Lefty Pundits Continue to Drown Out Democratic Actions with their Complaints about Democratic Inaction
On Tuesday, a small immigration reporting outlet, Migrant Insider, asked Hakeem Jeffries whether the masked ICE officials who had accosted LaMonica McIver and a Jerry Nadler staffer had been identified. Jeffries replied that every single one of them — no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes — would be identified, noting that the US was not the Soviet Union. Jeffries explained that “our first priorities” are making sure that the person on the front line is able to move on, but he also claimed that efforts to deal with the broader policy implications “are underway.”
Of the biggest outlets that picked up the comment, just MeidasTouch, which said “this is exactly kind of the fight that we need to be seeing from our representatives,” served to magnify Jeffries’ comment; their Instagram post got over 43,000 likes. Most of the others — Breitbart, CPAC, Sean Hannity, the Washington Examiner — tried to pitch this as a threat to ICE. Jeffries said something fiery, but while the right wing used it to claim Democrats were attacking cops, left wing pundits either didn’t notice or ignored it.
One probable reason left wing pundits didn’t mention Jeffries’ comment on Tuesday is they were still seething over a comment he made two days earlier — a comment they didn’t have to work to find. Jeffries told Dana Bash that Democrats would respond to Trump’s attacks on members of Congress — Bash mentioned both the charges against LaMonica McIver and the handcuffing of a Jerry Nadler staffer — but “we will make that decision in a time, place, and manner of our choosing.”
The comment from Jeffries has been used all week as an example of the feckless Dems, of their fecklessness on immigration issues, especially.
But Jeffries was right that Democrats have been responding to these issues, to the extent they can in the minority. Since Jeffries made that comment, at least the following has happened:
- On Monday, Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan did an unannounced visit to a Wisconsin detention center of the sort that turned into the McIver altercation in New Jersey; nothing happened and so it got little notice
- On Tuesday, Jerry Nadler and Jamie Raskin sent a sternly-worded letter to Jim Jordan demanding 1) He condemn the abuse of separation of powers presented by the ICE detention and 2) he call Kristi Noem for a hearing before the House Judiciary to answer for her “agency’s irresponsible and dangerous actions”
- On Tuesday (as noted) Jeffries promised to identify the ICE agents involved in such heavy-handed tactics
- On Tuesday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka sued Alina Habba for malicious prosecution and defamation
- Jerry Nadler released a second video of the altercation with ICE agents (who were actually unmasked); it shows that one ICE agent pushed the Nadler staffer before handcuffing her, debunking DHS claims
- As we speak, Jimmy Gomez is reporting on an atrocious detention situation in Los Angeles (he has demanded to go in)
And all that’s before other victories on detention, such as the release of Carol Hui and the return of an improperly deported man or the order to release details of the Administration’s deal with Nayib Bukele, legal cases that have attracted lefty attention, with or without involvement of members of Congress.
A number of these things — the detention center visit and the sternly-worded letter — are the kind of routine oversight that rarely attracts attention (though I’ve repeatedly been told that members of Congress are not making such detention center visits, so it’s important to mention that they are). I’ve noted that Jeffries’ promise to identify the ICE officers was largely ignored by much of the left — but not the right.
The Baraka lawsuit got a great deal of mainstream attention, but very little attention from pundits. Until this Baraka appearance on Democracy Now today, I’ve seen little focus on its significance.
That’s probably true, in part, because there’s a decent likelihood it gets dismissed based on prosecutorial immunity grounds; there are other lawsuits that are, legally, far more urgent and significant for legal commentators to cover.
But if it is not dismissed then it may turn into a political firestorm. Baraka cited a number of things that may get him beyond the normally very high bar of prosecutorial immunity: he cited Alina Habba’s comments before being confirmed as US Attorney, promising to abuse her authority, he cited Habba’s use of her private Twitter account to make knowingly false claims about his arrest, the false claims both Habba and DHS made about the circumstances of the arrest, and Magistrate Judge André Espinosa’s rebuke of DOJ for its conduct in the case gets past an attempt to dismiss it. If the lawsuit survives, it could be a very powerful political tool to fight back against Trump’s politicization of law enforcement.
But even as a messaging document, the lawsuit is important. It makes clear that Special Agent in Charge Ricky Patel — whom Baraka alleges instructed other agents to “take him down” while they were pushing and shoving the group — had no basis to arrest Baraka and also disputes claims made in the LaMonica McIver arrest affidavit. Details from the lawsuit — such as that Habba commented publicly even before Baraka was transported from Delaney Hall, or that they fingerprinted Baraka twice, once upon his arrest and once on his initial appearance — make it clear what a political hit job this was. If, as polls show is likely, Baraka doesn’t win New Jersey’s gubernatorial primary, he’ll be able to add the affect of the arrest on his electoral chances to the injury Habba caused to him. Those are all enough to make a stink out of.
All the more so given the obvious comparison with Eric Adams. Pam Bondi’s DOJ dismissed a case against Adams so it would not affect his primary chances, also citing his need to carry out his mayoral duties. But they arrested Baraka while he was carrying out his mayoral duties, trying to ensure the safety of a facility in his city, and did so weeks before a primary. Those are fundamentally inconsistent actions.
If this survives an initial motion to dismiss, then Baraka will have the ability to get discovery (including a comparison of his case with Adams’) and demand depositions.
And all of that makes a criminal case against Congresswoman McIver (which has yet to be indicted by a grand jury) far less viable. Unless and until DOJ gets the Baraka lawsuit dismissed, they will have competing threads of discovery out there, even further weakening an already weak case against McIver.
That should have made it a central messaging vehicle. The same is true of Jerry Nadler’s release of a video that shows DHS lied about the circumstances of the handcuffing of his staffer. With attention, it could create a firestorm by itself. I’ve seen no coverage from the pundit class. No pundit class, no firestorm.
It’s not so much the Democrats are doing nothing. It’s that the people who are best situated to make a stink about what has happened — to publicize Baraka’s competing claims about what happened at Delaney Hall, to generate outrage over how the Nadler video debunks DHS, and yes, even to use that sternly-worded letter to shame Jim Jordan for abdicating the independence of Article I power — are instead spending entire days claiming that nothing is happening except a comment they watched out of context.
ProPublica Explains How DOGE’s AI Cut Support for Veterans Care
Even among ProPublica’s exceptional work exposing DOGE’s failures, this is notable.
ProPublica used the opportunity of the disgruntled departure of an engineer named Sahil Lavingia from DOGE as an opportunity to unpack a specific task he took on, and botched. It provides valuable insight to the source of errors as Elon unleashed a bunch of coders on federal bureaucracy without the context to understand what they were doing.
Lavingia joined DOGE — after previously attempting to get a job with DOGE’s nonpartisan predecessor, US Digital Services — with a genuine wish to improve the way government works. He was assigned to review VA contracts to decide which could be “munched” — canceled. He claims that after his AI review of the contracts, people with some actual knowledge of the VA services should have reviewed the contracts he flagged to prevent obvious errors. It appears that didn’t happen, and as happened so often elsewhere, pretty critical contracts were cut.
Lavingia’s ouster and his willingness to speak up provides a glimpse of what has led to such stupid decisions from DOGE.
Back in March, after asking Elon at the sole all-hands DOGE meeting he ever attended if he could open source his code, he published it to GitHub. Months later he did an interview with FastCompany, which led to his firing.
Since his firing, in addition to telling multiple media outlets that there really wasn’t the kind of waste he’d expected, he walked ProPublica through the specifics of a task he was assigned, reviewing VA contracts for DEI and waste, which has led to key contracts getting canceled.
VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.
We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.
[snip]
Sahil Lavingia, the programmer enlisted by DOGE, which was then run by Elon Musk, acknowledged flaws in the code.
“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”
But the really great thing ProPublica did was to have experts, including Waldo Jaquith, who used to do IT at Treasury, review Lavingia’s code to explain how it went wrong.
You should read both stories, but here’s where things went wrong.
First, rather than simply consulting USA Spending to learn what contracts were doing and how much they were spending, Lavingia instead used AI to review the contracts themselves, which often had outdated information.
This portion of the prompt instructs the AI to extract the contract number and other key details of a contract, such as the “total contract value.”
This was error-prone and not necessary, as accurate contract information can already be found in publicly available databases like USASpending. In some cases, this led to the AI system being given an outdated version of a contract, which led to it reporting a misleadingly large contract amount. In other cases, the model mistakenly pulled an irrelevant number from the page instead of the contract value.
When he did that, though, Lavingia only asked AI to review the first 10,000 characters of the contracts, which isn’t where some of the most important information (not to mention information on whether a contract included a DEI component) would be found.
Analyze the following contract text and extract the basic information below. If you can’t find specific information, write “Not found”.
CONTRACT TEXT:
{text[:10000]} # Using first 10000 chars to stay within token limitsThe models were only shown the first 10,000 characters from each document, or approximately 2,500 words. Experts were confused by this, noting that OpenAI models support inputs over 50 times that size. Lavingia said that he had to use an older AI model that the VA had already signed a contract for.
He did that, he explained, because the VA only had dated AI that could only handle 10,000 characters.
Then the script prompted to assess whether contracts provided “direct patient care,” defined first by including “medical procedures,” then excluding “psychosocial support” of the sort that keeps Veterans alive, measuring how many layers removed from actual care a contract was, then finally running it through a list of things like audits (including “Nuclear physics and radiation safety audits for medical equipment” !!) that could not be “munched,” or canceled.
These two lines — which experts say were poorly defined — carried the most weight in the DOGE analysis. The response from the AI frequently cited these reasons as the justification for munchability. Nearly every justification included a form of the phrase “direct patient care,” and in a third of cases the model flagged contracts because it stated the services could be handled in-house.
But the exclusion of audits didn’t work.
The article provided one example of the kind of obvious (literal) patient support that got targeted for cancelation: the maintenance contracts for ceiling lifts used to reposition patients during their care.
The emphasis on “direct patient care” is reflected in how often the AI cited it in its recommendations, even when the model did not have any information about a contract. In one instance where it labeled every field “not found,” it still decided the contract was munchable. It gave this reason:
Without evidence that it involves essential medical procedures or direct clinical support, and assuming the contract is for administrative or related support services, it meets the criteria for being classified as munchable.
In reality, this contract was for the preventative maintenance of important safety devices known as ceiling lifts at VA medical centers, including three sites in Maryland. The contract itself stated:
Ceiling Lifts are used by employees to reposition patients during their care. They are critical safety devices for employees and patients, and must be maintained and inspected appropriately.
Back in February, Doug Collins bragged about the work DOGE was doing reviewing contracts.
This was, he said, the work DOGE was supposed to be doing.
I guess Doug Collins believed his job running the VA involved eliminating critical care based on shoddy code.
The Tax Elon Solution and Other Actual Reporting Not Included in the Frenzy
Politico’s Dasha Burns reports something that isn’t making headlines elsewhere: the fun of the Trump-Musk fight may be short-lived.
White House aides are trying to broker a peace.
White House aides, after working to persuade the president to temper his public criticism of Musk to avoid escalation, scheduled a call Friday with the billionaire CEO of Tesla to broker a peace.
“Oh it’s okay,” Trump told POLITICO in a brief telephone call when asked about the very public breakup with his onetime megabacker. “It’s going very well, never done better.” Trump went on to tout his favorability ratings saying, “The numbers are through the roof, the highest polls I’ve ever had and I have to go.”
Update, 1:30 ET: One after another access journalist has spoken to Trump and are now reporting that Trump thinks Elon has a problem. One after another access journalist has left unanswered — if Elon is nuts, why did Trump let him run unfettered through government for four months and what will Trump do to make sure Elon didn’t damage the government?
Aside from that actual news report, much of the rest of the reporting is no better — and often worse — than what we can do from the comfort of our own EU perch.
The same Politico lists seven right wingers who could get caught between the two narcissists. But only JD Vance — whose endorsement of Trump in the wake of Elon’s seeming endorsement of impeaching Trump was rather mild — is really stuck between the Silicon billionaires and Trump.
I’m really not worried, for example, about the Millers (though agree Stephen is the most likely peace broker, since he had a big role in recruiting Elon in the first place). And while David Sacks was one of Elon’s entrees into the Trump world, Trump’s increasing addiction to cryptocorruption guarantees Sacks some protection inside the White House.
Meanwhile, NYT has an inane post about eight ways Trump and Musk might damage each other. It doesn’t seem to realize that Musk could not just use Xitter as an irritant (which is what it reports), but could also rejigger Xitter to undercut the way it favors right wing discourse and disinformation generally. NYT simply doesn’t understand how important Xitter is to the far right project, not even with Charlie Kirk’s slavering tribute to it amid the worst of the blowup, not even with the way Elon destroyed Xitter’s gateway function to real journalism, in the process damaging outlets like NYT.
Worse still, NYT doesn’t seem to understand the ways Trump has used the presidency to pay off his election debt to Elon; it even calls DOGE a “pet project.”
Wield the power of the presidency against him. Mr. Trump has a tremendous array of powers at his disposal, with the ability to sign executive orders punishing political adversaries and to direct agencies like the Justice Department to initiate investigations. He could end some of Mr. Musk’s pet projects, such as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as well as his embrace of white South Africans, a priority of Mr. Musk’s.
As I noted, Elizabeth Warren made a list of 130 ways Elon exploited his access to Trump, many of them involving short-circuiting regulation of his businesses (this is an entirely different set of benefits to Elon than I included in this post).
34. Musk has direct business interests before over 70% of agencies and departments targeted by DOGE.
35. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was a top target. Musk called for “delet[ing]” the agency and DOGE attempted to fire up to 90% of CFPB staff, who would regulate X Money.
36. President Trump fired the CFPB Director and the new head of CFPB forbade the agency from doing work — after CFPB had received over 300 consumer complaints about Tesla.
37. X also deleted CFPB’s official account on the social media platform, limiting the public communications of an agency that regulates Musk companies.
38. X deleted the account of Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. after he posted about President Trump’s allegedly illegal firings of Democratic CPSC commissioners.
39. The Trump Administration fired Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) commissioners after EEOC investigated Tesla for alleged racial harassment and retaliation at the company’s Fremont Facility.
40. The Trump Administration plans to cut potentially thousands of EPA employees, after the EPA found that SpaceX violated the Clean Water Act, investigated Tesla’s actions at its Austin Facility, and investigated an xAI facility in Tennessee for air pollution.
41. The Trump Administration began requiring any EPA spending greater than $50,000 to obtain DOGE approval, potentially allowing Musk to slow down environmental enforcement actions, like past investigations into Tesla and SpaceX for hazardous waste dumping and other alleged activity.
42. The Trump Administration attempted to fire hundreds of FAA employees, including some who directly contribute to air safety, after the FAA required SpaceX to abide by environmental requirements.
And NYT’s treatment of DOGE as a “pet project” ignores one of the real risks exacerbated by this blowup. Elon’s DOGE boys remain burrowed into government agencies, rewarded for their lack of experience and ties to criminal hackers with GS-14 and GS-15 salaries.
Although Elon Musk has said that he is largely exiting his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), at least three of his early operatives and key lieutenants throughout his government takeover have recently become full-time government employees.
Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, and Ethan Shaotran’s employment designations at the General Services Administration (GSA) have been officially converted to full-time from the restricted special government employee classification that limited their time in government to a period of 130 days, according to documentation viewed by WIRED.
Coristine, who has gone by “Big Balls” online and previously worked for a telecommunications firm known for hiring former blackhat hackers, was converted to full time on May 31, along with Farritor. Shaotran became full time on April 10.
[snip]
Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran, according to documentation viewed by WIRED, each maintain their “senior adviser” titles. Coristine and Farritor are drawing some of the largest salaries possible for government employees through the “General Schedule” employee rankings. They have a salary grade of GS-15, one of the highest grades, and Shaotran is one step below at GS-14. When they were special government employees, Coristine, Farritor, and Shaotran did not appear to be drawing salaries at all through GSA, WIRED reported in March.
These boys have access to our data! We still haven’t learned who was exfiltrating data from NLRB — as reported by whistleblower Dan Berulis — or why entities using a Russian address seemed to know the new login accounts created by DOGE boys.
18. I started tracking what appeared to be sensitive data leaving the secured location it is meant to be stored. I initially saw gigabytes exiting the NxGen case management system “nucleus,” within the NLRB system, and I later witnessed a similar large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself. From what I could see the data that was being exfiltrated added up to around 10 gigabytes– in the case that the data was almost all text files it would be the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth if someone printed these files as hard-copy documents. It is unclear which files were copied and removed, and I’ve tried multiple routes to prove this was not an exfiltration event but none have yielded fruit and some have been stopped outright. I also don’t know if the data was only 10gb in total or whether or not they were consolidated and compressed prior. This opens up the possibility that even more data was exfiltrated. Regardless, that kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases.
[snip]
21. On or about March 11, 2025, NxGen metrics indicated abnormal usage at points the prior week. I saw way above baseline response times, and resource utilization showed increased network output above anywhere it had been historically – as far back as I could look. I noted that this lined up closely with the data out event. I also notice increased logins blocked by access policy due to those log-ins being out of the country. For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.
Whether the fight between Elon and Trump is real and ongoing or whether it’ll be patched up, the blowup should lead people from both parties to demand that these DOGE boys be removed from government systems and agencies and a thorough audit of their work be done systemwide. Yes, Elon’s meltdown is cause to revisit his security clearances (with a consequent review of the SpaceX relationship), but the national security and privacy risk posed by Elon’s infiltration of government is actually far broader than that.
Finally, I’m not seeing any outlets point out that making one small change to the Big Ugly bill at the center of this dispute — the huge tax cuts for people like Elon — would not only limit the damage it does to the deficit (Elon’s claimed complaint with it) but also call Elon’s bluff (since he very much wants to eat his tax cut too).
Let’s tax Elon. That’ll make this blowup go someplace productive!!
The narcissistic explosions of last night really aren’t just fun and games, as they’re largely being treated by the press.
They’re a visible reminder of the problem with access, the problem with wealth inequality, the problem with campaign finance failures, the problem with Trump’s unbound corruption.
To pay off a campaign debt, Donald Trump let an unstable man — allegedly abusing drugs — with no understanding of government bureaucracy unleash a tribe of DOGE boys throughout government for four months, countering the will of Congress based on his whims and conspiracy theories. And now that man has threatened vengeance on Trump.
This may get papered over because Trump needs to paper it over.
But it’s high time the political press caught up to Wired and ProPublica in unpacking the grave risk of all this.
Trump Muskmageddon Open Thread
The year of our lord 2025 started with a rabid Musk-Trump supporter self-immolating himself in a Cybertruck parked in front of a Trump casino, trying to send us all a message.
The most interesting development in the burgeoning Civil War between two historical narcissists is that Elon unfollowed both Stephen Miller and Charlie Kirk (the latter whom drooled a bit about how wonderful it was Elon decided to platform Nazis after he bought Twitter).
But that’s just one girl’s opinion. Feel free to share yours below!
Perhaps Stephen Miller (Also) Believes in the Efficacy of a Deportation Gulag as a Tool to Usher in Fascism
Like me, Greg Sargent continues to focus on the messaging opportunities presented by recent developments in Stephen Miller’s deportation gulag. (In the wake of NYT’s coverage and Sargent’s interview with Carol Hui the other day, Hui has been released from detention.)
This post reacts to this NBC story which, in turn, follows up on the Washington Examiner (!!!) story reporting on Miller’s recent meltdown about the number of deportations. NBC added to the story about Miller’s meltdown by pointing to how Trump has shifted law enforcement’s focus from their day jobs — hunting child sex traffickers, hackers, spies, and terrorists — to instead hunt peaceful undocumented migrants.
It is the latest example of how President Donald Trump’s push for mass deportations is reshaping federal law enforcement as officials shift resources toward immigration-related cases — including nonviolent administrative offenses — leaving less time and attention for other types of criminal investigations.
The plan calls for using 3,000 ICE agents, including 1,800 from Homeland Security Investigations, which generally investigates transnational crimes and is not typically involved in arresting noncriminal immigrants; 2,000 Justice Department employees from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration; and 500 employees from Customs and Border Protection. It also includes 250 IRS agents, some of whom may be used to provide information on the whereabouts of immigrants using tax information, while others would have the authority to make arrests, according to the operation plan.
Sargent argues that if Democrats (I would argue, Trump opponents generally) can explain how Trump is making the country less safe to hunt down people like Carol Hui, they’ll grow even more opposed to Miller’s deportation gulag.
It’s a good point — similar to the one I made about the extent to which Miller’s jihad is depriving Americans of cancer cures. There are a bunch of opportunity costs that come with Miller’s deportation gulag, including hunting child sex traffickers and curing cancer. All of them are bad. We need to tell that story.
Along the way to making that point, though, Sargent makes this claim about Miller’s beliefs. Miller believes, Sargent argues, that migrants poison the nation’s blood. He believes hunting down people like Carol Hui is an emergency.
Unlike Miller, that is, majorities are not ideologically hostile to the mere presence of peaceful unauthorized immigrants in this country; they just want the system to work. Yet Miller and Trump see that presence as itself posing a dire public emergency, or even a civilizational one. In this worldview, there can be no desirable pathway to lawful status here for these people, because they inherently represent a public threat—they are “poisoning” the nation’s “blood.” Making them legal wouldn’t change that. It would only make the threat they pose more insidious.
That’s why Miller is capable of tweeting that the House GOP budget bill is the “most essential piece of legislation” in “the entire Western World,” largely because it ramps up deportation resources. To him, saving the “Western World” rides on deporting all those unauthorized people, including all those “moms.”
All this gets at the deeper reason Miller and Trump are shifting extensive law enforcement resources away from serious crimes into deporting noncriminal immigrants: They simply do see the presence of these people as an extraordinarily urgent national emergency, perhaps more urgent than all those other serious crimes.
I want to suggest that Miller’s unrelenting obsession with his deportation gulag may be more than just uncontrolled racism (though I have no doubt it is that, at least).
When you shift law enforcement from the FBI to DHS, you do more than simply shift law enforcement from focusing on child sex traffickers, hackers, spies, and terrorists to focusing on nice ladies like Carol Hui.
You also shift from a law enforcement that must meet increasing evidentiary standards — first probable cause and then beyond a reasonable doubt — to jail people, to one that has a far more lower threshold, one that affords the claims of the Executive great deference. And even in that context, Miller keeps looking for ways to lower the burden of law enforcement still lower; that’s the reason he pursued his Alien Enemies Act project: because he believes and wants Judges to get no review of such deportations. Next up, Miller wants to eliminate habeas corpus, such that the Executive could detain anyone with no judicial review.
Shifting from the FBI, which must adhere to written rules developed over decades in the wake of past abuses, to DHS, frees you from a great many strictures on how you investigate people. (This would be one effect of making ICE a bigger law enforcement agency than FBI.)
Shifting from FBI to DHS shifts you from a legalized culture to thug culture.
And Stephen Miller has never hid that he wants to apply this abusive law enforcement approach to US citizens to. He’s just not sure how he’ll get there.
Miller explicitly wants to be able to jail and deport people — and he has swept up legal aliens and even American citizens — without any review. That’s the goal. False inflammatory claims about immigration is the means.
I would suggest that Miller’s fondness for deportation gulags is about more than racism (though, again, it is definitely about racism). Miller’s false claims about immigrants are the means he plans to use to lower or eliminate the legal protections that all people in America — citizen and migrant alike — have against abusive Executive power.
Stephen Miller both believes in white supremacy but also that the United States should eliminate due process for all enemies of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump Declares He Should Have Faced Trial
As part of an Executive Order ordering Pam Bondi to start a witch hunt against Joe Biden’s aides, Donald Trump implied that the only reason Joe Biden was not prosecuted for harboring classified documents was “his incompetent mental state.”
The Department of Justice, for example, concluded that, despite clear evidence that Biden had broken the law, he should not stand trial owing to his incompetent mental state.
That’s a wild misstatement of the record, starting with the fact that the only documents that Robert Hur showed Biden wittingly took — his notebooks and a memo he sent to Barack Obama about withdrawing from Afghanistan — Biden believed he could take based on DOJ’s treatment of Ronald Reagan.
But let’s take the premise on its face.
Donald Trump — who was charged by a Special Counsel appointed on the same basis as Hur was — claims that Joe Biden would have been legitimately prosecuted if only he weren’t senile.
Wow, Donny, you just said that Aileen Cannon was wrong for dismissing the case against you!!!
Let’s go, baby!
This whole thing (especially the order to David Warrington to review which orders Biden signed with an autopen) is a grotesque nuisance. As with Trump’s apparent waiver of Biden’s Executive Privilege invocation on his own Special Counsel interviews, it presents a troubling breach of Executive equities of precisely the kind of that Trump never stopped wailing about when he was investigated.
But I really think this order, like so much of Trump and Eagle Ed Martin’s push to review what Biden did while serving as President in his late 70s, could backfire in spectacular ways.
For example, Trump is trying to criminalize White House aides lying to the public about the mental and physical state of the President.
Investigation. (a) The Counsel to the President, in consultation with the Attorney General and the head of any other relevant executive department or agency (agency), shall investigate, to the extent permitted by law, whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President. This investigation shall address:
(i) any activity, coordinated or otherwise, to purposefully shield the public from information regarding Biden’s mental and physical health;
(ii) any agreements between Biden’s aides to cooperatively and falsely deem recorded videos of the President’s cognitive inability as fake;
(iii) any agreements between Biden’s aides to require false, public statements elevating the President’s capabilities; and
(iv) the purpose of these activities, including to assert the authorities of the President. [my emphasis]
We don’t even have to consider what Trump has done — the incidences of mental breakdowns — in the past five months to get to things that Trump wants to treat as a crime. After all, Trump’s White House went to great lengths to lie to the public about how COVID nearly killed him. All the reports from Trump’s physicians are riddled with obvious false claims.
This order would make it a crime to lie about how fat Donny is!!
Plus there are a number of things — starting with the Alien Enemies Act declaration — that Trump claims he did not personally do. This EO would make it a crime for whoever did make that declaration (cough).
And the push to review whether Biden was cognizant for the pardons of his family members? Have at it. Particularly given some obvious errors made in the pardon for January 6ers (such as a commutation for Jeremy Bertino, who had not been sentenced), we’ll just start chipping away at the pardons for Trump’s cop assailants and adjudged terrorists.
The entire premise of this EO is that things Trump and his White Houses have done — from lying about his weight and height to his theft of classified documents — must be prosecuted.
Could Elon’s Disgusting Abomination Create Opportunities for Other Migrants?
It’s fashionable to focus reporting about Elon Musk’s attacks on Trump’s Big Awful on the spat within the Republican party.
Politico has separate stories on how “hard-liners” like Tom Massie and Rand Paul are “rejoic[ing]” over Elon’s tweets and parroting White House excuses for Musk’s comments, which both repeat four claims Marc Caputo first aired (half of which are dubious or dated) and demand that journalists view Elon’s comments as exclusively about the effect on his own business.
“When businessmen criticize legislation, journalists don’t take them at their word, they look at how the legislation would impact their business interests,” said a Republican close to the White House. “They should be doing that in this case.”
I wonder if this anonymous Republican close to the White House raised similar concerns about Elon’s business interests driving his decisions as he shredded regulators overseeing his own businesses? In a brilliant summary of 130 shitty things Elon did in his 130 days in government, Elizabeth Warren cited 29 Federal contracts and 34 instances where Elon fiddled with his regulators, of which this is just a selection:
55. Musk’s cost-cutting team is laying off workers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the auto safety agency investigating Tesla for crashes stemming from its “full self-driving” and remote control features.
56. The Trump Administration first shut down NLRB altogether — which had cases against multiple Musk companies (including SpaceX, Tesla, and X).
57. Then President Trump removed independent NLRB members.
58. DOGE is gutting NOAA while Musk eyes privatization of NOAA weather satellites, which could present a business opportunity for Starlink.
59. President Trump signed an executive order halting operations of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which had Tesla on its list of contractors scheduled for audits.
60. OSHA has 27 cases against Tesla for workers rights violations and investigated SpaceX for workplace injuries — and now DOGE is limiting the agency’s work.
61. President Trump tried to fire over 90% of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which put two Musk companies — Boring and Tesla — on its “dirty dozen” list of worst workplace safety offenders.
All that drama is amusing. All the tweets from House members like Scott Perry and Marjorie Taylor Greene disavowing their votes could become more interesting once this bill returns to the House, but probably won’t
I’m more focused in the extent to which Elon’s comments will unsettle the dynamic that otherwise would permit (as Politico also reported was the plan) John Thune to ram through changes and Mike Johnson in turn to ram through the changed bill.
Elon’s comments unsettle things. Who knows what could happen as a result.
Consider the several instances where local communities have stood up against Stephen Miller’s authoritarian dragnet. There was the backlash to a heavy-handed raid in San Diego where ICE agents deployed flash bangs before bystanders chased them off, chanting, “Shame, shame.” Then there was the spontaneous protest yesterday in response to a restaurant raid in Minneapolis.
A more controversial case involves Carol Hui, whose plight mobilized a conservative Missouri town, with a number of Trump voters claiming they didn’t vote to deport their sweet neighbor.
“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”
She paused. “This is Carol.”
Whatever you think of such disavowals — Never Trumper JV Last is unimpressed; Greg Sargent did a great interview that conveys why she’s the kind of person non-liberals might rally behind — G Elliot Morris made a compelling argument that these Trump voters are precisely the kind of people you’d need to combat these policies.
The other way to say that — and the way Carol’s friends put it — is that millions of Americans voted for Trump, but they didn’t vote for this.
[snip]
If you are a Democrat, I know it is tempting to do schadenfreude and voter-bashing toward regretful Trump voters, who you see as enabling authoritarianism. But it is very important right now to make the point that people who voted for Trump did not support all of his policy agenda (the vast majority of which is unpopular) for four reasons.
First, internalizing that voting for someone is not an endorsement of their future policy agenda gives people data to fight the worst excesses of Trump’s agenda, especially on trade and immigration. Data can be a very powerful rhetorical tool in catalyzing opposition to unpopular policies.
In Trump’s first administration, for example, polling on his separation of families crossing the border was almost 50 points underwater. That data and related protests convinced the administration to change course.
The alternative to this is assuming that moderate Trump supporters actually support deporting non-criminal parents, which we know (given the data above) to be false. If you assume that, then there is a much smaller landscape of opinion on which to do battle about politics. You have to believe these people are persuadable to move them.
You will not defeat fascism with just the people who voted for Kamala Harris, or even just the people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. You need some of Carol Hui’s neighbors to stand up for what is decent.
All the better if the process of standing up leads them to rethink their support for MAGAt.
The point being, we’re beginning to see real activism against Trump’s immigration dragnet, the same kind of activism that (Morris notes) led Trump to temper his plans in the first term.
And we’re seeing it before it’s too late to, one way or another, defeat (or at least impose a cost for) the vast expansion of Stephen Miller’s dragnet in the Big Ugly.
Yesterday, Miller listed the immigration provisions first among the reasons he likes the bill — ahead of giving Elon a tax cut, ahead of taking food from poor children.
There’s a reason Miller is so excited about the bill. It would dramatically expand ICE, ICE detention centers, and ICE’s ability to deputize cops, making ICE — rather than the FBI — the biggest federal law “enforcement” agency.
The House GOP-crafted bill includes some $45 billion that would go toward detaining immigrants until 2029.
That’s roughly $9 billion per year — an amount that far surpasses a previous record-high of $3.4 billion Congress appropriated for ICE detention a little over a year ago, under the Biden administration.
ICE currently has capacity to detain roughly 41,000 people. Under the GOP bill, that number would increase to some 100,000.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, says there’s not currently enough space to detain that many people.
“ICE would be forced to use this funding to build new detention centers, new soft-sided detention camps, where tents would be thrown up by detention contractors, where immigrants would be held, potentially en masse,” he said.
The bill includes over $150 billion for various components of immigration enforcement, including detention, border wall construction and deportation transportation.
“Taken together, this funding would make ICE the best funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history, with more detention bed funding that the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons and potentially more agents on board than the entire Federal Bureau of Investigations,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
He says the new bill also includes additional funds for ICE to hire new agents and increase collaboration initiatives with local law enforcement agencies — like 287-g agreements. But, no funding for DHS oversight.
ICE is the leading edge of Miller’s assault on the Constitution. His goons are already struggling to find as many migrants as he demands be arrested, leading to screaming sessions and threats (first reported in the Washington Examiner!!).
“They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals,” the first official said. “That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid. … There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized.”
ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.
ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.
One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.
“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.
The (un)intended consequences of this vast expansion, with Stephen Miller screaming that ICE has to go search places for people who are definitely not the criminal aliens he lied about during the election, are pretty obvious.
Now is the time for the people shaming ICE’s invasions of their neighborhood to make a stink about this bill.
To be clear: it won’t kill the bill. The only way the bill will die is if the conflict between hardliners and those who want to preserve health care reaches an impasse which, so far, it has not.
But it would be useful if the localized mobilization raised the cost of this bill going forward, especially if the bill happens to die via other means.
Trump’s Trade War with China Risks Sending Production To China
I may be alone in this opinion, but Scott Bessent’s response to Bret Baier’s question about how trade negotiations with China are going looked like a hostage video.
Bessent’s description that talks with China were “a bit stalled” has gotten a lot of attention, but not his robotic cadence and stuttering, a real shift from his fluid flow of bullshit before that, leading up to his hint of a call with Party … Chair … Xi.
Bessent: I, I, I would say that they are … uh, a bit stalled. I believe that we will be having more talks with them. Uh, in the next few weeks. And I believe we may at some point have a call between uh the President and Party. Chair. Xi.
Baier: So stalled. There was a time when the President thought that that was moving forward pretty significantly.
Bessent: I, uh, again I, I think that given, given the magnitude of the talks, given the complexity, that it, this is going to require both. leaders. to. weigh. in. uh with each other. They have a very good relationship and I am confident that. the. Chinese. will come to the table when President Trump makes his preferences known.
The interview was on Thursday. It was the day before Trump’s Truth Social post where he made false claims about how the interim deal with China came about before then claiming that China had violated that deal (this screen cap reflects my normal five hour time difference).
A series of stories in WSJ explain what really happened in advance of that (IMO) stammering hostage video from Scott Bessent.
A piece on Friday — written the same day as Trump’s post and explaining Bessent’s comment about a stall (but not mentioning his stammer) — described that Trump’s accusation pertained to China’s slow-walking of export licenses for rare earth metals, which China attributed to retaliation for what the US claims was a restatement of export controls put on chip technology under Biden.
A trade truce between the U.S. and China is at risk of falling apart, as China’s slow-walking on rare-earth exports fuels U.S. recriminations that China is reneging on the deal.
Getting the pact together in Geneva earlier this month hinged on Beijing’s concession on the critical minerals, according to people familiar with the matter.
The people say the U.S. trade negotiators presented their Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, with a demand that Beijing resume rare-earth exports. In return, the U.S. would agree to a 90-day tariff truce. He agreed to the demand in the final hours of marathon discussions with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, the people said.
In the resulting deal, both sides suspended most of the tariffs they had imposed on each other—drawing cheers from global investors and businesses.
Since Geneva, however, Beijing has continued to slow-walk approvals for export licenses for rare earths and other elements needed to make cars, chips and other products.
[snip]
For He, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s economic gatekeeper, the willingness to comply with China’s rare-earth pledges faltered after the U.S. Commerce Department on May 12 issued a warning against the use of Huawei Technologies’s Ascend artificial-intelligence chips “anywhere in the world,” the people said.
Beijing viewed the warning as renewed U.S. aggression, and complained about it to Washington.
That same day, WSJ published a story describing that the US no longer has the tech advantage over China that might make this hardball work.
The U.S. has tried almost everything to win the tech race against China—across areas as varied as AI, energy, autonomous vehicles, drones and EVs. So far, none of it has worked.
China’s EVs are cheaper and by many measures better than America’s. The country dominates in consumer drones. Autonomous vehicles have rolled out on the streets of Wuhan and Beijing at a pace that Waymo and Tesla have yet to match. China produces the lion’s share of the world’s solar panels and batteries. And while the U.S. and its allies maintain a narrow lead in advanced microchips and AI, the gap appears to be closing faster than ever.
On Monday, a story about Vice Premier He Lifeng’s hardnosed negotiating approach described that he was the one slow-walking licenses.
In its deepening face-off with the Trump administration, Beijing’s trade negotiator has given a preview of Xi Jinping’s chief objective for this trade war: It won’t be like last time.
In Geneva in mid-May, Vice Premier He Lifeng extracted a 90-day trade truce from a Trump team that had until then declined to pause a tariff blitz on China the way it had for other countries. The deal calmed the nerves of investors and markets around the world.
Now, after both sides have complained that the other wasn’t upholding the terms of the deal, that trade truce is teetering, once again jolting global investors and businesses.
At the center of the storm is He, Xi’s economic gatekeeper, who has made clear China’s strategy in this trade war is nothing like the approach it had in Trump’s first term.
During the Geneva talks, He had removed a final sticking point by agreeing to U.S. demands that China resume rare-earth exports. Yet since then He has dug in his heels, slow-walking approvals of licenses to export the minerals critical in the manufacturing of modern cars and other products.
Beijing blames the U.S. for the breakdown, saying a warning against the use of certain artificial-intelligence chips from China’s Huawei Technologies was a renewal of U.S. aggression, and complained to Washington that it undermined the trade deal. It also took offense at the U.S. plan to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.
The U.S. said the Huawei warning was a restatement of a previous policy. Trump has expressed hopes to talk to Xi directly to break the impasse. A call could happen as early as this week, the White House said.
And a piece today describes what may have caused Bessent’s stammer. Auto companies are considering moving some production to China to get around the rare earth backlog.
Four major automakers are racing to find workarounds to China’s stranglehold on rare-earth magnets, which they fear could force them to shut down some car production within weeks.
Several traditional and electric-vehicle makers—and their suppliers—are considering shifting some auto-parts manufacturing to China to avoid looming factory shutdowns, people familiar with the situation said.
Ideas under review include producing electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping made-in-America motors to China to have magnets installed. Moving production to China as a way to get around the export controls on rare-earth magnets could work because the restrictions only cover magnets, not finished parts, the people said.
If automakers end up shifting some production to China, it would amount to a remarkable outcome from a trade war initiated by President Trump with the intention of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.
“If you want to export a magnet [from China] they won’t let you do that. If you can demonstrate that the magnet is in a motor in China, you can do that,” said a supply-chain manager at one of the carmakers.
China in April began requiring companies to apply for permission to export magnets made with rare-earth metals, including dysprosium and terbium. The country controls roughly 90% of the world’s supply of these elements, which help magnets to operate at high temperatures. Much of the world’s modern technology, from smartphones to F-35 jet fighters, rely on these magnets.
In the auto industry, rare-earths are what allow electric-vehicle motors to function at high speed. They are also used in less exotic, though no less critical, functions from windshield wipers and headlights.
Aside from describing how Ford shut down an Explorer line for a week, WSJ doesn’t mention which four auto companies were considering this move. But in a few places, it focuses on the specific vulnerability for electric cars: they need the magnets for engines to work at high speed, and older engines that don’t rely on them are more expensive.
A key part of a NYT profile on recriminations Elon Musk is facing at Tesla for his neglect over the last four months focuses on supply chain vulnerabilities.
During the visit, Mr. Musk asked about the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Tesla and was briefed on the effects and the company’s supply chain vulnerabilities, two people familiar with the meeting said. The timing of his question raised concerns from some attendees, since Mr. Trump had begun announcing tariffs two months earlier in February.
Days after Mr. Musk’s visit, Tesla reported that its vehicle sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, as profit plunged to its lowest level in four years. New tariffs on imported auto parts have added to the financial pressures facing the company.
Now, Bessent and Elon had the highest profile spat involving any of Trump’s cabinet members. Bessent likely doesn’t care, exclusively, about a hit to Elon’s business (though Elon’s petulance and self-regulation problems may explain why he’d lash out if Trump’s tariffs are killing the primary source of his wealth).
This is a far larger issue for Bessent. The issue that he’s got a weak hand. The issue that if this negotiation doesn’t work, it’ll crash the global economy, with the US in the lead. The issue that rather than isolating China, the Trump administration has found non-stop ways to make China stronger. The issue that if Bessent fails, far worse economic advisors, like Peter Navarro, will have the upper hand with Trump.
In the middle of all this, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, who didn’t know what ASEAN was at his confirmation hearing, flew to Singapore and dick-wagged about defending Taiwan, eliciting yet another backlash from China.
On Saturday Hegseth said China was “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific”, and was rehearsing for “the real deal” of invading Taiwan.
“There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent,” the US defence secretary said in a keynote address at the Shangri-la Dialogue defence forum, calling for Asian countries to increase defence spending.
On Sunday, China’s ministry of foreign affairs condemned his words, which it said were “filled with provocations and intended to sow division”.
“Hegseth deliberately ignored the call for peace and development by countries in the region, and instead touted the cold war mentality for bloc confrontation, vilified China with defamatory allegations, and falsely called China a ‘threat’,” it said.
“The remarks were filled with provocations and intended to sow division. China deplores and firmly opposes them and has protested strongly to the US.”
The statement also pushed back at Hegseth’s claim that China was trying to become a “hegemonic power” in the region.
“No country in the world deserves to be called a hegemonic power other than the US itself, who is also the primary factor undermining the peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific,” it said.
Overnight, Trump is wailing about China again, complaining that Xi is “VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!”
Which sounds like Trump is laying the groundwork to capitulate further to China.
Kristi Noem Combats Claimed Antisemitism by Trying to Deport 61 Israeli Students, and Other Tales of Harvard Derangement
Donald Trump is making American troops — and Americans generally — less safe from biohazards as part of his attempt to destroy Harvard University.
Among the details included in Harvard’s motion for summary judgement submitted yesterday in the university’s lawsuit challenging Trump’s effort to defund the university (there are two lawsuits — the one regarding Trump’s campaign to retaliate because Harvard refused to cede its independence, and the one responding to Kristi Noem’s denial of visa for Harvard students) is a description of how Pete Hegseth’s agency cut off DOD grants without informing DARPA that the “top performing team” on an effort to detect and deploy countermeasures to biohazards had been arbitrarily and immediately cut off.
The motion quotes the effort DARPA’s director of contracting made to reverse the cuts, to no avail.
Harvard is currently the top performing team on the AMPHORA program. Inadequate knowledge of the biological threat landscape poses grave and immediate harm to national security. Development of critical technologies that enables bio surveillance and biocollection in austere, field forward locations bolsters national security and warfighter safety and lethality by enabling medical countermeasure development to new and emerging threats and provides biological threat intelligence to the deployed warfighter. This technology is significantly outpacing the state-of-the art and provides a novel leap-ahead capability to the force. Harvard’s effort is at a pivotal juncture in Phase 1 as they are just starting the microfluidic experiments that will give first indications of whether the program goal is achievable. They are also a critical integrator of multiple technologies that enable this effort and could not be readily reproduced.
Pete Hegseth just did what Trump told him to do — cut off Harvard — with no consideration of how it undermines his claimed effort to make military more lethal.
National security took a back seat to Trump’s maniacal effort to get Harvard to bow down to his demand to turn the country’s most storied institution of higher learning into a bureaucracy replicating MAGAt ideology.
Harvard’s motion mentions — and a declaration from Harvard’s Vice Provost for Research, John Shaw, lists far more — of the other benefits to American taxpayers that Trump arbitrarily took away. As a breast cancer survivor, I would personally benefit from a $7 million grant supporting research “to find and describe early changes in breast tissue in women that may be at a higher risk of breast cancer.” As someone who lost a parent to Parkinson’s, I might personally benefit from efforts to “identify[] numerous modifiable risk factors for Parkinson’s disease.” We all would benefit from a $2 million effort to better understand resistance to antibiotics awarded by the (second) Trump administration.
Gone.
All of those benefits and many more have been stolen from taxpayers who’ve already sunk billions into this research.
And yet, with few exceptions (an important one is a NYT story, cited in the motion, describing how the cuts will disrupt efforts to prevent veteran suicides and otherwise improve healthcare for veterans) this is not how the story of Trump’s emotional tantrum against Harvard is being told.
“Harvard Digs In for Battle, but Trump’s Blows Are Landing,” WSJ described a boxing match when reporting the visa ban for Harvard students.
“Why is Trump going after Harvard?” WaPo promised to answer, instead explaining, “Here’s how the attacks have escalated,” even while treating wrestling booster Linda McMahon’s claimed pretense of fighting antisemitism in good faith. Their timeline missed several important details that show up in Harvard’s own timeline (submitted with the motion for summary judgement): notably:
- Harvard did a bunch of things to address antisemitism on campus
- Plans announced by Task Force on Antisemitism Senior Counsel, Leo Terrell, way back on October 24, 2024, to defund Harvard
- The Trump Administration’s persistent disinterest in the things Harvard had done to address antisemitism
- The Trump Administration’s persistent silence about any single instance of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus — the kind of due process to which Harvard would respond on Title VI
Having not presented the pretext of antisemitism as such, WaPo doesn’t ask how revoking the visas all foreign students at Harvard, including those of 61 Israeli students, combats antisemitism.
Politico similarly glosses the significance of all this in what is mostly a process story of Trump’s efforts to “brainstorm new Harvard measures.” Trump is seeking to “bring the storied institution to heel.” The Administration will need to “get more creative to keep squeezing the school.” When it contemplates the “Trump administration’s broader efforts to reshape not just American government but the institutions that have long surrounded it,” Politico did not mention how that effort included an ignorant effort to defund Politico subscriptions, to say nothing of Trump’s other assaults on the press.
NYT has been reporting a series of “escalations.” “[T]he administration appeared eager to escalate one of its civil investigations into a criminal inquiry,” Mike Schmidt and Michael Bender described a manufactured outrage that would backfire if it were criminally charged. The fight escalated, Mike Schmidt said in an interview. This was a sharp escalation, NYT set up another Schmidt interview. Cutting off visas was a major escalation, Schmidt and Michael Bender described. “Trump Administration Escalates Harvard Feud With New Justice Dept. Investigation,” another headline blared. Mike Schmidt, who always seems to reinforce Trump’s power, keeps insisting that, “Harvard Has No Way Out,” without thinking through what that would mean for the US, if true.
Schmidt apparently can’t imagine a political setback so significant — a backlash from taxpayers about the value Trump took from them, a value that Schmidt doesn’t consider — that Trump would realize he has to fund Harvard research just like he has to keep Air Traffic Controllers on the job.
Politico, at least, quotes one of several administration sources describing that the mere futility of Trump’s efforts when public opinion swung to Harvard when Trump revoked the student visas (it made no mention that that included visas for Israelis).
“We’re fighting a losing battle,” one of the administration officials said, acknowledging that the university has the narrative upper hand when it comes to the effort to revoke Harvard’s student visas. “We’ve taken one of the most evil institutions and made them the victim.”
But there remains no question about the way Trump has deliberately hurt Americans — not just elite Americans whose kids go to Harvard, or poorer Americans, whose Harvard tuition foreign students subsidize, but the Americans who benefit from the cancer cures and biohazard warnings and ways to combat antibiotic resistance.
Dan Drezner, from his perch just down the road from Harvard at Tufts, argues that Schmidt’s pessimism about Harvard is all wrong, that Harvard is winning this battle.
Over the weekend, however, some news stories have come out that reinforce a few points about how these attacks are going.
- The administration has already shot its wad in going after Harvard and has very little left in its cupboard.
- This anti-Harvard jihad is not going exactly as planned, either legally or politically.
- The Trump White House has now reached the same point in its dealing with Harvard that it previously reached in its trade negotiations with multiple countries: desperate for a victory that may never come.
This is not to say that Trump is not wreaking carnage. He’s wreaking a tremendous amount of carnage. What he is not doing, however, is winning.
Part of Drezner’s optimism is that academics, both within Harvard and across the institutions, have discovered collective action.
What Klein’s story omits is that after a stumbling start at collective action, the administration’s actions have galvanized a lot of universities to talk to each other about response strategies. The fundamental lesson to be learned from Trump’s actions to date is that no matter how a university responds, Trump will be coming after them anyway. That comes through loud and clear in all the coverage. And if university leadership knows this, they will choose standing their ground over backing down every day of the week.
From my own limited view of how higher education is responding, I see discussions about how to respond to further pressure from the Trump administration. I also see that none of the response strategies on the table include “cut a deal.”
Where I depart from Drezner’s optimism, and concede Schmidt has a point, is that unless this senseless battle imposes a cost on Trump, Harvard will ultimately lose, American taxpayers will ultimately lose the sunk costs in research and jobs that Trump decided to take away. Because until those resisting Trump — from the lawyers to the universities to the local nonprofits and yes even the media outlets — actually win the underlying battle, Trump remains in a position to take away those cancer cures.
And that — not Wharton grad Trump’s claim of Harvard snobbery and not the billionaire’s concerns about elitism and sure as fuck not a concern about antisemitism — is why Trump keeps doubling down.
Harvard has the means and the facts to win the legal cases before it. Without even telling the story of the cancer cures Trump took away, Harvard also has the means to look like less of an asshole than Trump.
But that’s a different thing from turning Harvard’s fight — and the collective action that has arisen — into a political win.
This is not about universities. Or — as I tried to visualize last week — universities are not what people think they are. Universities do a lot of the same kind of things Elon Musk does, but with nowhere near the grift, corruption, and — yes — the antisemitism.
This is not a boxing match, a wrestling match, or a series of escalations.
This is about a broader fight for civil society.
Perhaps journalists, from their very privileged position within civil society, will be the last to figure this out, to understand that all those escalations against Harvard are really inseparable from the — thus far — more successful escalations against the press.
But what is going on is a two-bit dictator is willing to take things away from the American people all so he can lord over an entity that dared stand up to him.