Writers and Editors

Updated 5/14/25:
• Musk Adviser May Make as Much as $1 Million a Year While Helping to Dismantle Agency that Regulates Tesla and X

  (Jake Pearson, ProPublica, 5-14-25)

Records show that Chris Young is simultaneously working as a political adviser to Musk while serving in the Department of Government Efficiency, helping to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’ Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.

• White House fires head of Copyright Office amid Library of Congress shakeup (Kyle Melnick and Hannah Natanson, WaPo, 5-11-25) 'Shira Perlmutter’s termination comes after her office this month released a report that raised concerns about using copyrighted materials to train AI. Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the Copyright Office, was terminated by email, Newlen said in his brief message to employees, according to a copy The Washington Post reviewed. The news came two days after President Donald Trump fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, who appointed Perlmutter in October 2020.
    'Under the second Trump administration, Elon Musk’s brainchild, the U.S. DOGE Service, which is charged with reducing federal spending and the workforce, has sought to use AI to fuel sweeping changes to government. DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is working to combine federal data into one database that could be searchable, including by AI tools, which might speed the process of identifying programs to cut, The Post reported.

     'Musk, who owns artificial intelligence firm xAI, wrote “I agree” last month in response to a post on X that said “delete all IP law,” referring to intellectual property. The Copyright Office reviews hundreds of thousands of applications annually, advises Congress on intellectual property issues and sets regulations.'

    'The Librarian of Congress, whom the president picks and the Senate confirms, doesn’t usually depart with the outgoing administration. The last time an incoming president replaced the Librarian of Congress was in 1861.

      The comments express strong criticism of the White House's decision to fire Shira Perlmutter, suggesting it was politically motivated and linked to her report on AI and copyright law. Many commenters argue that her firing was due to her challenging the interests of powerful figures like Elon Musk, who benefit from the use of copyrighted material in AI. There is also a recurring theme of the administration's alleged pattern of dismissing competent women and minorities, with some comments highlighting broader concerns about the erosion of intellectual property rights and the influence of big tech on government decisions.

 

• Techno-Fascism Comes to America (Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 2-26-25) When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests.

    The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms.

     In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government.

 

  • Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ (Makena Kelly, David Gilbert, Vittoria Elliott, Kate Knibbs, Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer, 'The Big Story,' Wired, 3-13-25) Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI. 'In Musk’s mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. His strike teams of young engineers would burrow into the government’s byzantine bureaucratic systems and delete what they saw fit. They’d help Trump slash the budget to the bone.'

• How Elon Musk Became a Kingmaker (Simon Schuster, Time, 11-21-24) No matter how often the Democrats reminded us that Trump’s fortune grew out of inherited wealth, multiple bankruptcies, and decades of corporate shenanigans, they could not deny Musk’s achievements as a businessman. Not since the age of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who greased FDR’s ascent nearly a century ago, has a private citizen loomed so large over so many facets of American life at once, pulling the nation’s culture, its media, its economy, and now its politics into the force field of his will. For now Musk and Trump act like partners, but their agendas do not align on everything. Both are willful, impulsive, and accustomed to being in charge. What will happen if they start to clash? Musk is “just realizing that being in control, directly or indirectly, of U.S. government budgets, is going to put us on Mars in his lifetime. Doing it privately would be slower.”

• How Is Elon Musk Powering His Supercomputer? (Bill McKibben, New Yorker, 5-6-25) "With typical modesty, he renamed his vacuum factory Colossus, and started stuffing it with Nvidia graphics-processing units, or G.P.U.s, the basic building blocks of A.I. systems. At the moment, he has two hundred thousand of these G.P.U.s, and he’s headed for a million; by some estimates, he is expected to build the “largest supercomputer” in the world.

    "All that processing takes power to run, and so the xAI team moved about thirty-five mobile methane-gas-powered generators onto the site to support the data center. These are truck-mounted units, many of them designed by Caterpillar, which give off some of the same brew of pollutants as other gas-combustion devices—including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde—and which are currently operating without a permit.

    “xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” the Southern Environmental Law Center said, in a report released in April."

   ..."But cost is evidently not a big issue for Musk. (DOGE claims to have saved a hundred and sixty billion dollars in government spending, but a new analysis by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that it only did so at a cost of a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars, because it has operated so quickly and ineptly.) Neither, judging from DOGE’s performance, is saving lives, but he could help do so in Memphis, if he wanted to. Pearson says, “Solar panels and battery storage would be a much cleaner alternative to methane gas turbines. Solar panels also don’t pump smog-forming pollution or chemicals like formaldehyde into nearby communities.”

•  Elon Musk’s Most Alarming Power Grab: Can anyone stop his space-based internet? (Ross Andersen, The Atlantic, 5-25) If Elon Musk continues to dominate the space-based internet, he could end up with more power over information than anyone in history. "Musk first announced his intention to build a space-based internet, which he would eventually call Starlink, in January 2015. He had plans to settle Mars, then the moons of Jupiter, and maybe asteroids too. All those space colonies would have to be connected via satellite-based communication; Starlink itself might one day be adapted for this use. Indeed, Starlink’s terms of service ask customers to affirm that they “recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.”

• Elon Musk has direct business interests in 70% of the government agencies that DOGE targeted (Robert Reich chart on Facebook, 5-9-25) "Elon Musk has financial conflicts of interest at more than 70% of the departments and agencies targeted by DOGE — including the CFPB, NLRB, and DOJ. DOGE was never about "efficiency." It was about making Musk more wealthy and less accountable."

• Bill Gates warns Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts will cause ‘millions of deaths’ (Clare Duffy, CNN, 5-9-25) Gates's "comments followed an interview Gates gave to the Financial Times earlier this week, during which he accused Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” with the government spending cuts.

• Trump Team Eyes Politically Connected Startup to Overhaul $700 Billion Government Payments Program (Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, ProPublica, 4-17-25) SmartPay, a little-known firm with investors linked to JD Vance, Elon Musk and Trump, could get a piece of the federal expense card system — and its hundreds of millions in fees.
    “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards,” one expert said.

• Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington (Simon Shuster and Brian Bennett, Time, 2-9-25) No single private citizen, certainly not one whose wealth and web of businesses are directly subject to the oversight of federal authorities, has wielded such power over the machinery of the U.S. government. So far, Musk appears accountable to no one but President Trump, who handed his campaign benefactor a sweeping mandate to bring the government in line with his agenda.

• Labor Leaders Fear Elon Musk and DOGE Could Gain Access to Whistleblower Files (Caroline Haskins, Business, Wired, 4-10-25) Companies tied to Elon Musk have dozens of workplace health and safety cases open at OSHA. Union leaders and former OSHA officials are concerned.  

 Read More 

Trump's tariffs: a roundup, updated May 2025

 

• 'The Economist' editor unpacks the 'biggest trade policy shock' of Trump's tariffs (Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 4-9-25) President Trump's sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs have upended the global economy, sending stock markets into turmoil. "This is, without a doubt, the biggest trade policy shock, I think, in history," Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, says.

    "Trump last week ordered a minimum 10% tax on nearly everything the U.S. buys from other countries. He's also ordered much higher levies on things the country buys from China, Japan and the European Union. However, a lot of those tariffs are in flux, because almost each day the president has either increased some tariffs or paused others." And then he increased them to preposterous proportions.

• Robert De Niro Slams Trump In Cannes Honorary Palme d’Or Speech: “We Are Fighting Like Hell For The Democracy We Once Took For Granted” (Melanie Goodfellow, Nancy Tartaglione, Deadline, 5-23-25)

    An impassioned De Niro used his acceptance speech to address issues he said are facing the artistic community and threatening democracy under the presidency of Donald Trump. “In my country, we are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted. That affects all of us here because the arts are democratic. Art is inclusive, it brings people together. Art embraces diversity and that’s why art is a threat, that’s why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists,” he said.
    “America’s philistine president has had himself appointed head of one of our premier cultural institutions,” he continued. “He has cut funding and support to the arts, humanities and education. And now he has announced a 100% tariff on films produced outside of the U.S. Let that sink in. … You can’t put a price on creativity, but apparently you can put a tariff on it.”

    “This is not just an American problem, it’s a global one,” he said. “We can’t all just sit back and watch. We have to act and we have to act now, not with violence but with great passion and determination. It’s time for everyone who cares about liberty to organize, to protest — and when there are elections, of course, to vote. Tonight and for the next 11 days we show our strength and commitment by celebrating art in this glorious festival. Libérté, égalité, fraternité.”

• Trump 2.0 tariff tracker (ReedSmith, Trade Compliance Resource Hub, 5-5-25) Reed Smith’s International Trade and National Security team tracks the latest threatened and implemented U.S. tariffs, as well as counter-tariffs from other countries around the world. Increases the tariff rate from 10% to 25%. Expands the list of derivative products subject to the tariffs (effective Mar. 12, 2025)
---Trump Tariffs: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War (Erica York, Alex Durante, Tax Foundation, 5-5-25)
---Tracking Every Trump Tariff and Its Economic Effect (Bloomberg's tariff tracker, 3-22-25) Financial Times also has a tariff tracker. Search and you'll find several tariff trackers (some may be behind paywalls).
---Trump’s Trade War and the Economic Impact: Tariff Tracker (Jeremy Diamond, Adrian Leung, Jane Pong, Christopher Udemans, and Jason Kao, Bloomberg Law, 4-14-25)

• Donald Trump versus Barbie (John Cassidy, News & Politics, New Yorker, 5-25)

    Can the Administration retain public support for a trade policy that could force Americans to buy less stuff?

    "In a televised Cabinet meeting, the President brought up the possibility that his trade war, and particularly his punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, would create empty shelves at retailers.

    “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty dolls,” he said. “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”
    To Greg Ahearn, the head of the Toy Association, an industry lobbying group, it was no laughing matter. Thanks to the tariffs, the industry is facing “a frozen supply chain that is putting Christmas at risk,” he told the Times. “If we don’t start production soon, there’s a high probability of a toy shortage this holiday season.”

   Despite this warning, Trump doubled down on his statements over the weekend, telling Kristen Welker, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “I’m just saying [children] don’t need to have thirty dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have two hundred and fifty pencils. They can have five.”

• What have US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies achieved? (Al Jazeera, 5-15-25) A mini-history of Trump and tariffs. What is clear is that Trump’s tariff announcements have roiled global markets, wiping out trillions in value, and leaving many businesses stumped on how to plan for the future amid the never-ending uncertainty. There are fears that the uncertainty is taking a toll on the US economy. A Bloomberg poll of economists put the chances of a recession next year at almost 50-50, the news agency reported on Monday.

• How Will Trump’s Current Tariffs Compare with Extending His 2017 Individual Tax Cuts? (Erica York, Tax Foundation,5-6-25) Though taxpayers would, on average, receive a tax cut given the net reduction in taxes, tariffs would offset more than half of the benefit of the tax cuts overall, and up to two-thirds of the benefit for lower- and middle-income taxpayers.
• Trump trade tariffs slump widens to ‘nearly all U.S. exports,’ supply chain data shows (Lori Ann LaRocco, CNBC, 5-6-25) An exports slide that began in early 2025 has reached most ports across the U.S. and nearly all export market products as the trade impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs worsens, with agriculture the hardest hit. As businesses cancel orders from China, U.S. imports continue to plummet, with a 43% week-over-week drop in containers through April 28.

• Politically Connected Firms Benefit From Trump Tariff Exemptions Amid Secrecy, Confusion (Robert Faturechi, Trump Administration, ProPublica, 4-22-25) The administration’s lack of transparency about tariff exemptions has experts concerned that some firms might be winning narrow carve-outs behind closed doors. “It could be corruption, but it could just as easily be incompetence,” one lobbyist said.

• The Political Tariff Trap for Republicans ( Brendan Buck, Opinion, NY Times, 5-7-25) "Many Republicans are hoping that the tax bill can blunt the economic damage caused by the Trump tariffs, but that is highly unlikely. The way Mr. Trump in particular is talking about the legislative package is doing them no favors. He and Republican leaders have sold the extension of the tax law as tax cuts “for everybody.” It will be “the biggest bill in the history of our country, in terms of tax cuts and regulation cuts and other things,” Mr. Trump said last month. But the reality is it’s no cut at all for most people. The rates they are preserving have been in place for more than seven years now....
      "In 2017, as counselor to House Speaker Paul Ryan, I helped pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It was a significant achievement, I remain proud of it and I’ve worked with groups that want to extend it. The law made American businesses more competitive by permanently lowering the corporate tax rate and eliminating scores of unproductive carve outs for businesses. It simplified the individual tax code and brought meaningful relief to families in almost every tax bracket. The scale of its ultimate economic impact was muddied by Covid, but I have no doubt it contributed to the robust economy that preceded the pandemic.
      "Today, allowing the expiring provisions of the law to lapse would significantly raise taxes on families at a moment of cratering economic confidence. Congress should absolutely extend the law and prevent a tax increase on working Americans. The political problem is there is little new here for voters. Despite Mr. Trump’s blitz of sweeping executive actions, there is a peculiar smallness to his legislative program."
       "Even if making the income tax rates permanent provides a degree of economic certainty and encourages investment, that is simply no match for the blowtorch the president is taking to the economy with his tariff regime. And Democrats have made clear that they will try to make Republicans pay a price for cutting Medicaid — perhaps the most tangible policy change that some Americans will feel."

     "To defy history and keep control of the House, Republicans will need to persuade voters they are working on the cost of living and creating a humming economy. The president, of course, is moving us in the other direction, raising costs and battering markets with tariffs. And many economists warn that the worst impacts of the tariffs, higher prices and empty shelves, won’t arrive until this summer — just in time to further overshadow the potential passage of the president’s tax cuts."

• Top Trump Crypto Buyers Vying for Dinner Seats Are Likely Foreign, Data Shows *(Bloomberg Crypto, 5-7-25)

• Tariffs against Canada and Mexico now in effect, sending stock markets tumbling and igniting a trade war (Landry Langford, Arkansas Traveler, 5-5-25) Many critics of the move have warned that the tariffs could raise costs for American consumers. Warren Buffett, a prominent investor and philanthropist, warned in a CBS interview that tariffs are “an act of war” and could lead to inflating costs. “Over time, they’re attacks on goods,” Buffett said. “I mean, the tooth fairy doesn’t pay them.”
     Despite the backlash and retaliations, Trump is standing by his decision, mocking Trudeau in a Truth Social post and threatening to retaliate as well.

• Trump claims he is negotiating with China on trade. China says otherwise. (Ana Swanson and Jonathan Swan, NY Times, 4-25-25)

    As he left the White House for his trip to Rome for the pope’s funeral, President Trump was pressed on his claim to Time magazine that President Xi Jinping of China had called him to talk about tariffs. According to a pool report, when asked if he had talked with Xi, Trump said he had spoken to him “numerous times,” but would not say whether they had talked since he imposed the new tariffs. Chinese officials said today that the two countries are not negotiating on tariffs, indicating that Trump is trying to create the impression that more is going on behind the scenes to resolve the trade war than actually is.

• How to Think About the Tariffs (Matthew C. Klein, The Overshoot, 4-4-25) This is bad policy, executed thoughtlessly. But it is worth thinking through exactly *why* it is bad.

• This Is What Trumponomics Is Really About (Kyla Scanlon, Opinion, NY Times, 4-16-25) Reindustrialization. But "the Trump administration sometimes appears to ignore that advanced automation means far fewer workers to produce the same manufactured goods. Even if factories return, they will employ a small fraction of the people they once did.
    "To reindustrialize will require investment in people and machines — and a coherent strategy. Given the Trump administration’s aversion to collaboration and the internal contradictions of the factions within the administration, its reindustrialization drive appears disconnected from reality and destined to fail."

• The unpredictability of Trump’s tariffs will increase the pain (The Economist, 3-27-25) The cost of uncertainty. Businesses are struggling to adjust.

• Larry Summers on Trump: ‘The First Rule of Holes Is Stop Digging’ (Lawrence H. Summers, NY Times, 4-14-25) The former treasury secretary on the president’s chaotic trade war. Summers explains the dangers of President Trump’s economic policies, and why we should expect more instability ahead. Tariff levels are still at once in century levels  Read More 

Trump Watch: A checklist.

A steadily growing batch of links to revealing pieces, continually updated (most recently 5-21-25)

    If the shape of the column goes wonky (too narrow, in particular), scroll down and click on one of the headings/links. That should bring the columns back to a readable width.

 

TRUMP FIRED THE WATCHDOGS. PROJECT 2025 IS HAPPENING NOW.

                          (Sign seen in 2025)
Trump and Musk are tearing down democracy to expedite Project 2025—threatening everything from fair elections to Social Security.  

  See more about Project 2025 here and check out David A. Graham's The Project 2025 Presidency (The Atlantic, 4-24-25) "The blueprint for Trump 2.0 predicted much of what we’ve seen so far—and much of what’s to come."

• A perfect pink-necked chickenshit in a suit (Lucian K. Truscott IV, 5-21-25) "Trump got scared and ran away from the entire Western world on Monday after his phone call with Vladimir Putin. He ran away from Ukraine and this country’s obligation to defend its sovereignty and freedom from Russia’s aggression. He ran away from NATO and our 75-year post-World War II promise by treaty to defend its signatory counties from any attack that threatens their security. He had already run away from our trade agreements with every country in the European Union by imposing tariffs on all of them, although significantly, not on Russia.
      "Donald Trump’s America is no longer the leader of the free world. He’s not interested in leading other nations, beginning with our allies, into an economic and secure future that is beneficial to all. He’s not a leader. He’s a taker. The only interest Trump has ever had is enriching himself, as he demonstrated so clearly for all the world to see during his trip to the Gulf States last week....Trump took his walk away from Ukraine by announcing that the “deal” for a ceasefire “will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.” Putin has nuclear weapons and the President of the United States in his pocket. Now that is scary.

• Judge orders White House to temporarily halt sweeping government layoffs San Francisco district judge says Congress did not authorize large-scale staffing cuts and restructuring of agencies
• How Donald Trump Is Expanding His Authority While Shrinking the Government (Jon Allsop, News/Politics, NY Times, 5-2-25)

    "Perhaps the two overarching themes of Trump’s first hundred or so days back in office have been that he has brazenly pushed the boundaries of executive power—over Congress, the courts, universities, firms, the media, former bureaucrats who have slighted him, migrants disappeared without due process to a mega-prison in El Salvador—while, at the same time, empowering Musk and DOGE, among others, to pare back the federal government and withdraw it from long-standing areas of activity. At least at a glance, these narratives seem to channel a classic political divide, between those who think the government should stay out of people’s business and those who think it should take a more hands-on role. That Trump finds himself on both sides of the divide surely reflects, at least in part, the chaos of his approach to governance; whether he pursues a particular policy often seems guided less by philosophical rigor than by naked self-interest. There’s also the issue of execution. Some of his early policies—not least his tariffs—have been implemented in messy ways, and have at times appeared to be driven by incompatible impulses." '

• Trump speech fact check for his 2025 joint address to Congress (Laura Doan, Emily Pandise, Alexander Tin, Politics, CBS News, 3-4-25) The questionable points that were True, Partially True, or Misleading. Interesting!

• Trump Policies at Odds With ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Push(Stephanie Armour, KFF Health News, 5-6-25) In his March address to Congress, President Donald Trump honored a Texas boy diagnosed with brain cancer. Amid bipartisan applause, he vowed to drive down childhood cancer rates through his “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. A few days later, the administration quietly dropped a lawsuit to cut emissions from a Louisiana chemical plant linked to cancer. He’s slashing 20,000 full time positions from HHS and cutting more than $4 billion in indirect costs related to health research grants, including studies into treatment for Alzheimer’s and cancer.
   He also supported a GOP plan likely to kneecap Medicaid, a joint federal-state program that covers about 72 million Americans. “The layoffs at HHS, cuts to Medicaid, and reduction in research could all end up resulting in less healthy Americans,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF.  

   “They’re talking about getting at the root causes of chronic disease. Less research and protections will undermine that goal.” KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
     “HHS declared that their mission is to Make America Healthy Again,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of Safe States Alliance, on a press call. The alliance is a nonprofit focused on preventing injury and violence. “How can we do that when the people who have spent decades of their life combating the health issues of our nation are being tossed out with no notice?” The HHS workforce reductions decimated divisions focused on chronic disease.

     Plus more examples of Trump's zero intention to make America healthy again and frequent moves in the opposite direction.

• The frightening precedents for Trump’s ‘legal abyss’ (Amanda Taub, The Interpreter, NY Times, 5-3-25) This week, when asked about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland father of three who was deported from Maryland to CECOT as a result of “administrative error,” Trump told a reporter that he has the power to free Abrego Garcia but won’t do so — despite a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his release. [He defers queries to others.]
     Those claims, along with the Trump administration’s broadly resistant attitude to court orders, its arrests of foreign students for their political activism and its wide-ranging campaign of retribution and intimidation against law firms and universities, have raised alarms that the country is hurtling into a new era of lawlessness....
     But there’s a more precise way to understand the Trump administration’s approach to the law, and its potential dangers: the concept of the “dual state.”
    Today, scholars say, the Trump administration appears to be claiming the right to create its own legal abyss. Courts have not yet acceded, and it remains unclear whether the administration will succeed in acquiring such powers. But some of the most vulnerable targets have already been swallowed up. And if left unchecked, the legal abyss can grow ever wider.

    [I expect someone smarter than Trump is planning things. He's just "the Boss."]

• White House ‘actively looking’ at suspending habeas corpus in immigration crackdown (Rebecca Beitsch and Brett Samuels, The Hill, 5-9-36) White House deputy chief of staff Stephen "Miller asserted that the Immigration and Nationality Act, passed in 1965, takes away the judicial branch’s jurisdiction over immigration cases and gives the president wide authority to end temporary protective status and other policies.

    "Miller’s comments come amid a broader discussion over the due process protections afforded to migrants under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. ('A writ of habeas corpus compels authorities to produce an individual they are holding and to justify their confinement.')

    "Like the suspension of habeas corpus, the Alien Enemies Act has also been used just a handful of times, activated three times prior and all during times of war. It was most recently used as the basis for Japanese internment."

 

• Obamacare would be even harder to kill now, but Trump promises to try anyway (Tami Luhby, CNN, 1-7-24) Nearly 60% of adults had a favorable view of the Affordable Care Act in May 2023, close to the highest share since the law was passed in 2010, according to the KFF Health Tracking Poll. In November 2024, Trump posted on his Truth Social site that Republicans should “never give up” trying to terminate the law and that he would replace it with “MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE.”

 

• The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out. (Michael Schaffer, Politico, 11-15-24)

   "The first Trump administration sparked waves of public activism and aggressive media coverage. This time, not so much. Trump returns to office with far more radical ambitions than he had in 2016, and much more coherent plans for achieving them. If you’re against gutting environmental regulations, bulk-firing public servants, doing away with Obamacare or instituting mass deportations, public fury is a way to push back — or at least stiffen the spines of Democrats who might collaborate with the administration. The left will have to wait for actual presidential deeds to drive the backlash. For better or worse, those will happen soon enough.

• One Word Describes Trump: Patrimonialism (Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, 2-24-25) "Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones."
     "Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a pliant big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution.
     "In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity."

• There Is a Very Good Reason Why Donald Trump Thinks Everything Is Rigged (David Corn, Mother Jones, 1-24)

    In business, he was a master of gaming the system.

    "When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us.    

    "Donald Trump is not a typical oligarch. Before entering politics, he was not part of the small group of powerful and rich people who buttressed the ruling elite.... But essential to his own rise to wealth and power was a core component of oligarchy: exploiting a rigged system. And during both his private sector career and his time in the White House, he has been friendly to oligarchs, cutting deals with them, cozying up to oligarchic regimes, and stacking his own Cabinet with the super­rich. It’s this world of immense wealth and power that Trump wishes to rule."

• Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administrative Actions is part of Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions (Just Security, 4-24-25)  Invaluable links.

    On Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump began his term with presidential actions including 26 executive orders, with more expected to follow. Just Security is covering key developments, including in concise “What Just Happened” expert explainers, legal and policy analysis, and more. Originally published Jan. 21, 2025, and frequently updated.

• Federal worker unions sue to block Trump’s effort to strip them of bargaining rights. (NY Times, 4-4-25) The complaint, filed late one night in federal court in Oakland, Calif., is the latest development in the unions’ escalating battle with the administration over its attempts to slash the federal work force and roll back the protections afforded to the civil service employees. Unions representing government workers have repeatedly sued over the efforts to cut jobs and dismantle offices and agencies, winning at least temporary reprieves in some of those cases.

 
• Trump's NIH Axed Research Grants Even After a Judge Blocked the Cuts, Records Show ( Annie Waldman, ProPublica, 5-8-25) Internal documents reveal sweeping changes at NIH. New whistleblower records submitted in a lawsuit led by the Washington state attorney general show that nearly 2 weeks after the court's preliminary injunction was issued, the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) then-acting head, Matthew J. Memoli, MD, drafted a memo that details how the agency, in response to Trump's executive orders, cut funding for research grants that "promote or inculcate gender ideology." An internal spreadsheet of terminated NIH grants also references "gender ideology" and lists the number associated with Trump's executive order as the reason for the termination of more than a half dozen research grants.
• The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet (Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 3-27-25) End a clinical trial early, and researchers might not be able to tell if it worked, leaving participants worse off than when they started. But that is what the Trump administration is asking scientists to do.
• R.I. District Court Grants Preliminary Injunction in IMLS Case (Nathalie op de Beeck, Publishers Weekly, 5-6-25) In welcome news for the Institute of Museum and Library Services and two more federal agencies targeted for dismantling by a presidential executive order, the District Court of Rhode Island has granted 21 states’ attorneys general the preliminary injunction they sought in Rhode Island v. Trump. Overall, the judge thought the plaintiffs had a strong likelihood of success for their claims that the actions were capricious.
      Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, who serves as the top Democrat on the House subcommittee overseeing the N.E.A., said in an interview that Mr. Trump was “making a broad-based attack on the arts, both for funding and content.” She cited his proposals to eliminate the endowments as well as his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and his efforts to influence the Smithsonian Institution.
       “We were able to restore the funding last time,” she said, “but as you know, based on the first 100 days of this administration, they’re in no mood to keep much of government alive anymore, and their attack is focused on everything, and the arts have already got a bull’s-eye on their back.”

• The Kennedy Center's history was marked by cooperation and independence — until now (Bob Mondello, NPR, 2-11-25) "The arts world was shocked when President Trump announced, three weeks into his second administration, that he was taking over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

    "Within a week he had purged the Center's bipartisan board of its Biden appointees, fired long-serving board chairman David M. Rubenstein and Center president Deborah Rutter, and installed himself as its new board chairman.

    "Trump told reporters that he was doing all this because Kennedy Center shows were "terrible" and "a disgrace," though in almost his next breath he conceded he had never seen one."

• The shame of Columbia University (Robert Reich, 3-21-25)

     Columbia University’s president and trustees today surrendered the university’s academic freedom to the Trump regime. Trump threatened to cancel $400 million in federal funding if Columbia didn’t put its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department in “academic receivership.” In surrendering to Trump, it's opening all universities to Trump's tyranny. A cornerstone of academic freedom is that professors can research and teach what they want. Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught. Trump also demanded that Columbia ban the wearing of face masks, so that protesters can be more easily identified. It’s all about intimidation — not only at Columbia but at every other university in America. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties.

---The Real Takeover of Columbia Was By Those on the Right (Alisa Solomon, The Nation, 5-6-24) Columbia offers a case-study in how right-wing politicians are using exaggerated claims of anti-semitism to advance a conservative agenda.
---The new definition of antisemitism is transforming America – and serving a Christian nationalist plan (Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, The Guardian, 3-23-25) Redefining antisemitism in the law (equating criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism) "was never about Jewish safety. It is about consolidating authoritarian power under the veneer of minority protection."

• Crimson Courage: Harvard Stands Up to Political Intimidation (Julian Vasquez Heilig, Cloaking Inequity, 4-14-25)

    "The April 14 letter from Harvard was more than administrative boilerplate — it was a declaration. The Trump administration had issued sweeping, punitive demands. These included requiring federal approval of admissions data, mandatory plagiarism scans for faculty, shuttering of DEI offices, and the placement of entire departments under third-party oversight for alleged “antisemitism.” The list of demands read less like a compliance memo and more like an authoritarian manifesto.
     "But Harvard didn’t flinch. In its official response, the university stated: “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.” That one sentence is as radical as it is obvious. Harvard wasn’t just rejecting a policy — it was rejecting the premise that education should be controlled by political whims.

  Garber went further: “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.” With that statement, Harvard transformed from a symbol of elite caution to a beacon of institutional defiance.

    "The implications are enormous. If Harvard can be threatened, any institution can. And if Harvard can resist, so can others."

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