Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
Neither side would ever admit it, but MAGA’s ongoing authoritarian takeover is the heir of one man: Dick Cheney, the former Vice President who died this week.
Trump and his movement tried to distinguish themselves by loudly abandoning the Iraq War as a legacy of the Bush administration. During one debate in 2016, Trump pointed out to Jeb Bush that 9/11 wasn’t exactly an example of his brother having kept the country safe. Before the 2024 election, Cheney called Trump the biggest individual “threat to our republic” that the country has ever seen.
Now, now. It’s a shame they couldn’t get along, after all, they had so much in common.
Starting in the late 1980s, Cheney developed and implemented the dictator-like theory of executive power in which we all now live. The roots here lie in the long-held bitterness among many on the right over President Nixon’s resignation in the aftermath of Watergate, but, as NYT reporter Charlie Savage noted, Cheney expressed the idea fully as the Iran-Contra scandal wound to a close. That was a critique of what Cheney described as a “more assertive Congress that no longer honors the traditions” of executive power, but really a vision of a president who, when invoking national security concerns, could do whatever he or she wanted with backing by the full federal government.
At one point, in 2002, Cheney told Cokie Roberts that there had been an “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,” citing both the War Powers Act and the Anti-Impoundment Act.
What’s striking here is how much this all anticipates — in a much more considered fashion — major Trump II actions. Russ Vought keeps threatening to impound federal funds, and the administration has done all but that. The most obvious examples of authoritarianism — troop deployments in American cities, the Alien Enemies Act removals to CECOT — have been done in the name of national security.
Both Cheney and Trump lack certain elements of what advocates of this view might want for an architect of autocracy. Cheney was never President. Trump is not the kind of philosopher king that an advocate of the unitary executive theory might envision (though there’s an argument among the theory’s supporters that Trumpian excess validates that the system “works” at the extremes).
But the reality is that Trump is Cheney’s true heir in terms of the breadth of the powers that he can claim. It’s not a particularly surprising irony, then, that the only Republicans to really mourn him this week were outside of the executive branch — it was Senators, now extremely supine, to pay their respects.
— Josh Kovensky
The Trump Administration Plays Games With SNAP
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to fund SNAP in full after the government delayed payments to more than 42 million people who rely on the benefits during the shutdown, kicking off a series of appeals and orders that played out over the course of Friday evening.
The Justice Department almost immediately appealed the district court decision, asking a federal appeals court Friday to block it. That court declined to, and the administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, which almost immediately provided a brief stay and returned the issue to the appeals level, where another ruling is expected soon. (The back and forth here is complicated, though very interesting, and we’ll punt you to law professor and writer Steve Vladeck for a full explanation of it, including the role played by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.)
As this unfolded, the Department of Agriculture curiously announced it is “working towards” providing full November benefits, seemingly contradicting the administration’s legal forays.
“The president and the entire administration are working on that, but we’re not going to do it under the orders of a federal judge. We’re going to do it according to what we think we have to do to comply with the law,” Vice President JD Vance said on Friday about the judge’s order, suggesting the administration might again defy the judiciary.
Friday’s district court order from Judge John McConnell Jr. came after the Trump administration ignored his initial order directing the Department of Agriculture to either provide full SNAP benefits to recipients by Monday or partial benefits by Wednesday.
USDA announced the administration picked the latter in a Monday legal filing but did not meet the deadline set. Trump threatened on Tuesday that payments will not go out until Democrats vote to open the federal government, but the White House walked that back quickly.
Judge McConnell attributed the delay, in part, to an attempt by President Donald Trump and his administration to disrupt the program “for political reasons.”
— Emine Yücel & John Light
Chuck Schumer Wasn’t Always Quiet About the NYC Mayor’s Race
As voters headed to the polls to elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City on Tuesday, one of the city’s most prominent politicians stayed quiet about his preference in the race. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has spent the months since Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary repeatedly refusing to make an endorsement or even to reveal who he voted for.
Schumer’s conspicuous, tortured silence made headlines as some Democrats have expressed worries about Mamdani’s socialist leanings and past pro-Palestine activism. The latter issue with Mamdani has led some Jewish voters to be particularly concerned about his mayoralty despite the fact the mayor-elect has repeatedly denounced anti-Semitism.
The awkward situation stood in stark contrast to Schumer’s handling of another contentious mayoral election 36-years-ago. During the 1989 race, the Democratic nominee, David Dinkins, faced skepticism and anger among Jewish voters. At that time, Schumer stood up to represent Dinkins in the community.
On Nov. 2, 1989 Schumer, who was then a member of the House of Representatives, stood in for Dinkins during a debate at the Rego Park Jewish Center in Queens. According to CSPAN, which has a full video of the absolutely weird and suddenly newly relevant event, Dinkins had “asked” Schumer to “appear in his place.”
As the program began, it was immediately clear why Dinkins might not have felt comfortable attending. Schumer was met with boos and shouts in both English and Yiddish.
At the outset, Jeff Wiesenfeld, a representative of the synagogue who served as a moderator warned the crowd there were to be “no outbursts of any kind.” He also touted the bonafides of Schumer, who is Jewish and, at the time represented what Wiesenfeld described as “the most heavily Jewish district in the United States.”
The appeals evidently didn’t work. Schumer noted in his remarks that he was “pushed” as he came into the room. As Schumer spoke, members in the audience continually became unruly and interrupted. Some surged towards the stage.
“I thought you were going to have some police here,” Schumer remarked to Wiesenfeld. “We’re going to need them.”
“This is disgraceful! … This is a synagogue!” Wiesenfeld shouted. “This is not the way to do things. Please!”
The tension largely stemmed from ties Dinkins, a former Manhattan borough president who was vying to be the city’s first Black mayor, had to Jesse Jackson, a Civil Rights activist who mounted a presidential bid the prior year. Some of Jackson’s comments and his support for Palestinian statehood deeply angered members of the Jewish community.
Amid the outbursts and upset, Schumer cited various ways Dinkins had expressed support for Jews. He also appealed to the idea of open debate.
“We are a people who do believe in argument. Our sages — during the worst of times — sat and argued,” Schumer said. “The day that the Jew cannot sit in a room with another Jew and have rational argument is the day we’ll begin to be washed up as a people.”
Schumer’s remarks also contained a comment that perhaps sheds light on why his response to Dinkins was different than the reaction he had to Mamdani. The future Senate minority leader repeatedly indicated that the idea of a Palestinian state was a bridge too far for him and said “the real reason there’s no peace in the Middle East is because the Arabs and the Palestinians don’t want peace.”
“I above all would never never support anybody who we thought would hurt the Jewish people and would hurt the cause of Israel,” Schumer said.
The man on stage with Schumer that night was former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was Dinkins’ opponent. Dinkins ultimately defeated Giuliani that time, however four years later, Giuliani was victorious in their rematch. That win was widely attributed to Jewish voters who were angered by Dinkins’ handling of riots that took place in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, a largely Black and Jewish neighborhood. And Giuliani’s victory was immediately preceded by a police riot he helped provoke outside City Hall.
And, of course, after his time in City Hall, Giuliani would go on to become one of President Donald Trump’s top lackeys. In that capacity, he played an intimate role in another mob scene: the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building. And, in response to this latest election, Giuliani went on Facebook and posted an Islamophobic attack comparing the win by Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim mayor, to 9/11.
Back in 1989, during the question and answer portion of his debate with Schumer, Giuliani was asked by an audience member if he would denounce the chaos that had erupted in the room. While Giuliani urged the crowd to show Schumer “courtesy” and said “debate and discussion in America is important,” his comments also provided a glimpse into his own political future and the Trumpian willingness to look the other way when supporters run amok.
Giuliani described political violence as par for the course while also absolving himself of any responsibility for responding to the evening’s outbursts.
“At one dinner recently, several members started knocking over tables and yelling and screaming and harassing people. I mean, look, that happens in politics,” he said. “I find it strange that Mr. Dinkins doesn’t show up for these things himself. … I didn’t see what anybody did and I’m not going to go around agreeing or disagreeing with behavior that I didn’t see.”
— Hunter Walker
Palantir CEO Not Sure if His Company Is Involved in Caribbean Bombing, but if It Is He Is Proud
“By the way, let me say something slightly political.”
That’s how Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp began a bizarre, two-minute rant at the end of a company earnings call Monday, during which he suggested that the Trump administration’s recently acquired habit of blowing up boats in the Caribbean is simply a matter of the government exercising its rights under the U.S. Constitution.
“To believe our Constitution does not give us the right to stop 60,000 deaths a year of working-class men and women is insane,” he said. “This country is right to stop that. I am very proud.”
Karp’s diatribe implied that people who opposed the Trump administration’s lawless attacks in Venezuela and around the South American-Caribbean region were actually classist, and did not care about the “working class” people being impacted by the illegal flow of fentanyl into the U.S. Unlike those oppositionists, the billionaire Karp said, Palantir is “on the side of the average American.”
“I want people to remember,” he said, “if fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads instead of 60,000 working-class people, we’d be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America.”
Karp runs the difficult-to-categorize government contractor, whose data systems have been described by ICE as “mission critical” and decried by former employees. Palantir recently scored a $10 billion contract with the Army and raked in more than $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts between fiscal years 2021 and 2026, according to an analysis by left-leaning public interest advocacy and research nonprofit Public Citizen. The company is also a donor to Trump’s ballroom project. According to its own third-quarter earnings call, Palantir’s largest revenue segment is U.S. government contracts, which saw a 52% increase year over year and netted the company $486 million year-to-date.
Karp claimed to be unsure of the extent to which Palantir is involved in the U.S.’s bombing of South American people and boats. “I don’t know all the efforts we’re involved in, but to the extent we’re involved in these efforts, I and most Palantirians are very proud of this,” he concluded.
— Layla A. Jones
