Wednesday Reads: Trump’s War on Harvard University

Posted: May 28, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump, education, just because | Tags: academic freedom, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, first amendment, Harvard President Alan Garber, Harvard University, higher education, international students, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, scientific research | 8 Comments

Good Morning!!

Memorial Hall, Harvard University

Today I’m going to focus on the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard University. Obviously, Trump’s war on Harvard isn’t just about Harvard. It’s a war on higher education. If he succeeds in destroying Harvard, he will move on to other universities. Thank goodness Alan Garber, Harvard’s president is standing strong against the blatant attacks on academic research, international students, and freedom of speech.

Here’s the latest news in the Trump-Harvard battle:

The New York Times: Trump Intends to Cancel All Federal Funds Directed at Harvard.

The Trump administration is set to cancel the federal government’s remaining federal contracts with Harvard University — worth an estimated $100 million, according to a letter sent to federal agencies on Tuesday. The letter also instructs agencies to “find alternative vendors” for future services.

The additional planned cuts, outlined in a draft of the letter obtained by The New York Times, represented what an administration official called a complete severance of the government’s longstanding business relationship with Harvard.

The letter is the latest example of the Trump administration’s determination to bring Harvard — arguably the country’s most elite and culturally dominant university — to its knees, by undermining its financial health and global influence. Since last month, the administration has frozen about $3.2 billion in grants and contracts with Harvard. And it has tried to halt the university’s ability to enroll international students.

The latest letter, dated May 27 from the U.S. General Services Administration, was delivered Tuesday morning to federal agencies, according to an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official had not been authorized to discuss internal communications.

The letter instructs agencies to respond by June 6 with a list of contract cancellations. Any contracts for services deemed critical would not be immediately canceled but would be transitioned to other vendors, according to the letter, signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the G.S.A.’s federal acquisition service, which is responsible for procuring government goods and services.

Contracts with about nine agencies would be affected, according to the administration official.

Examples of contracts that would be affected, according to a federal database, include a $49,858 National Institutes of Health contract to investigate the effects of coffee drinking and a $25,800 Homeland Security Department contract for senior executive training. Some of the Harvard contracts under review may have already been subject to “stop work” orders.

“Going forward, we also encourage your agency to seek alternative vendors for future services where you had previously considered Harvard,” the letter said.

It’s not just Harvard, of course.

Politico: Trump team pauses new student visa interviews as it weighs expanding social media vetting.

The Trump administration is weighing requiring all foreign students applying to study in the United States to undergo social media vetting — a significant expansion of previous such efforts, according to a cable obtained by POLITICO.

In preparation for such required vetting, the administration is ordering U.S. Embassies and consular sections to pause scheduling new interviews for such student visa applicants, according to the cable, dated Tuesday and signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

If the administration carries out the plan, it could severely slow down student visa processing. It also could hurt many universities who rely heavily on foreign students to boost their financial coffers.

“Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued septel, which we anticipate in the coming days,” the cable states. (“Septel” is State Department shorthand for “separate telegram.”)

The administration had earlier imposed some social media screening requirements, but those were largely aimed at returning students who may have participated in protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

What does this policy mean?

The cable doesn’t directly spell out what the future social media vetting would screen for, but it alludes to executive orders that are aimed at keeping out terrorists and battling antisemitism.

Many State Department officials have complained privately for months that past guidance — for, say, vetting students who may have participated in campus protests — has been vague. It’s unclear, for example, whether posting photos of a Palestinian flag on an X account could force a student to undergo additional scrutiny.

The administration has used a variety of rules to target universities, especially elite ones such as Harvard, that it sees as too liberal and accuses of allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses. At the same time, it is carrying out immigration crackdowns that have swept up a number of students….

The news was met with frustration in much of the higher education community.

NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a group that advocates for foreign students, decried the decision. The group’s CEO, Fanta Aw, said it unfairly cast aspersions on hardworking students.

“The idea that the embassies have the time, the capacity and taxpayer dollars are being spent this way is very problematic,” Aw said. “International students are not a threat to this country. If anything, they’re an incredible asset to this country.”

What is Trump’s supposed rationale for his attack on Harvard and high education?

The Boston Globe: Trump administration says Harvard funding cuts are punishment for ‘race discrimination.’

After a weekend of threats and criticism from President Trump, the federal government on Tuesday severed the last of its remaining business ties to Harvard University.

Josh Gruenbaum, a top official at the US General Services Administration, instructed all federal agencies to terminate any contracts with Harvard or transfer them to other vendors. He also said in a letter sent to federal procurement officials Tuesday that government agencies should refrain from awarding any new contracts to Harvard in the future….

Although the Trump administration’s original rationale for targeting Harvard was campus antisemitism, Gruenbaum’s letter Tuesday focused more on the government’s allegations that Harvard’s admissions and hiring practices violate antidiscrimination laws. For that reason, he said, Harvard should not be allowed to receive federal funding….

Gruenbaum’s letter laid out the government’s expanded justification for targeting Harvard. The university,the federal government alleges, systematically discriminates against white people, men, straight people, and, in some cases, Asian Americans.

“As fiduciaries to the taxpayer, the government has a duty to ensure that procurement dollars are directed to vendors and contractors who promote and champion principles of nondiscrimination and the national interest,” Gruenbaum wrote.

Harvard has denied the government’s allegations and sued the Trump administration. In two cases in federal court in Boston, Harvard’s lawyers argued the administration’s tactics violate federal laws and the Constitution and amount to illegal retaliation. Many lawyers, including some conservatives who share Trump’s critiques of universities, have agreed some of the Trump administration’s tactics appear to be illegal.

The administration’s letter on Tuesday accuses Harvard of discrimination in its admissions and hiring practices, as well as at the Harvard Law Review. Federal agencies have launched investigations on all of those subjects.

The Department of Justice is investigating whether Harvard’s admissions practices run afoul of a Supreme Court ban on affirmative action in college admissions. And the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have launched an inquiry into alleged discrimination by Harvard against white people, Asian Americans, men, and heterosexuals in hiring and promotions.

The Trump administration is even suggesting there could be criminal investigations of university officials.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Fury at Harvard Gets More Deranged—and Exposes a Big MAGA Scam.

President Donald Trump has mostly justified his lawless attempt to restrict international students from attending Harvard University by pretending it’s designed to root out the antisemites, woke radicals, and dangerous terrorists supposedly nesting in their ranks. Now, however, Trump has a new rationale: It’s all about helping young, aspiring Americans, particularly those in the working class.

“We have Americans who want to go there and to other places,” Trump told reporters over the weekend, adding angrily that many of Harvard’s international students are “bad” and are taking Americans’ slots: “They can’t go there because you have 31 percent foreign.”

Trump then tweeted:

I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land. What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!

Yeah, OK. If Trump really wants to facilitate the upward mobility of America’s working-class youth, here’s a better way to do it: Persuade his fellow Republicans in the House to drop their new budget’s changes to financial aid for higher education, which will restrict access to it for large numbers of working-class students, probably including many who want to attend—yup—trade schools.

With Trump’s fury at Harvard getting worse, this turn in the saga suggests another grotesque subtext to all of it: Telling working-class families that the real obstacle their kids face is zero-sum competition from foreign students makes it easier to take away resources previously appropriated to boost working-class kids to fund tax cuts for the rich.

What’s going on here?

Trump’s assault is a wildly unhinged abuse of power in every way. Last week, Trump revoked Harvard’s ability to host international students, due to Harvard’s alleged failure to share sufficient “information” about foreign students in response to an administration demand. That demand was itself absurdly intrusive, and seemed designed not to be met, creating a pretext for Trump to broaden his attack. The revocation appears wholly lawless, and after Harvard sued, a court blocked it within hours.

At this point, there’s no need to pretend there’s a genuine public-interest rationale at work here. Everyone knows it’s all about getting universities to surrender to flatter Trump, or about executing a broader hostile MAGA takeover of liberal institutions. For instance, in an article reporting that Trump is now nixing Harvard’s federal contracts on top of canceling billions in grants, The New York Times notes almost in passing that Trump wants to bring Harvard “to its knees,” as if this is unremarkable, when it should be depicted as the power-crazed ravings of a Mad King.

But there’s something particularly ghoulish about Trump’s suggestion that his blockade on international students is about helping American kids who are unfairly displaced by them.

That’s because the “big, beautiful bill” that House Republicans passed last week—which Trump has urged Senate Republicans to adopt—could make attending college harder for countless such kids. For a detailed summary of its changes, see this piece by The New Republic’s Monica Potts: They would make it harder for full-time students to qualify for Pell Grants, bump off large numbers of part-time students, and restrict access to the program and other financial assistance for higher education in numerous other ways.

Indeed, a coalition of education advocacy organizations estimates that the bill’s changes to Pell Grants alone could deprive as many as 700,000 people of eligibility entirely and hit many more with higher costs. As Potts summarizes, all this “takes an ax to one of the few reliable ladders for working-class people seeking higher education” as an “engine for social mobility.” These are mostly poorer and working-class students by definition, many with jobs or young kids of their own.

Trump’s attack on Harvard and higher education hurts Massachusetts, which is home to 114 colleges and universities.

Karen Miller at Boston Globe Magazine: Trump vs. Massachusetts: How one state represents everything the president despises.

In her State of the City address in March, Mayor Michelle Wu spoke about her then-2-month-old daughter. The world she entered was “not the world I expected or hoped for her,” Wu said. “I want her to grow up in the America that Paul Revere rode for, that Dr. King marched for, that my parents left home for.”

A few weeks later, as Paul Revere’s ride was reenacted and scores of redcoats lined up with muskets on the Lexington Battle Green, you didn’t have to look far to see signs that Massachusetts’ centuries-long revolutionary spirit was being threatened. Sprinkled through the crowd, posters read “No King! No Tyranny! Support the Rule of Law” and “In America, the Law is King.” [….]

Widener Library, Harvard University

Massachusetts may be uniquely positioned to suffer in President Trump’s second term. And not just because the president has slashed disaster aid, school funding, and health support for the Commonwealth. Or because he plans to withdraw clean energy support and undercut states with robust environmental laws.

Our economy is deeply reliant on elite colleges, elite hospitals, and the elite minds who come here from around the world. In Massachusetts — like it or not — we have built an economy on expertise, excellence, and education.

In the early 2000s, after graduating from high school outside of Chicago, Wu was drawn — like so many others — to the educational opportunities here. Her parents “didn’t know too much about America” when they arrived in the 1980s from Taiwan. She says that they, “like so many, held such a reverence for the institutions that in some ways symbolized the American dream for them. Harvard was one of them.”

Now, the magnets that have attracted talent to Massachusetts have become liabilities. “ Boston is at the center of many of the most targeted industries and communities,” Wu says. “And so we’re feeling it very much — very urgently.”

The mayor notes that the city is “trying to plan for unpredictability. And so our city budget this year includes preparations for worst-case scenarios.” Although Boston’s financial foundation is “quite strong,” Wu says, “we need to be prepared for immediate, significant impacts to federal funding or larger macroeconomic impacts.”

We’re living, she says, under “a cloud of chaos.”

The Boston Globe: ‘This is about more than Harvard’: Healey tells alumni as university faces down Trump.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey voiced support for her alma mater Tuesday night as Harvard University continues to battle President Trump’s attacks on the Cambridge institution’s autonomy and funding.

“This is about more than Harvard,” she told a virtual webinar of thousands of Harvard alumni.

In recent weeks, Harvard has filed litigation charging that Trump unlawfully froze billions in federal funding to the school after it refused to give the government control over academic decisions. More recently, the school also legally challenged Trump’s attempt to revoke the school’s ability to enroll international students.

On Tuesday night, a group of Harvard alumni held a pair of virtual events to discuss the impact of the administration’s actions on academic freedom, research, students, and employees of the Ivy League university.

Crimson Courage, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan community of Harvard alumni,” encouraged alumni to sign onto an amicus brief in ongoing litigation spearheaded by Harvard against the Trump administration.

The brief “supports the academic freedom and integrity of Harvard and higher education institutions across America—all of which must be able to educate students consistent with their missions and values, free from political interference.”

The brief, according to organizers, will be filed in a legal case where Harvard argues the government’s use of research funding cuts as leverage to exert control over its affairs is an abuse of federal power.

Healey, in her comments to alumni, said Trump’s moves against the university is undercutting American competitiveness and damaging the local and national economy. Harvard, she said, is the fourth largest employer in Massachusetts, and its international students alone contribute $400 million to the local economy annually.

If Trump succeeds in damaging Massachusetts, will other blue states be next?

NPR: As Trump targets elite schools, Harvard’s president says they should ‘stand firm.’

With elite U.S. universities in President Trump’s crosshairs, the leader of Harvard University says institutions need to double down on their “commitment to the good of the nation” and be firm in what they stand for.

The Trump administration, acting on its claims that Harvard has failed to stamp out antisemitism on campus, froze more than $2 billion in research grants and contracts in April and attempted to revoke the school’s ability to enroll international students last week. The university is suing the federal government for both actions.

Harvard President Alan Garber told Morning Edition that he finds the measures taken by Trump to be “perplexing.” While he acknowledges there is work to be done on campus, he said he struggles to see a link between funding freezes and fighting antisemitism.

“Why cut off research funding? Sure, it hurts Harvard, but it hurts the country because after all, the research funding is not a gift,” Garber said, adding that these dollars are awarded to efforts deemed “high-priority work” by the federal government….

As evidence of how his university’s work directly benefits the U.S. public, Garber points to recent honors awarded to Harvard faculty by the Breakthrough Prize, known as “The Oscars of Science,” for their work on obesity and diabetes drugs and gene editing, used to correct disease-causing genetic variations.

The Trump administration’s multi-billion dollar funding freeze came after Harvard refused demands to change policies around hiring and admissions, eliminate DEI programs, or screen international students who are “supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism,” as the administration put it.

Read the entire interview at the NPR link.

Commentary on Trump’s attacks on Harvard:

Daniel Drezner at Drezner’s World: The Trump Administration Is Trying to Kill American Higher Education.

Recent readers may recall that I was in a bit of a funk last week because among other things “The [Trump] administration further escalated its war on Harvard in myriad ways. This is part and parcel of a wider war on higher education that will destroy American soft power, one of the country’s leading export sectors, and American economic productivity.”

Harvard Art Museum

Impressively, the situation on this front has gotten even worse in the last 24 hours….

…consider the complete set of federal actions taken against Harvard that the New York Times’ Michael C. Bender has compiled. It’s an extraordinary list of punitive actions given that the Trump administration has been in office for just a little over a third of a year.

Now, as a professor at the Fletcher School, a direct competitor of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, readers might wonder if I think there might be some competitive advantage that might be gained from Harvard’s misfortune. And the answer to this is “not really, no,” for two reasons.

The first is raw politics: Harvard is the most prestigious university in the United States. It has the deepest pockets. If the Trump administration can force Harvard to acquiesce to its demands, that capitulation will make it that much harder for other universities to protect academic freedom.

The second is that while Harvard might be receiving the brunt of the administration’s malignant attention, Trump’s team is taking other actions that will harm most U.S. universities.

Examples: Threats to investigate foreign students’ social media and ordering embassies to stop vetting visas for international students applicants.

This administration seems bound and determined to force U.S. students to pay higher tuition, because it keeps stripping away alternative sources of revenue. Between slashing federal research funding to record-low levels, raising the transaction costs of accepting foreign grants, and this freezing the visa processing of foreign students, the Trump administration is disincentivizing scientific research and forcing universities to rely increasingly on the tuition payments of domestic college students.

The end result will be a poorer, less dynamic economy and a less vibrant society. I wish the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer was being hyperbolic in this paragraph – but he isn’t:

“These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.”

Why are they doing it? Serwer attributes it to politics: “by destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior.” I could proffer a variety of other ideological or political responses. As of now, however, such rationales are besides the point. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s not for the reasons proffered by the administration.

Read the rest at the Substack link.

Paul Krugman on his Substack: America Turns Its Back on the World.

My wife and I are co-authors of a widely used textbook on the principles of economics, which is revised on a three-year cycle. When a new edition comes out, I normally visit a number of schools that might adopt it, usually giving a big public talk, a smaller technical seminar, and spending some time with students and faculty. I enjoy it, by the way; there are a lot of good, interesting people in U.S. education, and not just in the high-prestige schools.

So it was that at one point I found myself visiting Texas Tech in Lubbock. Yes, it seemed pretty remote to someone who has spent almost his whole life in the Northeast Corridor, but as usual the overall experience was very positive. And it was also surprisingly cosmopolitan: there were students from many nations. I just checked the numbers, and currently 30 percent of Texas Tech’s graduate students are international.

So it is all across America. Our nation’s ability to attract foreigners to study here is one of our great strengths. Or maybe I should say was one of our strengths.

According to Politico, a cable from Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has directed U.S. embassies and consulates to halt all processing of visa applications from foreigners hoping to study in the United States. This is reportedly a temporary measure in preparation for a new system in which would-be students will be screened on the basis of their social media history. And you can be sure that the criteria for denying entry will go far beyond, you know, advocating terrorism. Probably asking “Why was Trump talking to West Point grads about trophy wives?” will be grounds for rejection.

This completely insane policy move is presumably a temper tantrum in response to a court’s rejection of the administration’s attempt to prevent Harvard from admitting foreign students, which was in turn a temper tantrum in response to Harvard’s rejection of demands from Trumpists that they be allowed to dictate the university’s hiring and curriculum.

The courts will probably reject this policy move, too, but I worry that Rubio and co. can put enough sand in the gears of the visa process to bring the entry of international students to a near halt. And even if they can’t, the clear message to students that they aren’t welcome (and may be arrested once here) will have an immensely chilling effect.

It’s hard to overstate the self-destructiveness of this move, and the war on higher education in general. This is madness even in purely economic terms.

Read the rest at the link.

One more by Liz Dye at Public Notice: Trump’s attack on Harvard hampered by his inability to STFU.

The Trump administration would be getting slapped down in court even if the president and his minions didn’t constantly announce their intent to violate the law. But their incessant chest thumping does make things go a lot faster.

Case in point: the temporary restraining order barring the government from canceling student visas at Harvard University. The order was issued just hours after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked Harvard’s visa “privilege” for foreign students. The administration teed up the ruling by declaring that it intended to flagrantly violate the First Amendment. But they telegraphed their punch so thoroughly that Harvard’s lawyers had a 72-page complaint with 28 exhibits ready to be filed the second Noem announced the plan.

Trump Hates Harvard

Just hours after being sworn in, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to “identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” of civic, corporate, and academic institutions, including “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars” for their supposed “illegal discrimination.”

Lowell House, Harvard University

The EO was clearly an attack on the Ivy League, long targeted by conservatives as a bastion of “wokeness” that should be brought to heel. And Project 2025, with its “big idea” to seize control of the budget from Congress, provided Trump with a blueprint to wield federal tax dollars as a weapon against state governments and institutions.

Part of the plan was for Trump to unilaterally announce new “laws” via executive order, and, instead of asking courts to enforce them, leverage federal funds to punish anyone who resists.

And so the president simply declared DEI “illegal,” and used the widespread adoption of anti-discrimination policies by corporations and academia as a pretext to go after anyone he doesn’t like. But, as a federal judge noted last week when he blocked an attack on the law firm Jenner & Block, “the defendants point to no case holding such diversity initiatives illegal.” This is simply the executive branch inventing a new legal theory and demanding that everyone treat it as settled law.

Dye describes how Harvard fought back successfully in court.

On April 11, Harvard sued in federal court in Massachusetts, alleging that the funding cuts were an arbitrary and capricious agency action in violation the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, and the Constitution’s separation of powers. That case landed on Judge Allison Burroughs’s docket, and when the school sued again 10 days later over a further round of funding cuts, it designated the cases as “related,” ensuring that it, too, would be assigned to the Obama appointee.

Harvard docketed voluminous correspondence demonstrating that the Trump administration is using federal funds to both coerce the school into changing its speech, and retaliating against it for speech conservatives don’t like. For instance, a letter signed by representatives of the General Services Administration and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services presented an “agreement in principle” demanding sweeping changes to all aspects of the university’s hiring, admissions, disciplinary, and curricular programs as a precondition of preserving the school’s federal funds.

“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the university wrote in response. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

That response was signed by longtime Republican lawyer Bill Burck, of the law firm Quinn Emanuel, and Robert Hur, the former special counsel tapped by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate Joe Biden. (Burck was immediately fired by the Trump Organization as an ethics advisor.)

But Trump kept on making public threats and posting nonsense on social media.

Trump’s constant public screeds serve as potent evidence that the funding cuts are retaliatory, and any supposed DEI “crimes” are mere pretext.

On April 15, he suggested that Harvard “should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” [….]

That’s an explicit attack on Harvard’s academic freedom, which is protected by the First Amendment. And he followed it up the next day by screeching that “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.” [….]

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon admitted in an interview with CNBC on May 7 that the administration is 100 percent targeting Harvard for disfavored speech.

“Are they vetting students who are coming in from outside of the country to make sure they’re not activists? Are they vetting professors that they’re hiring to make sure that they’re not teaching ideologies?” she said. “They’ve taken a very hard line, so we took a hard line back.”

All these comments — and so many more! — featured in Harvard’s lawsuits.

Please read the rest at Public Notice. It’s an excellent summary of what Trump has been doing and why it’s unlawful.

That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: May 24, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, education, public corruption | Tags: Covid vaccines, Covid-19 deaths, CryptoCurrency, FDA, Harvard University, international university students, Kristi Noem, National Security Council, NSC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump Corruption | 19 Comments

Woman and Cat, by Koji Fukiya, 1936.

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s crypto dinner, where he briefly spoke to the people who had spent the most on his personal memecoin. The “gala dinner” was held at Trump’s Virginia golf club. The attendees–mostly from foreign countries–had spent their money hoping to gain “access” to Trump, but that didn’t happen, at least at this event. Trump showed up on a “military helicopter,” spoke for less than half and hour and then did his YMCA dance. Then he left again without speaking to anyone personally. And the food was terrible.

Wired: A Helicopter, Halibut, and ‘Y.M.C.A’: Inside Donald Trump’s Memecoin Dinner.

Donald Trump left the stage at his golf club near Washington, DC, on Thursday night, he pointed to the crowd, brought his index finger to his temple—as if to say: You know what’s coming—then began to dance. To the beat of “Y.M.C.A” by The Village People, Trump shimmied, gyrated, and pumped his arms above his head.

Looking on were more than 200 people who had been invited to the Trump National Golf Club for a private gala dinner. They had won their seats by purchasing large quantities of Trump’s own crypto coin—TRUMP—some holding millions of dollars’ worth….

By late afternoon, the dinner guests had started to filter through the gates of the golf club. By comparison to Trump’s previous banquets, thronging with DC insiders and members of the Silicon Valley elite, the crypto dinner attracted a mismatched collection of oddballs: independent traders rubbed shoulders with crypto executives, die-hard Trump fans, and even professional sports stars—former NBA player Lamar Odom towered overhead. A handful wore bowties in Bitcoin orange; others sported gold Trump sneakers.

Just after 7 pm, the dinner guests gathered at the window to watch Trump descend in Marine One, his presidential helicopter. A short while later, he appeared from behind a blue velvet curtain to whoops and applause from the crowd. Had they seen the helicopter, Trump asked. “Yeah, super cool!” somebody yelled….

From behind a lectern at one end of the dining room, backdropped by four US flags, Trump delivered a characteristically winding and digressive speech that sources say lasted around 25 minutes. At some point, he got round to crypto.

“We’ve got some of the smartest minds anywhere in the world right here in this room,” said Trump. “You believe in the whole crypto thing. A lot of people are starting to believe in it … This is really something that may be special—who knows, right? Who knows—but it may be special.”

For some, the dinner represented a chance to network with other deep-pocketed crypto figures, and to hear directly from Trump about his plans to bring an end to the regulatory uncertainty that crimped the industry’s expansion under Biden.

“You don’t get to meet the president easily,” Vincent Liu, chief investment officer at trading firm Kronos Research, told WIRED a few days before the dinner. “To be able to hear his message on crypto directly—I’m definitely looking forward to that.”

Woodblock print from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885-1892)

No one got to meet the president, but I Wired says they also wanted to network with each other. On the general presentation and the food, served at circular tables

…each seating 10 people arrayed beneath a set of crystal chandeliers. Waiting on the chairs were gift bags containing Fight Fight Fight-themed hats and posters, and a collectible plastic card (some allege that they didn’t receive merch at their seats.) The four largest coin holders—along with two other attendees selected by raffle, sources say—received a gem-encrusted Trump gold watch.

Between mouthfuls, the attendees discussed trading and investment strategies—and Trump’s speech. “To feel his personal charisma to me was very inspiring,” says Liu. But others complained about the brevity of Trump’s appearance: After his speech, Trump had departed immediately in a golf cart bound for his helicopter. “Trump could have at least given the top people their watches himself,” says Pinto. “He didn’t.”

The food itself had left a bitter taste in the mouth, too. “It was the worst food I’ve ever had at a Trump golf course,” says Pinto, who added he left hungry. “The only good thing was bread and butter.” Another attendee described the meal as “OK, but not top-class.”

From Penn Live: Trump’s controversial crypto dinner ripped by attendee: ‘Trash.’

Donald Trump’s controversial memecoin dinner Thursday night was shrouded in secrecy, and while it still isn’t clear who all attended — the White House did not make the list public — we do have a report of how good the food was….

According to Fortune, 25-year-old Nicholas Pinto was one of those who attended. The site said he invested “more than $360,000 in Trump’s memecoin.

And for that, he told the site, the dinner that was served was “trash.”

“Walmart steak, man,” he texted Fortune.

The site said the menu for the included a “Trump organic field green salad” and an “entrée duet” of filet mignon and pan-seared halibut.

“Everybody at my table was saying the food was so of the worst they ever had,” Pinto said.

“I was hoping for Big Macs or pizza,” Pinto told Fortune. “That would have been better than the food that we were served.”

Trump is just raking in the dough as quickly as he can with the minimum effort.

The New York Times got the guest list: Who Won a Seat at Trump’s Crypto Dinner?

The invitees for President Trump’s private dinner for customers of his cryptocurrency business on Thursday included a Chinese billionaire fighting a lawsuit from U.S. regulators, a lawyer for Justice Clarence Thomas and a former basketball star, according to a guest list obtained by The New York Times and social media posts.

The dinner, at which Mr. Trump gave remarks, was an extraordinary moment in which the president leveraged his position to make money — for his crypto business and for his Virginia golf club, which hosted the event.

The event’s invited guests were not known publicly beforehand, even to each other. They were identified only by the pseudonyms they used on the electronic wallets where they kept their $TRUMP memecoins. Most had gained an invitation by becoming one of the top 220 holders of that memecoin over a certain period of time. The top 25 of those were given V.I.P. status and afforded a more intimate gathering before the dinner and an unofficial tour of the White House on Friday.

When they arrived at Mr. Trump’s club outside Washington Thursday evening, the digital world had become physical. The invitees’ names and contact information were delineated on paper lists, checked by staffers at the door. A Times reporter reviewed one of those lists, and used it to identify people who were present. Some other invitees self-identified on social media. A reporter and photographer from The Times also saw some $TRUMP crypto buyers enter and exit the White House on Friday.

Merchant’s Daughter by Mizuno Toshikata

Some top invitees:

Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto billionaire who was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for allegedly inflating the value of a cryptocurrency. Mr. Sun is a major investor in a separate crypto venture largely owned by a company tied to Mr. Trump, World Liberty Financial. After Mr. Trump took office, the S.E.C. asked a judge to put Mr. Sun’s case on hold….

Elliot Berke, a Washington attorney who has worked for congressional Republicans and Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court. The Times identified him because the invitee list included his email address at his law firm, Berke Farah. He was honored as “Republican Lawyer of the Year” in 2021 by the Republican National Lawyers Association….

Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of a digital-asset firm, Wintermute. The Times identified him because the list of invitees included his Wintermute email….

Anil Lulla and Yan Liberman, two co-founders of Delphi Digital, a Miami Beach firm that offers market intelligence for crypto investors. Their corporate emails were included in the list of invitees….

Cheng Lu, 32, a crypto investor from Shanghai, was observed by a Times reporter entering the White House on Friday. He said he did not have a chance to speak with Mr. Trump during the dinner on Thursday or at the Friday tour. “I just want to see President Trump,” he said.

Several more are listed at the NYT link.

Another big story today is Trump’s terrifying persecution of Harvard University. Here’s the latest:

From The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: Is Trump Trying to Destroy Harvard? The order against foreign students turns away the world’s brightest.

The Trump Administration has frozen billions in federal grants to Harvard University, threatened its tax-exempt status, and sought to dictate its curriculum and hiring. Now the government seems bent on destroying the school for the offense of fighting back. And for what purpose?

That’s how we read the Department of Homeland Security’s move Thursday to bar foreign students from attending the world-renowned institution. That’s 6,800 students, or a quarter of Harvard’s student body, whose futures are suddenly in disarray. It’s also a short-sighted attack on one of America’s great competitive strengths: Its ability to attract the world’s best and brightest.

The latest assault began when DHS demanded that Harvard turn over sundry records on its foreign students, including whether any had participated in illegal activity or left the university owing to “dangerous or violent activity or deprivation of rights.”

Some of its record requests are reasonable, but some overreached by requiring private student information. DHS also gave Harvard all of two weeks to respond. If it failed to do so, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said she would “automatically withdraw” the school’s certification in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. “The withdrawal will not be subject to appeal.”

The SEVP program lets non-citizens enroll at universities on student visas. DHS can bar universities from the program if they fail to comply with “recordkeeping, retention, reporting and other requirements” on foreign students. Harvard says it responded with “information required by law” within two weeks and handed over more records on May 14.

Twin Guardians, by Hawse Sumi

That didn’t satisfy Noem and she banned Harvard from enrolling international students. Harvard soon got a restraining order from a federal court.

Most of Harvard’s foreign students are enrolled in graduate programs. Many assist with scientific research and teaching undergraduate courses. Driving them out of Harvard will disrupt research projects and might cause some professors in the sciences to leave for other universities. This seems to be a goal of freezing Harvard’s research grants.

Harvard sued on Friday, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the student ban. The university rightly says the Administration’s actions are “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

The university seems likely to prevail on the law, but until courts settle the merits, thousands of students who have done nothing wrong will be in legal limbo. Some of them no doubt opposed the anti-Israel protests and may even hail from Israel. Why punish them? [….]

This will be terribly damaging to America’s ability to attract talented young people who bring their enterprise and intellectual capital to the U.S. Non-citizens accounted for more than half of doctoral degrees in AI-related fields in 2022. Many have gone to work at U.S. companies like Nvidia or started their own.

Clearly Trump hates Harvard, higher education, and education generally. But I’m coming to the conclusion that Trump’s goal is to destroy the U.S. in every possible way and at the same time enrich himself and his wealthy friends. He doesn’t even appear to care about the economy anymore. He wants Americans to be poor, ignorant, and isolated from the rest of the world.

The New York Times: Universities See Trump’s Harvard Move as a Threat to Them, Too.

The Trump administration’s surprising bid to end Harvard’s international enrollment put the higher education world on edge this week, looming as a larger threat against academic autonomy.

Well beyond the halls of Harvard this week, college leaders were shocked that one swift move by the federal government could eliminate their ability to serve students from abroad, a growing population that has infused their campuses with cachet and wealth.

“This is a grave moment,” Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a message to her campus.

More than 5,000 miles away, Wendy Hensel, the president of the University of Hawaii, said that it was “reverberating across higher education.”

President Trump has already unnerved universities this year by launching investigations, freezing grants, demanding changes in campus practices and attempting to deport international students. He has justified his punitive approach as a means to combat what he considers antisemitism. But he and his allies also have long resented a perceived liberal bias and racial diversity efforts at prestigious colleges.

The Trump administration said Thursday that it revoked Harvard’s international student certification because the university had failed to meet its demands, including a request for records of student protest activity dating back five years.

To many academics, that was a clear signal that Mr. Trump was prepared to use any federal mechanism as leverage if he did not get what he wants.

“While Harvard is the victim of the moment, it’s a warning and unprecedented attempt of a hostile federal government to erode the autonomy of all major universities in the U.S.,” said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yesterday, Trump and Marco Rubio began dismantling the National Security Council.

CNN: More than 100 National Security Council staffers put on administrative leave.

The Trump administration has put more than 100 officials at the National Security Council at the White House on administrative leave on Friday as part of a restructuring under interim national security adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to two US officials and another source familiar with the matter.

Woman and cat, by Toyohara Kunichika

CNN previously reported that a significant overhaul of the body in charge of coordinating the president’s foreign policy agenda was expected in the coming days, including a staff reduction and a reinforced top-down approach with decision-making concentrated at the highest levels.

An email from NSC chief of staff Brian McCormack went out around 4:20 p.m. informing those being dismissed they’d have 30 minutes to clean out their desks, according to an administration official. If they weren’t on campus, the email read, they could email an address and arrange a time to retrieve their stuff later and turn in devices.

The email subject line read: “Your return to home agency,” indicating that most of those affected were detailed to the NSC from other departments and agencies….

With this happening on a Friday afternoon before a long holiday weekend, the official called it “as unprofessional and reckless as could possibly be.”

Those put on leave include career officials, as well as political hires made during the Trump administration….

Staffed by foreign policy experts from across the US government, the NSC typically serves as a critical body for coordinating the president’s foreign policy agenda.

But under President Donald Trump, the NSC’s role has been diminished, with the overhaul expected to further reduce its importance in the White House.

Axios says they are trying to purge the “deep state.”

President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have orchestrated a vast restructuring of the National Security Council, reducing its size and transferring many of its powers to the State and Defense departments.

Why it matters: Trump’s White House sees the NSC as notoriously bureaucratic and filled with longtime officials who don’t share the president’s vision.

A White House official involved in the planning characterized the reorganization as Trump and Rubio’s latest move against what they see as Washington’s “Deep State.”
“The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. It’s Marco vs. the Deep State. We’re gutting the Deep State,” the official said of the move, which will cut the NSC staff to about half of its current 350 members. Those cut from the NSC will be moved to other positions in government, officials said.
“The right-sizing of the NSC is in line with its original purpose and the president’s vision,” Rubio told Axios in a statement. “The NSC will now be better positioned to collaborate with agencies.”

Zoom in: White House officials point to an NSC structure that’s filled with committees and meetings that they say slow down decision-making and produce lots of jargon and acronyms.

There’s a lot more a the link, but I think Trump is just trying to bring every part of the government under his personal control.

Finally, I want to look at what Trump and RFK Jr. are doing with Covid-19 and Covid vaccines.

ABC News: Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from COVID every week? Experts say there is low vaccine uptake and people are not accessing treatments.

More than five years after the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in the United States, hundreds of people are still dying every week.

By Utagawa Hiroshige, 1797-1858

Last month, an average of about 350 people died each week from COVID, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

While high, the number of deaths is decreasing and is lower than the peak of 25,974 deaths recorded the week ending Jan. 9, 2021, as well as weekly deaths seen in previous spring months, CDC data shows.

Public health experts told ABC News that although the U.S. is in a much better place than it was a few years ago, COVID is still a threat to high-risk groups.

“The fact that we’re still seeing deaths just means it’s still circulating, and people are still catching it,” Dr. Tony Moody, a professor in the department of pediatrics in the division of infectious diseases at Duke University Medical Center, told ABC News.

The experts said there are a few reasons why people might still be dying from the virus, including low vaccination uptake, waning immunity and not enough people accessing treatments.

Thursday Reads: Trump’s Wars on Universities and Immigrants

Posted: April 17, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Donald Trump, education, immigration | Tags: CECOT, constitutional crisis, El Salvador prison, Harvard University, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Mohsen Mahdawi, Senator Chris Van Hollen | 6 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

The news is mostly bad as it has been since Trump moved into the White House, and I have to admit I’m feeling frightened and depressed about what is happening to our country.

Trump is waging all-out war on Harvard University, and Harvard is fighting back. That’s one bright spot.

Harvard University is taking hits from Trump on multiple fronts. Here’s the latest:

CNN: IRS making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.

A final decision on rescinding the university’s tax exemption is expected soon, the sources said.

The administration already has blocked more than $2 billion in funding from the nation’s oldest university, which is fighting the White House’s policy demands, citing the constitutional right of private universities to determine their own teaching practices.

President Donald Trump in recent days raised the idea of punishing the Ivy League university for not complying with what the administration has sought to portray as a campaign to fight antisemitism.

“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday….

Asked about CNN’s reporting on “The Arena,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said that she doesn’t know whether Harvard will lose its tax exempt status but argued “it was certainly worth looking into.”

“We’ll see what IRS comes back with relative to Harvard,” McMahon told CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “I certainly think, you know, in elitist schools, especially that have these incredibly large endowments, you know, we should probably have a look into that.”

McMahon added that it is her “guess” that the IRS is also looking at tax exempt statuses of other universities.

Gary Shapley, whom Trump this week picked as acting IRS commissioner, has the authority to rescind the tax exemption under federal law. Doing so typically comes after the agency has made a determination that an organization has violated the rules that govern tax exemptions for not-for-profit entities.

There’s no evidence that Harvard has violated any of the conditions for tax exempt status, according to experts consulted by The Washington Post. From the Post article:

Harvard spokesman Jason Newton said in a statement that there was “no legal basis” to rescind the university’s tax-exempt status. Newton said the status “means that more of every dollar can go toward scholarships for students, lifesaving and life-enhancing medical research, and technological advancements that drive economic growth.”

Some Trump allies predicted that Harvard would only be the first of numerous colleges and universities that the administration would target over their tax-exempt status.

“I think they’re going to go after a whole bunch of them,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House GOP leader. “I’m not sure why we need to be funding people who aggressively refuse to give up a variety of values and structures that most Americans don’t agree with.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration demanded broad control over Harvard’s operations over complaints about “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies in hiring, admissions and curriculums and student activism surrounding Israel’s war against Hamas.

Harvard rejected those demands on Monday, marking the first time a university formally countered the administration’s campaign for sweeping changes in higher education. Hours later, the administration responded by saying it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding.

Jim Puzzanghera at The Boston Globe: Before Trump vs. Harvard, this is what a university had to do to lose its tax-exempt status.

If Harvard loses its tax-exempt status as President Trump has threatened, it would be extremely rare, but not unprecedented.

Moreover, the only instance in higher education that experts are aware of shows how far a university had to go to lose that coveted status.

View of Harvard Yard

In 1976, the Internal Revenue Service stripped the tax exemption from Bob Jones University, a private fundamentalist Christian institution in Greenville, S.C., because the school forbid interracial dating by its students. The university objected, saying it wasn’t practicing racial discrimination because the policy applied to all students.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the IRS action in 1983. The 8-1 ruling likely would be the legal precedent for the Trump administration if it revokes Harvard’s tax-exempt status over allegations it practiced discrimination through diversity equity and inclusion initiatives and a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment by Gaza war protesters.

“In 1983, the Supreme Court established the precedent that universities which practice racial discrimination can be stripped of their nonprofit status,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote on X Tuesday. “Harvard’s DEI programs are openly discriminatory and, therefore, the president has every right to proceed with this remedy.”

In Trump’s twisted notion of discrimination (it only counts if it’s against white men), I guess lots of tax-exempts institutions could be targeted.

That’s not all the administration is threating to do to Harvard. They want to stop the university from admitting foreign students.

The Harvard Crimson: DHS Threatens To Revoke Harvard’s Eligibility To Host International Students Unless It Turns Over Disciplinary Records.

The Department of Homeland Security sent Harvard a letter on Wednesday threatening to revoke its eligibility to enroll international students unless it submits information on international students’ disciplinary records and protest participation.

In a Wednesday press release, the DHS wrote that it had also canceled two grants worth $2.7 million to Harvard.

The letter threatening Harvard’s authorization to host international students, which was signed by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, accused Harvard of creating a “hostile learning environment” for Jewish students.

“It is a privilege to have foreign students attend Harvard University, not a guarantee,” the letter read.

American universities may host international students on student visas only if they have certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.

The Wednesday letter calls on Harvard to provide information regarding visa holders’ “known threats to other students or university personnel,” “obstruction of the school’s learning environment,” and any disciplinary actions “taken as a result of making threats to other students or populations or participating in protests.”

It comes less than a week after three federal agencies threatened to pull Harvard’s federal funding unless the University agreed to report international students for violation of its conduct policies. Harvard rebuffed the government’s demands on Monday and now faces cuts to more than $2.2 billion in federal funding.

The University also announced last week that a total of 12 current Harvard students and recent graduates have had their visas revoked.

Another view of Harvard

CNN: Harvard weighs its next moves amid the federal funding standoff.

About 24 hours after the Trump administration said it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts, Harvard University’s research arm began to assess the fallout.

The impact is already acute at Harvard’s School of Public Health, where professors are scrambling to salvage their research into tuberculous and cancer treatments.

Harvard – the nation’s oldest and richest university – has emerged as a new symbol of the Trump resistance after refusing to capitulate to a series of policy changes the administration had demanded. Now, having put itself in an uncertain position, Harvard must weigh its next moves.

John Shaw, vice provost for research at Harvard, emailed colleagues Tuesday evening asking them to notify the Office for Sponsored Programs of any funding disruptions they become aware of – and what steps they ought to take.

“While there will inevitably be important research that will suffer as a result of the funding freeze, we are asking for your help in assessing how best to preserve vital work and support our researchers, while using institutional resources responsibly through this disruption,” he wrote, according to an email reviewed by CNN. “This is meant to stabilize the research environment while we gather information, coordinate decision-making, and strive to protect what matters most.”

Professors at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, home to Harvard’s undergraduate and PhD programs, were notified in a separate email that a town hall would be arranged in the coming days to answer questions, according to the email.

The funding freeze threatens as much as $9 billion in federal money for Harvard. Beyond the practical implications of losing those funds, it’s not clear how far a standoff could go.

As we have seen, Trump is also attacking foreign students and immigrants individually, grabbing them off the streets or when they report to update their immigration status and disappearing them.

At The Boston Globe, Paul Heintz profiled a Columbia University student who was kidnapped when he arrived to take a citizenship test: ‘The town loved him’: Palestinian student detained in Vermont forged deep connections in the Upper Valley.

When federal officials led a handcuffed Mohsen Mahdawi out of an office building in northern Vermont on Monday, he became the latest international student whom the Trump administration had apparently targeted for speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza.

But those who know Mahdawi say it’s absurd to suggest he “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” as the president has said of protesters at Columbia University where he was a student. Rather, they describe him as a peaceful 34-year-old Palestinian who had a remarkable journey from a refugee camp in the West Bank to a cabin in rural Vermont to an Ivy League institution in New York City.

Mohsen Mahdawi

He is widely known in the upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire, where he has been based since moving to the United States more than a decade ago, as a spiritual man who grew up Muslim, is a practicing Buddhist, and whose closest friends are Jewish.

“He is such an advocate for peace. He is such an opponent of any kind of violence,” said Rabbi Dov Taylor, who leads Chavurat Ki-tov, a Jewish cultural and educational organization in Woodstock, Vt. “His love just comes out in what he says.”

Simon Dennis, a carpenter and a former selectboard member in nearby Hartford, described Mahdawi as “a person of great gracefulness and dignity and gravitas” who is “destined to go forward and do great things in the world.”

Mahdawi, who was set to graduate this spring, was being held Tuesday in Vermont’s Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.

On Wednesday evening, some 200 supporters gathered in a windswept field several hundred yards from the prison. They hoisted Palestinian flags and signs calling for his release. An organizer, Jesse Lubin of Burlington, encouraged the crowd “to be loud enough so that he might be able to hear us” from inside the prison.

Just a bit more, because this is behind a paywall:

Crystal Cole of St. Albans told fellow protesters that she was there to demonstrate that even residents of this rural county on the Canadian border were outraged about Mahdawi’s detention.

“People up here in Franklin County know just as well as everyone else across the state, across the country, and across the world that free speech is a right, kidnapping is a wrong, and we refuse to stand for it,” she said.

By all accounts, Mahdawi has assiduously accumulated friends in the Upper Valley since moving from the West Bank in 2014. He’s done so while working as a bank teller, joining faith events, speaking at lectures and protests on the Middle East, and serving as a jack-of-all-trades at Dan & Whit’s, a popular general store in Norwich.

“Everyone loved him,” said Dan Fraser, a former owner and manager. “The town loved him. The town knows him.”

Mahdawi has lived for years in Fraser’s home in Hartford. He attended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania before transferring to Columbia in 2021. He was expecting to enter graduate school there in the fall for international affairs.

Mahdawi has been a permanent resident, or green card holder, since 2015, according to his attorneys, and appeared on track to attain citizenship. He had been in hiding after a friend and fellow Columbia student organizer, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained on March 8, according to friends.

He sounds really dangerous, right?

We are all familiar with the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to the torture prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration admits this was a mistake, but they are determined not to return Garcia to his family in Maryland. Yesterday Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador in an attempt to meet with Garcia.

Politico: Van Hollen denied from meeting with wrongfully deported man in El Salvador.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) flew to El Salvador on Wednesday seeking to secure the release of a man wrongly deported by the Trump administration, as officials ramp up their defense of the administration’s actions in an escalating battle over President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy.

The Trump administration has made the fight around Kilmar Abrego Garcia the centerpiece of its broader deportation efforts, resisting efforts to bring him back to the United States, despite a Supreme Court ruling that the administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return after his illegal deportation.

Chris Van Hollen

But after a meeting with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, Van Hollen was denied the opportunity to see Abrego Garcia or visit the maximum security prison where he’s being held.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Van Hollen said that he asked Ulloa for a meeting with Abrego Garcia. Ulloa said he would have needed to “make earlier provisions” to visit, according to the senator, and also added he would be unable to arrange a phone call.

“I asked the vice president — if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and if courts found that he was illegally taken, and the government of El Salvador has found no evidence he was part of MS-13 — then why is El Salvador continuing to hold him?” Van Hollen said.

Statement from Van Hollen:

“The goal of this mission is to let the Trump administration, let the government of El Salvador know that we are going to keep fighting to bring Abrego Garcia home until he returns to his family,” Van Hollen said in a video from the airport on his way to San Salvador, adding that he hopes to “meet with representatives of the government” and “see Kilmar.” Van Hollen, in second a video posted to X, said he arrived in San Salvador a little before noon and that he was on his way to the U.S. embassy.

Trump border czar Tom Homan slammed the Democratic senator for his visit, calling the trip “disgusting” on Fox News on Wednesday morning and echoing a line from the administration that the senator is more concerned with an “MS-13 terrorist” than Rachel Morin, a Maryland woman whose killer — who was convicted this week — was an undocumented immigrant.

“He wasn’t abducted. He is an MS-13 gang member, classified as a terrorist, that was removed from this country. So we got rid of a dangerous person — an El Salvadoran national was returned to the country of El Salvador, to his home,” Homan said, going on to call Abrego Garcia a “public safety threat.”

There’s no evidence Garcia is a gang member or terrorist.

We are in a true Constitutional crisis right now, since the Trump administration is ignoring court orders about these actions from two judges. So far, the judiciary is holding the line. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will come down on the side of democracy or let Trump become a dictator. Here’s what’s happening on the immigration front this morning.

Reuters: Trump challenges judges’ probes of compliance with deportation orders.

The Trump administration is appealing efforts by two judges to investigate whether government officials defied their rulings over the deportation of migrants to El Salvador, escalating a confrontation between the executive and judicial branches.

On Wednesday night, the Justice Department said it would appeal Washington-based U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s finding that there was probable cause to believe the government had violated his order to return alleged members of a Venezuelan gang who were deported to El Salvador on March 15 under an 18th-century wartime law. Boasberg said administration officials could face criminal contempt charges.

Also late on Wednesday, government lawyers asked the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to stop U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland from ordering U.S. officials to provide documents and answer questions under oath about what they had done to secure the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.

In both cases, the Trump administration has denied it violated court orders and accused judges of overstepping their authority.

“A single district court has inserted itself into the foreign policy of the United States and has tried to dictate it from the bench,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in its filing with the Fourth Circuit.

“Emergency relief is needed.”

Below are commentary pieces on the El Salvador prison and what Trump is doing to immigrants.

Hunter Walker at Talking Points Memo: Trump is Sending People to the Camps.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary and strong language. President Trump’s plan to have migrants — and potentially U.S. citizens — rounded up, flown to El Salvador, and confined there in a maximum security facility that specializes in indefinite detention meets that bar. However, even when news coverage and criticism has acknowledged Trump’s vision is almost certainly illegal and unquestionably dangerous, it has often used fairly normal terminology and referred to the flights as deportations to a “prison.” That is not what is happening. President Trump is sending people to the camps.

The distinction comes from some of the unique features of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, the infamous El Salvadoran facility that is holding people on behalf of the Trump administration. A “prison” is most typically defined as an institution holding inmates who have been sentenced for a crime. And, of course, most sentences have an end date. However, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and his government have boasted that people placed in CECOT, “have no chance of getting out.”

U.S. prisoners arriving at El Salvador prison

Because of the prospect of indefinite detention and the lack of due process the Trump administration has afforded the people it has sent to CECOT, experts who spoke to TPM said the facility could be more accurately described as a “concentration camp,” “penal colony,” or “permanent prison camp.”

Dr. Sandra Susan Smith, who is the Daniel & Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was very clear on this point in an email.

“More than a prison, El Salvador’s CECOT has many if not all the hallmarks of a concentration camp,” Smith wrote. “The Trump administration has unlawfully deported a group it finds highly undesirable — migrants largely from Venezuela — to CECOT, a facility known for its utter brutality and unyielding inhumanity that is located in a foreign country where US courts have no jurisdiction. Further, they have done so with no evidentiary basis for claims of migrants’ criminality and with no due process.”

Smith’s point might sound extreme since the term “concentration camp” is most closely associated with the German Nazi regime that left millions dead. However, mass executions are actually not part of the official definition. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

Mike Wessler, the communications director of the Prison Policy Initiative, said he and his team were “discussing” whether CECOT should be called a “prison” this morning or whether another term should be applied. He pointed to the Holocaust Encyclopedia definition of “concentration camp.”

“I think there is a strong case to be made that the term prison does not fit for these sorts of facilities. Prisons are generally considered part of a larger legal system that is subject to judicial oversight and has somewhat defined processes, including around sentences, conditions, and releases,” Wessler said.

Read the rest at TPM.

Marcos Alemn, Regina Garcia Cano, and Alex Brandon at The Independent: Inside the brutal mega-prison where Trump administration has wrongly sent Maryland father.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration in March, despite a court order preventing his removal from the US….

He is among more than 200 immigrants sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), El Salvador’s maximum-security gang prison, in the past month….

El Salvador mega prison

What is the CECOT?

Bukele ordered the mega-prison built as he began his campaign against El Salvador’s gangs in March 2022.

It opened a year later in the town of Tecoluca, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of the capital.

The facility has eight sprawling pavilions and can hold up to 40,000 inmates.

Each cell can fit 65 to 70 prisoners.

CECOT prisoners do not receive visits and are never allowed outdoors. The prison does not offer workshops or educational programs to prepare them to return to society after their sentences.

Occasionally, prisoners who have gained a level of trust from prison officials give motivational talks.

Prisoners sit in rows in the corridor outside their cells for the talks or are led through exercise regimens under the supervision of guards.

Bukele’s justice minister has said that those held at CECOT would never return to their communities.

The prison’s dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are for guards.

Read the rest at The Independent.

The Handbasket: GOP photos at El Salvador prison evoke Abu Ghraib—and worse.

A row of Latino men with shaved heads and stoic expressions wearing identical white boxer shorts stand behind thick metal bars. In the back fellow prisoners sit cross-legged on large shelves that look like they’re meant for boxed furniture at IKEA, but are instead being used for humans. Outside the bars, free, is a white man in a blazer and collared shirt, his arm stretched out to hold the camera being used to take the photo of him and the men. The image is grotesque. And now it is history.

If you’re not familiar with the names Riley Moore and Jason Smith, don’t worry; I wasn’t either until yesterday. They’re Republican Congressmen from West Virginia and Missouri, respectively, who took a trip to El Salvador on Tuesday where they were given a tour of Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a two-year old maximum security prison. Each posted photos to their social media pages after the visit, gloating about their access….

Go to the linked article to see photos these Congressmen posted on social media….

Photos like this are only possible when you’ve become so divorced from the humanity of others that they become nothing more than props in your political ploy.

But they weren’t alone in their casual disregard: A photo posted to X by the US Embassy in El Salvador confirmed an additional five House Republicans went along for the trip, including Claudia Tenney (NY), Mike Kennedy (UT), Carol Miller (WV), Ron Estes (KS) and Kevin Hern (OK). I’ve reached out to the offices of these members and will update if I hear back.

These members at least had the sense not to brag about it on social media, but it also makes me wonder why? If visiting CECOT has become a Trump loyalty pilgrimage, why haven’t they blasted out thumbs up pics of their own? Is it enough for Trump just to know they went, or do Smith and Moore understand that you only truly get credit for your depravity if you broadcast it?

Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, had a very different experience when he arrived in El Salvador. Wednesday morning to check in on one of his constituents who was wrongfully and illegally imprisoned there beginning in March. He met with the country’s Vice President and asked if he could visit CECOT to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia: In a press conference later that day, he revealed he was told no. He also said the embassy told him they hadn’t received any direction from the administration to facilitate Garcia’s return, despite a court order.The visit by Republican members of Congress and Van Hollen’s subsequent rejection the very next day show that CECOT isn’t a prison holding Americans, but a place for Trump to hold his political prisoners—and where only his allies can wander and gawk. Some have compared the prison’s conditions to Nazi concentration camps.

Nick Miroff at The Atlantic (gift link): We’re About to Find Out What Mass Deportation Really Looks Like.

The Trump administration is working hard to convince the public that its mass-deportation campaign is fully under way. Over the past several weeks, federal agents have seized foreign students off the streets, raided worksites, and shipped detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador using wartime powers adopted under the John Adams administration.

The tactics have spread fear and created a showreel of social-media-ready highlights for the White House. But they have not brought U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement much closer to delivering the “millions” of deportations President Donald Trump has set as a goal.

“We need more money,” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” told me in an interview. “We won’t fail if we get the resources we need.”

Using the budget-reconciliation process, Republican lawmakers are now preparing to lavish ICE with a colossal funding increase—enough to pay for the kind of social and demographic transformation of the United States that immigration hard-liners have long fantasized about achieving.

Although GOP factions in the House and Senate have squabbled over the contours of the bill, spending heavily on immigration enforcement has bicameral support. The reconciliation bill in the Senate would provide $175 billion over the next decade. A House version proposes $90 billion.

To put those sums in perspective, the entire annual budget of ICE is about $9 billion.

The funding surge—which Republicans could approve without a single Democratic vote—would allow ICE to add thousands of officers and enlist police and sheriff’s deputies across the country to help arrest and jail more immigrants. It would funnel billions to private contractors to identify and locate targets, jail them in for-profit detention centers, and fast-track their deportations.

Paul Hunker, who was formerly ICE’s lead attorney in Dallas, likened Trump’s deportation campaign to a gathering wave. “It seems intense now, but wait until five months from now when the reconciliation bill has passed and ICE gets a huge infusion of cash,’’ he told me. “If that money goes out, the amount of people they can arrest and remove will be extraordinary.’’

ICE officials envision a private-sector contracting bonanza that would rely on old workhorses such as CoreCivic and Geo Group-–the for-profit firms best known for running immigration jails—while enlisting large data companies to make the deportation system run more like an e-commerce platform.

Read the rest at the link. It sounds a lot like the Nazi railroad cars, only with planes.

That’s for me. This is way too long already. Take care everyone.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: March 29, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, education, Elon Musk, just because | Tags: campus activism, Columbia University, Doge, Hamas, higher education, international students, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Peter Marks, Phil Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rumeysa Ozturk, Social Security, Tufts University | 7 Comments

Stephanie Lambourne, Blissful Teatime

Good Afternoon!!

As usual, so much is happening that I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll begin with the Trump administration’s war on higher education.

The most detailed story I’ve seen so far is at The Times of India, but they don’t allow copying. I hope you’ll go to the link and read the article. The gist is that the Trump administration is emailing international students who were involved in campus activism to self-deport. The administration spies are searching social media for any comments from foreign students that they interpret as anti-American. In addition, Marco Rubio is using AI to find student that appear to support Hamas or other terrorist groups and revoke their visas. There’s more at the link.

This is from Ken Klippenstein.com: Trump Admin Spies on Social Media of Student Visa Holders. Ideological purge of foreign students revealed in new leaked directive.

The Trump administration is requiring that foreign students studying in, or seeking to study in the United States, pass an ideological test in order to obtain a visa, according to a “sensitive” State Department directive issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and which I obtained.

The crackdown, instituted on Tuesday, makes it “mandatory” for consular officers and State Department personnel to conduct a “social media review” — including screenshotting posts — of new and returning student visa applicants for any evidence of terrorist connections. Such connections are defined broadly to include “advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse or espouse terrorist activities or support” a terrorist organization. Though the document doesn’t explicitly define what counts as advocacy, it mentions “conduct that bears a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).

Specific reference is made to students seeking to participate “in pro-Hamas events,” which is how the Trump administration has characterized student protests against the war in Gaza.

“When you apply to enter the United States and you get a visa, you are a guest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 16 in remarks quoted in the directive “If you tell us when you apply for a visa, I’m coming to the U.S. to participate in pro-Hamas events, that runs counter to the foreign policy interest of the United States ….. if you had told us you were going to do that, we never would have given you the visa.”

The order to “comprehensively review and screen every visa applicant” appears directed at Palestinian and other foreign students who are “sympathetic” to Hamas, but typical of every government directive, it also opens the door for broader ideological vetting. It also directs the social media of visa applicants to be assessed for “potential security and non-security related ineligibilities [that] pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

The directive, dated March 25, bears the subject line “Enhanced Screening and Social Media Vetting for Visa Applicants.” It begins with a reference to two of Trump’s executive orders, including one on “measures to combat anti-semitism” and another on combating foreign terrorists and other national security threats to public safety.

There’s more detail at the link.

The LA Times: California international students on alert as Trump ramps up arrests of pro-Palestinian activists.

Ali, a UCLA student who joined pro-Palestinian protests last year, avoided arrest when riot police dismantled the school’s encampment last May. An international student who took part in a surge of campus activism around Israel’s war in Gaza, he was wary of having a record that could affect his visa. But he did not otherwise hide his activism.

Now, as federal authorities act on President Trump’s directive to deport international student activists he accuses of being antisemitic “pro-Hamas” terrorism supporters, Ali has taken new precautions. He’s moved out of his apartment — the address listed with the government — and is staying with a friend. He attends classes but avoids social events. He carries a piece of paper with the number for a 24-hour hotline faculty set up for students detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Arthur’s Morning, by Vicky Mount

As more arrests unfold, fears among California international students are growing — and frustrations mounting — as they accuse campus administrators of not doing enough to protect them in the state with the largest foreign student population in the nation and universities at the forefront of national activism.

“It’s a matter of time before it gets here,” said Ali, who did not want his full name, nationality, area of study or age published because he is worried about being tracked. “This is free speech. Isn’t this what this country is supposed to be known for?” [….]

At UCLA, faculty members recently circulated advice to international students: “Don’t say anything to ICE. Don’t sign anything. Tell them to speak to your attorney,” it said alongside a hotline number. “… Please have a stamped, pre-addressed envelope to someone you trust with you in the event of an ICE arrest, you can send the mail to alert them you have been detained.”

During “know your rights” training events, some international students have been told to “not go out unless you need to and make sure someone knows where you are going if you do go out,” said Randall Kuhn, a UCLA professor of public health who last year joined protesters.

Apparently, Trump is attempting to cancel the First Amendment for international students, and he is working on ending it for all college students, professors, and administrators as well.

The New York Times (gift link): Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding.

The interim president of Columbia University abruptly left her post Friday evening as the school confronted the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the Trump administration’s mounting skepticism about its leadership.

The move came one week after Columbia bowed to a series of demands from the federal government, which had canceled approximately $400 million in essential federal funding, and it made way for Columbia’s third leader since August. Claire Shipman, who had been the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, was named the acting president and replaced Dr. Katrina Armstrong.

The university, which was deeply shaken by a protest encampment last spring and a volley of accusations that it had become a safe haven for antisemitism, announced the leadership change in an email to the campus Friday night. The letter thanked Dr. Armstrong for her efforts during “a time of great uncertainty for the university” and said that Ms. Shipman has “a clear understanding of the serious challenges facing our community.”

Less than a week ago, the Trump administration had signaled that it was satisfied with Dr. Armstrong and the steps she was taking to restore the funding. But in a statement on Friday, its Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism said that Dr. Armstrong’s departure from the presidency was “an important step toward advancing negotiations” between the government and the university.

The statement included a cryptic mention of a “concerning revelation” this week, which appeared to refer to comments from Dr. Armstrong at a faculty meeting last weekend. According to a faculty member who attended, Dr. Armstrong and her provost, Angela Olinto, confused some people when they seemed to downplay the effects of the university’s agreement with the government. A transcript of the meeting had been leaked to the news media, as well as to the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Ms. Shipman, a journalist with two degrees from Columbia, is taking charge of one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities at an extraordinarily charged moment in American higher education.

The federal government is threatening to end the flow of billions of dollars to universities across the country, many of which are facing inquiries from agencies that range from the Justice Department to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Reuters has an update on Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student who was recently kidnapped by ICE in Somerville, Massachusetts: US judge halts deportation of Turkish student at Tufts.

BOSTON, March 29 (Reuters) – A federal judge in Massachusetts on Friday temporarily barred the deportation of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, who voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza and was detained by U.S. immigration officials this week.

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was taken into custody by U.S. immigration authorities near her Massachusetts home on Tuesday, according to a video showing the arrest by masked federal agents. U.S. officials revoked her visa.

Artist unknown

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has accused Ozturk, without providing evidence, of “engaging in activities in support of Hamas,” a group which the U.S. government categorizes as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Oncu Keceli, a spokesperson for Turkey’s foreign ministry, said efforts to secure Ozturk’s release continued, adding consular and legal support was being provided by Turkish diplomatic missions in the U.S.

“Our Houston Consul General visited our citizen in the center where she is being held in Louisiana on March 28. Our citizen’s requests and demands have been forwarded to local authorities and her lawyer,” Keceli said in a post on X….

In Friday’s order, opens new tab, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston said that to provide time to resolve whether her court retained jurisdiction over the case, she was barring Ozturk’s deportation temporarily.

She ordered the Trump administration to respond to Ozturk’s complaint by Tuesday.

Mahsa Khanbabai, a lawyer for Ozturk, called the decision “a first step in getting Rumeysa released and back home to Boston so she can continue her studies.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been very busy undermining our health in his position as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Here’s the latest.

ProPublica: The CDC Buried a Measles Forecast That Stressed the Need for Vaccinations.

Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.

A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”

But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”

ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.

“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”

CBS News: RFK Jr. to gut vaccine promotion and HIV prevention office, sources say.

The entire staff of the federal government’s Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy is expected to be laid off, multiple federal health officials told CBS News Friday. The moves are part of a broader restructuring plan ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that involves cutting 20,000 HHS positions.

Much of the government’s efforts to buoy lagging childhood vaccination rates nationwide have been run through OIDP, including a new campaign called “Let’s Get Real” that had launched in the final months of the Biden administration to provide resources and information to health care providers talking to hesitant parents.

“Spreading the truth saves lives, so use our resources to help parents understand how vaccines work, why they’re safe, and how they help protect kids,” the department had said of the campaign after it was launched.

The Office of Minority Health has also been informed that it should expect to be dissolved, sources said.

OIDP, overseen by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health or OASH, had numbered around 60 employees at the end of the Biden administration. The cuts come as the Trump administration is trying to merge the other offices in OASH into a new HHS agency called the Administration for a Health America, or AHA….

The National Vaccine Program has also been run by OIDP, which works with an advisory committee to coordinate the department’s agencies to develop vaccines, oversee their safety and increase their availability and use.

The New York Times: Top F.D.A. Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy’s ‘Misinformation and Lies.’

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”

By Karyn Lyons

Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.

His continued oversight of the F.D.A.’s vaccine program clearly put him at odds with the new health secretary. Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies. He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.

“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at F.D.A. is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security,” Dr. Marks wrote.

This is insane:

Mr. Kennedy has, for example, promoted the value of vitamin A as a treatment during the major measles outbreak in Texas while downplaying the value of vaccines. He has installed an analyst with deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism.

And on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy said on NewsNation that he planned to create a vaccine injury agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the effort was a priority for him and would help bring “gold-standard science” to the federal government….

In his letter, Dr. Marks mentioned the deadly toll of measles in light of Mr. Kennedy’s tepid advice on the need for immunization during the outbreak among many unvaccinated people in Texas and other states.

Dr. Marks wrote that measles, “which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,” because of complications, “had been eliminated from our shores” through the widespread availability of vaccines.

Dr. Marks added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy’s concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.

Next up, the latest Musk news.

The latest DOGE plan for Social Security is terrifying. Wired: DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

“Of course, one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED….

SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency by DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, The Washington Post reported this week.

By Fernando Botero

Why this is problematic:

This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly….

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages….

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.

The New York Times: Elon Musk Says He Has Sold X to His A.I. Start-Up xAI.

Elon Musk said on Friday that he had sold X, his social media company, to xAI, his artificial intelligence start-up, in an unusual arrangement that shows the financial maneuvering inside the business empire of the world’s richest man.

The all-stock deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, Mr. Musk said on X. X’s price was down from the $44 billion that Mr. Musk paid for the social media company in 2022, but higher than the $12 billion valuation that some of X’s investors have recently assigned it. The last valuation of xAI, at a December fund-raising round, was about $40 billion.

Both companies are privately held and already share significant resources, such as engineers. A chatbot called Grok, made by xAI, is trained on data posted by X users and is available on X. Last month, bankers for X told investors that some of the social media company’s revenue came from xAI.

Mr. Musk wrote in his post that “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined.”

“Today,” he said, “we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.” He added, “The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge.”

The deal shows how Mr. Musk can play with different parts of his business empire. In this case, he folded a company that has been losing value, X, into one that has been gaining value, xAI. Mr. Musk made a similar maneuver in 2016 when he used stock of his electric car company, Tesla, to buy SolarCity, a clean energy company where he was the largest shareholder and his cousin Lyndon Rive was chief executive.

While Tesla is a publicly traded company that must disclose its finances and other information to shareholders, most of Mr. Musk’s companies are privately held and more opaque. Those include the rocket manufacturer SpaceX; the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up; and Neuralink, a brain interface company. Mr. Musk often moves resources and employees among his companies, defying traditional business norms and operating his various companies as one big Musk enterprise.

The latest on Pete Hegseth.

The Wall Street Journal: Hegseth Brought His Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Military Officials.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions.

Artist unknown

One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at a sensitive moment for the trans-Atlantic alliance, one day after the U.S. said it had cut off military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The group that met at the Pentagon, which included Adm. Tony Radakin, the head of the U.K.’s armed forces, discussed the U.S. rationale behind that decision, as well as future military collaboration between the two allies, according to people familiar with the meeting.

A secretary can invite anyone to meetings with visiting counterparts, but attendee lists are usually carefully limited to those who need to be there and attendees are typically expected to possess security clearances given the delicate nature of the discussions, according to defense officials and people familiar with the meeting. There is often security near the meeting space to keep away uninvited attendees.

Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth, isn’t a Defense Department employee, defense officials said. It isn’t uncommon for spouses of senior officials to possess low-level security clearances, but a Pentagon spokesperson declined to say whether Jennifer has one. Jennifer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting. Hegseth’s brother Philip Hegseth has also been traveling with him on official visits, the Pentagon said.

The Brussels meeting, which took place on the sidelines of a February conference of NATO defense ministers, was a gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a U.S.-led forum of some 50 nations that periodically meets to coordinate on production and delivery of weapons and other support for Ukraine. At the closed-door discussions, national representatives routinely present confidential information, such as donations to Ukraine that they don’t want to be made public, according to officials.

You can get past the paywall and read the rest if you click the link at http://www.memeorandum.com.

Defense News: Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key role inside the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key position inside the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior adviser, Hegseth’s office confirmed.

The high-profile job has meant meetings with a UFC fighting champion, a trip to Guantanamo Bay and, right now, traveling on the Pentagon’s 747 aircraft as Hegseth makes his first trip as defense secretary to the Indo-Pacific.

Phil Hegseth’s official title is senior adviser to the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and liaison officer to the Defense Department, spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said in a statement Thursday.

“Phil Hegseth, one of a number of talented DHS liaisons to DOD, is conducting touch points with U.S. Coast Guard officials on the Secretary’s Indo-Pacific trip,” which includes stops in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Japan, Wilson said in response to a query by The Associated Press….

It’s common for the Defense Department and other federal agencies to have liaisons. Each military branch sends liaisons to Capitol Hill. The Pentagon, State Department and others all use interagency liaisons to more closely coordinate and keep tabs on policy.

But it is not common for those senior-level positions to be filled by family members of the Cabinet heads, said Michael Fallings, a managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, which specializes in federal employment law.

Based on Phil Hegseth’s publicly available resume, his past experience includes founding his own podcast production company, Embassy and Third, and working on social media and podcasts at The Hudson Institute.

He sounds about as qualified as his older brother Pete.

That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?

Finally Friday Reads: The Incompetent and The Cruel

Posted: March 28, 2025 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, education, FARTUS, Hillary Clinton, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, MAGA Assholes | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, @repeat1968. John Buss, abu ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, Cabinet of incompetent imbeciles, Department of Education Blues, Elise Stefanik is a cunt, Every one goes to El Salvador!, FARTUS, higher education, Hillary Clinton on SignalGate, Kidnapping Graduate Students, Kristi Noem Sociopath and Cunt, Pete Hegseth weirdo sexual assaulter, The Whiskey Leaks | 11 Comments

“Kristi Noem is so thoughtful.” John Buss, @repeat1968.
@johnbuss.bsky.social

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Cartoonist John Buss continues to blow me away with his renditions of all the monsters inhabiting the Trump Regime. You never know how far they will go. Incompetency and cruelty are their defining parameters. The only thing you know about this regime is that they are negatively correlated and huge. You know the negative impact on the country in a big way, but the actual actions leading to the outcomes are unimaginable. You know they’re going to a new low that will be shocking and unimaginable. I’m beginning to think that some are designed to take our eyes away from the dismantling of our government and democracy. Today’s Featured Funny was more than I had hoped when I put this on his Facebook thread. “Hi! It’s your dark muse again. You have to do something about Kristin Noem doing a glam shot in front of all the shirtless, bearded men she likely sent to be tortured and enslaved. Abu Ghraib, but this administration has no shame!” She had paraded down here in a similar outfit during the Super Bowl, but instead of looking like a slutty ICE agent, she looked like a Slutty police officer. She just oozes psychopath, doesn’t she? She’s LARPing all those war criminals that psychologically torture whatever they capture. Just thinking about how the really bad ones torture animals first, and her poor puppy. This is from the Washington Post (article gifted). “How Kristi Noem’s $50,000 Rolex in a Salvadoran prison became a political flash point. The high-end Swiss watch lent a striking contrast to her tour of a notoriously overcrowded mega-prison in one of Latin America’s poorest countries.” I supposed she could wear that “I don’t care, do you?” jacket, but then everyone would miss her signature whitie tightie boob shot op. She must have a closet full of those. She wore them daily during her Super Bowl tour. This is reported by Drew Harwell and Alec Dent.

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem visited El Salvador’s most notorious mega-prison on Wednesday, she sported an eye-catching piece on her wrist that experts have identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that sells for about $50,000.

The high-end Swiss watch lent a striking contrast to Noem’s tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where imprisoned men watched silently from a crowded cell as she recorded a video for a social media post warning undocumented immigrants not to enter the United States.

“If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem said.

Noem’s choice of watch kicked off a race among internet sleuths to identify it and infuriated immigration advocates, who said the juxtaposition was insensitive to the harsh reality of mass imprisonment and deportation.

“You’re in front of all these people in a very poor country, who are in the bottom 10 or 20 percent of their country … and it looks like you’re just flaunting your wealth while you flaunt your freedom,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.

“This is an administration that is trying to be populist, anti-elite, appeal to the common man,” he added. Meanwhile, there’s “people stacked up like cordwood behind her.”

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the make of the watch in a statement, saying that “then-Governor Noem chose to use the proceeds from her New York Times best selling books to purchase an item she could wear and one day pass down to her children.”

While the #FARTUS purge of immigrants looks like an SS round-up. I fear escalation to Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen (killing squads). It is difficult to predict if they will actually go that far. We’ve already had children in cages and family separation. We also have midnight raids that have spirited away graduate students who have taken part in demonstrations or written op-eds against the bombing of Palestinian civilians in GAZA. This is from Mike Masnik from TechDirt. “Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds.”

For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes. This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in. But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up. The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana. The video of her kidnapping (because that’s what it was) is terrifying enough. If you listen, you hear her quite understandably surprised reaction with a scream, and then she asks to call the police, only to be told “we’re the police.” None of them are in uniforms. Most of them are masked. Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper. The government has attempted to justify similar renditions (and there is a growing list of victims) by falsely painting targets as “terrorist supporters” — a dangerous conflation of political speech supporting Palestinian rights with support for terrorism. But even those cases typically involved people involved in public protests, which are themselves constitutionally protected activities. This case goes even further: disappearing someone over an innocuous piece of student journalism published a year ago. Everyone should be alarmed. Everyone should be demanding that she (and others) be released and that ICE and DHS stop this horrifying and unconscionable practice. Everyone should be demanding that Trump and Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem stop this Gestapo bullshit. Even if — especially if — you disagree with her views on Israel and Palestine. This isn’t about that. This is about the very concept of freedom. The rights everyone — even visitors — are supposed to have in this country. The right to speak your mind, even if (especially if!) it is opposed to those in power. The right to walk down a street without being kidnapped. The right to due process. If the government genuinely believed Ozturk had violated immigration law or her visa terms (she hadn’t), there are established legal procedures to address such issues. Instead, they chose to send masked goons to disappear her without warning or due process — a chilling message to every other international student that their supposed right to express political opinions comes with the risk of rendition. And, of course, the implied threat is that this won’t stop at international students.

I have taught university classes for decades. Finance and Economic policy are inherently political. We stick to established theory and mention policies in the past that did not work. The two big ones are Tariffs and Tax cuts for the very rich. We have data that shows they don’t work and years of published papers. I fear the Commerce and Labor Secretaries will kill the data, so we cannot teach the theory and the reality using current economic and financial data. Since I’m now technically retired and only teach as an adjunct, I worry a lot about the current faculty. The Republicans have been after tenure for years. Universities and research are a significant source of progress. The attacks on research and the inability to run graduate programs and graduate Doctoral students will mean a lack of qualified professors after we old folks retire, which will severely curtail our leadership in science and the exercise of free thought. That is their goal. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Trump Orders Department Of Education Closure: What Happens Next.” The story is reported by Sarah Hernholm.

President Trump has issued an executive order to close the Department of Education, a move that will reshape federal education policy and affect America’s 49.5 million public school students. The order mandates redistributing the department’s functions across multiple federal agencies by the end of the year, marking a major change in how the federal government approaches education. This decision, long championed by conservatives who believe education should remain primarily a state and local matter, has sparked disagreement about the federal government’s role in education policy, funding, and oversight. The executive order outlines specific transitions for key education functions:

Civil rights enforcement will move to the Justice Department

Federal student loan programs will shift to the Treasury

Special education oversight will transition to Health and Human Services

These changes will affect the management of federal education funding streams totaling over $150 billion annually, including:

$18.8 billion in Title I funding for high-poverty schools, serving approximately 26 million students

$15.5 billion in IDEA funding, supporting 7.3 million students with disabilities

$120.8 billion in Federal Student Aid programs, helping 10.8 million college students

Educational stakeholders stress the importance of ensuring these resources continue without disruption during the transition period, particularly for disadvantaged students who rely heavily on federally funded programs. This will hurt rural and poor urban schools that rely on the funding to offer help for disadvantaged students and students with disabilities. I’m also wondering what will happen to ESL (English as a second language) teachers, programs, school nurses, and psychologists. These things are incredibly expensive.

“The backpedaling is something to behold..” John Buss, @repeat1968.
@johnbuss.bsky.social

Then there’s Pete Hegseth and his keystone cops LARPing military leadership. We got all the war moves and none of the conversation about what it means to target and bomb a civilian apartment. Hey! Hey DOJ! How many kids did they kill that day? They’re all suggesting it was successful, but really? What has all that incompetence brought us? This is breaking news from CNN. “Officials say texts sent by Waltz, Ratcliffe in Signal chat may have damaged US’ ongoing ability to gather intel on Houthis.” Evidently, the intelligence they got from the Israelis was from an on-site agent. But of course, no heads are rolling in any of the meeting’s inept Cabinet. They’ve declared war on The Atlantic instead. This story is reported by Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen,

Current and former US officials have told CNN they believe two texts sent by national security adviser Mike Waltz and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in the now-infamous group chat involving senior US officials discussing battle plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen, may have done long-term damage to the US’s ability to gather intelligence on the Iran-backed group going forward.

Although messages from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth detailing the sequencing, timing and weapons to be used in a March attack on the Houthis have drawn the most scrutiny because they could have endangered US servicemembers if revealed, the messages from Waltz and Ratcliffe, in the chat Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was added to, contained equally sensitive information, these sources said.

In one of the messages, Ratcliffe told other Cabinet members who were discussing whether to delay the strikes that the CIA was in the act of mobilizing assets to collect intelligence on the group, but that a delay might offer them the opportunity to “identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.”

That text, according to the current and former officials, exposed the mere fact that the US is gathering intelligence on them — bad in and of itself — but also hinted at how the agency is doing it. The language about “starting points,” these people said, suggests clearly that the CIA is using technical means like overhead surveillance to spy on their leadership. That could allow the Houthis to change their practices to better protect themselves.

Then, in a later message, Waltz offered an extremely specific after-action report of the strikes, telling the thread that the military had “positive ID” of a particular senior Houthi leader “walking into his girlfriend’s building” — offering the Houthis a clear opportunity to see who the US was surveilling and potentially figure out how, thus enabling them to avoid that surveillance in the future, the sources said.

The Houthis have “always been difficult to track,” said a former intelligence official. “Now you just highlight for them that they’re in the crosshairs.”

Trump administration officials, including both Waltz and Ratcliffe, have repeatedly insisted that no classified information was shared in the text. Ratcliffe, in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, specifically referenced his text about “starting points.”

But current and former officials have disagreed vehemently with that assessment: The kinds of information in not just Hegseth’s texts, but Ratcliffe’s and Waltz’s, included very clear references to sources and methods. Even if it wasn’t an explicit or technical description, these people say, it is information that the US government would typically withhold because it might allow an adversary to make an educated interference about US sources and methods.

Ratcliffe’s use of the Signal app in this way is raising eyebrows inside Langley, current and former officials said.

“I think he is going to be viewed skeptically for using the app for that purpose,” one US official told CNN.

“(Ratcliffe) was basically talking as if he was in a SCIF,” said another former intelligence official, referring to a secure room hardened against electronic surveillance that is designed for discussions of classified material.

“He’s the director,” said the first former official, calling Ratcliffe’s text “irresponsible.” “He should know better.”

A CIA spokesperson told CNN, “Director Ratcliffe takes his responsibility to safeguard America’s ability to gather intelligence extremely seriously.”

“Nothing he conveyed in the chat posed any risk to any sources or methods,” the spokesperson said. “The only lasting damage is to the Houthi terrorists who have been eliminated.”

CNN has reached out to the National Security Council for comment.

The primary tool of Trump’s spokespeople is to lie and deny and protect FARTUS at all times.

Former Secretary of State penned this Op-Ed in the New York Times today. “Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get?” Remember, it will get worse; we just can’t forecast how because only the incompetent and cruel can come up with such batshit crazy pogroms. Throw in narcissism and sociopathy, and it’s a forecaster’s nightmare. Clinton’s name has been evoked recently because the same folks who were traumatized by her personal emails being released by their Russian buddies are taking this incredible breach of security cavalierly.

It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.

This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.

In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.

Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.

There’s more at the link, which has been gifted.

It’s hard to get through the day without the next chain of what the hell did they do now coming out to beat us senseless. They’re worried about the midterms because FARTUS sent Elise Stefanik back to Congress yesterday. The poor woman won’t get that deluxe apartment in the sky now. This is from Politico. “Stefanik’s withdrawal suggests Republicans are sweating their thin margins. Democrats insist Republicans are panicking.” Democrats shouldn’t be so complacent.

President Donald Trump’s decision to keep Rep. Elise Stefanik in Congress is the clearest sign yet that the political environment has become so challenging for Republicans that they don’t want to risk a special election even in safe, red seats.

A pair of April elections in deep-red swaths of Florida next week was supposed to improve the GOP’s cushion in the House and clear the path for Stefanik’s departure, until Trump said he didn’t “want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.”
The decision to pull Stefanik’s nomination came as Republicans grew increasingly anxious about the race to fill the seat of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on April 1. Polling in the district, which Trump carried by 30 points, had tightened, and the president himself is hosting a tele-town hall there to try and bail out Republican Randy Fine. An internal GOP poll from late March showed Democrat Josh Weil up 3 points over Fine, 44 to 41 percent, with 10 percent undecided, according to a person familiar with the poll and granted anonymity to discuss it. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, conducted the survey. That result spooked Republicans and spurred them to redouble efforts to ensure a comfortable win in the district, according to two people familiar with internal conversations. Some Republican strategists said it’s not worth taking the risk of losing Stefanik’s sprawling northern New York seat, which Trump won by 20 points in 2024.
“Can they defend her seat? Absolutely. But why do you do that right now?” asked Charlie Harper, who was a top aide to former Rep. Karen Handel on her successful 2017 bid in a special election in Georgia.

Harper is not the only Republican making that calculation.

“If we’re far underperforming in seats Trump won by 30 then there’s obvious concern about having to chance special elections in seats Trump won by a lot less,” said one top GOP operative granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The juice is not worth the squeeze sweating them out.”

Okay, that’s enough shock and awe for now. What’s on your reading and blogging list today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufw9dVys3t0

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