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Heather Cox Richardson's 'Letters from an American' Takes a Good Look at
- Words to West Point’s Graduates from Our Country’s Most Famous Draft Dodger (the guy with bone spurs),
- His Sullying the Sacred Ground at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, and
- Litigation Against the Trump Administration
On May 26, the good professor from Boston College reported:
‘President Donald J. Trump’s erratic behavior was on display this weekend in two public speeches: one to this year’s graduates at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and the other at Arlington National Cemetery. While both speeches are traditionally nonpartisan, Trump indicated he would make them partisan when he wore a red MAGA hat at West Point.
The president began both speeches by sticking to a script but then veered off course. At West Point on Saturday, his speech went on for over an hour. He attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and said: “The job of the U.S. Armed Forces is not to host drag shows to transform foreign cultures, or to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun,” he said. “The military's job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place.” (In fact, the mission of the Department of Defense is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”)
Trump veered off into immigration and a chat about golf, then repeated a story about William Levitt, a real estate developer whose post–World War II housing developments became synonymous with suburbia, that he had told at a 2017 Boy Scout jamboree. On Saturday, Trump talked about Levitt becoming “very rich, a very rich man, and then he decided to sell. And he sold his company, and he had nothing to do. He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well, but it doesn’t—that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives. It doesn’t work out. But it made him happy for a little while, at least, but he found a new wife. He sold his little boat, and he got a big yacht, he had one of the biggest yachts anywhere in the world. He moved for a time to Monte Carlo, and he led the good life, and time went by, and he got bored and 15 years later, the company that he sold to called him, and they said, ‘The housing business is not for us.’ You have to understand when Bill Levitt was hot. When he had momentum, he’d go to the job sites every night, he’d pick up every loose nail, he’d pick up every scrap of wood, if there was a bolt or a screw laying on the ground, he’d pick it up, and he’d use it the next day and putting together a house.”
After his speech, Trump skipped the traditional shaking of each graduate’s hand, left the ceremony, and flew to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
At Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, the president veered off into a dig
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| Arlington National Cemetery (photo by me when I visited there several years ago.) |
at his predecessor, President Joe Biden, then noted that he, Trump, will be president for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And, he added, “Most important of all, in addition, we have the World Cup and we have the Olympics. Can you imagine [if] I missed that four years? And now look what I have. I have everything—amazing the way things work out. God did that, I believe that too.”
Trump’s social media account was similarly inappropriate. His message on Memorial Day—a solemn day to honor those American military personnel who died in service to the country—began: “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS….”
But that message quickly took a turn toward his recurring attacks on judges. Trump claimed that “CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE” are entering the United States “THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER AND RAPE AGAIN—ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY. HOPEFULLY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, AND OTHER GOOD AND COMPASSIONATE JUDGES THROUGHOUT THE LAND, WILL SAVE US FROM THE DECISIONS OF THE MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL.”
In February 2024, almost a year before Trump took office the second time, the country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general began preparing for a second Trump term. They listened to what he was saying on the campaign trail and read the plans in Project 2025, then wrote potential lawsuits against what he might try to put in place. Once he took office, they hit the ground running, banding together when they could to file lawsuits to bring the president’s unconstitutional and illegal actions before courts.
And they are not the only ones. On Friday, Alex Lemonides, Seamus Hughes, Mattathias Schwartz, Lazaro Gamio, and Camille Baker of the New York Times listed the many lawsuits against the Trump administration and noted that as of May 23, at least 177 rulings “have at least temporarily paused some of the administration’s initiatives.”
Those include cases involving the administration's attempt to fire large numbers of federal employees unlawfully, freeze federal funding required by Congress, refuse to recognize birthright citizenship, hand power to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” dismantle government agencies, take away civil rights from transgender Americans, revoke environmental policies, and use the federal government to punish individuals or organizations.
But it is the judicial orders and decisions concerning immigration that Trump and his administration are most vocally attacking. Their primary focus is on Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was rendered to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador on March 15 in what the administration at first called an “administrative error.” Nick Miroff of The Atlantic recorded that when Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit to get him returned, lawyers at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security quietly tried to secure his safety and bring him back to the United States.
But White House officials saw the case as a way to challenge the ability of the judicial branch to restrain presidential power. As Miroff writes, “Abrego Garcia’s deportation…developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process.”
They began to insist—without evidence—that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, a drug dealer, a terrorist, and a human trafficker. Despite orders from courts right up to the Supreme Court to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, they have publicly insisted that Abrego Garcia will never return to the United States. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a white-nationalist nativist, has said that the administration is thinking about suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would permit the government to throw people in jail without charge or trial. The Constitution specifies that Congress alone can suspend that writ.
Their attacks seemed designed to convince Americans that judges insisting on the rule of law are backing violent criminals. That, in turn, seems designed to encourage MAGA loyalists to threaten judges. And they are.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that a security committee at the judicial conference, the body that makes policy for federal judges, has floated the idea of creating an armed security force apart from the current U.S. Marshals Service that operates under the Department of Justice. Judges have expressed concern that Trump and loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi might withdraw protections from judges who have ruled against the administration.
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted: “It is an extraordinary and unprecedented development in American history that the Nation’s Federal Judiciary would have to consider having its own security force because federal judges cannot trust the U.S. Marshal’s Service under this President and his Attorney General. They cannot trust this president and this Attorney General to ensure their protection.”
He continued: “I had to admit that, given the continuing unprecedented and vicious personal attacks and threats on the federal courts and federal judges by the President, Vice President Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Donald Trump’s Cabinet and senior White House advisors, I would never rely upon the U.S. Marshal’s Service for my protection, were I still a sitting federal judge. How could anyone?"
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Thank you, Professor Richardson!
It appears to me that when the courts, as the vast majority of them are doing, rule against some of the actions of the Trump administration, the losers in court turn to disparaging and insulting the judges. And when a court’s ruling requires enforcement by the Department of Justice, how do you stop that Department from ignoring the judge’s orders, as the Trump loyalist Attorney General the the FBI’s head are likely to do?
Now that you’ve read Professor Richardson’s May 26 posting, …. What are you going to do about it? Sit there and twiddle your thumbs?
JL
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Teasers and Paywalls
There are quite a few news sources on the internet, but many of them, after attracting your attention with a headline and/or a picture, provide a paragraph of so of their story, but then ask you to ‘upgrade’ to read the full story. This usually costs a few dollars a month, helping to keep the site financially solvent.
The daily news sites of CNN and MSNBC don’t do this and provide the full stories of the news they headline. I recommend them. While Timothy Snyder’s postings and those of Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman are among those asking you to upgrade, they still provide a lot of information to those who access them ‘for free.‘ I used to pay $5 monthly to get Richardson’s full “Letters from an American’ but find the free version quite adequate.
Many newspapers have such ‘paywalls’ or limit the number of articles available at no cost, primarily because newspapers, a staple of an earlier age, have financial problems. Because I am old-fashioned enough to subscribe to the Palm Beach Post’s print and email editions in the old-fashioned way, I don’t have a problem getting to their articles, and I pay $4 a month for full access to what the New York Times posts online. I think that is a tremenous bargain.
Sites like ‘The Free Press’ and that of the Washington Post, however, leave the reading dangling in midair after a few paragraphs unless you pay to cross their ‘paywall.’ The site of the liberal Israeli daily, Haaretz, also features ‘paywalls.’ There’s a really inexpensive one-year digital subscription for the Washington Post now available which gets you through their ‘paywall’ but with the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, playing footsie with Donald Trump (remember the Post endorsed no one in the 2024 presidential race), and some of their now disgruntled staff quitting, I don’t know if that’s worthwhile.
If you spend a few minutes navigating the internet with a ‘search engine,’ you will discover that there are ways to get around these ‘paywalls’ if you try hard enough. For example, there’s a trick that enables one to read full articles from the Atlantic magazine, and from the New Yorker magazine, beyond the three that publication generously makes available to non-subscribers. Good Luck!
JL
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TACOs and the CIT
Before you check out Paul Krugman’s May 28 and 29 postings by CLICKING HERE or copying and pasting https://paulkrugman.substack.com/ on your browser line, you should know that the financial marketplace’s up and down gyrations are the result of its reacting to the President’s usually unpredictable and irrational actions, now commonly referered to there as ‘TACO’ (‘Trump Always Chickens Out’) trading. When asked about this, the President called it ‘nasty.’
And for those who were not aware of it, for many years, we have had a specialized court known as the ‘Court of International Trade’ (once known as the Customs Court), called the CIT for short, which has condemned Trump’s tariffs as illegal.
Read Krugman’s May 28 and 29 postings, but then, …. What are you going to do about it? Sit there and twiddle your thumbs?
JL
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Housekeeping at Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
In addition, I would be particularly interested in hearing from anyone in any of the following categories who support President Trump and those in Congress who vote to bring his ideas to fruition, and who would like their views included on Jackspotpourri:
• Senior Citizens
• Others on Medicare or Medicaid
• Veterans
• Persons of Color
• Latinos
• College Students
• Those Considered to be part of an LGBTQ community.
• Members of Particular Religious Faiths
They must have their reasons. I would appreciate those responding including their primary sources of news (Newspapers, TV Channels, Internet sites, etc.).
Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered daily ‘paper’ newspaper (currently the Palm Beach Post, a Gannett publication) and what appears in my daily email.
Be aware that when I open that email, I take these steps:
1. I quickly scan the sources of the dozen or two emails I still get each day at my old email address to see from where they are being sent. Without reading 99% of them, I usually immediately delete them.
2. I then go to the email arriving at jacklippman18@gmail.com. Gmail enables ‘Promotion’ emails to be so designated and separated out. I believe their criteria are whether or not they end up asking for donations or if they are no more than advertisements. I ignore most of these emails without reading them, deleting them. A very few, perhaps one or two a day, get moved over to the two or three dozen other emails which I will actually open.
3. Then I read my email.
Besides email, my other source of information is the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). I do not use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
Following such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the results of my initially having accessed Google (or any other search engine) for information. Contrary to the AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated.
I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information, yourself or something else (AI), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable.
(In doing searches on Google, I have found that these AI summaries can sometimes … but not always … be avoided by saying so in your search. For example, instead of searching for ‘FDR’s New Deal,’ I might search for ‘FDR’s New Deal – No AI.’ This is a work in progress.)
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it (Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.) If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you. Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog. Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
JL
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