'Jaw-dropping' report shows how far Trump has retreated on authoritarian takeover: analyst

A bombshell new report on high-ranking administration officials calling to suspend a constitutional right and invoke the Insurrection Act shows how far President Donald Trump's authoritarian ambitions have retreated since the start of this year.

New York Times correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in their forthcoming book that Stephen Miller pushed the president to suspend habeas corpus for accused illegal immigrants, while Vice President JD Vance called on him to use military troops to crack down on protesters in Minnesota, but The Bulwark's Andrew Eggers spotted a silver lining in that "jaw-dropping" report.

" Trump is, above all, a showman," Eggers wrote. "While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately. More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt."

The new reporting on those alarming efforts at the highest level of government serves as a graphic illustration of that, he argued.

"Reading this report was a shocking experience for two reasons," Eggers wrote. "First, obviously, are the merits — it’s insane that any White House would contemplate such measures in peacetime at all. But the piece also yanks the reader back to a time last year when pretty much everything was like this."

This time last year, Eggers wrote, Trump was running roughshod over a government battered and bruised by DOGE, migrants were being disappeared into foreign torture prisons, the National Guard was marching on cities, law firms and universities were fighting administration lawsuits, and the president was threatening to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal.

"This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year," he argued. "It has stayed dead since. Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him."

Courts have blocked man of his plans, and even compliant Republicans are gumming up the works for some of his legislative priorities, and the president has instead focused on slapping his name and coats of paint on buildings around Washington, D.C., or concoct new ways to raid the treasury.

"All this could change, of course," Egger wrote. "It’s far from impossible that Trump — his war concluded, his ICE re-funded, his White House UFC fights all brought to a satisfying conclusion — could seriously reapply himself to recapturing his god-emperor domestic-policy mojo. It’s safe to say that he intends to do this in at least one seriously chilling way: by monkeying with the upcoming 2026 and 2028 elections."

"It’s not fun, exactly, to see him and his people squee and gibber while a bloodsport fighter hoots that 'MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN!' from a fight cage erected preposterously on the White House lawn," he added. "But these circuses aren’t just intended to trigger the libs and titillate his base — they’re designed to distract both camps from how little the president is actually getting done these days. Compared to where we were last year, it’s a damn good start."

Alex Vindman is leaning into the one thing he knows gets under Donald Trump's skin: the prospect of becoming the president's own home-state senator.

In a fundraising appeal sent to supporters, the Vindman campaign made the geography the whole pitch. It pointed to Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida residence, and noted that the state is where Vindman is running for the U.S. Senate. "And if there's one thing Trump hates," the email read, "it's 'Vindman.'"

To prove the point, the appeal resurfaced one of Trump's own social media broadsides against him, in which the president raged that Vindman knew his 2019 call to Ukraine's president was "perfect" and accused him of staying silent about the whistleblower report. The campaign cast a strong fundraising quarter as payback. "A huge FEC report will be seen as a great rebuke to Donald Trump," it told donors. "Imagine … Alex Vindman as Donald Trump's Senator."

The needling draws on a long history. Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, was a key witness in Trump's first impeachment, testifying about the call in which Trump pressured Ukraine's president, and was pushed out of his National Security Council post after the trial. He is now running as a Democrat to unseat Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, the former state attorney general appointed to fill Marco Rubio's seat after Rubio became secretary of state.

The "Trump's senator" framing is potent for donors, but the underlying race remains an uphill climb. While Vindman's campaign has cited polls showing the contest within the margin of error, independent surveys have given Moody healthier leads, and Florida has trended firmly Republican, with no Democrat winning a Senate race there since 2012. The Cook Political Report rates the seat "Solid R." Vindman also has to clear an Aug. 18 Democratic primary first.

Still, the appeal underscores how thoroughly Vindman's campaign is built on nationalizing the race and turning his personal feud with Trump into small-dollar fuel, betting that the fantasy of representing Trump's adopted home state is worth a few dollars to Democrats itching to land a blow.

Barbra Streisand, the EGOT-winning singer and actress and a longtime Democratic megastar, is also supporting Vindman.

Rhode Island's chief federal judge is publicly rebuking the Trump administration after ICE falsely characterized a colleague's ruling in an immigration case and put his fellow judge in danger.

Chief Judge John McConnell issued a formal letter Tuesday condemning ICE for publishing a press release that described District Judge Melissa DuBose as an "activist Biden judge" who knowingly released "a violent criminal illegal alien who is wanted for murder in the Dominican Republic" – which he said was flatly false, reported The Providence Journal.

The case centered on Bryan Rafael Gomez, a migrant whom DuBose ordered released from ICE custody after a Justice Department attorney, Kevin Bolan, withheld information about a years-old homicide arrest warrant from the Dominican Republic.

A special counsel McConnell appointed to investigate the matter found that Bolan had committed a serious ethical violation by failing to be honest and transparent with the court — though the counsel recommended against formal disciplinary proceedings.

Without knowledge of the warrant, McConnell said, DuBose's decision to release Gomez was entirely appropriate, and the judge said ICE's press release suggested otherwise.

"ICE falsely suggested, contrary to the true record, that when Judge DuBose released the petitioner, she knew he was sought in connection with a homicide," McConnell wrote. "This false public statement by ICE put her in personal danger and undermined public faith in the federal courts."

Bolan, who said he withheld the information based on ICE guidance and was unaware it had already been publicly disclosed, apologized to DuBose and has otherwise handled his cases responsibly, McConnell said. But the chief judge warned him plainly: "Any future finding of misconduct will be severely sanctioned."

Gomez has not yet been located by authorities for re-detention. The ICE press release remains on its website despite DuBose's request that it be taken down.

The episode is one of many involving Justice Department attorney conduct that has drawn judicial scrutiny amid the Trump administration's aggressive immigration enforcement push.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire last week, and now a prominent economist is warning that his unprecedented wealth poses a grave threat to human freedom in the US and across the globe.

In a column published by The Guardian on Tuesday, Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman argued that Musk’s enormous fortune is fundamentally at odds with a democratic system of governance because it gives him “the power to stifle competition, the power to shape public discourse, the power to influence policymaking, the power to buy elections, the power to stall social progress,” and much else.

Zucman noted that wealth concentration is even greater now than it was during the original Gilded Age, as the top 0.00001% now have fortunes large enough to “buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.”

The economist added that while Musk—whose infamous destruction of the US Agency for International Development is projected to kill millions of people in the coming years—makes a particularly compelling villain, trillionaires would be a major problem for democracy even if they were of a more benevolent variety.

“No one should want to live in a society where one single individual can be worth $1 trillion, no matter their personal virtues,” Zucman emphasized. “Such levels invariably skew power, distort markets, and sap our democratic ideals.”

The best solution to this crisis, Zucman said, is to “create an unavoidable minimum tax on their wealth” that will “make it impossible for the super-rich to pay less tax than middle-class workers—a matter of basic equality before the law.”

“It is time to break decisively with the perverse logic in which retirees, the poor, or immigrants are expected to balance the budget,” Zucman concluded, “while the rich are to be allowed to live tax-free in their own parallel society. There cannot be a law more lenient for the rich and powerful than for the rest of us. If ever there was a time to act, it is now.”

Zucman’s thoughts on extreme wealth and democracy were echoed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who on Tuesday published an essay on his Substack page where he likened President Donald Trump’s White House cage-fighting matches to the kinds of spectacles put on by Roman emperors before noting ominous similarities between the US today and the Roman Empire.

“While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex,” Krugman wrote, “there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?”

Gautam Mukunda, a professor at the Yale School of Management, similarly warned that Musk’s newly minted trillionaire status was bad news for American self-governance.

In a Monday column published by Bloomberg, Mukunda pointed to the vast sums of money being spent by billionaires in US elections, which he noted “dwarf what candidates can raise themselves.”

And like Krugman, Mukunda saw disturbing parallels between the US today and Ancient Rome.

“Marcus Crassus was the richest man in ancient Rome,” he explained. “So rich that, by Plutarch’s account, he thought no man truly wealthy unless he could pay an army from his own purse. He spent that fortune bankrolling Julius Caesar and building the triumvirate that sidelined the Senate and, in fact if not in name, overthrew the republic.”