Trump Administration Tries To Rein In RFK Jr. As A Midterms Liability

from the too-late dept

I’ve obviously talked a great deal about how RFK Jr. and his activity as the Secretary of HHS has been a massive health liability for the American public. The implementation of his batshit anti-vaxxer stances have, of course, grabbed most of the headlines here, especially given the recent pushback he received from the courts, but it’s also worth noting the other craziness he’s spouted at the same time. He co-signed Trump’s nonsense about Tylenol giving all the kids autism. He’s overseen the worst measles outbreak in America in several decades. It seems likely he lied to Congress about his “work” in Samoa. He has vindictively repealed grant funding to groups that disagree with him on public health matters. He’s very interested in teenager sperm counts. He once took his grandkids swimming in a river known to be filthy with human waste.

It’s bad for the health of America. The Trump administration hasn’t really seemed to care all that much about that fact, of course, but it certainly does care about retaining power through the midterms. To that end, it seems the White House has finally woken up to the idea that most Americans hate what Kennedy and HHS are doing and has decided to pare back his activity because it’s a political liability.

The White House has taken steps to assert tighter control over HHS amid leadership and messaging changes tied to concerns that department Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s focus on vaccine policy could pose political risks heading into the 2026 midterm elections, The Wall Street Journal reported March 13.

While Mr. Kennedy remains in good standing with President Donald Trump, administration aides have grown frustrated with what they described as disorganization and missteps inside HHS, according to the report. Among them: a delayed response to a measles outbreak in Texas, backlash over mental health grant cuts and internal tension surrounding the FDA’s approval of a generic abortion pill.

We somehow are not at a place yet where the Trump administration realizes that they put a loon in charge of public health and are looking at making a leadership change. But they can read the polling as well as I can and they damned well know that the majority of America is not happy with Kennedy’s performance generally, and especially unhappy with his anti-vaxxer bullshit. To that end, the White House is making several moves to try to steady the waters and keep Kennedy and HHS out of the headlines.

Basically, it looks like they’re trying to provide a bit of more adult supervision, moving Chris Klomp up from managing Medicare to managing Kennedy… er… being Kennedy’s deputy, while moving Peter Thiel’s former righthand man, Jim O’Neill, out of his HHS Deputy Secretary role and over to the FDA where there’s hope he “reduce internal friction.”

The problem is that Captain Brain Worm remains at the top of all of this. Trump and his advisers know the country doesn’t like what HHS has done. They see the chaos, the resignations, and the bullshit that gets spewed out in press conferences and courtrooms alike. It would be nice if the government did this for reasons having to do with the American people rather than for its own political ramifications, but I suppose I’ll take what I can get under the circumstances.

Filed Under: chris klomp, donald trump, health & human services, jim o'neill, maha, rfk jr.

America’s Diminished Place In The World And The Consequences Of Not Impeaching

from the forfeiting-the-future dept

It has long been clear: Trump needs to be removed from office before he can inflict even more damage than he already has. But he doesn’t just need to be stopped; for America to have a future he also needs to be repudiated. Impeachment speaks to each need, to both make clear his behavior is beyond anything we would ever tolerate as well as remove his capacity to continue it.

But by not even attempting to impeach him, or any of his malign administration officials, he not only remains able to wreak more destruction but he now does it with Congress’s blessing. Instead of being repudiated, his behavior is endorsed. Because one could fairly conclude that if anyone in Congress had an issue with what Trump is doing, then surely they would try to do something to stop it with the power they have. Yet, with the so far sole exception of Representative Green, who has actually tried, twice, to file impeachment articles against Trump, no one—from any party—has filed any against anyone.

Obviously many in Congress do in fact object to what Trump does—there are tweets and speeches saying as much. But it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. Tweets and speeches do not amount to any sort of useful action. And through inaction the only message we’re sending is that no one thinks it is worth doing anything more.

A stunned and increasingly wounded world is now coming to terms with the realization that Trump’s disqualifying misbehavior is the sort of thing can happen in America, and moreover, the sort of thing that will be allowed to happen in America. His abuse of power—as well as his warmongering, war criming, corruption, ignorance, incompetence, racism, and range of other unconstitutional, illegal, and even criminal activities—is apparently something not just possible under our constitutional order but enabled. As we watch an addled monster drive us all towards disaster, with the rest of the U.S. government willingly along for the ride and no one with the constitutional authority even trying to apply the brakes, one is left to conclude that, at best, our vaunted Constitution must not provide an effective immune system to address Trump’s antidemocratic malfeasance, or, worse, that Americans are fine with all of it, because, even if there were a mechanism to stop him, there’s apparently no one with the authority to trigger it who thinks it’s worth bothering with. Both conclusions paint a very different picture of what sort of country the United States is than most had previously imagined, and it is this re-envisioning of America that will affect how others let the country and its people live in the wider world even after Trump is finally gone.

Of course, there is actually an immune system. The fundamental power to remove Trump from office—impeachment—is still there, as provided by the Constitution; the issue is that no one is willing to use it. And that unwillingness is ultimately what the world is judging, because when they wonder why no one is using it, it’s impossible to avoid concluding that no one else in the government of the United States of America, despite everything Trump is doing, thinks there’s actually a problem to address.

Perhaps this conclusion is unfair, though, so let’s take a moment to consider whether there could be any sort justification for Congress’s inaction. And, more specifically, the Democratic members of Congress, because while it’s an indefensible abdication of their own oath of office for Republican members of Congress to refuse to police Trump, because in theory he’s their guy, it’s something else for the political opposition to also refuse to, especially when he’s supposedly not their guy at all.

Perhaps that opposition may begin to explain the reluctance to take action: for better or worse, Trump was duly elected President and in general it is a good thing if democratic expressions of political will are respected, even, and especially, by those who disagree with them. As Trump himself illustrates, de-legitimizing election results is not healthy for a sustainable democracy. There may also be the pragmatic concern that taking aim at someone the people chose is bad politics, because it will antagonize the electorate so that they never vote for you, although recent polls and election results strongly suggest that this fear is unfounded. Furthermore, Trump never should have been on the ballot in the first place. As an ineligible insurrectionist he never was someone that Americans should have been able to choose to be President, and that he was nevertheless voted into office already means his reign is inherently illegitimate, and in a way that undermines our democracy more than if its legitimacy were challenged. But even setting his eligibility doubts aside, it’s one thing to acknowledge Trump as the legitimately-elected President. But it’s another entirely to allow him, as President, more power than the office actually grants him and shrug off the unconstitutional ways he abuses it. The Constitution only grants him so much, and no one has the right to grant him more by failing to check him when he has nevertheless taken it.

Perhaps some of the reluctance to press for impeachment is out of the concern that, terrible president or no, Congress still has a job to do to run the country, and bad things can happen if it turns its attention away. But this sort of mis-prioritization can’t withstand scrutiny either. For one thing, bad things are already happening by not acting to stop Trump. And not just all the bad things he’s doing, but all the bad things that Congress is doing too, like not passing ACA subsidies, or spending its time instead doing antidemocratic things like trying to pass First Amendment-violating legislation to censor the Internet, as if this moment of looming autocracy were a good time to join in on the constitutional violations too.

Perhaps the reticence to pursue impeachment is motivated by the desire to remain cordial with colleagues across the aisle, in the hopes that it could lead to mutually-negotiated solutions. If so, however, it doesn’t seem like such politesse is paying off particularly well—after all, those ACA subsidies still haven’t been passed, and Trump remains in office, doing things that hurt Americans, including the constituents of both Democrats and Republicans, along with the rest of the world and our standing in it. While it is true that there have been some small successes managing to restrain Trump here and there using more traditional political pressure, at best such efforts are like trying to drain the ocean with a teaspoon, one issue at a time, while meanwhile a deluge of chaos drowns us all. Congress has still left us all defenseless to danger that by not even trying to do what it would take to stop it.

And even if the concern about bringing impeachment now is that it wouldn’t have the votes to pass, it would still be bad math. First, by not pressing impeachment it prevents the political calculus from evolving so that there could come to be enough votes—no one needs to join the push for it if there’s no push happening. And it makes it doubtful that there would ever be enough votes, not even after midterms—assuming, of course, that an unchecked Trump doesn’t do something to interfere with them happening. If Congress is waiting for voters to send them more colleagues who will join them in impeaching, voters will need to know that there is an impeachment effort to be joined. Yet so far there is none. Not impeaching sends the signal that impeachment isn’t warranted, and if it isn’t warranted by now, there’s little reason for anyone to think that those already not bothering to try are ever going to change their mind and start.

Ultimately, no matter what members of Congress tell themselves to try to justify why they have acquiesced to Trump instead of playing the best card the Constitution gave them to stop him, all of those excuses ultimately fall flat. Trump is destroying America, but by refusing to use the tools the Constitution gave them to stop him, it is Congress that is finishing it off for good. Not just by letting him wreck everything we’ve built for 250 years, and the lives and liberties—as well as global and economic stability—that depended on the Constitution’s promise being fulfilled. But by doing nothing it instead sends the very loud message, now reverberating around the globe, that everything he and his subordinates are doing is fine, when the reality is anything but.

And the world is noticing. When they look at America they see it not as a strong, stalwart ally, but a frail country with weak civic institutions vulnerable to capture, indifferent to such a fate as long as it doesn’t affect the price of eggs, and possibly not even then. Worse, as Congress refuses to defend America from the exigent danger Trump represents to it and the world, and through its inaction instead enable it, the world is left to conclude that Trump is what America wants, because no one governing it is saying otherwise.

Without a sign that America does not want Trump, other countries are forced to presume it does and act accordingly, even when doing so is bad for themselves and the future—and even us. Not only does it mean they can’t support us in our effort to rid ourselves of him, because there is no effort to support, but in the absence of any official pushback they have little choice but to accept him as legitimate, even though doing so only reinforces the power he is abusing and makes reclaiming America from his lawless grasp that much harder to eventually effect.

Yet there seems to be this naïve belief held by many of the same cowered members of Congress currently doing nothing that somehow the problem will magically resolve, and once Trump is somehow eventually out of office America will simply be welcomed back to the world stage as a respected member of the global order. As if all we need to do is wait for his chaotic storm to pass and then we can all pick up where we left off. And as if the world will simply forgive and forget the real and often irreparable harm Trump has been inflicting, far beyond America’s borders, and that America has been refusing to even try to lift a finger to stop.

The world will not. Failing to impeach, among all its other infirmities, is a long-term foreign policy problem. Without impeachment, to not just dislodge Trump from office so he can no longer hurt us anymore but unequivocally condemn the harm he has already inflicted, and not just on ourselves, we will be resented, and rightly so. Not for what Trump has himself done, but for what we have been glad to let him do to us all.

Filed Under: congress, donald trump, impeachment, reputation

Trump Gets $10 Billion Kickback To The Treasury For Offloading TikTok To His Billionaire Buddies

from the bribes-for-the-king dept

We’ve discussed at length how Trump’s “fix” for TikTok’s problems basically involved forcing the sale of the platform to his greedy billionaire buddies (with the help of pathetic Democrats). The deal fixed none of the real issues Trumpland pretended to be concerned about (national security, privacy, propaganda), and China still maintains a significant ownership stake.

It was one of the more embarrassing examples of U.S. cronyism and corruption in recent memory.

But wait, as they say, there’s more!

As the Wall Street Journal notes (paywalled), the “Trump administration” is set to receive a $10 billion fee from investors for facilitating the deal. The new owners, which include Trump’s friend Larry Ellison, private equity giant Silver Lake, and MGX (controlled by the UAE) are funneling the payments, which will total $10 billion, to the “Treasury Department”:

“They and other backers paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total, the people said.”

We, of course, don’t actually know where that money is going and will actually be used for. You can confidently assume it will somehow eventually wind its way into Trump’s pocket somehow, since the entirety of U.S. democratic oversight has been wholly corrupted by these whiny zealots, who are busy stripping the country for parts and selling it for scrap off the back loading dock.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian:

“The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said. Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. operations is valued at about $14 billion in the deal, which some tech analysts have said dramatically undervalues the company.”

The outlet goes on to note that the $10 billion fee absolutely towers over any remotely comparable historical precedent:

“Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal. 

Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump’s role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers. “

The Wall Street Journal can’t be bothered to note that the deal fixed absolutely none of the purported concerns raised about TikTok. China still has a major ownership stake, and the new owners seem every bit as hostile to democracy and free expression as the worst Chinese autocrat (they’re just not honest enough with themselves or you to admit it yet).

All of these owners are equally just as likely to engage in privacy and surveillance violations as the Chinese (which again, despite a lot of pretense, did not have full direct control over the app). In fact, you could even argue that the previous TikTok was likely to be better on all of these subjects because they were at least trying to adhere to ethical standards to remain operating in the country.

TikTok’s new American owners are very up front about their plans to demolish the entirety of regulatory autonomy, corporate oversight, and consumer protection, leaving them with absolute freedom to pursue whatever unethical bullshit they can dream up. I suspect they’ll try to leave things alone for a year (to avoid a mass exodus of young people) before their goals become… unsubtle.

Again, Trump, with Democratic help, managed to steal the world’s most popular short form video app and offload it to his radical billionaire friends under the pretense he was protecting national security and U.S. consumer privacy. Even before you get to this $10 billion bribe, it’s easily one of the ugliest examples of corruption and U.S. tech policy dysfunction we’ve ever seen.

I like to convince myself history will not be kind.

Filed Under: autocrats, billionaires, corruption, donald trump, larry ellison, national security, privacy, propaganda, social media, video
Companies: bytedance, mgx, oracle, silver lake, tiktok

Trump DOJ Wimps Out On Ticketmaster, Again Revealing Hollowness Of MAGA ‘Antitrust’

from the giant-heaping-pile-of-bullshit dept

Last election season, you might recall how the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would “rein in big tech,” and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time, that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy press and a long line of useful idiots (including some purported “antitrust experts“.)

This last year has truly revealed the con: Trump not only has demolished regulatory independence, media consolidation rules, and consumer protection standards, he’s rubber stamped every shitty merger his administration has come into contact with (provided companies promise to be more racist), and fired the few Republicans in his administration that even vaguely cared about antitrust.

Trump’s latest betrayal to the the MAGA antitrust movement (that never really existed outside the skulls of rubes) is his DOJ’s surprise blindsiding of states by striking a pathetic settlement with Ticketmaster that doesn’t really fix the actual problem: monopoly.

The Biden DOJ and most US states sued Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary back in 2024, alleging that Live Nation has a monopoly on “the delivery of nearly all live music in America today.”

But while a new Trump settlement with the company requires $280 million in civil penalties and a 15% cap on service fees for people who want to use their amphitheaters, it backs off any attempt to pursue a break up of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the one move that would actually (more permanently) help protect consumers, artists, and the live music market from predatory behavior.

The Trump DOJ and pedophile protector Pam Bondi struck the deal behind closed doors and didn’t bother to tell any of the 27 states (including many Republican ones) currently fighting Ticketmaster in court. It’s another win for Bondi loyalists (whose function is to blindly serve our mad idiot king) and the final middle finger to Gail Slater and Mark Hamer types that at least sometimes cared about antitrust.

States are, you may be unsurprised to learn, pissed off and planning to continue the fight alone, though they say the Trump DOJ has caused potentially irreparable harm:

“The case went to trial, and testimony began last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. But the US and Live Nation informed the court of a proposed settlement on March 8, taking state attorneys general by surprise. The judge presiding over the case reportedly said in court today that the way the settlement was announced “is absolutely unacceptable.

States reserving the right to continue litigation filed a motion for mistrial, saying they need time to prepare for a new trial and evaluate the terms of the settlement between the US and Live Nation. The “sudden disappearance” of the US from the case will likely give the jury the incorrect impression that Live Nation’s “antitrust violations have been cured or resolved, or that Proceeding Plaintiff States’ claims lack merit,” the states said.”

This was always going to be the outcome. There were constant signs. Trump is an autocrat, fascist, and opportunist who believes in nothing beyond his own pursuit of power and wealth. The corruption and autocracy was always going to dominate any serious Republican interest in antitrust (which, let’s be honest, even among Gail Slater types was historically inconsistent at best).

The MAGA base belief in this line of bullshit was one thing, but Trump’s antitrust bona fides were also propped up by folks like purported progressive antitrust expert Matt Stoller, who praised guys like JD Vance and Josh Hawley for being serious anti-corporatists, when the entire thing was always a con designed to give phony populist credibility to autocrats who never had to actually earn it.

The U.S. press also played a giant role here. They spent years propping up Trump’s false claims he “wanted to rein in big tech,” when what the authoritarians really wanted was to abuse government power to scare (quite successfully as it turned out) tech companies away from doing even the most basic content moderation of right wing race-baiting propaganda online.

Now, unsurprisingly, here we are, staring down the barrel of democracy demolishing authoritarianism, with unchecked corporate power in full alignment with the effort.

Filed Under: antitrust, concerts, consolidation, donald trump, gail slater, maga, matt stoller, monopoly
Companies: live nation, ticketmaster

The U.S. Built A Blueprint To Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

from the avoidable-tragedies dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.

Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.

Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.

Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.

Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.

Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”

Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.

The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.

The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.

Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.

The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.

By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.

Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.

“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.

Spike in Strikes

Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.

Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.

U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.

Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”

In 2015, two dozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.

“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.

A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.

Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.

In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.

“Do It Right Now”

Under pressure from lawmakers, Trump’s then-Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.

Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.

During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”

That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.

“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.

The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”

Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involving boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.

Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.

At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.

Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.

Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.

To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.

“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”

Reforms Unraveled

As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.

At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”

When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”

Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.

The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.

A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”

At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”

By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.

Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.

Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.

Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.

Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”

Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.

“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.

After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.

“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”

In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.

Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.

CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.

One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.

“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”

If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.

Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”

“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”

Filed Under: civilian casualties, civilian protection, dod, donald trump, iran, pete hegseth, trump administration, war crimes, wes bryant

Real Consequences: Trump’s Bullshit Claim About Tylenol Is Seeing Real World Results

from the fever-dream dept

There’s this insane subset of people who, when they talk about Donald Trump, I’ll never understand. It’s the ones who claim that taking what Donald Trump says seriously is a mistake that most people are unlikely to make. It’s also expressed by the crowd that claims something to the effect of: you shouldn’t take Trump literally, but you should take him seriously.

That this is said about the most powerful single individual on the planet is bonkers. This is typically how I’ve talked about my own kids when they were toddlers. Inevitably, one of my kids would be trying to say something entirely innocuous, only to have what came out of their mouth be some horrible word or swear or something. And I would hand-wave that away. C’mon, I’d tell people, you know that’s not what he meant to say.

Donald Trump is, unfortunately, the President of the United States of America. When he speaks, people listen. And a percentage of those listening will take him both literally and seriously. And when Donald Trump told American women last year to not take Tylenol, or give it to their young children, because it would give their kids autism, well, they listened.

Researchers found that in the wake of that batshit crazy announcement, use of Tylenol and its generic equivalents dropped significantly in use in emergency rooms and prescriptions written for children.

For nearly three months after that, new research found, Tylenol orders for pregnant women showing up in emergency rooms dropped and prescriptions of the generic drug for children rose. This happened despite sharp criticism of the president’s message from doctor groups saying that the drug, leucovorin, shouldn’t be broadly used for autism and Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.

“It just shows that in our country right now, health care has been politicized in a way that political messages are driving and impacting care — and not always for good,” said Dr. Susan Sirota, a pediatrician in Highland Park, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the research.

The research suggested something like a 10% drop in measurable use of acetaminophen or paracetamol in the wake of Trump’s announcement. That doesn’t tell the whole story, of course, since so much of the use of Tylenol occurs through over the counter purchases at drug stores and the like. Based on market research, however, Tylenol specifically saw a nearly identical 11% or so drop in OTC sales as well back in November.

But that isn’t all. With all of this attention on a common drug supposedly giving children autism, parental anxiety about the condition has shot up as well. And, as a result, parents are turning toward experimental drugs for that that defy expert recommendations. That’s where leucovorin comes in.

Leucovorin is a derivative of folic acid used for, among other things, reducing the toxic side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs and treating a rare blood disorder. It has also been studied for a neurological condition known as cerebral folate deficiency and for a subset of autistic children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The pediatrics group doesn’t recommend routine use of the drug for autistic children. Early, small-scale studies have explored its use, “and some findings suggest potential benefit in carefully selected cases,” the group said.

Still, after the federal announcement about the drug, Sirota said some families in her practice asked about getting it for their autistic children. She educated them about the evidence, told them about the potential for side effects and didn’t prescribe it. Potential side effects include irritability, nausea and vomiting and skin issues like dermatitis.

This may sound melodramatic, but there is real psychological harm being done to those just starting families in this country. For most parents, their children become their entire world. Their raison d’etre. And if you scare the shit out of them about Tylenol giving their kids a disorder, they’re going to stop taking the common drug and turn to any hair-brained lifeline they can find to try to keep their children from that disorder.

Does leucovorin do anything at all for anyone with autism? I don’t have the slightest clue. And neither does the Trump administration. I’m quite confident that there is no current reason to see Tylenol as a danger to the general populace, however, and that didn’t stop Trump from going on television and playing doctor.

“It feels like a pattern with our government, right? They keep building on these houses of cards that just fall down,” she said. “This politicizing of medicine just in general, and moving away from science, has been so challenging.”

The consequences of this sort of thing are going to span decades. Let that sink in.

Filed Under: donald trump, health, rfk jr., tylenol
Companies: kenvue

Trump Administration Using Gross Video Game Footage To Cheerlead Its War Efforts

from the war-is-not-a-game dept

We should all know by now that this iteration of the Trump administration absolutely loves using pop culture imagery, including that of video games, to help message its horrible policies. Want to gloat about ICE terrorizing American cities and generally pissing everyone off when they’re not too busy perforating innocents? Let’s use images from Pokémon and Halo! Want to celebrate the destruction of American health thanks to RFK Jr. being in charge of it? Time to whip together a Stardew Valley meme!

It’s gross, of course. Wrapping these pop culture images around fascism, particularly where real deaths have been a result, is nauseating.

But if you want to make this absolutely as disgusting as possible, you need only to use video game footage to gloat about the body count America is racking up in its war/non-war with Iran.

On March 4, the official White House Twitter account posted a roughly one-minute-long video featuring numerous clips of real military strikes against different Iranian locations and targets. At the very start of the video is a clip from 2023’s Modern Warfare III that shows a player activating an MGB killstreak. This is a hidden killstreak for players who get 30 kills without dying. Once called, the bomb ends the match. The official video was posted with the caption: “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue.”

This is disgusting. Using video game footage to gloat about the Iranian body count is simply sick. Set aside what you think about this war. Set aside whether you think this administration has any fucking clue what it is doing and what will come next once it’s done dropping its bombs. Set aside the open question of what our goals actually are here, whether we’re going to see American troops on the ground in Iran, or whether this will end up as another American quagmire in the Middle East. None of that is the point here.

This isn’t a fucking game. It’s war, no matter how hard the president and the Republicans in Congress want to pretend otherwise so that they don’t have to do their damned jobs. War is a very serious matter, a sentence that never should need to be written in the first place. Eschewing that level of seriousness by treating this like it’s some kind of a video game and we’re all just trying to earn trophies and badges for our kill counts is fucking sick.

Particularly when you consider that this gloating includes over 1200 Iranian deaths, including 175 schoolgirls that committed the crime of trying to learn.

IRAN: At least 1,230 people killed, including 175 schoolgirls and staff killed ​in a missile strike on a primary school in Minab in ⁠the country’s south on the war’s first day, according to the non-profit humanitarian ​group Iranian Red Crescent Society. It was unclear if the overall death toll included ​Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military casualties.

Here’s an image of the mass graves Iran says it dug in order to put all of those children to their final rest.

I wonder, are those girls included in the body count to get the White House its Xbox achievement?

War is not a game. Treating it like a video game shows that these are deeply unserious people that are not only running our government, but currently prosecuting a war that they don’t want to call a war. The naked cruelty of it all, rather than treating the enemy and, more importantly, the American people with respect, is horrifying.

That they’re doing it in our name, all the more so.

Filed Under: donald trump, iran, modern warfare, social media, trump administration, video games

Trump Officials Attended a Summit Of Election Deniers Who Want The President To Take Over The Midterms

from the found-that-election-fraud dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.

According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. 

Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.” 

The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.

“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”

Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica. 

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.

In the past, Trump has expressed an openness to a federal takeover as a way to stem projected Republican losses in November. This month, he said in an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans need “to take over” elections and “to nationalize the voting.”

Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’” 

The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.

Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event. 

“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson posted videos of these interactions online. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”

Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”

In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.

One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.” 

Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.  

The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.

A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines. 

Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.

Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.” 

“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added. 

At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.

Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states. 

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”

Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.

Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency. 

“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”

McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”

Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.

Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.

“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.

Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.

The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”

Filed Under: cleta mitchell, donald trump, election deniers, elections, free and fair elections, heather honey, kurt olsen, michael flynn, midterms

The Trump Administration Just Admitted Its War On Law Firms Was A Bluff. The Cowards Who Folded Already Paid The Price.

from the profiles-in-cowardice dept

We’ve said it over and over again on this site: when you stand up to the bully, the bully backs down. When you capitulate, you get nothing but a permanent stain and an invitation for more abuse.

And here we are again.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the executive orders sanctioning law firms that dared to represent clients the president didn’t like. The Justice Department is expected to drop its appeals of four separate trial-court rulings that struck down Trump’s actions against Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey.

The fact that these attacks were legal losers is no surprise. We called this out as unconstitutional nonsense when Trump first started targeting law firms. The courts agreed, with judge after judge striking down the orders as unconstitutional retaliation. But it was at least a little surprising that the Trump admin just gave up on this fight, rather than continuing its losing streak. As the WSJ reports:

An ideological mix of judges ruled against the administration, saying the executive orders undermined bedrock principles of the U.S. legal system. In one decision, Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said blocking the sanctions was necessary to preserve an “independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting.”

In another decision, Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said even more cuttingly, “This action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.'”

So the firms that fought back—the ones that read the Constitution and believed it still meant something—won a total, complete victory. The administration folded. The executive orders are dead.

But, the story of the firms that fought and won is actually the less interesting part of this saga. The far more consequential story is about the firms that didn’t fight. The ones that looked at a blatantly unconstitutional executive order and decided the smart play was to grovel.

Led by Paul Weiss, nine large law firms decided to cut deals with the administration rather than challenge what was an obviously hollow legal threat. They promised nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. They effectively paid a cowardice tax—tribute to a bully who, it turns out, had no actual leverage over them.

And what did they get for it?

While the administration lost its battle in court, the executive orders nonetheless put a lasting chill on the industry. Fear of the orders prompted nine large firms to make deals with the president, promising nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. Many of the same firms that took a leading role opposing the Trump administration in court during his first term have shied away from taking on pro bono cases adverse to the government.

That “lasting chill” the WSJ describes is real, but it was from the law firms themselves, not the executive orders. By capitulating, those firms validated the threat and made it seem scarier than it ever actually was. Every firm that cut a deal told the world: “This threat is credible enough that we—supposedly the top lawyers in the country—would rather surrender than fight.” And by doing so, they made it harder for every other firm to stand up. They didn’t protect themselves. They weakened the entire profession.

As we said at the time, lawyers had one chance to pick which side of history they wanted to be on. Many chose poorly. And the consequences were immediate and tangible: even Trump-friendly companies refused to work with the firms that caved, because who wants to be represented by lawyers who demonstrated they’d fold under the flimsiest of pressure?

UCLA law professor Scott Cummings put it well in the WSJ piece:

“This affected the interest of big law firms doing what they normally do, to stand up for people without representation…. In that sense, Trump achieved something important that will linger.”

But I’d frame this differently than Cummings does. Trump didn’t “achieve” this. Paul Weiss and the other capitulators achieved it for him. Trump threw a blatantly unconstitutional punch, and instead of letting the courts block it (which they did, easily, for every firm that fought), these firms dove out of the way and handed him their lunch money. The “achievement” here belongs to institutional cowardice, not executive cunning. And that distinction matters, because it means the chilling effect on legal representation wasn’t an inevitable consequence of Trump’s power, but a choice.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this dynamic play out. Just a couple of months ago, the Trump administration quietly dropped its appeal in its effort to withhold education funding from colleges they deemed too “woke.” The administration had threatened to pull billions in funding from states and schools that refused to sign documents attesting they’d eliminated DEI programs. A federal judge struck it down on multiple grounds, including that it threatened educators’ free speech. The administration appealed… and then abandoned the appeal entirely.

The case was brought by the American Federation of Teachers, the American Sociological Association and a school district in Eugene, Ore. Randi Weingarten, president of the A.F.T., said the case was the most important of the 22 lawsuits that her union had filed, along with partner groups, against Mr. Trump in his second term, because of the precedent it would establish for limiting executive power.

“You cannot, by executive fiat, rewrite 60 years of educational opportunity,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview, referring to the civil rights laws that protect students from racial discrimination in schools.

The American Federation of Teachers fought and won. But universities like Columbia and Cornell had already surrendered. They cut their own deals, gutted their own programs, and reorganized their institutions to appease an administration whose legal threats were, once again, built on sand. And just like with Paul Weiss, the capitulation didn’t buy them safety. Columbia folded and then the administration still threatened its accreditation.

Because that’s how bullies work. Giving in doesn’t satisfy them. It emboldens them.

The pattern across both stories is pretty clear. The Trump administration launches a legally dubious attack. Some institutions panic and fold. Others stand firm, go to court, and win. Then the administration quietly abandons the fight. And the institutions that folded are left sitting there, having paid a price—in money, in reputation, in institutional integrity—for a threat that was never going to survive judicial review.

The nearly $1 billion in “pro bono” commitments those law firms made is particularly galling now. That’s a billion dollars pledged to administration-favored causes, extracted through what amounted to a protection racket built on an unconstitutional executive order that the government itself just admitted it can’t defend. It doesn’t even matter if those law firms ever actually pony up that pro bono representation. The damage is already done. They told the world — and every future authoritarian who might be taking notes — that major American law firms can be rolled if you just threaten them loudly enough.

Meanwhile, the firms that fought are walking away with their reputations intact, their principles uncompromised, and a stack of lower-court rulings affirming what was obvious from the start: what the administration tried to do was unconstitutional. And critically, the administration quit before those cases could work their way up to a Supreme Court that has proven… let’s say flexible… in its willingness to bless executive overreach. We’ll never know if SCOTUS would have found some creative way to let these executive orders stand. But we do know this: the administration’s own lawyers apparently concluded that the answer wasn’t going to be favorable, or at minimum that the fight wasn’t worth having.

That’s the actual lesson here—but it’s narrower than “the system works.” The administration’s legal theory was so weak it couldn’t survive even the first round of judicial scrutiny. A DOJ that has proven willing to argue almost anything looked at these cases and decided it couldn’t defend them. That’s how hollow this threat was. The firms that fought won not because the whole machine is functioning properly—plenty of evidence suggests it isn’t—but because this particular attack was so constitutionally indefensible that contesting it in court was basically a formality. Which makes the capitulation all the more inexplicable: they surrendered to a threat that collapsed the moment anyone bothered to fight it.

For Paul Weiss and the others, that’s going to be a fun thing to explain to future clients.

Filed Under: doj, donald trump, law firms, trump administration
Companies: paul weiss, perkins coie