How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the basics: Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported that for several days (March 11-15) he had a connection with Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz over the private messaging service Signal.

  • On March 11 Goldberg received a Signal connection request from Waltz. He was puzzled and doubted its authenticity, but he accepted.
  • On March 13 he was invited to join the “Houthi PC small group”, a chat that eventually included Vice President Vance, several members of the Trump cabinet, and a variety of other high-ranking members of the administration. Waltz described the group as a “principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours”. (Goldberg explains: “The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA.”)
  • On March 14, members of the group (who had apparently received a classified communication Goldberg did not get) began discussing whether to attack the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea. Vance wanted to delay the attack for a month, Defense Secretary Hegseth was for launching it immediately, and some others ambivalent. Vance yields, texting to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go”. (Strangely, President Trump was not on the chat and apparently did not make the final decision to launch the attack.)
  • On March 15, Hegseth began giving the group a play-by-play of the attack as it was carried out, beginning two hours before the bombs fell. Goldberg summarizes: “the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

Up until he received news reports of explosions in Yemen, Goldberg had not completely believed the chat group was genuine. The previous day,

I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

After becoming convinced that he had been overhearing an actual Principals meeting discussing highly classified information, Goldberg left the group.

So much is wrong with this series of events that the subsequent public discussion has often gotten confused, starting off talking about one issue before veering off onto another one. So let’s start by listing the various wrongnesses I’ve heard about or noticed.

  • The chat group shouldn’t exist at all. The Signal message chain in question was set up to be deleted after four weeks. This violates the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act, which require that require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business.
  • Signal is not an approved channel for discussing classified information. By law and policy, classified information can only be sent over very specific government systems.
  • Signal exchanges can be hacked. The security rules being broken here exist for good reasons, and are not just cumbersome or outdated regulations. The encryption feature in Signal is believed to be crackable by intelligence services of hostile foreign governments like Russia and possibly others. And even if an adversary has not hacked Signal, the cell phones or laptops several participants seem to have used could be compromised by malware.
  • Hegseth’s posts violate the Espionage Act. Apologists for the Trump administration have played legal/verbal games with the term “classified information”. Because Hegseth himself is the classifying authority for information like attack plans, they claim, he was implicitly declassifying it by posting it on Signal. But The Hill reports: “the Espionage Act … doesn’t rely on classification. Instead, it allows prosecution of those who share national defense information, whether intentionally or inadvertently. ‘While you can argue that it wasn’t classified — probably in bad faith — you cannot argue that it was not national defense information,’ said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a nonprofit law firm.” Whatever word-games you play, information about an imminent or ongoing attack is precisely the kind of thing the classification system was designed to protect.
  • No one on the chat objected. Back in the days when I had a Top Secret clearance myself, I was occasionally in conversations where an issue was alluded to, and then someone would say: “But we can’t talk about that here.” Everyone on the chat had an obligation to say that, and no one did. (The implication here is that this situation is not unusual. Possibly, highly-classified Signal chats are a regular occurrence in the Trump administration. I have not heard any Trump official address this precise point.)
  • Goldberg should not have been invited to the chat. People tend to focus on this part of the wrongness, but look how far we’ve gotten without mentioning it. The Russians could have been listening, and could have tipped off the Houthis to counter our attack or move what we were targeting. Goldberg is an inconsequential risk by comparison.
  • Hegseth had an obligation to verify that everyone on the chat had appropriate clearances to receive the information he was sending, but he did not. This is a problem even if you overlook the fundamental insecurity of Signal. Even if everyone on the chat had been gathered in a secure location like the Situation Room, attack plans shouldn’t have been shared when an uncleared person (i.e., Goldberg) was present. Protecting defense secrets is Hegseth’s job, not Goldberg’s, so the fault lies with him.
  • Waltz endangered intelligence sources in his after-action report. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” So the Houthis know that somebody with a view of the building that day was an American agent. Undoubtedly they are trying to find and kill this person.
  • The attack’s “success” is no excuse. Attorney General Bondi was one of many administration officials making this point: “what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission”. The best analogy I’ve heard is to drunk driving: The fact that you made it home safely doesn’t excuse it, or justify doing something similar in the future. If you take enough unnecessary risks, you will pay eventually. (BTW: Was the attack a success? Killing people and blowing things up is not an end in itself. The point of the attack was to either incapacitate or intimidate the Houthis so that they’ll stop shooting at ships. We don’t know yet whether the raid achieved that purpose. “The Signal chat reveals no suggestion of a strategic framework — or even the concept of a plan — into which the attack clearly fit.”)

So this is the kind of multi-layer screw-up that is hard to wrap your mind around. (An analogy: Imagine that your 15-year-old daughter is threatening suicide because her uncle has broken off their incestuous relationship after discovering that she’s pregnant. What aspect of the situation do you react to first? What’s the core problem here?)

Responses. One of the adages I heard while growing up was “It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong.” By that standard, there are no big men (or women) in the Trump administration. Across the board, everyone involved or implicated in the meeting has deflected, pointed elsewhere, or outright lied in order to deny responsibility.

Goldberg’s first article was circumspect about what he revealed. He wrote in generalities, like the quote above about “targets, weapons, … and attack sequencing”. Not wanting to damage national security himself, he didn’t spell out any details.

But Goldberg’s caution just made an opening for Hegseth and others to lie about the content of the chat.

I’ve heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.

White House apologists took up the “no classified information” talking point. Director of National Intellligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee

There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to make the whole incident a he-said/she-said issue.

Do you trust the secretary of defense — who was nominated for this role, voted by the United States Senate into this role, who has served in combat, honorably served our nation in uniform — or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg?

Goldberg’s response was basically: Don’t trust me; trust your eyes and your common sense.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.

Since there was “no classified information” involved, he had no reason not to publish chunks of the transcript of the chat. Goldberg summarized one section:

This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The release of the transcript should (but won’t) put an end to the attempts to dodge responsibility by vilifying Goldberg. (Leavitt: “arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.” Trump: “The guy is a total sleazebag.” Hegseth: “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.) Goldberg’s transcript is either accurate or it’s not. If it’s not, other participants can release their own records. But they haven’t. So we can assume Goldberg’s reporting here is accurate, independent of what you think of the rest of his career. (Personally, I respect him as a journalist.)

How did this happen? The larger wrong — discussing an ongoing attack on an insecure platform — happened because the Trump administration is full of people who don’t take security seriously. Many of them — Hegseth in particular — are totally unqualified for their jobs. (Whenever the administration talks about “merit” as opposed to DEI, I think of Hegseth. Only a White man could ever get such an important job with such a flimsy resume and so many red flags in his personal life. Hegseth is a walking advertisement for why DEI is necessary.)

But none of that explains how Goldberg wound up on the chat. If we believe Goldberg’s account, it was a two-part process. First Mike Waltz (or somebody with access to Waltz’ Signal account) made a connection with Goldberg. Then two days later Goldberg was invited to join the Houthi PC small group. So it’s not just somebody hitting Goldberg’s number by fat-fingering a list. (That explanation would be more convincing if some “Johnny Goldsmith” should have been in the group and wasn’t. But I have heard no suggestion of who that person might be. And doesn’t anybody double-check lists with national security implications?)

The explanation (offered by Waltz) that Goldberg may have hacked his way onto the chat group is not only unlikely, but is damning in a different way. It’s bad enough to think that Trump officials are relying on an app that Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies might hack. But magazine editors?

Lacking any other explanation, I’m driven to a conspiracy theory formulated by former West Point history professor Terrence Goggin: “a highly effective cell operating deep in the Pentagon and National Security Council” that Goggin dubs “Deep Throat 2.0”. (Waltz denied this: “A staffer wasn’t responsible.”)

Goggin connects the Signal story with another leak that embarrassed the Trump defense establishment: The NYT finding out that Elon Musk was about to get a briefing on the Pentagon’s plans for a war with China.

Someone contacted the New York Times with a copy of a written order to brief Musk on the Operational Plan to oppose a massive invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (“PLAN”). … Someone transmitted the written order instructing the Joint Chiefs to brief Musk to the New York Times, 12 hours before the briefing was to take place, in order for this to reach its 10 million digital subscribers worldwide. … The leak was timed for a last minute shock without warning, for maximum public damage and embarrassment. This was not an accident, but a deadly strike.

Adding Goldberg to the Houthi PC small group was similarly “not a mistake” but “a well planed clandestine operation”.

Clearly rattled, President Trump declared today that the uproar is a “Witch Hunt”. Actually he may be right. But the witches are His Own Men! It is a planned and organized operation to destroy his ability to govern with unqualified and deficient officials using and exposing his Administration’s own national security mistakes to do so.

Imagine that you’re a career staffer at the Pentagon. You’ve seen people live and die by the book, and now a bunch of yahoos who can’t be bothered to take even minimal security precautions are in charge. You’ve tried to impress on them the reasons for doing things in the standard way, but they always think they know better.

What better way to get your point across than to let the public see what’s happening?

March 31, 2025 – 8:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (25)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

OK, you’ve already heard about the Signal chat where a journalist was admitted to a Principals meeting discussing highly classified information. It’s been has been widely discussed all over the media. So ordinarily, I’d just find a good link summarizing the whole thing and post it with minimal comment.

But I feel like this event deserves some special care, and I also believe I have some personal insight. (I used to have a Top Secret clearance, so I’ve listened to many briefings about how secrets are supposed to be safeguarded.) It’s a complicated multi-layer screw-up that is easy to mischaracterize and deflect. So this week’s featured post is “How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?” It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will cover tomorrow’s special elections, RFK Jr.’s ongoing war against vaccination, the administration’s continuing threats against Greenland, the most recent tariffs, and the latest on the legal battle to restrain the Trump administration’s illegal actions. It should be out around noon.

March 31, 2025 – 8:39 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (5)

Staring at the Wall

Every time I open my phone to read the news, I kind of just stare at the wall for 10 minutes. It’s horrifying what they’re doing, not only to the trans community, but also to migrants, to communities of color, to so many marginalized communities that are being systematically targeted by the new administration and having protections revoked. It’s cartoonishly evil.

– Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s trans daughter

This week’s featured post is “Politics in the Attention Economy“.

This week everybody was talking about the rule of law

From the moment Trump took office, the big question has been whether his administration would obey court orders. We may be about to find out. Federal Judge James Boasberg ordered that the planes of Venezuelans being renditioned to El Salvador not take off, or be turned around if they had not yet landed. But prisoners were delivered to El Salvador all the same. Now he’s trying to get the government to tell him when exactly the planes took off and landed, and he’s being stonewalled. (More about that case below.)

Trump’s lawyers are claiming that they didn’t violate the court order, but their arguments are flimsy. Jack Goldsmith, the former head of George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel inside the Justice Department, described the lawyers as “playing games that verge on defiance”. Goldsmith’s article is a good summary of the legal issues in the case.

Openly defying court orders — especially a Supreme Court order — is a clear line that would define Trump as an autocrat.

There’s a fundamental fact about rights that I don’t think most Americans understand. I was writing about it during the Bush administration, when “enemy combatants” were being whisked away into military custody, and it comes up again now: If there is anybody who doesn’t have habeas corpus rights, then nobody has rights.

This comes up now because of the alleged Venezuelan gangsters that the Trump administration took off the streets and flew to a prison in El Salvador. Trump’s supporters want the debate to be about whether or not these are bad guys, as in “Why are you taking the side of immigrant gangsters who victimize law-abiding American citizens?”

And who knows? Maybe they are bad guys. (Or maybe not.) Maybe we are all safer because they’re locked up. But that’s not the most important issue here.

Imagine, just for a moment, that somebody scooped you up and put you on a plane to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Probably your first reaction to that suggestion is “That could never happen because I’m an American citizen. They couldn’t do that to me.”

And you’re right: They couldn’t do it legally. But what if your name wound up on a list either by mistake or because you have an enemy somewhere inside the Trump administration or because some ICE officer was too enthusiastic about rounding people up? What if you were put on that plane without a hearing, the way the supposed gang members were? When would you have had a chance to offer evidence that you are an American citizen?

If the answer is “never”, then yes, they can do it to you. Because who stops them?

Habeas corpus means that anybody who is imprisoned has a right to state their case to somebody who is (1) impartial between the prisoner and his accusers, and (2) has the power to order the prisoner’s release.

If there’s a loophole in habeas corpus, then anybody — literally anybody — can vanish down that hole.

The Homeland Security Department is firing the people who worry about stuff like that: 100 people from three oversight offices have been let go.

“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.“

That’s the problem in a nutshell: Inside the Trump administration, human rights like habeas corpus are “bureaucratic hurdles”. If the immigration enforcement people want to do something illegal, nobody should slow that operation down.

The administration seems to be obeying court orders to rehire many of the government workers it fired. Some are returning to the job, some have been put on administrative leave, and others are still waiting to hear.

When a probationary worker goes from being fired to being on leave, that may not look like much of a victory. But the bureaucratic fiction behind the firing was that the workers were all fired “for cause”, which means they would be ineligible to collect unemployment benefits. So rather than being cut off from all income, they’re getting their regular paycheck again.

It’s worth pointing out that in the name of “government efficiency”, we’re paying people to stay home. Also, many of the contracts DOGE has cancelled will eventually have to be paid for. When all is said and done, I wonder if Musk isn’t costing taxpayers money rather than saving us money.

Vox’ Ian Millhiser says that of the 132 lawsuits against the Trump administration, you should watch two: the ones about impoundment and birthright citizenship.

No competent lawyer, and certainly no reasonable judge, could conclude that Trump’s actions in either case are lawful. There is no serious debate about what the Constitution says about either issue. If the Court rules in favor of Trump in either case, it’s hard to imagine the justices offering any meaningful pushback to anything Trump wants to do.

MAGA folks sometimes claim they have nothing against immigrants, just illegal immigrants. But why then is Trump shutting down avenues for legal immigration? Friday, DHS announced that (as of April 24) it is revoking the legal status of half a million Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came here as part of a Biden-administration humanitarian parole program. Participants had to have US sponsors. They were granted work permits and a two-year parole from deportation.

Like so many Trump actions, this order is needlessly cruel. These people did nothing wrong, trusted US government promises, and made plans accordingly. Many of them presumably have jobs and leases. Trump could have just waited for their two-year paroles expire. But no, they have a month to leave the country.

Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described “the imperial boomerang effect”:

[T]echniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.

and Social Security

Since my wife made more money in her career than I did, I am eligible for higher Social Security benefits as her survivor than on my own employment record. The system is swamped because the SSA is understaffed, so I had to spend a lot of time on hold when I applied over the phone in February. But at least I was home and able to do other things while I waited.

Thank God I got that done before the new rules kicked in:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) says it will no longer allow beneficiaries and those applying for Social Security to confirm their identity over the phone and will instead require that they do so online or in person at a local office to complete the application process.

Simultaneously, SSA is closing local offices and firing staff.

In 2023 about 119,000 people visited local Social Security offices daily to get help or receive services. The SSA announced plans last month to reduce its workforce by 12 percent, from about 57,000 employees to 50,000, and multiple offices have been closed in recent weeks, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the office established by President Donald Trump to slash federal spending. … SSA staffing was already near a 50-year low when the agency initiated the planned reductions.

The Popular Information blog draws the obvious conclusion:

The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system — effectively denying many Americans the benefits they are due.

According to MAGA propaganda, Democrats are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Well, listen to this: Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggests that the best way to find fraudsters in the Social Security system would be to just not send out checks some month.

Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

Elon [Musk] knows this by heart. Anyone who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing!

Before Social Security, elderly Americans were more likely than any other age group to be living in poverty. (Elderly and disabled poverty are the most hopeless kinds, because your earning prospects are so low.) Now they are the least likely to be poor. That’s what Social Security has meant to America.

But if you’re a billionaire like Lutnick, or a centi-billionaire like Musk, you find it hard to imagine that a check not arriving some month might mean that you don’t get to eat, or that you might care enough about not eating that you might complain. Those are the kind of people who are running our country now.

and sabotaging the US tourism industry

Becky Burke from Wales was on a backpacking trip across North America when she was arrested by ICE and held for 19 days. Then she was taken to an airport in leg irons and sent home to the UK. Her crime? She did housework in exchange for a free room, which apparently broke the no-employment condition of her tourist visa.

How many tourist dollars does the US lose every time there’s a story like this?

Similar stories are being told by Germans.

Here’s another story, this time from a Canadian: Nathan Kalman-Lamb, a sociology professor at the University of New Brunswick. Having previously been denied entry to the US, he went through the bureaucratic steps necessary to be assured of admittance, which included an interview with someone from the State Department. This time he was detained for three hours and thoroughly searched, causing him to miss his flight.

Both times, Kalman-Lamb was coming to the US to promote his new book The End of College Football. Exploitation of college athletes has been his special focus in recent years.

Kalman-Lamb’s crime seems to be having opinions about Palestine and Israel. He signed a statement supporting a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Toronto (where he is an alum) and is a supporter of the movement to divest from Israel. (He has also written articles whose titles include words like gender and intersectionality.) His opinions have caused him to be fingered by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission as “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic”.

Kalman-Lamb posted Friday:

Well, I have successfully made it in (and now, thank god, out) of the United States. Idk if/when I will be back—which is sad, because I love US folks.

Tourism has been a major industry in the US. Expect it to crater this year. The US is becoming known as a risky place to travel.

and you also might be interested in …

I think Jon Ossoff has the right Democratic message in this one-and-a-half minute clip.

RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines has begun:

National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. … The mRNA technology is under study at the NIH for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, including flu and AIDS, and also cancer. It was deployed in the development of covid-19 vaccines credited with saving 3 million lives in the U.S. alone — an accomplishment President Donald Trump bragged about in his first term.

A scientist at a biomedical research center in Philadelphia wrote to a colleague, in an email reviewed by KFF Health News, that a project officer at NIH had “flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.”

“It’s still unclear whether mRNA vaccine grants will be canceled,” the scientist added.

In some ways RFK Jr. is worse than an ideologue; he’s a crank, the kind of amateur who thinks he’s smarter than the consensus of the scientific community. Anti-scientific ideas get into his head and no amount of evidence will get them out.

He has already cancelled research into vaccine hesitancy, i.e., public resistance to being vaccinated. It may cost countless lives every year and allow the resurgence of previously eradicated diseases like measles, which now has more than 300 cases in Texas alone. But to him it’s not a public health problem. Worse from his point of view, research would probably attribute much of the problem to disinformation-spreaders like Kennedy himself.

On the subject of cranks, I like this exchange from the 1967 version of Bedazzled.

Stanley Moon: You’re a nutcase! You’re a bleedin’ nutcase!
George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo.
Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.

The Guardian examines vaccine hesitancy in one American city: Sarasota.

I’ll let a WaPo editorial sum up the situation in Gaza:

In Gaza, a ceasefire deal that came into effect when Trump took office — and for which he took full credit — has effectively collapsed. With Israel and Hamas at a stalemate over whether to extend the ceasefire or move on to fresh talks on ending the conflict, Netanyahu has resumed a full-scale bombing of the enclave. More than 400 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of others were injured on Tuesday, one of the deadliest days of the war.

The official death toll in Gaza is now over 50,000.

The NYT documented the losses of the Abu Naser family, four generations of which lived in a single five-story apartment building in Gaza. 132 of them died in a single Israeli attack. The entire neighborhood is now rubble.

At a time when DOGE is cancelling many government contracts, Elon Musk’s businesses are in line to get much bigger contracts than they’ve ever had before.

The dismantling of the Department of Education has begun.

Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan jailed his most serious challenger in the next elections. Protesters across the country were met with substantial police violence. Over 1000 protesters have been arrested.

The day before, Saturday, Trump’s chief negotiator Steve Witkoff said this to Tucker Carlson:

the President had a great conversation with Erdogan a couple of days ago. Really transformational, I would describe it. I think it’s been underreported, to tell you the truth. … I think the President has a relationship with Erdogan and that’s going to be important. And there’s some good coming – just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation. So I think you’ll see that in the reporting in the coming days.

I have to wonder if part of the conversation was “Go ahead. Crack down on the opposition.” Or if the current unrest is part of the “good news” Witkoff was expecting.

Witkoff’s comments about Ukraine are also striking. Up front, he grants most of what Putin wants: Russia will get the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies. Ukraine will not join NATO. What Ukraine will get out of this deal is left vague. And he takes seriously the referendums Russia held in the occupied Ukrainian provinces, as if those were fair elections:

They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.

He also promises to back down any time Putin threatens nuclear war, even if it means not getting a “fair deal” for Ukraine.

And while I think we have to get a fair deal for Ukraine, we cannot allow that country to drag us into World War Three.

And he completely ignores Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine being an illegitimate country that has always been part of Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?

STEVE WITKOFF: 100% not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. Like, why would they.

STEVE WITKOFF: First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine. That would be like occupying Gaza. Why do the Israelis really want to occupy Gaza for the rest of their lives? They don’t. They want stability there they don’t want to deal with. But the Russians also have what they want. They’ve gotten—they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more?

I don’t know. After Chamberlain gave Hitler the Sudetenland at Munich, why did he need the rest of Czechoslovakia?

And the idea that Putin doesn’t want to reclaim dominance over Warsaw Pact countries like Estonia and Poland, what does Witkoff base that on? And “I wouldn’t want those countries”? How do Polish-Americans feel about that?

Trump is using the power of government to extort concessions from non-government institutions: Columbia University and a major law firm are the latest trophies for Trump’s mantle. This is the Orban model from Hungary.

and let’s close with an opportunity

You still have until Sunday to enter the National Wildlife Federation’s annual photo contest. Here’s the second-place photo from the bird section of last year’s contest: a parakeet attacking a lizard.

March 24, 2025 – 11:23 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

Politics in the Attention Economy

What happens to democracy when directing and misdirecting public attention becomes more important than convincing voters to agree with you?

Chris Hayes’ recent book The Sirens’ Call is worth reading in its entirety, but there is one particular aspect of it that I want to highlight. Once you’ve had this thought, it’s perfectly obvious, but I’ve never seen it spelled out so clearly before: Getting attention and holding attention are two very different problems. Getting attention is easy; holding attention is hard.

If you’re in a roomful of people and you want to get their attention, you have a lot of options: Drop something breakable, start yelling obscenities, run through the room naked or covered in blood, fire a gun in the air. The possibilities are endless.

But now imagine that you want to hold people’s attention long enough to explain something to them or convince them of something. That’s much harder. If the waiter who just dropped a tray of glasses starts trying to tell you about the dangers of climate change or rising government debt, you’re probably going to tune him out pretty quickly.

Traditionally, politics has been all about holding people’s attention long enough to change their minds about something or motivate them to do something. Politically active people might want to convince you that abortion is wrong or gays are people too or the rich have too much money or government regulations stifle economic growth, just to name a few possibilities. Yes, they need to get your attention. But more than that, they need to hold your attention long enough to present their case, maybe even long enough to overcome your initial resistance.

Hayes flashes back to something that seems unimaginable now: the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Back in 1858, people in Illinois more or less agreed that the biggest issue the nation faced was slavery and what to do about it. So that year’s two Senate candidates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, toured the state together, debating the slavery issue for three hours at a time. (My home town, Quincy, hosted one of the debates.) That format gave each man a chance to explain some fairly complex and subtle ideas.

Admittedly, that’s unusual. For well over a century, most American politics has revolved around slogans: “Equal pay for equal work”, “No third term”, “Remember the Maine”, and many others. A slogan boils a political message down to its absolute minimum. You still have to hold attention, but you don’t have to hold it very long. Sometime a slogan is just a placeholder that your supporters will flesh out later; it makes people curious to find out what the slogan means. In 2024, “Make America great again” and “Democracy is on the ballot” were both like that. If you didn’t have at least a little background, both were so vague as to be meaningless.

But Hayes describes a way of managing attention that skips the difficult hold-attention step completely. It has been pioneered by the social-media platforms and has now been adapted to politics: If you want to keep somebody on your platform for hours at a time, you don’t need to produce an epic like Lord of the Rings or Lawrence of Arabia — content capable of holding a person’s attention that long. Instead, you just grab somebody’s attention, then grab it again, and grab it again. Keep doing that for hours. That’s the secret of the infinite scroll. Hardly anybody sits down thinking they’re going to devote the next two hours to TikTok or Facebook. They just look up and realize they’re late for something.

Now apply that idea to politics. What if I’m not trying to explain anything at all, even at the slogan level? What if I’m just trying to grab your attention in a particular way and prevent my opponent from grabbing it some other way?

This is something the Trump campaign seemed to understand much better than the Harris campaign. If a voter went into the voting booth thinking about inflation, immigration, or trans athletes, probably that vote would go to Trump. But a voter thinking about democracy, climate change, racism, or healthcare probably would probably choose Harris. It almost didn’t matter what a voter thought about any of those issues. Just direct their attention and you command their vote.

That was the method behind the madness of the Trump campaign. As far back as 2015, Trump has been saying things that were supposed to be political suicide. When he said that immigrants were “animals” or spouted “facts” about them that were obviously false, it didn’t matter if he looked like an ignorant asshole, because he made you think about immigration. If he grossly overstated the price of bacon and was proven wrong the next day, so what? He made you think about inflation — and the debunking article the next morning made you think about it again.

Harris could never catch up. I kept reading columns by pundits frustrated that Harris didn’t just say X — and those columns frustrated me, because I knew that Harris DID say X, but nobody paid attention.

The big thing I got wrong about the election was that I expected voters to get serious at the end of the campaign; low-interest and low-information voters who had been checked out all summer would check back in long enough to decide who to vote for. It never happened. Right up to the last day, Trump dominated the news cycle with his look-here, look-there, look-at-this-other-thing tactics. He had no message to speak of, just the idea that things were bad and he would somehow make them better.

What we’ve been seeing these last two months is the new attention-politics as a governing strategy. In traditional politics, an incoming administration tried to focus on a few simple themes, with the idea of raising enough public support to push one or two big ideas through Congress. So George W. Bush came in promoting his tax cut. Barack Obama was focused on his stimulus plan and then healthcare. (I remember the frustration many environmentalists felt when a carbon tax and other items from a climate-change agenda were sidelined so as not to interfere with the healthcare push.)

Trump hasn’t been doing anything like that. Instead, he’s doing a million things at once, including many that circumvent Congress in a way that is flatly illegal. By ignoring Congress and relying on executive actions, he avoids the need to marshal public opinion. Quite the reverse: It’s the opposition that needs to marshal public opinion to stop him. And that’s difficult, because what opposition leader or opposition agenda can get attention when Trump grabs all the attention in the room with a new outrage every day? (Invade Greenland! Annex Canada! Brief Musk about China war plans! Defy court orders! Fire the people who keep track of nuclear weapons! Turn Gaza into a seaside resort!)

I’m frankly unsure what I ought to be rooting for. Eventually, assuming Trump doesn’t establish his own version of the Thousand-Year Reich, some Democrat will figure out how to master the new attention politics and become president. But how good is that outcome really? The new politics lends itself to autocracy. Probably a Democratic autocrat would do more things I like than Trump is doing. But I’m not sure what would take us back in the direction of democracy.

March 24, 2025 – 8:57 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s featured post takes a step back from the immediate news of the week to look at a force shaping the news. Using insights from Chris Hayes’ recent book The Sirens’ Call, I’ll look at how the attention economy has changed politics and governance. That post should be out shortly.

That leaves the news of the week to the summary: the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law, Social Security, the US tourism industry, the Education Department, and vaccine research. Also: developments in Ukraine, Gaza, and Turkey. That should be out before noon.

March 24, 2025 – 8:25 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Dangerous Confrontations

We are inevitably headed, whether it’s in this case or another, to a confrontation between a president who has rejected the rule of law and a judge sworn to enforce it. We are in an exceedingly dangerous moment for democracy.

– Joyce Vance

This week’s featured post is “Rights, Privileges, and Mahmoud Khalil“

This week everybody was talking about the shutdown that didn’t happen

Congress passed a continuing resolution keeping the government open for the rest of this fiscal year, i.e. until September 30. I have to own up to some disappointment here. Three weeks ago I wrote this:

The real test happens when the government runs out of money on March 14. It’s easy to be for or against things until somebody puts price tags on them and adds them all up. In order to get the bill he wants, Trump will need support from almost all of the Republicans in the House. If Democrats stay united and only two Republicans vote against a spending deal, it fails.

If that happens, that’s when congressional Democrats begin to have negotiating leverage.

But Speaker Mike Johnson wrote his continuing resolution without any input from Democrats, and he passed it through the House because he lost only one Republican vote. Heather Cox Richardson summarizes what’s in it:

The new measure is not a so-called clean CR that simply extends previous funding. Instead, the Republican majority passed it without input from Democrats and with a number of poison pills added. The measure increases defense spending by about $6 billion from the previous year, cuts about $13 billion from nondefense spending, and cuts $20 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service. It forces Washington, D.C., to cut $1 billion from its budget, protects President Donald Trump’s ability to raise or lower tariffs as he wishes, and gives him considerable leeway in deciding where money goes.

When that CR went to the Senate, Democrats could have blocked it if they had hung together. (It takes 60 votes to kill a filibuster, and Republicans only have 53 senators.) For a while it looked like that would happen, with many people speculating about whether 7 Democrats would break ranks.

Then Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer flipped to support the CR. This move is very unpopular inside the Democratic base, and was denounced by Democrats from AOC to Nancy Pelosi.

Schumer wrote an op-ed to explain. I’m going to try to express his view more convincingly than he did, not because I agree with it, but because I’m trying to evaluate it.

Ordinarily, a government shutdown is like a labor strike against a company: It hurts both sides, and the conflict is over who can endure the most pain before giving in. In a typical shutdown, both Republicans and Democrats understand that the American people don’t like it. So they maneuver to blame each other while looking for some acceptable compromise that will end it.

But what if Trump likes ruling over a shut down government? What if he’d be content to let the shutdown run until the end of the fiscal year in September? During a shutdown, only “essential” services are provided: the military stays on duty, Social Security checks still get mailed, and so on. But isn’t the whole point of all the DOGE firings and cutbacks to eliminate anything not “essential”?

If that’s the case, then Trump doesn’t feel pain and doesn’t come under more and more pressure to make a deal as the shutdown continues. Eventually the Democrats have to capitulate and get nothing, so why not capitulate and get nothing now?

I admit that I have trouble evaluating whether or not that’s how a shutdown would play out. Maybe it would. But even if I grant Schumer that point, I’m not impressed with his leadership, because he apparently didn’t see this situation coming and had no plan to deal with it when it arrived.

OK, I admit I also didn’t think Speaker Johnson would keep his ducks in a row and get a CR passed without Democrats. But it was always at least a possibility. Somebody on the Democratic side should have gamed out how to respond. There should have been a plan and a message: “We can’t fight Trump this way, so we’re going to fight him that way.” There should have been talking points, and major Democrats should have united in pushing those points.

Instead, Schumer was talking about defeating the CR right up until the moment he turned around. Democrats are presenting no plan for resisting Trump going forward, and they’re bickering among themselves about what they just did. They look weak and Trump looks masterful. Good going, Chuck!

The one saving grace in all this is that a shutdown itself is not in the headlines. Instead we can focus on the ever-weakening Trump economy, the assault on constitutional rights, and the crashing stock market. If only there were an opposition party with a plan to turn everything around.

and Mahmoud Khalil

His deportation case, and what it means for freedom of speech in general, is the subject of the featured post.

A related issue is the Trump administration’s attack on Columbia University, where Khalil was a student. The Harvard Crimson writes “First They Came for Columbia“, charging that “The administration has weaponized the fight against antisemitism as a means to another end: punishing and weakening universities.” It says that no university is in a better position to lead a fight against this than Harvard, which so far is doing nothing.

and the rule of law

With the failure of Congress to check Trump in any way, the full burden falls on the courts. From the beginning, two questions have loomed over all the cases challenging Trump’s illegal actions:

  • Will the Supreme Court invent new law to justify whatever Trump does?
  • What happens if the Trump administration doesn’t obey court orders?

We’re getting closer and closer to finding out. This week, hundreds of non-citizens were deported under the aegis of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. This is one of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts you may remember from US History class. Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the history:

That law, which applies during wartime or when a foreign government threatens an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” permits the president to authorize the arrest, imprisonment, or deportation of people older than 14 who come from a foreign enemy country. President James Madison used the law to arrest British nationals during the War of 1812, President Woodrow Wilson invoked it against Germans during World War I, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used it against Japanese, Italian, and German noncitizens.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would use the Alien Enemies Act to deport gang members, and in an executive order signed Friday night but released yesterday morning after news of it leaked, Trump claimed that thousands of members of the Tren de Aragua gang have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.” In connection with the Venezuelan government, he said, the gang has made incursions into the U.S. with the goal of “destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

This is pretty fanciful stuff. Maybe Tren de Aragua is operating in the US, though Trump has a long history of exaggerating immigrant gangs, so I’d be amazed if we’re really talking about “thousands” of members. But the idea that they aren’t just trying to make money the way all gangs do, but are instead “conducting irregular warfare” while conspiring with the Venezuelan government to “destabilize … the United States” — that seems like a fever dream to me. Is there any evidence to back that up?

So this was the justification for deporting 200 supposed gang members to El Salvador. El Salvador is getting paid $20K per man/year to imprison them (prior to any graft), so you can imagine the conditions they’ll be held in.

The ACLU filed suit pointing out that the administration had presented no evidence these actually were gang members, or that Venezuela was using them to wage war against us, so a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against invoking the AEA in this way. And then things got interesting.

Ryan Goodman of Just Security put together the timeline of what came next. At 5:00 last night, Judge Boasberg asked whether deportations would happen in the next 24–48 hours. The government’s attorney said he didn’t know; the ACLU attorney said the government was moving rapidly. Before 5:22, Boasberg ordered a break so the government attorney could obtain official information before the hearing resumed at 6:00.

At 5:45, Goodman reports, another flight took off.

Before 6:52, Judge Boasberg agreed with the ACLU that the terms of the Alien Enemies Act apply only to “enemy nations,” and blocked deportations under it. Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Gary Grumbach of NBC News reported that the judge ordered the administration to return the planes in flight to the United States. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off, or is in the air, needs to be returned to the United States,” the judge said. “Those people need to be returned to the United States.”

The plane did not turn around. Law Dork looks into the details. It appears that the administration’s position is that the judge’s order did not apply once the plane had left American airspace.

Of course that’s absurd — as many others also noted Sunday — because the U.S. government was still in control of the planes, and the Justice Department lawyer before Boasberg on Saturday evening had literally argued, albeit unsuccessfully, that there was no irreparable harm here — a factor in deciding whether to grant a TRO — because the challenge could continue even if individuals had been deported.

One thing you can see across multiple court cases: Trump administration lawyers are not operating in good faith. They say whatever will allow illegal policies to continue. And if they have to say the opposite tomorrow, they don’t care.

Jay Kuo summarizes the week’s other legal news, which was pretty good.

A federal judge ordered the administration to rehire tens of thousands of the probationary workers it fired. Basically, the administration took advantage of a loophole allowing probationary workers to be fired for poor performance, and pretended that all probationary workers had performed poorly. The judge called this scheme “a sham”.

A member of the National Labor Relations Board returned to work after a court found her firing illegal.

Perkins Coie, a private law firm targeted by a Trump executive order, won a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the executive order.

and you also might be interested in …

Paul Krugman looks at the purely economic cost of Trump trashing America’s image. He starts with Canada cancelling its order for F-35 fighter jets, which makes sense because “sophisticated military equipment requires a lot of technical support, so you don’t want to buy it from a country you don’t trust.” Several European countries are also reconsidering buying new American weapon systems.

I had not appreciated how big US military exports are: $318.7 billion in 2024. That’s 15% of total exports and twice as big as agricultural exports. And then there’s tourism ($100 billion) and education ($50 billion). As the US becomes more suspicious of foreigners and less welcoming (not to mention Trump trashing our universities), those numbers should go down.

One way to think about this is to say that Trump is doing to America what Elon Musk is doing to Tesla, destroying a valuable brand through erratic behavior and repulsive ideology. … Trump’s belief that America holds all the cards, that the rest of the world needs access to our markets but we don’t need them, is all wrong. We are rapidly losing the world’s trust, and part of the cost will be financial.

Krugman recognizes that as an academic economist, he’s not particularly good at predicting short-term business cycles. So he interviews somebody who does that for a living. The upshot is that numbers look decent right now, but it wouldn’t take much to change them. Both hiring and firing have been soft recently, so it wouldn’t take much in the way of layoffs to spike the unemployment rate.

You know those measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere and how it increases every year? Those come from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Well, maybe not for long. The NOAA office in Hilo that oversees the observatory is being closed.

Remember when Trump wanted to limit Covid tests so that the number of reported cases would go down? Same thing here. If we stop measuring CO2 it won’t be a problem any more.

Elon Musk has claimed that no one has died from his cutoff of foreign aid funds. Nicholas Kristoff provides some names and pictures of the victims Musk is denying.

Robert Morris, a Texas megachurch founder with connections to Donald Trump, was indicted in Oklahoma Wednesday for molesting a girl in the 1980s, when he was living with her family. I mention this not out of animus towards either Morris or the branch of Christianity he represents, but to make a point.

Certain cases become the center of movements; laws are named after them. For example, Lakin Riley was a nursing student murdered by an immigrant who had entered the US illegally. That led to the Lakin Riley Act, which requires the government to deport immigrants accused of certain crimes, even if they aren’t convicted.

Whether a case takes on that kind of symbolic value depends on the popularity of the people in question. Undocumented immigrants are unpopular, so crimes they commit are candidates for becoming the center of campaigns, depending not at all on whether the perpetrators are typical of some larger trend.

Drag performers are also unpopular, and various laws restricting them have been pitched based on the threat they pose to children, despite the fact that there seems to be no such threat. But imagine what would happen if a single drag performer raped a single child. That child would become famous, and very likely would end up with a law named after him or her.

Christian ministers, on the other hand, are popular. So of course there will be no Cindy Clemishire Act, (named for Morris’ victim) that puts restrictions on Christian ministers or abridges their rights in some way. It doesn’t matter how many ministers molest children. None of those cases will become the kind of cause célèbre that Lakin Riley’s murder was.

Trevor Noah’s “What Now?” podcast is consistently good. I recommend his interview with Robert Putnam of “Bowling Alone” fame.

and let’s close with something outrageously classical

A four-woman quartet turns Vivaldi and Mozart into a confrontational stage performance.

March 17, 2025 – 1:03 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (14)

Rights, Privileges, and Mahmoud Khalil

Can a legal permanent resident be deported for expressing views the President disagrees with?

A long-standing debate runs through American history: Does the Bill of Rights enumerate human rights, i.e., something that anyone can claim by virtue of being human, or privileges of citizenship that our government can ignore when it deals with non-citizens?

The Declaration of Independence uses theistic language to promote a human-rights view: Human beings (or at least “all men”) have been “endowed” with rights “by their Creator”. To say that a man lacks rights is tantamount to claiming that he was not created by God. But in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court took the opposite view: Rights derive from the social contract embodied in the Constitution. Africans residing in the United States, the Court held, were not party to that contract, and thus they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”.

Dred Scott has long been in the dustbin of history, and is widely viewed as one of the Court’s worst decisions. Currently binding Supreme Court precedents take an in-between view that leans towards human rights. Basically, the Court interprets the Constitution and the laws to mean exactly what they say: If lawmakers had intended a provision to apply only to citizens, they would have used the word “citizen” rather than some more general term like “person”. For example, the 14th Amendment uses both words:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

So there are privileges that apply only to citizens (the right to vote, for example), but due process and equal protection are not among them.

The Trump administration shows every sign of wanting to move that line. Just how far it wants to go is not clear. But the first case in point is Mahmoud Khalil.

Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Two weeks ago, Khalil (an Algerian citizen born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria) had the next layer of privileges short of American citizenship: He came here originally on a student visa, but became a legal permanent resident, a “green card holder”. He is married to an American citizen, who is eight months pregnant. If nothing goes wrong, in another month he’ll be the father of an American citizen.

He is also a pro-Palestine activist. Last spring, he participated in demonstrations at Columbia University, where he was a student at the time. (He has since finished his degree.) Wikipedia describes his views like this:

Following the start of the Gaza war in 2023, Khalil became involved in pro-Palestinian activism. He served as a negotiator for students associated with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) when they were bargaining with Columbia University officials. In a 2024 interview, Khalil said, “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.” He characterized the movement as one “for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone”. Of concerns about antisemitism, Khalil said, “There is, of course, no place for antisemitism. What we are witnessing is anti-Palestinian sentiment that’s taking different forms, and antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism [are] some of these forms.”

The Trump administration describes him differently, claiming that he “led activities aligned to Hamas” and “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity“. But it has produced no specifics to back those claims up, and the language itself is slippery. What does it mean that an activity is “aligned with Hamas”? Aligned in whose view? Similarly, unless Khalil himself endorsed terrorism or attacked Jews or America in so many words — and if he had, I’d expect his critics to have produced specific quotes — “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American” is an opinion, not a fact.

Khalil’s arrest. A week ago yesterday, agents from the Homeland Security department arrested Khalil at his home in New York. Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla recorded the event on her phone while simultaneously talking to Khalil’s lawyer on his phone. It isn’t exactly a classic police-state arrest — Khalil is not roughed up, for example — but it still has a lot of disturbing aspects. When Khalil’s wife asks for the names of the arresting agents, she is told “We don’t give our names.” They also refuse to say which agency they represent. All they’re willing to tell her is where Khalil is being taken: Immigration Custody at 26 Federal Plaza. They refuse to talk to Khalil’s lawyer, who is on the phone. “They’re literally running away from me,” Noor reports to the lawyer.

When Noor tried to visit Khalil at a detention center in New Jersey, she was told he was no longer there. It took some time for his lawyer to determine that Khalil had been moved to a facility in Louisiana, where at first he was not allowed to consult privately with lawyers. An immigration hearing to have him deported was scheduled for March 27.

Last Monday, a federal judge in New York ordered that Khalil not be removed from the US until a hearing in his court can determine whether deporting him violates constitutional rights.

The Just Security blog analyzes the legalities: No one in the executive branch can unilaterally revoke a green card.

To obtain authority to deport a green card holder, the government must charge (or accuse, as this is not a criminal matter) them with a condition under the immigration laws that in some way makes them “deportable.” “Deportable” is a term of art under the immigration laws. It refers to conduct defined in a set of provisions—most though not all involving criminal activity—codified at 8 U.S.C. 1227(a).

To prove that an [legal permanent resident] is deportable, the government must convene a “removal hearing” before an immigration judge. At that hearing, government attorneys must prove deportability by “clear and convincing” evidence.

Notably, the Trump administration has not accused Khalil of committing crimes, or of committing fraud in his green-card application (another deportability condition). Instead, it points to a condition that has never been used in this way before:

the government has invoked a rarely used “foreign policy” ground of deportation. That provision, located in section 237(a)(4)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, makes deportable any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” (emphasis added).

The statute contains a (freedom of speech and association) safe harbor, incorporated by reference to the inadmissibility provisions, prohibiting deportation “because of the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States,” but then contains an exception for the safe harbor: “unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien’s [presence] would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest” (emphasis added).

It’s worth pointing out that much of what the administration claims about Khalil (even if true) consists of “beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States”. The First Amendment would protect an American saying “I support what Hamas did on October 7”, even if most other Americans would find that statement reprehensible. (Again, Khalil seems not to have said anything like that.)

The foreign-policy justification is pretty obviously absurd: Khalil is up for deportation because Trump promised to deport pro-Palestinian campus demonstrators. There is no “compelling US foreign policy interest” involved. What the administration will probably argue, though, is that identifying US foreign policy interests is a judgment call that belongs to the executive branch, not the judiciary.

The case, then, will turn on whether an immigration judge feels empowered to use common sense, which says that the foreign policy interest here is a pretext, not a reason.

Protests. The administration has pledged that a Khalil deportation will be “the first of many“, and has already arrested a second Columbia protester. A third has returned to India after having her student visa revoked.

Protests calling for Khalil’s release were held in several cities this weekend. The most striking was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. Thursday, over 100 demonstrators were arrested for occupying Trump Tower in New York.

It would be a mistake to conclude from this that American Jews in general support Khalil. (A pro-Israel group is apparently fingering pro-Palestinian protesters for deportation.) But the administration’s usurpation of the fight against “antisemitism” as an excuse for curtailing freedom of speech is making a number of American Jews uneasy. Whatever pretext they claim for curtailing human rights, authoritarian governments have a way of using their powers against Jews eventually. Elon Musk’s antisemitism, as well as Trump’s and Vance’s embrace of the antisemitic Alliance for Germany party, undermines the administration’s claims to be fighting antisemitism.

In truth, the administration seems to be fighting freedom of speech, not antisemitism. The Khalil case shows the lengths it will go in order to find legal pretexts to punish people it disagrees with. That should worry all of us, no matter what we think about Palestine or Israel.

March 17, 2025 – 10:31 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

To me, two stories stand out above all others this week: Senate Democrats deciding not to shut down the government, and the arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. I’ll cover the first in the weekly summary and the second in a featured post.

The Khalil case raises two fundamental issues: (1) Is freedom of speech a human right that our government should respect for all people under its jurisdiction? Or is freedom of speech a privilege of citizenship that even legal permanent residents don’t have? (2) Do we still respect the famous quote attributed to Voltaire, that we will defend someone’s freedom to say something we disagree with?

The featured post will discuss those issues, and should appear maybe 10 or so EDT.

Chuck Schumer’s acquiescence with the Republican continuing resolution to keep the government open is partly an issue of strategy (Would Trump give up anything to reopen the government, or would he actually welcome keeping it closed?), but also a question of planning: Even if Schumer didn’t expect House Republicans to hang together enough to pass their continuing resolution, he should have had a plan covering that possibility. As it was, Democrats looked weak and discombobulated.

The week also saw a number of developments in the fight against Trump in the courts. And several writers posted discussions of the secondary effects of Trump trashing America’s image overseas. The summary should be out sometime between noon and 1.

March 17, 2025 – 8:37 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Crossed Lines

When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism

– Steven Levitsky

This week’s featured post is “Those Mysterious Tariffs“.

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

Pundits struggled to make sense of the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy on February 28, but nobody nailed it better than Jon Stewart: Trump and the Republicans just like Putin better. Stewart made an extended metaphor about a pro wrestling scene in which apparent good-guy John Cena sneak attacks a fellow good-guy wrestler.

Creating tension with Ukraine in the Oval Office meeting “was a ‘heel turn’ designed to create the alliance Trump always wanted in the first place,” Stewart explained, referring to the pro-wrestling narrative device in which a fan-favorite character changes to become a storyline’s villain.

Another way to understand the meeting is to take “Trump is Putin’s puppet” literally. Trump told Zelenskyy exactly what Putin would have told him had he been there: Surrender or World War III starts.

I have to wonder whether Trump can speak while Putin drinks a glass of water.

After the meeting, Trump withdrew all military aid from Ukraine, including intelligence. Time reports:

The Ukrainians have lost the ability to detect the approach of Russian bombers and other warplanes as they take off inside Russia. As a result, Ukraine has less time to warn civilians and military personnel about the risk of an approaching airstrike or missile.

The result: “hundreds of dead Ukrainians”.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has stood for collective security based on alliances with other democratic nations and resistance to aggression by dictators. We haven’t always applied those principles consistently, but we never explicitly rejected them. Now we do. If dictators want to take over their neighbors, that’s their business.

BTW: Trump’s cocksure assertion that Zelenskyy “doesn’t have the cards” because Ukraine is losing on the battlefield is another example of Putin’s puppetry. The battlefield is not going well for either side. Both countries are facing exhaustion, and while Russian forces are advancing slowly, at this pace it will take many years to conquer Ukraine.

and tariffs

Trump whipsawed the markets these last two weeks with a series of announcements about tariffs being imposed or postponed. That’s the topic of the featured post. But in that post I didn’t get around to making the obvious prediction: Capital spending is going to collapse, and is probably already collapsing, because companies and investors can’t trust their projections of where the economy is headed. Ditto for households, who can’t predict whether the government spending cuts are going to affect their jobs. (Maybe you can build that new bedroom onto your house, or maybe you’re going to need a cushion in case you’ll be unemployed.) So money is going to sit on the sidelines, and that is going to start a recession.

and the budget

Thursday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed what should have been obvious to everyone: The budget outline that the House passed recently is going to make substantial cuts to Medicaid.

House Republicans last week narrowly passed a budget instructing the energy and commerce committee, which is responsible for federal healthcare, to cut spending under its jurisdiction by $880bn … The independent in-house agency confirmed that it would be impossible to reduce spending by $880bn without cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip). That’s because after excluding Medicare, Medicaid and Chip, the committee oversees only $381bn in spending – much less than the $880bn target – the CBO said.

There’s a pretty clear game-plan of deceit here.

  • Start by claiming to protect safety-net programs Americans — especially Americans in the poorer, more rural Republican districts — depend on.
  • Announce plans to cut those general areas, but deny that the cuts will affect those programs, even if the math doesn’t work without such cuts.
  • Cut those programs, but claim that only “waste and fraud” will be affected.
  • Refuse to pay for your kid’s healthcare and/or kick your mother out of her nursing home.

We’re already hearing rhetoric about how deep cuts in federal spending are “necessary”, because the $36-trillion-and-rising federal debt is unsustainable. But no matter how dire a picture Republicans paint of our fiscal situation, taxing rich people is never an option.

House Republicans are committed to not negotiating with Democrats about either the FY 2026 budget or the continuing resolution to fund the rest of FY 2025, which is needed to prevent a government shutdown on Friday. Democrats want a commitment that whatever funding they pass is meaningful, and won’t just get frozen by Musk or Trump. Republicans want to give Trump maximum flexibility, even if it means surrendering Congress’ power of the purse.

In order to do that, they’ll need to hold all their members together, which they’ve never managed before. But maybe this time they can.

and Trump’s speech to Congress

which I didn’t watch (though I did quickly scan a transcript). I don’t see the point, since nothing Trump says can be believed. The Guardian fact checks the speech’s biggest whoppers. Since Trump has been corrected on these fake facts before, they are clearly intentional lies.

The biggest one was his claim that Elon Musk has uncovered “massive fraud”. So far, Musk has said the word “fraud” a lot, but he hasn’t provided any evidence of it. Quite likely, Musk has not uncovered any fraud.

Trump’s speech lasted a record-setting 100 minutes, reminiscent of the hours-long speeches dictators like Cuba’s Fidel Castro used to give.

Like me, James Fallows more or less ignored the speech’s content, focusing instead on its symptomology. He noticed four things:

  • Trump’s rhetorical range is shrinking. He used some form of his “like nothing ever seen before” cliche 20 times during the speech. By contrast, he said it only once in his first inaugural address, and it rarely appeared in his first-term State of the Union addresses. Similarly, “incredible” has become his dominant positive adjective, appearing six times.
  • More alarmingly, Fallows notes that all types of Trump speeches — MAGA rallies, presidential addresses, press conferences, televised Oval Office talks — have collapsed into one form. The broader press commented on how rally-like this speech was, but missed the larger point that all Trump speeches are basically the same now.
  • Recent presidential addresses to Congress have included heckling from the opposing party (going back to Joe Wilson’s “You lie” directed at Obama in 2009). But this was the first time a president has abused members of Congress: Trump called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” from the podium.
  • Presidents almost always spin or shade the truth in these speeches, and occasionally have even lied outright. But Trump’s lying has reached a completely different level. Lying is no longer an attempt to fool people, because some of Trump’s lies are so transparent — Social Security is paying benefits to people it thinks are 200 years old — that no one will believe them. Instead, lying has become an expression of power. “To me, Trump’s body-language—his bearing, mood, and presentation—suggested that the grossness of the lies was the point of the exercise. Preening in the knowledge that he could get away with it, and that he could make his minions applaud.”

Newly elected Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin needed only 10 minutes to respond.

We just went through another fraught election season. Americans made it clear that prices are too high and that government needs to be more responsive to their needs. America wants change. But there is a responsible way to make change, and a reckless way. And, we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country, and as a democracy.

She talked about the economy:

President Trump is trying to deliver an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends. He’s on the hunt to find trillions of dollars to pass along to the wealthiest in America. And to do that, he’s going to make you pay in every part of your life. Grocery and home prices are going up, not down — and he hasn’t laid out a credible plan to deal with either. His tariffs on allies like Canada will raise prices on energy, lumber, cars — and start a trade war that will hurt manufacturing and farmers. Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more because the math on his proposals doesn’t work without going after your health care. Meanwhile, for those keeping score, the national debt is going up, not down. And if he’s not careful, he could walk us right into a recession.

And national security:

[T]hat scene in the Oval Office wasn’t just a bad episode of reality TV. It summed up Trump’s whole approach to the world. He believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends, like Canada, in the teeth. He sees American leadership as merely a series of real estate transactions. …

[O]ur democracy, our very system of government, has been the aspiration of the world. And right now, it’s at risk. It’s at risk when a president decides he can pick and choose what rules he wants to follow, when he ignores court orders or the Constitution itself, or when elected leaders stand idly by and just let it happen. But it’s also at risk when the President pits Americans against each other, when he demonizes those who are different, and tells certain people they shouldn’t be included. Because America is not just a patch of land between two oceans. We are more than that. Generations have fought and died to secure the fundamental rights that define us. Those rights and the fight for them make us who we are.

and Tesla

For years, Elon Musk’s public image worked to Tesla’s benefit. He was Tony Stark. He was to our world what Hank Rearden was to Atlas Shrugged. And Tesla had a technology lead over rival electric-car companies. So Teslas weren’t just good cars, they were cool. Driving a Tesla was a virtue signal; it told the world you were serious about climate change.

Then he bought Twitter and made the online world safe for Nazis. He spent $290 million to elect Donald Trump. He addressed a rally for the AfD, calling that neo-Nazi party “the best hope for the future of Germany.”

His Trump contributions bought him the extra-constitutional power to cut government programs, fire civil-service workers, and shut down agencies created by Congress. (The Atlas Shrugged character he most resembles now is Wesley Mouch, head of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.) Has medical research ground to a halt in Musk’s America? Are children starving in Africa while food rots in US ports? What a shame.

Suddenly, people who had been willing to pay a virtue premium for a Tesla are instead looking for a vice discount. It isn’t just that competitors have caught up to Tesla (which they have). In many people’s minds, a Tesla would have to be a lot better than the next best EV to make up for the stigma of driving a “Swasticar“.

And in case you hadn’t noticed that stigma, anti-Musk demonstrators are showing up at Tesla showrooms to remind you. Saturday, Tesla Takedowns erupted all over the US, with 350 protesters in Manhattan alone.

In Europe as well, Tesla’s problems are growing: In Germany, sales were down 60% in January and 76% in February.

Maybe you were horrified by Musk’s statement (in a Joe Rogan interview) about empathy.

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

Well, you should know that seeing empathy as an exploitable weakness isn’t just a psychological quirk Musk has because he’s on the spectrum. It’s become a thing on the Right. A conservative Christian author has a book out called Toxic Empathy: How progressives exploit Christian compassion.

We are told that empathy is the highest virtue—the key to being a good person. Is that true? Or has “empathy,” like so many other words of our day—“tolerance,” “justice,” “acceptance”—been hijacked by bad actors who exploit compassion for their own political ends?

Yep. If you find yourself feeling sorry for bombed-out communities in Gaza, hungry children in Africa, or working-class families losing their health insurance in the US, it’s a trap. Jesus wouldn’t want you to fall for it. “Love your neighbor” now means something else entirely.

David French comments:

That’s one reason you’ll often see a shocking amount of derision online when anyone starts talking about the human toll of Trump’s decisions. His MAGA evangelicals are broadcasting that you cannot reach them with anything that looks like an appeal to the heart. … It’s also just bizarre to argue that describing the consequences of a policy is somehow emotionally manipulative when avoiding those consequences was the purpose of the program that’s being frozen or cut.

So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.

and you also might be interested in …

Paul Krugman looks at Trump’s “Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve” plan and concludes that it’s a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme. Even if you believe it’s somehow on the up-and-up, this observation should trouble you:

What would the U.S. government do with this reserve? Make payoffs to gangsters? Buy favors from rogue governments like North Korea? I guess it could, in a pinch, sell the stuff to raise money if people have lost trust in the U.S. government’s solvency, but surely it would be a better strategy to stay solvent — among other things by not borrowing to buy assets that will probably crash in value if and when America tries try to sell them.

HHS has notified the State of Maine that its policy allowing transgender athletes to compete in school sports violates Title IX

by denying female student athletes in the State of Maine an equal opportunity to participate in, and obtain the benefits of participation, “in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, club or intramural athletics” offered by the state by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes in current and future athletic events.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office was notified on Feb. 21 that the DHHS Office for Civil Rights started a compliance review of the Maine DOE, including the University of Maine System. A spokesperson for the Maine Attorney General’s Office said federal investigators did not interview anyone in their office.

Whenever we talk about trans issues, especially trans athletes, it’s important to realize just how few cases, and how little impact on cis-women’s rights, we’re talking about. HHS’ letter identifies two cases:

In the 2023 Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey, 4.5% of high school students reported a transgender identity. (That seems high to me, but what do I know?) If we picked some random group comprising 4.5% of students, that group would also probably contain a few successful athletes. So I don’t see evidence that Maine’s policy is distorting girls’ sports in any meaningful way.

A BlueSky poster brings the numbers home:

As of today, there are more kids infected with measles than there are trans athletes playing in college sports in the U.S.

In general, I disapprove of the Right’s tendency to make policy by anecdote. (Another example is to base immigration policy on anecdotes about misbehaving immigrants. Hitler’s Nazis used to publicize every “Jewish crime” they could find, for similar reasons.) Anecdotal policy lends itself to prejudice, because only the anecdotes that fit the ruling bias are allowed to count. For example, there are countless stories of boys and girls being abused by Christian ministers. Should Christian churches be shut down to prevent this? Of course not, because Christians are much more popular than transfolk.

The upshot of HHS’ letter is a referral to the Department of Justice for enforcement.

Various free-trade agreements have established an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process “to protect foreign businesses from state corruption and theft”, but these days it’s being used by companies whose investments are affected by a nation’s environmental laws. Right now, Greenland is being sued by a mining company because it shut down uranium mining in 2021. The company says it had invested $100 million in the site, but it is suing for $11.5 billion, based on what their mine would be worth had it been successfully developed.

That case motivated The Guardian to look at other ISDS suits, and the “chilling effect” they have on governments’ attempts to limit fossil fuels. In short, every time a country tries to protect its environment, it may have to pay a ransom to the parties who feel entitled to exploit that resource.

The Netanyahu government’s war against the independence of the judiciary branch has resumed.

and let’s close with a great relief

A Chilean kayaker was scooped up by the mouth of a humpback whale, and then spit back out. He was unharmed.

Humpback whales aren’t actually looking for large prey like humans. They typically suck in large quantities of seawater and filter it for krill and other small morsels. But that’s probably hard to remember when you find yourself in one’s mouth.

March 10, 2025 – 12:16 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Those Mysterious Tariffs

It’s clear that Trump loves tariffs. It’s not clear why.

LIstening to President Trump talk about tariffs is like listening to a teen-age boy talk about the object of his crush. Tariffs have every conceivable virtue and no drawbacks. The Daily Show runs together a series of Trump tariff quotes:

Tariffs are easy. They’re fast. They’re efficient. And they bring fairness. … We’re going to bring so many things back to our country, and the thing that’s going to get us there is tariffs. … We’ll take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. And we’re going to make our country so strong and so rich. It will never be so rich. … Tariffs. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?

It’s like listening to Tony sing about Maria.

Maria! Say it loud and there’s music playing.
Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.
Maria! I’ll never stop saying “Maria”.

To hear Trump tell it:

  • The threat of tariffs will make other countries do what he wants.
  • Tariffs are essentially free money. They will provide a dependable stream of government revenue that comes from foreigners rather than Americans.
  • In order to avoid tariffs, corporations will move production facilities from other countries to the United States, creating good jobs here.

What’s not to like? But strangely, most economists don’t like tariffs, and the stock market tanks whenever it looks like Trump is getting serious about imposing them. So what’s going on?

Well, to start with, those justifications contradict each other. If tariffs are going to raise money and cause corporations to change their production patterns and supply chains, they need to be imposed for the long term. (Ford isn’t going to move a Mexican factory back to the US unless they expect a tariff to be in place for years.) But if a tariff is supposed to change a country’s behavior, it has to come off as soon as the behavior changes. (Tariffs won’t make Mexico crack down on fentanyl-smuggling cartels unless the Mexican government expects the tariffs to end when it does.)

So which is it? Does he want long-term tariffs to raise money and move supply chains, or short-term tariffs to threaten other countries with?

And even if you pick one or the other, it doesn’t really work. Using a tariff to change a country’s behavior might (or might not) work once, acting like a threat from a protection racket. (“Nice economy you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”) But national leaders are smart enough to know that extortionists never go away after they’re paid. If a country gives Trump some concession to avoid a tariff, and then he comes back and threatens it again, they going to figure out that he intends to bleed them dry. Resisting being pushed around by the US is always a good look for a foreign politician, so they’re going to dig in their heels. Some already are.

A tariff can raise money, but that money will come from Americans, not foreigners. The American importer pays the tax, and probably passes it on to its customers. In the end, a big broad-based tariff will act like a national sales tax, which raises money by raising the cost of whatever is sold. Worse, that money tends to come from poorer Americans, who have to spend nearly all the money they get their hands on. (Meanwhile, the rich can pile up savings and pay nothing.) All those working-class Trump voters have essentially voted to shift the tax burden onto themselves.

Tariffs can work to change production and investment decisions — that’s their traditional use. (Typically, a developing country tariffs imported goods to encourage local manufacturers to replace the import. That was how the US used them in the 1800s, and how nations like South Korea used them more recently.) But in order to have that influence, a tariff needs to be predictable. And that’s a problem for Trump:

  • February 1: Trump orders 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
  • February 3: He pauses the Mexico and Canada tariffs for a month.
  • February 27: He announces that the 25% Mexico/Canada tariffs will be back on when the month runs out.
  • March 4: The 25% tariffs go into effect.
  • March 5: The tariffs related to the auto industry are paused for a month.
  • March 6: Tariffs on goods covered by the USMCA (a trade agreement Trump signed in his first term) are paused for a month. (That covers about half of Mexican imports and 38% of Canadian imports.)
  • March 7. Trump threatens tariffs on Canadian lumber and dairy products.

So OK, imagine you’re a CEO trying to decide where to invest your company’s capital. How do you plan for that?

Conspiracy theories. When the reasons a leader gives for his actions don’t make sense, inevitably people start trying to imagine what the real reason is. The most prominent conspiracy theories about the tariffs that I’ve heard are

  • It’s a shakedown. Your tariffs go up until you figure out who to bribe. The Big Picture blog quotes a study describing what happened during the trade war with China in Trump’s first term: “Politically connected companies were far more likely to receive valuable tariff exemptions than those that were not connected to Trump or Republicans. Specifically, the authors found that companies that had invested substantially into the GOP before or at the start of Trump 1.0 were more likely to win exemptions to Trump’s tariffs than those that had not.”
  • It’s a market manipulation. The market crashes whenever Trump announces a tariff. So if you know when he’ wa’s going to do that, you can make a killing by selling short, and then covering your short after he reverses himself. So Trump jerking the markets around is a way for well-connected insiders to make money.
  • Trump hates Canada.

The Canada-hating theory requires a little explanation. Trump’s original reason for both the Canada and Mexico tariffs was to defend the border from illegal immigrants and fentanyl smuggling. So in order to avoid the tariffs, Canada would have to address those problems and show real results. But there’s a catch: There is no problem to address in Canada. Take fentanyl, for example. According to the Council on Foreign Relations:

Canada plays virtually no role in the U.S. fentanyl influx, especially compared to the other countries. The country contributes less than 1 percent to its southern neighbor’s street fentanyl supply, as both the Canadian government and data from the DEA report. 

Paul Krugman puts it like this:

[R]emember that Canada can’t concede to U.S. demands, even if it were in a mood to do so (which it very much isn’t) because there aren’t any coherent U.S. demands; Canada has done nothing wrong!

But hey, truth has never been a problem for a Trump administration. Sunday, the White House sent National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett (and maybe some other people I didn’t notice) out to lie on the talk shows.

I can tell you that in the situation room I’ve seen photographs of fentanyl labs in Canada that the law enforcement folks were leaving alone. Canada’s got a big drug problem.

Yes, Hassett has seen photographs he can’t show you. I haven’t heard such convincing evidence since Bush and Cheney were getting ready to invade Iraq.

And here’s a graph no Republican will display: Fentanyl deaths in the US had been plunging for at least a year before Trump took office. Eventually, he’ll declare victory and take credit for everything that has happened since 2023.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is doing everything he can to piss off Canadians, suggesting they become the 51st state and referring to their former prime minister as “Governor Trudeau“. As a result, the US national anthem is getting booed at hockey games. And the patriotic “Joe Canada” character created by Molson Beer in 2000 has come back to defend his country from US imperialism.

They mistake our modesty for meekness, our kindness for consent, our nation for another star on their flag and our love of a hot cheesy poutine with their love of a hot cheesy Putin. … We are not the 51st anything. We are the first to unite in the crisis, the first to build bridges – not walls – and the first to stand on guard for thee.

So whatever Trump is trying to do to Canada, I don’t think it’s working. But what is he trying to do? That question is just as mysterious as the tariffs themselves. Krugman’s theory goes like this:

In any case, efforts to find some kind of economic justification for Trump’s Canada-hatred have the feeling of desperate efforts to avoid the obvious. Canada is a pretty decent place, as nations go. And Trump, whom nobody would describe as a decent person, dislikes and maybe even fears people who are.

Let me put a less psychological spin on this: Trump is building a hellscape, an America where people hate each other, let each other go hungry or die without healthcare, where diseases once eradicated come back, where corrupt oligarchs pillage the government and corporations are free to despoil the environment and treat workers like slaves. And then there’s Canada, right across the border, ready to demonstrate that life doesn’t have to be this way.

Sure, countries like Denmark or New Zealand also prove that point, but they’re far enough away that nobody in Trump’s base needs to notice them. Your cousin from Des Moines probably isn’t going to come home raving about Copenhagen or Christchurch. But Toronto, Vancouver — maybe. So Canada needs to be slandered in advance, painted as an enemy country full of propaganda that can’t be trusted. Say something about Canada and MAGA types will roll their eyes as if you’d just quoted something you heard on MSNBC.

And as for the tariffs, I’ll explain them like this: Tariffs are a power that Congress has yielded almost entirely to the President. So they’re a model for what Trump wants the country to be. He can announce a tariff without anybody wondering whether he has the votes for it. He says “tariffs” and there are tariffs. A day later he can say “no tariffs” and they go away. And every time he does, there are headlines and big moves in the stock market and people getting upset. Trump loves that stuff. He’ll never learn how to use his tariff power constructively, because it’s a toy that is just too tempting to leave on the shelf. For as long as he’s president, he’ll feel compelled to take that toy down and play with it.

March 10, 2025 – 10:12 am Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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