Trump has always considered cops to be better people than regular people. Unless they’re defending a federal building under attack by Trump’s people. Then they’re no better than anyone else.
Trump’s first term came coupled with an announcement that cops would be elevated above the people they’re supposed to serve and that the general public should just welcome the cool touch of swiftly-stomping boot heels to the face for the next four years. His unexpected second term came with similar expectations. Just like he did in his first term, Trump pretty much shut down the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which has historically been the only government agency attempting to hold local cops accountable for their rights violations.
The rest of our civil rights are continually being undermined by Trump and, subsequently, are no longer of concern to the eviscerated DOJ Civil Rights Division. We thought we’d never hear anything from this entity for the next four years, but apparently it still has some work to do. There are rights allegedly being infringed on and it’s up to the DOJ to ride to the rescue.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi Launches Compliance Review Investigation into Admissions Policies at Stanford University and Several University of California Schools, Advancing President Trump’s Mandate to End Illegal DEI Policies
There will be no more diversity, inclusion, or equal protection under Trump and AG Pam Bondi. Instead, there will be government-enforced segregation and bigotry, as AG Bondi explains:
“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “Every student in America deserves to be judged solely based on their hard work, intellect, and character, not the color of their skin.”
LOL. “Merit-based.” That’s pretty rich coming from a man who only became the person he is because of constant cash infusions from his father and the generous contributions of taxpayers to several Trump business bankruptcies. And it’s no doubt backed by Trump’s diversity hires, AG Pam Bondi (a woman!) and Elon Musk (an immigrant!).
That takes civil rights off the table. What’s left for the DOJ? Well, it definitely won’t be the Fourth or Fifth Amendment. Those are rights that only protect the guilty, amirite?! This DOJ definitely won’t be wasting its time on that.
Here’s the only right the DOJ Civil Rights Division cares about these days… at least, so far. And it cares about it so much, it’s willing to investigate other law enforcement agencies.
As part of a broader review of restrictive firearms-related laws in California and other States, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division today announced an investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to determine whether it is engaging in a pattern or practice of depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights. A recent federal court decision found that “the law and facts [we]re clearly in … favor” of two private plaintiffs who challenged the lengthy eighteen-month delays that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had imposed when processing their concealed handgun license applications. And the Civil Rights Division has reason to believe that those two plaintiffs are not the only residents of Los Angeles County experiencing similarly long delays that are unduly burdening, or effectively denying, the Second Amendment rights of the people of Los Angeles.
No doubt this investigation will end with a loud speech about the Democratic Republic of California and its stifling of this solitary constitutional right. And as loud and as long as the speech is (and the speech will still happen whether or not the DOJ discovers any wrongdoing), it will refuse to acknowledge this “pattern and practice” of violating civil rights includes the LASD violating rights the Trump Administration doesn’t actually care about, which would be every constitutional amendment but the Second.
We chronicled the implosion of the company Nikola and the fall from grace of its CEO, Trevor Milton, for years. If you don’t recall the story, Nikola was built to develop over the road trucks with a hydrogen propulsion system. In 2020, in a bid to gain more investment and boost confidence of current investors, Nikola showed off footage of what it called a working prototype moving down a lonely highway road. The problem is that it wasn’t a working prototype for the purposes of the footage. Instead, the truck was towed towards a descending hill and then allowed to roll down it with that momentum, with the filming camera tilted to make it appear as though it were on level ground. A sort of Adam West in Batman approach, in other words.
But last week Donald Trump pardoned Milton, who will now see no jail time, as he’d been out on bond as he appealed the case. Conmen of a feather flock together, it seems.
“It is no wonder why trust and confidence in the Justice Department has eroded to nothing. I wish judges would stop believing whatever the prosecutors feed them so Americans could trust the justice system again,” Milton said in a statement.
Milton was convicted by a jury. He was represented in that trial by Brad Bondi, a partner at law firm Paul Hastings and the brother of current U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Now a free man, Milton has said he plans to release a documentary that he believes will tell his side of the Nikola story.
Milton apparently did not note whether that documentary would feature a permanently tilted camera in order to keep things consistent.
But as you can tell, there is no remorse here. Far from any contrite admission of guilt, Milton is pitching his pardon as a validation that he was innocent all along, the victim of the Biden administration, rather than a valid conviction handed down from a jury. If there were accusations to be made of political fuckery in any of this, they should have been made at trial, not as part of a post-pardon media commentary.
Now, if you’re concerned that Milton’s cozy relationship between his attorney and the U.S. Attorney General, or that the millions his family donated to the Trump campaign had anything to do with his getting pardoned, rest easy. Milton is here to tell you that these conflicts had nothing to do with it, one by one.
Milton said donations he and his wife made to the Trump campaign in October played no role in the pardon.
“I wouldn’t even know how to do that,” he said. “It would be illegal to do that.”
Milton also said that Trump-appointed Attorney General Pamela Bondi, the sister of one of his attorneys, also had no role in the pardon. Milton on Monday repeatedly said he was a political victim under the Biden administration, adding the pardon says, “Trevor is innocent.”
I like to imagine that he made these comments with a shit-eating grin on his face and punctuated them with an exaggerated wink. A pardon of course does notconfer innocence onto the convicted. But it’s not crazy to suspect that donations and familial relationships at play here factored into his pardon. Just watching how Trump operates over the last few years should at least raise suspicions.
But again, there is no responsibility being taken by Milton for any of this.
Milton, who confirmed he sold more than $300 million in company shares in 2021, said he would not repay any of the investors. But he would be open to helping those people in future ventures.
“So, I’m not heartless,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I feel for these people probably more than most.”
One wonders if there is a hill steep enough to prevent those investors from running up them in response.
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.
We’ve noted more times than I can’t count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data.
It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate.
Enter the fine folks at (Trump friendly) Andreessen Horowitz, who are emerging as a late-stage bidder for a big chunk of whatever winds up being left of TikTok alongside (Trump friendly) Oracle:
“US venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz is in talks to invest in social media platform TikTok as part of an effort led by Donald Trump to wrest control of the popular video app from its Chinese owners. The venture capital group, whose co-founder Marc Andreessen is a vocal supporter of the US president, is in talks to add new outside investment that will buy out TikTok’s Chinese investors, as part of a bid led by Oracle and other American investors to carve it out of its parent company ByteDance.”
Thanks to America’s silly and performative ban, ByteDance has until April 5 to sell TikTok to U.S. controlled companies. There’s still no word on what a finalized deal will look like, and ByteDance has had strong reservations in including the company’s engagement algorithms as part of any deal.
Marc Andreessen, who has become increasingly incoherent as he prostrates himself and his empire to King Dingus, clearly wants TikTok ad money, but he also wants information control. Andreessen is already on the board of Meta and one of the investors in Elon’s takeover of Twitter. If he grabs a large stake in TikTok, an overt authoritarian will have meaningful power over the country’s three biggest social media platforms. That is, you know, bad for a long list of reasons that should be obvious.
Modern U.S. authoritarians don’t want major popular tech platforms engaging in content moderation of right wing propaganda and disinformation, a cornerstone of Trump power (since their actual policies, like letting shitty corporations do whatever they want, dismantling civil and labor rights, and giving billionaires more tax cuts, are broadly unpopular amongst the plebs).
There was, if you recall, a whole three year news cycle where major news outlets propped up the myth that this wasn’t about control, propaganda, and forcing unpopular right wing policies down everybody’s throat, it was about reining in corporate power and “holding big tech accountable.” These GOP efforts were, time and time again, portrayed in the press as serious, adult, good faith policymaking.
Really a great job on all fronts, from policymakers to U.S. journalism. Everybody really nailed it.
TikTok always heavily trafficked in a lot of right wing engagement bait because, as an amoral algorithmic engagement machine, they like to shovel more of the stuff you already like your direction. But at the same time, I personally found I was more likely to find left wing content on TikTok than I would on, say, Facebook’s reels. Ultimately, TikTok has veered even harder right as it tried to appease U.S. authoritarians.
However right wing friendly you think TikTok is now, it will be notably worse under Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz, and far more likely to take action against content and creators Trumpism doesn’t like. All in service to authoritarian control, and chasing where the real money is in America media right now: telling young angry men all of their worst lizard-brained impulses are correct.
Donald Trump has decided he can’t do immigration enforcement without doing war crimes. That’s where we’re at now as a country: under the thumb of someone exercising executive war powers to remove anyone looking faintly Mexican from the country under the extremely dubious theory that the people rounded up by ICE are all members of foreign gangs.
Oh wait. You haven’t heard of Tren de Aragua, a.k.a. TdA? Don’t blame your service provider and/or your social media feeds. The gang Trump (sort of) declared “war” on is something new. It’s not MS-13. Apparently, it’s the new “most dangerous thing ever,” even if there’s nothing that demonstrates TdA is making the sort of inroads into America that MS-13 has.
The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelans to a massive prison in El Salvador without any due process. How has the president justified using a 227-year-old law that has only been wielded during actual wars to override the Constitution? He claims these men are members of the gang “Tren de Aragua.”
[…]
[T]he NYPD and Mayor Eric Adams […] spent much of 2024 pushing a narrative that New York, which is home to thousands of recently-arrived Venezuelan migrants, is somehow being inundated with members of a small, relatively new regional gang that is named for the Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua.
[…]
“We believe they are participating in illegal behavior, and they’re the source of some of the increases in robberies and pattern robberies, particularly on scooters. And we continue to monitor the situation, but it is alarming,” Adams said. He added that Tren de Aragua was “a very dangerous gang,” and that he had sent his NYPD deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism to Colombia to gather information.
Scooter robberies? Vague “illegal behavior?” Well, no wonder Trump deployed his war powers to rid this country of a threat incapable of being coherently defined by the NYC mayor in the president’s back pocket.
Supposedly the easiest way to identify members of a gang no one had really ever heard of before Trump started sending planeloads of non-white people to prisons in El Salvador is by their tattoos. After all, MS-13 is notorious for its inking and its members’ inability to blend into any society that isn’t currently bathing itself in bathtub meth money.
In fact, ICE has its own guide [PDF] for identifying TdA members by their tattoos. But as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out on Bluesky, the guidelines are somewhat even worse and more lax than the bullshit regular cops use to place people in (domestic) gang databases.
This nomination system uses points. Eight points is all it takes to get you labeled as someone fast-tracked for an indefinite prison sentence in a nation you weren’t even born in. A lot of this relies on tattoos. Four points for gang tattoos. Four points for any tattoo an ICE officer believes is a gang tattoo. Six points for texting anyone ICE thinks is a TdA member and 3 points for sending funds (via Cash app or other services) to anyone whose tattoos are presumed to be TdA-related.
Even if someone fails to hit the 8-point threshold for immediate expulsion to El Salvador (and, remember, we’re dealing with alleged Venezuelan gang members here), points can be added by any ICE officer or supervisor willing to put their thumb on the scale.
Aliens scoring 6 or 7 points may be validated as members of TDA; you should consult with a supervisor and OPLA, reviewing the totality of the facts, before making that determination; if you determine an alien should not be validated at this time as a member of TDA, when available, you should initiate removal proceedings under the INA.
[I]nternal U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI documents obtained by USA TODAY reveal federal authorities for years have questioned the effectiveness of using tattoos to identify members of Tren de Aragua, also known as TdA.
“Gang Unit collections determined that the Chicago Bulls attire, clocks, and rose tattoos are typically related to the Venezuelan culture and not a definite (indicator) of being a member or associate of the (TdA),” reads a 2023 “Situational Awareness” bulletin on the criminal gang written by the U.S. Custom and Border Protection’s El Paso Sector Intelligence Unit.
In another DHS document, titled “ICE Intel Leads,” a former Venezuelan police official interviewed by authorities said tattoos are “the easiest but least effective way” of identifying members of the criminal gang.
Everyone who hasn’t been completely corrupted by their association with Trump knows the accepted method of identifying gang members doesn’t actually work. Everyone in the inner circle doesn’t care. And ICE has never given a shit one way or the other, so long as it’s able to hit the ever-escalating expulsion benchmarks set by the administration and backed by barely-sentient FEDZ® doll Kristi Noem, who decided to issue a “tough on crime” statement in front of an overcrowded El Salvadoran prison cell while prominently displaying her $50,000 Rolex watch.
Between the bizarre invocation of the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since the abuse of Japanese US residents during World War II made it unfashionable and ICE’s enthusiasm for rounding up any foreigners officers come across, it’s no surprise areas where Latin Americans are a majority of the population are considered target-rich environments.
In Santa Fe County, N.M., last month, local police leaders stood before a packed auditorium and showed photos of their uniforms so residents would know what they look like — and, more pointedly, what ICE does not.
“Whatever happens around the country, whoever is president, you are our community. We are your officers,” Santa Fe Police Chief Paul Joye said with the help of a Spanish interpreter. “It is a fundamental human right that you feel safe in your home regardless of where you’re from.”
[…]
Many police chiefs have opted to risk the ire of the federal government in an attempt to preserve trust with immigrant communities – a bond that can be tenuous even in the best of times.
It’s nice to know that at least a few cops aren’t on board with Trump’s anti-immigrant warfare. There’s still no unified front pushing back against ICE but every little bit helps. Unfortunately, none of this will matter to the Trump administration. It’s incapable of being shamed and it’s fine with massive amounts of collateral damage as long as its intended targets are included in the body count.
Anything that doesn’t jibe with Donald Trump’s white male-centric worldview must go. Whatever is deemed “woke” — no matter its basis in factual history — must be excised. If tossing aside DEI means pretending blacks, women, and other non-white, non-male people never contributed anything to this country, so be it. If stroking off the far right and its quasi-theocracy aspirations means turning the US into King George’s Great Britain, I guess that’s just the price we have to pay to live in a “free” society.
The latest assault on history by this administration is a bit more horrific than its previous efforts. Wiping out DEI initiatives caused considerable (and deliberate) collateral damage to documentation of the contributions of immigrants, non-whites, women, and LGBTQ+ to the rich tapestry that is American history. This one is more targeted, but that only means there will be no collateral damage. Everything harmed here will be deliberate.
The Order directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.
The Order directs the Administration to work with Congress to ensure that future Smithsonian appropriations: (1) prohibit funding for exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law; and (2) celebrate women’s achievements in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women.
The Vice President will work with congressional leaders to appoint members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents who are committed to advancing the celebration of America’s extraordinary heritage and progress.
That’s from the fact sheet accompanying the executive order. And, unfortunately, there’s a stooge right there waiting to be activated: JD Vance, who — as Musk’s understudy/nominal Vice President — is granted a position on the Smithsonian’s board of regents. It’s a government entity, but one that has rarely seen direct federal government interference in its day-to-day work.
The second paragraph of the fact sheet is extremely disturbing. It targets things that “degrade shared American values” — a list that would certainly include America’s century of slavery and the several decades of segregation that follows it. It would also include anything detailing the United States’ treatment of Native Americans, which includes genocide, rampant racism, and ongoing attempts to strip away what few rights Native Americans still possess. It might also highlight the routine abuse of immigrants, wartime internment camps, war atrocities, CIA coup attempts, police violence, child labor, and the refusal to treat all citizens as equal for most of Americas history. All of these things are part of American history. And every single one of these could be described as “degrading American values” and “promoting ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”
And yet, those are things most likely to be removed first or, at the very least, denied funding by Trump and Vance. While there’s a bone being thrown to women (although I doubt Trump is here to champion abortions rights or the success of the women’s suffrage movement), it’s only there to ensure that “men” do not get recognized as “women.”
Why is this such a problem? And why does Trump think the Smithsonian should be stripped of funding for exhibits straddling this men/women thing that seems to unduly trouble the world’s last consumer of whatever is the Aqua Net of spray tanning agents? It’s all explained (I guess?) in the actual executive order. And that order opens with a sentence that proves the adage “every accusation is an admission.”
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.
“Over the past decade?” From what I’ve seen, it’s only been over the past three months that I’ve witnessed a “concerted” effort to “rewrite our Nation’s history.”
The stuff making Trump so angry someone else wrote up an entire diatribe, called it an “executive order,” and asked him to drag his Sharpie across the signature box, includes all the things people say about Trump, his loyalists, his cabinet, and his voters. And, to a person, they’ll agree with these assertions when hanging out with their own. But, once again, everything listed as problematic is just something Trump doesn’t actually think is wrong.
For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.” The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.
The only way to read this is to take Trump at his word. The only reason he would want this removed or censored is because he truly believes white people should be able to do what they want to whoever they want, especially if those on the receiving end aren’t white and male. He doesn’t have a problem with the US government using race to “establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” He actually wants “white culture” to be the dominant force in America. And he seems to have a particular hard-on for something that happens so infrequently it doesn’t even amount to a statistical rounding error: male athletes participating in women’s sports.
Contrary to what some commenters believe about me, I actually think the United States is a great nation, or at least has the potential to become one. It isn’t one at the present and I don’t have a whole lot of hope for its future, given how things have gone over the last 15 years. But it’s a deeply flawed nation that has, historically, at least tried to eliminate its worst traits. But Trump wants to bring all the bad stuff back, and he wants to erase our history of improvement on the civil liberties front. It’s far more than disappointing. It’s sickening. It’s a retcon in which all the things that make this country better than it was will be buried and all the things that held us back will be treated as peaks of achievement, rather than the valleys of failure they always were and always will be.
America’s largest law firms are facing an existential choice that will define not just their legacies, but potentially the future of constitutional democracy: fight against clearly unconstitutional executive orders designed to destroy the ability of anyone to fight back, or surrender to authoritarianism. While that might sound hyperbolic, the evidence shows that it’s absolutely true.
In the last few weeks, Donald Trump has issued these orders against a variety of big law firms: Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale. As we’ve been discussing, these executive orders are effectively existential to these firms. While the specifics of each order differ a bit, they are designed to be death sentences for these firms, usually stripping them of security clearances that are often necessary in dealing with the government, making it nearly impossible to have any clients who have government contracts (which can be almost every big company), and, at the most extreme, barring lawyers from these firms from federal buildings (which can include courthouses).
There are reports from these law firms that they are losing clients and that other lawyers are seeking to poach both their top lawyers and their clients.
Here’s what we know so far about fighting back: it works. When Perkins Coie challenged these orders a few weeks ago, they got their TRO. When Jenner & Block and WilmerHale followed suit, they got theirs too. Three for three. The pattern is clear: when law firms actually defend the Constitution, courts still protect it.
Which makes the capitulation of some firms even more puzzling. They’re not just choosing the path of least resistance — they’re choosing a path that demonstrably leads nowhere good.
Basically: if you challenge these orders, you’re likely to win relief, and fast.
This is why it’s that much more puzzling that some law firms are caving. We’ve already talked about the shameful stain left on Paul Weiss for surrendering and agreeing to provide $40 million in pro bono services to Trump-aligned efforts.
Even worse, last week another big law firm, Skadden Arps, agreed to capitulate to Trump even before he issued an exec order against them, this time agreeing to an even more shameful $100 million in pro-MAGA pro bono work. Some lawyers at Skadden (one of the largest law firms in the world, and somewhat famous for being full of extremely aggressive lawyers, even among the biglaw world full of aggressive assholes) are already resigning and announcing it publicly.
There is only one acceptable response from attorneys to the Trump administration’s demands: The rule of law matters. The rule of law matters. As an attorney, if my employer cannot stand up for the rule of law, then I cannot ethically continue to work for them.
Even Donald Trump seems shocked at how quickly these giant law firms (and colleges, which is another story) are caving to him so quickly and easily:
“You see what we’re doing with the colleges, andthey’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much. We appreciate it,’” Trump said at a White House event marking Women’s History Month. “Nobody can believe it, including law firms that have been so horrible, law firms that, nobody would believe this, just saying, ‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?’ … And there’s more coming, but we really are in the ‘Golden age of America.’”
The apologists for capitulation want you to believe this is just standard risk management:
It’s not unusual for lawyers to “look at all of your options,” Cari Brunelle, a legal industry consultant, told CNN. “Sometimes you choose to litigate, and sometimes you choose to settle. It’s what you do for your clients every day.”
This argument fails spectacularly on both moral and practical grounds. This isn’t a routine settlement discussion over a contract dispute. This is about preserving the fundamental ability of our legal system to check unconstitutional power and criminal behavior. The “rational business decision” framing completely misses the point.
But even on pure business terms, capitulation is suicide. Think it through: If clients are fleeing firms targeted by Trump, how does surrendering help? A firm that caves ends up with three strikes against it: (1) it’s proven useless in standing up to government overreach, (2) it’s demonstrated it has no principles, and (3) the administration still views it as an enemy. The “settlement” buys nothing except shame.
At least if they fight, you know that they’ll fight, and somewhere they have some kind of principles.
And while there are reports that other law firms are cowering and hiding, at least some are willing to speak up. Over the weekend, the three named partners of Keker, Van Nest, and Peters wrote an op-ed for the NY Times entitled: “For God’s Sake, Fellow Lawyers, Stand Up to Trump.”
Our firm stands with Perkins Coie and all firms and lawyers who fight against this president’s lawless executive actions. That’s why we’ve called on other firms to join us in submitting a friend of the court brief in support of Perkins Coie.
If lawyers and law firms won’t stand up for the rule of law, who will?
[….]
We understand that while many firms have agreed to sign on to the Perkins Coie friend of the court brief, some large firms have hesitated or only conditionally agreed if enough of their peers do so first. No doubt they fear losing clients and incurring the president’s ire.
We sympathize. We take seriously our obligations to our clients, our associates, our staff and their families.But at this crucial moment, clients need to find their courage, too. And partners at big firms — who often earn millions a year — must be willing to take financial risks when the fate of our nation, the future of our profession and the rule of law itself is at stake.
You can support a lawyer’s right to represent unpopular clients and causes against powerful forces — essentially the oath we all took when becoming members of the bar. Or you can sit back, check your bank balance and watch your freedoms, along with the legal system and the tripartite system of government we should not take for granted, swirl down the drain.
This is not hyperbole. The common denominator among the president’s recent spate of actions is that he appears to believe he has absolute authority to govern by fiat. What we’ve seen in the last few months tells us that we are moving ever closer to becoming an autocracy — and the current Congress is a lap dog that essentially offers no resistance.
Keker is a well-known and well-respected firm, though it’s smaller than most of the other law firms being targeted to date. But it knows what’s up.
Our decision to speak out on this issue was an easy one. We believe that one of the noblest things a lawyer can do is to stand up against the government on behalf of a client whom the government seeks to destroy. When Mr. Trump was indicted and sued, he hired lawyers to defend him. They did a good job, keeping him out of jail and preserving his fortune. For his administration to attack lawyers and firms whose members have opposed or annoyed him is a threat to our democracy.
Lawyers and big firms: For God’s sake, stand up for the legal profession, and for the Constitution. Defend the oath you took when you became officers of the court. If we stand together and fight, we will win.
The choice facing America’s law firms today isn’t just about business survival — it’s about whether they’ll be remembered as defenders of constitutional democracy or enablers of its destruction. The cowards at Skadden Arps and Paul Weiss may think they’re making sophisticated business decisions, but history has seen this playbook before. When authoritarian regimes consolidate power, they always start by neutralizing those who might stand in their way. And history remembers who helped them do it.
As the Keker partners put it: “This is not hyperbole.” When future generations study how American democracy either survived or crumbled in 2025, they’ll look at what the legal profession did in this moment. The firms that fought will be remembered as heroes. The ones that caved? Well, being a law firm that surrendered to Hitler didn’t look any better in the history books just because they called it a “rational business decision.”
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.
This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.
But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.
The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.
The video of her kidnapping (because that’s what it was) is terrifying enough:
If you listen, you hear her quite understandably surprised reaction with a scream, and then she asks to call the police, only to be told “we’re the police.” None of them are in uniforms. Most of them are masked.
Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
The government has attempted to justify similar renditions (and there is a growing list of victims) by falsely painting targets as “terrorist supporters” — a dangerous conflation of political speech supporting Palestinian rights with support for terrorism. But even those cases typically involved people involved in public protests, which are themselves constitutionally protected activities. This case goes even further: disappearing someone over an innocuous piece of student journalism published a year ago.
Everyone should be alarmed. Everyone should be demanding that she (and others) be released and that ICE and DHS stop this horrifying and unconscionable practice. Everyone should be demanding that Trump and Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem stop this Gestapo bullshit.
Even if — especially if — you disagree with her views on Israel and Palestine. This isn’t about that. This is about the very concept of freedom. The rights everyone — even visitors — are supposed to have in this country. The right to speak your mind, even if (especially if!) it is opposed to those in power. The right to walk down a street without being kidnapped. The right to due process.
If the government genuinely believed Ozturk had violated immigration law or her visa terms (she hadn’t), there are established legal procedures to address such issues. Instead, they chose to send masked goons to disappear her without warning or due process — a chilling message to every other international student that their supposed right to express political opinions comes with the risk of rendition.
And, of course, the implied threat is that this won’t stop at international students.
But the Trump administration believes not in fundamental rights. It only believes in the cowardly authoritarian displays of theatrical power. Because they are weak and insecure. They are so frightened by a random college student op-ed or a protest, they are taking to disappearing people with no due process for their speech.
This won’t stop unless everyone speaks up and demands that the government respect the rights of everyone. These are bullying and intimidation tactics of weak insecure bullies, who know they cannot win in the marketplace of ideas. They are scared and pathetic, knowing that their beliefs are bad, and that the public doesn’t support them. Thus, their only response is an impotent rage, an attempt to replace respect and fair treatment with authoritarian tactics in hopes of intimidating people into silence and capitulation.
These are scary times, but people need to stop cowering. They need to speak up. They need to show up. They need to say that this is not the America any of us were taught to believe in. This is not the America of freedom and rights.
This is a desecration of the high (and often unmet) ideals of what America is supposed to be striving for. This is spitting on the fundamental concepts of the American project.
And where are all those self-proclaimed defenders of campus free speech now? The same voices who treated student protesters as an existential threat to academic freedom are conspicuously silent as government agents literally kidnap students for their political expression. Their silence exposes their previous concerns as purely performative.
This isn’t just about free speech anymore — it’s about whether we’ll allow the government to normalize disappearing people for their political views. Everyone who claims to care about constitutional rights and academic freedom needs to speak up now. Because those who remain silent in the face of such clear authoritarian overreach are complicit.
In Mike’s thorough post yesterday on the topic of the Trump administration’s naked contempt for judicial oversight, the main theme and takeaway from it was a simple one: this authoritarian regime would much rather waste everyone’s time trying to play procedural and semantic games with the courts than actually participate in honest deliberations with them. This is no small thing and it portends so much more about how this adminisration is going to behave across the government. Trump and his complicit cabinet, some members of which will inevitably be hung out to dry eventually when things go wrong enough, have no time for process. No time for rules. Or truth. Or honest dialogue. There is only the end goal that has been demanded by the mad king. Any norms or rules that get in the way of the goal are to be routed around in as contemptious a manner possible.
So it goes in the ongoing case before federal judge James Boasberg. This is the case in which the court ordered what the administration calls “deportations” — though since they are without any form of due process it’s more accurate to call them human trafficking — conducted as a result of Trump’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Boasberg issued verbal and written orders that the rendition flights be stopped and that any planes that hadn’t arrived at their destination, including those in the air, be returned until Boasberg could evaluate the legitimacy of the use of the centuries old law.
But some of the planes didn’t stop, and not all in the air were ordered to turn around. With no due process, there is no assurance that the government’s claim as to who the people on these planes are is accurate. Even as the judge demanded information on the timelines at play to determine if his orders were violated or ignored, administration officials as high up as the Secretary of State Marco Rubio jeered gleefully on social media sites with retweets and the like. Boasberg, a decidedly conservative judge, was falsely mocked as a “radical left lunatic.”
US District Judge James Boasberg vowed on Friday to find out whether officials in the Trump administration violated his orders temporarily blocking the use of an 1798 law for deportations by refusing to turn two flights around last weekend.
“I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order – who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said near the end of an hourlong hearing over whether he should lift the pair of orders he issued last Saturday.
Rather than participate with a coequal branch of government, however, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi have instead decided to play more childish games. Transparently childish, too, by any honest reading of their response. As had been speculated in previous news on the case, the government has decided to attempt to invoke state secrets privilege over the information the court has demanded. Which, again, is solely information about the timing of the order for the takeoff and the eventual landing of deportation flights that the court had temporarily ordered to be ceased. And because this administration can’t help itself, it did so with the vocabulary of a teenager refusing to go to bed on time.
The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before it,” Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top DOJ officials wrote in a filing to US District Judge James Boasberg. “Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address.”
“The information sought by the Court is subject to the state secrets privilege because disclosure would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs,” the officials wrote in the 10-page filing.
Among the questions Boasberg wanted the Justice Department to answer are ones concerning the exact timing of when the two planes took off from US soil and left US airspace that day, as well as the specific times individuals deported under Trump’s proclamation were transferred out of US custody that day.
Since the CNN post couldn’t be bothered to be so direct, allow me to: the Trump administration is full of shit. They know they’re full of shit. They know we know they’re full of shit. But they also are more than happy to wield what they think is a power card, believing they’ve found some procedural loophole. We just make this claim, they seem to think, and it lets us do whatever we want!
But that isn’t how asserting this privilege works at all. The judge will now have the opportunity to review whether the government’s assertion is warranted.
He told the government last week that it could submit the information under seal or invoke the privilege, though he said if DOJ decides to shield the information, he “is obligated to ‘determine whether the circumstances are appropriate for the claim of privilege.’”
The Trump administration appears to want it both ways. It wants to claim it has not violated any court order while also blocking the information to validate that it had not. There is nothing about what the government previously falsely called routine deportations that should have any play in state secrets. When did the planes take off, when did they land, and who did they contain? If those are state secrets, then anything can be a state secret.
And that’s the danger here. It’s the reason the administration must lose this game. If any judicial oversight can be routed around simply by putting a few complicit signatures on a piece of paper that says “state secrets,” then there simply is no judicial oversight.
And, in that negation of a coequal branch of government, you have the end of our Republic.
There comes a moment in every collapsing democracy when absurdity and menace fuse into something uniquely destabilizing—a phenomenon I’m tempted to call “malignant farce.” We’ve reached that moment. The President of the United States, after invoking a 1798 wartime law to mass-deport migrants to a third country, now claims he didn’t do it. “Other people handled it,” he told reporters, despite his signature appearing on the document.
This is not merely a lie—though it is certainly that—but something more fundamentally corrosive: the introduction of the Toddler Theory of Presidential Power. Like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar insisting “I didn’t do it,” Trump has advanced the novel constitutional principle that presidential actions somehow occur without presidential agency. Documents bearing his signature, orders issued under his authority, and policies implemented by his administration apparently materialize through some mysterious process for which he bears no responsibility.
The obvious absurdity of this claim would be comedic if it weren’t deployed to evade accountability for using the Alien Enemies Act—a law intended for declared wars against nations, not immigration enforcement—to justify mass deportations that a federal judge has already ruled likely unconstitutional. We have now entered territory where the head of the executive branch simultaneously claims the power to ignore judicial rulings while denying responsibility for the very actions judges are ruling against.
This isn’t just a president lying—a common enough occurrence in any administration. This is a president who wishes to exercise power without accountability, who signs documents then disclaims knowledge of their contents, who demands obedience to his authority while disavowing his own actions. It is the logic of the autocrat who wishes to be unbound by any constraint while maintaining plausible deniability for the consequences.
The pathetic spectacle of a president who claims vast powers while shirking basic responsibility reveals the infantile core of authoritarianism. For all its pretensions to strength and decisiveness, the authoritarian personality cannot bear the weight of consequence, cannot accept that power entails responsibility, cannot face the fundamental reality that actions have effects for which one might be accountable.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And a president’s signature on an executive order means he ordered it. These are not complicated truths, yet their denial suggests something profoundly broken in our political system. When the most powerful person in the country can point to his own signature and say “I didn’t do that,” we’ve moved beyond normal political dishonesty into the realm of reality dissolution.
The Founders designed a system based on the assumption that those in power would at least acknowledge their own actions, even if they abused their authority. They never envisioned a president who would simultaneously claim unlimited power while disavowing the exercise of that very power—a constitutional Schrödinger’s cat, both authoritarian and abdicated, depending on which serves his interests in the moment.
This is the essence of despotism—not the iron fist, but the infantile will that demands absolute authority without corresponding responsibility. It is, as Hannah Arendt recognized, the banality of evil clothed in the childish refusal to acknowledge reality itself.
If there is any comfort to be taken from this spectacle, it is the realization that such profound dishonesty reveals not strength but weakness. A president secure in his authority and confident in his actions would not need to deny his own signature. He would not hide behind the claim that “other people handled it.” He would own his decisions, defend them on their merits, and accept the constitutional constraints that make a president a democratic leader rather than a petulant monarch.
But comfort is cold indeed when the lie is in service of violating human rights, defying court orders, and systematically dismantling constitutional governance. The Presidential Toddler Theory may be absurd, but its consequences are deadly serious. And recognizing the absurdity, while necessary, is no substitute for confronting the danger.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
