Saturday Report 8/30/25 — Medicare Under Siege: Trump’s Radical Plan Now in Motion...

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by kp yamu Jayanath from Pixabay

I’ll be on MSNBC with Ali Velshi this morning at 9 AM Pacific time, Noon Eastern time, news and internet gods willing.

— The Appeals Court for the Federal District just ruled 7-4 that when the Constitution says only Congress can impose tariffs, it means exactly that. Trump knows this and tried to get around it by declaring a “trade emergency,” but the court ruled that there is no emergency and this is, essentially, a transparent ploy to seize power. They left his tariffs in place until October, however, so he can appeal it to the Supreme Court. Stay tuned…

— Trump’s fascist plan to militarize Blue cities to intimidate voters and flip states Red in the 2026 and 2028 elections takes clearer shape. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said it again on Thursday: “He [Trump] wants to have troops on the ground to stop people from voting, to intimidate people from going to the voting booth, so take note, that is what this is all about.” Both Trump and Pritzker know that if Trump can disrupt enough voting in Chicago, the Blue dot in mostly otherwise-Red Illinois, the entire state can flip Red. And now Trump is reaching out beyond just the National Guard in his effort to turn America into a police state in advance of the upcoming elections, an effort made even more urgent for Republicans after the drubbing they took this past week in Iowa where a district Trump won by 12 points went to Democrat Catelin Drey 55% to 45%. It was the fourth special election this year where Democrats wiped out the GOP, provoking Texas Republicans to gerrymander their state even more aggressively. Trump has now asked the Navy to get involved, reaching out to Naval Station Great Lakes to provide logistical support for, as the AP noted, everything “from troops assisting in immigration arrests to patrolling in the streets.” As longtime Republican strategist Rick Wilson said this week: “He is also, you know, [borrowing] from the dictator’s playbook. He wants to desensitize people to the presence of those folks out there all the time. ICE now has a bigger budget than the Marine Corps, and he loves this gigantic force that is answerable only to him. And he is certainly putting it to maximum effect. I would not be shocked if he did try to apply it as an intimidation tactic in the 2026 election season.” Get ready: Trump and his booklickers are playing for keeps and this time — unlike January 6th — have no intention of ever relinquishing power, regardless of election outcomes.

— Trump’s plan to destroy Medicare goes into effect. The Social Security Commissioner, Frank Bisignano, is a former Wall Street executive who’s now planning to have private for-profit Wall Street-type corporations look at things like tests and procedures your doctor wants for you. The more claims they can deny using new AI-based tools, the more the companies will be paid as “commissions” for the “savings” they can produce for Medicare. The “experiment” will roll out in January in Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington State. Trump’s goal, of course, is to use pre-authorizations to make real Medicare suck as much as the Medicare Advantage scam does, so people won’t care when they privatize the entire system. Arizona Republican Congressman David Schweikert has proposed legislation mandating that every person turning 65 must be automatically enrolled in the Medicare Advantage scam; his H.R. 3467 is awaiting action in the House of Representatives, but Bisignano’s plan to wreck real Medicare in these six states may well make it unnecessary. Republicans have hated Medicare ever since it passed Congress in 1965 with GOP majorities voting “No” in both the House and Senate. Now it looks like the dream of the billionaires on Wall Street and those running Big Insurance getting their hands on the $800+ billion that passes through the system every year will be realized before the end of the Trump administration.

— Russia threatens to march on Paris. One of Russia’s top TV commentators has said of France’s support for Ukraine and democracy in general, “That’s why we’ll be on Champs-Elysées. And Macron will be polishing the boots of a Russian officer.” As Putin has ramped up his murderous nightly attacks on Ukraine, CNN’s Erin Burnett says that Trump has fallen silent. Noting this, the president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said in a speech this past Wednesday, “The supreme leader of the world’s greatest superpower is, objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset. He functions as an asset. I am saying that, objectively speaking, the new American leadership has strategically favored the Russian Federation.” As some people are wondering out loud if the rumors are true that Trump’s hands are bruised because he’s getting transfusions of children’s blood like tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson and other billionaires, or how often he shows up in the Epstein files, international diplomats and foreign leaders are now saying out loud that Putin clearly has something on him. What is it? Apparently Mike Johnson plans to make sure we’ll never find out…

— We need fighters like FDR, not someone to send another “strongly worded letter.” California Governor Gavin Newsom is warning that Trump is dead serious about hanging onto power for a third term, regardless of the law or the outcome of elections. After all, it’s exactly what he tried to do on January 6th; why wouldn’t he try again? “You think he’s joking about 2028?” Newsom asked an audience this past week, pointing to Trump’s plan to build a 90,000-sq-ft state ballroom off the East Wing of the White House. “Who spends $200m on a ballroom at their home,” Newsom said, “and then leaves the house? The rule of law is being replaced by the rule of Don.” Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Democrats are openly expressing concern about the weak-kneed “leadership” of Schumer and Jeffries, particularly as both refuse to condemn Netanyahu’s slaughter in Gaza and cut off weapons shipments to Israel, or explicitly call out Trump’s turn toward fascism. FDR and LBJ understood leadership and, as a result, got a lot done. Democrats desperately need similar new leadership.

— If the Atlantic current collapses, Europe will descend into famine and chaos. And now scientists are saying that that scenario, where the current we call the Gulf Stream stops bringing heat to the Atlantic to the west of Europe, is “no longer a low-likelihood event.” Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany says the new results are “quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of AMOC collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%. Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25%.” And the timeline is getting more dire every day, as nervous Europeans are quickly realizing. “[W]e are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an AMOC collapse would be far too high,” Professor Rahmstorf said. “We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as well and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions.” Meanwhile, Trump — who promised a group of fossil fuel executives and billionaires pretty much anything they wanted in exchange for campaign contributions that would get him elected in 2024 — is following through by gutting green energy projects and increasing subsidies, tax breaks, and handing over public lands for fossil fuel development. Increasingly, “To hell with our children; there’s money to be made and campaign contributions to collect!” is the unofficial slogan of the GOP.

— Trump is offering $5000 checks to voters who go GOP. In multiple fundraising mailers and emails recently, Trump has dangled the possibility that the “savings” from DOGE firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and starving millions of poor people around the world will be turned into checks for his peeps. Of course, DOGE hasn’t saved the government anything, in contrast to what Trump and Musk have claimed. The entire thing is a scam (although it did put a halt two around 30 investigations of Musk and his various companies), but Trump knows his rubes well enough to know they’ll fall for it anyway, just like they’ve fallen for his thousands of other lies over the past decade.

— Crazy Alert! Bob Kennedy thinks kids should again be able to bring guns to school? Following the most recent mass school shooting, Kennedy noted that, “When I was a kid, we had shooting clubs at our school. People, kids, my classmates, other people would bring a .22 rifle with their guns to school and park it in the parking lot.” The problem, he suggests, isn’t the guns but, rather, the fact that some shooters have been on anti-anxiety or anti-depression pharmaceuticals. Peter Breggin has been arguing this for years, but multiple studies have found that American kids aren’t more or less depressed, mentally ill, or using pharmaceuticals than kids in other countries that don’t have regular school shootings. The difference? We have more guns than people and are the only nation in the world where that true, the result of 40+ plus years of the GOP’s unholy alliance with the weapons industry’s lobbying group the NRA and their Russian sponsors. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that continuing school shootings is the official policy of the Republican Party.

Geeky Science: Chinese company files a patent for a battery that will take a car 1800 miles on a single charge and can be recharged in 5 minutes or less. The giant electronics manufacturer Huawei has come up with a new type of sulfide-based solid-state battery with an energy density that’s substantially higher than the current generation of lithium-ion batteries. If they can bring this into production, it could revolutionize transportation worldwide.