Kristi Noem Combats Claimed Antisemitism by Trying to Deport 61 Israeli Students, and Other Tales of Harvard Derangement

Donald Trump is making American troops — and Americans generally — less safe from biohazards as part of his attempt to destroy Harvard University.

Among the details included in Harvard’s motion for summary judgement submitted yesterday in the university’s lawsuit challenging Trump’s effort to defund the university (there are two lawsuits — the one regarding Trump’s campaign to retaliate because Harvard refused to cede its independence, and the one responding to Kristi Noem’s denial of visa for Harvard students) is a description of how Pete Hegseth’s agency cut off DOD grants without informing DARPA that the “top performing team” on an effort to detect and deploy countermeasures to biohazards had been arbitrarily and immediately cut off.

The motion quotes the effort DARPA’s director of contracting made to reverse the cuts, to no avail.

Harvard is currently the top performing team on the AMPHORA program. Inadequate knowledge of the biological threat landscape poses grave and immediate harm to national security. Development of critical technologies that enables bio surveillance and biocollection in austere, field forward locations bolsters national security and warfighter safety and lethality by enabling medical countermeasure development to new and emerging threats and provides biological threat intelligence to the deployed warfighter. This technology is significantly outpacing the state-of-the art and provides a novel leap-ahead capability to the force. Harvard’s effort is at a pivotal juncture in Phase 1 as they are just starting the microfluidic experiments that will give first indications of whether the program goal is achievable. They are also a critical integrator of multiple technologies that enable this effort and could not be readily reproduced.

Pete Hegseth just did what Trump told him to do — cut off Harvard — with no consideration of how it undermines his claimed effort to make military more lethal.

National security took a back seat to Trump’s maniacal effort to get Harvard to bow down to his demand to turn the country’s most storied institution of higher learning into a bureaucracy replicating MAGAt ideology.

Harvard’s motion mentions — and a declaration from Harvard’s Vice Provost for Research, John Shaw, lists far more — of the other benefits to American taxpayers that Trump arbitrarily took away. As a breast cancer survivor, I would personally benefit from a $7 million grant supporting research “to find and describe early changes in breast tissue in women that may be at a higher risk of breast cancer.” As someone who lost a parent to Parkinson’s, I might personally benefit from efforts to “identify[] numerous modifiable risk factors for Parkinson’s disease.” We all would benefit from a $2 million effort to better understand resistance to antibiotics awarded by the (second) Trump administration.

Gone.

All of those benefits and many more have been stolen from taxpayers who’ve already sunk billions into this research.

And yet, with few exceptions (an important one is a NYT story, cited in the motion, describing how the cuts will disrupt efforts to prevent veteran suicides and otherwise improve healthcare for veterans) this is not how the story of Trump’s emotional tantrum against Harvard is being told.

Harvard Digs In for Battle, but Trump’s Blows Are Landing,” WSJ described a boxing match when reporting the visa ban for Harvard students.

Why is Trump going after Harvard?” WaPo promised to answer, instead explaining, “Here’s how the attacks have escalated,” even while treating wrestling booster Linda McMahon’s claimed pretense of fighting antisemitism in good faith. Their timeline missed several important details that show up in Harvard’s own timeline (submitted with the motion for summary judgement): notably:

  • Harvard did a bunch of things to address antisemitism on campus
  • Plans announced by Task Force on Antisemitism Senior Counsel, Leo Terrell, way back on October 24, 2024, to defund Harvard
  • The Trump Administration’s persistent disinterest in the things Harvard had done to address antisemitism
  • The Trump Administration’s persistent silence about any single instance of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus — the kind of due process to which Harvard would respond on Title VI

Having not presented the pretext of antisemitism as such, WaPo doesn’t ask how revoking the visas all foreign students at Harvard, including those of 61 Israeli students, combats antisemitism.

Politico similarly glosses the significance of all this in what is mostly a process story of Trump’s efforts to “brainstorm new Harvard measures.” Trump is seeking to “bring the storied institution to heel.” The Administration will need to “get more creative to keep squeezing the school.” When it contemplates the “Trump administration’s broader efforts to reshape not just American government but the institutions that have long surrounded it,” Politico did not mention how that effort included an ignorant effort to defund Politico subscriptions, to say nothing of Trump’s other assaults on the press.

NYT has been reporting a series of “escalations.” “[T]he administration appeared eager to escalate one of its civil investigations into a criminal inquiry,” Mike Schmidt and Michael Bender described a manufactured outrage that would backfire if it were criminally charged. The fight escalated, Mike Schmidt said in an interview. This was a sharp escalation, NYT set up another Schmidt interview. Cutting off visas was a major escalation, Schmidt and Michael Bender described. “Trump Administration Escalates Harvard Feud With New Justice Dept. Investigation,” another headline blared. Mike Schmidt, who always seems to reinforce Trump’s power, keeps insisting that, “Harvard Has No Way Out,” without thinking through what that would mean for the US, if true.

Schmidt apparently can’t imagine a political setback so significant — a backlash from taxpayers about the value Trump took from them, a value that Schmidt doesn’t consider — that Trump would realize he has to fund Harvard research just like he has to keep Air Traffic Controllers on the job.

Politico, at least, quotes one of several administration sources describing that the mere futility of Trump’s efforts when public opinion swung to Harvard when Trump revoked the student visas (it made no mention that that included visas for Israelis).

“We’re fighting a losing battle,” one of the administration officials said, acknowledging that the university has the narrative upper hand when it comes to the effort to revoke Harvard’s student visas. “We’ve taken one of the most evil institutions and made them the victim.”

But there remains no question about the way Trump has deliberately hurt Americans — not just elite Americans whose kids go to Harvard, or poorer Americans, whose Harvard tuition foreign students subsidize, but the Americans who benefit from the cancer cures and biohazard warnings and ways to combat antibiotic resistance.

Dan Drezner, from his perch just down the road from Harvard at Tufts, argues that Schmidt’s pessimism about Harvard is all wrong, that Harvard is winning this battle.

Over the weekend, however, some news stories have come out that reinforce a few points about how these attacks are going.

  • The administration has already shot its wad in going after Harvard and has very little left in its cupboard.
  • This anti-Harvard jihad is not going exactly as planned, either legally or politically.
  • The Trump White House has now reached the same point in its dealing with Harvard that it previously reached in its trade negotiations with multiple countries: desperate for a victory that may never come.

This is not to say that Trump is not wreaking carnage. He’s wreaking a tremendous amount of carnage. What he is not doing, however, is winning.

Part of Drezner’s optimism is that academics, both within Harvard and across the institutions, have discovered collective action.

What Klein’s story omits is that after a stumbling start at collective action, the administration’s actions have galvanized a lot of universities to talk to each other about response strategies. The fundamental lesson to be learned from Trump’s actions to date is that no matter how a university responds, Trump will be coming after them anyway. That comes through loud and clear in all the coverage. And if university leadership knows this, they will choose standing their ground over backing down every day of the week.

From my own limited view of how higher education is responding, I see discussions about how to respond to further pressure from the Trump administration. I also see that none of the response strategies on the table include “cut a deal.”

Where I depart from Drezner’s optimism, and concede Schmidt has a point, is that unless this senseless battle imposes a cost on Trump, Harvard will ultimately lose, American taxpayers will ultimately lose the sunk costs in research and jobs that Trump decided to take away. Because until those resisting Trump — from the lawyers to the universities to the local nonprofits and yes even the media outlets — actually win the underlying battle, Trump remains in a position to take away those cancer cures.

And that — not Wharton grad Trump’s claim of Harvard snobbery and not the billionaire’s concerns about elitism and sure as fuck not a concern about antisemitism — is why Trump keeps doubling down.

Harvard has the means and the facts to win the legal cases before it. Without even telling the story of the cancer cures Trump took away, Harvard also has the means to look like less of an asshole than Trump.

But that’s a different thing from turning Harvard’s fight — and the collective action that has arisen — into a political win.

This is not about universities. Or — as I tried to visualize last week — universities are not what people think they are. Universities do a lot of the same kind of things Elon Musk does, but with nowhere near the grift, corruption, and — yes — the antisemitism.

This is not a boxing match, a wrestling match, or a series of escalations.

This is about a broader fight for civil society.

Perhaps journalists, from their very privileged position within civil society, will be the last to figure this out, to understand that all those escalations against Harvard are really inseparable from the — thus far — more successful escalations against the press.

But what is going on is a two-bit dictator is willing to take things away from the American people all so he can lord over an entity that dared stand up to him.

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Alina Habba Back in Trouble for (Allegedly) Lying While Lawyering

One reason — I laid out a week ago — I was interested in the ways that Trump’s DOJ keeps getting caught in false claims, is because they create, “the possibility that these prosecutions will backfire, not just by creating sympathetic political martyrs, but also by further exposing [Pam] Bondi and her top aides as liars violating legal ethics.”

Which Ras Baraka is attempting to facilitate by suing Alina Habba for false arrest and malicious prosecution.

There are several key details about the lawsuit that might sustain it beyond what would normally be prosecutorial immunity, at least far enough to get discovery (discovery that might also sink the prosecution against LaMonica McIver).

First, Baraka showed that even before she was sworn in, Habba made clear that she would abuse the office for political gain.

13. Days before being sworn in, Habba announced on Fox News that she would be “investigating” New Jersey’s Democratic Governor and his appointed Attorney General, claiming New Jersey’s lawful Immigrant Trust Directive is thwarting Trump’s immigration policies. Habba claimed that New Jersey’s Governor and Attorney General were interfering with her effort to take “all criminals out of the country” — apparently except for her former client, convicted felon Donald Trump.

Along with including all the other false claims made about Baraka (an interview Habba did with Fox, a CNN interview DHS propagandist Tricia McLaughlin did, as well as false claims in the arrest affidavit), he included the tweet that Habba sent from her personal Xitter account even before Baraka was charged.

And he described the exceptional efforts to exacerbate Baraka’s arrest, not just by arresting him rather than citing him, but by subjecting him twice to fingerprinting and a mugshot.

One thing Baraka doesn’t mention, however, is the imminent primary for New Jersey’s gubernatorial race. He Baraka was well behind in polls before his arrest, but he will be able to make a plausible claim that the arrest harmed his chances — all the more so given that Pam Bondi’s own DOJ dismissed the charges against Eric Adams precisely because of the damage it would allegedly do to him in the upcoming primary.

As Liz Dye noted on Bluesky, Baraka is represented by the same lawyer, Nancy Smith, who forced Habba into a settlement on behalf of a Bedminster staffer whom Habba tricked into a hush payment in conjunction with being sexuallly harassed. She knows Habba’s tricks well.

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Hard Lines on Legal Capitulation

To succeed, authoritarians must weaken or co-opt civil society, those spheres of society via which people form social ties independent of government.

That’s what Trump has been trying to do with his attacks on universities, the press, and non-governmental organizations, among other targets.

Businesses — small and large — are an important subset of civil society, both because so much local, national, and international power is concentrated there, but also because corporations often favor certain trappings of authoritarianism, particularly if it comes (as Trump’s does) with a promise to let corporations commit crimes.

Businesses are often the easiest corners of civil society for budding authoritarians to co-opt.

Trump has attempted to co-opt businesses by trading thinly-disguised bribes for favorable government assistance, whether in the form of closing investigations into illegal business practices, approval for consolidation, or massive government contracts. These bribes have a lasting value for Trump, because they serve to corrupt businesses as an ongoing process, locking in a commitment to succeed not by competition, but by tribute. Businesses that buy into Trump’s corrupt quid pro quo will have a difficult time ever freeing themselves from it.

This has been a particularly useful tool with media corporations. While ABC continues to do important journalism in the wake of Disney’s capitulation, there’s a tacit understanding that Trump can repeat his coercion if future reporting really bothers him, and CBS has all but sacrificed its journalistic independence in advance of the expected Paramount settlement. WaPo’s plight in the face of Jeff Bezos’ obeisance to Trump is even more stark.

This dynamic is one reason why right wing opposition to Trump’s tariffs is so important: the tariffs are so destructive that at least some right wingers were and are willing to confront Trump publicly on them (and the rest of the business community is no doubt cheering silently from cowardly perches in executive suites).

And this dynamic is why I find WSJ’s report on the evolving response to Trump’s attempt to cow Big Law so interesting.

The entire piece presents a curious narrative arc, describing the stories that capitulating firms tell themselves to excuse their choice.

At Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, managing partner Pat Quinn grew emotional when he announced to fellow partners that their firm—the oldest in New York—had reached a deal for peace with the Trump administration. Days later, in a firmwide meeting, Quinn said Cadwalader’s leadership had strongly considered fighting the Trump administration but ultimately elected to reach a deal out of a sense of duty to the firm and its clients, according to people familiar with his remarks.

[snip]

Firms that struck deals hoped to find solidarity in numbers. The country’s largest firm, Kirkland & Ellis, which had about $9 billion in revenue last year, lobbied its peers to sign deals.

Some of this may be denial or cowardice. The WSJ specifically notes that Paul Weiss’ Brad Karp, who serves as a kind of villain in the piece, is “a longtime Democratic donor.” Given its longstanding right wing political posture, Kirkland’s pitch for solidarity in capitulation might be a corrupt bid to support authoritarianism.

As in all of these stories, GOP firm Jones Day is not mentioned.

The story contrasts that capitulation from Paul Weiss and Kirkland and others with examples of general counsels — Citadel appears in a splashy lede, and Oracle, Microsoft, McDonalds, and Morgan Stanley are named among ten or eleven other companies — that are specifically seeking out law firms that stood up to Trump, because they view that as indication that they’ll take a hard line in negotiations for their business.

At least 11 big companies are moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving—or intend to give—more business to firms that have been targeted but refused to strike deals, according to general counsels at those companies and other people familiar with those decisions.

Among them are technology giant Oracle, investment bank Morgan Stanley, an airline and a pharmaceutical company. Microsoft expressed reservations about working with a firm that struck a deal, and another such firm stopped representing McDonald’s in a case a few months before a scheduled trial.

In interviews, general counsels expressed concern about whether they could trust law firms that struck deals to fight for them in court and in negotiating big deals if they weren’t willing to stand up for themselves against Trump. The general counsel of a manufacturer of medical supplies said that if firms facing White House pressure “don’t have a hard line,” they don’t have any line at all.

In other words, the story portrays a very real spectrum of response to Trump’s threat, but a spectrum that may be shifting towards resistance to Trump.

Which is why two anecdotes at the end of the 1,900-word story are of such interest.

WSJ describes the role of Sullivan & Cromwell’s Robert Giuffra, in the seemingly conflicted role of representing Trump on two appeals at the same time as he negotiated Paul Weiss’ epic capitulation. Purportedly in an effort to tamp down objections to his role within the firm, Giuffra outsourced his own agency to judges who would block the attacks. These attacks on law firms are “likely unconstitutional,” he reportedly explained, but leave that for the judges to determine (this is precisely the stance that Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins has adopted towards Trump’s usurpation of her role).

At Sullivan & Cromwell, some lawyers have bristled at the role that co-chair Robert Giuffra played in facilitating a deal for Trump to drop an executive order against rival firm Paul Weiss. Giuffra, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, participated by phone in an Oval Office discussion with the Paul Weiss leader, who was there to work out a deal.

Giuffra is representing Trump in two New York appeals—one of them a challenge to his conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case. Giuffra told his partners that taking on the cases would give the firm strong ties to the new administration.

Trying to quell discontent within his own firm, Giuffra told partners at an April meeting that he believed the orders were likely unconstitutional and would be blocked by judges, and that he hoped the White House would stop issuing them, according to people familiar with his remarks. White House aides said they weren’t aware of his opposition.

The story is full of anonymous sourcing, hiding even the identity of at least six companies that are moving business to the targeted firms. Some, but not all, of that can be attributed to protecting privileged relationships. The rest is likely testament that even the companies seeking out firms willing to stand up to Trump want to avoid antagonizing the president. Hilariously, though, WSJ informed the White House of Giuffra’s opposition to these attacks, which may undermine the stated purpose — securing strong ties to the White House — of his role in these negotiations, and may heighten the discomfort with his role at Sullivan & Cromwell.

Which is how we arrive at the final two paragraphs of the story.

The second-to-last paragraph attributes the logic and authorship of the Executive Orders to Stephen Miller, where so much of Trump’s authoritarianism arises.

Trump remains interested in the orders, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller and his allies want to keep the threats of more executive orders on the table because they think it dissuades the best lawyers from representing critics of the administration. Miller has repeatedly complained that some of the country’s top lawyers took on lawsuits against the Trump administration in the first term, which he and other Trump advisers view as stymying the agenda of a democratically elected president.

The White House’s appetite for a fight with the legal industry appears to have waned. There hasn’t been a new executive order since early April.

Miller (who started an NGO designed to fight liberal policies, especially those of Joe Biden) complained when top lawyers fought Trump in the first term, which WSJ credulously parrots amounts to thwarting a democratically-elected President.

And so, WSJ describes, Miller and “his allies” (although both Ryan Barber and Josh Dawsey are bylined on this report, it doesn’t mention their past scoop about Boris Epshteyn’s role in brokering the capitulation deals) want to keep alive the threat of such orders, which have been soundly rejected by Obama appointee Beryl Howell and George W Bush appointees John Bates and Richard Leon. They want to sustain that threat because they imagine that it’ll dissuade precisely the lawyers who are finding it is good for business to show you’ll take a hard line to defend yourself.

That may true in some cases, at least for politically exposed entities, as WaPo describes. Corporations will find legal representation, but migrants and trans people may have a harder time doing so.

In spite of the described ongoing commitment to this attack from Miller (and “his allies”), WSJ ends this remarkable story with the observation that Trump has not issued any new such orders. It doesn’t mention that, 31 days of a 60-day appeal window after Howell’s ruling later, Trump has also not (yet) appealed any of the judges’ orders rejecting these EOs, not even the part — the part stripping security clearances — most ripe for appeal.

Perhaps they’re waiting for the fourth case, Susman Godfrey’s challenge currently pending before Biden appointee Judge Loren AliKhan. Or perhaps people smarter about the law than Miller (and unnamed allies like Epshteyn) may have noticed that these orders risk undermining Executive authority and create an acute ongoing legal risk, particularly if Democrats were to win one or both houses of Congress at midterms.

In rejecting these orders, all three judges pointed to Trump’s flipflop on the Paul Weiss order to adopt a maximal ruling against Trump.

Leon did so in adopting WilmerHale’s request to treat the entire order, including the security clearance restriction, as a unified whole:

The President’s treatment of the Paul Weiss Order underscores the unified nature of the Order. The Paul Weiss Order largely tracks the WilmerHale Order, with a Background section and similar operative provisions. See generally Paul Weiss Order. When Paul Weiss struck a deal with the President, he rescinded the Paul Weiss Order in full, citing the firm’s “remarkable change of course.” Compl. ¶¶ 102–03; Paul Weiss Rescission Order. The President’s treatment of the Paul Weiss Order shows that he “intended” these Executive Orders “to stand or fall as a whole.” See Minn. v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, 526 U.S. 172, 173 (1999) (finding that an Executive Order was designed “to stand or fall as a whole” because it “embodied a single, coherent policy”).

And both Howell…

While the Paul, Weiss Revocation Order summarized that firm’s agreement to, inter alia, “adopt[] a policy of political neutrality with respect to client selection and attorney hiring; tak[e] on a wide range of pro bono matters representing the full political spectrum; commit[] to merit-based hiring, promotion, and retention . . .; dedicat[e] the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services during [President Trump’s] term in office . . .; and other similar initiatives,” none of these agreedupon policy or practice changes appear to explain or address how any national security concerns sufficient to warrant the Paul, Weiss EO could have changed so rapidly. Id. § 1, 90 Fed. Reg. at 13685. The speed of the reversal and the rationale provided in the Paul, Weiss Revocation Order, which focused only on agreements to advance policy initiatives of the Trump Administration, see id., further support the conclusion that national security considerations are not a plausible explanation for Section 2.

[snip]

The fact that Paul, Weiss quickly negotiated a deal, including an agreement to provide “the equivalent of $40 million” in free legal work, rather than face the potential injuries of the similar Executive Order targeting that firm, see Paul, Weiss Revocation Order, 90 Fed. Reg. at 13685, demonstrates the coercive power of such targeting by the Trump Administration.

… And Bates did so to reach the normally unassailable presidential authority to govern security clearances:

And if any doubt remains as to the sincerity of the invocation of national security, take a look at the Paul Weiss saga. Paul Weiss’s executive order imposed the same tailored process on its employees’ security clearances. See First Paul Weiss E.O. § 2. What it took to escape that process—denouncing a former partner, changing client selection and hiring practices, and pledging pro bono work to the President’s liking—had not even a glancing relationship to national security.

Put simply, this blunderbuss of an order does not engage in the sort of “legitimate consideration of speech,” Reichle v. Howards, 566 U.S. 658, 668 (2012), that might sometimes be necessary to keep classified information in safe hands. Rather than ensuring that national secrets remain with those who will keep them, Section 2’s process “seek[s] to leverage” the Executive’s control over security clearances as a way to change speech. See Agency for Int’l Dev. v. All. for Open Soc’y Int’l, 570 U.S. 205, 214–15 (2013). Section 2, in other words, is about using another lever in the President’s arsenal to extinguish speech he dislikes. Cf. id. at 218 (“This case is not about the Government’s ability to enlist the assistance of those with whom it already agrees. It is about compelling a grant recipient to adopt a particular belief as a condition of funding.”). The First Amendment forbids that sort of speech manipulation by the government, even in an arguably national security-related setting.

These judges — particularly Howell, with her description of coercion — are describing bribery, of that thinly veiled quid pro quo used with direct payments now laid bare in the quick flip flop with Paul Weiss. The risk that Trump’s flipflop on Paul Weiss could be used to prove bribery, and the risk it poses to law firms going forward, was predicted in an amicus from ethics professors.

None of that, mind you, appears in the WSJ story.

WSJ is describing something simpler: the value proposition in hiring a law firm willing to stand up to a bully.

It’s just one response among many, even among many from corporations. But that value proposition has had the effect of getting key corporations to defend civil society.

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But Who Gets Sammy Alito in the Divorce?

Since I was traveling, I’m a bit late to  Trump’s fantastic 510-word Truth Social post, in which he calls Leonard Leo a sleazebag and blames the Federalist Society that Trump-appointed judges — including US Court of International Trade Judge Timothy Reif — have ruled against him and even suggests that people he calls “Radical Left Judges” are in cahoots with “very bad people” who by context must include Leo. 🤡🤡🤡

Simply fantastic.

I’ve annotated the post to unpack the treatise, which reads as if Peter Navarro and Mike Davis got together, chomped a bunch of hallucinogens, and stole the keys to Trump’s Truth Social account.

The key points are:

  • The tariffs are — Trump lies, repeatedly — super duper good!
  • The US Court of International Trade ruled they’re illegal, but the Federal Court of Appeals (which disappears later in this screed) put that ruling on hold
  • Leonard Leo (and not Mike Davis, who played a central role in confirming judges during Trump’s first Administration) must be responsible every time a Trump-appointed judge rules against Trump, because it surely can’t be the law and surely can’t be Trump’s (or Mike Davis’) shitty picks
  • And therefore (there’s really no therefore here — it does not logically follow at all) SCOTUS must reverse this decision

I’ve been tracking the significance of right wing support for these tariff challenges from the start.

It matters that not just a Leonard Leo-funded group but also a Koch-backed group opposed Trump’s tariffs — and his unconstitutional power grab in imposing them — even before Gavin Newsom and then a bunch of other Democratic states did (last week’s decision pertained to the Koch-funded effort; the one associated with Leo is still pending). It matters that there are some issues that are so dear to right wing jurisprudence (or pocketbooks) and are so clearly reserved for Congress that left, right, and centrist opposition to Trump can agree on those issues. It matters that the topic at hand, Trump’s tariffs, have already done so much damage to the US economy and stature in the world.

This treatise appears to be an attempt to deal with both those issues: Trump has been ruled to have violated the law over and over again, including (increasingly) by Trump-appointed judges and if SCOTUS sides with the Koch Foundation and Democratic states on this, it’ll be an enormous rebuke to Trump’s unlawful power grabs.

This legal case is one that threatens his entire bid to authoritarian power, not because it is key to codifying his police state, politicizing government, or destroying civil society — the other topics that SCOTUS has and will review in months ahead — but because it unifies left, right, and center.

And so Trump implores SCOTUS, a SCOTUS on which his two most reliable allies, Clarence Thomas and Sammy Alito, also happen to have benefitted from a lifetime of Leo’s lucrative attention, to “QUICKLY and DECISIVELY” side with him here. Poor Trump even whimpers, “I hope that is not so, and don’t believe it is!” that Leo controls SCOTUS, because if he did (the post implies) Trump would lose this case.

Perhaps Trump means this as a challenge to Clarence and Sammy’s self-respect.

As I said, I got to this fantastic post late. Much ink has been spilled about the extent to which this reflects a real break from Leo’s vetting of judicial candidates. Certainly Davis has promised to find real nutjobs in this second term. The screed appeared the day after Pam Bondi wrote the American Bar Association to tell them she believed their adherence to legal standards made them biased and so would exclude them from reviewing Trump’s judicial nominees. So it may well just be an effort to roll out a wider approach to installing hack judges.

That’s an interesting and important question; after all, Trump has yet to confirm any judge this term, so it’s possible that without Leo’s diligence, Trump simply won’t stack the courts like he did his first term. It’s also true that (as this post and his recent nomination of Emil Bove makes clear) Trump’s litmus test for judges going forward will be fealty to him, not the law.

But in the short term, I’m most interested in who gets Sammy Alito in the divorce. Who gets the hundreds of judges Trump appointed his first term. Who gets Aileen Cannon. Who gets everyone else who owes a decade of career advancement to Leo’s curation and care?

I imagine, in the short term, this is meant just like it reads. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump concludes, after giving SCOTUS an order. Don’t let Leonard Leo tell you what to do, that’s my job!

But it could well backfire among judges who do owe allegiance to the networks Leo built.

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Karoline Leavitt Says American Businesses Should Have No Recourse When Trump Mood Swings Destroy Their Businesses

Karoline Leavitt went on a rant today, attacking the three judges (one Reagan appointee, one Obama appointee, and a Trump appointee) who ruled that Donald Trump cannot usurp Congress’ authority to levy tariffs. (The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency en banc stay of the order.)

The courts should have no role here. There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the Presidential decision-making process. America cannot function if President Trump — or any other president, for that matter — has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges. President Trump is in the process of rebalancing America’s trade agreements with the entire world, bringing tens of billions of dollars in tariff revenues to our country and finally ending the United States of America from being ripped off. These judges are threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage.

Let’s ignore, for the moment, Leavitt’s typically inflammatory rhetoric.

Let’s consider her premise.

Leavitt is saying that America’s small businesses should have no recourse if Trump unlawfully destroys their business.

One of the five plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Terry Cycling’s Nikolaus Holm, which sells women’s cycling clothing, described in a filing submitted on April 10 that;

  • His company had already paid $25,000 in unplanned tariffs
  • Tariffs may cost the company $250,000 by the end of 2025
  • If the tariffs in effect on April 10 stayed in place, they would have to pay $1.2 million in tariffs in 2026
  • It had already raised prices by up to 30% to pay for the tariffs

“Tariffs will become the single largest line item operating expense on Terry Cycling’s Profit & Loss Statement,” Holm described. “It would be larger than payroll.”

In Karoline Leavitt’s world, small business owners like Holm should have absolutely no recourse if Trump’s mood swings  and unlawful usurpation of Congress’ power destroys their business.

Update: DC Judge Rudolph Contreras also threw out Trump’s tariffs (but stayed the injunction for 14 days).

How he found he had jurisdiction — after the Court of International Trade had already ruled; Contreras basically said they did not have jurisdiction, and how he used their prior ruling to dismiss Trump’s inflammatory claims of harm — are matters of some interest.

But for the purposes of this post, here’s how Contreras described the harm that Trump’s usurpation of Congress’ duties had done to the two family-owned toy companies that sued.

They cannot offset the highest IEEPA tariffs without raising prices 70 percent or more “as a matter of pure survival,” Woldenberg Decl. ¶ 9; their customers have already canceled over $1 million in orders, id. ¶ 10; and they face an immediate 40 or 50 percent decline in sales, year-over-year, id. ¶ 11. The companies “cannot possibly absorb the costs of the increased tariffs” without “changing [their] pricing radically.” Id. ¶¶ 6, 14. But they cannot pass price increases onto their customers without selling substantially fewer products. Id. ¶¶ 16, 18. Plaintiffs are not “massive entities that can withstand such losses in their core business[es].” See Everglades Harvesting & Hauling, Inc. v. Scalia, 427 F. Supp. 3d 101, 116 (D.D.C. 2019). Nor can they reduce the quality of their products to support lower prices: reducing quality is “unthinkable” for “premium brands” like Plaintiffs, and is practically unworkable because it would require them to “change the design and/or production of more than 2,000 products at once.” Id. ¶ 15.

Without an injunction, Plaintiffs may have to refinance loans on unfavorable terms; significantly scale back operations and product offerings; close facilities; lay off employees; or possibly sell their businesses. Mot. Prelim. Inj. at 41. Granted, financial losses typically do not constitute irreparable harm. E.g., Wisc. Gas Co. v. FERC, 758 F.2d 669, 674 (D.C. Cir. 1985). But that is not the case when “the loss threatens the very existence of the movant’s business.” Id.

The government argues that Plaintiffs’ harms are speculative and conclusory. See Defs.’ PI Opp’n at 37–39. The Court disagrees. See Pls.’ PI Reply at 20–21 (detailing, to the extent possible, the specific costs that Plaintiffs have incurred because of the Challenged Orders). How could Plaintiffs possibly describe the exact costs they will face from paying tariffs that the President imposes, pauses, adjusts, and reimposes at will?

Note that Contreras used Trump’s moodiness and unreliability against him in this ruling.

Stephen Miller’s shrill attacks on judges Karoline Leavitt parroted today have, heretofore, been directed at people Miller has spent years demonizing, primarily migrants (about whom he lies shamelessly). Miller has trained Trump’s rubes to believe that migrants should have no due process.

But this time around, Miller’s puppet Leavitt is saying that small business owners are not entitled to due process.

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One Explanation for Elon Musk’s Claimed DOGE Departure that Gossip-Mongers Missed

The NYT wrote an 1800-word, 5-byline post claiming Elon Musk’s departure from DOGE reflected tensions over Trump’s Big Ugly Tax Bill without mentioning one additional — possibly far more important — factor that may have influenced his announced departure.

This may be an attempt to preserve the damage Elon did to government, up to and including the data consolidation that DOGE carried out.

Even NYT’s claimed basis for Elon’s departure is unpersuasive.

On Tuesday, CBS posted a clip from an interview that will air Sunday, in which Musk complains that the Big Ugly Tax Bill raises the deficit.

Elon Musk says he is “disappointed” by the price tag of the domestic policy bill passed by Republicans in the House last week and heavily backed by President Trump. The billionaire who recently stepped back from running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, made the remark during an exclusive broadcast interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said.

NYT claims that this tweet was a response to Elon. (These screencaps are ET+6.)

That led, NYT claims, to Elon’s announced departure from DOGE.

As it is, there are problems with this narrative. The non-inclusion of DOGE was not Elon’s prior complaint about the Big Ugly; the exacerbation of the budget deficit was. There were plenty of people, in Congress and outside, who were complaining that the Big Ugly didn’t codify DOGE cuts or did fund USAID, complaints more directly relevant to Stephen Miller’s comment. And Miller has been lying about the bill already.

Maybe the NYT’s portrayed drama is correct.

Or maybe this is yet more theater about Elon’s relationship with the Trump Administration.

There was an important DOGE-related development in recent days that may be impacted by Elon’s claimed imminent departure, one not mentioned in NYT’s long story.

After John Roberts, on Sunday, stayed a Christopher Cooper order regarding a FOIA that CREW served on DOGE, on Tuesday, Tanya Chutkan denied DOJ’s effort to dismiss an Appointments Clause lawsuit by blue states — led by New Mexico — against DOGE. [docket]

The DC Circuit (Henderson, Millett, and Walker) had earlier stayed a discovery order from Chutkan pending her decision on the motion to dismiss, holding that she should only grant discovery if the lawsuit will continue. If Chutkan’s decision stands, the government may have to provide the discovery on DOGE that John Roberts halted (in a different, FOIA, context).

Chutkan summarized a list of things the states allege Musk did that would require Senate confirmation.

States claim that DOGE, with Musk at the helm, “has inserted itself into at least 17 federal agencies” and exercises “significant authority” across the Executive Branch. Id. ¶¶ 70, 200. They identify the following categories of allegedly unauthorized actions by DOGE and Musk:

  • Controlling Expenditures and Disbursements of Public Funds: States allege that DOGE obtained “full access” to payment systems at multiple agencies and used that access to halt payments. Id. ¶¶ 78–79, 85, 127–30. For instance, after the acting-Secretary at U.S. Department of Treasury refused to “halt” payments, DOGE personnel threatened the acting Secretary with “legal risk [] if he did not comply with DOGE.” Id. ¶ 84. Then, on February 2, DOGE obtained “full access” to Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Services payment systems, which disburses funds for social security benefits, veteran’s benefits, childcare tax credits, Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, federal employee wages, federal tax refunds, and facilitates state recovery of delinquent state income taxes. Id. ¶¶ 78–79, 85. That day, Musk posted on X that “[t]he @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments,” in response to a post by a non-profit organization receiving funds pursuant to government contracts. Id. ¶ 86.
  • Terminating Federal Contracts and Exercising Control over Federal Property: States allege that Musk and DOGE asserted responsibility for terminating federal contracts across the Executive Branch. Id. ¶ 203–04. DOGE reported the cancellation of “104 contracts related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) at more than a dozen federal agencies” on January 31, id. ¶ 205; of “thirty-six contracts across six agencies” on February 3, id. ¶ 206; of “twelve contracts in the GSA and the Department of Education” on February 4, id. ¶ 207; and “cuts of $250 million through the termination of 199 contracts” on February 7, id. ¶ 208. States also allege that DOGE and Musk exercise control over federal property by demanding access to secure facilities and threatening intervention by U.S. Marshals when agency officials refuse, id. ¶¶ 94–95; by “push[ing]” high-ranking officials out of their offices at agency headquarters, id. ¶¶ 164–66, by terminating leases for federal property, id. ¶ 206, and by announcing plans to “liquidate as much as half of the federal government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings,” id. ¶ 160.
  • Binding the Government to Future Financial Commitments without Congressional Authorization: States point to the Fork in the Road Email, which offered federal employees pay and benefits through September 2025 if they resigned by February 6, as entering into binding financial commitments. Id. ¶¶ 116–20, 212.
  • Eliminating Agency Regulations and Entire Agencies and Departments: States allege that DOGE personnel took steps to dismantle USAID and CFPB. On February 3, DOGE personnel allegedly “handed” USAID’s acting leadership “a list of 58 people, almost all senior career officials, to put on administrative leave.” Id. ¶ 102. The next day, USAID placed “nearly its entire workforce on administrative leave.” Id. ¶ 103. When “USAID contract officers emailed agency higher-ups” for authorization to cancel programs, DOGE personnel responded directly. Id. ¶ 101. Musk posted on X “CFBP RIP” on the same day that Musk’s aides “set up shop . . . at CFPB’s headquarters” and CFPB’s website was taken down. Id. ¶¶ 146–47. Three days later, CFPB’s acting Director Russell Vought told all employees to “[s]tand down from performing any work task” and “not come into the office.” Id. ¶ 148.
  • Directing Action by Agencies: States allege that Musk and DOGE obtain compliance from agency officials and employees by threatening action by U.S. Marshals, legal risks, or termination. Id. ¶ 84 (threatening acting-Treasury Secretary with “legal risk”); id. ¶ 95 (threatening USAID personnel blocking access to facility with action by U.S. Marshals); id. ¶¶ 176–178 (DOL employees told to comply or “face termination”). States claim that if agency officials object or raise concerns, Musk and DOGE ignore or override the agency and place on administrative leave or otherwise remove non-compliant individuals. Id. ¶¶ 84– 85 (acting-Treasury Secretary “placed on administrative leave” after refusing to halt payments); id. ¶ 110 (DOGE “gained full and unfettered access to OPM systems over the existing CIO’s objection”); id. ¶¶ 137–38 (DOGE representative was “installed” as the Department of Energy’s (“DOE”) “chief information officer” after DOE’s general counsel’s office and chief information office opposed DOGE’s access to DOE’s IT system); id. ¶ 166 (DOGE personnel “pushed” the “highest-ranking officials” at the Department of Education (“ED”) “out of their own offices”).
  • Acting as a Principal Officer Unsupervised by Heads of Departments: States allege that Musk acts and directs DOGE’s conduct without supervision by agency heads. For instance, States allege that Musk and his team sent the Fork in the Road Email “via a custom-built email system . . . without consultation with other advisers to the President or OMB officials,” id. ¶ 120; that DOGE personnel at agencies do not “interact at all with anyone who is not part of their team,” id. ¶ 165; and that Musk “reports only to President Trump,” id. ¶ 71.
  • Obtaining Unauthorized Access to Secure Databases and Sensitive Information: States allege that Musk and DOGE personnel obtained access to secure databases and systems at Treasury, id. ¶ 85, USAID, id. ¶ 95, OPM, id. ¶ 110, the Department of Health and Human Services, id. ¶ 127, DOE, id. ¶ 137, ED, id. ¶¶ 164, 167, DOL, id. ¶¶ 177–78, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, id. ¶ 190, Federal Emergency Management Agency, id. ¶ 194, and Small Business Association, id. ¶ 198.

These are all the DOGE actions that might be imperiled if this lawsuit succeeds.

Chutkan’s opinion sustaining the lawsuit focused closely on Elon’s role in DOGE.

Elon Musk’s role, authority, and conduct within the federal government is a central issue in this case. Defendants formally classify Musk as a “special Government employee.” Compl. ¶ 25 (citing 18 U.S.C. § 202(a)); see also Decl. of Joshua Fisher ¶¶ 3–4, ECF No. 24-1. Plaintiff States allege that Musk leads DOGE and directs the actions of DOGE personnel. Compl. ¶¶ 51, 59. Specifically, they claim that the “statements and actions of President Trump, other White House officials, and Mr. Musk himself indicate that Mr. Musk has been directing the work of DOGE personnel since at least January 21, 2025.” Id. They allege that, in this role, Musk “exercise[es] virtually unchecked power across the entire Executive Branch, making decisions about expenditures, contracts, government property, regulations, and the very existence of federal agencies.” Id. ¶ 67.

And given the precedents, it necessarily focused on whether Musk’s position at the head of DOGE is “continuing.”

That does not end the court’s inquiry. Having concluded that special government employees are not automatically exempt from the Appointments Clause, the court must assess whether Musk’s particular position is “sufficiently ‘continuing’ to constitute an office.” United States v. Donziger, 38 F. 4th 290, 296 (2d Cir. 2022), cert denied, 142 S.Ct. 868 (2023). In doing so, the court takes a holistic approach, focusing on a position’s “tenure, duration, emolument, and duties,” and whether the duties are “continuing and permanent, not occasional or temporary.” United States v. Germaine, 99 U.S. 508, 511–12 (1878); The Test for Determining “Officer” Status Under the Appointments Clause, 49 Op. O.L.C. __, slip op. at 3 (Jan. 16, 2025) (“[T]he Supreme Court’s approach to assessing the ‘continuing’ nature of a position has been a holistic one that considers both how long a position lasts as well as other attributes of the position that bear on continuity.” (citations omitted)). Positions that do not qualify are “transient or fleeting,” “personal to a particular individual,” and assigned merely “incidental” duties. Donziger, 38 F.4th at 296–97 (citation omitted).

[snip]

States allege that Musk is DOGE’s leader. Compl. ¶¶ 59–60, 224. The court finds that States have sufficiently pleaded that this position qualifies as “continuing and permanent, not occasional or temporary,” Germaine, 99 U.S. at 511–12. The subsidiary DOGE Service Temporary Organization has a termination date of July 4, 2026, but there is no termination date for the overarching DOGE entity or its leader, suggesting permanence.

So on Tuesday, Judge Chutkan ruled that Elon’s continuing role in DOGE made this lawsuit viable. On Wednesday, Elon announced he would not be continuing at DOGE.

The government has already filed with the DC Circuit asking to offer additional briefing on its challenge to Judge Chutkan’s orders.

Way back in February I pointed out the viability of an Appointments Clause challenge before SCOTUS explained the obvious efforts to retcon Elon’s role.

In a response and declaration, the government blew off the first question [ordering details about DOGE firing plans], but on the second, denied that Musk has the power of DOGE. He’s just a senior Trump advisor, one solidly within the White House Office, and so firewalled from the work of DOGE, yet still protected from any kind of nasty disclosure requirements.

But as the attached declaration of Joshua Fisher explains, Elon Musk “has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself”—including personnel decisions at individual agencies. Decl. ¶ 5. He is an employee of the White House Office (not USDS or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization); and he only has the ability to advise the President, or communicate the President’s directives, like other senior White House officials. Id. ¶¶ 3, 5. Moreover, Defendants are not aware of any source of legal authority granting USDS or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization the power to order personnel actions at any of the agencies listed above. Neither of the President’s Executive Orders regarding “DOGE” contemplate—much less furnish—such authority. See “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency,” Exec. Order No. 14,158 (Jan. 20, 205); “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” Exec. Order 14,210 (Feb. 11, 2025).

The statement is quite obviously an attempt to retcon the structure of DOGE [sic], one that Ryan Goodman has already found several pieces of evidence to debunk.

But it is a testament that the suit in question — by a bunch of Democratic Attorneys General, led by New Mexico [docket] — might meet significant success without the retconning of Elon’s role.

[snip]

The retconning of his role is all the more obvious when you understand that the right wing judges on SCOTUS feel very strongly about the Appointments Clause. And Trump is on the record relying on it, most spectacularly in convincing Aileen Cannon that Jack Smith had to be confirmed by the Senate before he could indict Trump.

In practice, Trump is saying Elon can dismantle entire agencies without Senate confirmation, but Jack Smith couldn’t prosecute him as a private citizen without it.

Or he was. Now he’s arguing that all this is happening without Elon’s personal direction.

And here we are again, two months later, and the apparent retconning has not stopped.

This ploy has already worked once. After Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that a USAID-focused Appointments Clause lawsuit was likely to succeed, the Fourth Circuit overruled him. Then DOJ installed DOGE staffer Jeremy Lewin as USAID Administrator, and actions which, back in February, were done by DOGE, now appear to be agency actions. On Tuesday, Chuang denied plaintiffs in that suit discovery.

These lawsuits are different. DOGE did a number of things at other agencies — most notably the data consolidation — that weren’t a central feature of shutting down USAID. Elon’s role at some other agencies was even more clearcut than Judge Chuang found at USAID.

But even if the states can show that Elon exercised the authority to override agency heads, as he reportedly did in several instances, the government is likely to point to Elon’s departure as proof that his appointment was always temporary, and therefore did not require Senate confirmation.

DOJ has been retconning what happened with DOGE for four months now. There’s no reason to believe the drama at this point.

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As Trump Seeks New Ways to Defund Harvard, Elon Musk Continues to Blow Shit Up

Yesterday, Trump moved to cut all remaining contracts with Harvard University via a letter from GSA instructing agencies to cancel or reassign $100 million in contracts the government has with the university.

The letter instructs agencies to respond by June 6 with a list of contract cancellations. Any contracts for services deemed critical would not be immediately canceled but would be transitioned to other vendors, according to the letter, signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the G.S.A.’s federal acquisition service, which is responsible for procuring government goods and services.

Contracts with about nine agencies would be affected, according to the administration official.

Examples of contracts that would be affected, according to a federal database, include a $49,858 National Institutes of Health contract to investigate the effects of coffee drinking and a $25,800 Homeland Security Department contract for senior executive training. Some of the Harvard contracts under review may have already been subject to “stop work” orders.

“Going forward, we also encourage your agency to seek alternative vendors for future services where you had previously considered Harvard,” the letter said.

Meanwhile, SpaceX — among several Elon Musk companies that expect to get increased federal funding under Trump — experienced another failure. While his Starship didn’t blow to smithereens over the Caribbean in its latest launch, like it had on its previous two attempts, it lost control and hurtled to Earth.

The latest flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, got all the way up to space, but not all the way back down to Earth.

The upper-stage vehicle coasted through space on Tuesday, surpassing flights in January and March that ended in explosions and showers of debris over the Atlantic Ocean. But halfway through its journey, the spacecraft sprang a propellant leak. That caused it to start spinning out of control. The Starship vehicle used in the test flight was not able to survive the intense heat, breaking up as it fell back into the atmosphere.

By design, the debris fell into the Indian Ocean, far from areas inhabited by people.

I’m writing a longer post on the blasé way reporters are covering Trump’s all-out assault on Harvard, as if such a relentless and largely illegal attack on one of the longest standing bastions of civil society in the US would have no effect on democracy or American well-being.

I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to tell that story better.

The answer may be sitting right there: a comparison of Harvard with Elon Musk.

Which entity engages in more egregious antisemitic behavior, the pretext behind many of Trump’s attacks on Harvard?

The guy who made a Nazi symbol at Trump’s inauguration and welcomed Nazis back onto the platform that the government increasingly uses as an official messaging platform (and as such should be covered by Trump’s Executive Orders prohibiting spending federal dollars on antisemitism).

Which entity commands the more disproportionate profits, a complaint made about Harvard’s endowment in support of attacks on its non-profit tax status?

The guy being paid $46 billion by the failing Tesla, which rivals the size of Harvard’s entire $53 billion endowment.

Which entity engages in more obviously unethical behavior which, along with alleged antisemitism, was the basis GSA cited for canceling contracts with Harvard?

In light of this deeply troubling pattern each agency should consider its contracts with Harvard University and determine whether Harvard and its services efficiently promote the priorities of the agency Agencies should also of course consider various provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR including without limitation provisions such as FAR 52.203-13(b ( (ii which requires contractors to otherwise promote an organizational culture that encourages ethical conduct and commitment to compliance with the law.

The guy firing regulators who had started investigations into $2.7 billion of alleged wrong-doing implicating Musk companies, the guy who bought a President for a quarter-billion dollars.

By Laura Loomer’s standards, Elon Musk has as many challenges with immigration as Harvard does, starting with the undocumented workers who helped build his plant in Texas, continuing to his alleged illegal discrimination against refugees,  including his expanded reliance on H1B visas in recent years. And all that’s before you consider the evidence that Musk himself violated immigration law while on a student visa.

Viewed as a university, Harvard might be an easy target for Trump — the Wharton grad — to attack as elitist.

But compared as a partner of the Federal government, Harvard has provided far more benefit to the public than Elon Musk.

Harvard was on the path to curing cancer. Meanwhile, like Icarus, Elon spins out of control on his quest to Mars.

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The Law, Conspiracism, and Gravity

The lawsuit [docket] by nine FBI agents attempting to prevent the public release of a list of the names of all agents who worked on January 6 has detoured into a debate about Eagle Ed Martin’s frustrations with rule of law.

That debate provides useful background to something going on more generally — the Trump Administration’s effort to sustain the conspiracism that fuels MAGAt in the face of judges and a law built around evidence.

After Eagle Ed failed to secure Senate confirmation to be US Attorney and was instead moved to head DOJ’s Weaponization and Pardon offices (in the latter of which he is considering freeing the men convicted of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer), Eagle Ed went on a media blitz promising to name and shame those he had long targeted as villains, but whose villainy consisted of no more than substantiating the crimes that Trump and his mob had committed.

There are some really bad actors. Some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are shamed. And that’s a fact. That’s the way things work. And so, that’s how I believe the job operates. [emphasis original]

Plaintiffs pointed to this appearance, arguing that Eagle Ed’s promise to name and shame his targets confirmed the concerns of the plaintiffs that a list compiled in the first days of the Administration would be released to help freed insurrectionists retaliate against FBI agents. The government responded by claiming that Eagle Ed would follow DOJ rules (as if Pam Bondi’s DOJ follows even court rules about public comment!). Plaintiffs replied by quoting still more appearances from Eagle Ed’s media tour, including his complaints that he can’t get what he calls the truth out in Article III courts.

Mr. Martin’s comments during his May 15, 2025 interviews lead to several conclusions. First, he views his perceived mandate to “name” and “shame” as a legitimate alternative to following basic standards of federal criminal procedure. Second, he has indicated he is unconcerned about the consequences if he improperly or unlawfully “names” and “shames” government employees. (“Watch me” and “let the chips fall where they may.”) Third, he believes that the trigger to “name it and shame it” is when something does not personally “make sense” to him. This is particularly troubling when considering Mr. Martin’s frequently publicized views about the events of January 6, 2021, which includes his own representation of several criminal defendants and his dismissal of one of those cases as United States Attorney. 5

For example, on or about May 14, 2025, Mr. Martin sat for a one hour, twenty minute broad-ranging interview with television personality Tucker Carlson.6 On the January 6 riots, he lamented that “[m]illions of Americans are falling victim to the hoaxes, one after the other, and if you fall victim to the January 6th hoax, that it was an insurrection, armed, and this close to the end, then you might . . . rant and rave and things like that.”7 To say the least, this indicates a vast departure from the Department of Justice’s previous position that the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol was not a hoax, and in fact involved the commission of serious, violent crimes. Far from enjoying the presumption of regularity, today’s Department of Justice is anything but regular. Al-Hela v. Biden, 66 F.4th 217, 237 (D.C. Cir. 2023) (“[The presumption of regularity] can be rebutted if a petitioner demonstrates internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with other evidence.”).

After discussing his suspicions about the FBI’s involvement in January 6, including in the FBI’s investigation into the pipe bombs found near political party headquarters that day, Mr. Martin again addressed his frustration with Article III courts, and emphasized why publicizing private information is preferable to going through established procedures:

Mr. Martin: And by the way, one of the reasons why I say information is so key, you can’t, we can’t win the Article III battle fast enough. We can fight it, and we can eventually win lots of them, you can’t win it fast enough to get the progress we need, in terms of our, so you’ve got to be doing the information from . . .

Mr. Carlson: For people watching, what’s the Article III battle?

Mr. Martin: Yea, the Article III means like, the federal courts, we’re in federal courts, the President says you can’t let people come into the country, and then the courts say nationwide injunction, then you know you’re not allowed to do that, and you’re constantly in court. You know, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. has all of the cases of when the government is sued, and the President is sued, they all come into our office on the civil side, and so you see all that stuff coming in. During the Biden administration, the conservatives were suing in Texas, it was friendlier judges, now it’s in D.C. So you’re in the courts, fighting to get the truth out, fighting to make these things, prosecutions and all, but they take a longer time than just getting the word out, right? Getting the information out. I just, I feel like it’s a different moment in history, and that’s how I was as U.S. Attorney, that’s why you saw, people saw so much outfacing action, because I wasn’t just looking at courts, I was looking at making an argument for the public so they could see the policies.8

5 See Andrew Perez, Trump’s New Federal Attorney Withdrew Jan. 6 Charge Against His Own Client, Rolling Stone, Feb. 5, 2025 and United States v. Padilla, 1:21-cr-214-JDB (D.D.C.), Unopposed Motion to Dismiss Case by USA, ECF No. 125.

6 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LotMJAdWyOs (last visited May 22, 2025). 7 Id. beginning at approximately 00:09:00. [my emphasis]

Eagle Ed doesn’t want to take the time to build cases. He wants to make an argument.

The problem, of course (besides those pesky rules on public comment), is that Eagle Ed’s “arguments” have no basis in reality, and never have. The problem Article III courts pose for Eagle Ed is they review the evidentiary claims the government makes. And once courts start reviewing conspiracy theories of the sort Eagle Ed favors, they poke holes in them.

That’s what happened — according to a recent NYT story — to Eagle Ed’s efforts to criminalize EPA grants.

A politically fraught investigation opened by the Trump administration into a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grant program has so far failed to find meaningful evidence of criminality by government officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

[snip]

While the investigation of some entities that received money through the program is continuing, agents and prosecutors see little evidence of any criminal conduct by E.P.A. officials who oversaw the funding. The vendor portion of the inquiry has yet to yield any strong evidence of criminal conduct, according to people with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Prosecutors and agents have shared their findings with senior political leaders at the Justice Department, according to people familiar with the matter.

When you chase James O’Keefe propaganda, it turns out to be false … what a shock!

Most of Eagle Ed’s complaints were directed at civil cases (where judges do keep catching DOJ in lie after lie after lie). But as Pam Bondi’s DOJ moves to weaponizing DOJ via criminal charges, it will likely become a still bigger problem.

In the criminal cases charging Democratic officials, Judge Hannah Dugan, Ras Baraka, and LaMonica McIver, the facts claimed using criminal complaints rather than grand juries deviate at least partly from reality and the inflammatory claims Trump’s aides have made publicly deviate further still.

For example, county officials released video from Judge Hannah Dugan’s interactions with an ICE team. Among other things, it clarifies that the doorway whence Eduardo Flores-Ruiz reentered the hallway from Judge Dugan’s courtroom was closer to the Chief Judge’s office where Dugan had sent the officers working with ICE than her own courtroom door; if she was really trying to hide him, she did a poor job of it. It also shows two DEA guys (possibly one of the ones she sent away) watch Flores-Ruiz just walk away down that hallway without arrest, undermining the claim that she concealed him (though success at concealing someone is not required to convict).

In New Jersey, the government told a different story in the felony criminal complaint against Congresswoman McIver, sworn out by HSI Special Agent Robert Tansey before Magistrate Judge Stacey Adams, than HSI Special Agent in Charge Rickey Patel swore out in the criminal complaint against Baraka before Magistrate Judge André Espinosa. Homeland Security told one story to a judge on May 9 and another story to a different judge on May 19.

The complaint against Baraka based its claim that Newark’s Mayor knowingly trespassed by pointing to the chainlink fence and No Trespassing signs.

3. The Delaney Hall Facility is surrounded by chain-link fences and is accessible only through granted access. In addition to maintaining security, it likewise displays No Trespassing signage.

But the complaint against McIver confesses that a security guard let Baraka in.

5. Perimeter cameras show that when the security gate of Delaney Hall opened momentarily to allow a vehicle to enter into the secure area of the facility, McIVER and two other members of Congress moved quickly inside the secured area as the gate closed.

6. Once the group entered the secured area, the Mayor arrived thereafter at the facility and was told he could not enter without authorization.

7. However, the Mayor returned with members of his security detail and was able to enter inside the gate because the guard was under the impression that the Mayor was part of the Congressional delegation.

8. While McIVER and the Mayor were in the secured area of the facility, V-1, an HSI agent, approached the Mayor and ordered him to leave the facility’s secure area.

9. V-1 spent approximately five minutes repeatedly ordering the Mayor to leave and issued multiple warnings that he would be arrested if he did not do so.

10. McIVER and the other Congresspersons overheard this conversation and challenged V-1, protesting the Mayor’s removal. V-1 explained to them that “Congress people are different,” indicating members of Congress had lawful authority to be there, and that the Mayor did not.

11. After numerous warnings to leave, and numerous warnings of potential arrest, the HSI agent announced he was going to place the Mayor under arrest. McIVER interjected, yelling “Hell no! Hell no! Hell no!” The HSI agent ordered the Mayor to put his hands behind his back and displayed his handcuffs. McIVER and other members of Congress surrounded the Mayor and prevented HSI from handcuffing him and taking him into custody.

12. McIVER initially remained inside the secured area as the Mayor was then moved outside the gate.[my emphasis]

These details of the complaint against McIver will be hotly contested. WaPo did a good assessment of what the video evidence shows. It shows Baraka remained unchallenged inside the perimeter of the facility for almost 45 minutes. WaPo describes that after an initial confrontation and after a guard told Baraka to “walk out,” he did (which is consistent with Baraka’s own claims), as compared to the complaint’s description that the Mayor, “was moved outside,” using the passive voice.

For nearly 45 minutes, Baraka remained just inside the secured area, occasionally chatting with members of his security detail, according to time-stamped videos. Then, at around 2:33 p.m., Homeland Security agents exited the building and confronted Baraka. In snippets of the conversation captured in video, agents told Baraka he had to leave because he was not a member of Congress. The three members of Congress joined the discussion as it grew tense.

Minutes later, video shows, an agent took a step toward Baraka, and Watson Coleman can be heard urging calm.

Referencing that moment, the Justice Department’s complaint said a Homeland Security agent ordered the mayor to “put his hands behind his back and displayed his handcuffs.”

McIver grew animated, calling the agent’s intervention “unnecessary” and “ugly.” One of the agents can be heard in videos saying: “All right, then. Walk out.”

At 2:39 p.m., within moments of that remark, and six minutes after agents first confronted Baraka, he turned and walked away, arm-in-arm with Watson Coleman. The guard reopened the gate, and Baraka exited to an area in front of the facility, recessed from the sidewalk.

Then, after Baraka walked out, the guards plotted to arrest him within earshot of Rob Menendez, Jr, who warned Baraka.

With concerns about Baraka’s presence seemingly resolved, the three House members returned to the building for a tour, according to interviews with congressional staffers. The mayor remained outside the gate, speaking with reporters and protesters. Inside the building, congressional staffers said, lawmakers saw agents huddled and overheard them discussing plans to arrest the mayor.

Menendez then quickly exited the building and approached the gate, videos show. He spoke to Baraka through the chain-link fence, warning that agents were going to arrest him.

About a dozen agents then massed behind the fence. Some pulled masks up over their faces, and the group exited the facility gate and approached Baraka with handcuffs.

This was a premeditated confrontation on public land. And, WaPo describes, after Baraka’s arrest, the members of Congress — including McIver — returned to the facility.

After the scrum, agents accompanied McIver and the other House members as they resumed their tour of the facility — part of nearly two hours combined she remained on the grounds.

As Menendez noted in an interview with the Hill, “If you would witness an assault of an officer, you would not bring a group of people in to do a tour for 45 minutes.”

The government’s priorities — first arresting Baraka for trespassing after he left the premises into which he had been freely admitted, then letting McIver back in after she purportedly assaulted two officers — betrays what a stunt this is. And all that’s before you look at Kristi Noem’s typically batshit comments, which DHS did not defend when WaPo inquired about them.

Speaking about the events outside the Delaney Hall detention facility, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem last week testified to Congress that a “mob of protesters including three members of Congress stormed the gate and they trespassed into the detention facility.” Her department published a news release claiming the lawmakers used an arriving “bus of detainees” as a decoy to gain entrance, then “holed up in a guard shack.” A department spokeswoman said lawmakers attacked officers, including “body slamming a female ICE officer.”

The videos examined by The Post did not support those descriptions of the events, and the government did not include them in its charges against McIver. In response to a request for comment, Noem did not directly address The Post’s findings about her remarks but noted in a statement that McIver had been charged. “No one is above the law,” she said.

Noem’s thugs ginned up this confrontation and then she blew them out of proportion. None of their actions — letting Baraka remain uncontested for a period, arresting Baraka after he left, allowing McIver back in after she purportedly assaulted them — make sense. But having ginned up that confrontation, with Noem further escalating them with false claims, DOJ had to do something. They first charged, then abandoned charges against Baraka. Now they’re attempting to prosecute McIver. And if this goes to trial, all the equivocations will be evidence of the unreliability of those behind the arrest.

The clown show has not gone unnoticed.

In comments made while dismissing the case against Baraka, Judge Epsinosa admonished Stephen Demanovich, the AUSA who picked up the Baraka case from a colleague and who is listed as the lead prosecutor in the case against McIver, for charging Baraka before investigating what really happened.

Mr. Demanovich, beyond those 9.5 million constituents and above any individual or agency interests, federal prosecutors serve a singular paramount client: Justice itself.

Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas.

[snip]

The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrisome misstep by your Office. An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence.

[snip]

The apparent rush in this case culminating today in the embarrassing retraction of charges suggests failure to adequately investigate to carefully gather facts and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power Your Office must operate with higher standard than that.

This is something I’ve been anticipating, as Trump and Eagle Ed and Pam Bondi and Noem promise prosecutions: They’re creating the expectation among Trump’s mob that there will be slam dunk prosecutions — precisely the same thing Eagle Ed kept promising but failing to substantiate — but in the process demonstrating the government’s unreliability. “[T]oday’s Department of Justice is anything but regular,” the nine FBI agent plaintiffs argued, because the government has “demonstrate[d] internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with other evidence.”

I’m interested in this for two reasons: first, the possibility that these prosecutions will backfire, not just by creating sympathetic political martyrs, but also by further exposing Bondi and her top aides as liars violating legal ethics. Just as important, I’m interested in whether, as Trump’s people have to abandon false claims when faced with judges, they’ll lose credibility with Trump’s rubes.

Several people entertained the latter possibility after Dan Bongino and Kash Patel debunked conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death last week.

Phil Bump described what happened here.

Over the weekend [now the weekend before last], Bongino — now the deputy director of the FBI, thanks to the president Bongino championed relentlessly for years — sat down alongside his boss, FBI Director Kash Patel, for an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Bartiromo, never one to shy away from a right-wing conspiracy theory, asked about Epstein.

“You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide,” Bartiromo said. “People don’t believe it.”

“Listen, they have a right to their opinion,” Patel replied. But given his own experience and background, he said, “you know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.”

“He killed himself,” Bongino added. “I have seen the whole file. He killed himself.”

When he subsequently posted his assessment of Epstein’s death on social media, the response from many of his followers was furious. Who’d gotten to him? Where was the Bongino from the podcast? He was offering a truth about America that wasn’t immune to the facts (as his podcast once promised) and his fans didn’t want to hear it.

Conspiracy expert Mike Rothschild reflected on the event and contemplated the possibility that conspiracists may no longer get away with contradicting their own past claims.

[B]ecause contradiction is inherent to conspiracism, nobody minds if a trusted and cherished influencer says something wildly at odds with something they said another time. Sure, Mike Flynn can support QAnon while also saying QAnon is nonsense, or Alex Jones can get unreasonably excited about Trump seizing total power despite having spent years decrying presidents who sought total power. It doesn’t matter, because these people are trusted. And trust is everything among people who don’t trust anyone.

But that might be changing, and recent adventures in contradiction haven’t gone well for major figures in conspiracism. We might be going back to a time when certain ideas in fringe spheres are so ingrained and taken as infallible gospel to the point where even these trusted figures can’t go against them.

As Trump 2.0 grinds on, and the brain-rotting of the west accelerates at Ludicrous Speed, even major figures in the world of cranks and frauds are running up against the immovable object of their conspiracies moving past the need for the people who popularized them. The idea is starting to outweigh the person who communicates the idea. And it’s a shift that doesn’t bode well for many major figures in the intersection of politics, conspiracy, and commerce.

[snip]

No matter how much the conspiracy faithful like or trust Patel and Bongino, it’s not enough to override their belief in the idea of Epstein being murdered (probably by the Clintons) and his death made the subject of a coverup. That idea is sacrosanct to them. It is unshakable. And it’s telling that even two of the biggest purveyors of conspiracy theories in American politics didn’t embrace it in an official capacity when they had the chance to.

And now they’ve lost the trust of their audiences, at least for now. They can probably recover from this and sweep it away with some kind of justification, but the two are finding that it’s a lot easier to spout nonsense from the sidelines than it is to have to deal with it personally – particularly when your boss is connected to the guy at the center of the conspiracy theory.

Bump provides a possible explanation why: conspiracy theories are the weapon of the weak, not people in powerful positions like FBI Deputy Director.

“Powerful people can’t use conspiracy theories very well,” Joseph Uscinski, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami and the co-author of “American Conspiracy Theories,” told me in 2017. “They’re tools of the weak to attack the powerful. But what we’ve seen in this instance is … Trump has built his entire machine on conspiracy theories.”

He’s built his machine in that way because reality doesn’t comport with his rhetoric. His claims about immigration or his criminal cases or Joe Biden are indefensible if left to rely on actual evidence. So he relies instead on rumors, lies and baseless claims. It works largely because he’s built a universe of compliant voices — like Bongino’s — in an isolated information environment. He can make obviously false statements and be confident that his supporters will never encounter (much less seek out) the countervailing evidence.

He’s also more adept at keeping the conspiracy theories alive. This is someone who, as president, refused to disavow adherents of QAnon, a bizarre theory about how he was secretly battling a cabal of Democrats and movie stars who were stealing children and extracting chemicals from them. (“I know nothing about it,” he said of the movement at one point. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia.”) He never flatly rejects any idea that his base supports, from theories about Epstein’s death to false claims about vaccines.

Others in his administration can’t do that as readily.

In some cases, reality is rewritten to accommodate the argument advanced by Trump. Experts who rejected a link between a Venezuelan gang and that country’s government were fired. Tattoos on a man sent to El Salvador are presented as reading “MS-13” when they don’t.

In other cases, the can just keeps getting kicked down the road. When Attorney General Pam Bondi (Patel’s boss) attempted to meet the roar of demand for ties between Epstein and prominent people on the left, she invited right-wing social media influencers to the White House and handed them binders of already available material. It was a flop — so Bondi keeps promising more to come. Those promises, incidentally, are one reason that the backlash against Patel and Bongino was so robust.

You can manipulate public releases — Eagle Ed’s preferred tactic — by cherry picking and relying on propagandists. Stephen Miller deliberately pursued a legal tactic, the Alien Enemies Act, he believed afforded him the ability to make shit up about human beings with no pushback.

But, thus far at least, criminal cases are different, because they come with Speedy Trial deadlines, the ability to confront accusers, and — in the case of public events captured by video — compelling proof of government lies or overreach.

For now, until Trump packs the courts with more judges who adopt his conspiracy theories, DOJ will be a uniquely important sphere where Trump officials like Bongino will face the awkward moments where conspiracy theories experience gravity, where even past enthusiastic adherents to conspiracy theories cannot sustain them, where Eagle Ed attempts to resort to name and shame rather than criminally charge the people who arrested thousands of January 6 mobsters. Even Pam Bondi, one of the most rabid parrots of Trump’s propaganda, has earned the distrust of Trump’s rubes with her own failure to deliver proof of the Epstein conspiracy theories.

None of that eliminates the pain and legal risk of those targeted with Trump’s legal conspiracies. Baraka’s lawyer, Rahul Agarwal, cataloged the cost being unjustly charged had had in just two short weeks.

MR AGARWAL Judge the only other thing I’d say and I think it’s worth noting publicly is you know the fact of this dismissal 10 days after the charges were — or lodged nearly two weeks after the charges were lodged does not undo the things that happened over the last two weeks; namely the fact that the mayor was detained for five hours in custody and the fact that he’s been under these criminal charges We can’t erase those things And think it’s worth noting that notwithstanding this dismissal the mayor had to undergo you know public scrutiny and interrogation and detention all because of charges that are now being dismissed.

None of that guarantees the effort to use DOJ as an instrument of Trump’s conspiracies will fail. And we saw in the Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko cases — Trump’s prior attempt to weaponize DOJ — that the cost can extend far beyond five hours of detention.

But there’s a way in which Trump and Bondi and Eagle Ed’s abuse of DOJ could backfire. Because it creates a sphere in which the legal claims made in court and the political claims made on Fox News dramatically split. It creates a sphere in which those stoking conspiracy theories, like Bongino, publicly debunk them. It creates the possibility that those seizing power by selling fear of the Deep State become it.

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Flying Bribery Palaces and the End of the Western Order

I am the rare person who thinks Trump’s authoritarian push has not, yet, gone as far as it might as quickly as I imagined.

I think that for two primary reasons. First, I expected far more violence than we’ve seen, both from jack-booted thugs and from Trump’s terrorists. While ICE has definitely done horrible things and wielded unnecessary violence, they have thus far limited their targets to people who are or look like they are migrants or those who’ve defended migrants’ due process. It doesn’t make what they’ve done right. It makes that violence an entrée.

That may change if Trump’s budget authorizing 20,000 more immigration cops–which should be viewed as a wholesale shift in the United States from law enforcement to policing–gets passed by the Senate. That may change as Trump and Stephen Miller continue to gin up violence targeting judges. That may change as Trump’s rubes begin to lose their livelihoods and need someone besides Trump to blame. But thus far, Trump has not wielded the kind of violence he has tested in the past.

The other thing I expected to happen more quickly was a solidification of an alliance with the great authoritarians of the world — the Middle Eastern autocrats who had been bribing Trump in plain sight throughout the Biden term, Russia, which had partnered with those same autocrats in Putin’s effort to destroy the United States, and eventually China. Such an alliance would leave Europe — already undermined by the Orbanist project — as the rump defender of once dominant Western ideals.

My concern about such a plight is more than my own parochial interest, living within that rump world protecting human rights and democracy.

If Trump joins such an alliance, it would turn all the tools the US has used to uphold a tainted version of the Western order for most of a century against itself, in precisely the same way Trump has turned the strengths that Made America Great — immigration, diversity, debate, science — against the United States.

When I wrote a post on the “terrifying complexity of tech oligarch obeisance to Trump,” I was thinking of the US power wielded through US tech giants, in the form of spying, platforming and promoting violent and fascist speech, and serving as the digital infrastructure for the world’s commerce and communication. I was imagining what Quinn described, where Trump wielded US power over Microsoft to cut off an ICC prosecutor targeting Israel and Russia, Karim Khan. I was imagining the tools once used against people the US called terrorists, now targeting human rights defenders as if they were terrorists.

It’s not just the Internet. So long as the dollar remains the reserve currency, it’s banking too, which Trump also used to debank Khan.

Trump has used the tools the US used to use against terrorism and dictators to instead make a prosecutor of war crimes a person non-grata. He has made it a crime to uphold human rights.

The reports of Khan’s targeting came out while Trump was in his triumphant Middle East tour, where oligarchs who want the ability to chop up journalists with bone saws with impunity feted Trump’s return and threw more bribery at him. Trump brought many of the tech oligarchs who had earlier bowed in obeisance, which turned it into an orgy of oligarchy. While there, Trump handed away American tech advantage on AI. While there, Trump assured the men who chop up journalists that he, that America, wouldn’t tell them what to do anymore. That was the message of his triumph. Probably Trump will, probably he did, share the intelligence that went into chopping up a WaPo journalist, but that didn’t stop WaPo’s owner Jeff Bezos from following along like a puppy.

And through it all, even Trump’s supporters criticized Trump’s plans to accept a flying bribery palace from Qatar, an expensive sign of how goddamned easy it was to purchase Trump with a bit of gilt.

But Trump has no self-control in the face of a shiny bribe, so he accepted it with no consideration of the symbolic and national security implications of doing so.

Trump is an insanely easy mark for ruthless autocrats bearing bribes.

Most commentators have been measuring Trump’s authoritarian project in terms of Orbán’s model, and they’re not wrong. That’s what Project 2025 had in mind. But Trump already went far beyond Project 2025 in key areas, starting with the gutting of USAID, including the projects Republicans favor, a move that likely eliminated good will to the US in areas threatened by authoritarianism.

But Trump seems to be pursuing an additive model, one adopting the excess of the Gulf. There was a video (I’m still looking for it again) of the end of a receiving line with Trump and — I think — Mohammed bin Zayed. Stephen Miller was last in line and whichever Sheikh it was shook Miller’s hand and then didn’t let go, embracing him, engaging in an extended discussion with him. There were smiles everywhere. (Update: From SteveBev, here’s that video.)

The project is larger than Orbán’s. Orbán’s was just a package to sell it to the Christian nationalists.

And Trump came back from the Gulf, determined to flaunt his flying bribery palace from Qatar, on the verge of ending sanctions on Russia having achieved absolutely nothing in the way of peace concessions to excuse it, even while 80 Senators support more sanctions on Russia. In recent days Trump has done several things (besides accepting the flying bribery palace).

He has floated draconian 50% tariffs for the EU. If imposed, they would treat the EU as a greater adversary to the US than China (which is exactly how Trump’s aides treated the EU when thinking of their short-lived campaign against the Houthis). He is complaining about more than trade. He is also complaining about non-monetary barriers — the kinds of rules that make EU life safer and more civilized than in the US — and lawsuits of the sort that impose limits on American tech.

And, under the same kind of dereliction Marco Rubio brought to dismantling USAID, Trump is now dismantling the NSC so as to eliminate the possibility that actual experts will advise him against stupid policies. Axios provided the propaganda version, but FT provides the best explanation of the import.

“By whittling down the NSC staff to almost nothing, you kneecap the US government’s ability to generate foreign policy options, or to potentially act as a brake on Trump’s preferences. All that remains is presidential power.”

That would be dangerous enough if Trump were smart, sophisticated, or fully cognizant.

He’s not.

As such, he remains suggestible to whoever is in his office, starting with Stephen Miller (who’ll expand his portfolio with this move), but undoubtedly including whatever dictator can get him on his phone, those autocrats bearing bribes.

Admittedly, Trump’s complete reversal of sanctions on Syria will provide the country needed relief. It’ll also help his Gulf buddies consolidate power.

We should expect to see more instances where Trump takes sudden actions that empower authoritarianism. And as he proceeds, he will look for ways to start chipping away at democracy where it remains.

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