On August 8, Todd Blanche was confirmed by the Senate as 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.

The fight over that fund lays bare Trump’s total control of Blanche and the DOJ. As GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee named termination of the anti-weaponization fund as a condition of their vote, Trump’s refusal to accede temporarily stalled the nomination. Someone who aims to lead the DOJ independently and judiciously would not need permission from the President to quash a legally dubious slush fund for Trump’s allies — one Blanche had previously sworn under oath he had already abandoned in June.

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.”

The increase in DHS activity over the summer has had deadly consequences. Several ICE-involved shootings made national headlines, and deaths in ICE detention facilities are reaching record levels. 24 people have already died in ICE custody this year.

Following the recent death of Edwin Jovanny Lopez Cornejo in ICE custody at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, his family said that he was denied the care he needed. “He had high blood pressure, he had diabetes,” the family explained. “And they refused to give him his medication, and they brushed it off as complaining.”

This reported disregard for life is yet another example of the cruelty and inhumanity that has characterized this administration’s approach to immigration since its earliest days. The deaths of those in ICE custody are a heartbreaking reminder of the tangible costs of the scapegoating the president has engaged in for more than a decade.

The United States is in a trade war with Canada, but it’s unclear what exactly that trade war is meant to accomplish. On Aug. 24, the president threatened to impose 50% tariffs on Canadian auto imports, which would harm U.S. auto manufacturers and consumers. This comes after the president introduced 50% tariffs on a more limited range of Canadian imports. Setting aside the economic effects, these tariffs have significantly degraded our relationship with Canada, a crucial neighbor and ally. And they are being implemented by executive fiat, without the approval or even input of Congress.

Tariffs are taxes on the American people, and the president is collecting them on his own. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The Constitution vests the power to collect “taxes, duties, imposts and excises” to Congress, and Congress has delegated that authority to the president only in emergency situations. Congress has largely abdicated its Constitutional authority here, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Congress could, and should, retake control over this vital economic and foreign-relations lever, which has an enormous impact on every American.

This week, the U.S. Postal Service followed through on its plan to implement Donald Trump’s nonsensical, long-shot executive order that seeks to upend voting by mail in the United States. The measure was partially unblocked by the Supreme Court, but they have not yet ruled on the substance of the order. If the order were to succeed it would inject unprecedented chaos into elections with less than 10 weeks before election day. All states would have to submit voter names to a “portal” that doesn’t exist yet and hasn’t been tested for accuracy or security — those states who refuse could have their mail-in ballots blocked outright.

Americans don’t really need to worry — there is almost zero chance this plan goes into effect for the 2026 election. There is much more litigation on the order to come, and the outcome of those orders is still unclear. If you plan to vote by mail: It’s going to be ok. You will almost certainly still be able to do so.

Donald Trump is purposefully trying to blow up voting for the roughly one-third of Americans who vote by mail. He is doing so because he (wrongly) believes that chaos will benefit his party electorally. And he’s trying to undermine faith in our elections across the board so that he can attempt to disrupt and deny the results in other ways going forward.

There are things we can all do to respond. Instead of feeling afraid, take that anger and channel it. Vote no matter what. Register other people to vote too. Sign up to be a pollworker. Protect the process that he’s so maliciously and incompetently trying to destroy.

New disclosures reveal that DHS started an expansive surveillance program at the height of ICE protests in Minnesota last year, targeting a host of non-profits, labor unions, and civic groups who opposed Operation Metro Surge. This sweeping operation — infiltrating meetings and Signal chats, taking down the license plates in parking lots when anti-ICE meetings were held, and obtaining records of financial transactions going back years — highlights the dangers of NSPM-7, President Trump’s order authorizing law enforcement activity based upon the dubious designation of many who oppose him as “domestic terrorists.”

At the same time, one of the top media companies targeted by the administration for its disfavored speech is fighting back. After years of pressure from the Trump administration against ABC, the network filed a suit on Aug. 18, accusing the FCC of violating its First Amendment rights through a series of moves that made it difficult for the network to continue operating.

The FCC under chair Brendan Carr has repeatedly threatened ABC, and called an early review of the broadcaster’s licenses, which they need to continue airing programming. This came after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel angered the president with a joke in his monologue, and after he was taken off the air by the network last year in response to earlier Trump pressure.

This lawsuit is unlikely to bring an end to the FCC’s pressure campaigns, but it’s a sign that they have not cowed all media. Instead of bending to accommodate the administration, one of the nation’s biggest networks, owned by one of America’s biggest companies, has decided to push back in court.

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.