I’m back after a busy and good summer! And here we go with the first week of September… Trump has been posting AI images of himself as a red-eyed, robot-flanked supervillain, and it’s genuinely one of the stranger things I’ve logged in the last 18 months. But it’s not the only thing worth your attention from the last week. Here are three stories you might have missed. Elections: a hunt for voter fraud that doesn’t exist, ICE at polling places, North Carolina’s new spoiled-ballot rules, and the mail ballot fight now at the Supreme Court. The leadership cult: a White House arcade, Trump ranking himself the greatest president ever, the supervillain AI images, and the ballroom and arch he’s building despite the courts. The state against its enemies: six unions investigated, a journalist’s phone records seized, and 18,000 universities threatened through the tax code. Subtitles available and every action is sourced and linked at trumpactiontracker.info. Also, as requested in my summer survey, here is the written version of the video content! ************************************************** Elections So elections. The first thing is a hunt for non-existent fraud. Hundreds of agents at the Department of Homeland Security have been pulled off their normal work, which includes investigating human trafficking and terrorism, and put onto an effort the government is calling, internally, the Unlawful Voter Initiative. The idea is to comb through the voter rolls of all fifty states looking for non-citizens who have registered or voted. The New York Times saw the training documents and videos. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, there never has been, and the Trump administration has been trying to “find” evidence for 18 months without success. The next thing is potential voter intimidation at the polls. At a press conference in New York, the homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin was asked about ICE at polling places. He said, and I am quote “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places, we’re there to enforce specific threats”. He said agents would only be at a polling place if there was a threat to it or if they were serving a warrant on someone they had been tracking. But federal law prohibits armed agents from being at any place where an election is held, and back in July a dozen senators warned Mullin in writing that deploying agents to voting sites would be illegal. So this is not a new policy being announced. If ICE agents were at polling places many citizens of colour – who are historically more likely to vote Democrat - might think twice about turning up. Then there are the rules on who can vote and how. Hours before North Carolina started posting mail-in ballots, its board of elections changed the rules for how mail ballots get counted. Many more ballots will be marked as “spoiled” and fewer people are eligible to hand in someone’s ballot. To give an example, a husband and wife who put both ballots in one envelope, which used to be a fixable mistake, would now have both votes thrown out. Or Someone who seals the outer envelope but forgets the inner one will now have their vote considered spoiled and not counted. And then there is the administration’s ongoing legal battle over mail voting itself. Back in the spring, Trump signed an executive order telling the US Postal Service to impose new requirements on mail ballots, including only mailing ballots to people checked on a new centralised ‘citizen database’. States and voting rights groups sued. A federal judge in Boston has now blocked the postal rule twice, first with a temporary order and then, on the fourth of September, with a preliminary injunction that blocks it indefinitely. The judge wrote that bringing this in less than seventy days before an election threatens to disenfranchise millions of people who vote by mail, and, in her words, the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the rule. The administration has gone to the Supreme Court twice in a week to try to lift her blocks, once against the temporary order and then again against the injunction that replaced it. As I record this, the Supreme Court has asked the challengers to file their arguments by Wednesday. The Trump leadership cult Most populist autocracies, or states becoming autocracies, glorify their leader and produce huge amounts of propaganda to demonise enemies, justify their policies and present the leader as beyond criticism. It’s happening right now in the US and getting ever more blatant. In early September the White House put a set of arcade games on its own official website, at arcade dot gov. There are five of them, built to look like old games like Snake and Tetris. In one, called Rio Run, you play the administration’s border czar chasing migrants, drawn with different skin tones, along the Rio Grande. In another, Build the Wall, you stack sections of border wall to, and I am quoting the game, protect the border from the coming horde. Another has you fill your kids’ Trump savings accounts by catching cash and gold. This is on a government website, paid for by taxpayers. In late August Trump posted a chart on Truth Social ranking the presidents, and he put himself alone in a category above everyone else, labelled the greatest. Lincoln and Washington are one tier below him, as merely great. Then, over this last weekend, he went on a spree of posting AI images of himself – and some of them are hugely disturbing. In one, he is sitting on a huge black metal throne surrounded by giant robots in a fiery industrial scene, with the words “give them nightmares” across the bottom. In another, Trump stands among an army of black robots with red glowing eyes under a cracked moon, captioned “they will dream of us forever”. I don’t want to over-interpret pictures. But a president posting images of himself as an all-powerful figure telling his enemies to have nightmares is not nothing. And there’s the DC building spree. Trump is building a huge ballroom at the White House, twice the size of the main building, after tearing down the East Wing to make room. A preservation group sued, saying he cannot build it without Congressional approval. Lower courts agreed and blocked it. At the end of August the Supreme Court let construction carry on while the case continues. The supreme court did not say that the ballroom is legal – in fact the Chief Justice dissented along with the three liberal judges, and wrote that it likely *not* lawful. Its five to four order turned on a technical point. So the ballroom goes up while the question of whether it is even legal remains unanswered. The same week, the Trump administration said it would break ground on its two hundred and fifty foot triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial, even though the planning body that has to approve it has only given preliminary approval and cannot give final approval until October. Opponents have gone to court asking for an emergency order to stop them. The Trump administration is rushing to outpace the la with its building. Finally, there’s erasing the independent record. On the 4 Sept, the Interior Department wrote to the Smithsonian’s board and said federal agencies cannot in good conscience keep supporting it under its current leadership, and threatened to stop lending it artifacts, helping with procurement, and giving it grants. The administration says the Smithsonian is pushing a divisive ideological agenda and ideological activism, and Trump has complained before about its focus on how bad slavery was. So Trump is building monuments and posting aggrandising, dark, AI slop while at the same time threatening to defund the institution whose job is to keep the independent record of the country’s history. Using the state against enemies Finally, there is the use of the state against its perceived enemies. The House Education and Workforce Committee has opened investigations into six major unions, including the… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christinapagel.substack.com
