8.29 By a 7-4 decision, a U.S. appeals court rules that most of Donald Trump‘s tariffs are illegal.
8.29 The Daily Beast: “Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith excoriated Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for suggesting that antidepressants could have caused Wednesday’s deadly shooting at a church in Minneapolis, where two children died and 17 others were injured. “I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do,” Smith wrote. “Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.” The Democratic senator was responding to comments Kennedy on Fox & Friends Thursday, where the health secretary was asked whether hormone therapy that transgender people undergo for treatment of gender dysphoria could have contributed to the shooting by the the transgender killer Robin Westman. “You are dealing with a person who is trans, who was transitioning,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said. “Are you going to be examining at all any of the drugs that are used in order to make that transition happening, to see if it plays a role?” In reply, Kennedy instead spoke about a common type of antidepressant, SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), saying “We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.”
8.27 Lawyers for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez said that she would not leave her post as a top public health official, despite attempts by White House officials and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oust her for “protecting the public” over “a political agenda.” “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted,” Monarez’s lawyers Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell said in a statement. The showdown began as a disagreement over demands from Kennedy and Stefanie Spear, his principal deputy chief of staff, for Monarez to support changes to COVID vaccine policy and the firings of high-level stafff, which Monarez would not commit to. HHS then announced that Monarez was “no longer director” of the CDC, which touched off a wave of high-level resignations from CDC officials in protest and, ultimately, a fiery response from Monarez’s lawyers, who said she wouldn’t resign.
8.27 Paul and Anne Lindstrom visit.
8.25 Gov. J.B. Pritzker: “Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against, and it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances.
What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.
No one from the White House or the executive branch has reached out to me or to the mayor. No one has reached out to our staffs. No effort has been made to coordinate or to ask for our assistance in identifying any actions that might be helpful to us. Local law enforcement has not been contacted. We have made no requests for federal intervention. None. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police? Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections. . . .If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to deescalate conflict on our streets. Cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the state and local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect. Trump is defunding the police. . . .Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab. . . . Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, “Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?” Instead, I say, “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.”
8.23 Jerry Adler dies at 96.
8.21 Jack White on Instagram: “I don’t always state publicly my political opinions, and like anyone I don’t always know all of the facts, but when it comes to this man and this administration I’m not going to be like one of the silent minority of 1930’s Germany. This man is a danger to not just America but the entire world and that’s not an exaggeration, he’s dismantling democracy and endangering the planet on a daily basis, and we. all. know. it.
8.21 Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray.
8.20 The Guardian: Over the last 20 years, the number of Americans who read daily for pleasure has fallen by 40%, according to a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London. They have found that between 2003 and 2023, daily reading for reasons other than work and study fell by about 3% each year, falling from 28 percent in 2004 to 16% in 2023. The definition of reading in the survey wasn’t limited to books; it also included magazines and newspapers in print, electronic or audio form.
8.20 Highest 2 Lowest, with Ginny and Tim.
8.18 Jules Witcover dies at 98.
8.28 Oliver Kornetzke in The Guardian: “Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.”
8.17 Terrence Stamp dies at 87.
8.17 At the Albany Rural Cemetery, we visit Chester A. Arthur, Philip Schuyler and Thurlow Weed.
8.16 Jamelle Bouie in the Times: “If you stopped paying attention on election night last year, you would’ve gotten the impression that Donald Trump won a commanding majority of the American public. But if you tuned in and kept following the count for another month and a half, what you would’ve seen is that, in fact, he got a little less than half of the voting public in that election and won the narrowest victory of any previous president since the 19th century. It was almost a split decision, if you want to use those terms. And under those conditions, your political capital, such that it is, is actually a pretty valuable resource. You don’t actually have as much of it as you think. I think MAGA seems to think of the election as an enabling act for Trump authoritarianism, but in fact, what it was is a small but critical number of Americans said: We want to go back to 2019. That’s it. That was the election. That was the whole thing. And if I were in Trump’s position, I would be very jealous of maintaining my approval, to accomplish my goals, but also really to prevent the bottom from falling out.”
8.15 Amanda Mull on Bloomberg: “The Lost Cause vision of the Confederacy has begun to gain ground again, as part of the backlash to 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests; the Trump administration recently announced that a Washington, DC, statue of a Confederate general that had been felled during those protests would soon rise again. And much of the South’s current leadership appears happy to cling to parts of that past with both hands, whether that means gerrymandering their states to stifle the power of Black voters or marketing their disproportionately Black blue-collar workforces to national and international corporations as easier to underpay and exploit. This fight for the soul of the South is nothing less than a fight over the future of America itself. The region’s recent trajectory of expansion, diversification and political moderation would not have been possible without ending Jim Crow and prying the bluntest instruments of racial domination from the hands of Southern elites. Now there is a real push to give those tools back — not just to Southerners but to wannabe Confederates across the country. But revanchists looking to today’s South as an answer to their prayers might be disappointed in what they find: a region that has become more like the rest of the US, which has in turn become more like it.”
8.15 Red and blue, 10 minutes apart
8.15 Rachel Maddow, on a podcast with Kara Swisher: “The crisis in this country is elite cowardice.”
8.13 A Gallup poll showed that only 54 percent of U.S. adults said they consumed alcohol. This is the lowest percentage in Gallup’s 90 years of collecting data on drinking behavior. Those who did drink alcohol said they were consuming less. Gallup’s annual poll has tracked a steady downturn in drinking: From 1997 to 2023, at least 60 percent of Americans said they consumed alcohol. That number fell to 58 percent in 2024, then to a record low this year.
8.13 Taylor Swift on the Kelce Brothers podcast “New Heights”: “You should think of your energy as if it’s expensive, as if it’s a luxury item. Not everyone can afford it.”
8.10 In Washington, Sean Charles Dunn, an employee in the international affairs section of the criminal division at the Justice Department. threw a wrapped footlong sandwich from Subway at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent. The officer was part of Trump’s effort to ramp up law enforcement in Washington. Before throwing the sandwich “stood within inches” of one of the officers, and yelled “F— you! You f—–g fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city,” according to a court filing. Dunn was charged with felony assault and fired.
8.9 Jen Pawol becomes the first woman to umpire a major league baseball game.
8.8 We agree to sell our house for $670k.
8.7 Jim Lovell dies at 97.
8.5 The Athletic: In a blockbuster trade, the NFL and ESPN formally announced their billion-dollar agreement that will see ESPN acquire NFL media assets — including NFL Network, linear distribution rights to RedZone and NFL Fantasy — in exchange for the NFL receiving a 10% ownership stake in ESPN. The deal is really two agreements: In one agreement, ESPN will own and operate NFL Network, the RedZone Channel (as distributed by pay TV operators, like cable systems) and NFL Fantasy, which would merge with ESPN’s fantasy football product. In a second agreement, the NFL will license to ESPN various assets that will help ESPN keep programming NFL Network, including three additional NFL games that will air on NFL Network, along with a shift of four other games to NFL Network, which will continue to air seven games each season.
8.5 Allison Schrager on Bloomberg about a potential “he-cession”: “While the overall unemployment rate was still a respectable 4.2% in July, for young men aged 20 to 24, it was 8.3%, which is near recession levels — and for recent college graduates, the annual rate is 5.3%. Both of these numbers are about double the comparable figures for young women.”
8.5 Thomas Edsall in the Times, quoting an email from Joseph Fishkin, a law professor at UCLA: “It would take a fine legal mind indeed to explain why, for instance, Biden’s student loan relief plans so dangerously exceeded statutory authority that the court had to stop them immediately by injunction, whereas the court upheld Trump’s evisceration of that entire department, in contravention of the statute Congress passed. So yes, there are many examples: This court is unmistakably more interested in consolidating executive power under this president than under any Democratic president. . . . [T]he most consequential decisions of the court in a unitary-executive direction are on matters, like firing the heads of agencies set up by Congress to be independent of control from the White House, where Trump is the only modern president to really try it. You cannot point to all the heads of independent agencies the court refused to let Biden fire, because Biden and other presidents respected the laws Congress passed in this area, an approach that served the country well. We are now in uncharted waters. . . .The Supreme Court has diverged very sharply from the district and appellate courts since Trump took office in January. The trial courts are continuing to do what they always do: detailed factual findings and careful legal assessment of the administration’s actions in relation to precedent. Regardless of political party, judges at the trial level are pretty consistently finding after investigation that many of the administration’s actions, especially its efforts to dismantle disfavored parts of the government, are unlawful. The Supreme Court, in contrast, has been reversing those lower courts and finding for the Trump Administration, at a rapid clip — primarily with summary orders that do not provide adequate reasoning.”
8.5 Lunch with George Kalogerakis in Hudson.
8.4 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: “One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole. Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point. And when you are done reading that, read Easterly’s response on LinkedIn: “As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.” And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.” That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.”
8.4 Gothamist: “Broad swaths of New York City’s tourism industry are reeling from a drop in tourism spending. New York City Tourism and Conventions, the city’s primary tourism booster, recently downgraded its expectations for tourism spending, predicting a loss of $4 billion this year, driven largely by a decline in arrivals from Canada, France, Germany and Mexico. The travel organization projects the city will attract 52 million domestic visitors this year, down from an earlier estimate of 53.1 million visitors, and 12.1 million international visitors, down from an earlier estimate of 14.1 million. . . .[I]nternational travelers on average spend substantially more than domestic visitors.
8.4 Allison Morrow on CNN Business: “US federal stats are the gold standard. They are how we keep a pulse on the giant, messy force that is the world’s biggest economy. If that data were to become corrupted, that’s the ballgame — businesses and policy makers would be flying blind, making it much harder to prevent (or claw our way out of) a recession. And right now, as Trump’s tariffs and cuts to social spending take their toll on American consumers, we need that credible data as much as ever.”
8.4 At the gardens at Yaddo
8.4 Steven Rattner in the Times: “Trump has been told over and over again by economists of all political persuasions that tariffs are much like a sales tax and will 
ultimately be paid by American consumers; he likely would have been taught that concept during his time at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. And while the overall inflation rate has only been edging up since Mr. Trump began imposing tariffs, the cost of many imported items has been escalating. In June, prices for furnishings and durable household equipment — a category with high import exposure — rose by 1.3 percent, the biggest increase in more than three years. Prices for recreational goods and vehicles, which are also frequently manufactured abroad, increased by 0.9 percent, the largest jump since February 2024. And tariffs likely played a role in the sudden slowdown in payroll growth announced on Friday, with the economy having created just 106,000 jobs in the last three months, far less than its monthly average in recent years. Trump’s response? Shoot the messenger: He directed his team to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the figures. Trump’s ignorance goes far beyond the tariffs-are-a-tax concept. He believes trade deficits are tantamount to “losing” money to other countries. Losing money is what happens when $100 falls out of your wallet. When you spend $100 to buy new earbuds made in China, you haven’t lost it; you’ve spent it on earbuds. . . .Moreover, the tariffs that Mr. Trump is imposing reflect no rhyme or reason. What is the point of imposing a 40 percent tariff on poor Laos? The country is hardly in a position to buy much from us. Trump’s fervent belief in tariffs seems to have originated in the 1980s, as Japanese cars flooded into the United States and wreaked havoc on domestic car manufacturers. Yet those same carmakers — such as Ford and General Motors — have been among the most vociferous opponents of his tariff regime today. Their latest financial results suggest that they stand to lose somewhere between $1 billion and $4 billion in earnings this year from Trump’s tariffs. Trump has demonstrated his economic ignorance in many other ways — with potentially even greater adverse consequences. His most recent, and potentially most dangerous, transgression has been his harsh and wrongheaded criticism of the policies of the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell. Trump insists that our interest rates are too high and should be as low as Europe’s (2 percent versus our 4.5 percent). Yet when he pronounces our economy “the strongest in the world,” as he regularly does, he is unconsciously citing one of the reasons for our higher interest rates: Robust economies need higher interest rates to restrain inflation.”
8.3 Loni Anderson dies at 79.
8.2 Tim Hart and I visit SPAC for the Outlaw Festival with Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, and Wilco.
8.2 After the Bureau of Labor Statistics released monthly jobs data showing surprisingly weak hiring in July and large downward revisions to job growth in the previous two months, Trump fires the commissioner of the department, Erika McEntarfer. Trump on Truth Social: “Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged. That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats.”
He continued: “Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement.
8.2 President Harry S Truman, in a 1951 address in Philadelphia at the dedication of the Chapel of the Four Chaplains: “Good leaders do not threaten to quit if things go wrong. They expect cooperation, of course, and they expect everyone to do his share, but they do not stop to measure sacrifices with a teaspoon while the fight is on. We cannot lead the forces of freedom from behind.”