Wednesday Reads: Packed News Day
Posted: June 25, 2025 Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration, Iran, Israel, SCOTUS | Tags: "F" bomb, Iran nuclear sites, Iran-Israel cease fire, maskeed ICE agents, NATO Summit, Nobel Peace Prize 10 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Donald Trump is not happy. He’s not happy with Israel because they kept bombing Iran after Trump has announced a cease fire. He’s not happy because the U.S. intelligence community has found that his bombing raid on Iran didn’t destroy their nuclear capabilities. He’s not happy that he will likely never get the Nobel Peace Prize that he desperately wants.
Yesterday, Trump spoke to the press on the way to Marine One to travel to the NATO summit in the Netherlands. He appeared disheveled, wearing a rumpled suit with no tie. In angrily criticizing Israel and Iran for not abiding by his cease fire announcement, he broke another presidential norm by swearing in public.
Tamara Keith at NPR: Breaking another presidential norm, Trump drops the f-bomb on camera.
President Trump on Tuesday emphatically dropped an f-bomb, on camera, expressing frustration that Israel and Iran appeared to be violating the ceasefire that he just celebrated going into effect.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing,” Trump said to reporters as he left the White House.
More than any other president, Trump has been known to use coarse language in speeches and other public appearances. But even for him, this on-camera utterance of the f-word was new. American presidents have typically refrained from using it publicly, even when angry or frustrated.
“Politics is sometimes a dirty and ugly business, and so people use language there that might be better preserved in the locker room — but in no instance do I recall a president openly using this term in a public forum,” said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
William Vallancourt at The Daily Beast: Why Trump Dropped Iran F-Bomb as ‘Perfect War’ Crumbled: Biographer.
Donald Trump’s f-bomb outburst Tuesday morning over the botched Iran-Israel ceasefire was due to the two embattled countries “ruining” the president’s “perfect war,” journalist Michael Wolff argued on The Daily Beast Podcast.
Trump drops the “F” bomb on the way to Marine One
Wolff also told host Joanna Coles that the context behind Trump’s comment—“You basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing!”—was that the president, unlike his predecessors, doesn’t intend on shepherding the conflict through to its end.
“The difference between all those other people getting sucked into these extended and incredibly damaging commitments is that they have the attention span to do that,“ Wolff said. ”He does not. So in a sense, that’s the weird silver lining. He’s not going to go forward with this.”
“And I don’t see him going down and becoming a wartime president and seeing this as something that he has to see to the end,” Wolff explained. “Trump’s whole impulse is exactly the opposite of that.” [….]
“Many wars are provoked by headlines, by propaganda, by people advocating for their position, trying to push people into wars. That’s certainly what the neocons did for so long,” he said. “But this is kind of the opposite; this is war to create a headline, and the headline is, ‘We won.’”
It’s all part of Trump’s childish personality. He bombed Iran and announced that their nuclear sites were “obliterated.” Right before he had to head to NATO meeting, it came out that that wasn’t true. He’s still publicly insisting that Iran’s nuclear program is dead, but he knows now that it’s a lie.
Trump’s Insane Claims about the Iran Strikes and His Wished-For Cease Fire
Thomas Wright at The Atlantic (gift link): The Problem With Trump’s Cease-Fire. Abandoning diplomacy could make Iranian nuclear progress harder to stop.
Last night, President Donald Trump announced a “total and complete” cease-fire between Israel and Iran. Iran’s nuclear program, Trump said, had been “obliterated” and “totally destroyed” by the U.S. strikes, and Iran’s retaliation was “very weak” and resulted in “hardly any damage.”
If the cease-fire holds, this episode would appear to mark a major foreign-policy victory for the president. But Trump may have made a crucial mistake that could bring about the very outcome that successive American presidents have sought to prevent: an Iranian nuclear weapon.
The problem is that the cease-fire is not linked to a diplomatic agreement with Iran on the future of its nuclear program. Trump apparently sees no need for further negotiation, because the military strikes were, to him, an unqualified success. But as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Sunday morning, assessing the damage to the sites will take some time. A preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency found that the strikes had failed to destroy some core components of the nuclear program, CNN reported today.
If parts of the program survived, or if Iran stockpiled and hid enriched uranium in advance of the strikes, then Tehran’s next steps seem clear. It will end cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Without eyes and ears on the ground, the international community will lose the ability to monitor Iran’s program. Iran could then choose to build a bomb covertly.
There is a worrisome parallel here to North Korea, which ended cooperation with the IAEA, pulled out of the NPT, and slowly resumed production of highly enriched uranium. A few years later, Pyongyang tested a nuclear device, much to everyone’s surprise.
The Iranian regime may conclude that withdrawing from the NPT is its most effective form of retaliation.
Our childish “president” doesn’t have the patience to deal with anything except instant gratification.
The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by seven people briefed on it.
The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.
Discouraged looking Trump arrives at NATO summit, still no tie.
The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing, and could change as more intelligence becomes available. But the early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also said on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “have been obliterated.”
Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.” Another source said that the intelligence assessed enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes….
The White House acknowledged the existence of the assessment but said they disagreed with it.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Trump, who’s in the Netherlands attending this week’s NATO summit, pushed back on CNN’s report in a Truth Social post. “One of the most successful military strikes in history,” Trump wrote in the all-caps post adding, “The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed!”
Netanyahu must be trying to suck up to Trump, because Israel has released their evaluation of the U.S. strikes.
BBC: Israeli nuclear body says strikes rendered Iran’s Fordo nuclear site ‘inoperable.’
The Israeli government’s nuclear authority says US and Israeli strikes on Iran have rendered the Fordo underground enrichment site “inoperable”.
In a statement the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) says the “devastating” strike “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure”.
“We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years,” it says.
The IAEC adds that the “achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material”.
The statement was initially shared by the White House, which distributed it to reporters earlier. It was later released by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez at Rolling Stone: Trump Is Desperately Trying to Bomb and Shitpost His Way to Peace.
As he embarked on his attacks on Iran, President Donald Trump was clear that his initial bombing run would be followed by unbelievable destruction, if the government in Tehran angered him too much. But then after giving war a chance, he was clear that he wanted “peace” for all nations involved. Then, he toyed with the idea of a “regime change” war. And then he announced a supposed cease-fire. But then he got very mad on the internet that nobody was following his huffy cease-fire demands. Then, he got really mad online, again. And then… who the hell knows? Even senior members of his own administration sometimes don’t seem to know what to make of this Trumpian blitz of war and supposed peace.
One thing is for sure: Trump wants you to believe that he can shitpost, bully, and even bomb his way to lasting, durable peace.
For years, Trump has wanted to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and both in and out of office, he has routinely brought up the topic of this elusive honor, people close to him say. However, you do not need to take their word for it, largely because the president often complains in public and on the internet about not getting a Nobel Peace Prize that he can mount in his office.
One reason for that is, despite his anti-neocon rhetoric, Trump has developed a markedly pro-war track record during both of his administrations, and the body count to go with it. His warfare against Iran is just the latest exhibit in that long record.
To this day, Trump still gets visibly upset when the issue is brought up in private conversations, according to a source who’s discussed it with him recently in this presidency, and he will lament that he might have to “save the whole world” in order to win the prize this term — but even doing that, he believes, might not be enough to win over the Norwegian committee due to perceived anti-Trump bias.
Suebsaeng and Perez write that the bombing of Iran is not necessarily popular with members of his administration.
But even within Trump’s second administration — which he packed full of yes-men, yes-women, and venal MAGAheads — there is some degree of hurt feelings over Trump’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend, even if no one expects this disappointment to lead to resignations or anything useful, rather than anonymous venting to reporters.
Vice President J.D. Vance, a former Trump critic, has said repeatedly that one of the things that drew him to his new boss was Trump’s professed commitment to “ending endless wars,” and bucking the GOP’s old guard on militarism overseas. Trump’s big talk on being the “candidate of peace” was, of course, always a gigantic fraud, and Vance is still assuming the role of committed Trump uber-loyalist, backing Trump’s war to the hilt.
One quietly frustrated Trump appointee told Rolling Stone that the president’s haphazard Iran bombing policy reflects the kind of “warmonger shit that we’re supposed to be against.” But as this week progressed, this source said that “at least he’s a lazy warmonger.”
Trump’s one accomplishment at the NATO summit is that NATO countries have agreed to spend 5% of their GDP on military preparedness.
Trump at the NATO Summit
Speaking at the NATO summit, Trump continued obsessing over the bombing and the intel assessment that it didn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear capability.
Will Neal at The Daily Beast: Trump Lashes Out at ‘Scum’ for Revealing Bombing Was Botched.
President Donald Trump lashed out at “scum” who revealed his much-championed strikes against Iran were likely far less effective than he claims.
Speaking at a NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump also conceded that the report from his own intelligence community was “correct,” even while continuing to insist that his strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities caused “total obliteration” and having previously dismissed the report as fake news.
Trump speaks at the NATO summit.
“CNN is scum, MSDNC is scum, the New York Times is scum. They’re bad people, they’re sick,” Trump raged Wednesday.
“What they’ve done is they’ve tried to make this unbelievable victory into something less,” Trump went on. “The generals and all of the people who did a good job, they get demeaned by these idiots at CNN, who can’t get ratings. The place is dying, nobody even wants to waste their time going on any of their shows, so they form what [sic] The New York Times, which is dying also. Without Trump, you wouldn’t have a New York Times.”
It follows after both publications reported leaked findings from a classified military intelligence report that suggested Trump’s weekend strikes against three separate nuclear sites in Iran fell far short of an “obliteration,” as Trump claims, and had likely only set the country’s nuclear program back by a mere matter of months.
The coverage of the leaked documents had already prompted a flurry of typically bellicose Truth Social posts from Trump stretching into the small hours of the night.
“FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY,” he wrote, adding: “THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!
In his NATO speech, Trump actually compared the bombing of Iran to Hiroshima!
Immigration News and Opinion
Immigration is also in the news today, because the corrupt Supreme Court has handed Trump permission to ship immigrants to third countries with no due process.
Liz Dye at Public Notice: SCOTUS clears the path for Trump’s network of global gulags.
With one anodyne paragraph, the Court simultaneously cut the legs out from under lower court judges and consigned countless immigrants to be renditioned to a system of global gulags.
It’s a decision that will have long lasting corrosive effects on American civil society and respect for the courts.
“I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her impassioned dissent.
The case involves a challenge to third country removals — that is, immigrants who cannot be repatriated to their home countries and are instead being dumped in some other nation which will accept them.
Immigration protesters in front of Supreme Court
Like most of the people swept up in Trump’s deportation dragnet, the vast majority of affected immigrants were released into the community years ago and have been doing harm to no one — a reality the administration tries to hide by blasting out mugshots of the tiny minority of deportees with serious criminal records.
But The Intercept reports that, in its bloodthirsty quest to shove out as many people as fast as possible, the White House “explored, sought, or struck deals with at least 19 countries: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.”
On March 23, a group of detainees sued in the District Court of Massachusetts seeking an injunction barring the government from deporting them to third countries without notice and an opportunity to object under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). Citing the Supreme Court’s rulings in the Alien Enemies Act cases, Judge Brian Murphy reasoned that telling people as they are being loaded onto planes that they’re about to be dropped in a country they’ve never seen clearly violates due process:
“This case presents a simple question: before the United States forcibly sends someone to a country other than their country of origin, must that person be told where they are going and be given a chance to tell the United States that they might be killed if sent there? Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation. All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree.”
Judge Murphy ordered the government to provide detainees written notice “in a language the alien can understand,” with “meaningful opportunity for the alien to raise a fear of return for eligibility for CAT protections and … if the alien is not found to have demonstrated ‘reasonable fear,’ provide meaningful opportunity, and a minimum of 15 days, for that alien to seek to move to reopen immigration proceedings to challenge the potential third-country removal.”
Read the whole thing at the link. See also, Adam Bonica at On Data and Democracy: The Supreme Court Is at War With Its Own Judiciary.
Pricilla Alvarez at CNN: Exclusive: New Trump administration plan could end asylum claims and speed deportations for hundreds of thousands of migrants.
The Trump administration is planning to dismiss asylum claims for potentially hundreds of thousands of migrants in the United States and then make them immediately deportable as part of the president’s sweeping immigration crackdown, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
It marks the latest in a series of moves by the administration to bar migrants from receiving protections in the US. As federal authorities come under pressure to deliver historic immigration arrest numbers, administration officials have quietly been working on efforts to make more people eligible for removal.
Masked ICE agents
The people being targeted in this case are those who entered the US unlawfully and later applied for asylum, the sources said. Their cases are expected to be closed, therefore leaving them at risk of deportation. It could affect hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants.
Over the last decade, the majority of applicants who applied for asylum with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, self-reported how they entered the US, with around 25 percent saying they entered the US unlawfully. That amounts to at least a quarter of a million people, according to a federal report analyzing asylees in 2023. The others entered legally via a port of entry through various visas.
Under US law, people who are seeking protection from violence or persecution in their home country can claim asylum to remain in the United States. Trump effectively sealed off access to claiming asylum at the US southern border upon taking office.
There are currently around 1.45 million people with pending affirmative asylum applications, federal data shows. People who are not in deportation proceedings can apply for affirmative asylum through USCIS.
USCIS — which falls under the Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for managing federal immigration benefits — has also been delegated the authority by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to place those individuals in fast-track deportation proceedings as well as “take additional actions to enforce civil and criminal violations of the immigration laws,” according to a memo obtained by CNN. That marks an unprecedented departure from decades-long protocol for USCIS.
They have already been doing this by asking immigration judges to dismiss people’s cases and then having ICE grab them as they leave the courtroom. Read more CNN.
and NBC News: Despite promise to remove ‘worst of the worst,’ ICE has arrested only 6% of known immigrant murderers.
After six months of aggressive immigration enforcement and promises to focus on deporting violent criminals, the Trump administration has arrested and detained a small fraction of the undocumented immigrants already known to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as having been convicted of sexual assault and homicide, internal ICE data obtained by NBC News shows.
The data is a tally of every person booked by ICE from Oct. 1 through May 31, part of which was during the Biden administration. It shows a total of 185,042 people arrested and booked into ICE facilities during that time; 65,041 of them have been convicted of crimes. The most common categories of crimes they committed were immigration and traffic offenses.
Almost half of the people currently in ICE custody have neither been convicted of nor charged with any crime, other ICE data shows.
Last fall, ICE told Congress that 13,099 people convicted of homicide and 15,811 people convicted of sexual assault were on its non-detained docket, meaning it knew who they were but did not have them in custody. A spokesperson said at the time that ICE had some information about but did not know the exact whereabouts of all the immigrants on the non-detained docket and that some could have left the United States or could be in prison.
Running for president at the time, Donald Trump used those figures to criticize his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“These are hard, tough, vicious criminals that are free to roam in our country,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Michigan.
One more, from Sherrilyn Ifill at Sherrilyn’s Newsletter: Masked Terror.
At this point, we have all seen the videos. Men dressed in plaid shirts, jeans and boots descending on constructions sites, chasing migrants in fields, lurking in courthouse hallways at courthouses, knocking on doors of homes, and surrounding cars. We see them wrestling men and women to the ground. Beating them in some instances. Chasing them. Jumping out of cars and descending. Surrounding unarmed women. Pointing their guns and demanding that people exit their cars. They have shown up at elementary schools demanding to see children of migrants.[i] They purport to be working for the Department of Homeland Security. They are ICE agents, we surmise. But often we don’t know. Because these men, for the most part, display no badges or names.
Masked ICE agents in Seattle courthouse
And they are masked. Their masks are not “government issue” or of the N-95 variety with which we became familiar during COVID. Often these masks are just large, black or green pieces of cloth, or bandanas covering the entire face, save for the eyes. A hat pushed down low also appears to be part of the required uniform.
Despite strong opposition from ordinary Americans to the appearance of a force that many liken to “secret police” in totalitarian regimes, Republican senators have doubled down on ICE agent anonymity, introducing legislation that would make it a felony to release the names of ICE agents.[ii]
There is something particularly menacing about being attacked by faceless people. The mask not only terrorizes the victim of the attack, but it also uniquely empowers the perpetrator. We see this in many of the videos as those who claim to be federal officers, speak crudely and cruelly, and behave with unspeakable brutality against unarmed laborers and their families. The mask prevents their victims from identifying the “officers.” But perhaps the anonymity offered by the mask also encourages these agents to obscure their own humanity from each other and from themselves.
This country has a unique history with the particular terror of masked attackers. The Ku Klux Klan, the violent white supremacist organization terrorized Black people in the American South in the first years after the end of the Civil War and through much of the 20th century. So rampant was Klan violence in the years immediately after the Civil War, that it threatened to derail the promise of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and was designed to ensure that Black people would equal citizens in post-Civil War America.
Read the rest at the link.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
Memorial Day and the Dingbat President
Posted: May 26, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, American Fascists, Broligarchy, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, due process, Economy, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, Polycrisis | Tags: 25th amendment, @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Big Beautiful Bill (NOT), ethically challenged SCOTUS, FARTUS, putin, Rambling Diatribes, Trump, Trump v Wilcox, Ukraine 15 Comments
“No one knows immoral more.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today is the day that the Nation pays tribute to many Americans who gave their lives in wars to support our Country. That is, everyone but #FARTUS. He’s ranting about how much our country sucks. This is from Alternet. “‘This is a disgrace’: Trump ripped for ‘outrageous’ and ‘divisive’ Memorial Day diatribe.” This comes on the back of one of the most bizarre and uninspiring graduation speeches ever given to the graduating cadets at West Point. I cannot believe this deranged monster was elected President. It’s beyond embarrassing.
Early Memorial Day 2025, President Donald Trump used his Truth Social platform to post a rambling diatribe.
Trump, writing in all caps, posted, “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THE BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTAO INSANE,THROUGH AN OPEN BORDER THAT ONLY AN INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT WOULD APPROVE, AND THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDERERS, AND RAPE AGAIN, PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY. HOPEFULLY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, AND OTHER GOOD AND COMPASSIONATE JUDGES THROUGHOUT THE LAND, WILL SAVE US FROM THE DECISIONS OF THE MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL.”
But Trump, according to Mediaite, later deleted that post and replaced it with a much shorter post that read simply, “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!
Who voted for this kind of shit? He also went off on Putin over the weekend. There’s some blowback on that as well as questions about the ongoing mental health crisis Trump is experiencing.. This is from Reuters. “Kremlin on Trump’s remark about Putin being ‘crazy’: there is some emotional overload.” Trump must be still pissed Obama got that Nobel Peace Prize when all he can get is a wink, wink, nod, nod of respect from Putin.
The Kremlin on Monday said that U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that Vladimir Putin had “gone absolutely CRAZY” might be due to emotional overload, but thanked the U.S. leader for his assistance in launching Ukraine peace negotiations.
Trump said Putin had “gone absolutely CRAZY” by unleashing the largest aerial attack of the war on Ukraine and said he was weighing new sanctions on Moscow, though he also scolded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“We are really grateful to the Americans and to President Trump personally for their assistance in organising and launching this negotiation process,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked about the Trump remarks about Putin.
“Of course, at the same time, this is a very crucial moment, which is associated, of course, with the emotional overload of everyone absolutely and with emotional reactions.”
Every man just loves to be told he is overly emotional. Believe me, I’ve had some bad experiences on that account in my past life in Omaha when I moved a lamp from my computer desk to my secretary’s. I told him that I never imagined he would get so emotional over a lamp. He got worse about it, needless to say. Men can be such toddlers.I’m going to go Quant on you because it’s important. Bear with me. Looks like we’re in for some Quantitative Easing. You may remember (or you got a good nap in) when I discussed how China was overloading US Treasuries. Well, the Fed is doing its Open Market thing now. “Fed Quietly Buys $43,600,000,000 in US Treasuries in Alleged ‘Stealth QE’ Operation After China Abruptly Dumps Billions in Bonds.” This is from The Daily HODL.
The Federal Reserve just bought $43.6 billion in US treasuries in the span of a week, sparking concerns that a quiet quantitative easing operation is underway.
New documents show the Fed purchased $8.8 billion in 30-year bonds on May 8th via its System Open Market Account (SOMA) – a move that followed a $34.8 billion purchase earlier that same week.
The move has triggered allegations that “stealth QE” has arrived, with a MarketWatch op-ed by Charlie Garcia calling the move “monetary policy on tiptoes.”
The Fed has long stated such purchases are routine reinvestments of maturing securities to adjust the money supply and influence interest rates to meet its targets.
The Fed’s buying spree follows a major Treasury sell-off from China.
New numbers from the Treasury Department show China sold $18.9 billion in US bonds in March, while most other countries increased their holdings.
China now holds $765.4 billion in US Treasuries and is in third place behind the UK and Japan, which hold $779 billion and $1.13 trillion, respectively.
Since you buy US Treasuries with U.S. Dollars, one has to wonder what the Chinese are going to do with the cash. Yam Tits once again, changed his plan on tariffs which might sound good, but remember, no on likes uncertainty and we’ll see what all this means tonight when the futures markets open up. This is from CNN. “Trump delays 50% EU tariffs until July 9.” I guess he thinks blowing up the markets over the Independence Holiday may cause a silversmith to jump a horse and ride into the countryside. Looks better to do it after.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he has agreed to delay a 50% tariff on European Union imports until July 9, the latest instance of Trump declaring an impending tariff and throwing markets into confusion only to later walk back the threatened levies.
Trump said he and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had a “very nice call” that led to the delay.
“(Von der Leyen) said she wants to get down to serious negotiation,” Trump told reporters at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey. “July 9 would be the day, that was the date she requested. Could we move it from June 1 to July 9? I agreed to do that.”
“She said we will rapidly get together and see if we can work something out,” he added.
As recently as Friday, Trump said he was “not looking for a deal” with the EU, and that their tariff rate was set at 50% and would go into effect on June 1. That rate would have come after he had imposed a 20% reciprocal tariff on the EU in April — which itself was also delayed, as were other so-called reciprocal tariffs.
Minutes after speaking with reporters, Trump posted on Truth Social that “talks will begin rapidly.”
Earlier in the day, von der Leyen had posted on X that there was a “good call” with Trump.
Leah Litman has a new book out for all of you interested in watching the Supreme Court blow up the Constitution. She is a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. Her book is “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes”. She describes it as “an assessment of the Court’s supermajority and how it serves Republican interests instead of the public good.” She writes on the issues at Public Notice.
Last Thursday evening, the Supreme Court all but demolished the legal basis for the independent agencies that are part of the modern administrative state.
In a brisk four paragraphs, only two of which contained any attempt at legal reasoning, the Court’s six Republican justices allowed the president to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) in violation of federal law. The decision highlights the lawlessness of the Court and is likely to further embolden a president who is very keen to place himself above the law.
The Court’s order in Trump v. Wilcox allows the president to violate the federal laws that prohibited him from removing NLRB and MSPB members without cause for doing so. Laws that insulate the heads of multimember commissions such as the NLRB are a common feature of the administrative state. The Supreme Court upheld one such law almost a century ago in Humphrey’s Executor v. Federal Trade Commission, the case that now undergirds modern independent agencies.
It was therefore a little surprising to read the Supreme Court’s order in Wilcox, which permits the president’s statutorily prohibited removal of officers on multi-member commissions, and see no mention of Humphrey’s Executor, the decision upholding statutes that prohibited such removals. Humphrey’s didn’t appear until the dissent.
But this dismissal of important precedents structuring modern society and government has become a hallmark of the Roberts Court. In a decision few years ago, the Court confidently declared that an earlier precedent on the Establishment Clause had been “abandoned.” Did that mean overruled? Unclear, but it at least meant the Court didn’t have to follow it!
Last term, the Court formally overruled the Chevron doctrine that had allows agencies to interpret ambiguous statutes they administer, as the Republican Justices turned tail on a a precedent they had previously embraced. The year before that, the Court announced that the time had come to end affirmative action programs in higher education, as if it was just closing up shop on the precedents upholding such programs.
It’s beginning to feel like the Supreme Court is bringing back slavery. It’s not like any of the current heads of agencies are going to actually do the work of the agencies anyway. But Alito just loves to dismantle democracy.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” is still hobbling its way through the Senate. Politico has this story on the man with the smallest gavel in the world. “Mike Johnson urges Senate not to make major changes to megabill. “We’ve got to deal within the realm of what’s possible,” the House speaker said Sunday.” After all, once you’ve blown up democracy, the Constitution, and the economy, what’s left but to hand the remainders over to the Kleptocracy?
House Speaker Mike Johnson is urging GOP senators to exercise caution in making changes to the sweeping megabill passed through the House last week.
“I encourage them to do their work, of course, as we all anticipate,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday on “State of the Union.” “But to make as few modifications to this package as possible, because remembering that we’ve got to pass it one more time to ratify their changes in the House. And I have a very delicate balance here, very delicate equilibrium that we’ve reached over a long period of time. And it’s best not to meddle with it too much.”
Jamming the megabill through the House the first time was a Herculean task for Johnson and his allies in leadership. It required a visit from President Donald Trump to the Capitol and careful negotiating by the speaker to bring the chamber’s many coalitions aboard. Doing it a second time — with major changes from the Senate side — could prove impossible.
But key senators are already looking to make modifications, with different factions holding that the bill goes too far in its approach to Medicaid and clean-energy tax credit cuts. Others, such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), say it doesn’t move the ball far enough. Johnson wants to cut spending by roughly $6 trillion.
“This is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending,” Ron Johnson told Tapper, also on Sunday. “And again, I think you can do it in the spending that we would eliminate, people wouldn’t even notice. But you have to do the work, which takes time.”
“The problem is the math doesn’t add up,” Paul told host Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.” “They’re going to explode the debt by the House says $4 trillion, the Senate’s actually been talking about exploding the debt $5 trillion.”
The speaker pointed to Republicans’ tiny majority in the House, with margins that may make sweeping changes unrealistic.
Yes, he also has a “tiny minority.” Should I mention he’s getting overly emotional, too?
So, I will close with that horrid West Point graduation speech. It’s really time for someone to question Trump’s mental health and send him to Walter Reed for a real test or 10. This is from US Today. James Powel has the analysis. “Trump tells West Point grads to avoid ‘trophy wives’ in commencement speech.” I’m not sure you’ve ever seen the average salary of a soldier, but I’m certain trophy wives and yachts are not likely to be in their future.
President Donald Trump told graduates to avoid “trophy wives” during his commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on May 24.
“He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife,” Trump said, referring to real estate developer Bill Levitt. “But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t it work.”
Trump has been married three times: Ivana Zelníčková – married in 1977, divorced in 1990; Marla Maples – married in 1993, divorced in 1999; and Melania Knauss, now First Lady Melania Trump – married in 2005. Each worked as professional models before their engagement to Trump.
The anecdote came during the commencement address, in which Trump touted his administration’s isolationist stances and the ending of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“The job of the U.S. armed forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures (and) spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun,” he said. “The military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime and any place.”
The military academy shut down a slew of on-campus organizations, including the Corbin Forum, a leadership club for female cadets, and Spectrum, a gay-straight alliance, in February following an executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the federal government, according to Military.com.
“We’ve liberated our troops from divisive and demeaning political trainings,” Trump said. “There will be no more critical race theory or transgender for everybody forced onto our brave men and women in uniform — or on anybody else for that matter, in this country.”
Trump, wearing his campaign’s red MAGA hat, also pulled a common campaign reference in the speech, saying, “I went through a very tough time with some very radicalized sick, people. I say I was investigated more than the great, late Alphonse Capone.”
Trump was convicted in 2024 on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
If there are any active gods flying around this solar system, could you please send a few burning bushes or thunderbolts at our truly evil president? I’d also settle for a few comic book characters with the same abilities, too! Oh, wait, one woman did call out the White House dingbat! “Unfit to Serve? Jasmine Crockett: ‘It’s Time for Republicans to Question Trump’s Mental Acuity’. The congresswoman wants the GOP to ask whether the president is “equipped to serve mentally.” This is reported by Peter Wade at Rolling Stone.
Following Donald Trump‘s bizarre speech to West Point graduates, where the president opined on topics ranging from yachts and trophy wives to drag shows and golf, Rep. Jasmine Crockett is calling on Republicans to “start calling him out and start questioning his mental acuity, and whether or not he is equipped to serve mentally.”
“I don’t think that those who have gone through West Point expected to have their commander in chief address them and start talking about trophy wives or start talking how he has so many investigations,” she said. “What a great reminder that you are not qualified to be the person that potentially will command troops to go into war. That is not instilling confidence whatsoever.”
“It is time for Republicans to start calling him out and start questioning his mental acuity, and whether or not he is equipped to serve mentally,” Crockett added. “We know when it comes down to his criminality, he is not qualified to serve, but this is just absolutely deplorable.”
Okay, so I know you have better things to do today than worry about the sanity of the President and the state of our democracy and economy. Please remember the people who died fighting for our democracy instead of the ones fighting to destroy it in your activities today.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Will no one rid us of this Turbulent Pest?
Posted: May 16, 2025 Filed under: "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, democracy is threatened, Democratic Backsliding, kakistocracy, Polycrisis | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Big Beautiful Bill attacks Abortion, Birthright citizenship, FEMA not ready for Hurricane Season, ICE Barbie, Medicaid, SCOTUS, Walmart earnings call 11 Comments
“True,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s not often I quote the Daily Mail, but it has that British humor touch that just puts the right tone on what should be a Monty Python Sketch. I used to have an apron that said, “Who invited all these tacky people?” Well, it’s Yam Tits and all those Republican Senators that approved the cast of this freak show. Every headline these days about the Regime of Orange Caligula and his cabinet of crazies is outrageous and depressing. Today, we’ll discover both categories. And, btw, I send apologies out to Henry II for messing with his lament. We’ve become the worst caricature of ourselves.
“ICE Barbie Kristi Noem is backing insane reality TV show where immigrants compete for fast-tracked citizenship.” Doesn’t that just have that perfect mixture of cruelty, inhumanity, and pathos that makes the news cringeworthy these days?
She’s been called ‘ICE Barbie’ for treating her Cabinet position like a TV production, but now Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for an actual reality show pitting immigrants against each other ‘for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship’.
It may sound like a joke, but the idea is for real and is outlined in a 35-page program pitch put together in coordination with the DHS secretary, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.
Noem is even offering up officials from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to tally votes for the made-for-TV contest.
The pitch comes from Rob Worsoff, a writer and producer known for Duck Dynasty, the A&E reality show about a Louisiana family and its hunting empire, and Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker.
The proposed series is called The American, named after the train that contestants would ride around the country, competing in regionally specific ‘cultural’ contests such as rolling logs in Wisconsin.
It would lead to a grand finale with the winner getting sworn in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
‘Along the way, we will be reminded what it means to be American – through the eyes of the people who want it most,’ reads Worsoff’s pitch.
Worsoff – who himself was born in Canada – said: ‘I’m not affiliated with any political ideology. As an immigrant myself, I am merely trying to make a show that celebrates the immigration process, celebrate what it means to be American and have a national conversation about what it means to be American, through the eyes of the people who want it most.’
Tricia McLaughlin, the top spokesperson for DHS, acknowledged that agency staff are reviewing this pitch and had a call with the producer last week. She insisted Noem is yet to be briefed on the initiative.
However, DailyMail.com has confirmed that Noem supports the project and wants to proceed.
And McLaughlin said: ‘I think it’s a good idea.’
Worsoff’s project comes as Noem is wanting to showcase what it means to become an American, amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
She and her agency have been working for weeks to get such a project greenlit from Netflix or another streaming or cable service, sources tell DailyMail.com.
But while past outreach has fallen flat, they’re hoping this one has a real chance.
In his pitch, Worsoff, 49, expresses confidence that The American would be a commercial hit and ‘lends itself to enormous corporate sponsorship opportunities’.
At the same time, there’s concern among some in DHS about the possible optics of turning the plight of immigrants into a reality game show, sources say.
“If you read the speech bubble using RFK Jr’s halting, raspy, tinny voice, it helps get past the grossness.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Isn’t that what brought us here? Illiterate, unhappy people who believe that “reality” shows are real? Cosplay Barbie isn’t alone for being out of her league, but melodramatic enough to keep the big guy happy. Yesterday, I listened to the most surreal edition of a Supreme Court hearing I’d ever seen. How on earth did this thing make it to the docket, and what’s next? This is from Slate. “The Supreme Court May Pick the Worst Possible Case to Cede More Power to Trump.” This analysis is provided by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. As usual, the Women on the Bench Rule and the guys drool.
During one of the term’s biggest sets of oral arguments on Thursday, everyone at the Supreme Court seemed to agree that the United States is in the midst of an emergency. But there was far less agreement about what specifically that emergency is. During debate over three nationwide injunctions currently protecting birthright citizenship from President Donald Trump’s attacks, the justices were deeply split over what manner of legal crisis the court—and the country—truly faces. And the growing gender divide emerged once again: The four women seemed concerned that the president is trying to undo the final restraints on his exercise of unconstitutional power, and doing so in ways that include breaking norms and defying courts. The five men, in contrast, sounded irked at allegedly monarchical district court judges who dare issue broad orders blocking the White House’s policies, even when they’re blatantly unconstitutional.
These five men, of course, make up the majority of the Supreme Court. And, as they keep reminding us, they can do anything they want with their authority. But there is reason to believe that one or two of these justices might balk at the mayhem they could unleash by limiting lower courts’ power to constrain the executive branch. And not onejustice even hinted that they think Trump should eventually win on the merits and get the green light to start stripping birthright citizenship from immigrants’ children. What they spent two and a half hours debating, in painstaking detail, is whether nationwide or universal injunctions are the way to stop that from happening.
It’s anybody’s guess how the court will come down on that question. It seems the majority wants to have it both ways, reining in lower courts that are—across all political and ideological lines—battling Trump’s lawlessness, and somehow doing so without itself blessing that lawlessness as the administration would like to deploy it against American children of noncitizens. That may well be an impossible task, and their attempt to pull it off in this case could provoke destabilizing confusion across the judiciary. In trying to resolve one perceived emergency, the majority may end up provoking many more.
During one of the term’s biggest sets of oral arguments on Thursday, everyone at the Supreme Court seemed to agree that the United States is in the midst of an emergency. But there was far less agreement about what specifically that emergency is. During debate over three nationwide injunctions currently protecting birthright citizenship from President Donald Trump’s attacks, the justices were deeply split over what manner of legal crisis the court—and the country—truly faces. And the growing gender divide emerged once again: The four women seemed concerned that the president is trying to undo the final restraints on his exercise of unconstitutional power, and doing so in ways that include breaking norms and defying courts. The five men, in contrast, sounded irked at allegedly monarchical district court judges who dare issue broad orders blocking the White House’s policies, even when they’re blatantly unconstitutional.
These five men, of course, make up the majority of the Supreme Court. And, as they keep reminding us, they can do anything they want with their authority. But there is reason to believe that one or two of these justices might balk at the mayhem they could unleash by limiting lower courts’ power to constrain the executive branch. And not onejustice even hinted that they think Trump should eventually win on the merits and get the green light to start stripping birthright citizenship from immigrants’ children. What they spent two and a half hours debating, in painstaking detail, is whether nationwide or universal injunctions are the way to stop that from happening.
It’s anybody’s guess how the court will come down on that question. It seems the majority wants to have it both ways, reining in lower courts that are—across all political and ideological lines—battling Trump’s lawlessness, and somehow doing so without itself blessing that lawlessness as the administration would like to deploy it against American children of noncitizens. That may well be an impossible task, and their attempt to pull it off in this case could provoke destabilizing confusion across the judiciary. In trying to resolve one perceived emergency, the majority may end up provoking many more.
If you squint, you can see the logic of what SCOTUS did here. Maybe the justices thought they could issue a compromise decision that would give Trump a procedural victory by trimming the nationwide injunctions while teeing up a someday defeat for him on the merits in the near future. This was the kind of Solomonic “grand bargain” that some commenters hoped would come with last year’s Jan. 6–related cases, in which the majority ultimately allowed the once and future president to run the table. It became painfully clear during Thursday’s oral arguments that any such vision here was a mirage: There is no clean way to separate the merits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to everyone born in the United States from the effort to claw back broad injunctions. To allow the states and plaintiffs to lose on the latter is to give away the farm on the former.
“Pretty sure this one’s headed to the trump library too..” John Buss, @repeat1968
Slate’s Mary Ziegler at Slate has another example of the sneaky, backdoor way the Project 2025 Klan has of making things worse for everyone. “Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Is a Sneak Attack on Abortion.”
“With Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” of tax and Medicaid cuts up for consideration, abortion might be the last thing on anyone’s mind. But a provision buried in the bill is Republicans’ latest attempt to stop losing on reproductive rights. The current version of the GOP budget reconciliation bill includes language denying Medicaid funding to any “large provider of abortion services.” This marks a big change in the GOP’s recent approach to abortion policy. Through the early months of the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress have been remarkably reluctant to do anything big on abortion. But now they are using the president’s signature legislation to wade back into the fight.
What made this bill different? The idea seems to be that Republicans can reframe unpopular attacks on reproductive rights as more acceptable government cost-cutting measures by relying on the Department of Government Efficiency to do their dirty work. If Americans like saving money, and are prepared to believe Elon Musk’s arguments about fraud and waste, the theory goes, maybe Republicans can deliver for their socially conservative constituents without the plan backfiring. But the GOP’s latest gambit is a reminder that there’s still no magic bullet for conservatives when it comes to reproductive rights.
It’s no surprise that anti-abortion leaders themselves have seized on this strategy. Trump has made some moves to placate abortion opponents, like announcing that no one will be prosecuted for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which protects access to clinics and places of worship, and pardoning several defendants convicted of violating it. But for the most part, he has frozen out the anti-abortion movement. The Department of Justice hasn’t started enforcing the Comstock Act as an abortion ban. When conservative state attorneys general sued to force a shift, the Trump administration just last week asked the court to dismiss the suit for procedural reasons.
At the same time, if voters actually are paying less attention, it’s probably because less seems to be happening. Republicans in Congress have sat on their hands. Trump has yet to make a big move. The truth is that plenty is still going on, with cases moving through state and federal courts, states poised to pass stringent new bills, and Trump’s future moves still shrouded in uncertainty. The minute one of these events makes news, there’s no reason to believe voters will be any happier with Republicans’ position than they ever were.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like running for the Canadian border. Why would anyone want to come here under these circumstances? I’m also very afraid of this year’s hurricane season. This is from ABC News. “FEMA ‘not ready’ for hurricane season, internal review finds. The acting agency head told staff that planning is about 80-85% complete.” The season starts on June 1st. There have already been disturbances reported. This administration seems hellbent on killing people. This might make Heckuva Job Brownie look like an efficiency expert.
The acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told staff members on Thursday that he believes President Donald Trump is a bold man with a bold vision for the agency — but that FEMA doesn’t yet have a full plan to tackle hurricane season.
“I would say we’re about 80 or 85% there,” Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson told staff on a conference call, parts of which were obtained by ABC. “The next week, we will close that gap and get to probably 97-98% of a plan. We’ll never have 100% of a plan. Even if we did have 100% of a plan, a plan never survives first contact. However, we will do our best to make sure that the plan is all-encompassing.”
The conference call came after an internal document prepared for Richardson as he takes the helm of the agency responsible for managing federal disasters indicated the agency was ill-prepared for the upcoming hurricane season, which starts on June 1.
“As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready,” according to the document, which was obtained by ABC News.
In the conference call, Richardson said he and staff sat down for “about 90 minutes” and started to come up with a plan for this year’s disaster season.
He said the plan would be ready soon.
“Listen closely: The intent for disaster season 2025 (is to) safeguard the American people, return primacy to the states, strengthen their capability to respond and recover, and coordinate federal assistance when deemed necessary, while transforming to the future of FEMA,” Richardson said.
Richardson was placed at FEMA by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after former acting Administrator Cam Hamilton was fired last week because of his testimony in front of a House panel, according to a source familiar with the matter, which went against the shuttering of the agency.
The acting administrator said this version of FEMA will look different than the agency of the past.
Meanwhile, the Tariff turbulence is coming to fruition. This is from CNBC. “Walmart CFO says price hikes from tariffs could start later this month, as retailer beats on earnings.” Melissa Repko has the story.
Walmart on Thursday fell just short of quarterly sales estimates, as even the world’s largest retailer said it would feel the pinch of higher tariffs.
Even so, the Arkansas-based discounter beat quarterly earnings expectations and stuck by its full-year forecast, which calls for sales to grow 3% to 4% and adjusted earnings of $2.50 to $2.60 per share for the fiscal year. That cautious profit outlook had disappointed Wall Street in February. Wall Street was also underwhelmed by the results Thursday, as shares closed slightly lower.
Walmart also marked a milestone: It posted its first profitable quarterfor its e-commerce business both in the U.S. and globally. The business has benefited from the growth of higher-margin moneymakers, including online advertising and Walmart’s third-party marketplace.
In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said tariffs are “still too high” – even with the recently announced agreement to lower duties on imports from China to 30% for 90 days.
“We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” he said. “It’s more than any supplier can absorb. And so I’m concerned that consumer is going to start seeing higher prices. You’ll begin to see that, likely towards the tail end of this month, and then certainly much more in June.”
Reuters reports the bottom line here. There’s only so long you can eliminate loss leaders, lower earnings, and try to slow things down. We will feel it everywhere, and it will be next month. Jennifer Saba has this headline: “Walmart can discount tariffs only so much.” So this is your friendly economist speaking, stock up and hunker down. It’s going to get real real soon.
Walmart (WMT.N), opens new tab wheeled its trolley cart right into President Donald Trump’s ankles. The largest U.S. retailer and a bellwether for consumers said on Thursday that tariffs would force it to raise prices, just a month after it expressed confidence that it would keep them low. Boss Doug McMillon may be able to do both at once, on a relative basis, but it also sends a clear signal to the White House that shelves are stocked with only so many ways to shield shoppers.
Flagship U.S. Walmart locations open for at least a year generated 4.5% sales growth for the three months ending April 30 from the same stretch in 2024, a second consecutive quarterly slowdown. McMillon warned that import levies are starting to take a toll. Supply-chain pressure began in late April and accelerated in May. The $750 billion company is trying to hold the line on food even as the cost of bananas, coffee, avocados and flowers increases, but it is unwilling to eat them everywhere.
McMillon and his deputies took a markedly different tone a few weeks ago. The CEO told investors that U.S. duties, which at the time were 145% on Chinese goods, remained a question mark, but that Walmart would focus on “managing our inventory and our expenses well.” Following news that those levies would be slashed to 30%, at least temporarily, McMillon cautioned of a challenging environment, implying that he can squeeze suppliers only so much.
He’s not alone either. JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon warned, opens new tab on Thursday that recession remains a threat despite Trump’s trade truce. Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant Foxconn, which assembles iPhones and makes Nvidia servers, also slashed its full-year outlook this week, blaming the stronger Taiwan dollar and “rapid changes” in U.S. tariff policy.Equity investors took comfort from the lower duty rates, pushing the S&P 500 Index up 5% this week, to higher than where it started the year. Business leaders are clearly less impressed. Sustained gloom from industry titans like Walmart will keep pressure on the president to reconsider his own pricing power.
Every day I read the headlines, all I can think is that we shouldn’t be in this position. But, here it is. Don’t even get me started on Drunk and rapey Pete Hegseth. (Must Read. VF: “VF editors are joined by special correspondent Gabriel Sherman to discuss Pete Hegseth’s tumultuous tenure atop the Department of Defense, and why the president is reluctant to break with his friend from Fox.)
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Bleak Monday Reads: Wherefore art thou Democracy?
Posted: March 31, 2025 Filed under: "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, democracy is threatened, Foreign Affairs, Hungary, Staglfation | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social, Anne Applebaum, John Buss @repeat1968, Marcy Wheeler, sadopopulism 7 Comments
“For once, I have to agree with JD” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Morning, Sky Dancers!
I’m trying to get this posted early since the Poland Avenue Rooster and the thunder have me awake, and I have another doctor’s appointment today. The weather is not good here. We have flash flood warnings. My first look at the headlines this morning made me want to go back to sleep. My first two suggested reads come from two of my favorite writers. The articles are both horrifying, but these are the times we live in. We cannot look away. Marcy Wheeler and Anne Applebaum tell it like it is. This first one is by independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, whom I have not since our days at the long-gone Fire Dog Lake, my first stop in blogdom. She writes this at her home at emptywheel. This is about how the press has been instrumental in trying to normalize a regime that is other than normal with their “hypothetical discussions” about the U.S. Constitution. I know I have a new term to add to our tags today: instrumental language. I will use Google’s AI function to give you a brief definition before Marcy applies the term.In the context of language, “instrumental” refers to language used as a tool or means to fulfill a need or achieve a goal, such as obtaining something or expressing a desireHere’s the application from a phone conversation between FARTUS and Kristin Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press. Sit down and put the cup of coffee down. You may need a deep breath. “Trump’s Threats to the Constitution Are Happening in Real Time, Not (Just) in a Third Term.”
There is no doubt in my mind that the intent of the Trump team is to retain power indefinitely, via whatever means. To fight that effectively, you should focus your action and words on the most pressing issues before us — elections on Tuesday, legal cases before appeals courts, legal US residents in detention — rather than trying to discern the means by which Trump will codify all the actions he is taking today, yesterday, last week. The actions he is taking in real time, and their goals, are utterly transparent. Which is why I think it a colossal waste of time that the punditocracy spent much of Sunday talking about Kristen Welker’s “report” that Trump says he wants a third term. You don’t say? Rather than spending the day discussing Trump’s Executive Order presuming to dictate to states how they — with the involvement of DOGE!! — must start suppressing the vote over the next months, we talked about something that might happen in 2028. Rather than spending the day talking about how Trump is already using federal funding and immigration law to silence speech protected by the First Amendment, we discussed what gimmick Trump might use in the future to evade the 22nd Amendment. Almost no one even tried to use Trump’s comments about a third term as a way to explain the end goal of assaults on civil society, speech, and voting — to connect the actions Trump took in the last week to what he says he’ll do in 2028 — something that would at least make use of Trump’s own rhetoric to educate low-information voters. Instead, they talked about Trump’s assault on democracy in the way Trump wanted it framed — distant, allegedly constitutional, and uncertain, rather than an imminent unconstitutional assault on democracy. What the fuck are we doing here, folks?
Indeed. Please go read this.
“The fact that Welker brought up this plot for a third term herself, mentioning Steve Bannon (who was presenting it on another channel), suggests that was the entire point: Trump called her, she dutifully brought it up, she got video but used almost none of it, leaving only Markwayne Mullin on camera (who should never be invited as a credible interlocutor in any case) to answer for the Administration on MTP itself. Not that it mattered; Welker was even more solicitous than usual yesterday. Trump’s genius is in managing attention: both keeping it, and directing it away and towards topics of his choosing. He has long integrated assertions about a third term into his political spiel. This is nothing new (indeed, NBC linked an earlier instance in the story). And yet NBC — along with a pack of credulous pundits — chose to focus on Trump’s third term comments all day Sunday rather on the things he did in the last week, covering up disappearances on Monday, tampering in elections on Tuesday, assaulting the independence of another law firm on Wednesday, attacking unions and whitewashing history on Thursday, compromising DC self-rule on Friday, that are obviously about a third term and beyond. How can you have lived through that week, or any of the last nine, and have doubts about the intent here? Why do you think hypothetical discussions about assaults on the Constitution will better serve fighting back than concrete discussion and organizing about specific assaults on it? This seems to be yet another instance where journalists and liberals, both of whom institutionally presume that language is transparent, misunderstand how authoritarians use language instrumentally and therefore forgo the most effective response to instrumental language.”
Human guardrails are not present in this administration. I’m not even certain you may call anyone in the administration fully human. Constitutional Guardrails are questionable even as we are not even in the first 100 days of this surreal mess. It’s no wonder former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder and his wife have taken off for the Great White North. It appears Fascism scholars can read the writing on the wall from the capitulation of major universities on the attacks they’ve received.
Here’s The Guardian‘s take on yesterday’s advance notice on the march to dictatorship. “Donald Trump criticized for suggesting there are ‘methods’ for a third term – US politics live. President attracting criticism from some in both parties after telling NBC ‘there are methods’ in securing a third term despite constitutional barriers.”
Republican John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon as president, who was jailed for his involvement in the cover-up of Watergate and later testified to Congress as a witness for the investigation into the scandal, criticized Trump’s apparent aspiration for a third term, in an interview with CNN.
“He likes constitutional end-runs … and that’s what seems to be on his mind is how he can get around the very clear language of the 22nd amendment [to the US constitution], which precludes getting elected to more than two terms,” Dean said.
CNN asked, if there are ways to get around the law, constitutionally what could those be?
Dean said: “They would have to be written by the supreme court, that would redefine the constitution. I just describe it as a constitutional end run.”
An end run is an American football term for the ball-carrier running around the end of the defensive line in their attempt to reach the line to score a touchdown.
The key line from the 22nd amendment, forbidding anyone who has been elected president twice from being elected again. reads:
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
The US Congress approved the amendment in 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures, where it was then ratified in 1951.
It’s the end-runs that worry me. He’s already got a history of back-to-back self-coups. I really don’t think most people realize how serious this is. FARTUS also has two Supreme Court justices in the tank for him; the rest of the right-wing majority is wobbly at best.
The other must-read article today comes from The Atlantic. It’s written by Anne Applebaum. “America’s Future Is Hungary. MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.” This is a bleak picture of our economic future, given the fascination with Orbán by this administration and its crazy White Nationalist Christian wing.
Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”
What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.
This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies. He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.
Remember the idea of visas for $5 million dollars? Well, now we know where that scatterbrained idea came from. Politico‘s Jack Blanchard warns us we are in for another mind-blowing week.
Get ready: We’ve got special and state-level elections happening Tuesday; Donald Trump’s latest tariff bonanza unveiled Wednesday; a budget vote-a-rama expected in the Senate Thursday and the TikTok ban deadline looming Friday night. On top of that, we’re expecting another big Trump phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and potentially the first Supreme Court ruling on the president’s efforts to deport migrants using an 18th-century wartime law. And that’s just the stuff we know about.I really do not get anyone who can’t see FARTUS and his cronies as a clear and present danger to our country. This is from CNBC’s Jeff Cox. “Goldman Sachs sees Trump tariffs spiking inflation, stunting growth and raising recession risks.” Well, can’t say I didn’t tell you this would happen back in mid-November when the real agenda became evident.
With decision day looming this week for President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs, Goldman Sachs expects aggressive duties from the White House to raise inflation and unemployment and drag economic growth to a near-standstill. The investment bank now expects that tariff rates will jump 15 percentage points, its previous “risk-case” scenario that now appears more likely when Trump announces reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday. However, Goldman did note that product and country exclusions eventually will pull that increase down to 9 percentage points. When the new trade moves are enacted, the Goldman economic team led by head of global investment research Jan Hatzius sees a broad, negative impact on the economy. In a note published on Sunday, the firm said “we continue to believe the risk from April 2 tariffs is greater than many market participants have previously assumed.” On inflation, the firm sees its preferred core measure, excluding food and energy prices, hitting 3.5% in 2025, a 0.5 percentage point increase from the prior forecast and well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal. That in turn will come with weak economic growth: Just a 0.2% annualized growth rate in the first quarter and 1% for the full year when measured from the fourth quarter of 2024 to Q4 of 2025, down 0.5 percentage point from the prior forecast. In addition, the Wall Street firm now sees unemployment reaching 4.5%, a 0.3 percentage point raise from the previous forecast. Taken together, Goldman now expects a 35% chance of recession in the next 12 months, up from 20% in the prior outlook. The forecast paints a growing chance of a stagflation economy, with low growth and high inflation. The last time the U.S. saw stagflation was in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Back then, the Paul Volcker-led Fed dramatically raised interest rates, sending the economy into recession as the central bank chose fighting inflation over supporting economic growth.
One more read from me, and it’s off to the shower. This is from Salon. It’s a commentary from Chauncey DeVega. “Sadopolitics: Why MAGA clings tighter to Trump the more his policies hurt them. Psychology helps to explain why Trump’s followers will not abandon him” H/T to BeadBear. The explanation that I like best is this one. “Donald Trump is an expert at sadopolitics “
In a 2018 conversation with historian Timothy Snyder here at Salon, he elaborated on the meaning of sadopolitics (what he terms as “sadopopulism”) and its implications for the Age of Trump and the larger democracy crisis:Hold on to the family silver. It might be more valuable than the dollar and more useful than cryptocurrency. Hold on to anything gold. That’s about to go way up. It ain’t that pretty at all out there. Remember stagflation? We really don’t need to see that again, but then, we have an incompetent Dotard with insane ideas in charge of the country. He’s got equally incompetent Dotards out there wrecking the government. Well, that’s enough of what looks like a Debbie Downer Day for me, and it’s just started. At least the thunder is letting up. What’s on your reading and blogging list today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwpagb-_Zk0“Sadopopulism” is the notion that you’re doing half of populism. You promise people things, but then when you get power you have no intention of even trying to implement any policy on behalf of the people. Instead, you deliberately make the suffering worse for your critical constituency. The people who got Trump into office, for example, are traditional Republican voters plus people in counties who are doing badly in terms of health care and other measures, and who need help.
Under Trump, of course, things will just get worse in terms of both the opioid addictions and in terms of wealth inequality. But that’s OK, because the logic of sadopopulism is that pain is a resource. Sadopopulist leaders like Trump use that pain to create a story about who’s actually at fault. The way politics works in that model is that government doesn’t solve your problems, it blames your problems on other people — and it creates the cycle that goes around over and over and over again. I started talking about sadopopulism because I got tired of people talking about populism.
In such a toxic relationship between the leader, the followers and the larger public, the abuse and misery actually bond them all closer together. The most loyal followers see their leader as simultaneously a source of protection and safety, even as he or she hurts them. To that point, the more Trump’s policies hurt his followers, the more likely they are to cling to him. Trump’s followers are also going to misdirect their rage, anger, blame, and other negative emotions and behavior at some “enemy.” In the Age of Trump, that enemy is Black and brown people and other nonwhites, “Woke” and “DEI, “illegal immigrants” and migrant “invaders,” the LGBTQ community and specifically transgender people, social “parasites” and “takers,” government employees, those not deemed sufficiently “patriotic” and therefore disloyal to MAGA and Trump (which here is synonymous with “Real America”), Muslims and other non-“Christians,” the Democrats, “liberals,” the news media (“fake news” and “lugenpresse”) and other targeted groups and individuals.
Wednesday Reads: Judges Push Back
Posted: March 19, 2025 Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, SCOTUS | Tags: Alien Enemies Act, Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Ana Reyes, Judge James Boasberg, Judge Jesse Furman, Judge Julie Rubin, Judge Maryanne Trump Berry, Judge Tanya Chutkan, Judge Theodore Chuang, Mahmoud Khlil 5 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
The Supreme Court at night
Yesterday, the courts pushed back on Trump and Musk. I’m not convinced that it will stop them, but we’ll find out soon enough. Here’s a brief summary of what happened from David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: The Day The Federal Courts Stood Tall.
The showdown between President Trump and the federal judiciary came to a head Tuesday in a more dramatic and direct way that Morning Memo had anticipated.
With Trump dangerously but also absurdly calling for the impeachment of the federal judge who ruled against him in the Alien Enemies Act case, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stirred from his torpor long enough to issue a rare rebuke of the president, though not by name (as Trump himself pointed out). Roberts’ decision to come to the defense of district judges who have been on the front lines of this constitutional battle keeps them from being marooned on an island while their decisions wind their way up through the lengthy appeals process.
“The Chief Justice’s statement now renders the Trump confrontation one with the entire federal judiciary, and not just the lower federal courts,” Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith observed.
What followed over the course of the day was a series of significant court rulings against the Trump administration. While the compressed timing of the rulings was mostly coincidental, the thrust of the decisions all pointed in the same direction: Two months into his second term, President Trump has wildly exceeded his constitutional authority on numerous fronts.
I wish I could say that the combination of the chief justice’s rebuke and the multiple legal setbacks suggests that the federal judiciary is girding for a fight over the rule of law and its own constitutional powers. I hope that’s the case. I want that to be the case. But we need to see appeals courts and the high court itself weighing in on the substance of these cases in the weeks and months to come before we can assess whether the judicial branch will hold the line. There’s no doubt that Trump is itching to coopt the judiciary.
It bears repeating that the courts alone can’t save us from autocracy. But losing the courts entirely would be a devastating blow that would make additional areas of American public and private life vulnerable to Trump’s rampage and would add immeasurably to the future workload of rebuilding what Trump has broken.
For one day, though, the judicial branch stood tall.
Some specifics:
The New York Times: Musk’s Role in Dismantling Aid Agency Likely Violated Constitution, Judge Finds.
Efforts by Elon Musk and his team to permanently shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the Constitution “in multiple ways” and robbed Congress of its authority to oversee the dissolution of an agency it created, a federal judge found on Tuesday.
The ruling, by Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, appeared to be the first time a judge has moved to rein in Mr. Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency directly. It was based on the finding that Mr. Musk has acted as a U.S. officer without having been properly appointed to that role by President Trump.
Judge Theodore Chuang
Judge Chuang wrote that a group of unnamed aid workers who had sued to stop the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. and its programs was likely to succeed in the lawsuit. He agreed with the workers’ contention that Mr. Musk’s rapid assertion of power over executive agencies was likely in violation of the Constitution’s appointments clause.
The judge also ordered that agency operations be partially restored, though that reprieve is likely to be temporary. He ordered Mr. Musk’s team to reinstate email access to all U.S.A.I.D. employees, including those on paid leave. He also ordered the team to submit a plan for employees to reoccupy a federal office from which they were evicted last month, and he barred Mr. Musk’s team from engaging in any further work “related to the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D.”
Given that most of the agency’s work force and contracts were already terminated, it was not immediately clear what effect the judge’s ruling would have. Only a skeleton crew of workers is still employed by the agency.
And while the order barred Mr. Musk from dealing with the agency personally, it suggested that he or others could continue to do so after receiving “the express authorization of a U.S.A.I.D. official with legal authority to take or approve the action.”
A federal judge has indefinitely blocked President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender service members, dealing a major defeat to a controversial policy the president resurrected from his first term.
In a scathing ruling, US District Judge Ana Reyes said the administration cannot enforce the ban — which was set to take effect later this month.
Reyes, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote that the ban “is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.”
Judge Ana Reyes
“Indeed, the cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed – some risking their lives – to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them,” she wrote.
The judge said she was pausing her preliminary injunction until Friday morning to give the administration time to appeal it to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The ruling came in a case brought by transgender active-duty service members and others hoping to enlist in the military who would be barred from service under the ban. Reyes said they had shown that they would likely succeed on their claim that the ban violated rights afforded to them by the Constitution.
Days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to implement its own policies that say transgender service members are incompatible with military service. The government had argued that continuing to permit trans individuals to serve in the US would negatively affect, among other things, the military’s lethality, readiness and cohesion.
The Washington Post: Judge halts Trump EPA bid to kill $14 billion Biden climate grant fund.
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily barred President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency from clawing back at least $14 billion in grants issued by the Biden administration for climate and clean-energy projects, saying the EPA had not put forward “credible evidence” of fraud or abuse.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of Washington, D.C., ruled that the EPA’s sudden mid-February asset freeze and March 11 termination of legally awarded grants came without a legally required explanation to three coalitions of grant recipients. The groups said the sudden cutoff of funds approved by Congress appeared to be arbitrary, capricious or in violation of federal law and regulations.
Judge Tanya Chutkan
Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, which received $7 billion, $5 billion and $2 billion, respectively, sued over the funding freeze. They are among eight recipients awarded more than$20 billion under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program established in President Joe Biden’s signature 2022 climate law more commonly known as the “green bank.”
In a 23-page opinion, Chutkan said the EPA’s actions raised “serious due process concerns” and issued a temporary restraining order barring the grant cutoffs for now. Chutkan did not release funds to the groups but ordered that the money be held as it was in their accounts at Citibank and not clawed back or reused for any other purpose by the EPA while the case moves ahead.
While the agency voiced concerns regarding “program integrity,” “programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse” and “the absence of adequate oversight,” Chutkan wrote, “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of fraud are insufficient.”
Chutkan said she was neither forcing the EPA to “undo” its termination nor making the funds unrecoverable, but ensuring that the government abides by grant laws and regulations, “which serves the public interest.”
The New York Times: Judge Orders Education Dept. to Restore Some Grants to Schools.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Education Department to restore some federal grants that were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Judge Julie R. Rubin of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland said in an opinion that the department had acted arbitrarily and illegally when it slashed $600 million in grants that helped place teachers in underserved schools. The judge also ordered the administration to cease future cuts to those grants.
Judge Julie R. Rubin
The grants fund programs that train and certify teachers to work in struggling districts that otherwise have trouble attracting talent. The programs cited goals that included training a diverse educational work force, and provided training in special education, among other areas.
The department, led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, argued that the grants trained teachers in “social justice activism” and other “divisive ideologies” and should be eliminated.
A coalition of educator organizations sued to stop the Education Department from terminating the grants. The coalition included groups, such as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Center for Teacher Residencies, whose members depend on the grants at issue.
The judge found that the loss of the federal dollars would harm students and schools with the fewest resources.
“The harms plaintiffs identify also implicate grave effect on the public: fewer teachers for students in high-need neighborhoods, early childhood education and special education programs,” she wrote. “Moreover, even to the extent defendants assert such an interest in ending D.E.I.-based programs, they have sought to effect change by means the court finds likely violate the law.”
One more from The Guardian today: Judge denies government’s attempt to dismiss Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation.
A federal judge has turned down a request from the Trump administration to dismiss Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to his deportation, and ruled his case should be heard in New Jersey rather than Louisiana, where he is now detained.
Judge Jesse Furman
In his decision, judge Jesse M Furman said that since Khalil’s attorney filed the challenge to his arrest while he was in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention in New Jersey, the case must be heard there. Government lawyers had asked that his petition be considered in Louisiana, where Khalil had been flown to after being arrested by Ice in New York City and then briefly held in New Jersey.
“Given that the District of New Jersey is the one and only district in which Khalil could have filed his Petition when he did, the statutes that govern transfer of civil cases from one federal district court to another dictate that the case be sent there, not to the Western District of Louisiana,” Furman wrote.
He added that “the Court’s March 10, 2025 Order barring the Government from removing him (to which the Government has never raised an objection and which the Government has not asked the Court to lift in the event of transfer) shall similarly remain in effect unless and until the transferee court orders otherwise.”
On the “Alien Enemies” case before Judge James Boesberg, NBC News reports: Trump administration pushes back on judge’s request for answers about deportation flights.
The Justice Department is pushing back against a federal judge’s request for more information about the deportation flights that took off over the weekend after President Donald Trump invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had ordered the Trump administration to submit answers to his questions about the timing of the deportation flights and custody handover of deportees, giving the government until noon Wednesday to respond.
Judge James Boasberg
The government submitted a filing Wednesday morning asking for a pause of Boasberg’s order to answer his questions.
“Continuing to beat a dead horse solely for the sake of prying from the Government legally immaterial facts and wholly within a sphere of core functions of the Executive Branch is both purposeless and frustrating to the consideration of the actual legal issues at stake in this case,” the DOJ wrote in the filing.
The judge had initially ordered the government to answer his questions surrounding the flights by noon Tuesday. The Justice Department declined to answer some of his questions, saying, “If, however, the Court nevertheless orders the Government to provide additional details, the Court should do so through an in camera and ex parte declaration, in order to protect sensitive information bearing on foreign relations.”
Boasberg agreed and directed DOJ attorneys to submit under seal the answers to his questions about the deportations that were carried out under the terms of a rarely used wartime act by noon Wednesday.
In its response Wednesday, the government blasted the judge for accepting its proposal and suggested he not take any action until an appeals court rules on its request for a stay.
“The Court has now spent more time trying to ferret out information about the Government’s flight schedules and relations with foreign countries than it did in investigating the facts before certifying the class action in this case. That observation reflects how upside-down this case has become, as digressive micromanagement has outweighed consideration of the case’s legal issues,” the DOJ filing said. “The distraction of the specific facts surrounding the movements of an airplane has derailed this case long enough and should end until the Circuit Court has had a chance to weigh in,” it added.
These Trump people are truly evil.
An interesting sidebar to the “Alien Enemies” law dispute from Forbes: Trump’s Sister Declared The Immigration Law He Used Unconstitutional.
In a historical twist, Donald Trump’s sister was the federal judge who ruled unconstitutional the immigration law the Trump administration is using to deport a pro-Palestinian protester. In 1996, U.S. District Judge Maryanne Trump Barry wrote an opinion that declared unconstitutional the part of U.S. immigration law that Donald Trump has promised to continue employing to deport protesters. The current case has captured headlines and will test the Trump administration’s immigration authority….
On March 8, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and pro-Palestinian protester who graduated in December from Columbia University. Controversy over the arrest surrounded the Trump administration using a provision in immigration law that allows for deportation if the Secretary of State believes an alien’s presence or activities “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
In 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher used the same authority when attempting to deport Ruiz Massieu to Mexico. As presented by the court documents, the circumstances in that case were quite different from the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.
In September 1994, Ruiz Massieu’s brother, a prominent member of PRI, Mexico’s ruling party, was assassinated. As Deputy Attorney General, Ruiz Massieu investigated and identified a PRI official, Manuel Munoz Rocha, as the lead conspirator in his brother’s killing. Rocha was protected, first by official immunity and later by disappearing before an interview could be conducted. In late November 1994, Massieu resigned in a public speech and later published a book criticizing the PRI.
After Mexican officials sought his arrest, he entered the United States legally as a visitor (he owned property in Texas) and flew to Spain with a stopover at Newark Airport. In Newark, he was arrested for declaring only $18,000 of the $44,322 in cash with him. While the declaration infraction was later dropped, the Mexican government charged him with crimes “against the administration of justice” and sought his extradition.
“It was then, however, that this case took a turn toward the truly Kafkaesque,” writes U.S. District Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister. She notes that the Immigration and Naturalization Service took Massieu into custody. “He was ordered to show cause as to why he should not be deported because, the Secretary of State has made a determination that . . . there is reasonable ground to believe your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” (Emphasis added.) In 1996, the provision was Section 241(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act but it was later redesignated Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) due to other changes in the INA. The language in both designations is identical.
More at the Forbes link.
More News links
CNN: Trump says he had ‘very good’ call with Zelensky after speaking to Putin yesterday.
AP: Zelenskyy says Putin’s vow not to hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is ‘at odds with reality.’
Steven Rosenberg at BBC News: Rosenberg: Trump-Putin call seen as victory in Russia.
Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic: Trump Gets a Taste of Putin’s Tactics. (Gift link)
Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times: Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional.
Politico: Hill Republicans already hated the ‘idiotic’ call to impeach judges. Then Trump jumped in.
Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: The Constitutional Crisis May be Upon Us.
The New York Times: DOGE Cuts Reach Key Nuclear Scientists, Bomb Engineers and Safety Experts.
The Washington Post: Trump aides prep new tariffs on imports worth trillions for ‘Liberation Day.
The New York Times: Kennedy’s Alarming Prescription for Bird Flu on Poultry Farms.
The Atlantic: The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: They’re coming for immigrants first. And the Trump administration is signaling that no one else might be safe, either.
Timothy Snyder at “Thinking about…”: The evil at your door. The deportation action as regime change.
Sorry this post isn’t longer. I’m still dealing with a bad cold. I just can’t seem to shake it.
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