Don’t let the White House (or the media!) get away with calling trafficking people they don’t like to foreign slave labor camps “deportation.” As we’ve noted, deportation involves due process. It also (by definition) means removing a foreigner from a country.
As we’ve covered lately, the government’s belief that it can engage in human trafficking to El Salvadoran slave labor camps with no due process was unlikely to stop at just those who were not citizens. After all, it has already involved tons of people who could not be shown to have been convicted of crimes, and in many cases with no actual affiliation with the “gangs” the administration insists they’re members of.
And, when you don’t believe in due process, then there’s no way to prove you’re a US citizen in the first place. The administration’s hatred and mocking of due process already meant that they believed they could disappear US citizens to a slave labor camp without any chance at review.
But now they’ve come out and said it. On Sunday, Donald Trump hinted at it, and on Tuesday, White House chief propagandist Karoline Leavitt said the quiet part out loud, admitting that the White House would like to traffic US citizens to El Salvadoran slave labor camps (where they now claim they have no ability to get someone out, even if they shipped someone by mistake).
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses….
Leavitt suggested the effort would be limited to people who have committed major crimes, but Trump has also mentioned the possibility of sending people who commit lesser offenses abroad.
Let’s be absolutely clear: This isn’t deportation — it’s extra-judicial rendition of American citizens, precisely the kind of authoritarian practice that the Constitution’s due process protections were designed to prevent. The administration’s deliberate misuse of immigration terminology attempts to normalize what would effectively be government kidnapping.
Combined with Trump’s head of human trafficking, Tom Homan admitting that ICE is the main decider in who gets renditioned this way (rather than a judge), and we have a lawless, sociopathic administration that is set to disappear US citizens without due process.
This is something many of us have been warning about for months, and Trump and his minions are now admitting it.
Hopefully, by now, more and more people are realizing that when Trump says stuff like this, he’s serious. He’s not joking. He’s not playing 10-dimensional chess. He’s not trying to make “the woke” upset. He legitimately thinks that people he doesn’t like deserve no rights, no due process, no dignity, and has no qualms at all with shipping them to foreign slave labor camps.
And that’s why people need to speak out and make it clear that this is not just unacceptable and unconstitutional. It is pure sociopathic evil. This is crazed dictatorial “disappear people who annoy me” bullshit.
Yes, many people will try to hide and cower in silence, and that’s what the MAGA crew want. But it’s why we need to be speaking up and calling out what’s happening. The history books will record the unfathomable evil of Donald Trump and his loyalist minions, agreeing to push pure evil in pursuit of power. But those of us living it need to speak out about it now while we still have the chance.
The gravity of this moment cannot be overstated. The administration is not floating trial balloons or engaging in political theater — they are explicitly stating their intent to create an extra-judicial system for disappearing US citizens. With ICE empowered as judge, jury, and executioner, and El Salvador’s prisons serving as black sites beyond US jurisdiction, we’re watching the blueprint for an American gulag take shape.
This represents something beyond a constitutional crisis that transcends typical partisan divisions. When a presidential administration openly advocates for the power to extra-judicially rendition citizens, silence becomes complicity. The time for “wait and see” or “they don’t really mean it” has long passed.
We’ve already seen how quickly “exceptional” measures against non-citizens became normalized. Now, as predicted, those same mechanisms are being turned against citizens. If we don’t forcefully reject this assault on fundamental constitutional rights now, we may soon lose the ability to reject it at all.
The Supreme Court yesterday effectively provided the executive branch with a technical manual for legally disappearing people to foreign slave labor camps. While claiming to require “due process,” the Court’s ruling dismantles real protections by treating fundamental human rights violations as mere procedural technicalities that can be overcome with minimal paperwork.
We’ve been covering this administration’s attempts to create a program of trafficking people to El Salvadoran slave labor camps — from their claims that due process doesn’t apply to their mockery of judges who try to stop them. Now the Supreme Court has provided its blessing for the government’s abuse of the horrific Alien Enemies Act, so long as the government follows a few minimal procedures.
The Court’s ruling in the challenge to the administration’s Alien Enemies Act trafficking scheme dissolves Judge Boasberg’s injunction while pretending to care about due process. The Court’s sole concession? People must get a “reasonable” amount of time to file individual habeas petitions before being disappeared — a theoretical protection that will prove meaningless for most victims who lack the resources or legal representation to file complex federal court challenges in time.
Some courts still understand what’s at stake. The same day in a separate case, the Fourth Circuit upheld an order requiring the return of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. Judge Stephanie Thacker cut through the procedural nonsense:
The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable
Even stalwart conservative Judge Wilkinson, while quibbling over whether courts can demand (versus ordering the US government to “facilitate”) Garcia’s return, acknowledged the government’s fundamental error in that case. But while that battle continues — with Roberts putting the order on hold for more briefing today — the Supreme Court has already made its broader position clear. In dissolving Judge Boasberg’s injunction against the entire trafficking program, the Court revealed its deeply troubling approach to fundamental human rights.
The Court’s approach is concerning on multiple levels. First, as habeas expert Lee Kovarsky details in a devastating analysis, the majority deliberately misrepresents precedent, conflating ordinary detention cases with state-sponsored human trafficking to pretend this extraordinary situation fits neatly within normal habeas doctrine. This intellectual dishonesty enables human rights violations while providing only the thinnest veneer of due process — requiring individual habeas petitions that the Court knows most victims won’t have the resources or legal representation to file in time.
The Court’s four female justices, in dissent, lay bare the majority’s stark hypocrisy. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is particularly devastating, pointing out an absurd contradiction: while all nine justices agreed that even alleged gang members deserve due process, the majority simultaneously dissolved an order preventing people from being trafficked without any process at all. As she writes:
In light of this agreement, the Court’s decision to intervene in this litigation is as inexplicable as it is dangerous. Recall that, when the District Court issued its temporary restraining order on March 15, 2025, the Government was engaged in a covert operation to deport dozens of immigrants without notice or an opportunity for hearings. The Court’s ruling today means that those deportations violated the Due Process Clause’s most fundamental protections. See ante, at 3 (reiterating that notice and an opportunity for a hearing are required before a deportation under the Alien Enemies Act). The District Court rightly intervened to prohibit temporarily the Government from deporting more individuals in this manner, based on its correct assessment that the plaintiffs were likely entitled to more process. 2025 WL 890401, *2.
Against the backdrop of the U. S. Government’s unprecedented deportation of dozens of immigrants to a foreign prison without due process, a majority of this Court sees fit to vacate the District Court’s order. The reason, apparently, is that the majority thinks plaintiffs’ claims should have been styled as habeas actions and filed in the districts of their detention. In reaching that result, the majority flouts well-established limits on its jurisdiction, creates new law on the emergency docket, and elides the serious threat our intervention poses to the lives of individual detainees.
Basically: if we all agree that the government has to give everyone due process, why the fuck is the majority getting rid of the district court’s order that required exactly that?
The majority’s actions are doubly troubling because they’re using the shadow docket — generally meant for genuine emergencies and (usually) maintaining the status quo — to create sweeping new law without proper briefing. This isn’t just procedurally suspect, it’s dangerous. The Court is fundamentally reshaping the government’s power to traffic people to foreign slave labor camps without the careful consideration and full briefing such a momentous change demands.
Justice Jackson’s dissent captures the gravity of this abuse:
The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison. For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning. Surely, the question whether such Government action is consistent with our Constitution and laws warrants considerable thought and attention from the Judiciary. That was why the District Court issued a temporary restraining order to prevent immediate harm to the targeted individuals while the court considered the lawfulness of the Government’s conduct. But this Court now sees fit to intervene, hastily dashing off a four-paragraph per curiam opinion discarding the District Court’s order based solely on a new legal pronouncement that, one might have thought, would require significant deliberation.
The contrast could not be starker: four justices recognize this as a defining moment for American human rights and due process, while the majority treats state-sponsored human trafficking as a mere administrative puzzle to be solved through casual procedural hairsplitting. It’s not just the majority’s callous disregard for human rights that’s shocking — it’s their seeming inability to even recognize the gravity of what’s at stake.
History will judge this moment harshly. When faced with an unprecedented executive power grab to disappear people to foreign slave labor camps, the Supreme Court’s majority responded not by defending fundamental constitutional rights, but by writing a technical manual for how to make human trafficking technically legal. In doing so, they’ve failed not just the immediate victims of this program, but their core duty to protect basic human rights and liberty against government overreach.
We came a bit too close to losing one of the most important First Amendment protections in American history — but at least for now we have a tiny bit of good news. Billionaire Steve Wynn, joining a growing chorus of the wealthy and powerful who want to make it easier to sue critics into silence, asked the Supreme Court to gut NY Times v. Sullivan’s vital “actual malice” standard. But last month, the Court turned him down, quietly listing his cert petition among the denied without comment.
While a simple cert denial may seem unremarkable, in today’s environment where foundational speech protections face relentless attack, keeping Sullivan’s protections intact represents a crucial firewall against wealthy interests weaponizing defamation law to silence critics.
The Sullivan standard exists for a very specific and crucial reason: to prevent the wealthy and powerful from using defamation lawsuits to bully critics into silence. The Court rightly recognized that if every minor mistake or inaccuracy about a public figure could trigger ruinous litigation, meaningful public discourse would become impossible. The “actual malice” standard (a confusingly named term that has nothing to do with “malice,” actual or not) requires plaintiffs to prove that false statements were made with knowledge of their falsity, or at least a strong suspicion that the statements were false.
Without this protection, billionaires like Wynn could bankrupt media outlets and critics simply by threatening expensive litigation over any perceived slight or minor factual error. The chilling effect would be devastating — who would risk reporting on corruption or misconduct if a single mistake could lead to financial ruin?
The “actual malice” standard has been so key to American free speech for over half a century that stripping it away would be a disaster of epic proportions.
Over the past decade, we’ve watched a coordinated campaign emerge to dismantle this vital protection. It started with Donald Trump’s calls to “open up” libel laws, but quickly evolved into a sophisticated infrastructure of MAGA-crafted nonsense legal scholarship and judicial skepticism. Federalist Society lawyers who once defended Sullivan began portraying it, practically overnight, as constitutional overreach (giving you a clear suggestion of just how “principled” some of those lawyers really are).
Basically, once Donald Trump said “jump” regarding defamation law, the MAGA legal infrastructure quickly began figuring out just how they should jump.
Most worryingly, two Supreme Court justices have explicitly called for overturning Sullivan. Justice Thomas led the charge (conveniently forgetting his own support for the standard during his confirmation hearings), followed by Justice Gorsuch, who was so eager to attack the standard that he relied on a deeply flawed law review article and had to quietly revise his dissent after its errors were exposed. We covered this disturbing evolution in detail in our recent podcast with “Murder the Truth” author David Enrich.
This cert denial suggests that, at least for now, there aren’t four justices ready to revisit Sullivan. We know Thomas and Gorsuch want to overturn it, and Alito likely agrees (he rarely strays from Thomas on such matters). But they needed a fourth vote to grant cert, and apparently couldn’t find one.
While it’s somewhat reassuring that two-thirds of the Court seems unwilling to demolish this crucial First Amendment protection, the fact that three justices appear eager to do so remains deeply concerning. The coordinated campaign against Sullivan isn’t going away — if anything, it’s gaining momentum. This cert denial bought us some time, but the next wealthy plaintiff with a grudge is surely already preparing their petition.
For now though, this firewall against frivolous defamation suits by the powerful remains intact. And in an era where free speech faces unprecedented challenges from all directions, we’ll take what small, but important, victories we can get.
In what might be the most perfectly on-brand Elon Musk move yet, at the end of March on a Friday evening, Elon Musk suddenly declared that xAI, his AI company that was always connected at the hip with X (which we’d been calling ExTwitter to avoid confusion), was officially “acquiring” X at a valuation of $33 billion (or, actually, $45 billion minus the $12 billion debt).
Many people likely reacted by saying, “Wait, they weren’t the same company, already?” And that’s a fair question, given how intertwined they’ve been. But no, they were technically separate companies. Just ones that shared the same majority shareholder, as well as apparently employees who would move from one to the other, and at times access to technology that Tesla supposedly bought. Oh, and also, technically X owned some of xAI’s shares. (The fact that X owned some of xAI’s shares — initially 25% but apparently diluted down to 12% at the time of Musk’s announcement — just adds another layer of circularity to this corporate ouroboros.)
This “merger” represents something of a perfect capstone to Musk’s evolving relationship with traditional corporate governance. Where most companies at least maintain the pretense of following standard M&A procedures, Musk has essentially decided that even the appearance of proper process is unnecessary. It’s just too much hassle.
Of course, the second question once you understand this is… “huh?” And it’s a good question. After all, most of the investors in Musk’s boondoggle with ExTwitter had pretty much given up hope that the investment would ever be worth any actual money.
Did anyone know X was for sale? Was the company shopped around before deciding to sell out to xAI? Were any bankers hired to value the two companies and set an exchange ratio? Yes, the two companies are private and majority-owned by Elon, but there are plenty of minority investors at each company. Were they consulted? Was anyone looking out for their interests?
Also, on the governance front, were there special committees of the boards of directors set up to evaluate the deal and make sure it was fair to the non-Elon shareholders? Supposedly, Morgan Stanley represented both companies in the deal. (Morgan Stanley was also the lead advisor to Elon when he bought X in October 2022, and was the lead underwriter on the $13 billion of X debt.)
The conflicts here are almost comically perfect. In a normal merger, you’d have independent boards, fairness opinions, maybe even competing bids. The acquiring company would hire one investment bank, the target would hire another, and they’d duke it out over valuation. But here? Morgan Stanley is representing both sides while also being the lead debt holder on the original Twitter acquisition. It’s like having the same lawyer represent both the plaintiff and defendant while also being the judge.
But that’s actually the point. This isn’t really an M&A deal in any traditional sense. It’s more like a corporate shell game where Musk is moving his disappointed Twitter investors into the frothy world of AI by basically saying “look over here at this shiny new valuation!” The traditional guardrails of corporate governance — you know, those pesky things designed to protect minority shareholders — are treated as less than afterthoughts, rather than actual rules.
The valuations. The split. The permissions. The conflicts of interest. None of it matters. The creditors and the equity holders in ExTwitter aren’t going to complain because they’re better off now. The investors in xAI likely aren’t really complaining either because even though they likely just got shafted in overpaying for a toxic asset, they just ponied up for another chunk of Elon’s johnny-come-lately AI plan, and if someone’s investing in anything Elon-related now, they’re likely true believers that Elon can do no wrong.
Nobody cares.Musk has absolute control of (1) xAI, (2) X and (3) US government regulators. If he wants to smush X and xAI together, no one will complain, and it doesn’t mean anything. Surely Musk isn’t required to file forms or get regulatory approvals anymore. He is not required to abide by merger best practices or zealously protect the interests of minority shareholders, in part because all his companies have left Delaware, but in larger part because none of the shareholders of his private companies complain about anything he does. If you are giving money to a private Musk venture, it’s because you trust Musk to make decisions, not because you care about corporate formalities.
X/xAI is the largest M&A deal so far in 2025 in the sense that it values X at, you know, 33/80 of the value of xAI, and Musk announced that xAI is worth $80 billion, and all of that is reasonably plausible though not clearly validated by arm’s-length transactions with economically motivated counterparties. xAI last raised money in December at a $51 billion valuation; it was reportedly looking to raise more at a $75 billion valuation last month. X raised money at a $33 billion equity valuation earlier this month, but (1) some of that money came from Musk and (2) I wonder if this deal was already in the works at the time? In hindsight, X’s funding round looks a little like it might have been designed to validate a merger price.
In any case, it’s barely an M&A deal? Two companies that were owned by the same person (and some slightly non-overlapping friends) and shared employees and data and revenue and, you know, a name, are now one company. They were informally one company before, and they are formally one company now, and no money changed hands. It feels like a silly technicality to call this a big M&A deal.
Yeah. This is a unique… I hesitate to call it a “deal”… announcement. What makes it particularly notable is how it represents a sort of end-stage evolution of Silicon Valley’s already loose relationship with corporate governance. Earlier tech companies at least maintained the pretense of following standard M&A procedures. Here, Musk has essentially decided that even the appearance of proper process is unnecessary, because it’s really too much of a hassle.
In a normal world, this move likely benefits those who bet on ExTwitter and substantially harms some of the investors in xAI by diminishing the supposed value of their equity, but it’s all made up funny money anyway at this point. And that’s perhaps the most telling aspect of this entire situation: in an ecosystem where valuations are increasingly divorced from reality, where “funding secured” has become a punchline rather than a legal standard, and where the traditional rules of corporate finance seem optional, Musk has simply taken these trends to their logical conclusion.
The math here is particularly telling: xAI, barely two years old, is supposedly worth $80 billion because… well, because AI is hot and Musk says so. X/Twitter, which actually has users and revenue (though massively less of both than when Musk bought it), is worth $33 billion because… that’s a number that makes the deal work. None of these numbers mean anything in any traditional sense, but that’s kind of the point.
The genius of this deal, if you want to call it that, is how it solves multiple problems at once. The X/Twitter investors get to pretend their investment isn’t underwater by trading it for shares in a shiny AI company. The xAI investors get to pretend their inflated valuation makes sense because look, they just did a real big boy merger at that price. Musk gets to pretend he didn’t destroy tens of billions in value at Twitter because now it’s part of a bigger, more valuable company. Morgan Stanley gets to pretend its original Twitter debt might actually be worth something. Everyone gets to pretend!
And that’s really what makes this the perfect deal for 2025. In an era where corporate finance has become increasingly performative — where valuations are more meme than math, where conflicts of interest are features rather than bugs, and where traditional corporate governance is for the little people — Musk hasn’t so much broken the system as shown us its logical conclusion.
The financial world used to at least maintain the pretense that numbers meant something, that process mattered, that rules existed for a reason. But why bother with all that when you can just… not? When you can have the same bank advise both sides of a deal while holding the debt, announce whatever valuation makes your story work, and treat corporate governance like an optional DLC pack that you’ve chosen not to purchase?
It’s like the perfect “deal” for the Trump/Musk administration.
Welcome to the era where corporate finance is just another form of shitposting.
When most people make a serious mistake that harms someone else, they try to fix it. That’s basic human decency. But when the Trump administration admits to “mistakenly” trafficking someone with protected status to an El Salvador slave labor camp, their response is to mock the judge who ordered them to try to fix it.
Last week, I wrote about the lawless evil of denying due process, focusing on how the administration is human trafficking people (not “deporting” them — deportation requires due process) to El Salvadoran slave labor camps. I used the word “evil” deliberately, as it’s not a word I use lightly. The administration’s gleeful response to their admitted “mistake” only reinforces that conclusion.
That story discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who goes by Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly trafficked by the US. Remember, the US admitted this directly: they knew he had protected status in the US that prevented them from sending him to El Salvador. And did so anyway:
On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error
On Friday, the district court judge overseeing his case made what seems like a reasonable ruling in response to the DOJ’s direct admission of supposed “error.” The judge told them to fix it.
And, normally, when good people make an error, they will do their best to fix it.
But here, something very different happened. First, the DOJ went to court, telling the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that the district court judge was being ridiculous in suggesting they fix things.
That order is indefensible. Foremost, it commands Defendants to do something they have no independent authority to do: Make El Salvador release Abrego Garcia, and send him to America. That is why Plaintiffs did not even ask the district court for an order directing Abrego Garcia’s return. As Plaintiffs themselves acknowledged, a federal court “has no jurisdiction over the Government of El Salvador and cannot force that sovereign nation to release Plaintiff Abrego Garcia from its prison.” Emergency TRO Mot., ECF No. 2, at 2. That concession is all that is needed to order a stay here. No federal court has the power to command the Executive to engage in a certain act of foreign relations; that is the exclusive prerogative of Article II, immune from superintendence by Article III. But that is exactly what this order does. Indeed, it is the only thing it does—requiring Defendants, on the clock, to try to force a foreign country to take a discrete action. That sort of FRCP 65 diplomacy is simply intolerable in our system of government.
But that was hardly the only thing the government did. El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, first mocked the judge on ExTwitter, posting a gif meme from “The Secret Life of Pets.” While this kind of shitposting is the sort of thing you’d probably expect these days, watching US officials gleefully respond to a foreign nation mocking the US courts is… well… pretty fucked up.
Elon Musk laughing about it is all kinds of fucked up. He’s literally laughing at the fact the administration he works for trafficked an innocent man, who had protected status in the US, to a slave camp in a foreign country, which they admit was a mistake.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s response dripped with contempt for judicial authority: “We suggest the Judge contact President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.” This deliberately mischaracterizes the ruling — the judge isn’t claiming authority over El Salvador, she’s ordering the US government to attempt to fix its own admitted mistake.
Even more telling was Stephen Miller’s response. Miller, the architect of many of the administration’s cruelest immigration policies, called the judge a “Marxist” (based on nothing but her ruling against unconstitutional actions) and sneered that she “now thinks she’s president of El Salvador.” This isn’t just wrong — it’s a calculated attempt to delegitimize judicial oversight of executive power.
Let’s be clear about what the administration is really claiming here: that they can grab anyone — anyone — off the street, and traffic them to a notorious slave labor camp in another country with no due process, where the US is paying the El Salvadoran government for taking these people, and there’s nothing that can be done. Even when the US government admits it made a mistake.
And, again, this is why I pointed out why due process was so central to the rule of law in the first place. If you don’t want to make these kinds of mistakes, you have due process there to make sure that such mistakes don’t happen.
But this administration doesn’t care about mistakes. They don’t care about human trafficking innocent people. They don’t care that they’re sending people likely to their deaths in slave labor camps in another country by “accident.”
That’s just evil.
Even if we’re talking about it as a legal matter, law professor Steve Vladeck points out that the DOJ is full of shit in claiming there’s nothing they can do here:
Federal courts may not have the power to compel the release of an individual from a foreign prison, but they unquestionably have the power to order theU.S. governmentto take whatever steps it can to effectuate the same result.
And that’s all that the judge is doing: telling the US government to fix its own fuckup.
And there are clear precedents for this kind of judicial authority, as Vladeck explains. It’s settled law that someone can be in “constructive custody” even when physically held by another country, if that detention happens at the behest of U.S. officials. The courts have repeatedly affirmed their power to order U.S. officials to take steps to address such situations.
Consider the case of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a U.S. citizen who was being held in Saudi Arabia in 2004. Abu Ali’s parents brought a habeas petition in the D.C. federal district court (naming Attorney General Ashcroft as the respondent), alleging that, although their son was in a Saudi prison, he was being held (and interrogated) only at the behest of the U.S. government as a way of avoiding judicial review in the United States.Judge Bates ruled that, if those allegations were valid, he would have jurisdiction over the habeas petition—not because he could order the Saudi government to release one of its own prisoners, but because he could order the U.S. government to cease doing … whatever it was doing. Bates thus ordered jurisdictional discovery into the extent of the U.S. government’s involvement—at which point, the U.S. government … mooted the case (by indicting Abu Ali on criminal charges and promptly transferring him to U.S. custody in Virginia—indirectly vindicating the central allegation in his habeas petition).1
The Abu Ali case is evocative, but it’s no outlier. Every first-year Civil Procedure student who suffers through “personal jurisdiction” learns that courts can use their power over defendants who are in their jurisdiction to regulate conduct that occurs elsewhere. And so the question in the Abrego Garcia case is not whether Judge Xinis can order President Bukele to do anything (she can’t); it’s whether and to what extent Secretary Noem, who certainlyissubject to Judge Xinis’s jurisdiction, can take steps to effectuate Abrego Garcia’s return.
So here’s the truly horrifying part about this. It would be one thing if Noem/DHS/DOJ tried to get Garcia back and Bukele told them to fuck off. They could then tell the court that, and it just becomes a foreign relations issue between two countries.
No, the horrific and fucking evil part is that the US government is making it clear they won’t even try to fix this error, and in fact they find the whole thing kind of amusing. They ignored basic due process and made a huge, life-destroying “error” in trafficking someone to a slave labor camp in another country when they knew he had protected status in the US. And they won’t even attempt to get the guy back.
And everyone knows if the US wanted him back, they could convince El Salvador to send him back.
But they won’t try. Because they don’t care.
It’s not that Judge Xinis is ordering El Salvador to do something. She’s ordering the US government to do something well within its power. And the US government is laughing at her.
As Vladeck powerfully explains, what’s at stake here goes far beyond one case:
And at a more fundamental level, it would be rather stunning if the law were otherwise. A world in which federal courts lacked the power to order the government to take every possible step to bring back to the United States individuals like Abrego Garcia is a world in which the government could sendany of usto a Salvadoran prison without due process, claim that the misstep was a result of “administrative error,” and thereby wash its hands of any responsibility for what happens next.
That’s exactly what’s happening here. The administration isn’t just failing to fix a mistake — they’re establishing the principle that they can disappear anyone they want into foreign prisons, claim it was an “administrative error,” and face zero consequences. Their mocking response to the judge’s order isn’t just cruelty toward Abrego Garcia — it’s a declaration that they view themselves as completely unbound by the rule of law.
Most people, when they make mistakes, try to fix them. That’s basic human decency. But this administration has made it clear they’re not even willing to try — not because they can’t, but because they see “mistakes” like this as features of their system, not bugs. They’re telling us, through their actions and their sneering response to judicial oversight, that they intend to keep making these “mistakes.” That’s not just cruel or incompetent. That’s a sociopathic level of evil that this history books will remember. Future generations will question how anyone allowed this to happen.
If you’re the President of the United States and you don’t like a law, you can apparently just… decide not to enforce it for a while? I mean, it’s not supposed to work that way, but for the past 74 days, that’s exactly what’s happened with the TikTok ban. Not just ignoring it quietly — Trump has explicitly declared we’re ignoring it. And today, he announced we’ll keep ignoring it for another 75 days.
The history here is instructive. First, Trump wanted to ban TikTok because teens were mean to him on it. Then Biden wanted to ban it because… China bad? Then Congress actually passed a ban because kids were using TikTok to express opinions about Gaza. Throughout all of this, the ban remained both stupid and unconstitutional (yes, even though the Supreme Court disagrees).
Somehow, this collection of terrible reasons resulted in an actual law, scheduled to take effect the day before the new administration started. But then Trump, whose stance conveniently shifted after a major TikTok investor donated to his campaign, simply declared “let’s ignore the law for 75 days” while floating vague ideas about “the US” buying TikTok.
For 75 days, we’ve mostly heard whispers about potential buyers expressing interest. There was some talk about how a deal was “imminent,” though many of the leaked details sound suspiciously familiar — China would retain control of the algorithm, data would be hosted on Oracle servers, with Oracle auditing for safety. If this sounds like déjà vu, it should: this already happened back in 2022. We wrote about it at the time, but apparently that was in a parallel universe, because everyone has been acting like it didn’t happen.
Anyway, apparently that “imminent” deal wasn’t actually so imminent. Because what is time, really?
Again, let’s be clear, because this is beyond ridiculous. The President has no authority to just declare “we’re ignoring this law for 75 days unless you do the thing I want.” But, that seems to be what a bunch of people are just going with. Astounding.
And, remember, this comes after years of politicians and the media insisting loudly and repeatedly that TikTok was “digital fentanyl” and the most dangerous thing in the world. The reasons would change based on who you were talking to, but either it was the Chinese Communist Party spying on all your phones (not how this works) or they were promoting pro-China propaganda (even as US views towards China are at all time lows) or they were promoting division (seems like that was cable news actually) or they were promoting terrorists (I dunno, man, none of this makes sense).
The fundamental problem isn’t just that this is Calvinball policymaking — though it absolutely is that. It’s that we’ve stumbled into a world where federal laws have expiration dates determined by presidential mood swings. And while everyone’s focused on whether TikTok will sell or survive (that is, if they’re not focused on their retirement savings being drained by the whole “destroying the economy through not understanding trade deficits” thing), they’re missing the bigger story here: we’re running an experiment to see if laws still matter when the president decides they don’t. Early results aren’t encouraging.
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Internet Society, a global nonprofit that advocates for an open, globally connected, secure and trustworthy Internet for everyone. In our Bonus Chat, Internet Society’s Natalie Campbell talks about issues around US leadership on digital trade and an open internet, related to a letter the Internet Society sent this week to the US Trade Representative.
There’s a fundamental problem with Donald Trump’s new trade policy: it fails a test that actual 5th graders can pass. I know this because I tried explaining his “Liberation Day” trade plan to one last night. Here’s how that conversation went:
“Imagine you want to buy a toy at a store which costs $50. You pay for the toy and walk away with it. The President looks at that transaction and says ‘wait, you paid the store $50 and the store paid you nothing, therefore the store is stealing from you. To “fix” this, I’m going to tax the store $25. From now on that same toy costs $75.”
The 5th grader looked at me like I was crazy. “Whaaaaaaat? None of that makes sense. If I pay for something, it’s not stealing. And taxing the store seems stupid, and then everything is more expensive. Why would anyone do that? That can’t be how it works.”
This is the core problem with Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade policy: it fundamentally misunderstands what trade deficits are. And if you think that’s bad, just wait until we get to the part where this policy declares economic war on penguins and our own military base.
The policy, unveiled yesterday afternoon, is called a “reciprocal tariff plan,” which is a bit like calling a hammer a “reciprocal pillow.” The premise is that since other countries have high tariffs on us (they don’t), we should have high tariffs on them (we shouldn’t). But that’s not even the weird part.
At the heart of this policy is a chart. Not just any chart, but what might be the most creative work of economic fiction since, well, Donald Trump launched his memecoin. Trump proudly displayed these numbers at a White House event, explaining that they showed the tariffs other countries impose on the US. He emphasized repeatedly that the US was being more than “fair” because our reciprocal tariffs would be less than what other countries were charging us.
There was just one small problem: none of the numbers were real tariff rates. Not even close. Vietnam, according to the chart, imposes a 90% tariff on US goods. This would be shocking news to Vietnam, which does no such thing.
At first, observers assumed the administration was simply inventing numbers, which would have been bad enough. But the reality turned out to be far more stupid. James Surowiecki stumbled into what was actually happening:
Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate what Surowiecki discovered. The administration didn’t just make up random numbers — that would have been too simple. Instead, they invented a formula that manages to be both more complicated and more wrong: they took our trade deficit with each country and divided it by that country’s exports to us.
So for Indonesia, the math went like this:
US trade deficit with Indonesia: $17.9 billion
Indonesia’s exports to the US: $28 billion
$17.9B ÷ $28B = 64%
Therefore (according to this logic), Indonesia must be charging us the equivalent of a 64% tariff
This is roughly equivalent to calculating your coffee shop’s markup by dividing how much coffee you buy from them by how much coffee they buy from you. Which would make sense if you were in the coffee business, but you’re not.
When confronted about this methodology, the administration didn’t backtrack. They just admitted it:
“The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers … based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a White House official said, calling it “the most fair thing in the world.”
Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit:
This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to “make my wrong econ math look more scientific.” The document even admits that they couldn’t figure out the actual tariff rates, so they “proxied” them with this formula instead. That’s a bit like saying you couldn’t find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.
The fundamental problem here isn’t just that the tariff numbers are wrong — though they absolutely are. It’s that the entire premise rests on treating trade deficits as if they were tariffs. They’re not the same thing. At all.
Let’s back up for a moment and talk about trade deficits, because Trump has been getting this wrong for longer than some of his supporters have been alive. His logic appears to be:
“Deficit” sounds bad
Therefore, trade deficits must be bad
Therefore, countries with whom we have trade deficits must be cheating us
Therefore, we should punish them with tariffs to “level the playing field”
Remember that 5th grader from earlier? They already understood what Trump doesn’t: when you buy a toy for $50 at a store, you have a “trade deficit” with that store. You gave them $50, they gave you $0. But you also got a toy. That’s not the store cheating you — that’s just how buying things works.
A trade deficit between countries works the same way. When we have a trade deficit with a country, it just means we bought more stuff from them than they bought from us. We got the stuff. They got the money. That’s it.
Trump’s solution to trade deficits (which aren’t a problem) is to impose tariffs (which don’t help). In fact, they can often make things worse. According to actual economists who study this stuff, higher tariffs can actually lead to higher trade deficits, not lower ones.
Joseph Gagnon, one of the world’s foremost experts on trade deficits, explains exactly why this is such a bad idea:
Although tariffs do not reduce trade deficits, they do reduce imports and exports, as well as total income. That’s because they force a country to shift resources from more profitable exports to less profitable imports, as well as to services. But the long-run economic effects are also negative. By shielding producers from foreign competition, a tariff ultimately leads to less business innovation, slower productivity growth, and lower household living standards.
You might notice something about that paragraph. It starts by describing how tariffs hurt the economy in the short term. Then there’s a “but” — which usually signals some kind of silver lining. Instead, it just pivots to explaining how tariffs hurt the economy even more in the long term.
Cool.
So we have a policy that:
Is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of trade deficits
Uses made-up numbers derived from a nonsense formula
Would actually make the “problem” it’s trying to solve even worse
Will definitely make Americans poorer
But wait, it gets better.
All of this glosses over the fact that “reciprocal tariffs” are not reciprocal at all. Trump’s team is making up fake tariff numbers for foreign countries based not on anything having to do with tariffs, but on trade deficits, which is just an accounting of inflows vs. outflows between two countries. It’s only reciprocal because the Trump team faked the numbers.
On top of that, Trump can only impose tariffs (normally a power of Congress) based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act. Both laws require there to be an actual “emergency.” The only emergency here is that nobody in the administration understands what trade deficits are.
But at least we may know where they got their brilliant formula from. There has been some suggestion that the administration got the idea from AI — specifically from asking a large language model how to calculate “fair” tariffs based on trade deficits. And yes, when asked “What would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the US is on even-playing fields when it comes to trade deficit? Set minimum at 10%,” several AI models did suggest something similar to the administration’s approach.
guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?i went to the pit for y'all and brought back the screenshots with alt text
But here’s the thing: every single AI model also included very clear warnings about why using this formula would be catastrophically stupid. I tested this myself with multiple LLMs (Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, and Copilot), and they all basically said “Well, if you insist on doing something this economically illiterate, here’s how you could do it, BUT PLEASE DON’T.”
My favorite was DeepSeek, in which I had its reasoning turned on, and it seemed particularly perplexed as to why I would try to balance trade deficits with tariffs, but felt resigned to do so:
That’s a little small to read, but it says:
Wait, but is this the right approach? I mean, tariffs can have various effects. If you impose a tariff, it might lead to retaliation from other countries, which could hurt US exports. Also, higher tariffs could increase prices for consumers in the US, which isn’t great for the economy. But the user is specifically asking about balancing the trade deficit, so maybe those considerations are secondary here.
Yeah, that’s literally DeepSeek grappling with the fact that the user here (the US government) is asking for a fundamentally stupid thing without understanding the consequences.
The administration appears to have taken only the formula and ignored all the warnings. Which would be merely sad if they were just playing with theoretical numbers. But they’re not. They’re actually implementing this policy, using emergency powers that are supposed to be reserved for actual emergencies — not “we don’t understand how trade works” emergencies.
Which then brings us around, finally, to the penguins.
Because MAGA’s best economists are implementing it so mechanically, applying their formula to every country in what appears to be the CIA World Factbook, we end up with some truly spectacular results.
Let’s take a closer look at the very last page of the administration’s tariff list:
Now, you might notice a bunch of these entries show a flat 10% tariff rate. That’s what happens when a “country” has no trade with the US at all — the formula defaults to the minimum. A mildly competent team might have wondered why these places have zero trade with us and done a quick check before declaring economic war on them.
But this team isn’t mildly competent. This team is extremely, profoundly, impressively incompetent.
So let’s look at who exactly we’re launching a trade war against, starting with the Heard and McDonald Islands. Total population: zero human beings. The only residents are some absolutely stunning penguins. You can actually adopt one if you want — though I suppose that may now cost 10% more, thanks to Trump’s tariff.
But that’s not even the best part. Just a few lines up, you’ll find the “British Indian Ocean Territory,” also known as the Chagos Islands. Nearly all of the humans currently on these islands are US military personnel at the Diego Garcia base. And they’re only there because, as detailed in a recent Behind the Bastards podcast, the British government forcibly expelled all the native inhabitants to lease the territory to the US military.
Let that sink in for a moment: Donald Trump just imposed tariffs on our own military base. On territory we lease. Where the only residents are US military personnel.
So to sum up where we are:
The administration invented an economic emergency
To justify a policy based on made-up numbers
Generated by an AI formula that came with explicit warnings not to use it
Which they’re now using to launch trade wars against:
Penguins
Our own military
And presumably Santa’s Workshop (someone check for a North Pole entry)
And while the penguins and military base make for amusing examples of this policy’s incompetence, the real damage will come from applying this same backwards logic to basically all of our actual trading partners — countries whose goods and services make American lives better and whose economic relationships we’ve spent decades building. And who, historically, welcomed back American goods and services as well. All of that is now at risk because someone couldn’t be bothered to learn what a trade deficit actually is. And the American electorate deciding that’s who we wanted to govern the country.
When your trade policy is so fundamentally misguided that you’re declaring economic war on flightless birds and your own armed forces, perhaps it’s time to admit that the 5th grader from the beginning of this story wasn’t just smarter than the administration — they were dramatically overqualified for Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Moral panics come and go, but stupid legislation is forever. At least until the Supreme Court steps in. This week on Otherwise Objectionable, my podcast series about Section 230, we talk about how the moral panic over “porn” online, including Senator James Exon’s infamous blue binder of internet porn, caused the Senate to pass a horrifying censorship bill that would have required the internet be as clean as Sesame Street.
Enter Representatives Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, who recognized that Exon’s approach wasn’t just unconstitutional — it fundamentally misunderstood how the internet worked. Instead of trying to turn every website into PBS Kids, they proposed something radical: trust users to make their own choices about what content they wanted to see, and protect the platforms that gave users those tools.
Their proposal, which would become Section 230, was based on a simple premise: the internet would work better if we empowered users rather than censors. Want to keep your kids away from adult content? Great — here are tools to do that. Want to create a family-friendly platform? Fantastic — you won’t get sued for trying. Want to build a more open platform? Also fine — you won’t get sued for that either.
This approach was such obvious common sense that it sailed through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support. But then congressional efficiency (or perhaps laziness) kicked in. Rather than reconcile the House and Senate approaches, leadership simply merged the bills together. The result? Section 230, a law designed to promote free speech and user choice, became part of the Communications Decency Act, a law designed to censor the internet into bland submission.
The supreme irony is that when the Supreme Court inevitably struck down most of the CDA as unconstitutional, Section 230 was the only part that survived. The provision that was never meant to be part of the censorship bill turned out to be its only lasting legacy. As Congress once again rushes to “protect the children” through ham-handed internet regulation, it’s worth remembering how the last moral panic resulted in terrible unconstitutional nonsense, that accidentally got merged with the very protection that makes a free and open internet possible.
Remember Mike Waltz? The National Security Advisor who’s spent the last few weeks demonstrating his profound inability to handle basic security? First, there was the illegal Signal chat where he accidentally added a journalist while discussing potential war crimes. Then we learned about his completely exposed Venmo contacts and leaked passwords. And now, in a twist that would be too on-the-nose for fiction, it turns out the same official who previously demanded DOJ action over private email use… has been conducting government business through Gmail.
Ah, but her emails.
All this seems less than great for the top “security” official in the administration.
Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.
The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.
A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.
This is, needless to say, pretty fucking bad. First, there’s the basic security incompetence: the National Security Advisor conducting sensitive government business through a commercial email service. Even if Gmail has robust security, it’s completely inappropriate for handling government communications — giving Google potential access to sensitive national security discussions that should never leave secured government systems.
But more concerning is what this reveals about Waltz’s (lack of) judgment. As National Security Advisor, he’s one of the highest-value targets for foreign intelligence services. Every personal account, every commercial service he uses represents another potential vulnerability for adversaries to exploit. And given his demonstrated pattern of security failures — from exposed Venmo contacts to leaked passwords — it’s clear he’s making their job easier.
The National Security Council’s response is a masterclass in missing the point (or, more accurately, misdirecting from the point). When pressed about “sensitive military matters” being discussed over Gmail, their spokesperson offered this gem:
Hughes said NSC staff have guidance about using “only secure platforms for classified information.”
This attempt at reassurance actually reveals the depth of the problem. The distinction isn’t just between classified and unclassified information — it’s about maintaining basic operational security for all sensitive government communications.
And as if to underscore how little they grasp this, we learned from a WSJ article that Waltz’s infamous Signal chat wasn’t a one-off mistake.
Two U.S. officials also said that Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations
The scale of security failures here should be absolutely disqualifying for any administration official, let alone America’s top national security advisor. But what makes this situation particularly galling is Waltz’s own history of grandstanding about private email use. Here he is in a tweet that remains up from less than two years ago:
Yes, that’s the same Mike Waltz demanding DOJ action over private email use by a previous National Security Advisor. The hypocrisy would be merely annoying if the stakes weren’t so high. But this isn’t just about scoring political points — it’s about the fundamental security of our nation’s most sensitive communications.
By Waltz’s own standard, articulated in that still-visible tweet, the DOJ should be investigating his wanton use of private commercial messaging services. But more importantly, someone needs to ask: if this is how carelessly our National Security Advisor handles basic operational security, what other vulnerabilities has he created that we don’t yet know about?
