The New Yorker Daily Newsletter – October 10, 2025

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/

Jon Allsop
A contributing writer who covers politics.

Yesterday, April M. Perry, a federal judge, barred the Trump Administration from deploying the National Guard in Illinois, for at least the next fourteen days. “I have seen no credible evidence that there is danger of rebellion in the state,” Perry noted from the bench. J. B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who had been resisting the deployments to Chicago (and who Trump said this week “should be in jail”), celebrated the ruling on social media, writing, “Donald Trump is not a king—and his administration is not above the law.”

President Trump’s dispatching of military personnel to American cities—including Portland, Oregon, where litigation is also pending—could be described in many such authoritarian-esque terms. Certainly, “popular” does not appear to be one of them. Earlier this week, CNN’s Aaron Blake pointed out that clear majorities among the public seem to be against the practice: a recent poll from Quinnipiac University found that fifty-five per cent of respondents disapproved of the deployment of the National Guard, compared with forty-two per cent who approved; on Sunday, CBS News/YouGov reported an even higher rate of disapproval, and the same rate of support—forty-two per cent.

The late science-fiction author Douglas Adams once posited that the number forty-two was the answer to the ultimate question of “life, the universe and everything.” It might, at least, be the answer to the question, How popular is Donald Trump? The aforementioned CBS News/YouGov poll also pegged Trump’s over-all approval rating at forty-two per cent, and several polling averages put him either at that figure, or a point or so to either side. This past Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel, a recent subject of Trump’s ire, crowed that, per another poll, he is more popular than the President. “At this point, finding a toenail in your salad has a seven-point lead over Donald Trump,” Kimmel said.

Trump obviously isn’t buying these figures. On Sunday, he accused Fox News of refusing “to put up Polls that correctly show me at 65% in Popularity, a Republican RECORD.” Whatever he actually thinks, he is behaving as if it’s correct, which is no surprise. What might be surprising is that so many ostensibly powerful people—G.O.P. leadership in Congress, heads of major corporations—seem so eager to accede to the imperial demands of a President who is not racking up imperial numbers.

I have a few theories about why they are bowing to Trump. First, America’s political divides appear so entrenched that when support for a single person or policy manages to break through, it creates a narrative boost that is disproportionate to actual support. Trump could still be bathing in the glow of his election win last year, even though he did not quite get fifty per cent of the popular vote and his approval rating since taking office has steadily declined.

At the same time, if you’re a corporation or university or media outlet considering bowing to one of Trump’s demands, it’s a safe-ish bet that the cost will not be universal public disapprobation. Plus, Trump is the President now, wielding that office in expansively transactional ways: G.O.P. lawmakers clearly do not want to get on his bad side; corporations—especially those with pending regulatory business before the Administration—have reason to be on his good side. Some corporations, in particular, may be taking advantage of this moment to pursue changes they wanted to make anyway—curbing costly diversity initiatives, for example, or disowning thorny content-moderation responsibilities. (Both this and the regulatory angle are potential explanations for CBS News putting Bari Weiss in charge, which I wrote about earlier this week.)

The bleakest theory is that major civil-society actors are betting that the power of Trump’s populism is untethered from his actual popularity, given his anti-democratic impulses and his win-at-all-costs mentality—that, in effect, Trump is no longer accountable to the public. But I don’t think this is true. As Jonathan Schlefer wrote for Politico last month, populist leaders in recent decades who have succeeded in undoing relatively strong democracies had approval ratings above eighty per cent—much higher, even, than the figure Trump accused Fox of suppressing. And the President’s imperial conduct isn’t omnipotent; Kimmel, of course, is still on the air.

Even if Trump’s approval rating were eighty per cent, that wouldn’t justify his authoritarian behavior; the Constitution guarantees minority rights for a reason. Flattering Trump, or caving to his demands, may be a savvy short-term bet, but I’m not sure it’ll prove smart in the long run. On Wednesday, CNN’s Blake noted what he described as “the most underappreciated aspect” of the National Guard story: that most Americans seem to oppose deployments not just as a waste of time and resources but on principle. He pointed to a question from a Times/Siena survey, which asked respondents if they were more worried about crime spiralling out of control in the absence of the Guard, or about Trump using troops to intimidate his political opponents. Concern over abuses of power prevailed: fifty-one to—you guessed it—forty-two per cent.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The New Yorker Daily Newsletter

#100 #2025 #America #AprilPerry #Barred #Chicago #DonaldTrump #Education #FederalJudge #History #Illinois #IllinoisGovernor #JBPritzker #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalGuard #NoKings #NotAboveTheLaw #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorker #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Civil Discourse – Project 2025: Taking on the Constitution – Joyce Vance

Another Saturday night in America. I remember when Saturdays were our nights off. That’s not the case right now. These developments are urgent, and it’s more important than ever that we continue to pay attention. If you aren’t already a subscriber, please consider becoming one. Your paid subscriptions help me devote the time and resources necessary to write the newsletter.

ICE rounded up parents and kids, including some American citizens, and herded them, some naked and zip-tied, into the streets, around 1 a.m. in Chicago last Tuesday. Today, there is video from Portland and Colorado showing what appears to be ICE agents attacking and tear-gassing peaceful protestors. In Chicago, agents appear to attack a man who is not threatening them, leg-sweeping him to the ground, something agents are trained not to do because it has the potential to be debilitating.

The violence is condoned, in fact directed, by the Department of Homeland Security, the agency ICE is a part of.

DHS’s Twitter feed is replete with posts claiming “more arrests of anarchists” despite the absence of any evidence of anarchy. Anyone who is looking is seeing American citizens protesting overreach by the government. It is love of country, not anarchy. DHS retweeted a post that said, “Federal agents aren’t tolerating rioting outside the ICE facility and are making prompt arrests of the far-left extremists who gathered outside to besiege the building.”

Apparently, having ICE on the streets isn’t enough for Trump, who is demanding that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker use the National Guard for law enforcement. If he won’t, Trump says he’ll federalize troops. Governor Pritzker tweeted, “I want to be clear: there is no need for military troops on the ground in the State of Illinois.”

Tonight, a federal judge in Oregon who was appointed by Donald Trump during his first term in office ruled he could not federalize the National Guard in that state. It’s a 14-day temporary injunction, but the Judge ruled the state of Oregon had shown it had a strong chance of success on the merits, would suffer irreparable injury in the absence of an injunction, and that the balance of equities and public interest were in its favor.

The administration argued, as it did in California when it deployed Guard troops and has elsewhere in multiple contexts that no court can “second guess” the president’s decisions. Judge Karin Immergut wrote that although the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the California National Guard case, held that a president’s decisions are entitled to “a great level of deference,” that “is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground” before rejecting the administration’s claim that it was necessary to federalize the Oregon Guard to protect ICE facilities. This insistence on the courts’ ability to engage in judicial review of presidential decision-making is essential to preserving the balance of the Constitution created between the three branches of government.

“The President’s own statements regarding the deployment of federalized National Guardsmen further support that his determination was not ‘conceived in good faith’ or ‘in the face of the emergency and directly related to the quelling of the disorder or the prevention of its continuance,” the Judge wrote in an opinion that is very narrowly tailored to discuss the facts and the law in this case without straying from them. “Despite the ‘minimal activity’ outside the Portland ICE facility in the days preceding September 27, 2025 … President Trump directed Secretary Hegseth ‘to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.’”

Judge Immergut concludes, with one of the most powerful judicial condemnations we’ve seen yet of the administration’s transparent excuses for sending the military against Americans, that: “this country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs. ‘That tradition has deep roots in our history and found early expression, for example, in … the constitutional provisions for civilian control of the military’ … This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.”

But Stephen Miller still blames it all on a “growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country.” There is absolutely no evidence that movement exists.

Trump’s use of military force continues outside of the country as well. On Friday, he conducted the fourth strike on a boat in the Caribbean, claiming drug traffickers were on it. Four people on board were killed.

The government shutdown is no closer to an end. Trump is using the shutdown, which he provoked by refusing to negotiate with Democrats, to shut down entire government offices, like DOJ’s Community Relations Service, which we discussed last night, while threatening to fire government employees. If he does that, it will leave him with vacancies he can fill with loyalists.

Friday night, the largest federal employees union sued the Department of Education, accusing it of violating the First Amendment by placing partisan language into the out-of-office emails that are automatically sent from accounts of non-essential employees for as long as they are furloughed.

We studied Project 2025 together here at Civil Discourse, from the earliest moment it was made available publicly on the Heritage Foundation’s website. Much of what this administration is doing will sound familiar to those with even passing familiarity with that plan, which Trump disavowed during the campaign.

As the details of the plan came to light during the campaign and the public was repelled, Trump distanced himself from it. But we discussed why he couldn’t be believed when he said it wasn’t his plan, and of course, now, he is embracing it. All of the developments we are seeing signal that Project 2025 is in full swing.

Trump is touting the work of Russ Vought, one of the primary architects of Project 2025, while his shutdown reorganization of government is underway. Project 2025 never disappeared. Vought has been implementing it since day one of this administration. (If you’ve got time to go back and read one of our earlier posts, this is a good one.)

In addition to vowing to fire federal employees during the shutdown—expect lawsuits if this happens, as it’s strictly illegal—Vought is also behind cutting infrastructure funds for blue states including the Green New Deal. It’s partisan politics, not government, and Trump is behind it: “Republicans must use this opportunity of Democrat forced closure to clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud. Billions of Dollars can be saved. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Project 2025 was always the plan. Now they’re using the shutdown to push harder and cast blame on Democrats for anything that goes wrong. They told us they would do this before the election. This was always the 2.0 plan for America.

Friday night, Trump’s pinned tweet showed him cackling with a Trump 2028 hat prominently placed on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Believe them when they tell you who they are.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Editor’s Note: I rarely, and to honor Joyce and Subtack folks, include a whole post from her, but this one is very important. Please read and understand this blueprint is guiding Trump for changing America in very wrong ways. We’re in this together.

Project 2025: Taking on the Constitution by Joyce Vance

Read on Substack

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Project 2025: Taking on the Constitution

#2025 #America #Chicago #CivilDiscourse #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Illinois #IllinoisGovernor #JBPritzker #JoyceVance #JudgeImmergut #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Oregon #Politics #Portland #Project2025 #Resistance #Science #StephenMiller #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Be Loud — For America – The Contrarian

Editor’s Note: This is a special supporting post for The Contrarian; take a look; read and subscribe. This special post is from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, please read and share. He’s one of our strong leaders, and we need more of those! – DrWeb

Be Loud — For America

By Governor JB Pritzker, Sep 19, 2025

I have spent the last few weeks addressing and preparing for a military invasion by the President of the United States. No, I’m not a soldier or a foreign adversary. I’m the Governor of Illinois, one of our nation’s largest and most prosperous states.

This is the reality we face, and it is not acceptable. Even though there is no emergency or insurrection, Donald Trump has put blue states that he considers his enemies in the crosshairs for political punishment.

As we work to overcome his Medicaid and SNAP cuts, grow our economy despite his new tariff taxes, balance our budget, rebuild our roads, and help students learn, we must now face a new reality. We have to support our communities as Trump’s ICE agents run rampant on our streets with impunity and detain U.S. citizens—while at the same time navigating the ongoing threats of sending in the National Guard.

I am not surprised. Trump has held onto an obsessive hatred for Illinois since before his first term, and he’s been disparaging Chicago—the most American of cities—since long before he built Trump Tower Chicago.

He knows our city is too great, too beloved, and too resilient to ever embrace a small-minded wannabe dictator like him.

Everything Trump stands for upsets our collective Midwestern values of hard work, kindness, honesty and caring for our neighbors.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Be Loud — For America – The Contrarian

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #IllinoisGovernor #IllustrationBySora #JBPritzker #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Substack #TheContrarian #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Illinois governor ‘deeply concerned’ by Trump rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi era

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/19/trump-rhetoric-reminiscent-of-nazi-era-jb-pritzker

#IllinoisGovernor #TrumpRhetoric #NaziEra #DeepConcern #PoliticalRhetoric #HistoricalComparison #Politics #News

#IllinoisGovernor
IL Governor SHUTS DOWN #GOP Plot With This Major Move
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsUNz6di6wE

There will be no #bookbans in #IL

#FreedomToRead #books

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