25 states are challenging the Trump administration’s new world-wide tariffs as unlawful. Previously, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs, characterizing them as a “transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy.” While the Trump administration is now pointing to different statutes as legal rationale, the new tariffs are an extension of efforts to impose major economic policy without Congress, to circumvent the court’s ruling, and to give the White House leverage to curry favor from companies seeking exceptions.

Such attempts to entrench and leverage White House power are key conduits of corruption. New reports reveal an expansive fundraising operation that’s extracted $800 million since 2024 from companies with direct business before the administration toward Trump’s personal and political projects. As companies buy access to the president, the president is also enlarging his personal influence over markets and government policy in a vicious cycle of entrenchment and enrichment. The arrangement has been personally lucrative for Trump, who made $2.2 billion in personal profit last year from crypto ventures, questionable deals, and pay-for-play schemes.

Meanwhile, the president continues attempts to wind down a war he decided, without Congress, to keep fighting. There are conflicting reports on the status of diplomatic talks with competing claims coming from the White House and Iran. Regional flashpoints and market uncertainty continue as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains bottlenecked.

Reporting suggests that ICE activity is set to increase even further as hundreds of thousands of Haitians across the country lose their Temporary Protected Status. The imminent surge comes as ICE detentions set a monthly record high during the Trump administration, as DHS intensified its crackdown by expanding deportation criteria and making arrests at airports and immigration check-in offices.

An increase in DHS activity over the summer has already had deadly consequences. Over the summer, several ICE-involved shootings made national headlines. And deaths in ICE detention facilities are reaching record levels. Most recently, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, who died last weekend while being held in custody at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, was the 22nd person to die in ICE custody this year.

This kind of public targeting comes from a familiar playbook. For years, the president has disparaged immigrant communities — particularly Black immigrants from Haiti, Somalia, and elsewhere — and blamed them for any number of social and economic ills. Yet not only have Haitian immigrants been living in the country legally for years, but they have played a critical role in revitalizing communities like Springfield, Ohio. Now that the Administration has stripped their legal status, many Haitians still living in the United States are now on edge.

“Once again our community members find themselves in a state of extreme trauma, fear and terror. One of them told me it feels like a tsunami or an earthquake with nonstop aftershocks,” Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told CBS News. “Her little girl doesn’t even want to go to school for fear of coming home and not finding her mother.”

While his path to confirmation is not assured, Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, is one step closer to confirmation as U.S. Attorney General. 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.

Blanche’s rise comes as D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has lost favor with Trump for failing to advance baseless criminal inquiries.Trump’s personal fixation with the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool spawned a months-long saga over cost overruns, algae blooms, and damage that the president blamed on vandals. The spurious vandalism claims escalated to felony charges against four individuals, which Pirro dropped when conclusive evidence pointed instead to “a rushed and flawed installation process.” The episode is a case study in what Trump’s DOJ demands: government power and taxpayer resources marshaled behind the president’s personal vendettas.

A recent analysis by Reuters concluded that in 75 cases, federal judges have found the Trump administration infringed on First Amendment rights.

Several recent investigations bring to light the extent of government efforts to chill speech and punish critics. ICE’s mass deportation and detention crackdown goes beyond surveilling and harassing the immigrant community to an extensive digital surveillance program targeting U.S. citizens and groups that criticize ICE online. Users identified through the program face the threat of potential criminal charges, with several reporting intimidating visits from DHS agents about their social media posts.

The surveillance program is consistent with broader efforts to suppress protest activity through prosecution and government harassment. ICE observers have reported interactions with agents threatening to add them to a “domestic terrorist watch list.” Protect Democracy is suing DHS to stop this unconstitutional surveillance and intimidation.

DOJ has also ramped up criminal charges of conspiracy and assault against those protesting immigration enforcement. With a high percentage of those charges falling apart under legal scrutiny (and in many cases revealing malfeasance by government agents), it is clear that criminal charges are meant to spread fear among critics, not punish serious wrongdoing.

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.

The DOJ is now 0-21 as federal courts reject the government’s demand for state voter roll data. While, the president still has ways to interfere with the 2026 midterms, his toolkit is dwindling. An appeals court has affirmed a lower court ruling that his executive order designed to interfere with mail voting cannot go into effect. Simultaneously, Trump is making a final push to pass the SAVE America Act, which could sow chaos and confusion about election rules just weeks before people start voting. But despite the President’s demands to cancel August recess, his odds of success in getting SAVE America passed are rapidly diminishing.

Trump is now taking his executive order to the Supreme Court, one of his final gateways to changing the rules ahead of November. Whether he succeeds or not, though, he has other levers to pull in the months ahead. Thankfully, there are also things all of us can do now to make a difference. By organizing, voting for your candidate of choice, and defending the results this fall, we can begin building a system that’s harder to disrupt in the future. With less than 100 days until the midterms, it’s time for all of us to do what we can.