Vance Slimes LA

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Salvador Hernandez, Seema Mehta, and Christopher Buchanan at LAT:

“What happened here was a tragedy,” Vance told reporters. “You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law, and you had rioters, egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job.”

Although Newsom and Bass have criticized the immigration raids, which led to protests and sporadic violent attacks against law enforcement officials, both have repeatedly urged demonstrators to remain peaceful.

Bass, who was not invited to meet with Vance, dismissed his description of what has unfolded in Los Angeles over the last two weeks.

“Unfortunately, the vice president did not take time to learn about our city and understand that our city is a city of immigrants from every country and continent on the planet,” Bass said at a news conference Friday evening. “But then again, he did need to justify the hundreds of millions of wasted taxpayer dollars that were wasted in the performance of a stunt.

“How dare you say that city officials encourage violence,” Bass said. “We kept the peace.”

Newsom weighed in repeatedly on the social media platform X, notably about Vance calling Sen. Alex Padilla “Jose” during his remarks.

Padilla was dragged to the ground by federal law enforcement officers and briefly detained when he attempted to ask U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a news conference earlier this week.

“I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question, but unfortunately I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn’t a theater, and that’s all it is,” Vance said.

A spokesperson for Padilla responded that Vance, as a former colleague of Padilla in the U.S. Senate, “knows better.”

“He should be more focused on demilitarizing our city than taking cheap shots,” spokesperson Tess Oswald posted on X. “Another unserious comment from an unserious administration.”

Trump v. Juneteenth

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Aishvarya Kavi at NYT:

Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the end of slavery in the United States, has been celebrated at the White House each June 19 since it was enshrined into law four years ago. But on Thursday, it went unmarked by the president — except for a post on social media in which he said he would get rid of some “non-working holidays.”

“Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year,” Mr. Trump said in mangled syntax, not mentioning Juneteenth by name nor acknowledging that Thursday was a federal holiday. “It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, indicated to reporters earlier in the day that she was not aware of any plans by Mr. Trump to sign a holiday proclamation. In the past week alone, he’d issued proclamations commemorating Father’s Day, Flag Day and National Flag Week, and the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill — none of which are among the 11 annual federal holidays.

In response to a reporter’s question about Juneteenth, Ms. Leavitt acknowledged that Thursday was “a federal holiday,” but noted that White House staff had shown up to work during a briefing that focused primarily on the matter of whether Mr. Trump would order strikes on Iran.

Social Security Involvency Just Eight Years Away

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

 Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

The Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports, today, highlighting the precarious financial states of the programs. The Trustees project that both the Social Security retirement trust fund and the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund are just 8 years from insolvency, and will require timely trust fund solutions.

Full analyses of the reports will be published soon. In this short analysis, we show the Trustees project that:

• Social Security’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund will be insolvent in 2033, or 2034 if funds are reallocated from the disability (SSDI) trust fund.
• Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will deplete its reserves by 2033.
• Over the next 75 years, Social Security faces a shortfall of 3.82 percent of taxable payroll, while the HI trust fund faces a shortfall of 0.42 percent of payroll.
• Total Medicare costs are projected to rise from 3.8 percent of GDP in 2024 to 6.7 percent by 2099, or 8.8 percent under the Chief Actuary’s alternative scenario.

The looming insolvency of Social Security’s retirement program will lead to a 23 percent across-the-board benefit cut when today’s 59-year-olds reach the Full Retirement Age and when today’s youngest retirees turn 70. On a theoretically combined basis, beneficiaries will face a 19 percent benefit cut just one year later.

One Big Fiasco

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump and his congressional supporters are on track to blow up the federal debt.

CBO:

The Congressional Budget Office and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) previously reported that H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as passed by the House of Representatives on May 22, would increase the primary deficit by $2.4 trillion over the 2025-2034 period.[1] That estimate reflects a $3.7 trillion reduction in revenues and a $1.3 trillion reduction in noninterest outlays.[2] It does not account for how the bill would affect the economy.

Under House Rule XIII(8), H.R. 1 is classified as major legislation and CBO and JCT are required, to the extent practicable, to account for the budgetary effects of changes in the economy resulting from the bill. CBO and JCT have now had time to complete that analysis and estimate the following relative to CBO’s January 2025 baseline:

• The economic effects of H.R. 1 would decrease the primary deficit by $85 billion over the 2025-2034 period, primarily reflecting an increase in economic output; and
• The bill would increase interest rates, which would boost interest payments on the baseline projection of federal debt by $441 billion.

Accounting for those budgetary effects, CBO’s estimate under House Rule XIII(8) is that H.R. 1 would increase deficits by $2.8 trillion over the 2025-2034 period (see Table 1).

First time I've seen a tax cut so poorly designed that the dynamic score RAISES the cost by $356 billion.

The infinitesimal growth revenues are dwarfed by the rising inflation and $441 billion in interest costs from higher interest rates. pic.twitter.com/mIfvIG7Qfd

— Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 (@JessicaBRiedl) June 17, 2025

Tulsi Under the Bus

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start

Politico Playbook:

This is a president who campaigned for years on ending American involvement in overseas wars; a man who, in 2011 and 2012, mockingly claimed then-President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran just to distract from his own failings. Only a couple of months ago, his own director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said Iran is “not building a nuclear weapon.” And this is the self-styled “dealmaker-in-chief.” Is he really going to flip it all around with a Middle East bombing campaign

Q: "Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon."

President Trump: "I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one." pic.twitter.com/6KTye52xP9

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 17, 2025

Split Screen

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.

From Waging Nonviolence:

April Rubin, Rebecca Falconer at Axios:

Millions of protesters across the U.S. took to the streets in demonstrations against the Trump administration on Saturday, in stark counter-programming to the president's Washington, D.C., military parade that evening.

Why it matters: "No Kings" protest organizers said the widespread movement marked the biggest single-day anti-President Trump protest during his second administration.

...

State of play: More than 5 million people took part in "No Kings" demonstrations in over 2,100 cities and towns across the country, with an additional 300 "Kick Out the Clowns" rallies being held.Philadelphia saw more than 100,000 attendees and Chicago 75,000, while smaller towns such as Pentland, Michigan, reported 400 in a town of 800, organizers said.

Newsmax is saying about 10,000 there. That’s small for some protest rallies today and a huge waste of our military $$$ when the world is on fire… https://t.co/AP7Rh2NWu3

— Barbara Comstock (@BarbaraComstock) June 14, 2025

The Padilla Incident

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start

In a disturbing and unprecedented move, FBI agents grabbed the sitting California Senator, dragged him out of the room, and shoved him to the ground, handcuffing him even after he identified himself. Video Courtesy of the Office of Senator Alex Padilla. pic.twitter.com/s5ON5cTxXs

— Santa Monica Mirror (@SMMirror) June 13, 2025

Padilla: From the moment I entered the building, I'm being escorted by a member of the National Guard and an FBI agent. I asked, well, since we're waiting, can we go listen in to the press conference? They escort me over to the press conference. They opened the door for me. pic.twitter.com/R3ur8msJKh

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 12, 2025

Michael Luciano at Mediaite:

While Padilla’s treatment understandably received all the attention, lost in the incident was a pledge from Noem that the federal government will “liberate” Los Angeles from the leaders the city’s voters elected to represent them:

The Department of Homeland Security and the officers and the agencies and the departments and the military people that are working on this operation will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city. We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.

It was at that point, Padilla interrupted and was physically pushed out of the room and into a hallway, where he was handcuffed.