Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News

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Saturday, August 09, 2025

President Donald Trump's approval rating among Black voters has dropped sharply in recent months, according to the latest The Economist/YouGov poll. read more


A lawsuit seeking a trove of government documents related to Jeffrey Epstein just got passed to the federal judge who made Donald Trump's life a living hell. read more


Thursday, August 07, 2025

The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu. read more


The attempt would likely face a flurry of legal and logistical challenges should the administration move ahead with it. read more


Cain, who played Superman in the 1990s series "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," revealed to fans that he enlisted as an officer in the federal agency U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to an Aug. 5 video shared to Cain's social media channels. read more


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More: The dissolution of these traditional bonds of trust " known in legal circles as the presumption of regularity " goes well beyond judges' use of blunt words " "egregious," "brazen," "lawless" " to describe the various parts of Mr. Trump's power-grabbing policy agenda.

Ultimately, legal experts say, the actions that caused such doubts among judges about the department and those who represent it could have a more systemic effect and erode the healthy functioning of the courts.

"I think people don't fully appreciate how much the ability of the legal system to work on a daily basis rests on the government's credibility," said Stephen I. Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. "Without that credibility, it's going to be harder for the government to do anything in court " even ordinary things. All of a sudden, you're going to have courts second-guessing things that they wouldn't have before."

While it is impossible to know for sure how deeply this distrust has set in among judges across the country, a number of judges in recent weeks have openly questioned the fundamental honesty and credibility of Justice Department lawyers in ways that would have been unthinkable only months ago.

In June, for instance, an order was unsealed in Federal District Court in Washington showing Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui ripping into prosecutors after they tried to convince him that he needed to be "highly deferential" to their request to keep sealed a search warrant in an ordinary criminal case.

"Blind deference to the government?" Judge Faruqui wrote. "That is no longer a thing. Trust that has been earned over generations has been lost in weeks."

After all, as the judge pointed out, Justice Department lawyers under Mr. Trump have done much to destroy the confidence normally afforded them in court.

They have fired prosecutors who worked on Mr. Trump's two criminal cases, he said. They have attacked the charges brought against the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as a witch hunt. And they have violated judicial orders in cases stemming from Mr. Trump's deportation policies and from his efforts to freeze federal grants.

"These norms being broken must have consequences," Judge Faruqui concluded. "High deference is out; trust but verify is in."

More: There is the case of Greece, where the government faked deficit numbers for years, contributing to a debilitating debt crisis that required multiple rounds of bailouts. The country then criminally prosecuted the head of the statistical agency when he insisted on reporting the true figures, further eroding the country's international standing.

There is the case of China, where earlier this century the local authorities manipulated data to hit growth targets mandated by Beijing, forcing analysts and policymakers to turn to alternative measures to gauge the state of the country's economy.

Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degree that the international community eventually stopped relying on the government's data. That loss of faith drove up the country's borrowing costs, worsening a debt crisis that ultimately led to it defaulting on its international obligations.

It is too soon to know whether the United States is on a similar path. But economists and other experts said that Mr. Trump's decision on Friday to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was a troubling step in that direction.

Janet L. Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, said the firing was not what is expected from the most advanced economy in the world.

"This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic," Ms. Yellen said.

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