The Brooklyn Rail

In a recent Instagram post, Michael Wolff (author of the 2018 book Fire and Fury: inside the Trump White House) said that Steve Bannon met Jeffrey Epstein in December 2018 and the two were inseparable from that time until Epstein’s death on August 10, 2019. Wolff said he was present when Bannon told Epstein “You were the only person I was afraid of,” in the campaign of 2016, and that Bannon “knows all the Epstein secrets.” He also said that Bannon was convinced that Epstein was murdered, and that it was very possibly ordered by Donald Trump.

Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred from the prison in Florida to a minimum-security facility called “Prison Camp Bryan,” in Texas. By law, sex offenders are not allowed to be detained in minimum security prisons, so someone had to waive Maxwell’s sex offender status to allow the transfer. Maxwell is also now permitted to leave the “campus” for work assignments, just as Jeffrey Epstein was. Another “sweetheart deal.” Will Trump wait until the end of his term to pardon Maxwell for her heinous crimes, or do it sooner than that, as a further repudiation of his MAGA base?

Alex Horton and David Ovalle of The Washington Post reported on August 12 that Trump is looking into forming a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” to send into American cities to respond to protests or civil unrest. One group of 300 National Guard troops would be stationed in Alabama and another 300 would be stationed in Arizona, to quickly respond to protests in regions east and west of the Mississippi River.

Also on August 12, Trump deployed about 800 National Guard troops to Washington DC, until September 25, ostensibly to clear out homeless encampments and discourage the crime and carnage that Trump insists are ravaging the district. He now says he’ll need much more than the thirty days allowed under the law to clean up Washington.

Obviously, this is a test for Trump’s plan to federalize local law enforcement in a number of other cities governed by Democratic Black mayors: Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The plan is to bring in the National Guard and then the Marines.

This escalation in federalization of the police and using US military troops to move against civilians is illegal, but the speed of the deployment has so far overwhelmed the ability of the judicial system to respond. And Trump has been filling the Justice Department with loyalist US attorneys to increase the rate of compliance. There are 93 US attorneys in the DOJ. In his first term, Trump nominated 86 people to become US attorneys and 84 of them were confirmed. This total included seven women and seven people of color. In the first eight months of his second term, Trump has named at least 45 interim US attorneys and has submitted nominations to the Senate for at least thirty of those. Early in August, the Senate approved two of those nominees: Jeanine Pirro in the District of Columbia (replacing embattled acting US attorney Ed Martin) and Jason A. Reding Quiñones in the Southern District of Florida. But Trump is now trying to install loyalist interim US attorneys without Senate confirmation. When the Senate refused to confirm Trump’s personal lawyer Alina Habba to be US attorney for New Jersey, Trump used various manoeuvres to circumvent the Senate vote.

Conservative jurist Michael Luttig has made it clear that these attempts to supersede the constitutional authority of the Senate by Trump are part of a larger assault on the justice system and the rule of law. “Every action that he’s taken has been intended to harass, intimidate, and threaten the federal judiciary into submission to his will,” said Judge Luttig.

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Now that the massive accumulation of personal data of US citizens by DOGE in Washington has died down, the Trump administration is moving rapidly to collect this kind of information from the states, who possess much more of this data than the federal government does.

President Trump signed an executive order in March euphemistically titled “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” It calls for the federal government to have “unfettered access” to data from all state programs that received federal funds. Nicole Schneidman, who heads the technology and data governance team at Protect Democracy, says this data could be used by the government to create powerful surveillance tools that they could then use on all Americans. “Once this kind of data is in the wrong hands and in particular is aggregated, it can be used for an incredibly broad ranging set of purposes,” Schneidman said. “It is critical for every American to understand there is no ‘undo’ button here.”¹

The Trump administration has taken steps to collect data such as Social Security numbers and home addresses on individuals receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits from the states, and requested voter registration data and other information.

In June, top officials at the US Department of Health and Human Services ordered workers at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to hand over sensitive data from several states—California, Illinois, Washington, and Washington, DC—about millions of their Medicaid enrollees. Privacy and democracy advocates saw the Medicaid data transfer to DHS as a turning point in the collection and aggregation of data by the Trump administration. And this is what they’ve managed to do in only the first eight months of a four-year term.

In a related development, the Trump administration is gearing up to try to redo the US Census before the midterm elections. Trump has ordered the Commerce Department (where the Census Bureau is housed) to begin work on a new census, ostensibly to eliminate undocumented immigrants from the rolls, but also clearly intended to redraw congressional district maps in red states to advantage Republican candidates. The Constitution clearly stipulates that a national census only be conducted every ten years, and work is already well underway for the 2030 census.

Trump is worried that Democrats will regain control of the House next year, start investigations into him and his administration, and put an end to his anti-democratic plans.

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Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the Godfather of AI,” who left Google in May 2023 over his concerns about the possible dangers of AI, now recommends that engineers should build into AI systems a “maternal instinct,” so they would not turn on humans under their charge. A few years ago, Hinton said that, within five to twenty years, AI would become smarter than humans, and after that, there is a 10-20% chance that the new intelligence will wipe out the human race. On building in the “maternal instinct,” Hinton said, “Evolution did it, so we should be able to do it.”

Hinton disagrees strenuously with Tech Bros who want to deregulate AI. “I’m a socialist,” he’s said. “I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’ is not good. If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximize utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximize utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing.”

Hinton has also spoken of the dangers of AI models in political electoral terms, citing the influence of mega-donor and activist Robert Mercer on recent political campaigns:

Bob Mercer and Peter Brown, when they were working at IBM on translation, understood the power of having a lot of data. Without Bob Mercer, Trump might well have not yet got elected. And Bob must have understood the power of manipulation that big data could give you, and so I think [it has] already had terrible consequences there.

This stuff helps authoritarian governments in destroying truth, or manipulating electorates.²