On this day in 1925, the Scopes Monkey Trial, concerning a young teacher accused of breaking state law by teaching evolution, opened in Dayton, Tennessee. It would go down as a milestone in the defense of free speech from religious fundamentalism â a battle that continues today in red states.
You made it to Friday! Itâs Swin, again. Here at Zeteo, some of us have a saying whenever fatigue or demoralization start to creep in, given how successful Donald Trump and his party have been in unleashing their barbarism on us all. Whenever I start to feel tired, I remind myself that they arenât tired. Stephen Miller isnât tired. Todd Blanche isnât tired. Marco Rubio isnât tired. Tom Homan isnât tired. Theyâre having the times of their lives, as they sadistically wreck countless others. If they arenât tired, I â sitting in my tiny, air-conditioned corner of the media â havenât earned the right to be tired yet.
Thereâs a lot more time left in the second Trump era. One thing he and the Republican Party are counting on is that they wear you out. Their political comfort â or survival, even â relies on just enough American voters getting bored, cooling on their outrage, or simply forgetting and moving on from the last news cycle that tore at President Trumpâs poll numbers.
In todayâs âFirst Draft,â weâll get into how much this government wants you to forget that his brutal clampdowns â on immigrants and Democratic-majority cities â are still happening, and escalating all over the country. Plus, the Graham Platner campaign confirms his plan to formally withdraw from the Maine Senate race on Monday and the Iran war keeps heating back up. Here goes.
âWe Need Better PRâ
In January, even the Trump White House was forced to acknowledge that its hyper-violent, televised and livestreamed crackdowns on blue cities, immigrants, and U.S. citizens had grown sharply unpopular. After the carnage in Minnesota, Team Trump flipped out that their policies were killing them in the polls in an election year, sidelined wannabe stormtroopers like Greg Bovino, and forced themselves into a brief period of strategic retrenchment. The White House began begging Republican politicians to downplay terms like âmass deportationâ â you know, the things Trump ran on in 2024. And orders were handed down from the highest levels that, as one White House official describes it to me, âWe need better PR.â
For a moment, Trumpâs demand for a kinder, gentler, less visible fascism held. At least some of ICE and DHSâs highly public militarized violence got shoved in the penalty box, even if everyone knew it was all just for show and that Team Trump planned to rev things up âafter the midtermsâ anyway. But for many of Trumpâs nativist allies, that wasnât good enough. They launched a pressure campaign, demanding the administration ratchet things back up before Election Day in November.
To some extent, the campaign worked. If they wanted blood, they got it. Still, sources in the Trump administration tell me that they want to have their crackdowns and their mass deportations but without the viral videos that sprang out of places like Minnesota early this year. Because of this, the sources say, officials at the White House, DHS, and elsewhere have spent a significant amount of time planning where to launch operations out of the public eye.