July 29, 2025

Tuesday, July 29, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

Trump is always crazy

And stupid.

To start the EU discussions, Trump met with the President of the European Commission, Ursula Vonder Leyen, in Scotland to discuss trade.

Trump unloads in late-night rants threatening to prosecute news networks, Beyonce, Oprah and Kamala Harris | The Independent

Despite the lateness of the hour in Scotland, Donald Trump remained vocal on social media Saturday, unleashing a late-night rant in which he threatened to prosecute Kamala Harris, Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce while lashing out at news networks whose “licenses could, and should, be revoked.”

The president, who is spending the weekend golfing in the UK, wrote at 7.45 p.m. ET (12.45 a.m. local BST) that he was reviewing the large amount of money spent by his Democratic opponents “probably illegally” during the 2024 election.

Trump claimed Beyonce was paid $11 million to endorse Harris, and that she “never sang, not one note, and left the stage to a booing and angry audience!” He also claimed that Democrats paid $3 million in “expenses” to Oprah and $600,000 to civil rights activist and TV personality Reverend Al Sharpton.

There is no evidence that any of the people named in Trump’s rant were paid for their endorsement by the Democratic campaign.

“YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO PAY FOR AN ENDORSEMENT. IT IS TOTALLY ILLEGAL TO DO SO,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post. “Can you imagine what would happen if politicians started paying for people to endorse them. All hell would break out!”

“Kamala, and all of those that received Endorsement money, BROKE THE LAW. They should all be prosecuted!” he added.

Oprah previously said she “was not paid a dime” to appear alongside Harris, whose campaign covered $1 million in production costs for a live-streamed event.

“The people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story,” Oprah said at the time.

---

Trading Deals.

US and EU strike trade deal

Washington and Brussels clinch agreement days before President Donald Trump’s deadline to do a deal or face higher tariffs.

TURNBERRY, Scotland — The United States and European Union struck a trade agreement on Sunday locking in a 15 percent tariff, days before Donald Trump’s deadline to do a deal or face tariffs double that level.

Trump, speaking after meeting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at his Turnberry golf club in Scotland, announced the deal to U.S. reporters.

“This is the biggest one of them all,” Trump said after a meeting that lasted around an hour.

Von der Leyen, who flew in at short notice to meet Trump, said: “It was heavy lifting we had to do. But many thanks also for the talks we had many times on the way to our goal — but now we made it.”

Trump, reading from a paper, said the EU will agree to purchase $750 billion of energy. It will also agree to invest $600 billion more than planned in the U.S., in military equipment and in opening countries to trade at zero tariff.

While a spokesperson for the Commission confirmed those figures, it wasn’t immediately clear how the vast commitments could be met. U.S. annual energy exports are worth around $250 billion.

The tariff rate applying to imports from the EU would be 15 percent, with the same rate for cars — a key demand of the powerful German car industry. Pharmaceuticals will not be covered by the deal. Trump also said that steel and aluminum would continue to be subject to 50 percent tariffs.

The talks followed a two-week standoff triggered by Trump, who in a letter to von der Leyen threatened to jack up tariffs on most EU goods to 30 percent if no deal were done by Aug. 1.

In a first sign that a breakthrough had been in the offing, von der Leyen announced Friday she would fly to meet Trump in Scotland, where the U.S. president was on a private visit.

Escalate to de-escalate

Trump’s escalation had stunned EU trade negotiators, who had been led to believe by their U.S. interlocutors that a preliminary deal was within reach.

A battle of nerves ensued, as Trump announced a string of other deals — including one with Japan that set a baseline tariff of 15 percent while offering relief to its auto industry. Some observers saw that setting a benchmark.

At the same time, the 27-nation bloc activated its trade countermeasures, drawing up a list targeting €93 billion in U.S. goods — ranging from aircraft to autos, and from soybeans to Kentucky bourbon — that would face retaliatory tariffs of up to 30 percent. Those were due to enter force from Aug. 7 onward, absent a deal.

Von der Leyen had earlier stressed the significance of the $1.7 trillion transatlantic trade relationship — the world’s largest — and appealed to Trump to do the biggest deal that either of them have ever done.

Speaking afterward, she said: “The two biggest economies should have a good trade flow between us. I think we hit exactly the point we wanted to find. Rebalance but enable trade on both sides. Which means good jobs on both sides of the Atlantic, means prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic and that was important for us.”

Unity and friendship

Trump, who said earlier he was in a bad mood, declared himself satisfied with the outcome.

“It’s going to bring a lot of unity and friendship. It's going to work out really well,” Trump said. “This was the biggest of them all.”

Von der Leyen was joined in Turnberry on Sunday by Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič while, on the U.S. side, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick flew in for the first top-level bilateral trade talks since Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on the rest of the world in April.

Lutnick told reporters that the result of an investigation into the semiconductor industry, which could lead to new sectoral tariffs being imposed, was expected in around two weeks.

Agreement with the EU proved harder for Trump’s team to reach than with Japan and a handful of other nations — reflecting the bloc’s economic power as a market of 450 million consumers.

The way the EU handles trade policy — with its executive Commission negotiating on behalf of, and having to consult with, the bloc’s 27 members — also hampered Trump’s swashbuckling style of dealmaking that has taken a wrecking ball to the multilateral trading system of the post-World War II era.

While the EU never got as far as implementing its retaliatory tariffs, or activating its “trade bazooka” — the Anti-Coercion Instrument — these exerted a deterrent effect through their potential economic impact on voters in Republican heartland states and on U.S. industries with lobbying clout in Washington.

No joint statement or deal text was immediately published. One person close to the European negotiating team said it would be vital to stabilize a written agreement as soon as possible.

The Commission was expected to brief EU ambassadors on the trade deal in Brussels on Monday said a spokesperson for the Danish presidency of the Council of the EU, the bloc’s intergovernmental branch. (Politico.eu)

This tariff court case could rein in the rampant Trump presidency.

Trump is a hare, and the federal courts are a tortoise. We know how that fable turned out.

Donald Trump’s destructive “Liberation Day” tariffs, announced April 2, should result in a constructive judicial ruling that significantly sedates today’s hyperactive presidency.

Next Thursday, a federal appeals court will hear oral arguments about this: May the president, by making a declaration (that he claims is exempt from judicial review) of a national “emergency” and “an unusual and extraordinary threat,” impose tariffs (taxes paid by U.S. consumers) whenever he wants, at whatever level he wants, against whatever country he wants, on whatever products he wants, for as long as he wants?

A unanimous lower court has said, essentially: Of course not. Eighteen organizations, spanning the jurisprudential spectrum, have filed amicus briefs opposing the president.

They demonstrate the following:
After the preamble, the Constitution’s first word is “all”: “All legislative Powers” are vested in Congress. And the power to tax is listed first among Congress’s enumerated powers. Because the Constitution vests in Congress the power to “lay and collect” duties and imposts, presidential authority to impose them must derive from a statute.

Trump relies on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. But it nowhere includes the term “tariff” or any of its synonyms, and no previous president has claimed that it authorizes tariffs. Today’s president argues that IEEPA’s conferred power to “regulate” trade implies the presidential power to tax it.

This is an astonishingly radical claim because hundreds of statutes authorize innumerable agencies to “regulate,” but not to tax. Congress has often authorized tariffs, but always with specific substantive, temporal and procedural limitations on presidential discretion.

IEEPA’s authority can be exercised only in an emergency involving “an unusual and extraordinary threat,” which trade deficits — the president’s obsession — are not. Unusual? He says they have been “persistent” for half a century.

Recently, the Supreme Court said the Federal Communications Commission’s “regulation” of communications carriers could include an FCC-imposed tax on them but only because Congress explicitly authorized this. Otherwise, the FCC tax would violate two related rules, the major questions doctrine and the nondelegation doctrine.

The former stipulates that for courts to construe statutes to grant the executive broad powers, Congress must “speak clearly” about authorizing executive “decisions of vast economic and political significance.” Congress did no such thing with IEEPA.

The Supreme Court says the nondelegation doctrine, which undergirds the separation of powers, “bars Congress from transferring its legislative power to another branch of Government” without providing “an intelligible principle to guide the delegee’s use of discretion.” Today’s president insists that IEEPA grants presidents unbounded discretion in wielding a power that is neither granted to him by the Constitution nor delegable by Congress.

Constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger says the Constitution’s framers thought “the natural dividing line between legislative and nonlegislative power was between rules that bound subjects and those that did not.” Tariffs bind Americans seeking to purchase imports.

The second law enacted by the first Congress established detailed tariff rates (e.g., 1 cent per pound of brown sugars). Tariff changes were largely Congress’s domain until the 1930s, when Congress began empowering presidents to negotiate — subject to congressional approval — tariff reductions. In 1974, Congress authorized the president to impose surcharges of limited amount (15 percent) and duration (five months).

And an appellate court stressed in 1975 that a declaration of national emergency “is not a talisman enabling the president to rewrite the tariff schedules” because this would unconstitutionally authorize “the exercise of an unlimited power.”

The 1974 law authorized the president to impose tariffs only to address “balance-of-payments deficits.” Trump’s idiosyncratic tariffs punish Brazil, with which there is a U.S. trade surplus, because he objects to Brazil’s internal politics.

States of emergency (51 are extant) tempt presidential abuses (the pandemic emergency was Joe Biden’s pretext for trying to cancel $430 billion in student debt) and are difficult to end: Congress cannot easily reclaim power delegated to the president, who can veto Congress’s retrieval attempts. Given the two-thirds vote requirement for veto overrides, delegation tends to be a ratchet clicking to the president’s advantage.

The president claims his declaration of an “emergency” is unreviewable because it involves foreign relations. But tariffs, which have domestic consequences and purposes, properly are congressional exercises of a constitutionally enumerated power and must come from statutes.

Today’s president is a hare, darting here and there. The judiciary is generally a tortoise, slow because it is deliberative. But you know the fable. And here is a fact: This tariff case could markedly restrain this rampant presidency. (George F. Wills, Op-Ed, Washington Post).

---

Good news to make your heart happy.

A popular Democratic former governor (Roy Cooper) running for Senate in NC & two popular Republican governors/former governors NOT running for Senate in GA & NH (Brian Kemp & Chris Sununu) tells a pretty clear story.

Now help it happen.

---

The Epstein Files.

Maybe we should call them The Trump Files?

The privilege?

He has said this twice.

Massie: DOJ 'hiding behind' victim protection in Epstein controversy

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) on Sunday accused the Department of Justice (DOJ) of “hiding behind” the argument of protecting victims as it faces calls to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“The Department of Justice says they will not be releasing further Epstein material in order to protect what they say is more than 1,000 victims, many of whom were underage,” NBC News’s Kristen Welker said during an interview with Massie on “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

I want to read you a little bit of a DOJ memo which writes, quote, ‘Sensitive information relating to these victims is intertwined throughout the materials. One of our highest priorities is combatting child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither one of those ends.’ What is your response to the concern that releasing these files could ultimately hurt the victims, Congressman Massie?” Welker asked.

“Well, look, that’s a straw man. Ro and I carefully crafted this legislation so that the victims’ names will be redacted and that no child pornography will be released. So, they’re hiding behind that,” Massie responded, referring to an effort he and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) are undertaking to force a vote in Congress on releasing Epstein-linked files.

“But we’re trying to get justice for the victims and transparency for America,” the Kentucky Republican added in the interview, highlighted by Mediaite. “And so, you know, we’ve redacted things before. We don’t want to hurt the victims. We’re doing this for the victims.”

President Trump and his administration have been facing heavy criticism over their handling of information related to Epstein in recent weeks, with the controversy also causing chaos in Congress.

Last Wednesday, the House broke for its weeks-long August recess a day earlier than planned as the Epstein controversy brought the chamber to a standstill.

The Hill has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on Massie’s remarks.

---

Gaza.

NYTimes: José Andrés: The World Cannot Stand By With Gaza on the Brink of Famine

Forty years ago, the world’s conscience was shocked into action by images of emaciated children and starving babies dying in their mothers’ arms. There was a surge in international aid, airdrops of food and activism from the world’s most popular artists. Thanks to the news media and events such as Live Aid, we could not look away from the hungry in Ethiopia.

A generation later, people of good conscience must now stop the starvation in Gaza. There is no excuse for the world to stand by and watch two million human beings suffer on the brink of full-blown famine.

This is not a natural disaster triggered by drought or crop failures. It’s a man-made crisis, and there are man-made solutions that could save lives today. The hunger catastrophe in Gaza is entirely caused by the men of war on both sides of the Erez crossing: the ones who massacred Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ones who have been killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the more than 21 months since.

We are far beyond the blame game of who is the more guilty party. We don’t have the time to argue about who is holding up the food trucks.

A starving human being needs food today, not tomorrow.

As the occupying force, the Israelis are responsible for the basic survival of civilians in Gaza. Some people may find this unfair, but it is international law. To that end, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli-backed aid group, put a new plan in place that distributes food from a few hubs, which forced desperately hungry people to walk for miles and risk their lives. At the time it was created, international aid groups warned this would be dangerous and ineffective. Those warnings have sadly proved true.

It’s time to start over.

Food cannot flow quickly enough to Gaza right now. The World Food Program, led by its American executive director, Cindy McCain, said last week that one-third of Gaza’s population had not eaten for multiple days in a row. Small children are dying of starvation in numbers that are rising rapidly.

World Central Kitchen, the international aid group I founded, works with our partners in Gaza to cook tens of thousands of meals a day. Last week we resumed cooking a limited number of hot meals after a five-day pause caused by a lack of ingredients. It was the second time we were forced to stop cooking because of food shortages this year. Our teams on the ground are committed and resilient, but our day-to-day ability to sustain cooking operations remains uncertain.

Since the start of the war, we have prepared and distributed more than 133 million meals across Gaza, through large field kitchens and a network of smaller community kitchens. We have delivered thousands of meals to displaced Israeli families, including last month when Israeli towns and cities came under intense missile attacks from Iran.

The Israeli government has claimed that Hamas is stealing the food in Gaza. It also says it is doing “everything possible” to feed Palestinians.

Here is the reality we have seen on the ground. Before Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid, which started in March, our convoys experienced very little violence or looting. After the blockade was lifted, the situation worsened significantly, with widespread looting and anarchy. It is rare now for trucks entering Gaza to make it safely to our kitchens or those of other aid groups without being looted. Drivers and kitchen workers are often attacked by armed groups of unknown origin.

The blockade that was supposed to pressure what’s left of Hamas only strengthened these gunmen and gangs. It precipitated mass deprivation and the collapse of society in Gaza.

Our proposal is to change how we feed people, secure distribution and scale up quickly.

First, we urgently need to open humanitarian corridors accessible to all aid groups operating in Gaza, to ensure that food, water and medicine can arrive safely and at scale.

Second, we need to substantially increase production of hot meals. Unlike bulk food supplies, hot meals have little resale value for organized gangs.

Third, we need to feed people where they are. We must deliver meals to where the Palestinian people are sheltering, rather than expect them to travel to a few distribution points, where violence often breaks out.

Fourth, we want to prepare one million meals a day, not tens of thousands. We estimate this would require five large cooking facilities in safe zones, where bulk food supplies can be delivered, prepared and distributed without risk of violence. These large kitchens would also supply hundreds of smaller community kitchens at the neighborhood level throughout Gaza, empowering communities as essential partners.

This proposal is dependent on securing food, equipment and vehicles. By itself, it won’t be sufficient. We want to see all aid groups operating in Gaza able to work freely in their own way.

I understand that many Israelis are still grieving and are focusing first on their own. On the long list of those who continue to suffer, there are the surviving hostages, the traumatized families and the wounded soldiers.

We have seen in the past several months how Israel is able to pursue what it sees as its national interest with courage. The challenge of feeding starving Palestinians is no different.

We are approaching the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of two holy temples in Jerusalem. It is a solemn day of suffering and remembrance.

The Book of Isaiah reminds us that fasting is not enough. The true fast is to share our bread with the hungry and give our clothes to the naked.

“If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness,” it reads. If we want to light the darkness, we need to extend our soul to the hungry. And we need to do it now. (New York Times, Op-Ed, Jose Andres).

---

Why Bard College’s orchestra performed Mendelssohn at the site of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies – The Forward

For conductor (and Bard’s president) Leon Botstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, the mission wasn’t only about the past.

Leon Botstein, Bard College president and director of its orchestra, leads a concert in Nuremberg, Germany, May 8, 2025. (Anton Doppelbauer)

NUREMBERG, Germany — On a spring evening in Nuremberg, an orchestra of New York students gathered for a concert celebrating 80 years since the end of World War II. They also came with a peace mission.

Bard College’s The Orchestra Now, or TŌN, was invited by the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra and made its first overseas trip for the concert on May 8. At the hour of Germany’s surrender in 1945, they performed a program by Felix Mendelssohn — whose music was banned under the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage — in Nuremberg’s Congress Hall, once the site of Hitler’s massive rallies.

The music closed with “Verleih uns Frieden,” or “Grant Us Peace,” a pleading choral piece using a prayer by Martin Luther that was also the concert’s title. (Nazi definitions notwithstanding, Mendelssohn was converted into Protestantism as a child and became a prominent composer of church music.)

For Leon Botstein, the president of Bard since 1975 and TŌN’s founder and conductor, the night was more than a commemoration.

He conceived this concert years ago to celebrate international peace, the historic alliance between the United States and Europe and the anniversary of a victory against intolerance and censorship. But Botstein found himself traveling to Germany as wars with global ramifications expanded in the Middle East and Europe, and as the U.S. government intervened in free expression at home.

Three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and almost two years into Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, both conflagrations have reached new heights. Russia is intensifying its pounding of Ukraine, with June seeing the highest civilian casualties in three years. In Gaza, which Israel’s offensive has largely reduced to rubble, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access aid since May, according to the U.N. human rights office, and aid groups are warning of mass starvation.

Bonds between the United States and Europe, which Botstein planned to honor, have also frayed. The second Trump administration has shown hostility to European allies, sidelined Europe’s diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East and flip-flopped on support for Ukraine. (It’s now back on Ukraine’s side.)

Meanwhile, Botstein was watching the Trump administration’s moves to control the ideological tilt of universities, cultural institutions and the press in the United States.

Nuremberg’s Congress Hall is on the former Nazi Party rally grounds and contains several concert halls. (Daniel Karmann/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Beyond the walls of the Congress Hall, a new world order was rapidly taking shape. Inside, Boststein addressed the crowd as a cultural messenger, promising a transatlantic partnership from within American music halls and universities.

“This concert is a sign that American citizens, although they freely elected our government, remain committed to the core beliefs that define a democracy,” Botstein said in his speech in German. “And that we, as people and artists, will prevail against autocracy and intolerance, that we will uphold our traditional alliance with Europe, which began 80 years ago, and that we will also defend Ukraine.”

He was interrupted by a swell of applause from the audience, which included Nuremberg’s mayor Markus König, former President of Germany Christian Wulff and the mayor of Kharkiv, Nuremberg’s sister city in Ukraine, Ihor Terekhov.

After threatening to abandon support for Ukraine’s defense just weeks ago, Trump has resumed weapons shipments while the country fends off Russia’s largest drone attacks of the war. His unpredictable foreign policy has left European leaders whiplashed and questioning the reliability of the United States as an ally.

Against this chaotic backdrop, Botstein arrived in Europe as an ambassador of cultural alliance — one rooted not in the changeable geopolitical reactions of the Trump administration, but in the longstanding foundations of history and music.

His own life is a story of cultural exchange built from the ashes of war. Botstein was born in Zurich in 1946 to Polish-Russian Jews who survived the Holocaust, arriving in the United States in 1949 as a stateless person. Trained in history and musicology, he became Bard’s president at 29 — his second stint as a college president, after leading the experimental and now-defunct Franconia College at age 23 — and steadily raised the school’s prestige as a home for the arts over the next five decades.

He has also left a footprint on Israelis and Palestinians. Along with serving as music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra from 2003 to 2011, Botstein formed a 16-year partnership between Bard College and Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. The Bard programs, which train Palestinian liberal arts students and high school teachers, have withstood the Israel-Hamas War.

Botstein has built his music career on advocating for ignored artists, from Jewish musicians whose work was erased by the Nazis to Palestinian students in the West Bank to incarcerated people who are educated through the Bard Prison Initiative.

“Partly because of growing up in the family I did, I found myself defending the unfairly forgotten,” Boststein said in an interview. “I was determined that erasure is ethically wrong and artistically wrong. It definitely had something to do with being part of a family that, through storytelling, kept alive a world that had been obliterated.”

Olivia Chaikin, a 24-year-old flutist in TŌN who is Jewish, said it felt “monumental” to perform Mendelssohn’s music that was outlawed by the Nazis in the very place where millions of people cheered Hitler’s ambitions. She also said she saw a direct line between the banning of Mendelssohn and the Trump administration’s moves to control cultural production at home.

“In the United States, it’s a very relevant topic right now, because of our president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center,” said Chaikin.

The Congress Hall’s burdened past has drawn disputes before. One of the largest Nazi projects still standing, the sprawling, colosseum-style compound was immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films. During the 1960s, the city of Nuremberg considered tearing it down, according to Lucius A. Hemmer, director of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra.

“It was impossible,” said Hemmer. “It has a grounding of concrete columns into the earth, in the size of 200 by 200 meters. So at that time, the transformation started.”

In 1963, the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra moved in. The building has since grown as a cultural hub and is currently adding a permanent home for the Nuremberg State Theatre.

Since 2001, one segment has housed a Documentation Center dedicated to sharing the history of the site. Still, some historians object to reincarnating a place so central to Nazism as a cultural venue for pleasure. Michael Steinberg, a professor of history and music at Brown University, said that controversy goes back to 1945, when Germany was littered with Nazi ruins. Germans are still debating what to do with them.

“It’s clearly very aggressive, in a way, to place these cultural institutions within this enormous building in this kind of dream fascist architecture,” said Steinberg. “But it also means that the past is in your face, and that people going there have to deal with it, so it’s really a question of how that’s handled.”

Botstein said he sides with repurposing the building so that it can house events like TŌN’s concert. He hoped to show a kind of commemoration that doesn’t just remember the past, but also reminds people what they might lose by forgetting it.

“We live in a time of disinformation, misinformation and a tremendous ability to convince people of what they want to believe,” he said. “The Germans wanted to believe that Jews were unable to be creative and original, and they criticized Mendelssohn’s music as being superficial. I wanted to show that this prejudice can blind people from seeing — or hearing — what’s out there.” (The Forward)

---