Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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PAGE 156 of 479
Texas Trumptards are feeling confident in their power
Texas GOP Introduces Bill to Test Waste Water For Abortion Pill Byproducts
The bill also requires testing water for the pregnancy hormone
By Troy Matthews | April 16, 2025
https://meidasnews.com/news/texas-gop-introduces-bill-to-test-waste-wa
ter-for-abortion-pill-byproducts
In one of the most bizarre moves from any Republican state government yet, Texas GOP have introduced a bill that would require water utilities to test waste water for chemical byproducts in urine related to the use of the abortion pill and birth control. SB 1976 would gather data on abortion pill and birth control urinary metabolites in water by area, but the bill also, strangely, requires testing for pregnanediol, the hormone that appears in urine when a person is pregnant.
Why is the Texas GOP trying to require water testing for pregnancy and abortion pill usage in municipalities? They say it is for environmental protection. Anti-choice extremists have long argued, without scientific evidence, that chemicals in the abortion pill mifepristone are harmful to water. However; Republicans, and especially Texas Republicans, are not known for their tough stances on protecting the environment.
It is also serves to back the talking point that abortion pills need to be banned because they are dangerous to women, which the medical community roundly rejects. This same disinformation campaign led to Louisiana classifying abortion pills as dangerous addictive substances, like Xanax and Ambien, which led to requirements that they be locked away in hospitals out of reach, when they are commonly used to treat dangerous miscarriages. No, people don't get addicted to abortion pills.
"This is a growing concern around the country, and it’s not a left or right issue—it’s a health issue," said State Senator Bryan Hughes, the author of the bill.
The bill also calls for testing for estrone and testosterone; spikes of which could be used to determine if people are utilizing gender affirming care in an area.
From the bill:
"(b) In accordance with Subsection (a), the commission shall conduct testing for the following urinary metabolites in the form of gluconates:
(1) benzophenone;
(2) bisphenol A;
(3) estrone;
(4) ethinyl estradiol;
(5) musk ketone;
(6) pregnanediol;
(7) testosterone;
(8) tonalide (AHTN);
(9) mifepristone; and
(10) any other organic substance required to be tested or by the commission.
The commission shall maintain detailed records of all testing conducted under this section and publish the records on the commission's Internet website. The records must include:
(1) the date on which each sample was collected;
(2) the location from which each sample was collected;
(3) the date on which each sample was tested for the presence of the urinary metabolites listed in Subsection (b); and
(4) the results of the test for each urinary metabolite listed in Subsection (b) in parts per trillion."
Whatever their purpose is, Texas republicans having access to urinary testing from entire regions is off putting to say the least. This seems like the next level in government intrusion from the state with one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, which also does not provide exceptions for rape or incest.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Fire Government Employees and Hire Crooks to do the same work, incompetently
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/17/ice-deportation-contracts-us-advis
ors/
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement just signed a contract worth $73 million with a firm whose executives are accused of taking part in a scheme to manufacture evidence against a co-worker during their time working at the Department of Homeland Security.
According to a contract document reviewed by The Intercept, federal contractor Universal Strategic Advisors will provide services pertaining to ICE’s “non-detained docket,” a master list of millions of noncitizens believed to be removable from the United States but not yet in the agency’s custody.
The contract cites President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, an overwhelming glut of potential deportees, and a shortage of officers to process them all as justification for hiring a private vendor to assist with the collection of biometric data, coordinating removals, and monitoring immigrant populations.
The document says that with a fleet of new outsourced employees, ICE can reassign hundreds of officers to tasks that better align with Trump’s recent executive orders aimed at maximizing the agency’s detention and deportation operations. With the contractors onboard, the document says at least 675 ICE officers “will be able to take all appropriate actions to comply with the EO’s by prioritizing conducting at-large arrests, removals, and detention related activities.”
A former ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said they were concerned by this plan to further privatize the agency’s operations at the same time as the Trump administration has dramatically slashed its workforce and gutted important oversight bodies like the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. “I certainly take issue with them firing career feds and demolishing whole offices, just to hire contractors to do the same work, many of them who are former ICE employees now retired,” the official said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Pardon-to-Prison Pipeline
Trump granted clemency to people who keep ending up back in trouble with the law.
By David A. Graham | April 16, 2025, 6:55 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/04/january-6-pard
on-prison-trump/682485/
Late last month, Jonathan Braun was arrested on allegations of shoving a 3-year-old, “causing a red mark on his back and substantial pain.” This is only his latest brush with the law over the past four years. He was banned by federal and New York State judges from working in debt collection; fined $20 million; and accused of punching his wife and father-in-law, groping a nanny, and attacking a nurse with an IV-bag holder. He also allegedly threatened a man at his synagogue who asked him to pipe down during services.
This crime spree is stunning, but what makes it national news is that it has all happened since 2021, when President Donald Trump commuted Braun’s 10-year prison sentence for smuggling marijuana. Braun, granted clemency during the last hours of Trump’s first term as president, is one of many recipients of a Trump pardon who has found himself back in trouble with the law. Some of them are people convicted of serious offenses on January 6, 2021, and then pardoned at the outset of Trump’s second term in office. Despite Trump’s depiction of the rioters as peace-loving patriots, more than a few of them have proved to be repeat offenders.
Braun, who is now back in prison, is not the only first-term recipient of clemency to be rearrested. Eli Weinstein, a convicted Ponzi schemer who received a last-minute 2021 commutation, was convicted on March 31 in a $41 million fraud case. Philip Esformes, whose sentence for his role in a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud was commuted in 2020, was arrested last year on domestic-violence-related charges, but the state dropped them a month later. The rapper Kodak Black has also been repeatedly arrested since receiving a commutation.
But the group of people convicted in connection with January 6 has been particularly likely to have found more trouble. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other crimes, was arrested for assault just a month after being pardoned—at the Capitol, no less. (D.C. prosecutors declined to pursue charges.) He also tried unsuccessfully to stir up conflict at a conference of Trump critics in February. Matthew Huttle, an Indiana man who received a pardon for entering the Capitol on January 6, was fatally shot by a deputy on January 27 after reaching for a gun. Emily Hernandez, a Missouri woman, was convicted for causing a fatal drunk-driving crash in 2022; the sentencing came days after her pardon for January 6 offenses. Andrew Taake of Texas was pardoned in January, then arrested in February on an outstanding charge for allegedly sending explicit messages to an undercover cop he believed was an underage girl.
It’s not just that clemency recipients have been accused of crimes since their pardons; they’ve also tried to use the pardons to get off for other offenses. Edward Kelley argued that his pardon from Trump for January 6 also covered his plot to kill the FBI agents who investigated him; a judge disagreed. Daniel Ball said that charges of illegally possessing a gun should be thrown out because the weapon was discovered in a search related to now-pardoned January 6 charges, and the acting U.S. attorney agreed, but Dan Wilson, a pardoned Capitol rioter who made a similar argument, had less luck with a federal appeals court. (Other defendants have made similar claims, with varying results.) David Daniel, who was charged with producing and possessing child pornography, also argued that a search that turned up the material was invalid because of his January 6 pardon, but the U.S. attorney in the case disagreed. (Daniel has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
Seeing so many people who received pardons get back in tr
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Anyone who looked either at Donald Trump’s personal history or the history of authoritarian regimes in general would have realized that there’s no such thing as a deal with this administration. Whatever you think Trump and co. have agreed to, they feel free to make new demands whenever it suits them.
Sure enough, yesterday the New York Times published an article with the headline “Law Firms Made Deals With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them.”
Big Law has just discovered what it should have known all along: Giving Trump what he wants doesn’t buy you lenient treatment. All it does is signal weakness, which leads to even more onerous demands.
And the fact that Trump never, ever keeps his promises is why he will lose his trade war, why the dollar may lose its status as a global currency, and why America may eventually face a debt crisis.
U.S. efforts to build an anti-China trade alliance are doomed to failure. Why? Because nobody with any sense trusts the Trump administration to honor the terms of any deals it makes, whether they’re deals about pro bono work with law firms or tariff deals with other governments.
And as more and more people realize that Trump and his minions can’t be trusted, the damage will spread from trade to finance. The international role of the dollar and, eventually, America’s ability to service its debt are very much at risk.
Why can’t Donald Trump be trusted? Partly because he’s Donald Trump. But even if he weren’t, absolute monarchs — which is what Trump is trying to become — are fundamentally untrustworthy. The ruler may sometimes choose to honor his promises, but it’s always his choice — a choice that can be changed at any moment.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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TDS is just flowing through you today.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:This is NOT about Trump and has bigger consequences than all the things put together by Trump and Project 2025:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
TDS is just flowing through you today.
Don't ignore Republicans' awful budget
More debt, big Medicaid cuts, and trillions in regressive tax cuts
By Matthew Yglesias | Apr 17, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/dont-ignore-republicans-awful-budget
To start with some self-criticism: Back when the American Rescue Plan was coming together, I thought that if American fiscal policy “overshot” somewhat on the demand side, that would have positive consequences for American politics. Interest rates would rise to contain inflation (this happened) and people would find the higher interest rates annoying (this also happened), and then, as a result, the political system would return to being worried about debt and deficits.
I thought that this would be good, because it would force us into a more real politics, one that wasn’t so dominated by pure symbolism — we would be dealing with hard fiscal tradeoffs and less culture war nonsense.
This did not happen, at all.
Joe Biden and the Democrats surprised me by not returning to the classic Obama/Clinton message of balanced deficit reduction. I found this incredibly annoying, because when Obama was president, the conventional wisdom among pure political hacks was so strongly in favor of a deficit reduction message that the White House ran with it, even though it was inappropriate to the economic circumstances and Obama’s economic team was mixed on the substance of it. But just a few short years later, the conventional wisdom among political operatives had pivoted so hard against deficit reduction that they weren’t focused on it even when it was substantively warranted. Then came the debate, the candidate swap, and what I hoped would be a chance for Kamala Harris to shake the etch-a-sketch and ditch Biden’s extensive set of proposals for new spending in favor of a “reduce the deficit and bring down interest rates” message.
She declined to go down that road. Trump won. And now, while a million crazy things are happening in the executive branch, congressional Republicans are moving forward with a fiscal agenda that is incredibly irresponsible and will add trillions in debt, despite DOGE’s efforts to saves pennies through measures like refusing to help Milwaukee address unsafe levels of lead in their public schools’ drinking water.
Republicans are telling some people that there will be trillions of cuts to social safety net programs while promising other people that there won’t. But all possible versions of the GOP fiscal agenda result in huge increases to the budget deficit. In some, those increases are partially offset by cuts to programs for the poor; other times the deficits are just really large. But every version involves the opposite of sound Obama-style deficit reduction.
What we should be doing is aiming for balanced fiscal consolidation: higher revenue and lower spending, while trying to shelter the most vulnerable from the impact of cuts.
But Republicans want to reduce revenue, raise the deficit, and ensure that the pain of budget cuts falls on the vulnerable.
Republicans’ confusing budget moves
This has all been a bit hard to keep track of, but the first mover in Republican budget drama this year was the House of Representatives, which passed a resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts partially offset by big cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.
This ultimately amounted to roughly $2.8 trillion in deficit increases that they chose to pretend would actually reduce the deficit via magical levels of economic growth.
The way this was written, the biggest spending cut by far is TBD but needs to come from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This is the committee that is
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Universities Told Students to Leave the Country. ICE Just Said They Didn’t Actually Have To.
By Natasha Lennard / Apr 17, 2025 at 1:10 PM
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/17/international-student-visas-deport
-dhs-ice/
The Department of Homeland Security said this week in a Michigan court that the agency does not have the authority to terminate students’ immigration statuses by terminating their records in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System. Known as SEVIS, the database allows both universities and authorities to track information about international students on visas in U.S.
Homeland Security’s changes to SEVIS, the Trump administration said, have no bearing on a student’s lawful nonimmigrant status.
“Terminating a record in SEVIS does not terminate an individual’s nonimmigrant status in the United States,” said Andre Watson, assistant director of the national security division for Homeland Security Investigations, in the filing. Watson added that existing laws and regulations “do not provide” the DHS-run Student Exchange and Visitor Program “the authority to terminate nonimmigrant status by terminating a SEVIS record.”
This will be news to many hundreds of students who have had their SEVIS records terminated by DHS in recent weeks — and were then told by their schools or the government that they have thus lost their immigration status and must immediately leave the country.
“Under pressure from ICE, schools have been advising students they are out of status after SEVIS record termination, and in many cases disenrolling them as a result,” said Nathan Yaffe, an attorney representing international students facing deportation in other cases. “Now ICE has submitted sworn declarations that SEVIS record termination has no legal effect on the student whatsoever.”
“Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one.”
Based on school officials checking their SEVIS records, hundreds of students have been led to believe that they had lost their student immigration status because a terminated record in the database is broadly taken to mean a student has fallen out of status.
The DHS’s latest claims to the contrary in court are sure to only sow further confusion, but they are strong grounds, Yaffe said, for schools to immediately stop disenrolling students believed to be out of status due to SEVIS record checks.
“Any school that continues to disenroll (and refuses to re-enroll) students is voluntarily punishing students to align itself with the Trump administration’s agenda,” Yaffe said. “Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one.”
What Schools Told Students
The DHS declaration was filed in response to a lawsuit brought by four Michigan students, who are suing the Trump administration over the reported loss of their F-1 student statuses. In response, the government argued that the case should be thrown out, since DHS did not remove the students’ statuses when it terminated their SEVIS records.
According to Inside Higher Ed, 16 lawsuits from at least 50 students have challenged the Trump administration over visa revocations and deportation threats. A number of the suits have challenged DHS’s authority to summarily change students’ statuses on SEVIS. It was only for the first time in the Michigan case, however, that the government said that its SEVIS interventions had no bearing on a student’s status.
The admission was an apparent effort by the government to dodge legal challenges. The students are suing to have their legal student immigration status restored, and the government is suggesting that their SEVIS terminations never changed the students’ statuses, so the agency cannot be sued for its actions. Communications from government agencies and school administrations, however, have up until this point taken a SEVIS termination to mean that a student’s status is terminated too.
In an email sent by a school official at the University of Michigan to one of the Mi
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There’s Only One Real Way to Reverse Big Law’s Capitulation to Trump
By Kevin Cope and Rachel Cohen | April 17, 2025 2:47 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/big-law-school-trump-excec
utive-order-skadden.html
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump began issuing a series of executive orders targeting law firms, penalizing firms that employ—or previously employed—attorneys who have challenged him in court. The orders are plainly retaliatory and amount to state-imposed punishment for speech on matters of public concern—violating the First Amendment’s protections for free speech and free association. And they’re having their intended effect: People and businesses with possible legal claims against the administration are increasingly unable to find representation, as are pro bono clients the president disfavors. Although several firms have resisted the orders and multiple lawsuits are ongoing, other firms continue to concede.
A new approach is needed. We are both former attorneys of the law firm Skadden, Arps. One of us recently resigned her position specifically over Skadden’s capitulation to a threatened executive order; the other of us is now a law professor. Our recent experiences show that law students and junior lawyers have the power to counteract and end the crisis—but only if they act collectively.
One might expect the most powerful law firms in the world to be both well-equipped and deeply motivated to resist such attacks on their independence. And indeed, some firms have mounted legal challenges, prevailing at the initial stages. But others, including Paul, Weiss; Skadden; and Kirkland & Ellis have quickly acquiesced, cutting widely reported-on “settlements” with the administration—not necessarily because the law required it, but because resistance apparently seemed too costly.
Commentators across the political spectrum have criticized the deal-cutters, some calling them “cowards” or “craven.” Former federal appellate judge J. Michael Luttig, a noted conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, lambasted Paul, Weiss for choosing to “cower before the powerful and sell out its firm and the nation’s legal profession to the President.”
Such critiques on principle are well-intentioned, and possibly justified. But if firms see their primary duty as serving their clients and preserving their business—rather than safeguarding legal institutions and constitutional norms—shaming won’t ultimately change behavior. Thus far, it seems that most firms take the former view. Moral appeals, without more, therefore won’t change their incentives. What we’re witnessing is a textbook coordination failure—a form of what political economists call a prisoner’s dilemma. Firms that push back against the administration risk losing clients, lawyers, and revenue to those that don’t. As Paul, Weiss chair Brad Karp put it, the executive order represented “an unprecedented threat” that “could have destroyed [the] firm” had it refused to comply. At first blush, it’s difficult to see how the administration’s unlawful threats could cripple a firm with $7.5 million in profit per equity partner. But in light of reports that peer firms Kirkland & Ellis and Sullivan & Cromwell promptly began pursuing Paul, Weiss’ clients and rainmaker partners, its concerns may seem more understandable.
The threat of an executive order is powerful—but it works only because firms act alone and even in conflict. A failure of collective action makes things worse for everyone. Consider that weeks after trying to poach Paul, Weiss clients, Kirkland & Ellis in turn found itself in the president’s crosshairs. If no firm had conceded, and all had refused to poach Paul, Weiss’ departing lawyers or clients under these conditions, much of the harm might have been avoided. Firms choosing to fight the administration have quickly secured court orders halting enforcement of their executive orders; Paul, Weiss could have done the same. But by defecting individually, Paul, Weiss and
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Trump Is Helping Putin Kill Ukrainians
Trump refuses to sell Patriot missiles for Ukrainian Air Defense
By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 16, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-is-helping-putin-kill-ukr
ainians
When I wrote in early March, “The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians”, some people said it went too far. They said that the US not aiding Ukraine was not the same as killing Ukrainians, that Trump still wanted a deal, etc, etc. Well, it turns out that I did not go far enough.
Just in the last few days we have incontrovertible proof of how Trump is helping Putin kill Ukrainians—both some now and many more in the future. Its the combination of what the US will not sell Ukraine (even though Ukraine has the money to buy them), the Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians, and how the two come together. Let’s start with what came out in the last few days.
Ukraine is desperate to purchase Patriot anti-air missiles, as the Ukrainians are running out of this vital system. These were provided (too late) by the Biden Administration in 2023. From the moment they appeared, however, they revealed themselves to be the most effective air-defense weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal. The Ukrainians have used them to great effect—shooting down some of Russia’s most advanced aircraft and, crucially, some of Russia’s most difficult to shoot down missiles that have been fired against Ukrainian cities. Indeed, the Patriots have proven quite effective against Russian Kinzhal missiles, which the Kremlin used to boast could not be intercepted.
Having Patriots allowed the Ukrainians to keep the power on during the Russian Winter attacks in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. However, they are very expensive to use. Zelensky claimed in February that 10 Patriot missiles were fired to bring down 6 Russian ballistic missiles—and that the cost of the Patriots was around $30 million.
In sum, these are a very effective but expensive system. They have made Ukraine much safer than it would be otherwise.
And the very effectiveness of the Patriots has provided Trump with a weapon to help kill Ukrainians. Even being sparing in their usage, Ukraine is running out. Patriots are an American system and the USA has been the source of most of the missiles. Right now there is no new US aid on its way to Ukraine. All we have had in 2025 is the left-over amounts of Biden Administration aid, whereas Trump and the GOP Congress have made no efforts to get any more aid for Ukraine—and that reality is not changing.
Russia understands this and is trying to make Ukraine use up all of its Patriots missiles. In the last few weeks the Russians have been using some of their advanced ballistic missiles against Ukrainian civilian targets, from Sumy last week (see picture above) to Kryvyi Rih the week before, to Dobropillia a little before that.
This seems very much to be a deliberate, targeted campaign to terrorize Ukrainian civilians and force the Ukrainians to use up their dwindling stock of Patriot missiles.
And it is working. The Ukrainians are desperately trying to get their hands on more Patriots—and its reached the stage that they are willing to pay whatever it takes to get more. Zelensky told CBS news that he wanted to buy up to 10 new Patriot systems and their missiles, which would be a major win for the US defense economy. Zelensky said he wanted to buy 10 U.S.-made Patriot systems — worth $1.5 billion each — to shield Ukrainian cities from relentless Russian missile and drone strikes.
"We will find the money and pay for everything," Zelensky said, stressing that Ukraine is prepared to purchase, not request for free, the $15 billion package.
Trump is refusing to sell them—even though that would benefit US workers and help the US economy. Indeed, in the last few days he has started boasting about the fact that Ukraine is desperate to buy more Patriots, and he is refusing to make a deal. Two days ago he told an Oval Office press conference:
Quote:
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How America Can Avoid Becoming Russia
Political pressure must be brought to bear—through the courts, the press, and the states, but also applied to legislators while they still have any power left.
By Garry Kasparov | April 17, 2025, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/04/america-russ
ia-trump-putin/682473/
Based on polls, election results, and the markets, Americans seem to be awakening, if only slowly, to the magnitude and nature of the threat they face. President Donald Trump and his allies in power are trying to erect an authoritarian Mafia state like the one Vladimir Putin and his cronies established in Russia. The American opposition talks of “undermining democracy” and “constitutional crisis”—but for the most part, its legislators, activists, and political strategists are pursuing politics as usual. They shouldn’t be.
If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too: Putin’s bad, but surely he’ll stop short of — and you can fill in the blank with a dozen things he did to destroy Russia’s fragile democracy and civil society, many of which Trump is doing or attempting to do in America today.
Attacking the press as fake news and the enemy of the state? Check. Delegitimizing the judiciary, the last constitutional brake when the legislature is co-opted and feckless? Check. Expanding influence over the economy by threatening businesses and using tariffs to introduce a crisis and a spoils system? Check. Creating a culture of fear by persecuting unpopular individuals and groups? Been there, done all of that.
Putin is still in the Kremlin, and I’m writing this from New York City—my family has made its home there, as well as in Croatia, since we were forced to leave Russia in 2013. America’s institutions and democratic sentiment are far stronger than in the flawed, fragile state Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago. Russia was a mere eight years removed from Soviet totalitarianism when it elected a KGB lieutenant colonel who restored the Soviet anthem and called the fall of the U.S.S.R. the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
Americans, by contrast, have a well-stocked toolbox with which to defend their democratic institutions, if only they would use it. The press is still free; its only limitations are self-imposed. The economy is strong, even though Trump is working hard to put a stop to that. (People who feel economically insecure, or who depend on the government for their daily bread, don’t often rise up against it. Instilling a feeling of helplessness, a lack of control, is a key ingredient of authoritarianism. For example, the uncertainty created by Trump’s tariff flip-flops are anathema to consumer and business confidence, but uncertain citizens are more likely to follow a strongman.) American federalism and the separation of powers are not trivial for a would-be autocrat to overcome. Political pressure must be brought to bear—through the courts, the press, and the states, but also applied to legislators while they still have any power left.
The American opposition should spend less time criticizing the content of the administration’s executive actions—eliciting sympathy for a deported individual, say, or decrying the impact of Trump’s tariffs on 401(k) plans—than focusing on its suspect methods. The real crisis is the lack of due process in the deportations, to take the first example, and the president’s assumption of Congress’s power to levy taxes, to take the second. Sure, Trump loves tariffs, in other words—but he mostly loves exercising power, and his slate of arbitrary levies, unilaterally imposed by the executive, is a power grab.
Never lose sight of the fact that the Trump administration’s aim is to weaken and devalue the machinery of government, on one hand, and privatize the levers of power on the other.
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