September has seen a wave of newly acute concern about the risks AI poses to Americans, and humanity writ large. Whatever you think about those fears, a consensus is forming that we need to do something.

Multiple approaches have been put forward, ranging from voluntary industry self-regulation to top-down, federal guidelines developed by Congress. All of these are a far-cry from what we have had up to this point: a black box of secret regulations developed and overseen by the Trump Administration. The White House has been making decisions about which new AI models can be released using an undisclosed and potentially corrupt regulatory process with no oversight from Congress, the public, or tech experts outside of the executive branch.

That’s why Protect Democracy recently sued the Trump administration for information on their secret AI evaluation framework. And now, the administration is starting to produce documents. Unfortunately, they are almost entirely redacted.

Todd Blanche is now the Attorney General of the United States.

Blanche has served as a willing agent of Trump’s retaliatory agenda, overseeing inquiries into Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Adam Schiff, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and former FBI Director James Comey. Blanche bragged about the DOJ purging lawyers who worked on January 6 prosecutions and personally signed off on the $1.8 billion dollar “anti-weaponization” fund as part of a settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.

As The New York Times describes, Blanche’s confirmation “represented a powerful endorsement by Congress of the philosophy that has guided him under a meddling, demanding boss — that he has a constitutional obligation to execute every lawful White House order, even if it shatters longstanding policy and rule-of-law norms, or contradicts what he thinks is right.”

Blanche was a featured speaker at the Republican mid-term convention in Texas. If the Attorney General had any shred of apolitical status left, that speech is likely the end of it.

Heartbreaking reporting from The New York Times spotlights Haitian immigrants who have been deported from the country following the end of Temporary Protected Status for many living in the U.S. These deportees are arriving in the Haitian capital of Cap Haitien, many reportedly without any money or possessions that could help them find lodging, food, or a permanent home. “They didn’t give me back my passport, and my passport cost me $600!” Natacha Antoine, a former nurse’s aide, said. “I have no problem that they want to send us home. Send us home! But treat us like human beings.”

Haiti, which the State Department advises Americans to avoid traveling to, is just one of many dangerous places the administration has been deporting people this summer. Some deportees are being returned to countries they are not from and have no tie to, like those sent to the Central African Republic, who are also reporting dangerous conditions. “We cannot leave, we don’t have documents and we’re suffering and missing our families, in a continent we don’t know,” Yasmany Moreno de Armas, a Cuban immigrant, told CBS News. Even as the administration has embroiled itself in other foreign entanglements, these deportations continue apace, and without any respect for the humanity of those being sent to dangerous, sometimes unfamiliar places.

In his ongoing attempts to silence media voices he doesn’t like, President Trump has often targeted ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel’s show was temporarily pulled off the air under FCC pressure in 2025, and that was just the beginning of the saga. One day after Trump criticized ABC host Jimmy Kimmel for a joke about Melania Trump earlier this year, the FCC ordered all eight of ABC’s owned-and-operated TV stations to file for early license renewal, an unprecedented maneuver. ABC has sued to stop these proceedings as retaliation prohibited by the First Amendment.

In mid-September, Kimmel said that an interview he conducted with Senate candidate James Talarico would not air on ABC because of threats from the FCC. The decision to air the interview on YouTube instead of ABC suggests that the pressure of the FCC is affecting ABC’s journalism, at least to some extent. Kimmel is still on the air, but the decision not to air Talarico’s interview is another example of effective government censorship.

The authoritarian project doesn’t limit its disinformation to current events — it deploys government power to challenge shared truths and rewrite history. A recent Executive Order does just that, in the latest of a series of attacks against the Smithsonian Institution. The order mandates that the National Museum of American History include signage that warns visitors of potential “inaccuracies” and to point them towards “alternative resources.” The order follows a report by the Domestic Policy Council that decried the Smithsonian as a tool of “extreme political activism” and “anti-white activism.”

Both the Executive Order and the report position the Trump administration as the proper keepers of “America’s Story” while attacking public knowledge centers. By shoring up familiar grievances against alleged “transgender” and “illegal alien” and “Marxist” activism, these types of actions reinforce division and propaganda that fuel the authoritarian project.

On July 1, a federal judge in Fort Worth handed down the final wave of sentences in the Prairieland ICE detention center case — some as long as 50 to 100 years — for a July 4, 2025 protest outside an Alvarado, Texas immigration facility where one attendee shot and wounded a police officer. The officer survived. But prosecutors charged and convicted sixteen people under a “material support to terrorists” theory tied to Trump’s September 2025 designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization — a designation civil liberties groups note has no formal legal definition, meaning it functions less as a criminal statute than as a label prosecutors can attach to political protest.

Several of those sentenced weren’t accused of firing a weapon: one defendant received 30 years for moving a box of “antifascist zines,” and a married couple who said they arrived late and left when confronted by guards were each sentenced to 50 years. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor said he wanted the sentences to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology,” while then-Acting AG Todd Blanche framed the case as proof that “Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement… will face swift and uncompromising justice.”

Violence is never an acceptable part of political discourse. In weaponizing this single act of violence, though, the Trump administration has worked to quash the dissent of more than a dozen political opponents, many of whom had nothing to do with the shooting, and potentially made other protesters more concerned about the harsh consequences they might face for opposing the administration.

This week, another court has told the Trump administration it cannot force its unworkable mail-ballot rule on American voters. The Supreme Court’s denial leaves in place what two lower courts already found: this rule is likely unlawful, and there is no evidence to justify it.

Over the past year and a half, the administration has tried — again and again — to tilt the rules of American elections in its favor. Again and again, it has been stopped. This decision adds to a growing list of authoritarian overreaches that have been blocked since the administration returned to office:

• A pair of executive orders to take control over election rules, infrastructure, and mail-in voting built on conspiracy theories about election fraud.
• The SAVE Act has failed to pass a Republican-controlled Congress.
• Courts have repeatedly turned back the administration’s demands for state voter data, resulting in a 0-23 loss record.
• The Supreme Court declined to let Missouri impose a mid-decade congressional gerrymander designed to benefit the president’s party.

The threats from inside the White House will not end here, but this Supreme Court ruling — which handed the overreaching administration a clear loss — is a good reminder that our system’s many, many safeguards are holding.