NC Democrats are still fighting attacks on their win
I’ve got somewhere to be in a few minutes, so please excuse me. The NC Appeals Court hearing on the Griffin challenge is this morning at 9:45 a.m.:
Three judges on the state Court of Appeals will hear arguments on Friday in Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin’s effort to throw out votes so he can win a seat on the Supreme Court.
Griffin, himself an appeals court judge, is suing the state Board of Elections in his attempt to toss out more than 60,000 votes he claims were illegally cast. Griffin is seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. Riggs is ahead by 734 votes, a lead that has been affirmed in two recounts.
Slate reports that details are now emerging about the “evidence” the Trump administration used to round up and incarcerate 250 Venezuelans in a notorious Salvadoran supermax prison.
Trump 2.0’s PR strategy behind this roundup is to claim — without providing evidence or even deportees names — that each and every one is a violent terrorist present on U.S. soil illegally, trust us. And then dare human rights activists to defend not deporting the supposed threats to Americans’ safety. Except it’s the extrajudicial deportation of #Donalds_Desaparecidos that’s at issue.
Trump 2.0 has taken an illegal page from the Bush II administration’s “extraordinary rendition” campaign 20 years ago. As a result of a “a paper-thin evidential chain,” Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, endured 10 months of beatings in Syria after being detained while changing planes at JFK airport. He was later released without charge. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after enduring two years of torture in Syria over allegations of al-Qaida connections. According to the Guardian newspaper, El Maati eventually “reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal,” including Arar. (I wrote an op-ed on this at the time.)
Trump 2.0 claims that the Venezuelans it rendered to El Salvador “are terrorists by virtue of their alleged membership in the Tren de Aragua gang,” but as with the kidnapping the U.S. did during Bush’s “global war on terror” (GWOT), “evidence of this affiliation is weak to the point of nonexistence.”
Consider Jerce Reyes Barrios, one victim of the deportations: a professional soccer player who had fled Venezuela after protesting against dictator Nicolás Maduro and was living peacefully in the U.S. until the government snatched him up and deported him to El Salvador. Linette Tobin, Barrios’ attorney, submitted a declaration in federal court that detailed the disturbing reasons why her client was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After entering the U.S. last year, Barrios was scheduled to have an asylum hearing in April. But on Saturday, he was arrested and held at a San Diego detention facility after ICE agents accused him of being a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that President Donald Trump has been fixated on to fulfill his mass-deportation plan.
ICE’s accusations were based on two things. First, Barrios has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball that, federal immigration authorities allege, “is proof of gang membership.” In reality, Tobin wrote, the tattoo was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer team, which is also circular in shape and features a crown. Second, Barrios posted a photo of himself on social media in which he’s gesturing with both hands, with his middle fingers down. This, federal agents claimed, was also proof of gang membership—except that Barrios’ hand gesture actually means “I love you” in sign language and is also commonly used as a symbol of rock ’n’ roll.
In the second episode of Netflix’s “Adolescence,” the son of an English detective investigating a girl’s murder pulls him aside to warn him that his embarrassing misreading of emojis in social media posts has him completely misunderstanding the case he’s building. Dad simply has no clue how online youth code works. Neither do ICE’s flunkies regarding tattoos. Nor are they inclined to care. Not when the boss’ mandate is deport ’em all, let El Salvador sort ’em out.
Trump 2.0 has adopted strategies for avoiding judicial review of its disappearing any non-citizens it deems undesirable. They will get to you soon enough.
Slate ponders what’s changed:
It’s an open question whether ICE targeted these men because of their tattoos or whether agents detained them first, then fabricated a pretext later. Those details will hopefully be sorted out when lawyers for the victims can interrogate those who perpetrated this scheme. What matters most now is that judges have an opportunity to review the alleged evidence, in conjunction with the relevant law, and end this persecution before its test run is expanded into a full-blown suspension of all immigrants’ constitutional rights.
Access to USIP’s website (http://usip.org/) is blocked this morning.
Talking Points Memo has been following the story of DOGE thugs breaking into the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C. TPM has coverage here, and here after a court hearing
In a hearing in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, District Judge Beryl Howell asked Justice Department attorneys whether Donald Trump’s administration could enforce his executive order seeking to shutter the agency “without using the force of guns and threats by DOGE against American citizens.”
“I mean, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigations, using arms of law enforcement … probably terrorizing employees and staff at the institute, when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals … why?” she said. “Just because DOGE is in a rush?”
What’s changed (escalated) in the last week is that DOGE now has now forced its way into an independent, nonprofit, national institute separate from the Executive Branch, and did it by coopting D.C. Metro Police and Inter-Con, an armed, private security force with government contracts.
Inter-Con promotional photo. Armed man with brown gloves wears Inter-Con patch.
I want to draw out a critical element of what happened on Monday and which we learned today. DOGE went to the private security contractor working for USIP and essentially said, you don’t have a clear legal or ethical ability to do this. But if you don’t want to lose all your federal contracts, you have to. And they did.
BREAKING: DOGE Strong-Armed USIP Security Contractors to Switch Sides talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/break…
Really key stuff here. DOGE flipped the Institute's security contractors – Inter-Con – against them by threatening to cancel all their security contracts across the federal government. This is where DOGE's money meets up with guns and the lawyers are kicked to the side.
This cuts to the core of DOGE’s role as a rogue operation inside the federal government and critically one that very much by design engineered its ability to work across the entire federal government. One department or another … none of that matters. DOGE is operating everywhere.
The critical point is this: There are a lot of very large federal security contractors who wield violence and force on behalf of the US government. In theory, they do it under the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and under law. But those contractors are also extremely vulnerable to DOGE because DOGE can make contracts disappear, absent any kind of review process, beyond the reach of the clout of stakeholders within any one agency, anywhere in the government. So the basic transition that occurred here has many potential applications. Maybe DOGE says to a policing contractor. Look, it’s not pretty. But if you don’t want to lose your contracts you’re going to have to break up that protest. Or maybe you need to take the mayor into custody. Simple point: lot of capacity of state violence and a lot of cash. And DOGE operates front to back across the transaction.
2/ How much of a threat was this? According to USASpending dot gov Inter Con has $209 million in US govt work across 252 separate contracts. So I'd say DOGE made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
“Four out of every ten people who work for the U.S. government are private contractors,” according to the Project on Government Oversight (2017). U.S. government agencies employ thousands of contractors around the world, many of them provide private security services. They’d like to keep their lucrative contracts. So long as DOGE and its operatives inside the Trump administration exist, “Nice contract ya got there…” will provide leverage most won’t be able to resist when called on to do Trump’s pardon-powered bidding, even if the military under Pete Hegseth doesn’t. And we know what Trump wants done with protesters.
The Art Of Dealing a death blow to a $2.3T industry
“We’ll always have Las Vegas.”
Americans may not give a damn about foreigners, but they’ll damn sure take their money. And do each year:
Travel and tourism is the largest single services export for the United States, accounting for 22 percent of the country’s services exports and 7 percent of all exports in 2023. The travel and tourism industry contributed $2.3 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2022 (2.97 percent of the country’s GDP), supporting 9.5 million jobs.
And the industry supports many more indirect jobs, as it does in my tourist town. Western North Carolina tourism got hit by Hurricane Helene and then by Donald Trump.
Before Donald Trump took office again in January, the U.S. Travel Association reported that according to the National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO), “there were 66.5 million international visits the U.S. in 2023, reflecting 31% annual growth, but still at just 84% of pre-pandemic inbound visitation levels.” International travel to the U.S. was booming:
International visitors are vital to the U.S. economy. Visitors from many countries spend an average of over $4,000 per visit, and collectively contribute $155 billion in U.S. travel spending every year. International visits also help balance the U.S. trade deficit, as travel spending is one of the biggest export services for the United States.
And after a few weeks of Trump’s trade wars and harrowing stories of foreigners being detained and abused at U.S. airports and other points of entry? Well, Charlie Pierce reports at Esquire that Trump 2.0 has “done everything except hang a sign at every port of entry reading, CLOSED: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.”
Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead. International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”
All the 51st state talk from Trump is souring Canadians on visiting their southern cousins. A friend reports that Trump’s crackdown on foreigners who set foot inside our borders has scuttled plans for a Canadian friend’s 10th wedding anniversary party in Las Vegas. Months of planning, dozens of guests, a hotel block and entertainment reserved, etc. Canadian guests are bailing out. Tempers are flaring.
With insane stories like this from Jasmine Mooney back in Vancouver, a Canadian just trying to renew her U.S. work visa in San Diego, who wants to come here now?
There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.
Mooney had no idea why this was happening, and it just got worse. They gave her a space blanket and plunked her down in a frigid holding cell with no phone call for three days. Then they sent her to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, gave her a prison uniform and fingerprinted her.
Jasmine Mooney.
“How long will I be here?”
“I don’t know your case,” the man said. “Could be days. Could be weeks. But I’m telling you right now – you need to mentally prepare yourself for months.”
Months.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
Then they sent Mooney in a prison bus to the San Luis Regional Detention Center in Arizona. It made the last jail feel like the Four Seasons. It took Mooney two weeks to get released. She felt lucky. Many of the women she met with fewer resources had been there longer.
If the system seemed rigged against that happening, Mooney thinks it is: “These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.”
And the prison business is booming. On Monday, DHS detained Badar Khan Suri at his home in Arlington, Virginia. Suri is an Indian “teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa,” NBC News reports. DHS and the State Department did not comment on his detention or why his visa had been revoked:
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said on X in response to the Politico story that Suri was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.”
So they say. Suri has been sent to the Alexandria Staging Facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, the same as Mahmoud Khalil.
NBC News reports, “Last week, ICE arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who took part in protests at Columbia and who overstayed her student visa, officials said.” Zero tolerance. Overstay your visa by one day and it’s the gulag.
According to a report from Tourism Economics, “Canada accounts for the sharpest projected decline in travelers to the U.S., with the firm forecasting a 15% drop in the number of visits from the U.S.’ northern neighbor in 2025.” But that’s not all (CBS News):
Overall, international travel from all foreign countries to the U.S. is expected to drop by just over 5%, according to the report. Factoring in diminished spending by Americans traveling domestically this year, overall travel spending in the U.S. could drop up to $64 billion in 2025, according to Tourism Economics, a unit of investment advisory firm Oxford Economics.
“The negative effects of an expanded trade war scenario will reach U.S. hotel room demand in 2025,” Tourism Economics said in the report. “Domestic travel will be negatively affected by slower income growth and higher prices while international travel to the U.S. will be hit by a trifecta of slower economies, a stronger dollar and antipathy towards the U.S.”
People don’t want to come here any more. Come April, here in Boston, the administration may have a worse effect on international participation in the Boston Marathon than the pandemic did. In three years, Los Angeles is due to host the Olympics and the Paralympics, and it’s hard to imagine we’ll have regained the trust of the world by then.
And then there are all the other reasons people have to come to this country that, in its previous generosity, it shared with the world. No more Japanese people on the Freedom Trail up here. No more Brits visiting Independence Hall in Philadelphia to show they don’t hold any grudges. No more Brazilians, or Costa Ricans, or, God help us, Venezuelans staring awestruck into the Grand Canyon. And, what the hell, the government doesn’t care about national parks anymore anyway.
How about a nice, relaxing vacation in a U.S. private prison instead?
Yesterday, we once again discussed where the Digital Medicis want to take this country. Remake the United States in Silicon Valley oligarchs’ image is more like it. You won’t like it.
Ezra Klein summarized that vision in three words last night: Their visions sucks.
This is my grab a coffee and take the weight off clip for the day. Ezra Klein absolutely nails it.
Klein and coauthor Derek Thompson are on tour promoting their book, “Abundance.” I haven’t read it yet, but it seems like a “look yourself in the mirror” moment for Democrats wondering why voters are turning away from them.
The difference is Republicans have embraced autocracy while Democrats have embraced bureaucracy.
Klein and Thompson rightly argue that conservative politicians aren’t the only ones who have hobbled the government’s essential role in a dynamic and innovative society. In recent decades, Democrats across the country exchanged novelty for NIMBYISM, progress for process and roaring growth for regulatory government. An anti-growth mentality changed many cities into gilded lairs closed to newcomers priced out of inadequate housing. Meanwhile, risk-taking science devolved into grant-seeking for small gains as government support waned and research became less about breakthroughs than paperwork.
Even worse, Americans gave up the ability to follow through, failing to get the most out of what they had already invented. Cheap, multistory apartment buildings, made practical by the emergence of the elevator in 1850s New York, could help ease the housing crisis in big cities. But today, Klein and Thompson write, ungainly regulations and baroque production methods mean that an elevator installed in America costs four times more than its Swiss counterpart.
This story of how American originality lost its way is arresting and well told. On an alternate timeline without Donald Trump in office dismantling the American scientific establishment and Elon Musk kneecapping the American state, it might have been the manifesto of a new politics. Still, there could be life after Trump and, if so, “Abundance” might inspire a demoralized Democratic Party to think big again.
The “idée fixe” is a problem for politics on the left. Ideas that become dogmas that won’t let go. And fads that come and go. Remember safe spaces, microaggressions, call-outs, and tagging every bio with pronouns? For example:
I once asked my late mother-in-law, a Columbia-trained school librarian, how she and her colleagues navigated the educational fads that blew in and out of public education over the course of her career.
“We tried to ignore them until they went away.”
(That’s my approach too.)
Democrats prioritize process over outcomes, Klein and Thompson argue. In the process — very expensive process — they are not delivering for people and in that process pricing young people out comfortable lives their parents took for granted. Hence the “a plague on both your houses” response seen in voter registration.
A Facebook commenter this morning remarked that while her college-age kids are registered Democrats (because she is), none of their peers are. We need to have a serious conversation about why “without regurgitating tired talking points,” she wrote. In my bright blue island, our county is now 43% Unaffiliated, 34% Democrat, and 21% Republican. “We have to turn out our Democrats” is a losing strategy. The rest of the state is more evenly divided, just with independent registrants outpacing Democrats by a bit less. Statewide, they vote Republican. Democrats are figuring out they need a reboot.
It’s not that we can’t do things right (see below), but that we have to fight not only the well-funded, think-tank right, but the factions in the Democratic coalition that insist that if their concerns are not voiced expressly in every ppolicy decision, they’ll take their balls and go home. Except that’s happening despite Democrats’ efforts at inclusivity.
Klein and Thompson argue that delivering a physically better world will be more beneficial politically than ideological posturing. At least, that’s what I hear. Will have to read the book.
The article discusses the cases of Fabian Schmidt, Mahmoud Khalid, and Rasha Alawieh who we’ve discussed previously, and notes:
You have, at some point within the last week, probably broken the law. You jaywalked or smoked in a no-smoking park or ignored a stop sign or any of a thousand other daily things that we hardly think about but which are on paper illegal. The reason you most likely weren’t arrested or even ticketed for these things is because it would not be possible for police to spot every single one of these violations, and because even if the cops did witness it, they decided that it just wasn’t worth the bother (or the paperwork).
But now Trump 2.0 is hunting enemies hiding in woodpiles to detain, arrest, and extrajudicially punish.
For a long time, certain populations in particular have been used to generally favorable discretion. Undocumented immigrants—in particular those from developing countries—never could expect much grace, but high-skill work visa holders, international students, European tourists, Canadian day-trippers, and others in this higher-status sphere enjoyed a lighter touch. Perhaps if there was confusion around their visa, they would get directed to file paperwork to fix it and sent on their way, or at worst merely turned away at the border. But now, it seems, immigration agents are increasingly using the full statutory powers that they always had, choosing to detain, abuse, and deport these tourists and workers instead of working with them.
At this point, traveling outside the country is a risk for holders of visas and green cards if the Trump administration looks at them sideways. And a tourism industry dependent on foreign visitors to the U.S. will begin to collapse. But that’s just the beginning.
Consider this report from NPR on Tuesday’s sparring match between Trump Department of Justice lawyers and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg over their ignoring his Saturday order to halt their deportation of 250 alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. The DOJ sent the detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador without any court hearing to test evidence that each was associated with TdA as the DOJ claimed:
In court filings on Tuesday, the Justice Department complied with a judge’s order for a sworn declaration about how planeloads of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang landed in El Salvador — hours after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued emergency orders temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using wartime powers to quickly deport people.
The DOJ complied with Boasberg’s Monday order with a Tuesday “declaration from Robert Cerna, a top official at the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement field office in Harlingen, Texas” on what happened and when on Saturday. But Boasberg was unsatisfied. He gave the Justice Department by noon ET on Wednesday to provide a more detailed account of these flights before declaring the DOJ in contempt.
In his Monday filing, Cerna claimed that ICE had vetted each “to ensure they were in fact members of TdA,” but in effect asked the court to take his word for it. Now consider this part of Cerna’s declaration (brackets and bolding mine):
While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their [alleged] association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are [alleged] terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.
I lack a criminal record and complete profile! Likely, so do you.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of authoritarianism, warns:
When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption and sabotage against their compatriots.
We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.
The Trump administration is in open defiance of judicial branch scrutiny.
I don’t have to spell it out. The law no longer protects you.
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern sum up where we stand only eight weeks into American Carnage 2.0 — The Return of the King.
The pair summarize for Slate the multiple examples of the administration asserting its supremacy over the judicial branch just over the last week: the Lebanese doctor from Brown University, the 250 Venezuelan migrants, the Monday hearing in which DOJ lawyers refused to present evidence that they did not deliberately defy another court order they unilaterally deemed not “lawful.”
The Trump administration’s position seems to be that “all judicial rulings are merely advisory, or just suggestions, and the three coequal branches of government have been replaced by an elected monarch.” Except for the elected part. Trump and his hangers-on have no real use for elections unless they validate his manliness.
Trump capped off this weekend of lawlessness by announcing, in the early hours of Monday morning, that Biden’s preemptive pardons for Jan. 6 committee members are “void” because they were allegedly signed by autopen. This declaration rejects well-known, long-standing guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel (which the Justice Department has not yet withdrawn), and seems to be based on a conspiracy theory promoted by the Heritage Foundation. The reason these facially absurd autopen claims are so vitally important to the emerging theory of the imperial presidency is that they reveal precisely how cynical Trump’s view of boundless presidential power really is. These novel assertions of authority are not statements about presidential powers, but rather statements about Trump’s powers, which clearly apply to no other president. And the fact that DOJ lawyers are comfortable standing up before both federal judges and the American people to claim that Trump’s constitutional authority is without limit—whereas Biden’s was part of some ongoing criminal conspiracy and wholly illusory—shores up the notion that none of these claims attach to the office of the president, but that they inhere in fact in the person of Donald J. Trump.
For those folks who have been waiting to climb the pole and ring the “constitutional crisis” bell, it would appear we have arrived. Neither Judge Sorokin nor Judge Boasberg believed that he was signing a meaningless order, and both judges demanded compliance that never came. We are long past the point at which courts have any reason to believe Trump’s lawyers when they use rhetorical tricks and deliberate misdirection to suggest that judicial orders were ambiguous or that compliance is inadvertently delayed in good faith. We are now at the place, only eight weeks into this presidency, at which judges must decide if they will take the necessary steps to enforce their decisions, including sanctions and contempt, or if they will agree to be made irrelevant. Those are the remaining options. And if the courts surrender now, the people will lose their last line of defense against an administration that wields Article II like a cheat code to subvert democracy.
Trump will of course appeal any adverse rulings all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and expect his SCOTUS majority to support his kingship. “The best support,” Lithwick and Stern explain, “comes from a solo 2015 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that even Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed as promoting ‘a presidency more reminiscent of George III than George Washington.’ ”
Thus, I would not say Trump is destined to be disappointed by SCOTUS. These days the court majority has found ways to get around disappointing him in rulings nearly as creatively evasive as the DOJ’s lawyers have proven this week. But the Roberts court majority might as well slit their own wrists as allow Yertle to declare himself unreviewable by the judicial branch.
Adding to the chaos in Washington is the fact that there is no one reactionary agenda at play in Trump 2.0. Yes, there is Donald Trump’s attempt to “king me” and join the exclusive Autocrats’ Club with all the appertaining riches and corruption. There is the well-documented Project 2025 with its Heritage and Christian nationalist influences. Bit players are the spineless Republicans kowtowing to Trump and minority Democrats’ flailing in House/Senate disunity.
And then there is Elon Musk and his DOGE coders doing their thing almost independent of everything else. But what their project is is not well understood. Efficiency and cutting waste are a smokescreen.
Mike Brock commented Monday (reacting to a February post by Noah Smith) on the ideological project behind Musk’s activities at Notes from the Circus. “[W]e face not chaotic incompetence but deliberate subversion,” he explains.
Short version, Musk’s anti-democratic DOGE project is in reality “a mechanism of state capture.” Behind him and behind J.D. Vance is eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley billionaires with their goal of establishing a “post-liberal order” imagined as a “domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.”
When you examine what DOGE is doing in the context of those goals, DOGE makes more sense. But the media has yet to take that project seriously because it sounds so much like a conspiracy theory.
Dr. Arnim Zola: Schmidt believes he walks in the footsteps of the gods. Col. Chester Phillips: Hm! Dr. Arnim Zola: Only the world itself will satisfy him. Col. Chester Phillips: You do realize that’s nuts, don’t you? Dr. Arnim Zola: The insanity of the plan is of no consequence. Col. Chester Phillips: And why is that? Dr. Arnim Zola:Because he can do it!
But if you recognize that Musk’s project is not merely about efficiency but about who controls the levers of power, then you see DOGE for what it is: a mechanism of state capture. A vehicle to strip the government of neutral expertise and replace it with an ideological vanguard, loyal not to institutions but to Musk’s broader anti-democratic project.
Similarly, if you see Peter Thiel merely as a wealthy libertarian with eccentric views, you miss the larger picture—that his project is not just about tax cuts and deregulation, but about the construction of a post-liberal order in which governance is no longer constrained by democratic accountability, but instead functions as a domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.
[…]
This is the Silicon Valley delusion in its purest form—the belief that technical proficiency is a substitute for political wisdom. But power is not just about competence. It is about ideology, incentives, and institutional control. Musk is not a stabilizer; he is an accelerant. He is not a bulwark against Trump’s excesses; he is a visionary for a different form of autocracy—one optimized for oligarchic rule rather than nationalist demagoguery.
It also explains Trump’s interest in Greenland. He’s been influenced by Dryden Brown’s Praxis project, another of those “network states” imagined by libertarians with too much money and no sense of civic responsibility as a democracy-free techno-dystopia. Run by them, of course, over your plebian objections.
They also imagine setting up AI-driven, deregulated “freedom cities” in this country and they are presenting those ideas to the Trump administration. Josh Marshall calls it “an important window into what’s happening right now with DOGE.” He emphasizes, “Once you get beneath what we might call the cyber-libertarian spray tan, these are really digital lordships which at a fundamental level would be very at home in the Middle Ages or in the early transitional phases of a number of European maritime empires.”
Marshall warns:
… the real idea here is to stand up what amounts to a sovereignty-free-zone where private corporations can step out of democratic self-government, which is of course the point. As I said, there’s nothing particularly “digital” or “networked” about any of this. These are just lordships which oligarchs now want to carve out of a democratic Republic.
As Brock sees it:
If anything, Musk represents an even more insidious danger than Trump’s erratic nationalism. Trump’s movement is destructive and lawless, but ultimately incompetent—prone to self-sabotage, incapable of sustained governance. Musk, on the other hand, represents the rationalization of autocracy. He doesn’t oppose strongman rule; he wants to optimize it—to strip away inefficiencies, to replace its vulgarities with precision, to run a dictatorship like a well-engineered company.
Run by digital Medicis.
As Zola warned, the insanity of the plan is of no consequence if they can do it.
If you are not already chilled by the Trump administration’s defiance of a federal court order, Bill Kristol adds more fuel for your anxiety. He listened via computer to Saturday’s emergency hearing on the Trump 2.0 administration’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of detainees to El Salvador.
He reflects on Judge Boasberg’s ruling for the plaintiffs. This is how sober aplication of the law is supposed to work, Kristol thought. Orderly. Deliberate, and “with little in the way of emotion or soaring rhetoric.” That we live in a country with a centuries-old rule of law is something to cherish.
But this administration places that tradition, that culture at risk. Vice President J.D. Vance invoked the “great replacement” theory again over the weekend in an appearance with Laura Ingraham. He warned that Germany taking in millions of “culturally incompatible” immigrants puts it on the verge of “civilizational suicide.” Vance is a big believer in culture, just not the one Kristol values.
Of course, Germany did destroy itself almost a century ago. It almost destroyed civilization itself until America stepped in to help save it. That didn’t happen because Germany took in too many migrants. It happened because the German people fell for arguments uncomfortably close to Vance’s. Those were arguments that derided the very concept of the rule of law, a derision that was defended in part by warnings about immigrants and foreign blood.
In defying a federal court over the weekend and making outsized claims about the president’s Article II authorities, Trump 2.0 is not defending our U.S. culture of law but slashing its wrists. Drowning it in the bathtub feels less violent in the present context.
One trusts that the United States isn’t going to go the way of Germany in the last century. But the slope toward lawlessness is a slippery one, and we have an administration that is eagerly leading us down it. There are still footholds we can grab onto in order to arrest the precipitous decline that lies ahead. But we are already part way down the hill, and the pace of decline is accelerating.
Faced with a lawless White House, the question many of us are asking ourselves this morning is what are we prepared to do arrrest that decline. It’s the question Officer Jim Malone (Sean Connery) famously asks Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in The Untouchables (1987).
It’s the question Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posed on Sunday. If we continue to observe norms and act like the U.S. is business as usual — if we won’t step outside our comfort zones — our democracy could be gone in under a year. We are “at immediate risk.”
BREAKING: Chris Murphy just issued an urgent warning about the fragility of American democracy on NBC’s Meet the Press. More Democrats need to be talking like this. The American people need to know just how dire of a situation we are in. pic.twitter.com/sF5Q5mejSi
— Trump’s Lies (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) March 16, 2025
“And then what are you prepared to do?” I haven’t answered that question for myself yet. But the clock is ticking.
Is it mere coincidence that Malone and Murphy are Irish?
X-post from “Official Rapid Response account of the Trump 47 White House. Supporting @POTUS‘s America First agenda and holding the Fake News accountable. MAGA!”
The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn’t apply, two senior officials tell Axios.
Shortly before 7 p.m. ET on Saturday, the New York Times reports, “Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Trump administration to cease its use of an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as a pretext for the expulsion of migrants, and immediately return anyone it was expelling under the act to the United States.”
Earlier in the day, five Venezuelans held by DHS “filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that their expulsion on that basis would violate federal law and the Constitution’s guarantee to due process.”
Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against use of the Alien Enemies Act to affect their deportation. Besides, because none of the prisoners received a hearing, it is unclear how many of the 250 passengers on the planes were actual gang members, illegally in the country, on visas , on green cards, or innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time when detained. The Trump White House didn’t so much as say “trust us.”
This timeline will be scrutinized and argued in court (Axios):
The timeline: The president signed the executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday night, but intentionally did not advertise it. On Saturday morning, word of the order leaked, officials said, prompting a mad scramble to get planes in the air.
At 2:31 p.m. Saturday, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights, posted on X that “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights” were departing from Texas to El Salvador, which had agreed to accept Venezuelan gang members deported from the U.S.
Hours later, during a court hearing filed by the ACLU., Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and said any flights should be turned around mid-air.
“This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he told the Justice Department, according to the Washington Post.
At that point, about 6:51 p.m., both flights were off the Yucatan Peninsula, according to flight paths posted on X.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stage-managed the deportation, Axios reports, aided by Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem of dog-shooting fame.
“Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders,” an unnamed White House official told Axios. The judge’s ruling simply came too late to change course. “We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,” said the official.
“Court order defied. First of many as I’ve been warning and start of true constitutional crisis,” attorney Mark Zaid posted to Twitter/X. “Ultimately will lead to Trump #impeachment proceedings.”
Count me skeptical. Both on the impeachment and because the White House has a very slippery definition of defying.
The White House is doubling down on its strongman shtick (which looks less like a shtick). As I’ve written, their game is to find the legal line, step over it, and dare anyone to push back. Lather, rinse. repeat. Now with virtual immunity granted by the Roberts court, Trump feels he’s above the law and untouchable. He IS the law,
A defiant White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that’s a fight we are more than happy to take.”
Next up from the Trump WH, it’s the “They just needed killin'” defense. The Constitution and the rule of law are inconveniences.
* Doubly frightening, many in Trump’s base will cream their jeans over it. And they live in your neighborhood.
Update:
Something else I meant to add from ABC’s coverage: “top lawyers and officials in the administration made the determination that since the flights were over international waters, Boasberg’s order did not apply.”
I’m no lawyer, but I imagine complying with the judge’s order that the planes be instructed to turn around damn sure applied to Trump’s lawyers standing on U.S. soil who ignored it. What is Boasberg prepared to do about it and to them?
