Weekly Wrap: Military Families in Peril, Fighting for the Epstein Files & Voters Blame Trump for the Shutdown

Welcome, Lincoln Loyal, to the first edition of the Weekly Wrap.

You asked; we listened. In the nonstop chaos of the Trump regime, it’s not always easy to catch every live video, conversation, or series episode — and some of you just prefer to read instead of watch. That’s why, every Sunday, we’ll bring you the Weekly Wrap: A brief rundown of the week’s most important conversations, with excerpts, highlights, and links to the full pieces.

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How Do Americans Get their News?

Edwin Eisendrath, host of It’s the Democracy, Stupid, spoke with ProPublica Co-Founder Richard J. Tofel to discuss the moment of unprecedented government censorship we are living through and how we can connect people with information they need:

Edwin Eisendrath: I have so many topics I want to talk to you about. I’ll start with what you wrote and I read this morning, which is, how do Americans consume information? What’s a news source? What isn’t a news source? And how do we think about that in the world we’re in?

Richard J. Tofel: The point I was trying to make this morning, Edwin, is that I think in the news business, people have been thinking too much about news sources being limited to news organizations. And on the receiving end, it’s obviously not that way.

I mean, just this week — is Jimmy Kimmel a news source? I think the answer has to be for a certain number of people, absolutely yes. Is Joe Rogan a news source? Is the screen in your elevator that gives you the news a news source? If you look at it, it sure is. And is your weather app a news source of a sort and our corporate websites and our government websites?

So from the perspective of the news business, which is how I try to think about it, I think we really need to open up our minds and remember it’s not just us and the other news outlets who are in the news business from the consumer end. It’s wherever they get information they consider news.

Read more of the interview here.

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Trump: U.S. Cities Should Be Military ‘Training Grounds’

Lincoln Square Editor Susan J. Demas and Edwin Eisendrath, host of It’s the Democracy, Stupid, sat down to discuss president Trump’s comments to military brass this week when he suggested that American cities be a training ground for their troops and what it means for our democracy:

Edwin Eisendrath: Everyone who holds office needs to do what you and I are doing. Everyone needs to appeal to the Americans to go out there and tell the story. Just tell people what’s going on. Tell them who’s responsible for the carnage we’re seeing in rural American farms, in our cities with these men in camo marching down the streets. This is all unacceptable and we need to enlist, because it isn’t just about winning a battle in Congress this week. It’s about throwing these people out of office in such a disgrace that they cannot regroup.

You know, we have to rebuild America. And we can’t rebuild America if everyone in Congress is focused on making a deal on this budget right now. There is no deal to be made with these guys. You cannot do a good deal with a bad partner. Last time we did, they lied. They did a recession bill and they did impoundments, all illegal.

There is no deal to be had with them. Every single elected official has to go out and tell the story. Tell it every day, and don’t speak in crazy talking points — speak from the heart about the damage these people are doing to America and about the wonderful future we can have once we get rid of them.

Susan J. Demas: Democrats who have said they want to make a deal, they’re talking about the fact that we don’t want more people to lose healthcare. And that’s a fair concern because we know about the budget bill that Republicans ran through over the summer that we are going to see upward of 10 million, maybe more, people lose their healthcare and the rest of us are going to be paying more. I mean, I have not gotten my rates yet for next year, but that is not something I’m going to be looking forward to.

But, how do you make a deal with Trump? Let’s say that he actually agreed to this. He’ll just come back like he did last time and say, “Oh, yeah, deals off. I’m going to take the money back,” and the Supreme Court has given him the green light to do that. They [basically] rewrote Article I of the Constitution and said, “the whole thing about Congress having the power of the purse … yeah the president can decide he doesn’t want to spend it.”

I have been lectured by conservatives for years that they are rule of law people and they are textualists and that is rewriting the Constitution. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the president that kind of power.

Read more of the interview here.

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The Fight to Release the Epstein Files

Spencer Kuvin, an attorney who represents nine Epstein survivors, joined Susan Demas to discuss Mike Johnson shutting down justice for sexual abuse survivors and exactly how Spencer is fighting to get them justice:

Susan J. Demas: Could you talk with us a little bit more about some of the other survivors that you represent and how they decided to come forward?

Spencer Kuvin: Sure. So the victims range in categories and I’ve always kind of given these categories to police when discussing the victims, specifically Jeffrey Epstein. There were a category of victims that were single event victims. These were young girls, children, that would go to the home — something would happen, inappropriate, sexually — and they would never go back again. They were disgusted by it, never go back again, and generally wouldn’t talk about it.

Then there was a second category. Those were what I called true recruiters or co-conspirators. Those included people like Ghislaine Maxwell, Sarah Kellan here in Palm Beach, Nadia Marcinkova. Those were individuals that were named in all of our lawsuits that we had sued as what we called ‘true recruiters.’ These are girls and women that were usually in their 20s to 25-year age-range and they were recruiting other young girls to come to the house for this conduct. Those were not victims at all in our minds as lawyers representing victims.

There was then a third category that was kind of a gray area. They were girls that were victimized the first time they went to the house, but then chose instead to recruit other girls to bring to the house instead of having to do these acts themselves and they would get paid to do that. Now, some would say that they’re just as guilty as the co-conspirators. But if you actually look at their ages and what they were being groomed to do, it’s unfortunate, but I think that some of those young women, girls, were also victims of an abuser who was grooming them to do inappropriate things, which included recruiting other girls.

Susan J. Demas: Is it fairly common in sex trafficking that girls are then recruited to recruit other girls?

Spencer Kuvin: Unfortunately, it is.

See more of the interview here.

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Generals Summoned to D.C., Military Families in Peril

On this episode of Anchor Watch, host Bobby Jones was joined by Executive Producer Sam Osterhout to discuss president Trump and Pete Hegseth summoning generals to D.C.:

Bobby Jones: The man promoted his own book in a speech that was supposed to be about the armed forces. He literally referenced his own book. That was almost egregious as the overuse of religious symbology. Like he was some damn crusader riling up the troops to go into Jerusalem. I’m like, “What am I looking at?’ And so when he saw in his delivery that these things weren’t hitting, he tried to use policy to try to at least wake the crowd up

In the second half of the show, Bobby welcomed Libby Jamison, the founder of Military Families for Ethical Leadership to discuss the toll that deployments can take on military families:

Bobby Jones: I don’t think the average American understands that when an executive order goes from the president to the Department of Defense, it affects the dependents too, the families. And guess what? You have no governor, you have no representative, you have no mayor to push back. Can you describe what it’s like to have something affect the schools that your kids go through and all of a sudden they come in the next day and their curriculum changes because of an executive order?

Libby Jamison: If you’ve ever dealt with the military in any way, you know there’s so many rules and regulations and it can be really confusing. Maybe there is a process, but just figuring out the process is 90% of the battle going through and reading some outdated manual to figure out what was put in place.

Where’s my service member going to be stationed? Where are they potentially going to be deployed to serve? What are their pay and benefits? What are their retirement benefits going to look like? There’s so much in a military family’s life that’s dictated at the federal level. And to your point, there are not a lot of channels necessarily to address it.

So a lot of times we’re telling families, call your command structure if it’s something at the local level — but a lot of it is reaching out to your members of Congress, trying to navigate the Pentagon… I was fortunate enough to work at the White House and be working on a lot of these issues. That really is half the battle, just figuring out who’s in charge of what and how to advocate for people in a meaningful way that’s going to produce results.

See more of the interview here.

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Project 2025 Is Happening in Real Time

Sam Osterhout and Andra Watkins discussed the enactment of Project 2025 by the Trump regime. Andra is an expert on Christian Nationalism and recognized the language of the plan right away:

Andra Watkins: I remember the day where I thought, “I don’t ever have to think about the rapture again.” I mean, that was just in the news. It was supposed to happen a few days ago and I don’t ever have to think about that stuff again. I’m so relieved I can go on with my life.

And then I picked up Project 2025 published by the Heritage Foundation. I started reading it in late 2023 and almost immediately within the first 10 pages, I was seeing this language that I had been indoctrinated in as a child and a teenager. I’d even read some of the pages out loud to my husband and asked ‘how do you take this?’ And he wasn’t taking any of it as christo-fascist. He wasn’t processing any of it as religious, but it absolutely was.

So I read the whole document and decided I have to write about this. I launched a Substack on it early last year (2024) where I talked about this document as a Christofascist manifesto to transform the United States from a democracy into a Christian nationalist theocracy and I cited numerous examples of that kind of language.

See more of the interview here.

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Uncovering the Hidden History of Racism in Mental Health Care

On this week’s episode of First Draft, Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan J. Demas was joined by MSNBC anchor Antonia Hylton to discuss her new book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, along with the history of racism in mental health care:

Susan J. Demas: Turning to your book, Madness, in which you chronicle an institution called Crownsville, which was known by the name ‘Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland.’ That gives us a window into a time period that a lot of us aren’t familiar with. I thought it was interesting how you tie this to present day struggles. How Black Americans for generations have struggled to voice concerns about mental health and to access mental health resources, and that’s still going on today.

I know you said in a previous interview that you feel like there’s a revival of the same culture in today’s America that dehumanizes and criminalizes the homeless and those struggling with mental illness. I was wondering if we could start there…

Antonia Hylton: Of course. I think we’re in this sort of strange full circle moment and I’m grateful to have done this work and to be able to share it and talk with people about it — and then, also, I’m sometimes saddened by the sort of repeat patterns.

Crownsville actually still stands to this day in the heart of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. It’s right outside of Annapolis. It was born after decades of debate [after slavery ended], about what to do with Black people who seem to struggle to adjust to everyday life. There were doctors and politicians and business owners arguing about what they described to be wayward, homeless, lost Black people.

I think it’s easy for us to look back now and say these people were clearly suffering and traumatized after hundreds of years of slavery and sort of struggling to find their way forward. But at the time, there was this expectation that they should have just had it figured out and that something must be wrong with them — or perhaps slavery had been a good thing because, well, we didn’t see this when those were the conditions.

See more of the interview here.

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Trump Sells Fear. Here’s How We Fight Back.

Lisa Senecal and David Pepper talked about the chaos and fear of the Trump regime. Whether it’s the reminders of climate change denial in Vermont and Ohio, Trump’s marathon rants to generals, or manufactured fear — and how we can fight back:

Lisa Senecal: I wish that when the media is covering deployed National Guard troops to these various cities, that they would spend time reporting not just on capturing videos of the troops, here’s why people are protesting — but what they overall energy is and what’s happening in those cities. I’ve been in Portland recently. I’m going to be in Seattle in a couple weeks. I’ve been through Chicago.

The people that Trump really wants to reach are people who don’t live in these cities and they don’t end up traveling a lot. And when the media only shows the video footage of the chaos that Trump is creating, it reinforces this misunderstanding of how great our cities in the United States are.

David Pepper: I went through the complaint that was filed by Portland and the state of Oregon against Trump’s use of troops and they said, “Yeah we had a few things happen in June. We made some arrests then. Nothing has arisen to the level that we’ve even had to arrest a single person.” And you should know that Fox News, shortly before Trump really went into Portland, was rerunning videos of Portland from 2020. And that’s what they’re running as if it’s today.

By the way, we live in Cincinnati. We had a video of a fight go viral and all of a sudden the entire thing is terrible. And whoever was a part of that fight should appropriately be in trouble and they have been. But, every city’s got to deal with crime of different sorts, we know that. But we saw for a moment that our city was turned into this caricature as if no one is wanting to go downtown. I’m sitting downtown. People are walking downtown. We go to Reds games.

See more of the interview here.

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Mass Shootings and Masculine Frailty

Tim Whitaker and April Ajoy of The New Evangelicals confronted the devastating reality of America’s gun violence epidemic and how Christian nationalists weaponize tragedy while gun reform remains stalled:

Tim Whitaker: One of the most ironic things, maybe ever, is hearing my whole life that we need the right to own guns in case the government becomes tyrannical and starts invading our cities. And we are literally watching them sending ICE agents by Black Hawk helicopter into Chicago and Portland. And all of a sudden, the NRA and all of the right-wing conspiracy theorists about the government coming up and taking over, are silent.

Guys, isn’t this why you wanted: arsenals? So you can go to war in case the government overreaches? It’s happening. But because it’s on their side, it’s okay.

April Ajoy: It’s just infuriating to witness. There’s also a video we had of Karoline Leavitt talking about how christianity is under attack which is why we’re doing that. She basically attributed it to being an attack on christianity. Notice though, as soon as it came out that the man [the Michigan Mormon temple shooter] was a Trump supporter and a christian himself, that they’re not talking about this shooting anymore. They were ready to go HAM and use this as their proof of Christian persecution and then suddenly — it’s nothing.

See more of the interview here.

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The Alarming Blueprint To Seize DOJ and FBI Power

In this episode of Lincoln Square’s new hit series, Protect & Serve, Michael Fanone and Maya May discuss what happens when an agency built to operate outside of accountability descends on city streets:

Maya May: It’s just happening in broad daylight [ICE raids] in many communities where there’s plenty of people with cell phones to tape these images and broadcast them all over the internet. But this is a reality that Black people have been living in.

I was talking to my mom about this, who grew up in Albany, New York. So she sent me this photo, and this is her high school. She was there that day and these are the cops. They sent in the SWAT team over several students – these are high school students who were protesting. And these kids, I think two people ended up in the hospital. I said to my mom, “Do you know him?,” and she replies, “Oh yeah, that’s Simon.” And she said it so casually – so the thing I want to point out to people is that what we’re seeing now, is what Black people have been complaining about this entire time.

Lessons can be learned by asking the Black community how we survive this, because that’s a lot of the questions we’re getting online right now – people are like: we don’t want to just hear about it, we want to learn how to stop this. We know what’s happening. We see what’s happening. How do we stop this?

So, I don’t know if you have any ideas or if we should ask our guests that but I would love to know because I feel like our hands are tied. As you pointed out, we have elected officials who are being prosecuted right now.

Michael Fanone: I looked it up today. I was just kind of perusing and there’s been more than three dozen state and local officials who have been arrested by ICE for protesting at their facilities. And some of them were even charged with incitement, which is absolutely bizarre to me. Again, they don’t ever release any of the details as an agency or give any press conferences when they arrest elected officials. But now we have state and local officials, we have judges that have been arrested, we have had a sitting U.S. Congressman who was shoved to the ground violently by ICE agents for attending a press conference.

Maya May: You just listed off so many abuses of power. And it’s like the boiling frog situation because it’s been a complete and total onslaught, but people are starting to get used to it. It’s starting to become our new normal which is the one thing that we had all warned about for months, let’s not let this be the new normal. But if the brain can only take so much before it’s forced to adapt, that’s my fear, is when I see somebody get thrown to the ground over and over again, zero accountability.

Michael Fanone: I was watching an interview with Nancy Pelosi the other day, and that was her expectation as well. But I will tell you from personal experience, never underestimate the vast majority of American’s inability to empathize with their neighbor’s lived experience. I always point to January 6th.

You know, you would have thought that in any other time period in human kind, you would have thought that would have been the off ramp to MAGA and to this administration. But somehow it has, I think, inspired the administration to do a lot of the things you’re seeing now in Trump 2.0.

See more of the interview here.

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Voters Blame Trump for the Shutdown

On this week’s episode of Behind the Numbers, Rick and Andrew Wilson tackle Trump’s plummeting polling numbers:

Rick Wilson: For us, The Lincoln Project, and for Democrats running for the House and Senate this year, and for Democrats running for governor. I said this yesterday on Morning Joe. It doesn’t have to be a complicated message. “This is crazy. It’s hurting your family.” This is a weak spot, a soft underbelly in the Trump idea. The crisis point that is approaching for trump, the pressure point that’s approaching is we are now at the end of all the contract periods for most agriculture products for the year. They are sitting in silos, costing farmers money or rotting. They’re about to have a catastrophic collapse in the agriculture markets across the country. Scary stuff.

And for folks who don’t get this, there will also be an almost instantaneous ripple effect out on property markets. There’ll be a ripple effect on heavy industrial products. There’ll be a ripple effect on car and truck sales. And all of it will bind together into one big thing. And there is no one, this polling is sort of consonant with that, there is no one who thinks, “Oh, the Democrats caused the tariffs.” Nope. Trump owned them, branded them as his own.

Andrew Wilson: Congressional Republicans gave him a blank check to do whatever he wanted with tariffs, that is correct. This issue can only hurt Republicans and Trump.

So, Texas is quite small, but it’s a job approval out of Pennsylvania. So, we got not just national polling this week, but a lot of state polling as well – so there’s some interesting things here. I thought it was a typo at first, but his approval with Black adults in Pennsylvania is at four percent. This is coalition collapse at its absolute worst. I can’t imagine that this is much worse than Republicans should typically perform with Black voters. Normally 8 to 11 percent is a bottom. But, he’s at four in a critical state.

You can see his approval with independents is at twenty-nine percent. It’s hard to put into words. I mean, this is a terrible failed presidency and people are waking up to it. It seems relatively obvious to most people, except for Republicans who are still rock-solid 90 percent approval.

See more of the interview here.