Letters from an American - July 8, 2025

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

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Music July 8, 2025. One hundred and eleven people are dead and more than a hundred and sixty are still missing in Texas after Friday's tragic flood. Who's to blame? Texas Governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. That's the word choice of losers. Every football team makes mistakes, he continued, referring to Texas's popular sport. The losing teams are the ones that try to point out

who's to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, don't worry about it, ma'am, we've got this. Abbott's defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall

Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county, but decided against it. Then-County Commissioner Thomas Moser told the reporters, it was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities, trying not to raise taxes. Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded

wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them, even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top one percent. Now, in Trump's second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives. Today, the Supreme

Court cleared the way for the administration to fire large numbers of employees at 19 different federal agencies and to reorganize them while litigation against those firings moves forward, although it required the administration to act in ways consistent with applicable law. A lower court had blocked the firings during litigation. Anne E. Maramo of the Washington Post notes that this court has repeatedly sided with President Donald Trump as he slashes the federal government. The court said it is not expressing a view on the legality of the cuts at this time.

The administration's cuts were in the news today as Marissa Cabas of the Hand Basket reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has just 86 people deployed in Texas today, although Trump declared a disaster on Sunday. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting today, Trump said it wasn't the right time to talk about his plans to phase out FEMA. The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four

other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of COVID vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes unlawful and unilateral and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act. Just who is in charge of the administration remains unclear. In The New York Times yesterday, Jason Zingerle pointed to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller as the final word on White House policy. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defers to him.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to him. White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, is concentrating on producing a reality TV show every day, a Trump advisor told Zingerle. So Miller, with his knack for flattering his boss, wields power. Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Secretary of

Defense Pete Haggiseth did not inform the White House before he stopped the shipment of weapons to Ukraine last week. Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that Haggiseth's lack of a chief of staff or trusted advisors means he has no one to urge him to coordinate with other government partners. Trump has ordered Hegseth to restart some of the shipments. When a reporter asked the president today who had authorized the pause, Trump answered, I don't know, why don't you tell me? At today's press opportunity, Trump was erratic, at one point veering off into a discussion of

whether he should put gold leaf on the moldings in the room's corners. The administration has so few successes to celebrate that as Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters reported today, it is claiming credit for investments that were actually made under former President Joe Biden. A government website touting the Trump effect claims more than $2.6 trillion in US investments, but Renshaw found that more than $1.3 trillion of those investments originated under Biden

or were routine spending. One company has warned that its pledge of investments worth $50 billion is threatened by Trump's policies. When asked why the administration had taken credit for projects that happened under Biden, White House officials said, the final investment decisions were announced under Trump's watch and prove his economic policies are triggering U.S. investment. Renshaw noted that it was not clear in many cases what role, if any, Trump

or his policies played in getting the deals across the line. Instead of embracing proven economic policies, the administration appears to be turning to ideologically-based ideas that seem far-fetched. Today, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rejected the idea that the government would find a way to protect undocumented agricultural workers. There will be no amnesty, she said. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we will move the workforce towards automation

and 100% American participation, which again, with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly. The administration is now facing a rebellion from MAGA supporters, who expected that, once in power, a Trump administration would release information about those men implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as people for whom Epstein provided underage girls. MAGA loyalists maintained the deep state

was hiding the list to protect unnamed Democratic politicians, and MAGA leaders fed the conspiracy theory to stoke anger at the Democrats. Once in power though, Trump officials have failed to produce a list of Epstein's clients. MAGA loyalists have now turned their anger on those officials, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in February that the Epstein list

is sitting on my desk right now, and who now maintains that no such list exists. Perhaps to distract their supporters from the issue, the Fox News Channel Today announced that the FBI is launching criminal investigations of former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey over their investigation of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. The Fox News Channel also announced that the White House has waived executive privilege for former President Biden's White House physician, Kevin O'Connor, who had asked to postpone his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee

about former President Biden's mental acuity and use of an auto pen. On Saturday, O'Connor's lawyer wrote to committee chair, James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, asking for the postponement, noting, we are unaware of any prior occasion on which a congressional committee has subpoenaed a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient.

And the notion that a congressional committee would do so without any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship is alarming. As its popularity sinks, the administration appears to be turning to extraordinary measures to enforce its will. Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel, and Aaron Schaefer of the Washington Post reported today that Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has tried to get access to emails and chats

of people working in the intelligence community in order to root out those perceived as insufficiently loyal to Trump. Gabbard's press secretary claimed the effort was designed to end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans. But Representative Jim Himes, a Democrat of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the reporters that Trump's loyalists' zeal to root out politicization often seems to be shorthand for anything less than unconditional support for the president. He noted their effort risks creating an echo chamber within the intelligence community

or creating counterintelligence risks. The Internal Revenue Service today changed their long-standing policy to say that churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. According to Gary Grumbach and Dara Gregorian of NBC News, the rule prohibiting churches from endorsing candidates is rarely enforced, and Trump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Protestants, has called for an end to it.

A judge will have to agree to the change. The administration show of force in Los Angeles yesterday, when immigration officers and about 90 National Guard members descended on MacArthur Park with 17 Humvees and four tactical vehicles in what looked like a military operation, appears to have been designed to intimidate immigrants and Trump's opponents. And today, Trump suggested he could take over New York City if voters elect Democratic mayoral candidate Zoran Mondani. He then suggested the administration could take over Washington DC as well. We could run DC. I mean we're looking at DC. We

don't want crime in DC. We want the city to run well," he told reporters. We would run it so good, it would be run so proper, we'd get the best person to run it. We want a capital that's run flawlessly, and it wouldn't be hard for us to do it. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Devin, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.