Author: Tony Wikrent Page 1 of 50

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 02, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

The Math Behind The U.S. Defeat in Iran

Spencer Ackerman, 30 July 2026 [forever-wars.com]

… By spreading out missile and drone attacks across a wide arc of U.S.-used or aligned military bases and civilian infrastructure (energy, data and desalination facilities) spanning from Kuwait to the United Arab Emirates—and now spreading inland—Iran has forced the U.S. into firing off lots of its interceptors. It also successfully attacked on-base radars that the interceptors rely on for accuracy. While story after story reported that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned about the limited supply of interceptors, known as magazine depth, President Trump insisted that the U.S. had sufficient capability to fend off Iranian attacks.

The actual magazine depth of the U.S. military is understandably classified. But yesterday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank with impeccable establishment credentials—Kissinger was a trustee—published an estimate of the current state of U.S. interceptor stocks. I don’t know what exactly I expected, but the burn rate of the interceptors is so extreme as to make this war look doomed from the outset.

According to CSIS, the U.S. had 2330 Patriot (smaller, short-range) interceptors and 452 THAAD (larger, long-range) interceptors at the start of the war. Five months later, it has between 759 and 827 Patriot interceptors and between 234 and 278 THAADs. Those aren’t figures for the interceptors the U.S. has in the Middle East. They’re the figures for all the interceptors the U.S. has, period.

In other words, the U.S. has so far used up around 66 percent of its Patriot stocks and around 40 percent, conservatively, of its THAADs. It did that in five months across a war it chose. A war that Trump said would be won in four to five weeks.

The rate of expenditure hasn’t been static in those five months. Remember that there was a ceasefire declared on April 8. CSIS’ figures, understandably, show the most intense period of interceptor usage occurring in just the first five weeks of the war. All this helps explain why Trump had to pursue a ceasefire in the first place….

U.S. general warns Pentagon he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel

The top U.S. general in Europe privately warned the Pentagon this week that he lacks sufficient naval forces to continue protecting Israel from incoming ballistic missiles, officials said, illustrating how the ongoing Iran war has imposed constraints on the military.

Israel and US consider Iran land blockade

Connor Stringer, July 31, 2026 [The Telegraph, via yahoo.com/news]

The United States and Israel are discussing a possible land blockade of Iran, The Telegraph can reveal.

The proposal is one of several options being explored by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to ratchet up economic pressure on the regime after months of strikes and a prolonged campaign failed to bring it to heel….

Iran shares borders with Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, meaning the leaders would have to persuade these countries, many of which they are not allied with, to co-operate.

Washington may view Pakistan and Iraq, which are not considered its close allies in the region, as weak links.

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Inside Trump’s Unprecedented Fundraising Operation

Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer, July 30, 2026 [Wall Street Journal, via PoliticsNC]

Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.

Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.

“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments….

Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.

Trump has been demanding large checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects—telling executives and lobbyists that their companies should give $25 million or $50 million. He has sometimes offered donors special access….

“Trump is shattering all fundraising paradigms in regards to hitting up corporate America for donations. The scope is mind-bogglingly large,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “We used to talk about the Lincoln bedroom being for sale, but this is just a wholesale money trough that’s totally different.” Critics alleged in the 1990s that the Clinton administration allowed overnight stays in the White House’s Lincoln bedroom in exchange for campaign contributions….

The White House referred requests for comment to Alvarez. She said the president is the “most successful fundraiser in modern political history” and that Trump plans to use the money to “help Republicans win big in the midterms, build an enduring political infrastructure and continue advancing innovative private-sector initiatives.”

“One thing has never changed. President Trump can’t be bought,” she said….

Several CEOs and board members said they believe there is a link between their contributions and their access to the president. One chairman of a publicly traded company said that if you give the money, you know you are either checked on a list, or crossed off a list if you don’t….

Companies have traded notes about what Wall Street analyst Blair Levin calls “The Trump Transaction Tax,” or a payment outside of the cost of normal business. “Another way of saying it,” Levin said, “is simply that we’re replacing the free market with the market for Trump’s affections.” ….

A Ruling Party That Faces No Consequences for Open Corruption Has No Reason to Accept Elections – We won’t survive if we try to play by their rules.

Christopher Armitage, Aug 01, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship

Mark Danner [The New York Review, August 20, 2026 issue]

Reviewed:

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00

… The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of NATO, the destruction of USAID, and the calamity of the Iran war, Trump’s name is more likely to appear on lists of leaders who have diminished their country’s power than lists of those who have increased it. But that he has become one of the most powerful American presidents—that he has since his second inauguration “put on a demonstration of raw executive power the country had not seen since the presidency of FDR”—is well-nigh indisputable. One could go further and say that not only has Trump, like Roosevelt and Lincoln, successfully imposed on the world’s first modern democracy a “constitutional dictatorship,”  he is the only president to have done so in the absence of a true emergency.

How did he do it? Aggressively, brutally, relentlessly—weren’t we all watching him? The more specific answer is that he did it by exploiting the chief executive’s myriad emergency powers or, as Haberman and Swan rather politely phrase it, by “redefin[ing] the very concept of an ‘emergency.’” Another way to put it is that Trump did what Trump does as easily as he breathes: he lied. Is the trade deficit, in uninterrupted existence for half a century, an emergency? Can a country leading the world in energy production be said to be undergoing an “energy emergency”? Can we consider that the southern border, where crossings dropped 77 percent after Joe Biden’s executive order limiting entry, remains in the grip of a “border emergency”? The answer is no. But it doesn’t matter. In issuing more than 140 executive orders in his first hundred days in office—Roosevelt issued ninety-nine—Trump declared that the country was beset by no fewer than ten separate emergencies.

 And in the face of this supposedly unprecedented onslaught the president must have unprecedented powers to confront them….

Trump’s National Killer Police Force

[The Intercept, July 24, 2026]

Within the span of a week, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people in Maine and Texas, and another was hit by a truck and killed in Florida after trying to avoid ICE agents. A fourth person recently died in ICE custody after reportedly being denied medication.

Their deaths prompted yet another round of questioning as to how federal immigration agents have amassed so much power and so little accountability. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Naureen Shah, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Nayna Gupta, of the American Immigration Council, on the consequences of allowing the government to build a national policing force that’s bringing Trump’s war on immigrants into communities across the country.

“The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level,” says Shah. “Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world.” ….

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 26, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Prosecutor Investigating U.S. Boat Strikes and Claims of Torture Was Murdered in Ecuador 

Camila Lourdes Galarza, July 23, 2026 [Drop Site]

QUITO, Ecuador—Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack.

Are Foreign Intelligence Agencies and Criminals Killing Donald Trump’s Enemies to Earn His Favor. The Quiet Dismantling of America’s Defenses Against Foreign Assassination on U.S. Soil.

Christopher Armitage, July 25, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

War on Voting

Don’t Let ICE Freeze Voting

Guest article by Jay Inslee, former governor of Washington State [MeidasTouch Network, Feb 03, 2026]

… Ask yourself this – why would Trump NOT surround polling places with camo-clad, face-masked, helmet-wearing, semi-automatic long gun carrying ICE and Border Patrol agents on election day, in every Democratic-leaning precinct in any targeted district? What would restrain him? His well-developed sense of propriety? His internal moral code? The spineless Republicans in the House and Senate that would have to threaten him with impeachment if he did this? Good luck finding those Profiles in Courage.

This would be devastating. He would not target all the precincts, just those with heavy Democratic performance. Given the fact that the Trump administration shoots protesters and then lies about them, the abject fear these troops would put in the minds of thousands of people who just want to vote cannot be measured, but is surely significant, particularly given the close margins in the House….

THE PLOT AGAINST THE MIDTERMS

Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2026]

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 19, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War on voting

Letters from an American, July 11, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, Jul y12, 2026

Meanwhile, on Friday a Pentagon official told Rebecca Turco of WJLA 7News in Washington, D.C., that National Guard troops will stay activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”

“So,” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark commented. “[M]ilitary troops under the direct control of Trump and Hegseth will be on the streets of our nation’s capital for the rest of Trump’s term. The rationale—they’re here to help with a crime emergency—is laughable. But of course the real reason is ominous.”

Miller Labels Leftists a “Cancer” That World Must “Root Out” in Fascistic Speech

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2026]

Representatives from 67 countries gathered in the U.S. on Thursday for a meeting called Rubio on the supposed “Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” In addition to Rubio and Miller, several U.S. officials spoke, including figures like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The remarks from top officials quickly made clear that the meeting’s purpose was to put forth a global offensive against people with left-wing beliefs….

Letters from an American, July 17, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, Jul 18, 2026

Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.

As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Miller’s Ministerial: The Most Dangerous Speech Wasn’t Trump

Jim Stewartson, July 17, 2026 [MindWar]

While everyone focused on elections, Stephen Miller was putting the architecture in place to ensure they never matter….

… a few hours before Trump’s dud of a speech, Stephen Miller gave a “ministerial” to an international audience at the State Department that was nothing short of Third Reich plagiarism. If this had just been a rally speech, it would be extremely disturbing, but it went along with a simultaneously released document entitled “Trump Administration Unleashes Global Campaign to Crush Radical Left Terrorism.”

Put together, Miller’s speech and official policy document enshrine an overtly fascist, transnational program to persecute nearly anyone the regime wants in the name of “leftist terrorism.”

Here is a key section of Miller’s speech which is textbook dehumanization—the precise language Joseph Goebbels used to target Jews, communists, and Bolsheviks.

Miller draws a picture of the in-group as “morally superior,” ordered,” “beautiful,” and “normal.” The out-group on the other hand, identified as “leftists,” is “abnormal,” “scarred,” and “deformed.”….

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

Dr. John Gartner: Trump is “the most pure incarnation of evil that I have ever encountered” (video)

Dean Obeidallah, July  18, 2026

… Dr. Gartner explained that he meant that very much from a clinical point of view, explaining that Dr. Erich Fromm had studied Hitler and coined the term “the essence of evil.” Fromm explained that “evil” from this perspective is not a supernatural force but a severe psychological pathology.

And when you see what Fromm said next you will see Donald Trump. Fromm explained this essence of evil was marked by a dangerous combination of extreme self-absorption, sadism, destructiveness, and a lack of empathy or conscience. It was also Fromm who created the term “malignant narcissism”—which many apply to Trump today.

But it’s the “evil” part of this that really stuck with me. As Dr. Gartner noted, Trump is a sadist who “gets pleasure from chaos, and destruction, and fear, and damage, and death.” He continued on, stating, “Every indication is that when Trump first started bombing Iran, he was gleeful and talking about, you want to see the fun and showing people the videos of the blowing up targets and talking about it like he was having fun.” ….

After Killings, Homan Says There Will Be ‘More Bloodshed’ Unless Dems ‘Shut Their Mouth’ About ICE

Stephen Prager, July 16, 2026 [CommonDreams]

… Instead of trigger-happy agents, he said that anti-ICE “rhetoric” from Democrats was to blame for the recent killings.

“It all goes back to the Dems who want to continually attack ICE and tell people to evade them and tell people don’t comply, tell people to resist, and tell people ICE isn’t a real law enforcement agency,” Homan said.

“You and I talked about this a year-and-a-half ago, Laura,” he continued. “I said, if the hateful rhetoric didn’t stop, there would be bloodshed.”

“I’m saying it right now,” Homan said. “There’s still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted.”

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 12, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War on voting

Eighteen States Have Complied With the GOP’s Election Theft Infrastructure. How Many Is Enough to Kill a Democracy?

Christopher Armitage, July 05, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

… The court wins protect mostly the governments that sued. The June 25 injunction covers the 23 suing states and DC, and the administration told the courts this week that it is moving ahead with the system in the remaining states. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate on June 24 that under the proposed rule the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not send their voter lists to the federal government. A voter in Houston or Columbus gets nothing from the injunction, because that voter’s state government joined the federal programs instead of fighting them. One ruling reaches further: in a separate case brought by the NAACP, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan found the plan to deliver ballots only to preapproved voters broke a 2021 agreement with the Postal Service, and his ruling applies nationwide. That ruling protects ballot delivery. It does not touch the data collection, the purge agreements, or the state purge laws. So the court protection concentrates in states whose governments already refused to cooperate. In the cooperating states that hold the races deciding control of Congress, only the ballot delivery ruling applies.

The 60 million registration checks flagged about 24,000 possible noncitizens, and officials also flagged several hundred thousand registrations of people who may have died. Those totals only show how many people the government has flagged so far. It can flag as many as it chooses, and no one has to prove a flagged voter is ineligible before the registration is canceled; the voter has to prove they are eligible. That arrangement is a devastatingly powerful voter disenfranchisement tool.

In Texas, flagged voters got a letter, and if the county heard nothing within 30 days, the registration was canceled; some who did answer turned out to be citizens. A new Ohio law makes local election boards promptly cancel the registrations of people the secretary of state flags as noncitizens in checks he must run at least monthly. That secretary, Frank LaRose, defends the law on the ground that flagged voters can “immediately restore their registration status” by showing proof of citizenship.

The system also discourages people from registering at all, separate from the cancellations. A federal official confirmed that people flagged by SAVE are referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and the judge who reviewed the system wrote that a centralized federal database like this would discourage registration because citizens could fear misuse of their personal information. In races decided by hundreds or a few thousand votes, losing voters from only one side, and mostly from one party, can change the result even when the national numbers stay small….

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 05, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

UNhappy birthday, America

Reconsidering the Constitution’s Preamble: The Words that Made Us U.S. — University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 1718

David S. Schwartz, September 25, 2021 [37 Constitutional Commentary 2022]

[TW: I now refer to the GOP and its members as (anti)Republicans and the (anti)Republican Party, because they believe in a philosophy of governance that is repugnant to the original principles of civic republicanism on which USA was founded. The two major principles of civic republicanism are promoting the general welfare, and justice, as explained by Senator Charles Sumner in a speech on February 5 and 6, 1866, The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government; Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution Fixing the Basis of Representation. (Here are excerpts.)

[(Anti)Republicans have openly and explicitly rejected the founding principle of promoting the general welfare. This rejection is centralt to their attacks on the “welfare state.”  See Randall G. Holcombe’s 1992 article arguing that the major improvement of the Confederate Civil War constitution was the elimination of the General Welfare mandate. Holcombe served on Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors in Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. Also see Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s May, 2011 misinterpretation of James Madison, enumerated powers, and the General Welfare mandate.

[Recovering the meaning of the General Welfare Clause  necessarily includes a rebuttal of conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist attempt rewrite the Constitution with their pet theories of constitutional originalism and enumerated powers.

[Until they were shocked by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, liberals and leaders of the Democratic Party have been blind to this reactionary project. Democrats and “the left” have committed a grievous error of omission by ignoring the historical record of the fight within USA between republicanism and oligarchy, and rejecting out of hand USA Constitutional law and political history as mere instruments of an oppressive and exploitative capitalist system tainted irremediably by slavery, racism and bigotry. This omission has crippled the ability of “the left” – not to mention the leadership of the Democratic Party – to comprehensively understand how thorough, insidious, and deadly the reactionary project is. They mistakenly believed liberalism was a derivative of civic republicanism instead of seeing how much of liberalism — with its emphasis on “private property” and “individual liberty” — was shaped as an oligarchical response to civic republicanism and the rise of the American republic. Thus they were disastrously outflanked by the Rehnquist / Scalia / Thomas assault on the law and persistent undermining of the principles of civic republicanism.

[Nevertheless, some constitutional scholars and historians — such as those listed in the excerpts below — were quite aware of the reactionary assault on the USA justice system, and working to correct a historical record that had been hijacked by the conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist project. The liberal / Democratic / “left” response to “the right” is bound to fail until it incorporates the work of these constitutional scholars and historians.

[Conservatives and originalists dismiss the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution as a “stylistic flourish with no operative legal significance,” but “the drafting history of the Preamble, observable by comparing the preambles in the Articles of Confederation, the Committee of Detail draft of the Constitution, and the Committee of Style’s final version, demonstrate that the Framers considered the Preamble to be substantively meaningful.” There is room to debate the exact meaning of the Preamble — “it might be viewed as a rejection of compact theory, as an interpretive guide to the powers granted in the body of the Constitution, or as a source of implied powers.” But concluding that the Preamble is “a legally inoperative flourish has no basis as a matter of text or history.”

[In his 1833 three-volume Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States — long considered the most through and faithful exposition of Constitutional interpretation — Justice Joseph Story wrote that while the Preamble does not confer any “substantive power” on the national government, it does “expound the nature, and extent, and application of the powers actually conferred by the
constitution,” and should be used as a guide to interpreting the Constitution when “the terms of a given power admit of two constructions, the one more restrictive, the other more liberal.” Further, interpretation should be “governed by the intent of the power;” that is, Constitutional interpretation of federal powers should “promote” and not restrict — Story uses the word “defeat”” — that power. Schwartz writes,

“For Story, then, the preamble is an argument against strict construction of federal powers: a statement that the Constitution’s grants of powers are to be liberally construed, to promote such things as “the general welfare.”

[This is, of course, the exact opposite of the doctrines of conservatives and originalists such as William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas,  and Samuel Alito, not to mention the entire (anti)Federalist Society.  Schwartz makes the important point that

The argument that the preamble meant nothing more than a stylistic flourish … was highly congenial to compact theorists, nullifiers, and secessionists.

[We have seen this throughout American history: the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution have tried repeatedly to have the Constitution reinterpreted in ways that limit and even abrogate the powers of the national government. Today, the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution want to dismantle “the administrative state” and allow “free enterprise” and “private property” free reign to foul our environment, alter our climate, exploit our labor, limit our economic prospects, mute our political participation, and surveil our lives.

[Schwartz ends by noting that at the time of ratification, the Anti-Federalists fully understood that the grand objectives proclaimed in the Preamble meant that the federal government was not at all strictly limited in its powers, but pointed to an expansive realm of implied powers, as Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton would argue in his February 1791 report to President Washington on the constitutionality of establishing a national bank.

[Schwartz writes,

The Framers felt they had to clarify that the new government was a truly national government, and moreover, one based on republican principles—that is, authorized by the sovereign people, not by a grand interstate compact.

Significantly, nothing in the Preamble makes “limited enumerated powers” an object, or—pace Madison—an essential characteristic of the national government. The preamble does not list “federalism,” or “state sovereignty” or “balancing national powers with the rights of the states” among its great objects. [p. 10] ….

Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the ratification debates and early republic both understood the Preamble “as reinforcing a theory of sovereignty and national union that expanded the scope of national power, beyond either those powers that were enumerated or those powers that might be aggregated from that enumeration.”  This nationalist reading, channeling the constitutional vision most acutely expressed by James Wilson, was thus a prominent reading—although so read with horror by Anti-Federalists—as Federalists in the early post-ratification years argued that the Preamble was indeed a legitimate source of implied powers. [pp. 11-12]

[There is plenty of history that clearly demonstrates the wild inaccuracy of “originalist” interpretation: Hamilton’s reports, Justice James Wilson’s law lectures in the first years of the republic [and it was actually Wilson who wrote most of the Constitution; Madison is better known because he took notes on the proceedings and later became President], Justice Story’s Commentaries, and more. Never forget that yhe Southern slaveholders insisted the slave states were the true republics in their time. Failure to understand what a republic really is at that time, and repudiate the slaveholders accordingly, led to civil war. ]

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 28, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Trump administration begins mass layoffs at ODNI

Drop Site Daily, June 23, 2026

The Trump administration has begun mass layoffs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with hundreds of employees expected to lose their jobs, CNN reported Monday.

Acting ODNI Director Bill Pulte, whom President Donald Trump tasked with downsizing the agency, is overseeing cuts expected to hit the National Counterterrorism Center and National Counterintelligence and Security Center, with as many as 400 employees at the counterterrorism center reportedly targeted.

War on voting

The Real Reason Trump Never Stops Talking About Voter Fraud

Jamelle Bouie, June 17, 2026 [New York Times]

… To say, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that there was systematic voter fraud is to lie. And Trump, again, was lying. But he was also making a specific political claim. If there were no shenanigans but there was still “fraud” because the election was “rigged,” then it’s clear that the meaning of fraud has less to do with any particular set of rules and procedures than it does with the more elemental aspects of American political life. And it doesn’t take much work to decipher the president’s conception of “fraud.”

There was a reason, to put it differently, that Trump centered his crusade on ferreting out “illegal votes”; there was a reason he focused on cities with large Black populations like Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia; and there was a reason that when his supporters fought their way into the Capitol, they unfurled Confederate flags to mark their achievement.

The president’s convoluted and false claims about “fraud” were little more than a smoke screen for a more basic claim about who belongs to the community — about who counts as a voter and who counts as a citizen. To say that Democratic victories in Pennsylvania or Georgia were the product of fraud in Philadelphia or Atlanta was to say, in short, that the wrong people were voting. And in the same way that Trump’s “birtherism” wasn’t really about whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, his crusade to “stop the steal” wasn’t about the nation’s election procedures. It was a declaration that the only real voters were his own….

Brad Reed, June 25, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Letters from an American, June 24, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, Jun 25, 2026

… this morning at 9:49, Trump suddenly announced he will not sign the bill into law until Congress passes the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE or SAVE America Act, that he keeps pushing….

Then, at 10:26, he posted: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

That language is important. Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has used official emergency declarations at an unprecedented rate in order to claim emergency powers under which he can ignore laws. Although the Republicans hold a majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning Trump could work with Congress to pass legislation, he and his advisors appear to be applying the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt.

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who himself almost certainly has not read Schmitt—asserted this view in August of last year when he said: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Alex Kaplan of Media Matters notes that since Trump took office in 2025, his loyalists have urged him simply to declare a national emergency in order to justify dictating new voting and election rules to the states.

The U.S. Constitution gives to the states the authority to conduct elections, but the Trump administration wants state voter lists, at least in part so it can run them through a tool designed to find noncitizens who might have applied for benefits for which they’re ineligible. That system, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements and, confusingly, also abbreviated as SAVE, is not designed for voter rolls, and as Liz Dye explained today in Public Notice, it explicitly did not cover U.S. citizens.

But, Dye explains, between last April and last August, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration linked the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to the master file from Social Security, called NUMIDENT. Then they reprogrammed SAVE to upload voter rolls for mass citizenship screening.

Certain Republican-dominated states, like Texas, handed over their voter rolls. An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.

In addition to the system’s inaccuracy, the uploading of the files, Dye notes, was “a gross violation of the Privacy Act of 1974,” which prohibits the government from repurposing an individual’s data for a new use without notice and without providing for 30 days of public comment….

Marc Elias: The Stakes in November – The famed election lawyer sizes up where we stand

Win McCormack, June 26, 2026 [The New Republic]

War

Negotiating Without Leverage And With Lies – What We Are Seeing Is Astonishing For The USA

Phillips P. OBrien, June 24, 2026 [via Letters from an American, June 24, 2026]

… Personally, I have never seen the US in such a position of weakness.

Because the US has no significant leverage over Iran, the Trump administration (as it has been for months, it needs to be said) will simply have to dissemble about non-existent Iranian concessions to try and make it seem that they have not been completely routed. And that is the second part of this update. The US government has reached the stage where the default assumption must be that it is lying when it comes to Iran making any concessions. For months the Administration has been claiming that Iran was agreeing to this concession or that concession—and none of these claims has been true. Now that the US has even less leverage, the lies will probably get larger.

We are witnessing the most extraordinary negotiating moment in the history of US foreign relations, and that alone makes it worthy of note….

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 21, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

US Finally Capitulates with ‘Memorandum’ of Surrender

Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]

Iran Enlisted “Senior Psychologists” to Help Craft Messages to Trump Ahead of Agreement

[Jeremy Scahill, June 15, 2026 [DropSite]

… “We added two senior psychologists to the negotiations’ advisory circle so that we can shape messages intended for President Trump from the perspective of managing what we regard as psychopathic behavior pattern,” an Iranian official told Drop Site. He said the psychologists began assisting Iranian negotiators following the initial round of bilateral talks in Islamabad in April as the two sides began exchanging proposed terms for a potential Memorandum of Understanding.

“[Trump’s] reactions have improved noticeably since we began incorporating the recommendations of these advisers into our messages and written communications,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

“Because the exchanged texts will ultimately become part of the historical record, we conduct our negotiations in a manner that ensures the relative weight and sophistication of each party’s negotiating techniques will be evident should these communications be made public in the years ahead,” the official added….

The Race for Hypersonic Missiles

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]

The Future of Warfare is Coming Faster Than Most Think

Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]

Ukraine’s Naval Drone Program: Origins, Development, and the Organizations Behind It 

[Black Mountain Analysis, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 14, 2026

by Tony Wikrent  

War  

‘Sounds a Lot Like a Nuclear Threat’: Trump Floats ‘Ultimate Alternative’ If Iran Talks Collapse

Jake Johnson, June 13, 2026 [CommonDreams]

President Donald Trump claimed Saturday that the US and Iran are on track to sign a diplomatic agreement this weekend, but added that “we have the ultimate alternative” if the process doesn’t “work out.”

“The ‘ultimate alternative’ sounds a lot like a nuclear threat,” Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, wrote in response to the president’s Truth Social post. “Not the first time Trump has hinted at it.”

Trump not violating any laws

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’ Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’ Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025  

Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein File

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, June 10, 2026 [New York Times]

On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

 

Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files….

The Orbit is Fracturing

Mike Brock, Jun 10, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have a book coming out. The book is called Time Change, and Simon & Schuster has put substantial weight behind it, and the New York Times Magazine has run the set-piece excerpt this morning. The piece is framed, with the careful gentleness of the trade, as an inside look at the White House freakout over the Epstein files. The frame is not what the piece is.

What the piece is is a scene. The scene is the John F. Kennedy Conference Room inside the White House Situation Room complex, on the evening of July 17, 2025, at approximately six in the evening. The Vice President of the United States is in the chair. Around the table are the Chief of Staff, the Counsel, the Press Secretary, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, the Communications Director, the Deputy Attorney General, a personal attorney to the President, another personal attorney to the President, and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Legislative, Political, and Public Affairs. On speakerphone — on speakerphone, the detail to which I will return — are the Attorney General of the United States and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The President is not in the room. The President is not in the building.

The Vice President says, this is a significant issue. He is described by people who were present as visibly anxious. He is, according to the reporting, advocating internally for the full release of all Epstein-related files held by the Justice Department, and for a congressional inquiry. The Chief of Staff has told colleagues, in some venue or other that Haberman and Swan have access to, that the Vice President has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories. Another senior official has told the reporters that the Vice President has been aggressively pursuing the Epstein issue since the memo’s release.

That is the scene. That is what we are looking at.

I have written, in these pages, that the man at the center of this administration is evil, and that the orbit around him has chosen, every day, to be where it is. I asked, in that piece, why anybody around him is tolerating the insanity. I am writing this piece because today’s excerpt is the beginning of an answer, and the answer is not what some readers wanted to hear. The answer is that some of them are, in fact, no longer tolerating it. They are positioning. They are leaking. They are sitting for interviews. They are, in private rooms, telling Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan things that they know will appear in books published by Simon & Schuster and excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. They are, in other words, beginning the work of constructing the record by which they will, later, explain what they were doing in the room….

Donald Trump is Evil

Mike Brock, June 08, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

… Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity?

The question is not rhetorical. I want it asked out loud, by name, in the rooms where it matters, by the people who go home at night and tell themselves they are the adults in the room. I want it asked of the Cabinet members who have signed on to be the cabinet of a man whose pathology is not a secret and has never been a secret. I want it asked of the aides who walk down the hallway with their phones in their hands and pretend they did not hear what they just heard. I want it asked of the Senate Republicans who have voted, vote after vote, to let this man put his name and his face and his will on the institutions of the United States. I want it asked of the donors who have written the checks. I want it asked of the lawyers who have drafted the briefs. I want it asked of the press secretaries who have stood at the podium and said the words they were told to say. I want it asked of every single one of them, and I want them to have to answer it, and I want the answer to be on the record.

There is no good answer. There is only the answer of careerism, and the answer of cowardice, and the answer of the ambient corruption of being in the orbit of a man whose pathology you have to pretend not to see. The aides who tell their friends he is not really like that. The Cabinet members who tell themselves they are the bulwark. The Senate Republicans who tell themselves they are the moderating influence. The donors who tell themselves they are funding tax policy. The legal team that tells itself it is doing the work of the law. Each of these is a lie….

Trump asking (anti)Republicans in Congress to void first-term impeachments

Joyce Vance, June 12, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

…there’s a 1984, “Let’s rewrite history” moment tonight. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has a new gambit to rewrite history. He is “pushing lawmakers to pass a resolution aimed at voiding his first-term impeachments.”….

‘Abolish ICE,’ Summer Lee Says After Haitian Immigrant Daphy Michel’s Death Ruled a Homicide

Jessica Corbett, June 12, 2026 [CommonDreams]

The U.S. Took Over Venezuela’s Oil Industry. Where Has All the Money Gone?

[Council on Foreign Relations, via Letters from an American, June 11, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson]

… Based on tanker-tracking data from Bloomberg and reports on discounts applied to Venezuelan crude, the estimated value of U.S.-controlled oil exports has increased from $600 million in January (about 380,000 barrels per day) to about $3.7 billion in April alone (about 1.1 million barrels per day). The largest recipients of Venezuelan oil since January 3 have been the United States (43 percent), India (26 percent), and Spain (8 percent).

The Trump administration has shared some details with Congress. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified in January that $300 million had flowed through a “short-term” account in Qatar and been disbursed to Venezuela, while another $200 million was “still sitting” in the account. He indicated the administration would conduct a retroactive audit on the funds that moved through the Qatar account. The following month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said during a press interview that the full $500 million had been transferred to Venezuela and that the administration would use U.S. Treasury accounts going forward.