Thursday,, August 21, 2025
D+286/214/-1248
1955 Emmett Till arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives, a week before he is murdered
1968 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago, went on to nominate Hubert Humphrey
1968 Warsaw Pact forces completed their invasion of Czechoslovakia by arresting Czech leader Alexander Dubček and forcing him to sign the Moscow Protocols
1991 Latvia declared its independence from USSR
2014 Israeli airstrike in Rafah killed Mohammed Abu Shammala, Raed al Atar and Mohammed Barhoum - 3 of Hamas's top commanders
2018 Michael Cohen, President Trump's personal lawyer, pleadsed guilty to charges, including making illegal payments at the direction of Trump to women with whom Trump had affairs
2018 Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, was convicted on eight counts of fraud in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia
2019 Donald Trump said Danish PM Mette Frederiksen is "nasty" to him over his interest in buying Greenland and canceled his trip to Denmark
In bed at 9, up at 5:10 with painful left hip.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 4:30 p.m.
Morning musings: (1) I pushed my rollator down the hall from the bedroom at 5:15 thinking "53 days," the short time it took Adoph Hitler to convert the Weimar Republic into a legal dictatorship, a country governed no longer by laws passed by its parliament, but by decrees issued by Hitler. For Hitler, it was decrees; for Trump, it is executive orders, samo samo.
(2) The day at the bird feeders began at 6:15 when Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal flew in fora leisurely breakfast on the tray feeder. The tube feeder is almost empty; my bad. The small brownish birds are harder to identify by species in the dim light, not so the male goldfinches, cardinals, jays, and doves. . . . I filled the feeders at 8 or 9 this morning. By noon, the tube feeder is about 80% empty.
(3) I looked back at the entries in this journal 1, 2, and 3 years ago on this date. Two years ago today I was "out of commission" from pelvic pain all day. Last year, I wrote a reflection on Mormon heaven, not wanting 'eternal life,' the US's dropping 400 million tons of ordnance on Vietnam and my compassionless complicity.
(4) Trump wants a 10% ownership stake in NVIDIA for the US government. Isn't this what used to be called "socialism" by Republicans and everyone else? From Thomas Edsell's NY Times op-ed two days ago, "The Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump."
The Trump administration ranks among the most intrusive in American history, driving the tentacles of the federal government deep into the nation’s economy, culture and legal system.
Economically, the administration is dictating corporate behavior through tariffs, subsidies and the punishment of disfavored industries and companies, while rewarding allies with tax breaks and deregulation. And that’s all before the government takes its cut.
Culturally, Trump is seeking to redefine the boundaries of public discourse: pressuring universities, elevating grievance politics and reshaping federal agencies to reflect ideological loyalty rather than expertise or experience.
Within the legal system, the administration is aggressively reshaping the federal judiciary, asserting executive power over independent institutions and using the Justice Department for political ends.
Taken together, these interventions reveal a presidency determined to expand executive reach into virtually every sphere of national life.“No peacetime president has remotely approached the Trump administration’s campaign to control the conduct of all the major institutions that comprise American civil society as well as its governments,” Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote to me by email.
This is comparable to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mussolini said even a teacher of mathematics must be a fascist.Now all who do not take positions on American politics, policies and history that comply with the administration’s views are in danger of being denied funding, subjected to lawsuits, and derided by the White House in ways that can inspire violent private attacks. All this has precedents, but not in America’s peacetime history.
Trump’s intrusions are aimed at wide and varied subjects, with targets that include corporate governance, academia, the legal profession, the administration of justice, criminal investigations of political adversaries and such liberal Democratic organizations as ActBlue and Media Matters.For Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, the word “intrusive” fails to capture the full scope of Trump’s agenda. Writing by email, Wilentz argued that Trump
has intimidated major institutions of civil society, including universities, major law firms, and the corporate media, to bend them to his will. He has deployed the military for political purposes. He has militarized ICE and turned it into nation’s largest law enforcement force, accountable only to himself and Stephen Miller, thus laying the basis for a police state.
He and his attorney general have hounded federal judges who oppose the Trump agenda to the point where those judges and their families rightly fear for their lives. His appointees to the Supreme Court, in concert with Chief Justice Roberts, are completing the gutting of the 14th Amendment and (as crucially supplemented by the 1965 Voting Rights Act) the 15th Amendment, thereby destroying crucial legal legacies of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.Trump has taken upon himself an attempt to force a revision of the American historical narrative. As Wilentz put it:
Most recently, he has commanded a rewriting of American history as a providential story culminating in his own divinely inspired rule. Approaching the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, he is grasping for a monarchy that the Revolution repudiated, in the name of a plutocratic and theocratic order that the Revolution rejected.
At one level, Trump’s policies are the embodiment of what have been core Republican principles since Ronald Reagan, as foreshadowed by the ultraright big business opposition to the New Deal: slash taxes on the wealthy, bash the poor, dissolve the social safety net and deregulate, deregulate, deregulate.This is the main reason so many Republicans who otherwise despise Trump remain so loyal to him. They don’t quite get how, alongside his turbocharged Reaganism, Trump is building the framework of an international crime and corruption syndicate, ending restraint of private efforts to corrupt foreign governments, embracing Bitcoin, a currency custom-made for bribery, asset-laundering, and other gangster-like activities.Trump, Wilentz argued,
is intruding like a wartime president when there’s no war. The only checks on his brazen lawlessness would be the Congress and the Supreme Court. But the first is supine and the second has thus far sustained Trump on 90 percent of the cases where lower courts have tried to restrain him. And if permitted, his assumption of war powers without a war will enable his authoritarian regime.
Bruce Miroff, a political scientist at SUNY-Albany, expanded on Trump’s autocratic approach to government in an email:Trump himself has an authoritarian mind-set that ignores a checks and balances system that has frustrated some earlier chief executives. But he also has an advantage in the capitulation of the other two branches out of fear, but also out of hope that only under him can a long sought conservative agenda finally roll back the liberal welfare state.From the early dismantling of the “deep state” to the current takeover of law enforcement in D.C. and Trump’s threat to institute a makeover of the Smithsonian that will stifle any exhibits that don’t use happy talk on even the darkest moments in American history, Trump has forged ahead to shut down anything he dislikes and replace it with his own imagination.
George C. Edwards III, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M and a fellow at Oxford, contended that “President Trump is unique”:
No peacetime president has been as intrusive in intervening in the economy, including extracting funds from corporations (Nvidia), requiring domestic investments, strongarming the selection of C.E.O.s, picking winners (fossil fuel companies, steel manufacturers) and losers (wind farms, EV vehicles) in the economy, and using tariffs — to raise revenue, to reduce trade imbalances, and to coerce both U.S. companies and other nations.
And no other peacetime president has so blatantly sought the territory of a sovereign nation. No president has been as hostile to environmental protection, financial regulation, and efforts to advance civil rights.
What makes Trump one of a kind, Edwards wrote, are
his efforts to influence so many other spheres of American life. No president has reached so far into the governing of universities, been so active in determining Kennedy Center honors, and been so eager to employ the symbolic politics of naming everything from athletic teams to mountains and oceans.
What may be most significant of all, in Edwards’s view,
is the president’s undermining the structural and moral underpinnings of the government. Unilaterally dismantling the administrative state by destroying expertise that took generations to build in areas ranging from investigating and prosecuting crime and protecting the public against environmental hazards to predicting the weather and curing cancer can cause long-term, structural harm to American society.
Disregarding appropriate legal bases for action, disobeying judicial orders, punishing law firms, stretching the interpretation of laws, and employing the military for domestic purposes weakens the foundations of American government. So do the many ethical lapses and brazen profiteering of the president and his family. The rule of law is the bedrock of any democracy, and the White House itself is threatening it.
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