After describing in a post that “a budget is a moral document,” Don Moynihan argued that the skinny budget Trump released last week wasn’t even that. It was, instead, propaganda, infested with the same nasty slogans all Trump’s other White House policy documents are. Those slogans, Moynihan argues, serve to convince us to take actions — here, to destroy science and foreign aid — “that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code.” The nasty slogans convince us, or at least convince Trump’s loyal rubes, to let children die.
[P]eople can debate the lab leak hypothesis, but the idea that you would stop providing foreign aid or cut cancer research for this reason is odd. Both USAID and NIH cuts will result in a massive numbers of unnecessary deaths. An analysis in the journal Nature, estimated that 25 million people will die if the USAID money disappears. Around 7 million people died due to COVID.
The purpose of propaganda is to divorce us from reality, to push us to actions that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code. In an administration that formed an anti-Christian bias taskforce, it is hard to think of anything less Christian than condemning millions of the most vulnerable people in the world to die. Of course, mercy and empathy are not just Christian values, but for a certain type of Christian nationalist they are values to be avoided. Propaganda makes such hypocrisies more palatable.
When countries engage in a massive dismantling of their scientific infrastructure, they cannot do it quietly. It is so obviously counterproductive that it can only occur via a broader mobilization, where higher education or experts are treated as part of an evil corrupting the nation. [emphasis original]
But the numbers described in the budget do make the morality of it quite plain. Trump is transferring the money saved by cutting AIDS prevention and cancer cures and using it to massively expand the budget for Stephen Miller’s deportation regime.
As described, Trump cuts $163 billion from what OMB calls discretionary spending and uses the “savings” to increasing funding for DHS by 65%.
The Budget, which reduces non-defense discretionary by $163 billion or 23 percent from the 2025 enacted level, guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security. The Budget also provides support for air and rail safety as well as key infrastructure and our Nation’s veterans and law enforcement.
This is the lowest non-defense spending level since 2017. Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide.
Defense spending would increase by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete the mission. [emphasis original]
It’s not just that Russ Vought and Stephen Miller are cutting AIDS prevention and cancer research. They’re doing so to pay for Miller’s gulag. Miller is cutting your access to health care and cancer cures to pay to deport your nurse assistant and cancer researchers (and, given the unnecessary bump in DOD spending, to invade Canada to take their health care away too).
Miller and Vought have targeted cancer cures via many vectors: deportations, cuts to grant funding, and personnel cuts.
Deportations of two of US citizen children with their parents, for example, disrupted their cancer treatment, first with a ten year old brain cancer patient turned away at the border.
Immigration authorities removed the girl and four of her American siblings from Texas on Feb. 4, when they deported their undocumented parents.
The family’s ordeal began last month, when they were rushing from Rio Grande City, where they lived, to Houston, where their daughter’s specialist doctors are based, for an emergency medical checkup.
The parents had done the trip at least five other times in the past, passing through an immigration checkpoint every time without any issues, according to attorney Danny Woodward from the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal advocacy and litigation organization representing the family. In previous occasions, the parents showed letters from their doctors and lawyers to the officers at the checkpoint to get through.
But in early February, the letters weren’t enough. When they stopped at the checkpoint, they were arrested after the parents were unable to show legal immigration documentation. The mother, who spoke exclusively to NBC News, said she tried explaining her daughter’s circumstances to the officers, but “they weren’t interested in hearing that.”
More recently a four year old boy with stage 4 cancer was sent to Honduras without his cancer medication.
Another mother wasn’t allowed to speak with attorneys or family members before she was deported, accompanied by her U.S.-born children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew one of them had Stage 4 cancer.
Attorneys for the mothers and their children who were sent to Honduras are blasting Trump administration officials, saying the deportations of three U.S. citizen children over the weekend, including the 4-year-old boy who left without access to his cancer medicines, are illegal.
It’s not just cancer patients getting caught up in Miller’s dragnet. Cancer researcher Kseniia Petrova has been in detention for almost two months after CBP accused her of trying to smuggle research materials — frog embryos — into the country.
A groundbreaking microscope at Harvard Medical School could lead to breakthroughs in cancer detection and research into longevity. But the scientist who developed computer scripts to read its images and unlock its full potential has been in an immigration detention center for two months — putting crucial scientific advancements at risk.
The scientist, the 30-year-old Russian-born Kseniia Petrova, worked at Harvard’s renowned Kirschner Lab until her arrest at a Boston airport in mid-February. She is now being held at ICE’s Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, and fighting possible deportation to Russia, where she said she fears persecution and jail time over her protests against the war in Ukraine.
Broad cuts to NIH, NCI, and NIOSH have stalled research into cures and prevention progress.
Firings at the NIH Clinical Center, the country’s biggest research hospital, have already devastated highly promising research work that aims to use the body’s own immune cells to combat gastrointestinal cancers. Patients’ experimental treatments have already been delayed because of limited staff capacity to make these personalized cell therapies and purchasing stalls. These therapies represent potential lifelines for those with advanced cancers that have not responded to standard drugs. And many of these individuals, who are now increasingly younger in age, cannot afford to wait.
Elsewhere, hiring freezes at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health have scuppered work studying elevated cancer rates in firefighters and paused a clinical trial of a new drug for advanced head and neck cancers. Research grants for Columbia University’s cancer center have been canceled because of student-led Gaza protests. Concerns around “wokeness” have ended funding for studies examining cancers in sexual and gender minority individuals — an understudied group with poor cancer outcomes — at various academic institutions such as Emory University and the Mayo Clinic.
And cuts at the VA have disrupted clinical trials helping veterans.
Earlier this year, doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals in Pennsylvania sounded an alarm. Sweeping cuts imposed by the Trump administration, they told higher-ups in an email, were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”
The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.
“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”
The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.
As entities like Harvard face the effects of these draconian cuts, this is a story that needs to be told. The Trump Administration is deporting and defunding cancer cures so that it can dramatically increase funding for a gulag system that voters don’t want.
The right wing has boasted for months already that Trump has shut down migration across the border, and they’re not wrong.
Yet Stephen Miller is still taking money that had been used to cure cancer and pursue scientific discovery in order to hunt down cancer researchers and, in the name of hunting down cancer researchers, to eliminate the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
This is a moral story. And especially when described as a transfer, money taken from cancer cures and dumped into an expanding gulag, the moral imperative becomes even more clear.
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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.
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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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