The Don Jones Index

the DON JONES INDEX…
	GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 10/30/25… 15,256.59 10/23/25… 14,919.59 6/27/13... 15,000.00
(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 10/30/25... 46,253.41; 10/16/25... 46,253.41; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

LESSON for OCTOBER 23rd, 2025 – “BLUE CITY BLUES!”

Just when Joneses, (especially in the blue cities like New York – one of several upon which President Trump seems to have declared war and, perversely, his own) believed that Djonald UnBelievable had reached the frontier of his idiocy, he posted a (presumably AI-generated) video of Himself flying a jet over Gotham and then unloading a massage blob of... uh... poop (?) upon the wokesters and protesters down below.

The pro-Trump New York Post (Oct. 19, ATTACHMENT “A”) reported that “(t)he president posted that wild AI-generated video of himself late Saturday as a fighter pilot wearing a crown on his head, unloading sewage on “No Kings” protesters.”

With “Danger Zone,” the iconic “Top Gun” theme song, blaring in the background, “Trump’s fighter jet (emblazoned with the words “King Trump”) was shown dropping masses of manure on (an AI generated image of) lefty influencer Harry Sisson and other presumed demonstrators over what appeared to be New York City.

Vice Veep (and wannabee Prez) Vance followed his master’s voice and image by posting another AIster of Trump putting a crown on his head and transforming into a monarch, then Donnie donning a majestic robe and drawing out a sword as photoshopped Dem pols like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were shown kneeling before him.

Yahoo (ATTACHMENT “B”) repored that supporters had said “the marches (were) a patriotic defence of free speech, while critics are calling them anti-American.”

There was also predictable criticism of what some see as “an aggressive executive, confronting Congress and the courts, in ways that protest organisers believe are a slide toward authoritarianism.”

Speaker Mike, on Tuesday, argued that: “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that,” he said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “He is using satire to make a point.” (MSNBC, ATTACHMENT “C”)

Johnson seemed quite adamant that Trump, as opposed to auditioning for a side gig as a latenite comedy host on Fox to compete with the Jimmies or even replace Colbert, was making “a point” with the video, but the GOP leader never quite got around to explaining what, exactly, that point was.

Other recent Republican leaders learned quickly to say, “I didn’t see the tweet,” even when they obviously had. Perhaps Johnson would embarrass himself less if he took a page from his predecessors’ script.

“Trump sharing that obscene video was totally disgusting. Any regular person could say as much,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said via Bluesky, “It’s genuinely pathetic to see elected leaders like Speaker Johnson twisting themselves into pretzels to put on a show for the President like this.”

And songwriter Loggins made a futile plea to POTUS to remove the audio to his poopy video, telling NPR (ATTACHMENT “D” – with more URLs attached) that it was “an unauthorized use of my performance of 'Danger Zone.' Nobody asked me for my permission, which I would have denied, and I request that my recording on this video is removed immediately." ("Danger Zone", NPR added, was written by Top Gun's score composer, Giorgio Moroder, and songwriter Tom Whitlock, with Loggins as the performer.)

In reply, White House spokesperson Davis R. Ingle did not respond to NPR's questions but sent NPR an image from the film Top Gun of stars Tom Cruise and the late Val Kilmer, captioned: "I FEEL THE NEED FOR A SHIT... er... SPEED."

Various musicians and their representatives, including The White Stripes and the estate of Isaac Hayes, have also filed civil suits against Trump alleging copyright infringement. “The White Stripes dropped their suit in November 2024. The Hayes suit, which was filed against the president, his reelection campaign and (the late Charlie Kirk’s) activist group Turning Point Action, is continuing to wriggle its way through federal court in Atlanta.”

The President/King’s AI bomber was on target, of course, but it won’t be long before some troll steals the concept and drops the feces over Trump Tower.

It’s been an... uh... shitty week (pardon the expletive) not only for New York, but for the rest of the country too.

Thursday is Day Twenty Four of the gumment shutdown and House Mouse Speaker Mickey... er... Mikey was quoted by the Independent U.K. (ATTACHMENT ONE) as warning that “we’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history.”

What is he doing? He sent Congress home to drink champagne and raise campaign money, play golf and stay away from the increasingly hostile town hall meetings that have dogged donkeys and elephants alike, claiming that there was no point in the House staying open while the Senate could not agree on the 2025-6 budget. (A few trolls... Democrats, of course, or leaning that way... say that his real reason for shutting down the House is to prevent the swearing in of Adelita Grijalva – who would cast the deciding vote on opening up the Epstein files – as might embarrass certain lawmakers, billionaires, royals and celebrities.)

Not so, Speaker Mike replies. It’s the Senate’s fault... specifically the Democrats and, more specifically, the wicked cabal of Schumer, Schiff and Soros. Senate Majority Leader John Thune continuing to hold “Potemkin Votes”, IUK reports, no matter the popular adage that doing the same futile thing over and over again fits the definition of insanity.

Shunting the Senate aside until something substantial occurs, there are plenty of other afflictions ailing Don Jones... the tariff-troubled e-con-me (in the toilet that President Donnie emptied out for his video), immigration (a good thing for the President in that border crossings are down, a bad thing in that the optics of ICE raids are killing off the Republican brand, even in red states, the way that support for Israel suffers from images of starving children), that war (the ceasefire another good thing for Trump altho’ perhaps unraveling) and the other, Ukraine, Venezuela and now, it seems, Colombia), the culture wars, adventures of his cabinet of children (Kristi, Tulsi, Bobby Junior and so on), the week’s new disasters (from the airplane of shit to the garbled White House renovations... and perhaps impending disclosure that the Louvre jewel robberies were committed (or, at least, commissioned) by Djonald DisHonest Himself to bling up his ballroom... to the streak o’mean Nazi ideations suppurating through MAGA like a pail of rotting bacon). And the word police policing DHS memes and memoranda – specifically seeking “remigration” traditionally used in Europe “to refer to the mass deportation of non-white immigrants,” as set forth by ultra-conservative politicians such as Austria’s Herbert Kickl and millennial influencer Martin Sellner, Alice Weidel of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the remigratist bible Which Way, Western Man, by Hitler wannabee William Gayley Simpson. (Time, October 16^th, ATTACHMENT TWO)

But this Lesson will set all those aside for the past or for the future and focus on Trump’s improbable campaign of revenge and retribution against his real or imaginary enemies.

More than a little of the R&R campaign owes its origin to the perennial problem of crime in America, which, with the premise that many of there dark-skinned perps are, in fact, alien invaders – inciting the escalating Federal crackdown of National Guard, unarmed military observers to, now, boots on the American ground given permission to use “necessary” (i.e. “deadly”) force on migrants and protesters as resulted in shootings (if not, yet, killings) on Tuesday.

First in the nation’s capital, just down the road from where Drumpf hangs his hat again, after four years of eviction and grumbling in the wilderness, then in New York, Chicago, and Portland (Oregon, not Maine) and soon, as the President ventured in a meeting with military leaders and Secretary Hegseth that cities like Chicago should be “training grounds for our military,” describing the unrest over immigration enforcement and federal troop deployments as “a war from within.”

“Separately, on Saturday, federal judge Karin Immergut (who was appointed by Trump in his first term) issued a temporary restraining order blocking the federal government from deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to Portland. Judge Immergut found that the size and nature of the immigration protests in the city did not justify mobilizing the Guard,” writing that President Trump’s statements to the contrary were “simply untethered to the facts.”

Tangle’s survey of red and blue commentary included Jarrett Stepman’s statement in the Daily Signal that “...It couldn’t be clearer that Portland’s leaders have little interest in getting the rioters under control outside of pressure from the Trump administration,” adding that the real problem is that Portland is returning to violence and chaos “because organized agitators in their city — like Antifa and other similar groups — want to stop federal immigration enforcement.”

On the left, Nicholas Kristof warned that National Guard troops dispatched by President Trump to fight ‘domestic terrorists’ in this ‘war-ravaged’ city of Portland, Ore., will face an unexpected challenge: naked bicycle riders. Cycling in the buff is a Portland specialty, and one organization has announced a naked ride ‘in response to the militarization of our city.’ Such is the war zone here,” Kristof wrote in the New York Times, and in extreme cases — such as at Tiananmen Square in 1989 — I’ve seen such troops used to massacre protesters,” Kristof wrote. “I don’t think that will happen here, but Trump has long had an interest in marshaling military force to suppress opponents.”

And in the other ICEbound American city, Chicago Tribune’s David White argued that, as Trump told his generals that the ‘invasion from within’ must be crushed with force, while “serving as a training ground for American troops.” Advising that history and science warn: “When federal police use force to suppress dissent, larger and more violent protests follow,” White tripped back in time to the George Floyd protests in 2020 and could have rearviewed even more – to the 1968 DemCon and Jackson and Kent State massacres thereafter.

Tangler-in-Chief Isaac Saul customarily ends his dispatches with his person “take” on the issue and viewed the current troop deployments as perhaps justified given the failure of local and state gumment to protect its citizenry but also noted that immigration crackdowns are “politically popular, and fears about crime are high, so a lot of people welcome a president ‘doing something’ — legal arguments aside.” Besides, the costs... monetary (especially to the largely Republican leaning farmers and business interess) and to the American image and reality... are too high: is remigration “worth detaining American children, dragging them out of their homes naked and afraid?”

Both partisan factions “increasingly see each other as existential threats that have to be dealt with in an immediate, unyielding fashion,” Tangle concludes, which is leading to “a very, very dark future” – one that many fear, but others embrace.

The Heritage Foundation, a gentleman’s club for gentlemen of the very, very far right persuasion and promoters of “Project 2025”, a manual for making America even greater than great again, released another of its many reports; this contending that “Democrat policies in Democrat lead (sic) cities and counties are actually responsible for rising crime rates” in both blue and red states.

A “Heritage Explains” kaffeklatsch between staffer Michelle Cordero and Cully Stimson, “a widely recognized policy expert in crime control, and deputy director of Heritage’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies” (ATTACHMENT FOUR) derided the contention by “leftists” like Hillary Clinton that “states with the highest crime levels are states run by Republicans.”

One liberal organization called the Third Way, “even went so far as to publish a study arguing that Republicans are to blame for the spike in murders across the country,” Cordero said, despite the fact that, of the 30 American cities with the highest murder rates, “27 have Democratic mayors.”

Stimson agreed: not only were blue cities more criminally inclined but that there are bad parts of all cities “...where crime is high and decent parts of town where there's not really a lot of crime,” adding that “Crime is geographically and demographically concentrated,” presumptively committed by Trump’s alien invaders, Charlie Kirk’s “prowling blacks” or, at the white or yellow collar level, predatory Chinese manufacturers strangling American industry and low-end retailers and bodegas that abet them.

Taking murder alone, Stimson said that even the murder rates in red states “are driven primarily by the blue cities and counties in those states” where the policies of “Soros bought-and-paid-for rogue prosecutors” (he singles out Kim Foxx in Chicago) are “pro-criminal, anti-victim and encourage lawlessness.”

“By the way,” Stimson added, “rapes went up dramatically over their five year historical average in many of these cities. Burglaries, larcenies. Car thefts have gone up tens of thousands in these cities. 14,000 some alone in Philadelphia over their five year historical average.” Blue city crime is causing death, rape, theft, stores to close, stores to shutter. “Wawa, a convenience store chain in Philadelphia is leaving the city. Walgreens, leaving San Francisco. Shops in a lot of these cities are closing and leaving because they can't keep their employees safe. Starbucks leaving because of employee safety concerns.” These people (and he means the rulers, not the robbers) are anti-American. These people contribute to the crime rise in these cities, “and they're laughing about it because in their mind it is working. They're getting exactly what they want.”

What they want, he concludes, is “a dystopian world” as opposed to the criminals, who want, in some cases, revenge or retribution upon or intimidation of enemies or, in fewer but more publicized cases, random acts of mayhem often attributed to mental illness – but, mostly, money. Like Donnie and the donkeys do.

Kamalala Harris may not have robbed liquor stores to fund her ’24 failure; President Trump may not be personally going to blue cities to kill random pedestrians or rob street vendors (he’s using ICE for that), but his R&R, (as above) against the states and cities that supported Old Blue Joe in ’25 is extending beyond police and military invastions to economic war and even sporting contests.

Now, he promises to move matches from the eleven U.S. host cities at the 2026 World Cup (football, that is, soccer tournament) from any cities he thinks are unsafe.

The Evil ‘leven, listed alphabetically, are: Atlanta (73%), Boston (77%), Dallas (60%), Houston (52%), Kansas City (59%), Los Angeles (65%), Miami (58%), New York/New Jersey (with multiple counties and boroughs...Manhattan racking up 83% to lead the pack while Staten Island, where so many police are domiciled, was the only Republican bastion at just 35%in ‘24), Philadelphia (79%), San Francisco (80%) and Seattle (75%). (See complete maps via apps on A.P.’s “select-a-state” site here)

Trump was asked specifically about matches in the Democratic-run cities of Seattle and San Francisco and also mentioned Los Angeles - another Democratic stronghold, which will host the 2028 Olympics and eight matches next year.

"If any city we think is going to be even a little bit dangerous for the World Cup, or for the Olympics, but for the World Cup in particular, because they're playing in so many cities, we won't allow it to go. We'll move it around a little bit," he told the press, domestic and foreign, like the BBC. (ATTACHMENT FIVE)

It is also unclear whether Trump has the authority to make such changes, though he does have a close working relationship with FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association, a French name that translates to "International Federation of Association Football" in English) president Gianni Infantino and is chair of the World Cup taskforce.

Previously controversial for advocating overturning of FIFA’s banning Russia for invading Ukraine, Trump may or may not pursue this crusade, given his day-to-day ups and downs with dictator Bad Vlad Putin (down yesterday after Moscow kissed off their proposed talks in Hungary).

Al Jazeera (ATTACHMENT SIX) also reported that “[Seattle and San Francisco are] run by radical left lunatics who don’t know what they’re doing.”

Six matches are scheduled to be played at Seattle’s Lumen Field and six are set for Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, about an hour’s drive from San Francisco.

Trump sent the National Guard into Washington, DC, last month to deal with what he called a “crime emergency,” and he subsequently said that the move resulted in the city having “no crime”. They also, per FIFA, will have no games either in the District or adjacent communities.

“As you probably know, we’re going into Memphis and we’re going into some other cities. Very soon we’re going into Chicago,” he said. “It will be safe for the World Cup. If I think it isn’t safe, we’ll move into a different city, absolutely. It’s actually a very fair question... (w)e’ll move it around a little bit. But I hope that’s not going to happen.”

Victor Montagliani, the organization's vice president, said during a conference in London on Wednesday that FIFA determines game sites.

"It's FIFA's tournament, FIFA's jurisdiction, FIFA makes those decisions," Montagliani said. "With all due respect to current world leaders, football is bigger than them and football will survive their regime and their government and their slogans. (Reuters, October 2, ATTACHMENT SEVEN)

More football (to the Brits, French, Irish and others, as opposed to “gridirish”) meddling by the White House was reported in the Daily Beast, which quoted a State Department spokesperson who declared: “We will absolutely work to fully stop any effort to attempt to ban Israel’s national soccer team from the World Cup,” which prohibition stemmed from war – in this case the conflicts in Palestine. (ATTACHMENT EIGHT)

And a bit further down the road... to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics... could this crowning glory for Team Trump be crushed like Empress Eugenie’s topper... overturned by the politics of the future?

The Los Angeles Times (ATTACHMENT NINE), in its reporting on the challenges facing the nations Number Two city... an economic slump, wildfire and environmental crises and, amidst the summer heat, an ICE-y spectre remaining in the streets, jacking off and jerking around foreign athletes and tourists... speculated whether Djonald UnGreek’d R&R campaign against the blue Angelos might go so far as to order the games moved or cancelled entirely, and legal niceties be damned.

After addressing the challenges as will be posed by housing, traffic and Federal funding, the Times recalled how the city, in 1984 – as well as Rio and Atlanta – “sanitized” the public image by violently uprooting homeless encampments and demolishing “unsafe” (i.e. poor and ethnic minority) neighborhoods, bulldozing homes and dragging occupants away to be dropped off in the desert.

And now, of course, the Times warned that Trump’s whose “intense enthusiasm” for hosting the Olympics near the end of his second term is matched only by “the volatility he brings to the planning process.”

“Even if Trump doesn’t do anything directly that would hurt the LA 28 effort, he has created a lot of enmity internationally, and a lot of revulsion,” said Andrew Zimbalist, an economist who wrote a book on the “economic gamble” of hosting the Olympic games or the World Cup.

“There are a lot of people who won’t come because they’re politically not willing to support the Trump government by spending money here,” said the economist (no known relationship to Efrem, beyond the Angeleno confluence of “77 Sunset Strip”). We’ve already seen tourism in the US go down appreciably. That’s another big threat.”

Daniel Durbin, director of the Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media & Society at the University of Southern California, does not believe that even the President’s hatred of Gov. Gavin Newsome or Mayor Karen Bass or a real or imagined perception of crimes committed by citizens or migrants would suffice to kill off the Golden Games. “I don’t think an individual of his type and his position is going to want to have his legacy tarnished by an absolutely abysmal Olympics.”

But with Trump, especially Future Trump, one can never be sure.

For Now Trump, his campaign of revenge and retribution... amidst wars, migrants, tariffs and other emergent emergencies like complaints about his bulldozing the White House to prepare for construction of his Golden Ballroom... is largely focused upon “leftwing civil society groups and NGOs” and the spooky Soros sideshow shadowcrats according to Joe Miller of the Financial Times.

“We should all be disturbed that the executive branch has weaponised its power against the charitable non-profit sector,” Miller was told by Akilah Watkins, president of Independent Sector, which represents a range of non-profits. (ATTACHMENT TEN)

“If you are a small community organisation that doesn’t align with the priorities of this administration, you don’t have the high-powered lawyers to defend yourself,” she added.

At yesterday’s White House briefing press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the administration’s campaign against the enemy within was, is and will press forward.

“We will continue to get to the bottom of who is funding these organisations and this organised anarchy,” Leavitt said.

Time (ATTACHMENT ELEVEN) reported, at the beginning of October, that mass federal layoffs could start as soon as Thursday as he touted a meeting with Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and longtime advocate for shrinking the federal government.

“The President said in a social media post early Thursday that the meeting would “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies” should be cut. The officials would also discuss “whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

Democrats and unions, predictably, protested... so Vought outlined plans to cut $8 billion in energy projects across 16 states, including California, Colorado, Illinois, and New York and announced that he was pausing an $18 billion climate-related project in New York City to “ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.”

“Vought was among many Trump allies involved in Project 2025's drafting,” Time reminisced, adding that, during the ’24 campaign, Trump 1.0 distanced himself from Project 2025, “but has since adopted many of its proposals in his second term.”

Overseas, Al Jazeera explained that the President and his puppets were notable in their explicit embrace of Project 2025, the controversial policy blueprint drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation that Trump distanced himself from during his 2024 re-election campaign. (See above, below and all around)

Trump later repeated his threats against Democratic priorities in an interview with the One America News (OAN) Network, a right-wing channel.

“There could be firings, and that’s their fault,” Trump said of Democrats in Congress. (ATTACHMENT TWELVE)

“We could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut,” he continued, adding “I am allowed to cut things that should have never been approved in the first place and I will probably do that.”

With no easy endgame at hand, the standoff risks dragging deeper into October, when federal workers who remain on the job will begin missing paycheques. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated roughly 750,000 federal workers would be furloughed on any given day during the shutdown, a loss of $400m daily in wages.

After Vought announced he was withholding $18bn for the Hudson River rail tunnel and Second Avenue subway line in New York City, Politico reported that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called it “political payback.” The Trump/Vought R&R plot got an unenthused reception from Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who represents a swing House seat. (ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN) and his mob boss tactics in favor of dumped Democratic candidate for Mayor, Andrew Cuomo... “withholding federal funds if (Zorro) Mamdani, the frontrunner, prevails in the race next month” backfired, as so many of the President’s other vengeful ventures.

“Donald Trump has dethroned Richard Nixon as the most vindictive president in history,” said Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres.

Djonald UnTrained also vowed to end the Gateway tunnel project meant to expand train service between New York and New Jersey along the nation’s busiest rail corridor.

The project − meant to create a new rail tunnel and rehabilitate the existing 115-year-old pair of tunnels under the Hudson River − has already begun construction at several sites with hundreds of workers operating as of Oct. 17. That hasn’t stopped Trump, a former New York real estate mogul, from threatening the $16 billion project. (USA Today, ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN)

“I'm cutting the project,” Trump told FOX News. "The project is going to be dead," he said. "It is pretty much dead right now."

Each day, hundreds of thousands of people ride Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains crossing under the Hudson to and from Manhattan. “The two existing century-old rail tunnels were damaged during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. If one track's tunnel were to fail, the nonprofit Regional Planning Association estimated it could cost $16 billion over four years, or about 33,000 jobs each year.”

Across the Hudson, the billion-dollar Gateway project has also become key in the closely watched New Jersey governor’s race between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

"I’ll fight tooth and nail to get this funding back and complete this essential infrastructure project for our state, commuters, and economy," Sherrill, a current New Jersey Congress member, said in an X post.

Ciattarelli, a businessman and former state assembly member, has received Trump’s endorsement. But that didn’t stop him from vowing to fight for Gateway.

"New Jersey needs a Governor who has the standing to work with, and when necessary disagree with, the President and advocate for New Jersey’s fair share of federal tax dollars - including the Gateway Tunnel," he said in an X post.

Inevitably, Trump’s crazy train identified the root of all evil as George Soros, the billionaire investor who has been a fixation among conservatives for his lavish giving to progressive causes. “The long-running scrutiny did not appear to deter Soros’ group, now run by his son Alex, from donating $10 million in support of Newsom’s ballot measure to redraw California’s congressional maps, which the governor has framed as a salvo against the Trump presidency but liberals support as a counterweight to similar gerrymandrish gibbertyflippits in Texas.

On the other coast, California is used to being in Trump’s crosshairs, dating back to his first term when he baselessly insisted the state was the site of mass voter fraud,” Politico (above) recalled.

“Trump clearly has it in for California. We’re the opposite of his vision of America,” said Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla, the state’s senior senator.

That didn’t stop Trump from trying to deploy 300 federalized members of the California National Guard to Oregon, on Sunday, a day after being blocked by a federal judge from federalizing Oregon's own National Guard, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said. (Time, ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN)

"This isn’t about public safety, it’s about power,” he added in a statement stating that lawsuits were on the way. “The commander in chief is using the U.S. military as a political weapon against American citizens. We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the president of the United States,” Newsom said.

Trump’s war on blue cities, as Time listed, spans the nation from Oregon and California east to Chicago, then New York with stops here and there where Republicans in the Trump train have stopped or intended to stop necessary infrastructural endeavors in either blue states or blue cities in red states and supported the deployment of in- and out-of-state National Guardfolk and the military to enforce ICE immigration hunts.

Trump first deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, over Gov. Gavin Newsom's objections, after protests broke out in response to immigration raids. The president then ordered the National Guard to the streets of D.C., painting it as an effort to fight crime before focusing attention on some especially criminal communities.

CHICAGO

Time’s take on Chicago included commentary on “weeks of threats from Trump over the deployment of troops to the city”, which he has characterized as a “hellhole”. Trump drew outrage when he threatened Chicago with the newly renamed Department of War, a statement he eventually walked back.

The Trump Administration launched immigration launched an expanded immigration crackdown dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” in the city in September, which has brought a dramatic increase in federal raids and arrests.

That, in turn, has prompted an increase in protests, turned the city into a flashpoint in the nationwide immigration crackdown and “drew backlash from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.” Johnson has accused Trump of “authoritarianism,” and he and Pritzker “have continuously said that Chicago does not want the military on their streets.”

When Trump launched ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ in the city and threatened to send in the National Guard, GUK’s Oliver Laughland called the mood “febrile”, with “fears things could get worse.”

Laughland sets a showbiz stage... picture a pre-dawn curtain opener in a warm, but windy city... “a small crowd of protesters assembl(ing) in the dark. They are gathering outside the Broadview immigration processing centre, a two-storey brick structure in the Chicago suburbs that has the ambience of a US outpost in a foreign war. Windows are boarded with plywood. Fences are lined with razor wire and black cloth. Masked Ice agents appear sporadically, dressed in military fatigues – tactical helmets, flak jackets and rifles.

“The protesters begin to heckle each time an agent turns up for work or leaves through a chainlink gate. “Quit your job!” they chant. “Take off your mask!”

Will the drama escalate to a bloody shootout more “Ballerina” than Broadway? (ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN) Unfortunately not, for the bloodthirsty... Laughland “expect(s) to see civil disobedience” but finds only distraught migrants searching for information about friends and relatives scooped up like ice cream by ICE.

“I thought America was the land of opportunity,” says a sixteen year old daughter of a detained janitor. “But it doesn’t make any sense now.”

And then the action perks up. Protesters “start blocking government vehicles from entering and exiting the buildings. Masked agents appear from behind the fence and snatch people from the street. One young man is body-slammed and dragged inside the centre. (A)gents fire pepper ball irritants from above and teargas canisters are launched into the group. A small phalanx of officers appear, as if dressed for combat. A thick plume of gas envelopes the street. It is a remarkable and disproportionate escalation; a telling keepsake,” Laughland evokes, “of where the country is right now.”

But “Beekeeper” it still ain’t.

It’s still no laughing matter on rightwing cable news network as have, Laughland looks back, “...long elicited a line of predictable tropes, branding (Chicago) a failed liberal city ravaged by violence, corruption and economic decline. But it is also a window into the splitscreen of American life at this early inflection point in Trump’s second term – amid an assault on free speech and an alarming rise in political violence in the wake of the murder of rightwing youth organiser Charlie Kirk” (whose “Turning Point” office, now womanned by his widow, is just a few steps down the road).

Laughland drives out to the small converted garage in the village of Lemont where Kirk began his movement and finds that a “steady line of mourners have been arriving all day” while a “sprawling tribute” spills on to the pavement. “Fight for freedom or lose it,” says one placard.

“It’s a sincere gathering,” Laughland remarks, many having driven for hours to come and lay flowers. “One man tells me he has watched the video of Kirk’s murder a hundred times. I wonder if replaying an act of such horrendous violence on repeat is good for anyone. “We must never look away from the atrocities,” he says. “It just showed me that the division between the people of this country will never be breached.”

Back at Broadview, Kat Abughazaleh... a 26-year-old Democratic candidate for Illinois’s ninth congressional district... tells him that: “I don’t think our representatives are doing enough to stand up against fascism... I feel like Democratic leaders in particular have missed the moment.”

Later that day, the 5’0” candidate is beaten up and arrested by Federal agents praised by Fox News host Laura Ingraham while a HomeSec spokesthing accuses her of “siding with vicious cartels, human traffickers and violent criminals”.

Bailed out and doctored up, she tells Laughland on the next day that: “What this administration is trying to do is terrifying. They want to crack down on our basic human rights. They do not want appeasement, they want complete and utter submission.”

Local residents fear a return to 1968, when the city hosted the Democratic National Convention, and seven days of anti-Vietnam war protests saw protracted clashes between police and protesters. Others point even further back, to the fight against fascism in the second world war.

“On the day of Charlie Kirk’s memorial, which draws tens of thousands of attendees to a stadium in Arizona,” Laughland drives about 60 miles out of Chicago, to McHenry county – “a Republican-leaning area dotted with cornfields and grain silos” where a local tavern is streaming the event for 600 angry MAGAnauts.

A local pastor declared that: “We know that as one has fallen, millions and millions are rising up. We are truly a giant who has been woken from his sleep,” he says. “Bless this nation because of Christian people who are making a stand, who will not be pushed to the corner. Let us gain courage for the battle ahead.”

Trump, in Arizona says: “I hate my opponent(s),” drawing a line between himself and Kirk, who opposed initiating political violence. “And I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.”

Today, the planes are dropping shit on New Yorkers. Tomorrow?...

Well, Trump and budgieman Vought are, perhaps, thinking exercise will improve Chicagoans’ health as they cancel funds for the Chicago Transit Authority – even granting pedestrians “time enough to die” while shutting down small businesses as fail to kneel before new TranSec rules and regulations prohibiting what they believe to be favoritism towards “women and people of color.” (Capitalnews Illinois, ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN)

Billionaire Gov. Pritzker Gov. accused billionaire President Trump (who, by latest estimates, outbillions the potential “28 candidate five to four... pending positive or negative resolution of numerous lawsuits) of “holding bipartisan funding hostage.”

“It’s attempting to score political points but is instead hurting our economy and the hardworking people who rely on public transit to get to work or school,” Pritzker said in a statement posted on social media.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Il) said that “33 projects were canceled, with funds withheld from energy giant Exelon, the University of Illinois and Northwestern University among others”... some which were greenish, some bluish.

“President Donald Trump wants to punish states like Illinois, and the people who live there, because they didn’t vote for him in the last election,” Durbin said from the floor. “Freezing funds for these projects is a blatant abuse of power by a president and an administration that would rather settle petty personal scores than actually help people.”

USA Today (ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN) reported earlier this month that Operation Midway Blitz had impacted life in Chicago... not “major events, including the Cubs’ National League Division Series aspirations (the Brewers did that) but in small, often petty personal ways with ICE targeting migrants but frequently making dangerous mistakes.

"Our communities are being terrorized by agents who are kidnapping people," Corina Pedraza, a longtime South Sider, told USA Today. "People are living in fear of going out to get groceries, dropping their kids off at school. People are strategizing how to get three or five blocks to work."

Scenes from the blitz captured by reporter Michael Loria include “a Mexican man fatally shot by immigration agents in the northwest suburbs who said the man drove his car into an officer; federal officials deploying chemical agents on protesters and journalists outside the local immigration enforcement facility; and agents rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters to raid a South Side apartment building in the middle of the night.”

Department of Homeland Security officials said that, as of two weeks ago, they had "arrested more than 1,500 illegal aliens − including criminal pedophiles, murderers, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers" in connection with the blitz and President Trump said he would jail Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for resisting the administration's crime-fighting goals in the city.

DHS has also criminalized neighborhood alert groups (some aliens, other citizens) who monitor them, ICE and police and military, warning Chicagoans to stay off the street during sweeps – some of which use vehicles with Mexican flags as decoys to trap and abduct aliens.

"Over the past few weeks we’ve all felt it: families afraid to leave their homes and go to school, parents kissing their kids goodbye not knowing they’ll make it home. That’s something nobody should have to live with," said Edwin Lagunas of Toluca’s Restaurant in Waukegan – alleging the ICE raids had caused other small businesses to close because people were afraid to venture outside.

Even now, as it seems, Pritzker and Johnson according to NBC (ATTACHMENT NINETEEN) who interviewed White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson saying that "JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson have blood on their hands" and (without specificying what crimes they had committed and whether the Feds would be taking them in) accused the politicians of having "stood idly by while innocent Americans fall victim to violent crime time and time again."

She argued that "instead of taking action to stop the crime, these Trump-Deranged buffoons would rather allow the violence to continue and attack the President for wanting to help make their city safe again."

Pritzker replied to reporters that Trump is "a coward."

"He likes to pretend to be a tough guy," Pritzker said of the president. "Come and get me."

“Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power,” he posted to X, adding: “What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” He has also told Congress that the President should be impeached or removed from office under the 25^th Amendment for reason of mental illness (which would elevate Veep Vance from Trump’s Number Two to America’s Number One)

Johnson accused the President of... surprise!... racism.

Lawsuits have been filed coinciding with AyGee Bondi’s arrests of Trump’s once-advisor John Bolton, former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James to which those of the Mayor and Governor, if followed through, would follow.

Here, in a TimePiece on the Windy City versus the Windy President (October 23, ATTACHMENT TWENTY), “Editorial Fellow” Connor Greene selects stories and snippets of life in America’s now-Number Three municipality and explains that ICE raids in the poorer and more dilapidated neighborhoods are making them even poorer and more dilapidated.

In the South Shore, ICE raiders arrived in unmarked trucks and a helicopter to carry out a raid on the building using what Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called “military-style tactics.” As the agents kicked down doors and detained people with zip ties, including children, residents told Reverend Ciera Bates-Chamberlain that “they had been left outside past 3 a.m. with their kids, that their apartments had been pillaged, and that guns had been pointed at them by federal law enforcement.”

“Trump has long painted Chicago as a hotbed of crime,” wrote Fellow Greene, with POTUS calling it “the most dangerous city in the world” last month and accusing Pritzker last week of “letting people be killed in his city because he doesn’t want to deal with Chicago.”

DHS similarly pointed to crime, and city and state leadership, when announcing Operation Midway Blitz. “This ICE operation will target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” the agency said in a statement at the time.

Earlier this month, Trump further escalated his attacks by calling for Pritzker jailed over his opposition to the federal deployment. When Johnson object, Trump also called for his arrest.

“The fact that President Trump describes people who disagree with him as ‘enemies from within’—it's a real evil precedent that he has created,” Mayor Johnson told TIME.

TIMEly data indicate that Chicago is not the most dangerous city in the world and that crime in the city—like many others in the U.S.—has been declining after rising during the pandemic. “Sending in the National Guard is the wrong solution to a real problem,” Johnson wrote in a New York Times op-ed in early September.

He also revealed to TIME that his office is currently working on an Executive Order that would prevent the Administration from purchasing property in Chicago to create detention centers, saying that efforts to develop such facilities are ongoing. “I think it's absolutely abhorrent that we have a president who is looking to create facilities where there's a concentration of only immigrants or black and brown people being detained,” Johnson said, even if his EO has about as much chance of being obeyed as have Republicans to apologize for cutting off medical aid for the poor and passing or even increasing the Obamacare bennies.

And, in fact, Illinois Lieutenant Gov. Juliana Stratton opined that the “chaotic” regimen of raids and repression is a “manufactured crisis that Donald Trump has really brought to the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois”... pulling government resources away from other issues arising from his presidency.

And, also, in fact, distracting attention in the city and the country away from his BBB.

Despite the crackdowns, ICEness is being litigated... extensively and expensively with the Illinois AyGee, Kwame Raoul, worrying that, beyond the legality, Chicagoans’ growing ire toward the federal presence in the city could affect the way they view the authorities more broadly.

“How do we in the aftermath of this, whenever that is, return to a place of respect for our law enforcement and trust that they're not the same people as the ICE officers that we've been seeing?”

“The reality here in Chicago is this,” Pritzker said over the weekend, addressing the city’s “No Kings” rally, where more than 100,000 people protested against what they perceived to be Trump’s rising authoritarianism and corruption as part of a broader demonstration movement across the country. “Black and brown people are being rounded up because of the color of their skin. Children are being zip tied and separated from their parents. Worshippers coming from church are being questioned and detained. Workers are being harassed and detained at our shops and restaurants.”

The ACLU calls the Broadview lockup, where immigrants and bystanders are being detained, “...just not a fit place to be detaining people.

In early October, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the tactics deployed by agents in the Chicago area operation, calling it “an extremely dangerous situation.” DHS said following the raid described by Greene at the top of his article – specifically that the building was targeted because it was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates,” and a spokesperson for the agency told CNN that children were taken into custody during the raid “for their own safety.”

“The dehumanization that the immigrant community is facing right now should make everybody worried,” Castro tells TIME. “If they can get away with violating our basic rights within the immigrant community, that's only a step away from taking away the rights of everybody.”

“The dehumanization that the immigrant community is facing right now should make everybody worried,” Veronica Castro, the deputy director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (ICIRR), told TIME. “If they can get away with violating our basic rights within the immigrant community, that's only a step away from taking away the rights of everybody.”

PORTLAND

Time (ATTACHMENT TWENTY ONE) also reported that Trump directed DefSec Pete Hegseth to send California NatGuard troops to “War ravaged Portland” in response to immigration enforcement protests, and that troops would protect “ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa,” and that he authorized “full force, if necessary,” in the Oregon city.

But District Judge Karin Immergut “granted a temporary restraining order blocking the deployment, stating that Trump’s deployment was done so “absent constitutional authority,” and that current protests in the city against immigration enforcement “did not pose a ‘danger of a rebellion.’”

CalGov. Newsom—who has a contentious history with the President—vowed: “Trump’s abuse of power won’t stand,” and posted an online statement with an explicit song choice—Dr. Dre’s “F*ck You”— and encouraged readers to have the “sound on.”

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, like Chicago’s Johnson, insisted that the city “doesn’t need nor want” federal troops – whether from California, Texas, Guam or even their own NatGuard

“The fight the federal Administration seeks is not in our city, and I call on our national leaders to chart a course that leads to our future, and not to further fear and division,” said Wilson.

“Trump’s efforts put the country on a path toward using the military for law enforcement, and Oregon challenged Trump in court to draw a “bright line,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield told TIME (October 6^th, ATTACHMENT TWENTY TWO), declaring “(t)his is not a third-world country, and we felt that the President is on a path to normalize the use of the military in our cities.”

“This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law,” wrote Judge Immergut, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018. When Trump tried to send in the California National Guard, Immergut blocked that too. The judge has scheduled a trial on deployments for next Wednesday.

TIME added that the President is forbidden from using the military inside the U.S. for law enforcement purposes by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. The National Guard can be deployed to assist Americans during natural disasters and in times of insurrection or open revolt according to the even older (1807) Insurrection Act.

With Comey, James and Bolton riding the railroad to Alligator Alley, Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X that Immergut’s ruling was “legal insurrection.” When TIME asked Miller if he is recommending President Trump take action against judges who make rulings he disagrees with, Miller said, “No, it’s simply a factually accurate statement that when a judge assumes for him or herself the powers that have been delegated by the Constitution to the President, that that is a form of illegal insurrection.”

In other words, lock her up. Or at least have her bounced from the bench – or, as a last resort, overruled by the President’s 6-3 SCOTUS majority.

Immergut’s double jeopardy for deployment of first the state, then California National Guard to Portland promped her to ask an (unnamed) Trump lawyer: “How could bringing in federalised national guard from California not be in direct contravention of the [decision] I issued yesterday?”

White House deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson, replied: “President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement.” (GUK, ATTACHMENT TWENTY THREE) “For once, Gavin Newscum [sic] should stand on the side of law-abiding citizens instead of violent criminals destroying Portland and cities across the country.”

That other lefty English rag, IUK enhanced its coverage of AyGee Leavitt and her minions’ contention that ICE was “under siege from attack by Antifa and other left-wing domestic terrorists” in “war-ravaged Portland,” and that MAGA videographer Nick Sortor was mistakenly arrested by “Antifa thugs” on the Portland police department while fighting with protesters.

Within hours, IUK reported (ATTACHMENT TWENTY FOUR), Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon took to her own official X account to say she’d spoken with both Sortor and Attorney General Pam Bondi about the case.

She said, there, “that an investigation into the influencer’s arrest was a “high priority” for the department’s Civil Rights Division, which since Trump’s inauguration” IUK contends “has moved away from its longstanding mission of protecting racial and ethnic minorities from discrimination in favor of investigating discrimination against Christians and white Americans.”

Leavitt told reporters that the Justice Department would be “launching a full investigation” into Sortor’s arrest and said Trump has directed administration officials to review what federal funds to Portland can be cut as a result.

“We will not fund states that allow anarchy,” she said, but added later that there would be “an additional surge of federal resources to Portland immediately” – the catch being that these funds would be going to more Customs and Border Protection and ICE officers.

Trump, Leavitt said, is “genuinely serious about wanting to restore order in America's cities” and claimed it had “become apparent that the local and elected officials in Oregon do not feel the same.”

“That's very unfortunate for the people who live there,” she added.

Matters came to a head last Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2–1 that President Donald Trump can deploy Oregon National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, finding it was likely that the president had “lawfully exercised his statutory authority” in mobilizing the Guard. The decision lifted Immergut’s temporary block on the Oregon soldiers’ deployment, so Trump then asked the judge to lift a second order barring all federalized National Guard troops from deploying to the city. (Tangle, Oct. 23^rd, ATTACHMENT TWENTY FIVE)

During oral arguments before the 9th Circuit panel, Trump attorneys contended that deployment was necessary “to address rising unrest and protect against future violence.” The majority of the panel appeared sympathetic to this argument as opposed to Oregon Assistant Attorney General Stacy Chaffin’s argument that protests in the city did not meet the definition of a “rebellion” necessary to meet the legal pretext for National Guard deployment.

In its ruling, the 2–1 majority wrote: “Some of these protests have been peaceful, but many have turned violent, and protesters have threatened federal law enforcement officers and the building,” adding, “Even if the President may exaggerate the extent of the problem on social media, this does not change that other facts provide a colorable basis to support the statutory requirements.”

Judge Susan Graber dissented, writing, “The record contains no evidence whatsoever that… [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] was unable either to protect its Portland facility or to execute the immigration laws it is charged with enforcing.”

Immergut has scheduled a trial on the full lawsuit by the state and city for October 29.

As is Tangle’s wont, arguments pro and con were summarized. Liberals, upholding Immergut, opposed the panel with Slate pointing out that majoritarian Judge Ryan Nelson’s argument that “Trump enjoys absolute discretion to send troops into American cities for any reason he deems necessary,” amounts to a fascist judicial coup; Washington Monthly’s Garrett Epps said the decision greenlighted the contention that “protest itself is ‘violence’ and ‘rebellion;’” Joe Patrice, in Above the Law, said the appeals court “[laid] a little more track on the authoritarianism express.”

The right’s support of the panel’s overruling included contentions that the president of the United States “has the authority to protect federal installations” (Washington Examiner); Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey cited the precedents of the Whiskey and Shay’s Rebellions of centuries past and Civitas compared the NatGuard deployment to Federal defense of school desegregation “in the 1950s after Brown v. Board of Education and to protect civil rights protesters in the 1960s.” If critics want the federal government to have the power to enforce civil rights laws against resistant states, wrote John Yoo, “they also must concede to President Trump the authority to enforce immigration laws against rioters in the cities of Portland and Chicago.”

Tangle’s Managing Editor Ari Weitzman looked to Trump grump (and, to many, 2028 Presidential front-runner) Stephen Miller’s contention that “illegal immigration (is) an invasion and civil disobedience (is) rebellion,” and added that the protesters, like the courts, were also pivoting... instead of escalating violent confrontations, many are now showing up in front of federal buildings in ridiculous inflatable costumes and organizing an “emergency” naked bike ride – actions that make the military’s violent repression victorious, but also ridiculous.

“Trump is gifted at controlling media narratives, but I can’t remember a time that protesters have played a gambit that countered him so effectively,” Weitzman concluded.

NEW YORK

While Gothamites are presumably still wiping shit from Trump’s MAGAplane off their shirts and their shoes, the President plans to cancel the $16 billion tunnel project between New York and New Jersey.

“The project − meant to create a new rail tunnel and rehabilitate the existing 115-year-old pair of tunnels under the Hudson River − has already begun construction at several sites with hundreds of workers operating as of Oct. 17. (USA Today, ATTACHMENT TWENTY SIX) That hasn’t stopped Trump, a former New York real estate mogul, from threatening the $16 billion project.

“I'm cutting the project,” Trump told FOX News Channel’s "Sunday Morning Futures" on Oct. 19.

"The project is going to be dead," he said. "It is pretty much dead right now."

Trump has made clear he wanted to send a message to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, who fought to get funds on Gateway. “Tell him it’s terminated,” the president said earlier this week.

On the Senate floor a week ago, Schumer said the funding cut was "petty revenge politics."

Each day, USA Today reported, “hundreds of thousands of people ride Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains crossing under the Hudson to and from Manhattan. The two existing century-old rail tunnels were damaged during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. If one track's tunnel were to fail, the nonprofit Regional Planning Association estimated it could cost $16 billion over four years, or about 33,000 jobs each year.

“Although Trump has campaigned on increased infrastructure spending − including specifically for mass transit in New York City − those promises have never been fulfilled. The self-described "builder president" tried to kill Gateway in his first term as well.”

In an X post, Russ Vought, the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, said the hold is meant to “ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles," referring to diversity, equity and inclusion, administration shorthand for holding down the ranks of blacks, browns, chinks and trannies working all day long on the railroad.

Shafts and portal entrances are being built all the live long day in anticipation of (tunnel, not aesthetically) boring machines expected to arrive around January at the “five active construction sites in New York, New Jersey and in the Hudson,” said Mike Hellstrom, vice president and eastern regional manager of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “The funding cut likely means delays for a multigenerational project, which means extra costs and potential job losses.”

In an Oct. 15 MSNBC interview, Gov. Kathy Hochul called Trump's threats on the new tunnel "shortsighted."

"We need to replace them because if this system of transportation collapses, the Northeastern economy and the economy of the country collapses," she said.

USAT reported that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is overseeing the Manhattan subway expansion, said “funding for its tunnel-boring contract has already been approved” meaning that cancellation will bring... yes... more lawsuits.

The tunnel is also tangled up in two high-profile November elections... Gotham’s Mayoral race between Democratic Socialist turned Democrat Mandabi and Democrat turned Trumpy Cuomo, as well as the New Jersey contest between Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who supports the project, and Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who also does, and Trump be damned.

SAN FRANCISCO

Formerly a hotbed of political, sexual and cultural insurrectionism until its lower classes (including our Managing Editor) were gentrified out and replaced by techsters whose $100,000/year salaries are being eaten alive by $7,000/month rents, even the shadow of the name of the city still evokes rage in the hearts and minds of Republicans so President Trump is adding Baghdad by the Bay to his National Guard deployment list, “claiming that people in the city “want” it on the Fox “Sunday Morning Futures,” which aired over the weekend.

“San Francisco was truly one of the great cities of the world, and then 15 years ago (actually more like 150 years ago – DJI) it went wrong—it went woke,” Trump continued. “We’re going to go to San Francisco, and we’re going to make it great.” (Time, October 21, ATTACHMENT TWENTY SEVEN)

“San Francisco does not want or need Donald Trump’s chaos,” said former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Our City takes great pride in the steps we’ve taken to significantly increase public safety and reduce crime in partnership with community and state officials (again, by cancelling rent control... some of its most avaricious and vicious landlords and realtors actually being members of the Communist Party USA!) and weeping over Gaza while police are sweeping up the old and new homeless – DJI) — without the interference of a President seeking headlines.”

Earlier this month, Trump called San Francisco a “mess,” and suggested that he would deploy troops there. He has made similar comments about other cities led by Democrats, including Memphis and Portland, claiming that they aren’t safe.

“Data show that crime in San Francisco, as in a number of other U.S. cities, has already been dropping. Overall crime in the city has gone down about 26% so far this year compared to the same period in 2024, according to city police data. Homicides, for instance, have dropped by about 12%, and rapes have gone down by nearly 17%. Robberies and burglaries have gone down about 23% and 28%, respectively. Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement last week that crime is “at its lowest point in decades,” with homicides at 70-year lows,” reports reported, validating the supposition that rich people, even in blue cities, do not commit blue-collar crimes while Time travelling back to the 1906 earthquake, the race riots of 1966 (when there were still dark people to do the rioting), the (lesser) 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and Gov. Newsom’s 2023 “War on Fentanyl” (peace having been declared between the cops and potheads, mushroom mommies and venture-capital crack and cranksters working their 21 hour days to pay the rent) to prove past local NatGuard deployments were also “at the request of or with the approval of local leaders.”

BLUE CITIES in RED STATES

President Trump, Speaker Mike and other Republican officials have fought back against accusations that the 2025 War on Crime is spurred solely by revenge against states that voted for Poor Ol’ Joe and Kamalala by also deploying, or promising to deploy, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast and exterior National Guards and, for all we know, the Space Force to fight alien criminality in red states too – albeit with the help and co-operation of their Governors, so long as deployments are limited to the blue cities within.

Some examples of this are...

NEW ORLEANS and LOUISIANA

The far-left New Republic (ATTACHMENT TWENTY EIGHT) published a report from Edith Olmstead that predictably charged Gov. Jeff Landry with submission to the police state – dating back to August, when Landry approved sending 135 members of the Louisiana National Guard to Washington to assist in Trump’s federal takeover there. “After finishing a sweeping crackdown on the city’s poorest, least white areas with high crime rates, service members (were) been enlisted to help Trump’s effort to beautify the nation’s capital so, a month later, Landry sent a letter sent to War Secretary Pete Hegseth Monday pleading for reciprocity by deploying 1,000 National Guard troops “to urban centers” throughout Louisiana. “Louisiana currently faces a convergence of elevated violent crime rates in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans coupled with critical personnel shortages within local law enforcement,” Landry wrote.

Like many of the Democratic-led cities targeted by Trump’s federal takeovers, Louisiana’s urban centers have majority-Black populations. But unlike those cities, the NR bit the bullet, Louisiana actually has a crime problem.

“Louisiana’s homicide rate in 2023 was 19.3 per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than 300 percent higher than the homicide rate of the most recent site of Trump’s federal law enforcement takeover: Oregon, which had a homicide rate of 4.6 per 100,000 people that same year.

“Shreveport, which is in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s district, landed at number 25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000 and New Orleans had a murder rate of 31 per 100,000. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is twice the rate in Washington. Meanwhile, Portland, saw a 51 percent decrease in homicides in the first half of 2025.

What the NR called Landry’s “sycophantic” praise “doesn’t detract from the lawlessness of Trump’s campaign to intimidate Democratic-led cities,” they rallied, “and concerns that Trump’s sweeping crackdown and cuts to crime prevention programs could undermine already decreasing crime rates” – at least across much of America, if not in the Big Easy.

MEMPHIS

Time, on October fifth, (Attachment Fifteen above) profiled several deployment struggles – focusing on California (where San Francisco, at least, has cut a deal with DHS, ICE and the military to keep the troops out) but also including the usual Portland and Chicago, as well as the City of Elvis.

“While Trump’s effect in Chicago and Portland is yet to be seen,” Time-ly Rebecca Schneid reported, “Trump’s crackdown on Memphis, Tennessee, is already underway, after the President signed a memorandum two weeks ago directing agents from multiple agencies, as well as the National Guard, to address what he says are ‘tremendous levels of violent crime’ in the city.”

Unlike the Governors of Oregon and Illinois, though, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee welcomed Trump’s militarization in Memphis, and says that the operation will occur over the “next weeks and months.”

“Memphis is a world-class city with a historic opportunity to address its crime challenge,” Lee said on “X”, adding that he will be working “side-by-side” at the local and federal level.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young told TIME that he was “certainly not happy” with Trump’s National Guard deployment, while “other local leaders” in Memphis, pointed out that the Memphis Police Department (MPD) reported in September that overall crime was at a 25-year low in 2025 – as opposed to 2023, when the city hit record highs with more than 390 homicides.

Despite the reality of crime in blue city streets... even if dropping of late... and the inevitably of ICE raids by heavily armed local, state and Federal authorities positing an eventually murderous chain of conflicts, the “No Kings” people remain determined to take to the streets.

Reporting on the planned and well-publicized rallies planned for last Saturday, Time’s Nik Popli (October 17, ATTACHMENT TWENTY NINE) wrote that organizers were “preparing demonstrators to remain calm, lawful, and nonviolent—even if met with aggression”... a strategy that was largely successful (even wholly ineffectual in stopping the raids, just as Democratic opposition has not been able to wrangle an end to the gumment shutdown that does not decimate heal care for poor and working-class Joneses).

“No Kings” reflects a broader clash over the meaning of public dissent in the Trump era. Administration officials framed the protests as a potential threat to order, but organizers (including the American Civil Liberties Union, Indivisible, MoveOn and the American Federation of Teachers) said they “represent a test of the country’s ability to tolerate peaceful opposition—and of citizens’ willingness to defend their own rights”... both of which, for the moment, tested positive.

Gumment gunslingers resorted to non-lethal repression (gas, clubs, fists, but only a few bullets); “No Kingsters” marched around in circles, chanted slogans and, in some cases, amused bystanders and the omnipresent professional and situational media with creepy costumes (often Halloween inspired but also including many of the meme-licious frog suits) and theatrical stunts.

Most appeared to have had a good time.

Popli wrote that “House Speaker Mike Johnson called the demonstrations against the Trump Administration a “Hate America rally” and claimed it would draw the “pro-Hamas wing” of the Democratic party and “the antifa people,” Majority Whip Tom Emmer accused Democrats of “promoting the terrorist wing of their party” (and SecTreas) Scott Bessent described expected participants as “the farthest left, the hardest core, the most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas suggested “the National Guard might need to show up” – which they did, but the lone wolves of the left howled alone while the gummenties chose not to initiate a Kent State or Jackson State bloodbath.

Watching the Americans perform and posture from across the pond, Graig Graziosi of the liberal Independent U. K. (presumably either based in the colonies or with access to superstrong international internet powers) tuned in to Fox News a week ago and heard White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accuse the Democratic voting base “of being terrorists and violent criminals” (ATTACHMENT THIRTY) telling the Foxies that the Democratic Party's "main constituency" is "Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals."

Her evidence was a video that New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani played, “refusing to say he thinks that Hamas should disarm” while celebrating President Trump’s shaky but still holding peace and hostages deal which many “conservatives” (if not the families of the detainees) opposed.

Leavitt insisted that Democrats don't care about the situation in Gaza, and are simply antisemites.

"They don’t stand for anything except for catering to their far-left base, which as I said, includes antisemites, includes Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals who they want to let off freely to roam in American streets," Leavitt said.

President Donald Trump even posted to Truth Social that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker "should be in jail".

"Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!" he said in the post. "Governor Pritzker also!"

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that "JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson have blood on their hands" and accused them of having "stood idly by while innocent Americans fall victim to violent crime time and time again." (NBC, ATTACHMENT THIRTY ONE)

The plump Democratic billionaire shook his fists and shouted that Trump was "a coward."

"He likes to pretend to be a tough guy," Pritzker said of the president. "Come and get me."

Johnson, for his part, resorted to the tired, tried and true: saying that "this is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested.”

Jackson concluded by positing that "instead of taking action to stop the crime, these Trump-Deranged buffoons would rather allow the violence to continue and attack the President for wanting to help make their city safe again."

But: are Leavitt, ICE, DHS, Little Marco, tough guy Hegseth and the mastermind of them all (as he now sits amidst Gaza-ish rubble dictating his decrees) all overestimating the peril, blindly or knowingly?

Maybe the problem is just that it’s the Democrats who are cowards, who are weak – obsessed with weak words and woke gestures; easily bullied and, so, unable to fight back against even the most ludicrous allegations.

Americans who eschew both red and blue contend that Democrats are yellow... that is: the minority Executive, Legislative and Judicial party either cannot or will not implement corrections necessary to survival of the nation or, in fact, are too confused, too old (or young) or too weak to take any action other than marching around in circles and getting beat up by the police.

With midterm elections just about a year away, according to Ingrid Jacques of USA Today (ATTACHMENT THIRTY TWO), the signs of a blue wave are looking … well, “grim”... with USA Today reporting that a recent analysis of polling data by NBC News shows what a pickle Democrats are in ahead of next year’s midterms.

As of Oct. 17, 2017, the Real Clear Politics polling average on the generic congressional ballot showed a 9-point lead by Democrats. That lead continued over the next year, and Democrats gained 40 seats in the House – giving them control of that chamber.

This Oct. 17, things don’t look quite so rosy. The same RCP average shows that Democrats are only up by 1.6 points.

And while Trump’s average approval is slightly higher – in the mid-40s – than it was during his first term (granted that the numbers haven’t included last week’s adventures like the poop plane or demolition of the White House) “the same isn’t true for Democrats.”

(Since the end of July, Trump’s second-term approval is higher than that of former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the same time during their second terms.)

Not only is the party unpopular, an October CBS News/YouGov poll found 64% of those surveyed use “weak” as the top word to describe Democrats.

And even the shutdown, which the donkeys hoped would kick a little life into their image at first, is starting to sour... Jacques, apparently a MAGA sympathizer or else a “plague on both houses” cynic (or else simply naïve) claims that it is pretty obvious it's the Democrats’ fault for not signing on to a simple bill that would keep the government running while the parties work out their differences.

Healthcare? Whuzzat?

Only 6 points now separate the Republicans (39%) from the Democrats (33%), as to which party deserves shutdown blame, according to a poll by YouGov/The Economist.

“Democrats may detest Trump,” Jacques concluded, “but that alone will not build the wave they’ll need in 2026” (let alone 2028).

The crises... from shutdown to coffee prices to real or imaginary alien invasions... have become so numerous and strange that USA Today’s Rex Huppke even found himself half-believing that Marjorie Taylor Greene was starting to make sense.

In an Oct. 9 interview, the Georgia congresswoman and “Olympic-level nutter” Huppke still contends – “she of the Jewish space lasers and QAnon conspiracies” – bucked Trump and her own party and “advocated for health care subsidies and the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, while accurately stating that Trump has not lowered prices” and that “Americans are continuing to have a very difficult time getting by.”

“I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself or have someone fetch the smelling salts,” Huppke joked as MAGA choked.

“(H)ere’s one of the most obnoxious, loony MAGA devotees effectively saying that the Democratic explanations for the government shutdown – health insurance costs and GOP-led cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies – are legitimate.

“This is such a crisis that I’m willing to say, ‘OK everyone, we have to do something about this,’” Greene told CNN, of all places. “What am I hearing from my constituents? It’s great, we track all the calls that come into my office. About 60% of the calls coming in right now are calls of support and saying, ‘Yes, health insurance is a crisis.’ They’re telling us stories about how they’re already paying $2,000 a month with $10,000 deductibles. I’m getting phone calls from people that are saying that if the ACA tax credits expire, they aren’t going to be able to have health insurance, they’re going to have to drop it.”

There was more.

“Prices have not come down; that is a reality. People’s wages have not gone up; that’s another reality. So Americans are continuing to have a very difficult time getting by.”

For once in my life, Huppke said he could say this: “Somebody is lying, and it’s not Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

Greene even joined the sick donkeys in alleging that Speaker Mike Johnson isn’t calling the House back into session in order to avoid the vote on Grijalva’s swearing-in so as to avoid her deciding vote on releasing Jeffy’s pervy pix to a hungry public.

“I can't conclusively say if that's why the House is not in session, but the House should be in session,” Greene said. “If it's to avoid the discharge petition, why drag this out? That is going to have 218 signatures, so I say go ahead and do it and get it over with.”

She also said of the Epstein files: “I genuinely do not understand why there has been any effort to hide this and prevent it from coming out. … This involves women who were raped, women at 14 years old who were raped, and they say there’s more people involved. I don’t know how anyone in their good conscience can be against letting that information come out.”

“Wow!” Huppke explained, the backing off to maintained that Greene was still a con artist... a Grade-A grifter who said, during the same interview: “I am a Republican and I support the president.”

Huppke submitted evidence that Trump is unpopular and aging swiftly. The economy, as Greene so boldly noted, is not good for most Americans. Trump is engaged in the kind of government overreach the far right has long railed against, whether it's dispatching troops to the streets of U.S. cities or cracking down on free speech.

Opinion: Anyone with courage has to acknowledge Trump isn't well. And he's getting worse.

“I don’t think Greene has come to her senses,” Huppke concluded. “I don’t think she suddenly cares about governing or the average, hardworking American. I think she’s a gifted grifter dipping a toe in the pool of Trump defiance to see if it makes waves she can ride.

“I (also) think she sees signs that there are cracks in the MAGA foundation...

“And for the first and probably last time ever, I hope she’s right.”

Our next Lesson comes in the anticipation of Halloween and the Mexican Days of the Dead, so we’ll take a closer look at the spooks now in power and the dead donkeys, moribund media and cowardly corporations that have submitted to an arguably insane President and gumment Gestapo as may be haunting us for the next three years.

IN the NEWS: OCTOBER 16^TH to OCTOBER 22^ND, 2025

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Dow: 45,952.24

It’s National Burger Day.

Gazans might like a quarter-wounder, or a falafel... even a crust of bread. As the homed hostages celebrate and eat all they wish, pundits say the cease fire is “under pressure” over return of the dead and (a few) food trucks are being allowed to trickle over the border by IDF but nobody can say how many or for how long.

Trump pulls truck drivers in America out of their cabs so ICE can force them to verify citizenship, as it is believed that companies have been hiring cheap, mobild, hostile aliens. (In a possible revenge killing, a big rig driver in Port Canaveral, FL crushes fifty birds.) His renewed enforcement of English Only laws spurs mass testing and defunded funding for blue state and cities (see above). The Department of War sinks more boats believed to be smuggling Venezuelan drugs and a Monroe Doctrine invasion is floated.

The gumment shutdown continues, Democrats say they won’t reopen without restoration and preservation of healthcare, Republicans insisting on a “clean” kick-the-can bill. Angry families blame red, blue or both parties for furloughs or firings at VA cemeteries, where wild pigs are digging up graves, officials alternately deny the destruction or say it’ll stop when Democrats submit.

Friday, October 17, 2025

Dow: 46,190.61

It’s National Pasta Day and Pam Bomdi’s ravishing ravioli of revenge and retribution clouts another clown on Trump’s enemies’ list – former ally John Bolton (and his little mustache, too). He wrote an unblattering book based on confidential docs noted in a “Dear Diary” for his wife then hacked by... yes!... a “bad actor” – the same crime Trump 1.0 committed before Trump 2.0 dropped the charges. He faces 180 years, and some inquiring minds want to know if he’ll also be shaved upon imprisonment.

But there’s freedom and happiness for another, already-convicted felon. Rep. George Santos, arrested for fraud, lying to nearly everybody and even lying about his mother’s death in the Nine Eleven is sprung – Trump actually saying that he was a “rogue” but always “had the sense to vote Republican,” thus criminalizing (or de-criminalizing, if you will) political affiliation. Might MAGA intervene in Enemy CalGov Newsome’s decision to pardon Mansonista septaguinarian Patricia Krenwinkle? Or an Arizona AyGee kawsuit against Speaker Mike for delaying confirmation of Rep. Adelita Grijalva in order to prevent a deciding vote to unseal the Epstain files and identify his footloose friends?

In the far north, Alaskans on the far west coast overlooking Russia are being evacuated after Typhoon Halong floods low-lying villages (no towns or cities thereabouts) risking drowning by climate-inducted glacier melt. They are flown 500 miles to a (fortunately indoor) stadium inAnchorage.

Saturday, October 18 2025

Dow: Closed

“America haters” rally for “No Kings” protests against King Donnie the Second – most are mostly peaceful but Bill Nye, the Science Guy, protests an alleged War on Science prosecuted by HHSec RFK.

U.K. has a “No Dukes” day as Prince Andrew is stripped of his royal titles over escapades with Epstein as culminated in pedo parties with Virginia Giuffre at Jeffrey’s: causing her to win a lot of lawsuit money, write a book and then kill herself. With York un-Duked, Andy Puke will not be invited to the royal X-mas parties.

While pardoning Santos (above), President Trump TACOs on providing Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, stiffing President Zelenskyy – at least until his proposed meeting with former friend, turned foe, now perhaps turned friend again, Bad Vlad Putin. They’ll wine and dine in Hungary in two weeks, more or less.

A ways north and West of Pest (and Buda, too), four brazen thieves invade and rob the Louvre in Paris, leaving the Mona Lisa to smile, but seizing crown jewels that French jewelers and historians call “priceless” and “irreplaceable” and worth untold millions of euros. South a ways, in Spain, more arty criminals steal a Picasso, but that’s worth only $650,000.

Sunday, October 19, 2025

Dow: Closed

NFL will follow NCAA’s day of upsets on National Running Back Day – games

Those Joneses not entranced by football tune in to Talkshow Sunday where Speaker Mike (“The Week”) says “No Kings” protests are really “Hate America” orgies bringing “Marxists, anarchists, socialists, terrorists and Hamas-helpers” together to take money from rural hospitals and give it to aliens and public television; and that, if Trump were King, he’d have shut and shot them down. Republicans, responds Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, “care more about George Santos than saving healthcare,” but does a JACO in denying endorsement of “Marxist” Mayor wannabee Zohran Mandabi in New York City who, also on “The Week” contends “I’ll make up what I lack in experience with integrity,” while defeated Democrat primary puppet-turned-Independent Andy Cuomo has neither integrity nor experience.

On the ABC roundtable, former DNC Chair Donna Brazille says Zorro is supported by rabbis and pastors and wants to MGAA (make Gotham affordable again) rival RNC Reince Pribus admits he’s “running against a guy nobody likes,” but predicts “goofy oddball” candidates will gas the asses in ’26 and ’28. MAGAnaut Sara Isgur agrees that Zorro “will become the face of the Democratic party” while Leigh Ann Caldwell (Puck) believes NY ‘pubs want to “protect moderate Dems”.

Pivoting from his War on Maduro, President Trump declares (word) war on neighboring Colombia (a now – former ally) because President Petro protested killing of fisherman mistaken for Venezuelans. He, too, is a cartel crony, so the Monroe Doctrine will support invasion (or at least tariffs like on Brazilian coffee) driving morning Joe Joneses into the embrace of meth dealers. But Argentines are good people with lotsa cattle.

Monday, October 20, 2025

Dow: 46,706.58

Massive cloudburst on Amazon wipes out merchers like Amazon, streamers & dreamers like Disney, gamers’ Robloxes and FortNites and all sorts of social media opioids. Was it terror?

Hamas and Israel resume their terror campaigns of executions, bombings and starvation. “Hope is killed,” says a Palestinian mother as the food trucks halt and two more coffins are delivered.

French police fear the Louvre thieves will break up the stolen crown jewels (worth an estimated $100 million) into salable gold and chopped diamonds and rubies worth much less but are relieved that they dropped Napoleon’s wife’s crown.

The Senate reopens, but the gumment does not and hope fading until at least November, if not next year. Charities mobilize to prevent American childen from joining Gazans in starvation while, between repetitive votes, sell MAGA merch and another Trump EO calls for roundups and incarceration of the homeless.

But there is some good news: gas prices drop below average $3 for the first time since the plague (cheapest is in Oklahoma at $2.51/gal while a “Miracle on 34^th Street” is found abandoned at NYC’s Penn Station, is revived, survives and is now thriving while police seek Mommy and influencers inform copycats that many police and fire stations have boxes to drop unwanted babies in.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Dow: 46,924.34

Joneses marvel or shudder as Trump brings a bulldozer in to demolish part of the White House to clear space for his new Golden Ballroom, leveling Melania’s office and the Visotiors’ Center to construct what Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md) calls a “Marie Antoinette Ballroom.”

Inspectors still inspecting the robbery at the Louvre and haven’t entirely ruled out the possibility that the American President or agents working for him did the deed to decorate the ballroom with crown jewels that royalists call “irreplaceable.” Jewelers fear that the robbers, Presidential or other, might chop the crowns and sell the gems piecemeal – fortunately they dropped the headgear of Napoleon’s Empress Eugenie. In probably unrelated criminal news, ex-Prez Sarkozy reports to prison for a five year fraud hitch.

Also headed for the slammer are Billy Cagle, the Atlanta wannabee shooter who boasted about his plans on social media and, perhaps, a ballroom of basketballers who shaved points, threw games and partied with the old school Mafia (remember them?).

And new schools Nazis are back Im Trend… Special Counsel nominee Paul Ingrassi (who looks like a vampire) admits he has a “Nazi streak” while Young Republicans swap Nazi swastikas and slogans on social media and than are slapped down themselves by Old Republicans who worry about their image for upcoming elections.

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Dow: 46,590.41

Glad Vlad plays Trump for a patsy, pretending to support Hungarian peace talks until he sends Zelenskyy away empty handed, then resumes bombing kindergartens. Angry, Djonald UnWise decides to make the American patsy-up for his legal bills accrued during various litigations, all stopped once he returns to office.

After Jan. 6 pardonee busted before he can kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and creepy George Santos claims he’s “reformed” after his pardon and will hence “mentor” young people, copious cells of cons are calling for their sentances to be cut.

More economic woes for Joneses as Amazon plans to replace 600,000 workers with robots (hopefully not before Christmas) while prices rise on chocolate, cars and coffee and the prospect of shutdown lasting after Halloween imperils SNAP benefits to cut off food for the poor just in time for Thanksgiving.

Fortunately there are distractions... the NBA regular season and World Series are beginning as college and pro football, women’s volleyball and golf continue. Retired Jack Niklaus wins $50M in a defamation case against his former business partners.

After several months of delayed readings... likely imposed by the politicians... there was an unprecedented increase in wages, leading to the Don climbing back over its original listing more than a decade ago. Accident? Shutdown catchup? Or are wages rising and more people finding jobs – which, together with the still-holding MidEast semi-ceasefire, adds up to a red, white and blue banner weekend for The President.

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

Gains in indices as improved are noted in GREEN. Negative/harmful indices in RED as are their designation. (Note – some of the indices where the total went up created a realm where their value went down... and vice versa.) See a further explanation of categories HERE

ECONOMIC INDICES		(60%)
CATEGORY	VALUE	BASE	RESULTS by PERCENTAGE			SCORE		OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS
INCOME	(24%)	6/17/13 revised 1/1/22	LAST	CHANGE	NEXT	LAST WEEK	THIS WEEK	THE WEEK’S CLOSING STATS...
Wages (hrly. Per cap)	9%	1350 points	10/16/25	+16.12%	11/25	1,589.97	1,846.20	https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/average-hourly-earnings 31.46 36.53
Median Inc. (yearly)	4%	600	10/16/25	+10.90%	10/30/25	829.68	904.38	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 44,687 714 48,740
Unempl. (BLS – in mi)	4%	600	10/16/25	+2.33%	10/25	530.25	530.25	http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/ 4.3
Official (DC – in mi)	2%	300	10/16/25	+0.04%	10/30/25	215.44	215.35	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,275 277 280
Unofficl. (DC – in mi)	2%	300	10/16/25	+0.28%	10/30/25	232.01	231.35	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 14,748 790 832
Workforce Participation Number Percent	2%	300	10/16/25	+0.036% -0.008%	10/30/25	297.01	296.97	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ In 163,477 513 549 Out 104,055 115 175 Total: 267,724 61.117 61.089
WP % (ycharts)*	1%	150	10/16/25	-0.16%	10/25	150.71	150.71	https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.30
OUTGO	(15%)
Total Inflation	7%	1050	10/16/25	+0.4%	10/25	927.45	927.45	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.4* NC
Food	2%	300	10/16/25	+0.5%	10/25	262.59	262.59	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.5
Gasoline	2%	300	10/16/25	+1.9%	10/25	255.11	255.11	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +1.9
Medical Costs	2%	300	10/16/25	-0.1%	10/25	274.20	274.20	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm -0.1
Shelter	2%	300	10/16/25	+0.4%	10/25	250.63	250.63	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.4
WEALTH
Dow Jones Index	2%	300	10/16/25	-1.39%	10/30/25	349.98	354.93	https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/ 46,590.41
Home (Sales) (Valuation)	1% 1%	150 150	10/16/25	+1.015% -1.75%	10/25	123.91 277.56	125.77 272.70	`https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics` Sales (M): 4.00 06 Valuations (K): 422.6 415.2
Millionaires (New Category)	1%	150	10/16/25	+0.05%	10/30/25	134.02	134.09	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 23,780 793 805
Paupers (New Category)	1%	150	10/16/25	+0.019%	10/30/25	133.28	133.31	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 37,290 282 275

GOVERNMENT	(10%)
Revenue (trilns.)	2%	300	10/16/25	-0.49%	10/30/25	471.28	458.98	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 5,518 531 260
Expenditures (tr.)	2%	300	10/16/25	+5.80%	10/30/25	278.28	294.42	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,415 426 019
National Debt tr.)	3%	450	10/16/25	+0.07%	10/30/25	357.18	356.92	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 37,845 874 902
Aggregate Debt (tr.)	3%	450	10/16/25	+0.09%	10/30/25	379.13	378.79	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 104,794 890 985

TRADE	(5%)
Foreign Debt (tr.)	2%	300	10/16/25	+1.51%	10/30/25	255.83	259.70	http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 9,453 471 330
Exports (in billions)	1%	150	10/16/25	+1.15%	10/25	174.76	174.76	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 280.5
Imports (in billions))	1%	150	10/16/25	-5.94%	10/25	151.56	151.56	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 358.8
Trade Surplus/Deficit (blns.)	1%	150	10/16/25	-23.12%	10/25	253.88	253.88	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 78.3
								An official website of the United States government census.gov Notification Due to the lapse of federal funding, portions of this website are not being updated. Any inquiries submitted via www.census.gov will not be answered until appropriations are enacted.
SOCIAL INDICES		(40%)
ACTS of MAN	(12%)							33932
World Affairs	3%	450	10/16/25	+0.1%	10/30/25	470.08	470.55	Voters elect right wing candidates in Bolivia and Japan (below) while ex-French Prez Sarkozi is off to jail, spooking Trump. Swifties are going to Germany to see “Ophelia” painting. Sumo rasslers invade U/K. – U.S. next? Daad dinosaur found in the mountains of Argentina.
War and terrorism	2%	300	10/16/25	-0.3%	10/30/25	290.08	289.21	War resumes in Ukraine, peace “shaky” in Mideast despie Israeli bombings and Hamas beheadings; Trump and his MAGAmen call “No Kings” protesters terrorists and want military to kill them. ICEman and protester shot during LA raid on street vendors. Trump releases a Truth Social video of Himself wearing a crown and flying a jet, strafing New York City with shit (above) and calls for jailing or killing homeless. Frogs become a symbol of terrorists.
Politics	3%	450	10/16/25	-0.2%	10/30/25	461.15	460.22	More Trump lumber tariffs hit cabinetmakers and homebuilders, more air traffic layoffs hit passengers as the Prez promotes strange EO’s amd videos, appoints Nazis and pardons George Santos. Gerrymandering in Texas and California spreads to other states in what media call “a race to the bottom.” Republicans in Congress not home with the donor class are lobbying to have all the docs and EO’s autopen signed by Biden overturned.
Economics	3%	450	10/16/25	-0.1%	10/30/25	430.93	430.50	US gas prices fall below $3/gal, lowest since the plague, but electricity costs expected to rise 4% this winter due to hungry AI apps. Amazon expects to replace 600,000 workers with robots; Nestle’s cuts only 16,000 jobs but raises prices on Halloween candy. Airlines imposing extra fees on reclining seats. Coffee mercher Keurig acquiring Dr. Pepper.
Crime	1%	150	10/16/25	+0.1%	10/30/25	209.48	209.77	Porta potty photo pervo caught in Iowa. Cop accused in murder of Sonya Massey in Illinois; ICE arrests alien policeman. Spam and scam robocalls at 6 year high. Idiot gunslinger boasts of his plans, arrested at Atlanta airport. Serial kidnapper out on bond kidnaps and kills Radi Scott in Philly. Woman stabbed for taking too long in checkout line. Florida caregiver accused of poisoning baby with antifreeze. 9 year old boy and 10 year old girl assault and rape five year old girl in Cleveland. Thieves bash hole in liquor store to steal 14 boxes of booze while cops in Maryland are looking for volunteers to smoke weed.
ACTS of GOD	(6%)
Environment/Weather	3%	450	10/16/25	-0.1%	10/30/25	284.36	284.08	Typhoon Halon floods Alaska, causing mass evacuations. Researchers say global CO2 levels higher than ever and weatherpeaople say the long, hot summer might finally be falling away into fall.
Disasters	3%	450	10/16/25	+0.3%	10/30/25	457.94	459.31	Animal controllers greenlight pink vests for deer hunters as mating and running into the road seasons begins. Hunters advised not to eat sick animals. Silo of soybeans falls, cutting off power to Martinton, IL. Lithium batteries explode and set plane on fire. No casualties. Miracle on 34^th Street – baby found abandoned at Penn Station but survives.
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX		(15%)
Science, Tech, Education	4%	600	10/16/25	-0.1%	10/30/25	617.69	616.67	Researchers says banning phones in school improves education; massive internet outage de-clouds Amazon, Disney and many games. Portland degenerates hire falconers to kill a murder of crows. Trump’s NASA chief Sean Duffy says Elon Musk’s Space X has too many glitches and we risk losing the new moon race to China.
Equality (econ/social)	4%	600	10/16/25	+0.1%	10/30/25	665.06	665.73	Japan elects conservative first female leader Sanae Takaichi – a right wing metalhead. First female crew crosses the Pacific. Horrorsexual Rocky Horror Dr. Frank N. Furter actor Tim Curry, now 79 says he’s not afraid of death.
Health	4%	600	10/16/25	nc	10/30/25	420.50	420.50	TV-con-mystics predict Medicare will be cut or killed – advised the sick and elderly poor to pay off debts and save more, but with what money? The good news is that eye implants developed that will cure those blinded by macular degeneration, childhood exposure to peanuts will prevent (or at least inhibit) allergies later in life and that cancer docs are developing treatments for sick children, but need private funds due to RFK’s policies. Protein shakes recalled for lead and sodium, Publix ice cream for allergenic eggs, cinnamon recalled for lead that kills kids and salmonellic dog & cat foods kill pets. “Ben’s” (de-Uncled by wokesters) recalls rice with unwanted ingredient – rocks. Ford recalls 625K vehicles with bad seat belts,
Freedom and Justice	3%	450	10/16/25	-0.1%	10/30/25	482.57	482.09	Third Trump enemy Bolton arrested; he compares the President to the head of Stalin’s Secret Police (not worth Stalin himself). SCOTUS back to work with busy agenda: keeping, limiting or repealing the Voting Rights Act to promote gerrymandering (above),
CULTURAL and MISCELLANEOUS INCIDENTS			(6%)
Cultural incidents	3%	450	10/16/25	-0.1%	10/30/25	571.13	570.56	New TV shows and new season of old shows debut – cops and contests proliferating after Sir Richard Attenborough (99) becomes oldest Emmy winner. “Hamilton” has record 10^th year on Broadway while “Black Phone 2” leads movie B.O. MLB’s World Series sees defending Dodgers sweep sour Brews behind Ohtani hitting and pitching v. Toronto who beat Seattle in seven; upsets and thrillers in college and pro football... Cincy’s Joe Flacco (40) defeats Aaron Rodgers (41) of Steelers in Icy Hot Bowl. Plenty of new books include “Raising Brows” by Romanian Eyebrow Queen Anastasia Soare, Malala Yousef and Kevin Federline, RIP: rockers Sam Rivers (Limp Bizkit), KISS guitarist Ace Frehley, NFL star Doug Martin after fight with police, MLB Jesus Montez in cycle crash, chess grandmaster David Navechinsky. R(etire)IP Admiral Halsey, scourge of Venezuelan drug boats, after dispute with DefSec Hegseth.
Miscellaneous incidents	4%	450	10/16/25	-0.1%	10/30/25	543.94	543.40	Trader Joe’s accused of selling cheaper imitations of Smuckers’ Uncrustables. Liberals complain that ICE agents “peered down” at them from Portland rooftops.

The Don Jones Index for the week of October 16^th through October 22^nd, 2025 was UP 337.00 points

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.

ATTACHMENT ONE – FROM IUK

Hardly working: Senate heads home with House already gone as shutdown persists and Americans suffer

Don’t expect the government shutdown to end anytime soon – especially since Washington isn’t expecting it to end anytime soon.

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned this week that “we’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history.”

Is Johnson doing anything to stop the logjam? Oh, Heavens, no. The speaker has kept the House out of session and refused to even swear in Adelita Grijalva, the Democrat who won a special election in Arizona.

One sign that the Trump administration has given up? It’s begun moving money around to ensure that troops are paid during the shutdown, buying Republicans in Congress time and giving them one less pain point.

Rather than bringing leaders in the House and Senate together to shake hands the way he did with Israel and its Arab neighbors, Trump seems virtually checked out.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune continues to hold Potemkin votes on the same continuing resolution that Democrats have already said is a non-starter.

Democrats insist that any continuing resolution include a plan to salvage the COVID-era enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.

That’s a non-starter for Republicans, who say any discussion about health care must begin only after the government re-opens.

ATTACHMENT TWO – FROM TIME

TRUMP’S DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY EMBRACES A WORD WITH TIES TO WHITE NATIONALISM

By Connor Greene Oct 16, 2025 2:11 PM ET

For months, the White House and federal agencies have drawn outrage from critics for social media posts promoting President Trump’s immigration agenda. Some of the posts deploy jokes or memes. Others use language or images seen as racist dog whistles. This week, the Department of Homeland Security drew pushback for a post that was just one word: remigrate.

The term, which has been embraced among Trump’s MAGA base, has a fraught history in Europe, where it has ties to white nationalism and has been seen as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

The short post on X was followed by a link to a government site promoting self-deportation.

Where “remigration” came from

The term “remigration” has traditionally been used in Europe to refer to the mass deportation of non-white immigrants. It has been used by right-winged politicians such as Austria’s Herbert Kickl and Germany’s Alice Weidel of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The term has also been popularized by the Austrian, millennial far-right influencer Martin Sellner.

“In Europe, it's an established part of the linguistic toolbox of white supremacy,” Nicholas J. Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, tells TIME.

The use of the term in Germany and Austria has been a trademark of recent anti-immigration campaigns. Protests across Germany were sparked last year after it was alleged that AfD party members and far-right Austrians were plotting to deport thousands of migrants, causing mass pro-democracy demonstrations.

When asked for comment on its post from Tuesday, Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokesperson, responded in an email, “Is the English language too difficult for you?” The message was followed by a Collins English Dictionary definition of the word “remigrate.”

The DHS post seems to be a nod to the efforts of the State Department to create an “Office of Remigration,” the plans for which were rolled out through a proposal in May that called for an overhaul of the agency that would cut a series of programs and reduce domestic staffing. The details of the plan are outlined in a 136-page document that the State Department sent to six Congressional Committees. The document says the Office of Remigration will “actively facilitate the voluntary return of migrants to their country of origin or legal status.”

This year, Trump has embraced the term and used it multiple times on social media. “America was invaded and occupied. I am reversing the Invasion. It’s called Remigration,” he said in one Truth Social post from June.

“Everybody can hear what this means,” Cull says of the DHS post. “It's a clear escalation in the language around issues of migration.”

A string of similar rhetoric

The department’s use of the word and the baggage it carries follows a pattern of posts by Trump and Administration officials that appear to disfavor certain groups living in the U.S. and promote Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

In August, the Administration was accused of quoting a white supremacists in a DHS post for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruiting. The department wrote the caption, “which way, American man?” which was argued to reference Which Way, Western Man, a 1978 book by the white supremacists William Gayley Simpson, who was a supporter of Hitler.

In other posts, the agency depicts an old Morgan Weistling painting of a white family with the caption, “remember your homeland’s heritage,” while misnaming the painting.

Other posts call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) applicants to “defend your culture!” One post shows a photo of the Capitol circa 1943 with the caption, “we can return.”

Also this week, the U.S. Border Patrol posted, and then later deleted, an Instagram reel this week that used an antisemitic slur from the Michael Jackson song "They Don't Care About Us,” which was condemned by Jewish groups when the song was released in 1995, prompting Jackson to update the song.

"Jew me, sue me, Everybody, do me, Kick me, k*ke me, Don't you black or white me,” the lyrics go in the video, which, unlike certain streaming services that have blurred out the offensive language, were not edited out by the agency.

“This is, unfortunately, part of how extreme politics works, that it tries to find ordinary ways to describe horrible and morally abhorrent things,” Cull says.

ATTACHMENT THREE – FROM TANGLE

THE FEDERAL CRACKDOWN IN CHICAGO AND PORTLAND.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump deployed Illinois National Guard troops to Chicago and attempted to mobilize the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, leading to arrests and clashes with protesters in the cities. In Chicago, hundreds of federal officers carried out a large-scale raid at an apartment building on Tuesday, leading to a reported 37 arrests of alleged unauthorized immigrants. In Portland, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying the Oregon National Guard. Then on Sunday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called up 400 members of the Texas National Guard for deployments to Portland, Chicago, and other cities to support federal agents and protect property.

White House officials say the law enforcement activity in Illinois is necessary to maintain public safety in and around Chicago while also protecting immigration authorities from heightened threats. Tuesday’s raid — a joint operation involving multiple federal agencies and utilizing Black Hawk helicopters — targeted a residential building allegedly frequented by members of the Tren de Aragua gang. However, witnesses and residents said that nearly every building resident was detained, including children and U.S. citizens, in some cases without clear explanations for their arrests.

Also on Tuesday, President Trump suggested in a meeting with military leaders and Secretary Hegseth that cities like Chicago should be “training grounds for our military,” describing the unrest over immigration enforcement and federal troop deployments as “a war from within.” The comments drew strong rebukes from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D). “Sending troops into cities, thinking that that’s some sort of proving ground for war, or that indeed there’s some sort of internal war going on in the United States, is, just frankly, inane,” Pritzker said.

Tensions between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and protesters escalated on Saturday when federal agents were allegedly rammed and boxed in by 10 cars near an ICE facility outside Chicago. Officers fired shots at a woman in one of the cars, saying that she was armed with a semi-automatic weapon. No one was seriously hurt, but Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that additional personnel would be deployed to the area in response to the incident.

Separately, on Saturday, federal judge Karin Immergut (who was appointed by Trump in his first term) issued a temporary restraining order blocking the federal government from deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to Portland. Judge Immergut found that the size and nature of the immigration protests in the city did not justify mobilizing the Guard, writing that President Trump’s statements to the contrary were “simply untethered to the facts.” The order will remain in effect for 14 days, unless extended. In response, the Trump administration filed a notice of appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

However, after the Trump administration mobilized members of the California National Guard to Oregon, Judge Immergut convened another hearing and issued a broader ruling barring the government from sending any National Guard troops to Portland while the restraining order is in effect.

Today, we’ll share views from the right and left about the federal activity in Chicago and Portland. Then, my take.

What the right is saying.

· The right mostly backs Trump’s actions in Chicago and Portland, with many arguing that protests are out of control.

· Some say a dearth of local leadership requires federal intervention.

· Others suggest deploying troops won’t fix the underlying problems fueling the protests.

In The Daily Signal, Jarrett Stepman wrote “Trump is right to clamp down on Portland’s Jacobins.”

“Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities have been besieged for months in the Oregon city with little indication that local authorities will do anything to get control of the situation… It couldn’t be clearer that Portland’s leaders have little interest in getting the rioters under control outside of pressure from the Trump administration,” Stepman said. “The primary issue right now for Portland is not just an intractable problem with basic street crime, though that was a big one after the George Floyd riots when the city defunded the police.

“No, the problem is that Portland is returning to violence and chaos because organized agitators in their city — like Antifa and other similar groups — want to stop federal immigration enforcement. They are throwing a continual violent tantrum because they aren’t getting their way. Not only are the ICE facilities besieged on a regular basis, but many residents are fed up with having their lives disrupted while local officials do nothing,” Stepman wrote. “Since Portland is clearly not willing to do its job to protect the lives of federal employees in the city, the Trump administration has a duty to step in and put the kibosh on Portland’s Jacobins.”

In PJ Media, Michael A. Letts said “Trump is showing why order is needed in cities like Portland.”

“Trump has done a great job in Washington, D.C., when it came to turning around their misfortunes, because the leaders eventually worked with him to find that level of peace. But in Chicago and Portland, things are not that easy, and now I wonder just how long it will take for a resolution to be found,” Letts wrote. “A majority of the problem, again, comes down to leadership. For example, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has made it clear that he’s not a fan of Trump, insisting that he is ‘threatening to go to war with an American city’ when, in fact, the war’s coming from within, due to his own problematic leadership.”

“Poor leadership is going to lead to the wrong kind of pushback and, as a result, the lack of any real progress within the state. That’s why Trump is doing what he can on his end, in an effort to bring true law and order back to these fallen states,” Letts said. “So here we are. Trump’s trying to push for law and order within these states, and the combined efforts of these violent Antifa types and Democratic leaders are now creating a dangerous situation.”

In Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward argued “deploying federal troops is not a sustainable solution to crime in American cities.”

“An August Associated Press–NORC poll found that 81 percent of respondents view crime as a ‘major problem’ in America's large cities, while 66 percent view it as a ‘major problem’ nationwide,” Mangu-Ward wrote. “But a military occupation of American cities is neither constitutionally sound nor fiscally viable. Legally and logistically, you can't solve deep social and policing problems with Humvees parked at intersections forever. These deployments tend to devolve into a high-risk form of political theater, rewarding mayors and presidents who want to look tough while leaving communities no closer to a lasting solution and America one step closer to authoritarian rule.

“The idea of uniformed federal agents patrolling city neighborhoods as if they were appropriate for everyday law enforcement feels profoundly out of step with the spirit of America's founding values as we approach the semiquincentennial,” Mangu-Ward said. “The Constitution's architecture was designed to prevent just this kind of centralization where a standing force functions not as a last resort but as a default mode. Letting soldiers or masked federal officers replace traditional policing undermines the boundary between citizen and subject.”

What the left is saying.

· The left opposes the administration’s actions in cities, saying Trump is grossly exaggerating the situation.

· Some call on protesters to resist Trump’s attempts to antagonize them.

· Others say troop deployments will only increase the likelihood of violent disorder.

In The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote “Mr. President, may we interest you in a naked bike ride?”

“The National Guard troops dispatched by President Trump to fight ‘domestic terrorists’ in this ‘war-ravaged’ city of Portland, Ore., will face an unexpected challenge: naked bicycle riders. Cycling in the buff is a Portland specialty, and one organization has announced a naked ride ‘in response to the militarization of our city.’ Such is the war zone here,” Kristof said. “National Guard troops could help Portland, if they rented office space. But the way Trump dispatches troops to fight a ‘war from within’ won’t solve the city’s problems and may inflame them.”

“Because I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarian governments, I’m particularly alarmed by Trump’s attempt to create, in effect, his own Praetorian Guard, available to punish critics or Democratic cities. That is standard autocratic behavior, and in extreme cases — such as at Tiananmen Square in 1989 — I’ve seen such troops used to massacre protesters,” Kristof wrote. “I don’t think that will happen here, but Trump has long had an interest in marshaling military force to suppress opponents.”

The Oregonian editorial board said “keep proving Trump wrong.”

“Portlanders love a good social media throwdown and President Donald Trump’s characterizations of Portland as ‘war ravaged’ invited the onslaught… With their lighthearted humor, Portlanders are displaying the quirk and creativity so deeply ingrained in the city’s culture, while showing just how unfounded Trump’s claims are,” the board wrote. “Amid the uncertainty, Portlanders must pause and recognize how much is at stake as the country heads toward the midterm elections when voters will decide whether America is on the right path.

“This is not just about protesting inhumane immigration enforcement or defending Oregon from federal overreach. Trump’s military ploy to suppress one block of protests is yet another page from his playbook of bulldozing rights and norms while insisting such action is justified. Portland’s response must help show the rest of the country how wrong he is,” the board said. “The mayor and City Council must reinforce Portland Police’s authority to step up their presence at protests and quickly intervene if any criminal behavior occurs. They must understand that protecting public safety is not the same as supporting immigration enforcement.”

In The Chicago Tribune, David White argued “Chicago is right to resist [Trump’s] tactics.”

“President Donald Trump told generals this week that cities such as Chicago are ‘under invasion from within’ and must be crushed with force, serving as a training ground for American troops… History and science warn: When federal police use force to suppress dissent, larger and more violent protests follow,” White wrote. “Consider two philosophies of policing. Escalated force means aggressive tactics — tear gas, rubber bullets, baton charges, mass arrests, militarized gear — meant to break up crowds and crush dissent. Negotiated management, by contrast, treats protests as political expression, protected by the First Amendment.”

“Yet Chicago has periodically returned to the hard-knuckles approach, often with more harm than good. The George Floyd protests in 2020 showed the same pattern nationwide: Escalated force was followed by greater unrest, while negotiated management saw fewer confrontations,” White said. “The role of law enforcement is clear: to serve and protect, not enable federal escalation. That means rejecting militarized policing and standing between Chicagoans and outside forces who would inflame unrest.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

· Trying to cover this moment fairly and without hysterics is very difficult, and none of our political leaders are helping.

· These troop deployments and immigration raids are increasingly dangerous and not worth the cost.

· Federal law enforcement faces real threats, but we still don't want presidents to have this kind of power.

When President Trump deployed troops into the nation’s capital to police crime, I said it was clearly a “trial run for other cities.”

Trump made no secret of it, and now that prediction has self-evidently come true.

As with the D.C. deployment, I am vehemently opposed to the president’s use of the National Guard in Chicago and Portland. He is now checking off three of the five boxes I said I’d be watching to determine whether he was pursuing an authoritarian style of governance, a development that is deeply alarming as an American and makes our work at Tangle incredibly difficult. And just as I said a few weeks ago, I set out these five parameters before Trump’s second term ramped up; they were designed as a forward-looking gut check, not as alarmist assumptions about what Trump would do in office.

But fully describing why these deployments concern me requires acknowledging the problems that have compelled so many people to support them. So here’s the best argument I’ve heard for Trump’s actions, starting with Chicago:

Over 10 million unauthorized migrants entered the country under Biden while Democratic leaders told us the border was secure, and many of those migrants went to Chicago. Trump is making good on his deportation pledges that won him the election by sending ICE to the city, which under decades of Democratic leadership has been home to some of the country’s most dangerous neighborhoods. It makes sense to want federal troops there to protect those ICE agents, because Chicago’s leadership won’t support the immigration enforcement effort, its police don’t have a handle on the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and we’ve seen what appear to be organized attacks on ICE agents.

The argument is similar in Portland: The city’s federal facilities, including ICE detention centers, have been the targets of protests and demonstrations. In some cases, those demonstrations have been violent or dangerous. Portland police’s inability to get a handle on the situation has forced Trump to deploy federal troops to protect federal law enforcement and federal buildings.

Basically: He wouldn’t be doing this if leaders in Chicago and Portland had control of their cities.

An easy and immediate counterargument is that these deployments are illegal and will be halted by the courts. In fact, that is a likely outcome — though the courts move slowly and Trump moves fast — and it’s impossible to know how many appeals and refilings the cases will require before they’re settled (Trump deployed troops to Portland for 60 days; the deployment could easily end before a binding court order permanently halts it).

Obviously, the president violating the law (or a state’s sovereignty) should be enough to compel people against this move. But it clearly isn’t; very few Republican leaders are objecting to Trump’s deployment, his voters seem invigorated by it, and pro-Trump pundits seem outright supportive of it.

I can understand this posture. An immigration crackdown is politically popular, and fears about crime are high, so a lot of people welcome a president “doing something” — legal arguments aside. While I believe that the legal limitations on Trump’s power are sufficient reason to oppose them, I’m also more compelled by a different argument: These actions cost us too much.

Some costs I accept. For example, I’d be happy to see my tax dollars go toward securing the border and paying for more immigration judges to process asylum claims and bring order to our system. Trump has approved those actions, and I support them. Increased border security with technology and troops is a worthwhile cost for more order to our immigration system. I own property near the border in West Texas, and I accept that increased security in this area means I have to go through checkpoints and submit to questioning by border patrol agents.

I also accept the cost of changing our asylum system. This one is tougher for me because it means we, as a nation, are going to be much stricter toward the downtrodden and desperate who come here seeking a better life. But our asylum system is broken, and it is being abused, and it needs to be reformed for the greater cause of improving our entire immigration system.

These costs are all worth it.

But other costs give me pause. Is it worth normalizing masked agents in America roaming the streets in unmarked cars, snatching up people who look or sound like immigrants? Is it worth abandoning due process and deporting people without hearings? Is it worth treating apartment buildings in Chicago like terrorist hubs in Afghanistan? Is it worth having soldiers rappel from helicopters into their homes? Is it worth detaining American children, dragging them out of their homes naked and afraid?

Perhaps, to some, all of this is worth it if the upside is rounding up illegal-immigrant gang members who are terrorizing communities. But what if these raids are consistently pulling in American citizens, or people here legally and nonviolent criminals? What if, despite all this, the government cuts highlight reels of said raids to share on social media, treating our Constitutional rights like a video game?

Do I want there to be order in Portland? Of course I do. Like many Americans, I watched Portland’s 2020 protests devolve into property damage, looting and arson, and I wondered where the real leaders on the left were who could control their own cities. But Portland gets to decide how to govern itself; it has elections where its citizens get to choose their own future and determine how their city is run and what environment they want to live in.

But is the cost of “fixing Portland” worth accepting a president flouting a court order from a judge he appointed, who explained in great detail why the justification for his troop deployment was unwarranted? Is it worth having a president describe U.S. cities as “training grounds” for our military, and quite obviously reveling in the thought of a military crackdown on citizens he sees as his political enemies?

Something else about this moment worries me, too. As Trump’s actions have become increasingly alarming to me over the last few months, I’ve tried my best to fulfill the promise of “My take” by being both honest (I’m alarmed) and fair (not exaggerating or sensationalizing the situation, or taking any partisan angle). The unfortunate result is that a lot of Tangle readers who support the president have unsubscribed, accused me of having “Trump derangement syndrome,” or believed me to be so biased that I can’t see the genuine threat the left poses — a threat that they say needs to be stomped out.

This is not a new phenomenon, or unique to the right. Just recently, we lost a lot of liberal readers for our coverage of Charlie Kirk. We lost a lot of Democratic voters during the Biden administration for criticizing his policies and for suggesting he was unfit for a second term. What worries me now, though, is that the underlying response to fears about the left seems to be a genuine desire for Trump to gather more power. Top aides to the president are now openly calling for a crackdown on prosecutors and judges and describing legitimate rulings from Trump-appointed judges as a “legal insurrection.”

Both sides increasingly see each other as existential threats that have to be dealt with in an immediate, unyielding fashion. This dichotomy has backed the American citizenry into a corner that feels hard to navigate out of. It’s really not difficult to imagine where all this is going and to see a very, very dark future. Right now we need leaders willing to pump the brakes and step back from the brink — but there don’t seem to be many in sight.

ATTACHMENT FOUR – FROM HERITAGE FOUNDATION

THE BLUE CITY MURDER PROBLEM

The Left’s claim that America has a “red state murder problem” is misleading and deflects from “progressive” soft-on-crime policies that have wreaked havoc.

Recently, some on the Left have tried to advance their arguments by claiming that rising crime rates are due to policies pursued by red states. In response, Heritage released a new report that shows that Democrat policies in Democrat lead cities and counties are actually responsible for rising crime rates in these red states. Cully Stimson, a widely recognized policy expert in crime control, and deputy director of Heritage’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, and an author of this report joins us to explain more.

MIchelle Cordero: From The Heritage Foundation, I'm Michelle Cordero, and this is Heritage Explains. Recently, some on the left have tried to advance their arguments by claiming that rising crime rates are due to policies pursued by red states. Here's former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on CNN.

Hillary Clinton: If you look at real crime statistics, which they're not interested in examining, the states with the highest crime levels are states run by Republicans. That's just a fact.

Cordero: And here's Larry Krasner, district attorney of Philadelphia on a local Fox News Station

Larry Krasner: These states in the United States that have a rate of homicide that is 40% higher are MAGA states. They are Trump states. I'll say it again, the rate of homicide in Trump states as compared to Biden states, take all 50 of them, is 40% higher.

Fox News Host: You know Republicans say the opposite. It's all the blue states.

Larry Krasner: Republicans lie. I mean, let's just get down to it. Republicans lie.

Cordero: One liberal organization called the Third Way, even went so far as to publish a study arguing that Republicans are to blame for the spike in murders across the country. And that study was picked up by dozens of liberal media outlets. But facts are powerful and stubborn things.

>>> The Blue City Murder Problem

Cordero: Heritage recently released a new report, a rebuttal to the Third Way's report that shows that Democrat policies in Democrat led cities and counties are responsible for rising crime rates in these red states. In fact, in the 30 American cities with the highest murder rates, 27 have Democratic mayors.

Cordero: Today we have one of the authors of this report on to explain more. Cully Stimson, a widely recognized policy expert in crime control is the deputy director of Heritage's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. And he'll join us after this short break.

Cordero: Cully, thank you so much for joining us. Okay. We have you here to discuss a new report that you authored with your colleagues here at Heritage. The report actually went viral, which is really cool. The report finds that high crime counties are largely governed by Democrats. Can you first talk to me a little bit about why you decided to write this report? Let's talk a little bit about the myth that started it all.

Cully Stimson: Well again, thanks for having me on Heritage Explains. I love listening to the show.

Cordero: Thank you.

Stimson: And I love being on the show. So there was a report, it was more of a little paper, written this spring by an organization called the Third Way. It was clearly a political hit job, and it was entitled The Red State Murder Problem. And typically I don't read things like that because they just come across as crass and overtly political. But then I saw that the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Politico and a bunch of other organizations-

Cordero: Paul Krugman.

Stimson: Paul Krugman wrote about it recently and I thought, geez, this thing is getting legs. Let me read it. And when I read it struck me exactly as I thought it would. And that is that it really made no sense because nobody talks about a state's murder rate.
You can talk about employment rate at a state because that makes sense. You can talk about other indices of states' strength or weaknesses, whether companies are moving to states or not, whether they have a low tax burden in a state. That makes sense. But crime rates, for anyone who knows anything about crime, crime is geographically and demographically concentrated.

Stimson: Everyone knows that there are bad parts of town where crime is high and decent parts of town where there's not really a lot of crime. And that's what the data shows. And so we read this report for what it really was, a sort of a political attempt at jujitsu, flipping the political narrative to try to say that Trump voters and Trump states have high crime rates.

>>> Rogue Prosecutors

Stimson: Now, anyone who's had a heartbeat knows that the Republicans and traditional independents and sort of the Reagan Democrats believe in law and order and they want crime to be enforced. Right? They want the laws to be enforced.
So I sort of laughed at this at first, honestly. And then we realized we really need to dig into the data and rebut this. And that's how we came up with the Blue City Murder Problem legal memo, because we crunched the data at the granular level where you crunch it. And here's our report.

Cordero: So basically they blamed the right or Republicans for crime as a big picture in a red state when it's leftist policies at the city and county levels that cause the problem to begin with?

Stimson: Right. Yeah. And so when you look at their charts and data, you would think that, oh my gosh, these so-called red states have a high murder rate, and they only focused on murder. But when you drill down and see that the murder rates in those states are driven primarily by the blue cities and counties in those states, and you remove those blue cities, it totally changes the chart.

Stimson: And so what we did is we wanted to see where the cities were with the highest murder rates. We wanted to see who ran those cities. We also wanted to overlay on top of that whether or not there were Soros bought-and-paid-for rogue prosecutors. And lo and behold, we found out what we found out.

Cordero: Okay, so in the report, there are these tables that list the 30 cities with the highest murder rates in the US as of June, 2022. New Orleans is at the top, Baltimore is second, Birmingham is third. Before I go on and on, and I highly recommend that everybody go check out this report, I'll put the link in our show notes. Were you surprised by any of the states on this list?

Stimson: The cities? No, not at all.

Cordero: The cities, yeah.

Stimson: No, I wasn't surprised at all because I've been a prosecutor at the local, state and federal level. So it was my co-author Zack Smith. And Kevin Dayaratna, the PhD statistician, has been looking at this data for a long period of time. And so when you see that New Orleans has a homicide rate of 36.8 per hundred thousand people, that's not surprising. What we hadn't looked at, and this is why this report I think went viral, is that 27 of those 30 cities are run by Democrats. Two are run by Republicans, one is run by an independent. And 14, in other words, half of those cities, have Soros bought-and-paid-for rogue prosecutors.

Stimson: And when you add up the dead bodies in those 14 cities, that's 1,752 homicides or 68% of the dead bodies across those 30 cities. And the blood's on their hands because their policies are pro-criminal, anti-victim and encourage lawlessness.

Cordero: Yeah, that's really the crux of this problem, isn't it?

Stimson: It's a huge driver of this problem, really. First off, the left in this Third Way little paper tries to suggest that the crime wave only started in 2020. That's just not right. Most people don't realize, Michelle, that crime has actually been going down dramatically for almost 25 years, since its peak in 1992. And incarceration rates, which trail crime rates, have been going down dramatically since 2008. But around 2015, not 2020 during Covid, but 2015 crime rates started going up. At the same time, the first rogue prosecutor bought and paid for by George Soros was elected, Kim Foxx in Chicago. And then in every one of those cities where he installs one of his bought-and-paid-for minions, crime rates explode. And so crime rates are already going up in those cities where these rogue prosecutors were well before Covid in 2020.

Cordero: Yeah, that's my last question for you. One of the lefts talking points is that Covid 19 caused or at least contributed to the general rise in crime, and that crime started during the pandemic. Did your report find anything to do with that at all?

Stimson: So the reason that the left's talking points hit home with some people is there's always a grain of truth in it. But that's about it. And here, yes, crime went up after the George Floyd death in cities that had rogue prosecutors, or the toxic trio of defund the police or demoralize the police and rogue prosecutors. But in other cities with a real prosecutor like San Diego, Summer Stephan is the DA in San Diego, crime didn't go up in 2020. It didn't go up in other cities with real prosecutors, people who enforced the law. Crime was increasing in this country, in those cities, starting in 2015 and kept going up. And in 2020 there was even more of a spike, although nothing like the original spike in 2015 and '16.

Cordero: Well, Cully, thank you so much. You had mentioned to me briefly that you guys are digging into this a little bit more. Is there anything before we end the show that you want to share with me that you're finding?

Stimson: Well, yeah, I hope all of the folks listening to this get ready to buy our book, because Zack Smith and I have written a book about rogue prosecutors, how Soros bought- and-paid-for rogue prosecutors are pro-criminal and anti- victim. It comes out in March and we're digging into the average number of crimes, especially murder, rape, robbery, larceny, motor vehicle theft, in the eight cities that we focused on.

Stimson: And we're finding that compared to the average five years before they were elected, crime has exploded in these cities. So for example, in Baltimore where they had Marilyn Mosby, who just lost her primary. Compared to the five year average number of murders before she was elected, there were an additional 832 people slaughtered during her tenure. Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, there was almost a thousand extra people slaughtered over the five year average before he took office.

Cordero: Wow.

Stimson: Kim Fox in Chicago, well over a thousand. By the way, rapes went up dramatically over their five year historical average in many of these cities. Burglaries, larcenies. Car thefts have gone up tens of thousands in these cities. 14,000 some alone in Philadelphia over their five year historical average.

Stimson: So when Larry Krasner says to the media a couple weeks before the election, when asked about whether his policies have contributed to the rising crime, he laughed it of and said, "It's working." It's obviously not working. It's obviously causing death, rape, theft, stores to close, stores to shutter. Wawa, a convenience store chain in Philadelphia is leaving the city. Walgreens, leaving San Francisco. Shops in a lot of these cities are closing and leaving because they can't keep their employees safe.

Cordero: Look at Union Station right down the road.

Stimson: Correct. Starbucks. Starbucks leaving because of employee safety concerns. And so these people are anti-American. These people contribute to the crime rise in these cities, and they're laughing about it because in their mind it is working. They're getting exactly what they want. And it's a dystopian world if we have more of these people in office.

Cordero: Well, Cully, thank you so much for contributing this extremely important data and this report. We'll be keeping an eye out for your book and hopefully you can join us when it comes out.

Stimson: Thank you very much.

Cordero: And that's it for this week's episode. I'm going to put a link to the new report in our show notes. Believe me, you want to check this one out. It's a good one. Please help us spread this message and grow Heritage Explains by sharing our podcast with your friends and on social media. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next week.

Heritage Explains is brought to you by more than half a million members of The Heritage Foundation. It is produced by Michelle Cordero and Tim Doescher with editing by John Popp.

ATTACHMENT FIVE – FROM BBC

TRUMP 'WILL MOVE WORLD CUP GAMES FROM UNSAFE CITIES'

'We won't allow it to go there' - Trump on 'unsafe' World Cup cities

By Tom Mallows 26 September 2025

US President Donald Trump says he will move matches at the 2026 World Cup from any cities he thinks are unsafe.

Eleven US cities are scheduled to host matches at next summer's 48-team tournament, which will be co-hosted by Canada and Mexico.

The US will host 78 of the 104 fixtures, including the final.

World governing body Fifa is in charge of organising the tournament and selecting host cities, and any changes now - or at a later stage - would face logistical challenges.

It is also unclear whether Trump has the authority to make such changes, though he does have a close working relationship with its president Gianni Infantino and is chair of the World Cup taskforce.

"It will be safe for the World Cup," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "If I think it isn't safe, we'll move it into a different city."

The 11 host cities in the US are Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

Trump was asked specifically about matches in the Democratic-run cities of Seattle and San Francisco. Both are due to host six games.

He also mentioned Los Angeles - another Democratic stronghold, which will host the 2028 Olympics and eight matches next year.

Is crime in Washington DC 'out of control', as Trump claims?

Donald Trump has a close working relationship with Fifa president Gianni Infantino

Trump has made tackling crime a central part of his agenda. Last month, he deployed National Guard troops and federal officers into Washington DC, despite figures showing a fall in crime since it spiked in 2023.

He said he planned to send troops into Memphis and Chicago too.

In June, he ordered 2,000 National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to deal with unrest over raids on undocumented migrants.

The draw for the group stage of the World Cup is scheduled for 5 December in Washington DC.

The tournament will run from 11 June to 19 July.

This is not the first time Trump has spoken about the World Cup.

In May, he said the opportunity for Russia to play at the tournament could be an "incentive" to end the war in Ukraine.

That is despite the Russian national football team being banned from international competition by Fifa and Uefa since the country's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and qualification for the World Cup having already started.

In March, he claimed the political and economic tensions between the US and co-hosts Canada and Mexico would be good for the tournament.

That came after he imposed tariffs - taxes charged on goods imported from other countries - on the US' two neighbours.

BBC Sport has contacted Fifa for comment.

ATTACHMENT SIX – FROM AL JAZEERA

TRUMP SUGGESTS FIFA WORLD CUP COULD BE MOVED FROM UNSAFE CITIES

The 2026 edition of the FIFA World Cup is being staged in the United States, Canada and Mexico, with the final in New Jersey.

By News Agencies

Published On 26 Sep 202526 Sep 2025

President Donald Trump would look to move matches for the 2026 FIFA World Cup if he deems any of the United States cities planning to serve as hosts to be unsafe.

Speaking on Thursday about the football event, which will be co-hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, Trump was asked by reporters in the Oval Office specifically about games in Seattle and San Francisco.

“Well, that’s an interesting question … but we’re going to make sure they’re safe,” he said. “[Seattle and San Francisco are] run by radical left lunatics who don’t know what they’re doing.”

Six matches are scheduled to be played at Seattle’s Lumen Field and six are set for Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, about an hour’s drive from San Francisco.

World Cup matters are overseen by FIFA, which determines the game sites and would figure to be in charge of any changes. However, Trump has a close working relationship with FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

Trump cited his policies as helping make the country safer ahead of the World Cup. He sent the National Guard into Washington, DC, last month to deal with what he called a “crime emergency,” and he subsequently said that the move resulted in the city having “no crime”.

He said Thursday, “As you probably know, we’re going into Memphis and we’re going into some other cities. Very soon we’re going into Chicago. It will be safe for the World Cup. If I think it isn’t safe, we’ll move into a different city, absolutely. It’s actually a very fair question.

“If I think it’s not safe, we’re going to move it out of that city. So if any city we think is going to be even a little bit dangerous for the World Cup, or for the [2028] Olympics, you know where they have Olympic overthrow right, but for the World Cup in particular, because they’re playing in so many cities, we won’t allow it. We’ll move it around a little bit. But I hope that’s not going to happen.”

The draw for the World Cup, which will feature 48 teams, is scheduled for December 5 in Washington, DC.

ATTACHMENT SEVEN – FROM REUTERS

FIFA VP SAYS ORGANIZATION DECIDES WORLD CUP CITIES, DESPITE TRUMP'S COMMENTS

By Reuters October 2, 20259:33 PM EDTUpdated October 2, 2025

FIFA's vice president said soccer's global governing body decides whether to move 2026 World Cup matches from host cities, contrary to comments made Sept. 25 by President Donald Trump.

Speaking last week about the event, which will be co-hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, Trump was asked by reporters in the Oval Office specifically about games in Seattle and San Francisco.

"Well, that's an interesting question ... but we're going to make sure they're safe," he said. "(Seattle and San Francisco are) run by radical left lunatics who don't know what they're doing.

"If I think it's not safe, we're going to move it out of that city. So if any city we think is going to be even a little bit dangerous for the World Cup, or for the (2028) Olympics ... but for the World Cup in particular, because they're playing in so many cities, we won't allow it. We'll move it around a little bit. But I hope that's not going to happen."

Six matches are scheduled to be played at Seattle's Lumen Field and six are set for Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., about an hour's drive from San Francisco. Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia and New York/New Jersey (East Rutherford) are also host cities in the United States.

Victor Montagliani, the organization's vice president, said during a conference in London on Wednesday that FIFA determines game sites.

FIFA first established its World Cup host city plan in 2022, with specific games assigned in February 2024, including the final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Making changes would create logistical and legal issues, made potentially more difficult because FIFA tournaments depend on local and national governments for support with matters such as visa processing and security measures.

Gianni Infantino, FIFA's president, has publicly appeared with Trump numerous times as the organization has developed a closer relationship, including establishing an office in Trump Tower in New York.

The final draw for the 2026 World Cup, which will feature 48 teams, is slated for Dec. 5 at Washington's Kennedy Center, over which Trump has taken control as its board chairman.

More “football” refs include...

MSNBC

FIFA official throws cold water on Trump’s World Cup threat

Reuters

FIFA VP says organization decides World Cup cities, despite Trump's comments

The Independent

FIFA says Donald Trump can’t move World Cup matches despite threat to ‘left lunatic’ cities

Times of India

FIFA Shuts Down Trump's 2026 World Cup 'Unsafe Cities' Threat With Bold Remark

Sports Illustrated

‘It’s FIFA’s Tournament’—FIFA VP Responds to President Trump’s Remarks Over Moving 2026 World Cup

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – FROM DAILY BEAST

DESPERATE DONALD TRUMP NOW TRYING TO USE SOCCER TO SETTLE WARS

By Cameron Adams Updated Sep. 29 2025 3:13AM EDT Published Sep. 28 2025 9:54PM EDT

Donald Trump could soon find himself in a surprising position of power.

With a decision looming on a potential ban on Israel taking part in next year’s World Cup due to its war in Gaza, the president may be able to intervene by leaning on his personal relationships.

The European footballing body UEFA is expected to decide whether Israel will be able to qualify for the World Cup this week. It follows countries including the U.K., Canada, France, Portugal and Australia recognizing Palestine and condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza at the United Nations General Assembly last week.

America will host 11 World Cup games next summer, including the final in New Jersey on July 19.

The critical decision needs to be made before Oct. 11, when Israel is scheduled to play Norway in their World Cup qualifier match. Trump’s relationship with FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, is said to be influential, and the pair have met at least a dozen times, according to Politico.

“We will absolutely work to fully stop any effort to attempt to ban Israel’s national soccer team from the World Cup,” a State Department spokesperson told the Daily Beast.

The Turkish Football Federation has already demanded Israel be banned from the World Cup, while 48 athletes have signed a letter that calls for the country’s suspension, the BBC reported last week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has personally contacted senior football figures in an attempt to shut down any potential ban, while Trump is believed to have called Infantino to warn against stopping Israel taking part, according to The Times of London.

Trump’s administration says he is happy to be involved in the decision-making.

“We know soccer is so important to so many countries all around the world,” White House FIFA World Cup Taskforce head Andrew Giuliani told Politico last month. “The president knows that better than anybody, and I think he’s willing to utilize whatever he has to to actually create peace around the world.”

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

Trump called out the actions against Israel at the U.N. last week, stating, “As if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body are seeking to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists, for their atrocities… including October 7."

A move against Israel’s World Cup inclusion on political grounds would not be without precedent. FIFA and UEFA banned Russia from all competitions four days after it invaded Ukraine in 2022.

“Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine,” the two organizations said in a joint statement at the time.

Trump floated the idea in May of allowing Russia to play in next year’s World Cup if they ended the war with Ukraine.

“Hey, that could be a good incentive, right?” Trump said, but deflected any decision on their inclusion to Infantino, calling him “the boss” and saying that he personally had “nothing to do” with reinstating them.

Trump hosted Infantino at the White House in August, where he handled the gold FIFA World Cup trophy and asked if he could keep it. “Seriously, it fits very well on the wall right over there,” Trump said. “We’ll put it right below the angels.”

(Small) Peanuts Gallery...

· XombiQilla

10 hours ago

is he going to keep the trophy?

release the Epstein files.

· iheartanniebaker

7 hours ago

I want a hat that says Trump Is Never Right About Anything.

ATTACHMENT NINE – FROM LA TIMES

LOS ANGELES VOWED TO HOST THE OLYMPICS WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK AND ENVIRONMENT. CAN IT?

With three years to go, experts agree that the city has set bold goals and faces steep challenges

By Lois Beckett in Los Angeles Mon 29 Sep 2025 07.00 EDT

Hosting the summer Olympics used to be a dream for many global cities, but it is now seen by many as more of a nightmare. There’s the cost of hosting – $10bn and up, in recent years – the displacement of local residents, the environmental toll, and the risk of being left, like Rio de Janeiro or Athens, with major debt and crumbling Olympic stadiums.

In the decade since Los Angeles secured its bid for the summer 2028 games, the city’s leaders have promised they will do it differently, and that Los Angeles is prepared to deliver world-class Olympics and Paralympic games in its “sunny, ideal weather”, all while keeping costs, environmental damage, and community disruption to a minimum.

This would be a challenge in any context, but it has grown far more difficult recently. Los Angeles has spent much of 2025 in crisis. The number of Hollywood projects being filmed in the region has dropped dramatically in recent years, leaving the region’s entire economy shaky. Then, in January, historically damaging wildfires made worse by the climate crisis burned down 16,000 homes and other buildings and killed 31 people. In June, federal agents began staging aggressive immigration raids across southern California, leaving many of the region’s millions of Latino residents terrified of sudden arrest. In response to protests over the immigration raids, Donald Trump sent in the national guard and US marines, and he and his officials have engaged in repeated attacks on the leadership of California governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass.

With LA facing so many pressing environmental and political problems, some southern California residents are publicly questioning whether investing massive resources in the summer 2028 Olympics makes sense.

City and state leaders are staying firm: Los Angeles, the home of “many of the greatest storytellers on earth”, of Venice Beach volleyball and palm-tree lined Sunset Boulevard, is ready and willing to host the 2028 summer games.

With less than three years to go, experts agree that the city has set bold goals and faces steep challenges. But it is also doing well in some areas, opening the possibility that the city might break even on hosting the games, offering itself once again as a model for a smooth and budget-friendly Olympic Games.

That is, of course, if Trump doesn’t disrupt the effort.

Break even or break down?

Some recent summer Olympics hosts, including Brazil in 2016 and Greece in 2004, ended the games burdened by debt – and doubts over whether hosting the games was worth the tremendous cost to taxpayers.

Los Angeles, in contrast, is aiming to repeat the success of the city’s 1984 Olympics, which made a profit of $223m and created a new model of financial prudence for Olympic host cities. Pulling that off is crucial: the city is already facing a nearly $1bn budget deficit this year, with more economic woes on the horizon.

While the current budget estimate for the 2028 games has grown to nearly $7.15bn, organizers are aiming to cover that cost with corporate deals, licensing deals, ticket sales, and contributions from the IOC.

If costs go over budget or other sources of revenue fail, Los Angeles and California taxpayers will ultimately be on the hook: the city signed a contract with the IOC agreeing to cover the first $270m in cost overruns, while the state of California will cover the next $270m, and Los Angeles taxpayers will have to fund the remainder.

But organizers of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic committee, a privately funded non-profit, say they are on track to deliver the $2.5bn in corporate sponsorship deals needed to make their plan work.

“We’ve driven significant commercial progress this year by securing 12 new partnerships to date, with more to come, and anticipate closing in on $2 billion in revenue by the end of this year with confidence that momentum will continue to build,” an LA28 spokesperson said in a statement.

Aiding LA in its goal to stay debt-free is its ambition to build as little new infrastructure as possible.

The city made its existing sports and hospitality infrastructure a center of its bid to host a lower-cost games, highlighting its wide range of already-built facilities, from the SoFi stadium, which has hosted the Super Bowl, to Dodger stadium, to the Los Angeles Coliseum at the University of Southern California, which hosted the 1932 Olympic Games. A Universal Studios backlot where Back to the Future was filmed will host squash games; the stunning beaches of San Clemente in Orange county will host surfing.

“The 2028 Games will mark the first time in Olympics history that no new permanent venues will be built to host the Games,” USC announced in a press release touting its participation.

Unlike in Paris, where an “Olympic Village” for athletes was constructed from scratch in a low-income area north of the city, Olympic athletes in LA will be housed at the University of California, Los Angeles, while the global news media covering the games will be housed at the USC. The city’s massive hotel, tourist infrastructure, and theme park infrastructure is already poised to host millions of visitors. Even experts who tend to be Olympics skeptics say those already-built, already-operating facilities put Los Angeles in a much better position than many other host cities.

In fact, the city’s infrastructure puts Los Angeles in a pretty good financial position, said Andrew Zimbalist, an economist who wrote a book on the “economic gamble” of hosting the Olympic games or the World Cup.

“At the end of the day, I think there’s a decent chance that LA is going to break even,” Zimbalist said.

‘A no-car games’ – or at least a ‘transit-first games’

When Bass told interviewers during the 2024 Paris Olympics that Los Angeles was aiming to deliver a “no-car games”, many listeners were shocked (the Guardian even wrote about it). Was Los Angeles, city of bumper-to-bumper traffic that makes driving across town during rush hour impossible, really claiming it would deliver fans to the Olympics using only public transportation?

The answer was “yes” at the beginning: the city’s official bid to host the Olympics described its aim “that 100% of ticketed spectators travel to competition venues by public transport or Games transport systems designed specifically for spectators, such as shuttle bus systems”.

But with the games three years away, the official rhetoric about public transportation is already being watered down. The mayor’s office has since described the Olympics as a “transit-first Games” that will also “promote the use of zero-emissions vehicles”.

“The Games have always been transit-first. Mayor Bass has been taking urgent action to improve public transit in the region, including by securing funding to electrify Metro buses and strengthen critical infrastructure,” a spokesperson for the mayor’s office said in a statement.

One of the recently announced corporate sponsors of LA28 is Uber, which was named the “official ride and on-demand delivery partner”. Another was Archer, an electric air tax company that aims to transport “VIPs, fans, and stakeholders”.

“LA28 is committed to hosting a transit-first Games that prioritizes moving athletes, fans and games personnel effectively and efficiently to trainings and competitions while keeping LA residents moving throughout the region,” a spokesperson said, describing the use of Uber and Archer as “a key part of that plan”.

LA28’s recently released sustainability plan did reiterate one factor designed to radically limit the use of cars at the 2028 games: “No spectator parking will be available at or near most Los Angeles area venues,” it noted.

Meanwhile, the city has made progress with some key new transit developments, including finally extending its metro line to the Los Angeles airport.

“The vast majority of what’s being invested is being invested for the long-term health of transportation in LA,’ said Joshua Schank, the former chief innovation officer for the LA Metro system, and now a transportation consultant.

“Any time you have a major infrastructure undertaking, there’s going to be projects that are behind schedule,” he said. “ I think setting ambitious goals is a good thing.”

Schank said that many transit advocates see the attempt to hold a transit-first Olympics as a huge win for transit advocates – no matter how the attempt plays out.

“This is an opportunity for people to come to LA and experience the city differently than it’s ever been experienced before,” he said.

And, if the Olympics public transit “goes well”, it could build support for public transit in the future, Schank said.

One troubling sticking point is how the city is going to get funding to pay for an estimated 2,700 energy-efficient buses and the workers to drive them, a cornerstone of the current transit plan for the games. (Buses were a key part of the smooth functioning of the 1984 games.) The city is currently hoping the department of transportation will come through with $2bn for the buses, part of an overall $3.2bn federal funding request. The federal government provided support for supplemental bus programs to move spectators at the 1996 and 2002 US Olympic Games, a spokesperson for LA28 noted.

The IOC handed LA the 2028 Olympics. Now Trump is weaponizing them

While Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has offered some hopeful rhetoric in a letter in June, an LA Metro spokesperson told the Guardian it had no new updates to from the department or the administration since then.

“In the short term I don’t doubt [Trump will] put political pressure on for a variety of reasons,” said Daniel Durbin, the director of the Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media & Society at the University of Southern California. “I really do believe, in the end, the federal government will come through with money and support.”

“It’s going to be nerve-racking,” he added. “ I think there will be a lot of political infighting before the money comes.”

Another major concern for local organizers has been LA’s most vulnerable populations. Olympic host cities often prioritize looking prosperous and attractive to international visitors – which can mean trying to cover up or even raze neighborhoods that are struggling. During the 1984 Olympics, the Los Angeles police spoke openly about efforts to “sanitize” the city by hiding homeless people from sight.

“In Rio, they displaced 77,000 people who lived in the favelas,” said Zimbalist, the economist who has written several books about the Olympics. “In Atlanta, in 1996, they displaced tens of thousands of people who were living in the central city where they ended up building the Olympic Village. They tore down two neighborhoods that were minority neighborhoods–Black and brown people living there, and that’s very common.”

“In addition to tearing down neighborhoods and forcing people to be displaced: they build walls, so people traveling to Olympic events don’t see the poverty behind the walls and the television cameras don’t pick up the poverty behind the walls,” he added.

For 2028, Los Angeles has pledged not to displace local residents in order to impress tourists. But activists and community members are worried that the city will not keep that promise, particularly when it comes to harsh treatment of unhoused people.

There’s recent precedent for these fears: During the 2022 Super Bowl, activists accused LA officials of trying to “disappear the poor from the streets” when city employees destroyed a camp near SoFi stadium where unhoused people had been living in advance of the big game.

Los Angeles has also pledged to host a green games – as much as is possible for an event with a massive carbon footprint from spectators’ airplane travel to the city. The Los Angeles 2028 committee has pledged to improve further on the carbon reductions of the 2024 Paris Games, producing an additional 10% reduction in the games’ carbon footprint compared to Paris, according to a sustainability plan released this summer.

The Paralympics are coming to LA. But has the US done enough to guarantee success?

Some environmental activists are hoping the 2028 Olympics can be used as a “point of leverage” to get Los Angeles to act on its most pressing problems – such as the relative lack of tree canopy or other shade in many of the city’s lower-income neighborhoods, which Shade LA, a partnership between UCLA and different public agencies, aims to improve by the Olympics.

How much change that will bring is far from clear. “What’s missing right now is a firm commitment from the city and Olympic organizers – a number, a budget, something we can leverage,” Marcos Trinidad, a senior director of forestry at TreePeople, an advocacy organization, told the Los Angeles Times in August.

Then, of course, there is Trump, whose intense enthusiasm for hosting the Olympics near the end of his second term is matched only by the volatility he brings to the planning process.

From Trump’s sweeping travel ban, to his public, personal battles with Los Angeles officials, to his choice to his administration’s recent attacks on free speech, the president is creating many hurdles to a smoothly functioning event.

“Even if Trump doesn’t do anything directly that would hurt the LA 28 effort, he has created a lot of enmity internationally, and a lot of revulsion,” Zimbalist said. “There are a lot of people who won’t come because they’re politically not willing to support the Trump government by spending money here. We’ve already seen tourism in the US go down appreciably. That’s another big threat.”

But in the end, Durbin, the media expert, argued, Trump will probably do what he can to make the games a success: “I don’t think an individual of his type and his position is going to want to have his legacy tarnished by an absolutely abysmal Olympics.”

ATTACHMENT TEN – FROM THE FINANCIAL TIMES

WHAT WE’RE HEARING

The US president and officials in his administration have dramatically scaled up their efforts to crack down on leftwing civil society groups and NGOs in recent weeks.

Aside from targeting George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and hedge fund manager, as well as his son Alex Soros, Trump’s moves are having a chilling effect across other charities, reports Joe Miller of the FT’s Washington bureau. The fear is particularly acute within the smaller groups.

“We should all be disturbed that the executive branch has weaponised its power against the charitable non-profit sector,” said Akilah Watkins, president of Independent Sector, which represents a range of non-profits.

“If you are a small community organisation that doesn’t align with the priorities of this administration, you don’t have the high-powered lawyers to defend yourself,” she added.

At yesterday’s White House briefing press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the administration’s campaign was set to continue — and pointed out that many government departments were involved, including the US Treasury and the intelligence agencies.

“We will continue to get to the bottom of who is funding these organisations and this organised anarchy,” Leavitt said.

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – FROM TIME

TRUMP TOUTS MEETING WITH VOUGHT TO DISCUSS CUTS TO ‘DEMOCRAT AGENCIES’ AS SHUTDOWN IMPASSE CONTINUES

By Solcyré Burga Oct 2, 2025 12:28 PM ET

As the government shutdown entered its second day with no end in sight, President Donald Trump hinted that mass federal layoffs could start as soon as Thursday as he touted a meeting with Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and longtime advocate for shrinking the federal government.

The President said in a social media post early Thursday that the meeting would “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies” should be cut. The officials would also discuss “whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

The looming federal job cuts arrive amidst a stalemate between Republicans and Democrats as the latter fights to keep health insurance premiums from spiking in the coming weeks by extending tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” Democrats are also looking to reverse Medicaid cuts Republicans included in legislation passed this summer and hinder the Administration’s ability to withhold or cancel federal funding for foreign aid or public broadcasting.

Last week, the OMB released a memo warning Congress of a “reduction in force” if Democrats rejected Republicans' funding plan. It is unclear which agencies and how many workers would be affected by the federal worker cuts, though Vought told House Republicans Wednesday that federal layoffs were “one to two” days away, according to NBC News. Since Trump’s Inauguration in January, hundreds of thousands of federal workers have left their positions after being laid off or taking offers to resign.

In response to the threat of layoffs, unions representing federal workers are preemptively fighting back. Earlier this week, the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees sued the Trump Administration over the President’s plan to conduct mass firings, arguing that the threats are “contrary to law.”

“The cynical use of federal employees as a pawn in Congressional deliberations should be declared unlawful and enjoined by this Court," the legal complaint, filed on Tuesday, reads.

In the first 24 hours of the shutdown, the Trump Administration announced it was canceling billions in funding to some Democratic-led states. Vought on Wednesday outlined plans to cut $8 billion in energy projects across 16 states, including California, Colorado, Illinois, and New York. “More info to come from [the] Energy [Department],” he wrote on X. All of the states were ones Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election.

The OMB director also announced he was pausing an $18 billion climate-related project in New York City to “ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.”
The President has warned Democrats that layoffs are not the only chip on the table. “There could be firings,” Trump told One America News in an interview set to air Thursday. “And it could also be other things. I mean, we could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut.”

In his post, Trump described Vought as "of PROJECT 2025 Fame," referring to the sweeping policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation, that included proposals to shrink parts of the fedreal government through cuts and deregulation. Vought was among many Trump allies involved in Project 2025's drafting. During last year's campaign, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, but has since adopted many of its proposals in his second term.

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – FROM AL JAZEERA

TRUMP THREATENS TO CUT ‘DEMOCRATIC AGENCIES’ AMID GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

The US presidents meets with the White House budget director as the shutdown continues into a second day, amid impasse.

By News Agencies Published On 2 Oct 20252 Oct 2025

United States President Donald Trump has seized on the government shutdown as an opportunity to reshape the federal workforce and punish detractors, posting on social media his intent to cut what he described as “Democrat agencies”.

On Thursday, Trump used his post on Truth Social to announce he would meet with budget director Russ Vought to talk through “temporary or permanent” spending cuts that could set up a lose-lose dynamic for Democratic lawmakers.

· A history of US government shutdowns: Every closure and how long it lasted

· US government shutdown continues, as Trump cuts funds for Democratic states

· Fact check: US 2025 government shutdown talking points

He wrote that he and Vought would determine “which of the many Democrat Agencies” would be cut — continuing their efforts to slash federal spending by threatening mass firings of workers and suggesting “irreversible” cuts to Democratic priorities.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump said. “They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The post was notable in its explicit embrace of Project 2025, a controversial policy blueprint drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation that Trump distanced himself from during his 2024 re-election campaign.

The effort aimed to reshape the federal government around right-wing policies, and Democrats repeatedly pointed to its goals to warn of the consequences of a second Trump administration.

Trump later repeated his threats against Democratic priorities in an interview with the One America News (OAN) Network, a right-wing channel.

“There could be firings, and that’s their fault,” Trump said of Democrats in Congress.

Vought on Wednesday had offered an opening salvo of the pressure he hoped to put on Democrats. He announced he was withholding $18bn for the Hudson River rail tunnel and Second Avenue subway line in New York City, which have been championed by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his House counterpart Hakeem Jeffries, in their home state.

Vought is also cancelling $8bn in green energy projects in states with Democratic senators.

Meanwhile, the White House is preparing for mass firings of federal workers, rather than simply furloughing it as is the usual practice during a shutdown. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week that layoffs were “imminent”.

“If they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government,” Leavitt said on Thursday of Democrats.

Trump’s announcement on his Truth Social website came with the government entering the second day of a stoppage that is expected to see 750,000 employees being sent home without pay across a wide range of agencies.

Leavitt told reporters on Thursday the job cuts were likely going to number “in the thousands”.

Schumer and Jeffries, meanwhile, have dismissed the job cuts threat as an attempt at intimidation and said the mass firings would not stand up in court.

“These are all things that the Trump administration has been doing since January 20th,” said Jeffries, referring to the president’s first day in office. “The cruelty is the point.”

Five additional Democratic votes would be needed to reach the 60-vote threshold in the 100-member Senate to greenlight a bill the House passed in September.

With Democrats expected to block the Republican reopening plan again, Republicans were reportedly mulling sending their senators home after the vote — effectively guaranteeing the shutdown drags into next week.

But House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose members have been off all week, told reporters that Senate leaders need to stick to an initial plan to work through the weekend in Washington.

“And the House is coming back next week, hoping that they will be sending us something to work on, that we can get back to work and do the people’s business,” Johnson told a news conference at the US Capitol.

He blamed Democrats and said “they have effectively turned off the legislative branch” and “handed it over to the president”.

For now, Democrats are holding fast to their demands to preserve healthcare funding and refusing to back a bill that fails to do so, warning of price spikes for millions of Americans nationwide.

The economic effects could spill over into the broader economy. Past shutdowns saw “reduced aggregate demand in the private sector for goods and services, pushing down GDP”, the CBO said.

“Stalled federal spending on goods and services led to a loss of private-sector income that further reduced demand for other goods and services in the economy,” it said.

Overall CBO said there was a “dampening of economic output”, but that reversed once people returned to work.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also told CNBC on Thursday that the shutdown could hurt US economic growth.

“This isn’t the way to have a discussion, shutting down the government and lowering the GDP,” he said.

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – FROM POLITICO

TRUMP TURNS SHUTDOWN INTO WEAPON AGAINST BLUE AMERICA

The president's detractors say he’s following his scorched-earth playbook by cutting projects in liberal states.

By Melanie Mason and Nick Reisman 10/03/2025 05:00 AM EDT

LOS ANGELES —The government shutdown is opening a new front in Donald Trump’s scorched-earth approach to power, with the president weaponizing the impasse to punish heavily-Democratic cities and states.

Trump appeared jubilant Thursday at the “unprecedented opportunity” to slash “Democrat Agencies.” His administration cut $8 billion in green energy projects — all in states that voted for his 2024 rival, Kamala Harris. Major infrastructure projects in New York — not only his estranged home state but also that of Democrats’ top legislative leaders — have been put on ice.

It may be a bare-knuckle negotiation tactic to pressure recalcitrant Democrats to drop their demands to restore health care funding. But his detractors see the shutdown as just the latest stop on Trump’s vengeance tour — which to an unprecedented degree has used the levers of government to torment the people, places and institutions that Trump sees as adversaries.

“The continuing through line is the president is going to use every means in his power to silence and intimidate his critics,” said Sen. Adam Schiff, a frequent target of Trump’s ire who denounced the White House’s clean energy freeze as punishing “political enemies” — a list that has swelled to include late night comics, universities, the former FBI director, the current New York attorney general, major Democratic donors, blue-tinted states and, of course, himself.

“This is an effort to intimidate the whole of society,” Schiff said in an interview.

Trump supporters say the president is not the first to leverage the government against political opponents, pointing to the myriad state and federal investigations he has faced in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats.

A senior Trump administration official confirmed the infrastructure funding freezes were a direct response to the shutdown. The White House did not respond to an inquiry about Trump’s motives.

Democrats were already queasy at the prospect of Trump capitalizing on a government shutdown. Explaining his opposition to a shutdown in March, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, said a funding stalemate would enable Trump and then-ally Elon Musk to supercharge their effort to slash government bureaucracy.

This time, Schumer and his House counterpart Hakeem Jeffries have united behind a strategy of withholding support to keep the government open unless the GOP agrees to extend some health care subsidies. But for some Democrats, the concern still lingers.

A shutdown “would be the ideal outcome for Project 2025,” Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman told reporters, pointing to the sprawling conservative policy blueprint which takes aim at the heart of Democrats’ decades-long policy gains.

So far, the most eye-catching shutdown moves are aimed at states that voted against Trump in the last election — especially the twin bulwarks of blue America, New York and California.

Just hours after the shutdown took effect, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced that money for two New York infrastructure projects – the Hudson tunnel and the Second Avenue subway — was put on hold “based on unconstitutional DEI principles.”

The announcement was swiftly rebuked by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul as “political payback.” It also got an unenthused reception from Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who represents a swing House seat.

It’s a familiar position for the state and some of its prominent residents, whom Trump has repeatedly singled out.

“New York is his home. It’s where he started his businesses, and I think it particularly irks him that he doesn’t do well politically in New York,” said Rep. George Latimer, a first-term Democrat from Westchester County.

Trump has publicly urged U.S. attorneys to prosecute state Attorney General Letitia James amid mortgage fraud allegations that she’s denied. James’ civil fraud case against Trump led to a Manhattan trial judge finding last year that the president and other defendants inflated his net worth and the value of his real estate properties. Trump was ordered to pay a massive financial penalty in that case that with interest has reached more than $500 million. He is appealing the verdict.

The president has also tried to put his thumb on the scale in the race for New York City mayor. His Department of Justice moved to dismiss corruption charges against incumbent Eric Adams this year. Trump allies also discussed a possible administration post for the mayor in an effort to aid ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and complicate the path to victory for democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. And the president has floated the possibility of withholding federal funds if Mamdani, the frontrunner, prevails in the race next month.

“For Donald Trump the purpose of government isn’t to serve the public, it’s to attack his opponents,” said Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres. “Blue states like New York are front and center. Donald Trump has dethroned Richard Nixon as the most vindictive president in history.”

One New Yorker who has been able to stitch together a semblance of a working relationship with Trump is Hochul. The Democratic governor has met with him twice to discuss a controversial Manhattan toll program that he vowed last year to end by rescinding federal approval. So far, the president has kept the toll in place, but has pressed state officials to approve gas pipeline projects environmental advocates oppose.

Yet Hochul has also countered the administration. On Wednesday she won a temporary court order blocking the federal government from slashing nearly $34 million in Department of Homeland Security antiterrorism funds to New York City subways.

“I have no doubt he’s going to do more of this,” Latimer said. “We have a president who is hostile to our state and our politics. We’re going to have to do our best to get to the other side of it. But the president has a lot of power and he’s choosing to use it that way.”

On the West Coast, California is used to being in Trump’s crosshairs, dating back to his first term when he baselessly insisted the state was the site of mass voter fraud.

“Trump clearly has it in for California. We’re the opposite of his vision of America,” said Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla, the state’s senior senator.

Trump’s second go-round in the White House has brought a steady drumbeat of pressure bearing down on California. He has gutted the state’s climate standards, used Los Angeles as a marquee testing ground for his immigration crackdown and domestic deployment of the military and has demanded University of California Los Angeles pay more than $1 billion to restore federal research funding.

California’s ruling Democrats have seen these policy moves as hostile acts. But others see a distinction between Trump’s salvos at the state government and how he views Californians as a whole.

“We’ve actually been able to work with the administration to deliver very positive things for the people of California, and that often means doing what we can to rein in the government of California,” said Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, citing his legislation that revoked California’s ability to ban gas-powered cars. “That’s a very clear example of how the administration worked with me to benefit the people of California and stop our state government from harming them.”

California is also the geographic heart of Trump’s de facto enemies list, the largest concentration of individuals and companies that have found themselves at the receiving end of a furious presidential Truth Social post.

At the top is its governor, Gavin Newsom, who has eagerly stepped into the role of chief Trump antagonist with his trollish social media presence and Trump rage-bait merch. Newsom even took a page out of the president’s playbook Thursday by threatening state funding to any university that signed a novel compact floated by the administration to entice schools to adopt the president’s educational priorities.

“CALIFORNIA WILL NOT BANKROLL SCHOOLS THAT SELL OUT THEIR STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, RESEARCHERS, AND SURRENDER ACADEMIC FREEDOM,” Newsom wrote on X, mimicking Trump’s signature social media style.

Others called out by Trump have been more circumspect. Last month, Trump singled out LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, a prolific Democratic donor and one of Silicon Valley’s fiercest Trump critics, as a potential target for the Justice Department to investigate. He had just finished signing a presidential memorandum to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence,” telling reporters he wanted to crack down on backers of the “left-wing” groups he believed were behind such acts.

“I hear names of some pretty rich people that are radical left people,” Trump said. “Maybe I hear about a guy named Reid Hoffman, somebody’s a pretty rich guy, I guess.” Hoffman did not immediately comment on the remarks.

Also mentioned was George Soros, the billionaire investor who has been a fixation among conservatives for his lavish giving to progressive causes. The long-running scrutiny did not appear to deter Soros’ group, now run by his son Alex, from donating $10 million in support of Newsom’s ballot measure to redraw California’s congressional maps, which the governor has framed as a salvo against the Trump presidency.

Hoffman, meanwhile, has not reported any donations to federal campaigns or within California this year, after going all in on Harris and spending millions of dollars to oppose Trump.

Harris has also experienced retribution after her bitterly-fought campaign against Trump. In August, Trump ended Secret Service protection for the former vice president, cutting short the extended protection that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had put into place. The California Highway Patrol has since been providing protection for Harris as she criss-crosses the nation on her book tour.

Now, the federal government shutdown is reverberating through California, most significantly by imperiling a massive hydrogen hub that aims to replace fossil fuels — a decision Padilla denounced as “vindictive.” (The impacts of this and other energy cuts may ripple into dozens of GOP districts across the country.)

“By and large, during a shutdown, a president seeks to minimize the pain on the American public. That’s not the case this time,” Padilla said. “Donald Trump, Russell Vought and Stephen Miller and everybody around him are very intentional about exploiting the shutdown to make it more painful for people and constituencies that they deem the enemy. That’s absolutely un-American.”

ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – FROM USA TODAY

TRUMP WANTS TO ‘END’ LARGEST US INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT, A TUNNEL BETWEEN NY AND NJ

The $16 billion project has gained bipartisan support in New Jersey and New York amid a closely watched governor's race.

NEW YORK − The nation’s largest infrastructure project has drawn President Donald Trump’s ire in his latest fight with congressional Democrats.

Trump has vowed to end the Gateway tunnel project meant to expand train service between New York and New Jersey along the nation’s busiest rail corridor.

“I'm cutting the project,” Trump told FOX News. The full interview is set to air on FOX News Channel’s "Sunday Morning Futures" on Oct. 19.

"The project is going to be dead," he said. "It is pretty much dead right now."

On the Senate floor on Oct. 16, Schumer said the funding cut is "petty revenge politics."

"Gateway is the most important infrastructure project in America, period," he said. "It will keep our economy moving, our region connected, and tens of thousands of union workers on the job."

The project, set to build nine miles of new passenger rail track with a two-tube tunnel, is set to be completed by 2035. The old rail tunnel is expected to be fixed and back in service by 2038. The project has been billed as bringing tens of thousands of jobs, tens of billions of dollars in economic activity and increasing transit ridership with four tracks instead of the current two.

U.S. President Donald Trump, with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, gestures as he speaks during a press conference, as a painting of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan sits in the background, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 15, 2025.

Stephen Sigmund, a spokesperson for the Gateway Development Commission, the public authority tasked with the project, declined to comment.

The White House, Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Transportation didn't immediately respond to email requests for comment.

A central component of the largest regional economy

Each day, hundreds of thousands of people ride Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains crossing under the Hudson to and from Manhattan. The two existing century-old rail tunnels were damaged during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. If one track's tunnel were to fail, the nonprofit Regional Planning Association estimated it could cost $16 billion over four years, or about 33,000 jobs each year.

Although Trump has campaigned on increased infrastructure spending − including specifically for mass transit in New York City − those promises have never been fulfilled. The self-described "builder president" tried to kill Gateway in his first term as well. The Trump administration in 2017 said the deal to fund the new tunnel between New York, New Jersey and the federal government was nonexistent, Crain's New York Business reported.

While the project has faced threats to its funding for years, the Trump administration set its sights on the Hudson on the first day of the government shutdown.

On Oct. 1, the Transportation Department officials withheld grants to the Gateway project and the Second Avenue Subway construction, in Manhattan, citing New York City’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, an equity initiative meant to expand participation in federally assisted contracts.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill on Oct. 7, 2025, following the Democratic leaders' weekly policy lunch as the government shutdown continues.

Grant disbursements for Gateway have been on hold since then, Sigmund said in an email. The commission is working with federal partners to comply with federal laws and regulations.

Mike Hellstrom, vice president and eastern regional manager of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, said the funding cut likely means delays for a multigenerational project, which means extra costs and potential job losses.

The project already has five active construction sites in New York, New Jersey and in the Hudson, he said. Shafts and portal entrances are being built ahead of boring machines expected to arrive around January.

"There's a lot on the line for us as working people," Hellstrom said. "There's also a lot on the line for the rail riders."

New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli poses with Artist Victor Victori in front of Victori's painting of Donald Trump as he participates in a campaign event at the artist's home on October 27, 2021 in Rutherford, New Jersey. Ciattarelli, who is running against Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy, has promised to reduce taxes and a streamline the state budget if elected.

In an Oct. 15 MSNBC interview, Gov. Kathy Hochul called Trump's threats on the new tunnel "shortsighted."

"We need to replace them because if this system of transportation collapses, the Northeastern economy and the economy of the country collapses," she said.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is overseeing the Manhattan subway expansion, said funding for its tunnel-boring contract has already been approved.

Across the Hudson, the billion-dollar Gateway project has also become key in the closely watched New Jersey governor’s race between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

Ciattarelli, a businessman and former state assembly member, has received Trump’s endorsement. But that didn’t stop him from vowing to fight for Gateway.

With years fighting for the project, and political consensus now around it, Trump's actions wouldn't kill the project but would delay it, Alon Levy, a public transportation research scholar at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.

"Cancelation will not actually save money," Levy said.

ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN – FROM TIME

Trump Orders National Guard to Oregon and Chicago. Here Are the Other Places Where Soldiers Are Being Deployed

By Rebecca Schneid Oct 5, 2025 1:03 PM ET

The Trump Administration tried to deploy 300 federalized members of the California National Guard to Oregon, on Sunday, a day after being blocked by a federal judge from federalizing Oregon's own National Guard, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

Gov. Newsom called the move a “breathtaking abuse of power” and said his state would sue.

"This isn’t about public safety, it’s about power. The commander in chief is using the U.S. military as a political weapon against American citizens. We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the president of the United States,” Newsom said.

President Donald Trump also authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago on Saturday, as the city roils from a series of sweeping immigration raids that have caused anger and pushback from local leaders.

The actions demonstrate Trump's increasing willingness to use the U.S. military for domestic political purposes in his second term. In recent months, he has deployed troops to cities across the country, raising concerns about the stifling of dissent against his unpopular government.

In a speech to top generals last week, Trump called for the U.S. military to use American cities as “training grounds,” describing a fight against “a war from within.”

The deployments also come as the Trump Administration is launching a widespread crackdown on what it describes as “left-wing terrorism” in the wake of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That has involved declaring Antifa a terrorist organization and directing federal agencies to investigate and disrupt liberal philanthropic organizations.

Here are the places where Trump has deployed or is trying to deploy troops across the United States.

Chicago

Chicago has faced weeks of threats from Trump over the deployment of troops to the city, which he has characterized as a “hellhole”. Trump drew outrage when he threatened Chicago with the newly renamed Department of War, a statement he eventually walked back.

That, in turn, has prompted an increase in protests and turned the city into a flashpoint in the nationwide immigration crackdown.

Trump’s threats and the increased raids drew backlash from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Johnson has accused Trump of “authoritarianism,” and he and Pritzker have continuously said that Chicago does not want the military on their streets.

Both Johnson and Pritzker have attempted to prepare for a potential National Guard deployment in several ways, including a city measure that directs the city’s police force not to cooperate with federal agents in a potential crackdown on crime and immigration, and Pritzker's promise to “absolutely” sue the federal government over the issue.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said on Saturday that the president had authorized the deployment of 300 Illinois National Guard members to Chicago, citing what she called "ongoing violent riots and lawlessness."

On Saturday, Pritzker said that after pushing back against the use of National Guard in his state, the White House issued him an ultimatum: “call up your troops, or we will.”

“It is absolutely outrageous and un-American to demand a Governor send military troops within our own borders and against our will,” Pritzker said on X in his thread announcing the 300 troops set to descend upon Chicago. “I want to be clear: there is no need for military troops on the ground in the State of Illinois,” he continued later in the thread.

Portland

The Trump Administration activated 200 National Guard soldiers in Portland on Friday as it waited for a court to rule on a lawsuit brought by the city and state.

On Saturday, District Judge Karin Immergut granted a temporary restraining order blocking the deployment, stating that Trump’s deployment was done so “absent constitutional authority,” and that current protests in the city against immigration enforcement “did not pose a ‘danger of a rebellion.’”

This news comes a week after Trump announced that he directed his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send troops to “War ravaged Portland” in response to immigration enforcement protests, and that troops would protect “ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa,” and that he authorized “full force, if necessary,” in the Oregon city.

Immergut, a Trump appointee, said that skirmishes between protestors and ICE facilities are “nowhere near” the levels that could not be handled by local law enforcement, and that the Trump Administration’s arguments “risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.”

“President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement — we expect to be vindicated by a higher court,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told TIME in an emailed statement.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday that the 200 National Guard members sent to Oregon were “in place,” although the temporary restraining order is now set to last 14 days. The state plans to file an extension.

“There is no insurrection in Portland. No threat to national security. No fires, no bombs, no fatalities due to civil unrest,” Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said in a statement after the ruling came down Saturday. “The only threat we face is to our democracy – and it is being led by President Donald Trump.”

When his effort to federalize Oregon's National Guard was blocked, Trump sent 300 California National Guard troops instead. That move, too, was blocked by a judge in a last-minute ruling.

Memphis

While Trump’s effect in Chicago and Portland is yet to be seen, Trump’s crackdown on Memphis, Tennessee, is already underway, after the President signed a memorandum two weeks ago directing agents from multiple agencies, as well as the National Guard, to address what he says are “tremendous levels of violent crime” in the city.

Thirteen federal agencies comprise the new "Memphis Safe Task Force," which U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi says is already making arrests.

Unlike the Governors of Oregon and Illinois, though, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has welcomed Trump’s militarization in Memphis, and says that the operation will occur over the “next weeks and months.”

“Memphis is a world-class city with a historic opportunity to address its crime challenge,” Lee said on his social media, adding that he will be working “side-by-side” at the local and federal level.

Other local leaders in Memphis, though, have pointed out that the Memphis Police Department (MPD) reported in September that overall crime was at a 25-year low in 2025. In 2023, though, the city hit record highs with more than 390 homicides.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young has said he is “certainly not happy” with Trump’s National Guard deployment.

Washington, D.C.

Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to D.C. and his federalization of D.C. police in August was the first of several more attempts to come.

President Trump declared a 30-day takeover of Washington, D.C.’s police force via a state of emergency declaration. Although the 30 days expired in mid-September, the federal crackdown on the city is not yet over.

The city pushed back against Trump’s federalization, specifically Bondi’s move to tap the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to be D.C.'s "emergency police commissioner," a move that was considered illegal and eventually allowed MPD chief Pamela Smith to remain in charge of the police force.

Prior to the expiration, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered city officials to continue coordinating with federal law enforcement, but notably, this order did not include cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the city. (According to The Associated Press, more than 40 percent of arrests during Trump’s crackdown—a crackdown that was posed to be about crime—were related to immigration.)

Trump threatened to federalize the police once again if Bowser and D.C. leadership did not cooperate with immigration enforcement.

“If I allowed this to happen, CRIME would come roaring back,” Trump says, though D.C.’s violent crime rates were already at all-time lows in 2025 prior to Trump’s federal takeover of the Capitol.

Despite the expiration, troops—many of whom are stationed at parks and tourist spots—are set to remain in D.C. until later this year.

Trump has claimed victory over crime in the city, though, stating that “We have a very safe city now.”

He continued, “The country is going to be safe. We do it one at a time.”

ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN – FROM GUK

MY TRAVELS THROUGH CHICAGO: TEARGAS, RESISTANCE AND TRUMP’S BIG IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN

Donald Trump recently launched ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ in the city and threatened to send in the National Guard. The mood is febrile, with fears things could get worse

By Oliver Laughland Fri 3 Oct 2025 00.00 EDT

At 5am on a warm September morning a small crowd of protesters assembles in the dark. They are gathering outside the Broadview immigration processing centre, a two-storey brick structure in the Chicago suburbs that has the ambience of a US outpost in a foreign war. Windows are boarded with plywood. Fences are lined with razor wire and black cloth. Masked Ice agents appear sporadically, dressed in military fatigues – tactical helmets, flak jackets and rifles.

The protesters begin to heckle each time an agent turns up for work or leaves through a chainlink gate. “Quit your job!” they chant. “Take off your mask!”

The centre is a focal point in the resistance to Donald Trump’s recent immigration crackdown in the city, portentously dubbed Operation Midway Blitz. It is here, following arrest, that hundreds of people targeted for deportation are brought to languish in squalid conditions before being sent to detention centres around the country.

I expect to see civil disobedience. But the first people I meet are 22-year-old Milagros Pelayo and her sister, Yessenia Garcia, who is 16. They have been here at sunrise for the past five days, searching for information about their father, Rosalio, a janitor who was arrested by immigration officers at his home a week earlier. He is currently detained inside. “They won’t let us talk to him,” Pelayo tells me. “They won’t give us any information.”

Still bleary-eyed, the siblings stand by the doorway waiting for answers – or an opportunity to say goodbye to their dad. “I thought America was the land of opportunity,” says Garcia. “But it doesn’t make any sense now.”

Suddenly, things begin to unravel. About a dozen protesters start blocking government vehicles from entering and exiting the buildings. Masked agents appear from behind the fence and snatch people from the street. One young man is body-slammed and dragged inside the centre.

As the sun rises, more people arrive. A dispersal order is played on repeat and immigration agents appear on the roof, looking out over a crowd of around 100 people. Two SUVs attempt to leave the building and protesters push back. The agents fire pepper ball irritants from above and teargas canisters are launched into the group. A small phalanx of officers appear, as if dressed for combat. A thick plume of gas envelopes the street. It is a remarkable and disproportionate escalation; a telling image of where the country is right now.

I find Pelayo and Garcia in the aftermath. Both squint into the sun, their eyes still watering. A first experience of teargas while still in high school, for Garcia. “It was a burning sensation,” says Pelayo. “But we’re still here. We’re still fighting.”

Chicago is among the handful of Democratic strongholds where Donald Trump has pledged to deploy the military amid false claims of rising crime. A mere mention of the city on rightwing cable news has long elicited a line of predictable tropes, branding it a failed liberal city ravaged by violence, corruption and economic decline. But it is also a window into the splitscreen of American life at this early inflection point in Trump’s second term – amid an assault on free speech and an alarming rise in political violence in the wake of the murder of rightwing youth organiser Charlie Kirk.

The 31-year-old, who was shot dead on a college campus in Utah in September, grew up about 20 miles away from Broadview, in a separate Chicago suburb. He founded Turning Point USA, his hard-right campus political group, at a small office a short distance from here. “One of the last things he [Kirk] said to me was: ‘Please, sir. Save Chicago,’” Trump said during a eulogy at the organiser’s memorial later in September. “We’re going to go into Chicago and we’re going to have Charlie very much in mind.”

The troops may not be here yet, but to many in the immigrant community a federal government occupation has already begun.

With the residue of teargas still on my shirt, I drive out to the village of Lemont, to the small converted garage where Kirk began his political movement. A steady line of mourners have been arriving all day and a sprawling tribute spills on to the pavement. “Fight for freedom or lose it,” says one placard.

It’s a sincere gathering. Many have driven for hours to come and lay flowers. One man tells me he has watched the video of Kirk’s murder a hundred times. I wonder if replaying an act of such horrendous violence on repeat is good for anyone. “We must never look away from the atrocities,” he says. “It just showed me that the division between the people of this country will never be breached.”

Others strike a more conciliatory note. A young woman weeps as she lights a candle. “I think he’s a modern-day martyr,” she says. “And sometimes it takes the darkest dark to bring the greatest good. I truly think he was the vessel for that.” Another young man, who neatly lays a white T-shirt with the word “Freedom” on it (the same design Kirk was wearing when he was shot), worries about the role social media plays in exacerbating polarisation. “The elites have designed this algorithm to basically make us fight,” he says.

The sentiment here, away from the glare of cable news punditry, online polemic and Trump himself, is measured. But closer to Chicago the onslaught is inescapable.

I first meet Kat Abughazaleh at the Broadview protest, sat cross-legged at the entrance to the facility with other protesters. A 26-year-old Democratic candidate for Illinois’s ninth congressional district – and formerly a journalist with a focus on the far right – her approach to electoral politics is at odds with the establishment wing of the Democratic party, with its lurch to the right on immigration policy and perceived capitulation to Trump’s expanding authoritarianism.

“I don’t think our representatives are doing enough to stand up against fascism,” she tells me at the protest. “I feel like Democratic leaders in particular have missed the moment. I think they are working from a playbook that is not in 2025. This is not a dry run.”

Abughazaleh, who is 5ft tall, was shoved later that day by a federal agent and thrown hard to the asphalt. A video of the incident spread quickly online and was picked up by Fox News, whose prime-time host Laura Ingraham ran a segment declaring the officer had done a “good job”. The Department of Homeland Security’s official X account also acknowledged it, posting an absurd accusation that effectively suggests she is “siding with vicious cartels, human traffickers and violent criminals”.

When I visit Abughazaleh at her campaign office the following day, she is nursing bruises but remains resolute, despite the online barrage from some of the world’s most powerful institutions and media organisations.

“Things are going to get worse, and that is why it is more important to have solidarity between elected officials and protesters, between anyone with power or a platform,” she says. “What this administration is trying to do is terrifying. They want to crack down on our basic human rights. They do not want appeasement, they want complete and utter submission.”

“We need to stop underestimating these people, we need to stop assuming that they will follow this social contract that people say exists, because they are following a new one, and it only caters to Donald Trump.”

She points to the documented instances of poor conditions inside the Broadview facility, which is overcrowded, has no showers or cafeteria and where there is extremely limited access to medical care. “Ice has shown us who they are. They will do anything, including throwing a 5ft woman to the ground, but they’ll do a lot worse stuff than that.”

Trump only returned to office eight months ago, but the popularity of his extreme domestic agenda already appears to be waning. Polling published by the New York Times this week indicates more than 60% of Americans believe the president has gone “too far” in pressuring media organisations that cover him unfavourably, while 53% oppose sending the National Guard into major cities.

Cook County, the second most populous county in the US, and home to Chicago, is of course a staunchly Democratic jurisdiction where 70% of residents voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Unsurprisingly, revulsion at Trump’s plans for military deployment and his ongoing immigration raids seem pervasive throughout the city – extending well beyond the frontlines of protest.

In some areas, community groups have created their own informal patrols, where volunteers walk the streets, equipped with whistles and “know your rights” handouts. I join one of them, led by a local jiu-jitsu instructor named Elias Cepeda, in the city’s Pilsen neighbourhood.

We walk along tree-lined streets, and head towards a local middle school in time for pick-up. Chatter fizzes with politics and history. Some people fear a return to 1968, when the city hosted the Democratic National Convention, and seven days of anti-Vietnam war protests saw protracted clashes between police and protesters. Others point even further back, to the fight against fascism in the second world war.

“It’s disgusting what they’re doing,” says one man standing by his stoop, who claims that Ice surveys the area on a daily basis. “They’re violating everybody’s rights.”

Cepeda, who himself was later detained and then released at another Broadview protest as they continue to escalate, fears even these informal neighbourhood patrols could come under suspicion. Last week, Trump signed a sweeping memorandum authorising government-wide investigations into activists and non-profits broadly connected with “domestic terrorism” – he has recently labelled a decentralised, umbrella movement known as “antifa” with this classification. It is a move civil liberty groups say is simply an attempt to “investigate and intimidate his critics”.

“They’re trying to criminalise speech,” says Cepeda. “And they’re trying to criminalise working with and giving resources to undocumented immigrants.”

Like Abughazaleh, he remains undeterred.

On the day of Charlie Kirk’s memorial, which draws tens of thousands of attendees to a stadium in Arizona, I drive about 60 miles out of Chicago, to McHenry county – a Republican-leaning area dotted with cornfields and grain silos. I come to a tavern in the small town of Woodstock, which is airing the event on a large outdoor screen. I had expected, perhaps, a few dozen people. Instead, around 600 arrive.

There are lavish motorbikes, patriotic clothing and extremely loud fireworks, which explode between prayer and song. A giant stars and stripes hangs from a crane, and some raise a single hand in prayer while holding a beer in the other.

A local pastor offers his own invocation to the group. “We know that as one has fallen, millions and millions are rising up. We are truly a giant who has been woken from his sleep,” he says. “Bless this nation because of Christian people who are making a stand, who will not be pushed to the corner. Let us gain courage for the battle ahead.”

As the afternoon wears on, the alcohol continues to flow and there is louder heckling as the speeches beamed in from Arizona become more and more political. “Fuck Obama!” one man shouts.

But a thunderstorm also rolls through; pounding rain and wind leaves me soaked to the bone and a few gazebos blow away. The event empties out before Trump speaks. I listen to his chilling words on the motorway back to the city.

“I hate my opponent,” Trump says – drawing a line between himself and Kirk. “And I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.”

His shortcomings as a leader have perhaps never been so clear. And the consequences are likely to intensify in Chicago and far beyond.

ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN – FROM CAPITALNEWS ILLINOIS

TRUMP FREEZES $2.1B FOR CHICAGO TRANSIT PROJECTS IN LATEST ‘PUNISHMENT’ OF BLUE STATES

Pritzker accuses administration of ‘’holding bipartisan funding hostage’’ to score political points

By Maggie Dougherty October 3, 2025

CHICAGO — The White House on Friday froze $2.1 billion in federal funding for Chicago infrastructure projects in the latest move targeting Democratic cities and states amid the federal government shutdown.

Federal budget director Russ Vought announced on social media that the money has been put on hold “to ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting.” He specified that the pause applied to funds earmarked for Chicago’s Red Line extension and Red and Purple Line modernization projects.

In a follow up statement, the U.S. Department of Transportation said it had sent letters to the Chicago Transit Authority to indicate that the two projects were under review to determine the constitutionality of their contracting requirements.

The Chicago Transit Authority confirmed receipt of the letters, saying it was reviewing them late Friday afternoon. Earlier in the day, the Office of the Secretary of Transportation issued a ruling to remove race and sex as elements for inclusion in small business initiatives intended to level the playing field for disadvantaged groups, particularly women and people of color.

The U.S Department of Transit’s statement referenced the Chicago Transit Authority’s past commitment to meeting disadvantaged business contracting goals, with 21% of spending on the Red-Purple Modernization projects going to 119 firms that qualified under the disadvantaged business criteria as of last November.

“Illinois, like New York, is well known to promote race- and sex-based contracting and other racial preferences as a public policy,” the DOT’s statement said. “The American people don’t care what race or gender construction workers, pipefitters, or electricians are. They just want these massive projects finally built quickly and efficiently.”

Illinois Democrats said freezing the funds will cause delays in a Red Line extension project that was expected to bring economic growth.

“This project will expand transit access to 100,000 people. It will be an economic boost for the city and create tens of thousands of jobs for working families,” Sen. Dick Durbin said on the Senate Floor on Friday.

Democratic leadership also called the move a vindictive abuse of power, with Gov. JB Pritzker accusing President Trump of “holding bipartisan funding hostage.”

The funding pause for Chicago projects followed an announcement Wednesday that the administration would withhold $18 billion in funds previously awarded to New York City for major infrastructure projects. The White House also announced Friday that Trump had directed his team to identify potential cuts to federal aid for Portland, Oregon, another Democratic stronghold.

The Chicago Tribune also reported on Thursday that the federal government froze $583 million in funding to Illinois for energy projects. U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth said in a statement that 33 projects were canceled, with funds withheld from energy giant Exelon, the University of Illinois and Northwestern University among others.

The funding would have gone to grid reliability projects, carbon capture technology and other grid modernization, according to a spreadsheet released by Duckworth.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has had some success in court challenging Trump administration cuts to funding that had been allocated by Congress. Recently, he won two injunctions against the administration for trying to withhold funding based on the state’s immigration policies.

Jerry Nowicki contributed to this story.

Maggie Dougherty is a freelance reporter covering the Chicago area. Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN – FROM USA TODAY

'AGENTS HAVE CREATED A WAR ZONE IN OUR COMMUNITY': TRUMP BLITZ UPENDS LIFE IN CHICAGO

Major events, including the Cubs’ National League Division Series matchup, continue like normal. But across the Chicago area, locals say Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown has upended lives.

By Michael Loria

USA TODAY

How has Operation Midway Blitz impacted Chicago's daily life?

What is the fatal incident involving Mexican man and immigration agents?

How has Operation Midway Blitz impacted Chicago's daily life?

CHICAGO – Ivy-covered walls. Forty thousand people singing in the middle of the seventh inning. The hope of raising a white flag with a symbolic "W."

Gametime at Wrigley Field on Oct. 8, a National League Division Series matchup between the Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers, carried on as if things were normal in Chicago. And the Cubs' hopes for another trip to the World Series stayed alive with a 4-3 victory.

But away from the Friendly Confines, residents say something never seen before is underway.

"Our communities are being terrorized by agents who are kidnapping people," said Corina Pedraza, a longtime South Sider. "People are living in fear of going out to get groceries, dropping their kids off at school. People are strategizing how to get three or five blocks to work."

Since President Donald Trump launched his immigration enforcement crackdown known as Operation Midway Blitz, life in and around Chicago has been upended.

The White House says the crackdown is aimed at catching "the worst of the worst" criminal immigrants. Local officials say it’s a power grab. Residents feeling the brunt of the crackdown say immigration agents are making life untenable.

Scenes from the blitz include a Mexican man fatally shot by immigration agents in the northwest suburbs who said the man drove his car into an officer; federal officials deploying chemical agents on protesters and journalists outside the local immigration enforcement facility; and agents rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters to raid a South Side apartment building in the middle of the night.

Department of Homeland Security officials said on Oct. 8 that they had "arrested more than 1,500 illegal aliens − including criminal pedophiles, murderers, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers" in connection with the blitz. USA TODAY has not been able to independently verify Homeland Security’s arrests.

Most recently, Trump said he would jail Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson for resisting the administration's crime-fighting goals in the city. National Guard troops are now deploying to the area.

Here’s a look at how the blitz is affecting people in the Chicago area, from near the Wisconsin border to Indiana.

South Side parking lot stakeout

In the predawn hours Oct. 7, dozens of Chicagoans gathered near an empty parking lot off a busy thoroughfare on the South Side.

The early hour, they told reporters at the scene, was in response to the schedule they noticed immigration enforcement agents were keeping. They said they hoped to be able to document agents carrying out their duties.

Federal agents arrived at the parking lot in the Back of the Yards neighborhood and set up a staging point for operations. The Yards Plaza lot is off the major thoroughfare of 47th Street near schools and a Home Depot.

Residents say masked men carrying guns take people off the streets in the surrounding area and bring them to the lot to move them into a van to be taken elsewhere.

"We went from being this community that walks our kids to school or goes out to parks. ... . Now the streets are empty," said Pedraza, adding she worries about students in the area witnessing agents at work. "Imagine being a first grader and seeing agents with military weapons, masked men. No child should have to pass through that."

Among the people on hand was local alderwoman Julia Ramirez. The City Council member said she came to fight back for residents she sees as caught in a "war zone."

"People can't live their lives the way they did before," Ramirez said. "Agents have created a war zone in our community."

Many of the people there were members of what’s known as the Southwest Side Rapid Response team, a group of volunteers that aims to document immigration enforcement actions and confirm sightings of immigration agents.

Pedraza, a team member, said neighborhood residents looking to leave the house will give her a call first to see about the latest confirmed immigration agent sightings.

After assembling in the morning, team members were seen standing on corners throughout the neighborhood, notably at sites where immigration agents have been reported before, including the Home Depot.

The Southwest Side team is one of many active throughout the Chicago area. Many regularly broadcast confirmed immigration agent sightings.

DHS officials have criticized those efforts, saying activists tracking federal immigration agents are endangering law enforcement officers who are doing their jobs.

On Oct. 8, the Southwest Side team reported sightings of immigration agents in the area that included the make, model and license plate number of immigration agents’ vehicles.

Across town, on the Northwest Side, another team reported seeing eight immigration agents' vehicles, including a white SUV with a Mexican flag on the hood. Locals believe agents are adding Mexican flags to cars to act as a decoy.

Teams in the suburbs also reported immigration agent sightings on Oct. 8, saying that in Oak Park, Berwyn and Cicero, volunteers "were able to confirm that ICE was active in our communities and abducted at least two of our neighbors."

Rapid-response teams respond to calls to a hotline organized by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Spokesperson Brandon Lee said their role consists of documenting federal law enforcement, not interfering with their work.

Friendly Confines still full of 'joy'

Amid the increasingly aggressive crackdown, many in Chicago are trying to maintain a sense of normalcy and big events help eclipse the national spotlight that comes from immigration agents clashing with residents or Trump calling for the governor’s arrest.

"It’s sometimes hard living your own life knowing all this is happening," said Jeanne Uehling, a Chicagoan of more than 20 years attending the Cubs game Oct. 8. "It’s surreal that at work I have to care about someone turning something in when there are helicopters landing and raiding people."

The downtown office worker spoke with USA TODAY outside Wrigley Field with longtime friend Julie Murphy. They said that they were going to the game despite the president calling Chicago a hellhole.

"We have to still feel joy, and this city has so much joy," said Murphy, who originally moved to the city from the suburbs. "People outside the city, they don’t know what's going on. They think we're being rescued somehow."

The game and crowds teeming up and down Clark Street outside the stadium are just the latest example of the city letting loose to enjoy itself. During a break in the first inning, fans stopped to sing "Y.M.C.A.," a notable Trump anthem that has also been a Wrigley Field staple for years.

Hundreds of swimmers recently competed in races in the city’s river for the first time in nearly a century. The inaugural Chicago River Swim comes after decades spent cleaning the former industrial waterway.

For Sunday, Oct. 12, the city was preparing for its annual marathon, in which more than 53,000 runners were expected to compete. The race showcases the city’s iconic downtown Loop neighborhood.

'Closed due to the situation'

Unpredictable immigration raids and the deployment of National Guard troops have the region on edge.

Lagunas, who was born and raised in the Chicago suburb, spoke at a news conference Oct. 7 held in response to at least seven people being detained by agents in the area the day before.

The crackdown has had a severe impact on life in the area, locals say. Toluca’s and other neighborhood spots had signs posted saying that they were "closed due to the situation" until at least Oct. 9, when a federal judge in Chicago was expected to rule on the question of whether National Guard troops may remain in the area.

ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – FROM NBC
TRUMP SAYS GOV. JB PRITZKER AND CHICAGO MAYOR BRANDON JOHNSON 'SHOULD BE IN JAIL'

The president's Truth Social post comes a day after federalized National Guard troops arrived in Illinois.

By Megan Lebowitz Oct. 8, 2025, 9:14 AM EDT / Updated Oct. 8, 2025, 2:06 PM EDT

President Donald Trump said in a post to Truth Social on Wednesday that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker "should be in jail" in an escalation of his conflict with the two Democratic officials.

"Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!" he said in the post. "Governor Pritzker also!"

The president's post comes a day after Texas National Guard troops arrived in Illinois, despite the Democrats' fierce opposition. Trump has threatened for weeks to send troops to Chicago as part of a crime-fighting and immigration effort, and Democrats have slammed his push as overreach and a political stunt.

Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that "JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson have blood on their hands" and accused them of having "stood idly by while innocent Americans fall victim to violent crime time and time again."

The statement did not address NBC News' questions about what crimes the president believes Johnson and Pritzker and whether the White House planned to try to have federal agents arrest them.

Pritzker responded to the president in a post to X, saying, “I will not back down.”

“Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power,” he said in the post. “What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”

Later, Pritzker told reporters that Trump is "a coward."

"He likes to pretend to be a tough guy," Pritzker said of the president. "Come and get me."

Reached for comment, Johnson said that "this is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he added.

On Monday, Illinois sued in an attempt to prevent the White House from deploying federalized troops to Chicago. A judge scheduled a hearing on the case for Thursday and declined to sign a temporary restraining order, which would have blocked the administration as the case proceeds in court.

The president’s comments come as protests across Immigration and Customs Enforcement have rippled across the country as the administration ramped up efforts to detain and deport migrants.

The White House has previously argued that deploying the National Guard is necessary to "protect federal assets and personnel" and prevent "attacks on law enforcement."

The administration is also trying to send federalized National Guard troops from California to Portland, Oregon, but a judge granted a temporary restraining order this week to block the move as the case is considered in court. A Pentagon spokesperson had said that the troops would have worked to "support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property."

In Chicago, a frequent target of the president, Johnson signed an executive order on Monday in an effort to block immigration agents from using city property during their operations in Chicago.

"We will not tolerate ICE agents violating our residents’ constitutional rights nor will we allow the federal government to disregard our local authority," Johnson said in a press release marking the so-called "ICE Free Zone" executive order.

Pritzker has emerged as a leading critic of the Trump administration as his state faces the president's ire. Trump has compared Chicago to a "war zone," and Pritzker said Sunday in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union" that "they’re just making this up."

"Then what do they do? They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone," Pritzker said on Sunday, appearing to refer to federal agents. "And they, you know, get people on the ground are, frankly, incited to want to do something about it, appropriately."

In recent days, Pritzker also said that he believed that Trump should be removed from office.

“There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked,” he said, referring to a process for removing the president from office.

On Tuesday, Pritzker was asked during an event whether he believed he could be arrested.

"I’m asking any of you to come visit me in the gulag in El Salvador," Pritzker joked, referring to the prison where the Trump administration has deported some immigrants.

House Speaker Mike Johnson did not say whether he believed Mayor Johnson and Pritzker should be jailed when asked by NBC News about Trump's post.

"Should they be in prison? Should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison?" Johnson responded. "I'm not the attorney general. I'm the Speaker of the House, and I'm trying to manage the chaos here. I'm not following the day-to-day on that."

Trump has repeatedly threatened legal action against some of his political opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Last month, he urged Attorney General Pam Bondi in a post to Truth Social to not "delay any longer," slamming his political opponents and writing, "JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!"

Comey was indicted days later and is set to be arraigned on Wednesday.

ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – FROM TIME

NEWSOM LAUDS LEGAL VICTORY OVER TRUMP, BUT DEPLOYMENT BATTLE LOOKS FAR FROM OVER

By Callum Sutherland Oct 6, 2025 7:55 AM ET

California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom is celebrating his latest legal victory over President Donald Trump’s Administration after a federal judge blocked the President from sending any National Guard troops, including ones from California, to police Portland, Oregon.

“We just won in court—again,” Newsom said late Sunday night. “A federal judge blocked Trump’s unlawful attempt to deploy 300 of our National Guard troops to Portland. The court granted our request for a temporary restraining order, halting any federalization, relocation, or deployment of any guard members to Oregon from any state.”

Signing off the note, Newsom—who has a contentious history with the President—vowed: “Trump’s abuse of power won’t stand.”

Newsom accompanied the online statement with an explicit song choice—Dr. Dre’s “F*ck You”—and encouraged readers to have the “sound on.”

Federal judge Karin Immergut put the temporary block on any National Guard deployment just hours after blocking Trump from using Oregon National Guard troops in Portland.

Both California and Oregon had sued to block the move.

“How could bringing in a federalized National Guard from California not be in direct contravention to the temporary restraining order I issued yesterday?” Immergut queried of Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton on Sunday.

“Aren’t defendants simply circumventing my order?... Why is this appropriate?” she questioned.

Immergut's ruling is set to remain in effect until at least Oct. 19, with California and Oregon both moving toward obtaining a longer-term ruling.

The Trump Administration appealed Immergut's initial decision regarding the Oregon troops on Sunday, arguing that the judge had "impermissibly second-guessed the Commander-in-Chief's military judgments."

“The facts haven’t changed: President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement to TIME on Monday morning.

The legal battle over the deployment of troops is gaining steam against the backdrop of the government shutdown, which has entered its second week and has only exacerbated tensions between the Trump Administration and Democrat-run cities.

Prior to the temporary block against the Trump Administration, Illinois’ Gov. JB Pritzker said that Trump was attempting to deploy 400 troops from the Texas National Guard to Portland, as well as his own state which has seen major clashes over the weekend resulting from ICE officials conducting military-style mass raids.

“No officials from the federal government called me directly to discuss or coordinate,” said Pritzker, who earlier argued that Trump is "attempting to manufacture a crisis."

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas responded, saying: “You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let [the] Texas Guard do it.”

Following the ruling, Newsom’s press office sent a mocking reply Abbott’s way.

“Sorry, Champ—the Constitution’s in your way! A respected federal judge just ruled you can’t send your troops to Oregon,” the statement read.

Trump’s focus on Portland intensified over a week ago after he deployed troops to the city, claiming that it was “war-ravaged” and that ICE centers and personnel were under attack. It was the latest move in his targeting of Democratic-run cities, many of which he claims are crime-ridden.

Mayor Keith Wilson has insisted that the city “doesn’t need nor want” federal troops.

“The fight the federal Administration seeks is not in our city, and I call on our national leaders to chart a course that leads to our future, and not to further fear and division,” said Wilson.

The Trump Administration has faced numerous legal battles and blockings since it began its campaign of deploying National Guard troops without the request, or approval, of state leaders.

In September, Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco delivered Newsom a legal triumph over Trump when he ruled that the President broke federal law when he sent thousands of National Guard members and Marines into Los Angeles earlier in the summer during protests related to ICE raids.

After Judge Breyer’s decision, Newsom said that he would continue his legal battle against Trump, who had extended the federalization and deployment of the National Guard in California until Nov. 5, when a statewide general election will take place.

“There was never a need—and there is certainly no need now—for troops to be deployed against their own communities,” said Newsom, arguing that “Trump can't justify keeping the military in Los Angeles… We won't back down.”

Trump’s move to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles marked the first time a President deployed those troops without a request from the state Governor since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent federal troops to Alabama to protect those partaking in a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Trump’s directive in Los Angeles, though, was for the deployed troops to “perform military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary to ensure the protection and safety of federal personnel and property.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY – FROM TIME

INSIDE CHICAGO’S BATTLE WITH TRUMP

By Connor Greene, Editorial Fellow Oct 23, 2025 6:00 AM ET

On a street in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Reverend Ciera Bates-Chamberlain stood in front of a five-story apartment complex praying with other city faith leaders and residents. Windows across the facade of the building were broken. Inside, occupants told Chamberlain, doors had been torn from their hinges and the apartments they belonged to had been ransacked.

“You could tell that something happened that destroyed that building,” Chamberlain, the executive director of Live Free Illinois, which mobilizes Black churches to improve public safety and enact criminal justice reform, recalls to TIME. “Once you walk up, it looks like it's an abandoned building.”

A couple nights earlier, around 1 a.m., federal agents arrived in unmarked trucks and a helicopter to carry out a raid on the building using what Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called “military-style tactics.” As the agents kicked down doors and detained people with zip ties, including children, residents told Chamberlain that they had been left outside past 3 a.m. with their kids, that their apartments had been pillaged, and that guns had been pointed at them by federal law enforcement.

The early October raid marked a flashpoint in President Donald Trump’s targeting of Chicago, which has become a proving ground for his Administration's aggressive crackdown on immigration and the sanctuary cities that have made noncooperation with federal immigration enforcement their official policy. Since early September, a campaign dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” has drastically increased the presence of federal immigration agents in the nation’s third-largest city and brought on a wave of raids and, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), nearly 2,000 detentions. Weeks into the operation, with local officials and residents pushing back against the federal crackdown, Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard troops into the greater Chicago area to quell what White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson described as "ongoing violent riots and lawlessness."

Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have been active in their opposition to what the governor has repeatedly described as a federal “invasion,” challenging the Guard deployment in court and barring city personnel and spaces from being used in the Administration crackdown. Speaking with TIME, Johnson described his office as “beating back tyranny at the federal level” even as he works to govern Chicago in more typical ways.

The escalating struggle in the city is one piece of a larger battle unfolding around the U.S. as the President seeks to carry out mass deportations and deploy troops in American cities. But what happens in Chicago and around Illinois over the next few months—in the streets, in the courts, in the fight for public opinion—could help determine the direction of the country for the remainder of Trump’s second term.

The fight from the inside

Trump has long painted Chicago as a hotbed of crime, calling it “the most dangerous city in the world” last month and accusing Pritzker last week of “letting people be killed in his city because he doesn’t want to deal with Chicago.”

Earlier this month, Trump further escalated his attacks by calling for Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be jailed over their opposition to the federal deployment.

“The fact that President Trump describes people who disagree with him as ‘enemies from within’—it's a real evil precedent that he has created,” Mayor Johnson tells TIME.

Data indicate that Chicago is not the most dangerous city in the world and that crime in the city—like many others in the U.S.—has been declining after rising during the pandemic. “Sending in the National Guard is the wrong solution to a real problem,” Johnson wrote in a New York Times op-ed in early September. “If President Trump had listened to the city’s leaders, he would recognize that Chicago just experienced record-low homicide numbers, making this the safest summer since the 1960s, a result of effective collaboration between communities and law enforcement.”

Prior to the beginning of Trump’s enforcement campaign, with the President threatening to deploy troops in the city, Johnson signed an Executive Order at the end of August that instructed city law enforcement not to cooperate with federal agents or members of the Guard. After the operation began, he signed another to establish ICE-free zones, restricting the areas where federal agents could operate.

Johnson revealed to TIME that his office is currently working on an Executive Order that would prevent the Administration from purchasing property in Chicago to create detention centers, saying that efforts to develop such facilities are ongoing.

“I think it's absolutely abhorrent that we have a president who is looking to create facilities where there's a concentration of only immigrants or black and brown people being detained,” Johnson says of the attempts to build on Chicago land.

When asked about the atmosphere among his staffers over the last couple of months, the mayor says there “is a great deal of energy and strong conviction in my office, people working countless hours, quite frankly, to find creative, innovative and powerful ways in which we can protect the people of the city as we deal with an authoritarian government right now.”

On the state level, Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton says the environment in her office has been “chaotic” since Trump began his second term in January.

Stratton characterized Trump’s crackdown on Chicago as a ploy in his “authoritarian playbook,” saying the Administration’s immigration efforts have not targeted dangerous criminals—despite what Trump and Administration officials have repeatedly said—and arguing that the President has used protests against federal agents as a “justification” for sending in National Guard troops.

“Trump is invading the state of Illinois … and he's done so without our consent,” Stratton says. “People are frightened, but they're also being courageous.”

The lieutenant governor expresses concern that what she called the “manufactured crisis that Donald Trump has really brought to the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois” is pulling government resources away from other issues arising from his presidency.

She references rising costs associated with Trump’s sweeping tariffs and cuts to health care and food assistance in the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

These ongoing issues, Stratton says, have not been forgotten by her office, but its attention has been forced in a different direction.

“I can tell you that we continue to fight back, and we will do so until he takes his hands off our state and leaves,” she says. “Chicago is not a sandbox for Donald Trump to play dictator.”

Johnson similarly points to his office’s ongoing work on other issues amid the federal crackdown.

Last week, the mayor presented his 2026 “Protecting Chicago Budget” to the City Council, in which he proposes new taxes on large corporations and seeks to protect Chicago programs and services from federal cuts.

“It's not just these Executive Orders, because keep in mind, I'm still running an entire city,” he says. “And so my budget ensures that we're investing in youth employment, that we're investing in our first responders, that we're investing in mental and behavioral health, that we're investing in building more affordable homes, ultimately, to keep our people safe.”

The battle in the courts

Chicago and Illinois have been engaged in legal battles with the Trump Administration for most of the year.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who has been serving in his position since 2019, tells TIME that his office has been working tirelessly on a series of “reactionary litigation” to the President’s executive actions since Trump’s second term began.

“This is just a different level of activity this time around, and a sort of different level of emotional intensity as well to the work,” Raoul says about the current Administration.

The state moved quickly to challenge Trump’s efforts to send federal troops into the Chicago area after the President deployed roughly 200 troops from the Texas National Guard and 300 from the Illinois National Guard at the beginning of the month.

So far, the state has succeeded in halting the mobilization. The federalization and deployment of the Guard members has been blocked since October 9th by a temporary order from U.S. District Court Judge April Perry. The Administration appealed the order to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and later asked the Supreme Court to lift it after the appeals court denied the request.

Raoul says he has been able to lean on the “AG community,” especially California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, whose states have also been fighting Trump’s efforts to deploy troops in their cities.

“While not all of the deployments have been identical, and while the facts surrounding them have not been identical either, a lot of the same law is applicable,” Raoul says.

The state contended in its lawsuit that the Guard deployment to the Chicago area “infringes on Illinois’s sovereignty and right to self-governance” and “will only cause more unrest.” The Trump Administration argued that the protests in the area had manifested in hostility and violence against DHS and ICE personnel, necessitating the intervention of Guard troops to maintain civility and order.

Raoul contends that “almost everything that they alleged in terms of facts, were just blatantly false,” which he credited for the state’s securing the temporary restraining order from Perry. He points to the Administration’s claims that protests outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, where many of those detained in the Chicago-area operation have been taken, had gotten so out of hand that they justified sending in federal troops.

Eric Hamilton, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, stated before Perry’s decision that there was “brazen hostility” and “tragic lawlessness” in the Chicago area, listing examples of “agitators” who had thrown rocks, bottles, and fireworks at federal agents, amounting in an “unprecedented” and “blatant disregard for law and order.” The attorney for Illinois countered that the situation on the ground, specifically at Broadview, had been quelled by state police after restrictions on protest hours were instituted.

“DHS’s perception of events are simply unreliable,” Perry said at a hearing.

Looking ahead, Raoul doesn’t see the legal fight ending any time soon. The state’s litigation against the Administration will likely continue even if the federal troops are withdrawn and the immigration crackdown subsides, he says.

“We anticipate a lot of these matters to work their way up to the Supreme Court at some point,” he says. “The country is watching, right? And this is pretty important s–. It's pretty weighty stuff.”

Beyond the courts, Raoul worries that Chicagoans’ growing ire toward the federal presence in the city could affect the way they view the authorities more broadly.

“How do we in the aftermath of this, whenever that is, return to a place of respect for our law enforcement and trust that they're not the same people as the ICE officers that we've been seeing?”

On the ground

Since “Operation Midway Blitz” began in September, the tactics federal immigration agents have used in the campaign have raised alarms from local officials, organizations, and residents.

Veronica Castro, the deputy director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (ICIRR), tells TIME about the ways in which members of the immigrant community she has spoken with have been affected by ICE detentions in and outside of Chicago.

In some cases, she says, construction workers are choosing to sleep at the sites of the unfinished homes where they work, instead of returning to their houses each night, for fear that they will be pulled over and detained while commuting. “That means that they're leaving on Monday and not coming back home until the weekend,” Castro says, which puts strain on families. She says another woman she spoke with, who works as an Uber driver, has been sleeping in her car outside of the city instead of returning to her neighborhood, where she says ICE’s presence has increased.

At the ICE facility in Broadview, Castro says the family of a plumber who was detained by ICE while he was at work told her conditions are “terrible.” The family didn’t know if the plumber would be released from the facility, she recalls, or if he was still there.

Rebecca Glenberg, the chief litigation counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois who has been involved in a lawsuit against the Administration’s crackdown and spoken with a number of protesters, called the Broadview facility “a real locus of the immigration enforcement regime in Chicago” and an “unofficial detention center,” saying food and water are limited and there are no showers.

“It's just not a fit place to be detaining people. And I say all that just to explain why it is that all of these people gathered at Broadview to protest,” Glenberg says.

Incidents between ICE, protesters, clergy, and journalists outside of the facility created the basis for the case against the Administration for alleged violations of First and Fourth Amendment rights, she says, which led to another temporary restraining order blocking federal agencies from using forceful tactics to stop protesters or journalists. Judge Sara L. Ellis issued the order in response to a First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of several news organizations, clergy members and protesters, who alleged federal agents had responded to protests at the Broadview facility with “a pattern of extreme brutality in a concerted and ongoing effort to silence the press and civilians.”

ICIRR, one of multiple organizations that are on the ground in the Chicago area documenting detentions and seeking to protect the immigrant community, has been coordinating a vast rapid response network across Illinois to respond to ICE detentions. The rapid response teams are scattered across the state and made up of local volunteers who document reports of ICE activity after receiving information through the organization’s Family Support Network hotline. In addition to that documentation work, they help provide legal resources to detainees and their families.

The hotline, which was used during Trump’s first term, has seen an exponential increase in the volume of calls this Administration, especially since the crackdown in Illinois began, according to Castro. In January, the month Trump returned to office, she says the hotline experienced a nearly 800% increase in calls compared to the same month last year.

According to internal ICIRR data, Castro tells TIME that in 2024 the hotline received a total of 11,000 unduplicated calls, marking individual instances of reported ICE activity. In September 2025 alone, there were 5,582 calls, putting the rate of reports on pace to surpass 2024’s number in just two months.

In the first week of October, ICIRR received 2,479 calls. October 10th marked the organization’s highest call volume in a single day, with 1,300 calls.

Chamberlain, the reverend from the South Side of Chicago, tells TIME many of her colleagues in different congregations have been providing physical refuge every day for members of the migrant community who fear prosecution from ICE. She recalls being on the ground at clashes with federal agents, where she says citizens and undocumented people alike have been profiled and detained by masked officers.

“The narrative that they're putting out is not what we are actually seeing on the ground. What they're doing is literally terrorizing communities, working class communities,” she says.

She says she has also witnessed U.S. citizens being detained, and that members of the Black community have been threatened and restrained by federal agents as a result of racial profiling tactics used by federal agents.

“They're targeting citizens,” she says.

She also notes that although much of the attention has been given to ICE activity in Chicago and Broadview, she has been speaking with and supporting people in smaller cities outside of Chicago like Kankakee and Waukegan, where the agency has expanded its crackdown.

TIME has reached out to DHS for comment from ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, who has been leading the crackdown in Chicago. Judge Ellis has ordered depositions from Bovino, among others, on agents’ ongoing use of force despite her order providing protections to protesters and journalists. Federal officials have said agents used tear gas in response to threats to their safety.

In early October, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the tactics deployed by agents in the Chicago area operation, calling it “an extremely dangerous situation.” DHS said following the raid on the South Shore apartment building specifically that the building was targeted because it was “known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates,” and a spokesperson for the agency told CNN that children were taken into custody during the raid “for their own safety.”

Pritzker similarly warned while speaking at the “No Kings” rally that “when we allow tyrannical policies against any group, we make tyranny possible against every group.” But, he said, tyranny fails “when ordinary people refuse to cooperate.”

“What Trump didn't count on is Chicago coming together to stand up for freedom and individual rights, for American values, because we love America,” he said.

On the phone with TIME, Johnson recalled his work as a social studies teacher. He pointed out the “long history of resistance in Chicago,” citing the Rainbow Coalition, a political group formed in Chicago in 1969 by Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party to bring together marginalized groups to fight against systemic oppression.

When asked how he would advise other cities to prepare for the circumstances Chicago is facing, the mayor encouraged partnerships across all aspects of the city and state communities, including faith congregations, elected leaders, and businesses. He urged other cities to "utilize government to its fullness,” passing ordinances, signing executive orders, and mounting challenges in court, as his city has.

“Black, brown, white, Asian, young, old, rich and poor. We have to come together to save our democracy,” he says. “To protect our humanity.”

Must-Reads from TIME

· ‘Push Back Against Tyranny’: Chicago and Illinois Fight Trump’s Intensifying Crackdown

· ‘Military-Style’ ICE Raid On Chicago Apartment Building Shows Escalation in Trump’s Crackdown

· Trump Calls for Chicago Mayor and Illinois Governor To Be Jailed

· Trump’s Crackdown on Chicago Could Start This Weekend, Pritzker Says. Here’s How the City Is Preparing to Fight It

· L.A. Mayor Says Trump Administration Is Continuing ‘All Out Assault’ on City

ATTACHMENT TWENTY ONE – FROM TIME

NEWSOM LAUDS LEGAL VICTORY OVER TRUMP, BUT DEPLOYMENT BATTLE LOOKS FAR FROM OVER

By Callum Sutherland Oct 6, 2025 7:55 AM ET

Signing off the note, Newsom—who has a contentious history with the President—vowed: “Trump’s abuse of power won’t stand.”

Newsom accompanied the online statement with an explicit song choice—Dr. Dre’s “F*ck You”—and encouraged readers to have the “sound on.”

Federal judge Karin Immergut put the temporary block on any National Guard deployment just hours after blocking Trump from using Oregon National Guard troops in Portland.

Both California and Oregon had sued to block the move.

“Aren’t defendants simply circumventing my order?... Why is this appropriate?” she questioned.

Immergut's ruling is set to remain in effect until at least Oct. 19, with California and Oregon both moving toward obtaining a longer-term ruling.

“No officials from the federal government called me directly to discuss or coordinate,” said Pritzker, who earlier argued that Trump is "attempting to manufacture a crisis."

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas responded, saying: “You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let [the] Texas Guard do it.”

Following the ruling, Newsom’s press office sent a mocking reply Abbott’s way.

“Sorry, Champ—the Constitution’s in your way! A respected federal judge just ruled you can’t send your troops to Oregon,” the statement read.

Mayor Keith Wilson has insisted that the city “doesn’t need nor want” federal troops.

“The fight the federal Administration seeks is not in our city, and I call on our national leaders to chart a course that leads to our future, and not to further fear and division,” said Wilson.

The Trump Administration has faced numerous legal battles and blockings since it began its campaign of deploying National Guard troops without the request, or approval, of state leaders.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY TWO – FROM TIME

‘THIS IS NOT A THIRD-WORLD COUNTRY’: OREGON AG SLAMS TRUMP’S EFFORT TO SEND TROOPS INTO PORTLAND

By Brian Bennett Oct 6, 2025 6:56 PM ET

Oregon officials are pushing back in court against President Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to send National Guard troops to Portland. And so far, they’re winning.

A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s order to militarize the Oregon National Guard to defend federal immigration agents in Portland and—when Trump tried to get around that ruling—also stopped his effort to deploy the California National Guard to the city.

Trump’s efforts put the country on a path toward using the military for law enforcement, and Oregon challenged Trump in court to draw a “bright line,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield tells TIME.

The protests outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the city don’t justify sending in the military, Rayfield says. “It’s foundational in our democracy that using the United States military in our cities is not normal. This is not a third-world country, and we felt that the President is on a path to normalize the use of the military in our cities.”

Judge Karin Immergut of the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon ruled on Saturday that military assistance wasn’t necessary, as Justice Department lawyers argued it was, and temporarily stopped troops from deploying. “This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law,” wrote Judge Immergut, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018. The next day, when Trump tried to send in the California National Guard, Immergut blocked that too, saying Trump’s Justice Department was trying to go against her Saturday order. The judge scheduled a trial for October 29.

The President is forbidden from using the military inside the U.S. for law enforcement purposes by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. The National Guard can be deployed to assist Americans during natural disasters and in times of insurrection or open revolt.

When Trump was asked about her ruling later on Sunday, he seemed to express a belief that judges he nominated should be ruling in his favor. Trump told reporters that if his Administration put a judge like Immergut on the bench during his first term, “I wasn’t well-served by the people who picked judges.”

Under the Constitution, federal judges are given lifetime appointments and put in a separate branch of government that is not controlled by the President in order to insulate them from political pressure.

Rayfield, the Oregon attorney general, said it was “absurd” that Trump would “ignore the judge’s order.” Trump has since tried to mobilize National Guard troops from Texas and other states to send them to Oregon, Rayfield says.

Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X that Immergut’s ruling was “legal insurrection.” When TIME asked Miller if he is recommending President Trump take action against judges who make rulings he disagrees with, Miller said, “No, it’s simply a factually accurate statement that when a judge assumes for him or herself the powers that have been delegated by the Constitution to the President, that that is a form of illegal insurrection.”

In Portland, Rayfield has encouraged protestors to not “take the bait” if provoked by federal law enforcement. “This is an issue that has been fabricated in the heads of the Trump Administration,” Rayfield says. “If the President is telling his folks to be more aggressive and they’re moving off of federal property to instigate interactions with peaceful protestors, we need have our protestors to not take the bait and to back off. Don’t play into their game.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY THREE – FROM GUK

JUDGE BLOCKS DEPLOYMENT OF NATIONAL GUARD TO OREGON AS NEWSOM VOWS TO SUE

California governor says president ‘attacking rule of law’ as Trump-appointed judge rules twice to stop use of military

By Olivia Empson Mon 6 Oct 2025 06.34 EDT

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying any national guard units to Oregon a few hours after the California governor, Gavin Newsom, announced he would sue the president over the planned deployment of his state’s troops.

Both states sought the temporary restraining order after the president sent guard members from California to Oregon earlier in the day. On Saturday, the same judge temporarily blocked the administration from deploying Oregon’s national guard troops to Portland.

The ruling by the US district judge Karin Immergut said there was no evidence that recent protests necessitated the presence of national guard troops, no matter where they came from. Immergut asked a Trump administration lawyer during a hearing on Sunday night: “How could bringing in federalised national guard from California not be in direct contravention of the [decision] I issued yesterday?”

Immergut’s ruling on Sunday, which will remain in effect until at least 19 October, blocks the Trump administration from sending any national guard troops to Portland while Oregon and California seek a longer-term ruling in court.

Earlier on Sunday, Newsom had said national guard troops were already on their way to Oregon. “The Trump administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words – ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the president himself, as political opponents.”

A Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, announced the deployment on Sunday: “At the direction of the president, approximately 200 federalized members of the California national guard are being reassigned from duty in the greater Los Angeles area to Portland, Oregon to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”

Caroline Turco, Portland’s senior deputy attorney, said that there had been no violence against Ice officers for months and that recent Ice protests were “sedate”, sometimes featuring fewer than a dozen protesters, in the week before the president declared the city to be a war zone.

“This isn’t about public safety, it’s about power,” Newsom said. “We will take this fight to court, but the public cannot stay silent in the face of such reckless and authoritarian conduct by the president of the United States.”

In a statement on X, Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, said the state was “quickly assessing our options and preparing to take legal action. The President is obviously hellbent on deploying the military in American cities, absent facts or authority to do so. It is up to us and the courts to hold him accountable. That’s what we intend to do.”

The California national guard referred questions to the defense department. A department spokesperson declined to comment.

A response from the White House deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson, read: “President Trump exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement. For once, Gavin Newscum [sic] should stand on the side of law-abiding citizens instead of violent criminals destroying Portland and cities across the country.”

White House official inadvertently reveals plans to send elite army unit to Portland

The news from Oregon came a day after Trump authorised the deployment of national guard troops to Chicago, the latest in a string of similar interventions across several US states.

Trump had first announced the plan on 27 September, saying he was “authorizing full force, if necessary” despite pleas from Oregon officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who said there had been a single, uneventful protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.

For years, Trump has amplified the narrative that Portland is a “war-ravaged” city with anarchists engaging in chaos and unlawful behavior.

During his first term in 2020, he deployed federal forces to the city amid the protests over the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The protests spread across the US but were especially heightened in Portland. Despite protests against Ice being relatively small in the state this year, Trump has used them as a justification to deploy troops.

Speaking on X about the latest move from Trump, Newsom said: “It’s appalling. It’s un-American, and it must be stopped.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FOUR – FROM IUK

TRUMP THREATENS PORTLAND WITH FUNDING CUTS AND A DOJ INVESTIGATION AFTER POLICE ARREST A MAGA INFLUENCER

Karoline Leavitt vows Trump will ‘end the radical left's Reign of Terror’ in the Rose City

BY Andrew Feinberg in Washington, D.C.

Friday 03 October 2025 20:50 BST

The Trump administration is looking to deploy federal troops to Oregon’s largest city while withholding federal funds and launching an investigation into its police department because a pro-Trump influencer was arrested after allegedly getting into a fight there late Thursday.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday said President Donald Trump was ordering Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to “to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland,” citing anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests at facilities which she described as being “under siege from attack by Antifa and other left-wing domestic terrorists.”

Leavitt also decried what she called a “extremely troubling incident” in which live-streamer Nick Sortor, a self-styled “independent journalist” who often travels to the sites of protests and disasters to make content attacking Democrats and promoting Trump and other GOP figures, was captured on video being placed under arrest late Thursday evening.

She claimed that the influencer had been “ambushed by Antifa thugs” and criticized the Portland Police Bureau for having “arrested a journalist who was there trying to document the chaos” there.

A review of Sortor’s X profile by The Independent shows had been in Portland filming and posting videos of the protests since earlier in the week.

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According to a Portland Police Bureau press release, he allegedly began fighting with two people near the ICE building’s driveway.

All three were arrested, charged with second-degree disorderly conduct and later released.

Sortor, who did not immediately respond to a text message from The Independent requesting comment, has amassed a following of over one million followers on X, posted there after his release, claiming that the Portland police department was “going to absolutely HATE what’s coming.”

Within hours, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon took to her own official X account to say she’d spoken with both Sortor and Attorney General Pam Bondi about the case.

She also said that an investigation into the influencer’s arrest was a “high priority” for the department’s Civil Rights Division, which since Trump’s inauguration has moved away from its longstanding mission of protecting racial and ethnic minorities from discrimination in favor of investigating discrimination against Christians and white Americans.

“We will not fund states that allow anarchy,” she said, adding later that there would be “an additional surge of federal resources to Portland immediately” including more Customs and Border Protection and ICE officers.

Newsom roasts Stephen Miller over ‘homeland defender’ call: ‘Slay queen’

“That's very unfortunate for the people who live there,” she added.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FIVE – FROM TANGLE ON PORTLAND

TODAY’S TOPIC: THE PORTLAND NATIONAL GUARD RULING.

On Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2–1 that President Donald Trump can deploy Oregon National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, finding it was likely that the president had “lawfully exercised his statutory authority” in mobilizing the Guard. The decision lifted District Judge Karin Immergut’s temporary block on the Oregon soldiers’ deployment, and the Trump administration asked the judge to lift a second order barring all federalized National Guard troops from deploying to the city. Immergut gave the state and city of Portland 24 hours to respond to the request.

Back up: On October 4, Immergut (a Trump appointee) issued the temporary restraining order after Oregon and Portland sued to stop President Trump from deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to the city to maintain public order. Trump alleged that protests against federal immigration agents had become uncontrollably violent, a claim the city and state denied. Immergut ruled against Trump, finding that his characterization of the situation was “simply untethered to the facts.” On October 5, Immergut issued a second order blocking any National Guard troop deployments to Portland after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called up Texas National Guardsmen and attempted to send them to the city.

We covered the initial ruling here.

During oral arguments before the 9th Circuit panel, attorneys for the Trump administration contended that the deployment was necessary to address rising unrest and protect against future violence. The majority of the panel appeared sympathetic to this argument. Conversely, Oregon Assistant Attorney General Stacy Chaffin argued that protests in the city did not meet the definition of a “rebellion” necessary to meet the legal pretext for National Guard deployment.

In its ruling, the majority wrote, “Some of these protests have been peaceful, but many have turned violent, and protesters have threatened federal law enforcement officers and the building,” adding, “Even if the President may exaggerate the extent of the problem on social media, this does not change that other facts provide a colorable basis to support the statutory requirements.”

Judge Immergut is expected to rule in the coming days on the Trump administration’s request to lift the second temporary restraining order. Furthermore, Immergut has scheduled a trial on the full lawsuit by the state and city for October 29.

Today, we’ll share arguments from the left and right on the 9th Circuit’s ruling, followed by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman’s take.

What the left is saying.

· The left sharply criticizes the decision, suggesting the court was overly deferential to executive power.

· Some say the ruling is a blow to civil liberties.

· Others worry the court is paving the way for more serious authoritarian abuses.

In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern wrote “Trump’s crackdown on Portland is bad enough. One judge has a plan to make it worse.”

“As bad as Monday’s decision was, it could have been far worse. In a concurrence, Judge Ryan Nelson argued that the judiciary has no power at all to review (or halt) a president’s deployment of the National Guard to suppress alleged domestic unrest,” Stern said. “In Nelson’s view, Trump enjoys absolute discretion to send troops into American cities for any reason he deems necessary, and no court may stand in his way.

“It may be tempting to dismiss this argument as Nelson’s audition for a Supreme Court seat. But it must be taken seriously, because it is precisely what the Trump administration is now asking SCOTUS to embrace. And it is wrong from top to bottom,” Stern wrote. “[Nelson] wrote that the current statute ‘uses similar language’ to its predecessors, disregarding Congress’ deletion of a clause that gave more deference to the president. But as Judge Graber pointed out in dissent, today’s statute includes careful limitations on the president’s discretion. And those limits create a ‘judicial responsibility’ for courts to rebuff the president when he deploys the Guard ‘in a situation far divorced’ from what Congress envisioned.”

In Washington Monthly, Garrett Epps criticized the court “greenlight[ing] Trump’s Portland troop surge.”

“The panel’s per curiam opinion upholds a militarized response to this civic impudence by noting that the Department of Homeland Security had to bring in some out-of-state personnel to handle the June demonstrations,” Epps said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the aim of the troop interventions in California, Chicago, and Portland is a massive shifting of the civil liberties goal posts. To this administration and its supporters, protest itself is ‘violence’ and ‘rebellion.’”

“Immergut, a Trump appointee, contemplated facts and law and ruled against the administration — the way we teach in law school that a good judge must sometimes do. Her pains, however, earned her the accusation from Trump aide Stephen Miller of ‘legal insurrection,’” Epps wrote. “Such rhetoric is undoubtedly part of a campaign to intimidate federal judges, Republican or Democratic. And of course, some judges are predisposed to obeisance: Judge Nelson of the panel wrote in a separate opinion that, as far as he is concerned, no court has jurisdiction to review Trump’s order ever, no matter what.”

In Above the Law, Joe Patrice said the appeals court “[laid] a little more track on the authoritarianism express.”

“This decision becomes another collectible in the White House’s effort to string together step-wise court victories toward laying the legal groundwork for unilateral authoritarianism,” Patrice wrote. “That’s really what’s going on here. The administration is fully aware that they don’t need the National Guard to secure ICE from eight hippies. But they’re counting on judges like Nelson and Bade to write opinions establishing that Trump’s subjective assessment of ‘danger’ justifies military deployment.”

“After paying lip service to recent Ninth Circuit precedent clarifying that the White House can’t make unfounded declarations to justify sending troops, the majority strung together a series of anecdotes that amount to little more than ‘there was once a protest’ — regardless of whether it actually prevented law enforcement from functioning — and said that’s enough to make Trump’s decision colorable,” Patrice said. “That’s not legalism, it’s epistemic control: the right to define what counts as a threat, what counts as a rebellion, and what counts as the ability to execute laws.”

What the right is saying.

· The right supports the ruling, saying Trump had sufficient grounds to deploy the Guard.

· Some note the historical rationale for this executive authority.

· Others say the left’s view of deployment power is hypocritical.

In The Washington Examiner, Byron York said the court’s ruling “shows why Trump is right about the National Guard.”

“The anti-Trump world celebrated earlier this month when a federal judge blocked President Donald Trump from federalizing National Guard troops in Portland… Of course, the White House appealed. And now the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned Immergut, giving the president another victory in the courts,” York wrote. “The new ruling rests on very clear reasoning. There have been extensive and frequent attacks on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland. The president of the United States has the authority to protect federal installations.

“So Trump can order National Guard troops to protect a federal installation that is under attack. It’s a ruling so based in common sense that it should be noncontroversial,” York said. “The key part of the decision is the judges’ recitation of the factual background of the case… ‘“As a result of the destruction caused by protesters” and threats to the building,’ the opinion [said], ‘the Department of Homeland Security was forced to close the facility for more than three weeks, from June 13 to July 7.’ That, of course, ‘significantly impeded’ the work of the federal government.”

In Hot Air, Ed Morrissey wrote about the “Ninth Circuit overturn[ing]” the lower court.

“For the second time this year, the Ninth Circuit has had to reverse a lower court on presidential authority to protect federal buildings and personnel. Earlier this year, Gavin Newsom got handed a defeat over National Guard troops in Los Angeles,” Morrissey said. “Unlike the June ruling in Newsom, today’s decision was not unanimous. Today’s 2-1 ruling did, however, tread the exact same ground as Newsom, specifically the presidential authority of Section 12406. The court went all the way back to the Whiskey Rebellion and Shay’s Rebellion to conclude that an insurrection need not be armed nor organized for the direct overthrow of the government.”

“Judge Nelson offers the historical perspective in his concurrence. The Whiskey and Shay’s Rebellions demonstrated the need for presidential authority to stop insurrections before they grew larger. They also provided a model for proportionate response that Trump’s deployment clearly followed in its small and time-limited mission,” Morrissey wrote. “Nelson’s clarity puts the Portland rioting into that historical perspective, which then demonstrates that Trump has done nothing that even Founding Father presidents did to maintain federal authority and enforcement.”

For the Civitas Institute, John Yoo asked “does federal law extend to Portlandia?”

“In Title 10, Congress delegated the President the authority to call out the National Guard in cases of invasion, rebellion, or resistance to federal law. Portland and Chicago naturally claim that the law only applies in cases of ‘invasion’ or ‘rebellion,’” Yoo said. “But these Democrats conveniently ignore the third ground to call out the National Guard. Congress allows the President to federalize the National Guard when he ‘is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.’ As the Ninth Circuit decision found, protestors in Portland have been launching riots to stop ICE and DHS agents from carrying out their duties since early June.”

“Trump critics in Portland and Chicago cannot claim that Presidents lack the authority to call out the troops to protect the national government and enforce federal law. Presidents have used these same authorities to desegregate southern schools in the 1950s after Brown v. Board of Education and to protect civil rights protesters in the 1960s. Those who cheer those interventions cannot now deny the same constitutional authority when it is exercised by a president they oppose,” Yoo wrote. “If critics want the federal government to have the power to enforce civil rights laws against resistant states, they also must concede to President Trump the authority to enforce immigration laws against rioters in the cities of Portland and Chicago.”

My take

· Trump’s, and Stephen Miller’s, argument that the National Guard has to quell a rebellion in Portland is ridiculous.

· However, the government has now tapered its argument to say the city needs assistance in executing the laws, which is much more cogent.

· Protesters are also pivoting, and both developments leave me feeling strangely optimistic.

Managing Editor Ari Weitzman: I’m going to go straight to the root of this issue: When President Trump issued his June 7 memorandum authorizing the use of the military to support immigration enforcement, I immediately found the logic absurd. Here’s the reasoning the president marshalled in that memo: “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

This choice of words is significant — and, ultimately, self-defeating. The president wants to say that any protest of the government constitutes a legitimate rebellion against the authority of the government. This simply isn’t true. Even violent protests don’t generally have the aim of overthrowing the U.S. government.

And in case you think I’m being hyperbolic or unfair about the administration’s use of the term “rebellion,” I’m not. I’ll refer you to the arguments being made by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has been constructing the case for use of the military in supporting the administration’s deportation actions that hinges on this definition of rebellion, along with “invasion” and “insurrection.”

There’s no reason to be coy about it: This is the administration’s strategy. Since at least 2023, Miller has argued that Trump could use the military domestically by defining illegal immigration as an invasion and civil disobedience as a rebellion.

Now, Trump is attempting exactly that argument, and he’s running into roadblocks. Because, again, these terms just don’t fit. A wave of illegal immigration is not an invasion, and civil unrest or mass protests are not the same as an insurrection. Judge Immergut saw all of that when she issued her initial temporary restraining order blocking deployments of Oregon National Guardsmen earlier this month — and when she subsequently blocked any deployments to Portland under this line of argument. Because this line of argument simply fails, full stop.

But in the recent appeal, the government did something interesting: They pivoted their argument to something different and more legally defensible. And, in their recent ruling, the 9th Circuit judges seemed to find this new argument convincing.

The majority’s per curiam opinion said that the president can deploy the National Guard if he can make a reasonable claim of any of these three things: an invasion, a rebellion, or violence that inhibits the execution of the laws. That is to say, the government doesn’t have to prove any one of those three things, just show that “the facts provide a colorable basis to support” just one of them.

Furthermore, the president does not have to prove exactly what he claimed in his memo, that disrupting law enforcement constitutes a rebellion. This would make his more bombastic statements about Portland burning down or being a “war zone” immaterial.

Here’s what the opinion said:

All three statutory prongs are the same as to whether prior events may be considered. And the President is entitled, and indeed, duty-bound, to evaluate the entire context of events leading up to a decision to invoke §12406 as part of the constitutional command to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Considering the totality of the circumstances, there is a colorable basis for the President’s determination that he is unable with regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.

Second, the district court erred by placing too much weight on statements the President made on social media. The district court interpreted President Trump characterizing Portland as “War ravaged,” as the equivalent of the President “ignoring the facts on the ground.” As such, the district court relied on these statements to disregard other facts that do “reflect a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment.”

That leads to the question: Do the “facts on the ground” reasonably support the president’s attempt to deploy the National Guard? And remember: It’s not the judges’ job to give a definitive “yes” or “no” to whether they would call in the Guard, just whether or not these facts could reasonably support a determination that the city was unable to execute the law.

In my opinion, a summary of the facts could easily support such a determination. Even Judge Immergut, in a somewhat understated telling, described how protesters’ actions affected law enforcement by shutting down ICE's facility in Portland for nearly a month in June. Additionally, what the Department of Homeland Security referred to as “riots” several times in September provoked violent confrontations with protesters. Here’s the 9th Circuit’s summary of the evidence presented to them about the Portland Police Bureau’s (PPB) ability to respond to incidents at the federal building:

In emails summarizing these incidents, PPB officers report that no officers are available to respond to disturbances at the ICE facility (September 16 email explaining PPB has “no officers to go or call” to respond to disturbance at ICE facility); (September 19 email stating the PPB had “few to zero officers available” to address a “verbal disturbance” in front of the ICE building); (September 20 email stating that PPB “would not be able to address the call or make an arrest with the resources we have”).

After reading the new legal argument, and the PPB statements from September, I found myself convinced that the Trump administration is on solid legal footing here. If Judge Immergut sends the appeal back to the 9th District for another review or an en banc ruling (which seems likely), I expect that the judges will be relatively split between those who oppose deployments on the public arguments and those who support it on the 9th District’s recent ruling.

Now, that isn’t to say that I think President Trump is right. First of all, it’s pretty ridiculous that his administration’s best legal argument is to ignore what the president tells us in public. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if we can’t trust what the president is saying — and courts are telling us not to trust what the president is saying — then that’s pretty bad.

Second, legally defensible isn’t the same thing as productive. In Portland, protests had all but died down in August and September before the deployments, which then brought people back to the streets. National Guard deployments, combined with the public statements (that we’re supposed to ignore) and immigration enforcement stunts, are inflammatory. They often dance on the line of what is legal, and in Los Angeles and Chicago, they have provoked more unrest rather than bringing order to an unstable situation. Trump came into office spoiling for a fight — with the courts, with unauthorized migrants, and with protesters. And so far he’s gotten all three.

But, now, something interesting is happening in Portland: Protesters are also pivoting. Instead of giving Trump his fight, Portlanders are now showing up in front of federal buildings in ridiculous inflatable costumes and organizing an “emergency” naked bike ride.

We’ve often criticized ineffectual protesters in Tangle, but I’ve got to say: I love this. Protesters seemed to be legitimately hampering ICE’s ability to perform their functions, and that seemed to be an intentional tactic. Now that Trump is responding with force, they’re pulling the rug — making the president’s whole show of force look excessive and ridiculous. We hear “Portland is burning” and “antifa is trying to overthrow the government,” then the camera pans to a bunch of people dancing in Pokémon costumes. Trump is gifted at controlling media narratives, but I can’t remember a time that protesters have played a gambit that countered him so effectively.

Tomorrow, Isaac’s publishing a sobering piece about the excesses of the current administration. But today, I’m feeling pretty optimistic: The Trump administration is showing signs of abandoning Stephen Miller’s ridiculous legal fancies, the courts are making justifiable rulings, and Portland is providing a template for genuinely effective protest.

Regardless of whether or not the National Guard ever does arrive in Portland, I’d be willing to bet that the worst moments of civil unrest in the city are already in the past.

Staff dissent — Executive Editor Isaac Saul: As you’ll see tomorrow, I’m not optimistic at all. I think this ruling is more alarming than anything else; Nelson’s concurrence posits that Trump can deploy the National Guard without any judicial review from the courts, introducing an extreme view of presidential power with boundless opportunities for abuse. Even if the legal justification is easier to track, I have a hard time imagining a future in Portland where things don’t get more violent and combative, and I worry deeply that such an outcome is exactly what this administration wants to justify harsher and harsher crackdowns.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY SIX – FROM USA TODAY