From The Atlantic

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Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

The administration has downplayed the importance of the text messages inadvertently sent to The Atlantic’s editor in chief. By Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris

So, about that Signal chat.

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.”

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.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.

Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

We sent our first request for comment and feedback to national-security officials shortly after noon, and followed up in the evening after most failed to answer.

Late yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.” (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was “completely appropriate” to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on the group chat that broke the internet

Trump consistently frames policy around ‘fairness,’ trading on American frustration

A long article worth reading.

By Kevin Rector, Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times

In a sit-down interview with Fox News last month, President Trump and his billionaire “efficiency” advisor Elon Musk framed new tariffs on foreign trading partners as a simple matter of fairness.

“I said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do: reciprocal. Whatever you charge, I’m charging,’” Trump said of a conversation he’d had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “I’m doing that with every country.”

“It seems fair,” Musk said.

Trump laughed. “It does,” he said.

“It’s like, fair is fair,” said Musk, the world’s richest person.

The moment was one of many in recent months in which Trump and his allies have framed his policy agenda around the concept of fairness — which experts say is a potent political message at a time when many Americans feel thwarted by inflation, high housing costs and other systemic barriers to getting ahead.

“Trump has a good sense for what will resonate with folks, and I think we all have a deep sense of morality — and so we all recognize the importance of fairness,” said Kurt Gray, a psychology professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the book “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”

“At the end of the day,” Gray said, “we’re always worried about not getting what we deserve.”

In addition to his “Fair and Reciprocal Plan” for tariffs, Trump has cited fairness in his decisions to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, ban transgender athletes from competing in sports, scale back American aid to embattled Ukraine and pardon his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump has invoked fairness in meetings with a host of world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He has suggested that his crusade to end “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs is all about fairness, couched foreign aid and assistance to undocumented immigrants as unfair to struggling American taxpayers, and attacked the Justice Department, the media and federal judges who have ruled against his administration as harboring unfair biases against him.

Trump and Musk — through his “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is not a U.S. agency — have orchestrated a sweeping attack on the federal workforce largely by framing it as a liberal “deep state” that either works in unfair ways against the best interests of conservative Americans, or doesn’t work at all thanks to lopsided work-from-home allowances.

“It’s unfair to the millions of people in the United States who are, in fact, working hard from job sites and not from their home,” Trump said.

In a Justice Department speech this month, Trump repeatedly complained about the courts treating him and his allies unfairly, and reiterated baseless claims that recent elections have been unfair to him, too.

“We want fairness in the courts. The courts are a big factor. The elections, which were totally rigged, are a big factor,” Trump said. “We have to have honest elections. We have to have borders and we have to have courts and law that’s fair, or we’re not going to have a country.”

Before a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this month, Trump complained — not for the first time — about European countries not paying their “fair share” to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, and the U.S. paying too much.

“We were treated very unfairly, as we always are by every country,” Trump said.

Almost exclusively, Trump’s invocations of fairness cast him, his supporters or the U.S. as victims, and his critics and political opponents as the architects and defenders of a decidedly unfair status quo that has persisted for generations. And he has repeatedly used that framework to justify actions that he says are aimed at tearing down that status quo — even if it means breaching norms or bucking the law.

Trump has suggested that unfavorable media coverage of him is unfair and therefore “illegal,” and that judges who rule against him are unfair liberal activists who should be impeached.

The politics of feeling heard

Of course, grievance politics are not new — nor is the importance of “fairness” in democratic governance. In 2006, the late Harvard scholar of political behavior Sidney Verba wrote of fairness being important in various political regimes but “especially central in a democracy.”

Verba noted that fairness comes in different forms — including equal rights under the law, equal voice in the political sphere, and policies that result in equal outcomes for people. But the perception of fairness in a political system, he wrote, often comes down to whether people feel heard.

“Democracies are sounder when the reason why some lose does not rest on the fact that they are invisible to those who make decisions,” Verba wrote. “Equal treatment may be unattainable, but equal consideration is a goal worth striving for.”

According to several experts, Trump’s appeal is in part based on his ability to make average people feel heard, regardless of whether his policies actually speak to their needs.

Gray said there is “distributive fairness,” which asks, “Are you getting as much as you deserve?” and “procedural fairness,” which asks, “Are things being decided in a fair way? Did you get voice? Did you get input?”

One of Trump’s skills, Gray said, is using people’s inherent sense that there is a lack of distributive fairness in the country to justify policies that have little to do with such inequities, and to undermine processes that are in place to ensure procedural fairness, such as judicial review, but aren’t producing the outcomes he personally desires.

“What Trump does a good job at is blurring the line between rules you can follow or shouldn’t follow,” he said. “When he disobeys the rules and gets called out, he goes, ‘Well those moral rules are unjust.’”

People who voted for Trump and have legitimate feelings that things are unfair then give him the benefit of the doubt, Gray said, because he appears to be speaking their language — and on their behalf.

“He’s not just saying that it’s him. He’s saying it’s on behalf of the people he’s representing, and the people he’s representing do think things are unfair,” Gray said. “They’re not getting enough in their life, and they’re not getting their due.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at UC Berkeley and author of “Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism,” said Trump and his supporters have built him up as a leader “interested in fixing the unfairness to the working class.”

But that idea is premised on another notion, even more central to Trump’s persona, that there are “enemies” out there — Democrats, coastal elites, immigrants — who are the cause of that unfairness, Rosenthal said.

“He names enemies, and he’s very good at that — as all right-wing authoritarians are,” Rosenthal said.

Such politics are based on a concept known as “replacement theory,” which tells people to fear others because there are only so many resources to go around, Rosenthal said. The theory dovetails with the argument Trump often makes, that undocumented immigrants receiving jobs or benefits is an inherent threat to his MAGA base.

“The sense of dispossession is absolutely fundamental and has been for some time,” Rosenthal said.

John T. Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, said Trump has “a remarkable capacity for constructing the world in a way that favors him” — even if that’s as the victim — and appears to be an “outlier” among presidents in terms of how often he focuses on fairness as a political motif.

“Certainly since his first term with impeachment, ‘the Russia hoax,’ ‘dishonest media,’ ‘fake news’ and then ‘weaponizing’ of justice — he’s constructed a kind of victim persona, in battle with the deep state, that is now really basic to his interaction with his core MAGA constituency,” Woolley said.

An idea for Democrats

In coming to terms with Trump’s win in November, Democrats have increasingly acknowledged his ability to speak to Americans who feel left behind — and started to pick up on fairness as a motif of their own, in part by zeroing in on mega-billionaire Musk.

In an interview with NPR last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) evoked the idea of unfairness in the system by saying American government is working for rich people like Musk, but not for everyone else. “Everything feels increasingly like a scam,” she said.

She and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have since embarked on a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, where they have blasted Musk’s role in government and questioned how his actions, or those of Trump, have helped average Americans in the slightest.

“At the end of the day, the top 1% may have enormous wealth and power, but they are just 1%,” Sanders wrote Friday on X. “When the 99% stand together, we can transform our country.”

Trump Does Not Have Absolute Power

Did Donald Trump have a face to face meeting with Chief Justice John Roberts or was it a telephone call? Either way Trump was apparently told he does not have absolute power over everything.

The consequence was Trump administration reinstated thousands of probationary federal workers. The Trump administration is making the move after several court orders ruled that the firings were not legal.

The decision reinstates at least 24,500 recently fired probationary workers following a pair of orders from federal judges last week that found the terminations pushed by President Donald Trump were illegal.

The reinstatements, spanning 18 departments, are outlined in a filing Monday by the Department of Justice in federal court in Maryland after a judge asked for a report on efforts to reinstate the employees.

The separate declarations from Trump officials within each of the departments offer the most detailed public account yet of the administration’s firing of recently hired or promoted probationary workers as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s push to drastically cut the federal workforce.

Here are the tallies of recently fired probationary workers, by department, the Trump administration says it is working to reinstate:

Environmental Protection Agency: 419
Department of Energy: 555
Department of Commerce: 791
Department of Homeland Security: 310
Department of Transportation: 775
Department of Education: 65
Department of Housing and Urban Development: 299
Department of Interior: 1,710
Department of Labor: 167
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 117
Small Business Administration: 298
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.: 156
Human Capital and Talen Management: 270
General Services Administration: 366
Treasury Department: 7,613 (including 7,315 IRS employees)
Department of Agriculture: 5,714
Department of Veterans Affairs: 1,683
Department of Health and Human Services: 3,248

Conservatives have a 6-3 advantage on the high court and Trump himself nominated three of the current justices. The court has frequently sided with him in major cases, most notably the decision last year to grant former presidents wide immunity from criminal prosecution for their official actions. But in a series of emergency orders since Trump’s return to the White House, the court has preliminarily ruled against him.

At the same time, Trump appeared especially eager to woo Roberts during his joint address to Congress earlier this month.

US green card holders, student visa holders can be deported

Can a green card holder be deported from the United States? The recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist involved in organising campus protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict at Columbia University in New York City, has raised questions about the protections foreign students and green card holders have against deportation from the US.

A green holder and student visa holders have been given a privilege. They have no rights

A green card holder has lawful permanent resident status, allowing them to live and work in the US indefinitely. However, this status is not absolute, and deportation remains a possibility under certain circumstances.

Rights and responsibilities of green card holders

According to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), green card holders have the right to:

< Work in any legal job they qualify for, except some roles restricted to US citizens for security reasons

< Be protected by all US laws, including state and local regulations

They are also subject to specific responsibilities:

< Obey all US and local laws

< File income tax returns and report income to the Internal Revenue Service and state tax authorities

< Support the democratic form of government (without voting in elections)

< Register with the Selective Service if they are male and between 18 and 25 years old

< Work in any legal job they qualify for, except some roles restricted to US citizens for security reasons

< Be protected by all US laws, including state and local regulations

Can green card holders be deported?

Yes, they can.

“Generally, green card holders have the same First Amendment rights as US citizens. Constitutionally protected speech, including peaceful protest, would not normally be grounds for cancelling a green card. Green cards are typically revoked for serious crimes or other obvious violations,” Russell A Stamets, partner at Circle of Counsels told Business Standard.

“While they have strong legal protections, such as the right to a hearing before an immigration judge and the ability to appeal deportation orders, they can still be removed for reasons like aggravated felonies, fraud, national security threats, or abandoning their residency by staying outside the US for too long,” Aurelia Menezes, partner at King Stubb & Kasiva, Advocates and Attorneys, explained to Business Standard.

As protests over the Gaza conflict ignited rancor and division at Columbia University last year, one student stood out for his role as a negotiator representing activists in talks with the school officials who were desperate to achieve peace on campus.

Mahmoud Khalil, 30, emerged as a public face of students opposed to the war, leading demonstrations and granting interviews. He delivered a message that his side viewed as measured and responsible but that has been branded by some, including the Trump administration, as antisemitic.

Mr. Khalil has been involved in demonstrations as recently as January, when four masked demonstrators entered a class on the history of Israel taught by an Israeli professor at Columbia to accuse the school of “normalizing genocide.” Videos of an unmasked Mr. Khalil at a related sit-in were soon circulated on social media among critics of Columbia’s protest movement, with some calling for him to be deported.

Over the weekend, Mr. Khalil was at the center of the news again. He was arrested by federal immigration officials in a drastic escalation of President Trump’s crackdown against what he has called antisemitic campus activity. Mr. Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States, had been living in Columbia’s student housing when he was detained and then transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, La.

A green card holder and student visa holders have been given a privilege. They have no rights. Deportation for bad behavior by ICE is a consequence of that behavior. Deporting Mr. Khalil and others who are guests in this country is the right thing to do.

Canada and Greenland

Yes, I was born in Canada. My parents moved to the United States when I was 6 months old. As a boy I visited Winnipeg every summer until I was 10 years old to see my grandparents. I have cousins in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and other cities in Canada. I have visited Canada many times as an adult. Toronto and Vancouver are fun places to tour.

That being said, I am concerned about Canada’s future.

It appears Donald Trump is serious about annexing Canada and Greenland. The difference between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is that Trump wants to accomplish his goals without a war.

Earlier this month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly said of President Donald Trump, “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”

Trudeau’s accusation was extraordinary and unprecedented. Here was the leader of Canada, one of America’s closest and longest-standing allies, accusing the U.S. president of engaging in economic warfare. More and more, however, it seems Trudeau wasn’t making this argument up. The evidence is piling up that Trump has declared economic war on Canada for the express purpose of making our Northern neighbor the 51st state.

Trump first referred to Canada as the 51st state in a December 2024 meeting with Trudeau. At the time, the Canadian Prime Minister assumed Trump was joking. But then, in January, he said it again publicly, this time threatening the use of “economic force” to pursue annexation. In addition, he began referring to Trudeau as “Governor” rather than “Prime Minister.”

By this point, one could easily chalk this up to Trumpian bluster. He couldn’t possibly be serious about annexing Canada? Could he?

But, two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, a private call between him and Trudeau, which was supposed to be about tariffs, took an odd turn. According to The New York Times, Trump told “Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.” He also mentioned revisiting long-standing treaties between the U.S. and Canada regarding the sharing of lakes and rivers.

Even the Canadians were taken aback by Trump’s statement — and it slowly began to dawn on them that perhaps the president was serious (or as serious as one can be about an insane notion like the U.S. annexing Canada).

Publicly, Trump wouldn’t let the matter die. In an interview broadcast before the Super Bowl, on February 9, Trump told Fox News’ Bret Baier his plans to annex Canada were a “real thing.” And to magnify Canada’s economic vulnerability, Trump told reporters that Canada was “not viable as a country” without U.S. trade.

The problem for Canada is that Trump isn’t wrong on this front. Canada is so dependent on cross-border trade that if the U.S. were to turn the screws on The Great White North it could crater Canada’s economy.

In the current context of the emerging trade war between the U.S. and Canada, it seems more than reasonable to believe that this is precisely Trump’s intention.

Consider for a moment how this trade war has unfolded. When Trump first declared his intention to slap tariffs on Canada, he used the smuggling of fentanyl across the Canadian border as a justification (never mind that 19 kilograms of fentanyl came across the Canadian border last year, compared to 9,600 kilograms that crossed the U.S.-Mexico border). After Trudeau reminded Trump of Canada’s plan for slowing the smuggling of fentanyl, which was introduced late last year, he backed down.

But then last week, Trump returned to the trade spat with Canada, but this time blamed Canada because of its protectionist trade policies on dairy, lumber and banking. After Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, announced a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to Michigan, Minnesota and New York, in response, Trump upped the ante announcing a new 25% tariff on Canada’s exports of steel and aluminum (which is in addition to already planned tariffs on steel and aluminum).

In announcing the new tariffs, Trump didn’t mention fentanyl as a justification, but instead wrote on TruthSocial that “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.” In a follow-up post, he wondered why the U.S. “allow(s) another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area?”

Trump’s zigzagging has left markets and the business community flummoxed. For Canadians, the confusion is even worse. How can they end these trade tensions if the reason Trump is slapping tariffs on their country keeps changing?

But perhaps the obvious answer is staring us in the face, and we’re all too dumbfounded to acknowledge it. Trump has been remarkably consistent in stating that Canada should become America’s 51st state — he has said this repeatedly for months now. Moreover, he has openly espoused using U.S. economic power to achieve that goal — and is doing precisely that.

Just so we’re clear, this is not a Trump-only phenomenon. Yesterday, when asked if the U.S. still considers Canada a “close ally,” White House press secretary Katherine Leavitt said that Canada would “benefit greatly” from joining the United States and pointed to its high cost of living as a reason for surrendering sovereignty.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sounded a similar theme, noting that “Canada is gonna have to work with us to really integrate their economy, and as the president said, they should consider the amazing advantages of being the 51st state.”

In recent days, the Trump administration has further imposed its will on Canada by requiring Canadians who visit the country for more than 30 days to register with the U.S. government.

The first 51 days of Trump’s presidency have been, for lack of a better word, an odyssey. Crazy has been dropped on top of more crazy. But in the year 2025, an American president, with no pushback from his Cabinet or Congress, has declared economic war on our closest neighbor to annex its land (which is larger than America’s) and wants to make its 40 million citizens part of the United States. This is the craziest notion of all.

The first three paragraphs of this posting are my words. The rest of this article was originally published on MSNBC.com

Trump Dares the Courts to Stop Him

New York Times Editorial Board

Feb. 13, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET

The U.S. Constitution established three branches of government, designed to balance power — and serve as checks on one another. That constitutional order suddenly appears more vulnerable than it has in generations. President Trump is trying to expand his authority beyond the bounds of the law while reducing the ability of the other branches to check his excesses. It’s worth remembering why undoing this system of governance would be so dangerous to American democracy and why it’s vital that Congress, the courts and the public resist such an outcome.

Among legal scholars, the term “constitutional crisis” usually refers to a conflict among the branches of government that cannot be resolved through the rules set out in the Constitution and the system of checks and balances at its heart.

Say, a president who openly disregards the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit and asserts a right to remain in office indefinitely.

But there’s no need to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, in February 2025, only weeks into President Trump’s second term, he and his top associates are stress-testing the Constitution, and the nation, to a degree not seen since the Civil War.

A partial list would include flouting the express requirements of multiple federal laws, as though Congress were an advisory board and not a coequal branch of government. It would include feeding entire agencies into the “wood chipper” (their words), an intentionally gory metaphor for the firing of thousands of civil servants without the legally mandated congressional approval. It would include giving an unelected “special government employee” access to the private financial information of millions of Americans, in violation of the law. And it would include issuing an executive order that purports to erase one of the foundational provisions of the Constitution on Mr. Trump’s say-so.

There is also reason to fear that powers that solely rest with the president, and therefore don’t raise direct constitutional concerns, are being abused in ways that weaken the constitutional order. His mass pardon of Jan. 6 rioters, for instance, is technically legal, but it both celebrates and gives license to anyone who wishes to engage in violence to keep Mr. Trump in power.

Any one of these acts sets off major alarms. Taken as a whole, they are a frontal assault on the laws and norms that underpin American government — by the very people who are meant to execute the law.

So are we in a constitutional crisis yet?

The most useful way to answer that question is to focus less on discrete events and more on the process, in which one branch pushes the limits of its authority and then the others push back. When those in power understand that their first obligation is to the Constitution and the American people, this process can be normal, even healthy.

When they don’t — well, that’s what we are watching play out.

Voters gave Mr. Trump a Republican-controlled Congress, and those lawmakers are within their right to try to pass the president’s agenda through the legislative process. That doesn’t relieve either chamber of its constitutional responsibility to the American people to serve as a check on the power of the president.

With virtually no exception, Republican leaders in Congress have made clear through their inaction that as long as they and Mr. Trump hold power — until January 2027, at least — they will stay out of his way. One reason, however, that Mr. Trump is using executive orders so often is that many of his plans would find resistance from Congress because of the Republicans’ slim majorities and the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold.

While it may seem that the Republican leaders in Congress are free to abdicate their power to the president if they choose, that is not the case. As the sole branch granted lawmaking authority, they can repeal a law only by passing another one — not by failing to complain when a president chooses not to follow the ones he doesn’t like. That ensures that every law passed has the support of a majority of members elected to represent this diverse, divided country.

The United States Agency for International Development, for example, is funded through the congressional appropriations process. Would the current Congress vote to cut that funding? Perhaps. But at the very least, the House speaker and Senate majority leader should be putting the question up for a vote.

And Congress plays another important role: When the president or his administration is believed to have broken the law, it’s up to Congress to investigate and, when appropriate, use its censure powers. There is no sign that lawmakers plan to hold Mr. Trump accountable in this manner.

The willingness of Republican congressional leadership to watch passively as its own rights and responsibilities as a coequal branch of government are undermined leaves only one other branch actively checking the excesses of this overreaching presidency: the federal courts, where nearly all intragovernmental disputes eventually wind up.

The courts exist to define the bounds of the Constitution and the laws and to tell the other branches when they have strayed past those bounds. They also tend to slow everything down — frustrating, perhaps, for those who are impatient to wield their power or who wish to see justice done quickly — but that deliberation is essential to the rule of law and due process. So far, the federal courts have done their job, blocking several of Mr. Trump’s more brazenly illegal moves, including his executive order ending the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. He has already refused to comply at least once: A Rhode Island judge ruled on Monday that the president has defied a federal court order to release billions of dollars in federal grants. This is a dangerous trial balloon that Mr. Trump is daring someone to pop.

It’s fine for presidents to disagree, even strongly, with court rulings. That’s part of America’s evolving constitutional conversation, and it can lead to important changes. But the way to handle such disagreements is through the appeals process or passing legislation or even an amendment. “That’s how the rule of law works,” one federal judge said last week in blocking Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

In short, change needs to happen through the established channels of litigation in, and obedience to, the courts. Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized this last December, when he warned of the dangers of disobeying court rulings. “Every administration suffers defeats in the court system,” he wrote, but until recently people didn’t dare ignore decisions they didn’t like. Now we live with “the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings.”

He did not name Mr. Trump, but it was clear whom he was talking about. Of course, Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues made their jobs harder with their 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, which granted astonishingly broad presidential immunity — a decision that emboldened Mr. Trump and his allies to see how far he can expand his powers without resistance.

Some may argue that defying a lower court order is not as serious as defying a final ruling of the Supreme Court. The complication is that the judiciary depends on the executive branch to enforce its orders. When the executive branch is the defendant, as it is in these cases, and refuses to follow a court order, who can compel it to do so? This is the predicament Mr. Trump and his allies have put the nation in.

However it may play out, the refusal to obey a Supreme Court ruling — from which there is no appeal — would be the moment that America’s constitutional order completely fails. That is a clear red line separating countries that operate under the rule of law from those that do not. If he crosses it, Mr. Trump will have created the precise scenario the nation’s founders fought a war and established an entirely new government to avoid. And if that happens, no part of society can remain silent.

There is disagreement among even legal scholars about whether the country is all the way to a constitutional crisis yet. Regardless, the statements from the White House and the unwillingness of Republican leaders in Congress to even consider acting as a check should be taken as a flashing warning sign. If we have learned anything from the past decade of living with Donald Trump, it’s that when he tells you about what he will do with power, believe him.

America has Surrendered to a Madman

This column and introductory commentary was forwarded to me. Mike Greenberg of Texas wrote the opening comments. This is exhausting.

I don’t think any US journalist has written as tough (and spot-on) a portrayal of the threat facing us as this Canadian, Andrew Coyne of the Toronto Globe and Mail. If you read to the end, you will be rewarded with the most flattering photograph yet of the convicted-felon-in-chief:

“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.

At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.

At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.

The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.

Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.

Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.

We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”

Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.

All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.

All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”

The only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America

Opinion by Thom Hartmann on Alternet https://www.alternet.org/

Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired.

Let’s be very clear: this is how dictatorships start.

A guy who wants to be a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation had agreed previously that the government should do certain things in certain ways, he reassures everybody he’s got a better way and it’ll all work out.

In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly shrug because they don’t directly affect them. Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany; to paraphrase: First they came for the government workers…

Then people start resisting, which is when he begins to use the police power of the state. The people who show up in the streets, the people who speak out in the media, the people who try to fight him in the legislatures and the courts: he figures out ways to get them fired, harassed, and ultimately imprisoned.

When she was being confirmed, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to say that she would not executed an illegal order on Donald Trump’s behalf. Like if he directed her to investigate somebody who irritated him. Or prosecute somebody who had investigated him. Or imprison — perhaps only temporarily, at first — somebody who has spoken out against him.

We’re there now. Bondi just announced that the political prosecutions are about to begin. At first they will be going after the police agencies themselves, as a way of bringing them to heel: Terrify the terrifiers.

Next will be the Press. First they will use financial terror to force compliance; we’re already seeing that with Trump’s lawsuits against all three major networks and multiple newspapers. That will expand. Eventually it will turn into shutdowns and arrests.

He will remake our schools so they become indoctrination factories for his white, male supremacist worldview and the new authoritarianism.

He will realign our democratic country away from democratic allies and toward countries run by dictators like he aspires to become.

He will purge the military of leadership that might resist him and of troops who might refuse his orders.

He will remake our criminal justice system so it becomes more violent and brutal, opening prisons for “the worst of the worst“ in places beyond the reach of law, like Auschwitz in Poland or Guantánamo in Cuba.

He will remake our media so it becomes a Greek chorus, singing his praises and carrying his every word.

By proclaiming, as every dictator does, that divine providence and the blessings of God put him where he is, he will bring the country‘s largest religious institutions to heel.

He will proclaim grand plans and spectacular efforts, like the Autobahn or remaking Gaza, Greenland, and Panama. They will distract the public from the relentless, grinding destruction of the guardrails of government itself.

He and his allies will empower civilian militias who will then become his terror shock troops against the people who oppose him. Hitler had his Brownshirts; Republicans in Nassau County are right now trying to field America’s first armed private militia.

He will remake commerce and business, so the most successful companies are those that throw money and resources at him. Fritz Tyson wrote a book about this, about his shame at facilitating it, titled I Paid Hitler. Someday, perhaps, Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook will write a similar book.

America today is early in this process, although it doesn’t typically take very long. It took Hitler 53 days. It took Putin about a year. It took Victor Orban about two years. It took Pinochet less than a week, although he had the help of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Trump and his project 2025 friends, however, have been preparing for this for four years: They hit the ground running.

This moment proves that the preservation of democracy requires constant attention and a collective commitment to uphold the integrity of its institutions.

Right now, though, the only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America are public opinion, the media, and the Democratic Party; Republicans have completely caved and the courts move too slowly to stop him.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem to think they can pull this off in a matter of weeks, and so far — because of the cowardice of Republican legislators and the disorganization and lack of leadership among Democrats — they may be right.

Unless we all stand up and speak out now.

545 vs. 300,000,000 People

Charlie Reese (January 29, 1937 – May 21, 2013) was a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper. This is his final column.

545 vs. 300,000,000 People

-By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does.

You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. ( The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.)

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House?( John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. ) If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to. [The House has passed a budget but the Senate has not approved a budget in over three years. The President’s proposed budgets have gotten almost unanimous rejections in the Senate in that time. ]

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan ..

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees… We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

A show-stopping takedown of Donald Trump

BREAKING: Democratic star Congressman Jamie Raskin delivers a show-stopping takedown of Donald Trump’s lawless mass pardon of violent January 6th insurrectionists.

This is exactly what all of us are thinking right now…

“The chairman began by saying that the point here is to restore the rule of law… restore the rule of law… Can you even pretend to do that if you stand by and support Donald Trump who on day one — as the chairman of the committee just said — day one of his presidency, pardoned fifteen hundred insurrectionists including hundreds of people who violently assaulted and attacked American police officers?” said Raskin during a hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

“Let’s just take one person who is free today, Julian Khater, who had been convicted after having every due process protection, the right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses, the right to introduce evidence, but they had him completely,” said Raskin.

“They knew exactly what happened. Most of this was videotaped so the whole world could see it,” he continued. “Well, Julian Khater repeatedly violently assaulted our officer protecting us in Congress, Officer Brian Sicknick, who then proceeded to have several strokes and died on January the 7th, 2021, the next day.”

“The family of Officer Sicknick is absolutely devastated and demolished by what’s just happened,” Raskin went on. “I invite any of my colleagues, including the members new to this committee who maybe weren’t here on January 6th and didn’t experience the trauma of that violent insurrection when we saw a mob marauding through here yelling ‘Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!’ and looking to assassinate Nancy Pelosi.”

“And now you have the temerity to come forward and say this is about public safety? How much safer are we now with these fifteen hundred criminals at large in Washington D.C. and going out into the country?” asked Raskin.

“Are you vouching that these people are not going to be attacking any other police officers?” he added. “Are you vouching that they’re no longer a threat to public safety? What an outrage! What a scandal!”

The truth is that there is no defending Trump’s pardons on anything other than purely partisan grounds. He released these criminals because they support him. He doesn’t care that they attacked police officers. He doesn’t care that they might do it again. All that matters is that they’re in his MAGA cult.