Letters from an American - May 16, 2025

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

May 16, 2025. MAGA World is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump. 86 slang for tossing something away, followed by 47, a reference to Trump's presidency. Using 86 as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock.

It is a common term used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody. Until now. MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey's threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel, that meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. He's calling for the assassination of the Fox News Channel, that meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. He's calling for the assassination of the president. That's going to be up to Pam and all of the great people. He's a dirty cop."

Trump's reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off. Yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. today for an interview. In the past day, Trump's social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on Shellgate and Trump's posts

about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news. In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump's posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election

swept like a brush fire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR,

the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief, and the US Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing anti-white genocide. Southworth calls this narrative warfare, and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now,

this technique is also known as political technology, or virtual politics. This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian President Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool, flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.

The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order to sell the country on Trump's expansionist approach to presidential power. The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of soundbites, interviews with loyalists, meme-slamming Democrats, and attack lines. We're here.

We're in your face, said Kaylan Doar, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. It's irreverent. It's unapologetic. The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Stephen Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was full spectrum dominance.

Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump's appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn't know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist SV Datté noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump's words. Chung told Dutte, you must be truly stupid if you think we're not transparent.

The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business Insider Monday comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former President Joe Biden's son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider's German parent company. Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist

and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the weaponization working group in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russian Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were critical elements in Russia's disinformation and propaganda ecosystem, where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.

As Trump's popularity falls, Trump's political operators have spent in the high seven figures, Alex Eisenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump's economic program. Tell Congress this is a good deal for America, the ad says. Support President Trump's agenda to get our economy back on track. In their advertising efforts, Musk's mining of the U.S. government records is deeply concerning. For the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016. The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20th, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans

and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy. Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the US to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession. His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market.

Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record. Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. It's not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us, he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries

would pay high tariff duties, helping the US Treasury to address its high deficits. At the same time, the wealthy got further tax cuts. Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed One Big Beautiful Bill, a reference to Trump's term for it. The measure extended Trump's tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over 10 years

and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs. The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C., and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody's downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.

Since Trump took office, the Department of Government Efficiency also claimed to be slashing waste, fraud, and abuse from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31 percent to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money. Tax evasion among the top 10 percent of earners costs about $700 billion a year. The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Voigt,

director of the Office of Management and Budget. Voigt was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government. Voigt talked about traumatizing federal workers and has done so. But the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that the Department of Government Efficiency tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed

3.5 million people rots in government warehouses. Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost contact with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers lost contact with airplanes. Yesterday, the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contacts with planes for two minutes. Cuts to a program that funds the health care of first responders and survivors of the September

11, 2001 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments for example will be covered Yesterday acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season which starts on June 1st and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said, as FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood. Thus, FEMA is not ready.

Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their US citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made for TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward. Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA, but it is a profound perversion of the American dream.

Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. Thanks for watching!