing exactly the same clothes he wore when he golfed on August 23, according to his own social media posts.

Of course, even given Trump's propensity for brazen and easily disproved lies where his health is concerned, the most likely explanation is that he and Gruden really were on the course, whether or not Trump was able to rise from the cart. But even by Trump's famously lackadaisical weekend standards, it continues to be eerily quiet on the White House beat.

In the post on Trump's blog, he (or whoever wrote it) described Gruden as "a really nice guy" with "true character." Gruden was fired as the coach of the LA Raiders in 2021 after an avalanche of revelations that he'd used homophobic, misogynist, and racist language for more than a decade to describe players, referees, staff, league officials, and anyone else who upset him. Players going back to Gruden's time as a college football coach have long confirmed those rumors and others about toxic and abusive behavior, including his famous aversion to hiring Black coaches and coordinators or putting Black players at "skill positions" like quarterback. But there's also documentary evidence, like the 2011 e-mail he wrote commenting on a Black player's intelligence and appearance in minstrel-show terms.

Confronted with such evidence at the point when he was forced to resign, Gruden insisted, "I don't have an ounce of racism in me." That's oddly similar to Trump's favorite expression when confronted with racist language he's used, or made racist assumptions about Black people he encounters in public, or his belief that African-Americans should be sent back "where they came from," or racist groups who endorse him for their belief in his racism. In those situations, Trump usually describes himself as "the least racist person ever."

Why does this matter?

• The problem is that nobody really doubts Trump does think highly of the character of people like Jon Gruden. 

• Under the circumstances, a president who could let reporters close enough to see him do more than sit quietly in a golf cart, probably would. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He returned to the land of the living with a demand for money to get him into heaven.

On Tuesday of this week, Trump sat through a cabinet meeting, occasionally but ineffectually attempting to hide from view the IV bruise that now regularly appears on his hand. (The White House has refused to say what Trump is receiving treatment for, and continues to insist the bruises are from handshaking—although lately they've started appearing on his left hand, too.)

He wasn't seen again by the public or independent press until this morning, 90 hours later, when he appeared at telephoto distance from the White House press pool while entering a Virginia golf resort. Press were not allowed to approach. It's not known whether Trump went out on the course or, as he sometimes does, simply rested in the clubhouse.

 

Trump's absence from public view, combined with a long history of frankly ridiculous claims about his often fragile health, led to jokes and less-than-friendly speculation online last night about whether he had died. 

He has not. But Trump and his supporters seem perversely determined lately to put the idea in people's heads themselves. Earlier this week, Vice-President JD Vance volunteered in an interview with USA Today that he was ready to assume the presidency at any moment—not the sort of thing someone in his job usually goes out of his way to mention.

And Trump—in an extremely uncharacteristic turn—has recently seemed preoccupied with his own mortality. Earlier this month, on an unscheduled call to a Fox News morning program, Trump reflected on his (failed) attempts to force Ukraine to accept Russian terms to end their war. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

Trump is—theoretically—a member of the Presbyterian faith, which (like most Protestant Christian denominations) rejects the idea that salvation can be attained by worldly accomplishments. Normally, when Trump talks directly about religion, it's in sacrilegious terms, as when he compares himself to Jesus Christ or demands that his followers accept that he has been specially marked by God. But the seemingly abashed language about the possibility of his eternal damnation was out of character for a man who has repeatedly claimed not to confess his sins because he doesn't have any.

With the specter of his not-yet-realized mortality being joked about worldwide, today Trump put a more Trumpian spin on the same language: he sent out an e-mail to supporters reiterating his desire to go to heaven—and telling them to pay his political action committee $15 to help make it happen.

Trump, whose net worth is estimated at about $6 billion (Mt. 19:24), and who has encouraged his followers to build literal golden idols of him (Dan. 3:1-18; Exo. 32:1-35), and who has openly defied the biblical commandments against adultery and bearing false witness and covetousness and theft, and who has in thought, word, and deed spurned the teaching of Jesus to shelter the immigrant (Lk. 10:29–37; Mt. 25:35-36; many others) and to share his wealth with the poor (Lk. 6:20-21; Mk. 10:21-22; many others) and to pay his taxes (Lk. 20:19-26) and to forgive his enemies (Mk. 11:25-26) and treat them gently (Mt. 5:38-39) and to make his charitable donations* in secret rather than make a show of them to appear righteous (Mt. 6:1) and to not exalt himself, lest he be humbled (Mt. 23:8-12) and to store up his treasures in heaven rather than on earth (Mt. 6:19-21) and to not despise in his worldliness those of simple faith (Mt. 18:10) and above all (save for his obligation to love God) to love his neighbors as he loves himself (Mt. 22:36-40), was not seen for the remainder of the day.

Why does this matter?

• There is a difference between a person who falls short of their faith and one who cruelly exploits it in others. 

• Americans are entitled to know how severe their president's health issues are.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it would "literally destroy" America if he couldn't impose taxes on a whim.

Trump, or someone else posting from his social media account, blew up over the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals decision that today struck down virtually all of the import taxes he'd imposed since returning to office. In a lengthy rant to his private microblogging site, Trump thundered that depriving him of the right to impose tariffs at will (a power that the Constitution gives to Congress, not the president) would "literally destroy the United States of America."

In fact, Trump not being able to impose taxes on American businesses and consumers that Congress has not voted on will not "literally destroy" the United States of America. 

What is "literally" true is that tariffs have not been this high since the 19th century, and the last time they were even close to this rate was during the Great Depression. As high school history students are generally expected to know, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 are generally blamed for making the Depression much worse in the United States than it otherwise would have been, because instead of bolstering domestic industries, they all but killed the American export trade.

 

The post attributed to Trump also railed against the "HIGHLY PARTISAN" nature of the ruling, although the actual 7-4 decision fell along technical lines, with half of the dissenting votes (that is, in Trump's favor) coming from justices appointed by President Obama. 

Most of the rant was aimed at begging the Supreme Court to decide the case in advance. In any event, Trump's tariffs—and the inflation in prices they cause—will remain in place at least through October, when the Supreme Court will likely hear it.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents aren't kings and they don't get to ignore "partisan" rulings either. 

• A president who wanted to avoid "partisan" rulings would probably stop telling the Supreme Court justices he personally appointed how he expects them to vote via social media posts.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He named a very on-brand appointee to run the CDC and provoked a massive staff walkout.

A White House spokesperson said today that the Centers for Disease Control would be run by Jim O'Neill, a former speechwriter and venture capitalist. O'Neill's most notable contribution to public health has been his insistence that allowing people to sell their organs would improve health care.

Today, at the CDC campus in Atlanta, hundreds of staff walked out of the building and cheered for Monarez and three other senior officials who resigned in protest over her firing.

Dr. Deb Houry, who resigned as Deputy Director of the CDC, receives flowers from a crowd of staffers

Robert Kennedy Jr., who Trump appointed as Secretary of Health and Human Services as part of a political endorsement bargain made during the 2024 campaign, faced calls for his resignation. Yesterday, he told a crowd that children today suffer from "mitochondrial challenges," saying that he could diagnose "inflammation" and "lack of social connection" in children by examining their faces. Kennedy is a former talk show host and recovering heroin addict whose adoption of fad diets led to at least two different neurological diseases that, by his own admission. caused cognitive problems. He has no medical background.

More than a day after the CDC's social media claimed that Trump had fired Monarez, it remained unclear that Trump had actually taken the legal steps necessary to do so. Her lawyers said today they were "not aware" of any changes to her status, which only Trump himself can change.

Trump himself has not made any public appearances since Tuesday's Cabinet meeting, although staff claimed he signed some executive orders today—something he normally enjoys doing in front of an audience, especially when the subject is something he enjoys talking about. (Today's order concerned the decoration of federal buildings, something he's been positively obsessed with since his second term began.) 

By contrast, Vice-President JD Vance has been visible, mentioning in the course of an interview that he feels able to take over the presidency should the need arise.

Why does this matter?

• Americans' health and well-being is way too important to leave to an incompetent crank, or anyone willing to rubber-stamp what an incompetent crank wants to do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried and failed to quietly fire his CDC Director for not going along with his administration's attack on the COVID-19 vaccine.

For a man whose game show catchphrase was "you're fired," Trump is quite squeamish about actually firing people, and has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to do it himself. He prefers to act through intermediaries or via social media—even when the person in question works in the same building as him. In his second term, at least where his inner circle is concerned, he's all but abandoned the concept, preferring instead to "promote" staff who offend or underperform in some way to diplomatic jobs.

With regular federal employees—the ones with no personal connection to Trump—it's a different story. Trump has fired hundreds of thousands of workers, including many he had no legal right to fire, forcing them to take legal action just to be temporarily reinstated. The full scope of Trump's decimation of the federal workforce is becoming clear: just shy of 200,000 government employees have lost their jobs, with another 100,000 expected this year. 

The damage done by those firings is far greater than the immediate loss of the workers' livelihoods. The job market itself has virtually shut down over the last few months, and unemployed former government workers are now competing with new entrants to what's left of the private sector market. Meanwhile, federal agencies are unable to staff critical positions because skilled workers are resigning too, either out of fear for the uncertainty of working under Trump or disgust at his treatment of workers.

All of these tendencies were on display today, as Trump unofficially and indirectly fired the head of the CDC, Dr. Susan Monarez—the person he'd appointed to the role just weeks ago. But while the firing was announced on the CDC's own social media site, as of late this evening, it had not actually been done, apparently in the hope that Monarez would resign of her own accord. 

Through her attorneys, Monarez posted this response to Trump's attempts to get her to fall on her sword:

Throughout the day, both CDC and White House spokespeople insisted that Monarez had been fired, but Trump himself must order it done, and whether through inability or unwillingness, he had not yet made any such order as of midnight Thursday.

Meanwhile, three other senior CDC officials resigned in protest tonight. Like Monarez, they cited the dangerous and anti-scientific orders from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who today announced restrictions on who would be eligible to receive this winter's updated COVID-19 vaccine. Kennedy, a former talk show host and lawyer with no experience in health care, is a vaccine conspiracy theorist. The officials who resigned cited Kennedy's censorship of medical research to fit his personal political agenda, his purging of scientists who wouldn't promise to issue the findings he wanted, and the Trump administration's belief in the discredited science of eugenics.

Under today's orders, which appear to have set off the firings and resignations, Americans will no longer be able to simply choose to receive a vaccine at a convenient location like a pharmacy. Instead, they s will have to schedule a visit with their doctor first. This will add expense and inconvenience even for those whose access to health care won't be affected by Medicaid cuts in Trump's budget bill. 

Studies vary, but the COVID-19 vaccine is generally credited with saving 20,000,000 lives worldwide in its first year of availability alone.  

Full text of the resignation letters

Why does this matter?

• Americans' health and safety literally depends on letting competent public health officials do their jobs.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again said, in public, that Americans want him to be a dictator and that he can be if he wants to.

Trump held a Cabinet meeting today. Even more so than in his first term, these have become less about policy and more about a public competition between his appointees to flatter him the most—a role that Trump, a former reality game show host, clearly loves. It took more than two hours to complete one circuit of the table, with top Trump administration officials vying to out-schmooze one another. 

In the midst of it, Trump repeated a shocking claim that went largely unnoticed in the barrage of weird, confused, and false statements he made yesterday. It began with a rehashing of a "sir" story about the Democratic governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, who he has been fighting with over the latter's criticism of Trump sending military forces to patrol peaceful American cities. Trump was so angry over Moore's remarks that he threatened to kill funding to rebuild the critical Key Bridge, which was destroyed in a barge accident in 2024.

I watched a man from Maryland who said to me, "Sir, you’re the greatest president, you're doing an unbelievable job. What a great job." Governor Moore. Has anyone heard of him? He's another hopeful for president. I don't think so. But I met him, and I didn't realize it was on camera, Did you see, they caught him on camera. I was at a game, I don't know, like the Army-Navy game or something. And I met him in a hallway. And as usual, ‘You do your job very well.’ One of these great cameramen, had it on tape. 

No such recording exists. Moore did say to Trump "It's great to have you back here," meaning in Maryland for the Army-Navy football game.

Trump continued, after repeating a few sentences he'd just said: 

But I met this gentleman. I never met him before. "Sir, you're doing a great job. You're doing an unbelievable job. Thank you very much." But then he goes on television, says, "Oh, Trump is a dictator." And a lot of people get — get — so the line is, I'm a dictator, but I stopped crime. So a lot of people say you know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.

Today, National Guard troops activated from all around the country—most of them part-time and missing work in their own communities—"stopped crime" by putting on high-visibility vests over their camouflage BDUs and picking up litter in a park adjoining the White House. 

Trump also insisted that he has a dictator's powers whether or not anyone wants him to:

I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States. If I think our country's in danger — and it is in danger, in these cities — I can do it. …But it would be nice if they'd call and say, "Would you do it?"

In reality, he can't just do whatever he wants.

Why does this matter?

• The United States of America is not a dictatorship, and its president is not a king or any other kind of despot, no matter how badly Trump wants to believe it is. 

• Nobody who needs two dozen people publicly kissing his ass every few weeks is emotionally stable enough to be president. 

• Nobody who speaks with this much contempt about Americans and their love of freedom is, either.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried and failed to beg an invite to invade Chicago.

Trump had what was, even by his standards, a bizarre day in the Oval office. It included, among a great many other things, Trump

• expressed confusion about the political situation in South Korea, accusing its legitimate president Lee Jay Myung of leading a "purge" immediately before meeting with him  

• warned Americans about the deadly danger of "violent" Chinese carp  

• said he wanted to nationalize private American businesses "as much as I can"    

• was baffled by South Korea making "comfort women" an issue after WWII [referring to the women forced into prostitution and systemically raped by Japanese occupiers]

• insisted that European leaders call him "the president of Europe"

• needed to be reminded who Kim Jong-un was, the North Korean dictator with whom he famously "fell in love" during his first term  

• claimed that friends of his in Beverly Hills leave their cars unlocked so that they won't be damaged when thieves inevitably "steal the radio" [a type of theft that hasn't really been common since the early 1980s, when car radios were often expensive custom installations and crime was as common as Trump seems to think it is now] 

• threatened his former advisor Chris Christie with further federal investigations of "Bridgegate," a political scandal that predates Trump bringing him on to his team, as an explicit act of revenge for Christie's recent criticism of him 

• said the words "nobody needed magnets until [China] convinced everybody 20 years ago, 'let's all do magnets"  

• complained that people still called him a racist even though he'd stopped a war in "deepest, darkest Africa" between Congo and Rwanda [Trump had nothing to do with the armistice between those two countries, which is failing anyway]  

• claimed that Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland who he's been sniping at on social media over his plans to invade Baltimore with federal troops, privately told him, "Sir, you're the greatest president of my lifetime," and

• sneered at people calling for "freedom" and said Americans actually wanted him to be a dictator.

That last comment was in regard to what he called the "killing fields" of Chicago, one of the cities he has threatened to send American military forces into, much as he has done with Washington, D.C. Supposedly, the federalized troops he has called up to mill around Metro stations are there to fight crime, but the main effect has been to turn tourists away and provoke demonstrations by Americans enraged at seeing de facto martial law declared for political reasons. 

Trump seemed to sense his weakness on the issue today, saying that he'd prefer to be asked to invade Chicago by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat. Pritzker is considered likely to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2028, and responded forcefully—not only rejecting Trump's "un-American" request for an invitation, but promising to prosecute any official who followed unlawful orders from Trump:

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.

You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

The full text of Pritzker's remarks follows. No transcript is available for Trump's appearances today, because the White House has ended a decades-old policy of producing rush transcripts—and, therefore, a permanent written record easily accessible by the public—of what Trump says out loud at official events.

 

I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.

Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against, and it's the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances.

What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.

No one from the White House or the executive branch has reached out to me or to the mayor. No one has reached out to our staffs. No effort has been made to coordinate or to ask for our assistance in identifying any actions that might be helpful to us. Local law enforcement has not been contacted. We have made no requests for federal intervention. None.

We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did: We read a story in the Washington Post.

If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.

There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no inter- insurrection. There is no insurrection. Like every major American city in both blue and red states, we deal with crime in Chicago. Indeed, the violent crime rate is worse in red states and red cities.

Here in Chicago, our civilian police force and elected leaders work every day to combat crime and to improve public safety, and it's working.

Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area. But calling the military into a U.S. city to invade our streets and neighborhoods and disrupt the lives of everyday people is an extraordinary action, and it should require extraordinary justification.

Look around you right now. Does this look like an emergency? Look at this. Go talk to the people of Chicago who are enjoying a gorgeous afternoon in this city. Ask the families buying ice cream on the Riverwalk. Go see the students who are at the beach after school. Talk to the workers that I just met taking the water taxi to get here. Find a family who's enjoying today sitting on their front porch and ask if they want their neighborhoods turned into a war zone by a wannabe dictator. Ask if they'd like to pass through a checkpoint with unidentified officers in masks while taking their kids to school.

Crime is a reality we all face in this country. Public safety has been among our highest priorities since taking office. We have hired more police and given them more funding.

We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines. We invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs. We listened to our local communities, to the people who live and work in the places that are most affected by crime and asked them what they needed to help make their neighborhoods safer.

Those strategies have been working. Crime is dropping in Chicago. Murders are down 32% compared to last year and nearly cut in half since 2021.

Shootings are down 37% since last year, and 57% from four years ago. Robberies are down 34% year over year. Burglaries down 21%. Motor vehicle thefts down 26%.

So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump's military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.

Memphis, Tennessee; Hattiesburg, Mississippi have higher crime rates than Chicago, and yet Donald Trump is sending troops here and not there? Ask yourself why.

If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.

Trump is defunding the police.

To the members of the press who are assembled here today, and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is.

This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions.

Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.

Look at the people assembled before you today, behind me. This is a full cross-section of Chicago's leaders from the business world, the faith community, law enforcement, education, community organizations, and more. We sometimes disagree on how to effectively solve the many challenges that our state and our city face on a daily basis. But today, we are standing here united, in public, in front of the cameras, unafraid to tell the president that his proposed actions will make our jobs harder and the lives of our residents worse.

Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, "Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?" Instead, I say, "Mr. President, do not come to Chicago."

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power.

As a governor, I've had to make the decision in the past to call up members of the National Guard into active service, and I think it's worth taking a moment to reflect on how seriously I take that responsibility, and on the many things that I consider before asking these brave men and women to leave their homes and their communities to serve in any capacity for us.

As I've said many times in the past, members of the National Guard are not trained to serve as law enforcement. They are trained for the battlefield, and they're good at it. They're not trained to arrest people and read them their Miranda rights. They did not sign up for the National Guard to fight crime. And when we call them into service, we are reaching into local communities and taking people who have jobs and families away from their neighborhoods and the people who rely upon them.

It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the Guard to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.

I know Donald Trump doesn't care about the well-being of the members of our military, but I do and so do all the people standing here.

So let me speak to all Illinoisans and to all Chicagoans right now.  Hopefully the president will reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty. Hopefully rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days. If not, we are going to face an unprecedented and difficult time ahead.

But I know you Chicago, and I know you are up to it. When you protest, do it peacefully. Be sure to continue Chicago's long tradition of nonviolent resistance. Remember that the members of the military and the National Guard who will be asked to walk these streets are, for the most part, here unwillingly. And remember that they can be court martialed and their lives ruined if they resist deployment. Look to the members of the faith community standing behind me today for guidance on how to mobilize.

To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.

The State of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever at our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.

You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

As Dr. King once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Humbly I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times. 

Why does this matter?

• The President of the United States was incoherent, confused, and emotionally unstable all day in full view of the cameras. 

• Americans are not the enemy that the United States armed forces are meant to fight.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He called for a baseball player who had sex with a minor as an adult to be admitted to the Hall of Fame… again.

Trump waded back into sports commentary today, demanding on his private microblogging site that Roger Clemens be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

 

Trump is correct about one thing: Clemens was undoubtedly one of the best pitchers in baseball history. But that's not the reason he hasn't been elected to the Hall of Fame. Clemens' suspected use of performance-enhancing drugs certainly doesn't help his case, and the case for that is a lot stronger than Trump is claiming, according to most experts and the eyewitness testimony of other players. (Barry Bonds, the most famous user of hypermodern PEDs, also never got caught by MLB's testing protocols, because the regimen he was on was carefully tailored to avoid detection.)

But there's a much more serious scandal that has tarnished Clemens' reputation in and out of baseball: his romantic and sexual relationship as a 28-year-old man with a then-15-year-old girl. Mindy McCready, who later became famous in her own right as a country music singer, confirmed the relationship in 2008 after the New York Daily News reported on what had long been an open secret among people who knew them.

Clemens never admitted to a sexual relationship with McCready while she was underage, but at first acknowledged that McCready was a "close friend" at the same time he publicly apologized to his wife for "mistakes" in his personal life. McCready committed suicide in 2013. After her death, Clemens tried to backtrack about the depth of their relationship, saying that his former "close friend" was just someone he'd met "a few times."

This makes the second time since returning to office that Trump has lobbied for a baseball player to be inducted into the hall of fame. The first time came in March, when he made a similar pitch for Pete Rose. Rose was banned from baseball over his gambling, but he also admitted to the statutory rape of a 14- or 15-year-old girl.

Of course, it's possible Trump—who is facing his own scandal over connections to a massive child sex trafficking ring—is simply a fan of Clemens as an athlete. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump actually is a baseball fan. He played on his tiny private school's team as a teenager, batting a miserable .138 in games for which records survive. 

But Trump also claimed that he was so good at baseball that he was scouted as a pro alongside Hall of Famer Willie McCovey—who was eight years older than Trump and already in the majors by the time Trump was in middle school.

Why does this matter?

• One way to get people to stop speculating about whether you had sex with underage girls is to stop complaining about how unfair life is for men who had sex with underage girls. 

• Trump being president doesn't make him a king, a god, or a voting member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to blackmail an immigrant into pleading guilty to felonies to cover up his own mistakes.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen living in the United States under a protective order, became the face of Trump's second-term immigration policy when he and roughly 250 other people were unlawfully sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison camp. They were identified as members of a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua, based on shoddy evidence (or none) because of the supposed "national security threat" it posed. Trump and his newly-installed appointees at the Department of Justice ignored court orders for months, at times openly mocking the judges who issued them. 

Abrego Garcia came to particular attention because, as a Salvadoran living under a court-supervised arrangement, he was supposed to be protected from deportation back to El Salvador because of the threat of violence he faced if he returned there. The Trump administration eventually claimed that his deportation was an "administrative error" but refused to comply with court orders to have him returned, even though it was paying the Salvadoran government to imprison deportees and had full control over the situation.

Abrego Garcia and other deportees were eventually returned to the United States, but the Trump administration—having quickly burned through public goodwill on its handling of immigration—insisted he was a member of a different gang and hastily charged him with various crimes, including human trafficking. 

The allegation that he was a member of the MS-13 gang was based on the opinion of a disgraced police officer who was subsequently fired for leaking police information to a sex worker he was involved with. But in what appears to have been a serious attempt to bolster the credibility of that claim, Trump released an obviously manipulated photo showing fake "tattoos" on Abrego Garcia's fingers reading "MS-13."

 

No actual evidence that Abrego Garcia committed these crimes has ever been publicly released, and he has strenuously denied them. 

Today, with his pretrial release from a Tennessee jail imminent, the Trump administration announced plans to deport Abrego Garcia again, this time to the African nation of Uganda—unless he agreed to plead guilty to the felonies he is charged with. Arrangements had already been made to send him to Costa Rica instead, a vastly more suitable destination.

In other words, Trump is trying to force an immigrant whose botched deportation humiliated him into choosing between pleading guilty to politically-motivated charges, or being sent to a country on a different continent from his country of origin where he has no cultural or language fluency.

Trump has made a point of using third-party country deportations as punishment for using legal means to resist removal, such as when he sent immigrants from a variety of countries to South Sudan, a country in the middle of its own humanitarian crisis. For obvious reasons, people deported to countries where they do not speak the local language or have ties to the culture are at severe risk of endangerment. 

Why does this matter? 

• Leaders who don't screw up this badly don't have to punish the people who embarrass them by making it clear how badly they screwed up. 

• Ruining Abrego Garcia's life won't make Trump right, or even make him look right.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He extorted a major American company for 10% of its value to make his "national security" concerns disappear.

A few weeks ago, Trump said that the CEO of Intel, the only major American manufacturer of computer chips, was "highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately," adding that "there is no other solution to this problem."

The "conflict" that Trump was talking about appears to be that the CEO, Lip-bu Tan, is ethnically Chinese, although he was born and raised in Singapore. Tan has connections to Chinese-owned businesses, but then so does almost anyone in the semiconductor industry.

Today, Trump sang a different tune, calling Tan "Highly Respected." Nothing has changed except that Intel agreed to sell 10% of its stock to the United States, apparently to get Trump to stop attacking them. 

In a post to his private microblogging site, Trump claimed that the United States had paid nothing for the stock, but that's a lie. In reality, the money for the sale came from funds that had been set aside to help Intel stay competitive in the semiconductor industry—which was a major national security priority of the Biden Administration. The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 created research and development subsidies for Intel and other American computer companies. Instead of receiving those funds, Intel is now treating them as cash for the purchase of its stock by the government.

In other words, what Trump has done is claw back a major American investment in its computer industry, while at the same time admitting that he can be convinced to ignore "national security concerns" for the right price.

Trump recently arranged for a similar forced sale when he permitted the acquisition of US Steel by a Japanese company, although in that case, it was for a voting share in management rather than stock. He's also made specific demands of companies he hasn't tried to seize control over. These have ranged from the ridiculous (insisting that Coca-Cola change its recipe) to the sinister (trying to get a Goldman Sachs executive fired for pointing out the economic damage Trump's tariffs are doing). 

This kind of involuntary nationalization through direct government control of private corporations is called a command economy, and it has been tried before, for example by the Soviet Union.
 

Why does this matter?

• You can have capitalism, or you can have predatory governments extorting businesses, but not both at the same time.

• The computer chip industry is extremely important, so deliberately weakening the United States' biggest player is a pretty bad idea. 

• It's bad if the President of the United States is only pretending to care about national security.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to punish Americans living in Colorado if the state didn't free a supporter who committed crimes on his behalf.

Trump continued his attack against American election systems today, this time in the form of a threat to the state of Colorado if they didn't release a woman, Tina Peters, who committed election crimes on his behalf. She was convicted on ten counts, including four felonies, and is in the first year of a nine-year prison sentence.

In a post to his private microblogging site, Trump demanded that Peters be "let out of jail, RIGHT NOW" calling her an "old woman." (Peters, 69, is ten years younger than Trump—who is also a convicted felon.) He said that he would take "harsh measures" against the state of Colorado if she weren't freed.

Trump, who has no authority to demand that states ignore their own laws or jury verdicts, did not specify what "harsh measures" he had in mind. 

In her role as Mesa County clerk, Peters signed off on a routine post-election audit on November 19, 2020, certifying that a random check of paper ballots against vote tabulating machines had returned no errors. But she became convinced by the conspiracy theories about a stolen election that Trump and his other supporters were promoting in a desperate attempt to keep him in power. In May of 2021, she ordered surveillance cameras guarding voting machines turned off, then gave a QAnon conspiracy theorist named Conan Hays stolen credentials to "inspect" them. Peters lied to other county officials about Hayes' identity.When Hayes released video and data that he had downloaded from the machines' on-board software to the internet, Peters lied again about her involvement and falsely claimed that the reveal of the data (which included passwords that could have been used to further tamper with Mesa County election results) were not a "big deal." 

The voting machines Peters allowed to be tampered were ordered replaced by the county's all-Republican board in order to comply with Colorado's strict ballot security laws. This cost taxpayers more than $800,000.

Her crimes during the 2020 election cycle weren't even Peters' first brush with tampering with election results. In 2019, she left 574 ballots uncounted in a drop-off ballot box in a heavily Democratic area of her district. When this was discovered, she called it an "error."

Trump using his power to reward people who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is nothing new: he called the convicted criminals who stormed the session of Congress where Joe Biden's win was certified "hostages," and then pardoned them immediately after returning to office—including those who attacked and injured police. He's even appointed some of them to high-ranking positions in the Justice Department.

Why does this matter?

• Rewarding people who break the law on your behalf is textbook fascism. 

• People who abuse their powers of office and commit crimes, especially for political reasons, should be punished.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to extort a Federal Reserve governor out of her seat.

Lisa Cook is a governor of the Federal Reserve with a term that runs through 2038. Today, Trump called on her to resign after the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency accused her of filing an inaccurate mortgage application in 2021, and made a criminal referral to Pam Bondi (the Attorney General of the United States and previously Trump's personal defense lawyer).  

The criminal referral was posted to the social media page of Bill Pulte, Trump's appointed head of the FHFA. Pulte is not a household name for most Americans—unless they've lived in the houses his company built, in which case they may know him as the defendant in a class action suit for shoddy construction practices or his building company's 1.4-star Yelp reviews. Like Trump, he inherited his real estate fortune. Until Trump appointed him, was better known as a Twitter personality who dangled "charitable" gifts for randomly selected followers in exchange for retweeting ads for his business. 

Pulte is refusing to answer direct questions from reporters about whether he was directed by Trump to target his political enemies. 

What Cook is accused of—listing two consecutive properties as a primary home on mortgage documents—is not a crime or even a breach of policy, unless it was part of a larger fraudulent scheme. Trump himself presents a contrast: he lied to banks and the government about the value of his properties in order to obtain cheaper mortgages while also paying too little in taxes. Trump and his company had to pay a $364 million fine after New York Attorney General Letitia James proved that fraud in civil court.

James is one of another of Trump's political enemies, along with California Sen. Adam Schiff, whose mortgages have suddenly come in for scrutiny. He's also tried to force the resignation of the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, by threatening him with fraud charges over money spent on renovations to the Fed complex that Trump himself approved.

One of the few topics Trump has been personally engaged with since returning to office has been the subject of interest rates. Trump wants the baseline Federal Reserve rate cut by 3%, a massive shock to the economic system that is normally nudged along by quarter- and half-point increments. Not only would such a drastic cut create short-term chaos in financial markets, it would leave the United States without any tools to respond to the next recession. Cutting rates while the economy is strong is like taking a toxic medicine before you're sick: it makes you more susceptible to the disease you were trying to avoid in the first place, while taking away the only tool that will fight it.

But an extremely wealthy investor who knows that this will happen can get rich off of it. Coincidentally, an NBC News report released today makes clear just how much Trump will personally benefit if he can stack the "independent" central bank with loyalists. Since taking office, Trump has bought more than $103,000,000 in corporate bonds, mostly in banks he is in charge of regulating. When interest rates fall, the price of bonds goes up. If interest rates plummeted suddenly, Trump would stand to make tens of millions of dollars instantly, at the cost of any economic protection against the next recession. 

Why does this matter?

• This is what weaponization of government looks like. 

• Abuse of power is a criminal act.

• Using your political powers to force public servants to do things that will enrich you is what every tinpot dictator does.  

• The health of the American economy is VASTLY more important than Donald Trump making money personally.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lashed out at "museums" in general, but especially the Smithsonian Institution, for talking about "how bad Slavery was."

 

This was an actual post to his private microblogging website.   

This is not the only time in recent weeks that Trump, who explicitly aligned himself with white nationalist organizations during his first term in office, has tried to soft-pedal the horror of slavery. In place of the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which developed Sesame Street and countless other children's shows, Trump has promoted PragerU, a right-wing producer of "educational" videos. Among their work are AI-generated cartoons of historical figures like Christopher Columbus claim that slavery was "no big deal." They also produce a video in which a cartoon Frederick Douglass says that slavery was a worthwhile "compromise" in which enslaved Black Americans were willing to sacrifice their freedom for the good of the United States.

It's not very likely Trump cares much about the culture war he's stoking by minimizing "how bad Slavery was," his long history of overt racism aside. But his anger at the Smithsonian is almost certainly real, because it publicly acknowledged the fact that he has been impeached twice. Earlier this summer, Trump succeeded in forcing the Smithsonian to remove an exhibit in the National Museum of American History dealing with presidential impeachments (all of them, not just Trump's two). When it was replaced, the language was softened, and text related to Trump's impeachment over attempting to blackmail Ukraine into providing fake dirt on his political rival Joe Biden, and his fomenting of the attack on Congress after the 2020 election, was moved to a less visible spot.

Presenting a sanitized history of a nation's glorious past—and punishing anyone who questions it—is a core element of fascism. Presenting an image of the state as perfect makes it harder to criticize the leader. But in the case of historical evils like concentration camps, nativism, colonialism, forced labor, eugenics, racism, science denialism, religious intolerance, propaganda, or xenophobia—things virtually nobody would want to advertise as good things—a deliberate erasure of history makes it harder to tell when authoritarian governments are backsliding towards them.

Why does this matter? 

• Even by Trump's standards, complaining about teaching that slavery was bad is some astonishingly evil shit.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He woke up very angry about Americans voting in ways he doesn't approve of.

Early this morning, Trump posted this to his private microblogging site:

I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly “Inaccurate,” Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election. We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED. WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do. With their HORRIBLE Radical Left policies, like Open Borders, Men Playing in Women’s Sports, Transgender and “WOKE” for everyone, and so much more, Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS. I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON’T HAVE EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

About a third of all votes cast in recent elections have been by mail, and virtually all of the rest on some form of "VOTING MACHINE" or another. Eight states, including extremely conservative ones like Utah, conduct all elections by mail. (Dozens of other countries use it, too.)

American military personnel overseas also vote by mail—and so do American citizens abroad, for a total of about 3 million voting-age citizens who would be disenfranchised by Trump's plan. This is not the first time Trump has tried to toss out the votes for servicemembers: when he demanded in 2020 that courts "STOP THE COUNT" while his in-person vote lead still held in enough swing states, a lot of the uncounted votes were mail-in ballots from military bases.

To be clear, Trump has absolutely no authority to do any of what he's threatening to do here. The United States Constitution gives the states the power to conduct and regulate elections, subject only to laws passed by Congress. Of course, Trump's party controls both houses of Congress, and could in theory pass laws similar to what he's demanding here. 

But whether or not Trump is aware of it, the sovereignty of the states is about as bedrock a Republican idea as there is, and the idea that (for example) Utah is "merely an agent" is likely to be extremely unpopular in red states as well as blue. In fact, it's exactly the kind of thing that conservatives have long accused liberals of secretly plotting towards—federal control of everything.

In remarks later today, Trump repeated his claim that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had put the idea in his head during their summit meeting last week. (There are no real elections in Russia under Putin, who bans anyone who seriously opposes him from the ballot, and assassinates them if they still pose a threat.)

Much of Trump's rant is obviously just self-soothing over his loss in 2020 to Joe Biden, something he is rarely able to go a day without mentioning. That was the first election in which absentee voting showed any real partisan split, as Democrats took advantage of Trump's bizarre preemptive attack on the safest way to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump's case for re-election was that COVID had simply gone away—somewhat undermined by the fact that he nearly died from it in October of that year—and while Republican voters clearly responded to him urging them to vote in person rather than by mail, not all of them were willing or able to vote in person.

In other words, Trump's attacks on voting by mail absolutely cost him votes in an election that was close enough for him to have won if a few close states had gone differently.

Why does this matter?

• In a democracy, voters choose the government, not the other way around. 

• Making threats you can't back up without ignoring the law is what tinpot dictators do. 

• Republicans who voted for Trump may have thought he understood what it meant when he said he was a Republican. 

• Presidents should know or care what the Constitution says.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He figured out how everyone else saw his meeting with Putin, and responded emotionally.

Trump spent a fair amount of time on his personal microblogging site today, lashing out emotionally at the coverage of his half-day summit with Vladimir Putin. It's not a surprise that he's upset: even Trump-friendly media is acknowledging it was a complete failure to advance American aims, or even move towards a negotiated peace, as Putin succeeded in getting a propaganda victory and more or less publicly bullying Trump into agreeing with his negotiating points. 

Trump is absolutely determined to save face and be able to take credit for a war that he'd bragged he could settle on his first day in office. That desperation has played into Putin's hands, since Ukraine's chances of surviving the war are much slimmer without American support. Trump's latest "negotiating" tactic is to simply demand that Ukraine surrender in advance to the single biggest Russian demand—that it be allowed to annex the Ukrainian territory it currently controls.

It was coverage of this demand—"absurd even for him," as one pundit put it—that seems to have gotten most under Trump's skin today. In one post, he conjured up an emotionally overwrought hypothetical in which he negotiated a deal where Russia gave up Moscow and was still criticized by the "fake news media." In another, he seemed to be ordering the firing of an MSNBC anchor, the former George W. Bush spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace. 

For the record, the Putin regime has not shown any sign that it is willing to give up its capital and largest city, which is about 400 miles from the front lines. And while Trump has characterized the process of giving eastern Ukraine to Russia as a "land swap," it's clear that Ukraine wouldn't be receiving any Russian territory in return. 

In reality, what Trump is calling a "land swap" is Ukrainian surrender on Russian terms, without any guarantee of security that Russia won't simply overwhelm what is left of the country later. 

For some reason, in the same series of posts, Trump also labeled Russia's unprovoked 2022 surprise attack on Ukraine as "Biden's stupid war." Blaming Biden for it happening during Biden's term is about as close as Trump has ever come to denouncing the invasion itself: in the past, he has also blamed Ukraine for being invaded by Russia, on the theory that Russia was entitled to launch a war to prevent Ukraine from NATO. Or, in other words, Trump's stance is that only Russia is allowed to decide whether a neighboring country allies itself with the United States. 

Today, Trump repeated his demand that Ukraine must renounce any plans to join NATO in order for peace talks to move forward, which remains a major goal of the Putin regime.

Why does this matter?

• A president who can't stand up to the dictator of a hostile nation should find an easier job.  

• Trying to get people fired for pointing out your mistakes doesn't fix your mistakes.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He let Russian state media be the one to release embarrassing footage of him—again.

Early this morning, Russia Today, the English-language arm of Russian state-owned media, released exclusive footage of Trump showing Putin a very different face than he had during their brief public appearance together.

In that appearance, Putin spoke first and at length, painting a picture of two countries working quickly towards an agreement on what to do with Ukraine. Confident and smiling, Putin seized the opportunity to put words in Trump's mouth and essentially dare him to contradict them—which is, as a rule, why the leader of the host country normally speaks first at such appearances.

Trump, for his part, appeared unwilling or unable to directly contradict Putin's claims, or to establish a framing that gave him or the United States any agency to act. He appeared dejected and retreated to the comfort of complaining about his American political enemies for a minute or two, then yielded the floor back. The entire appearance took 12 minutes, far less than the hour allotted by a schedule that Trump's team accidentally left in the output tray of a hotel printer.

But backstage, in a more private setting, Trump was once again back in the role of an eager host, matching his energy from the start of the day. (Putin, who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, was greeted by American military personnel rolling out a literal red carpet for him while Trump applauded.) 

On the video released by Russian state media, Trump can be seen speaking warmly to Putin and clasping both of his hands, with only Putin's translator in earshot. Trump and his appointees have made a bad habit of relying on Putin's translator, an enormous security breach, but one that limits the number of American witnesses. Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid having such meetings in the presence of people within reach of the American justice system, at times ordering his own translators' notes seized or seeking a secret Russian-built secure communications conduit to Moscow that could not be monitored by American intelligence.

Russian state media releasing potentially embarrassing information about Trump's contacts with the Putin regime is a long-established pattern in the Trump White House, something that has happened again and again and again and again on his watch. 

Why does this matter?

• A president who keeps falling for the same basic trick over and over again is either too stupid or too gullible to hold office. 

• The idea that the President of the United States needs to keep secrets from the American people but trusts the Putin regime is absurd.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He handed Vladimir Putin a massive diplomatic win and strategic advantage in exchange for nothing.

 

The headline news from Trump's hastily-arranged summit meeting with Vladimir Putin is that no agreement was reached regarding anything of substance where Russia's war on Ukraine was concerned. That is probably the best possible outcome for Ukraine and its allies, given how much Trump has invested in being able to end the conflict on any terms, no matter how unfavorable to Ukraine. But it was still a coup for Putin, who succeeded in boxing Trump in diplomatically while shoring up his domestic political flank.

Most of the meeting took place behind closed doors. No readout was available, although Trump did offer some post-meeting spin in an interview taped immediately afterwards. The general mood was similar to the infamous Helsinki meeting in 2018: Trump was visibly excited to greet Putin with full ceremony as he got off the plane to a red-carpet welcome, but subdued afterwards. A Fox News reporter put it this way: 

JACQUI HEINRICH, FOX NEWS: The way that it felt in the room was not — not good. It did not seem like things went well, and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.

In the press conference that followed the three-hour meting, Putin, in a breach of protocol, spoke first, delivering a lengthy speech in Russian. In his remarks, Putin nodded towards Russia's historic ownership of Alaska, and put words in Trump's mouth about what Trump "understands" and who he finds "trustworthy." Above all, Putin seized the initiative to frame their meeting—which had pointedly excluded Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy—as having produced an "agreement."

When Putin finally gave Trump a chance to add his remarks, Trump pushed back weakly on the idea that there was any agreement, but essentially conceded the frame:

TRUMP: Thank you very much, Mr. President, that was very profound, and I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on, most of them, I would say, a couple of big ones that we haven't quite gotten there, but we've made some headway. So there's no deal until there's a deal.  

If anything, Trump seemed unsure about what had actually happened, and veered away from offering any specifics. 

The remainder of Trump's remarks centered on his grievance about the "Russia Russia Russia hoax." (Trump sought and received the Putin regime's assistance in manipulating the 2016 election, something that was confirmed by a Republican special counsel appointed by Trump's own deputy Attorney General.) In the Fox News interview afterward, Trump said that Putin had blamed Americans' ability to cast their votes by mail for his "loss" in 2020. 

Putin conducts sham elections to legitmize his hold on power and had his chief political rival murdered with nerve poison.

Why does this matter?

• Nobody, least of all the President of the United States, should be praising Vladimir Putin's ideas about democracy.  

• People in Ukraine will die because Trump went into this meeting unprepared and desperate for a personal victory regardless of what it meant for American interests. 

• It should not be possible to manipulate an American president this easily, or this publicly.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He found a huge inflation spike on the "tariff shelf."

Speaking to reporters today from the Oval Office, Trump told a shaggy-dog story about his advisors coming to him with an unusual mystery: there was too much money in the Treasury, and they couldn't explain it. "I said, check the tariff shelf," Trump claims he responded. "And they said, 'How did you know that?'"

Trump's story is ridiculous, but there's a grain of truth to it: while revenues from taxes imposed on imported goods are still a tiny fraction of the government's income, they are up sharply. And, inevitably, so are the prices Americans pay for those heavily taxed goods. 

The latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on inflation were released today, and they are very bad for American consumers. The Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures wholesale prices of domestically produced goods, was up 3.7% year-on-year and a staggering 0.9% over the single month of July. (On an annual basis, that would be about 11% inflation.)

The reason the PPI is up so sharply is clear: even goods produced in the United States need raw materials purchased from abroad, so when those raw materials are heavily taxed on import, prices rise at every point down the line.

There was other policy-related news on inflation today, too: vegetable prices were up an astonishing 38.9% in July. Supermarket prices for produce can be volatile in the winter, but not in the middle of a growing season, and this month's spike was the largest ever recorded in the summer since data first started being collected in 1947. 

Part of the reason for skyrocketing produce prices are that many vegetables are imports, too. But the main issue is labor, or the lack of it. Depending on what day he's been asked about it, Trump appears to believe that he will soon or already has put in place a complicated scheme to arrest, deport, "retrain," re-import, and employ foreign workers to do the farm jobs they have always done in the United States. 

In reality, no such plan exists, and farmers have been reporting crops rotting in fields since Trump began raiding farms in order to try to meet a self-imposed deportation quota.

Why does this matter?

• Americans who aren't billionaires need a president who is capable of understanding what everyone has been telling him for months about how his policies hurt them economically.

• Even by Trump bullshit story standards, "check the tariff shelf" is pretty embarrassing.