Monday, July 7, 2025

Trump's agenda becomes law, more.

If you'd like to get these posts via email, you can join the international readership and subscribe here.

Trump’s agenda passes into law

Congress passed Trump’s agenda, and Trump signed it into law. It cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans and supercharges ICE funding, and, although it also makes enormous cuts to Medicaid and food assistance for the poor, it will increase the national debt by trillions of dollars. 

Heather Cox Richardson gives something of an overview:

[T]he nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania projects that the measure will decrease national productivity, known as gross domestic product (GDP), by 0.3% in ten years and drop the average wage by 0.4% in the same time frame.

. . . Penn Wharton projects the top 10% of households will receive about 80% of the total value of this law . . . .

[T]his law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year.

. . . [E]conomists, investors and politicians are sounding the alarm that the U.S. is “bingeing on debt” when there is no national emergency like a pandemic or a war to require taking on such debt. The measure will raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

. . . The Republicans’ new law . . . cut[s] $890 billion from Medicaid over the next ten years, and about $230 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food assistance for low-income Americans. It cuts tax credits for wind and solar power while promoting fossil fuels.

* * * 

. . . [T]he law . . . pour[s] $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement—more than the military budgets of all but fifteen countries. The law provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget.

. . . [T]he law gives ICE more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, . . . the law will make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

Here’s an illustration of who benefits from this law:

As I’ve written previously, I think the increased ICE funding and its significance are under-appreciated.

Trump is already openly talking about deporting and denaturalizing US citizens. Now the country may have just created its own Gestapo, and I expect the new funding will be used to put Proud Boys and January 6 insurrectionists on the federal payroll en masse. Harvard sociologist/political scientist Theda Skocpol says we should be concerned:

[M]assive militarization of ICE is the real heart of this law[.]

. . . I thought last year that the USA was somewhat protected against [something like Hitler’s coercive] authoritarian takeover [of Germany] by its federal structure, given state and local government rights to control most U.S. police powers . . . . 

But now I see that the Miller-Trump ethno-authoritarians have figured out a devilishly clever workaround.  Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice.  Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources – much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots [will be used] to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens.  The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants.  They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements . . . to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can. 

This is the key story unfolding right now.

As if this isn’t enough to worry about, scholar of authoritarianism Tim Snyder says we should expect the Trump regime to use their concentration camps for slave labor, for both public and private entities:

In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful. Trump has already said that this is the idea, calling it "owner responsibility."

At least the public absolutely hates this law. It is the least popular law since at least the mid 1990s, which makes sense given that “[w]hat America gets with the new GOP budget law will be a government welfare and tax policy that takes money away from poor people, gives it to rich people and ICE, all while exploding the deficit.”

It's Miller time

Anti-immigration bigot Stephen Miller is running the Trump administration:

The 39-year-old immigration hawk, who has been by Trump’s side since the 2016 campaign, has emerged as a singular figure in the second Trump administration, wielding more power than almost any other White House staffer in recent memory—and eager to circumvent legal limitations on his agenda.

Stephen Miller is one of the few people I know of who seems to be genuinely evil. In a now-deleted tweet, ABC journalist Terry Moran seemed to agree:

ABC subsequently terminated Moran. Even after losing his job, Moran said “I wrote it because I thought it was true” and declined to apologize: “I don’t think you should ever regret telling the truth. And I don’t.” Moran wasn't perfect, but the world needs more journalists with that attitude.

Immigration

The big news is the huge increase in funding, discussed above.

Trump's increased immigration enforcement is hurting the economy.

US immigration detention facilities are overcrowded and dangerous:

Some immigrants have gone a week or more without showers. Others sleep pressed tightly together on bare floors. Medications for diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic health problems are often going unprovided. In New York and Los Angeles, people have been held for days in cramped rooms designed for brief processing, not prolonged confinement, and their lawyers and family members have remained in the dark about their whereabouts.

* * *

At least 10 immigrants have died in ICE custody in the six months since Jan. 1, including two at a facility in Miami, the Krome detention center, where detainees earlier this month formed a human “S.O.S.” sign in the yard. At least two of the deaths were suicides, in Arizona and Georgia.

In a new court filing, Kilmar Abrego Garcia describes his treatment at El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison:

Ukraine deserves better

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth surprised officials at home and abroad when he halted a shipment weapons headed for Ukraine. He suggested he did so because he was concerned over American military readiness, which was a lie.

Russia has ramped up its military offensives, apparently aiming to occupy as much territory as possible before considering a cease fire.

As many as 35,000 Ukrainian children are still missing after being kidnapped by Russia during its invasion of Ukraine. It’s hard for me to see how a lasting peace can be achieved without addressing this.

Only the best people?

We're already hiring insurrectionists to work in the government:

A former FBI agent who was charged with joining a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol and cheering on rioters is now working as an adviser to the Justice Department official overseeing its ‘weaponization working group,’ which is examining President Donald Trump’s claims of anti-conservative bias inside the department.” Among other things, “Wise repeatedly shouted, ‘Kill ’em!’ as he watched rioters assaulting officers outside the Capitol, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit.

Republican judge shocked by Trump regime's bigotry

In a hearing over the legality of cuts to NIH grants for programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and purported “gender ideology,” a federal judge nominated by Ronald Reagan expressed shock at the Trump regime’s rank bigotry:

A federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan on Monday accused the Trump administration of “appalling” and “palpably clear” discrimination against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ Americans.

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” said U.S. District Judge William Young, a Massachusetts-based jurist who took the bench in 1985.

* * * 

“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion — but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it — that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” the judge said. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.“

Young’s commentary was an extraordinary departure for a federal judge of any era . . . .

* * * 

“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” Young said. “The Constitution will not permit that. … Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

* * * 

. . . Young said the administration made virtually no effort to push back on claims that the cuts were discriminatory. “We’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s appalling.”

You really don't see judges talk this way. Remarkable.

Independence Day reflections

A good reminder of why I love my country and celebrate its birth:

[O]n July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.

America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.

And yet another:

The America I love is not a stretch of soil or a place where the people of my blood lived and died. It’s a set of impudent and improbable goals: the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, freedom of speech and conscience, decency. We have always fallen short of them and always will, but we wrote them down and decided to dedicate ourselves to pursuing them. That’s worth something.

Miscellanea

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is meeting the moment, even if none of her colleagues are.

Trump may be losing Joe Rogan, who seems genuinely horrified by Trump's immigration abuses.