Hooters, Greenville, SC. Photo by Jose Angelo Cardoso.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Elon Musk the visionary genius is tasked with making the government more efficient with a much leaner workforce full of brainy Trumpers who love America. How’s that going so far?
At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.
At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)
I’ve spent the past few weeks interviewing frustrated civil servants, whose remarks typically rotate through panic, rage and black humor. Almost none are willing to speak on the record because of concerns about purges by the U.S. DOGE Service. But their themes are easy to corroborate: Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity. DOGE is also bogging down employees with meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.
That sounds very efficient.
How about this Orwellian busywork?
For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”
What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.
They are literally scrubbing “forbidden words” repeatedly. I think this describes it well:
“They’re like a kid in a nuclear power plant running around hitting buttons,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service (which actually focuses on government efficiency), when asked about DOGE’s measures. “They have no sense of the cascade of consequences they’re causing.”
Having been through some corporate takeovers where geniuses come in and immediately fire a bunch of people making those who are left absorb all the work in the midst of chaos, let’s just say the work suffered. The best transitions were those that featured someone coming in and interviewing everyone to find out exactly what they did and spending time evaluating the systems before making wholesale changes. Even then there were months of people being nervous and worried if they were going to have a job and a lot of good people leaving for greener pastures.
But for all that, even the worst ones I went through were nothing like this level of sheer destruction. This is akin to asset stripping by vulture capitalists who take over a company with the intention of selling its various parts and closing the company itself. But the government isn’t a business and even if they want to privatize everything it’s not possible. And mostly, what they want is to destroy “the deep state” which they have defined broadly as the entire federal bureaucracy without the slightest idea of what the ramifications of doing that will be to our society and economy.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to work in the federal government right now. Trauma doesn’t really describe it. I think emotional torture is more like it. But then that’s part of the plan. Project 2025 author and Director of OMB Russell Vought made it very clear with his “trauma” comment:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
I actually don’t think Vought is getting enough “credit” for the current dumpster fire. His plans are being implemented by Elon Musk not the other way around. Musk really is “IT Support” as his cutesy t-shirt says.
If you haven’t seen this undercover video of Vought before the election explaining what he planned to do, you should watch it. it’s not long and it’s really well done. His plan is being perfectly executed:
Donald Trump has almost certainly never read Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t in his 78 years heard and taken inspiration from “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (The New York Times):
President Trump broadened his campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes with a new memorandum that threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration.
The memorandum directs the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States” or in matters that come before federal agencies.
Mr. Trump issued the order late Friday night, after a tumultuous week for the American legal community in which one of the country’s premier firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, struck a deal with the White House to spare the company from a punitive decree issued by Mr. Trump the previous week.
Trump cannot obey the law and will not uphold the Constitution, but nobody knows more than him about “frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation.” He ran for president in 2024 to avoid spending the rest of his life in a jumpsuit matching his slathered-on complexion and to exact retribution against perceived enemies. He’s making good on both.
The biggest legal thorn in Trump’s side, attorney Marc Elias, had a pithy response last night to the “deal” Trump stuck with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
May we all be as defiant when the brownshirts come for us. Elias went further:
Anna Bower, Senior Editor at Lawfare, posted a thread on Trump’s attacks on the legal profession:
So go out and hug a civil rights attorney, howboutit?
Trump has give up people’s rights for Lent
It’s Lent. It’s spring. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and it’s “first they came for” season.
Trump 2.0 started with non-citizens. Now it’s moved on to lawyers. Don’t think that if this administration sees you as an enemy, it won’t in time come for you on whatever they can “Trump” up.
