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      John Bolton raid shows weaponization of FBI against Patel’s ‘gangsters’ list

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      When Kash Patel, the FBI director, faced senators during his confirmation hearings on 30 January, he bristled at suggestions that his 2023 book contained an “enemies list”. The appendix to Government Gangsters, which included a list of names for 60 people, was simply documentation of those who had “weaponized” the government, he insisted.Seven months later, that denial appears increasingly hollow. Friday’s FBI search of the former national security adviser John Bolton’s home and office, reportedly to find classified documents, marks the fifth investigation targeting people from Patel’s book.Bolton now joins a growing list of Trump critics from Patel’s roll the administration has targeted with what appear to be retaliatory federal investigations: James Comey, the former FBI director, John Brennan, the former CIA director, Miles Taylor, the ex-homeland security official and Lt Col Alexander Vindman. All five people, investigated in just seven months, were on Patel’s 60-name list.Typically, federal prosecutors open cases based on tips, evidence or ongoing criminal activity. They don’t work their way through the index of a political book. While there is no public evidence that the book itself or any outside group is directing investigations, the overlap appears more than coincidence. The Biden justice department definitively closed both civil and criminal proceedings against Bolton in 2021 over his memoir about his time in the Trump White House. Bringing that investigation back to life requires a deliberate decision to re-litigate an already settled matter.Bolton’s investigation, like those into the other four on Patel’s list, is unprecedented in how it is calculated to target a critic. The justice department acknowledged opening criminal investigations into Comey and Brennan over their 2016-2017 Russia investigation roles. Taylor faced presidential orders revoking his security clearance and demanding investigations into his anonymous anti-Trump writings. The DC interim US attorney pressed representative Eugene Vindman for business records tied to Ukraine aid, targeting the twin brother of Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump during his first impeachment.When asked for details about the raids and the reasoning behind them, a spokesperson for the FBI did not answer directly.“The FBI is conducting court authorized activity in the area,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “There is no threat to public safety. We have no further comment.”The systematic nature of these investigations exposes the fundamental contradiction in the administration’s approach. Officials claim to be combating the “weaponization” of justice while at the same time weaponizing it against a pre-compiled list of critics.Notably, Patel’s targets are both “deep state” bureaucrats and former Trump allies. Along with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, they include Trump’s own former officials like the former defense secretary Mark Esper and Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary, a suggestion that the list features anyone who crossed or flipped on the president, regardless of their previous loyalty. Patel on Friday morning posted on social media that “NO ONE is above the law”.Trump’s reaction to the Bolton investigation undermines claims of prosecutorial independence. Asked about the raids, the president claimed ignorance while launching familiar attacks: Bolton was “sort of a lowlife” and “could be a very unpatriotic guy – we’re going to find out”, he told reporters on Friday.By systematically investigating critics while claiming to restore justice department integrity, the administration is creating an environment in which political opposition becomes presumed as evidence of criminal behavior.This marks another example of evolution from Trump’s first term, when efforts to weaponize federal law enforcement were often chaotic and ultimately unsuccessful. The current approach appears more disciplined, with Patel’s book providing targets and Bondi’s working group providing bureaucratic cover. More

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      Trump’s presidential philosophy is government by shakedown | Steven Greenhouse

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      Americans have long glorified their constitution and the rule of law. But Donald Trump’s volatile and vindictive presidency has increasingly replaced that philosophy with something very different – call it “governing by shakedown”.Trump has often violated federal law, and sometimes the constitution, as he has sought to throttle his targets – whether universities, law firms or US trading partners – in the hope that they will cry uncle and agree to his demands. This style of governance would make any caudillo proud. But it should make anyone who cares about the rule of law – and avoiding authoritarian rule – very worried.By threatening to cripple this university’s finances or that country’s exports, Trump has become the global emperor of shakedowns. It has been great for him and his ego. He dominates negotiations and news cycles, and his White House cheerleaders rush to proclaim victory whenever he reaches a deal with one of his targets.Claiming that many universities haven’t done enough to combat antisemitism, Trump has demanded that Harvard, Columbia, Brown and other schools submit to his rightwing vision. Furious that some law firms have hired people or filed lawsuits he didn’t like, Trump has taken unprecedented steps to attack them unless they submitted to his demands. Trump has wreaked havoc on global diplomacy and supply chains by threatening America’s trading partners with stratospherically high tariffs unless they reached trade deals with Washington.Far too many Americans – whether senators, the media or the public – fail to realize that Trump’s attacks on these institutions evidently violate the law. Federal district courts have ruled in four cases that Trump’s broadsides against law firms violate their free speech rights. The US court of international trade ruled that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs against dozens of countries were illegal, concluding that Congress hadn’t given him “unbounded authority” to slap tariffs on nearly every country. (The administration is appealing that ruling.)As for Trump cutting off billions in aid and research grants to universities because of their alleged failures in responding to antisemitism, many legal experts say his administration has plainly failed to comply with anti-discrimination laws that require the government to follow specific procedures before penalizing universities, such as giving schools an opportunity for a hearing. Moreover, federal law says the government can halt funding to only particular university programs where noncompliance has been found, and not, for instance, to scientific research far afield from that.Last week, Trump expanded his shakedown efforts. He told the chipmaker Nvidia that he would let it sell high-end AI computer chips to China only if it paid 15% of the revenue from those sales to the US treasury. Nvidia agreed, even though Trump’s demand was of dubious legality; the constitution prohibits the government from placing a tax on exports.Trump also threatened Brazil with a 50% tariff unless it stopped prosecuting its rightwing former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for allegedly seeking to overturn Brazil’s presidential election. When Brazil’s current president rejected that demand, saying that Trump shouldn’t be telling a sovereign democracy how to run its justice system, Trump imposed the 50% tariff. Trump’s move is an outrage because he’s seeking to strong-arm a longtime US ally over how to run its justice system and because, as Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said, this is “far outside his legal authority”.Many lawyers voiced shock and dismay when the law firm Paul, Weiss, a litigation powerhouse, reached a deal with Trump instead of fighting him. Paul, Weiss promised to provide Trump with $40m in pro bono legal services after he sought to cripple the firm by suspending its security clearances and barring its lawyers from federal buildings. All told, nine law firms have reached deals with Trump, promising nearly $1bn in pro bono services . Some legal experts call these deals illegal – one Yale law professor said “a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract”.Columbia has reached a $221m settlement with the Trump administration, while Brown reached a $50m deal. While denying any liability, Columbia vowed to “work on multiple fronts to combat” antisemitism and other “forms of hatred and intolerance at Columbia”. The university also pledged not to use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions and said its admissions policies would be merit-based and wouldn’t “unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color, or national origin”.Columbia officials hailed one part of the deal – the Trump administration agreed to unfreeze $1.3bn in funding. That freeze was devastating Columbia’s research programs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut David Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia, denounced the deal, saying it “gives legal form to an extortion scheme”. Pozen described it as the “first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures”. Pozen slammed this deal-by-deal style of governance as “coercive”, “arbitrary”, “deeply susceptible” to “corruption” and “corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself”.We shouldn’t be shocked that Trump acts this way. He loves dealmaking and lording it over others and he has long paid scant heed to following the law. But we should be shocked by the way the two other supposedly co-equal branches of government, Congress and the supreme court, have behaved. They have essentially rolled over in the face of Trump’s ruling by shakedown.Republican lawmakers in Congress have cravenly sat on their hands while Trump has boosted inflation and sabotaged economic growth by forcing tariffs on more than 90 countries, notwithstanding the strict restrictions Congress set on when and how a president can impose tariffs. Republicans have vowed never to raise taxes, but let’s not fool ourselves: Trump’s tariffs are a regressive sales tax that hits non-affluent Americans hardest. Republican lawmakers have also been quiet as mice while Trump has used a wrecking ball to threaten leading universities – institutions that played a vital role in making the US a world leader in medicine and many other fields of research.The supreme court has been strangely, worrisomely silent while Trump rules by shakedown, even as many district court judges have shown plenty of spine, ruling, for instance, that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs and assaults on law firms are illegal. When the supreme court wants to move quickly, it often finds a way. It would be great if the court moved to protect the rule of law, universities and academic freedom from Trump’s shakedowns. The court could and should issue a ruling as soon as possible that Trump violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by egregiously failing to follow its requirements before freezing universities’ funding. Similarly, the court could greatly reduce the economic mayhem that Trump’s tariffs are causing by quickly upholding the US court of trade’s ruling that Trump has far overstepped his authority to impose tariffs. But the high court been shamefully passive, even submissive.Congress and the supreme court need to wake up, step up and lay down the law. They must stop Trump’s rule by shakedown, which far too often involves capricious, vindictive dealmaking and ignores our legal rules and standards. Americans need to realize that Trump’s style of governance is dangerously eroding our rule of law and democracy.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Canada finally faces a basic question: how do we defend ourselves? | Stephen Marche

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      The second Trump administration has been worse than Canada’s worst nightmare. The largest military force in the history of the world, across a largely undefended border, is suddenly under the command of a president who has called for our annexation. Canada could not be less prepared. The possibility of American aggression has been so remote, for so long, that the idea has not been seriously considered in living memory. Donald Trump has focused on economic rather than military pressure, but the new tone in Washington is finally forcing Canada to ask itself the most basic question: how do we defend ourselves?For most other countries in the world, self-defence is the key to national identity. Canada’s immense good fortune has been that we haven’t really needed a strong military to build our country. In the war of 1812, we were British, and the British kept us alive because we were British. There hasn’t been an attack on our homeland since. Confederation, the founding of the country, was the result of a political negotiation rather than a conquest or a violent independence movement. Our military was based on a fundamental assumption about our place in the world, and the nature of the world itself. Our place in the world was to contribute to the global order. The global order shared our fundamental values. Peacekeeping was more our style than defense.Recently, I’ve been working on Gloves Off, a podcast about how Canada can protect itself from any threat emanating from the US, and from every other country in the world now that the US is no longer our protector and guardian. The consensus from military and security experts is that we would be “a snack”.It is far from unusual for countries sliding toward authoritarianism, such as the the United States, to use foreign engagements to justify the suspension of their own laws. Trump has already started trumping up crazy excuses for anti-Canadian sentiment – a supposed flow of fentanyl over the border and other nonsense. His ambassador says Trump thinks our boycotts make us “nasty” to deal with.So what does Canada need to do to develop the capacity to defend itself?The good news is that Canada’s new reality is far from unique. In fact, it’s the historical norm. Finland is a potential model for us. It has lived its entire existence next to a belligerent country that is either expanding imperially or collapsing dangerously. The Finns do not have nuclear weapons. They are only 5.5 million people, next to Russia’s 143 million.Finland’s strategy is whole society defence. Matti Pesu, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, and a reserve commander of an armoured personnel carrier, explained that whole society defence does not pretend to be able to overcome a potential Russian onslaught. “Power asymmetry is an absolutely essential factor in the Finnish security thinking,” he told me. “Given how much bigger Russia is, in order to thwart that potential threat, we need to mobilize broadly the resources available in society.”Because Finland is geared, throughout its national institutions, towards self-defence, its resistance to Russia is credible. The idea is not to match Russian military capacity, but to make the conquest of Finland not worth the trouble. “Full societal resources of a smaller nation can actually be enough to thwart the potential threat from a larger power because the costs for the larger power to invade could actually be much higher than the potential benefits it would gain from such an invasion,” Pesu explains. The more capable a country is of causing pain to occupiers, the less likely the occupation happens in the first place.Conscription is essential. The Finns can put a million soldiers in the field within 72 hours. But every facet of Finnish government, from the healthcare system to the national broadcaster, has a role in the security system, and knows its role in a possible military conflict. “A preparedness mindset permeates the whole society,” Pesu says. “From the state level all the way to an individual living somewhere in the country.”To rise to Finland’s level, Canada would need to reorchestrate its entire frame of reference. The prime minister, Mark Carney, has recently announced serious boosts to national military spending: 2% by the end of this year, rising to 5% at some point in the future. But the government has pushed its readiness targets back to 2032. And those are targets that align with our typical military practices: meeting our commitments to our alliances. That money sounds good on a theoretical level. But the Canadian military situation has not fundamentally altered. We have not reset our position.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe period we are entering is a period of deep chaos, of the weakening of international institutions, of multiple, interlocked collapses. Any reliance on international institutions and their restoration is a false hope. If Canada is to remain a stable democracy, we will have to find the stability in ourselves. A whole society defence would bolster us against the chaos that threatens us from every side and from within. In an era of splintering society, conscription is a force of unification, what Pesu calls “a strong democratic linkage”. Canada is a big country, with huge geographical and demographic diversity. We are as vulnerable as any other society to the informational chaos that is overtaking the world, to the incipient breakdown. A whole society defence would be a massive force for unification. It would establish, to Canadians at least, that there are crises we are going to face and we need to face them collectively. The thing about a whole society defence is that it determines that you are living in a whole society, a society that needs defending.Canada has no history of needing to defend itself. In fact, not needing a military is baked into our national identity – and that creates a psychological bind. To preserve who we are, we have to overcome one of our oldest tendencies, one of our best tendencies: our peace-loving nature, our idea of our country as an escape from history rather than its perpetrator or victim.And that leads to a very scary question: what will be the crisis that makes us realize that we need whole society defence? Let us hope it won’t be Canada’s last.

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      Trump news at a glance: 55m US visa holders in potential limbo in fresh immigration crackdown

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      The Trump administration is reviewing the records of more than 55 million US visa holders for potential revocation or deportable violations of immigration rules, in a significant expansion of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.The state department said that all of the foreigners who now hold valid US visas are subject to “continuous vetting” for any indication that they could be ineligible for the document, including those already admitted into the country. Should such evidence come to light, the visa would be revoked and, if the visa holder were in the United States, they would be subject to deportation.Here are the key stories at a glance.Trump administration to review 55m US visa holders for potential rule violationsTrump officials will review records of more than 55 million US visa holders in the latest expansion on the US president’s immigration crackdown.It follows an announcement by the Trump administration on Tuesday that it will look for “anti-American” views, including on social media, when assessing the applications of people wanting to live in the United States.“The state department revokes visas any time there are indications of a potential ineligibility, which includes things like any indicators of overstays, criminal activity, threats to public safety, engaging in any form of terrorist activity, or providing support to a terrorist organization,” a department spokesperson said.Read the full storyCourt throws out $500m civil fraud penalty against Donald TrumpA New York appeals court has thrown out the massive civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump, ruling on Thursday in the state’s lawsuit accusing him of exaggerating his wealth.The decision, which was not unanimous, came seven months after the Republican returned to the White House. A panel of five judges in New York’s mid-level appellate division said the verdict, which stood to cost Trump more than $515m and rock his real estate empire, was “excessive”.Read the full storyPentagon asks civilian employees to aid Ice deportationsThe Pentagon is recruiting civilian employees to join Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign and asking staff to sign up for deployments to immigration enforcement facilities across the United States.Read the full storyCalifornia moves closer to gerrymandered maps after key measures passCalifornia lawmakers on Thursday approved a sweeping redistricting proposal aimed at redrawing the state’s congressional boundaries and creating five potential new Democratic US House seats – a retaliatory strike against the gerrymandered maps Republicans in Texas are working to pass at the behest of Donald Trump.Read the full storyJD Vance previews defense of Trump’s bill for midterms in GeorgiaThe US vice-president, JD Vance, previewed in Georgia on Thursday the lines of attack candidates will use to defend the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the midterms next year, calling it “the biggest tax cut for families that this country has ever seen”.Read the full storyNew details emerge on Trump tariffs for EUWashington will not lower steep tariffs on European cars until Brussels has introduced legislation to reduce its own tariffs on US exports, maintaining pressure on the EU’s automotive industry.While the Trump administration has agreed to lower the current 27.5% US tariffs on European cars and car parts to 15%, details of a framework trade deal published on Thursday revealed the terms and conditions.Read the full storyTrump officials urge Fed to remove governor The Trump administration is ratcheting up pressure on the Federal Reserve to remove governor Lisa Cook, after the economist declared she had “no intention of being bullied” into stepping down.Read the full storyJudge rules ex-Trump lawyer unlawfully serving as US attorney in New JerseyA federal judge ruled on Thursday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.In his order disqualifying Habba from prosecuting three defendants who challenged her appointment, chief US district judge Matthew Brann wrote: “The Executive branch has perpetuated Alina Habba’s appointment to act as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey through a novel series of legal and personnel moves.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Donald Trump gave a speech to law enforcement at a park police HQ in Washington DC after announcing he would join federal officers and the military on the city’s streets as part of the forced takeover of the local police force.

      Trump intends to leave Russia and Ukraine to organize a meeting between their leaders without directly playing a role for now, according to administration officials familiar with the situation, taking a step back from the negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

      The president again called for the release of a former election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in breaching election data in a quest to find fraud, threatening he would take “harsh measures” if she was not let out of prison.

      With Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” set to alter how families and students finance higher education starting in July 2026, a new survey suggests the majority of college students expect to be affected by the bill.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 20 August 2025. More

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      A coal-fired plant in Michigan was to close. But Trump forced it to keep running at $1m a day

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      Donald Trump has made several unusual moves to elongate the era of coal, such as giving the industry exemptions from pollution rules. But the gambit to keep one Michigan coal-fired power station running has been extraordinary – by forcing it to remain open even against the wishes of its operator.The hulking JH Campbell power plant, which since 1962 has sat a few hundred yards from the sand dunes at the edge of Lake Michigan, was just eight days away from a long-planned closure in May when Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order that it remain open for a further 90 days.On Wednesday, the administration intervened again to extend this order even further, prolonging the lifetime of the coal plant another 90 days, meaning it will keep running until November – six months after it was due to close.The move, taken under emergency powers more normally used during wartime or in the wake of disaster, has stunned local residents and the plant’s operator, Consumers Energy. “My family had a countdown for it closing, we couldn’t wait,” said Mark Oppenhuizen, who has lived in the shadow of the plant for 30 years and suspects its pollution worsened his wife’s lung disease.“I was flabbergasted when the administration said they had stopped it shutting down,” he said. “Why are they inserting themselves into a decision a company has made? Just because politically you don’t like it? It’s all so dumb.”The 23 May order and the latest edict, by the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, both warn that the regional grid would be strained by the closure of JH Campbell with local homes and businesses at risk of “curtailments or outages, presenting a risk to public health and safety” without it.“This order will help ensure millions of Americans can continue to access affordable, reliable, and secure baseload power regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining,” Wright said in a statement on Thursday.But Miso, the grid operator for Michigan and 14 other states, has stressed it has had “adequate resources to meet peak demand this summer” without JH Campbell and Consumers Energy had already set about making plans for life after its last remaining coal plant.“What’s remarkable is that this is the first time the energy secretary has used these powers without being asked to do so by the market operator or power plant operator,” said Timothy Fox, an energy analyst at ClearView. “It shows the Trump administration is prepared to take muscular actions to keep its preferred power sources online.”View image in fullscreenWright – whose department has bizarrely taken to tweeting pictures of lumps of coal with the words “She’s an icon. She’s a legend” – has said the US “has got to stop closing coal plants” to help boost electricity generation to meet demand that is escalating due to the growth of artificial intelligence.The administration has also issued a separate emergency declaration to keep open a gas plant in Pennsylvania, although it has sought to kill off wind and solar projects, which Trump has called “ugly” and “disgusting”.The president, who solicited and received major donations from coal, oil and gas interests during his election campaign, has signed an executive order aimed at reviving what he calls “beautiful, clean coal” and took the remarkable step of asking fossil fuel companies to email requests to be exempt from pollution laws, again under emergency powers.So far, 71 coal plants, along with dozens of other chemical, copper smelting and other polluting facilities, have received “pollution passes” from the Trump administration according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, allowing greater emissions of airborne toxins linked to an array of health problems. Coal is, despite Trump’s claims, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and the leading source of planet-heating pollution.Trump has launched a “political takeover of the electricity grid” to favor fossil fuels, according to Caroline Reiser, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The result of this will be higher electricity bills, more pollution in our communities and a worsening climate crisis,” she added.In Michigan, the cost of keeping JH Campbell open is set to be steep. Consumers Energy initially estimated its closure would save ratepayers $600m by 2040 as it shifts to cheaper, cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind.Reversing this decision costs $1m a day in operating costs, an imposition that midwest residents will have to meet through their bills. It is understood the company privately told outside groups it fears the administration could keep adding 90-day emergency orders for the entire remainder of Trump’s term.“Consumers Energy continues to comply with the [Department of Energy] order and will do so as long as it is in effect,” a company spokesperson said. “We are pursuing recovery of the costs of running the Campbell plant in a proceeding currently before [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission]. Timely cost recovery is essential.”Should the Trump administration go further and force all of the US fossil fuel plants set to retire by 2028 to continue operating, it will cost American ratepayers as much as $6bn a year in extra bills, a new report by a coalition of green groups has found.This would almost certainly be met by legal action – Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, has already filed a lawsuit arguing the “arbitrary and illegal order” to extend JH Campbell’s lifespan will unfairly heap costs upon households in the state.Trump’s efforts may bear some fruit, with US coal production expected to tick up slightly this year, although the longer-term trend for coal is one of decline amid cheaper gas and renewables. “The administration may slow the retirement trend although they are unlikely to stop it,” said ClearView’s Fox. “The economics don’t change but the administration could be a savior for these plants at least while Donald Trump is in office.”For those living next to and downwind of coal plants, there is a cost to be paid that isn’t just monetary. Tiny soot particles from burned coal can bury themselves deep into the lungs, causing potentially deadly respiratory and heart problems.The closure of such plants can lift this burden dramatically – a recent study found that in the month after a coal facility was closed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2016, the number of childhood asthma visits to local hospitals declined by 41% and then continued to fall by about 4% each month.The study shows “the closure of a major industrial pollution source can lead to immediate and lasting improvements in the lung health of the those who live nearby”, said Wuyue Yu, research co-author and postdoctoral fellow at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.For those living in the township of Port Sheldon, a mostly bucolic setting on the shore of the vast Lake Michigan, a pollution-free future beckoned once JH Campbell had been scheduled to close, with lofty plans for new parkland, housing and a battery plant touted for the site.View image in fullscreenNow there is uncertainty. Last week, a few dozen residents and activists held a protest event next to the sprawling plant, which hummed and whirred in the summer heat, one 650ft chimney puncturing the horizon, another, smaller flue striped red and white, like a candy cane.Dozens of train cars full of coal, hastily procured after the plant’s supply was used up ahead of a closure that has been scheduled for four years, backed up in the sunshine. When burned in the huge 1.5GW plant, this coal emits about 7.7m tons of carbon dioxide a year.“Trump is just trying to keep the money coming into coal companies as long as he can, I suppose,” said David Hoekema, who has lived a couple of miles from the plant since 2006 and has had to clean coal dust from his windows. Trump easily won this county, called Ottawa, in last year’s election, but Hoekema said even his staunchest conservative neighbors don’t want the coal plant.“I’ve not met anyone along the lake shore who says, ‘Oh yeah, let’s keep this open’ – even the conservative Republicans are concerned about their health,” he said. “Republican ideology says local control is best but the Trump administration is saying, ‘We don’t care what the hell states do, we will impose our order on them.’ I know there’s a lot of competition, but this would have to be one of their craziest decisions.”The Department of Energy did not respond to questions about its plan for JH Campbell once its latest extension expires. The battle over the coal plant’s future has taken place to a backdrop of a scorching summer in Michigan, one of its hottest on record, with algal blooms sprouting in its lakes, both symptoms of an unfolding climate crisis.“The talk in neighborhoods has been how hot it’s been this summer – my kid was prepared to be outside every day and it’s been so hot so often it’s been irresponsible to do that,” said Stephen Wooden, a Democratic state lawmaker who added that Michigan residents are also “pissed off” about increasing power bills.“We’re seeing the impacts of climate change daily, it is impacting our state,” Wooden said. “And this is being caused by the continuation of outdated, expensive fossil fuels that Donald Trump wants to prop up.” More

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      The umpire who picked a side: John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America

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      View image in fullscreenOn 4 March, Donald Trump delivered his epic 100-minute speech to Congress, the longest such presidential address in US history. Having finished speaking, in time-honored fashion, he walked down the line of supreme court justices, gladhanding each in turn before coming to a stop before the chief justice, John Roberts.“Thank you again, thank you again,” Trump said, taking Roberts’s hand into both his own and shaking it vigorously. Then, as he began to step away, the president tapped Roberts on the arm in a gesture of buddy-buddy intimacy, and said: “Won’t forget.”Supreme court watchers have wondered why Trump thanked the chief justice so effusively. Was it because the Roberts court had, exactly a year earlier, allowed Trump to stay on the electoral ballot even though he had inspired a violent mob attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021?Could it have been that Roberts had written the ruling that immunised Trump from criminal prosecution for that January 6 insurrection and for any other criminal misdeed he might commit while in the White House?Or was it, as Trump later claimed, more innocent than that: a simple thank you to Roberts for having administered the oath of office at Trump’s second inauguration?Whatever the truth, time has moved on since that friendly encounter five months ago. Were the president to bump into the chief justice today, one might expect an even more extravagant display of gratitude.In the past 10 weeks America has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of decisions from its highest court that should make Trump very happy indeed. The six rightwing justices who control the court – three of them given their lifetime seats by Trump himself – have effectively greenlighted the president’s explosive and law-busting agenda.The supermajority has granted Trump 18 straight victories in the administration’s requests for emergency relief. Steve Vladeck, a leading supreme court scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, has tracked the decisions in his Substack, One First, noting that the rulings have been handed down largely in the legal darkness.View image in fullscreenThey have been piped through the court’s so-called “shadow docket”, where important affairs of state are decided at speed and with little or no debate or deliberation. By Vladeck’s count, seven of the orders have been issued without any explanation, leaving the American people clueless as to the justices’ thinking.Yet the emergency rulings, though temporary in nature, could have seismic consequences. For as long as they hold they have the potential to cause untold suffering to millions of people targeted by Trump.That includes countless federal employees who can now be fired at whim after decades of loyal public service; transgender people purged from the military; more than 1 million individuals from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and other countries who are being stripped of their status to remain in the US; immigrants singled out for deportation to war-torn third countries where their lives are in danger.Legally, the consequences are also profound. Several of Trump’s actions given temporary go-ahead are of dubious legality, violating congressional or international laws and running roughshod over fundamental tenets of the US constitution.By conceding to Trump’s wishes, the justices have for now approved what Vladeck has called “a truly unprecedented amount of lawlessness by the executive branch”.The liberal-leaning justice Sonia Sotomayor has sounded a similar alarm in a series of increasingly despairing dissenting opinions. Her conservative peers on the court, she has written, are “rewarding lawlessness”, and undermining the bedrock principle that America is a “government of laws, not of men”.All of this has put Roberts, 70, in a strange and uncomfortable position. Just as he should be celebrating the completion of his 20th year at the pinnacle of the US judiciary, he is being accused of betraying the very legal edifice he is supposed to protect.Prominent jurists have held Roberts responsible for emboldening Trump’s drive towards an authoritarian presidency. J Michael Luttig, who served on a federal appeals court for 15 years, put the criticism starkly.“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” Luttig told the Guardian.In Luttig’s view, the court under Roberts is “acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness. And it is doing so without briefing, without argument, without deliberation – and without even a single word of explanation of its decisions.”For Luttig, this is more than just the 6-3 supermajority of the court expressing its conservatism. This is a fundamental distortion of the American legal system.“The supreme court was never intended to function like this. Never before has it entertained such challenges from the president, and never before has it decided them so flippantly.”When it comes to assessing the chief justice’s record, Luttig has special standing. He was himself a one-time contender for a supreme court seat, and has known Roberts as a friend since they worked together in their 20s in the Reagan administration. Roberts asked Luttig to be a groomsman at his wedding in 1996.“I have had four decades of knowing and respecting him,” Luttig said.Having had a ringside seat for so many years, Luttig has no doubts about how the chief justice is conducting himself in the current fraught moment.“John Roberts knows exactly what he is doing,” the judge said, “and he knows exactly the message he is sending to America.”Luttig’s characterisation of Roberts as a disciplined individual with absolute self-awareness chimes with the chief justice’s reputation as someone who cares deeply about public image. His attention to detail is legendary: he is known to rehearse his questions and fine-tune his jokes before oral arguments.He speaks so smoothly – and disguises his inner convictions so thoroughly – that he has been able to straddle political and personal divides. As one lawyer who has presented before Roberts at the supreme court put it: “There is no person I would rather deliver my eulogy, even if I knew that he hated me.”The roots of Roberts’s controlled conservatism lie in Buffalo, New York, where he was born on 27 January 1955, and in north-west Indiana where his family moved when he was 10. He was brought up in a devout Catholic well-to-do family enjoying the benefits of the post-war boom.His parents came from Johnstown, now a struggling hollowed-out town in western Pennsylvania but then one of the world’s great steel-producing centers. His father, John Glover “Jack” Roberts Sr rose to be a manager of a steel plant and moved the family to Long Beach, Indiana, a heavily segregated white enclave on Lake Michigan.As a teenager, Roberts imbibed a fusion of Catholic morality and a powerful work ethic. He went on to attend an elite Catholic boarding school, La Lumiere, that had been recently founded by local businessmen.“I have always wanted to stay ahead of the crowd,” he wrote in an application letter to the school at age 13. “I’m sure that by attending and doing my best at La Lumiere I will assure myself of a fine future.”Harvard and its law school followed. He remarked in 2006 that the culture shock of being an Indiana boy surrounded by liberal students protesting against the Vietnam war helped cement his conservatism.“I didn’t view myself as conservative until I went there and kind of reacted against the orthodoxy,” he said.Joan Biskupic, who wrote a 2019 biography of Roberts, describes him as having emerged from Harvard with a “flawless veneer” and an eye for appearances. In The Chief, she writes: “He has always shown a keen interest in how he is portrayed in the media. Even as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, he demonstrated an awareness of the importance of messaging.”The message for which Roberts is most famous was deployed during his Senate confirmation hearings for the role of chief justice in 2005. In a speech dripping with faux humility, he presented himself as the impartial arbiter of the law.“Judges are like umpires,” he said. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them … Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”Over the past 20 years he has honed that umpire character, modelling himself as a modern institutionalist. He has kept his personal convictions largely hidden, shrouding himself and his leanings in mystery; as Biskupic puts it, he is “his own enigma”.Meanwhile, the court he leads has marched – through Trump’s three nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – in an ever more rightward direction. Over time, the gulf has steadily widened between Roberts’s media representation as a moderate conservative and the increasingly extreme actions of his court.“Supreme court reporting has been generous to Roberts, and has reinforced the idea that what is happening in his court is a sort of normalcy, when it is not normal at all,” said Lisa Graves, the former chief counsel for nominations for the Senate judiciary committee and founder of True North Research, a watchdog investigating rightwing groups that undermine democracy.Graves has reappraised the chief justice’s 20-year record and come up with a very different narrative than that of Umpire Roberts. Her conclusions are laid out in her forthcoming book, Without Precedent, which will be published next month.In it, she argues that Roberts is anything but the modest judge he claims to be. Rather, he has used his power as chief justice to promote a rightwing agenda from the moment George W Bush placed him in the court’s central seat in 2005.View image in fullscreen“He has consistently shown hostility towards civil rights, trade unions and environmental protections, approaching the law with the rigidity of a rightwing ideologue. That was true from the time when as a young man he chose to clerk for the most regressive supreme court justice, William Rehnquist, and it remains true today,” Graves said.Roberts cut his legal teeth not in the wood-panelled setting of a federal court, but in the executive branch as an eager young pup in the Reagan administration. He began in 1981 working for Ken Starr, then chief of staff to the US attorney general (and later Bill Clinton’s bete noire), before joining the White House counsel’s office where he became friends with Luttig.Those early days of Ronald Reagan’s first term bear comparison with Trump’s second. Both presidents wielded a strong media presence, both were vitriolically dismissive of liberals whom they blamed for destroying America, both were committed to radical tax and spending cuts and slashing what they regarded as the bloated federal government.Roberts adopted Reagan’s mission with zeal. “I felt he was speaking directly to me,” he once recalled about listening to the newly ensconced president’s 1981 inaugural speech.Within the Reagan administration, Roberts began to formulate rightwing passions that have endured through his years on the top court. They included hostility towards civil rights and voting protections for racial minorities, and skepticism of racially based affirmative action.View image in fullscreenAt the justice department he wrote a series of spiky legal memos in which he let down his mild-mannered guard. Out came a stream of aggressive and combative missives designed to boost Reagan’s power and stature.The memos make for a chilling read in the context of today. Roberts lambasts fellow government officials whom he accused of standing in the way of the Reagan agenda – an echo of Trump and Doge’s war on the “deep state” civil service. He railed against affirmative action programs seeking to redress the balance for women and Black people – a view that was made manifest in 2023 when his court put an end to affirmative action in universities.The future head of the US judiciary went so far in his memos as to berate federal judges for what he called “unwarranted interference” in executive branch affairs. Fast forward four decades, and we now see the Roberts court repeatedly overturning the rulings of lower court judges who have resisted Trump’s lawless actions.Just how far federal courts should go in reining in presidents is a perennial question that has divided jurists and politicians for years. What disturbs some supreme court watchers about the present moment is the context in which this wrangling is happening: with Trump so brazenly challenging the rule of law, is now the time for the top court to be clipping the wings of federal judges struggling to hold him back?As Graves points out, Roberts’s approach to lower court judges would be more understandable if it were consistently applied – or to put it another way, if he actually did behave like a neutral umpire free of political motives. “When a Democrat was in the White House, the chief justice went out of his way to block student loan debt relief, which was a modest effort by the Biden administration that in no way compares to the extreme actions that Roberts is now greenlighting for Trump.”Roberts’s early musings on the importance of a strong executive in the White House, so evident in those Reagan memos, run as a theme through his jurisprudence. It culminated with him authoring Trump v US.That was last year’s shattering ruling that gave Trump absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his official presidential acts.The chief justice justified this extraordinary decision to shield the president from basic accountability by invoking the desire of the framers – the men who drafted the US constitution – for a “vigorous” and “energetic” executive.He conveniently overlooked the framers’ other core executive requirements: “responsibility”, and an obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”.Trump has repeatedly ignored that duty over the past six months. He has disregarded congressional laws, such as the 1974 Impoundment Control Act which limits the president’s power to withhold funds approved by Congress from federal agencies.He has also violated constitutional laws such as birthright citizenship – a right that is written in plain, unambiguous English into the 14th amendment.Graves believes that Roberts’s immunity ruling has had devastating consequences. “It paved the way for Trump’s return. It sent a signal to some sections of the American people that not only did Trump do no wrong, he could do no wrong – that if he returned to power, he would be above the law.”When Trump did return to the White House on 20 January, Roberts was widely seen as the last great hope for constitutional government. The chief justice would draw a line in the sand that Trump, thirsting for supremacy, would not be allowed to cross.Initially there were signs that such hopes might be founded. At 1am on 19 April – in the early hours of a Saturday morning – the supreme court issued an order that could be deemed to draw precisely such a line in the sand.It barred the Trump administration from deporting undocumented Venezuelans summarily to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The Roberts court had struck a blow for due process and, yes, the rule of law.The rosy glow of that pre-dawn intervention did not last for long. Since then the supreme court has used the shadow docket to grant Trump virtually his every wish, trampling over the separation of powers in the process.The most recent emergency order from 23 July allowed Trump to fire without cause three Democratic members of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. The decision was a direct affront to Congress, which had created the agency and only permitted the president to fire its commissioners on grounds of neglect of duty, or malfeasance.Just days earlier, the justices cleared the way for Trump to eviscerate the federal education department even though, as Sotomayor pointed out in one of her withering dissents, only Congress has the power to do so. And a week before that they gave the green light to the mass firing of thousands of federal workers, delivering a potential death knell to the US government as we know it.The court’s most egregious shadow docket rulings relate to cases in which Trump has not only violated the law, he has done so in open defiance of federal judges. On 23 June and 3 July the justices released two emergency orders which had the combined effect of allowing the Trump administration to deport people to third countries such as South Sudan, a nation devastated by civil war and with a shaky human rights record.Federal judges in lower courts had expressly forbidden the deportations, ordering that the individuals had to be given a chance to prove they faced torture in those destinations. Under the international Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, it is prohibited to expel people to places where they might be subjected to such illegal treatment.The Trump administration ignored the court rulings, deporting the individuals regardless.Roberts’s willingness to preside over a court that sides with Trump over the judiciary itself, even in cases involving brazen defiance of federal judges, has profoundly shocked the legal world.“The supreme court is the ultimate guardian of the rule of law, and it appears to have abdicated that role,” said Amrit Singh, director of the Rule of Law Lab at New York University. “The court has clearly indicated that it is willing to tolerate the Trump administration’s violation of federal court orders.”Singh’s charitable interpretation is that Roberts was trying to “appease the Trump administration to avoid direct confrontation”. Were that the case, she said, the chief justice was pursuing an “extremely dangerous strategy”.“He is letting the Trump administration get away with it. When district court orders are ignored, and the supreme court turns a blind eye, then the rule of law has already been sacrificed.”Some supreme court watchers have cautioned against assuming that the justices’ emergency rulings are their final word. Bob Bauer, Barack Obama’s White House counsel who co-chaired Joe Biden’s presidential commission on the supreme court, has pointed out that the court has yet to rule on several of Trump’s biggest provocations.They include birthright citizenship, and the use of the Alien Enemies Act under which third-country deportations are being carried out. “There is yet no final resolution of these issues,” Bauer has written in his Substack, Executive Functions.It is true that, if and when those issues are fully addressed by the supreme court, Roberts could surprise us once again. He could dust off his old umpire’s uniform, revisit his carefully crafted posture as a moderate institutionalist, and confound us all – Trump included – with nuanced rulings.But for his longtime friend Luttig, that is besides the point. The price of what Roberts is doing here and now, in the legal darkness of the shadow docket, is just too high.“The supreme court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said. “The chief justice has no higher obligation than to protect the federal judiciary from attacks by this president, and in my view he has utterly failed.”

      This article was amended on 21 August 2025 to correct that John Roberts administered an oath of office to Donald Trump; he did not take the oath as previously stated. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: president fights ‘woke’ Smithsonian after claims it is too focused on ‘slavery’

      by

      After Donald Trump on Tuesday lashed out at the Smithsonian Institution – a premier museum, education and research complex for US history and culture – over what he called an excessive focus on “how bad Slavery was”, the Guardian has revealed the shape his administration’s targeting of seven flagship museums will take.Trump suggested he would pressure the institution to accept his demands, just like he did with colleges and universities by threatening to cut federal funding. The White House said last week it would lead an internal review of some Smithsonian museums after Trump earlier this year accused it of spreading “anti-American ideology”.Here is the key Trump administration news of the day:Exclusive: Trump to review Smithsonian museums to ‘get Woke out’Amid the Trump administration’s heavy-handed review of Smithsonian museums, the Guardian has seen a document compiled by the White House that argues the widely visited cultural institutions have overly negative portrayals of US history, from a Benjamin Franklin exhibit that links his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people to a film about George Floyd’s murder that it says mischaracterizes the police.Read the full storyPresident calls on Federal Reserve governor to resignDonald Trump called on a Federal Reserve governor to immediately resign, renewing his extraordinary attack on the central bank’s independence as officials mull next steps on interest rates. The president has repeatedly broken with precedent in recent months to demand the Fed cut rates and urged its chair, Jerome Powell, to quit after disregarding such calls.Read the full storyTexas Republicans pass gerrymandered congressional map requested by TrumpThe Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives has approved a redrawn congressional map requested by Donald Trump and fiercely opposed by Democrats, who led a weeks-long protest to stall the effort that kicked off a redistricting arms race between red and blue states.With the House’s approval, the measure next goes to the state Senate, where it is expected to pass, possibly as soon as Thursday.Read the full storyJudge rejects Trump’s request to unseal Epstein transcriptsA federal judge in New York who presided over the sex-trafficking case against the late financier Jeffrey Epstein has rejected the government’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts.Judge Richard Berman’s ruling in Manhattan on Wednesday came after the judge presiding over the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell also turned down the government’s request.Read the full storyUS health agency workers accuse RFK Jr of fuelling violenceMore than 750 current and former federal health employees on Wednesday accused the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, of fuelling harassment and violence directed at government healthcare staff.Read the full storyMilitary vehicle crashes in DC as red states send more troopsA military vehicle crashed into a car in Washington DC on Wednesday morning, an incident that comes as more than six Republican-led states have all pledged to send more national guard troops to the capital.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      JD Vance was booed and heckled with chants of “Free DC!” during a photo op with national guard troops at Union Station in Washington on Wednesday afternoon.

      A Yosemite national park ranger was fired after hanging a pride flag from El Capitan, while some park visitors could face prosecution under protest restrictions that have been tightened under Donald Trump.

      Texas cannot require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, a judge said in a temporary ruling against the state’s new requirement.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 19 August 2025. More