A federal judge appointed to the bench in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan announced his resignation over the weekend in a damning public letter, excoriating the Trump administration for its assault on the rule of law.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf didn’t hide behind niceties in the missive, published by The Atlantic on Sunday, instead stating his opinion bluntly.

“President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment,” he warned.

“This is contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench. The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out. Silence, for me, is now intolerable.”

Wolf proceeded to detail numerous abuses of the law by Trump and his appointees, describing the blatant corruption of justice as an “existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.”

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He spent the twilight of his career denouncing Donald Trump as a threat to the republic he loved. But Dick Cheney arguably laid the foundations of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.

Cheney, who served under George W Bush for eight years, was one of the most influential and polarising vice-presidents in US history. Some critics said they would never forgive him for pushing the US to invade Iraq on a false pretext but suggested that his opposition to Trump offered a measure of redemption.

Perhaps Cheney’s defining legacy, however, was the expansion of powers for a position that he never held himself: the presidency. Cheney used the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext to assert a muscular executive authority that Trump now amplifies and exploits to challenge the system of checks and balances.

The former vice-president died on Monday aged 84. The White House lowered flags to half-mast in remembrance of him but without the usual announcement or proclamation praising the deceased.

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Sam Rasoul, the Virginia Democrat who is currently the longest-serving Muslim state lawmaker in the US and who faced accusations of antisemitism over language condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza as genocide, scored a resounding victory in Tuesday’s election that he believes shows voters are craving honesty from politicians.

Rasoul, an American Palestinian state legislator since 2014, strengthened his majority as he was re-elected to an area of Virginia where the city of Roanoke leans Democrat and the surrounding areas are deeply conservative. In an election seen as a referendum on Trump’s policies, which have disproportionately affected Virginia, Rasoul increased his vote share from four years ago by more than 5% as Democrats trounced Republicans from the legislature to the governor’s mansion.

“A 70% victory in the Bible belt of Virginia for a Palestinian Muslim is really a validation, beyond just Democrats winning, that you can be bold on the Gaza genocide and still be victorious,” Rasoul told the Guardian.

His win came despite months of attack ads and rebukes from other party leaders in the state. He was accused of hate speech and antisemitism by his opponent, a Jewish Republican party member who ran as an independent, pro-Israel groups and senior members of his own party after he called the killing of at least 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023 “the most evil cleansing in human history” and blamed Zionism, which he labelled “a supremacist ideology created to destroy and coronquer everything and everyone in its way”.

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The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.

The bizarre anecdote was contained in a Wall Street Journal report released on Friday, which recounted how Noem and Corey Lewandowski – who managed Donald Trump’s first winning presidential campaign – had recently arranged to buy 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two intended to use the jets to expand deportation flights – and for personal travel.

Those sources also claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had cautioned them that buying planes would be far more expensive than simply expanding existing flight contracts.

Complicating matters further, Spirit, which filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time, in August, did not own the jets and their engines would have had to be bought separately. The plan has since been paused, according to the Journal.

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