The Trouble with Trump
A steadily growing batch of links, continually updated (most recently, 3-25-25)
• Trump's further descent into dictatorship (Robert Reich, 3-18-25) This morning, he issued a bellicose post against a federal judge who's trying to constrain him. It's part of an increasing attempt by Trump and Musk to threaten judges with violence. But today’s post by Trump was his first and most direct attack on the judiciary since he’s become president for the second time. Federal courts are now hearing more than 100 lawsuits challenging Trump’s and Musk’s initiatives. That's the issue: The collapse of the rule of law.
• Trump moves toward a more efficient fascism (Lucian Truscott Newsletter, 3-23-25) "Donald Trump is in the process of issuing a series of executive orders targeting law firms he doesn’t like. The orders strip partners and employees of the firms of their top-secret security clearances, bar the firms from doing business with the federal government, ban employees of the firms from federal office buildings, ban federal contractors from doing business with the firms, and initiate federal investigations of the firms for hiring and promoting people on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
"Trump’s first order was against Covington & Burling, a firm that had done legal work for Jack Smith, the Special Counsel assigned to investigate Trump for his theft of top-secret national security documents and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election." ***
• Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable (Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, 3-20-25) During his first official campaign rally for the 2024 Republican nomination, held in Waco, Texas, Donald Trump vowed retribution against those he perceives as his enemies. Sixty days into Trump’s second term, we have begun to see what that looks like.
The president fired the archivist of the United States because he was enraged at the National Archives for notifying the Justice Department of his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office following his first term. (The archivist he fired hadn’t even been working for the agency at the time, but that didn’t matter.)
U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as Elon Musk and other Trump-administration allies “ramp up efforts to discredit judges,” according to a Reuters report. On his social-media site, Musk has attacked judges in more than 30 posts since the end of January, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil,” and deriding the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.” ["Must" reading. Do read, or skim, the full article.]
---Trump Revokes Security Clearances for Biden, Harris, and More. Here’s the Full List and What That Means (Rebecca Schneid, Time Magazine, 3-22-25) President Donald Trump has made good on his promise of revoking security clearance for former President Joe Biden. Issued late on Friday night, a memo titled “Rescinding Security Clearances and Access to Classified Information from Specified Individuals” laid out Trump’s instructions for Biden, several members of the Biden Administration, and other political rivals to have their security clearances rescinded.
• American Oligarchy (Tim Murphy, Mother Jones, 1-24) The US is finally taking Russia’s oligarchy seriously. "It’s time we started paying attention to our own."
• Donald Trump (Brittanica profile) An overview of his life and first presidency (especially his first term) https://www.britannica.com/event/Ukraine-scandal
---Ukraine Scandal (Brittanica entry) This U.S. political scandal arose in the summer of 2019 from an attempt by Pres. Donald J. Trump to coerce the president of Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Trump’s political rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter for alleged wrongdoing in connection with a Ukrainian energy company. The scandal led the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach Trump in December 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.In December the Judiciary Committee drafted two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress. The articles were adopted in two party-line votes by the entire House on December 18, making Trump the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.
• Trump to declare “illicit” fentanyl “Weapon of Mass Destruction," per draft EO (Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, 3-18-25) The heads of the US Departments of Commerce, Defense, Justice and State received a copy of a draft executive order (EO) likely sometime last week stating that President Trump would be designating “illicit” fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, The Handbasket is first to report.
'The EO may be published as early as next week, the Department of State source tells me, but the timeline isn’t confirmed. The source speculates the purpose is a combination of designating fentanyl cartels as terrorist organizations and creating justification for conducting military operations in Mexico and Canada. They also suspect that it will be used domestically as justification for rounding up homeless encampments and deporting drug users who are not citizens.'
• 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."
• A Great Unraveling Is Underway (Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, 3-11-25)
"If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.
"And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.
"The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed."
---It Isn’t Just Trump. America’s Whole Reputation Is Shot. (David Brooks, NY Times, 3-13-25)
"President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.
"This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist."
• The Return Of The McCarthyite Chill (Andrew Sullivan, 3-14-25) Trump and Vance say they are for free speech. Yeah, right.
"Days after immigration officers arrested a prominent pro-Palestinian campus activist, administrators at Columbia University gathered students and faculty from the journalism school and issued a warning ... “If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” [Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer] told the gathering ... When a Palestinian student objected, the journalism school’s dean, Jelani Cobb, was more direct about the school’s inability to defend international students from federal prosecution.
“Nobody can protect you,” Mr. Cobb said. “These are dangerous times.”
"It’s important to note that this is not about protection from woke professors or ideologically captured deans. It’s protection from direct surveillance by the federal government. The Trump administration has launched a massive, all-of-government, AI-assisted program called “Catch and Revoke,” which will scan every social media comment and anything online they can use to flush out any noncitizen who might be seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or indeed just getting on Marco Rubio’s wrong side."
• Trump administration asks Supreme Court to partly allow birthright citizenship restrictions (AP, WTOP, 3-13-25)
"The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow restrictions on birthright citizenship to partly take effect while legal fights play out.
"The order currently is blocked nationwide. Three federal appeals courts have rejected the administration’s pleas, including one in Massachusetts on Tuesday.
"The order would deny citizenship to those born after Feb. 19 whose parents are in the country illegally. It also forbids U.S. agencies from issuing any document or accepting any state document recognizing citizenship for such children.
"In all, five conservative justices, a majority of the court, have raised concerns in the past about nationwide, or universal, injunctions. But the court has never ruled on the matter.
"Roughly two dozen states, as well as several individuals and groups, have sued over the executive order, which they say violates the Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise of citizenship to anyone born inside the United States.
"The court eventually upheld Trump’s policy, but did not take up the issue of nationwide injunctions. The problem has only gotten worse, Harris told the court on Thursday. Courts issued 15 orders blocking administration actions nationwide in February alone, compared to 14 such orders in the first three years of President Joe Biden’s term, she wrote.
"The heightened pace of activity also reflects how quickly Trump has moved, less than two months in office, to fire thousands of federal workers, upend tens of billions of dollars in foreign and domestic aid, roll back the rights of transgender people and restrict birthright citizenship."
• The Thing That Could Be Trump's Undoing (Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, 3-8-25) President Trump is doing immense long-term damage to the United States by undermining democratic norms, vandalizing the federal government and siding with alleged war criminals in the Kremlin, yet if support for him falls, I doubt it will have anything to do with all this. Rather, it may be … egg prices....in a strange way, what may impede Trump and preserve American democracy is not popular revulsion at the historic damage that he is doing to America but rather alarm at the myriad banal impacts on our daily lives because of Trumpian mismanagement.
Trump’s tariffs, even if partly delayed, presumably will raise consumer prices and hurt the financial markets and thus our retirement savings; they will create a mess of supply chains for manufacturing goods. Historically, Americans have not been very forgiving of presidents who preside over recessions. What’s more, Republicans are now apparently preparing to slash Medicaid to pay for continued tax cuts for the rich.
Elon Musk’s criticism of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” accompanied by Trump’s making false claims of widespread fraud in the program, accompanied by talk of selling Social Security offices, seems even more likely to worry voters. In an effort to prune regulations and the bureaucracy, Trump’s attacks on the federal government are being undertaken with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel.
Cuts in the Federal Aviation Administration and in the National Weather Service and NOAA will make flying less safe; at a time when extreme weather events are becoming more common, it’s bizarre to reduce our ability to predict hurricanes, tornadoes and heat waves.
"In short, Trump-Musk incompetence and recklessness may — just may — discredit the vandals in Washington and rein them in.
• The Price Of Slashing Social Security’s Staff (Howard Gleckman, 2-27-25) "Despite President Trump’s repeated promises that ”we’re not touching Social Security, other than to make it more efficient,” it appears his Administration is planning deep cuts in the program’s administration. And that inevitably will mean trouble for those receiving or applying for benefits."
"Trump and Musk have justified staffing cuts by claiming massive Social Security fraud. They have presented no evidence of widespread fraud, but even if they did, it is hard to see how slashing SSA staff could help reduce it."
• How do Ukrainian soldier fatalities compare with Russia’s? (The Economist, 3-6-25) Russia is losing more troops than its opponent. That makes it a strange time for America to force an unequal peace on Ukraine. DONALD TRUMP appears determined to end the war in Ukraine—and on terms that are strongly in Russia’s favour. He and his vice-president have harangued Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office, warning him that he has no leverage and that he needs a ceasefire or he will have no country left.
---The shame of it (Robert Reich, 3-2-25; But it's not our shame) After Trump and Vance’s disgraceful treatment of President Zelensky on Friday, some of you might feel ashamed of America. You might even feel ashamed to be an American. The proper locus of shame is Trump and Vance. The fundamental choice has not been as stark since World War II: Democracy and freedom, or dictatorship and tyranny. Trump and his sycophants are siding with the latter.
---Trump Drops the Mask (Jonathan Chait, Politics, The Atlantic, 3-10-25) The president’s latest positions on the Russia-Ukraine war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it.
---Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump? (David Remnick, New Yorker, 3-9-25)
The historian Stephen Kotkin analyzes what a President who governs in the style of professional wrestling gets wrong—and right—about an unstable world. "Trump plays good cop with all your strongmen and faux strongmen, and he then has his staff play bad cop with them; and he plays bad cop with all of our allies, our treaty allies, and he has his staff play good cop with them.
"Again, Trump: this is World Wrestling Entertainment. This is television. DOGE is “The Apprentice,” with Musk sitting in temporarily for Trump, firing people. This is a version of government that’s news-cycle-driven, that’s attention-driven, that’s Trump-centric. That’s the reality that you have, some of which is sincere and some of it is reversible, even in sometimes the same news cycle. You work with that—that’s what you have."
• US immigration is creating a mirage of mass deportations on Google search (Dara Kerr, The Guardian, 2-6-25) Thousands of press releases about decade-old enforcement actions topped search results, all updated with a timestamp from after Trump’s inauguration. At first, the immigration lawyer was baffled when she clicked on these seemingly new press releases and they detailed Ice raids from more than a decade ago. So she set to work doing some digital sleuthing and enlisted a friend who is a tech expert to help. What they found leads them to believe that Ice is gaming Google search. “These claims were completely unsubstantiated, with no evidence to support them.”
---‘Panic benefits Ice’: local newsrooms fight back as immigrants face misinformation (Robin Buller, The Guardian, 2-3-25) Mounting anxieties about mass deportations under a second Trump administration are spawning potentially dangerous falsehoods about sweeps and mass arrests. And to stoke fears even further, the administration is spreading its own rumors about sweeps to make the threat appear more immediate and widespread. As rumored raids fuel anxiety about mass deportations, outlets are offering resources and debunking falsehoods.
• The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out. (Michael Schaffer, Politico, 11-15-24)
I quote: 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.
• Trump Turns Homelessness Response Away From Housing, Toward Forced Treatment (Angela Hart, California Healthline, 3-27-25) Trump wants to gut taxpayer-subsidized housing initiatives. He is pushing for a punitive approach that would impose fines and potentially jail time on homeless people. And he wants to mandate sobriety and mental health treatment as the primary homelessness intervention — a stark reversal from Housing First. “Throwing everybody into treatment programs just isn’t an effective strategy. The real problem is we just don’t have enough affordable housing.” Liberal leaders want to maintain existing streams of housing and homelessness funding while expanding shelters and moving people off the streets. Conservatives blame Housing First for the rise in homelessness and are instead pushing for mandatory treatment and cutting housing subsidies.
• 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!
• White House insists Musk cuts to Social Security, Medicare won’t affect benefits (Justine McDaniel, WaPo, 3-11-25) Elon Musk alleged that up to $700 billion in entitlement spending could be “waste and fraud,” raising alarm among Democrats. That figure is much higher than what has been identified by watchdogs.
Musk has previously attacked Social Security, calling it a “Ponzi scheme” and reposting a meme calling people who receive federal benefits “the Parasite Class.” Democrats have warned that those cuts could affect Americans’ ability to collect their benefits and said that further cuts could decimate the system.
• Democracy Is Crumbling. Is Anybody Doing Anything? (Sherilynn Ifill, Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, 2-9-25) Read her piece, for an articulate call to action, which links to some of the the following checkmarks on Trump's-damage-to-do list.
• DOGE redefines ‘fraud’ to defend cutting federal employees, programs (Dan Diamond and Faiz Siddiqui, WaPo 3-7-25) Outside watchdogs and analysts say Trump and Musk are using overly broad claims of fraud to build political support for their plans.
Among the alleged fraudsters targeted by the Trump administration: foreign-aid programs such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, clean-energy groups that received funding from the Biden administration, and organizations that specialize in diversity initiatives.
• Federal judge blocks DOGE from accessing sensitive U.S. Treasury Department material (NPR, 2-8-25) A federal judge early Saturday blocked Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records that contain sensitive personal data such as Social Security and bank account numbers for millions of Americans. The case, filed in federal court in New York City, alleges the Trump administration allowed Musk's team access to the Treasury Department's central payment system in violation of federal law.
---The biggest Ponzi scheme in history (Robert Reich, 3-6-25) In response to Elon Musk’s comment that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” Reich argues, "If you want to see a real Ponzi scheme, look no further than the crypto investments Musk and Trump have hyped."
• Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions (Just Security)
The Tracker is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions.
• Judge pauses Trump order to put USAID employees on administrative leave (Fatma Tanis, Shannon Bond, Goats and Soda, NPR, 2-7-25) The lawsuit accuses Trump of taking "unconstitutional and illegal" actions in trying to shut down the agency, which was created by Congress in 1961. The case brought by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees, which represent foreign service officers and other USAID employees, is intended to halt the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the agency and freeze most foreign aid.
---Kansas’ Moran, Davids sound alarm on delay of USAID food aid to starving people worldwide (Tim Carpenter, Yahoo, 2-7-25) President Donald Trump said he wanted to shut down USAID, which served as the federal government’s primary provider of development and humanitarian aid worldwide. U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said there was a moral imperative for the U.S. government to deliver international food aid to starving people. Senator Moran said a freeze on federal funding and change at the U.S. Agency for International Development left $340 million in lifesaving food grown in the United States sitting at domestic ports awaiting delivery to locations around the world where people were starving.
---USAID’s History Shows Decades of Good Work on Behalf of America’s Global Interests (Christian Ruth, Bunk History, 3-5-25) USAID started in the 1960s as a way to offset the spread of communism. Since then, it has had various other soft-power benefits for the US.
Reuters reported that a senior USAID official wrote in a March 2 internal memo that a yearlong pause in USAID’s work on health, food and agriculture in the world’s poorest countries would raise malaria deaths by 40%, to between 71,000 and 166,000 annually. It would also result in an increase of between 28% and 32% in tuberculosis cases, among other negative effects.
From a foreign policy standpoint, USAID’s greatest contribution to American influence abroad has always been its intangible soft-power effects. It helps to create an image of the U.S. as a positive, helpful world power worth partnering with.
• DOGE sued to follow the law or cease operations (Citizens for Ethics) The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is operating in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Public Health Association, American Federation of Teachers, Minority Veterans of America, VoteVets Action Fund, Center for Auto Safety, Inc., and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), represented by Democracy Forward and CREW. The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the establishment of DOGE is unlawful, and for the court to force DOGE to comply with the transparency, ethics, records retention and equal representation required under FACA.
"Currently, DOGE is operating unchecked, without authorization or funding from Congress and is led by unelected billionaires who are not representative of ordinary Americans. DOGE representatives have reportedly already been speaking with agency officials throughout the federal government, and communication is allegedly taking place on Signal, a messaging app known for its auto-delete features."
• 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.
• 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.”
• Trump’s E.P.A. Seeks to Deny Science That Americans Discovered (Bill McKibben, New Yorker, 2-27-25) Widespread news reports said that the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, has recommended the reversal of the long-standing federal position that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the public. Trump has said that climate change is a “hoax” and a “scam.” But the proposed reversal would be truly and deeply disgraceful—not just climate denial but basic-science denial. It’s in this country that scientists, funded by or working for the government, came to understand the role of carbon in our atmosphere.
The Trump Administration is resistant to science in general—an unvaccinated school-aged child died in Texas on Wednesday from the measles, even as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was pausing a new COVID-vaccine project.
---EPA pauses Biden’s new chemical disaster protections (Amudalat Ajasa, WaPo, 3-7-25) In a court filing, the agency said it would reassess a new rule that strengthens safeguards at almost 12,000 chemical plants. The EPA asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to pause legal challenges to safety regulations introduced during the Biden administration while it “undertakes a new rulemaking,” without specifying how it would change them. The stricter standards established under the Biden administration were set to go into effect next year and be fully implemented by May 2027.
“We’ve been here before, and the losers are always the families, workers and first responders,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “The EPA should be implementing its chemical disaster safety, not rolling it back.”
• The anti-Trump resistance begins to wake in earnest (WaPo, 2-26-25) After an initial period of stunned confusion, protesters are packing meetings, states are suing, and Democrats are preparing for a budget showdown.
• Donald Trump, Reprised (New Yorker, 11-24) What his return to the Presidency reveals about America. George Saunders on our poisoned wells, Rachel Maddow on crooks and thieves,Timothy Snyder on Trump’s fascism, Jia Tolentino on the gender war, Jane Mayer on the coming decades for the Supreme Court, Kelefa Sanneh on Trump and race, Lorrie Moore on the source of Trump’s continued appeal, and more.
• Trump’s Putinization of America (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 2-20-25) It’s not just in foreign policy that the President is turning Russia’s way. In 2018, at a press conference in Helsinki, Trump announced that he accepted Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia did not intervene in American elections, despite our own intelligence agencies’ conclusion to the contrary. Trump’s embrace of America’s adversary (Russia) and rejection of its ally (Zelensky) has been so swift and complete that even top Kremlin officials are astonished.
• 'Really scary to me': Thomas Friedman on Trump admiring autocratic Russia over democratic Ukraine (Morning Joe, MSNBC, 3-7-25) The New York Times' Thomas Friedman joins Morning Joe to discuss U.S. and Ukrainian officials meeting next week in Saudi Arabia and Trump's public remarks and attitude toward Ukraine and Russia.
• How Trump’s Federal-Aid Fiasco Is Testing the Separation of Powers (Tyler Foggatt, New Yorker, 1-30-25) “We are in an era of a real reckoning with the relationship of the President to the other branches of government,” the Harvard Law professor and New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen says.
• The Unchecked Authority of Trump’s Immigration Orders (Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker, 1-24-25) The President is recasting migration as a form of “invasion,” broadening his already expansive powers and making anyone in the U.S. who’s undocumented a potential target.
• Killing People Through Corruption: More Examples from Aviation. (James Fallows, Breaking the News, 3-3-25) Some of the assault on governing institutions comes from ignorance and zeal. Some is just corrupt. Together this will lead to deaths.
NOAA and its National Weather Service have produced ever-more precise tools to help aviators avoid these dangers. Now the Doge team has decided that their staffs must be cut. Airlines in the US are [or were] still the safest way you can travel. But the odds are not as good as they were six weeks ago, and they will get worse.
Starlink for the FAA is dangerous and corrupt. It is a rush to judgment, in a system that prizes cautious deliberation. And it is naked self-dealing, favoring a company controlled by Elon Musk.
Defunding NOAA and the National Weather Service is dangerous and corrupt. Among other consequences, it jeopardizes probably the biggest single advance in aviation safety, which is ever more-accurate weather awareness. Ongoing cuts at the FAA will turn the aviation infrastructure from something we take for granted into something we need to worry about.
• Trump Pulls Secret Service Protection From Hunter and Ashley Biden (Shawn McCreesh, NY Times, 3-17-25) The president posted on social media that Hunter Biden would lose his security detail “effective immediately” and also identified the country he was vacationing in. Trump has been on a revenge tour since he returned to the Oval Office, and he has several times exerted his power to revoke Secret Service protection from perceived enemies. His animus toward the Biden family is in part what motivated the former president to pardon his son.
• Schiff Destroys Donald Trump, Live on Jimmy Kimmel (YouTube, 17 min.) "What would John McCain do?" We so desperately need a John McCain in the Senate right now.
• Trump Administration Live Updates: Chief Justice Rebukes Calls for Judge’s Impeachment After Trump Remark (New York Times Live, 3-18-25) Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a rare public statement after President Trump assailed Judge James E. Boasberg in a social media post. Hours after Mr. Trump referred to the judge, James E. Boasberg, as a “Radical Left Lunatic” in a social media post and called for his removal. Judge Boasberg had ordered the administration to provide more information about deportation flights that carried more than 200 migrants to El Salvador on Saturday, as he sought to determine whether the White House had violated a court order. Justice Department lawyers only partly complied: They asserted that no flights left after the order was placed in the docket, but refused to provide departure times.
• ‘Frankly Insane’: Trump’s Plan to Ship Migrants to Guantanamo Could Quickly Collapse (Ben Fox, Politico 2-5-25) President Donald Trump plans to send up to 30,000 migrants to the detention facility. Guantanamo has been used to hold people who are coming to the United States. It’s never been used as a place to send people who’ve been in the United States, especially those who have been lawfully in the United States at some point. A reality check from a top lawyer who knows Guantanamo. “Shortsighted policymakers think they found a solution, and they have ended up creating a problem for which they have no exit strategy. That’s exactly what they’re doing again.” (Stopped in its tracks?)
• Judge Blocks Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Nationwide (Campbell Robertson and Mattathias Schwartz, NY Times, 2-5-25) The nationwide injunction, from a Maryland case, is more permanent than last month’s restraining order from a judge in Seattle. The Judge's preliminary injunction indefinitely blocked President Trump’s attempt to unilaterally eliminate automatic U.S. citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil.
• Federal judge blocks DOGE from accessing sensitive U.S. Treasury Department material (Associated Press, 2-8-25) Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, was created to discover and eliminate what the Trump administration has deemed to be wasteful government spending. "This unelected group, led by the world's richest man, is not authorized to have this information, and they explicitly sought this unauthorized access to illegally block payments that millions of Americans rely on, payments for health care, child care and other essential programs," said New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office filed the lawsuit, said DOGE's access to the Treasury Department's data raises security problems and the possibility for an illegal freeze in federal funds.
• CNN's 5 Things AM (3-4-25) "The Trump administration is working to develop a cryptocurrency reserve, part of the president's pledge to make the US the "Crypto Capital of the World." However, some prominent tech and crypto leaders have criticized the plan to direct the government to stockpile bitcoin, ethereum and three other tokens. Analysts say it has raised obvious questions of conflict of interest, considering that the company that owns Trump's social media network recently made clear its plans to invest $250 billion in the cryptocurrency industry. Other critics have likened Trump's plan to a government bailout of crypto, an asset class that just experienced its worst trading month in two years. Bitcoin, a market bellwether, fell 18% in February — its steepest drop since June 2022."
---Even the crypto bros don’t love Trump’s proposed crypto reserve (Allison Morrow, CNN, 3-4-25)
---The crypto president has some ideas for your tax dollars (CNN) The company that owns Trump’s social media network, and where Trump is the largest shareholder, recently made clear its plans to invest $250 billion in the cryptocurrency industry.
• FBI agents sue over Justice Dept. effort to ID employees involved in Trump-related investigations (Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer, AP News, 2-4-25) "FBI agents who participated in investigations related to President Donald Trump have sued over Justice Department efforts to develop a list of employees involved in those inquiries that they fear could be a precursor to mass firings.
"Two lawsuits, filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington on behalf of anonymous agents, demand an immediate halt to the collection and potential dissemination of names of investigators who participated in probes of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. One of the complaints says agents were also asked to fill out surveys about their participation in the investigation into Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida."
• Protesters in cities across the US rally against Trump’s policies, Project 2025 and Elon Musk (MORGAN LEE, AP News, 2-5-25) Demonstrators gathered in cities across the U.S. on Wednesday to protest the Trump administration’s early actions, decrying everything from the president’s immigration crackdown to his rollback of transgender rights and a proposal to forcibly transfer Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Websites and accounts across social media issued calls for action, with messages such as “reject fascism” and “defend our democracy.” The protests were a result of a movement that has organized online under the hashtags #buildtheresistance and #50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, one day.
• Two Transgender Girls, Six Federal Agencies. How Trump Is Trying to Pressure Maine Into Obedience.
(Callie Ferguson and Erin Rhoda, Bangor Daily News, and Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, 3-11-25)
Trump vs. Maine: After an exchange between Maine’s governor and President Donald Trump over transgender girls competing in girls’ sports, several federal agencies launched investigations.
University Funding Halted: A federal agency investigating the University of Maine System has not yet issued any findings. But on Tuesday, the university said the agency had halted research funding.
Big Response, Few Students: Only two transgender girls in Maine are competing this school year. Six federal agencies now have their sights on the state.
• Amid Concern Over Trump Order, New Yorkers Rally to Support Trans Youth (Alyce McFaddenNell Gallogly and Wesley Parnell, NY Times, 2-8-25) Thousands of protesters in Union Square called for action against Trump's executive order that threatens to withhold federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care.
• Trump threatens funding cut to colleges allowing 'illegal protests' (Kanishka Singh and Jonathan Allen, Reuters, 3-4-25) Trump says federal funding will stop if protests happen. 'Agitators' will be imprisoned or deported, he says. Comments repeat ideas he has expressed with previous orders.
• The Trump administration is said to have dropped a lawsuit over emissions of a toxic chemical in Louisiana. Lisa Friedman, NY Times, 3-3-25) The 2023 lawsuit was among several enforcement actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of poor and minority communities that have disproportionately borne the brunt of toxic pollution.
• ALA statement on White House assault on the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Press release, American Library Association, 3-15-25)
"To dismiss some 75 committed workers and the mission of an agency that advances opportunity and learning is to dismiss the aspirations and everyday needs of millions of Americans. And those who will feel that loss most keenly live in rural communities.
"As seedbeds of literacy and innovation, our nation’s 125,000 public, school, academic and special libraries deserve more, not less support. Libraries of all types translate 0.003% of the federal budget into programs and services used in more than 1.2 billion in-person patron visits every year, and many more virtual visits."
• Federal Employees Protest Musk’s ‘Fork in the Road’ Offer With Spoon Emojis (Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, NY times, 2-5-25) Some federal employees have a new symbol for their resistance to President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s radical overhaul of the U.S. government: a spoon. Last week, in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” the administration urged federal workers to consider resigning from their posts and said they would be paid through September — a bid to rapidly shrink the size of the work force.
• Trump orders a plan to dismantle the Education Department while keeping some core functions (AP, 3-20-25)
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday calling for the dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, advancing a campaign promise to take apart an agency that’s been a longtime target of conservatives.
Trump has derided the Education Department as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. However, completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979. Republicans said they will introduce legislation to achieve that, while Democrats have quickly lined up to oppose the idea.
Trump said his administration will close the department beyond its “core necessities,” preserving its responsibilities for Title I funding for low-income schools, Pell grants and money for children with disabilities.
The White House said earlier Thursday the department will continue to manage federal student loans, but the order appears to say the opposite. It says the Education Department doesn’t have the staff to oversee its $1.6 trillion loan portfolio and “must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.”
• Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American, 3-23-25) "Fifteen years ago today, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, into law. In addition to making healthcare more affordable, the law eliminated lifetime limits on benefits, prohibits discrimination because of pre-existing conditions, and allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they are 26.The ACA has increased the number of Americans covered by health insurance and slowed the rise of health care costs across the board.
"Republicans immediately vowed to get rid of the ACA because they object to government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, and promotion of infrastructure. Such a government, Republicans argue, is essentially socialism: it prohibits individuals’ ability to control their businesses without government interference, and it redistributes wealth from the haves to the have-nots through taxes."
• Democratic Lawmakers Denied Entry to the Department of Education (NY Times, 2-8-25) In a striking display of the limits being placed on congressional authority in the first weeks of the new administration, several Democratic lawmakers were denied entry to the U.S. Department of Education on Friday.
“Get out of the way,” Representative Maxine Waters of California told a man blocking more than a dozen House Democrats from the doors at the department’s Washington offices. The standoff follows a campaign promise by President Trump to dismantle and eventually shut down the Department of Education, which he has characterized as an agency injecting extreme ideology on race and gender into the nation’s public schools. “We will move everything back to the states, where it belongs,” he said during one campaign speech.
• 10 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency (Robert Reich, video, on Facebook).
• An intriguing analysis has been circulating online regarding the psychological aspects of Zelensky’s meeting with Trump and Vance, conducted using ChatGPT. (Yuliia Vyshnevska's Post on Facebook)
• Do read: Democracy is Crumbling. Is Anybody Doing Anything? Sherrilyn Ifill's call to action.
Scroll to the bottom of her post for suggested names of organizations to follow and/or support.