Saturday Report 7/4/26 — On America’s 250th birthday the billionaires got 11% richer, the Court crowned a king, and ICE handcuffed a nun on her way to Mass...

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— Two hundred and fifty years on, the real fight over the Declaration of Independence isn’t about fireworks: it’s about who gets to own it. Trump has spent the run-up to the semiquincentennial draping himself in the founding parchment like a gold-lamé toga, but as a sharp New Republic essay reminds us, that document has been contested since the ink was still wet. And it was never a birthday card: it was a fighting manifesto. Its most radical line isn’t the bit about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that gets cross-stitched onto throw pillows; it’s the part where Jefferson insisted that when any government “becomes destructive of these ends,” it is the right of the people “to alter or to abolish it.” The men who signed it weren’t celebrating a king. They were firing one. So it’s a rich spectacle to watch a president who muses aloud about third terms, pardons his own insurrectionists, and stamps his face on everything but the currency (give him time) claim Thomas Jefferson as a hype man. The Declaration doesn’t belong to the guy building the throne room replica of Putin’s in St. Petersburg: it belongs to the people it was written to protect, and it still comes with instructions.

— Nothing says “Happy Birthday, America” quite like a heat dome trying to kill a hundred million of us. As the nation fires up the grills, the National Weather Service warned that record-shattering temperatures would drive the heat index as high as 115°F from the Midwest to the East Coast, with more than 100 million people in the path, a drought gripping 45 states, and El Niño pouring gasoline on the whole thing. Across the Atlantic, Europe had just finished burying roughly 2,000 people in Spain and France after a June that hit 44°C — and the scientists at World Weather Attribution confirmed, in the dry prose of people who are quietly furious, that burning fossil fuels made it dramatically worse. That’s the fossil-fuel barons’ whole business model in one sentence: privatize the profit, socialize the corpses. And now the bill is coming due for our history itself, because Jamestown, Virginia is literally drowning. The site of the first permanent English settlement, the first representative assembly in 1619, and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans that very same year has watched the sea rise 1.6 feet in a century, with another three feet projected by 2075. As one archaeologist grimly put it, do nothing and we go “from Jamestown Island to Jamestown Islands.”

— And right on cue, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can keep throwing the signs explaining all of that down the memory hole. On July 2, the First Circuit lifted a judge’s order that would have forced the National Park Service to reinstall dozens of exhibits on slavery and climate change it had torn out under Trump’s executive order to “restore truth and sanity” to American history. The district judge, Angel Kelley, had accused the administration of trying to rewrite the nation’s story “with a white-out pen,” which is about as gentle as that description gets. Savor the double erasure: at Jamestown the rising water is dissolving the physical evidence of both American democracy and American slavery, while a thousand miles away the Trump regime and its employees are prying off the plaques that would explain either one. They pulled the climate signage out of Acadia last fall, presumably because a placard about rising seas might “disparage” the sea. And here’s the tell: even a panel of judges appointed entirely by Democratic presidents waved it through on a procedural technicality, which is the surest measure of how far the goalposts have already been dragged. The plaintiffs at Democracy Forward called it a “temporary procedural setback.” History is very much hoping they’re right.

— Good news! The world got nearly 11% richer last year. The bad news is you can probably guess who’s holding it. UBS’s new Global Wealth Report found global personal wealth jumped 10.8% in 2025 — the fastest pace since 2017 — minting close to a million new millionaires at a clip of some 2,680 a day, with the United States alone cranking out more than 440,000 of them and the billionaire count swelling 13% to 3,302. Champagne all around. Except for the “fly in the ointment” the bank tucked a little further down: median wealth actually fell in most countries even as the average rocketed upward — because “average” is the number you get when a few thousand people vacuum up the gains while the person standing in the exact middle just treads water. America ranks second in the world in average wealth and a humbling 28th in median wealth: the mathematical signature of an oligarchy wearing a middle-class Halloween mask. The World Inequality Report sharpens the knife: the top 0.001% — roughly 56,000 people — now control more wealth than the poorest four billion human beings on Earth combined, and their share has nearly doubled since 1995. That’s not a bug in the system: that’s forty-five years of Reaganomics and neoliberalism performing exactly as it was engineered to.

— Speaking of the folks who did get richer: the President bought 327 stocks the day before he personally moved the entire market. Buried in Trump’s new 927-page financial disclosure is the revelation that his investment accounts made 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025 — worth as much as $12.8 million in names like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet — exactly one day before he announced the tariff “pause” that sent the S&P 500 up nearly 10% and restored some $4 trillion in market value in a single session. The trades were disclosed more than fourteen months later than the law requires. The penalty for filing a year past the deadline? Two hundred dollars: roughly two D.C. parking tickets levied against a nearly $13 million bet. Remember when Martha Stewart did five months in a federal prison for a single well-timed phone call to buy some stock? The Founders wouldn’t have been shocked in the slightest at Trump’s corruption: as a companion New Republic piece lays out, the men who built this republic warned obsessively that concentrated wealth would one day swallow self-government whole, and those warnings have now “come appallingly true.” They wrote our Constitution to stop a king from looting the treasury; they just never imagined one who’d do it through a brokerage app.

— The headlines insisted Trump “lost” at the Supreme Court this term. Down in the fine print, though, King Trump is doing just fine. Yes, the 6–3 conservative majority rejected his bid to end birthright citizenship and struck down his emergency-powers tariffs, which are genuine losses, worth every bit of the celebration. But look at what those same justices handed him on the way out the door: they overruled a 91-year-old precedent to give him the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, and — because Citizens United apparently didn’t finish the job — struck down limits on coordinated party spending mere months before the midterms, flushing still more dark money into the GOP’s massive, billionaire-funded machine. Layer on the “shadow docket,” where a run of unexplained emergency orders keeps quietly clearing Trump’s path, and the pattern is unmistakable. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe warned the republic is now “hanging by a thread”; Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele compared this bench to the pliant courts Putin and Orbán packed with loyalists. And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said it plainest of all, accusing her own colleagues of contorting the law so that Trump “always wins.” The scholars say next term’s target is the professional civil service itself, as I mentioned earlier this week when discussing the history of the Pendleton Civil Service Act.

— Meanwhile, the agency Trump just funded to the eyeballs handcuffed a 56-year-old nun on her way to Mass. Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja — a Nigerian-born Catholic sister who has spent a decade working as a registered nurse in South Texas — was walking the single block from her home to Our Lady of Sorrows in McAllen for Sunday Mass, in her habit, when ICE agents stopped her, took her rosary, cuffed her, and hauled her to a detention center an hour away, where she reportedly was held without the medication she needed. She was released the same day only after a frantic bipartisan scramble including Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, who allowed that “a Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat.” You don’t say! This is the same MAGA/GOP movement whose IRS just blessed partisan politicking from the pulpit and whose DHS quietly struck houses of worship from its “sensitive locations” list back in January: the self-styled defenders of Christendom who clutch their crosses at the prayer breakfast and then zip-tie a nurse holding a rosary. As one local official warned, if they’ll grab her, “even the best of us are not safe.” Somewhere, Jesus is flipping over a table.

— Geeky Science Alert! Want to outlive the billionaires? Turns out you should eat like a peasant. A new study written up over at StudyFinds — drawn from research in Cell Metabolism — finds that a mostly-plant “longevity diet” with a little fish, modeled on the old Mediterranean and Okinawan patterns, trimmed body fat and frailty, while the fashionable Western and keto diets did the opposite: more fat, more frailty, worse metabolic numbers all around. In other words, the beans-grains-olive-oil-and-sardines menu that kept Blue Zone grandmothers spry into their hundreds beats the influencer steak-and-butter regimen, and it does it without a single supplement bought from one of Bob Kennedy’s buddies. The through-line is the one your great-grandmother knew for free: eat the plants, skip the processed junk, and don’t let anyone sell you longevity in a bottle. The billionaires can keep the caviar.

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:

Is America Celebrating 250 Years on the Wrong Side of the Revolution?

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Words spoken to Sen. McCarthy of the red scare by Fred Fisher. A quote I would love to say to everyone still supporting Trump.

~ G2

Correctly outlined. Again, accurate remembrances that so sadly need to be replayed so that people don’t forget. So many assaults to trust. So much pain and destruction.

~ G.P. Baltimore

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