Tag Archives: Trump administration

Trump only has ICE for you

July 7, 2025 – 8:52 am

The most dangerous feature of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is one of its least publicized: ICE becomes a massive federal police force, overseeing a system of “detention” centers that could easily become concentration camps.

Despite all the side deals necessary to get it passed, the basic structure of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill never changed from proposal to signing: It cuts rich people’s taxes (with a few crumbs like no-tax-on-tips thrown in for working people), and partially pays for those cuts by also cutting safety-net benefits like Medicaid and SNAP (i.e., food stamps). What those cuts don’t cover gets added to the deficit. So:

  • benefits for rich people
  • cuts for poor people
  • more debt for everyone.

Probably you knew that, and maybe you also heard that there was money for immigration enforcement. But the sheer size of the new anti-immigrant money hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. NPR estimates the total immigration enforcement appropriation as “about $170 billion“. That’s larger than the defense budget of Russia.

The bill includes $45 billion to build Trump’s border wall. (So much for claims that he nearly completed it during his first term or that Mexico would pay for it. He didn’t build much of it and Mexico isn’t contributing a dime.) But the scarier piece of this is the additional $45 billion to build more ICE detention camps. The WaPo reports:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they plan to use the [$45 billion] to roughly double the nation’s detention capacity to 100,000 beds, giving them more capacity to arrest undocumented immigrants targeted for deportation.

Lincoln Square’s Don Moynihan puts this in perspective.

For context, this is more than the combined budget for all 50 state prison systems. The current budget for the federal Bureau of Prisons is just over $8.3 billion.

There is also money to hire many more ICE agents.

The agency, which currently has about 6,000 deportation officers, would also receive billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029.

Masked ICE agents kidnapping people off the streets and making them disappear is already a cause for concern. So is the Trump administration’s claim that ICE’s victims should not have due process rights. Now consider the possibility that the majority of these new agents will have less loyalty to the Constitution than to Trump personally. They will be Trump hires empowered to carry out a Trump mission (with the perk that they get to beat up a lot of brown people).

Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol comments:

Last spring, when Dan Ziblatt and I taught a comparative course on democratic backsliding, our study of the Hungarian and German (1920s-30s) cases left me slightly reassured about the United States today.  Hungary is highly centralized, and in Germany the most important state transformation happened just before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, when the previous government nationalized the Prussian police and bureaucracy, removing it from Social Democratic control in federated Germany’s largest state.  Not long after, unexpectedly, Hitler could easily turn the centralized agencies into his Gestapo core.  I thought last year that the USA was somewhat protected against any similar coerceive authoritarian takeover by its federal structure, given state and local government rights to control most U.S. police powers (I presented this argument in my Madison lecture for the Sept 2024 American Political Science Association). 

But now I see that the Miller-Trump ethno-authoritarians have figured out a devilishly clever workaround.   Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice.  Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources – much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens.  The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants.  They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can. 

Jay Kuo draws a worrisome conclusion that I share:

Once you spend that much on internal security, the system—which is profit-driven by the companies providing the apparatus—begins to feed on itself. It will demand ever more bodies in a supercharged prison/industrial complex.

And fascism expert Timothy Snyder is using the C-word:

With the passage of Trump’s death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.

In particular, Snyder worries that the detainees might become slave labor, which makes a perverted kind of sense: As Trump causes a labor shortage by rounding up immigrants, the detained immigrants might be rented out to do things like pick crops.

If these fears seem over-the-top, consider a little history. The Nazi concentration camps were not originally conceived as death mills. Hitler used the Reichstag Fire (in February, 1933) as evidence that a Communist revolution was at hand, and began rounding up his political enemies as Communist co-conspirators. Needing a place to put them, he opened the Dachau concentration camp in March.

At the time, Dachau was just a place political opponents could be kept outside the ordinary legal process. But as time went by, the convenience of having a black hole they could drop people into was just too tempting for the Nazi government. The mission of Dachau and the subsequent camps kept expanding, until they became the horror we now associate with concentration camps.

I find it too easy to imagine history repeating itself. ICE already sees itself as unencumbered by law, and its targets as undeserving of human rights. ICE may not, at the moment, be a Gestapo, and places like the new Alligator Alcatraz in Florida may not yet deserve the Alligator Auschwitz label critics have given it. But what prevents that progression from taking place?

All the visible forces push that way. We have already seen reality drift from the Trump administration’s rhetoric. Supposedly ICE was “making us safer” by rounding up violent criminals. But now they’re grabbing harmless people who are simply raising their children and doing their jobs, like the wife of this Marine Corps veteran and the father of three Marine sons. TracReports estimates that 71.7% of ICE detainees have no criminal record. CBS discovered that a similar percentage of the Venezuelans flown to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison had no criminal record.

Here’s a simple example of ICE’s sense of license: Florida law gives members of the legislature the right to make unannounced inspections of any state-run facility. Five Democratic legislators showed up to inspect Alligator Alcatraz and were denied access. Law? What law?

Imagine that someday you get scooped by ICE, maybe because you have brown skin and Spanish surname, or maybe because some AI has determined that your blog is too critical of Trump. There you are in Alligator Alcatraz or some other camp designed to hold undesirables. The letter of the law favors you, but the lawyers your family hires get the kind of run-around Kilmar Abrego Garcia has gotten. Where does your story go from there?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (9)

Questions to ask as a war begins

June 23, 2025 – 11:23 am

Saturday night, the United States joined Israel’s air war against Iran. The most significant piece of the US intervention was to do what Israel could not: drop giant bunker-buster bombs on the underground Iranian nuclear research facility at Fordow. The US dropped 14 GBU-57 bombs, the largest non-nuclear bomb in our arsenal. (They are also sometimes referred to as MOPs, massive ordinance penetrators.)

The attack came a week after Israel began bombing Iran, and ended several days of what had appeared to be indecision on Trump’s part. Wednesday, he said: “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” He suggested a two-week window for negotiations, then attacked in two days. (As several people have pointed out, “two weeks” is Trumpspeak for “I have no idea”. He seems to believe that two weeks is long enough for the news cycle to forget about an issue.) Like so many of Trump’s actions, this has been justified after the fact as intentional misdirection rather than indecision.

In response, the Iranian Parliament has authorized closing the Strait of Hormuz, but has left the final decision up to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. One-fifth of the world’s oil goes through that strait, which sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Closing it would raise world oil prices substantially, at least in the short term. So far, markets seem not to be taking the threat seriously.

As I’ve often said, a one-person weekly blog can’t do a good job of covering breaking news, particularly if it breaks on the other side of the world. So you should look to other sources for minute-to-minute or day-to-day coverage.

I also frequently warn about the pointlessness of most news-channel speculation. The vast majority of pundits have no idea what’s going to happen next, so taking their scenarios seriously is at best a waste of time and at worst a way to make yourself crazy.

So if I can’t reliably tell you what’s happening or what’s going to happen, what can I do? At the moment, I think the most useful discussion to have on this blog is to ask the right questions.

What are we trying to accomplish in this war? Failure to get this right has been the major failing in America’s recent wars. Our government has frequently marshaled public support by invoking a wide variety of motives, with the result that we never quite know when we’re done. Our involvement in Afghanistan started out as a hunt for Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership behind 9-11. But it quickly evolved into an attempt to establish a friendly regime in Kabul, combat Muslim extremism in general, test counter-insurgency theories, and prove that liberal democracy could work in the Muslim world. So our apparent early success turned into a two-decade failure.

Similarly in Iraq. Were we trying to depose Saddam Hussein? Chase down the (apparently false) rumors of his nuclear program? Control Iraq’s oil? Try yet again to build liberal democracy in the Muslim world? If all we had wanted to do was replace Saddam with a friendlier dictator, that’s not a very inspiring ambition, but we might have been in-and-out quickly. Instead, the failure to find Saddam’s mythical weapons of mass destruction left the Bush administration grasping after some other definition of victory, and getting stuck in another long-term war with dubious goals.

The early indications about this war are not encouraging. Maybe we’re just trying to make sure Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons. Of course, Obama had a treaty in place that did just that, which Trump ditched, claiming he could get a “better deal”. This war, apparently, is that “better” deal.

But maybe we want to topple the Islamic Republic. Maybe we once again want to control the oil. Those kind of goals bring back Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule“: If we break the country’s government, we own own the ensuing problems until we can fix them. That implies the same kind of long-term commitment we had in Iraq.

Of course, Trump might walk away from such a moral obligation, since he has little notion of morality in any sphere. Then we wind up with a failed state three times the size of Afghanistan, and who knows what kind of mischief might germinate there?

Did our attack work? The answer to this question depends on the answer to the previous question: What does “work” mean?

If the goal was simply to destroy Iran’s current nuclear program, maybe it did work, or can be made to work soon. Trump announced that the attacks were “a spectacular military success” which “completely and totally obliterated” the target sites. But then, he would say that no matter what happened, wouldn’t he? Without someone on the ground, it’s impossible to know.

And without regime change, or without some kind of verifiable agreement in which the current regime renounces nuclear weapons, any such damage is just temporary. Any nation with sufficient money and will can develop nuclear weapons. If Iran comes out of this war with money and will, it can start over.

If the goal is regime change or “unconditional surrender”, the attack hasn’t worked yet and may never. Air war is a poor tool for establishing a new government. I would hope we learned our lesson from Dick Cheney’s famous “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” comment, but maybe not. I’ve heard commentators cite internal political opposition to the Iranian theocracy as some kind of ally, but It’s hard for me to picture how that works.

Apply the same logic to the United States: I am deeply opposed to the Trump administration and regard it as a threat to the tradition of American constitutional government. But would I favor some Chinese operation to overthrow Trump? No. What if the internal opposition in Iran is like me? Might they have to unite behind their government to avoid foreign domination?

What could Iran do in response? It’s always tempting to imagine that I will take some extreme action and that will be the end of the matter. Probably you’ve seen this yourself in online discussions. Somebody says something stupid, and you come up with some devastating comment, figuring that the other person will slink off in disgrace.

It doesn’t usually work out that way, does it? The other person will strike back at least as hard as you did, and the exchange might go on for days. You never planned on a flame war eating up hours of your time, but there you are.

Same thing here. Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, sending the price of gas shooting up and the world economy reeling. It might attack American troops stationed in various places around the Middle East. It might launch terrorist attacks in the US itself. (Do you trust this 22-year-old to protect you?)

Even worse is the possibility of the unexpected. We seem to be at a hinge point in the history of warfare, where drones and various other new technologies change the battlefield in ways that are hard to imagine. Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s Siberian bomber bases is a case in point, but there are others.

Traditional symbols of power may be vulnerable, the way that the American battleships at Pearl Harbor were vulnerable to the new technology of air power. Are we prepared for, say, a massive drone attack sinking an aircraft carrier? What about a cyberattack blacking out some major city? If we suffer such an unexpected blow to our prestige and power, will we be able to respond in a rational way?

What will this war do to the United States itself? The War on Terror undermined the consensus against torture, and authorized previously unprecedented levels of government spying on ordinary Americans.

So far, this war looks like another few steps down the road to autocracy. We attacked Iran because Trump decided to. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, by contrast, was authorized by a bipartisan vote in Congress (to the shame of opportunistic Democrats who should have stood against it). That vote was preceded by a spirited public debate and mass protests.

This time, Congress was not consulted in any formal way. And even informally, a few congressional Republicans were informed ahead of time, but played no part in the decision. Democrats were not consulted at all. No effort at all has been made to convince the American public that this war is in our interests.

So far we’ve been treating this war as if it were a reality show involving Trump, Netanyahu, and the Iranian leadership. We’re just spectators. Until, that is, our city blacks out or we can’t afford gas.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (12)

Trump Invades Los Angeles

June 9, 2025 – 9:02 am

It started with ICE raids at Home Depots and other places undocumented immigrants might congregate to look for work.

Xochitl, a Guatemalan mother of two, was inside a McDonald’s that shares the parking lot with the Home Depot when she said she saw numerous agents running after men she sees every day but knows only by their nicknames. She said she momentarily froze but then began walking in the opposite direction of agents who were detaining food vendors on sidewalks.

“They were just grabbing people,” she said. “They don’t ask questions. They didn’t know if any of us were in any kind of immigration process.”

Anti-ICE protesters gathered, as they do in towns and cities all over America. (There’s a weekly protest outside a Massachusetts ICE facility one town over from mine. I haven’t attended yet, but I feel like I should.) Increasingly, ICE is targeting not the violent criminals Trump campaigned against (who never existed in the numbers he claimed), but the neighbors, friends, and co-workers of ordinary Americans.

By Friday, the situation had devolved into law enforcement officers using tear gas and protesters shooting fireworks at ICE. Who started the violence? Hard to say. In this video, a man describes an ICE raid causing a traffic jam. When agents began dragging people out of a local business, people stuck in the jam began taking videos on their phones. “We’re not there to protest. We were stuck at the light.” The tear gas, the man claims, was aimed at the people taking videos on their phones. “One of the agents, I hear them: ‘Go for the people with the phones’.”

Local officials thought the police response was appropriate to the size of the disturbance, but Trump evidently disagreed. Saturday, he federalized 2000 troops from the California National Guard and placed them under the command of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Using National Guard troops to control unrest is a well established practice, but usually the troops are requested by the governor. Here, Governor Newsom (and LA Mayor Karen Bass) opposed using the troops, but Trump sent them in anyway — something that hasn’t been done since 1965, when LBJ sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights workers.

Trump’s over-the-top response has created an additional reason to protest: the appearance of a military takeover as federalized troops are used against the citizens of a major American city. A weekly blog can’t cover breaking news, so I’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out.

The legal authority here is tricky. Jay Kuo breaks it down: Trump is invoking his authority under Title 10, which allows him to use National Guard troops to respond to “a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”. Characterizing spontaneous demonstrations as “rebellion” against the US government is a bit of a stretch, but it’s the kind of stretch the Trump administration has made before, like when it claimed illegal immigration is an “invasion” that justifies invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

But Title 10 doesn’t allow martial law.

So here’s the part that’s a bit hard to grasp at first. Title 10 permits the President to federalize the troops and put them under his command. But what they are permitted to do as military troops operating on domestic soil is still governed by other laws.

And one of those laws is the Posse Comitatus Act.

The PCA doesn’t allow federal troops to play the role of local law enforcement. All they can do is protect federal buildings and federal agents carrying out their duties.

The Insurrection Act makes an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, and so would be a step towards martial law. But so far Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act.

Now I’ll begin to speculate: It looks like Trump wants this confrontation, and is hoping the situation escalates. This will provide lots of violent video to show on Fox News, of blue-state citizens battling US troops. After a few days of that, he can justify invoking the Insurrection Act, turning LA into a military occupation zone.

It’s hard not to connect this directly provoked confrontation with the events scheduled for next Saturday. Trump has planned a North-Korea-style military parade in Washington. Ostensibly, the parade is to celebrate the 250th birthday of the US Army. But coincidentally, Saturday is also Trump’s own birthday.

Trump’s $45 million birthday party has incited plans for thousands of counter-protests around the country, under the theme “No Kings“. Whether he intends to meet these protests with state violence remains to be seen.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (6)

Are Trump’s Tariffs Legal?

June 2, 2025 – 10:21 am

Can Trump decide for himself the extent of his own power?

Many of the Trump administration’s most controversial actions are based on novel (and perhaps far-fetched) interpretations of existing laws. The most objectionable deportations are based on a bizarre reading of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, and soon the Supreme Court will have to rule on whether it really does give Trump he power he claims. Similarly, many of the tariffs he has declared are based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

But the same question arises: In the IEEPA, Congress delegated certain powers to the President. But did it delegate these powers, to be used in this situation.

Wednesday, the United States Court of International Trade said no.

The argument. Simplifying somewhat, the Trump administration argues that the IEEPA gives Trump essentially unlimited powers over tariffs. He can invoke the IEEPA by declaring a national emergency of his choosing, and once he does, the emergency powers Congress has delegated to the President allow him to do just about whatever he wants. Courts have no power to intervene, because the existence of an emergency and the measures necessary to deal with it are “political questions” that unelected judges have no business resolving.

The counter-argument is that emergency laws like the IEEPA delegate specific powers with limitations, not dictatorial powers for the President to use however he likes. Even if you could interpret the language of the law to grant unlimited power, that would itself be unconstitutional: Congress can only delegate its power up to a point.

Moreover, the courts have a necessary role in interpreting whether a President’s use of an emergency power is within the limitations of the statute. Otherwise we’re back in the dictatorial situation: The President has as much power as he says he has, and no one can say otherwise.

Ordinary tariffs. Some background: Presidents don’t ordinarily make tariffs. Tariffs are taxes, and the Constitution assigns Congress “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”. Congress is also empowered to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”. So that’s typically how tariffs get done: Congress passes a law establishing them, like the ill-fated Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

This Congress has not passed a tariff bill, and Trump has not asked it to. Instead he has invoked the IEEPA, which Wikipedia describes like this:

The IEEPA authorizes the president to declare the existence of an “unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” that originates “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” It further authorizes the president, after such a declaration, to block transactions and freeze assets to deal with the threat and requires the president to report to Congress every 6 months on the circumstances, threats and actions taken. In the event of an actual attack on the United States, the president can also confiscate property connected with a country, group, or person that aided in the attack.

IEEPA falls under the provisions of the National Emergencies Act (NEA), which means that an emergency declared under the act must be renewed annually to remain in effect.

A textbook example of the IEEPA in action was what President Bush II did after 9-11: He declared an emergency and blocked the assets of organizations identified as terrorist.

Emergency tariffs. Tariffs come into the picture because President Nixon used a predecessor of IEEPA (the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, or TWEA) to raise tariffs across the board. That action was contested in court, and an appeals court reversed a lower-court finding that the tariffs exceeded the power Nixon was delegated under TWEA. In reversing that decision, the higher court emphasized that the President’s power was not unlimited. Nixon had

imposed a limited surcharge, as a temporary measure calculated to help meet a particular national emergency, which is quite different from imposing whatever tariff rates he deems desirable

After that ruling, Congress passed IEEPA to pull back some of the power it had delegated to the President. The TWEA powers were now reserved for wartime, while IEEPA covered “national emergencies” short of war. These powers

may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.

Questions related to the balance of trade are dealt with in a separate piece of legislation: Section 122 of the Trade Act, where the President’s powers are still more restricted: Tariff surcharges are limited to 15% and 150 days.

But the Trump administration’s position in court is that the IEEPA’s delegation of power is essentially unlimited: It’s up to the President to decide what a national emergency is and what measures are necessary to “deal with” it. Courts can’t second-guess him, because that’s a “political question” off limits to the unelected judiciary. (So if the President declares that vaping constitutes a national emergency and banning pogo sticks is necessary to deal with it, courts have no power to intervene.)

The court didn’t buy any of that. The language of the statute is not the President’s to interpret.

This language, importantly, does not commit the question of whether IEEPA authority “deal[s] with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the President’s judgment. It does not grant IEEPA authority to the
President simply when he “finds” or “determines” that an unusual and extraordinary threat exists. … Indeed, “[t]he question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it.” [Biden v. Nebraska, 600 U.S. at 501]. The court simply asks whether the President’s action “deal[s] with an unusual and extraordinary threat.” Congress provided the necessary standards for resolving this inquiry when it enacted IEEPA, and the court’s task is to apply them.

Which tariffs are at issue? Trump used IEEPA authority to impose tariffs of three types

  • worldwide tariffs. The 10% tariff on all imports.
  • retaliatory tariffs. The country-by-country tariffs Trump announced on “liberation day”.
  • trafficking tariffs. Tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China to pressure them to prevent fentanyl smuggling into the US.

The court rejects all of them. There are other tariffs, including tariffs on metals and car parts, that Trump invoked on other authorities. Those were not questioned.

Nondelegation and Major Questions. During the Biden administration, the Supreme Court created new legal principles to restrain executive power. Nondelegation is essentially the idea that certain powers are so central to Congress’ role that they can’t be delegated. So legislation that delegates those powers broadly, rather than in very specifically defined circumstances, is unconstitutional.

The major questions doctrine says that large-scale grants of power to the executive branch must be made explicitly in the authorizing legislation. For example, the Court used this doctrine to knock down President Biden’s cancellation of student debt. The authorizing legislation allowed the executive branch to tinker with student loan repayments. But if Congress had intended to allow the President to cancel over a trillion dollars of debt, it would have said so explicitly.

Findings. The Court of International Trade found that Trump’s worldwide and retaliatory tariffs were balance-of-trade remedies that belonged under the restrictions of Section 122, not the IEEPA. A trade deficit by itself is not an “unusual and extraordinary threat” that invokes IEEPA emergency powers.

The President’s assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration or scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under IEEPA. The Worldwide and Retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra vires and contrary to law

The trafficking tariffs fail because they do not “deal with” the emergency that the President has declared. Fentanyl smuggling may well be a national emergency, but the connection to tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China is too indirect and tenuous.

“Deal with” connotes a direct link between an act and the problem it purports to address. A tax deals with a budget deficit by raising revenue. A dam deals with flooding by holding back a river. But there is no such association between the act of imposing a tariff and the “unusual and extraordinary threat[s]” that the Trafficking Orders purport to combat.

Trump argues that the tariffs are necessary to put pressure on the targeted nations, so that they will crack down on fentanyl smuggling.

The Government’s “pressure” argument effectively concedes that the direct effect of the country-specific tariffs is simply to burden the countries they target. It is the prospect of mitigating this burden, the Government explains, that will induce the target countries to crack down on trafficking within their jurisdictions. See Gov’t Resp. to Oregon Mots. at 39. But however sound this might be as a diplomatic strategy, it does not comfortably meet the statutory definition of “deal[ing] with” the cited emergency. It is hard to conceive of any IEEPA power that could not be justified on the same ground of “pressure.”

The Government’s reading would cause the meaning of “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to permit any infliction of a burden on a counterparty to exact concessions, regardless of the relationship between the burden inflicted and the concessions exacted. If “deal with” can mean “impose a burden until someone else deals with,” then everything is permitted. It means a President may use IEEPA to take whatever actions he chooses simply by declaring them “pressure” or “leverage” tactics that will elicit a third party’s response to an unconnected “threat.” Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers “may not be exercised for any other purpose” than to “deal with” a threat.

The ruling concludes:

In so holding, the court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage. That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [the law] does not allow it.

What happens now. The International Trade Court is not the final authority, and the administration has already appealed to the appellate court for the Federal Circuit. That court has put a stay on the ITC’s ruling until it has time to consider the case. Ultimately, this is probably headed to the Supreme Court.

That will be an interesting test for this Supreme Court, which expanded its own power to overrule presidential orders during the Biden administration. But do the same limitations apply to Democratic and Republican presidents? Or has the law become partisan, so that what was done matters less than who did it?

The politics. The Trump administration interprets all its losses in court as judges making their own policy decisions and trying to impose them on the executive branch. Stephen Miller, for example, decried how “15 Communist judges” spread through the courts can “block and freeze each executive action”.

That framing allows Trump’s people to describe the issues the way they want, and then say that judges are against what the administration is for. Trump wants to deport dangerous criminals, while judges want to stop him. Trump wants to defend our economy from predatory foreign countries, but judges want to stop him, and so on.

But that framing sidesteps whether the United States will continue to be a country of laws, or whether it will become a Trump dictatorship. The Constitution defines the powers of our government, and assigns them to different branches. When Trump gathers all those powers to himself — and more powers that the Constitution does not assign to anyone — our way of life is endangered.

Whatever legitimate goals Trump may have — deporting criminals or protecting American jobs or whatever — can be accomplished in legal ways. (For example, Trump could ask Congress for a new tariff law. He could deport criminals through the immigration courts.) When he ignores legal pathways in favor of illegal ones, he needs to be stopped.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (3)

The Greatness Paradox

May 26, 2025 – 8:50 am

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.

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“.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (13)

What’s up with the Supreme Court?

May 19, 2025 – 9:19 am

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.

At least for now.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , , | Comments (9)

As we approach our crisis of democracy, we’re in better shape than I expected

May 12, 2025 – 9:24 am

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.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (11)

On Tariffs and the Markets

April 7, 2025 – 10:29 am

Wednesday, Trump announced sweeping tariffs against almost every nation on Earth, with Russia being a notable exception. The plan included a 10% tariff on all imports, supplemented by specific tariffs ranging up to 50% on a long list of nations (including a few islands that are uninhabited).

He pitched the tariffs as “reciprocal”, i.e., matching our tariffs on imports to the tariffs other nations have put on our exports. However, no one can find nations whose tariffs are anything like the ones Trump is imposing in return. In his announcement, Trump also referred to “non-tariff barriers” to American exports. He framed any trade deficit as the result of some form of unfairness to American exports, which the new tariffs attempt to equalize.

As a result, when people finally figured out how the tariffs were being calculated, the tariff rate was simply half of the trade deficit with that country as a percentage of that country’s total exports to the US. So it’s a function of that country’s trade surplus/deficit with the US, not any specific unfairness in its tariffs or laws.

That’s how the highest tariff rate wound up falling on Lesotho, a tiny poor country surrounded by South Africa. Lesotho makes denim for jeans and also exports diamonds and a few other commodities. Few Lesothans can afford imported goods from the US.

The administration has made three cases for its tariffs, which The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out contradict each other. The tariffs are supposed to

  • Raise $6 trillion in revenue (if you believe Trump aide Peter Navarro).
  • Restore free trade by incentivizing other nations to negotiate away their trade barriers against us (if you believe Palmer Luckey).
  • Bring manufacturing jobs back to the US (if you believe Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers).

In order to raise revenue and increase US manufacturing, the tariffs have to last for many years, which they can’t do if they are a negotiating ploy to lower other country’s tariffs and trade barriers. Similarly, no tariff is going to restore coffee production to the US, because our climate doesn’t lend itself to coffee production.

Global stock markets reacted to the tariffs by collapsing. If you’re an investor yourself, you may not realize how unusual this is. A market truism is “Buy on rumor, sell on news.” In other words, you make your moves in anticipation of events, not in reaction to them. Once a thing is announced, you close the position you based on it and look for the next thing you think is going to happen.

So the widespread expectation, as the world awaited the tariff announcement, was that the stock market would get a small bounce out of it. Rumors of tariffs had been depressing stock prices for months, but once the news was out, investor attention would shift to something else. But the actual tariffs turned out to be far worse than anything investors had anticipated, so the reaction was down instead of up.

And boy, was it down. The S&P 500 lost more than 10% of its value Thursday and Friday, and opened sharply down again today.

So if the market isn’t anticipating tariffs any more, what is it anticipating? The recession these tariffs are expected to cause. J. P. Morgan is one of many forecasters now predicting a recession. Morgan economists anticipate the unemployment rate rising to 5.3%.

But no one knows how far the predicted downturn will go, because recession fears can be self-validating. People afraid of losing their jobs tend not to spend as much, which in turn causes other people to lose their jobs. Businesses expecting a downturn will cancel expansion plans and emphasize cost-cutting.

The administration’s response to these fears has been a no-pain/no-gain message that was totally absent from Trump’s 2024 campaign. On the campaign trail, Trump kept talking about positive change that would happen “very quickly” or “on Day One“.

But now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant is talking about a “detox period” where the economy breaks its addiction to government spending.

The right-wing news bubble is doing its best to help push the administration’s story, or just to distract its viewers from the bad news. When the market started crashing Thursday morning, I channel-scanned and observed the same thing The Daily Show saw:

CNN: Stock market plummets
MSNBC: Stock market craters
Highlights for Children: Stock market down big
FOX News: New info about alleged cover-up of Biden’s decline

Fox also focused on some silly thing Alec Baldwin said, as if he were the voice of the Democratic Party. Fox also removed the stock ticker from the corner of its screen.

So the 30% or so of the country that is die-hard Trump is likely to keep drinking the kool-aid. But the additional 20% that won the election for him is experiencing considerable cognitive dissonance and even buyers’ remorse. To them, Trump was a great businessman who would handle the economy better than Biden did. That image is hard to sustain as you worry about your job, watch prices of foreign-produced goods rise, and see your 401(k) investments sink.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (6)

Is this a turning point?

April 7, 2025 – 8:35 am

The scenario where American democracy survives Trump got a little more credible this week.

Consider the events of this week, all of which will be described in more detail in the weekly summary I’ll post later this morning:

It’s tricky to evaluate the significance of all this. If you look at it all pessimistically, Booker’s speech was a stunt that produced no direct congressional action, off-year elections are notoriously bad predictors of subsequent elections, Trump has announced and withdrawn tariff plans before that whipsawed the markets, and massive protests in his first term seemed to have little consequence. A month or two from now, none of this may look all that important.

But.

Six weeks ago, I posted “How Things Stand“, a summary of how Trump was threatening American democracy and where things might go from there.

So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.

What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.

It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate.

I projected a scenario that avoided the establishment of a lasting Trump autocracy, emphasizing that it was just a scenario, not a prediction. My point was that a way out of this was still possible. The first steps were:

  • Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
  • That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support.

I had hoped that the looming government shutdown of March 14 would be the time when congressional support would waver, and that Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass a continuing resolution without negotiating a deal with the Democrats. That didn’t happen. Mike Johnson was able to hold his small majority together to pass the CR on a nearly party-line vote. Then Chuck Schumer folded in the Senate (for reasons I found plausible but not necessarily convincing), ending the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So the government is funded through September.

However, the events of this week show that we’re still on the path I laid out. Again, I’m not saying that success is certain, just that there is still a way out of this through political processes, without widespread riots or civil war.

There is no legal or political mechanism that directly links public opinion, market crashes, or elections for relatively minor offices to the kinds of legal or congressional action that will halt the Trump/Musk coup or lead to the restoration of American democracy. However, autocratic movements rely on a sense of inevitability and self-confidence, with each usurpation of power emboldening its leaders and foot-soldiers to dare the next one. Autocrats depend on a sense of public helplessness that demoralizes opposition and makes each successive victim feel alone and unsupported.

The narrative of Trump’s inevitability and his opposition’s powerlessness ran aground this week. He remains in office and retains his grip on the levers of executive power. But his true supporters have never been more than about 1/3 of the American public, and many in Congress, the courts, the media, the business community, and elsewhere have lined up behind him more from intimidation or a lack of attractive alternatives than real conviction.

The momentum that has swept Trump forward can turn, with each act of opposition emboldening the next. All along, there has been a scenario in which his seizure of unconstitutional power fails. That scenario is still intact, and is more credible today than it was a week ago.

The Hands Off march in Portland, Oregon Saturday.
By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (5)

How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?

March 31, 2025 – 8:51 am

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?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (25)