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.

In multiple high-stakes and consequential legal fights, the White House continues to publicly refuse to accept the reality of losses. As The Washington Post writes, “President Donald Trump has made it clear that he will not take Supreme Court decisions as the final word on some of his most cherished priorities.”

He has introduced new world-wide tariffs — which 25 states are challenging — giving the the White House leverage to curry favor from companies seeking exceptions. He has restarted the effort to illegally fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, all while directly pressuring Fed chair Kevin Warsh in an attempt to lower interest rates. On birthright citizenship, he signed two new executive orders that in some ways directly contravene the Supreme Court’s ruling. And, in a less significant but deeply symbolic move, he plans to re-add his name to the building despite a court order to the contrary.

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.

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 highlights the dangers of NSPM-7, President Trump’s order authorizing law enforcement 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 asuit  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.

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.

While the president still has ways to interfere with the 2026 midterms, his toolkit is dwindling. This week, we challenged his attempt to do an end-run around his failure to get Congress to pass the so-called “SAVE America Act” by withholding critical disaster relief funding from states that don’t comply with his demands to make five changes to their election processes. These changes are, unsurprisingly, designed to tilt the playing field toward the president’s party. In a lawsuit filed on behalf of localities in several states, we argue that the funds are being illegally withheld, and could have real consequences for states facing disasters if they are not distributed.

This new lawsuit comes the same week the Census Bureau, under Trump’s influence, published highly questionable data suggesting that 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020. That announcement landed with a thud, as experts have made it abundantly clear that this is just the latest interference ploy from the White House, and is not worth taking seriously. Other analyses have affirmed that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare in U.S. elections.

The administration still has cards to play, but so does the pro-democracy movement. With less than 100 days until November, there are things all of us can do now to make a difference. By organizing, voting for your candidates of choice, and defending the results this fall, we can begin building a system that’s harder to disrupt in the future.