June 28, 2025

Saturday, June 28, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

The Public’s Not With Trump by William Kristol

Demonstrators gather outside City Hall during a rally opposing the United States' strikes on Iran on June 22, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

In case you hadn’t noticed, everything’s not great as we approach the celebration of our nation’s 249th birthday.

Donald Trump’s abuses get more brazen and his usurpations get more dramatic by the day. He is tightening his control of the executive branch and using its powers ever more aggressively to execute his authoritarian agenda. The other two branches of government don’t seem able or willing to do much to check or balance him, or even slow him down. And much of the private sector is too timid to embrace the cause of defending liberty and a free society.

Things could be worse. They’d be worse if the American people were enthusiastically supporting Trump’s actions. But they’re not. That might make the inability or unwillingness of their “leaders” to resist Trump more forcefully seem inexplicable. But there is also hope that with the public resisting, these leaders might eventually stiffen their spines a bit.

There’s some fresh evidence of public resistance in a new poll from Quinnipiac University. It shows 41 percent of voters approving of the way Trump is handling his job as president, while 54 percent disapprove.

More striking is this: On Trump’s signature issue of immigration and deportation—central in so many ways to his authoritarian project—64 percent of voters say they would prefer giving most undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status, while only 31 percent say they prefer deporting most of them. In December 2024, those numbers were 55 percent versus 36 percent. So Trump has lost ground on his most high-profile initiative.

What’s more, 56 percent of respondents in the Quinnipiac poll disapprove of the way ICE is doing its job, 55 percent disapprove of sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles, and 60 percent disapprove of sending in the Marines. Again, cause for optimism but also befuddlement, too. After all: Couldn’t Democrats in Congress do more to point out that the “One Big Beautiful Bill” now before the Senate massively increases spending for the unpopular masked men of ICE and their deportation efforts?

Then again, maybe making this point is unnecessary. The Quinnipiac poll shows that the Big Beautiful Bill is already extraordinarily unpopular. An unusually high 71 percent of respondents say they have heard or read a lot (36 percent) or some (35 percent) about that legislation. And they don't like it. Fifty-five percent of voters oppose the bill while only 29 percent support it, and 16 percent are unsure or have no opinion.

I can recall no similar case when the signature legislation of a new president and his party in Congress had the support of only 29 percent of the public. Even Democrats in Disarray should be able to run successfully in 2026 against Republican members of Congress who’ve voted for this bill—and more broadly, against the Republican leadership in D.C. that insisted on it.(The Bulwark]

---

The Public stands against Trump. The Supreme Court, not so much.

Supreme Court Sides With Trump in Birthright Citizenship Case

The justices ruled that courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions blocking executive orders — regardless of their constitutionality.

Demonstrators at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 15, 2025.

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that lower federal courts should not have the power to issue nationwide injunctions blocking presidential orders — no matter how obviously unconstitutional such an order may be.

The decision is a monumental gift to Donald Trump’s administration, which is seeking to implement much of its anti-immigration and other policy priorities through executive orders. The ruling was 6-3, with the court’s six conservative justices opting to restrict the power of the lower courts.

The ruling comes in response to the Trump administration’s argument that the judiciary does not have the power to block the president’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s ruling effectively restricts the injunctions that blocked the birthright citizenship order, and could potentially apply to other authoritarian actions by Trump and his administration that have been blocked by federal courts.

Trump was ecstatic. “GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with the babies of slaves (same year!), not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process. Congratulations to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Solicitor General John Sauer, and the entire DOJ.” News Conference at the White House, 11:30 A.M. EST.”

The day he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which was intended to strip the children of non-citizen immigrants — regardless of their legal status — of the right to American citizenship if they were born in the United States.

The effort is blatantly unconstitutional. The 15th Amendment guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The order was challenged in multiple lawsuits, and its implementation was quickly blocked by several district court judges across multiple states.

In response, the Trump administration disregarded the question of the order’s constitutionality almost entirely, appealing to the Supreme Court on the grounds that the lower courts don’t actually have the right to issue nationwide injunctions against an executive policy. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, called out the administration’s tactics in her dissent of Friday’s decision.

“The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the government makes no attempt to hide it,” she wrote. “Yet, shamefully, this court plays along.”

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates,” Sotomayor continued. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.”

During oral arguments in May, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that executive orders could not be blocked by the lower courts, and should be allowed to go into effect until something like a class-action lawsuit against a given policy makes its way to the Supreme Court.

Your argument turns our justice system into a catch me if you can kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during one oral argument exchange with U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer.

The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives, though, three of which Trump appointed in his first term. In the end, they agreed with the Justice Department. (Rolling Stone).

The Supreme Court on Friday limited the ability of federal judges to temporarily pause President Trump’s executive orders, a major victory for the administration. But the justices made no ruling on the constitutionality of his move to end birthright citizenship, and they stopped his order from taking effect for 30 days.

The 6-to-3 decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and split along ideological lines, may dramatically reshape how citizenship is granted in the United States, even temporarily. The ruling means that the practice of extending citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and some temporary residents and visitors would end in the 28 states that have not challenged the measure.

The court’s ruling appeared to upend the ability of single federal judges to freeze policies across the country, a powerful tool that has been used to block policies instituted by Democratic and Republican administrations. The majority offered a different path to challenging Mr. Trump’s orders on a nationwide basis: class action lawsuits.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the majority’s decision “a travesty for the rule of law.”

The majority stressed that it was not addressing the merits of Trump’s attempt to end automatic citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. (New York Times).

One more thing. Or two.

The Court doesn’t like LGBTQ+ people.

The economy doesn’t love Trump.

---

New York is an American melting pot.

Some of us still value that idea.

Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani, by Michelle Goldberg.

In 2023, a branch of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat opened in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, not far from where I live. The eatery trumpets its politics; the seafood section on the menu is headed “From the River to the Sea,” which I found clever but some of its Jewish neighbors considered threatening. An uproar grew, especially online, so Ayat made a peace offering.

In early 2024, it hosted a free Shabbat dinner, writing on social media, “Let’s create a space where differences unite us, where conversations flow freely, and where bonds are forged.” Over 1,300 people showed up. To serve them all, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, Ayat used 15 lambs, 700 pounds of chicken and 100 branzino fish. There were also sandwiches from a glatt kosher caterer, a six-foot-long challah and a klezmer band.

The event captured something miraculous about New York City, which is, for all its tensions and aggravations and occasional bursts of violence, a place where Jews and Muslims live in remarkable harmony. In Lawrence Wright’s recent novel set in the West Bank, “The Human Scale,” a Palestinian American man tries to explain it to his Palestinian cousin: “It’s not like here. Arabs and Jews are more like each other than they are like a lot of other Americans. You’ll see them in the same grocery stores and restaurants because of the halal food.”

Eating side-by-side does not, of course, obviate fierce and sometimes ugly disagreements. But while outsiders like to paint New York as a roiling hellhole, there’s an everyday multicultural amity in this city that’s low-key magical.

I saw some of that magic reflected in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, and especially in the Muslim candidate’s alliance with New York’s Jewish comptroller, Brad Lander. They cross-endorsed, urging their followers to list the other second in the city’s ranked-choice voting system. The two campaigned together and made a joint appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and Lander was beside Mamdani when he delivered his victory speech.

Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian politics have sparked enormous alarm among some New York Jews, but he’s also won considerable Jewish support. In a poll of likely Jewish voters done by the Honan Strategy Group in May, Andrew Cuomo came in first, with 31 percent of the vote, but Mamdani was second, with 20 percent. On Tuesday, he won most of Park Slope, a neighborhood full of progressive Jews, and held his own on the similarly Jewish Upper West Side.

“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others. After he gave an interview to Der Blatt, an ultra-Orthodox Yiddish newspaper, Rabbi Moishe Indig, the leader of a faction of Hasidic Jews, told The New York Times, “As mayor, we wouldn’t have a problem with him.” (Though Indig considered adding Mamdani to his endorsement slate, he ultimately decided against it.)

So it has been maddening to see people claim that Mamdani’s win was a victory for antisemitism. A Republican running for local office in Long Island posted on X that Mamdani will try to shut down “every single synagogue” and Jewish nonprofit in the city. “Evacuate NYC immediately,” wrote the Republican Jewish Coalition, a political group.

Some on the right have responded to his triumph with anti-Muslim hysteria. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a picture of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa, as if Mamdani, a man who campaigned with drag queens and promised public funding for trans health care, wants to impose Shariah law. Her House colleague Andy Ogles called for him to be denaturalized and deported.

I can certainly understand why Jews who see anti-Zionism and antisemitism as synonymous find Mamdani’s rise alarming. There’s no question that he sympathizes with the Palestinians over the Israelis. New York’s past mayors — even the left-leaning Bill de Blasio — supported Israel reflexively. After the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on war crimes charges, Cuomo joined his defense team. Mamdani, by contrast, has said he’d enforce the warrant if Netanyahu ever comes to New York.

One needn’t even be an ardent backer of Israel to have reservations about Mamdani. I’m worried about his inexperience, and I suspect he won people over by making economic promises that he can’t keep. Even though my own stance on Israel’s prime minister is closer to Mamdani’s than to Cuomo’s, I thought it was a terrible mistake for Mamdani to try to justify the phrase “globalize the intifada” on a podcast this month. He’s right, of course, that the literal meaning of intifada is simply “struggle,” but context matters. Mamdani should understand why many Jews find the words threatening, particularly after the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington and the firebombing, just this month, of people in Colorado demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages.

He has consistently denounced antisemitism, and has spoken movingly about Jewish fear, including on the podcast that tripped him up. But Mamdani shouldn’t give the nervous people he aspires to represent any reason to doubt that he’ll protect them. He struck the right tone on the night of the primary, when he promised that while he won’t “abandon my beliefs or my commitments, grounded in a demand for equality,” he would also “reach further, to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree, and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements.”

Ultimately, though, New York’s Democratic primary wasn’t about Israel, no matter how much Cuomo wanted it to be. Mamdani won because of his relentless focus on affordability and our quality of life, and his ebullience, optimism and authenticity. At a time when the Democratic Party is ossifying into a gerontocracy, its leaders dependent on focus-grouped talking points, he’s young and energetic and comfortable speaking extemporaneously. In a cynical and despairing time, he gave people hope.

He benefited, too, from being underestimated. No one is underestimating him now. In the general election, he’ll be facing the disgraced mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent, and possibly an independent Cuomo as well. The attacks on Mamdani during the primary were brutal, but now that he’s a national figure, those coming his way will be worse. His foes will try to leverage Jewish anxieties to smash the Democratic coalition. Adams is even planning to appear on the ballot line of a fake political party called “EndAntisemitism.”

Mamdani’s opponents will try to reduce him to a caricature, some mutant offspring of Jeremy Corbyn and Yahya Sinwar. They will say they’re doing it for the Jews, and plenty of Jews will believe them. But don’t forget that the vision of this city at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign — a city that embraces immigrants and hates autocrats, that’s at once earthy and cosmopolitan — is one that many Jews, myself included, find inspiring. He won in part because he is so obviously a product of the New York we love. (Op-Ed, New York Times)

---

On Thursday, another Trump 2020 lawyer was disbarred.

That makes 3.

Kenneth Chesebro was disbarred in New York on June 26, 2025, after pleading guilty in Georgia in 2023 to conspiracy to file false documents related to the fake electors scheme.

He joins 2 other lawyers who advised Donald Trump on the 2020 election who have been disbarred:

• Rudy Giuliani: Disbarred in New York in July 2023 and in Washington, D.C. in September 2024 for making false claims about the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the results, particularly in Pennsylvania.

• John Eastman: Disbarment recommended in California in March 2024 and upheld by a review panel in June 2025 for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election; his license remains revoked pending final review by the California Supreme Court.

One more thing.

Jenna Ellis was not disbarred but had her law license suspended for three years in Colorado after pleading guilty in Georgia to aiding and abetting false statements related to the 2020 election.

Sidney Powell remains Scot-free.

Only the finest people.

---

Resistance, meet ART.

Another mysterious anti-Trump sculpture appears on the National Mall

This time, featuring clips of President Trump dancing. The White House was not amused.

The statue is set up on the Mall near Third Street NW in direct view of the Capitol. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

The mystery artists responsible for a statue on the National Mall mocking President Donald Trump last week have done it again — this time with a multimedia work taking aim at comments the White House made about them.
On Thursday morning, a replica of an old-school television set showing clips of Trump dancing was set up near Third Street NW in direct view of the U.S. Capitol.

The set displays a 15-second silent video loop of Trump’s signature slow-motion shimmy from various times and locations.
In one, Trump is dancing next to multimillionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking minors in 2019 and killed himself while awaiting trial. A bouncy jingle from an ice cream truck parked nearby provided an unintentional soundtrack.

If there is a theme, it is a golden one. The television is spray-painted gold, as is a replica of a bald eagle with wings outstretched that sits atop the television. Ivy, also spray-painted gold, bedecks the display.


A plaque at the base of the statue reads, “‘In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called “art,” no matter how ugly it is.’ — The Trump White House, June 2025.”


That quote is taken from a comment the White House sent to The Washington Post last week in response to an 8-foot-tall artwork titled “Dictator Approved,” which depicts a gold-painted hand with a distinctive thumbs-up crushing the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

The base of that statue included quotes from authoritarian leaders praising Trump, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

The statue is set up on the Mall near Third Street NW in direct view of the Capitol. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

The purpose of the new video art installation is “to demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery,” according to the organizer’s permit application to the National Park Service. It is set up on the Mall in the same place where the Dictator Approved statue was placed last week and is permitted to stay there until 8 p.m. Sunday.

The White House was not amused.

“Wow, these liberal activists masquerading as ‘artists,’ are dumber than I thought!” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote Thursday in statement sent to The Post. “I’ve tricked them into taking down their ugly sculpture and replacing it with a beautiful video of the President’s legendary dance moves that will bring joy and inspiration to all tourists traversing our National Mall. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

“Maybe they will put this on their next sculpture,” Jackson added.

(If so, these sculptures may have to get bigger).

Exactly who is behind the artworks remains a mystery. The new television installment and the “Dictator Approved” statue are similar in style and materials to protest artworks placed in the District, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, last fall.

However, no individual or group has publicly claimed responsibility for those pieces, which included a bronze-painted tiki torch and a replica of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with a pile of poop on it that paid satirical tribute to the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mary Harris was listed as the applicant for permits issued this year but no contact information was provided. And the name may be another symbolic distraction. Mary Harris Jones is the name of legendary union organizer and labor leader Mother Jones, who died in Silver Spring, Md. in 1930.
Few visitors braved the early afternoon heat Thursday to see the new work. Tasnim Mokhtar, 25, was taking a family friend visiting from Texas on a sightseeing tour when they happened upon it.

Mokhtar, who lives in Northern Virginia, said she thought the installation was “a great way to raise consciousness. Not just about steps Trump has taken but how it’s affecting our culture as a whole.”

D.C. resident Julianne Brienza stopped by on her bike to take a peek. She had heard about the previous artworks but didn’t know there was a new one.

“Nothing is even-keeled right now,” said Brienza, 50, as she shaded her eyes from the fake gold gleam. “So it’s good to see something and feel reaffirmed about something we’re all facing. Whether we’re Republicans or Democrats.”
But Brienza wasn’t sure the image would change any minds. “Does this really do anything? I don’t know, I don’t know.”

---

Happy Stonewall Anniversary.

Bless the Drag Queens and Gay men and Lesbians who fought back against injustice in 1969. They are a model for Resistance to all who believe in human rights.

---

See you on Tuesday. At least there won’t be another opinion from the Supreme Court for a while.

---