It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.
This week everybody was talking about the FY 2026 budget
Trump's "big beautiful bill" squeaked through the House Budget Committee yesterday. Details about what the bill is intended to accomplish are in one featured post.
and Trump's retreat on tariffs
It's been about six weeks since Trump announced "Liberation Day", when drastically increased tariffs freed Americans from the tyranny of full shelves and cheap products made overseas. Stephen Miller called it "the most significant action on global trade policy that has taken place in our lifetimes".
Then it all started to unravel. (Timeline from The Guardian.) The bizarrely determined individual "reciprocal tariffs" imposed on imports from each country came and went in less than a day, even though deals had been announced only with the UK -- and that one was still tentative. A week ago, Trump announced that the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods would go down to 30% for 90 days.
So here we are. The Treasury secretary is still threatening that the "reciprocal" tariff levels will be back if countries don't negotiate "in good faith", as if the US has been acting in good faith. But the markets have returned to their pre-liberation levels, as investors seem to be pretending the last six weeks were just a bad dream. Maybe Trump has learned his lesson now, as Senator Collins claimed after voting to acquit in his first impeachment.
If you get your picture of what’s happening from “news analyses” rather than experts who actually do the math, you might well think that the Trump trade war is basically over, that we’re back to more or less normal policy.
The reality is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy. And China accounts for only a fraction of our imports. Tariffs on everyone else are still at 10 percent, a level we haven’t seen in generations. And there are still other shoes to drop: Trump has, for example, been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
The trade war is still very much on. ... In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.
and bribery
Other than going to Vatican City to sleep at Pope Francis' funeral, the first overseas trip of Trump's second administration was the tour of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf he completed this week. He took with him friendly tech-company CEOs "including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Palantir’s Alex Karp and two dozen others".
While it's not unusual for presidents to promote US business interests overseas, the trip's biggest headlines concerned the benefits to Trump himself, including Qatar's gift of a $400 million "palace in the sky" intended to replace Air Force One, which Trump has long considered shabby and whose replacement is behind schedule. (Technically, the plane is a gift to the US government, but Trump's plan is for it to go to his presidential library foundation -- which he will control -- after he leaves office.)
Richard Painter, previously a government ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, commented:
[T]he impression is given that the position of the United States can be swayed and even bought.
and the Guardian reported:
Past administrations would have run from the perceived conflicts of interest being welcomed by Trump. ... “The status quo has been saying no, because it’s an actual and apparent conflict of interest, and it could jeopardize our domestic and foreign policies,” said [Scott] Amey [of the non-profit Project On Government Oversight]. ”It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test for a lot of Americans.”
The lavish gifts and other investments come as Trump is reshaping America’s policy in the Middle East, skipping Israel and turning toward the Gulf states in a flurry of deal-making that could benefit both sides handsomely.
and the Palm Springs bombing
An IVF clinic in California was bombed Saturday morning, in an apparent terrorist attack. My first thought was that this was the work of people who believe in ensoulment at conception, upset that IVF clinics destroy fertilized embryos after they are no longer needed.
But no, it looks like the perpetrator, who also appears to have been the sole fatality, is an antinatalist. I had no idea what that was until NPR explained it: An antinatalist believes it is wrong to have children.
DOGE is still around, and still exceeding any possible authority it might have. It's been trying to take over agencies that serve Congress, like the Library of Congress and the General Accounting Office.
Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?
Leo XIV may surprise me, but at first glance it looks like the Francis faction won. The new pope seems more interested in the Sermon on the Mount than in fighting the culture wars.
I think the name he chose is significant: in 1891, Leo XIII wrote the ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), which has been the foundation of Catholic social justice thinking ever since. The main idea of Rerum Novarum is for the church to take seriously the plight of working people under capitalism. It represented a realization that without a clearly worker-sympathetic position, the church might lose out to some form of Marxism.
By choosing to be another Leo, this pope gestures towards both a sympathy with the lower classes and a willingness to modernize Catholic doctrine.
Much is being made of Leo's American roots He grew up in Chicago, and his time the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago overlapped my years at the University of Chicago a few blocks away. We probably walked past each other on the sidewalk. Chicago is extremely proud to claim Leo, as the following cartoon illustrates.
To me, the greatest significance of an American pope is that he'll be much harder for conservative American Catholics to ignore. (I'm looking at you, J. D. Vance and Sam Alito.)
and Trump's legal losses
Yesterday, a federal judge in Vermont ordered Rümeysa Öztürk released on bail without travel restrictions. She's the Tufts student who was kidnapped off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts by masked DHS agents and taken to a detention center in Louisiana. The administration obeyed the order, and Özturk is back in Massachusetts walking around free.
[Judge William Sessions concluded] that she has raised "a very substantial First Amendment claim" in her underlying habeas challenge, in addition to a “substantial claim” that the Trump administration violated her due process rights regarding her detention as well.
Prior to being arrested, Öztürk had been a Tufts Ph.D. student legally in the country on a student visa. What appears to have drawn the administration's ire was an op-ed Öztürk wrote (with co-authors) in Tufts Daily urging the Tufts administration to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide". The judge wrote:
"There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.” Additionally, he noted, “I do not find that any of the contacts that she has in the community create any danger or risk of flight."
If you read the First Amendment, you will notice that it says nothing about citizenship. Freedom of speech is a human right, not a privilege of citizenship.
In a similar case, a federal appeals court denied the administration's motion to stay the release of Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. Mahdawi was a green-card holder who was arrested in Vermont when he appeared for an interview related to his application for citizenship. He similarly has no record of violence or criminality, and has only advocated for Gaza.
Several federal judges have ruled against the administration on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act; this is the basis for Trump to send people to prison in El Salvador. (See the same Law Dork link.) The Act allows the president to deport foreign nationals during time of war, predatory incursion, or invasion. Judges in a variety of jurisdictions have been finding that the current situation does not fit into any of those categories. Trump can call mass migration of individuals an "invasion", but that does not match the way such a term was used in 1798 when the AEA was passed.
Yet another judge issued a restraining order against Trump's mass firings of federal workers. (Same Law Dork link.)
“It is the prerogative of presidents to pursue new policy priorities and to imprint their stamp on the federal government. But to make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his co-equal branch and partner, the Congress,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote in the decision. “Federal courts should not micromanage the vast federal workforce, but courts must sometimes act to preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.“
... “Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the President’s Executive Order 14210 is ultra vires” — or beyond the president’s legal authority, in other words illegal — “as the President has neither constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch,” [Judge Susan] Illston wrote.
In general, I think the media is doing a bad job of explaining why the Trump administration is snatching people off the street, deporting American children, and so on: Trump was elected because he sold voters a dark fantasy about Biden's America: The nation had been overrun by millions of immigrant criminals whose gangs had taken over our cities. The local police knew who they were, but couldn't do anything because Biden protected the criminals. But Trump would be able to deport them all quickly. Millions of them.
So now he's elected and has a real world to deal with: There aren't millions of immigrant criminals and there is no migrant crime wave. If he just deports people for legitimate reasons, he can't achieve the numbers his supporters expect.
As for Missouri, it is one of 40 Medicaid expansion states — because our voters wanted it that way. In 2020, the same year Mr. Trump carried the Missouri popular vote by a decisive margin, voters mandated that the state expand Medicaid coverage to working-class individuals unable to afford health care elsewhere. Voters went so far as to inscribe that expansion in our state constitution. Now some 21 percent of Missourians benefit from Medicaid or CHIP, the companion insurance program for lower-income children. And many of our rural hospitals and health providers depend on the funding from these programs to keep their doors open.
All of which means this: If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.
A preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with health care by 8.6 million over the decade.
They're clever about it: They aren't cutting "benefits", they're just slashing the federal reimbursement to states. Then most red states will scrap the Medicaid expansion associated with Obama's Affordable Care Act, providing Congress with deniability: We didn't do it, the states did it.
The end result, though, is exactly what Hawley says: People (particularly people working for barely more than minimum wage) will lose their health insurance, and rural hospitals will close.
Cuts like this (and to food stamps, which also affects the working poor) are necessary so that billionaires can pay lower taxes. And even then, a huge deficit will remain. I don't know how Republicans will be able to sell this to their base. And if they can't, their slim majorities in Congress won't hold together well enough to push it through.
This is another example of the MAGA fantasy world running into reality. In the fantasy world, government is full of waste and fraud that a smart guy like Elon can point out and eliminate. That way, spending can be slashed without affecting ordinary Americans.
but I want to talk about optimism
That's the subject of this week's featured post. My view wouldn't be optimistic in any other context: I still think we're facing a crisis of democracy. But we're facing it in better shape than I thought we'd be in.
and you also might be interested in ...
Brought to you by the party that supports family values:
“Within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Smotrich said. “In another six months, Hamas won’t exist as a functioning entity.”
He told the listening audience that the population of Gaza, some 2.3 million Palestinians, would be “concentrated” in a narrow strip of land between the Egyptian border and the so-called Morag Corridor, which runs the width of Gaza between Khan Younis and the border city of Rafah.
“They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”
Beauchamp notes that this is "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".
Trump has stopped just about all refugee resettlement in the US. But he has finally found a group of refugees he likes: White South Africans.
The Trump administration is bringing a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees next week in what it says is the start of a larger relocation effort for a minority group who are being persecuted by their Black-led government because of their race.
But are they persecuted? Not in any way that makes them stand out, and maybe not at all. But they're White, so they go to the front of the line.
In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar -- a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.
Nothing to see here, just a foreign government giving an extremely valuable gift not to the United States, but for the benefit of one person, who happens to make many decisions the government of Qatar might want to influence.
The Guardian reviews the rules on presidential gifts, which are legally regarded as gifts to the American people. Previous presidents have transferred gifts -- none of them nearly this large -- to their presidential libraries for public display. But in Trump's case this appears to be a dodge, as the plane will remain available for Trump's personal use after ownership transfers. Judd Legum:
Can we please stop staying that, after Trump leaves office, the $400 million plane from Qatar will be given to the "Trump Presidential Library" Libraries do not fly on planes. The plane will be given to Trump.
The measles outbreak continues to spread, and even though it started before RFK Jr. took over as HHS Secretary, he's coming to own it. The costs of his anti-vaccine crusade are becoming obvious.
A Republican attempt to steal a state supreme court seat in North Carolina was finally thwarted this week, a mere six months after an election that the Democratic candidate won.
[Incumbent Justice Allison] Riggs won the election in November by just 734 votes, but [Republican challenger Jefferson] Griffin mounted a massive legal challenge to overturn the election results and disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters. At the heart of Griffin’s lawsuit was a challenge to 65,000 lawfully cast ballots that he believed should be tossed out, because of errors made by the North Carolina elections board. The board counted some 60,000 ballots cast by voters with allegedly incomplete registration. ... In fact, the litigation raised no significant evidence whatsoever that any illegitimate votes were cast.
“This case concerns whether the federal constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals. This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible,” Myers wrote in his opinion. “To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”
Griffin decided not to appeal, so the case is finally over.
The US and China have agreed to reduce the massive tariffs each have imposed on the other, from 145% and 125% to 30% and 10%. The reduction is temporary: 90 days. We'll see if that's enough to cause trade to start flowing again. 30% is still a pretty hefty price increase.
and let's close with something distracting
If you're on BlueSky and looking for something to brighten up your otherwise depressing news feed, I recommend following Daily Bunnies. You'll get a reliable stream of cute rabbit pictures. I guarantee that this sleepy bunny is not worrying about whatever is bothering you.
I have never been Catholic, so I view all papacies from the outside. But Francis was the first pope of my adult lifetime that I didn't instinctively think of as a political and social opponent. Previous popes, from my point of view, allowed Catholicism to be dominated by culture-war issues: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-birth-control, pro-patriarchy, and so on.
People closer to the Catholic Church can comment on whatever doctrines he may have changed, which were largely invisible to non-Catholics. The church he leaves behind is still a patriarchal institution that teaches many ideas I view as wrong-headed. But to me, the main thing he did was shift the emphasis: from policing people's bedrooms to standing up for the downtrodden and those on the fringes of society.
Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?
Two of the last things Francis did were to celebrate Easter and meet with J. D. Vance. Call me cynical, but I expect Vance to lie extensively about his papal audience. It is very easy for unscrupulous people to put words into the mouths of the dead.
and Pete Hegseth
Back when the Signal fiasco first surfaced a few weeks ago, many people speculated that this didn't come out of the blue. Nobody on the chat treated the situation as weird, suggesting they'd done it before.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.
The first Signal chat group was set up by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, but this one was set up by Hegseth himself.
This administration is filled with unqualified people like Hegseth who are not serious about national security. Showing off for friends, family, and coworkers is more important to them than keeping Americans safe.
Remind me: Why did anybody ever think Pete Hegseth belonged in this job?
and Harvard
Who expected Harvard to start leading the academic community's resistance to the Trump autocracy? How did we get here?
On April 11, representatives of the GSA, HHS, and Education Department sent a list of demands to the president of Harvard University and the leading member of the Harvard Corporation. The demands essentially would put in the university in receivership, with "an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith" empowered to audit "the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity". Departments that failed this audit would required to hire new faculty and admit new students until "viewpoint diversity" was achieved.
In other words: Acceding to the government's demands would authorize MAGA thought police to roam the campus, searching out dissent and bringing in Trump acolytes to "balance" campus viewpoints. This proposal directly contradicts the government's demand to eliminate DEI programs in favor of "merit-based" hiring and admissions. "Merit" only matters if you're Black, not if you're pro-Trump.
The letter warns that the government's "investment" in Harvard (i.e., research grants that Harvard wins in competition with other universities) "is not an entitlement", and depends on Harvard taking steps to prevent "ideological capture" by any ideology other than that of the Trump administration.
So all in all Harvard felt it had little choice in its response:
The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.
The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
Various Trump officials then claimed the threatening letter had been sent by mistake. But that didn't square with the fact that the Trump administration then started carrying out its threats: $2.2 billion in grants are frozen, though they have been slow to announce which ones. The optics of that are going to be really bad for Trump. Cancellations we already know of stop research on tuberculosis and ALS. If you are counting on research like that to produce a miracle cure for yourself or your family, you're not going to be very happy.
I know no one is shamed by hypocrisy any more, but The Bulwark's Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell went back to look at the outrage of people like J. D. Vance and Ted Cruz a few years ago when the Right (falsely) thought the Obama administration had instructed the IRS to target Tea Party groups. (In the wake of Citizens United, the IRS did heighten their scrutiny of new tax-exempt groups, which included a bumper crop of new Tea Party groups. But none inappropriately lost their tax-exempt status and no link to the White House was ever found.) Here's what Vance was saying:
This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free country.
The biggest sham of this whole attack on American universities is that it has something to do with antisemitism. Trump cares nothing about antisemitism.
In Charlottesville, Trump was careful to differentiate between actual Nazis and the "very fine people" who marched next to the Nazis. But there is no similar consideration for any "fine people" who participated in campus protests in honest sympathy with the plight of Palestinians, or out of horror at the genocide in Gaza. To Trump, the presence of antisemites in the demonstrations tars everyone involved. The double standard here has an obvious interpretation: Antisemitism is just a club to use against the universities, which he sees as his enemies anyway.
and the courts
The Trump administration had another bad week in court. First, there's the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who came to the US illegally in 2011 and was granted withholding-of-removal status by an immigration court in 2019. The Trump administration ignored his legal status and deported him to the CECOT prison in El Salvador on March 15, in what an administration lawyer has since described as "an administrative error". On April 10, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to "facilitate" Garcia's return to the US, where he might then face renewed attempts to deport him within the law. The Court sent the case back to district court Judge Paula Xinis to work out the details of Garcia's return.
The administration has defied that order while claiming that it is not defying it, by putting a ridiculous spin on "facilitate" that does not require it to do anything at all. Trump had an oval office meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, where they each professed their powerlessness to do anything for Garcia, essentially making a joke out of the Court's unanimous order.
Xinis has ordered a two-week inquiry into the case that will include sworn depositions from administration officials, creating a record that could lead to contempt proceedings. Trump's lawyers tried to put a stay on her order, which an appeals court unanimously rejected on Thursday. More than just the order itself, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson's opinion rejected Trump's arguments in their entirety.
The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.
The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.
As Jay Kuo notes, Wilkinson is a Reagan appointee whose conservative credentials are impeccable. This isn't about left-and-right, it's about right-and-wrong.
The entire American media and left wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien)
The problem with that argument should be obvious: Vance assumes what so far has not been proved. If Garcia actually is a gang member who poses a threat to public safety, then by all means deport him. No one argues against that. But so far all we know is that the Trump administration SAYS he's a gang member who threatens public safety. They could say that about me or you or anybody. If Trump can send someone to his concentration camp in El Salvador just by accusing him of something, then we really are in a totalitarian state.
The Supreme Court also ordered 7-2 that further deportations to CECOT be stopped.
In a brief order released at about 1 a.m. Saturday, the court directed the administration to temporarily halt any plan to deport a group of Venezuelan nationals who have been detained in northern Texas and have been designated as “alien enemies.”
Again, Trump wants to make this about immigrant crime, assuming without proof that all the people he wants to deport are actually dangerous. So far, though, everything we know suggests the administration isn't being particularly rigorous about establishing guilt.
The essential difference between a legitimate prison and a concentration camp is legal process. If you can be sent there on somebody's unsupported say-so, you'll stay there until somebody else says you can leave, and while you're there you have no way to protest your treatment, then you're in a concentration camp.
found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes. ... “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
The gist of all these rulings is that time is running out on the administration's claims that it isn't disobeying court orders, based on obviously ridiculous interpretations of those orders. Before long they're going to have to either obey the orders or openly defy them.
I'm pretty much where Eisen is. When Trump took office, I anticipated a lot of the ways he would assault American democracy. The real question in my mind was how clever he would be and whether anyone would oppose him.
Well, three months into his second administration, we can see that he's not being very clever at all, and opposition is forming, both in the courts and in public opinion. The Economist shows Trump's net approval rating crossing below his sorry showing from the same point in his first term.
Congress will be slower to come around, but I think that will happen, at least partially. It will start with Republicans' inability to unite around an FY 2026 budget proposal. What they have so far
cuts rich people's taxes
cuts programs that many small-town and rural Trump voters rely on, like Medicaid and food stamps.
still has a huge deficit.
A lot of Trump voters still believe that the spending cuts will all be "waste and fraud" cuts that target illegal aliens and maybe some other dark-skinned people they don't like. (In MAGAland, spending on non-whites is inherently wasteful.) They're going to see that it really means kicking Mom out of the nursing home, closing their small-town hospital, and skipping a few meals of their own.
Trump could even sell those White working-class "sacrifices" as necessary to control an out-of-control government debt. But calling for sacrifice and not controlling the debt is going to be a hard case to make.
Alaska's Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said out loud what a lot of people have been whispering: Republicans in Congress are afraid to cross Trump. "I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real. And that’s not right."
A transwoman runner in Virginia had to leave the girls cross-country team when the Virginia HIgh School League changed its rules to get into harmony with the Trump administration. So she did what a lot of anti-trans rhetoric suggests she should do: join the boys team.
So now somebody who presents as female is on the male team, presumably raising a new set of locker room issues. Is this better?
RFK Jr. says he will identify the "environmental toxin" that causes autism. People who have spent their lives studying autism don't believe such a thing exists, but cranks like Kennedy always know better.
Remember when Candidate Trump said that ending the Ukraine War was easy, and that he could do it in 24 hours? Well, now that he's president, Trump is complaining that the two countries aren't cooperating, so he's thinking about taking his Peace and going home.
Average grocery prices were about 2.41% higher in March 2025 than they were in March 2024, Consumer Price Index data shows. This was the highest year-over-year grocery inflation rate since August 2023. And average March 2025 grocery prices were up about 0.49% from February 2025. That was the highest month-to-month grocery inflation rate since October 2022.
And that's before we see the effect of tariffs on imported foods like coffee and fruit, which should kick in soon.
spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink ... While the administration and Doge have targeted hundreds of thousands of federal employees, critics say the decision shows Musk is willing to allow federal workers to remain employed if their work benefits him.
The myth behind DOGE is that Musk commands a small army of smart nerds who can revolutionize how government works. But wouldn't you know it? The Pentagon had already thought of that idea back in 2015 and has assembled its own nerds in the Defense Digital Service. Unlike Musk's minions, these folks have actually done a few things that worked.
One former senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be named because of possible retaliation, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Defense Department as damaging and unproductive: “They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said. At the DDS, “The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said.
In this era where so many institutions are yielding to autocracy without a fight, I've been interested to see what Marvel Studios and their Disney overlords have done with the new Daredevil series Daredevil: Born Again.
No one ever refers to Trump during the series, and if the words Republican or Democrat were spoken, I don't remember them. But it's hard to imagine a major studio making a stronger anti-MAGA statement.
The story arc of the season is how Daredevil's nemesis, Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. the Kingpin, escapes accountability for his criminal past and gets elected Mayor of New York on a very MAGA-ish platform: New York is in crisis and only a crusading outsider like Fisk can fix it. Once in power, he uses a combination of legal and illegal power to co-opt the city's other power centers. He recruits NYPD's most brutal officers into an elite "anti-crime" squad that operates outside normal rules, then artificially creates a crisis that justifies a near-complete authoritarian takeover. The "resist, rebel, rebuild" quote at the top of the page is from Daredevil's rallying message to his allies at the end of the season, presumably setting up the fall of Fisk in season 2.
and let's close with something embarrassing
I explained last week how my town of Bedford often finds itself in the shade of its neighbors Lexington and Concord. So I felt a little schadenfreude when this particular celebration in Lexington didn't go exactly as planned.
The bottom line is: If the economy and the government were working the way it should for most Americans, a guy like Donald Trump and a movement like Trumpism would not have been possible.
That's the subject of one featured post, in which I express the hope that we can have a debate more nuanced than just Trump's tariffs vs. free trade.
and Abrego Garcia
This much has been established in court: There was a court order that Kilmar Abrego Garcia not be sent back to El Salvador, his country of origin. The Trump administration violated that order due to an "administrative error", so he is currently in the harsh Cecot prison, which is widely acknowledged to be a hellhole.
In a sane judicial system dealing with a sane administration, the next step would be obvious: You violated a court order, so get back into compliance with it, i.e., bring Abrego Garcia back to the US.
What should happen to him then is a matter for other proceedings to establish. Whatever evidence DoJ may or may not have against him, whether he committed some crime or belongs to a foreign gang or whatever, is just not relevant at this point. Bring him back, and then we can talk about those other issues in a court where he can face his accusers and defend himself.
You know: human rights.
So a federal judge did the common-sense thing: issued an order demanding Abrego Garcia's return by a date that has already passed. Trump's lawyers appealed that order and the Supreme Court more-or-less upheld it: It did not demand that Abrego Garcia be returned by a particular date, but instructed the administration to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return. It sent the case back to the district court to work out the details.
Then the district judge did another common-sense thing: held a hearing where he asked the government how it planned to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return. The government stonewalled the judge, and now says "facilitate" only means that it remove barriers to Abrego Garcia returning, should El Salvador decide (on its own) to release him.
Presumably, the district judge will have to issue another order, which the government will appeal to the Supreme Court. At that point, what should have been obvious the last time will be doubly obvious: the Trump administration is not dealing with the court in good faith. It should have no claim on the "deference" or "respect" a good-faith administration would receive from the Court. Whether this Supreme Court's partisan-hack majority will see it that way is an open question.
The significance of this case should be obvious to any thinking person: If Trump can send someone to El Salvadoran prison illegally, and then just say "oops" when the "mistake" is pointed out, then he can make anybody disappear.
I assume someone at my level -- a blogger with only a few thousand subscribers -- is beneath their notice. But I write things Trump wouldn't like if he bothered to read them. If he threw a tantrum and decided to order my removal to Cecot prison, what would stop him? How would anyone bring me back?
In thinking about Cecot, I encourage you to read the history of Hitler's first concentration camp: Dachau. Originally, it was a temporary place to put political dissidents. But once a black hole exists, it has many uses that an authoritarian regime can't help but notice. Why let anyone out, ever? Why not put Jews there, and homosexuals, and Gypsies? Once they are out of public view, why not turn them into slave labor or run medical experiments on them? Why not kill them?
Trump supporters accuse people like me of being hysterical when we make comparisons between Cecot and Dachau. Sure, Cecot is nothing like the final-solution death camp Dachau had become by the time American soldiers liberated it 80 years ago this month. But it bears a striking resemblance to the original Dachau of 1933.
In other legal news, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student who participated in the protests against Israel's war in Gaza (and appears to have done nothing else "wrong"), can be deported on the say-so of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
There is no indication that Congress contemplated an immigration judge or even the attorney general overruling the secretary of state on matters of foreign policy.
An appeal is expected.
and the spirit of '75
250 years ago, Americans rebelled against one-man rule. Another featured post expresses the hope that we can do so again.
and Trump vs. the environment
I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that Trump administration policy tends to be pro-pollution and anti-environment. This week, however, Trump signed executive orders that slap in the face anyone who cares about the future of the climate.
One order, which uses scare quotes whenever mentioning "climate change", orders the attorney general to identify and challenge in court
all State and local laws, regulations, causes of action, policies, and practices (collectively, State laws) burdening the identification, development, siting, production, or use of domestic energy resources that are or may be unconstitutional, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable. The Attorney General shall prioritize the identification of any such State laws purporting to address “climate change” or involving “environmental, social, and governance” initiatives, “environmental justice,” carbon or “greenhouse gas” emissions, and funds to collect carbon penalties or carbon taxes.
Environmental groups report being "outraged", but the order strikes me as being more about putting on a show for Trump's fossil-fuel donors (as well as "owning the libs") than producing actual change. The order itself takes no action, but only instructs the Justice Department to take action, adding its weight to court challenges that fossil fuel companies have already launched. It will subsidize these lawsuits with tax dollars, but fossil fuel companies don't lack for money or lawyers.
Grist points to some of the targeted state laws, and provides links to longer explanations:
That directive almost certainly includes the climate superfund laws that New York and Vermont recently passed. The statutes require fossil fuel companies to pay damages for their emissions, a move the executive order deems “extortion.”
attempt to prevent some Biden-era policies from going into effect that would have caused the shuttering of dozens of American coal plants; support policies promoting the continued incorporation of coal and fossil-fuel forms of energy into the grid; and direct the Department of Justice to investigate state policies that may illegally or unconstitutionally “[discriminate] against coal” and “secure sources of energy.”
Again, such orders may win the votes of coal miners, troll environmentalists, and ensure that fossil-fuel money keeps rolling in to Republican coffers, but it should have little long-term effect on the coal industry. Coal isn't just a victim of government policy, it's being phased out by the market, because it has become more expensive than not only natural gas, but also sustainable energy sources.
Nearly all U.S. coal-fired power plants are more expensive to run than new, local wind, solar and energy storage resources, according to a January 2023 report from Energy Innovation. ... Capstone [a private energy consulting group] doubts any company will seek DOE loan guarantees for new coal-fired power projects. “We are skeptical the private sector will chase funding targeting coal assets beyond potential assistance for coal-to-gas switching,” said the research firm
If you're wondering what kind of mischief the Trump administration might do with the government databases, here's an example: The WaPo reports that
the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead ... eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. ... Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts ... told [Musk-appointed Chief Information Officer Scott] Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead.
Security guards came and escorted Pearre out of the building.
After his removal from his office this week, he was placed on paid leave, possibly severing his 25-year career.
Whoever has control of the SSA database can declare anyone dead.
The White House told The Post that the roughly 6,000 immigrants all have links to either terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence of the alleged crimes or terrorist ties but said some are included on an FBI terror watch list. The immigrants added to the death database include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds — as well as one person in their 80s and a handful in their 70s, according to records obtained by The Post.
As I pointed out above in the note on the Abrego Garcia case, if they can do this, they can do it to anybody. Social Security says you're dead, so no one can employ you.
and let's close with something adorable
The news has been rough this week. If you've made it this far, you deserve an otter video.
Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis
Saturday's protests at 1400 locations around the country had been planned for some time. But they got a huge boost from a week of bad news for the Trump administration, which I summarize in the other featured post.
Good estimates of how many people participated are hard to come by. Organizers tend to inflate numbers, while news organizations and public-safety departments usually underestimate. Then there's the problem of combining over a thousand individual estimates into a collective estimate.
The organizers of these protests claim "millions" of participants. And that total sounds reasonable when you see police estimates like 25-30 thousand in Boston alone, or NYT reporting of a march 20 blocks long in New York.
Hands Off march in New York City Saturday
and Cory Booker's speech
The political impact of Cory Booker's record-breaking 25-hour speech to the Senate surprised me. It was a stunt, of course. The speech itself produced no direct change in law or policy. And yet it drew massive amounts of public attention and made an important symbolic statement: Yes, Democrats in Congress do realize that American democracy is at a crisis point, and they are looking for ways to do something about it.
The point of a stunt is to draw attention, and Booker certainly did. An estimated 300K viewers livestreamed at least part his speech, and the Tik-Tok stream got 350 million likes.
Like many stunts, Booker's speech was a feat of physical endurance. He had to remain standing for the full 25 hours, and didn't take any bathroom breaks. He didn't have to speak the entire time, because allies in the Senate took up some time by asking him occasional questions. I had thought he would wear Depends or have some kind of catheter strapped to his leg, but apparently not.
I think I stopped eating on Friday, and then to stop drinking the night before I started on Monday, and that had its benefits and it had its really downsides.
I believe I would faint dead away or start hallucinating if I tried that. But Booker mainly reported muscle cramps from dehydration.
A side benefit of Booker's speech was to take arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond out of the record books. Thurmond's previous record-holder was a 24-hour speech against a civil rights bill in 1957. Unlike Thurmond, who resorted to reading the phone book at one point, Booker remained on-topic and empassioned right up to the end.
That's due largely to the changing times, I think. Thurmond was filibustering, so the time he took up was an end in itself. While Booker did interrupt the business of the Senate for 25 hours, there was no particular action he intended to delay. He was trying to build and hang onto a worldwide audience, an impossibility in 1957.
and Wisconsin voters' rejection of Elon
A number of election were held Tuesday. The most significant was for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Liberals achieved a 4-3 majority on the court two years ago, and had begun to undo a gerrymander that had put the Republican leadership of the legislature virtually beyond the reach of voters. Wisconsin's congressional districts are similarly gerrymandered, so that the evenly divided state sends 6 Republicans and only 2 Democrats to the U. S. House. If the conservative had won, flipping the court to a 4-3 conservative majority, that gerrymander would likely have remained.
Elon Musk made himself a major issue in the election by contributing quantities of money variously reported in the $20-25 million range. His contributions were controversial and possibly illegal: He gave voters $100 each to sign a petition denouncing "activist judges", and offered two million-dollar checks to voters who came to a rally he headlined in Green Bay. Musk claimed "the future of civilization" hung on the outcome of this election.
But apparently Wisconsin voters don't want the richest many in the world choosing their judges: the Trump/Musk candidate lost 55%-45%.
Tuesday's other elections are harder to interpret. Two special elections for Florida congressional seats went to the Republicans, but only by about half the 30-point margin Trump had in those districts in November. Democrats may take encouragement from those elections -- and Republicans whose districts were only +15 in November may get anxious -- but a loss is still a loss.
and you also might be interested in ...
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019, so the government has been specifically barred from sending him back to El Salvador, where he says he would be in danger. The government has claimed that he is in the infamous MS-13 gang, but has never presented evidence supporting that claim.
Nonetheless, Garcia got pulled over while driving on March 12 (his 5-year-old in the back seat) and was sent to the gulag in El Salvador where the administration has been dumping immigrants it doesn't like. The government has acknowledged the mistake in court (and the lawyer who acknowledged this obvious fact has been put on leave).
[Judge Paula] Xinis on Sunday wrote in a legal opinion that allegations against Abrego were “vague” and “uncorroborated” –– and that in any case, he was under protected status.
“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” she wrote.
She ordered him returned to the US by today, which the Trump administration is refusing to do while it appeals her order. Absurdly, they claim that Garcia is now out of their control, since they do not run El Salvador. If this claim is allowed, it puts a loophole in everyone's rights. Trump could arrest me or you, send us to El Salvador, and then claim it made a "mistake" that can't be rectified.
In one featured post I covered how Fox News has played down the stock-market collapse. Here's how Fox handled this story: Numerous Fox hosts have argued that Garcia is just one guy, and he's an immigrant anyway, and Trump's people claim (without evidence) he's part of a criminal gang, so it doesn't matter.
It turns out there's an internal reason why the Trump administration keeps running afoul of judges, and it has nothing to do with judicial bias.
In previous administrations (even Trump's first administration), the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice has been powerful. Essentially, it's been the executive branch's internal Supreme Court, the ultimate within-the-administration authority on what the law says or allows. OLC reports are technical and sometimes secret, so they usually slide under most voters' radar. But occasionally some have drawn attention, like during the Bush-43 administration when OLC came up with creative readings of the law to justify torture.
The head of OLC is a political appointee, so it's not like OLC has ever been completely independent of the White House. For the most part, it's going to give the president the most favorable opinion it can justify. Nonetheless, OLC is made up of lawyers who have certain professional standards. They don't like being pushed to frame opinions so far out of line that judges will sanction administration lawyers who make those arguments in court.
That's why it's significant that the Trump administration has downgraded the OLC. Trump still has not named the OLC's head, and the office has not vetted Trump's executive orders for legality. It's part of the larger pattern: No one should tell Trump that he can't do what he wants to do, even if it's illegal.
The Pentagon has sent at least six B-2 bombers – 30% of the US Air Force’s stealth bomber fleet – to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in what analysts have called a message to Iran as tensions once again flare in the Middle East. ... Images taken by private satellite imaging company Planet Labs on Tuesday show the six US bombers on the tarmac on the island, as well as shelters that could possibly conceal others.
Maybe this is a ramping up of the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which the US attacked in mid-March. But it might be something else:
Trump has also been pushing Iran to make a deal over its nuclear capabilities, saying on March 19 that he would give Tehran two months to come to an agreement or face the consequences. There “are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal."
the B-2 isn’t just any bomber. It’s the only US aircraft certified to carry the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-busting message written in steel and fire. That’s tailor-made for Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites in places like Natanz and Fordow.
and let's close with something useless
In addition to all the news-relevant topics I have to research to write this blog, you probably have no idea how much totally useless knowledge I accumulate along the way. This week I learned that the word ritzy derives from a man's name: César Ritz was a Swiss businessman who founded the Ritz hotels, which became synonymous with luxury.
He opened The Ritz in Paris in 1898, and shortly afterward the upscale Carlton Hotel in London. The North American rights to the Ritz-Carlton brand was franchised to Albert Keller, who opened New York's Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 1911.
The Ritz cracker appears to have no direct connection to either the hotels or César Ritz. In 1919, Nabisco bought Jackson Cracker company of Jackson, Michigan, which made a precursor of the Ritz. That cracker got rebranded as Ritz during the Depression, as part of a marketing plan to make it seem luxurious. (Apparently, in that less litigious age, the Ritz hotels didn't sue.) The Ritz cracker also appears to be the first beneficiary of a movie marketing tie-in: Walt Disney included a box of Ritz crackers in Mickey's Surprise Party in 1939. The Wikipedia article does not mention whether Walt got paid to do this.
