Embedded Files
The State of Play
Mid-September 2025 finds us 8 months into Donald Trump's second term. It seems like it's been 8 years.
At Home
Democracy is shredded as Trump assaults free speech, investigates "enemies", militarizes Democratic-controlled cities, and ignores or fights court orders limiting his attacks on democracy. The media and universities cower as immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and anti-genocide protesters find themselves targeted and threatened. The Republican Budget Bill effected the greatest transfer of wealth upward in American history by stripping benefits from the less well-off to provide tax breaks for the wealthiest. A MAGA-controlled Republican Party plans to destroy the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with help from the democracy-challenged conservative majority Supreme Court.
Abroad
The war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza continue. In the former, Trump has failed utterly to push the warring parties to the negotiating table while managing to upset our European allies. In the latter, ethnic cleansing and forced starvation have increased the suffering of the people of that besieged and destroyed enclave to unimaginable levels. While we should expect nothing from Republicans in Congress, centrist and AIPAC Democrats disgrace themselves as they did in the Biden Administration by going along with the slaughter of Palestinians. Corporate media, for the most part, remains clueless at best and biased at worst. America becomes more and more isolated in enabling the genocide and providing cover for Israel's war crimes. Expressing its contempt for international law, the United States has relinquished any claim, perhaps forever, to be a defender of human rights.
News and Opinion
Angry constituents confront Congress on immigration, Medicaid cuts and Gaza August 30
"The few lawmakers who held town halls this summer faced voters furious with Republicans about Trump's agenda and with Democrats for not doing enough to fight back." The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that up to 15 million people will lose health coverage by 2034 due to the cuts to Medicaid. Approximately 2 to 4 million low income people will lose some or all of their food assistance benefits each month due to new work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) under the bill. For Democrats, major issues of contention were their continued arming of Israel and failure to speak out about the genocide in Gaza.
While it is impossible to relate even a fraction of Israel's crimes against humanity during its War on Gaza, here is one of the more telling: "Save the Children reports Israel has killed more than 20,000 Palestinian children over the past 23 months. This means at least one Palestinian child has been killed every hour, on average, by Israeli forces. The group said, quote, “If the international community does not step up, an entire generation of children in Gaza will be lost,” unquote. Meanwhile, another six Palestinians have died of starvation, bringing the total to almost 400, including 140 children, who have starved to death."
In recent days, Israel took its traveling war crime machine on the road to Qatar and Yemen where they killed 6 in an assassination attempt on the Hamas ceasefire negotiators in Qatar and massacred 46 people including 25 journalists in attacks on two newspaper offices in Yemen. Qatari officials announced they were suspending the ceasefire negotiations after the attack. The Yemeni Journalists Union condemned the attack there, labeling it a heinous war crime. The Houthis are maintaining a blockade to stop the genocide in Gaza, but even opposition leaders have warned US Senators that the US and Israeli strikes in Yemen have only empowered the Houthis.
The big problem with the White House’s spin about the economy September 8
Trump's economy is already causing pain. His erratic policymaking is stoking widespread uncertainty—from unpredictable tariffs, to immigration raids, to threats to disaster assistance, to the chaos and harm caused by his budget law, and more. The August job report brought more bad news. "The Trump administration has a problem. The latest jobs report showed just 22,000 jobs were added in August. Employment data for June was revised to a loss of 13,000 jobs, the first net loss since the end of 2020."
The Trauma Immigration Raids Leave in Classrooms September 10
"No one, not Trump or ICE, should have the power to weaponize our government against our most vulnerable. They have abducted our students, separated our families, and terrorized communities. In the face of these assaults, we are inspired by the daily actions of courage and bravery by students, educators, and allies rejecting violence, protecting students, and exercising their right to speak out."
On 9/11, After Charlie Kirk’s Assassination, America Faces Another Test September 11
"Political violence is spiraling. Empathy is slipping away. And how we respond now will decide who we are...Charlie Kirk’s assassination is not an isolated act. Over the past decade, we’ve lived through Charleston’s church massacre, Charlottesville’s car attack, the El Paso Walmart and Buffalo grocery store shootings, the Tree of Life synagogue, Club Q,... Different communities, different ideologies, different targets, but the same thread of political violence and hateful ideology running through all of them." As Trump orders flags to half-mast - a courtesy he did not extend to the Minnesota Democratic lawmaker gunned down by one of his supporters - and declares war on the "radical left", hypocritical conservatives are using Charlie Kirk's murder to cynically smear the Left with no mention of the lack of adequate mental health care or the widespread availability of guns.
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