Letters from an American - October 22, 2025

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

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October 22nd, 2025. It's not his house, it's your house, and he's destroying it. Yesterday, former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton cut to the heart of President Donald J. Trump's destruction of the East Wing of the White House. Indeed, that might have been the whole point. After saying in July that the ballroom he planned to build would not touch the East Wing. The president tore into the building on Monday, the first work day after about seven million people

turned out for the No King's protests to demonstrate their opposition to his administration. There are currently no approved plans to rebuild, no permits, no signs of weatherproofing for a construction project begun just before winter, no indication that the history or the paintings or the artifacts in the East Wing were preserved. There is only the destruction of the people's house.

Today, Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that Trump will demolish the entire East Wing. According to a senior administration official, the demolition should be finished by this weekend. Today, the U.S. military struck another vessel the administration claims was smuggling drugs into the U.S., killing two people on board. This is the eighth strike that has been made public. The U.S. strikes have killed at least 34 people. According to Defense Secretary Pete Heggzeth, this strike was in the eastern Pacific, widening the zone the administration is patrolling

for those it claims are enemy combatants, a legal claim that experts widely reject. Eleanor Watson of CBS News noted that on Sunday, Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat of Arizona, told Margaret, Brennan of Face the Nation that when administration officials briefed Congress about the strikes, they had a very hard time explaining to us the rationale, the legal rationale for doing this and the constitutionality of doing it. The officials informed Congress that they have a secret

list of over 20 narco organizations drug trafficking cartels, but did not share the list with lawmakers. National Security scholar Tom Nichols commented on today's strike, the president is establishing the principle that he can order the murder of anyone he deems a threat, and Congress is letting it happen. Today the Pentagon announced a new press corps to cover Hegseth and the Defense Department after the traditional pool turned in their press badges rather than agree to publish only material approved by Defense Department officials. Among those who walked out were Heggseth's former colleagues at the Fox News Channel. The new press corps, all of whom accepted the Pentagon censorship,

consists of right-wing outlets, including Lindell TV, run by MyPillow Chief Executive Officer and Key Election Denier Mike Lindell, and podcaster Tim Poole, who was funded by Russia before the 2024 election. Yesterday, Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that Trump is demanding the Department of Justice hand over about $230 million to compensate him for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022. Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024. His own appointees will decide whether to approve the claims. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote today, How do you top ordering your appointees to cut you a check for $230 million taxpayer dollars?

What thing can be more unimaginable and beyond belief than the president just saying, cut me a check for a quarter billion dollars? What can be weirder than is bulldozing a big chunk of the White House? The real story here is that Trump has been operating as king or dictator for going on a year, Marshall wrote. There's no accountability for anything. No limits. No penalties. So the demands keep spiraling. Speaking with Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, Chris Hayes of All In with Chris Hayes, admitted that the destruction of the East Wing hit him hard. There was really something visceral about those images that landed, he told the Senator. I wonder if you or other colleagues or other people you're talking

to have had that same reaction. Murphy answered, there's a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress. It was absolutely illegal. That visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down it's just a symbol about how cavalier he is about every single day acting in new and illegal ways that's the story with the killings in the caribbean as well the president just doesn't believe that any law applies to him that he can destroy federal property that he can steal from american citizens that he can kill with impunity that he can throw anyone in jail.

We are not living in a functional democracy any longer. It's not too late to save it, but it's just important to acknowledge that we aren't on the precipice of losing our democracy. We are losing it every single day. We are not a functional nation with a rule of law any longer, and those toppled walls in the East Wing are a pretty stark reminder of that.

Marshall, though, noted that Trump's behavior opens up opportunities the political opposition can and must exploit. The president is increasingly reckless, acting like someone who's free from any consequences or the need for support from anyone beyond his admirers. But the reality is that Trump is deeply unpopular. Some evidence for that unpopularity today came in the form of Treasury Department sanctions against Russia's two largest oil companies, which suggests the administration feels it can no longer entirely ignore Republican senators.

As Hans Nichols and Steph W. Kite of Axios recalled yesterday, bipartisan majorities in the Senate have been demanding sanctions since July, when Trump put them off by saying he would impose sanctions in 50 days if Russia's President Vladimir Putin didn't end his war in Ukraine. Then, in August, Trump invited Putin to Alaska, and Senate Republicans backed off to give the president room to negotiate. Last week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, signaled he was ready to move forward, and lawmakers and aides told the press the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would pass three bills to increase pressure on Russia. One would label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.

One would impose economic penalties on China for its support of Russia, and the third would transfer Russian assets frozen in the U.S. to Ukraine. Today, the administration announced its own, much more limited, sanctions. On Monday, the White House was forced to withdraw Trump's nomination for Paul Ingrosia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him, after the publication of texts in which Ingrossius said he has a Nazi streak in me. Ingrossia still works for the administration, but will not move to the head of the Office of Special Counsel.

Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen wrote on Midas Plus, the Senate, this 119th Congress, which has spent nine months acting like an annex of the West Wing, finally pushed back. This is the same chamber that Greenlit Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Pete Higgseth at Defense, both appointments that made career staffers consider early retirement. But, he continued, some line was finally crossed. Maybe it was the word Nazi. Maybe it was the timing, coming as it did just days after the exposure of another group of young Republicans texting Nazi talk. Maybe Thune, a man who's built his career on calculated restraint, decided he wasn't going to be remembered as the Senate leader who confirmed the guy with the Nazi jokes, Cohen wrote.

Whatever the reason, the rubber stamp hesitated. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead of Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.