Saturday Report 8/2/25 — Has Trump Heralded a New “Gilded Age?” What Comes Next?

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— Has Trump heralded a new “gilded age?” What comes next? Like Gatsby’s 1925 West Egg mansion — stuffed with opulence but rotting underneath — Trump’s America is plunging headlong into a new Gilded Age, this time gilded not with gold but with grift. The signs are everywhere. There’s the multimillion-dollar White House ballroom Trump wants built for his private fundraising galas, while federal workers go without raises. There’s the Qatari luxury jet/bribe gifted to him — worth hundreds of millions — that Senate Republicans just voted to let him keep after leaving office, even after the Pentagon diverted nearly a billion dollars from a nuclear weapons maintenance program to refurbish it. And while billionaires hoard wealth and party with their wannabe king, a chilling jobs report has reminded the rest of us just how fragile the working class has become in this deregulated, union-busting, trickle-down circus. (Trump just fired the woman in charge of the agency that compiled the statistics because he doesn’t like the numbers; nobody in the world will trust future employment numbers out of this administration.) Like in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this isn’t sustainable. The first Gilded Age — also birthed by Republican policies — collapsed into the Republican Great Depression. If history is any guide, this one will, too. Trump has built a country of spectacle and showmanship, where glitter masks decay and inequality reigns supreme. But even the most gold-plated illusions eventually crack. The question is: will we stop it before the crash, or let this corrupt spectacle drag us into a second Republican Great Depression like The Fourth Turning predicts?

— GOP lawmaker runs into a buzzsaw at town hall. Republicans showing up in public to defend their and Trump’s obscene behavior is becoming like trying to defy gravity; it rarely works out well. Mike Johnson knows this, which is why he won’t do town halls and he’s advised all the other Republicans to likewise avoid contact with the dirty public (but keep up the big-bucks dinners with lobbyists and donors). Wisconsin Republican Congressman Brian Stiel thought he could pull it off, and was quickly set straight. While about 50 presumably Democratic protesters showed up outside the venue, inside the presumably Republican constituents of Stiel’s were having none of his BS. He tried to defend ICE wearing masks and was booed down. Same thing happened when he said it was important for Republicans to have cut Medicaid with the Big Ugly Bill. One voter called him an “embarrassment,” another said, “You’re not the right fit for us anymore,” and a third said: “I am so disappointed in how you represent us as the citizen of Walworth County. Southeast Wisconsin has not been represented by you. President Trump seems to run southeast Wisconsin through you.” While Stiel thought he could defy political gravity, it didn’t work; this is another example showing there’s a good chance for Republicans to get wiped out in the ’26 elections, which, of course, is why they’re so vigorously trying to gerrymander Red states and purge millions of voters from the rolls in Blue cities. Will it work? Will Gavin Newsom call a special election to redraw California’s maps? Will other Democratic states follow Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s advice to “fight gerrymandering fire with fire” and Congressman and Progressive Caucus President Emeritus Mark Pocan’s advice for Blue states to begin their own voter purges? Stay tuned…

— First it was Nazi salutes; now Elon wants you to know that “women are built to be traded.” Seriously. Check this out; it sorta speaks for itself and tells you everything you never wanted to know about this bizarre billionaire African immigrant who is now the GOP’s single largest donor:

— Trump wants the federal government to be able to track every one of your medical and health issues in real time, and Big Tech is all excited about being able to get their hands on your private data. Georgetown University law professor who specializes in public health, Lawrence Gostin, noted, “There are enormous ethical and legal concerns. Patients across America should be very worried that their medical records are going to be used in ways that harm them and their families.” The Associated Press reports: “More than 60 companies, including major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple as well as health care giants like UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, have agreed to share patient data in the system.” Just what we all needed, right? These guys snooping into our private medical information and then sharing it all with Trump, Noem, Bondi, and ICE…

— Trump is threatening other countries with steep tariffs if they don’t change their sovereign foreign policy decisions. The Constitution says only Congress can impose tariffs; it’s unambiguous. The Emergency Powers Act that Trump is citing as justification for his imposing unilateral tariffs doesn’t even mention the word “tariffs.” What he’s doing is entirely illegal and no business is going to build a factory here just because Trump threw up a tariff when they know he could (and probably will) change his mind next month or the next president — or a future Congress or the Supreme Court — can cancel his tariffs. That’s why Trump’s tariffs are not only screwing up America’s standing in the world but also taking a hammer to our economy. But now he’s using them as punishments; in this case, going after Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney for saying that he’d support a Palestinian state. Felon Trump and accused felon Netanyahu want nothing to do with that, so Trump’s saying he’s going to hit Canada — or, more correctly, he’s going to hit American consumers of Canadian goods — with a 35% tariff. This is nuts and, as I mentioned yesterday, he’s only doing it because it forces leaders of countries around the world to come grovel before him the way he’d always hoped the guys on Wall Street and in New York high society would do (but they refused). Trump’s fragile ego has become a wrecking ball that threatens a second Republican Great Depression. Buckle up…

— Where are the 4,725 Epstein wire transfers that Trump, Noem, and Bondi are hiding? That’s the question my senator, Ron Wyden, wants answers to. He’s unearthed proof that the details of the cash movements totaling over a billion dollars are in the possession of the Trump administration, but they’re not only refusing to release them, they won’t even acknowledge Wyden’s demand for transparency. It could, after all, blow open the entire underage sex-trafficking business Epstein was running out of his two homes, each just down the street from his “best friend” Trump’s homes in New York City and Palm Beach. We also learned yesterday that the DOJ has been going through the Epstein documents and redacting anything that has to do with Trump. Meanwhile, in what’s almost certainly the down payment in the deal Trump’s criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche worked out with her, Ghislaine Maxwell was moved yesterday from a real women’s prison in Florida to a “minimum security facility” in Texas that’s more like a women’s sorority house. This is particularly odd since it’s against the law as Allison Gill notes: you can’t put sex offenders into minimum security facilities (because they could represent a threat to the other inmates; the same reason there are no violent offenders there). Somebody waived that rule — or Blanche/Noem/Bondi/Trump are ignoring it — and the media’s not even asking who or why. The big question now is whether Trump’s base will accept it (Fox already has) when the coverup is complete, Maxwell testifies that he had nothing to do with underage girls but Bill Clinton was sure there, and Trump declares “total transparency.” I’m betting, reluctantly, that they will and it’ll all blow over by November, but with this case it’s impossible to know for sure.

— Geeky Science! There was a mass die off of Monarch butterflies is 2024 and we now know why. Over 90 percent of Monarch butterflies that were common across North America just 50 years ago are gone, and there was another mass die-off at a California over-wintering site last December. Up until now, nobody has known for sure what’s killing the insects; the main suspects have been pesticides, climate change, and loss of habitat to development. So a plucky group of scientists visited the mass death site and autopsied a bunch of the Monarchs; most had as many as 7 different pesticides in their bodies, all at lethal levels. We have to stop using these deadly chemicals (that aren’t good for us, either!) and return to sustainable agriculture practices. Roundup, for example, is known to cause cancer in humans and dogs, but the last Trump administration said they could ditch the warning labels. You can kill weeds with high-strength vinegar, and Neem oil is a great insecticide; there are lots of natural alternatives to the chemicals that are applied both commercially and in residential environments and we should all use them, encourage our HOAs and neighbors to use them, and push our politicians to get the EPA back on the job.