Saturday Report 1/31/26 — Trump's New Grift: A $10 Billion Demand for "Reputational Harm" After his Income Tax Avoidance Was ExposedThe Best of the Rest of the News..
— Is this how a free press dies in America, with Don Lemon in handcuffs? What's left of American democracy just hit another crisis with the arrest of independent journalist Don Lemon by federal agents yesterday in Los Angeles. This was for reporting on a protest at a Minnesota church, and it isn't just a legal spat: this is intimidation aimed at the free press itself. As fascism expert Jason Stanley noted on Ali Velshi's show this morning, this is the moment of fascism when the fascists begin arresting members of the press. Federal officials are pursuing charges even after a magistrate judge refused to approve a complaint against Lemon, and his lawyer says Lemon was there doing what journalists have done forever — reporting the truth — and that's exactly what the First Amendment protects. The message being sent is clear: "If you speak truth to power — particularly if you are Black or brown — you could end up in handcuffs." This cannot stand. Call your elected officials (the number for Congress's switchboard is 202-224-3121) to support independent journalism and let them know that we need them to defend the Constitution, the First Amendment, and our tattered republic. — New Trump act may lead to the takeover of elections. Trump has officially begun his corruption of the 2026 election, raiding the warehouse in Georgia where the 2020 election ballots were being stored by the state. He and his lickspittles know they're facing an overwhelming defeat this November unless they can figure out multiple ways to rig the elections. Orbán and Putin have both used their equivalents of gerrymandering, destroying the free press, and voter purges to stay in power, and Trump has been following their examples (and even hung Putin's picture in the White House this week). When conspiracy nut, former cult member, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard showed up in Atlanta to participate in the seizure of these materials, election integrity folks from across the country went on high alert. Something really dark is afoot; keep an eye on this… — Trump's New Grift: A $10 Billion Demand for "Reputational Harm" After his Income Tax Avoidance Was Exposed. Seriously. A man is now serving a 5-year prison sentence for leaking Trump's tax returns to the press in 2018, and he wasn't even a federal employee; he worked for a contractor. But Trump still thinks his embarrassment when we learned he's been a tax cheat most of his life is, Trump says, so severe that the American government must give him and his two oldest boys a massive pile of cash. This family never saw a grift it couldn't embrace… — Trump building 'white supremacist army' inside government that will outlast him. "I've said some pretty harsh things in my time," Ta-Nehisi Coates said on a podcast this week, "but I don't know that I've seen before the President of the United States attempt to build what I can only call a white supremacist army that'll outlast him. That is new. And I don't know what else to call it! Given the propaganda and the recruiting." I documented the white supremacist memes that Republicans and ICE are using for recruitment and general racist incitement, and it's now so broad and pervasive it's impossible to ignore. Good on Coates for calling this out. — Is Minneapolis now a "papers please" city for non-whites? CBS News reports that people of color, including people whose families have been born here for generations, are now carrying their passports or birth certificates with them in Minnesota because ICE continues to defy the Fourth Amendment and federal and state law by randomly stopping people and demanding they show their proof of citizenship. If it's not readily available, they often end up in ICE detention (which some reports suggest generates a bonus for the agent who nabs them, "undocumented immigrant" or not), something that's already happened to multiple US citizens. Trump's reign of terror is just getting underway; Minneapolis is widely regarded as a test case, with other Blue cities in Blue states up next. My congresswoman, Maxine Dexter, just warned Portlanders that we should all get whistles and be prepared for an invasion here, as most observers think Portland will be next (although, apparently they've decided to go after Black Somalis in Ohio first). It's a sentiment echoed by an administration official who spoke with NBC News, saying: "The reality is, you can't stop what you're doing. This is the whole point of ICE existing in these cities, and Minnesota is not going to be the last state that ICE goes to. Oregon was next. We were not done. We need to keep going." Trump is trying to create a situation where people in Red states feel "safe" and people in Blue states go to bed every night feeling like they are under siege. So far, it appears to be generating more backlash than fear, even after he's murdered two people and inflicted violence and chemical weapons on thousands of others. Will America eventually back down and bow before him? Stay tuned… — Mark Carney stood up for democracy, and Trump is pissed. Canadian Prime Minister Carney went to Davos and gave a great speech arguing that as Trump moves America closer and closer to Putin-style fascism it's high time for the remaining democratic nations of the world to band together. That would include economic cooperation, military and defense collaborations, along with new alliances. It'll be a massive undertaking and will probably produce a short-term hit to the Canadian economy, but Canada is now — perhaps correctly — viewing Trump and the US the way Poland was viewing Hitler and Germany in 1938. The damage our bone-spurs rapist fraudster felon president is inflicting on America and the world is mind-boggling. — DOJ busted for removing Epstein files accusing Trump of child rape. Minutes after releasing an FBI document detailing reports to our government of Trump raping young girls, they pulled it off their server. Nonetheless, the FBI report is widely circulating on the web now, including text like this: "[Redacted] reported an unidentified female friend who was forced to perform oral sex on President Trump approximately 35 years ago in NJ. The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13-14 years old when this occurred, and the friend allegedly bit President Trump while performing oral sex. The friend was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting President Trump. The friend said she was also abused by Epstein." That's just one of a series of allegations against our president who's already been found — twice — by a jury of his peers to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. Only the best, right? |
Saturday, January 31, 2026
Something for 31 January
Friday, January 30, 2026
Something to Know - 30 January
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Public outrage over the violence of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol has given Senate Democrats a powerful lever. Tonight they forced the Republican majority to split new funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) off from five other spending bills that must pass by Friday to keep the government funded. The Department of Homeland Security will be funded separately for just two weeks while the Democrats and Republicans negotiate the conditions of funding DHS. The funding measure passed the House before Saturday's shooting of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Seven Democrats joined the Republican majority in backing it to continue funding for other important agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), reasoning that since the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act had provided enough money to fund ICE and Border Patrol through September 30, 2029, there was no point in taking a stand against renewed extra funding. But popular anger over ICE shootings and the administration's lies about them made Democrats in the Senate take a stand against the measure. They demanded accountability and reforms to current ICE operations. Republicans initially said they would not split DHS funding from the rest of the package, then proposed handling the excesses of ICE and Border Patrol through an executive order or through a new, different piece of legislation. Such a plan would avoid the necessity of taking the measure back to the House, which is out of session until Monday. Senate Democrats refused to pass the measure as it stood. They demanded an end to "roving patrols," with federal agents required to use warrants and coordinate with local and state law enforcement officials. They wanted a uniform code of conduct for agents and independent investigations to enforce that code. And they wanted agents to use body cameras and to stop wearing masks. Senate Republicans wanted a longer period of time to consider these demands, but they settled on two weeks. The Senate did not vote on the measure tonight. NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur reported that, according to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the holdup is coming from Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham was one of those Republican lawmakers who worked to help Trump try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, calling Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, for example, and suggesting that he should throw out some of Biden's ballots in the state. His phone records on and around January 6, 2021, were among those examined by special counsel Jack Smith's team. Now, according to Kapur, he wants the Senate to add back into the funding package necessary to prevent a government shutdown a measure that would let senators whose records were seized sue the government for $500,000. The House is out of session until Monday, and the fate of the measure in that chamber is not clear. House Democrats have said they will not support the measure without significant concessions and will leave the Republicans to pass the measure on their own. But the Republican majority has fallen to two seats and is expected to fall by another seat over the weekend as a special election in Texas is expected to add another Democrat to the House. Meanwhile, footage circulated today of a woman in Minnesota who left her home to warm the car for her kids and got taken by federal agents. The video shows her calling someone to look after her children, who were left alone in the house. In the last week, since federal agents shot Pretti, former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all spoken out to condemn his killing and the violence of federal agents as well as the administration's lies. They have warned that the nation's core values are under assault and urged Trump officials to change course, while also calling on Americans to defend those core values. The criticism of all the living Democratic presidents, along with his disastrous performance in Davos, Switzerland, last week and his plummeting numbers—as well as the fact the American people have not forgotten that the administration is continuing to break the law by refusing to release the Epstein files—appears to have sent Trump back to the comfort of older grievances. Today he hit not only his Big Lie but also his complaints about the inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, who has been strangely invisible now for months, resurfaced yesterday when the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election from a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. The role of the DNI is to coordinate information from various intelligence agencies to make sure the president has good intelligence for making national security decisions, but Josh Dawsey, Dustin Volz, and Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Gabbard has been moved off of national security intelligence to chase down Trump's allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him, focusing on the idea that a foreign government was involved in such a theft. Two officials told the Wall Street Journal reporters that Gabbard's report is designed to bolster executive orders about voting before the midterm elections. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: "President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort." In reality, Trump's claims about the 2020 election have been thoroughly debunked, and dozens of court cases his followers launched have been dismissed. In contrast, a grand jury actually indicted Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election. Yesterday, Trump's account amplified a post claiming that Italian officials used military satellites to hack U.S. voting machines in an operation coordinated by China "all to install Biden as a puppet." Gabbard is also trying to prove that former president Barack Obama and his staff were behind the accusation that Trump's campaign worked with Russian operatives in 2016, although this conspiracy theory has no evidence at all and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously agreed that Russian operatives had meddled in the election to help Trump. Trump's social media account posted, under emojis of flashing red lights: "BREAKING: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has just released HUNDREDS OF BOMBSHELL RUSSIAGATE DOCUMENTS proving that Barack Obama personally ordered CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence on President Trump and was actively 'working with the enemy' to undermine and erode Americans' confidence in our democracy and President Trump's LANDSLIDE 2016 VICTORY. This was a coup attempt by Barack Hussein Obama and his cronies… As Jesse Watters said 'Whatever happens to these guys is not revenge… it's accountability. And it's time for people to pay the price.' ARREST OBAMA NOW!" Today President Donald J. Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, saying the government agency was responsible for an IRS contractor's having leaked some of Trump's tax documents to the press. Presidential candidates and presidents routinely release their tax documents to the public, but Trump has consistently refused to do so. The leaked documents showed that Trump paid no income tax to the U.S. for fifteen out of twenty years while paying almost $200,000 in taxes to China. The lawsuit says that the leak caused the Trump family "reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump." This lawsuit is different from the one seeking $230 million from the government for the FBI search of his residence at Mar-a-Lago to find retained classified documents and the investigation of the relationship between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives. Brad Heath, who covers crime, justice, and investigations for Reuters, explained: "President Trump has filed a lawsuit against the IRS, in which he demands that the IRS, which he as president controls, pay him $10 billion." Bluesky user Micah made the point more clearly: "the president of the united states should not be allowed to personally loot the treasury to the sum of ten billion dollars and that this is not resulting in immediate, unanimous impeachment is a dramatic indictment of what has become of our political system." |
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Something to Know - 29 January
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Dear Friends, I was very happy to be able to speak with Laurence O'Donnell on MSNOW last night at 10:00pm. I've been interested to observe how his commentary has become ever more informed by history and ethics. His overture last night on moral thresholds for action was very powerful. The video below is our conversation that followed. We covered a couple of topics that I have been trying to explain here on substack and elsewhere: the political logic behind the ICE deployments in chosen US cities, and the dangers of the use of mendaciou language such as "terrorist" and "assassin" by members of the Trump administration. There is also the more subtle but equally important problem of using terms, such as "law enforcement," in an inverted sense — in this case, to justify lawlessness. MSNOW posted the whole conversation, so I am just going to repost it here.  Hopefully this gets across some points in a concise way! Less concisely, if you would like… The argument about lawlessness and statelessness can be found at enormous length in my Holocaust history Black Earth, in which I also pointed (more than a decade ago) to some of the dangers that have since more visibly emerged. A similar case can be found within the foundational text of Holocaust studies, which is Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg. The warning about "dangerous words" is explained in lesson 17 of my little book On Tyranny. The lesson begins like this: "Be alert to use of the words 'extremism' and 'terrorism.' Be alive to the fatal notions of 'emergency' and 'exception.' Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary." But that like much of the book drew on some of the classic considerations of totalitarian language, such as Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Victor Klemperer's diaries and Language of the Third Reich, and the essays of the Polish literary scholar Michał Głowinski, some of which were collected in English in 2014 (and his childhood Holocaust memoir Black Seasons is also memorable for its reflections on language). That authoritarian regimes need us to repeat their untruths is an idea of Václav Havel, whose analysis of late communism is strikingly fitting for this moment. His "Power of the Powerless" can be found in many places; I wrote a preface to this edition (in Paul Wilson's translation). George Orwell's novel 1984 also remains very powerful — I read it myself once every decade, and each time something new strikes me. My reflections on what freedom of speech would mean as a positive right are in my new book On Freedom. We all need to do what we can — but sometimes reading can help us see what we should be doing. So today I give you the brief as well as the long. Thanks for being with me! More to come this weekend. |
Andy Borowitz
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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a scathing letter to Donald J. Trump, on Thursday the nation's dogs demanded that Kristi Noem be fired as Secretary of Homeland Security. "We were incredulous that someone as incompetent as Kristi Noem was nominated in the first place," the canines wrote. "We knew this wouldn't end well." "This is not a partisan issue," the dogs concluded. "Cats agree."
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