Letters from an American – September 19, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson
Letters from an American, September 19, 2025
By Heather Cox Richardson, Sep 19, 2025
Today U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday threw out the $15 billion lawsuit President Donald J. Trump filed on September 15 against the New York Times for defamation. The judge, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, called the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible” and took Trump’s lawyers to task for using a legal complaint as a public forum for abusive language.
Noting that the two defamation counts followed eighty pages of praise for Trump and allegations against the “hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady,'”—an old nickname for the New York Times—he set a forty-page limit on any amended complaint.
The administration’s pressure on ABC to fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel is very unpopular, as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, with people polled by YouGov on September 18 seeing it as an attack on free speech.
That unpopularity showed today when podcaster and senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) celebrated Kimmel’s firing but called the threat of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to retaliate against ABC “unbelievably dangerous.” Cruz called Carr’s threats “right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
He explained: “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’”
Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted that three new polls out this week show Trump’s approval rating dropping and commented that voters don’t like “[t]his dictator sh*t.” AP-NORC observed that Republicans are growing pessimistic about the direction of the country. While the share of all American adults who say the country is off track has increased 13 percentage points since June, from 62% to 75%, the biggest change has been among Republicans. In June, 29% of Republicans were concerned about the direction of the country; now that number is 51%.
Most American adults think Trump has gone too far with his tariffs, his use of presidential power, and sending troops into U.S. cities.
Democratic lawmakers this week have reflected the growing opposition to Trump and his administration. Today in The Contrarian, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote that Trump’s attacks on Chicago aren’t really about stopping crime. Instead, Trump is creating chaos and destabilizing the country in order to erode our democratic institutions and cement his power.
Pritzker warned that Trump “has become increasingly brazen and deranged in his rhetoric and his actions” and that the things he “is doing and saying are un-American.” In contrast, Pritzker held up as a model “our collective Midwestern values of hard work, kindness, honesty and caring for our neighbors,” and urged people to “be loud—for America.”
Yesterday Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) spoke at the Center for American Progress. He, too, outlined the administration’s attacks on the rule of law and blamed “billionaires padding their stock portfolios and buying up politicians,” “self-interested CEOs cynically dialing up the outrage and disinformation on their social media platforms,” and “politicians who saw more value in stoking grievance than solving problems” for creating the conditions that ushered Trump into the presidency.
Schiff called for restoring American democracy through legislation, litigation, and mobilization. He noted that Democrats have just introduced a package of reforms to put into law the norms Trump has violated. Democrats have also introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision permitting unlimited corporate money to flow into elections. While this legislation almost certainly won’t pass in a Republican-dominated Congress, he noted, it would force a debate.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: September 19, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson
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