Month: March 2025

Trump has an Executive Order signing ceremony almost every day and we really only know what’s in the most high profile of them. John Elwood, a former DOJ attorney, took a look at a couple that we should probably be aware of. It appears to me that anything that causes them any legal roadblock is met with a new EO to clear it. We have no idea if he has the authority to do all these things but regardless, it’s leading to massive messes down the road. Nobody is going to know how anything works anymore or where to go to find out:

Via BlueSky:

As an alum of the Justice Department unit that reviews EOs for form & legality–the Office of Legal Counsel–I’ve been watching the EOs & memoranda as they came out. What struck me most is the centralization of control and access. Things are happening so quickly that many haven’t realized it yet.1/x

Certain high-profile executive orders — like the one shutting down the Education Department — have drawn the most attention from the press this week. But a trio of mostly overlooked EOs and memoranda released this week seem likely to have great practical importance. 2/x

First: this EO will centralize in GSA procurement of 1) IT, 2) Professional Services, 3) Security, 4) Facilities & Construction, 5) Industrial Products, 6) Office Management, 7) Transportation/Logistics, 8) Travel, 9) Human Capital & 10) Medical. This will reshape contracting landscape. 3/x

Second: If I’m reading it right, this memorandum will permit OPM to fire *any federal employee* for being “unsuitable” based on post-employment conduct on 5 days’ notice. Some previous firings had to be walked back b/c done by people w/o authority. This appears to address that. 4/x

Third: This directs agency heads to allow access to all unclassified data, including “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding,” including data “maintained in third-party databases.” Seems to centralize access to LOTS of data. 5/x

I’d be interested in what any experts reading this think, but as an ex-government employee whose own federal personnel records were hacked by the Chinese government, I wonder what permitting such centralized access means for external vulnerability. 6/x

This provision is so specific it seems likely to be responsive to some roadblock DOGE hit. Dept of Labor specifically called out–“unfettered access to all unemployment data and related payment records,” including info from Department’s Inspector General. What is this provision getting at? 7/x

In any event, some very interesting and potentially momentous changes that seem to have flown under the radar so far. 8/8 /FIN

They want their hands on all that juicy data and nothing’s going to stop them from getting it. They also want to bring virtually every important function directly into the White House to be executed by the office of the president. You know, this guy:

This should work out just great.

"It is evil, and anyone that is involved with it is evil."

Trump and his cronies sent Andrys, a gay Venezuelan man, to an El Salvador prison camp to be beaten with no due process. @Timodc responds with a message of action and fury. pic.twitter.com/WdLQWGHrw0

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) March 23, 2025

Among all the political atrocities committed by the second Trump administration, and there are many, perhaps the most egregious so far is the deportation of plane loads of Venezuelan men to an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador called the Center for Terrorism Confinement (aka Cecot) in direct contravention of a federal judge’s order. The men have disappeared into the prison and no one is even sure who all of them are much less if they are actually members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang that President Trump claims has “invaded” the United States. But news is starting to emerge that this was a sloppy operation that swept up some innocent people and one can only imagine what’s happening to them in that dystopian hellhole of a prison.

Over the weekend TIME published a first person account by photo journalist Philip Holsinger of the Venezuelan deportees arrival and processing in El Salvador the week before. We had seen the grotesque propaganda video produced by the Salvadoran government (and celebrated by the White House) but this is the first time we’ve heard about their treatment from someone who was on the ground. It is harrowing, to say the least.

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.

The men were pulled from the buses so fast the guards couldn’t keep pace. Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear. 

Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

There is good evidence that this young man is what he says, a barber and make-up artist from Texas, not a gang member. How he got caught up in this we have no idea. I cannot even imagine what he’s going through in this prison full of hardcore gang members.

It was not entirely unexpected. Trump has reportedly been angry at the pace of deportations and told his henchmen to speed it up. By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, the extremely rarely used wartime power to remove non-citizens without following the usual immigration laws, Trump was able to finally get the satisfaction he’d been desperate to achieve. The case is currently being heard in federal court where the judge is beside himself at the government’s uncooperative behavior and will almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court before too long.

It shocks the conscience to see America completely abandoning any semblance of due process to kidnap people and take them to another country to be dealt with by governments that have no respect for human rights. But let’s be honest. It’s not the first time and I’m not talking about the Palmer raids in WWI or the Japanese Internment in WWII, both of which were shameful episodes in which the President used this obscure wartime power to detain, imprison and deport people based solely on their ancestry or national origin under the suspicion that they might commit sabotage or espionage. America just perpetrated something this ugly in this century only 20 years ago.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. government kidnapped hundreds of people around the world and sent them to black sites in foreign countries where they were tortured by the CIA. They were also sent to countries notorious for their lack of human rights where they were also tortured. It was called “Extraordinary Rendition” and what was so extraordinary about it was that it required no due process.

Rendition has been used since the 1880s to grab suspected criminals on foreign soil to bring them to America to stand trial. Grabbing them to torture them (or what they euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation”) in secret prisons in ways that were beyond our imaginations was on a whole other level.

We know what we know about all this from great reporting in the media and some dogged investigations by the U.S. Congress. (They even made a movie about the Senate investigation starring Annette Bening and Adam Driver.) But the country has never seen the full Senate Report, only the summary which was pretty damning, because the White House under Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden all refused to release it. I think that says something very disturbing about what must be in it.

The torture regime under the Bush administration was one of the most shameful moments in our history. We’ve let it go down the memory hole as we do with virtually everything we hate about ourselves. But that cruel, unnecessary and counterproductive set of policies along with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and all the rest of the gruesome acts of overkill committed in the wake of 9/11 set the table for what Donald Trump is doing today.

However, while the Bush policies were barbaric and un-American, they were in response to an actual attack on the United States. The reaction was insanely excessive and motivated by some longstanding policy goals that had little to do with the attack but the casus belli wasn’t conjured up out of thin air.

On the other hand, Trump’s rationale for dredging up wartime powers to render foreigners to a foreign prison notorious for its inhumane treatment is completely made up. Crime is down. Illegal immigration is down. To the extent that these Venezuelan gang members are dangerous criminals (assuming they are gang members at all) it’s nothing that can’t be dealt with through the American justice system.

Trump’s immigration crisis is, and always has been, a campaign strategy to scratch the ids of his racist base. They are all too happy to believe it and he and his GOP accomplices are all too happy to take advantage of that to seize more and more power. It’s as if Hitler made up the fact that the Reichstag was on fire and his Nazi followers all nodded their heads and insisted they smelled the smoke.

20 years ago the U.S. government completely lost its bearings and began the process of finally destroying our society’s belief that while it often fails, America still believed in the ideals set forth in the founding documents. It became a lot harder to accept our “shining city on a hill” myth once we saw how our powerful country discarded its values the minute we faced a serious threat. Now we don’t even pretend anymore. The President simply proclaims that we have been invaded without any evidence at all and seizes the powers that come with that, all to give his followers the strongman spectacle he promised.

Salon

I had to share

This article about Hooters surprised and charmed me (gift link):

But later in the meal, when my grandfather went to the restroom, she slipped into the booth across from me and leaned in close. “You’re perfect just the way you are, kid,” she said …

I’ve eaten at Hooters just once (the one above). My design team took me there for lunch on Boss’s Day.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

“L’état, c’est moi”

Chief Justice John Roberts created a monster when his ruling in Trump v. United States gave the president immunity for “official acts.” He’s figuring that out now. Trump is signing executive order after executive order to render his pogrom against perceived enemies “official.” Roberts’s very legacy is on life support.

Retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, the conservative icon who tesified before the January 6 Committee, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace this month that Trump has effectively “declared war on the rule of law.”

“In the past several weeks, however, he has really launched a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of justice and the entire legal profession,” Luttig added.

At The Atlantic, Tom Nichols concurs:

He has issued trollish and almost certainly unconstitutional executive orders, unleashed verbal fusillades against jurists (as well as various law-enforcement officials and prosecutors), and forced government lawyers to stand tongue-tied as they struggled to answer simple questions from judges. He has sent his minions, including the vice president of the United States, out in public to argue that a president has the right to ignore court orders, making an eventual showdown with the federal bench practically inevitable.

Then there are the physical threats to judges of the sort Republican lawmakers no fear if they cross Trump.

Trump has used this authoritarian approach, undergirded by his legendary shamelessness, to break through every line of constitutional and moral defense—impeachment, elections, even the humiliation of arrest and conviction—that would otherwise restrain a rogue president (or, for that matter, any ordinary American felon).

Despite conservatives’ faith in the deterent effect of punishment, Roberts stripped it from a man twice impeached, convicted of 34 felonies, banned from doing business in New York, and unrepentant for stoking an attempt to overturn a presidential election and for absconding with national security documents.

Roberts has devoted his life to the rule of law, remember.

Nichols observes that Trump’s visit to the Department of Justice where he gave a lie-filled speech made his intentions to weaponize against his enemies the agency he declared had been weaponized against him because on good evidence it investigated his (alleged) crimes.

So blatant were Trump’s attacks on U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg and so sweeping his claims of presidential authority to ignore the courts that Roberts himself issued a rare statement directed at Trump’s attack.

Luttig himself published an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday calling out Trump for launching a “stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government,” to our “American system of justice,” and to our constitutional democracy.

Luttig has more confidence in the judicial branch than I have. He writes:

If the president oversteps his authority in his dispute with Judge Boasberg, the Supreme Court will step in and assert its undisputed constitutional power “to say what the law is.” A rebuke from the nation’s highest court in his wished-for war with the nation’s federal courts could well cripple Mr. Trump’s presidency and tarnish his legacy.

If only. Trump has already dismissed Roberts’s admonishment as irrelevant because he did not call out Trump by name.

So now Trump is attacking law firms that supplied lawyers who investigated and/or brough cases against him:

The presidential memorandum, “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” also ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to recommend revoking attorneys’ security clearances or terminating law firms’ federal contracts if she deems their lawsuits against the administration “unreasonable” or “vexatious.”

The memo, which was issued Saturday, follows executive orders against three firms: Covington & Burling, which provided pro bono legal services to former special counsel Jack Smith, who secured an indictment against Trump; Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and worked with an opposition research firm that compiled a discredited dossier against Trump; and Paul Weiss, where a former firm partner, Mark Pomerantz, tried to build a criminal case against Trump while he was working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office several years ago.

The executive orders suspended the security clearances of the firms’ employees and barred them from some federal buildings, steps that would make it difficult for them to represent clients.

This is, in a word, bad, as Nichols sees it:

The dismantling of America’s constitutional government is under way. The United States in 2025 no longer has an independently led national law-enforcement organization. It no longer has a Department of Justice whose leadership is following the mission to serve the American nation and its Constitution. The immense power of the Defense Department is in the hands of a talk-show culture warrior who intends to purge the officer corps of generals and admirals suspected of ideological unreliability. The Congress is dominated by men and women who either agree with this authoritarian project or are too scared to oppose it. The judges now stand alone—but their courage may not be enough to stop Trump.

And Roberts? He has painted himself into a corner. If he finds a way to rule for Trump on upcoming cases that question Trump’s overeaching authority, he neuters his own court. If he rules against Trump and Trump gives the court his middle finger, Roberts has few levers for compelling compliance … which neuters his own court and our constitution.

After that, it’s people in the streets or “L’état, c’est moi” dictatorship. Donald Trump can’t say it but he means it.  

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions

Former federal judge Micahel Luttig writes I nthe NY Times today:

Mr. Trump seems supremely confident, though deludedly so, that he can win this war against the federal judiciary, just as he was deludedly confident that he could win the war he instigated against America’s democracy after the 2020 election.

The very thought of having to submit to his nemesis, the federal judiciary, must be anguishing for Mr. Trump, who only last month proclaimed, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” But the judiciary will never surrender its constitutional role to interpret the Constitution, no matter how often Mr. Trump and his allies call for the impeachment of judges who have ruled against him. As Chief Justice John Marshall explained almost 225 years ago in the seminal case of Marbury v. Madison, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

If Mr. Trump continues to attempt to usurp the authority of the courts, the battle will be joined, and it will be up to the Supreme Court, Congress and the American people to step forward and say: Enough. As the Declaration of Independence said, referring to King George III of Britain, “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

We like to think that the courts are apolitical but with the country polarized the way it is and the very partisan judges Trump put on the bench in his first term, it’s understandable that we see them through the prism of partisanship. And after some of the Supreme Court rulings these past few years it’s hard to have much faith that they’re going to defend us from the MAGA purge. They haven’t shown any respect for precedent and it’s clear that at least three of the members are obviously hardcore MAGA themselves.

But there is another way to look at this. The main excuse we get from many Republicans on background as to why they support even Trump’s most monstrous policies is that their MAGA constituents will throw them out of office. This has been recently expanded to included the threats Musk is making to primary anyone who looks at him sideways.

But federal judges don’t have to worry about that. They have lifetime appointments and Musk’s money is meaningless to them. Yes, they do worry about death threats and that’s a concern. But the vast majority of them are well-off and can afford security and many live pretty cloistered lives. They aren’t like politicians who have to be out in public all the time among the people. (I suspect that a lot of people use this as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway.)

And needless to say, despite the shrill cries of impeachment, they do not have the votes in the Senate to convict so there is really no fear of that. I suppose they think they will intimidate the judges into ruling for them because they will be embarrassed by the impeachment proceedings but on some level I think they know that the risk is huge that public will not approve of such a spectacle and it may even hurt their cause. They are not serious about this and the judges know it.

The point is that the incentives for judges are different than they are for politicians. They can do the right thing without having to worry as much about Trump’s tweets. So we are going to find out how many of them are actually true believers in Trump’s authoritarian cult and how many respect the rule of law and believe in American democracy.

Obviously, this is a separate question from whether or not Trump will defy them. We really have no idea what they will do in either case. But these cases are going to illuminate for us just how potent the MAGA threats really are. These judges have much less to fear than anyone else. Will they stand up or not?

I honestly never thought I would see this. Ever. But here we are. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a mild mannered former Central Banker, called for snap election on April 28th. Here’s what he said:

“President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us — we will not let that happen. We’re over the shock of the betrayal, but we should not forget the lessons.”

“We [need] to act to fight the Americans,”

Over the past week, Carney has been working on new military and defensive deals with Australia, France, and the UK.

Is an actual war in the offing? Probably not. But it’s quite clear that the rest of the world, especially our allies, now consider America a threat. And they’re right, we are. We are led by a man with diminished capacity who prefers our traditional enemies and he’s empowered a group of tech-oligarchs with nefarious goals to do whatever they want. They have no choice but to band together.

When he approached everyone girded for a confrontation And then…

When this man approached a group of protesters waving Mexican flags, the interaction definitely didn’t go how we expected pic.twitter.com/pns1SW92cm

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) March 23, 2025

We should all do this.

Totally corrupt price pumping from the President of the United States this weekend:

But he had other very important business to conduct as well:

I think it makes him look much better than he actually does. He’s less orange and mottled and his hair looks almost normal.

This is what he thinks he looks like:

That’s the portrait he had his charity illegally buy to hang at one of his properties:

He’s a very serious man working every day for the American people.

.

He demands a full-throated apology and a promise that she will never challenge the federal government again before the case can be settled? It’s not exactly subtle, is it?

I suppose most people think this is just Trump being Trump again and it doesn’t mean anything. But he got Columbia University and Paul Weiss law firms to come crawling on their bellies just in the last few days. He means it.

The Guardian reports:

Inside the White House, advisers to Donald Trump reveled in their ability to bully Paul, Weiss – one of the largest law firms in the US – and see its chair criticize a former partner as he tried to appease the US president into rescinding an executive order that threatened the firm’s ability to function.[…]

The most extraordinary part of the deal, widely seen as humiliating for Paul, Weiss, was that Trump had not made any explicit requests of the firm, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The commitments and most notably the sacrificing of Pomerantz were offered up proactively by Karp at a White House meeting this week, the people said.

The deal marked a significant new chapter in Trump’s campaign of retribution against several top law firms he sees as having supported efforts to prosecute him during his time out of office – and how he has used the far-reaching power of the presidency to bring them to heel.

It raises the prospect that Trump and his advisers, victorious over Paul, Weiss, will now feel emboldened to launch similar strikes against firms that tangle with the administration. After the executive order was withdrawn, some aides privately gloated that a precedent had been set.

I wonder when any powerful person or institution is going to fight back when he tries this? Maybe it’s up to the Governor of Maine.

This might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. pic.twitter.com/ZKo0365hAl

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) March 22, 2025

Tucker Carlson: What did you think of [Putin]?

Steve Witkoff:

I liked him. .. In the second visit that I had it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him.

It’s been reported in the paper but it was such a gracious moment and told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president not because he was the president of the United States … he could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend.

Can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kid on conversations? I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting and he was clearly touched by it. This is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish.

This is the real Trump Degrangement Syndrome. They actually seem to believe this bullshit.

Trump crony Witkoff appears to have absolutely no qualifications or experience to be this shadow Secretary of State and clearly suffers from the same wide-eyed gullibility about Putin that Trump does. It’s embarrassing.

Vladimir Putin is a former KGB agent. He is ruthlessly focused on his goal to re-establish some version of the former Soviet Union and he correctly sees Donald Trump as a total moron he can manipulate into helping him do it. And Trump now has around him nothing but fools in his own image who are either too thick to understand what Putin’s doing or are cynical careerists who could not care less about this country or the world as long as they are in proximity to power.

For instance, the actual Secretary of State, Li’l Marco who very neatly fits into the second category:

Over the first two months of the second Trump administration, Rubio has in some ways taken a back seat on the world stage to Witkoff, whose portfolio has expanded beyond his official title of special envoy to the Middle East.

Witkoff has been a leading player in some of Trump’s highest profile foreign policy wins — the release of hostages in Israel, a since-broken ceasefire in Gaza, and the return of American Marc Fogel from Russia after Witkoff traveled to Moscow to finalize negotiations for his release.

He’s jetted around the Middle East and become a key mediator in talks to end the war in Ukraine. Witkoff went back to Moscow for a face-to-face with Russian president Vladimir Putin last week to try to advance the administration’s ceasefire proposal.

Witkoff is “flying all over the world playing secretary of state,” said a person familiar with the dynamic. “He has one thing that no one else has — he has Trump’s 100% confidence.”[…]

“I think he is frustrated,” a senator still in touch with Rubio told CNN.

Did Marco really think that Trump had forgiven him for implying that he has a small penis? Not in a million years.

Trump just threw him to the wolves again, saying the El Salvador deportation scheme was all Rubio’s and he just went along with it. (We know it was Stephen Miller’s baby.) I give Marco maybe another 3 months. He gave up his Senate seat for yet another humiliation that will put the final coda to his mediocre career.