Dear Everybody:
It’s getting so there’s a new crisis every single day, and today is no exception:
--Today we found out that Trump’s DOJ is investigating Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, and worse, has been doing so for some time. (Jeannine Pirro is the one in charge.) They claim Powell committed fraud in the renovation of the Fed’s headquarters, claiming the cost overruns were a crime.
--The Fed received grand jury subpoenas from the DOJ on Friday that threaten a criminal indictment of Powell.
--This is clearly another retaliation/extortion prosecution because Powell wouldn’t lower interest rates like Trump wanted him to. Trump also couldn’t legally fire him, so he has done this instead, hoping to get him off the board this way, even though his term as chair ends next month.
--Anthony Scaramucci: "So future potential fed chairs just remember if you don’t do what Trump wants he will criminally prosecute you."
--It was SO obvious that even Republicans have spoken out against it. Lisa Murkowski: "It’s clear the administration’s investigation is nothing more than an attempt at coercion...If the Fed loses its independence, the stability of our markets and the broader economy will suffer."
--GOP Senator Thom Tillis said Trump is weaponizing the DOJ to control the Fed. "It is now the independence and credibility of the DOJ that are in question." Tillis is blocking any Federal Reserve nominations till this is resolved.
--Trump is claiming he didn’t know anything about the Powell investigation. Trump: "I knew nothing about it, but Powell is certainly not very good at the Fed and he’s not very good at building buildings. Is this to pressure him on rates? No, I wouldn’t even think of doing it that way."
--The move rattled the stock market, made the value of the dollar drop, and caused people to flee (even more than they have been already) into long-term bonds.
--Wall Street investors seemed absolutely gobsmacked by the investigation, even though Trump has said multiple times that Powell should be investigated and/or arrested. (When, oh, when will people take him seriously? If he says it, he plans to do it.)
--That isn’t the only financial move by Trump that’s rattling the markets. His executive order than credit card interest rates can be no higher than 10% sent JP Morgan and American Express down sharply.
Trump and DHS (and the rest of the right) are now tripling down on their response to the murder of Renee Good:
--Trump, when asked about Renee Good: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. Law enforcement shouldn’t be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff."
--MuellerSheWrote: "So if you’re annoyed or disrespected, you can just kill the person so you don’t have to put up with it?"
--Kristi Noem: "Stop arguing with the president."
--GOP Rep Pete Sessions: "This protesting that goes on--honking of horns, obstructing federal law enforcement--should not be tolerated."
--MuellerSheWrote: "Which is why we are posthumously indicting Paul Revere."
--GOP Rep Randy Fine: "If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders from our country, you get what’s coming to you."
--GOP Rep Nancy Mace: "Fuck around and find out."
--Lindsey Graham: "This could have easily been prevented by complying with the official’s command. If an official lawfully asks you to exit a vehicle, but you do not comply and then strike that officer with a vehicle, you may get shot."
--exlrrp: "So if, when an ICE officer tells you to get out of the car, you’re supposed to get out of the car, what are you supposed to do when a judge tells you to release the Epstein files?"
--New York Times: "All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authorities, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience."
--Jon Favreau: "Your government killed an unarmed citizen this week, and if you think we’re going to stop talking about it, you can fuck right off."
--Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect: "ICE’s Gestapo tactics are stimulating a mass revulsion."
Not only Kristi Noem and Trump have doubled down on the murder of Renee Good, but so have their ICE agents:
--Reports and videos show ICE agents asking American citizens whether they’ve "learned their lesson over the last few days."
--There’s a video on Instagram of an ICE agent approaching a car and saying to the woman inside, "Have you all not learned from the last couple of days? Have you not learned?" When the woman asks what she was supposed to learn, he snatches the phone away from her and the video ends.
--rminnesota: "This took place at an intersection in a Twin Cities suburb. This woman was simply recording these agents as they stopped another vehicle in front of her. These agents feel emboldened after the murder of Renee Good, and I fear more deaths are on the way."
--In Louis Park, Minnesota (a suburb of Minneapolis) ICE agents ordered a woman out of a car, saying, "Get out of the car! Don’t you know what happened in the last couple of days?"
--50501: The People’s Movement: "A gang of ICE terrorized a female US Marine vet named Skye, calling her ‘it’ and telling her: ‘Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!’" Skye told reporters they broke the window of her car and dragged her out of it, and then tortured her, turning her ankle all the way around and saying, "I bet you like that." Skye: "They tried to break my ankle. I took an oath that they’re spitting on. This isn’t Germany." (Her account of what they did to her is on video.)
--In another incident, you can hear on the video ICE agents saying, "Have you not learned anything?"
--lorask: "They are Trump’s SS."
--rugbymom: "They are actively conducting operations in order to create violent confrontations."
--The Border Patrol and ICE have both expressed plans to go door to door looking for immigrants, and resistance groups are putting out instructions of what to do if they come to your house--"Hide in a bedroom and do not answer the door. Call 911.")
--GT: "We’re now in the Anne Frank portion of the program."
--Germany 1933: "Police were given immunity for random violence, including killings of minorities and the political opposition. Many were promoted. They had a license from the top. For the first time in Europe, the police were the violent criminals."
Even worse, they are openly embracing Nazi slogans:
--On Kristi Noem’s DHS podium, instead of the Official Seal of the United States, she has "One Of Ours, All of Yours." This slogan, which in the English version originated with Qanon, actually originated with Hitler’s SS:
--The message is clear: "If you disrespect, disobey, or even question one of our people, we will murder all of yours."
--DHS isn’t the only one displaying Nazi slogans. The Department of Labor now has as its official slogan, "One Homeland, One People, One Heritage. Remember who you are, America!" This is disturbingly close to Hitler’s "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer!" (One People, One Realm, One Leader!)
Trump is also threatening to stop elections:
--The New York Times says in the interview they did with Trump, "Trump regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election. He said he doubted whether the Guard was ‘sophisticated enough’ to carry out the order effectively."
--Marc Elias: President Donald Trump said he ‘should have’ ordered the National Guard to seize ballot boxes during the 2020 election, raising fears he will actually do so in the upcoming midterm elections."
--Adam Parkhomenko: "When power starts slipping, they don’t moderate, they rush to break the system before voters can stop them, and every single day this is starting to look a whole lot more like Russia, and we know how voting goes there."
A number of experts spent the weekend trying to figure out what the heck Trump is doing and what’s going on (and what we should do in response:)
--Adam Parkhomenko: "Donald Trump is scared out of his mind that Republicans are going to lose the House in the midterms if not sooner given how fast things are unraveling, which is why he’s accelerating his authoritarian and fascist plans at a pace we’ve never seen before. This isn’t confidence, it’s panic."
--Sean Carter: "(Trump) is dangerous in the same way that a cornered, rabid raccoon is dangerous. He is looking for points of weakness where he can escape. Stay focused on the reasons why the walls are closing in. Don’t flinch when he froths at the mouth."
--Benched Not Broken: "You get what you give. So you can’t go around strutting, flaunting, displacing, and destroying without consequences. And you definitely shouldn’t do it if your home base isn’t safe and secure."
--Professor Daniel Immerwahr: "Trump’s version of a strong United States seems to be a large piece of real estate enclosed within high walls, making nuclear and other dire military threats...he wants power over the world but not presence in it."
--Fran Leibowitz: "Trump allows people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while, and they really love him for that. It’s a shocking thing to realize that people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives."
--Robert Reich: "We must stop trying to make rational sense out of what Trump is doing. He is a ruthless dictator, plain and simply. All analyses of what is happening--all reporting, all efforts to understand, all attempts at strategizing--are doomed. The only reality is that an increasingly dangerous and irrational sociopath is now exercising brutal and unconstrained power over America, and, hence, the world."
In historical news:
--Hitler’s SS totally lived up to their slogan. On June 9th and 10th, 1942, they destroyed the Czech village of Lidice after Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy (and the one who implemented the "final solution" to murder all the Jews.) Germans alleged that two families in Lidice had a connection to the men who carried out the assassination, and they executed all the men in the village and shipped the women and children to the death camps. The village itself was demolished, and German officials declared Ludice would no longer exist and that its name would be excised from history.
--They then made sure reports of the massacre were circulated to all their occupied territories so everyone would know this would happen to them if they killed any of Hitler’s men: "If you kill one of ours, we will kill all of yours."
--They continued to massacre people right up through D-Day, and four days after the invasion, they murdered the entire village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Nazi-occupied France and razed the village in retaliation for actions by the French Resistance, even though no one in the village had participated in the Resistance. They herded the men into barns, machine-gunned them, doused the insured with gasoline, and set fire to the barns. They locked the women and children in the church, threw in grenades, and then set fire to it. Anyone who managed to escape through the windows of the church was machine-gunned. They then searched for anyone who might have been hiding, killed them too, and burned the village to the ground.
In Resistance news:
--The Rude Pundit: "Minneapolis is resisting and Ice and the Trump administration don’t know what to do. They were expecting everyone to fold, but, if anything, this is starting to look like some kind of tipping point, like a line was crossed here that is moving even those who supported this administration and supported this bullshit immigration crackdown. It’s moving those who have only a glancing interest in politics. ICE is going door to door in Minneapolis, literally just breaking down doors and looking for anyone they can drag in. DHS is having its largest ever force in there to punish the city for daring to fight back, for daring to not just knuckle under."
--GB Doggo: "Germans protested Hitler in the 1930s, but their protests and resistance wasn’t galvanized into a united effort, and they never won over the masses. Renee Good has given us the means to galvanize the masses. Her murder, which everyone can see, is the difference between 1930 and now. They didn’t have the video to prove Hitler’s Brown Shirts were the aggressors. We have it. Stay strong and stay united and keep showing the masses their actions and lies to cover it up. This and the Epstein files need to be repeated, along with sustained mass protests against ICE and Trump. We can defeat them with truth."
In other news:
--Steve Bannon is actively trying to undermine JD Vance’s chances of being the Republican nominee for President in 2028. Bannon claims Vance is too cozy with tech billionaires and too willing to play nice with old-guard Republicans, and he is not convinced Vance will stay true to the hardline "America First" agenda.
--There were 179 cases of measles reported in South Carolina in 2025. Over 2000 cases have been reported in the US as a whole. The number is higher than the number of measles cases recorded for the entire US in 6 of the last 10 years.
--Trump posted his photo on Truth Social with the caption: "The President of Venezuela."
In good news:
--Spotify is no longer running recruitment ads for ICE, due to pressure from customers.
--In sort of good news, a former ICE attorney resigned this week, citing pressure to meet deportation quotas that risk detaining legal residents and US citizens. Another former ICE official said what started as a patriotic duty has now turned into a job they no longer recognize.
--A second Ohio town has placed a moratorium on data center construction over concerns about impacts on residents’ air and water quality. (This is becoming more and more of an issue because data centers take ENORMOUS amounts of water and electricity and are incredibly noisy, with people complaining about the noise up to a mile away.)
Best advice of the day, from George Conway: "Trump’s both weaker and more dangerous than ever. Buckle up, but don’t be afraid. Because fear is how he wins."
Best comment of the day, from Tammy E: "He thinks he’s in a movie. I wish we all were. At least it would have an ending."
Today’s bit of poetry, from Robert Frost: "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep."
Keep calm and carry on,
Connie Willis