For those still looking for the point in what Trump is doing, I give you a quote. This is from A scary quote for the GOP on Trump and tariffs by Aaron Blake at WaPo.  And here’s the quote.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told The Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f—. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

I don’t know how much of the current ongoing disaster really is about what Trump promised on the campaign trail. I do suspect he has some kind of notion about how all this chaos is going to work out, somehow. I don’t think he’s deliberately sabotaging his own administration. but Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. And Aaron Blake’s point is that when the tariff ship sinks (as it undoubtedly will) the Republican party is going to go down with it. The entire party has spend years protecting him and making excuses for him and Letting Trump Be Trump. When the ship sinks it will be too late for backsies.

But Trump doesn’t give a bleep what happens to them. He’s going to do what he wants to do, what feels good to do. So every government agency that ever in the least bit annoyed him,, which is probably all of them, is getting cut. Every program that doesn’t directly reflect glory and honor on him is being cut. He doesn’t give a bleep if they are popular or even if lives depend on them.

And I do think the tariffs are in part a power play. He thinks the world will come groveling to him. That’s what he most dearly wants, to be the capo dei capi of the whole planet. That is, I think, why he keeps changing his story about whether the tariffs are permanent or negotiable. If they are supposed to be protectionist and cause more goods to be manufactured in the U.S., they have to be permanent. Nobody is going to start building a new factory to relocate manufacturing to the U.S. if they think the stupid tariffs will end in a few weeks. Even Trump ought to be able to understand that. So Trump has to say the tariffs are around to stay. But what he really wants is the groveling. So then an hour later he’ll say they are negotiable.

But it’s not going to work. He doesn’t understand tariffs, and economies. He over-calculated America’s importance. Instead of making himself stronger, he’s leaving a power vacuum where the U.S. used to be, and sooner or later some other country, or perhaps the EU, will step into that void. Under Trump’s “leadership” the U.S. is becoming more isolated, and vulnerable, and dysfunctional, and quickly a whole lot poorer. So much winning. And as people lose their investments and FEMA doesn’t show up after a disaster and hospitals close and prices get ridiculous and unemployment goes up because nobody is hiring because consumers aren’t buying, Republicans who have hitched themselves to Trump will have no where to hide.

How bad is the tariff plan? Even the bleeping right-wing American Enterprise Institute says it makes no sense. See also There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.

Thompson is basically saying that the tariff policy is an extension of Trump’s chaotic psyche. No real thinking went into any of this. Nobody knows anything about how it’s supposed to work. It was just slapped together to please Trump. As Thompson says, we’re all living in Trump’s head.

On a brighter note, the Hand’s Off protests seem to have gone well yesterday. We need more of those. I was sorry to not go, but I’ve been dealing with a lot of arthritis pain and haven’t been all that mobile. Still, sitting out really bothers me.

It’s been another exciting day for investors.

The S&P 500 fell 6 percent by the end of trading on Friday, pulling the benchmark U.S. index closer to a bear market, Wall Street’s term for a decline of more than 20 percent from its latest peak in mid-February. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell 5.8 percent, pushing it into a bear market.

The U.S. rout followed falls in global markets, and worries about an escalating global trade war overshadowed a positive reading about the health of the U.S. labor market.

The problem with jobs reports is that they’re a lagging indicator. They’re a snapshot of the recent past, which may or may not show us anything about the future.

Meanwhile, the White House can’t seem to get its story straight about exactly what it’s doing. Today various spokespeople sternly told the press that the tariffs were not open to negotiation. Later in the day Trump said they were. In fact, he has decided that was the goal all along.

If it helps you feel better, Gallup now has Trump’s approval at 34 percent, which is equal to his lowest approval rating from his first term. If he drops to 33 percent, it will be his lowest Gallup approval ever. And speaking of dropping, the stock market is doing just that, big time. It’s been going lower all day, from what I can tell.

I can’t read the story at The Economist, but here’s the cover:

Here’s the first paragraph, which is as far as I can go:

IF YOUfailed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

Paul Krugman has been writing more than he did when he was a New York Times columnist. He has a lot to say. See Trump Goes Crazy on Trade  and Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? This is from the latter:

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down.

See also Trump’s Trade War Risks Forfeiting America’s Economic Primacy by Patricia Cohen at the New York Times (gift article):

The global economic system that the United States has shaped and steered for more than three-quarters of a century was animated by a powerful guiding vision: that trade and finance would be based on cooperation and consent rather than coercion.

That system, for all its faults, entrenched the United States as the world’s richest nation and its sole financial superpower. The rule of law and the stability and trust that this approach generated helped make the dollar the world’s go-to currency for transactions and America a center of global investment.

By provoking a worldwide trade war, President Trump risks abandoning that vision of shared interests and replacing it with one that assumes sharp economic conflicts are unavoidable.

Gone are appeals to a larger purpose, mutual agreements or shared values. In this new order, the strongest powers determine the rules and enforce them through intimidation and bare-knuckled power.  …

… But quarterly gains and losses are trivial, many economists and political leaders said, compared with the potential long-term damage to the unique power and privileges that the United States has built up in the postwar global order. At stake are the country’s unmatched influence over the world’s financial system, the advantages its businesses enjoy and a reputation that attracts investors and innovators.

It may be that future generations will divide American history into two parts: pre-Trump and post-Trump. And the post-Trump America will be considerably less great.

Congress could stop this. Already the Senate — with some Republican votes — rescinded some of the tariffs Trump put on Canada.  And today “A bipartisan pair of Senate lawmakers on Thursday unveiled legislation they said would reaffirm Congress’ role in setting trade policy, just hours after the Donald Trump administration rolled out a slate of import tariffs on some of the country’s closest partners in commerce,” it says here. But can these bills pass in the House? That’s very unlikely, according to just about everybody.

I haven’t yet written about the massive layoffs at Health and Human Services. If you missed the interview with Dr. David Kessler on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, do watch.

First, some celebration:

So we’ve been given a bit of light. Yesterday’s election results were as good as we could have hoped for. With 95 percent of the vote counted as I write, Susan Crawford is winning easily, 55 % to 45 %, over the Musk candidate, Brad Schimel, in Wisconsin. Elon spent a huge amount of political capital, along with real money, trying to elect Schimel. I’m reading that Schimel was running on how loyal he is to Trump, and how he would support Trump’s agenda, and Elon seems to have thought this would bring Trump supporters out to the polls. We see how that worked. From the New York Times:

Even more than Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk emerged in Wisconsin as the primary boogeyman for Democrats. His involvement altered the terms of the election. Instead of making the race an early referendum on Mr. Trump’s White House and abortion rights, Wisconsin Democrats pivoted to make Mr. Musk their entire focus, while Republicans rode the wave of his largess.

Don Moynihan writes on his Substack site, “All signs suggest that Musk was a drag, rather than a boost, to the candidate he invested so much personal and financial capital into.” Musk is a liability to Republicans rather than an asset, in other words. Also, while Republicans won, the results in the Florida House elections were a lot closer than the results in the same districts just five months ago. Republicans who are not in deep red districts and who face elections next year have got to be worried. Worried enough to take back some of Musk’s power? We’ll see. See also Elon Musk Can’t Take the Heat by Tim Murphy at Mother Jones

Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech turned into something genuinely inspirational. If you missed the closing moments, you can see them here. Frank Luntz, of all people, says the speech may have changed the course of political history. I think it’s a bit early to say that, but I do think it could have helped turn a corner for the Dems. They needed this.

Now on to freedom. There’s an article at The Atlantic by David Graham titled The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come. It begins:

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967, in his inaugural address as governor of California. Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, approvingly quotes the speech in his foreword to Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s blueprint for the Trump administration. Roberts writes that the plan has four goals for protecting its vision of freedom: restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”; dismantling the federal bureaucracy; defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”; and securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”

Now, what does this tell us about how people like Roberts define “freedom”? Is “restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life” freedom? What sort of family is being restored? Graham continues,

A focus on heterosexual, married, procreating couples is everywhere in Project 2025. “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-­ordered nation and healthy society,” writes Roger Severino, the author of a chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services and a former HHS and Justice Department staffer. … He argues that the federal government should bolster organizations that “maintain a biblically based, social-­science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” saying that other forms are less stable. The goal is not only moral; he and other authors see this as a path to financial stability and perhaps even greater prosperity for families.

So, apparently, “freedom” requires enforcing a rigidly narrow lifestyle that may work very well for some people, but it doesn’t work for everybody. Those who are not heterosexual or terribly interested in marriage or children just have to suck it up and, what? Give up their freedom?

In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers. “Without women, there are no children, and society cannot continue,” Max Primorac writes in his chapter on USAID, where he served in the first Trump administration. (Primorac calls for ridding the agency of “woke” politics and using it as an instrument of U.S. policy, but not the complete shutdown Trump has attempted.) Jonathan Berry writes that the Department of Labor, where he previously worked, would “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work” and seek to “understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.” (This sounds a lot like research predetermined to reach an outcome backing the traditional family.)

So we’re going back to stuffing all women into a rigidly narrow gender role that requires they give up personal aptitudes and interests so they can stay home and take care of children. I’ve got news for these people: This is not freedom.  It’s true that we’re still working to make the motherhood-and-career mix work a little more rationally. But I think we can get there.

The Labor Department would produce monthly data on “the state of the American family and its economic welfare,” and the Education Department would provide student data sorted by family structure. Severino suggests that the government either pay parents (most likely mothers) to offset the cost of caring for children, or pay for in-­home care from family members; he opposes universal day care, which many on the right see as encouraging women to work rather than stay home with kids.

This makes me crazy. First, I suspect nearly all families who need day care call on family or trusted friends to provide that care before they resort to paying for day care. But very often that’s not an option. Republican politicians don’t want to pay for reliable day care, but when jobs are going unfilled because women don’t have reliable day care they don’t like that, either, especially if the unemployed mothers need food and housing assistance. It can be a burden even for women who keep their jobs. I well remember having to spend time at work on the phone looking for day care  because of a school break or some other interruption in the usual arrangement. It cuts into productivity, and it’s a horrific expense.

The parts of this family-oriented agenda that the Trump administration has already moved to enact are some of those that enforce a strictly binary concept of gender, aiming to drive trans and nonbinary people underground; open them up to discrimination at work, at school, and in the rest of their lives; and erase their very existence from the language of the federal government.

And I’m still not seeing the “freedom.”

Trump has not yet made stricter abortion policies a focus in his new term. Though he has boasted about appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he seems wary of pushing further, for fear of political backlash. Project 2025 has no such qualms. Severino recommends withdrawing FDA approval for abortion drugs, banning their prescription via telehealth, and using 1873’s Comstock Act to prohibit their mailing. 

I’m not seeing pro-freedom agenda there, either. Not having a say over one’s own body is kind of not free.

I’ve been complaining about the Right’s misuse of the word freedom for years. It’s like that to be free, in their sense of the word, we have to agree to not be free, really. We give up our actual freedom to enjoy a kind of theoretical freedom. Or something.

And then there is their twitchiness about “government bureaucracy.” Sometimes the lack of it is a bigger threat to freedom. Just ask the people standing in lines outside Social Security offices these days. But, speaking of Reagan, I’m sure you remember what he said when the Medicare Act was passed way back when. “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” How “free” is it to not be able to afford health care? How “free” is it to have a debilitating illness or chronic pain that goes untreated or else puts you in debt for the rest of your life? Where is the “freedom” in that? If we citizens choose to spend our tax money toward providing access to medical care for everybody, as other nations do, how is that “not free”? I honestly don’t understand.

In brief, the Right’s idea of freedom has nothing to do with individual self-determination or being free from hindrances that keep you from fully living your life. What it means is that they want to live in a country that reflects their personal biases and that protects them from things that make them uncomfortable, like brown people, especially foreign ones, and assertive women of any color. That’s why they love Viktor Orbán so much. It’s the most corrupt country in the EU, and the people have no guarantee of civil liberties, but he’s doing a heck of a job shoving gay people back into the closet. 

I’m watching Sen. Cory Booker break the Senate for the longest speech in Senate history. I don’t know if most Americans are aware this is going on, but it’s a good effort.

I’m waiting to see the results of the special elections tonight, hoping to see a big Democratic overperformance, if not wins. Maybe wins in Florida is hoping for too much, but cutting the margin from last November would be nice. And I do hope the Republican in Wisconsin is absolutely trounced. Fingers crossed.

Do discuss the day’s events. And here are a couple of things to read from The New Republic:

Michael Tomasky, Of Course Trump Will Tank the Economy. It’s What Republicans Do.

Greg Sargent, The Lawlessness Is the Point

One of the saddest things about the ongoing destruction of the U.S. is that Trump/Musk/Vance are blowing off many long-nurtured relationships with other countries. Yesterday I caught this interview with a former U.S. ambassador to Denmark on J.D. Vance and the ham-handed bullying of Greenland.

See also The Imperialism Has no Clothes: JD Vance in Greenland by Timothy Snyder on how utterly contradictory and incoherent Trump’s policies really are.

If Dems take back both houses in 2026, IMO another Trump impeachment and removal from office have to be on the table. It’s the only way the U.S. can even begin to get its credibility back.

Trump’s problem, as I understand it, is that he understands only one kind of relationship, between dominators and the dominated. He doesn’t understand strategic alliances, or equal partnerships in which nations work together where they share mutual interests. To Trump, you’re either the boss or you’re the flunky. He and Vance and Musk also don’t seem to grasp that what happens in other countries can really, truly, impact the U.S. Ultimately isolationism makes us weaker.

Regarding Elon Musk, see Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic, Why DOGE Could Actually Increase the Deficit. In the long run Musk’s antics probably will cost us a lot more than he “saves.” And if he were really all that smart he should be able to figure that out himself. Or maybe he has, and he doesn’t care.

See also Greg Sargent, Trump Accidentally Wrecks His Own Tariff Spin in Leaked Call Stunner. You’ve no doubt heard that Trump has ordered a 25 percent tariff on all cars imported into the U.S. This is supposed to take effect on April 3. Some time later there is to be a 25 percent tariff on all car parts imported into the U.S. Trump has already slapped 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, and he’s threatened to impose tariffs on copper. (If you’re thinking of replacing your laptop, do it before the cost of copper goes up.)

This is supposed to bring more car manufacturing back to the U.S. Car industry experts are saying it probably won’t, and even if it did cars would cost more. But somebody must have gotten through to Trump that his tariffs will raise the price of cars. Greg Sargent:

The Wall Street Journalreports that in a private call with CEOs of the nation’s leading auto companies this month, the president warned them against hiking prices after his tariffs hit. The White House will look unfavorably on them if they do, he darkly intimated, leaving them worried about retribution.

I’m waiting for the outrage from the “free market” libertarians and the Friedrich Von Hayek devotees to scream about the “road to serfdom.” Crickets so far.

This is getting attention as another abuse of power, akin to his extortion of law firms. But it’s notable for a different reason: It wrecks the spin Trump has offered on his tariffs on many different levels, and it highlights a glaring absurdity about his economic agenda that continues to be overlooked. While Trump’s stated goal of tariffs is to rebuild the nation’s industrial base, he’s gunning to reverse policies by his predecessor in a way that would kill large numbers of manufacturing jobs, including in the auto industry, simply because they would facilitate the transition to a green future.

He wants to undo everything Biden accomplished because Biden accomplished it. He also wants to stay in the good graces of fossil fuel companies. Meanwhile, China is cornering the EV market. U.S. automobile manufacturers will be left behind.

Some Trump-targeted law firms are fighitng back. That’s encouraging.

The latest: Trump has asked the Supreme Court to let him resume deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act. Let’s see what SCOTUS does with this.

There’s some good news — apparently some GOP senators are squeamish about cutting Medicaid. And there’s some bad news — DOGE is preparing to re-code the Social Security database. And they plan to do it quickly. Wired reports:

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

Today JD Vance told troops in Greenland that the US has to gain control of the Arctic island to stop the threat of China and Russia. At least he’s acknowledging Russia is a threat. But why is it that Greenland all of a sudden has all this strategic importance?

It’s because of global climate change, folks. You know, that thing Trump says is a hoax.

Brett Simpson writes at The Atlantic:

As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.

Do read the whole article; no paywall. It says the DoD has been factoring climate change into military planning for some time.

The stock market is not happy. Way to go, Trump.

Another wipeout walloped Wall Street Friday. Worries are building about a potentially toxic mix of worsening inflation and a U.S. economy slowing because of households afraid to spend due to the global trade war.

The S&P 500 dropped 2% for one of its worst days in the last two years. It thudded to its fifth losing week in the last six after wiping out what had been a big gain to start the week.

Tonight a federal judge blocked Trump from shutting down the Voice of America.

Possibly to do a solid for his buddy Vladimir, Trump’s ICE thugs have “disappeared” a Russian medical researcher at Harvard. She left Russia after publicly criticizing Putin for invading Ukraine. If she is deported to Russia she’ll no doubt be jailed.

There are more outrageous things going on than I have had time to write about, sorry. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow. Do feel free to rant about whatever is pissing you off in the comments.

First off, Jeffrey Goldberg released the Signal group chat, which clearly discussed plans for bombing in Yemen. So the other participants who claimed there were no war plans or anything that should have been classified in the chat were, um, fibbing. This is a gift link, so you can read it all without a subscription to The Atlantic.

A lawsuit has already been filed regarding SignalGate. Trump officials were sued yesterday by the government watchdog group American Oversight. And the suit has been assigned to none other than the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, James Boasberg. Yep; the same guy Trump’s lawyers are butting heads with over the deportation flights. See Trump’s Nightmare Judge Will Decide Case on War Plans Group Chat at The New Republic.

For the latest in the deportation flights court brawl, see A Constitutional Collision In Slow Motion by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo. In brief, the DoJ lawyers have taken the position that the Trump Administration doesn’t have to comply with the Court’s information requests, nyah nyah nyah.

The next step in this matter isn’t exactly clear to me. The ball is now in Boasberg’s court, with the administration adamant that there are no grounds to hold it in contempt while refusing to recognize the judge’s authority to inquire into the matter. Something’s got to give.

In other news, a Democrat is the projected winner of a Pennsylvania state senate election yesterday. This is newsworthy because the district hasn’t elected a Democratic state senator since it moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster County in 1979. Trump won there last November with 57 percent of the vote. I’m reading that even though it was a state race, the winner, James Malone, made Elon Musk and recent events in Washington a central part of his campaign. A sign of things to come?

Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times that Trump and Musk Are Suffering From Soros Derangement Syndrome. This is my last NY Times gift article for the month, so enjoy. Bouie writes that Trump, Musk, and the political Right genuinely believe that all opposition to their cause is being fueled and manipulated by powerful elites (like George Soros). Just about everything Trump has been doing lately has been about striking down the institutions and “shadowy” government agencies that are behind this manipulation. Eliminate these elites, and the opposition will vanish. Right?

One upshot of the idea that there is no such thing as genuine popular political opposition to Trump and the MAGA right — and that most, if not all of it, is the product of secret machinations by elusive billionaires and shadowy government agencies — is that the people are inherently on your side and your opponents are illegitimate. The other is that to defeat your opposition, all you have to do is strike at the individuals and institutions that fuel it. Remove them, and you’ll have no one in your way.

We see both conclusions at work in the way the president and his supporters are operating.

So, in brief, the Right is dismissing all the blinking red warnings that their attacks on portions of government — like Social Security — are really pissing off regular Americans, including many of their own voters, and are not the work of George Soros paying people to yell a lot at town halls.

Probably as part of this effort, yesterday Trump signed an executive order demanding big changes in how elections are held. The headline provision is that people must provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. It’s not clear to me if this applies to people who are already registered. But what is clear is that an executive order by a POTUS is not binding on state governments, and states run elections, per the Constitution.

Another provision in this order is that it bans certain election equipment that use QR codes. I don’t know if that would include Dominion or Smartmatic machines. But it might force a lot of states to spend a ton of money replacing equipment, if the states decided to comply.

But my favorite provision is that it would allow the Lost Boys of DOGE to comb through voter registration rolls to find the “bad” voters. Entire Democratic-leaning voting districts would probably be declared dead. See Steve Benen at MSNBC.

I’ve been out most of the day and am just now catching up to the fallout from SignalGate. The best thing I’ve read so far is by Josh Marshall, SignalGate Is Bad; But OPSEC Isn’t Even the Worst Part Of It. Here’s just a bit of it.

Especially in the national security domain, many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the U.S. government. The U.S. government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the National Archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed.

This all goes to the fundamental point Trump has never been able to accept: that the U.S. government is the property of the American people and it persists over time with individual officeholders merely temporary occupants charged with administering an entity they don’t own or possess.

Think this is hyperbole? Remember that when Trump held his notorious meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2019 he confiscated his translator’s notes and ordered him not to divulge anything that had been discussed. Remember that Trump got impeached over an extortion plot recorded in the government record of his phone call with President Zelensky. An intelligence analyst discovered what had happened and decided he needed to report the conduct. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’ve already happened. And he’s even been caught. Which is probably one reason there’s so much use of Signal.

This is clearly routine in the Trump administration. How many of President Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders are happening on these apps? It’s the obvious place for bribes, various kinds of criminal conduct, asking foreign governments to do dirty jobs, maybe against American citizens, that Trump doesn’t dare try himself.

Do read the whole thing. See also Marcy Wheeler, Seven Reasons Trump’s Entire National Security Team Should Resign in Disgrace. And see Marina Hyde at The Guardian, It’s war and peace with Donald and Pete – and the worst group chat the world has ever seen. I think this story is going to be with us for a few days.

In other news, today Trump signed an executive order calling for changes to how U.S. elections are administered. Since the Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states, I suspect many lawyers are already at work at the legal challenges. Says Democracy Docket, “Tuesday’s executive order is an extension of those efforts by attempting to make it more difficult for Americans to register to vote, to vastly increase federal supervision over state registration rolls and to punish states that do not comply with the order.”

Even more terrifying, apparently House Speaker Mike Johnson is considering “eliminating” federal courts that are causing particular trouble for Trump’s agenda.

More tomorrow.

Here are a couple of new things to read on Social Security. One, see Why DOGE is struggling to find fraud in Social Security,  a WaPo piece republished at Yahoo News. It’s an article of faith on the Right that Social Security is rife with fraud and way overdue to be audited. In fact, it gets audited up the proverbial wazoo. “Social Security is among the most scrutinized and audited agencies in government, with frequent probes by its 500-person Office of Inspector General. It pays outside auditors to examine its books,” the article says. So there is not a lot of fraud to be found.

Then see Paul Krugman, Social Security: A Time for Outrage. He makes the point that what Trump/Musk et al. are trying to do to Social Security will devastate a whole lot of people who voted for Trump, who for the most part are not that wealthy. And then there’s the breathtakingly out of touch comment by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

This could well be one of the dumbest things ever said by a federal U.S. official. “And the attack on Social Security is something that should both inspire outrage and offer an opportunity to connect with working-class Americans,” Krugman writes.

Well, some of the Democrats are trying. Some of them aren’t. And Lutnick hasn’t yet issued a “clarification” or walkback of his comment that I’ve seen.

Wowzer of the Week, so Far: Jeffrey Goldberg, a smart guy who is editor in chief of The Atlantic, inexplicably was invited into a super-secret encrypted chat group for high-level Trump Administration operatives. Goldberg writes,

 I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president

The group discussed plans to bomb Houthi militants in Yemen. And then, the Trump Administration bombed Houthi targets in Yemen, exactly as the people in the group chat said they would. Maybe it wasn’t a hoax. You need to read this.

Trump is having another bad day in court:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is hearing arguments over the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act last week to deport more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador with no due process.

“There were plane loads of people. There were no procedures in place to notify people,” Judge Patricia Millett said. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.”

Judge Millett noted that alleged Nazis were given hearing boards and subject to established regulations, while the alleged members of Tren De Aragua were given no such rights.

“There’s no regulations, and nothing was adopted by the agency officials that were administering this. They people weren’t given notice. They weren’t told where they were going. They were given those people on those planes on that Saturday and had no opportunity to file habeas or any type of action to challenge the removal under the AEA,” Judge Millet said. “What’s factually wrong about what I said?”

“Well, Your Honor, we certainly dispute the Nazi analogy,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign said, arguing some of the men were able to file habeas petitions.

Ensign compared a federal judge’s order temporarily blocking the deportations to a judge directing a carrier group from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf — an analogy that drew an immediate rebuke from Millett.