Gratifying to see sharp presidential critiques like this one from Dana Milbank remain tenable in the “personal liberties and free markets” era of The Washington Post:

By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.

Milbank outlines failure after failure: Legislative. Economic. Foreign policy. Constitutional. And on and on.

Milbank also identifies a “key difference” between Trump and “previous attempts at executive overreach”:

We have been through ruinous periods before, but never when the president was the one actively and knowingly causing the ruin. During past upheaval, there “wasn’t this sense that the White House, the president, is directing the destruction of 250-year-old American values,” [David Greenberg of Rutgers University] says. He also notes that, because of the expansion of the executive powers over the past century, particularly during the New Deal and the Cold War, Trump has more ability to cause destruction than his predecessors did. “I don’t think we’ve ever had the combination of such a vast and extensive executive apparatus and at the same time an attempt to eliminate the built-in safeguards,” he says.

The entire piece is a recitation of receipts, the many dozens of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things Trump and his regime have unleashed on this country. It’s relentless. A political pummeling.

More like this, please. If “democracy dies in darkness,” shine some damn light.

I greatly admire the candor and moral clarity Teen Vogue brings to its headlines and reporting. The publication often provides the most forthright, unflinching version of vital issues. This headline is a tremendous example. It tops this “Teen Vogue Take” from Lex McMenamin, who, in reaction to a student’s description of the shooter as a “normal college dude”, writes:

To that student’s point, the alleged gunman is a quintessentially American school shooter: a radicalized, young white male who, classmates told NBC News, espoused white supremacist rhetoric. The son of a longtime local sheriff’s deputy, according to NBC, he used one of his mother’s guns to commit the shooting.

At the sheriff department’s press conference about the shooting, Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil told media that Ikner was a “longstanding member” of the office’s youth advisory council, and that, due to his training, it was “not a surprise to us” that Ikner had access to a gun.

So, just to sum up the state of things in this country: The American government is so hostile to immigrants and those sympathetic to Palestine that it is deporting them, snatching them off college campuses, and separating them from their families. Meanwhile, the real threat to college campuses are people like the FSU shooter, who, a fellow student told NBC, had been kicked out of a campus debate club over his white supremacist views.

Every news outlet should strive for this level of lucidity, and ask themselves: Why is a “young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the world” a better truth-teller than us?

Josh Dawsey and Alex Leary with an “exclusive” for The Wall Street Journal: (Apple News+ Link)

Donald Trump’s inaugural committee raised almost $250 million from Corporate America, more than doubling the previous record as companies sought to win favor with Trump and the incoming administration.

The record sum shows how the country’s largest and most powerful companies flocked to Trump in the period after the election, with senior executives traveling to his Florida club and cutting seven-figure checks. The previous record for an inaugural committee was about $107 million, which Trump amassed in 2017 in the run-up to his first-term swearing in. Other recent presidents have raised less than $100 million, according to financial disclosures.

The list of contributors is exactly who you’d expect (crypto, oil companies, tech) with some surprises, like “Pilgrim’s Pride, a sprawling poultry company that gave $5 million.”

Dawsey and Leary add:

A filing reviewed by The Wall Street Journal in advance of a federal deadline Sunday showed a range of companies contributed to the inauguration, including many industries that have benefited so far from Trump’s decisions in office.

You can guess what comes next:

Trump has now alienated some of those same companies, putting in place stiff tariffs and starting a trade war that has caused the markets to sag.

I’m sure these companies and individuals have no regrets parting with their hard-earned cash.

Parker Molloy, at The Present Age, on NPR’s frustrating decision to effectively ignore the large-scale, nationwide protests against the Trump administration in early April:

NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride defended this editorial decision in her April 10 newsletter, titled “How does NPR cover peaceful protests when the only news is the protest?,” writing that “aside from crowd sizes, most protests aren’t newsworthy enough to warrant continuous, national coverage.” She even went to New York to watch one of the demonstrations herself, concluding, “As a news event, it wasn’t very compelling.”

Molloy:

When Americans feel compelled to take to the streets in mass numbers, news organizations should be asking why. They should be interviewing participants, exploring the issues that drove people to protest, and examining the policies being contested. Instead, NPR opted for a couple of radio stories and three web articles.

McBride writes: “The individual protests themselves are unlikely to become significant news events. Instead, NPR’s best service is to describe the broader implications of the protests, if and when those implications are clear and significant.”

But how can audiences understand the “broader implications” if news organizations don’t explain what people are protesting about in the first place?

She astutely observes:

McBride’s position essentially argues that mass protests only become newsworthy when they turn violent or disruptive. She writes that “once a protest movement results in conflict or property damage, NPR journalists covering the protests will often note the exception.” This creates a perverse incentive: want coverage? Create conflict.

Unsaid is that Trump is likely hoping for violence and conflict, as an excuse to declare martial law and use military force against the protesters. The organizers and protesters understand this and specifically reject the idea of creating conflict.

I previously noted the lack of coverage of the Hands Off! protests (as did Molloy). With more nationwide protests happening today, how will NPR and other media organizations cover them this time?

(Early assessment: marginally better, judging from a quick check of several sites. I spotted at least a small mention on the front pages of New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, CNN, Chicago Sun-Times, CBS News, AP News, ABC News, Los Angeles Times, and NPR. Nothing on MSNBC, NBC News, Wall Street Journal. Let’s see what the front pages bring tomorrow.)

Jamelle Bouie, writing for The New York Times Opinion page under the (visible) headline “The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing” (and a hidden headline of “Trump’s Lust for Power Cannot Be Satiated”) ^[1]:

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

And later:

The upshot of this understanding of Trump’s personality is that there is no point at which he can be satisfied. He will always want more: more supplicants to obey his next command, more displays of his power and authority and more opportunities to trample over those who don’t belong in his America.

When Trump suggested sending American citizens to foreign prisons, I wrote about how I anticipated newsrooms would react:

[…] those newsrooms will dismiss it as the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind, because they still haven’t learned that when Trump says something, even if it was just a stray stream of consciousness thought, that statement becomes a part of his identity and he can’t back down from it. He must defend it, double down on it, make it real. It’s a crippling personality flaw that he can never be wrong, and the toadies he surrounds himself with enable it.

These two character deficiencies—his desire to appear strong, coupled with his desperate need to always be right—have toppled us into autocracy.

Sara Boboltz, at HuffPost:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses. […] “These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders on American streets,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

“The president has said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that. He’s not sure, [and] we are not sure if there is,” Leavitt continued. “It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly in the effort of transparency.”

They desperately want concentration camps.

This should be setting off klaxons across the country, and every newsroom should be leading with this story. Donald Trump Suggests Sending American Citizens to Foreign Prisons.

Instead, those newsrooms will dismiss it as the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind, because they still haven’t learned that when Trump says something, even if it was just a stray stream of consciousness thought, that statement becomes a part of his identity and he can’t back down from it. He must defend it, double down on it, make it real. It’s a crippling personality flaw that he can never be wrong, and the toadies he surrounds himself with enable it. Little miss can’t be wrong.

RawStory quotes Trump:

“I love that,” Trump said. "If we could take some of our 20 time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and purposely run people over in cars, if he would take them, I would be honored to give them.

Those who purposely run people over in cars you say? I wonder if he means this guy? Or maybe this one? He could mean the guy who put someone in a wheelchair, or any of these guys. Perhaps this police officer, or anyone from this list. Wait, he definitely means this guy. Right?

Edith Olmsted at The New Republic:

President Donald Trump said that he hopes to erase the U.S. trade deficit with other countries—but anyone who understands economics knows that wouldn’t be a good thing. 

“I spoke to a lot of leaders—European, Asian—from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said, ‘We’re not gonna have deficits with your country,’” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One Sunday. “We’re not gonna do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re gonna have surpluses or at worst we’re gonna be breaking even.”

A trade deficit isn’t a “loss,” regardless of what Trump thinks. A trade deficit simply means that one country spends more on goods from another country than that country spends on goods from them. 

Crucially, economists say that having a trade deficit is not an inherently bad thing at all, because the U.S. simply can’t and shouldn’t make everything. Trump’s insistence that the U.S. is being taken for a ride betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of economics that is built on a dislike of other countries and a desire to be the dealmaker responsible for a new world order.

This New York Times article (“What Rights Do Immigrants Have?”) by Albert Sun and Miriam Jordan—purportedly about who is and isn’t “safe” from arrest and deportation based on their legal immigration and citizenship status—is written in the typical here’s how it’s normally done/here’s what’s actually happening approach we’re all used to from the Times, with its quiet, thoughtful, “we’re just sharing facts, here” tone, with links to stories that are the editorial equivalent of I can’t talk… he’ll hear me….

I find it absolutely maddening.

Especially frustrating are the charts it includes, which give a deeply misleading sense of, for example, who could be “arrested and deported based on [their] speech or for engaging in protest”—look at all the green! Things are fine!—but which doesn’t match current reality. The article itself acknowledges this fact, in its own blink-twice-for-no manner, by circling the “Situations in which the Trump administration has attempted to restrict the rights people have.”

In other words, the premise of the article—here are the protections green card and visa holders have under the law—is undermined by the article itself. The Times knows that these legal residents are being arrested and deported for their speech, for engaging in protests. That it’s happening without those people being convicted of—far less committing or even being accused of committing—any crimes. Yet they refuse to speak it plainly.

The entire article reads like a well-mannered version of “Oh my god! Trump’s immigration plan is completely fucked up! Look at this shit! He’s denying legal residents due process of law! We must fight against these atrocities or citizens are next!”

They need to get a damn anger translator.

I must give credit where it’s due for my use of “Mafia Don” in my two previous pieces. It’s from David Rothkopf’s article at The Daily Beast, which he opens thusly:

Imagine a mob boss were president of the United States. See, that wasn’t very hard, was it?

It’s paired with a pitch-perfect photo illustration that nails the comparison.

Rothkopf writes:

Trump seldom acts as past presidents do. Clearly, he does not put America’s national interests first. (Otherwise he would not weaken our institutions or national standing with every move he made.) But he does act as a crime boss. And he thinks like a crime boss.

The result is the question to ask when looking to understand a Trumpian action, big or small: What’s in it for Trump?

His bottom line:

These aren’t tariffs. They are a horse’s head in the bed of (almost) every world government and business leader.

Chef’s kiss.

I referenced this The Washington Post story in my last piece about the TikTok ban, but I wanted to flag this bit on Trump’s obvious Art of the Deal brilliance:

The White House was hours away from announcing a proposal this week to spin off the popular video app TikTok when the Chinese government shattered the idea, saying it would not approve of any deal without first discussing President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade policy, three people close to the negotiations said.

The White House and TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, had agreed to a proposed deal by Wednesday and were preparing to announce it Thursday […].

Trump must be the greatest dealmaker in the world to get China to agree to a sale, and then blow up that sale by imposing 34% tariffs on China on the same day (and then threatening another 50% the next).

Clearly Trump is an n-dimensional chess player, where n is so bigly only Trump can play.

Trump this week mused about the possibility of including the sale in broader negotiations with China amid the escalating trade war.

“I’m a very flexible person,” Trump said. “Maybe I’ll take a couple of points off if I get approvals for something.”

Oh, no, my bad. It’s just his usual Mafia Don approach to doing “business.”

This report from Michael Barnard on CleanTechnica is a looming disaster of Trumpian proportions:

In April 2025, while most of the world was clutching pearls over trade war tit-for-tat tariffs, China calmly walked over to the supply chain and yanked out a handful of critical bolts. The bolts are made of dysprosium, terbium, tungsten, indium and yttrium—the elements that don’t make headlines but without which your electric car doesn’t run, your fighter jet doesn’t fly, and your solar panels go from clean energy marvels to overpriced roofing tiles. They’re minerals that show up on obscure government risk registers right before wars start or cleantech projects get quietly cancelled.[…]

What China did wasn’t a ban, at least not in name. They called it export licensing. Sounds like something a trade lawyer might actually be excited about. But make no mistake: this was a surgical strike. They didn’t need to say no. They just needed to say “maybe later” to the right set of paperwork. These licenses give Beijing control over not just where these materials go, but how fast they go, in what quantity, and to which politically convenient customers.[…]

The materials China just restricted aren’t random. They’re chosen with the precision of someone who’s read U.S. product spec sheets and defense procurement orders.

The potential ramifications Barnard describes are a direct consequence of Trump’s terrible tariffs. We’re talking an inability to build our own jet engines, semiconductor chips, fiber optics, radar systems, electric vehicles, solar panels… frankly, it’s quite alarming—and a diabolical move by China. And Trump still thinks he can bully them.

See also: The U.S. Department of Energy’s assessment of critical materials and minerals charting the critical Supply Risk of these (and other) minerals in the short and medium terms. I would imagine concerns have accelerated since publication in 2023.

A chilling site from Danielle Harlow:

Inspired by the USA Disappeared Tracker account on BlueSky, this dashboard visualizes persons brought into ICE custody when the Trump Administration has demonstrated undeniable political motive/animus and/or the person has been denied appropriate due process, even if the charges are eventually substantiated in a court of law.

As of April 6, 2025, it shows 803 people have been “disappeared.” When I first saw it on April 2, it was 243 people. A testament to the power of crowdsourcing no doubt, but that this site exists—that it needs to exist—is appalling, and a scathing indictment of both the United States government for doing it, and its citizens for allowing it.

Nintendo, in a statement to Polygon (and others):

Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.

By which I presume they mean “We’re probably gonna have to raise the $450 price tag in the U.S.”

Fucking Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, which already seems like a lifetime ago, Nintendo announced its long-anticipated Switch 2. You can read all the details in The Verge, but in short:

• A large, 7.9", 1080p, 120Hz screen
• 4K (upscaled) dock for TV playing
• 256GB internal storage (up from 32GB in the original Switch)
• “Mouse mode” with the (larger) JoyCon 2 controllers
• Custom Nvidia processor

it looks great, and I’d buy it in a heartbeat, even though we hardly use our original Switch, if it was less expensive. And the market didn’t just crash.

Again: Fucking. Donald. Trump.

Brian Tyler Cohen and Glenn Kirschner on The Legal Breakdown illustrate the utterly preposterous and incredibly dangerous state of affairs in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s “mistaken” deportation case:

Cohen: Are you telling me, with all the agreements that we have with El Salvador that allows us to just—without any due process—deport these people to their country… we have no mechanism whatsoever to bring back somebody who is a legal resident, who is there as a result of an administrative error, that we have no mechanism to bring that guy back?

Kirschner: I don’t believe, you don’t believe it, but that is what the attorneys who are in court—not exactly defending this action, because they concede they did not have a legal reason to deport him, a legal basis—they’re also saying “Uh, we just don’t think we have a mechanism to bring him back.”

Cohen later makes this astute observation about Trump’s intentions:

I think this isn’t necessarily about this one specific person, this is about Donald Trump showing his detractors that he is exactly as all-powerful as he perceives himself as being […].

He doesn’t care what person he has to steamroll through in order to get his way, he’s trying to send a message and everybody that gets hurt as a result of that, that’s just collateral damage […] The goal here is the chilling effect this will have […].He’s not looking to bring [Abrego Garcia] back, because the fact that [Abrego Garcia] can be disappeared in an extrajudicial way is the point unto itself. It’s not about this guy, it’s about Trump being able to display his power.

In response to a question from Cohen about what can be done, Kirschner offers one possible solution:

The Trump administration and these ICE agents that engaged in this unconstitutional deportation violated a court order, violated a judge’s protection order saying Mr. Garcia cannot be deported to El Salvador.

One thing the court has available to it is the power of contempt, and if a court wanted to inspire the Trump administration to get a plane down there to El Salvador and bring this man back, the judge could say “I am going to begin to hold everyone in contempt who was part and parcel of this unconstitutional deportation that violated a judicial order.”

I would love to see them all held in contempt. Sadly, enforcement of such sanctions is done via the US Marshals Service, which is under the Executive branch, and while the US Marshals are supposed to legally comply with a judicial order, I expect the president, via his attorney general, to attempt to block any contempt order.

Nick Miroff, at The Atlantic, chronicles this incredibly harrowing tale (Apple News+ link):

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.

But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.

This story is absolutely terrifying. It’s a constitutional five-alarm fire that should see Americans up in arms and flooding the streets.

In their filing, the US government’s lawyers write:

This Court lacks jurisdiction because Abrego Garcia is not in United States custody.

Writing further:

[…] a person “is held ‘in custody’ by the United States when the United States official charged with his detention has ‘the power to produce him.’”

They’re claiming that no United States official has such power. Rather than apologizing profusely and taking every possible action to rectify the situation, Trump’s lawyers instead argue against the judge’s jurisdiction and the family’s right to petition for redress. The government has effectively professed that once they deport a person—without any due process—there’s nothing the United States can do to reverse course, even after admitting the removal was done in error. That Abrego Garcia—or anyone else—is forever out of their reach. It’s the despotic equivalent of “finders keepers, losers weepers,” or the “Oh no! Anyway” meme, applied to a man’s life.

A week ago Timothy Snyder wrote:

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

The truth is, today, right now, there is absolutely nothing preventing Donald Trump’s regime from snatching you or anyone you know, throwing you or them on a plane to El Salvador, and wiping their hands clean.

Or, as Gillian Branstetter wrote:

No matter your station in life, there is astoundingly little separating you from those men in that cage behind Kristi Noem. No charges, no attorneys, no hearings, no trial. Just conjecture and brute force could be enough to justify completely dehumanizing you, too.

How are we any different from Nazi Germany, or modern-day Russia?

Steven Zeitchik, at The Hollywood Reporter, with the most interesting take I’ve read about Cory Booker’s marathon speech:

You may not have watched anything but the last hour, or few minutes, or even a second of the Democratic senator’s 25-hour, one-sitting (or standing) opus on YouTube or C-SPAN. Trust me then when I tell you the whole thing was the kind of spectacle that should be eligible for an Emmy, so subtle were its layers and so ambitious the performance.

On its face, Booker’s speech building an elaborate case against the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk was pure political theater — if theater involved a prize for never relying on a chair, food or the bathroom. As he broke Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour, 18-minute mark for longest Senate-floor speech in history, the New Jersey lawmaker spoke from giant loose-leaf binders of facts and read anecdotes off index cards; he thanked the Parliamentarian and gave at least his vocal cords a break by deferring to extended questions (that were more of a comment) from other senators. Booker balanced rousing constitutional ideals with basic economic litmus tests, reappropriating Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate line of, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” as (fittingly for these lightning times), “Are you better off now than you were 71 days ago?”

But what Booker was doing was nothing less than creating a cinematic spectacle, a binge-worthy awards contender in which all 25 hours happened to drop at once. And while the consequences are deadly serious, the techniques came from some of our most popular entertainment. Focus on different through lines of Booker’s performance and you’d experience different arcs; come in at different moments and you’d infer different genres.

In a story for WBEZ (signup required; Apple News+ link), Adriana Cardona-Maguigad writes that “attorneys with the National Immigrant Justice Center and the ACLU of have Illinois” accused the federal government of violating immigration law—arrests without probable cause, “making arrests without proper warrants and creating warrants in the field after the arrests,” which allegedly violate something called the Nava Settlement.

The story includes this revelation about one of the arrested people:

[…] Chicago resident Julio Noriega, 54, a U.S. citizen […] was arrested, handcuffed and spent most of the night at an ICE processing center […]. He was never questioned about his citizenship, and was only released after agents looked at his ID.

“I was born in Chicago, Illinois and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and social security card. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.”

ICE arrested a US citizen—born here!—because, I presume, he “looks like” an immigrant and has “an immigrant’s” last name. No questions, no due process. He was held for ten hours:

He was released after midnight without any way to return home and without documentation of what happened […].

Appallingly, this isn’t the only instance of citizens being detained. Since Trump retook office, ICE agents are allegedly targeting people they presume don’t look or sound American, including Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans and Navajo Nation tribal members.

We’ve officially entered the snatching Americans and legal immigrants off the streets phase of fascism. Next, we’ll be told it’s merely protective custody.

Kaveh Akbar drops a searingly emotional piece for The Nation in reaction to the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk:

This is, more than anything, a plea for principled leftists to rise en masse and not just decry but disrupt a nation helmed by gleeful genocideers. I’m writing frantically, aware my prose is ugly, overearnest, unvetted against worst-faith readers. It’s graceless, unlovely. So am I.

Tonight I want to be understood, not appreciated.

I could quote the piece at length, but to do so would be a disservice to both Akbar and to you.

It’s critical that I share this plea, however:

I want to tell you powerlessness is an alibi. Hopelessness too. I want to ask, what specifically are you going to do? Tomorrow, the next day? What’s your “I am Spartacus” move to protect the more vulnerable, the targeted, the invisibled, the next-on-the-list?

I want to say, it’s your turn now, help. This is us asking you while we still can.

I’ve taken one tiny step: I added the phone number for the San Francisco Immigrant Rapid Response Hotline (415-200-1548) to my contacts, so I’m prepared to act if I see someone being confronted by ICE.

Find the equivalent service in your area and add the number to your phone.

I finally brought myself to watch the video of ICE’s abduction of Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk. It’s even more disturbing than I expected after reading the story because, watching, it looks exactly like a random kidnapping off the streets—plainclothes men and women, with masks, approaching a woman and coercing her into an SUV. It was simply done quietly, with badges and handcuffs, instead of loudly, with guns and chloroform-soaked handkerchiefs.

Opportunistic criminals with two-bit tin badges can now confidently disappear someone off the street, and we’ll simply assume they’re with ICE. 

That ambushing people on the street or at home is tolerated, even applauded by a fraction of Americans—and defended by our government officials, no less—is profoundly alarming. That it’s done in such a casual manner is equally disturbing.

At what point does ICE become indistinguishable from the Gestapo?

The Wall Street Journal ran this story Wednesday evening (Apple News+ link) by Michael R. Gordon, Nancy A. Youssef, and Lindsay Wise, posted at 6:26 pm EDT, under the headline “Hegseth Comes Under Scrutiny for Texting Strike Details as Fallout Grows” and the subhead “Republicans react with concern about new details on posts about weapons used and timing of Yemen attack.”

It reads like the first sharp blows of an upcoming hit piece against Hegseth, presented initially as mostly Democratic criticisms, with a few Republicans tossed in so those criticisms aren’t dismissed out of hand.

The entire piece is filled with jabs and body blows, each one preceded by a slight feint of a defense of Hegseth’s actions before countering with a gut punch of reality.

One example: About his decision to share “specific times that F-18s, MQ-9 Reaper drones and Tomahawk cruise missiles would be used in the attack” and “that an unnamed target of the strikes was at a ‘known location’”, the WSJ dryly notes:

Such information is normally guarded carefully by the Pentagon before imminent strikes to avoid disclosures that could help adversaries. 

Hegseth’s lack of qualifications for the position is also called out—he’s “never held a senior national security post”—with the paper noting his experience as a “former Army National Guard major and Fox News host” and following up with a comment from “Sen. Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat who flew combat missions in the 1991 Persian Gulf war as a naval aviator,” who dubbed Hegseth “the most unqualified Secretary of Defense we’ve ever seen.”

Then, WSJ has other chat participants doing their best to distance themselves from Hegseth, basically saying “I didn’t post classified information in the chat.…”

But to me, the real tells about Hegseth’s future come from the various members of the military and security communities—past and present—making their (anonymous) opinions clear:

Several U.S. military officials said the strike information Hegseth included was still classified as secret when he shared it.

And:

Targeting plans and the employment of American forces have long been considered to be highly classified before action is taken because their disclosure can tip off adversaries and provide them with insights on how the U.S. conducts sensitive military operations, former officials and national security experts say.

The WSJ added:

Top national-security officials have access to secure communications on government networks designed for classified discussions about such information.

They then closed thusly:

Earlier this month, the Pentagon sent an advisory to all military personnel warning that a “vulnerability” had been identified in Signal and warned against using it for classified information.

“It borders on incompetence,” Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator and defense secretary during the Obama administration, said of Hegseth’s texts. “It’s certainly reckless.”

It’s tough to run the Department of Defense if the military you’re responsible for doesn’t trust you to keep their secrets and keep them safe.

To me, all of this adds up to Hegseth’s resignation because “the fake news media has made this story a distraction to President Trump’s important agenda to Make America Great Again.”

I expect a WSJ Opinion calling for his resignation within the week, Hegseth’s decision to step away soon after, and reluctant acceptance by Trump, who will undoubtedly cast it as a “witch hunt,” and be followed by the inevitable pardon.

Not too much new in this New York Times annotated version of The Atlantic’s leaked Signal chat, but I sniggered several times at the obvious delight the reporters took in slapping the Trump administration officials. For example, this, from Helene Cooper, on Pete Hegseth’s response to J.D. Vance:

Pete Hegseth: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.

Cooper: Mr. Hegseth is echoing here a Trump-administration critique that the U.S. Navy does more to keep shipping lanes through the Suez Canal open than European naval forces do. Using words like “loathing” and “pathetic” will likely make his next meetings with European counterparts dicey.

“Dicey.” Right.

Axios also has a great compendium of the Trump administration’s repeated denials of any classified information being leaked in that Signal chat:

After Goldberg published a partial version of the texts, withholding key details for national security reasons, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegsethswiftly went into shoot-the-messenger mode. […]

Here’s how those statements match with what we learned in the subsequent Atlantic story.

My favorite:

Ratcliffe in the Senate hearing said he was not “aware” of any “information on weapons packages, targets or timing” that was discussed in the chat. Gabbard concurred.

The texts include a detailed sequencing of the timing of the attacks, to include Hegseth’s to-the-minute breakdown of when F-18s and drones would take off and drop their payloads.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, and Shane Harris share the byline on this story detailing exactly what was shared in that now-infamous Signal chat. (Apple News+ link.)

So, about that Signal chat.

I chuckled at the dry acknowledgement that a chat thread is the biggest story of the week.

Much of the text thread reads like first-time managers receiving status updates from their teams and, having no understanding of what it is or means, naively share it, believing it makes them look like they’re “in the loop.”

I also get a distinct vibe (from Pete Hegseth, especially) of “check out what I know! I’m cool now!”

Goldberg and Harris:

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

It surprises no one that Hegseth (and Mike Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard, and the rest, all the way up to Trump himself) would deny any top-secret national security information was leaked. What’s surprising is those denials would come knowing Goldberg had screenshots of the Signal thread—and that it was already confirmed as legitimate by administration officials.

In my head canon, Goldberg presented the original story as he did, confident the administration would go into full-on denial mode, and claim, as they did, that the material shared was not classified, thus freeing him to post the thread in its entirety:

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

I can’t be sure that releasing the full chat was the plan from the outset, but it must be deeply satisfying to use a person’s (or administration’s) predilection for lying against them.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was added to a Signal thread with 17 high-ranking Trump administration officials, where the group proceeded to discuss what could only be considered top secret information (Apple News+ link):

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The entire story demonstrates a stunning disregard—willful or otherwise—for even basic operational security procedures among people entrusted with our nation’s most sensitive secrets.

As Goldberg notes:

Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

Every Monday, new Apple employees receive a stern lecture about keeping devices and communications secure, and ensuring sensitive information isn’t accidentally leaked to those not authorized to receive it. Literally on Day One. 

At Apple, this level of security malfeasance has cost people their jobs, and in any other administration—or, more precisely, in any Democratic administration—this would be a huge scandal, and people would be fired—and quite possibly prosecuted—for leaking this information. I’m also confident that had Goldberg shared the Signal thread prior to the bombings, he would be arrested and tried for treason.

I doubt the stunningly reckless behavior of these officials will result in even a hand-slap.

(Via Laffy.)

Jasmine Mooney writes in The Guardian about her harrowing experience being locked up in a series of ICE facilities after her visas were revoked:

I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.

For two days, we remained in that cell, only leaving briefly for food. The lights never turned off, we never knew what time it was and no one answered our questions.

Stories about the inhumane conditions in these detention facilities mainly seem to make the news when it’s someone who “doesn’t belong there,” but the conditions are awful for everyone. It’s imperative that we continue to bring attention to this issue. I’m glad Mooney was willing to speak out and use her personal privilege.

To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks.

Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.

I can’t imagine having no way to reach someone who can help you, whether in the US or your home country, because you don’t have their telephone number or email address. It’s a nightmare—and there’s no incentive for the facilities to resolve things:

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn't just a bureaucratic nightmare. It's a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It's a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560mfrom Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

If Donald Trump and Elon Musk were truly serious about cutting wasteful government spending, they’d abolish ICE.

Which I’m sure is next, right after “cancel Starlink contracts”.

Because rueful laughter is still laughter.

Garrett Bucks on the importance of taking small, seemingly insufficient actions:

Why? Because others will see you do them, and it will make it easier for them to take their own (slightly less lonely but equally beautiful) action by your side.

From February, but still (maybe even more) relevant today.

Here’s the first one:

The next time you read an article about how USAID or the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau or the Department of Education is being attacked, remember that no matter how impactful the agency, movements don’t coalesce around acronyms—they are always about empathy for each other. Take a few minutes to research a specific program administered by those agencies that help people, and ring the alarm for everybody you know. Stop saying “Trump and Musk are the worst” and practice saying things like “Trump and Musk are sentencing millions of AIDS patients to death” or “Trump and Musk want credit card companies to rip us off” or “Trump and Musk just cut mental health and math tutoring resources for your kids’ school.”

I’m working to do better at this when I rant on Mastodon. And I’ll try to do a few of the remaining 29, despite many of them giving me, as Bucks puts it, “anxiety about putting [myself] out there.”

From John Broich in The Conversation (via Smithsonian Magazine^[1]):

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

First published in December 2016. Our biggest newspapers have learned nothing since, and—dare I say—are even worse now.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get.

When will today’s journalists come to the same realization about Trump?

What will historians write about today’s newspapers one hundred years hence?

Priscilla Alvarez, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene, writing for CNN:

The Trump administration is expected to invoke a sweeping wartime authority to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.

The little-known 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, gives the president tremendous authority to target and remove undocumented immigrants, though legal experts have argued it would face an uphill battle in court.

[…]

The announcement, which could come as soon as Friday, has been a moving target as officials finalize the details.

This threat isn’t new—Trump has been making it since at least September 2023—but this latest report, coming just days after the illegal detention of Mahmoud Khalil, suggests a move may indeed be imminent.

(Not to get too conspiratorial, but today—Friday—marks Day 53 of the Trump regime, which some may recognize as significant.)

Calling it an “uphill battle” is a bit of a gloss, though. Here’s the relevant section of the Act (emphasis mine):

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.

To my layman’s eyes, a plain reading of the Act makes it clear that it cannot be invoked without a declared war or invasion from a foreign country.

The “first” group Trump wants to use this Act against:

The primary target remains Tren de Aragua (TDA), a Venezuelan organized crime group that is now operating in the United States and other countries.

Are we supposed to believe we are at war with or threatened by an invasion from Venezuela—a country with fewer people than Texas? Does Trump even know where Venezuela is?

Attempting to use it in this situation would be, at best, misleading and at worst, blatantly illegal. Not that such trivialities matter much to Trump.

Trump wants to use this Act for one, simple reason:

Those subject to the Alien Enemies Act would not be allowed to have a court hearing or an asylum interview since they would be processed under an emergency, wartime authority — not immigration law. Instead, they would be eligible to be detained and deported, with little to no due process, under Title 50, the section of the U.S. code housing America’s war and defense laws.

Bypassing the courts and the legal system: the preferred tactic of every would-be dictator.

This Act has been invoked just three times since 1798, all in times of war. By first threatening to invoke this little-used law against a foreign criminal gang, Trump is defying us to defend them, daring us to stand with “the enemy.” After all, who’s against cleaning up our streets from dangerous gangs, right?

If he succeeds with this abuse, who gets flagged as a “member” of the gang will expand, followed by which gangs get targeted. You can bet Mexico and other South and Central American “gangs” are on his list. Muslim and African “gangs” won’t be too far behind. Eventually, it won’t even need to be couched as “members of a gang.” It’ll just be dehumanized “vermin” from “shithole countries.” By the time the country realizes what he’s doing, it will have been normalized.

Every immigrant—legal or undocumented, recently arrived or decades settled—is at risk to the whims of the Trump regime.

It’s just a matter of time before Trump starts detaining natural-born citizens, too.