Maggie's Opinions

06/24/2026

Seething Officials Want Some Omerta from Trump

The collateral damage from Donald Trump’s latest international spat is starting to pile up.
Administration officials are privately seething after a U.S.-Italy business and innovation forum scheduled for Miami this week collapsed in spectacular fashion following the president’s very public feud with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

The June 22 event was set to be held at the prestigious Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, home to a championship golf course and rooms charging up to $900 a night. It was supposed to be a showcase of transatlantic cooperation, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio slated to headline alongside a roster of corporate heavyweights, government officials, and diplomats from both countries.

Months of planning had gone into the gathering. Speeches were finalized. Deliverables were ready for rollout. Officials expected announcements aimed at boosting investment and trade ties. “Mark your calendars!" beamed Marco Peronaci, Italy’s ambassador to the U.S., on Instagram last week. “Together - insieme - Italy and the U.S. will generate new opportunities, investments, and innovation!
”
Then Trump happened.

First on Italian television and then via social media, Trump claimed that Meloni "begged" him to pose for a photo with her during the recent G7 summit. Within minutes, Meloni took to her socials with a strong denial and a reminder to the US President that, “Italy and I do not beg."

Soon after, Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani pulled out of a planned visit to Washington—and organizers immediately knew they had a problem. What followed, according to frustrated officials, was a rapid unraveling that ended with the entire event being scrapped at the eleventh hour.

“The president couldn’t keep his mouth shut,” one exasperated source complained, summing up the mood inside parts of the administration.

For Rubio and the administration’s economic team, a week that was supposed to be about jobs, investment and partnership instead became another exercise in damage control. The cancellation is of course more than just an embarrassing scheduling hiccup. It’s the latest example of career officials and cabinet members spending months building relationships, negotiating agreements and organizing splashy diplomatic events—only to watch everything go sideways after a presidential outburst. Perhaps Rubio could persuade his boss to try some omerta?

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06/23/2026

Five hundred volunteers in Montana just did what most thought was impossible—they forced a vote on banning dark money in state elections onto the November ballot.

Initiative I-194 is the breakthrough. It works like this: states create corporations, and states decide what powers those corporations get. Montana voters will now decide whether spending in elections is one of them.

The volunteer campaign fanned out across all 56 Montana counties in 13 weeks and came back with nearly 50,000 signatures—they only needed 30,121. Jeff Mangan, who led the campaign, didn’t mince words: “To the out-of-state corporate interests trying to spread disinformation: look at the power of this volunteer army. That is what grassroots democracy looks like.”

Seventy-four percent of Montana voters support I-194—including majorities of Republicans and independents. Hawaii already showed it can be done by passing a similar measure last month. Now Montana gets to vote.

The Chamber of Commerce is already organizing against it. They’re scared. They should be.

06/23/2026

Jersey City Mayor James Solomon just made history. His city pulled $265 million from Citizens Bank—$150 million of it in a single day—in a direct rebuke of the bank’s financing of Trump’s detention machine. The city council voted unanimously to back the move.

Councilman Joel Brooks put it plainly: “What is happening at these facilities is not immigration enforcement. It is state-sponsored cruelty, bankrolled by institutions like Citizens Bank. We are done pretending that is acceptable.”

Citizens Bank has provided more than $2.5 billion in loans and financing to CoreCivic and GEO Group—the two companies that hold more than half the people ICE has locked up in America. Most major banks cut ties with them in 2019. Citizens Bank kept going—adding $100 million in new credit to the companies just this past January.

The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization pulled $3 million after the bank’s CEO agreed to meet with faith leaders at his own shareholder meeting—then refused to. More than 50 unions, faith groups, and community organizations have filed a petition to the board demanding Citizens cut ties entirely.

Pastors, union workers, and a unanimous city council all said the same thing this week: not with our money.

06/23/2026

How it’s going…..

06/19/2026

How it’s going….

06/19/2026

How it’s going…

06/18/2026

Republicans Starved Social Security
Now they want to wreck it.
Jennifer Rubin
Jun 18

These days, the MAGA Republican Party displays the survival instinct of dodo birds. Republican House and Senate leaders face staggering losses in both houses of Congress and in state races as a result of their cowardly capitulation to Donald Trump and the ensuing policy blunders they committed at his behest.

Aside from the narcissist in chief, no one will be shocked if Republicans get clobbered in November — certainly not after they passed the big, ugly bill (slashing healthcare and SNAP benefits to give billionaires more tax cuts); refused to compel complete disclosure of the Epstein pe*****le files, or exercise a modicum of oversight of the most corrupt administration in history; sided with Trump’s ICE shock troops; and enabled the illegal, disastrous war in Iran. But wait: Republicans are still digging their political hole.

Now, Republicans are menacing Social Security. After their own policies worsened the Social Security funding crisis (more about that in a minute), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) last week grabbed hold of the proverbial third rail in politics, delivering Democrats a soundbite perfect for any “throw grandma over the cliff” midterm ad.

In a radio interview, Johnson responded to a government report that the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will run dry by 2032:
The reason we’re in trouble is because over seventy-four percent of federal spending is on autopilot — mandatory spending, that is your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security — they have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that next year, and it’s critical, because we’re at $40 trillion-plus in debt. At some point, you get into a hole so deep you can’t climb out of it, so desperate times call for desperate measures.

(Considering the timing — right after Elon Musk attained trillionaire status and Trump got slammed for professing love for inflation and indifference to Americans’ financial pain — you almost wonder if Johnson is picking Democrats to win in the midterm prediction markets.)

Reacting to Johnson’s blunder, even right-wing Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told The Bulwark that the speaker made Republicans sound like they want “all of their tax breaks and loopholes and carried interest deductions … [and want] working people who’ve paid into all of these programs to take less.” (Although Hawley says he really does not “like the sound” of cutting Social Security, he really did not like the sound last year of Trump’s proposal to slash Medicaid either — but then voted for it.)

Three senior House Democrats swiftly pounced, recounting Republicans’ long- standing animosity toward Social Security. DOGE stooges sabotaged Social Security customer service, mishandled private data, and got caught trying “to mark millions of living people as dead to force them out of the country.” Putting benefit cuts on the table (even with the midterm disaster looming) confirms Republicans have not given up their yearning “to destroy Social Security and Medicare,” House Democrats argued.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CN) on Monday followed up with a detailed letter. “Republicans have a history of attempting to increase the retirement age, privatize Social Security, or otherwise cut Social Security benefits, and some Congressional Republicans have called to raise the retirement age or means-test benefits as the ‘solution’ to this problem,” they wrote. Recently, both SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz have raised these ideas “to pay for the federal deficit, which the [big, ugly bill] worsened,” the senators observed.

Republicans’ favored “solutions” to the Social Security solvency problem exemplify their Simon Legree approach to governance. As the Democratic senators explained, raising the retirement age by two years would reduce a median retiree’s benefits between 17 and 35 percent, thereby “cutting tens of millions of Americans’ Social Security benefits and disproportionately [harming] seniors at the lower end of the income distribution who rely on Social Security as one of their main sources of income.”

The senators also demanded Trump answer pesky questions such as: Would you support removing the cap on income? Does the administration currently have a proposal to address the insolvency of the Social Security trust fund, and if so, does raising the retirement age factor into that proposal?

We anxiously await the answers — and for Democrats to raise the Social Security issue over and over again on the campaign trail and in every available oversight and budget hearing.
In addition to their generic vow to strengthen entitlements by “making the wealthy finally pay their fair share, so every American can retire with dignity,” Democrats could offer additional proposals to boost funding for Social Security, such as slapping a 100 percent tax on illegal presidential emoluments or prohibiting corporate tax deductions for donations to projects defacing federal property (e.g., the arch, the ballroom).

In this same vein, Democrats, who should restore Social Security reserves when they regain the majority, should highlight how two key Trump initiatives have undermined Social Security.

First, the big, ugly bill worsened the Social Security funding gap. By lowering tax rates and temporarily expanding seniors’ standard deductions, it reduced the number of people paying into the system and the total amount paid in. Applying the Hippocratic Oath — first do no harm — would mean at least repealing the big ugly bill that robbed Social Security of critical revenue. (Certainly, repeal would also improve the general revenue picture, restore Medicaid and SNAP benefits, and end the unparalleled funding bonanza for abusive ICE and Border Patrol operations.)

Second, Trump’s draconian deportation operations and the concurrent crackdown on legal immigration make the Social Security problem worse. “Immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—offset the demographic factors that are straining the Social Security Trust Fund, namely fewer young workers paying into the fund and many more older Americans drawing from it,” the American Immigration Council has explained.

Halting the morally disgusting and economically disastrous assault on migrants would bring a bevy of positive results, but perhaps none as critical as helping to put Social Security on sturdier financial footing. Trump and his fellow white supremacists won’t admit that their economically suicidal anti-immigrant agenda, among other things, shrinks the tax base, stifles access to the best and brightness minds who promote technological innovation, and increase housing and food costs. But facts are facts. The resulting decrease in the workforce and payroll tax receipts has only aggravated the Social Security funding shortfall.

In sum, it took a decade, but Trump bootlicker extraordinaire Sen. Lindsey Graham’s infamous 2016 prophesy (“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it”) certainly proved accurate. Republicans’ midterm blunders, specifically their latest assault on Social Security, perfectly illustrate that their Faustian bargain with Trump drained them of whatever political survival skills they still had. A crushing defeat in November would be precisely what they deserve.

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06/16/2026

The Question Inside Trump's White House Wasn't Whether They Could Suspend Rights—It Was Whether They Could Get Away With It

Joyce Vance
Jun 15

The headline read “Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right.” It teased the story like this: “Secret memos show that the White House debated last year, to a greater degree than previously known, whether to limit habeas corpus rights for undocumented immigrants.”

What follows is an outrageous attempt, even though it ultimately failed, at least for now, to shatter firmly established constitutional rights and protections. In sharing this story, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are giving us a peek at their forthcoming book. Leaving aside, for the moment, the inevitable debate over whether journalists have an obligation to report in real time as opposed to holding their most interesting revelations for later publication, their reporting in this story puts together some previously known or suspected information with new details to provide detailed support for understanding this administration as a threat to democratic ideals.

On April 29, 2025, A confidential memo written by White House staff secretary Will Scharf, who is a lawyer, warned Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles that a plan to suspend habeas corpus for unauthorized immigrants was in the works. Haberman and Swan write that it was “careful and lawyerly but amounted to a warning against end-running the rule of law.”

Habeas corpus is the legal right to challenge government-imposed confinement. The Latin phrase roughly translates to “you shall have the body,” and the legal doctrine brings people to court to require the government to justify why an individual is in custody—regardless of citizenship status. In other words, it’s the basic check that prevents government from locking people up indefinitely without sufficient reason. It’s a foundational protection against “disappearing people”. Habeas is the heart of due process.

Its constitutional roots are in Article I, Section 9, which prohibits interfering with the right of habeas corpus, noting that it “shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Its origins go back to England and the Magna Carta. And it is the law—something this administration and this president have shown casual disregard for at times, frequently with impunity, so the fact that this instance drew high level concern signifies how truly shocking the ideas were.

Habeas has been suspended only a few times in our nation’s history, and only in genuine emergencies; never as a pretext or with a deliberate intent to circumvent people’s legal rights for political purposes. It happened during the Civil War, during Reconstruction in nine South Carolina counties to combat white supremacist Klan violence, and after 9/11 for enemy combatants held at Guantánamo. Suspension always generates significant legal and political controversy, even in these emergency settings. No surprise that it did here.

The Times reports that “Trump and some members of his team wanted to test how far the emboldened president’s authority could be pushed, setting off previously unreported internal struggles over where the limits should be.” That’s a polite way of saying they wanted to suspend habeas so people they were trying to deport couldn’t take advantage of it, something they were fully entitled to do. In his memo, Scharf cautioned Wiles that suspending habeas is only available in the face of rebellion or invasion and that courts “have almost uniformly held that only Congress can do it.” (The “almost” is because of Lincoln suspended habeas during the Civil War, not Congress, which drew dissent from Judge, later Justice, Taney, but the issue was never fully resolved).

The Supreme Court had already weighed in to confirm Scharf’s caution. By early April in the J.G.G. case, even as it permitted the government to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans who were in the U.S. without legal status, the Justices made it clear detainees could use habeas to challenge removal. The administration was frustrated by it because it slowed down deportations and the drive for large numbers they could tout publicly.

Scharf also wrote a memo to warn against invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops on American streets for use against protestors exercising their First Amendment rights against Trump’s mass deportation policy. The reporting says JD Vance, who is a lawyer, pushed to invoke it shortly after a federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis without justification.

The push for suspending habeas came from Stephen Miller. Miller is not a lawyer and he frequently seems to view the law as an obstacle to be overcome rather than an essential element of American democracy. That view appears to be what galvanized the ultra-conservative Scharf. No closet liberal, he contributed to the legal work that allowed Trump to outrun the Mar-a-Lago criminal case.

The reporting here is not completely clear, but it appears that Scharf was motivated by the fear that if the administration pushed too far after the bad result for them in the J.G.G. case, the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, would shut them down, limiting their ability to make other changes. That makes sense, since Scharf appears to subscribe to notions of an expansive unitary executive. The report in the Times suggests that, “Their worry was self-inflicted damage: Weak legal arguments would invite sweeping rulings against the administration, and those rulings would constrain everything that came after.”

So, this was not a matter of constitutional principle; it seems to have come down to expediency—how much the administration could get away with before it set off one of the other two branches of government that could counter it. The administration used other tools to make it difficult for detained immigrants to enforce their legal rights and to tamp down on protests, some ultimately disallowed by the courts, others unAmerican. There is not a day that goes by where I do not think about Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the others.

The reporting clarifies that Miller’s role extended to advocating for the suspension of basic rights, and that he was narrowly run off. The same appears to be true for the Vice President. The risk is not over. It is a warning for what could be coming, one that cannot be ignored.

Every White House tries to prevent its internal disputes and debates from being aired in public. With this White House, that airing is essential, as the court of public opinion is frequently the only or the best guardrail. Knowing this, the administration has made a concerted effort to keep its secrets. Considered and rejected in that past moment, moves to suspend habeas and invoke the Insurrection Act could easily be reconsidered if the relevant actors in the White House develop concerns about their hold on power in advance of the upcoming election. That makes it incumbent on all of us to stay informed.

Authoritarian movements depend on people forgetting what happened yesterday. One of the things we do together here is keep a long memory. If that matters to you—if you want reporting grounded in documents, law, and context, and a community committed to paying attention—then I hope you'll join us. We have work to do.

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