The US Court of International Trade struck down most of the new tariffs Trump has imposed, while putting major restrictions on the tariffs he can impose in the future.
Ukraine launched an incredible drone strike thousands of miles from its border, destroying bombers on three Russian air bases.
Elon Musk had his last day as a “special government employee”, prompting reflections on what the whole DOGE thing has accomplished.
The featured post will delve into the court ruling on tariffs, leaving Ukraine and Musk for the weekly summary. Expect to see the featured post around 10 EDT, and the summary around noon.
Trump isn’t trying to make our communities safer from migrant crime, which is not a widespread thing. He is trying to divide us, to make us fear and despise other human beings who live in our communities, and to gain power from that division and fear.
This week everybody was talking about the GOP’s budget bill
Last week I wrote about what the “Big Beautiful Bill” contains: tax cuts for rich people, cuts to programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps that help the working poor, and a huge deficit.
Trump’s supporters will undoubtedly see hypocrisy my complaints about this bill’s deficits when I was fine with Biden’s deficits. But there’s a big difference: Biden was investing in the future, in infrastructure, and in mitigating the damaging effects of climate change. Trump is just transferring wealth from the bottom of society to the top.
The “Freedom” caucus in the House briefly slowed down the bill’s passage, but enough of them fell into line to pass the bill by one vote. The holdouts got a variety of concessions, but the big one is a further cut in Medicaid: the “work requirement” (that adds bureaucratic hurdles to the program and will cause millions of qualified working people to lose their medical coverage) starts in 2027 rather than 2029.
A handful of Republican senators are still pretending to care about the national debt. They will make lots of favorable headlines for themselves and their serious good intentions — and then quietly cave.
An obscure point about this bill deserves more attention: PAYGO legislation from years ago forces an across-the-board sequestration if deficits go too high. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the Big Beautiful Bill might cross that limit and lead to $500 billion in Medicare cuts.
and the ongoing wars
The Ukraine War continues, long after Trump’s promise to end it “in 24 hours” expired. As Putin responds to Trump’s attempts at peace talks with ever-more-deadly attacks, Trump appears to finally be recognizing that Putin is an enemy to peace. But he frames the situation as Putin-has-changed, not Putin-fooled-me.
“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post, adding, “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!
Pressed by a reporter to say if he was now seriously considering “putting more sanctions on Russia”, Trump replied: “Absolutely. He’s killing a lot of people. What the hell happened to him?”
The sanctions will never happen, because Putin is the alpha in the Putin-Trump relationship.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues and even escalates. I used to hesitate to use that word, but I don’t see how else to characterize the situation. This week, Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote an op-ed in a leading Israeli newspaper:
“What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians,” he said.
“We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit — but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly,” Olmert’s op-ed continued. “Yes, we are committing war crimes.”
I continue to denounce any attempt by Americans of any opinion to bring the Gaza War here. The murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. Wednesday helps no one. And there is even less justification for harassing American Jews for the actions of the Netanyahu government.
In America, we can and should argue about issues of all kinds. We have the right to speak out and peacefully demonstrate to make our opinions known. But leave the violence over there. Our goal should be to stop the violence there, not bring it here.
and Joe Biden
Last week we heard that Joe Biden has an advanced form of prostate cancer. I cannot remember bad news about a former president being met with less compassion. Don Jr. tweeted:
What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???
When he took flack for that stone-hearted comment, he struck back:
I sometimes forget that part of the mental disorder of leftism is an inability to understand sarcasm.
No, we get the sarcasm. What we can’t understand is posting a sarcastic response to another human being’s death sentence.
Laura Loomer skipped any attempt at humor and went straight for venom.
To all of you praying for Joe Biden, can you pray for the people he killed with his open border policies instead? “Ohhhh boo hoo he’s such a good guy booo hooo he’s such a fighter.” No he’s not. And no, he’s not. He is going down in history as the worst US President EVER.
No, Laura, I think your guy has that title pretty well wrapped up.
In a statement to Axios, an anonymous Biden aide said: “Yes, there were physical changes as he got older, but evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity.”
The spokesperson added: “We are still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.
“In fact, the evidence points to the opposite – he was a very effective president.”
I don’t know how much he did himself and how much he delegated, but everything that happened during the Biden administration was consistent with the man he has always been. The US was well-governed during his four years, and he did an excellent job of cleaning up the mess Trump left behind after his first term.
And whether you liked his politics or not, his career is done now and he’s likely to die soon. It costs you nothing to treat him like a human being.
The measles outbreak in Texas seems to be waning, but the disease is still spreading in New Mexico and Kansas. Officials worry about the outbreak spreading further as more people travel in the summer. Already, 2025 has the second-most cases of any year in this century.
MSNBC host Jen Psaki used to answer questions as Biden’s press secretary. One of the more charming features of her current show is to take questions from current White House press conferences and answer them honestly, something current press secretary Karoline Leavitt will never do.
I always thought Kristi Noem was an opportunist. But now we find out she’s also an idiot.
It’s been five years since a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, igniting protests around the country. NPR’s Michel Martin spoke to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. Activists M Adams and Miski Noor argue that the resulting movement to defund the police accomplished more than you might think. On the other hand, the NYT reports that police killings have risen every year since Floyd’s murder.
If you’re talking about jobs that could relatively easily be replaced with AI, I would suggest, at the top of the list: [mainstream media] political reporter. How trivially easy would it be to program an AI to crank out “Dems in disarray” pieces from now to eternity?
Trump’s notion of national greatness is stuck in the Napoleonic Era. That’s causing him to destroy everything that makes America great today.
Nothing is more central to the positive version of Trump’s image or to the aspirations of his followers than the idea of greatness. Throughout his political career, policies come and go, allies are cast out as enemies and then welcomed back into his good graces, and whether he wants more or less of something may change from the beginning of a speech to the end. But the slogan never changes: Make America Great Again. It’s been so steady that everyone knows it just by its initials, MAGA. You talk about MAGA followers or the MAGA Party, and everyone knows what you mean.
And who can argue with that goal? Don’t all loyal Americans want their country to be greater rather than lesser? The “again” may be controversial — when exactly are we talking about? — but “greatness”, who doesn’t aspire to greatness?
And yet, every day we see Trump tear down the things that have made America great: scientific excellence, the rule of law, trade, alliances, our open society, and the soft power that comes from the attractiveness of our vision. How does that make any sense? Is it just hypocrisy? Is “greatness” just a buzzword to exploit? A false banner for the gullible to flock behind?
I want to propose a different explanation. When we asked what era “again” referred to, we were on the right track, but we didn’t take it far enough. What era does “greatness” refer to?
Look at some of the things Trump thinks will make America “great again” and ask yourself what era they belong to. Invariably, they fit a Napoleonic view of greatness, not a 21st-century view.
Territorial expansion. Great nations gain territory while lesser nations lose territory. Taking over Greenland, regaining the Panama Canal, and annexing Canada, would be a sure sign of our renewed greatness.
Mercantile dominance. A great nation exports more goods than it imports, drawing in gold and silver. This was the dominant theory of economics at least until Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations came out in 1776 and for some while thereafter. Such mercantilism is the primary motive behind Trump’s tariff policy.
Manliness. In the Napoleonic years, Frenchmen were confident of their ultimate victory over England, because the English were “a nation of shopkeepers” that did not properly center martial valor in their national identity. This attitude resonates with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s prioritization of “restoring the warrior ethos” in our military, and getting rid of efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality”. As if armies still relied on glorious cavalry charges rather than drone pilots who might have any sex, sexual preference, or gender identity.
A Great Leader. A primary knock on democracy centuries ago was that it could not produce great leaders like Louis XIV or Peter the Great. Democratic leaders were barely larger than their voters and changed every few years. How could a comparative nonentity like Prime Minister William Pitt compete with a world-bestriding figure like the Emperor Napoleon? Similarly, how could a Kamala Harris or Tim Walz stand up to a contemporary czar like Vladimir Putin? Centuries ago, the pettiness and towering rages of absolute rulers were signs of greatness, while the self-control of a democratic leader seemed weak.
But think for a minute about what has made America great these last hundred years:
Science. Yes, the United States fielded valiant soldiers during World War II. But so did our enemies. Our margin of victory came from developments like radar, code-breaking, and the atomic bomb. As we enter into an era of war-fighting AI, global pandemics, and drones, scientific leadership is more important than ever.
Trustworthy institutions. The primacy of the US in the postwar era has less to do with being a military hegemon than with being at the heart of a global order. The dollar is the global currency. The US banking system is the nerve center of the world economy. US Treasury bills have been the default investment of all other nations’ central banks. Wall Street is the world’s stock market. Other countries tolerate this because (until recently) they have trusted US institutions to be reliable partners.
The rule of law. Why have so many entrepreneurs come to America to found their businesses? Because a fortune made in America was protected by law and safe from predatory rulers like Putin or Viktor Orban. Contracts were enforceable in America, rather than subject to reinterpretation every time an autocrat changed his mind.
Education. Around the world, families aspire to send their most promising children to top American universities like Harvard or Columbia. Much of that talent has stayed in America, and even the graduates who returned home brought with them American ideals and an appreciation of American culture.
Alliances and treaties. US power has been multiplied by the NATO alliance America leads. American support for international law and international standards has enabled global trade that produced much wealth.
Immigration. Immigrants have never been welcomed in America with open arms. But throughout our history, oppressed people around the world have seen America as a refuge, and have hoped their descendants could be fully integrated into our “melting pot”. This influx of energy and talent has kept our society young and vibrant. The freshness and openness of American culture has made the US a place of aspiration.
Moral leadership. No great power has ever been mistaken for a saint, and the US won’t be the first. But when disaster strikes anywhere in the world, the US has been among the first nations to help. This generosity has paid dividends for us, both in terms of influence and in our ability to fight epidemics overseas before they can arrive here.
Freedom. Much of the mystique of America has revolved around freedom: If you come here, you are free. You can say what you want and believe what you want without fear of government retribution.
Now look at what the Trump administration has been doing.
Trump’s attempt to cut America off from the world economy via his ever-shifting tariffs, and his focus on tax cuts in spite of trillion-dollar deficits has prompted a “sell America” response from the rest of the world. “Winnie Cisar, the global head of strategy at CreditSights … adds that investors now share ‘a general perception that the U.S. is perhaps a riskier place to park your cash than it was six months ago’.”
Trump has declared war on Harvard specifically and on US higher education in general. J. D. Vance has gone even further, openly declaring that “universities are the enemy“. Ellen Schrecker, a historian who has studied the McCarthy Era’s effect on academia in the US, finds that the Trump assault is much worse. How long until the world decides US universities are too uncertain and either keeps its future leaders home or sends them somewhere else?
His ambivalence about supporting Ukraine and constant flirting with Putin have convince our allies that America is unreliable. His “America First” vision openly rejects a world governed by treaties and international standards.
Another of DOGE’s first targets was USAID, the agency that feeds starving children overseas and prevents the spread of AIDS and other infectious diseases. Any money related to charity overseas is like to be reclassified as “waste”. Even American religious organizations have been falsely accused of “fraud” and “money laundering“.
So is Trump pursuing national greatness? Yes, but according to a notion of greatness that passed its sell-by date centuries ago. He aspires to a Napoleonic greatness and is oblivious to everything that makes a 21st-century nation great. That’s why his policies have America on its way to the dustbin of history, not to a new “golden age“.
The featured post today is another take-a-step-back post, where I try to make sense out of something that looks mysterious at first glance. The subject this week is greatness, as in “Make America Great Again”. There’s been a lot of debate about what era “again” refers to: the Confederacy? the Gilded Age? Jim Crow? Pre-feminism? When?
But hardly anybody asks what era “great” refers to. Because the meaning of national greatness has changed over the centuries. You can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out how “national greatness” can lead a movement to slash funding for science, destroy higher education, weaken our alliances, or undermine the rule of law. From a 21st-century perspective, everything Trump is doing tears down America’s greatness. So how can his followers be so gullible as to imagine he’s making us “great again”?
I think I know the answer to that one: Trump and his most ardent followers don’t have a 21st-century concept of greatness. They’re stuck in the Napoleonic Era, when “greatness” meant something completely different, like territorial expansion and mercantile dominance.
That’s the topic of the featured post, “The Greatness Paradox”, which should be out before 9 EST.
That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: passage of the “big beautiful” budget bill through the House, the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, and so on. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.
This week everybody was talking about the FY 2026 budget
Trump’s “big beautiful bill” squeaked through the House Budget Committee yesterday. Details about what the bill is intended to accomplish are in one featured post.
and Trump’s retreat on tariffs
It’s been about six weeks since Trump announced “Liberation Day”, when drastically increased tariffs freed Americans from the tyranny of full shelves and cheap products made overseas. Stephen Miller called it “the most significant action on global trade policy that has taken place in our lifetimes”.
Then it all started to unravel. (Timeline from The Guardian.) The bizarrely determined individual “reciprocal tariffs” imposed on imports from each country came and went in less than a day, even though deals had been announced only with the UK — and that one was still tentative. A week ago, Trump announced that the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods would go down to 30% for 90 days.
So here we are. The Treasury secretary is still threatening that the “reciprocal” tariff levels will be back if countries don’t negotiate “in good faith”, as if the US has been acting in good faith. But the markets have returned to their pre-liberation levels, as investors seem to be pretending the last six weeks were just a bad dream. Maybe Trump has learned his lesson now, as Senator Collins claimed after voting to acquit in his first impeachment.
If you get your picture of what’s happening from “news analyses” rather than experts who actually do the math, you might well think that the Trump trade war is basically over, that we’re back to more or less normal policy.
The reality is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy. And China accounts for only a fraction of our imports. Tariffs on everyone else are still at 10 percent, a level we haven’t seen in generations. And there are still other shoes to drop: Trump has, for example, been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
The trade war is still very much on. … In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.
and bribery
Other than going to Vatican City to sleep at Pope Francis’ funeral, the first overseas trip of Trump’s second administration was the tour of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf he completed this week. He took with him friendly tech-company CEOs “including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Palantir’s Alex Karp and two dozen others”.
While it’s not unusual for presidents to promote US business interests overseas, the trip’s biggest headlines concerned the benefits to Trump himself, including Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “palace in the sky” intended to replace Air Force One, which Trump has long considered shabby and whose replacement is behind schedule. (Technically, the plane is a gift to the US government, but Trump’s plan is for it to go to his presidential library foundation — which he will control — after he leaves office.)
Richard Painter, previously a government ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, commented:
[T]he impression is given that the position of the United States can be swayed and even bought.
and the Guardian reported:
Past administrations would have run from the perceived conflicts of interest being welcomed by Trump. … “The status quo has been saying no, because it’s an actual and apparent conflict of interest, and it could jeopardize our domestic and foreign policies,” said [Scott] Amey [of the non-profit Project On Government Oversight]. ”It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test for a lot of Americans.”
The lavish gifts and other investments come as Trump is reshaping America’s policy in the Middle East, skipping Israel and turning toward the Gulf states in a flurry of deal-making that could benefit both sides handsomely.
and the Palm Springs bombing
An IVF clinic in California was bombed Saturday morning, in an apparent terrorist attack. My first thought was that this was the work of people who believe in ensoulment at conception, upset that IVF clinics destroy fertilized embryos after they are no longer needed.
But no, it looks like the perpetrator, who also appears to have been the sole fatality, is an antinatalist. I had no idea what that was until NPR explained it: An antinatalist believes it is wrong to have children.
DOGE is still around, and still exceeding any possible authority it might have. It’s been trying to take over agencies that serve Congress, like the Library of Congress and the General Accounting Office.
Since the Republicans took it over in January, one of our three branches of government has been AWOL: Congress. The Executive branch has been all too active, as President Trump has sought to exercise powers the Constitution does not grant him. That has kept the judicial branch busy as well, processing lawsuits that try to block Trump’s illegal actions.
But where has Congress been? Not only has it passed almost no laws, but it has watched mutely as the Trump administration refuses to spend money it appropriated and closes down agencies it established. The Senate shrugged as Trump nominated one absurdly unfit and unqualified character after another to the most important positions in our government. And as one scandal after another unfolded, Congress has not even held any noteworthy investigative hearings.
However, there is one congressional power that neither the President nor the Supreme Court has yet figured out how to usurp in any major way: authorizing the government to collect taxes and spend money.
So we saw Congress act back in March, when the government was about to run out of money. It did just about the minimum possible: passed a continuing resolution that kept fiscal 2025 spending at more-or-less the same level as fiscal 2024. But the money runs out again when FY2026 starts on October 1.
From the beginning, there’s been pressure on Congress’ Republican leadership to put its mark on the new budget. After all, if the government keeps spending the same amounts of money on the same things, what was the point of giving the GOP control? The Party needs a budget it can take back to its voters and say, “See? This is what you sent us to Washington to do.”
Or, to put it another way: Republicans own the FY 2026 budget. They can’t blame Biden or Nancy Pelosi or any of their usual scapegoats. So what are they going to do?
If you’ve ever managed anything — a household, a church, a business, or whatever — you know that budgets are where the rubber meets the road. You can say lofty things about your values, your principles, or who you care about, but it’s all just words until you have to put numbers on paper. When real dollars start coming in and going out, your rhetoric doesn’t matter any more.
That’s a particular problem for MAGA Republicans this year, because much of what they’ve been telling their voters isn’t true. In particular, they’ve been claiming for years that government spending is full of waste and fraud that serves no legitimate public purpose. So spending can be drastically cut without hurting anybody other than the bureaucrats and the fraudsters. They can spend even more on Trump priorities like border security and missile defense, and still find enough waste and fraud to give big tax cuts to the Dear Leader’s wealthy friends — all without increasing the national debt that they claim is destroying the nation.
But then there are those pesky numbers, and disciplines like arithmetic that they still haven’t managed to write out of the national curriculum. So as of yesterday, when the budget bill squeaked through the House Budget Committee on its second try, it can be summed up in three points:
In theory, this combination — transferring wealth from the working poor to the very rich, while worsening the debt problem Republicans claim is an existential threat to the Republic — should repel the White working-class voters who provided Trump’s margin of victory. But we’ll see. Whatever comes out of this process, Trump will claim that it’s wonderful. Perhaps his MAGA base will be loyal enough and gullible enough to believe him, as they so often do.
What Democrats need to do during this process is keep the discussion focused on things that are real, and cut through Republican attempts to cloud the real issues.
Work requirements. The biggest attempt to cloud the reality of the Medicaid and food stamp cuts is the imposition of work requirements on recipients. This sounds great to the typical MAGA voter, who has been fed story after story of able-bodied young men taking advantage of the system. These moochers, Speaker Mike Johnson says, “need to be out working instead of playing videogames all day.”
When Arkansas applied this policy in 2018, it failed disastrously. Even though nearly all enrollees should have met the work requirement or qualified for an exemption, a large share tripped over the red tape and lost their health care coverage anyway. About 1 in 4 people in Arkansas subject to the requirements—about 18,000 people—lost coverage in just the first seven months of the new policy, before a federal judge determined that the policy violated the purpose of the Medicaid program and put a stop to it.
New Hampshire followed Arkansas’ lead in 2019, and similarly found that about 2 out of 3 enrollees subject to the new policy would have lost their health care coverage in the first two months—so the state suspended the program. Shortly after, it was halted permanently by a federal court.
And in Georgia, the only state allowed to continue a work requirement policy, which applied to a narrow eligibility expansion, the administrative costs to run the program were astronomical—nearly $60 million in the first year to cover just 4,200 people.
Think it through: If you’re going to require recipients to work (or engage in some other worthwhile behavior like school), they’re going to have to provide proof that they’re working, and do it on a regular basis. And you’ll have to hire more bureaucrats to check up on that paperwork.
Now picture the life of typical Medicaid or SNAP recipients, who are not playing video games all day. They’re working 30 hours or more a week at something close to minimum wage, dealing with inefficient public transportation or unreliable car pools because they don’t have a car, and probably juggling child care at the same time. Many of them are not well educated, so they have trouble navigating complex systems. Completing a new set of forms (with supporting documentation) every 90 days or so has a way of slipping through the cracks.
Now think about health insurance. If you’re healthy, nothing happens when you lose health insurance, at least not right away. Your kids will complain if you don’t get dinner on the table, and your boss may fire you if you’re late for work, but if your Medicaid paperwork slides a day or two, that doesn’t seem like an emergency. How are you going to allocate your time?
So yes, the government can save money by imposing work requirements. But those savings come from denying care to people who are actually eligible. (The people who are working the most hours are the ones who will have the hardest time keeping their paperwork up to date.) And much of the savings is eaten up by the increased bureaucracy.
The bill includes a range of other cruel Medicaid policies that should also come out. In yet another play to harass people off of their Medicaid coverage, it would roll back a rule finalized by the Biden administration to modernize and simplify how people enroll and stay enrolled in coverage. Repealing this rule will save the government $162 billion over the next 10 years— largely because rolling back the rule reinstates a lot of unnecessary red tape, which reduces the total number of people enrolled.
ObamaCare. For years Republicans tried to repeal ObamaCare, but now they’re taking refuge in it. Specifically, they argue that people who get kicked out of Medicaid can still get subsidized policies on the ObamaCare marketplaces.
Subsidized, but not free. And that brings up a public-policy aspect of healthcare: We don’t want people to gamble with their health insurance.
I know how this works because decades ago I did it myself: In the two or three months between the end of my final school year and the beginning of my first job-with-benefits, I went without health coverage. It would have cost me hundreds of dollars a month to fill the gap, which seemed like a lot of money to me at the time. I was healthy, so why not risk it?
I got away with it. Lots of people do. But the ones who don’t end up costing our healthcare system a lot of money, because emergency rooms are the least efficient way to take care of people.
Again, if you’re healthy, nothing immediately goes wrong when your health insurance lapses. The kids will suffer if you stop buying groceries, and they’ll complain if they have to keep wearing clothes they’ve outgrown. The landlord may throw you out if you stop paying rent. But if you don’t have health insurance for a month or two, maybe you get away with it. Doing without can look like the easiest way to fill the hole in your budget. And then months stretch into years, until something happens.
We don’t want to tempt people to make that trade-off.
Values. Finally, think about what we’re giving away here: health care and food. We’re not giving poor people sports cars and Super Bowl tickets. If someone “takes advantage” of you to get the medicine and treatment they need, or food for themselves or their families, are you really that upset? How many needy people are you willing to cut off to make sure that some handful of young men aren’t playing video games all day?
If your answer to that question isn’t tiny, you might want to take another look at your moral values.
Consider this a follow-up to last week’s post of qualified optimism about the prospects for American democracy to outlive the Trump administration. We continue to be steaming towards a direct clash between Trump and the Supreme Court. How that plays out will be a big factor in whether our way of government survives.
A lot of the pessimists I talk with say this clash has already happened and the bad guys won. Specifically, the Court told the Trump administration to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from the concentration camp Trump has established in El Salvador. Trump has ignored that order and gotten away with it. So: courts and laws are powerless and Trump will do as he pleases. For all practical purposes, American democracy is already dead.
I read the situation somewhat differently. To me, the Supreme Court and the Trump administration look like two fighters circling each other warily, each waiting to see if the other really wants to do this.
It already seems clear that the Court will not endorse Trump’s most obviously illegal acts. It will not deny that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, no matter how badly Trump wants that denial. It won’t agree that he can invoke wartime powers (like the Alien Enemies Act) when there is no war. It won’t endorse him unilaterally unmaking agencies made and funded by Congress. The administration seems to understand this, which is why it hasn’t pushed for the Court to resolve those issues quickly.
Instead, Trump’s lawyers keep offering the Court ways to surrender quietly, by writing itself out of the picture. For example, the portion of the birthright citizenship case that the administration argued in front of the Court this week did not seek an answer to the central question. Instead, it focused on whether lower court injunctions could cover the entire country. The acting Solicitor General argued for a system in which each loss in a lower court only affected the specific plaintiffs involved, leaving the administration free to ignore the birthright citizenship of any other Americans until they sued too. Only a Supreme Court ruling could shut the administration down completely.
This leaves an enormous loophole: If the administration simply refused to appeal a series of lower-court losses, none of the cases would make it to the Supreme Court, so there could be no national ruling against them.
In other words: You don’t have to endorse our position, Supremes, just write yourself out of the picture and let us proceed.
For its part, the Court has so far treated the Trump administration as if it were a good-faith actor, which it clearly is not. In the Garcia case, the Supremes supported a lower-court order to “facilitate” Garcia’s release, leaving the details to the executive branch. (That’s appropriate if the executive branch is acting in good faith, because the executive is presumed to be better equipped to deal with foreign governments.) In essence, it was offering Trump the opportunity to stop all this nonsense and start behaving like the kind of American president the Constitution envisions.
But of course he did not. The Trump administration interpreted “facilitate” in a ridiculously narrow way, and — surprise! — the details of Garcia’s release haven’t worked out. The government continues to give the lower-court judge a run-around as to what it is or is not doing to get Garcia back.
Sooner or later, Judge Xinis is going to tire of this and order the administration to present Garcia in his court on a particular date. That order will also get appealed up to the Supreme Court, which will then have to decide whether it is ready to confront Trump or surrender to him. If it isn’t ready to surrender, then Trump will have to decide whether he recognizes the authority of the Court. If he doesn’t, that’s the crisis point.
I don’t think anyone knows whether we’ll get there, or what will happen then. Trump himself may not know, and the answer may turn on how popular Trump is at the time, how the economy is going, how vigorously Republicans in Congress are standing up for him, how well organized anti-Trump protesters are, and a lot of other factors that have nothing to do with the case at hand.
It’s worth noting that so far the Trump administration is not acting as if it had thrown off the burden of judicial oversight. For example, on Friday the Supreme Court extended its previous ban on deporting any more people under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act until the administration’s invocation of the AEA’s wartime powers can be fully adjudicated. As best we can tell, the administration is obeying the order.
From my point of view, two things that happened this week are worth paying attention to: Trump and the Supreme Court continued steaming towards a democracy-rattling confrontation, and Republicans in Congress made a few more steps in the direction of passing a disastrous budget for the fiscal year that starts in October. Each one of those developments gets a (fairly short) featured post.
The first, “What’s up with the Supreme Court?” is done and should post soon. The second “The Big Beautiful Bill” should appear by 10 EST.
That leaves a few major things for the weekly summary: Trump’s turnaround on tariffs, his corruption-filled trip to the Persian Gulf, the Palm Springs bombing, and a few other things. That should be out by noon or so.
Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?
Leo XIV may surprise me, but at first glance it looks like the Francis faction won. The new pope seems more interested in the Sermon on the Mount than in fighting the culture wars.
I think the name he chose is significant: in 1891, Leo XIII wrote the ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), which has been the foundation of Catholic social justice thinking ever since. The main idea of Rerum Novarum is for the church to take seriously the plight of working people under capitalism. It represented a realization that without a clearly worker-sympathetic position, the church might lose out to some form of Marxism.
By choosing to be another Leo, this pope gestures towards both a sympathy with the lower classes and a willingness to modernize Catholic doctrine.
Much is being made of Leo’s American roots He grew up in Chicago, and his time the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago overlapped my years at the University of Chicago a few blocks away. We probably walked past each other on the sidewalk. Chicago is extremely proud to claim Leo, as the following cartoon illustrates.
To me, the greatest significance of an American pope is that he’ll be much harder for conservative American Catholics to ignore. (I’m looking at you, J. D. Vance and Sam Alito.)
and Trump’s legal losses
Yesterday, a federal judge in Vermont ordered Rümeysa Öztürk released on bail without travel restrictions. She’s the Tufts student who was kidnapped off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts by masked DHS agents and taken to a detention center in Louisiana. The administration obeyed the order, and Özturk is back in Massachusetts walking around free.
[Judge William Sessions concluded] that she has raised “a very substantial First Amendment claim” in her underlying habeas challenge, in addition to a “substantial claim” that the Trump administration violated her due process rights regarding her detention as well.
Prior to being arrested, Öztürk had been a Tufts Ph.D. student legally in the country on a student visa. What appears to have drawn the administration’s ire was an op-ed Öztürk wrote (with co-authors) in Tufts Daily urging the Tufts administration to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”. The judge wrote:
“There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.” Additionally, he noted, “I do not find that any of the contacts that she has in the community create any danger or risk of flight.”
If you read the First Amendment, you will notice that it says nothing about citizenship. Freedom of speech is a human right, not a privilege of citizenship.
In a similar case, a federal appeals court denied the administration’s motion to stay the release of Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. Mahdawi was a green-card holder who was arrested in Vermont when he appeared for an interview related to his application for citizenship. He similarly has no record of violence or criminality, and has only advocated for Gaza.
Several federal judges have ruled against the administration on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act; this is the basis for Trump to send people to prison in El Salvador. (See the same Law Dork link.) The Act allows the president to deport foreign nationals during time of war, predatory incursion, or invasion. Judges in a variety of jurisdictions have been finding that the current situation does not fit into any of those categories. Trump can call mass migration of individuals an “invasion”, but that does not match the way such a term was used in 1798 when the AEA was passed.
Yet another judge issued a restraining order against Trump’s mass firings of federal workers. (Same Law Dork link.)
“It is the prerogative of presidents to pursue new policy priorities and to imprint their stamp on the federal government. But to make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his co-equal branch and partner, the Congress,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote in the decision. “Federal courts should not micromanage the vast federal workforce, but courts must sometimes act to preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.“
… “Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the President’s Executive Order 14210 is ultra vires” — or beyond the president’s legal authority, in other words illegal — “as the President has neither constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch,” [Judge Susan] Illston wrote.
In general, I think the media is doing a bad job of explaining why the Trump administration is snatching people off the street, deporting American children, and so on: Trump was elected because he sold voters a dark fantasy about Biden’s America: The nation had been overrun by millions of immigrant criminals whose gangs had taken over our cities. The local police knew who they were, but couldn’t do anything because Biden protected the criminals. But Trump would be able to deport them all quickly. Millions of them.
So now he’s elected and has a real world to deal with: There aren’t millions of immigrant criminals and there is no migrant crime wave. If he just deports people for legitimate reasons, he can’t achieve the numbers his supporters expect.
As for Missouri, it is one of 40 Medicaid expansion states — because our voters wanted it that way. In 2020, the same year Mr. Trump carried the Missouri popular vote by a decisive margin, voters mandated that the state expand Medicaid coverage to working-class individuals unable to afford health care elsewhere. Voters went so far as to inscribe that expansion in our state constitution. Now some 21 percent of Missourians benefit from Medicaid or CHIP, the companion insurance program for lower-income children. And many of our rural hospitals and health providers depend on the funding from these programs to keep their doors open.
All of which means this: If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.
A preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with health care by 8.6 million over the decade.
They’re clever about it: They aren’t cutting “benefits”, they’re just slashing the federal reimbursement to states. Then most red states will scrap the Medicaid expansion associated with Obama’s Affordable Care Act, providing Congress with deniability: We didn’t do it, the states did it.
The end result, though, is exactly what Hawley says: People (particularly people working for barely more than minimum wage) will lose their health insurance, and rural hospitals will close.
Cuts like this (and to food stamps, which also affects the working poor) are necessary so that billionaires can pay lower taxes. And even then, a huge deficit will remain. I don’t know how Republicans will be able to sell this to their base. And if they can’t, their slim majorities in Congress won’t hold together well enough to push it through.
This is another example of the MAGA fantasy world running into reality. In the fantasy world, government is full of waste and fraud that a smart guy like Elon can point out and eliminate. That way, spending can be slashed without affecting ordinary Americans.
but I want to talk about optimism
That’s the subject of this week’s featured post. My view wouldn’t be optimistic in any other context: I still think we’re facing a crisis of democracy. But we’re facing it in better shape than I thought we’d be in.
and you also might be interested in …
Brought to you by the party that supports family values:
“Within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Smotrich said. “In another six months, Hamas won’t exist as a functioning entity.”
He told the listening audience that the population of Gaza, some 2.3 million Palestinians, would be “concentrated” in a narrow strip of land between the Egyptian border and the so-called Morag Corridor, which runs the width of Gaza between Khan Younis and the border city of Rafah.
“They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”
Beauchamp notes that this is “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
Trump has stopped just about all refugee resettlement in the US. But he has finally found a group of refugees he likes: White South Africans.
The Trump administration is bringing a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees next week in what it says is the start of a larger relocation effort for a minority group who are being persecuted by their Black-led government because of their race.
But are they persecuted? Not in any way that makes them stand out, and maybe not at all. But they’re White, so they go to the front of the line.
In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.
Nothing to see here, just a foreign government giving an extremely valuable gift not to the United States, but for the benefit of one person, who happens to make many decisions the government of Qatar might want to influence.
The Guardian reviews the rules on presidential gifts, which are legally regarded as gifts to the American people. Previous presidents have transferred gifts — none of them nearly this large — to their presidential libraries for public display. But in Trump’s case this appears to be a dodge, as the plane will remain available for Trump’s personal use after ownership transfers. Judd Legum:
Can we please stop staying that, after Trump leaves office, the $400 million plane from Qatar will be given to the “Trump Presidential Library” Libraries do not fly on planes. The plane will be given to Trump.
The measles outbreak continues to spread, and even though it started before RFK Jr. took over as HHS Secretary, he’s coming to own it. The costs of his anti-vaccine crusade are becoming obvious.
A Republican attempt to steal a state supreme court seat in North Carolina was finally thwarted this week, a mere six months after an election that the Democratic candidate won.
[Incumbent Justice Allison] Riggs won the election in November by just 734 votes, but [Republican challenger Jefferson] Griffin mounted a massive legal challenge to overturn the election results and disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters. At the heart of Griffin’s lawsuit was a challenge to 65,000 lawfully cast ballots that he believed should be tossed out, because of errors made by the North Carolina elections board. The board counted some 60,000 ballots cast by voters with allegedly incomplete registration. … In fact, the litigation raised no significant evidence whatsoever that any illegitimate votes were cast.
“This case concerns whether the federal constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals. This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible,” Myers wrote in his opinion. “To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”
Griffin decided not to appeal, so the case is finally over.
The US and China have agreed to reduce the massive tariffs each have imposed on the other, from 145% and 125% to 30% and 10%. The reduction is temporary: 90 days. We’ll see if that’s enough to cause trade to start flowing again. 30% is still a pretty hefty price increase.
and let’s close with something distracting
If you’re on BlueSky and looking for something to brighten up your otherwise depressing news feed, I recommend following Daily Bunnies. You’ll get a reliable stream of cute rabbit pictures. I guarantee that this sleepy bunny is not worrying about whatever is bothering you.
During my two weeks off, I drove cross-country and saw a lot of my old friends plus a few like-minded relatives. I was struck by how depressed so many of them are with the current political situation. Again and again, I had to be the voice of optimism in the room. For the sake of depressed Sift readers I didn’t see during my travels, maybe I should explain why.
Partly, I feel optimistic because I got my pessimism out of the way early. After Trump’s inauguration, I think a lot of people were expecting a second Trump administration a lot like the first. We got through that, they thought, so we’ll probably get through this too.
I was much more negative. Everything and everybody who had restrained Trump’s worst impulses during his first administration was gone now, so it seemed obvious he would make a play to become a dictator. It was also clear how that would play out: He would keep pushing until either Congress or the Supreme Court tried to stop him. Then there would be a crisis and we’d see who won.
We seem to be reaching that crisis point now, as the Supreme Court is going to have to decide whether to call Trump out on his flouting of their Abrego Garcia ruling. (To be clear, the administration is denying that it’s ignoring the Court’s order, but it’s interpreting that order in an absurd way that makes it meaningless.) So now we see whether the Court has the courage to stand up to Trump, whether Trump will decide that the Court has no power over him, and whether (if he does) Congress will just stand by and let him do it.
In addition, courts up-and-down the line have been restraining Trump’s illegal actions. And surprisingly often, Trump officials are obeying. Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish Tufts student masked DHS agents snatched off the streets, is now free on bail and walking the streets of Somerville rather than rotting in a Louisiana detention camp. She seems likely to prevail in her attempts to complete her degree in the US. Another detained student, Mohsen Mahdawi, is also free.
This is the point we have been headed towards ever since Trump was elected last November. What I feel good about is that we’re hitting this point in much better shape than I thought we would. For several reasons:
Trump is unpopular. Imagine if he had just taken credit for the good Biden economy rather than starting all this tariff nonsense. Imagine if Musk had focused on actual government waste and could point to real accomplishments.
He has visibly declined. Falling asleep at Pope Francis’ funeral (while wearing an inappropriate blue suit) is just the most obvious example. (Imagine if Biden had done that.) And while he’s always had moments of incoherence, it’s now unusual when he appears coherent.
The administration has multiple competing factions. You can see this in the persistent leaks saying Trump as about to reverse his position on something. That’s an internal faction trying to nudge him to reverse a position backed by a different faction.
His promises are failing. Trump has always been good at declaring victory and making his followers believe him. But he made some very definite promises that are obviously not being fulfilled: Prices did not start dropping “on Day 1”. He didn’t solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. And so on.
Popular opposition is rising. Early in the administration, I kept hearing anti-Trump people express their sense of isolation. No more.
Congress is wavering. You can see this in the floundering negotiations over the FY 2026 budget. More and more Republican congresspeople are realizing that they can’t get reelected on Trump’s endorsement alone.
All these factors add up to give the Supreme Court a little more spine, and to make Trump and his minions waver about open defiance. If Trump were riding high in the polls, at the peak of his powers, leading a united administration, facing little public protest, and backed by a solid Republican majority in Congress, standing up to him would be far more difficult, even for somebody like John Roberts who has an independent constitutional mandate.
That’s not to say that everything is going to go smoothly. There still might be rough waters ahead, and a Trump dictatorship is not impossible. But trends are going our way, and we’re in better shape than we were on Inauguration Day.
The Weekly Sift 