The president’s announcement in early September that the Pentagon now owns a stake in an obscure Venezuelan oil company is an extension of his belief in his own imperial authority. This move, which comes eight months after the president approved a raid to take out Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, is another sign of the way the Trump administration appears to be running Venezuela out of the White House.

This return to 19th century imperialism has come without any consultation with Congress. In fact, Congress, which is supposed to hold both the power to tax and the power to declare war, has been left out of all decisions about Venezuela entirely. Through inaction, Congress has allowed the Pentagon and State Department to co-opt Venezuelan oil in an attempt to lower gas prices before the midterms. This is an abdication of Congress’s clear authority, and one that is also a new vector for corruption inside the administration.

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.

Under the president’s March executive order DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the State Department are trying to pull Social Security numbers, addresses, birthdates, and citizenship records into one unverified, untested federal system with unknown contractors running it, and states are being given mere days before the start of early voting in the 2026 election to run their voter rolls against the result. This is the same administration whose Secretary of Homeland Security threatened to prosecute election officials who don’t hand over sensitive voter data. In tandem with their ongoing attempts to abuse the USPS as a tool of election subversion, their attempts to tilt the field are getting more desperate— because the closer we get to an election the White House expects to lose, the more they are reaching for ways to decide who votes in it. We’re suing the administration over this unconstitutional attempt to violate Americans’ privacy and to interfere with the 2026 midterms.

Time and again this government has been shown it simply cannot be trusted with Americans’ data. Building a government-approved voter registry in plain sight right before the midterms is more of the same plan to try and deceive Americans, disrupt the state-run process, and deny voters and election outcomes they don’t like. Do something about it: double and triple-check your registration now and again in October. Ask your county clerk what the federal government has asked them to hand over. And then sign up to work the polls.

In his latest attack on a member of the media, President Trump posted on Truth Social that Meet the Press host Kristen Welker would be reported to the FCC. This came after Welker suggested on air that the president has a mixed endorsement record in Republican primaries. “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” Trump said. “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”

This isn’t an empty threat: 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. And 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. We don’t know whether the president plans to follow through on this week’s threat against Welker, but the pattern is clear: the administration is weaponizing the FCC to make broadcasters think twice about how they cover the administration.

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.