June 13, 2025

Friday, June 13, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

Breakin’!

Judge Charles Breyer - “That's the difference between a constitutional government and King George. It's not that the leader can simply say something and then it becomes it,”

Judge issues a temporary ruling against Trump using the National Guard in LA.

A federal judge has ruled against President Trump's use of the National Guard in Los Angeles, siding with the state of California's argument that the president erred in how the guard was being activated. The order requires Trump to return control of the National Guard to California Gov. Gavin Newsom by noon Friday (Pacific Time).

The ruling could still be appealed. But it's a setback for the White House in the dispute over the powers it can assert in cracking down on illegal immigration - and over public opposition to it. It was not immediately clear if or when Guard units would be removed.

In a hearing Thursday, District Judge Charles Breyer rejected an argument by the administration's lawyer that the courts do not have authority to review a president's decision on whether the National Guard is needed.

"That's the difference between a constitutional government and King George. It's not that the leader can simply say something and then it becomes it," the judge said.

Starting on Saturday, Trump deployed 4,000 California National Guard and several hundred U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, over the objections of Democratic Gov. Newsom. National Guard units across the country are under the command of governors but can be federalized by presidents.

Breyer said during the hearing that he could not rule on the use of the Marines, though the lawyer for California said they might replace Guard troops.

In his order deploying the guard, Trump said there had been attempts to impede immigration agents in Los Angeles that constituted "a form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States."

It was the first time in 60 years that a president had activated a state's National Guard over objections of the state's governor. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.

California's Newsom had said that Trump's use of the military was unlawful.

"The federal government is now turning the military against American citizens," Newsom said in a statement when his state sued to get control of the Guard back.. "Sending trained warfighters onto the streets is unprecedented and threatens the very core of our democracy."

California officials said the protests were being handled by local law enforcement, the violence was brief and isolated and the military deployment actually escalated tensions and led to more unrest. No deaths or serious injuries have been reported.

"At no point in the past three days has there been a rebellion or an insurrection. Nor have these protests risen to the level of protests or riots that Los Angeles and other major cities have seen at points in the past," the state wrote in its lawsuit against the administration.

The White House had argued in court that there had been ongoing interference and "fighting" with immigration agents and that the president has the power to decide when the situation requires using the military. Justice Department lawyers said the military was not conducting law enforcement duties but would be used to protect or accompany federal agents and their operations. (NPR)

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Historian Heather Cox Richardson on 5 topics.

June 11, 2025.

Headings and sub-headings are mine.

Trump’s falling and failing popularity.

While President Donald Trump is trying to project strength by ordering a federalized National Guard and the Marines into Los Angeles, a new Quinnipiac poll of American registered voters out today reinforces that both Trump and his policies are unpopular.

The numbers are remarkable.

The poll shows that 38% of registered voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president; 54% disapprove.

Voters aren’t keen on Trump’s appointees, either. Thirty-eight percent of voters approve of the way Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is handling his job; 53% disapprove. Thirty-seven percent of voters approve of the way Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is handling his job, while 46% disapprove. Thirty-eight percent approved of the work billionaire Elon Musk did, while 57% said it was either “not so good” or “poor.”

More voters disapprove than approve of Trump’s handling of immigration issues (43% approval to 54% disapproval), deportations (40% approval to 56% disapproval), the economy (40% approval to 56% disapproval), trade (38% approval to 57% disapproval), universities (37% approval to 54% disapproval), the Israel-Hamas conflict (35% approval to 52% disapproval), and the Russia-Ukraine war (34% approval to 57% disapproval).

Voters are opposed to the budget reconciliation bill the Republicans have dubbed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” (and Democrats have called the “Big, Beautiful Betrayal”) by 53% to 27%. While the measure cuts almost $800 billion out of Medicaid over the next ten years, only 10% of registered voters believe the federal funding for Medicaid should decrease.

Trump’s falling and failing effect on the economy.

There is little good news for the administration in economic numbers, either. Yesterday, the World Bank, an international organization of 189 countries, joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in concluding that Trump’s trade war would cut U.S. economic growth sharply. The World Bank estimates that growth will fall by half in 2025 compared to 2024. In 2024 U.S. economic growth was 2.8%; in 2025, the World Bank predicts growth of just 1.4%. It forecasts that Trump’s trade wars will cut global economic growth from 2.8% in 2024 to 2.3% in 2025.

Trump’s falling and failing tariffs.

After promising 90 tariff deals in 90 days, Trump has been desperate for a deal with China. In retaliation for Trump’s high tariffs, China tightly controlled exports of rare earth minerals and the magnets made from them, which the U.S. needs to build cars, electronic products, and missiles. Rare earth minerals are valuable minerals that are not uncommon, but are present in such small concentrations the amount of labor it takes to refine them is enormous. Most of them are currently mined in China. As Ana Swanson reported yesterday in the New York Times, late last month Ford had to close a Chicago factory temporarily and other companies have been forced to suspend some of their operations.

On Sunday, on CBS’s Face the Nation, top White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said: “The point is we want the rare earth, the magnets that are crucial for cellphones and everything else, to flow just as they did before the beginning of April,” that is, before Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Today Trump posted, “OUR DEAL WITH CHINA IS DONE,” although China simply called it a “framework” and neither Trump nor Xi has agreed to it. Malcolm Ferguson of The New Republic wrote that the proposed deal simply revives a May deal that rolled tariffs back for 90 days.

Further, the rare earth deal only lasts for six months.

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers wrote: “The US & Chinese trade negotiators have negotiated a handshake agreement to seek signoff to agree that a previously-agreed agreement was still their agreed upon agreement. (That agreement is not an agreement but a framework for seeking future agreements).” He added: “Notice that not only are we not getting a better deal, we’re not even getting back to where we were at the start of the Administration.”

Before the House Ways and Means Committee today, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Trump is likely to extend the 90-day pause on his tariffs with countries to whom the administration is speaking.

Trump’s failing behavior on our military.

Meanwhile, Konstantin Toropin and Steve Beynon of Military [dot] com confirmed today that the troops Trump addressed in a partisan speech at Fort Bragg had been handpicked Trump supporters with a fit physical appearance. (One message simply read: “No fat soldiers.”)

Toropin and Beynon reported: “The soldiers roared with laughter and applauded Trump's diatribe in a shocking and rare public display of troops taking part in naked political partisanship.” They also reported that an Oklahoma-based retailer was selling pro-Trump and right-wing campaign-style merchandise at the event, a violation of military policy.

When questioned about Trump’s undermining of the traditional nonpartisanship of the military, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told the journalists: “Believe me, no one needs to be encouraged to boo the media. Look no further than this query, which is nothing more than a disgraceful attempt to ruin the lives of young soldiers.”

But a commander at Fort Bragg commented, “This has been a bad week for the Army for anyone who cares about us being a neutral institution,” speaking with Military [dot] com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “This was shameful. I don’t expect anything to come out of it, but I hope maybe we can learn from it long term.”

Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Roger Wicker (R-MS) and chair of the House Armed Services Committee Mike Rogers (R-AL) have said nothing. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch, who served as a Marine, called their silence “a betrayal of their duty to the military and the Republic.”
The administration’s policies continue to gather opposition.

Disapproval and opposition against Trump grow.

National Institute of Health.

More than 90 scientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, signed and another 250 supported anonymously a letter sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and NIH leader Jay Bhattacharya titled the Bethesda Declaration. The scientists used as a model Bhattacharya’s own October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which echoed the political plan of the first Trump White House and called for ending any attempt to control Covid-19 and instead simply letting it spread.

The Bethesda Declaration said: “[W]e dissent to Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.” It said the leaders of NIH and members of Congress who oversee it are prioritizing “political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources.” They called out the politicization of research by stopping high-quality, peer reviewed grants and contracts, thus throwing away “years of hard work and millions of dollars,” risking the health of participants in studies, and damaging public trust.
They noted that some of the signers felt they had to remain anonymous while others, “due to a culture of fear and suppression created by this Administration[,] chose not to sign their names for fear of retaliation.”

Kash Patel and the FBI.

Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing of Politico reported today that former Trump allies are turning on Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino. Both of them had pushed a number of conspiracy theories on right-wing media before Trump appointed them to office, and supporters expected that they would expose the “Deep State” once they were in power. But they have not released new information about the Jeffrey Epstein case, which right-wing adherents believe will show a list of people who are implicated in the convicted sex offender’s actions. Micah Morrison at the right-wing Judicial Watch wrote: “Conservative insiders are alarmed by mounting signs that Patel and Bongino have been taken hostage by the Deep State consensus and are failing to bring meaningful change to the FBI.”

Disapproval as shown by elections and Elected Officials.

Yesterday, voters in districts in Florida, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma chose state House and Senate members in special elections. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes that in five of the six, Democrats continued to overperform relative to their 2024 numbers.

Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky, Calen Razor, and Mia McCarthy reported today that of the 50 Republican members of Congress they surveyed, only 7 said they planned to go to the June 14 military parade in Washington, D.C. Although the parade is in honor of the 250th anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Army, the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees do not plan to attend.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who has criticized Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, yesterday said: “I love parades, but I’m not really excited about $40 million for a parade. I don’t really think the symbolism of tanks and missiles is really what we’re all about…. All the images that come to mind are Soviet Union and North Korea.”

Today, Paul told Jordain Carney of Politico that the White House has uninvited him from the annual White House picnic for members of Congress and their families, a move that Paul learned of only when he tried to pick up the tickets and that he called “incredibly petty.” He commented that the “level of immaturity is beyond words.” (Letters from an American, Substack).

One more thing.

As we count the numbers.

Majorities in key U.S. allies have no confidence in Trump

More than half of people in key U.S. allies – including France, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea and Japan – have no confidence in President Trump's leadership in world affairs, according to a new global survey by the Pew Research Center.

People in 15 of 24 countries downgraded their ratings of the U.S., according to the survey of more than 28,000. In addition, majorities in almost every country surveyed describe Trump as "arrogant" and "dangerous."

NPR reached out to the White House for a response to the survey's results.

"President Trump is the president of the American people and his priority is to work on their behalf, nobody else's," wrote spokesman Steven Cheung. "The overwhelming majority of Americans support his America First agenda. America is back on top after four years of failure under Joe Biden."

In fact, recent polls show the president's approval rating stands at about 43%.

Richard Wike, who runs the global attitudes team at Pew, says one reason that Trump and the U.S. are receiving low ratings overseas is many people around the world want a more engaged America.

"If you look at our surveys over the years, people in other countries often want to see the U.S. working collaboratively, engaging in efforts with other countries to address big global challenges," says Wike. "When the U.S. is going its own way, it's seen more negatively."

For instance, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris international climate accord for the second time after taking office in January. In the Pew survey, less than 20% of people in Canada, France, Germany, Australia and Spain expressed confidence in Trump's handling of climate change.

Trump has also imposed a series of steep, on-again, off-again tariffs on allies, such as Canada, and rivals, such as China, wreaking havoc with financial markets. Less than a third of people in the Netherlands, Italy, Japan and Sweden expressed confidence in the president's ability to manage global economic problems, the survey found.

The survey was conducted from Jan. 8 to April 26 in 24 countries across Europe, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Of course, foreigners don't vote in American elections, but Wike says international political opinion of the U.S. still matters.

"I think it makes it easier for leaders to cooperate with the United States if the U.S. is relatively popular in their country," Wike says. "It doesn't mean that a leader is not going to cooperate with the United States if the U.S. is unpopular . . . but hey, look, politicians respond to incentives."

Some people did find positive aspects to Trump's style. For instance, majorities in 18 countries consider Trump a strong leader. Ratings of the U.S. have improved since last year in Israel, Nigeria and Turkey.

Trump also did well with populists in Europe, according to the survey. 88% of people who support Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's ruling Fidesz Party also express confidence in Trump, as do 56% of supporters of Germany's right-wing party, Alternative for Germany.

This is not the first time many people overseas have expressed concerns about Trump and his personality.

Confidence in Trump's ability to do the right thing in international affairs plunged during the early months of his first term, according to a Pew survey at the time. For instance, 86% of Germans had confidence in President Barack Obama towards the end of his term. But that fell to just 11% after Trump took office in 2017. Back then, a majority of those polled in 37 countries called Trump arrogant, intolerant and dangerous. (NPR).

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On another issue.

Huckabee is Trump’s man in Israel. His stance strengthens Netanyahu.

US ambassador to Israel says US no longer pursuing goal of independent Palestinian state

Mike Huckabee suggested any future Palestinian state should be carved out of ‘a Muslim country.’

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has said that the US is no longer pursuing the goal of an independent Palestinian state, marking what analysts describe as the most explicit abandonment yet of a cornerstone of US Middle East diplomacy.

Asked during an interview with Bloomberg News if a Palestinian state remains a goal of US policy, he replied: “I don’t think so.”

The former Arkansas governor chosen by Donald Trump as his envoy to Israel went further by suggesting that any future Palestinian entity could be carved out of “a Muslim country” rather than requiring Israel to cede territory.

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“Unless there are some significant things that happen that change the culture, there’s no room for it,” Huckabee was quoted as saying. Those probably won’t happen “in our lifetime”, he told the news agency.

In a separate interview with the BBC, Huckabee said: “Muslim countries have 644 times the amount of land that are controlled by Israel. So maybe, if there is such a desire for the Palestinian state, there would be someone who would say, we’d like to host it.”

When pressed on Palestinian aspirations in the West Bank, where 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, Huckabee employed Israeli government terminology, asking: “Does it have to be in Judea and Samaria?”

Trump, in his first term, was relatively tepid in his approach to a two-state solution, a longtime pillar of US Middle East policy, and he has given little sign of where he stands on the issue in his second term.

The state department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Middle East analysts said the comments made explicit a shift that has been broadly expected.

“This is not at all surprising given what we’ve seen in the last four-plus months, including the administration’s open support for expelling the population of Gaza, the legitimization of Israeli settlement and annexation policies,” said Khaled Elgindy, a scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and former adviser to Palestinian negotiators.

“This is an administration that is committed to Palestinian erasure, both physical and political,” Elgindy said. “The signs were there even in the first Trump term, which nominally supported a Palestinian ‘state’ that was shorn of all sovereignty and under permanent Israeli control. At least now they’ve abandoned the pretense.”

Yousef Munayyer, head of Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington DC, said Huckabee was merely articulating what US policy has long demonstrated in practice. “Mike Huckabee is saying out loud what US actions have been saying for decades and across different administrations,” he said. “Whatever commitments have been made in statements about a Palestinian state over time, US policy has never matched those stated commitments and only undercut them.”

The ambassador’s position has deep roots in his evangelical Christian beliefs and longstanding support for Israeli settlement expansion. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Huckabee said: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian.” In a 2017 visit to the occupied West Bank, he rejected the concept of Israeli occupation entirely.

“I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” said Huckabee at the time. “There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”

What distinguishes Huckabee, Munayyer argued, has been his willingness to be explicit about objectives that previous officials had kept veiled. “What makes Huckabee unique is that he is shameless enough to admit out loud the goal of erasing the Palestinian people.”

The analysts add that Huckabee’s explicit rejection of Palestinian statehood, which comes as the war in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and displaced most of the territory’s more than 2 million residents, would also create diplomatic complications for US allies.

“This will put European and Arab states in a bind, since they are still strongly committed to two states but have always deferred to Washington,” Elgindy said.

Hours after Huckabee’s comments were reported, the US imposed sanctions on a leading Palestinian human rights organization, Addameer, as well as five charity groups in the Middle East and Europe, claiming that they support Palestinian militants.

A bike race in Rafah, Gaza, last year, organised by the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees. Israel claims the group is a front for the PFLP.

The US treasury department alleged that Addameer, which provides legal services to Palestinians detained by Israel or the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, “has long supported and is affiliated” with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a militant group classified as a terrorist organization by the US and EU.

Israel raided the West Bank offices of Addameer and other groups in 2022 over their alleged PFLP links. The United Nations condemned that raid at the time, saying that Israeli authorities had not presented to the UN any credible evidence to justify their declarations.

The Guardian later reported that a classified CIA report showed the agency had been unable to find any evidence to support Israel’s description of the group as a “terrorist organization”. (The Guardian)

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Not there yet, but possible good news for Harvard and everyone else.

US Education Secretary McMahon Hints at Possible Detente With Ivy League Amid Campus Antisemitism Fight

US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon hinted at the possibility of unfreezing billions of dollars the federal government put on ice to punish elite universities it deemed as soft on campus antisemitism and excessively woke.

“It would be my goal that if colleges and universities are abiding by the laws of the United States and doing what we’re expecting of them, they could expect to have taxpayer funded programs,” McMahon told Bloomberg’s Akayla Gardener during an interview which aired on Tuesday on the news outlet’s YouTube channel.

Responding to an additional question Bloomberg posed regarding President Donald Trump’s saying recently that Harvard University — which lost over $2.26 billion during the spree of cuts — “is starting to behave” — McMahon agreed with the president, suggesting that Harvard and the administration are drawing near a compromise, perhaps even on reforms that conservatives have long said will make higher education more meritocratic and less ideologically biased.

“Clearly what he’s indicating is that we are, I think, making progress in some of the discussions, even though they [Harvard] have taken a hard line,” McMahon said. “They have, for instance, replaced their head of Middle East Studies. They have already put in place some of the things that we have talked about in our negotiations with Columbia.”

She added, however, that taxing Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment, the value of which exceeds the gross domestic product of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and over 120 other nations, would benefit taxpayers. In April, Trump ordered the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to review Harvard’s tax-exempt status, a measure that was cheered by populists while being regarded as extreme by others who argue that following through on the revocation stands to make American higher education less competitive.

“You know, these are really outstandingly large endowments — $53 billion, you know, for Harvard, and that money doesn’t just sit still,” McMahon continued. “It is invested, and if it’s invested well, they can expect a good return on that investment. And so, if citizens of our country are providing tax support to universities that do take federal dollars, then maybe some of that should come back.”

Later on in the interview, McMahon said that Columbia University and the Trump administration have weighed agreeing to a consent decree, in which neither party concedes fault, to resolve the government’s claims against the institution. Only days earlier, her Education Department said the university should lose its accreditation with the Middle States Commission for being “in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws.” Such a measure would be catastrophic to the institution, which is one of the oldest in the US. [it is the oldest] (this account was in the Algemeiner)

A United States Senator was manhandled and arrested for trying to ask a question at a Homeland Security Press Conference.

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The Senator from California.

You may have heard.

“Sir! Sir! Hands off!” Mr. Padilla, 52, shouted as federal agents tried to muscle him out of the room where Ms. Noem was speaking inside a government office building about 15 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. “I am Senator Alex Padilla, I have a question for the secretary.”

His office and Fox News made videos.👇

Senator Padilla spoke after his release.

https://www.youtube.com/live/MJKS4syY3GY?si=JMPJC_WSdOhZ8cM8

From the New York Times.

Ms. Noem said she spoke with Mr. Padilla after the news conference, adding that his attempt to intervene “wasn’t appropriate.” Outraged Democrats took to the Senate floor to protest Senator Padilla’s treatment and called on Republicans to join them. “This is the stuff of dictatorship,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii.

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The World Class Cowards of ABC News.

In an official statement on Tuesday, ABC News announced that it would not renew the contract of correspondent and anchor Terry Moran.

"We are at the end of our agreement with Terry Moran and based on his recent post—which was a clear violation of ABC News policies—we have made the decision to not renew," the statement read. "At ABC News, we hold all of our reporters to the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism, and we remain committed to delivering straightforward, trusted journalism.”

That statement is such a sublime example of comedy writing, it made me want to say, “Stay in your lane, ABC News!”

Instead, I’d like to ask two questions about ABC’s beef with Moran.

First question: Was what he posted on social media—that Donald J. Trump and Stephen Miller are world class haters—really just his opinion, or verifiable fact?

In my view, Moran was just recognizing these two gentlemen for excelling in their chosen field.

It would be impossible to list all the times Trump and Miller have brought home the gold in the hating Olympics, but let me give a couple of examples.

On the campaign trail last year in Wisconsin, Trump said, “These migrants, they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat... I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members.”

Sounds pretty hate-y to me.

As for Miller, his long career in hatred is well documented in the 2020 book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, by reporter Jean Guerrero, who probably won’t be working at ABC News any time soon.

In an appearance on the “PBS NewsHour” on November 14, 2019, Guerrero revealed that Miller was a big fan of The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian novel about immigrants destroying Western Civilization. This top pick for the Stephen Miller Book Club describes migrants as "kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms, all the teeming ants toiling for the white man's comfort."

So, yes, when Terry Moran called Trump and Miller world class haters, he was stating fact, not opinion. If he can be criticized for anything, it’s that as a newsman, he was reporting something that wasn’t exactly news.

But let’s move on to my second question: What other journalists in broadcast history would have been canned for violating ABC’s “highest standards of objectivity”?

Well, Walter Cronkite, for one.

On February 27, 1968, after a fact-finding trip to Vietnam, Cronkite famously said this on his evening news program, which had an audience of 30 million Americans: “The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic if unsatisfactory conclusion.”

Pack up your office, Walter!

Terry Moran’s non-renewal has less to do with ABC’s pompously-stated policy than with parent company Disney’s sweaty campaign to appease the fascistic Trump regime. This is the same company, after all, who shoveled $15 million into his trough last year to settle a baseless defamation suit.

The ongoing capitulation of media corporations undermines the First Amendment, enables authoritarianism, and should alarm anyone who cares about democracy.

At the risk of violating the highest standards of objectivity, let me say this: I am more grateful than ever that I don’t work for corporate media. I work for you.

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