Letters from an American - July 10, 2025

Episode Date: July 12, 2025

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The House of Representatives The House of Representatives July 10th, 2025. Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded. And at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana,

announced Republicans were laying a key cornerstone of America's new golden age. But the past week has shown a nation and an administration in turmoil. On July 4th, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing.

Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service, or NWS, for the disaster. But reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1.14 a.m., 4.03 a.m., and 6.06 a.m. But four hours passed before the police department in the city of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn't until 7.32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the Weather Service employee in charge of coordinating between them.

He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency and has not been replaced. Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending

by requiring her personal sign off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn't put crews in place ahead of the storm or respond immediately. Nome didn't sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started. Trisha McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Nome did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. �FEMA is shifting from bloated, D.C.-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,

McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades. DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse and is re-prioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens, McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA. Meanwhile, FEMA's acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site.

Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson's absence suggests Nome is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped. The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff, because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president's intent. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA," he said. Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS canceled a three million dollar grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.

Tariffs are back in the news as Trump's postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever. On April 2nd, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that beginning on April 9th, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%, a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect, and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries, using a

bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro. Immediately, the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9, yesterday, vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly. 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said.

But only two deals have been forthcoming, one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam, meaning that on July 9th, the high tariffs of April 2nd would take effect. Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1st. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9th to August 1st.

Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders, informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzelbenn of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. A letter means a deal, he told reporters.

We can't meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they're doing, that are doing a good job, but you can't do it. You have to do it in a more general way, but it's a very good way. It's a better way. It's a more powerful way." On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry

to that point will take years. He also announced a 35 percent tariff on goods from Canada. Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10 percent tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit. While Trump continues to insist, incorrectly, that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former Vice President Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg's surveillance, he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessens boasts that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year. Well, tariffs are a

tax and American importers and businesses and ultimately consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families. The administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods. Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor, Emil Bove,

to be a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Boeve is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6th rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CICOT terrorist prison in El Salvador. On June 24, Erez Ruveni, a former Department of Justice, or DOJ, lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Rouveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CICOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Rouveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice

and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety. Ruvenny alleged that Boeve insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ would need to consider telling the courts, f**k you, and ignore any such court order. Ravendi then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate

the orders of the court. Boeve told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had no recollection of saying f**k you to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Ruvini was a leaker asserting false claims. Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Rouveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boesberg,

one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men, when, as one of Rouveni's colleagues said, I can't believe he said he doesn't know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours. Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois, the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee,

said in a statement Thursday that Bove belongs nowhere near the federal bench. This is about more than a random F-bomb, he said. This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land. Today, a federal judge appointed

by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump's executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge LaPlante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal. Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury's verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.

Tonight, the White House posted on X an image of Superman Trump, a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched against a gauzy background with the caption, Truth, Justice, The American Way. ["The American Way"] Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts.

Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.