On April 14, declarants from DOD, ODNI, CIA, and State submitted filings in American Oversight’s lawsuit regarding the Houthi Signal text that confirmed that the Signal chat had not been preserved on John Ratcliffe’s phone. As CIA’s Chief Data Officer Hurley Blankenship revealed in a declaration dated April 11,
the Director’s personal Signal account was reviewed and a screenshot of the Signal Chat at issue was captured from the Director’s account on 31 March 2025, and transferred to Agency records systems the same day. I understand that the screenshot reflects the information available at the time the screenshot was captured, which I characterized as “residual administrative content” in my initial declaration. I used that terminology because the screenshot does not include substantive messages from the Signal chat; rather, it captures the name of the chat, “Houthi PC small group”, and reflects administrative notifications from 26 March and 28 March relating to changes in participants’ administrative settings in this group chat, such as profile names and message settings.
That led American Oversight to file an amended complaint on April 21, which included both Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth’s additional known Signal use, and also complained that Marco Rubio was failing to take remedial action in his role as Acting Archivist.
Their motion for a Preliminary Injunction filed the next day used the CIA declaration to substantiate their claim that some records had been destroyed.
Some of Defendants’ Signal messages have already been lost or destroyed, see, e.g., Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3, and others will be imminently destroyed in violation of the FRA without further judicial intervention. Under the FRA, “[n]o records may be ‘alienated or destroyed’” without authorization of the Archivist and unless the records “do not have ‘sufficient administrative, legal, research, or other value to warrant their continued preservation by the Government[.]’” Armstrong v. Bush, 924 F.2d 282, 285 (D.C. Cir. 1991) (quoting 44 U.S.C. § 3314). Autodelete settings are plainly inconsistent with this standard.
In a response submitted today, the government claims that American Oversight is “nit-pick[ing].”
To respond to the proof that some of the messages had been destroyed, the response reveals that the White House Counsel provided “a consolidated version of the Signal group chat.”
Plaintiff nit-picked at the adequacy of Defendants’ declarations, and after a second hearing, Defendants agreed to file supplemental declarations providing a few additional facts for certain Defendants, specified by the Court on the record, such as when searches were conducted. Defendants timely filed those supplemental declarations on April 14, ECF No. 15. Plaintiff complained about the CIA’s declaration, ECF No. 16, and Defendants filed a reply, ECF No. 20.
In addition to their own preservation efforts about which the Court ordered declarations, the defendant agencies received an email from the White House Counsel’s Office containing a consolidated version of the Signal group chat. The consolidated version was created from publicly available information and information saved from participants to the chat’s phones. The document includes content that has not been published by The Atlantic. This document is now saved in the agencies’ recordkeeping systems. See Decl. of David P. Bennett ¶ 2, Exhibit 3; Decl. of Christopher Pilkerton ¶ 8, Exhibit 4; Decl. of Robert A. Newton ¶ 3, Exhibit 5; Decl. of Mary C. Williams ¶ 5, Exhibit 6; Decl. of Mallory D. Rogoff ¶ 3, Exhibit 7.
What the response doesn’t admit is that there may be more than one consolidated chat. While Treasury, ODNI, CIA, and State all submitted declarations describing receiving a consolidated chat on April 8 — which was before the April declarations submitted by all but Treasury!! …
The U.S. Department of State received an email from the White House Counsel Office on April 8 containing a consolidated version of the Signal group chat referenced in the March 24 and 26, 2025 articles in The Atlantic, which was created for federal records purposes. The document was created based on publicly available information and information saved from participants’ phones. The document includes content that has not been published by The Atlantic. This document is now saved in FRA-compliant systems of the Department.
… DOD described receiving a consolidated chat on May 7, almost a month later.
The Department of Defense received an email from the White House Counsel’s Office on May 7, 2025, containing a consolidated version of the Signal group chat referenced in the March 24 and 26, 2025, articles in The Atlantic, which was created for federal records purposes. The document was created based on publicly available information and information saved from participants’ phones. The document includes content that has not been published by The Atlantic. This document is now saved in FRA-compliant systems within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
That is, even for CIA, where there were clearly messages destroyed, Hurley Blankenship could have but did not claim that the consolidated set received from the White House Counsel amounted to FRA compliance. Blankenship did not write the declaration filed today; only Treasury’s Christopher Pilkerton filed all the declarations from that agency.
That kind of compartmentation suggests they’re still hiding things — like maybe how much of the chat they were unable to preserve.
And DOJ’s response stops well short of claiming that the entirety of the chat has been preserved.
Plaintiff’s irreparable harm argument is that as a FOIA requester, it faces irreparable harm as a result of the Signal chats that allegedly have been destroyed and that Plaintiff speculates will be destroyed in the future. The argument is based on Plaintiff’s assumption that significant portions of the Signal group chat have been deleted because then National Security Advisor and chat participant Michael Waltz enabled the autodelete function, and on Plaintiff’s speculation that Waltz would do so on future Signal chats initiated by his team. Mem. of Law in Supp. Pl.’s Mot. for a Prelim. Inj. at 24, ECF No. 19-1 (“Pl.’s Mem.”). But as the declarations Defendants have already submitted establish, the agencies have in fact preserved parts of the Signal group chat from Defendants’ and other participants in the Signal group chat’s phones. As the declarations submitted with this brief show, the agencies have also preserved a consolidated version of the chat that they received from the White House Counsel’s Office, which was created from publicly available information and information saved from participants to the chat’s phones. And as these declarations further attest, the document is saved in the agencies’ recordkeeping systems. [my emphasis]
The passage admits that the agencies were only able to preserve “parts of” the chat, and that they needed to rely on public information to reconstruct the “consolidated version.” They describe the consolidated version includes stuff that’s not public. But nowhere do they say the White House Counsel was able to preserve everything that was sent.
The silence on that point strongly implies they were not able to preserve everything.
Indeed, the response seems to confess that participants on the Houthi chat destroyed at least some of what Jeffrey Goldberg published, perhaps in an attempt to hide the classified information they exchanged.
Bizarrely, days after Mike Waltz was photographed sending Signal texts to (among others) Tulsi Gabbard and Marco Rubio, the response claims that firing Mike Waltz, but not Whiskey Pete and his multiple Signal threads, mitigates any harm.
Michael Waltz is no longer in the role of National Security Advisor, which further undermines any claim to irreparable harm in the future.
But it only adds to the problems. Acting Archivist Marco Rubio has been passive throughout this scandal, and assuming the “consolidated” chat received from WHCO lacks messages, it would mean Rubio, too, destroyed parts of the chat.
With each new filing, these bozos dig their hole deeper.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-22-at-15.03.56.png412424emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-05-08 15:22:292025-05-09 07:15:17Nit-picks: The White House’s Stealth April 8 Archive of “Parts” of the Houthi Signal Chat
Thom Tillis has made a lukewarm announcement making it clear he would not vote to confirm Eagle Ed Martin to be US Attorney for DC.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said he informed the White House that he opposed naming Trump’s interim appointee to a full four-year term.
“If Mr. Martin were being put forth as a U.S. attorney for any district except the district where Jan. 6 happened, the protest happened, I’d probably support him,” Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, told reporters. “But not in this district.”
[snip]
“We have to be very, very clear that what happened on January the 6th was wrong. It was not prompted or created by other people to put those people in trouble. They made a stupid decision, and they disgraced the United States by absolutely destroying the Capitol,” Tillis told reporters. “There were some people that were over-prosecuted, but there were some two or three hundred of them that should have never gotten a pardon, and he [Martin] agreed with that.”
There’s wiggle room here. Tillis suggested he would vote for Martin in some other district — perhaps his native Missouri (where Trump nominated a slate of nutjob judicial appointees yesterday). One of Martin’s little hobbies has been to pester medical journals at RFK Jr’s behest to suggest science is an impermissible bias, and there is no more jurisdiction in DC for such things than in Missouri.
And while Chuck Grassley has made it clear he won’t call Martin up for a vote unless he knows it’ll pass, he has also suggested the nomination might not be dead (Lisa Murkowski is a likely no vote; it’s unclear if there are four no votes if the full Senate got the nomination).
In response the MAGAt mob has done what the MAGAt mob does best: froth and threaten. Some have started conspiracy theories suggesting that Tillis’ opposition stems from something other than the insurrection, such as corrupt real estate deals. Others have called to replace Tillis on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Perhaps the most interesting response is a call to have Lara Trump, who is originally from North Carolina, primary Tillis next year.
It’s never a good idea to underestimate the cowardice of elected Republicans. If Tillis holds out until May 20, thought, Trump either needs to replace Martin (some have suggested he should simply replace Martin with Matt Gaetz, which honestly wouldn’t be a horrible trade — that’s how shitty Martin is), or the judges in the DC District will name someone to serve in the interim.
But if Tillis does hold out, particularly if he holds out in the face of primary threats, it will neutralize a lot of the power of these mobs (some of which, led by Laura Loomer, are increasingly focused on internecine fights).
The MAGAt mob only has power so long as Trump can offer the target something of value. If the response here is to make reelection impossible (or to give Tillis the kind of distance from Trump that might be useful in a swing state), then the target in question would be liberated to act on conscience. For example, Tillis could start to honor the needs of the many service members in North Carolina rather than carry water for Trump’s disastrous Secretary of Defense.
It’s still far too early to declare Martin’s nomination to be dead. But one way or another, Tillis’ public opposition to Martin may create space in the Senate that thus far doesn’t exist.
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The two NYT journalists who would be targeted in an investigation of the sources of leaks debunking Donald Trump’s Tren de Aragua Alien Enemies Act invocation have published a memo that further debunks Donald Trump’s Tren de Aragua Alien Enemies Act invocation. Charlie Savage and Julian Barnes published the memo, which Freedom of the Press Foundation liberated via FOIA.
The contents of the memo themselves are newsworthy. Like the initial report from Savage and Barnes and a follow-up about this memo in the WaPo, the memo describes that the Intelligence Community doesn’t think that the Maduro regime directs the actions of TdA.
The Maduro regime generally does not impede illegal armed and criminal groups from operating in Venezuela, but it does combat and seek to contain them when it fears they could destabilize the regime or when corrupt dealssour. Venezuela’ssecurity services lackthe capacity to fully control Venezuelan territory, giving the regime an interest in cooperating with armed groups for insight and control in areas outside the services’ traditional areas of operation. Furthermore, combatting such groups often results in personnel losses, probably encouraging the regime to at times cooperate with some groups instead of contesting them.
Some mid- to low-level Venezuelan officials probably profit from TDA’s illicit activities, according to [(b)(1), (b)(3)] and press reporting. For example, local military officials have alerted other armed and criminal groups conducting aerial drugshipments to Venezuelan Air Force patrols and might have alerted TDA leadership of a planned raid in 2023 against the prison that was its base of operations.
Even the FBI — the single agency of 18 that backed a claim that Maduro directs TdA — only claimed that some officials directed the migrants, and (as NYT also noted) other agencies think that may be based on fabrications.
While FBI analysts agree with the above assessment, they assess some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members’ migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries, based on DHS and FBI reporting as of February 2024.
[snip]
In some cases, reporting warns that these sources could also be motivated to fabricate information.
[snip]
Some reports come from people detained for involvement in criminal activity in the United States or for entering the country illegally, which could motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise “valuable” information to US prosecutors.
But I’m just as interested in the significance of a successful FOIA that undercuts investigations into these leaks (and therefore, into the debunking of the core AEA invocation).
The AEA, which Trump secretly invoked on March 14, was used as justification to deport at least two planeloads of mostly Venezuelans on March 15. The NYT published their first story on March 20, as Judge James Boasberg queried whether the government defied his order not to do so. That same day, the government first moved toward invoking State Secrets to cover up the basis for their rendition flights, followed by a declaration from Todd Blanche. NYT published the story in their dead tree version only after Blanche announced an investigation into what seemed to be that leak. As I noted, in one of his first acts as Deputy Attorney General, Blanche was launching a witch hunt into a leak that exposed his actions.
Days after the WaPo followed up on the NYT story reporting the results of this report, Tulsi Gabbard adopted Dick Cheney’s habit of lying about intelligence assessments, accusing those who leaked the true contents of the assessment to be weaponizing intelligence.
I noted that her claims of a classified leak were likely overstated: what WaPo reported went little beyond an answer Gabbard gave to Joaquin Castro in the Global Threats hearing.
Castro: I want to ask about the Alien Enemies Act, real quick, while I have time. The President has used the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used to detain German and Japanese nationals during World War II, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. To invoke this law, the President must demonstrate the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government. They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government. The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans. The unclassified version of the Annual Threat Assessment the Intelligence Community just released makes no mention of any invasion or war that we are fighting with the nation of Venezuela. You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in this Threat Assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the Intelligence Community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?
Ratcliffe: We have no assessment that says that.
Castro: In invoking the law the President alleged that Venezuela is taking hostile actions at the direction — clandestine or otherwise — of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Director Gabbard: Does the Intelligence Community assess the Venezuelan government is directing Tred de Aragua’s hostile actions against the United States.
Gabbard: There are varied assessments that came from different Intelligence Community elements. I’ll defer to Director Patel to speak specifically to the FBI assessment.
[Kash moves to speak.]
Castro: But let me ask you. So you’re saying there are conflicting assessments that have come from the IC?
Gabbard: That’s correct.
Castro: Thank you. We’ll take it up in closed session.
Nevertheless, days later, Tulsi announced an investigation into the leaks.
And just days after that, Pam Bondi reversed Merrick Garland’s press protections, describing only the NYT and the WaPo stories to include classified information.
The leaks have not abated since President Trump’s second inauguration,6 including leaks of classified information.7
7 See, e.g., John Hudson & Warren P. Strobel, U.S. intelligence contradicts Trump’s justification for mass deportations, Washington Post (Apr. 17, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/17/us-intelligence-tren-de-araguadeportations-trump; Charlie Savage & Julian Barnes, Intelligence Assessment Said to Contradict Trump on Venezuelan Gang, New York Times (Mar. 22, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/intelligence-trump-venezuelan-gang-alienenemies.html.
That created the appearance that, like Blanche before them, Tulsi and Bondi were also ratcheting up attacks on the press because the press and its sources called out Trump’s corrupt AEA declaration in real time.
These repeated paranoid leak investigations attempted to squelch public debunkings of Trump’s efforts to use a false claim about TdA to chip away at due process (a project that Stephen Miller has been pursuing for years).
And at a time when Trump’s Administration is falling further behind on FOIA requests, FOPF got near immediate response for its FOIA showing that even if any material in the NYT and WaPo stories was classified, it has since been publicly released. That kind of response only happens when people within an agency want something to be released. And in this case, it means that Tulsi has not sufficiently commandeered ODNI to prevent FOIA professionals to carry out a classification review and release information publicly.
It likely means that the people who leaked these debunkings in the first place have found a way to undercut claims that they committed a crime by doing so. At the very least that will make it hard for the FBI to argue this leak is of sufficient seriousness to obtain warrants and subpoenas targeting journalists. It may even make it impossible for the FBI to claim a crime was committed in the first place, because the FBI will have to prove that the NYT and WaPo stories relied on more than made it into this memo.
And all the while, even as one after another judge — including Trump appointees like Fernando Rodriguez Jr! — rule that the original AEA invocation was unlawful (in Rodriguez’ case, because any claimed invasion from Venezuela does not resemble what Congress would have understood an invasion to be in 1798 when AEA was passed), the IC is finding ways to make clear that Donald Trump knows or should know that the claimed ties between Nicolás Maduro and TdA are false.
And the spooks have, for a third time, exposed the core lie on which that effort builds.
Update: Lauren Harper, who liberated the memo, has posted the letter granting her FOIA. She submitted the FOIA on April 25; she got the memo on May 5.
Update: Judge Alvin Hellerstein also held the AEA invocation to be unlawful, finding there’s no war or invasion. But this may be more pertinent to these times:
The third consideration set out by Mathews, the “Government’s interest,” is more complicated. Drafting complaints with particular allegations against individual aliens, providing aliens with time to contact counsel and file a habeas petition, and preparing for a hearing before a federal judge takes time and manpower. However, it is the nature of due process to cause fiscal and administrative burdens. Rule by the ipse dixit of a President is likely more efficient than the deliberative procedures of a court. But it is what our Constitution, and the rule of law, demand. And due process, once surrendered, is difficult to reinstate.
Update: Citing the memo, Jim Himes and Joaquin Castro call on Tulsi to explain “Director Gabbard should explain why her public descriptions of this intelligence failed to correspond with the IC’s findings.”
Last month, we jointly wrote a classified letter to Director Gabbard asking her to declassify the April 7, 2025 Statement of the Community Memorandum entitled ‘Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua.’ We are pleased that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a redacted declassified copy of that analysis in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. As the now-public document makes clear, the Intelligence Community assesses that the ‘Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA operations in the United States.’ This assessment reinforces the finding of a District Court judge last week that the Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act with respect to Tren de Aragua was illegal.
Now that the public can read the Intelligence Community’s analysis that the Maduro regime does not direct Tren de Aragua, Director Gabbard should explain why her public descriptions of this intelligence failed to correspond with the IC’s findings. The most basic responsibility of the Director of National Intelligence is to speak truth to power and, where possible, the American people. Misrepresenting intelligence in public causes grave damage to the IC and to national security.”
Update: In another sign that the Spooks are not impressed with their new boss, WSJ reveals that they’re being asked to collect for actions that would support regime change in Greenland and Denbmark.
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.
The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.
The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.
Tulsi continues to squeal about the Deep State Actors exposing her actions.
In a statement, Gabbard said: “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information. They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”
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There’s a detail that often gets missed from slobbering transcription of DOGE propaganda. When Elon Musk first said DOGE would save $150 billion, he said that money would be saved in FY26 — that is, the year starting in October, the year for which Republicans are pushing through a budget now.
That’s important background to the expected release today of Trump’s topline proposed budget, which cuts … $163 billion from discretionary spending, largely consisting of the things that Elon has been putting through a woodchipper.
The fiscal 2026 budget proposal, which the White House is planning to release on Friday, is a largely symbolic wish list that lays out the president’s spending and political priorities. Congress, which Republicans control by narrow majorities in both chambers, will spend months debating which elements of the proposed plan should be turned into law.
The budget plan will propose $557 billion in nondefense discretionary spending, officials said. It would reduce nondefense discretionary spending by $163 billion, the officials said. The administration said that represents a 22.6% cut from projected spending in fiscal 2025, which ends Sept. 30. It wasn’t clear how the administration calculated that percentage.
[snip]
According to administration officials, Trump’s proposed budget cuts include:
Eliminating offices at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
Defunding “environmental justice” initiatives at the EPA
Closing USAID and reallocating grant funding
Eliminating a federal program that provides grants to nonprofits that help people who face housing discrimination
Defunding the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit that supports democratic institutions around the world
Cutting what it calls “wasteful and woke FEMA grant programs”
Closing the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank that seeks to prevent global conflict
Refocusing the National Institutes of Health on research that aligns with Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda
Eliminating a $315 million grant program for preschool development that the administration contends pushed DEI initiatives
Cutting $77 million in grant funding for teacher preparation and professional development the administration says pushed “Critical Race Theory” and DEI initiatives
Eliminating the Minority Business Development Agency, which promotes minority-owned businesses
Eliminating the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which promotes economic growth in poor communities
Cutting $5.2 billion from the National Science Foundation
Canceling $15 billion in funding in the infrastructure law signed by former President Joe Biden for renewable energy technology
Eliminating U.S. investments in global funds to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change
Eliminating EPA research grants to nongovernmental organizations
Cutting $2.5 billion from the Energy Department’s renewable energy program
Cutting $80 million from renewable energy programs at the Interior Department
Eliminating grants at NOAA, which forecasts weather and monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditions, among other things
If these cuts aren’t made, it’s not clear whether DOGE will have saved anything, even while incurring hundreds of billion in costs.
There’s already some discomfort between Congress and the Administration about this process.
Tom Cole and other budget Chairs were supposed to meet — and provide advance feedback — both about the prospective budget and the rescissions (the money not spent in this current year for which Trump needs Congress’ retroactive sanction). But Russ Vought rescheduled the meeting to do so from Thursday morning to Thursday afternoon, after members go home for the week.
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole vented Thursday about the White House’s seemingly inattentive approach to its relations with congressional funders, saying that President Donald Trump is not the “commander” of Congress and that top Republicans need the White House to quickly share their funding plans.
The unusually tart comments from Cole (R-Okla.) came after White House budget director Russ Vought canceled a planned Thursday morning meeting with the House’s GOP funding leaders because of a “presidential request,” Cole said.
While a White House official said that was “fake news” and that the meeting was rescheduled for later Thursday, Cole noted that most lawmakers would already be headed back home.
“It’s not going to be happening with all the cardinals later today, because we’re not going to be here later today,” Cole said of the dozen chairs of the House’s appropriations panels.
Those leaders are increasingly vexed that the White House budget office has not shared details of the funding cuts it is already undertaking at federal agencies and its plans for the fiscal year that starts in October.
“Look, no president — and administrations — don’t get to dictate what’s going to happen here,” Cole told reporters Thursday morning. “Congress is not the Army. And the president is the president, but not the commander in chief of Congress.”
Having advance influence on the rescissions package is particularly important because there are some things that DOGE cut (and more specifically, Pete Marocco cut while Marco Rubio claimed he had not) that Republicans don’t want to sanction, starting with PEPFAR.
The administration initially floated sending $9.3 billion of DOGE cuts to the Hill, which would encompass DOGE’s elimination of the main agency providing foreign aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as zeroing out some money for public broadcasting. The cuts would take just 51 votes in the Senate to pass, which means lawmakers would not need to worry about a Democratic filibuster to make the cuts permanent, under a provision in the 1974 budget law that allows requests for rescinded funding to be expedited. Musk has claimed $160 billion in savings so far.
This week, however, lawmakers began to raise concerns about even that smaller effort, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) telling colleagues she would have trouble supporting cuts to PEPFAR, an effort to combat HIV/AIDS abroad that other foreign-policy minded senators also support.
“I think it depends what’s in it precisely,” Collins said of the package’s chances of passing in the Senate. “For example, the $8.3 billion in foreign aid cuts, if that includes the women’s global health initiative as is rumored, if it cuts PEPFAR as it may, I don’t see those passing.”
[snip]
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said passing DOGE cuts could be difficult even in the Republican-controlled Congress, given the chamber’s tiny majority. He’s asked the administration to review the package before it is submitted to ensure the cuts have political support.
“Do you really want to roll out and have a failure?” Cole asked. “I think if they put it out there, they need to succeed at it.”
The futility of this process — having someone like Elon cut a bunch of things, in hopes Congress would take the politically risky vote to sanction it — has people like Rand Paul and Tom Massie mocking the whole process, to say nothing of Mike Johnson’s servitude to Trump.
“One of the most surreal moments this year was at the State of the Union, when my colleagues all got up and clapped because DOGE found all of these cuts and all this wasteful spending,” Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who often wears an electronic national debt-tracker clipped to his suit, told NOTUS on Thursday. “It was all stuff they funded, and all stuff they were going to fund again in the CR. And they were just, like, clapping.”
“They didn’t realize it was actually an insult and an indictment of their own performance,” Massie said. “Not only do we write the checks, we’re responsible for the oversight after we do write the checks. And clearly we failed.”
[snip]
Massie, for his part, thinks there are plenty of institutional changes that could help Congress do more work to monitor spending, instead of relying on an outside panel like DOGE. One tweak he’d like to see would allow members to hire contractors to do short-term oversight projects instead of relying only on full-time staff.
But, he said, getting serious about spending would also “take a speaker who wants to breathe life back into this institution.”
“Mike Johnson’s stated goal is to carry water for Trump,” Massie complained. “That’s not going to get it done.”
But it may be bigger than that.
If Congress doesn’t approve of Trump’s rescissions — the gutting of foreign aid that is popular with Republicans by boys who know nothing about it — it will make Trump’s legal justification for having made these cuts before a score of judges around the country far more fraught. In the same period Congress will be debating these rescissions, judges will be considering whether the cuts were legal.
This may be Russ Vought’s goal, to treat Congress as an appendage. But in theory, at least, it should create a Constitutional crisis. And this time, the courts will have a say.
This is one of many reasons why I think it so important that Trump’s self-imposed tariff disaster will start causing excruciating pain before Congress works through retroactively codifying the things he has been doing.
Right now, it looks increasingly likely that Trump’s tariff emergency will pre-empt — and likely dramatically disrupt — both the effort to codify his agenda and his bid to get SCOTUS to neuter Congress entirely.
[snip]
The shit is going to start hitting the tariff-inflated fan in the next few weeks. We’re beginning to see spikes in certain items (including toilet plunger parts). We’re beginning to see increasingly large layoffs tied to the expect drop in shipping. In the coming weeks, we expect to see expanding shortages.
Unless something dramatic changes, the US will experience a COVID-like crisis without the COVID, and with no appetite or excuse to start throwing money at people to stave off further crisis.
[snip]
[M]aybe Trump will get a deal and convince people who can’t buy fans and toilet plungers — to say nothing about small businesses who will be filing for bankruptcy and farmers watching their crops go to waste — that his tariffs aren’t a disaster. Maybe he will make a humiliating reversal on tariffs, one of the few things in which Trump actually believes. Maybe that will happen. Republican members of Congress, in particular, have a near-infinite ability to allow themselves to buy rank bullshit and that may well happen here.
Or, maybe, the economy will be in meltdown by May, June, July, when the Administration needs near-total unity from Congressional Republicans to codify Trump’s policies into law.
How’s that going to work out?
[snip]
What I am certain of, though, is that the wavering unanimity we’re seeing as everyone rubbernecks at the car crash of Trump’s trade policy may dissolve if Trump continues to willfully destroy the US economy.
Tom Cole is already pissy at Russ Vought, and pissy especially because Vought has snubbed Congress’ power of the purse. Susan Collins, his counterpart on appropriations in the Senate, is already warning Trump things may not work out like he imagines.
That’s this week, when the impact of Trump’s tariff emergency is mostly anxiety and initial lost jobs.
Next week, when the Chairs who had a meeting with Vought that he unilaterally rescheduled will return to work, is when the shit hits the tariff-inflated fan.
Some of the last cargo ships carrying Chinese goods without crippling tariffs are currently drifting into US ports. Come next week, though, that will change.
Cargo on ships from China loaded after April 9 will carry with them the 145% tariff President Donald Trump slapped on goods from that nation last month. Next week, those goods will arrive, but there will be fewer ships at sea and they will be carrying less cargo. For many importers, it is too expensive to do business with China.
[snip]
“Starting next week is when we begin to see the arrivals off of that (tariff) announcement on April 2,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, where nearly half of the business comes from China. “Cargo coming into Los Angeles will be down 35% compared for a year ago.”
Again, I’m not saying this will grow Republicans a spine (though this negotiation was always going to be difficult given the majorities). I’m not saying this will change the outcome.
I am saying that the already-testy negotiating environment is going to get far testier as shelves start to go bare.
Update, May 12: In a very good state of play on the fragile status of negotiations, David Dayen notes:
There’s a mechanism in the reconciliation instructions that ties the amount available for tax cuts to the spending cuts; if Republicans fail to hit $2 trillion, they have to pull the tax cuts back. That could mean time-limiting them, pulling parts out, or raising taxes elsewhere in the package, like the tax increase for millionaires that Trump has gently proposed. “Gently” is precisely the word, as on Friday Trump spat out a word salad about such a tax increase that concluded, “Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!”
Slightly increasing the top marginal rate on taxpayers who make above $2.5 million in income, as a policy matter, does not offset the large loophole on pass-through income, the lack of a wealth tax to deal with capital income, all the tax avoidance strategies (like “buy, borrow, die”) rich people use to skip taxes, and the gutting of the IRS that would track that money down. But it would close off a Democratic talking point about how the Trump tax cuts are only for the rich, while humiliating the last part of the Republican establishment Trump hasn’t corralled: the “no new taxes” fiscal zealots.
But that ideology is embedded in Republican DNA; while a couple of Freedom Caucus right-populists like Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) might go along with it, there are few others. As an example of the bind he and his party are in, Trump also floated closing the “carried interest” loophole that lowers the tax rates for hedge funders. Within days, four committee chairs and the head of the Republican campaign arm in the House joined a letter saying, basically, “No way.”
That incident shows that Trump’s falling approval ratings and the likelihood of a recession are diminishing his ability to dictate terms to Congress. The initial Energy and Commerce proposal I scooped last week included a White House proposal for “most favored nation” status for prescription drugs, a measure Trump tried by executive order in his first term that would attempt to limit drug purchases in Medicare to the price other countries pay.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Screenshot-2025-02-28-at-1.04.28 PM.png450658emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-05-02 07:13:082025-05-12 13:11:41Today’s Difficult Budget Negotiations Will Be Far More Difficult as Shelves Go Bare
I want to tell the story that NYT reports about Trump’s deal with Nayib Bukele to send people the Administration claims to be members of Tren de Aragua (TdA) to his concentration camp, including the critical details they left out. The entire deportation regime associated with TdA is built on a series of Stephen Miller lies, and as courts move towards discovery with the goal of holding those responsible in contempt, the stakes of Miller’s lies are going up.
Five takeaways (By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz, Devlin Barrett, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, and Annie Correal)
As NYT’s stories lay out, starting at least as early as 2023, Stephen Miller viewed the Alien Enemies Act as a way to deport people with no due process.
Mr. Miller had long been interested in the Alien Enemies Act, a law passed in 1798 that allows the U.S. government to swiftly deport citizens of an invading nation. The authority has been invoked just three times in the past, all during times of war. He saw it as a powerful weapon to apply to immigration enforcement.
The law “allows you to instantaneously remove any noncitizen foreigner from an invading country, aged 14 or older,” Mr. Miller told the right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk in a September 2023 interview, adding: “That allows you to suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding.”
During the campaign, Trump made overblown claims about TdA and Aurora, CO central to his campaign, and in real time associated those false claims with the AEA.
Though not mentioned in NYT’s opus, NYT’s Jonathan Weisman described the source of the false claims in September 2024. The claims about Aurora had been pitched by a slum landlord from NY — a man after Trump’s own heart — trying to project blame for his own neglect in caring for his properties, which quickly turned into a propaganda spiel on Murdoch outlets.
As far back as May 2023, Aurora officials had been trying to force an out-of-state landlord to fix up three blighted apartment complexes in the downtrodden East Colfax Corridor, which connects the cities of Denver and Aurora.
In July 2024, the landlord, CBZ Management, which says it is based in Colorado and Brooklyn, offered a new argument for why it couldn’t repair the buildings: Venezuelan gangs had taken over, and the property managers had been forced to flee.
Mr. Coffman and a Republican City Council member, Danielle Jurinsky, quickly repeated CBZ’s unverified claim in interviews.
“We have areas in our city, unfortunately, that have been taken, and we have to take back,” Mr. Coffman told a local talk radio host on July 31.
On Aug, 5, a public relations agent, Sara Lattman, hired by CBZ, pitched a “tip” to the local Fox television network affiliate in Denver.
“An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area,” she wrote on Fox 31’s tip line, according to an email obtained by The Times. “The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”
But it was a viral video that began circulating in late August that shows armed men in the hallway of one of the complexes that ultimately caught Mr. Trump’s attention. The incident was reported as a connection to gang violence, particularly the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though documentation was scarce.
On Tuesday, the Aurora Police Department announced it had arrested 10 members of Tren de Aragua on charges of ”felony menacing,” attempted first-degree murder, assault, child abuse, domestic abuse and others. But Todd Chamberlain, Aurora’s new police chief, could not say whether any of those men were among those seen in the video, or whether any in the video had actually done anything criminal.
Still, the clip, taken by a resident and played on endless loops on Fox News Channel and the website of The New York Post, metastasized into grandiose stories of whole buildings, whole sections of town and, in Mr. Trump’s telling, the whole city of Aurora being taken over by migrants carrying weapons of war.
”And getting them out will be a bloody story,” Mr. Trump said of Aurora at a rally in Mosinee, Wis., last Saturday, adding that it was “not going to be easy, but we’ll do it.”
Mr. Coffman and Ms. Jurinsky have both since backtracked.
That culminated in a Trump rally on October 11. Miller served as Trump’s opening act, using posters of alleged TdA members (just like those Trump set up outside the White House the other day) to rile up the crowd.
Here’s how NYT’s Michael Gold and Jonathan Weisman described the rally, including their cautions about Trump’s reading of the AEA, something that didn’t make NYT’s opus yesterday.
Former President Donald J. Trump escalated the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric that has animated his political career with a speech Friday in Aurora, Colo., where he repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.
For weeks, Aurora has been fending off false rumors about the city. And its conservative Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to show Mr. Trump that Aurora was “a considerably safe city.”
But Mr. Trump has made debunked claims about Aurora, a Denver suburb, such a central part of his stump speech that he took a campaign detour to Colorado, which has not voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 2004, to make the case in person at a rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center.
And during a meandering 80-minute speech Mr. Trump repeated claims, which have been debunked by local officials, that Aurora had been “invaded and conquered,” described the United States as an “occupied state,” called for the death penalty “for any migrant that kills an American citizen” and revived a promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.
That law allows for the summary deportation of people from nations with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.” It was far from clear whether the law could be used in the way that Mr. Trump was proposing.
[snip]
The city put out a statement on Friday pre-emptively fact-checking the former president ahead of his rally.
“A gang has not ‘taken over’ the city,” it said. “The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true. It is tragic that select individuals and entities have mischaracterized our city based on some specific incidents.”
Major crimes, it continued, are down more than 17 percent in Aurora. And “the city is actively deploying every legal tool to ensure CBZ Management is accountable for its properties and meets its responsibilities.”
After the rally, Mr. Coffman, the mayor, said that he was “disappointed that the former president did not get to experience more of our city for himself” and that “the reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity in our city — and our state — have been grossly exaggerated and have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety.”
“The city and state have not been ‘taken over’ or ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by migrant gangs,” he said. “The incidents that have occurred in Aurora, a city of 400,000 people, have been limited to a handful of specific apartment complexes, and our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns and will continue to do so.” [my emphasis]
Weisman described the opposition from local politicians that same day.
The visit, Mr. Coffman said in a statement to The Times, “is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora is a considerably safe city — not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs. My public offer to show him our community and meet with our police chief for a briefing still stands.”
It is not a message likely to get through.
In the closing weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign, his efforts to demonize immigrants, whether they are from Venezuela, Haiti or elsewhere, have gotten ever more lurid — and more impervious to the facts, even those provided by Republican allies such as Mr. Coffman. Last month, the former president began portraying Aurora, a sprawling suburb of Denver, population 404,219, as “a war zone” overrun by a violent Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua.
Despite the entreaties of Aurora city officials in both parties to stay away, Mr. Trump took his case to Aurora itself on Friday. He was there for an afternoon rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, a location that is decidedly not overrun by Venezuelan gangs.
He is not welcome, declared Crystal Murillo, a Democratic city councilwoman and a Mexican American.
“My message is, Trump doesn’t belong here,” she said in an interview. “His divisiveness, his rhetoric, is not what Aurora is about.”
When Tim Walz and others called out the lies Trump was telling in real time, Miller accused them then (as he is now) of defending gang members.
Even though the claims Trump made about Aurora during the campaign were built on exaggerations and lies, ICE did a high profile raid in the city early in Trump’s term, on February 6, with Fox News’ chief immigration propagandist Bill Melugin in tow.
The raid found only one TdA member.
On Thursday, shortly after the raid, the Fox News propagandist whose job it is to stoke fear about migration, Bill Melugin, first celebrated the “massive” raid, only later to reveal the raid had resulted in far fewer arrests than promised and just one arrest of a Tren de Aragua member. ICE immediately blamed its failure to detain more people on leaks.
That same day, Tom Homan announced he may have to halt the kind of embed ICE has been all too happy to give Melugin, because of leaks or operational security; he did not say that truthful reports to Fox viewers about his failures gets him in trouble with the boss. Tom Homan can’t afford to have Trump know that this massive raid found only a single Tren de Aragua member.
Kristi Noem blamed the failure to find numbers of TdA members that might substantiate Stephen Miller’s false claims about the gang on leakers. Tom Homan claimed to have identified the leakers on February 26, but they have not yet been charged.
In the wake of the raid that failed to substantiate the false claims and overblown promises he made during the election, Trump started bitching that ICE wasn’t meeting his promised deportation targets (they still aren’t, though they have shut down new migration). Tom Homan and Stephen Miller were failing to fulfill Trump’s top campaign promise, a promise built on Miller’s lies.
Agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are under increasing pressure to boost the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, as President Donald Trump has expressed anger that the amount of people deported in the first weeks of his administration is not higher, according to three sources familiar with the discussions at ICE and the White House.
A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is getting “angry” that more people are not being deported and that the message is being passed along to “border czar” Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello.
“It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people,” said the person familiar with Trump’s thinking.
[snip]
Meanwhile at ICE, Vitello told agents in January to aim to meet a daily quota of 1,200-1,400 arrests. According to numbers ICE has posted on X, the highest single day total since Trump was inaugurated was just 1,100, and the number has fallen since that day. On Tuesday of this week, arrests of immigrants were over 800, according to a source familiar with the numbers. But last weekend, there were only about 300 arrests, another source told NBC News.
In order to fulfill Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “millions and millions” of deportations, the Trump administration would have to be deporting over 2,700 immigrants every day to reach 1 million in a year.
And, as NBC News has reported, arrests do not always equal immediate detentions, much less deportations. Of the more than 8,000 immigrants arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, 461 were released, according to the White House.
Later that month, on February 26 (the same day Homan claimed to have found the leakers), the Intelligence Committee did an assessment of the relationship between TdA and Nicolás Maduro’s government. Only the FBI believed there was a tie.
The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Analysts put that conclusion at a “moderate” confidence level, the officials said, because of a limited volume of available reporting about the gang. Most of the intelligence community, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, agreed with that assessment.
Only one agency, the F.B.I., partly dissented. It maintained the gang has a connection to the administration of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, based on information the other agencies did not find credible.
“Multiple intelligence assessments are prepared on issues for a variety of reasons,” the White House said in a statement. “The president was well within his legal and constitutional authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to expel illegal foreign terrorists from our country.”
This NYT story is one of only two stories that Pam Bondi claimed to include classified information when she reversed protections on journalists (the other was this April 17 WaPo story reporting that a more formal National Intelligence Estimate also debunked the claim of ties between Maduro and TdA). Bondi wants to find the people who debunked this false claim, and she’s willing to use subpoenas to journalists or even warrants targeting them to do so.
NYT’s story yesterday described this assessment retrospectively — as something that led bureaucrats at State to grow concerned about their reliance on it.
During an internal State Department briefing about issues related to Latin America, some employees were dismayed to hear that weeks earlier, American spy agencies had assessed that Tren de Aragua was not actually controlled by the Venezuelan government — which was the premise for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
What NYT couldn’t fit into a 4,000-word article is that this assessment precededTrump’s AEA declaration — in which the asserted tie between TdA and Maduro was legally central — by more than two weeks.
Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.
TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus. TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017. In 2017, El Aissami was appointed as Vice President of Venezuela. Soon thereafter, the United States Department of the Treasury designated El Aissami as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, 21 U.S.C. 1901 et seq. El Aissami is currently a United States fugitive facing charges arising from his violations of United States sanctions triggered by his Department of the Treasury designation.
Like El Aissami, Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as Venezuela’s President and asserts control over the security forces and other authorities in Venezuela, also maintains close ties to regime-sponsored narco-terrorists. Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to “flood” the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.
Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States. Indeed, in December 2024, INTERPOL Washington confirmed: “Tren de Aragua has emerged as a significant threat to the United States as it infiltrates migration flows from Venezuela.” Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens. [my emphasis]
That is, Trump knew or should have known, when he made this invocation, it was based on claims his own IC would not substantiate. Only the agency run by Kash Patel would back that claim.
Trump made this invocation, per the NYT story, the same day that Trump finalized a deal with Nayib Bukele (NYT describes elsewhere the MS-13 members to whom Bukele did have a tie, that seem to have been included in the deal, but not here), and previewed its use in a presser at DOJ watched over by Stephen Miller.
On March 14, the Trump administration exchanged diplomatic notes with El Salvador laying out the terms: Mr. Bukele’s government would receive up to 300 members of Tren de Aragua in exchange for financial support from the United States.
That same day, Mr. Trump hinted at the forthcoming deportations during a speech at the Justice Department. Sitting in the front of the audience was Mr. Miller, who had moments earlier conferred with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, about the pending deportations.
“We’ve caught hundreds of them, the Venezuelan gang, which is as bad as it gets,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of loyalists. “And you’ll be reading a lot of stories tomorrow about what we’ve done with them and you’ll be very impressed.”
That’s what triggered a hasty effort to put bodies on planes, a process riddled with error.
That presser is also what led ACLU to try to preempt precisely this AEA invocation, to successfully obtain an order enjoining deportations relying on Trump’s TdA AEA declaration, even as planes were departing enjoining such flights.
The President has invoked—or will imminently invoke—a war power, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (“AEA”), in an attempt to summarily remove noncitizens from the United States and bypass the immigration laws Congress has enacted. 1 In either circumstance, a Temporary Restraining Order is needed because there may not be sufficient time for this Court to intervene between the time when the Act is invoked and when the planes removing Plaintiffs-Petitioners depart the United States. 2
But the United States is not at war, and the prerequisites for invocation of the AEA have not been met. See 50 U.S.C. § 21. The President can invoke the AEA only in a state of “declared war,” or when an “invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.” Id. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Act has been invoked only three times in our country’s history, all in declared wars: The War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.
The President’s imminent Proclamation targets Venezuelan noncitizens whom the government accuses of being part of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang. But the President’s Proclamation is invalid under the AEA for two plain reasons. First, Tren de Aragua is not a “foreign nation or government.” Second, Tren de Aragua is not engaged in an “invasion” or “predatory incursions” within the meaning of the AEA, because criminal activity does not meet the longstanding definitions of those statutory requirements—and has never been a sufficient basis for the executive to cast foreign nationals as “alien enemies” subject to arrest, internment, and removal. As a result, the President’s attempt to summarily remove Venezuelan noncitizens exceeds the wartime authority that Congress delegated in the AEA, violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed elsewhere in the country’s immigration laws for the removal of noncitizens, and violates due process.
Based on reports from Plaintiffs and legal service providers, the government has begun moving Venezuelan men who the government claims are part of Tren de Aragua to facilities in Texas.
1 See Remarks of President Trump, March 14, 2025 (addressing the Department of Justice) (“You will read in the papers tomorrow the bad thing we will do to Tren de Aragua.”).
2 See also Priscilla Alvarez, et al., Trump expected to invoke wartime authority to speed up mass deportation effort in coming days, CNN (Mar. 14, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/politics/alien-enemies-act-deportationconsideration/index.html (“The Trump administration is expected to invoke [the AEA] to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days, according to four sources familiar with the discussions. . . . The primary target remains Tren de Aragua[.]”).
As described in this NYT story (and earlier ones), unnamed senior officials in the White House discussed whether to obey this order or not.
Inside the White House, senior administration officials quickly discussed the order and whether they should move ahead. The team of Trump advisers decided to go forward, believing the planes were safely in international airspace, and well aware that the legal fight was most likely destined for the Supreme Court, where conservatives have a majority.
At 7:36 p.m., the third flight took off. Officials would later say the migrants on that flight were not deported under the Alien Enemies Act, but through regular immigration proceedings.
The White House’s decision to press forward, despite Judge Boasberg’s order, raised questions about whether the administration was defying the court. The Justice Department has argued that a federal judge cannot dictate foreign policy.
No one is saying it, but there are a lot of breadcrumbs in this article and others that Miller was one of those SAOs who instructed that the flights should go even in spite of Judge Boasberg’s order. One big breadcrumb is that, as the story describes, even before inauguration, Miller told others not to worry about legal challenges to the means via which Trump planned to deport migrants, challenges like the one before Boasberg that, in real time, these SAOs assumed SCOTUS would make go away.
Stephen Miller, the main architect of Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda, had a message for other advisers inside the presidential transition offices in West Palm Beach, Fla.: Be bold. Do not worry about potential litigation, especially when drafting Mr. Trump’s immigration actions.
It was roughly a month before the inauguration, and Mr. Miller knew he needed to move fast to make good on Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge of mass deportations.
The Administration has invented flimsy excuses for why the planes flew in spite of Boasberg’s order, precisely the claimed belief that NYT accepts unquestionably, that the planes were in international airspace (NYT are more skeptical, as am I, that the third included only men against whom DHS had already obtained deportation orders). In finding probable cause that, “the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt,” Judge Boasberg was far less impressed with these excuses than the NYT.
As this was blowing up in the wake of Boasberg’s order, per the stories, Bukele asked for cover for the people delivered to his custody, for proof they were who Trump had said they were.
[W]eeks earlier, when the three planes of deportees landed, it was the Salvadoran president who had quietly expressed concerns.
As part of the agreement with the Trump administration, Mr. Bukele had agreed to house only what he called “convicted criminals” in the prison. However, many of the Venezuelan men labeled gang members and terrorists by the U.S. government had not been tried in court.
Mr. Bukele wanted assurances from the United States that each of those locked up in the prison was members of Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang with roots in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the situation and documents obtained by The New York Times.
The matter was urgent, a senior U.S. official warned his colleagues shortly after the deportations, kicking off a scramble to get the Salvadorans whatever evidence they could.
Mr. Bukele’s demands for more information about some of the deportees, which has not been previously reported, deepen questions about whether the Trump administration sufficiently assessed who it dispatched to a foreign prison. [my emphasis]
Something has been misunderstood about this passage, which describes Bukele’s concerns as retrospective (though he did reject Venezuelan women — which NYT notes — and one Nicaraguan — which it does not, and which debunks their claim that Bukele was willing to accept detainees of any nationality — in real time). Bukele asked for proof these people were criminals as this was all blowing up. By deciding to send the planes in defiance of Judge Boasberg’s order, Trump created problems for Bukele, problems that their utter failure to vet any of these people — their decision to let flimsy lies stand in for evidence — exacerbated.
Within a week, Trump was disavowing having signed the AEA proclamation relying on claims that his Intelligence Community had debunked weeks earlier.
President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.
The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court on Friday that the proclamation was “signed in the dark” of night and that migrants were hurried onto planes.
“We want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
But when the conservative majority he banked on ruling for him twice did not, first ruling that detainees had to have an opportunity to challenge their deportation under habeas corpus, and then ruling that Trump had to “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return, Miller blatantly lied at the Bukele Oval Office presser about what SCOTUS said, followed by a colloquy in which Trump got him to repeat his bullshit claims.
[T]here’s an illegal alien from El Salvador. So with respect to you, he’s a citizen of El Salvador. So it’s very arrogant, even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point, as two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13. When President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law, which I’m sure you know, you’re very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible for any form of immigration relief in the United States.
So he had a deportation order that was valid. Which meant that under our law, he’s not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation. This issue was then, by a district court judge, completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and flying back here. That issue was raised with the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court said the District court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously stating clearly that neither Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador, who again is a member of MS-13. Which is, I’m sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world. And I can promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.
REPORTERS: So you don’t plan to ask for-
But the Supreme Court is asking to-
Donald Trump: And what was the ruling in the Supreme Court, Steve? Was it nine to nothing?
Steve Miller: Yes. It was a 9- 0-
Donald Trump: In our favor?
Steve Miller: In our favor against the District Court. Ruling saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States. As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual, at El Salvador’s sole discretion, was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time.
No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he’s a citizen of El Salvador. That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about it per the court can only be directed to him.
It’s not just that Trump had Miller perform this for the press and Bukele. He also performed himself taking Miller’s false claims about what SCOTUS said as word, even as he continues to insist unnamed lawyers provide him legal advice that informs his own actions. This was Trump laying out his own plausible deniability in real time. It’s not his fault he continued to defy SCOTUS. He’s just getting demonstrably erroneous advice, from the guy who orchestrated this entire ploy years in advance, orchestrated the propaganda to justify the focus on TdA, and seemingly orchestrated the problematic AEA invocation as well.
It’s not Donald Trump’s fault.
It’s Miller’s, the gatekeeper who prevents any contrary information to make it to Trump.
And that’s the background to the second story describing how, in a week during which DOJ bought time, someone performed asking Bukele to send Abrego Garcia back and Bukele performed refusing to do so.
The Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in El Salvador to inquire about releasing a Salvadoran immigrant whom government officials have been ordered by the Supreme Court to help free, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
But the authoritarian government of Nayib Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, said no, two of the people said. The Bukele administration claimed the man should stay in El Salvador because he was a Salvadoran citizen, according to one of those people.
It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of the immigrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom administration officials have repeatedly acknowledged was improperly expelled to El Salvador last month in violation of a court order expressly prohibiting him from being sent there.
NYT describes that their scoop came after Trump blew all this up in his ABC interview.
The revelation came just hours after the president, reversing course on his administration’s previous statements, said in an interview with ABC News that he had the ability to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back. The president added that he did not believe Mr. Abrego Garcia was a good person and that his administration’s lawyers would decide. The Justice Department is also facing a court-ordered deadline of early next week to provide information about what it has done to seek his freedom.
This was certainly published after Trump’s comments. Is NYT really saying that this entire story came together in the wake of ABC’s interview (or airing thereof)?
Whatever the case, these details — and Judge Paula Xinis’ renewed discovery order — explain the stakes of the twin exchanges between Trump and Terry Moran the other day.
When Trump demanded Moran adopt his false claims about Abrego Garcia’s knuckles, he did so because Stephen Miller has left him politically exposed (though not legally, thanks to SCOTUS’ immunity order last year, which may explain why Trump is so openly defiant). Trump has to affirm Miller’s lies and his belief in them, just as he tripled down on his election lies as it became a criminal problem, because otherwise he has the kind of guilty consciousness and foreknowledge that could become a problem down the road.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Wait a minute.
TERRY MORAN: I want —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Hey, Terry. Terry. Terry.
TERRY MORAN: He — he did not have the letter —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don’t do that — M-S-1-3 — It says M-S-one-three.
TERRY MORAN: I — that was Photoshop. So let me just–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can’t do that — he had —
— he– hey, they’re givin’ you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doin’ the interview. I picked you because — frankly I never heard of you, but that’s okay —
TERRY MORAN: This — I knew this would come —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you — Terry — but you’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We’ll agree to disagree. I want to move on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
TERRY MORAN: — to something else.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry. Do you want me to show the picture?
TERRY MORAN: I saw the picture. We’ll — we’ll — we’ll agree to disagree —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, and you think it was Photoshop. Well —
TERRY MORAN: Here we go. Here we go.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — don’t Photoshop it. Go look —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — at his hand. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Fair enough, he did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way. I’m not an expert on them.
I want to turn to Ukraine, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no. Terry —
TERRY MORAN: I– I want to get to Ukraine–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry, no, no. No, no. He had MS as clear as you can be. Not “interpreted.” This is why people —
And when Trump grew hostile after Moran cornered him into admitting that, yes, he had the power to get Abrego Garcia returned, Trump needed to reinforce the plausible deniability he started building as soon as this thing started going to shit.
TERRY MORAN: I’m not saying he’s a good guy. It’s about the rule of law. The order from the Supreme Court stands, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He came into our country illegally.
TERRY MORAN: You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could.
TERRY MORAN: You could pick it up, and with all —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could
TERRY MORAN: — the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, “Send him back,” right now.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.
TERRY MORAN: But the court has ordered you —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But he’s not.
TERRY MORAN: — to facilitate that — his release–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want —
TERRY MORAN: You’re the president.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — to do this, Terry —
TERRY MORAN: Yeah, but the — but the buck stops in this office —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I — no, no, no, no. I follow the law. You want me to follow the law. If I were the president that just wanted to do anything, I’d probably keep him right where he is —
TERRY MORAN: The Supreme Court says what the law is. [my emphasis]
Sure, the buck stops here. Trump is all powerful. But he — the President — is not making the decisions, did not make the AEA invocation based on lies. “The lawyers” did that. And they don’t want him to pick up that phone and facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.
There’s no sign that Trump and Stephen Miller plan to give up this campaign, even as conservative Catholic SCOTUS justices break their Easter weekend observances to prevent Trump from pulling this trick a second time, a third adverse ruling. Instead, Stephen Miller will instead target the judges who tell him he (who is not a lawyer) has gotten the law wrong, over and over.
And that will force Trump to continue to insist that journalists affirm whatever Stephen Miller tells him is true.
Update: Trump appointed Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr. just ruled that Trump’s invocation of the AEA is unlawful and will move to relieve three plaintiffs held under it.
Those factual statements depict conduct by TdA that unambiguously is harmful to society in this country. And as previously explained, the political question doctrine prohibits the Court from weighing the truth of those factual statements, including whether Maduro directs TdA’s actions or the extent of the referenced criminal activity.
Instead, the Court determines whether the factual statements in the Proclamation, taken as true, describe an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” for purposes of the AEA. Based on the plain, ordinary meaning of those terms in the late 1790’s, the Court concludes that the factual statements do not. The Proclamation makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation. Thus, the Proclamation’s language cannot be read as describing conduct that falls within the meaning of “invasion” for purposes of the AEA. As for “predatory incursion,” the Proclamation does not describe an armed group of individuals entering the United States as an organized unit to attack a city, coastal town, or other defined geographical area, with the purpose of plundering or destroying property and lives. While the Proclamation references that TdA members have harmed lives in the United States and engage in crime, the Proclamation does not suggest that they have done so through an organized armed attack, or that Venezuela has threatened or attempted such an attack through TdA members. As a result, the Proclamation also falls short of describing a “predatory incursion” as that concept was understood at the time of the AEA’s enactment.11
For these reasons, the Court concludes that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful. Respondents do not possess the lawful authority under the AEA, and based on the Proclamation, to detain Venezuelan aliens, transfer them within the United States, or remove them from the country.
Just before he did that, he certified class status to similarly situated people in SDTX.
You’ve likely seen some clips from Terry Moran’s rather supine interview of Donald Trump.
Moran let Trump get away with a whole range of false claims uncontested. But they got into it over Trump’s efforts to portray Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a bad man.
The clips don’t do the exchange justice.
Trump and Moran went back and forth around 28 times, and then Trump returned to it for another six exchanges (I’ve included two excerpts of the fight over knuckles below).
I actually don’t think this exchange reflects dementia It certainly reflects Trump’s ego. It’s an instance where Moran, as credulous as he otherwise was, refused accept Trump’s chant, 2+2=5.
Close to the beginning of the exchange, Trump held up everything — wait a minute! — when Moran refused to accept Trump’s claim that the tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s hands were proof of his MS-13 membership.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: On his knuckles — he had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. There’s dis — there’s a dispute over that —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Well —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — on his knuckles tattooed.
TERRY MORAN: — he — he — he — it didn’t say– oh, he had some tattoos that are inper — interpreted that way. But let’s move on
After Moran insisted on something obvious: that the photo of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles was clearly labeled both with interpretations of his tattoos and from that an annotation turning it into MS-13, Trump told Moran he could not state that because Trump gave him the break of a lifetime: “Terry, you can’t do that — he had — — he– hey, they’re givin’ you the big break of a lifetime.” That is, Moran could not state the truth because Trump had granted him this access. Moran tried to move on. Trump claimed this was not an interpretation. Moran tried to move on. Finally, Moran made a half concession.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles.
TERRY MORAN: Alright. I —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay?
TERRY MORAN: — we’ll — we’ll take a look at it —
But that was not good enough for Trump. Trump asked Moran, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Yes, he does,’ and, you know, go on to something else –”
Minutes later, after Moran tried to move onto the Ukraine question he had been trying to get out, Trump took a question about Putin and turned it back to Moran himself.
TERRY MORAN: Do you trust [Putin]?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t trust you. I don’t trust — I don’t trust a lot of people. I don’t trust you. Look at you. You come in all shootin’ for bear. You’re so happy to do the interview.
TERRY MORAN: I am happy —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And then you start hitting me with fake questions. You start tellin’ me that a guy — whose hand is covered with a tattoo —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. We’re back to that.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — doesn’t have the tattoo, you know.
He repeated his claim that Moran is excited to have access, but then accused him of asking “fake questions,” all because he refused to say 2+2-5. That’s when Trump labeled Moran dishonest.
This is not dementia.
This is power.
This is precisely the purpose Trump reserves for mainstream journalists: As props in his performance of forced adherence to his reality.
And it works.
After all, Moran was willing to accept as given the last 8 years of forced doctrine, about Ukraine, about Joe Biden, about Trump’s grievances. Moran has already internalized lies Trump has told for years, and wildly grotesque claims about rule of law went uncontested, unnoticed.
Moran could have stood up and walked away when Trump insisted that he repeat, 2+2=5, but instead Moran tried to make a series of half-concessions so he could move on. But even then, Trump still used it as a means to suggest he — Moran — was less trustworthy than Vladimir Putin.
It’s with that background that I want to return to the other noteworthy part of this, where Moran tried to get Trump to concede that SCOTUS had ordered Trump to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return (NYT has a report that in the last week that discovery in Abrego Garcia’s case had been paused, the US requested and Nayib Bukele refused to return him, as well as an even more credulous report on how Stephen Miller dreamt up this entire plan over a year in advance, both of which I’ll return to).
When Terry Moran noted that Trump had the power to get Kilmar Abrego Garcia released, goading him to assert his own power, Trump complied (this was, in my opinion, the smartest thing Moran did in the interview, and it could backfire on Trump in the legal case).
TERRY MORAN: I’m not saying he’s a good guy. It’s about the rule of law. The order from the Supreme Court stands, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He came into our country illegally.
TERRY MORAN: You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could.
TERRY MORAN: You could pick it up, and with all —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could
TERRY MORAN: — the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, “Send him back,” right now.
But then Trump shifted to the slander against Abrego Garcia — to the Administration’s decision, reported by The Atlantic earlier this week, plan to impugn him rather than remedy their mistake.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.
TERRY MORAN: But the court has ordered you —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But he’s not.
Here, several belief systems came into conflict.
At once, Moran was saying that Trump should return Abrego Garcia for two reasons, because the Supreme Court ordered he do so and because as President he absolutely has power to do so. In response, Trump disclaimed authority for making the decision. “We have lawyers,” the most powerful man in the world who appointed his defense attorneys to run DOJ said. And from there, Trump said he’s just following the law by doing whatever “the lawyers” tell him to do, not by doing what SCOTUS tells him to do.
TERRY MORAN: — to facilitate that — his release–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want —
TERRY MORAN: You’re the president.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — to do this, Terry —
TERRY MORAN: Yeah, but the — but the buck stops in this office —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I — no, no, no, no. I follow the law. You want me to follow the law. If I were the president that just wanted to do anything, I’d probably keep him right where he is —
TERRY MORAN: The Supreme Court says what the law is.
When you and I spoke last April. Are you still committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders?
Sure, I believe in the court system.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven’t done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?
Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.
Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don’t make that decision.
Have you asked President Bukele to return him?
I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t.
Did you ask him?
But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.
But if you haven’t asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?
Well, because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.
Remember, too, that Trump claimed that he didn’t sign the Alien Enemies Act proclamation that, NYT describes, Stephen Miller has been concocting for over a year.
President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed his involvement in invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants, saying for the first time that he hadn’t signed the proclamation, even as he stood by his administration’s move.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporters before leaving the White House on Friday evening.
The president made his comments when asked to respond to Judge James Boasberg’s concerns in court on Friday that the proclamation was “signed in the dark” of night and that migrants were hurried onto planes.
“We want to get criminals out of our country, number one, and I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” Trump said. “Other people handled it, but (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
Two things are going on here, neither of them dementia.
First, Trump is either being compartmented from the most problematic decisions behind his detention program, or claiming to be. I would be unsurprised if the lawyers have compartmented him, but his public claim to CNN should be basis to claim the entire AEA declaration is invalid.
Second, Trump is enforcing a system of belief — inviting journalists in and grinding them down until they they publicly adopt Trump’s false claims — that justifies (in his mind) his detention program. It doesn’t much matter whether Trump really believes Abrego Garcia’s knuckles really say MS-13 based on false briefing from Stephen Miller or whether he’s just parroting the lines Stephen Miller told him to say because he hasn’t tested what Miller told him.
He did the same thing when he stated, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” and got elected anyway. He did the same thing when he adopted Miller’s false claim that Aurora had been taken over by Tren de Aragua, the fiction that Miller was crafting last fall to set up his use of AEA, the fiction that has been debunked by the Intelligence Committee.
It’s far too late to waste time on whether Trump believes the torrent of lies he tells, to ponder whether this latest lie is a sign of dementia when his false claims about winning an election were instead calculation. Trump’s utterances are always utilitarian anyway. Always.
Trump’s fundamental unfitness lies in his need to and success at creating his own reality. Is Stephen Miller managing that unfitness to his own ends? Undoubtedly. But Trump’s unfitness remains — the reason Miller has exploited his genius for propaganda.
Stand up, call him out for doing it, and walk away. Do not be the prop in this display of dominance.
No matter what you think the mental acuity of Donald Trump and his chief advisor is, the ABC interview yesterday displayed both roots of Trump’s power, his success at bullying others into parroting his doctrine, and his use of that to claim those falsehoods legitimize something wildly divorced from American justice and rule of law.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And you’ll pick out one man, but even the man that you picked out —
TERRY MORAN: He’s got —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — he said he’d — wasn’t a member of a gang. And then they looked, and —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: On his knuckles — he had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. There’s dis — there’s a dispute over that —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Well —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — on his knuckles tattooed.
TERRY MORAN: — he — he — he — it didn’t say– oh, he had some tattoos that are inper — interpreted that way. But let’s move on
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Wait a minute.
TERRY MORAN: I want —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Hey, Terry. Terry. Terry.
TERRY MORAN: He — he did not have the letter —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don’t do that — M-S-1-3 — It says M-S-one-three.
TERRY MORAN: I — that was Photoshop. So let me just–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can’t do that — he had —
— he– hey, they’re givin’ you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doin’ the interview. I picked you because — frankly I never heard of you, but that’s okay —
TERRY MORAN: This — I knew this would come —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you — Terry — but you’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We’ll agree to disagree. I want to move on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
TERRY MORAN: — to something else.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry. Do you want me to show the picture?
TERRY MORAN: I saw the picture. We’ll — we’ll — we’ll agree to disagree —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, and you think it was Photoshop. Well —
TERRY MORAN: Here we go. Here we go.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — don’t Photoshop it. Go look —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — at his hand. He had MS-13 —
TERRY MORAN: Fair enough, he did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way. I’m not an expert on them.
I want to turn to Ukraine, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no. Terry —
TERRY MORAN: I– I want to get to Ukraine–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry, no, no. No, no. He had MS as clear as you can be. Not “interpreted.” This is why people —
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — no longer believe —
TERRY MORAN: Well.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — the news, because it’s fake news —
TERRY MORAN: When he was photographed in El Sal — in– in El Salvador, they aren’t there. But let’s just go on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He is —
TERRY MORAN: They aren’t there when he’s in El Salvador.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –there — oh, oh, they weren’t there —
TERRY MORAN: Take a look at the photograph —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But they’re there now, right?
TERRY MORAN: No. What —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But they’re there now?
TERRY MORAN: They’re in your picture.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
TERRY MORAN: Ukraine, sir.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles.
TERRY MORAN: Alright. I —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay?
TERRY MORAN: — we’ll — we’ll take a look at it —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s — it’s — you do such a disservice —
TERRY MORAN: We’ll take a look. We’ll take a look at that, sir —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Why don’t you just say, “Yes, he does,” and, you know, go on to something else —
He then returned to it for another four exchanges when discomforted by Moran’s questions about trusting Putin
TERRY MORAN: You think he wants peace?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — this is —
TERRY MORAN: You think Vladimir Putin wants peace?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think he does, yes. I think he does–
TERRY MORAN: Still?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think because of me —
TERRY MORAN: Even with the raining missiles on —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think he really — his — his — his dream was to take over the whole country. I think because of me, he’s not gonna do that.
TERRY MORAN: Do you trust him?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think —
TERRY MORAN: Do you trust him?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t trust you. I don’t trust — I don’t trust a lot of people. I don’t trust you. Look at you. You come in all shootin’ for bear. You’re so happy to do the interview.
TERRY MORAN: I am happy —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And then you start hitting me with fake questions. You start tellin’ me that a guy — whose hand is covered with a tattoo —
TERRY MORAN: Alright. We’re back to that.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — doesn’t have the tattoo, you know.
TERRY MORAN: Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I mean, you’re being dishonest.
TERRY MORAN: No, I’m not —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let — let– let me just tell you —
TERRY MORAN: No, I am not, sir.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Do I trust — I don’t trust a lot of people. But I do think this. I think that he — let’s say he respects me. And I believe because of me he’s not gonna take over the whole — but his decision, his choice would be to take over all of Ukraine.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-30-at-18.08.10.png8401642emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-04-30 14:46:112025-04-30 14:46:11How Trump Knuckles Journalists to Parrot His Doctrine
Amid all the 100-day reviews of Trump’s term so far, a few people made an important point. In normal times, the legacy of presidential administrations rests on what a President can get passed into law, not what he can do via a flurry of Executive Orders thrown out on near-daily basis during his first hundred days.
Unlike Roosevelt and every president who followed, however, Mr. Trump has relied mainly on executive authority rather than trying to pass legislation through Congress. Roosevelt set the standard when he took office in 1933 in the teeth of the Great Depression, pushing through 15 landmark pieces of legislation in those epic 100 days.
Overall, Roosevelt signed 76 bills into law in that period, more than any of his successors, while Mr. Trump has signed just five, the lowest of any president since then. By contrast, Mr. Trump has signed a whopping 142 executive orders, more than three times the 42 that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed in his first 100 days in 2021.
The lack of major legislation is not because Mr. Trump failed but because he has not even bothered to try. Even though his own Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, the president has all but disregarded Capitol Hill so far, other than seeking a giant package of spending and tax cuts that is only just starting to make its way through the House and Senate. Executive orders feed his appetite for instant action, while enacting legislation can involve arduous and time-consuming negotiations.
But the price of instant action could be failure to bring about sustained change. Bills passed by Congress and signed by a president become the law of the land for years if not decades to come, while executive orders can simply be repealed by the next president.
“F.D.R.’s accomplishments were enduring,” said H.W. Brands, a Roosevelt biographer at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Supreme Court overturned some but they were revised and reinstated. Most are with us still. Trump’s accomplishments, so far, can be undone by mere strokes of the pens of his successors.”
At the same time, Mr. Trump has claimed authority to act that his predecessors never imagined they had, setting off an escalating battle with the courts, which as of Monday had ruled at least 123 times to at least temporarily pause actions by the new administration that might be illegal or unconstitutional.
Mr. Trump has issued increasingly menacing threats against judges who dare to block him, and in one case his F.B.I. agents even handcuffed and arrested a county judge accused of obstructing his immigration crackdown.
“These first hundred days have been historic, not because of how much of his agenda he has achieved, but because of how much damage he has done to democratic institutions and state capacity in his effort to wield an unprecedented amount of executive power,” said Nicole Hemmer, director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Roosevelt too expanded executive power, but in the early days at least he did so in tandem with Congress, which empowered him to respond to the crisis afflicting the country. In the process, he designed a domestic architecture that broadened the federal government’s role in society just as he would later fashion a new American-led international system that would last for generations.
There are several reasons why Trump hasn’t relied on Congress. Republicans don’t have the margins in either house to push through the awful things Trump wants to do. In Trump’s preferred model, Congress remains a thoroughly captured rubber stamp for his agenda. And if his larger power grab succeeds, he will win legal sanction for emasculating tools Congress has — the power of the purse and the power to set up boards insulated from politics most of all, but even transparency tools via which Congress can exercise oversight — to affirm their status as a coequal branch.
Though few in Congress seem to understand this, the Executive is making a mad dash to get the Courts to rubber stamp Trump’s gutting of the already-supine Legislative Branch.
But he may not get there in time — particularly not as SCOTUS grows increasingly irked by Trump’s defiance of them.
And while the outcome of this clash is totally uncertain, the timeline of it is coming into focus.
Right now, it looks increasingly likely that Trump’s tariff emergency will pre-empt — and likely dramatically disrupt — both the effort to codify his agenda and his bid to get SCOTUS to neuter Congress entirely.
Congress must pass budget bills to raise the debt ceiling
Thus far, Republicans in Congress have successfully overcome disunity by deferring all the hard questions. In the House, especially, Mike Johnson faces a block of members who know they will lose reelection if Congress makes big Medicaid cuts recognized as such (they’re trying to disguise them with work requirements and other gimmicks) and another block that refuses to pass a bill that doesn’t create the illusion of fiscal austerity that requires huge Medicaid cuts. Given that both blocks include at least eight members, the math is nearly impossible.
This week marks the beginning of the effort to really overcome those disagreements. And already, the timeline is slipping, first to Memorial Day (Johnson’s bid) and now to Fourth of July (Scott Bessent’s new deadline).
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set a new deadline for Republicans’ sweeping domestic policy bill Monday: July 4.
“We’ve got three legs to the President’s economic agenda, trade, tax and deregulation, and we hope that we can have this tax portion done by Fourth of July,” Bessent told reporters at the Capitol after a meeting with congressional leaders and top tax writers.
The deadline pegged to the Independence Day recess — which POLITICO reported over the weekend — comes as Republicans work through significant sticking points to get the party-line megabill through the House by Speaker Mike Johnson’s Memorial Day target.
Bessent’s updated timeline came not long after Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters earlier Monday that the speed of the process would be dictated in part by the need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. That would constitute a “hard deadline” for lawmakers, he said, since Republicans plan to include debt hike in the bill.
The exact “X-date,” as the federal default deadline is known,” remains in flux, though outside estimates have pegged it to hit sometime over the summer.
So the GOP plans to use all the time between now and whenever the government bumps up against the debt ceiling overcoming these near-intractable disagreements.
Gotcha. So July, for present purposes. May, June, July. Over two full months from now.
A lot can happen.
SCOTUS intervenes in national injunctions and Trump’s firing authority
Meanwhile, challenges to Trump’s executive power grabs are churning through the courts. On April 15, SCOTUS scheduled a highly unusual (in terms of timing and posture) May 15 hearing for first they will formally review, birthright citizenship. But as Steve Vladeck explains, that won’t even get into the guts of the question about birthright citizenship; this is about national injunctions.
The technical but critical point here is that the Trump administration is not formally asking the Supreme Court to get rid of the injunctions altogether (and uphold the policy). It’s asking only for the second type of relief it sought in the courts of appeals – to narrow the three injunctions so that they apply only to the plaintiffs.
This ties into concerns that administrations of both parties have raised about the power of courts to freeze a president’s polices nationwide. By raising that argument in the context of the highly controversial birthright citizenship policy, it is a transparent attempt to get the court to rule for the Trump administration without having to hold that these new limits on birthright citizenship are constitutional.
If the court sides with Trump, the practical effect would be largely the same; if the Supreme Court narrows these three district court injunctions to only the handful of specific, named plaintiffs in the three cases, then the result would be to allow the Trump policy to go into effect against everyone else – albeit without the Supreme Court specifically upholding it.
Of course, non-citizens who would be affected by the policy who are not parties to one of these three cases could bring their own lawsuits challenging it, and would likely succeed in those lawsuits, but their claims would have to be litigated on an individual basis—which would not only take some time, but might be beyond the resources of at least some of those who might be impacted.
SCOTUS has also frozen another consequential pair of cases, the challenges to Trump’s firing of two board members whose tenure was protected by Congress, Gwynne Wilcox on NLRB and Cathy Harris on Merit Systems Protection Board. Two days ago, Vladeck noted that this temporary stay has been on hold for 19 days, the kind of comment Vladeck often makes before something substantial happens.
This legal dispute has consequences not just for workers’ ability to get independent protection that cannot be politicized, but also for the functioning of the Federal Trade Commission and the Fed, including any authority Trump has to fire Jerome Powell. Judge Loren AliKhan has scheduled a hearing in the lawsuit from Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya challenging their own firing from the FTC, one that directly addresses the precedent that SCOTUS might overturn, for May 20. So that issue could be accelerated, or it could wend its way to the court by fall.
The disputes about Trump’s unlawful impoundment and usurpation of Congress’ right to set tariffs — the latter an issue being fought by both Democratic states and groups backed by right wing donors, including Charles Koch and Leonard Leo — will take longer to get to SCOTUS, but we will continue to have confrontations on these issues all summer. Just the other day, former Trump White House Counsel Greg Katsas reversed his earlier position, siding with Obama-appointee Cornelia Pillard to let Amy Berman Jackson continue to review an injunction on Trump’s dismantlement of CFPB.
Instead, as his month on the “special panel” nears its close, Katsas — Trump’s former White House lawyer — joined with Pillard to tell the agency that it had to stop with any RIFs at all until the D.C. Circuit can hear the appeal of the injunction in May.
Of course, this is not some sea-change, and Katsas is likely still to side with the administration on many matters.
But, over the course of the month, a cautionary tale has played out in front of him — and he responded by stepping in to assert the rule of law.
Again, we’ll have consequential decisions (and even more important ones on habeas corpus) over the next several months, but with the possible exception of the firing authority, the substantive issues will take some time to get to SCOTUS.
Trump’s tariff emergency will hit before Congress passes a budget
Now throw Trump’s self-inflicted tariff disaster into the mix.
The shit is going to start hitting the tariff-inflated fan in the next few weeks. We’re beginning to see spikes in certain items (including toilet plunger parts). We’re beginning to see increasingly large layoffs tied to the expect drop in shipping. In the coming weeks, we expect to see expanding shortages.
Unless something dramatic changes, the US will experience a COVID-like crisis without the COVID, and with no appetite or excuse to start throwing money at people to stave off further crisis.
For all the claims of fecklessness, Senate Democrats will force Republicans to tie themselves to this shitshow for a second time later this week. John Thune invited Jamieson Greer to the first Senate lunch after Senators heard from their constituents what a disaster this is; it’s unclear whether he has placated their concerns.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned Republicans during the lunch against helping the Democrats pass the resolution, just weeks after four GOP senators crossed the aisle to pass a resolution disapproving of Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
“This is a messaging vote for the Democrats. And it’s important to — especially now with the administration on the cusp of getting some deals on trade with other countries — that our folks hang together, give them the space to do that,” Thune said of his message to his conference in a brief post-lunch interview.
The majority leader also launched a staunch defense of Trump’s trade strategy in the face of poor polling and economic turmoil over it, insisting the president’s “policy decisions are the right ones.”
Some Republicans remain uneasy about the tariffs, as they’ve watched Trump’s favorability ratings and consumer sentiment dip to the same level as the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There were a lot of questions,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who said he didn’t want to use the word “concerns” because it would be taken out of context. Kennedy said he expected to hear about a deal in the next few weeks — and wasn’t expecting the administration to announce all of its deals at once.
That reassured Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who said senators advised Greer to roll out deals as they happen, not to wait for when the 90-day pause ends July 9.
“Roll them out as they come along, don’t try to, you know, save them all up for the Fourth of July,” Cramer said. “Because people are anxious about it. They want to see the results.”
Trump has succeeded in winning near-unanimous support from Congress and on the issue of Congressional efforts to revoke his claimed emergency, he has already, repeatedly, issued a veto threat (meaning the effort is, in theory, futile). But the only way Republicans can convince themselves this trade war will not be a catastrophic disaster is by believing Administration hype that a deal, any deal, contours of a deal, a framework of a deal, sketches of deals — something they’ve been saying non-stop for 20 days now — will come any day now.
I mean, sure, maybe Trump will get a deal and convince people who can’t buy fans and toilet plungers — to say nothing about small businesses who will be filing for bankruptcy and farmers watching their crops go to waste — that his tariffs aren’t a disaster. Maybe he will make a humiliating reversal on tariffs, one of the few things in which Trump actually believes. Maybe that will happen. Republican members of Congress, in particular, have a near-infinite ability to allow themselves to buy rank bullshit and that may well happen here.
Or, maybe, the economy will be in meltdown by May, June, July, when the Administration needs near-total unity from Congressional Republicans to codify Trump’s policies into law.
How’s that going to work out?
I don’t know what will happen with any of this. No one does. Trump has succeeded in conning his way out of enormous problems before. The right wingers on SCOTUS are bound to help Trump in many, but not all, ways in months ahead. And Republicans in Congress have used every opportunity they could find this year to hand away their own power. Alternately, as I noted yesterday, malignant narcissists rarely respond well when they suffer a grave humiliation of the type that Trump may be headed towards.
What I am certain of, though, is that the wavering unanimity we’re seeing as everyone rubbernecks at the car crash of Trump’s trade policy may dissolve if Trump continues to willfully destroy the US economy.
Update: Just as I was posting this, CBO announced that GDP fell 0.3% in the first quarter.
Update: I was trying to remember the name of this YouTube, which Amicus12 noted in comments. So now I’m posting the most recent post on What Is Going on with Shipping.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-16-at-13.11.46.png594622emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-04-30 08:16:582025-04-30 13:00:01Three Coequal Timelines of Government
Congratulations! You’ve survived 100 of the 1461 total days Trump is scheduled to serve as President.
In honor of the occasion, I wanted to pull together three accounts of DOGE, which suggest DOGE and related cuts have cost Americans over a trillion dollars.
First, there’s this WaPo story from March, which describes the cuts to IRS may cost 10% of revenue — or $500 billion a year.
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
NYT reported last week (in a piece that discussed, but did not put a price tag on, other costs) that the way Elon carried out personnel cuts may have created $135 billion in personnel costs, partly because Elon fucked up firings and so Russ Vought had to do it again.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.
And today, Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray released a tracker that lays out $430 billion in spending that taxpayers have paid for, but for which the services have been withdrawn or frozen.
As the tracker details, President Trump has—through a variety of different means—frozen, cancelled, clawed back, illegally impounded, and slow-walked federal funding for all manner of key priorities. Among much else, this includes investments in:
Critical research into Alzheimer’s disease, women’s health, cancer, diabetes, and much more, throwing research already conducted into the shredder and setting back treatments and cures.
Public safety, including COPS grants, Office of Violence Against Women grants, and programs to help victims of crime.
Relief for states and communities responding to and recovering from natural disasters.
Farmers and local agriculture businesses, making it more expensive for hardworking people to run their farms and cutting off research they count on.
School lunches and food for child care institutions at the detriment of the farmers who rely on these local markets.
Head Start. Head Start programs are already beginning to close their doors as this administration slow-walks funding, kicking kids out of their classrooms and sending parents scrambling to find new preschool options.
Critical investments in transportation projects—for roads and bridges, airports, public transit, ports, and more—and energy projects across the country that are creating new, good jobs and lowering families’ monthly energy bills.
Our national security and efforts to prevent and end global conflicts.
Essential health services like birth control and cancer screenings for over 800,000 patients—and resources to protect people from public health threats.
As a reminder, I’m collecting these and other DOGE debunkings here.
Altogether, that’s $1.065 trillion (of which the $430 billion includes stuff Elon touts as “cost savings”).
Elon Musk came in promising (at various times) to save a trillion dollars.
Instead, a hundred days in, and we’re already a trillion in the hole, and that’s before you consider defending these unlawful cuts, the increased costs that disease and extreme weather and wars will incur because we’ve defunded their mitigation, or increased borrowing costs arising from Trump’s trade war.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Miller-Correction.png9601200emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-04-29 11:25:102025-04-29 12:48:02100 Days, a Trillion Dollars: DOGE’s Costs Keep Adding Up
Trump is in the process of spectacularly failing at least three high profile negotiations, all while insisting he’s making imaginary deals left and right.
No, there’s many deals.
When are they going to be announced?
You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals.
Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?
I’ve made 200 deals.
You’ve made 200 deals?
100%.
I’ll explain what those three are, but the larger point I want to raise is that these failures, all coming at roughly the same moment, will create a psychological and political need for Trump to seek some other way to look strong, even as these failures prove he’s not.
Harvard
Start with Harvard. That Trump failed what he intended to be a negotiation is evident by the timeline.
At first, Harvard hired Bill Burck, along with Robert Hur. Burck is a formidable lawyer, but quasi-adversaries of Trump (think Eric Adams, who also hired him) hire him because of his relationship with Trump, because he’ll be able to make a deal. When they hired Burck, it is clear, that’s what Harvard expected to do: to deal.
But in response to Trump’s White House overplaying their hand — who overplayed their hand is an open question — with a letter basically demanding to reorganize the most prestigious university in the US and a freeze of $2 billion in funding, Harvard prepared for war, both suing (adding a different set of lawyers) and launching a PR campaign that has not only explained the value Harvard (and higher education generally) brings to the US, but also set an example for and given cover to other universities, giving them the space to fight back, now more unified in opposing Trump’s power grab. While not directly a response to Trump’s attack, Harvard also has the ability and is taking steps to weather this fight financially, but doing so in ways that could influence an already volatile market.
The solidarity formed in response to Harvard’s created a problem. A WSJ piece on how elite universities came together after Harvard took a stand reports, “the Trump administration has been worried schools would team up in resistance, because it is harder to negotiate with a united front.”
After Harvard said they sue, Trump seeded the transparently bullshit story with NYT claiming that the letter — on purpose-made letterhead and signed by three officials — had been sent in error.
Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.
The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.
The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.
It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.
In a ridiculous attempt to reset the negotiations, White House senior policy “strategist” May Mailman blamed Harvard (whence she got her JD) for taking a signed letter seriously, but then invited them to resume negotiations with an offer of “a potential pathway to resume discussions” even while accusing Harvard of playing the victim. [!!!]
A senior White House official said the administration stood by the letter, calling the university’s decision to publicly rebuff the administration overblown and blaming Harvard for not continuing discussions.
“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”
Still, Ms. Mailman said, there is a potential pathway to resume discussions if the university, among other measures, follows through on what Mr. Trump wants and apologizes to its students for fostering a campus where there was antisemitism.
Having now filed the lawsuit, Harvard plans to skip the steps many other adversaries (including the law firms) have taken, forgoing a request for a Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction.
Harvard does not at present request a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunctive relief. Because this case concerns agency action subject to review of the administrative record under the Administrative Procedure Act, Harvard’s claims can be resolved expeditiously through cross-motions practice.
To move towards that, Harvard issued a demand for records that will show the claimed basis for Trump’s interference in Harvard is bullshit, and will also show who was involved (including at the White House, up to and including Trump himself) in manufacturing that pretense.
Proof that the government had found a Title VI violation: “the materials considered to conclude there was a Title VI violation, and materials considered in concluding that the government action taken—a funding “freeze”—was the appropriate, legally-justified action in response”
Basis to claim that Harvard had been ideologically captured, whatever that is: “the materials considered in concluding there was such ‘capture,’ and materials considered in determining, again, that a “freeze” was the appropriate and lawful response
Proof that Trump retaliated by withdrawing funding: “the materials considered in presenting the demands and conditions the government did, and in proceeding with the freeze when Harvard declined the conditions, are part of the record”
Basis for freezing specific grants (which Harvard has noted affect legal entities unrelated to Harvard itself): “All materials considered in arriving at those notices are also part of the record”
The communications within the government about this, including from the White House, up to and including Trump: “all materials directly or indirectly considered by agency decisionmakers in freezing funding, even if those materials include directions by White House officials”
Given that antisemitism is a transparent pretense to interfere with the university and to predicate funding on a mandated ideology, this documentation will be rather damning. As Harvard’s complaint lays out:
[T]he Government wielded the threat of withholding federal funds in an attempt to coerce Harvard to conform with the Government’s preferred mix of viewpoints and ideologies. Defendants sent Harvard the April 11 Letter and, when Harvard refused the demands, ordered the freeze of billions of dollars in federal funding.
The day after Harvard pushed to accelerate this process, Trump issued a whiny tweet partly targeting Burck (but not by name), which Kaitlan Collins reported led Eric Trump to drop him as outside ethics counsel for Trump Organization.
The reason Trump didn’t get what he appears to have wanted from Harvard — quiet capitulation and ongoing corruption — stems in significant part because his negotiators assumed they had more power than they had and they put that in writing, in the April 11 letter.
But according to the NYT, his negotiations also failed because he couldn’t explain what he wants.
The back and forth lacked specifics on what the administration wanted Harvard to do. The Trump administration lawyers said they would send Harvard a letter last Friday that laid out more specifics.
By the end of the workday on Friday, the letter had not arrived. Instead, overnight, the lawyers from Harvard received a letter, sent from Mr. Keveney in an email, that was far different from the one the school had expected.
I’m not sure I buy that. I suspect the letter really was what Trump wanted. He intended the “negotiation” to result in obeisance, not a deal crafted around specifics tied to the alleged antisemitism — something the law firms that capitulated have discovered to their chagrin.
Trump’s missteps with Harvard are far less consequential than the others, but it maps the same pattern: His need for adulation, his overstep, leading to failure.
Ukraine
Yesterday, Sergey Lavrov announced — in English — Russia’s terms for a deal: effectively, complete capitulation. Unless Trump takes an adversarial stance for the first time since he took office, this may well end it, with Russia and their North Korean cannon-fodder moving on to grander plans.
The dynamics around the failed Ukraine negotiation that brought us here are, in my opinion, entirely different from that with Harvard.
President Donald Trump is frustrated his efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine have so far fallen short, and has privately told advisers that mediating a deal has been more difficult than he anticipated, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.
Behind the scenes, he frequently brings up how much Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hate one another, one of the sources said – an unsurprising fact, but one the president argues further complicates negotiations.
On Thursday, his agitation boiled over as Russia launched its worst assault on Kyiv since last summer, killing at least 12 people. The attack, Trump said, came at an inopportune moment: just as he believes he is on the verge of securing a deal, which he has told aides he wants in place by his 100th-day anniversary.
“I didn’t like last night,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, where he was meeting with Norway’s prime minister. “I wasn’t happy with it, and we’re in the midst of talking peace, and missiles were fired, and I was not happy with it.”
It was a rare moment of criticism directed toward Russia from a president whose ire over the course of his time back in office has mostly been aimed at the Ukrainians.
The exchange shined a light on a rising sense of exasperation among the president and his advisers at his inability to mount a successful pressure campaign against Putin to end the war. Trump bristled at a reporter’s suggestion that he had not applied pressure to the Russian leader.
“You don’t know what pressure I’m putting on Russia,” Trump snapped. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on Russia, and Russia knows that.”
Trump is frustrated that Russia won’t allow his capitulation to look like a peace deal; his pretense to care about Ukrainians just that.
To be sure, I think someone coached Trump to say he wanted and was uniquely suited to craft a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia during the election. I think he believed all that when he said it! He even did some things during the transition — the beginning of it, anyway — that resembled things that you’d do if you actually expected you could make peace and win a Nobel prize for doing so (again, the kind of conceit you might encourage if you were manipulating Trump to act in a certain way).
But then, after Pam Bondi eliminated all possibility that fulfilling a quid pro quo with Russia would be investigated, this time, and in the wake of Nikolay Patrushev’s oblique warnings about campaign debts after the election, Trump — or the Russians — put Steve Witkoff in charge of “negotiations.”
This is actually consistent with what Russia was prepping to do in the 2016-2017 transition, where they sought someone someone — they tried both Jared Kushner’s buddy Rick Gerson and Erik Prince — to be an instrument whom Kirill Dmitriev could entice with financial goodies and in the process ensure “negotiations” ended as Russia wanted. It’s unclear why Gerson didn’t work out (probably timing). Prince turned out to be venal enough for the job (he was chasing a big deal with UAE), but not stupid enough. As Dmitriev was testing him in Seychelles, Prince remembered that he shouldn’t sell away US interests in Libya. And that was probably the end of things.
But Witkoff was the perfect combination of venal, stupid, and trusted by Trump. Once Russia had him in place, there was never going to be a successful negotiation. Never. There was and is only the question of how much advantage Russia can get and how much chaos in the Western alliance they can cause by letting Trump believe he might be able to claim a deal.
And the “deal” that wishcasters are treating as serious ends up delivering the quid pro quos Trump owed Russia from 2016: sanctions relief and Crimea. As Finley lays out, that was always the end goal, not peace.
This is actually the end point Trump has been trying to get us to all along, in my opinion. He desperately wants to appease Putin and do business with the man he admires. These discussions have already begun, with administration officials beginning to outline business deals (including in energy and in minerals).
My guess is Trump doesn’t care one way or the other if this “deal” gets accepted or not. If Ukraine refuses to accept it (indeed, Zelenskyy has already said the Crimea recognition point is dead on arrival), Trump will blame Ukraine for the lack of a deal and then say the US cannot wait any longer to restart business with Russia. If somehow the deal is accepted, Trump will celebrate and say now it’s time to get back to business with Russia.
I suspect the reason Trump has to pretend he is making a deal (or invent the thin appearance that Ukraine is at fault for his failure to make one) is because, most practically, there are enough Republicans who oppose his capitulation that he needs to at least provide them political cover for their lockstep support. He also needs to make it look like he’s not the big weak plaything of Vladimir Putin that he is.
While Trump’s failure to negotiate a real deal will bother him less than his failures to command obeisance from private universities and foreign countries, some of the reasons he has failed to craft even the appearance of a deal are the same.
As The Atlantic just laid out, for example, Trump’s paranoia about loyalty has made Mike Waltz an appendage at NSC, with the result that there is no policy process, no expertise, no adults.
On the priorities that matter most to the president, Waltz has less influence than Stephen Miller, the homeland-security adviser and deputy White House chief of staff for policy, whose team is part of the NSC. Miller treats the advisory body not as a forum to weigh policy options, current and former officials told me, but as a platform to advance his own hard-line immigration agenda. On the most sensitive geopolitical issues, including Russia’s war in Ukraine and U.S. interests in the Middle East, Trump’s longtime friend and special envoy, Steve Witkoff, sometimes draws on the support of the NSC staff but often operates independently, officials said.
Meanwhile, Waltz’s authority to hire and fire his own staff has been swept out from under him. Vetting by the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, typically uninvolved in internal NSC matters, has derailed hiring and led to dismissals of career staff for infractions that include donating $50 to a Democratic Senate candidate eight years ago. (Screening for political affiliation is a prohibited employment action under federal law.)
The chaos has marginalized the NSC in the making of Trump’s foreign policy; major decisions have been reached without a traditional NSC process. Some staff with portfolios that include Russia’s war in Ukraine, for instance, first learned from news reports that Trump had decided to pause intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Once that choice was made, they were unable to answer questions that flooded in from agencies about the scope of the decision and how it would be implemented. The chaotic approach to foreign-policy decision making was also reflected in a lax attitude toward operations security, current and former officials told me. “There were always too many cellphones in the Oval Office,” one former official said. (The White House denied that cellphones are present during sensitive discussions.)
That’s how you end up with the quotes to CNN, the purported surprise on Trump’s part that Putin and Zelenskyy hated each other.
As with his other deals, Trump has absolutely no end game for the negotiation (unless it’s the financial benefits for himself that Russia has been dangling); he doesn’t know what he wants and claims to have wildly inaccurate beliefs about how the war started, though those beliefs may be necessary fictions to justify full capitulation.
Perhaps most importantly, Russia was able to manipulate Trump into capitulating on ever-increasing Russian terms by telling Trump he is strong. Trump can’t negotiate because his belief that he’s stronger than he is makes him vulnerable.
Trade deals
And all that might be enough if he weren’t capitulating to Putin even as he and Scott Bessent search for allies who’ll help Trump undo the damage he has done by starting a trade war.
I’ve already written about how Scott Bessent pitched this idea to Trump — to pause draconian tariffs with the excuse that Trump was using the threat of them to negotiate dozens of new trade agreements — in a rush, as the economy was going to shit because of the tariffs Peter Navarro rolled out. I’ve also written how foolish Bessent — Trump’s most grown-up advisor — looks when he claims we have a bunch of friends rushing to make a deal to isolate China, even as Trump pisses off all our friends by capitulating to Putin.
Since Bessent staved off immediate collapse by convincing Trump to adopt this “strategy,” he has settled into a rhythm. Someone like Charles Gasparino describes an imminent deal — often sourced to bankers who learned of it from private speeches by Bessent that encourage insider trading — with one or another country. The market spikes. Then the deal never happens. Sunday, when asked about Trump’s claim to have hundreds of deals, Bessent explained those are just sub deals. Along the way, Bessent confessed that they’re only focused on 17 deals plus China in the 90 day period when (Peter Navarro promised) Trump would make 200.
BESSENT: I believe that he is referring to sub deals within the negotiations we’re doing. And, you know, Martha, if there are 180 countries –
RADDATZ: But those aren’t actual deals?
BESSENT: Martha, if there are 180 countries, there are 18 important trading partners, let’s put China to the side, because that’s a special negotiation, there’s 17 important trading partners, and we have a process in place, over the next 90 days, to negotiate with them. Some of those are moving along very well, especially the – with the Asian countries.
All the while, Bessent posts frequently and obsequiously on Xitter to butter up Trump’s ego.
But even Gasparino admits Trump is looking for little more than some means to save face. Justin Wolfers has been having fun on TV pointing out that Trump is preparing to claim that the existing free trade deal with key allies is a big victory (like he did during early confrontations with Mexico and Colombia). And even then, the American allies with which Bessent claims will be the easiest to make deals are instead making deals with each other (and India, another country allegedly prepared to deal, is instead threatening military action against Pakistan).
As it is, China knows it has leverage over the United States, both because Trump already blinked and because he backed himself into a hole, and that’s before shortages start showing up in a few weeks. Bessent, desperate to sustain the con, insists that the Big Box stores who were issuing dire warnings exactly a week ago, today said, “I assume they preordered,” as if it’s not his job to check.
I fear that, having talked Trump off the ledge Navarro built for him, having staved off Trump frustration only by public obeisance and attacks on the press, Trump will now hold Bessent responsible for the impossibility of this task (though to be sure, Bessent appears to have oversold how easy this would be). When the shit really starts to hit the fan in a few weeks and Bessent’s proposed way out doesn’t work, Trump will need someone to blame.
At this point, I worry Bessent will be the first cabinet member to be fired, before more worthy candidates like Pete Hesgeth and Mike Waltz, because Trump will need a scapegoat. If that happens, there could be a snowball effect, not least because Bessent is the one who backed Trump off his plans to fire Jerome Powell.
Trump’s desperation to reassure the markets that all the damage he caused will have an upside increasingly results in batshit exchanges like this one.
Can you share with whom?
Because the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. Some have been horrible to us. Some have been okay. Nobody’s been great. Nobody’s been great. Everybody took advantage of us. What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world. So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else. For instance, do they have the VAT system in play? Do they charge us tariffs? How much are they charging us? How much have they been charging us? Many, many different factors, right. How are we being treated by that country? And then I will set a tariff. Are we paying for their military? You know, as an example, we have Korea. We pay billions of dollars for the military. Japan, billions for those and others. But that, I’m going to keep us a separate item, the paying of the military. Germany, we have 50,000 soldiers—
I’m just curious, why don’t you announce these deals that you’ve solidified?
I would say, over the next three to four weeks, and we’re finished, by the way.
You’re finished?
We’ll be finished.
Oh, you will be finished in three to four weeks.
I’ll be finished
This goes to the core of why Trump is facing three embarrassing failures.
Trump believes he has this power. He has to believe he has this power. He has to believe he has leverage, at least for psychological reasons, and probably for very big political ones too.
He has to sustain the con.
He also has surrounded himself with sycophants — Bessent is the least unqualified!! — who refuse to do anything but applaud his disastrous instincts. And whether it’s miscalculating in response to Harvard and then trying to deny it, sending someone who knows nothing about Russia to “negotiate” with an old KGB hand, or letting Peter Navarro anywhere close to a decision-maker, the sheer incompetence of the people who surround Trump make it less likely he could negotiate if he had a clear strategy.
But he doesn’t. We’ve heard from international partners and Harvard that he couldn’t explain what he wanted. We know what Trump wants for Russia, but as a result his demands on Ukraine keep changing.
Ultimately, Trump is staking one after another negotiation on his need for everyone — the entire world — will bow down to him.
And that may cause follow-on problems.
Most Americans won’t feel the pain of the fight with Harvard — at least, they won’t understand that the lifesaving cancer treatment they were hoping would save their lives has been shut down thanks to Trump.
Thus far, Trump has managed to spin the totality of his humiliation at the hands of Vladimir Putin. That may change. Particularly if the rest of his con starts to collapse, his claim to be a peacemaker might too. But for now, that’s a sideshow for most Americans.
The trade war is different. That has begun to cause and will cause increasingly sharp pain going forward, At some point, starting in a few weeks, Trump will face the political and psychological blowback from the damage his trade war has caused. I wouldn’t be surprised if China aimed to ensure maximal humiliation in how he does that.
And all these things are happening at once.
This certainly presents an organizing opportunity — a moment to convince Americans Trump has harmed, and their elected representatives, to take steps to reverse the damage Trump has done. A moment to point out that Trump, given the team he wanted with no limits on what he could do, shat the bed, and did so after bullying the rest of the world and losing; Trump’s opponents need to be laying the ground for accountability, with lockstep discipline, now. This is a moment to point out that Trump invented an emergency to make a power grab, and with that invented emergency created a real, global one.
That’s an opportunity. But even setting aside the likelihood of follow-on damage as Trump tries to avoid accountability, this moment of failure will also be one of extreme risk for a malignant narcissist like Trump.
These failed negotiations happened because Trump sought to create the appearance that he has unlimited power; they failed because he does not have that power. As the impact of Trump’s disastrous attack on the economy begins to hurt Americans, exposing that Trump doesn’t have the power he claims to impose his will, he will have both a psychological need to do something else to look strong, and a political need to convince Republicans he still has the power to determine their political fate.
He doesn’t have the power to win these negotiations. But he still has plenty of ways to avenge the exposure of his own weakness.
Update: Thomas Edsall interviews a bunch of experts on how Trump might respond to losing support. Most raise the kinds of concerns I do here.
The Canadian election, then, demonstrates why Trumpist trade policy, and foreign policy in general, is doomed to catastrophic failure. Trump isn’t trying to drive tough substantive bargains. Mainly, he seems to want to indulge in narcissism, demanding that other nations humiliate themselves so he can put on a display of dominance. And America doesn’t have remotely enough leverage, even against Canada, to make such demands. You could say that Trump is a reverse Godfather, making offers other countries can’t accept.
Consider the state of negotiations — or, actually, non-negotiations, since talks appear to have broken down — with Japan, another country Trump appears to have thought he could bully. Japan does sell a lot to the United States and might have been willing to offer something to preserve its access to our market.
But reports indicate that Japanese representatives sent to Washington left without accomplishing anything because they found Trump’s people impossible to deal with. The Americans insisted that the Japanese make offers without giving any indication of what our side wanted — in effect, they demanded that Japan make a show of obeisance without any reason to believe that it would get anything in return. The Japanese government wouldn’t, probably couldn’t do that. After all, it has to answer to its own voters. So there is no deal.
And then there are the Chinese, who — unlike the Canadians or even the Japanese — probably have more economic leverage over us than we have over them. They have no interest in helping Trump sustain his fantasies of dominance. Bear in mind that Trump’s trade war is working out very well for them. Bloomberg reports that
President Xi Jinping’s diplomats are fanning out across the world with a clear message for countries cutting deals with Donald Trump: The US is a bully that can’t be trusted.
Unfortunately, they’re right. And Trump’s repeated insistence that the Chinese are negotiating with him, when they say they aren’t, comes across as pathetic.
Update: Dan Drezner catalogs four ways Trump broke basic rules of negotiation:
LESSON #1: Hurt the target more than one’s self. The U.S. economy is much bigger than most other economies in the world, so the administration clearly believed that it had leverage over everyone else. And, to be fair, that is likely still true of a lot of smaller countries. The administration may well succeed in wringing concessions from India or South Korea.
It is far from obvious that this is true of China or the European Union however.
[snip]
LESSON #2: Clearly articulate one’s demands. This ain’t rocket science! For a deal to be struck, the target needs to know what concessions would satisfy the coercer! Instead, there are widespread reports that even loyal allies don’t know what the Trump administration wants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is even trying to claim that this is a purposeful strategy!
[snip]
LESSON #3: Minimize expectations of future conflict. All else equal, when the target anticipates more frequent coercion attempts in the future, they will be less willing to acquiesce in the present. And if Trump has succeeded in one thing, it is in making the rest of the world believe he will coerce anyone and everyone again and again and again and again. For fuck’s sake, some of his first targets during his second term were signatories to a trade deal he negotiated during his first term!
Everyone expects Trump to break deals in the future — which disincentivizes negotiating any concessions in the present.
LESSON #4: Build a multilateral coalition. Multilateral economic sanctions tend to work better than unilateral sanctions. An institutionalized coalition of sanctioners can give a target pause in a way that unilateral action might not. And, of course, Donald Trump did the exact opposite of this. Only too late did they realize that maybe coordinated approach towards China could be a good idea. Instead, now it’s China going around talking to other countries about how crazy the United States is behaving.
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