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.

President Trump has continued to escalate his war with the media, announcing in mid-September that he would be removing reporters from MSNow, Politico, and CNN from his press pools. Trump said that reporting from outlets he doesn’t like is “a threat to democracy.”

In response, all three outlets have sued to maintain their access to the White House, and all of the major TV networks have suspended their participation in the daily press pool in solidarity. This attempt to deny journalists access to the president is designed to make it more difficult for members of the media to question the president and his staff, and to hold them accountable. It’s also part of a broader pattern of attacks on the media during his second term, which have come largely from the FCC.

Thankfully, major media outlets have responded with a united front, reminding a president who reportedly spends hours a week watching himself on television that he relies on their cameras for that coverage.

On Sept. 20, an ICE agent shot and wounded Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man, in North Austin. His attorney has said that, following the shooting, Garces Perez was sent to a detention facility more than 100 miles away “with a bullet in his back without pain medication” and “slept overnight in a processing center without a bed.”

CNN has reported that ICE and CBP agents have shot at least 20 people, eight of them fatally, during this term. The presence of ICE in cities across the country has fomented this level of instability and violence. It might not be the stated goal of these deployments, but evidence suggests that, at least in the first two years of Trump’s term, this violence is an inevitable outcome of the mass deportations that were core to the president’s 2024 campaign. These ICE raids are stoking violence, and the president shows no signs of changing course.

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.

Last 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 0-25 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.