Today’s Sift will be the last one until May 12, three weeks from today. I need the time for two reasons related to my wife’s death in December: On May 4 I’m going to give probably the most difficult talk of my life, at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois. Back in 2023, I spoke there about my own views on life-after-death. In retrospect, though, that talk had a big hole in it, because I focused on thinking about my own death. This talk will try to fill that hole. I’m calling it “Life After (Somebody Else’s) Death”.
A lot of people (including a few of the voices in my head) have warned me that it’s too soon for me to take on that topic. But having had the idea, I found that I couldn’t not do it. It will be stressful to deliver, but I think it will be very good.
The second reason is how I’m getting there: This is going to be the first long-distance driving trip I’ve done solo for several decades. I’m going to take my time and visit several people along the way.
Anyway, the two weeks off don’t signal any kind of flagging of my commitment to this blog. I’m sure I will miss it and be eager to return to it on May 12.
Today has a bit of reduced schedule as well: There’s no featured post, but the summary be a little extra-long. It should appear around noon.
The bottom line is: If the economy and the government were working the way it should for most Americans, a guy like Donald Trump and a movement like Trumpism would not have been possible.
That’s the subject of one featured post, in which I express the hope that we can have a debate more nuanced than just Trump’s tariffs vs. free trade.
and Abrego Garcia
This much has been established in court: There was a court order that Kilmar Abrego Garcia not be sent back to El Salvador, his country of origin. The Trump administration violated that order due to an “administrative error”, so he is currently in the harsh Cecot prison, which is widely acknowledged to be a hellhole.
In a sane judicial system dealing with a sane administration, the next step would be obvious: You violated a court order, so get back into compliance with it, i.e., bring Abrego Garcia back to the US.
What should happen to him then is a matter for other proceedings to establish. Whatever evidence DoJ may or may not have against him, whether he committed some crime or belongs to a foreign gang or whatever, is just not relevant at this point. Bring him back, and then we can talk about those other issues in a court where he can face his accusers and defend himself.
You know: human rights.
So a federal judge did the common-sense thing: issued an order demanding Abrego Garcia’s return by a date that has already passed. Trump’s lawyers appealed that order and the Supreme Court more-or-less upheld it: It did not demand that Abrego Garcia be returned by a particular date, but instructed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. It sent the case back to the district court to work out the details.
Then the district judge did another common-sense thing: held a hearing where he asked the government how it planned to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. The government stonewalled the judge, and now says “facilitate” only means that it remove barriers to Abrego Garcia returning, should El Salvador decide (on its own) to release him.
Presumably, the district judge will have to issue another order, which the government will appeal to the Supreme Court. At that point, what should have been obvious the last time will be doubly obvious: the Trump administration is not dealing with the court in good faith. It should have no claim on the “deference” or “respect” a good-faith administration would receive from the Court. Whether this Supreme Court’s partisan-hack majority will see it that way is an open question.
The significance of this case should be obvious to any thinking person: If Trump can send someone to El Salvadoran prison illegally, and then just say “oops” when the “mistake” is pointed out, then he can make anybody disappear.
I assume someone at my level — a blogger with only a few thousand subscribers — is beneath their notice. But I write things Trump wouldn’t like if he bothered to read them. If he threw a tantrum and decided to order my removal to Cecot prison, what would stop him? How would anyone bring me back?
In thinking about Cecot, I encourage you to read the history of Hitler’s first concentration camp: Dachau. Originally, it was a temporary place to put political dissidents. But once a black hole exists, it has many uses that an authoritarian regime can’t help but notice. Why let anyone out, ever? Why not put Jews there, and homosexuals, and Gypsies? Once they are out of public view, why not turn them into slave labor or run medical experiments on them? Why not kill them?
Trump supporters accuse people like me of being hysterical when we make comparisons between Cecot and Dachau. Sure, Cecot is nothing like the final-solution death camp Dachau had become by the time American soldiers liberated it 80 years ago this month. But it bears a striking resemblance to the original Dachau of 1933.
In other legal news, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student who participated in the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza (and appears to have done nothing else “wrong”), can be deported on the say-so of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
There is no indication that Congress contemplated an immigration judge or even the attorney general overruling the secretary of state on matters of foreign policy.
An appeal is expected.
and the spirit of ’75
250 years ago, Americans rebelled against one-man rule. Another featured post expresses the hope that we can do so again.
and Trump vs. the environment
I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that Trump administration policy tends to be pro-pollution and anti-environment. This week, however, Trump signed executive orders that slap in the face anyone who cares about the future of the climate.
One order, which uses scare quotes whenever mentioning “climate change”, orders the attorney general to identify and challenge in court
all State and local laws, regulations, causes of action, policies, and practices (collectively, State laws) burdening the identification, development, siting, production, or use of domestic energy resources that are or may be unconstitutional, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable. The Attorney General shall prioritize the identification of any such State laws purporting to address “climate change” or involving “environmental, social, and governance” initiatives, “environmental justice,” carbon or “greenhouse gas” emissions, and funds to collect carbon penalties or carbon taxes.
Environmental groups report being “outraged”, but the order strikes me as being more about putting on a show for Trump’s fossil-fuel donors (as well as “owning the libs”) than producing actual change. The order itself takes no action, but only instructs the Justice Department to take action, adding its weight to court challenges that fossil fuel companies have already launched. It will subsidize these lawsuits with tax dollars, but fossil fuel companies don’t lack for money or lawyers.
Grist points to some of the targeted state laws, and provides links to longer explanations:
That directive almost certainly includes the climate superfund laws that New York and Vermont recently passed. The statutes require fossil fuel companies to pay damages for their emissions, a move the executive order deems “extortion.”
attempt to prevent some Biden-era policies from going into effect that would have caused the shuttering of dozens of American coal plants; support policies promoting the continued incorporation of coal and fossil-fuel forms of energy into the grid; and direct the Department of Justice to investigate state policies that may illegally or unconstitutionally “[discriminate] against coal” and “secure sources of energy.”
Again, such orders may win the votes of coal miners, troll environmentalists, and ensure that fossil-fuel money keeps rolling in to Republican coffers, but it should have little long-term effect on the coal industry. Coal isn’t just a victim of government policy, it’s being phased out by the market, because it has become more expensive than not only natural gas, but also sustainable energy sources.
Nearly all U.S. coal-fired power plants are more expensive to run than new, local wind, solar and energy storage resources, according to a January 2023 report from Energy Innovation. … Capstone [a private energy consulting group] doubts any company will seek DOE loan guarantees for new coal-fired power projects. “We are skeptical the private sector will chase funding targeting coal assets beyond potential assistance for coal-to-gas switching,” said the research firm
If you’re wondering what kind of mischief the Trump administration might do with the government databases, here’s an example: The WaPo reports that
the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead … eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. … Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts … told [Musk-appointed Chief Information Officer Scott] Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead.
Security guards came and escorted Pearre out of the building.
After his removal from his office this week, he was placed on paid leave, possibly severing his 25-year career.
Whoever has control of the SSA database can declare anyone dead.
The White House told The Post that the roughly 6,000 immigrants all have links to either terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence of the alleged crimes or terrorist ties but said some are included on an FBI terror watch list. The immigrants added to the death database include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds — as well as one person in their 80s and a handful in their 70s, according to records obtained by The Post.
As I pointed out above in the note on the Abrego Garcia case, if they can do this, they can do it to anybody. Social Security says you’re dead, so no one can employ you.
and let’s close with something adorable
The news has been rough this week. If you’ve made it this far, you deserve an otter video.
In its 250th year, New England’s revolutionary history has become relevant again.
Here in Massachusetts, April is the month of patriotism, centering on the April 19 anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord.
I live in Bedford, a town that sits between Lexington and Concord, and so has an understandable sense of inferiority (though Bedford’s Minutemen joined several other nearby community militias in mustering to defend Concord Bridge). Longfellow never wrote a poem about us, but we do have our own April revolutionary celebration: Pole Capping Day, on which people dress in colonial-era costumes, Minutemen march and fire muskets, and speeches are given. The center of the ritual is the erection of a pole, which some agile person climbs and adorns with a liberty cap, symbolizing Bedford’s rebellion against King George and the English monarchy.
Saturday, hundreds of people braved drizzle and sleet to celebrate. This year’s pole capping had an extra flavor, as autocratic rule no longer seems like a historical curiosity. For some while, townspeople have been decorating their yards with ambiguously historical/political signs: “No King”, “Resisting Tyranny Since 1775”, and so on. If anyone objects to these “partisan” messages, they have so far stayed quiet for fear of confessing their pro-dictatorial aspirations.
My church’s retired minister John Gibbons is the chaplain of the local Minuteman corps, and annually officiates in his colonial-parson costume. This year’s homily was cribbed from the Declaration of Independence, but seemed like a denunciation of the Trump administration’s current deeds and near-term ambitions. Consider these accusations against King George:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
Back in 2009, conservatives (and various other people upset to find themselves living in a country with a Black president) misappropriated New England’s revolutionary tradition and called themselves the Tea Party. As I pointed out in 2014, in one of the Sift’s most viral posts, they were actually a Confederate party, and drew much more from John Calhoun than John Adams.
Over the next 15 months, a lot of 250th anniversaries are going to roll around. I hope we use them to reclaim the true spirit of American patriotism from the fascist posers who so often usurp that legacy. Let us rededicate “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to the cause of the inalienable rights of all people, and resist all attempts to impose one-man rule on these hallowed shores.
Trump’s protectionist overreach shouldn’t send Democrats back to neo-liberalism and free trade.
I’m guessing you know the basics of this story, because it’s gotten blanket coverage in the media: Trump announced wild and ridiculous tariffs, global markets crashed, and then he partially backed off, leading to a partial recovery. (If you want a more complete review, it’s in footnote [1].)
Of course Trump never admits a mistake, so the party line is that he meant to do this all along; the whole fiasco is a negotiating tactic straight out of The Art of the Deal. And the Trump-worshiping chorus immediately fell into line: “an absolutely brilliant move“, “brilliantly executed“.
But anybody with their eyes open saw this episode for what it was: a colossal blunder that is far from fixed even now. Jay Kuo summarized: “Trump screwed up bigly on tariffs, and he knows it.” [more critiques, including mine, in footnote 3]
The best such article I found was Ross Douthat’s interview with Oren Cass (author of the “Stop Freaking Out” article). I’m not usually a big Ross Douthat fan, but here he asked the right questions and got significant nuance out of Cass.
Cass begins with a critique of the globalization era, arguing that while GDP has increased just as economic theory says it should, GDP doesn’t tell the full story.
when we’re looking at the actual well-being and flourishing of the typical working family and their ability to achieve middle-class security, we’ve seen real decay. And I think that explains why somebody like Donald Trump has become as successful politically as he has.
The bottom line is: If the economy and the government were working the way it should for most Americans, a guy like Donald Trump and a movement like Trumpism would not have been possible.
Cass notes the bifurcation between types of working people.
When you’re looking at these household income numbers, it’s important to notice how much they rely upon the household having two earners and how much more reliant they find themselves on government programs than in the past. … I think we have a problem, particularly for the right of center that sold this idea of a rising-tide-lifts-all-ships model and we all march forward together into the brave new future. What people are seeing instead is that some people got to march ahead into the brave new future and a lot of folks did not. … Research at very optimistic groups like the American Enterprise Institute shows that young men ages 25 to 29 are earning the same or less than they would’ve been 50 years ago. And I think it’s hard to sell that as a successful economy or one that’s likely to produce a flourishing society.
The conversation shifts to trade, and the corresponding loss of manufacturing jobs. Douthat asks the right question: What’s so special about manufacturing jobs? If the pay is the same, why should we care whether people work in a Ford plant or in a bank?
Cass has a set of answers:
Manufacturing jobs tend to be scattered throughout the country, while service jobs cluster around big financial centers. So loss of manufacturing has impoverished large sections of the country, particularly small towns in otherwise rural areas.
An economy with both manufacturing and service jobs has employment opportunities for a broader talent pool than a pure service economy has.
Our country is more secure militarily if we manufacture the products we need to defend ourselves (rather than depend on, say, Taiwan for our advanced computer chips; depending on a potential enemy like China is even worse). But it’s hard to preserve those industries in isolation, rather than as part of a diverse and robust manufacturing sector. “If you actually want to be an industrial power, you need the actual materials themselves. You need to know how to make the tools that make the materials, things like machine tooling, the actual excellence in engineering that’s going to lead to efficient production.”
His prescription is more nuanced than either Trump’s or the free traders’.
the equilibrium you’re headed toward is not one where we shut off trade. It’s one in which there’s more friction in trade, so that there’s a preference for domestic manufacturing
So he favors the across-the-board 10% tariff. That’s not high enough to bring back low-productivity manufacturing jobs, which is probably not a worthy goal anyway. If a t-shirt made in Indonesia now imports wholesale for $2.20 rather than $2, you’re not going to start making them in Mississippi. And because trade continues, that 10% tariff does raise revenue, but not enough to replace the income tax. It’s friction, not a locked door.
Higher country-specific tariffs might be used as negotiating tools against countries that have truly unfair trading practices. But the mere existence of a trade deficit doesn’t imply unfair practices.
And finally, he sees China as a special case. Because it is our main rival for global power, we can’t let ourselves depend on them for anything really important. So higher tariffs on Chinese imports make sense, but in concert with our allies, rather than fighting a one-on-one trade war.
we want to have a large, U.S.-centered economic and security alliance. We want to have very low tariffs within that group, obviously Mexico and Canada, obviously other core allies.
But unlike in the past, we have some demands. We want to see balanced trade within that group so that we reshore and reindustrialize significantly in this country, and we want to see a common commitment among all these countries to decoupling from China.
That’s the substance of his proposals, but he also makes an important point about how they would be implemented. The purpose of tariffs is to change long-term behavior, not to create short-term shocks to the system that might drive the world economy into recession or worse. It’s more important that corporations, governments, and other key decision-makers know what tariffs will be two and three years down the line than that significant change happen right away.
That means:
gradually phasing in higher tariffs over time
justifying those tariffs as part of a coherent strategy
building a consensus around that strategy — in particular getting them passed into law by Congress — so that decision-makers will know they won’t change every time the political winds shift
What we have instead — sudden tariff shocks based on the whims of one man, who might change his mind tomorrow — is all cost and little benefit.
Cass represents American Compass, a conservative think tank. But the substance of his proposals is not far away from the ideas of the Democratic left. To me, this suggests the possibility of bipartisan consensus on policy — if we could get Trump out of the way.
[1] A somewhat longer version of the story: Trump announced massive tariffs on April 2. World stock markets [2, a footnote to a footnote] spent a week crashing (with a temporary rally on April 8 when it was rumored he would back off), and then on April 9 he announced he would delay enforcing most of the tariffs for 90 days to allow the targeted countries to negotiate. However,
Trump said he would raise the tariff on Chinese imports to 125% from the 104% level that took effect at midnight, further escalating a high-stakes confrontation between the world’s two largest economies. The two countries have traded tit-for-tat tariff hikes repeatedly over the past week.
Trump’s reversal on the country-specific tariffs is not absolute. A 10% blanket duty on almost all U.S. imports will remain in effect, the White House said. The announcement also does not appear to affect duties on autos, steel and aluminum that are already in place.
The 90-day freeze also does not apply to duties paid by Canada and Mexico, because their goods are still subject to 25% fentanyl-related tariffs if they do not comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement’s rules of origin. Those duties remain in place for the moment, with an indefinite exemption for USMCA-compliant goods.
On Friday night, the US president handed Apple a major victory, exempting many popular consumer electronics. That includes iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches and AirTags. Another win: The 10% tariff on goods imported from other countries has been dropped for those products.
The partial reversal on tariffs led to a partial stock-market recovery: The S&P 500 was at 5670 when the tariffs were announced, fell to just under 5000 at its low on Tuesday, and bounced back to 5363 by the end of the week, a net fall of about 5.4%
[2] If you want to get into the weeds, apparently the crash in the bond market had more influence on Trump. The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma explains why this was so unnerving:
Yesterday morning, the U.S. economy appeared to be on the verge of catastrophe. The stock market had already shrunk by trillions of dollars in just a few days. Usually, when the stock market falls, investors flock to the safest of all safe assets, U.S. Treasury bonds. This in turn causes interest rates to fall. (When more people want to buy your debt, you don’t have to offer as high a return.) But that didn’t happen this time. Instead, investors started pulling their money out of Treasury bonds en masse, causing interest rates to spike in just a few hours.
Suddenly the entire global financial system appeared to be at risk. If U.S. Treasuries were no longer considered safe—perhaps because the country that issues them had recently shown its willingness to tank its own economy in pursuit of incomprehensible objectives—then no other asset could be considered safe either. The next step might be a rush to liquidate assets, the equivalent of a bank run on the entire global financial system.
[3] Jay Kuo also provided this chart showing just how high the average tariffs are, even after Wednesday’s walk-back.
I wanted to put up a quick response to yesterday’s sudden move to exempt electronics. What you need to know is that it does not represent a move toward sanity. On the contrary, the Trump tariffs just got even worse.
Import Chinese battery: 145% tariff Import Chinese battery inside Chinese laptop: 20% tariff Import Chinese battery inside Vietnamese laptop: 0% tariff
I’m putting my own critique of Trump’s tariffs in this footnote, because I’ve posted it before and don’t want to get repetitive. Basically, Trump touts his tariffs as accomplishing three contradictory purposes:
To provide a revenue stream that can replace other taxes, the tariffs have to last for years and the US has to continue importing tariffed products. But to the extent that manufactured products and their supply chains move to the US, imports of tariffed products will fall, lowering revenue from the tariff.
In order to move manufacturing and its supply chains back to the US, the tariffs again have to last for years. Corporations will only move their factories if they expect the tariffs to remain in place into the distant future. But if the tariffs are a bargaining chip to be negotiated away, they won’t last. To the extent that corporations expect trade negotiations to succeed, they’ll leave their factories overseas.
Worse, the on-again/off-again nature of Trump’s tariffs, at least so far, discourages businesses from making plans that rely on those tariffs. So even if they last far into the future, they may not bring jobs back to the US. In many ways, the erratic policy we have seen the worst of all worlds.
The tariff fiasco continued this week. After swearing that he’d never back down from last week’s tariffs, Trump did indeed back down — and then claimed he’d meant to do that all along.
This week’s featured post focuses on not getting trapped in whatever position is the opposite of Trump’s. In this case, that means being careful in how you oppose Trump’s nonsensical tariff policy. These particular tariffs are crazy, but that shouldn’t push us to critique them from a neo-liberal free-trade stance. Globalization has had its victims, particularly among the non-college White men who make up the core of Trump’s coalition. They’re not wrong to want change.
So tariffs and industrial policy have a role to play in the Democratic worldview. But not this role. It’s a more nuanced and harder-to-communicate position than free trade, but otherwise we’ll get trapped into defending the very flawed pre-Trump status quo.
That post should go out around 10 EST. The weekly summary will cover the approaching clash between Trump and the Supreme Court, some very wrong-headed executive orders concerning the environment, abuse of the Social Security database, and one more thing I may spin off into its own featured post: As we approach the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, anti-Trump and anti-King-George rhetoric is starting to merge.
Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis
Saturday’s protests at 1400 locations around the country had been planned for some time. But they got a huge boost from a week of bad news for the Trump administration, which I summarize in the other featured post.
Good estimates of how many people participated are hard to come by. Organizers tend to inflate numbers, while news organizations and public-safety departments usually underestimate. Then there’s the problem of combining over a thousand individual estimates into a collective estimate.
The organizers of these protests claim “millions” of participants. And that total sounds reasonable when you see police estimates like 25-30 thousand in Boston alone, or NYT reporting of a march 20 blocks long in New York.
Hands Off march in New York City Saturday
and Cory Booker’s speech
The political impact of Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech to the Senate surprised me. It was a stunt, of course. The speech itself produced no direct change in law or policy. And yet it drew massive amounts of public attention and made an important symbolic statement: Yes, Democrats in Congress do realize that American democracy is at a crisis point, and they are looking for ways to do something about it.
The point of a stunt is to draw attention, and Booker certainly did. An estimated 300K viewers livestreamed at least part his speech, and the Tik-Tok stream got 350 million likes.
Like many stunts, Booker’s speech was a feat of physical endurance. He had to remain standing for the full 25 hours, and didn’t take any bathroom breaks. He didn’t have to speak the entire time, because allies in the Senate took up some time by asking him occasional questions. I had thought he would wear Depends or have some kind of catheter strapped to his leg, but apparently not.
I think I stopped eating on Friday, and then to stop drinking the night before I started on Monday, and that had its benefits and it had its really downsides.
I believe I would faint dead away or start hallucinating if I tried that. But Booker mainly reported muscle cramps from dehydration.
A side benefit of Booker’s speech was to take arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond out of the record books. Thurmond’s previous record-holder was a 24-hour speech against a civil rights bill in 1957. Unlike Thurmond, who resorted to reading the phone book at one point, Booker remained on-topic and empassioned right up to the end.
That’s due largely to the changing times, I think. Thurmond was filibustering, so the time he took up was an end in itself. While Booker did interrupt the business of the Senate for 25 hours, there was no particular action he intended to delay. He was trying to build and hang onto a worldwide audience, an impossibility in 1957.
and Wisconsin voters’ rejection of Elon
A number of election were held Tuesday. The most significant was for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Liberals achieved a 4-3 majority on the court two years ago, and had begun to undo a gerrymander that had put the Republican leadership of the legislature virtually beyond the reach of voters. Wisconsin’s congressional districts are similarly gerrymandered, so that the evenly divided state sends 6 Republicans and only 2 Democrats to the U. S. House. If the conservative had won, flipping the court to a 4-3 conservative majority, that gerrymander would likely have remained.
Elon Musk made himself a major issue in the election by contributing quantities of money variously reported in the $20-25 million range. His contributions were controversial and possibly illegal: He gave voters $100 each to sign a petition denouncing “activist judges”, and offered two million-dollar checks to voters who came to a rally he headlined in Green Bay. Musk claimed “the future of civilization” hung on the outcome of this election.
But apparently Wisconsin voters don’t want the richest many in the world choosing their judges: the Trump/Musk candidate lost 55%-45%.
Tuesday’s other elections are harder to interpret. Two special elections for Florida congressional seats went to the Republicans, but only by about half the 30-point margin Trump had in those districts in November. Democrats may take encouragement from those elections — and Republicans whose districts were only +15 in November may get anxious — but a loss is still a loss.
and you also might be interested in …
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019, so the government has been specifically barred from sending him back to El Salvador, where he says he would be in danger. The government has claimed that he is in the infamous MS-13 gang, but has never presented evidence supporting that claim.
Nonetheless, Garcia got pulled over while driving on March 12 (his 5-year-old in the back seat) and was sent to the gulag in El Salvador where the administration has been dumping immigrants it doesn’t like. The government has acknowledged the mistake in court (and the lawyer who acknowledged this obvious fact has been put on leave).
[Judge Paula] Xinis on Sunday wrote in a legal opinion that allegations against Abrego were “vague” and “uncorroborated” –– and that in any case, he was under protected status.
“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” she wrote.
She ordered him returned to the US by today, which the Trump administration is refusing to do while it appeals her order. Absurdly, they claim that Garcia is now out of their control, since they do not run El Salvador. If this claim is allowed, it puts a loophole in everyone‘s rights. Trump could arrest me or you, send us to El Salvador, and then claim it made a “mistake” that can’t be rectified.
In one featured post I covered how Fox News has played down the stock-market collapse. Here’s how Fox handled this story: Numerous Fox hosts have argued that Garcia is just one guy, and he’s an immigrant anyway, and Trump’s people claim (without evidence) he’s part of a criminal gang, so it doesn’t matter.
It turns out there’s an internal reason why the Trump administration keeps running afoul of judges, and it has nothing to do with judicial bias.
In previous administrations (even Trump’s first administration), the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice has been powerful. Essentially, it’s been the executive branch’s internal Supreme Court, the ultimate within-the-administration authority on what the law says or allows. OLC reports are technical and sometimes secret, so they usually slide under most voters’ radar. But occasionally some have drawn attention, like during the Bush-43 administration when OLC came up with creative readings of the law to justify torture.
The head of OLC is a political appointee, so it’s not like OLC has ever been completely independent of the White House. For the most part, it’s going to give the president the most favorable opinion it can justify. Nonetheless, OLC is made up of lawyers who have certain professional standards. They don’t like being pushed to frame opinions so far out of line that judges will sanction administration lawyers who make those arguments in court.
That’s why it’s significant that the Trump administration has downgraded the OLC. Trump still has not named the OLC’s head, and the office has not vetted Trump’s executive orders for legality. It’s part of the larger pattern: No one should tell Trump that he can’t do what he wants to do, even if it’s illegal.
The Pentagon has sent at least six B-2 bombers – 30% of the US Air Force’s stealth bomber fleet – to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in what analysts have called a message to Iran as tensions once again flare in the Middle East. … Images taken by private satellite imaging company Planet Labs on Tuesday show the six US bombers on the tarmac on the island, as well as shelters that could possibly conceal others.
Maybe this is a ramping up of the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which the US attacked in mid-March. But it might be something else:
Trump has also been pushing Iran to make a deal over its nuclear capabilities, saying on March 19 that he would give Tehran two months to come to an agreement or face the consequences. There “are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal.”
the B-2 isn’t just any bomber. It’s the only US aircraft certified to carry the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-busting message written in steel and fire. That’s tailor-made for Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites in places like Natanz and Fordow.
and let’s close with something useless
In addition to all the news-relevant topics I have to research to write this blog, you probably have no idea how much totally useless knowledge I accumulate along the way. This week I learned that the word ritzy derives from a man’s name: César Ritz was a Swiss businessman who founded the Ritz hotels, which became synonymous with luxury.
He opened The Ritz in Paris in 1898, and shortly afterward the upscale Carlton Hotel in London. The North American rights to the Ritz-Carlton brand was franchised to Albert Keller, who opened New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 1911.
The Ritz cracker appears to have no direct connection to either the hotels or César Ritz. In 1919, Nabisco bought Jackson Cracker company of Jackson, Michigan, which made a precursor of the Ritz. That cracker got rebranded as Ritz during the Depression, as part of a marketing plan to make it seem luxurious. (Apparently, in that less litigious age, the Ritz hotels didn’t sue.) The Ritz cracker also appears to be the first beneficiary of a movie marketing tie-in: Walt Disney included a box of Ritz crackers in Mickey’s Surprise Party in 1939. The Wikipedia article does not mention whether Walt got paid to do this.
He pitched the tariffs as “reciprocal”, i.e., matching our tariffs on imports to the tariffs other nations have put on our exports. However, no one can find nations whose tariffs are anything like the ones Trump is imposing in return. In his announcement, Trump also referred to “non-tariff barriers” to American exports. He framed any trade deficit as the result of some form of unfairness to American exports, which the new tariffs attempt to equalize.
As a result, when people finally figured out how the tariffs were being calculated, the tariff rate was simply half of the trade deficit with that country as a percentage of that country’s total exports to the US. So it’s a function of that country’s trade surplus/deficit with the US, not any specific unfairness in its tariffs or laws.
That’s how the highest tariff rate wound up falling on Lesotho, a tiny poor country surrounded by South Africa. Lesotho makes denim for jeans and also exports diamonds and a few other commodities. Few Lesothans can afford imported goods from the US.
The administration has made three cases for its tariffs, which The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out contradict each other. The tariffs are supposed to
Raise $6 trillion in revenue (if you believe Trump aide Peter Navarro).
Restore free trade by incentivizing other nations to negotiate away their trade barriers against us (if you believe Palmer Luckey).
Bring manufacturing jobs back to the US (if you believe Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers).
In order to raise revenue and increase US manufacturing, the tariffs have to last for many years, which they can’t do if they are a negotiating ploy to lower other country’s tariffs and trade barriers. Similarly, no tariff is going to restore coffee production to the US, because our climate doesn’t lend itself to coffee production.
Global stock markets reacted to the tariffs by collapsing. If you’re an investor yourself, you may not realize how unusual this is. A market truism is “Buy on rumor, sell on news.” In other words, you make your moves in anticipation of events, not in reaction to them. Once a thing is announced, you close the position you based on it and look for the next thing you think is going to happen.
So the widespread expectation, as the world awaited the tariff announcement, was that the stock market would get a small bounce out of it. Rumors of tariffs had been depressing stock prices for months, but once the news was out, investor attention would shift to something else. But the actual tariffs turned out to be far worse than anything investors had anticipated, so the reaction was down instead of up.
So if the market isn’t anticipating tariffs any more, what is it anticipating? The recession these tariffs are expected to cause. J. P. Morgan is one of many forecasters now predicting a recession. Morgan economists anticipate the unemployment rate rising to 5.3%.
But no one knows how far the predicted downturn will go, because recession fears can be self-validating. People afraid of losing their jobs tend not to spend as much, which in turn causes other people to lose their jobs. Businesses expecting a downturn will cancel expansion plans and emphasize cost-cutting.
The administration’s response to these fears has been a no-pain/no-gain message that was totally absent from Trump’s 2024 campaign. On the campaign trail, Trump kept talking about positive change that would happen “very quickly” or “on Day One“.
But now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant is talking about a “detox period” where the economy breaks its addiction to government spending.
The right-wing news bubble is doing its best to help push the administration’s story, or just to distract its viewers from the bad news. When the market started crashing Thursday morning, I channel-scanned and observed the same thing The Daily Show saw:
CNN: Stock market plummets MSNBC: Stock market craters Highlights for Children: Stock market down big FOX News: New info about alleged cover-up of Biden’s decline
So the 30% or so of the country that is die-hard Trump is likely to keep drinking the kool-aid. But the additional 20% that won the election for him is experiencing considerable cognitive dissonance and even buyers’ remorse. To them, Trump was a great businessman who would handle the economy better than Biden did. That image is hard to sustain as you worry about your job, watch prices of foreign-produced goods rise, and see your 401(k) investments sink.
The scenario where American democracy survives Trump got a little more credible this week.
Consider the events of this week, all of which will be described in more detail in the weekly summary I’ll post later this morning:
Monday, Cory Booker began his record-setting 25-hour speech in the Senate, making the case that “the country is in crisis”. At its peak, the livestream of this speech was being watched to 300,000 viewers.
Thursday and Friday, investors around the world reacted to Trump’s tariffs by selling their stocks. The S&P 500 lost 10% of its value in just two days. By Friday evening it was 17% below its February high. The panic is continuing this morning.
Saturday, “Hands Off” protest rallies happened in 1400 locations across the country. 800K people had signed up for the protests, making credible the organizers’ claim that millions participated.
It’s tricky to evaluate the significance of all this. If you look at it all pessimistically, Booker’s speech was a stunt that produced no direct congressional action, off-year elections are notoriously bad predictors of subsequent elections, Trump has announced and withdrawn tariff plans before that whipsawed the markets, and massive protests in his first term seemed to have little consequence. A month or two from now, none of this may look all that important.
But.
Six weeks ago, I posted “How Things Stand“, a summary of how Trump was threatening American democracy and where things might go from there.
So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.
What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.
It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate.
I projected a scenario that avoided the establishment of a lasting Trump autocracy, emphasizing that it was just a scenario, not a prediction. My point was that a way out of this was still possible. The first steps were:
Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support.
I had hoped that the looming government shutdown of March 14 would be the time when congressional support would waver, and that Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass a continuing resolution without negotiating a deal with the Democrats. That didn’t happen. Mike Johnson was able to hold his small majority together to pass the CR on a nearly party-line vote. Then Chuck Schumer folded in the Senate (for reasons I found plausible but not necessarily convincing), ending the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So the government is funded through September.
However, the events of this week show that we’re still on the path I laid out. Again, I’m not saying that success is certain, just that there is still a way out of this through political processes, without widespread riots or civil war.
There is no legal or political mechanism that directly links public opinion, market crashes, or elections for relatively minor offices to the kinds of legal or congressional action that will halt the Trump/Musk coup or lead to the restoration of American democracy. However, autocratic movements rely on a sense of inevitability and self-confidence, with each usurpation of power emboldening its leaders and foot-soldiers to dare the next one. Autocrats depend on a sense of public helplessness that demoralizes opposition and makes each successive victim feel alone and unsupported.
The narrative of Trump’s inevitability and his opposition’s powerlessness ran aground this week. He remains in office and retains his grip on the levers of executive power. But his true supporters have never been more than about 1/3 of the American public, and many in Congress, the courts, the media, the business community, and elsewhere have lined up behind him more from intimidation or a lack of attractive alternatives than real conviction.
The momentum that has swept Trump forward can turn, with each act of opposition emboldening the next. All along, there has been a scenario in which his seizure of unconstitutional power fails. That scenario is still intact, and is more credible today than it was a week ago.
Donald Trump had a bad week. The tariffs he announced Wednesday were met with almost universal derision, and they sparked a massive stock-market sell-off that is still continuing. His chosen candidate for the swing-seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court got soundly defeated, despite Elon putting more than $20 million in to the race. The protests planned for Saturday turned out to be massive, with millions of Americans turning out to express their opposition to his unconstitutional seizures of power. Courts continued to rule against his administration, and there were even glimmers of opposition from Republican members of Congress.
In short, if you have opposed Trump all along, you probably feel more energized and emboldened than you did a week ago. Conversely, if you have been going along with Trump out of fear or a desire to join the winning team, you are more likely to be having doubts and wondering if you should moderate your support.
None of that means Trump is about to fall or even become ineffectual. But the optimistic scenario I laid out six weeks ago is still intact. It is by no means inevitable and may not even be the most likely path into the future. But the first steps are being taken.
The specifics of each of this week’s major developments will be in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out by noon EST. But the featured post “Is this a turning point?” will be a short piece putting events into the larger frame of a democracy-survives scenario. It should be out shortly.
This week everybody was talking about the Signal leak
Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had been accidentally included on a Signal group chat where Defense Secretary Hegseth narrated an imminent and then ongoing attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t devote a featured post to an event that had been getting so much coverage all week long, figuring that I’d just be repeating stuff you’ve already heard. But much of the coverage has been more confusing than enlightening, and Trump administration officials have taken advantage of the complexity of their blundering to deflect responsibility for any wrongdoing at all. Also, having once had a Top Secret clearance myself, I have some background many commentators don’t.
So the featured post tries to sort this fiasco out, beginning with the observation that a whole lot had gone wrong before Goldberg ever got there, and ending with another blogger’s fascinating theory about how Goldberg’s invitation might not have been accidental at all.
And I forgot to mention that Hegseth has brought his wife to high-level meeting with foreign military leaders where sensitive information was discussed. He is not a serious person. My late wife had clearances I lacked, and never told me what went on in meetings where I wouldn’t have been welcome. Couples all over the government operate in this way, respecting the commitments they have made to their country.
I have heard a snide comment about what Jennifer Hegseth was doing at these meetings: She was Pete’s designated driver.
While I’m entertaining snide comments, here’s David Roberts:
The most obvious lesson to draw from the leaked Signal chat is that these people really are morons. It’s not a public act, it’s not a schtick, there’s not some secret back room where they drop the facade. They are genuinely stupid, incompetent people.
and special elections
We don’t usually think of odd-numbered years as election years, but some important votes are happening tomorrow: two special elections in Florida to replace congresspeople nominated for Trump’s cabinet, and a state supreme court election in Wisconsin that Elon Musk has been spending millions to buy.
When Trump nominated Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz attorney general and Mike Waltz national security adviser, it didn’t seem like a big risk. (Gaetz eventually withdrew in response to scandal.) Both come from bright-red districts, so the special elections to replace them should have given Republicans no trouble. And that appears to be true for Gaetz’ district (FL-1), which Gaetz won 66%-34% in 2024. But Waltz’ district (FL-6), which Waltz won by almost exactly the same margin, is unexpectedly close in recent polls.
Polling always predicts more upsets than actually materialize, so I’ll be surprised if the GOP doesn’t hold on to both seats. But even a close election will send a shot across the bow of Republicans who so far have been slavishly loyal to Trump. If a +33 district suddenly produces a +5 result, any Republican in a +20-or-less district should be alarmed.
With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.
Stefanik won in 2024 by 24%. So Trump’s caution reflects his knowledge that the tide has shifted against him.
If Republicans in Congress are reading the tea leaves similarly, they may be less inclined to support the GOP’s budget proposal for FY 2026, which calls for massive cuts in Medicaid and food stamps to pay for massive tax cuts for billionaires — and still includes a huge deficit. Many Republicans are from rural districts where large numbers of Republican voters rely on Medicaid and food stamps. MAGA supporters who believed claims that Trump and Musk were only targeting “waste and fraud” are going to be surprised to discover that their own benefits are in danger.
Another important election is for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Court only swung to a liberal majority two years ago, when Janet Protasiewicz won a surprisingly resounding victory. Subsequently, the Court ordered legislative maps redrawn, undoing an extreme Republican gerrymander that had locked in a Republican majority in what is ordinarily a swing state. As a result, Democrats picked up 14 seats in the 2024 elections. In 2026 they might have a legitimate shot at gaining control of the legislature.
That’s why Elon Musk has poured at least $17 million into the election, including some spending that appears illegal.
Speaking at a rally Sunday night, Musk said “we just want judges to be judges”, before handing out two $1m (£750,000) cheques to voters who had signed a petition to stop “activist” judges.
[Wisconsin Attorney General Josh] Kaul had tried to argue the giveaway was an illegal attempt buy votes. Musk’s lawyers, in response, argued that Kaul is “restraining Mr Musk’s political speech and curtailing his First Amendment rights”.
If that’s not illegal, it ought to be.
However, Musk himself has become so unpopular that his attempt to buy the supreme court seat for the conservative may work in favor of the liberal candidate. After all, what does the world’s richest man hope to gain from the Wisconsin Supreme Court that makes it worth this kind of investment?
We’ll see tomorrow how it all plays out.
Last week, a Democrat won a Pennsylvania state senate seat that Republicans had held for nearly a century. Trump had gotten 57% of the vote there last November. James Malone seems to have tried to nationalize his election, running against Trump as much as against his opponent.
Everyday voters are not liking what they’re seeing at the federal level, they don’t like the chaos. We want to be sure that we, as Pennsylvania, are standing up for our neighbors and are standing up for our state.
I’m following the challenge to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which is the justification he has used for taking non-citizens off the streets and flying them to a gulag in El Salvador with no due process. As I explained last week: Once they create a hole in habeas corpus rights, anybody can vanish down that hole. If there is some circumstance where they don’t have to explain why they’ve arrested somebody, nothing stops them from falsely claiming you’re in that circumstance. You may have proof that they’re lying about you, but who cares? You won’t get a hearing where you could show your proof to somebody with the power to set you free.
A district judge has issued a temporary restraining order against using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people. That order has been upheld by an appellate court.
The argument in a nutshell: The AEA is a wartime law, and we’re not at war against Venezuela. Saying we are at war requires taking literally Trump’s rhetorical characterization of undocumented immigration as an “invasion”. Trump argues back: It’s up to the president, not the courts, to decide whether we’re being invaded.
How I hope it turns out: If “invasion” is a close call, the president gets to decide. But if the president’s claim is purely a pretext for claiming the emergency powers in the AEA, a court can overrule him. Trump’s claim is a pretext, so I hope his executive order gets struck down.
The appeal goes first to Chief Justice Roberts. Tomorrow, he will receive a response to the government’s filing from lawyers for five migrants facing removal. From there he’ll decide whether to make a ruling, hold some hearings, or involve the whole court.
and RFK Jr.’s war on vaccination
Dr. Peter Marks, who has been the top NIH official regulating vaccines under presidents from both parties, and oversaw the Operation Warp Speed push to get a Covid vaccine during Trump’s first term, has been forced out. He wrote a damning resignation letter.
It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary [i.e. HHS Secretary RFK Jr.], but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
NPR comments:
The abrupt departure comes as concern has been mounting among many public health experts about moves involving vaccines under Kennedy, who has questioned vaccine safety and effectiveness. Independent federal vaccine advisory committees have been postponed and cancelled, the National Institutes of Health has terminated research on vaccines and a vaccine critic has been picked to conduct a controversial study about vaccines and autism – a link that has long been debunked.
Marks cited special worry about the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas, which has now grown to at least 400 cases. Measles can cause a long list of potentially serious complications and the vaccines provide strong, safe protection, Marks said. Kennedy has promoted alternative treatments during the Texas outbreak.
“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety. and security,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter to Sara Brenner, acting commissioner of food and drugs.
About that “vaccine critic” who has been “picked to conduct a controversial study about vaccines and autism”? That line understates the issue.
“It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don’t,” said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funds autism research. “They are starting with the conclusion and looking to prove it. That’s not how science is done.”
Maybe you didn’t care when bird flu just affected birds. Maybe you still didn’t care when you realized that chickens are birds, so egg prices would go up. Well, now it’s infecting cats. Care yet?
One of this week’s sorriest stories was J.D. Vance’s trip to Greenland. Originally, he and his wife were going to do a photo-op tour of the island and promote the idea that Greenland should want to be taken over by the United States. But things didn’t work out.
U.S. officials went door to door in Greenland’s capital of Nuuk looking for residents who wanted to greet the second lady, Jesper Steinmetz from Denmark’s TV 2 reported. But everywhere they went, they were rejected. The unwelcoming response forced the second lady to change her plans, Steinmetz said, ahead of her arrival with Vice President JD Vance on Friday.
So instead, the Vances along with national security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife made a quick trip to the American military base in Greenland. They stayed for three hours, saw nothing of the island, met none of the locals, and then gave them this advice:
I think that you’d be a lot better … coming under the United States’ security umbrella than you have been under the Denmark security umbrella
Tyranny expert Timothy Snyder unpacks all this. First, if you take the NATO treaty seriously, Greenland is ALREADY under the US security umbrella by virtue of its relationship with our on-paper ally Denmark. We used to have more bases on the island and more troops manning them, but Denmark did not kick them out; we chose to reduce our force. From there, things just get dumber.
The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous. The United States has nothing to gain from it, and much to lose. There is nothing that Americans cannot get from Denmark or Canada through alliance. The very existence of the base at Pituffik shows that. Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last eighty years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations.
and let’s close with an advertisement for myself
Friends at a local retirement home asked me to speak at their forum, which I did Tuesday, on the topic “Nurturing a Healthier Relationship to the News”. Here’s the video. If you watch it, you may recognize a bunch of the ideas from last week’s featured post. The camera doesn’t capture most of the slides, but you can see them here.
The Weekly Sift 