You may be tired of hearing about measles by now, but measles is not tired of infecting Americans. It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a disease that was declared gone in America. Cases and transmission rates were so low in 2000, thanks almost entirely to the widespread promotion and adoption of the MMR vaccine, that we officially put the disease on America’s pay-no-mind list.
But thanks to RFK Jr.’s promotion of vaccine conspiracy theories, ironically demoted in preference of conspiracy theories more recently of Tylenol and circumcision, fewer people got themselves or their children vaccinated and the case counts began to rise. The ultimate betrayal of our public health system was performed by Donald Trump and his compliant drones in Congress in putting Kennedy in charge of HHS and America’s health. That was combined with whatever that whole DOGE experience was supposed to be, which helped to reduce HHS staffing by at least 1/8th of its previous workforce. Once that was done, the consequences for disease control became inevitable.
You will have heard about the huge measles outbreak that began in Texas. We also just talked about another outbreak that is currently underway in South Carolina that is seeing hundreds of children in quarantine. But those are certainly not the only places where measles cases in at least double digits are popping up in 2025. Here’s a map that shows where cases are occurring, with the larger circles being a large number of cases.
It’s basically everywhere, including in Alaska and Hawaii. That map is also lagging behind CDC’s reported counts, which itself lags weekly, as the reporting is only updated every Wednesday. And those numbers? Yeah, they are almost certainly wildly under-reported.
Nearly two months after a deadly, massive measles outbreak in Texas was declared over, the highly contagious disease continues to spread across the country. The U.S. has now confirmed 1,596 cases this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the highest annual number in more than three decades.
But the true total could be even higher, says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“If you talk to people on the ground, including not only in Texas, but other states, they all say the same thing, which is that the numbers are much worse than that. Probably closer to 5,000 cases,” Offit says. “And it’s not done.”
Not by a long shot. If you’re not from the Southwest, you probably haven’t even heard about the new outbreak occurring along the border of Arizona and Utah, where over 130 total cases of measles have been reported just this year. That’s about half the number of measles cases that occurred in 2024 nationally. Minnesota also is seeing a surge in new cases very recently. While the officially reported case count there is listed at 20, experts expect that to grow as those cases have been popping up these past few weeks.
So how many outbreaks have there been this year? Way more than you probably think, and definitely way more than Kennedy or anyone at HHS is talking about.
All told, the CDC has confirmed 44 measles outbreaks in 41 states this year. The agency defines an outbreak as three or more cases that are linked.The vast majority of cases were in people who were unvaccinated; 27% percent have been in children under the age of 5. About 1 in 8 measles cases have resulted in hospitalization.
This is all preventable. We can’t seriously want to go back to the days like in 1990 when there were nearly 28,000 cases of measles… can we? And what horrible, painful thing do we have to do to make sure more people, and especially children, aren’t getting this horrific and deadly disease?
While news about measles in recent months may have been a surprise, it’s also alarming. Experts warn that the number of cases (and possibly deaths) are likely to increase. And due to falling vaccination rates, outbreaks are bound to keep occurring. One study estimates that between nine and 15 million children in the US could be susceptible to measles.
But there’s also good news: we know that measles outbreaks can be contained and the disease itself can be eliminated. Learn how to protect yourself and your family. Engage respectfully with people who are vaccine hesitant: share what you’ve learned from reliable sources about the disease, especially about the well-established safety of vaccination.
Too late, Harvard. This country has been conditioned to distrust “experts” and “knowledge” and “data.” We do shit on vibes now.
This is going to get worse before it gets better. The story of how we eliminated measles long ago is found in that same 1990 statistic I cited earlier. The public was so horrified with what was happening to children in this country that they were ready to get a safe and effective MMR vaccine to put it to an end.
Why in the hell do we have to wait for those horrors to resurface before we put this diseased genie back in the bottle?
Elon Musk is having a very bad week. The man who bought Twitter for $44 billion to secure unaccountable power over public discourse is discovering what unaccountable power actually looks like when wielded by someone who understands dominance better than he does.
Trump just stripped SpaceX of a government contract and handed it to Jeff Bezos. Musk’s response? Rage-tweeting at Trump officials, including the immortal question “why are you gay”—the rhetorical sophistication we’ve come to expect from the richest man-child on the planet having a public meltdown because Daddy won’t give him what he wants.
This isn’t just delicious schadenfreude, though it is that. This is the neo-reactionary project—the Silicon Valley movement to restore hierarchy and reject democratic constraints—consuming its architects in real-time. A perfect demonstration that the oligarchs funding authoritarian politics fundamentally misunderstood what they were building.
They thought they were buying hierarchy with themselves at the top. They’re discovering that authoritarian hierarchy doesn’t work that way. It requires constant demonstration of dominance through arbitrary humiliation of subordinates. There are no stable positions. No guaranteed seats at the table. No amount of money that exempts you from being the example.
Musk thought he’d bought partnership. He bought the privilege of being degraded publicly.
This is what Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and the entire Silicon Valley neo-reactionary apparatus never quite explained to their fellow travelers: In the systems they’re building, someone has to be subordinate. The hierarchy they’re restoring doesn’t stop conveniently at their own necks. And Trump—whatever else he is—understands this instinctively. He knows that power in authoritarian systems isn’t demonstrated through competent governance or policy achievement. It’s demonstrated through the arbitrary exercise of dominance over those who thought themselves powerful.
Musk genuinely believed his wealth made him Trump’s equal. That his “genius” and his billions and his control of critical infrastructure (Twitter, SpaceX, Starlink) secured him a permanent seat at the table. He thought he was Roy Cohn but permanent. He thought “First Buddy” meant something.
He’s learning what Roy Cohn learned: You’re useful until you’re not. And when you’re not, the humiliation is public, arbitrary, and designed to demonstrate to everyone else what happens when you forget your place.
The contract going to Bezos isn’t about SpaceX’s technical capabilities or cost-effectiveness or any rational criterion. That’s the point. It’s about Trump demonstrating he can take from Musk and give to his rival for no reason except to show he can. And Musk—for all his billions, for all his companies, for all his supposed genius—can do exactly nothing except tweet impotently while the adults laugh at him.
This is the system they built. This is what they wanted—rule by the strong, unencumbered by democratic constraints, where power flows from dominance rather than from consent. They just thought they’d be the ones doing the dominating.
Here’s what makes it particularly delicious: Musk can’t even exit. All that crypto-libertarian fantasy about “exit” and seasteading and network states—it was always cope. You can’t exit power when the person wielding it controls access to the government contracts your companies depend on, the regulatory environment your businesses operate in, and the geopolitical decisions that determine whether your satellites stay in orbit.
Thiel’s dictum that “competition is for losers” works when you’re the monopolist. But Trump is the ultimate monopolist—of attention, of dominance, of the willingness to humiliate anyone anywhere for any reason. There’s no competing with that. Only submitting or being destroyed.
And Musk will submit. He’ll apologize. He’ll grovel. He’ll delete the tweets and post something obsequious about how President Trump is making brilliant decisions for America. Because the alternative is watching everything he’s built get systematically dismantled by someone who understands that in authoritarian systems, the point isn’t good governance—it’s demonstrating who’s subordinate.
The man who bought Twitter because he wanted absolute control is learning what absolute control actually means when someone else has it. The irony would be poetic if it weren’t so terrifying. Because this isn’t just about Musk’s bruised ego. This is about oligarchs discovering that the authoritarian systems they funded don’t stop at the people they don’t like. Hierarchy has teeth. And those teeth point in every direction.
Ask yourself: in the system you’re part of, are you ever really at the top—or always potentially the subordinate? The architects of neo-feudalism are learning the answer the hard way.
This is what authoritarian dominance looks like—cultivated by the powerful, weaponized by the dominant, and turned back on its architects.
Welcome to the world you built, Elon. How’s it feel?
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.
Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.
So ProPublica created its own count.
We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.
Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.
These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.
Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.
The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”
A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.
Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.
We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.
Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.
In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.
When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”
Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”
When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.
Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.
Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”
Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.
Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.
This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.
DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.
Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.
Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.
“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”
George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.
The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.
Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.
Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.
Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.
“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”
Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.
Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”
DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.
The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twiceordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.
But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.
Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.
Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.
“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”
Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)
The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.
Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.
DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.
Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.
“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.
More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”
The “appearance of impropriety” doesn’t bother this administration. It prefers open impropriety, having learned the wrong lessons from Trump’s first term, where most of his worst impulses were somewhat muted by the adults in the room.
There are no adults left. If they haven’t been fired, it’s because they were never invited to participate in the first place. His cabinet is stocked with Fox News commentators. Trump’s personal lawyers are now holding top-level DOJ positions. Another of his lawyers is now an appeals court judge.
The DOJ is bleeding talent. This is deliberate. The Trump administration is divesting itself of everyone but loyalists who view the president as a king, much to the mounting horror of the system of checks and balances, which simply assumed no president would dare to engage in this sort of audacity.
Career prosecutors at the Justice Department do not believe criminal charges are warranted from an investigation seeking to discredit an earlier F.B.I. inquiry into Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, according to people familiar with the matter.
It leaves unclear what political appointees at the Justice Department might do, given the breadth of Mr. Trump’s demands that it pursue people he perceives as enemies. Already, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia overseeing the case, Todd Gilbert, was forced to resign in August because he refused to sideline a high-ranking career prosecutor who found the evidence flimsy, the people familiar with the matter said.
Todd Gilbert seemed like an unlikely target for Trump’s vindictiveness. He was a career GOP legislator before being elevated to the position of US Attorney in Virginia. But he made a fatal mistake: he refused to pretend there was anything to get prosecutorial about when it came to the 2016 FBI investigation into possible election interference by Russia.
Two people better known for their podcast antics than actual investigative expertise (FBI director Kash Patel and his loyal assistant, Dan Bongino) demanded more action on this front. Gilbert refused to play along, resulting in him being fired less than three months after Donald Trump installed him in office.
After reviewing the evidence, Mr. Gilbert told his superiors that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a grand jury investigation, these people said. Frustrated by that answer, aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, blamed a senior career attorney in the office who they believed had swayed Mr. Gilbert: Zachary Lee, a veteran prosecutor with more than two decades of experience involving public corruption and narcotics, among other issues.
[…]
Pressed to further sideline or remove Mr. Lee, Mr. Gilbert refused, these people said. Department officials then informed Mr. Gilbert that he would be fired, and he resigned shortly afterward, posting a GIF on social media with a joke from the movie “Anchorman,” in which the lead character exclaims, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”
This administration knows nothing else but increasingly speedy escalation. It moves fast not just because it wants to break things, but because it’s so often in the wrong it needs to constantly correct course. Anyone who isn’t immediately and usefully subservient is expendable. The pattern will continue until Trump is surrounded only by people willing to indulge his worst impulses without entertaining any of their own second thoughts… or even first thoughts. They’ve installed a king in the Republic, making a mockery of their claims to love America and everything it stood for before they regained power.
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There are levels of corruption, and then there’s whatever the hell this is.
Donald Trump is demanding that American taxpayers pay him $230 million for being prosecuted. Which is like getting a speeding ticket and then billing the state for the cost of your traffic lawyer. Except in this case, the traffic lawyer is now the judge, and the judge gets to decide how much the state pays you and you get to approve it all, and somehow this is all legal because we’ve apparently given up on the concept of shame.
The New York Times reports that Trump has filed what’s known as administrative claims demanding approximately $230 million in compensation from the Department of Justice for two federal investigations, including one that led to indictments—investigations that only stopped because he won the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department manual, settlements of claims against the department for more than $4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or associate attorney general,” meaning the person who oversees the agency’s civil division.
The current deputy attorney general, Mr. Blanche, served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer andsaid at his confirmation hearingin February that his attorney-client relationship with the president continued. The chief of the department’s civil division, Stanley Woodward Jr., represented Mr. Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. Mr. Woodward has also represented a number of other Trump aides, including Mr. Patel, in investigations related to Mr. Trump or the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
This is not normal. This has never been normal. This will never be normal. Although at this point, “normal” is doing a lot of work there, given that we’re living in a timeline where a business failure reality TV host became president, tried to overturn an election, got indicted for stealing classified documents, got re-elected, embraced every authoritarian instinct, and is now suing the government for having the audacity to notice.
According to the Times, Trump submitted two separate administrative claims through a standard government process that typically precedes lawsuits, but can also be used to “negotiate” a settlement. The first claim, filed in late 2023, seeks damages for the Russia investigation and Robert Mueller’s well-publicized (though often misrepresented) probe into Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election.
The second, filed in summer 2024, targets the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent prosecution for mishandling classified documents—you know, the prosecution where Trump was literally caught on tape discussing how he couldn’t declassify the documents he was showing people, and where there were famously boxes of sensitive documents stored in places like a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
The second claim accuses the government of “malicious prosecution” intended to sway the election:
Attorney General Garland FBI Director Wray and Special Counsel Smith’s targeting indictment and harassment of President Trump has always been malicious political prosecution aimed at affecting an electoral outcome to prevent President Trump from being re elected This malicious prosecution led President Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation
By this logic, every criminal defendant should be able to bill taxpayers for their legal fees. And the FBI Director supposedly orchestrating this “harassment”? Christopher Wray, whom Trump personally appointed after firing James Comey. Why would he want to go after Trump?
But let’s get back to the craziest part: Trump’s former personal lawyers, now in government positions specifically because Trump appointed them, get to decide whether the government should pay their former client (and current boss) hundreds of millions of dollars for prosecuting him.
As legal ethics professor Bennett Gershman told the Times:
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
This is amazing for multiple reasons, including that the NY Times did its usual “view from nowhere” cop-out of trying to find an expert to give them a quote because the NY Times house style is never to directly call out bullshit for being bullshit. And even that guy is like “dog, you don’t need an expert. Literally everyone can see this is the most corrupt bullshit imaginable.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump directly about the claims. His response is worth reading in full because he essentially admits everything:
COLLINS: The NYT is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own DOJ now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don't even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money. They rigged the election.
COLLINS: The NY Times is reporting your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own Justice Department now in response to the investigations into you. Is that something you want?
TRUMP: It could be, yeah. I don’t even know what the numbers… I don’t even talk to them about it. All I know is they would owe me a lot of money, but I’m not looking for money. I’d give it to charity or something…. But look, they rigged the election.
“They rigged the election.” There it is. Trump’s entire justification for demanding a quarter billion dollars from taxpayers rests on his repeatedly debunked lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The same lie that led to January 6th. The same lie that has been rejected by every court that examined it, including judges Trump himself appointed. The same lie that even his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, said was “bullshit.”
Trump then tries to bolster his case by pointing to recent settlements:
As you know, in one case, 60 Minutes had to pay us a lot of money. George “Slopadopulous” had to pay us a lot of money and they already paid. You know, they paid me a lot of money.
Let’s be clear about those “settlements”: ABC and CBS didn’t settle because Trump’s claims had merit. They settled because fighting Trump—who controls the federal government and has repeatedly threatened to use that power against media companies—became too expensive and risky. And, in the case of 60 Minutes, it happened because Shari Redstone needed FCC chair Brendan Carr’s approval to sell Paramount, and everyone knew that wouldn’t be approved without paying Trump. Those settlements aren’t vindication; they’re protection money. They’re evidence of the exact kind of corrupt pressure campaign Trump is now trying to formalize by demanding payment from the government itself.
But then—and I want you to really appreciate this—he just admits the whole scam on camera:
Now, with the country, it’s interesting. Because I’m the one that makes the decision, right? And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk.And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.[Turns to look over his shoulder]. Did you have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages?
No, Donald. It’s not “interesting.” It’s a conflict of interest. “Interesting” is when you learn that octopuses have three hearts. This is just corrupt. It’s bad. You’re not supposed to be in a position where you’re both the plaintiff demanding money and the defendant deciding whether to pay it out of the coffers of the US Treasury.
And it’s even worse, though he never acknowledges this, because it’s him deciding how much of the taxpayers’ dollars he gets to transfer to his own bank account. By himself. It’s horrifically corrupt, as anyone can see.
He tries to salvage this with a throwaway line about charity:
But I was damaged very greatly and any money that I would get I would give to charity.
Sure you would. This is the same Donald Trump whose charitable foundation was shut down in 2018 after a lawsuit found it had engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality” including using charitable funds to settle business disputes, buy portraits of himself, and make illegal campaign contributions. The same Donald Trump who admitted in that case to misusing charitable funds and was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. The same Donald Trump who appears constitutionally incapable of doing anything that doesn’t personally enrich him.
But even if we believed him—even if he pinky-swore to give every penny to charity—the entire premise is corrupt. If the money should go to a good cause, how about leaving it in the federal treasury? You know, the one that’s currently empty because the government is shut down and can’t pay its bills?
Let’s zoom out for a moment, because the specific details of Trump’s grift can obscure just how unprecedented this is.
The government almost never pays compensation to people it prosecutes, even in cases of actual wrongful prosecution. When someone is exonerated after being wrongly convicted, many states don’t provide any compensation at all, and those that do typically cap it at levels far below what Trump is demanding. The idea that you deserve compensation simply for being prosecuted—when the prosecution was based on actual evidence of actual crimes you actually committed—is lunacy.
The Russia investigation that Trump claims he deserves compensation for resulted in 34 indictments, seven guilty pleas, and five people sentenced to prison. The special counsel’s report explicitly did not exonerate Trump, instead noting that if they had confidence Trump didn’t commit a crime, they would have said so. The investigation was not “malicious prosecution”—it was a legitimate investigation into serious matters of national security.
Did some people exaggerate the extent of what Mueller would find? Sure. But there remains no evidence that the investigation itself was improper. Indeed, the exact opposite is true. The investigation was done, it found some clear evidence of law breaking, and that resulted in some people going to prison.
The classified documents case was even more clear-cut. The FBI found over 300 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite Trump’s lawyers claiming they’d returned everything. The evidence included surveillance footage showing Trump’s employees moving boxes of documents around to hide them from investigators. Trump was literally recorded discussing how he couldn’t declassify documents but was showing them to people anyway. This wasn’t a witch hunt—it was an open-and-shut case that only ended because Trump won an election.
And now he wants taxpayers to pay him for it.
Perhaps most disturbing is what Trump’s own comments reveal about how thoroughly he’s corrupted the Justice Department. When asked about the claims, he said, “I don’t even talk to them about it”—implying that his subordinates are pursuing this on his behalf without his direct involvement. This is almost certainly false (Trump has never been shy about directing his personal legal affairs), but even if it were true, it would mean the Justice Department is so thoroughly captured that officials are proactively working to enrich the president without being asked.
The Times notes that “administrative claims are not technically lawsuits” and that “such complaints are submitted first to the Justice Department… to see if a settlement can be reached without a lawsuit in federal court.” In other words, this is all happening behind closed doors, with no public scrutiny, no judicial scrutiny, and the Justice Department has the discretion to simply cut Trump a check.
Oh, and also this:
The Justice Departmentdoes not specifically require a public announcement of settlementsmade for administrative claims before they become lawsuits. If or when the Trump administration pays the president what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, there may be no immediate official declaration that it did so, according to current and former department officials.
Trump could pocket hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, approved by his own lawyers, and there might be no public record.
And if you think that there’s some sort of ethics rules in place to stop it, Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to have made sure nothing stands in the way here:
A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department. Asked if either of those top officials would recuse or have been recused from overseeing the possible settlement with Mr. Trump, a Justice Department spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, said, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
In July, Ms. Bondi fired the agency’s top ethics adviser.
Mr. Trump famously hates recusals. He complained bitterly after his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, withdrew from overseeing the Russia investigation that is now the subject of one of his demands for money.
Trump seems to have taken the joke “no conflict, no interest!” to heart.
Look, we’ve become numb to Trump’s corruption. Every day it’s a new batshit thing, and honestly, I’m exhausted. But this one deserves to break through the noise because it’s not complicated.
The President is demanding the government pay him $230 million for investigating his crimes and prosecuting him. His own lawyers get to approve it. He’s justifying it with the Big Lie. The government is shut down and can’t pay its bills, but sure, let’s cut Trump a check. And he’s doing all of this while admitting on camera that it’s “interesting” he gets to decide how much to pay himself.
This is just theft. The president is looting the treasury, and the only people who can stop him are the Justice Department he controls, the Congress that won’t hold him accountable, and the Supreme Court that already gave him immunity for crimes.
So yeah, he’ll probably get away with it. Because we’ve built a system where the most powerful person in the country can openly steal from us and face no consequences. Trump didn’t break the system—he just realized it was already broken and decided to take advantage.
And honestly? The fact that he can admit all of this on camera and still expect to cash the check is perhaps the most depressing part of all.
I recognize that this is like the fourth impeachable thing he’s done in the past week alone, and with each new horror the old one slides off the front pages, but really, this one deserves extra attention. At a time when the government is shut down, prices everywhere are rising, and the economy is stalling, Donald Trump is looking to personally enrich himself with a quarter of a billion dollars from the US Treasury.
This is a shockingly brazen level of corruption, even for Donald Trump. And we shouldn’t let it just slide away.
If Elon Musk probably has a superpower, it isn’t his engineering or business savvy. It’s probably his rank opportunism. The latest case in point: this week saw a massive outage for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that managed to take many of your favorite websites and services offline. The outage also hampered the workflows of countless online businesses. The impact was fairly universal.
And, ever the opportunist, Musk was quick to leverage the outage to unfairly smear a potential competitor and promote his own, shittier alternative.
Musk, however, took the opportunity to exploit the outage to criticize Signal over at his right wing propaganda and crypto grifter website:
Why would Musk do this? He’s trying to promote his own, shittier encrypted chat software beta, the creatively named X Chat. X Chat is part of Musk’s quest to turn what was once Twitter into an “everything app,” despite the fact he’s shown little real indication he’s innovative enough to actually make X useful for anything outside of sports chat and fighting with racist crypto grifter bots.
While Signal isn’t perfect and certainly has some dependencies on centralized infrastructure, the AWS outage didn’t create any specific risk issues related to encrypted Signal communications. Musk simply saw an opportunity to exploit the outage to market his barely-used beta software. Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk by noting that Signal was at least transparently open source:
But because every brain fart Elon Musk has somehow warrants its own clickbait news cycle, what’s left of the U.S. press couldn’t help but amplify Musk’s criticism of Signal and parrot his attacks mindlessly:
Much like Trump, Musk’s real skill set has absolutely nothing to do with engineering.
His real skill set revolves rank opportunism (like cozying up to talented engineers and taking singular credit for their work) and exploiting America’s very broken press for attention and marketing. In this case, trying to convince people to migrate from a trusted, open source, secure messaging app to a closed source app run by an erratic white supremacist ideologically aligned with the planet’s shittiest people.
