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Sam
Foreign.
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Heather Cox Richardson
2025 the Epstein List made it into last night's premiere of the 27th season of the television series south park when Satan in bed with Trump commented, it's weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax. The episode hit the president's lawsuit against the parent company of CBS News Paramount, which paid Trump $16 million to settle his complaint that it had edited an interview with then Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris misleadingly. Paramount also said it would not renew comedian Stephen Colbert's contract just days after the deal was announced. Paramount and Skydance Media are in the midst of an $8 billion merger and they needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission, or fcc, to complete the deal. Today, Skydance Media promised to eliminate Paramount's diversity, equity and inclusion practices and to root out the bias at CBS News in order to win the administration's support for the merger. This afternoon, the FCC approved the deal. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte's Web Thoughts notes that on Monday, south park creators Trey Parker and Matt stone signed a $1.5 billion, five year deal with Paramount with for global streaming rights to the show. This new episode skewered Paramount's cozying up to Trump. Clymer points out that the south park writers go on to portray Trump exactly as they once did Saddam Hussein, not only putting him in bed with Satan as they did Saddam, but also giving Trump the same mannerisms, same voice inflections, same love affair with Satan, same dictatorial chaos. In fact, Satan references this by telling Trump he reminds him of a guy he used to date. Clymer notes that the writers of one of the country's hottest shows are communicating that they think Trump is a bull two bit dictator. The Bulwarks Joe Perdicone reported today that in a decade of reporting on Congress, he has never seen such a level of panic among Republican lawmakers. In the past, he notes Trump could weather crises because Republicans closed ranks around him. The Epstein issue, though, has driven a wedge through the Republicans themselves, some of whom are turning against Trump just as the House of Representatives is headed back home. There, Republican members will hear directly from constituents who are angry over the administration's about face. On releasing more information about Epstein and his associates, Trump boasted to the House Republicans on Tuesday that his poll numbers are the best he's ever had. But in fact, a Gallup poll out today shows his approval rating at its lowest in his second term. Just 73% of American adults approve of his performance in office. Journalist Bill Gruskin notes that this puts Trump six points below where Biden was after the final US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The biggest shift has been among independents. Only 29% of them say they approve of his job performance, down from 46% at the beginning of his term. Gallup reports that 60% of American adults disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration, with only 38% approving. That is unlikely to change as Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ice, newly flush with funding from the budget reconciliation bill, ramps up both immigration sweeps and detention. Neither is popular with Americans as they hear stories of overcrowding at ICE facilities and inhumane and unsanitary conditions. On Tuesday, Nicole Acevedo of NBC News reported that detainees at the detention center in the Florida Everglades spoke of torturous conditions in cage like units full of mosquitoes with lights on at all times, lack of food and medical treatment, and unsanitary conditions. On June 20, she reported, the U.S. was holding more than 56,000 people in detention centers, the highest number in U.S. history. Nearly 72% of those held had no criminal history. Just two days after the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Branch, Ken Baguric, resigned out of frustration with the administration's work to destroy the agency and the same day FEMA Acting Director David Richardson would not commit to the agency's continued existence, Colleen de Guzman of the Texas Tribune reported that the US Department of Defense had awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build the largest detention facility in the US at Fort Bliss, an army base in El Paso, Texas. The facility will be designed to hold 5,000 people in tents, and it is expected to open in September 2027. De Guzman notes that the company that was awarded the contract, Acquisition Logistics, appears not to have experience running detention centers. On Friday, July 18, the government of El Salvador repatriated more than 250 Venezuelan men who had been held at the notorious Seacot prison after being sent there by the Trump administration. The administration maintained it was not responsible for the men after they left US territory, a claim the government of El Salvador repeatedly refuted. But with the repatriation of the men in exchange for the release of 10 U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents held as political prisoners in Venezuela. The State Department claimed the exchange was thanks to President Trump's leadership and commitment to the American people. The former Seekot prisoners are telling the story of their four month incarceration, detailing human rights abuses, beatings, being shot with pellets, deprivation of due process, torture. Today, naive Adrian Leon Rengell filed an administrative claim against Homeland Security when it sent him to the terrorist Sea Cot prison in El Salvador. The filing is the first step in a lawsuit. I want to clear my name, he told Jasmine Uloa of the New York Times. I am not a bad person. The Trump administration received a rebuke yesterday in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to seacot. The administration brought Abrego back to the US Only after it indicted him on charges of human smuggling. Once back, he was imprisoned in Tennessee, and the administration threatened to deport him again if he were released from custody pending trial. Yesterday, U.S. district Judge Paula Cinnis in Maryland prohibited officials from taking Abrego into custody and said the administration must give him at least three days notice if it intends to deport him. Shortly afterward, U.S. district Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. Ordered that abrego be released from criminal detention, saying the government had not shown that he is a threat. While the administration insists that Abrego is a gang member, Crenshaw wrote that he had seen no evidence that Abrego has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation, has working relationships with known Ms. 13 members, ever told any of the witnesses that he is an MS.13 member or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity. Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Abrego requested to stay his release for 30 days, and a magistrate judge issued that stay yesterday. The administration is facing rough waters elsewhere, too. On Monday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or cbo, released its final score for the budget reconciliation bill that poured money into border security. Although Republicans insisted it would not add to the deficit, the CBO predicts it will in fact increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion and push 10 million people off health insurance. Most of the cost for the bill will come from the Republicans extension of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. In the Washington Post today, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that while the Republicans insisted that extending the tax cuts should not be counted toward raising the deficit because they were part of current policy, they entirely rejected the current policy argument when it came to extending the increase in the Affordable Care Act's premium tax credit, or ptc, established under Biden. Unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are letting that tax credit die, a change that will mean a tax increase of $335 billion for working families over the next 10 years. The loss of the PTC will not only drive health care up more than $18,000 a year for a typical 60 year old couple making $82,000 a year, Sperling writes, but will also drive healthier of the market, making health care coverage more expensive for those who remain in it. Sperling notes that unlike many of the cuts in the budget reconciliation bill, the PTC will expire this year, making voters aware of what the Republicans have done before the midterms, a reality that might have been behind the recent calls from some Republican lawmakers to extend the ptc. Yesterday, Dan Lamoth and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the messages Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent in a signal chat came from an email with secret classification, meaning that disclosing that information could cause serious damage to national security. Senior members of the administration have repeatedly denied that classified information was shared in the chat. Finally today, cryptocurrency reporter Molly White noted that a meme coin by cryptocurrency billionaire Justin sun, who has invested about $213 million in cryptocurrency projects connected to Trump, posted a meme showing its mascot sporting an evil grin manipulating the White House with the mechanical system of a puppeteer. Over the image, the meme read, you never truly know who's pulling the strings.
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Michael Moss
Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.
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Sam
Sam.