On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I'm averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won't go into it very much, because I don't know the final numbers yet. I don't know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They've been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….” Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we’re gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they're going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they're doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.” Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million. The announcement says that “[f]or 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed.” Traditionally, the White House has been called “The People’s House” because it symbolizes that the government belongs not to the temporary inhabitant of the building but to the American people. And yet it seems as if rather than representing the people’s government, Trump is trying to turn that historic building into the kind of property in which he is comfortable, something like Mar-a-Lago, where he can host parties in a big gold room. It certainly doesn’t seem as if much governance is going on in Trump’s White House. As Josh Marshall pointed out today in Talking Points Memo, when the head of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy resigned today, it turned out that the White House had never formally appointed him in the first place. Marshall added: “We’re six months into this administration and it wasn’t even clear whether this guy was ever in the position at all…. And now he’s gone from the position…that he may or may not have held. This is the state of things from the very top to the very bottom of this administration. And the impact of that is bleeding out into every aspect of the society and economy." Trump’s claim that he has ended six wars is pure fantasy, and as for his boasts that Europe and Japan are going to pay huge sums of money to the U.S.—which is not actually how trade deals work—the European Union and the U.S. have already published different versions of what was in the agreement between them, although that agreement itself was only preliminary. Economist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that the European Union appears to have promised private investments of $600 billion in the U.S.—an empty promise because the government cannot compel private investment—and pledged to buy $750 billion of U.S. energy, mostly from oil and gas, over three years. Krugman calls this pledge nonsense. Among other things, it would require significant increases in infrastructure capabilities, which couldn’t be built in three years even if anyone wanted to, which is unlikely given that Europe is switching to renewable energy quickly. There also seems to be significant daylight between what Trump is claiming and what Japan says about their agreement, which was thrown together in just over an hour on Tuesday. Japan’s negotiator said the $550 billion investment was not “a target or commitment” but an upper limit, and Japanese officials said that “no written agreement with Washington” was made—“and no legally binding one would be drawn up.” Meanwhile, Trump appears to be trying to exert his will by fiat, announcing new tariff rates tonight just hours before the self-imposed deadline of August 1. Today, after a federal appeals court heard a challenge to Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that Congress, not the president, is the only body the Constitution empowers to enact tariffs, the White House announced a base tariff rate of 10% on countries to which the U.S. exports more goods than it imports, with a 15% rate for countries that export more to the U.S. than they import. About a dozen countries—including Canada—will have even higher rates. Before Trump started his trade war, U.S. tariff levies stood at about 2.4%. Part of Trump’s determination to demonstrate his power is likely coming from the continuing unraveling of his involvement in the affairs of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to try to cast himself as the protector of girls from Epstein, but his suggestion that he had turned on his friend after Epstein had hired 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre away from Mar-a-Lago in 2000 immediately attracted attention to the actual timeline of the friendship between the two men. It showed that their friendship lasted quite a bit longer. In fact, it was in 2002 that Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “[t]errific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." Members of Giuffre’s family said in a statement yesterday: “It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey 'likes women on the younger side…no doubt about it.’ We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this.” Tonight Trump told reporters he doesn’t know why Epstein was taking girls from Mar-a-Lago. — Notes: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/sic-transit-16 Paul Krugman, “Fossil Fool, How Europe took Trump for a ride,” Paul Krugman, July 30, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-state-ballroom-east-wing-trump/ https://newrepublic.com/post/198469/trump-trade-deal-japan-falling-apart-joint-investments Jeff Tiedrich, “shh! don’t wake the sleeping fuckwit, presidenting is hard,” everyone is entitled to my own opinion, July 31, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/trade-deadline-tariffs-trump-deals#cmds03d9n00053b6tmsyjlxhg https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/trade-deadline-tariffs-trump-deals#cmds0clsz0000356toc8am68m https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5rm7v5166o Bluesky: beyerstein.bsky.social/post/3lva47s6j2c2x onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3lv4tewlzps2s YouTube: You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. 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Thursday, July 31, 2025
July 31, 2025
The Senate Confirms Trump's Criminal Defense Lawyer to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals
In a tragic moment for the judiciary, Senate Republicans, instead of waiting to get all of the facts, rushed to confirm Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer Emil Bove to a judgeship on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday. We have lived through a litany of conduct by Bove that would have made a nomination, let alone a confirmation, impossible in any other administration. But when the president values personal loyalty alone as a criteria, a Judge Bove can become a reality.
But regardless of all of this, Bove is now a judge with life tenure on one of the most powerful courts in the country.
In May, Trump attacked the Federalist Society, the right-wing conservative organization whose suggested nominees filled the ranks of the federal judiciary during his first term in office, including his three appointments to the Supreme Court. Trump posted on social media: “I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!” So now, we have Judge Bove. For life. Someone who has repeatedly demonstrated loyalty to Donald Trump over the Constitution will have life tenure on the federal bench, perhaps even a launch pad for a seat on the Supreme Court. Trump has branched out on his own when it comes to judicial appointments, and this is what we get. Republican Senators bear their share of blame for the role they played in this debacle. Or perhaps more aptly, the one they didn’t play. They’re supposed to advise and consent on a president’s appointment, and they didn’t. They just rolled over. Like they did with Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, and so many others. Fifty-one percent of the current senators are law school graduates. They know that no federal judge should be confirmed simply because they possess the requisite personal loyalty to the current president. But they failed to do their constitutional duty and, in doing so, failed the country. How much impact can one judge have? If you’re a judge on one of the country’s appellate courts, a lot. Cases of all types come before them. Appellate judges, who usually sit in panels of three, decide issues that impact our daily lives. They are currently deciding whether the administration can let DOGE access our personal data, whether the administration can deport people without due process, and whether government services can be cut off by the executive branch without congressional actions. And, the appellate courts are a feeder for the Supreme Court. Justice Alito was a Third Circuit Judge until he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2006. His seat was filled by Joseph Greenway Jr., who stepped down in 2023. That seat is now occupied by Emil Bove. A single federal judge in the United States can have a significant and wide-ranging impact on the country, especially in the long term. Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices and district judges, make decisions every day about issues that have an effect on the lives of every American. Now, Emil Bove, who has done Trump’s bidding in every regard when the opportunity to do so presented itself, will take on that role. What can we do? The bottom line is, elections matter. Whoever is in the White House picks federal judges. The only guardrail is the Senate. If your Senator voted for Emil Bove and is up for reelection in 2026, you know what to do. If you don’t, pick a state to lend your voice to. Let’s get to work. We can’t afford to have more judges like this take the bench. We’re in this together, Joyce P.S. If you haven’t decided yet whether to join our group read of 1984, some new reporting tonight may convince you that you should. The Washington Post is reporting that “The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in July removed references to President Donald Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit display. A person familiar with the exhibit plans, who was not authorized to discuss them publicly, said the change came about as part of a content review that the Smithsonian agreed to undertake following pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director.” Rewriting history—and why a government feels compelled to do that—is right up George Orwell’s alley. Join us and read the book! You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Citizenship Ruling, Meta Settlement, and a Construction Cat
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Police say information from a Reddit tipster who had a strange encounter with another man on a sidewalk outside Brown University provi...
