Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and May 2025 news and views

Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this. 

 

 

May 31

New York Times, World Scientists Look Elsewhere as U.S. Labs Stagger Under Trump Cuts, James Glanz, May 31, 2025. With the welcome mat withdrawn for promising researchers from around the world, America is at risk of losing its longstanding pre-eminence in the sciences.

For decades, Bangalore, India, has been an incubator for scientific talent, sending newly minted Ph.D.s around the world to do groundbreaking research. In an ordinary year, many aim their sights at labs in the United States.

“These are our students, and we want them to go and do something amazing,” said a professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, Raj Ladher.

But this is not an ordinary year.

When Professor Ladher queried some 30 graduates in the city recently about their plans, only one had certain employment in the United States. For many of the others, the political turmoil in Washington has dried up job opportunities in what Professor Ladher calls “the best research ecosystem in the world.” Some decided they would now rather take their skills elsewhere, including Austria, Japan and Australia, while others opted to stay in India.

As the Trump administration moves with abandon to deny visas, expel foreign students and slash spending on research, scientists in the United States are becoming increasingly alarmed. The global supremacy that the United States has long enjoyed in health, biology, the physical sciences and other fields, they warn, may be coming to an end.

“If things continue as they are, American science is ruined,” said David W. Hogg, a professor of physics and data science at New York University who works closely with astronomers and other experts around the world. “If it becomes impossible to work with non-U.S. scientists,” he said, “it would basically render the kinds of research that I do impossible.”

Research cuts and moves to curtail the presence of foreign students by the Trump administration have happened at a dizzying pace.Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.

The administration has gone so far as moving to block any international students at all from attending Harvard, and more than $3 billion in research grants to the university were terminated or paused. At Johns Hopkins University, a bastion of scientific research, officials announced the layoffs of more than 2,000 people after losing $800 million in government grants. An analysis by The New York Times found that the National Science Foundation, the world’s pre-eminent funding agency in the physical sciences, has been issuing financing for new grants at its slowest rate since at least 1990.

It is not merely a matter of the American scientific community losing power or prestige.

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, Revisiting “The Gray and The Brown,” Simon Rosenberg with Ron Brownstein, May 31, 2025. . Got three videos for your consideration this weekend: 1) my recent talk with Brian Tyler Cohen 2) my regular talk this week titled On Trump’s Plunder, Sabotage and Betrayal 3) and this one, above, a long and meaty discussion with award-winning journalist, Ron Brownstein. 

I asked Ron to join us to revisit his seminal 2010 essay, The Gray And the Brown. In that essay Ron explores what has become one of the most important questions of the last several decades of American politics: Would an aging white US population fund programs for kids who increasingly did not look like theirs? In other words would aging American whites embrace the profound demographic changes underway in a country that had just elected Barack Obama, or would they recoil?

The post-Southern Strategy GOP has never really had an economic strategy, but has sold a tribal social policy of “more for us, less for them” as economic policy for decades now. It’s an explanation for why the economy does so poorly when they are in power, and we are seeing it again with Trump 2.0 - everything is about more for him and his tribe and less for everyone else. This approach may work as social policy but it has repeatedly not worked as economic policy.

The difficulty Republicans are going to have in selling Trump’s “more for me, five pencils and two dolls for you” agenda to working people became evident this week in a now infamous moment in an Iowa town hall with Senator Joni Ernst, shown above.

Below is the extended clip. You will note that her attempt to parrot the ridiculous GOP talking point that their Medicare/Medicaid cuts will only effect “those people” (illegals!!!!!) devolves into her admitting that: yes, many people will die. 

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks, Charlie Savage, May 31, 2025 (print ed.).The president has grown increasingly angry at court rulings blocking parts of his agenda, including by judges he appointed.

President Trump appears to be declaring independence from outside constraints on how he nominates judges, signaling that he is looking for loyalists who will uphold his agenda and denouncing the conservative legal network that helped him remake the federal judiciary in his first term.

Late Thursday, after a ruling struck down his tariffs on most imported goods, Mr. Trump attacked the Federalist Society, leaders of which heavily influenced his selection of judges during his first presidency.

“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” Mr. Trump asserted on social media. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!”

Hours earlier Thursday, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees. A day before, Mr. Trump picked a loyalist who has no deep ties to the conservative legal movement for a life-tenured appeals court seat, explaining that his pick could be counted on to rule in ways aligned with his agenda.

Together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees. Such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained how he exercised power during his first presidency.

But it could also give pause to judges who may be weighing taking senior status, giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to fill their seats. Conservatives have been eyeing in particular the seats of the Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, who will turn 77 next month, and Samuel A. Alito, 75.

“Conservative judges are going to be much more open to stepping down if they’re confident that their replacements will be high quality,” said Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator and former lawyer for the Bush administration. “Trump’s bizarre attack on his judicial appointments in his first term doesn’t inspire confidence.”

Mr. Trump and his allies have expressed increasing anger at the federal judiciary as courts have blocked his actions, including his aggressive claim to wartime powers to deport migrants without due process and his efforts to freeze grants and dismantle agencies without going through Congress.

Mr. Trump lashed out at the Federalist Society, blaming it for bad advice on whom to appoint to judgeships. He singled out Leonard Leo, a former longtime leader of the Federalist Society who helped recommend his first-term nominees and who exemplifies the conservative legal movement.

“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I’m very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved.”

May 30

New York Times, Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration, for Now, to End Biden-Era Migrant Program, Abbie VanSickle and Adam Liptak, May 30, 2025. The Trump administration had asked the court to allow it to end deportation protections for more than 500,000 people facing dire humanitarian crises in their home countries.

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil.

The court’s order was unsigned and provided no reasoning, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority had not given enough consideration to “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”

The ruling, which exposes some migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to possible deportation, is the latest in a series of emergency orders by the justices in recent weeks responding to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies.

Friday’s ruling focused on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s expansion of a legal mechanism for immigration called humanitarian parole, in which migrants from countries facing instability are allowed to enter the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.

Earlier this month, the justices allowed the Trump administration to remove deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.

Humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., are two different mechanisms by which migrants from troubled countries can be temporarily settled in the United States. Humanitarian parole is typically obtained by individuals who apply on a case-by-case basis, while T.P.S. is more often extended to large groups of migrants for a period of time. Individuals can hold both statuses at the same time.

Between the two rulings, the justices have agreed that, for now, the Trump administration can proceed with plans to deport hundreds of thousands of people who had fled war-torn and instable homelands and legally taken refuge in the United States.

New York Times, Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans, Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, May 30, 2025. The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.

New York Times, White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, Dani Blum and Maggie Astor, May 30, 2025 (print ed.). A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.

The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.

But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.

“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.

The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.

Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.

New York Times, Why the U.S. Opened Its Doors to Chinese Students, and Why Trump Is Closing Them, Kurt Streeter, May 30, 2025. The 1970s era of academic exchange began as a form of diplomacy, which now stands in sharp contrast to President Trump’s recent stance toward China.

In 1987, when Haipei Shue arrived in the United States as a student, he recalls receiving the warmest of welcomes. He was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“People were curious about us, inviting us to their homes, wanting to be friends,” Mr. Shue said on Thursday, describing an openness that defined his early years in a country then seen by many in China as a beacon of opportunity.

“It was an extraordinary time,” he said.

That era of academic exchange between China and the United States, beginning in the 1970s under President Jimmy Carter as a form of soft power diplomacy, now stands in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s recent stance toward the country.

The administration announced this week that it would aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or for those studying in broadly defined “critical fields.” The administration also plans to enhance vetting of future applicants for student visas, including looking at social media posts.

Those policies promise to reduce the number of students from China coming to the United States, who have been a fixture on American university campuses for decades. In 2024, there were roughly 277,000 students.

The Trump administration says China exploits U.S. universities to bolster its military and technological capabilities. And Trump officials argue that some Chinese students may pose risks of espionage and technology theft.

New York Times, Analysis: Trump Makes a New Push to ‘Decouple’ U.S. From China, Edward Wong, May 30, 2025 (print ed.). Trump administration officials are getting a second chance to try to sever ties with China by starting a trade war, imposing export controls and revoking student visas.

The Trump administration has threatened to revoke the visas of many of the 277,000 or so Chinese students in the United States and to subject future applicants from China, including Hong Kong, to extra scrutiny.

Cargo ships laden with goods from China stopped coming into American ports earlier this spring as President Trump escalated his trade war against Beijing.

And the Trump administration is suspending sales of some critical U.S. technologies to China, including those related to jet engines, semiconductors and certain chemicals and machinery.

Taken together, the actions by the Trump administration amount to an aggressive campaign to “decouple” the United States from China, as it seeks to break the close commercial ties between the world’s two largest economies and toss away what had been the anchor of the relations between the nations for decades.

Aggressive decoupling would bolster American security, from the perspective of Mr. Trump and his aides. And it would also accelerate a trend toward each power being entrenched in its own regional sphere of influence. 

The Guardian, US health secretary calls leading medical journals such as Lancet ‘corrupt’ and pushes to create state-run alternatives, Joseph Gedeon, May 29, 2025 (print ed.). Robert F Kennedy Jr has threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, which he branded “corrupt”, and to instead create alternative publications run by the state.

“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Jama and those other journals, because they’re all corrupt,” the US health secretary said on the Ultimate Human podcast. He accused the publications of being controlled by pharmaceutical companies.
Instead, Kennedy outlined plans to launch government-run journals that would become “the preeminent journals” because National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding would anoint researchers “as a good, legitimate scientist”.

The three publications Kennedy targeted are among the most influential medical journals globally, established in the 19th century and now central to disseminating peer-reviewed medical research worldwide. The Lancet and Jama each report morethan 30m annual website visits, while the New England Journal of Medicine claims more than 1 million weekly readers.

Kennedy has similarly accused the agencies he now oversees – including the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – as “sock puppets” for the pharmaceutical industry.

 

 

New York Times, Elon Musk Leaves Washington Behind but With Powerful Friends in Place, David A. Fahrenthold, Eric Lipton and Jess Bidgood, May 30, 2025. President Trump will send off the world’s richest man, above, in a news conference today at the White House.

Just three months ago, Elon Musk stood before a crowd of roaring conservatives and held up a chain saw. He was at the height of his influence, swaggering in a self-designed role with immense power inside and outside the government.

“We’re trying to get good things done,” he said, using the chain saw as a metaphor for the deep cuts he was making in government. “But also, like, you know, have a good time doing it.”

Mr. Musk’s time in government is over now. His good time ended long before.

Mr. Musk is leaving his government position after weeks of declining influence and increasing friction with both President Trump and shareholders of his own private companies. But Mr. Trump on Thursday suggested that he was still aligned with one of his chief political patrons, saying that he would appear with Mr. Musk at the White House on Friday afternoon for a news conference.

“This will be his last day, but not really, because he will always be with us, helping all the way,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his social media site. “Elon is terrific!”

Mr. Musk’s time in Washington has brought significant benefits to his fastest-growing company, SpaceX, the rocket and satellite communications giant. Musk allies were chosen to run NASA and the Air Force — two of SpaceX’s key customers — and one of the company’s major regulators, the Federal Communications Commission.

But Mr. Musk never came close to delivering on the core promise of his tenure: that he could cut $1 trillion from the federal budget.

His Department of Government Efficiency was full of government newcomers who struggled with both the law and the facts. They posted error-filled data and made procedural mistakes undercutting their credibility. They also rushed through cuts without seeming to understand what they were cutting. On the group’s website, 47 percent of the contracts they canceled are listed as saving taxpayers nothing.

Politico, ‘Well, we all are going to die': Joni Ernst spars with town hall crowd over Medicaid, Cheyanne M. Daniels, May 30, 2025. The Iowa senator shocked constituents Friday when she defended Republicans’ reconciliation package.

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst is the latest Republican to face an angry crowd of constituents, sparring with town hall attendees over President Donald Trump’s signature piece of legislation.

Constituents on Friday gathered in Butler County, Iowa, to hear Ernst defend the Trump administration’s work, including efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency and Republicans’ congressional priorities.

But when a constituent questioned Ernst about the reconciliation bill, things became heated. The woman, who said she had previously emailed Ernst’s office with her concerns, argued the bill’s proposed cuts seemed neither “compassionate” nor “fiscally responsible.” She accused Ernst of supporting a “tax shelter” for the wealthy.

As the audience applauded the woman, she continued, expressing concerns about the bill’s proposed cuts to SNAP benefits and Medicaid spending. Ernst said those who would lose Medicaid were not currently eligible for Medicaid.

New York Times, A Black Eye at the White House: Did Somebody Punch Elon? Shawn McCreesh, May 30, 2025. The list of possible suspects seemed long.

It was like metaphor turned reality.

After 130 days spent fighting the federal government, Elon Musk turned up with a black eye at the White House on Friday for his last day as a “special government employee.” If you squinted, you could see it: His right eye socket was puffy and empurpled. No doubt about it, that was a big, fat shiner.

His project in Washington more or less finished, he never came close to cutting the $1 trillion from the federal government he had promised. His businesses and his public image got somewhat battered, and now, apparently, so had his face.

Did somebody beat him up?

The list of possible suspects seemed long. An abridged lineup of people and constituencies currently unhappy with Mr. Musk includes: at least two of the many women with whom he has fathered children; pretty much the entire federal bureaucracy; his neighbors in a suburb of Austin, Texas; Tesla shareholders; old friends of his; Republicans on Capitol Hill; his 20-year-old daughter; all those people who have lit Teslas on fire; and even some Trump voters.

But it wasn’t any of those people who gave him the black eye. It was, he said, his progeny X, age 5.

“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did,” Mr. Musk explained after a reporter asked him if he was OK.

It was an odd moment in a news conference that was quite odd to begin with. Moments earlier, Mr. Musk had angrily refused to engage with a question put to him about a new report in The New York Times detailing his drug use. Mr. Trump remained mostly mute as Mr. Musk batted back that question. Now the tech mogul was explaining why he looked beaten up. 

Spectrum News, Homeland Security claims these locations are "deliberately obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws and endangering American citizens," Natalie Mooney and Wendy Wright, May 30, 2025. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has accused multiple areas across upstate New York of violating federal immigration law.

They published a list of what it calls "sanctuary jurisdictions defying federal immigration law."

The list includes the cities of Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, Beacon, Hudson, Ithaca, Kingston, New Paltz, Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, as well as Albany County, Dutchess County, Monroe County, Orange County, Putnam County, Rockland County, Saratoga County, Sullivan County, Tompkins County, Ulster County, Warren County, Wayne County, Westchester County and Yates County.

Homeland Security claims that these locations are "deliberately obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws and endangering American citizens."

“These sanctuary city politicians are endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

According to DHS, each jurisdiction will receive formal notification of all potential violations.

In response, Rochester city officials said, "Rochester's Sanctuary City policy is legally sound and always has been-including during the entirety of the Trump administration's first term. The city will continue to vigorously defend the legality of this policy and confront the Federal administration's overused tactics of distortion, distraction and division."

Steve Barz, director of communications and special events for Monroe County, called the announcement "classic government by press release" from the federal administration.

"Monroe County has not received any notification from the Department of Homeland Security of noncompliance or any other potential violations. The inclusion of Monroe County and the allegations in the DHS press release are factually incorrect and legally unfounded, and the County does not know why it is on the list distributed by DHS,” Barz said.

Kingston Mayor Steve Noble released a joint statement with Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger.

“We want to assure our residents that Ulster County and the City of Kingston are fully compliant with all federal laws, and any claim to the contrary is incorrect. We have not received any official communication from the federal government regarding the reasons our County and City and neighboring counties and cities appear on this list. Our commitment to public safety remains unwavering, as is our commitment to upholding the United States Constitution and the rights enshrined in it," the statement says.

Warren County said it had incorrectly appeared on the federal sanctuary county list.

“Warren County leaders were informed Friday that the county is on a list of immigration-related ‘sanctuary' counties released this week by the federal government," county Administrator John Taflan said. "Warren County has taken no actions to be considered a ‘sanctuary county’ by the US Department of Homeland Security or any other agency or organization. Multiple county agencies are working with federal officials to correct this error to ensure the federal funding that Warren County receives will not be impacted.”

Additionally, the city of Rochester faces a lawsuit from the federal government over its sanctuary city policy, stemming from an instance where Rochester Police intervened in a Border Patrol traffic stop.

Syracuse is awaiting notice from the Justice Department regarding the announcement, said Greg Loh, chief policy officer for the city. He said the department continues to support removing violent criminals from the city, but Syracuse has not changed its policy since the previous Trump administration.

"Syracuse has been and always will be a welcoming city and proud refugee and immigrant resettlement community. We are in regular contact with our non-profit and government partners to ensure immigration enforcement efforts are in compliance with local, state and federal laws. We do not want to see the lives of our resettled refugees, New Americans and all groups of immigrants, their friends, and their families upended," Loh said in a statement.

New York Times, On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama, Kirsten Grind and and Megan Twohey,  May 30, 2025. I’ve been reporting on Musk’s drug use for years. In this article, we found that as he rose to political power last year, his drug consumption was more intense than previously known.

As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.

At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Musk announced that he was ending his stint with the government, after lamenting how much time he had spent on politics instead of his businesses.

New York Times, Opinion: Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death, Michelle Goldberg, right, May 30, 2025. There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. DOGE claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

Now, Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

White House officials deny that their decimation of U.S.A.I.D. has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nick Kristof’s reporting from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who’ve been in the field say he’s either lying or misinformed.

 

Lincoln Square Media, Commentary: TACO Don: Why a Seemingly Silly Insult Hits Donald Trump Where It Hurts, Rick Wilson, right, May 30, 2025. The nickname may be goofy, but it's oh so meme-worthy. And that's worth a lot.

Among all the barbs hurled at Donald Trump over the years — from the devastatingly clinical takedowns by career prosecutors to the meme-worthy Twitter dunks — few insults have had the sheer, inexplicable sting of being called “TACO.”

“Trump Always Chickens Out.”

Penned by Wall Street wags tired of his trade war pump-and-dump behavior, the so-called Masters of the Universe finally understand that Trump’s trade war is like Trump himself: stochastic boasting, deep-vein chaos, juvenile bluster backed up by … nothing.

It’s short, sharp, silly on its face — but beneath that shell is a devastating payload. Like so many things with Trump, the humor strikes a deeper, raw nerve. The insult enrages him not because it’s the cruelest or cleverest, but because it’s the most diminishing. And Donald Trump cannot survive being made small.Subscribed

You could see it today when a reporter asked him about it — his slow, bovine mind registering the insult gradually, but deeply. His snippish responses belied his rage. As an anthropologist of this hideous creature, one of my perverse delights is watching him try to hide that rage as his spun-sugar ego takes a hit. Having delivered many such hits myself, I like to call it an allowable cruelty.

At the core of Trump’s psychological infrastructure is a pathological obsession with dominance. His entire public persona is built like one of his gimcrack Atlantic City casinos: gaudy gold trim, carpet the color of a three-day bruise, faux marble, and fake tits in abundance. The constant hum and ding of slot machines promising WINNING. He doesn’t merely want to be respected.

He wants to be feared, idolized, mythologized. Anything less is a personal affront. To be called “TACO” — a word that evokes, not unfairly, both the reality of his utterly botched trade war fiasco and something messy, cheap, handheld, and delightfully common — is to jab a shiv directly into the myth of Trump the Colossus.

TACO is not just a random insult. It’s silly. It’s unserious. And that’s exactly the point. Nothing unsettles an autocrat like mockery. Authoritarians thrive on fear and control, not punchlines. “TACO Don” isn’t threatening — he’s laughable. We’re laughing at him, not with him.

Trump has always been obsessed with branding—his name is his religion. “TRUMP,” in all caps, plastered on buildings, steaks, water bottles, a failed airline, a failed university, and a presidency on life support.

But “TACO”? It mocks that very premise. It takes the monosyllabic power of his name and replaces it with a word that sounds just as punchy but carries the opposite weight. “Trump” is meant to sound final, dominant. “Taco” sounds like something you order off a dollar menu at midnight. Worse, it’s a food associated with immigrants, Latinos, and Mexico — the very people Trump has vilified, stereotyped, deported, and used as punching bags to galvanize his base.

May 29

 

Then-President Donald Trump and Melania Trump greet Russian President Vladimir Putin prior to the 2018 Helsinki Summit (Kremlin photo). Late in 2024, Russian state media controlled by Putin began publishing nude photos of Trump's wife drawn from her years as a model, a clearcut effort by Putin to humiliate the Trumps and thereby demonstrate dominance that is largely ignored by the American legacy media that is, in turn, largely intimidated by Trump and his appointees.

Lincoln Square Media, ICYMI: Putinism on American Soil, Joe Trippi, May 29, 2025. Trump's fusion of political power and personal enrichment may seem familiar. It's how his dear friend, Vladimir Putin, has ruled Russia.

America is often described as a democracy and a capitalist nation in the same breath, as if the two are natural allies. But our Founders knew better. They feared that the unbridled power of wealth — what Keynes would later call the “animal spirits” of capital — could overwhelm the democratic institutions they were building.

Today, that fear feels prophetic. From corporate influence in elections to the market's dominance over public policy, capitalism often appears to rule democracy, not serve it. But that was never the intention. The Founders, for all their flaws, believed that the will of the people must be sovereign — and that capital must answer to democracy, not dictate its terms.

The early American republic was deeply suspicious of concentrated wealth. Thomas Jefferson worried about the rise of an "aristocracy of monied corporations." James Madison warned that inequality could erode the public good. Even Alexander Hamilton, who championed markets, believed the federal government should shape economic life — not be captive to it.

Fast forward to today, and the picture is inverted. Political candidates depend on massive fundraising machines. Lobbyists write legislation. Billionaires buy platforms, shape discourse, and even negotiate with foreign powers. Markets dictate policy choices, while citizens’ concerns that vast majorities support are ignored. This isn’t democracy reigning in capitalism — it’s capitalism consuming democracy.

Democracy is supposed to reflect the dignity and equality of citizens. Capitalism, for all its efficiency and innovation, doesn’t recognize either. It rewards accumulation, not consent; profit, not justice. Left unchecked, it will always devour public interests for private gain. That’s why it must be subordinated to democratic values — not elevated above them.

The choice isn't between capitalism and socialism. It's between a democracy that governs markets in the public interest, or a market that governs democracy for the private one.

Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, we face the most dangerous form of capital's dominance yet: a fusion of political power and personal enrichment that corrodes both democracy and markets. This is not merely a return to a pro-business agenda or deregulation. It is the full flowering of crony capitalism — a system where loyalty to the leader is rewarded with contracts, immunity, and influence, and where state power is wielded in service of Trump and his obsessions. Drain the swamp has a different meaning when you realize we the people are the swamp and Trump is taking all he drains from us for himself, his family and to reward those that do his bidding.

This isn't traditional authoritarianism. It's not ideological. It’s transactional. Trumpism is not about building a strong state or a coherent political vision. It’s about building a network of loyalists who profit from proximity to the president. In that sense, it closely resembles the system Vladimir Putin has built in Russia — one where oligarchs thrive not because of free competition or innovation, but because of their personal loyalty to the regime. To call Trump an autocrat is to miss the point. He is bringing Putinism to America as Russian dissident Gary Kasparov has warned us he would.

Putinism isn’t just about silencing dissent or undermining elections. It’s about fusing state and capital into a single instrument of power — wielded for personal gain and political revenge. It creates the illusion of order while hollowing out institutions. It claims to speak for the people while enriching a narrow inner circle. And it erodes democracy not with tanks in the streets, but with deals behind closed doors, Fox News spin, and billion-dollar giveaways to insiders.

In the face of this creeping Putinism, the defense of democracy cannot be left to institutions alone. They are already under siege — from courts packed with loyalists to agencies purged of dissent. The true counterweight must come from the people themselves. Democracy is not self-executing. It lives only when citizens insist that it does.

If Americans still believe in government of, by, and for the people, then it's time to reassert the primacy of democracy — before it's too late.

That means more than voting. It means organizing, speaking out, and yes — peacefully protesting. It means standing in the streets, writing to editors, showing up at school boards and town halls, and refusing to accept a government that serves money over people. And one man over the Constitution. This is not about left or right. It is about whether public life will be shaped by democratic debate or sold off to the highest bidder.

The revolt against all of this must come from us and it must be heard loud and clear in November 2026.

That is the fight we are in and the fight we must win.

Failure is not an option.

Stand up America.

May 29

 

New York Times, Trump Tariffs Ruled Illegal by Federal Judicial Panel, Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, May 29, 2025 (print ed.). The U.S. Court of International Trade said the president had overstepped his authority in imposing his “reciprocal” tariffs globally, as well as levies on Canada and Mexico.

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his primary leverage as he looks to pressure other nations into striking trade deals more beneficial to the United States.

Before Mr. Trump took office, no president had sought to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law, to impose tariffs on other nations. The law, which primarily concerns trade embargoes and sanctions, does not even mention tariffs.

But Mr. Trump adopted a novel interpretation of its powers as he announced, and then suspended, high levies on scores of countries in April. He also used the law to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico in return for what he said was their role in sending fentanyl to the United States.

On Wednesday, the Court of International Trade, the primary federal legal body overseeing such matters, found that Mr. Trump’s tariffs “exceed any authority granted” to the president by the emergency powers law. Ruling in separate cases brought by states and businesses, a bipartisan panel of three judges essentially declared many, but not all, of Mr. Trump’s tariffs to have been issued illegally.

It was not clear precisely when and how the tariff collections would grind to a halt. The ruling gave the executive branch up to 10 days to complete the bureaucratic process of ending them. The Trump administration immediately filed its plans to appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

For now, the decision threatens to undercut the administration’s efforts to reach trade agreements globally since the president is using the prospect of boundless tariffs — enacted on his own, without congressional approval — as a bargaining chip in negotiations with roughly 18 countries. Those deals are still under negotiation, and some of Mr. Trump’s top aides had told the court in recent days that an adverse ruling could imperil the talks.

The ruling does not affect tariffs issued by the Trump administration under separate legal authorities, including levies on steel, aluminum and cars, and others that Mr. Trump has threatened on pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and other critical products.

A White House spokesman, Kush Desai, sharply rebuked the court, saying in a statement that unfair trade relationships had “decimated American communities, left our workers behind and weakened our defense industrial base — facts that the court did not dispute.”

Lincoln Square Media, Commentary: The Trump Sanewashing Hall of Fame Gets a New Entry, Jennifer Schulze, May 29, 2025. A look at the Big Media outlet that normalized the Trump rant about trophy wives, Al Capone, short golfers, and more.

Every single time Donald Trump gives a speech, it’s a chaotic mess. He always rants about his personal grievances. He makes up accomplishments that do not exist. He veers into bizarre fantasies that end up becoming reckless American policy. He also regularly tells lies and spreads conspiracy theories.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the news coverage rarely portrayed the jarring reality of the Trump gibberish accurately. Instead, the odd bits about fictional movie characters were ignored, the long-winding answers to questions about economic policy sanded down to a cogent few words. Even his nazi-style threats were glossed over. Now four+ months into Trump’s second term, the New York Times has given us a new entry for the Trump sanewashing hall of fame.

This past Saturday, Trump gave the commencement speech at West Point. As usual, Trump repeatedly veered away from his prepared remarks. Speaking for nearly an hour, Trump’s ramble included comments about trophy wives, yachts, Chicago mobster Al Capone, a ‘stolen’ rocket, short golfers, male models, drag shows, trans women, and the size of his election victory. All while wearing the most prominent political symbol of his campaign, a red MAGA hat.

The Bulwark, Opinion: An Unprecedented Assault on American Greatness, William Kristol, May 29, 2025. If the Trump administration’s sudden assault on thousands of foreign students legally studying at Harvard seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.

If the abrupt abrogation of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans legally living and working in the United States seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the sudden arrests and deportations of law-abiding immigrants checking in as ordered at government offices seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the deportations of other immigrants without anything like due process and basically in defiance of court orders to prisons in third countries seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.

And if it all seems utterly stupid and terribly cruel and amazingly damaging to this country, it’s because it is.

New York Times, Court Blocks Tariffs Fragile U.S.-China Truce Trump Delays E.U. Tariffs, Tony Romm, May 29, 2025. Federal Appeals Court Temporarily Spares Trump From Having to Wind Down Tariffs. 

A federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily agreed to preserve many of President Trump’s sweeping tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners. The move paused an earlier decision by a separate court that would have forced the White House to wind down duties deemed to be illegal.

The new order, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, granted the pause on an administrative basis. That decision bought time for the panel’s judges to consider the government’s ask for a longer delay, as Mr. Trump pursues a ruling that would safeguard one of the most potent tools in his global trade war.Which Tariffs Could Be Halted

A U.S. trade court struck down tariffs imposed by President Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but a federal appeals court temporarily paused the ruling. Tariffs under a separate national security provision are not affected.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has relied on a federal emergency powers law as a form of political leverage, hoping to use sky-high duties — or the mere threat of them — to force other governments to make trade concessions.

 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: One Ruling Won’t Stop the Takeover, Michael Cohen (above, best-selling author and former Trump counsel), May 29, 2025. The court checked Trump’s tariff overreach; but his war on co-equal power is just beginning. This isn’t trade policy; it’s a test run for dismantling democracy, one branch at a time.

In a much-needed moment of clarity and constitutional courage, the Court of International Trade actually did its damn job; ruling that President Trump’s unilateral imposition of sweeping global tariffs was not just illegal, but flat-out unconstitutional.

You heard that right. The emperor of impulsiveness, the high priest of petty retribution, has been told “No.” And if there’s one thing I know Trump despises more than a mirror that reflects reality, it’s being told he’s not above the law.

So, let’s be clear: this wasn’t just some misguided economic policy cooked up at Mar-a-Lago over Big Macs and Diet Cokes. This was a shakedown. A mafia move wrapped in our flag. A strongman’s attempt to bully the world into paying tribute, and when the money didn’t come fast enough, he made them kiss the ring for tariff “waivers.”

 

Donald J. Trump, center, in a promotional photo from his "Apprentice" series of TV and cable shows. 

And just like that, multinationals and entire nations found themselves playing The Apprentice: Global Edition, where the only prize was avoiding economic disaster.

The court’s ruling was scathing, unflinching, and patriotic. They affirmed what the Constitution has made clear since 1787: The power to impose tariffs, to regulate international commerce, rests with Congress. Not with one man. Not with a wannabe despot who governs by tweet and temper.

Think about this: on Monday he slaps on a 150% tariff like he’s imposing penalties on a contestant who forgot their lines; Tuesday, he walks it back to 20% because—surprise—someone with actual knowledge whispered in his ear that maybe, just maybe, this isn’t how global markets work. By Friday? Well… no one knows. Not even him.

But Trump doesn’t care about process. He doesn’t even care about results. He cares about domination. Optics. Control. That’s what the tariffs were always about: leveraging fear to gain compliance. If he could force corporations to beg for exemptions, he could show them who’s boss. If he could make foreign governments bow, he could pretend to be the great negotiator. Except he wasn’t negotiating. He was extorting. And the court just called his bluff—BIGLY!

Now here’s the part that should really keep you up at night: What’s he going to do about it?

Because if you think this man—this ego wrapped in flesh—takes kindly to limits on his power, you haven’t been paying attention. Trump is allergic to accountability. The judiciary? A nuisance. Congress? A sideshow. Checks and balances? That’s for suckers and losers. 

He doesn’t just want to bend the Constitution; he wants to rewrite it in gold leaf with his name stamped at the top like a Trump University diploma.This ruling isn’t going to stop him. It’s going to provoke him.

 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump Declares Divine Mission and Infallibility in Meme Posts, J.D. Wolf, May 29, 2025. Trump about himself: “He’s on a mission from God.”

On Wednesday night, Trump posted two memes to his Truth Social account. In one image, a stylized photo shows Trump walking down an empty street beneath the caption: “He’s on a mission from God & nothing can stop what’s coming.”Trump

Behind him looms a cartoon of Pepe the Frog, a meme (or its variant at left) used by far-right, QAnon, and white nationalist online communities. The phrase “nothing can stop what’s coming” is a well-known QAnon slogan, used to invoke a coming reckoning or prophetic judgment.

The second post featured a mock billboard emblazoned with Trump’s portrait and the statement: “President Trump was right about everything.” Taken together, the memes portray Trump not just as a political figure but as a divinely sanctioned force of destiny. Trump

This type of messaging has become increasingly common in his social media presence, blurring the line between political propaganda and religious zeal. By amplifying this imagery, Trump continues to suggest he is both infallible and an inevitable, savior-figure.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 28 [Court's Tariff Decision], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 29, 2025. Judges continue to decide cases against Trump, with a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruling today that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs are illegal.

The judges, one appointed by President Ronald Reagan, one by President Barack Obama, and one by Trump himself, noted that the U.S. Constitution gives exclusively to Congress the power to impose tariffs. In 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, often abbreviated as IEEPA, delegating to the president the power to adjust tariffs in times of national emergency, but Trump has used that power far beyond what the Constitution will permit.

Since he took office on January 20, 2025, the judges noted, Trump “has declared several national emergencies and imposed various tariffs in response.” But the IEEPA has “meaningful limits,” the court writes, and “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would be unconstitutional.” The court blocked all the tariffs Trump imposed under the IEEPA, thus ending Trump’s tariff spree, although the administration will appeal.

“Congress manifestly is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to other the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested,” the court writes.

That principle echoes far beyond tariffs, as the impoundment of funds by the “Department of Government Efficiency” takes from Congress the power to pass laws that the executive branch must faithfully execute.

Tariffs were in the news today in another way, too, as Wall Street analysts have begun to talk of “TACO trade,” short for “Trump always chickens out.” The phrase was coined earlier this month by Robert Armstrong of Financial Times and refers to Trump’s habit of threatening extraordinarily high tariffs and then backing down. Armstrong noted that investors have figured out that they can buy stocks cheaply immediately after Trump’s initial tariff announcement and then sell higher when stocks rebound after he changes his mind.

Trump’s tariff machinations — he has moved them more than 50 times since he took office — are also enriching the Trump family. Last week, Trump’s son Eric Trump joined Vietnam’s prime minister Pham Minh Chinh in a groundbreaking ceremony for a $1.5 billion luxury real estate development with three 18-hole golf courses outside the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.

New York Times, U.S. Cancels Contract With Moderna to Develop Bird Flu Vaccine, Apoorva Mandavilli, May 29, 2025. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly questioned the safety of mRNA technology, which is used in the company’s shot.

The Trump administration has delivered its latest blow to vaccines, canceling a nearly $600-million contract to the drugmaker Moderna that was intended to develop a shot for humans against bird flu.

The decision also forfeited the U.S. government’s right to purchase doses ahead of a pandemic, and canceled an agreement set up by the Biden administration in January to prepare the nation for a potential bird flu pandemic. The Moderna contract built on a previous government investment of $175 million last year.

The move was not entirely unexpected. The Department of Health and Human Services said earlier this year that it was reviewing the contract. And Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly questioned the safety of mRNA technology, which is used in Moderna’s Covid vaccine.

First used for the Covid vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of the virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response.

Andrew Nixon, a Health and Human Services spokesman, said: “After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable.”

Moderna said it would explore alternatives for developing the vaccines covered by the contract, which were to be designed for several types of flu viruses that have the potential to cause a pandemic.May 29, 2025, 5:29 p.m. ET17 minutes agoTrump Administration Live Updates: Appeals Court Spares Trump’s Tariffs While It Considers Challenge

 

New York Times, U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Many Chinese Students, Rubio Says, Edward Wong, May 29, 2025 (print ed.). Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the targeted students would include those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and those studying in “critical fields.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday evening that the Trump administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in “critical fields.”

He added that the State Department was revising visa criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong.

The move is certain to send ripples of anxiety across university campuses in the United States and spur recriminations in China. China is the country of origin for the second-largest group of international students in the United States, and many universities rely on Chinese and other international students paying full tuition for a substantial part of their annual revenue.

American universities have also benefited over many decades by drawing some of the most talented students from China and other countries. Chinese students and researchers are represented in large numbers in university science laboratories.

New York Times, Live Updates: Judge Intends to Block Trump Effort to Stop Harvard From Enrolling Foreign Students, Dana Goldstein, May 29, 2025. The decision was a victory for Harvard in its ongoing confrontation with the White House, which has sought to undermine the university’s finances and influence.Here’s what to know about Harvard’s fight with Trump.

A federal judge in Boston said on Thursday that she would temporarily block President Trump’s effort to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students, part of the administration’s all-out battle to undermine the university’s finances and global influence.

The judge’s decision was a victory for Harvard, at least for now, in its ongoing confrontation with the White House, which has already seen the university stripped of billions of dollars in federal funding.

The result came as 9,000 Harvard students were gathered in Harvard Yard to receive their diplomas, in a spirited graduation ceremony filled with symbols of protest against Mr. Trump and messages of support for international peers. There were sporadic cheers as students, faculty and families learned of the judge’s ruling.

Harvard’s lawyers argue that the Trump administration is attacking it politically, in violation of the First Amendment, and have said that international students were panicked and seeking to transfer. “I want to maintain the status quo,” Judge Allison D. Burroughs said in the hearing on Thursday. “People are terrified.”

The Trump administration continues to seek options for restricting the flow of foreign students into the country. It has described visa holders as “agitators,” and President Trump has argued that more of their admissions spots should go to Americans.

The administration stepped up its effort to restrict foreign students across higher education late Wednesday, with an announcement by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, that officials would begin to “aggressively revoke” the visas of some Chinese students.

Here’s what else to know:

• Political target: The administration has accused Harvard of liberal bias, violating the Supreme Court ban on affirmative action and allowing antisemitic behavior. Harvard’s lawyers argued in court — using the president’s own words and social media posts — that the institution is being politically targeted in violation of the First Amendment. Here’s an overview of the legal fight.
• Funding fight: The Trump administration has frozen more than $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard, and Mr. Trump has said he would like to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. This week the administration said it would cancel the federal government’s remaining contracts with Harvard, worth an estimated $100 million.

New York Times, Trump Suggests Limit on International Students at Harvard, Michael C. Bender, May 29, 2025 (print ed.). The school has so far resisted considerable pressure from the Trump administration to enact other policy changes.

President Trump on Wednesday said Harvard should have a cap on the number of international students it admits to create more spots for Americans, undercutting his administration’s argument that merit alone should guide admissions practices as it escalates its fight with the elite university.

New York Times, Analysis: Harvard Fight Illustrates Trump’s Worldview: If He Attacks, It’s Your Fault, Maggie Haberman, May 29, 2025 (print ed.). Since regaining the White House, President Trump has been fixated on making an example of those who push back against him.

In President Trump’s telling from the Oval Office on Wednesday, Harvard University has no one but itself to blame for his administration’s swift suffocation of its federal funding.

The “last thing” he wants to do is harm the storied jewel of American higher education, he said. But he had no choice. The university was fighting back.

“Harvard has got to behave themselves,” Mr. Trump said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves.”

He went on: “I’m looking out for the country and for Harvard.”

The president’s framing of his administration’s aggressive pressure campaign speaks not just to how he sees his efforts to dominate Harvard and what it teaches and who it admits, but also how he views opposition more broadly. It’s a constant in Mr. Trump’s worldview: If he goes after someone or something, it is their fault, not his. They are responsible for his actions. Not him.

New York Times, U.S. Pauses Exports of Jet Engine and Chip Technology to China, Ana Swanson, May 29, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump has stopped some critical products and technologies made only in the United States from flowing to China.

The Trump administration has suspended some sales to China of critical U.S. technologies, including those related to jet engines, semiconductors and certain chemicals. The move is a response to China’s recent restrictions on exports of critical minerals to the United States, a decision by Beijing that has threatened to cripple U.S. company supply chains, according to two people familiar with the matter.

New York Times, A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington, Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer, Jonathan Swan and Ryan Mac, May 29, 2025 (print ed.). Elon Musk, shown above in a file photo, has made clear he is frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he tried to upend the federal bureaucracy as an adviser to President Trump.

Elon Musk took a swipe at President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, saying it would add to the national deficit. He complained to administration officials about a lucrative deal that went to a rival company to build an artificial-intelligence data center in the Middle East. And he has yet to make good on a $100 million pledge to Trump’s political operation.

Mr. Musk, who once called himself the president’s “first buddy,” is now operating with some distance from Mr. Trump as he says he is ending his government work to spend more time on his companies. Mr. Musk remains on good terms with Mr. Trump, according to White House officials. But he has also made it clear that he is disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, raising questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.'

The Bulwark, Commentary: A Whiff of Courage in the Air, William Kristol, Andrew Egger, Sam Stein, and Jim Swift, May 29, 2025. Despite the furious assaults by the Trump project, some of our institutions are holding. Others are fighting back.

Lots of us have had occasion in recent years to quote Robert Frost’s 1961 comment and lament, that “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

But could things be changing? Aren’t there signs that some liberals, confronted by the present danger of a real and vicious authoritarian threat, are beginning to take their own side? That side is the side of liberalism broadly construed; the side of the principles and practices of a free society.

What are the signs of hope?

In the midst of a complete takeover and weaponization of the executive branch of government by the authoritarians, and the complete collapse into timid passivity of the legislative branch, the third branch (the courts) is at least trying to step up. Yesterday’s unanimous decision from the Court of International Trade striking down as unlawful Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs was the most recent and one of the most striking examples.

We’ll see how that decision fares upon appeal. But the decision was a unanimous one, from a panel consisting of a Reagan, an Obama, and a Trump appointee. As in other cases in areas ranging from tariffs to immigration to executive governance, federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties have done a lot to remind us that we live—or should live—under a Constitution and the rule of law.

The Constitution and the rule of law used to be things we could all agree on. At The Bulwark, we do. If you do too, join us and help us grow.Subscribed

Yes, there’s plenty to worry about when these cases make it to the Supreme Court, as they seem destined to. But as someone who’s warned that we can’t count on the courts alone to save us—and as someone who still thinks that’s the case—I have to acknowledge that so many federal judges have done their best.

So have some other civic leaders, from outside the government. After an initial near-collapse of many private-sector institutions before the Trump administration, we’re now seeing at least some resistance. Some law firms are fighting the bullying. Some universities, most notably Harvard, are fighting not just for their own rights and interests but for the principles of the rule of law and free society.

And beyond the borders of the United States there is cause for hope and inspiration. Despite every indication of a willingness—even an eagerness—by the Trump administration to betray this gallant nation under brutal assault, Ukraine still fights, and is holding its own. President Zelensky stands tall. Europe is stepping up more than one might have expected.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I wouldn’t have expected a decade ago to be writing in praise of federal judges, the administration of Harvard, and a president of Ukraine. But times change. And those who are fighting for us, for our Republic and our liberties, deserve our admiration and support.

During the 2024 campaign, many of us said that democracy—by which we meant liberal democracy—was on the ballot. I believe subsequent events have proven us right. Democracy lost. We have already paid a great price for that defeat. More, perhaps much more, damage will be done. But at least there are those fighting back in defense of liberalism.

Quick Hits:

DANGEROUS IDEAS: There’s saying the quiet part out loud, and then there’s whatever this was from Education Secretary Linda McMahon yesterday: “Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.”

Hear that, Harvard? Are you listening, Johns Hopkins? MAGA-approved research—into the perils of biological males in girls’ sports, say, or perhaps racial disparities in crime statistics—can carry on with no worries. You wouldn’t want to get crosswise with “what the administration is trying to accomplish,” though. What are you, some sort of commie subversive?

New York Times, Bernard Kerik, New York’s Police Commissioner on 9/11, Dies at 69, Sam Roberts, May 30, 2025 (print ed.). Before his career imploded, he rose meteorically to become New York City’s chief law enforcement officer under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Bernard B. Kerik, the New York City police commissioner who was hailed as a hero for overseeing the department’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, only to fall from grace after he pleaded guilty to federal corruption and tax crimes, died on Thursday. He was 69.

Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., announced Mr. Kerik’s death in a post on X. He said the former commissioner died “after a private battle with illness.”

A cocksure high school dropout with a black belt in karate, shaved head and bulging biceps, Mr. Kerik vaulted to senior public posts as a disciple of Rudolph W. Giuliani after serving as Mr. Giuliani’s bodyguard during his successful 1993 mayoral campaign.

In 1997, after Mr. Kerik rose through the ranks of the Police Department from a street cop in Times Square and narcotics investigator, Mr. Giuliani promoted him to correction commissioner, where he curbed sick time abuse by guards and reduced violence by inmates.

Mr. Kerik’s appointment as police commissioner in August 2000 was not well received, in part because of his rapid promotions despite his lack of a college degree, which uniformed police officers ordinarily needed for promotion to captain and above. His highest rank before becoming commissioner was detective third grade. He later went on to earn a degree in 2002.

During his tenure as police commissioner, for 16 months through 2001 when Mr. Giuliani’s mayoral term ended, crime continued the decline that was accomplished most by two of his predecessors, Raymond W. Kelly and William J. Bratton. Morale among officers improved. So did relations between the department and Black and Hispanic New Yorkers who had been alienated by incidents of police abuse.

But Mr. Kerik was accused of heavy-handed management and abuse of power as commissioner until Dec. 31, 2001 when Mr. Giuliani left office.

Like the mayor himself, Mr. Kerik received kudos for his response to the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. He and Mr. Giuliani rushed to the site to speed the evacuation of the World Trade Center. They were showered by debris from the collapse of the towers and were temporarily trapped in a nearby building.

Among the honors bestowed on Mr. Kerik was his appointment as a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.Editors’ PicksAfter 50 Years in the Same Rental, She Grabbed Her Chance to Buy a PlaceGreenland Says Visit. But Step Lightly and Speak Softly.A Ministroke Can Have Major Consequences

After leaving the Police Department, Mr. Kerik made millions of dollars working as a security consultant for the former mayor’s firm, Giuliani Partners, whose clients included companies and foreign governments seeking advice on crisis management and counterterrorism.

Mr. Kerik later established his own consulting firm, which advised King Abdullah II of Jordan, President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana and the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, among others. More recently, he was a security consultant to the monarchy in Qatar.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush appointed Mr. Kerik as the interior minister for that nation’s provisional authority. He recruited thousands of police officers and assembled a SWAT team to pursue kidnappers and insurgents.

But his career was soon derailed by a series of embarrassing public setbacks.

In 2004, he was named by the president to head the Department of Homeland Security, but withdrew one week later because, he said, he had employed an undocumented immigrant as a babysitter and neglected to pay payroll taxes.

His admission triggered several investigations.

It was revealed that while he was married with two children and living in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, he had rented an apartment in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan to conduct an extramarital affair with Judith Regan, who had published his best-selling memoir. The apartment had originally been donated by a developer for use by rescue workers at the World Trade Center site.

In 2006, he pleaded guilty in State Supreme Court in the Bronx to two misdemeanors involving renovations to his apartment in Riverdale, while he was correction commissioner, by a New Jersey construction firm suspected of links to organized crime. He was fined $221,000.

In 2007, he was accused of tax fraud. The federal indictment was based, in part, on information provided by his former friend, Larry Ray, who was later accused of operating a sex cult at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester.

May 28

New York Times, To Win Pardons, Trump Allies Echo His Claims of Political Prosecutions, Kenneth P. Vogel, May 28, 2025. President Trump is increasingly using his clemency powers to undermine Justice Department cases against his supporters.

When they pleaded guilty, the three men took responsibility for crimes.

Brian Kelsey acknowledged his involvement in an illegal campaign cash scheme. Paul Walczak expressed “so much shame” for his tax fraud. Daniel Rodriguez wrote a letter to “apologize from the heart” to a police officer he assaulted with a stun gun.

But when they or their allies pushed for pardons from President Trump, they argued that they — like him — had been unfairly targeted by prosecutors because of their politics.

New York Times, Trump Pardons Former N.Y. Representative Who Pleaded Guilty to Tax Fraud, Liam Stack and Tyler Pager, May 28, 2025. Michael G. Grimm, a Republican, represented Staten Island and part of Brooklyn from 2011 until he resigned in 2015.

President Trump on Wednesday pardoned Michael G. Grimm, a former New York representative who pleaded guilty in 2014 to felony tax evasion, according to a White House official.

Mr. Grimm, a Republican, represented Staten Island and part of Brooklyn in the House of Representatives from 2011 until he resigned in 2015. On Wednesday, a White House spokesman compared Mr. Grimm’s prosecution to the president’s own legal troubles, which Mr. Trump has long derided as a witch hunt.

New York Times, Trump Administration Agrees to Return Guatemalan Man to U.S., Mattathias Schwartz and Hamed Aleaziz, May 28, 2025. A federal judge in Massachusetts had ordered officials to “facilitate” his return. The U.S. is still holding a group of other deportees at a base in Djibouti.

Justice Department lawyers said on Wednesday that the government was taking steps to comply with a court order to facilitate the return of a man who had been deported to Mexico and was then sent to Guatemala.

The Guatemalan man, known by the initials O.C.G., had been deported this year despite having told U.S. authorities that he had experienced violence in Mexico and was afraid to go back.

Immigration authorities made contact with O.C.G.’s legal team over the weekend and were working to bring him back to the United States on a charter flight, according to the two-page filing in the case before Judge Brian E. Murphy of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts.

HuffPost, House Republican's Trump Talk Gets Not-So-Beautiful Response In Wild Town Hall Scene, Ben Blanchet, May 28, 2025.  Rep. Ashley Hinson's defense of the president was just the latest instance of GOP lawmakers being shouted down by their constituents.

Rep. Ashley Hinson’s praise of President Donald Trump and his “big, beautiful bill” didn’t hold up on Wednesday as constituents hit back with jeers, boos and laughter during a town hall event in Decorah, Iowa.

“The president is, I believe, fighting for you and fighting for me —,” said Hinson (R-Iowa), just minutes into her prepared remarks at the event.

“No!” the crowd resoundingly shot back.

Elsewhere in her remarks, Hinson got a sour reaction when she name-dropped Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), and she got jeered when she described “all of the damage done” from Joe Biden’s presidency before touting what she described as Trump’s “accomplishments.”

“I was also proud to vote for President Trump’s ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ last week,” she said of legislation that could slash $1 trillion in health and food assistance programs to pay for about $4 trillion in tax cuts to mostly high earners.

“Boooooo!” replied the crowd as some attendees — seemingly supporting Hinson — sprinkled in claps.

“This is your time!” Hinson hit back.

Hinson faced a similar reaction at a separate town hall event earlier in the day in Elkader, Iowa, per Cedar Rapids’ ABC affiliate KCRG.

 

Meidas Touch Network, The Trump Administration Pauses New Student Visa Interviews, Aaron Parnas, May 28, 2025. This could have devastating impacts on new enrollment at college campuses.

According to newly obtained information from Politico, the Trump administration is considering a major policy shift that would require all foreign students applying to study in the U.S. to undergo social media screening. This would mark a significant expansion of current vetting practices.

A cable obtained by Politico, dated Tuesday and signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, instructs U.S. embassies and consulates to temporarily halt scheduling new visa interviews for international students. The pause is intended to give time to prepare for the potential rollout of mandatory social media checks

If implemented, the plan could create serious delays in processing student visas and have financial consequences for U.S. universities, many of which rely heavily on tuition from international students.

“Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued,” the cable reads. The term “septel” in the message refers to a follow-up communication expected in the near future.

The move could reshape how international students engage with U.S. education, potentially deterring many from applying and further straining the country’s higher education institutions.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Economic Analysis: America Turns Its Back on the World and self-betrayal, Paul Krugman, right, May 28, 2025. Blocking foreign students is an act of self-destruction.

My wife and I are co-authors of a widely used textbook on the principles of economics, which is revised on a three-year cycle. When a new edition comes out, I normally visit a number of schools that might adopt it, usually giving a big public talk, a smaller technical seminar, and spending some time with students and faculty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently, Making America Great Again means destroying one of our most successful industries.

But wait, there’s more.

International students make up an especially large proportion of graduate students. And if you know anything about higher education, you know that grad students do a lot more than study. More often than not, they participate in research — some of it financed by the government, some of it sponsored by foundations, these days often sponsored by businesses. There are good reasons America’s clusters of high-tech innovation, from Silicon Valley to Greater Boston, are often centered around great research universities. And ambitious international students, sometimes bringing new perspectives, are part of what keeps these research universities great.

Of course, the people now running things do not themselves accept what people like me consider fundamental American values. They may insist that they’re pro-American, but what they mean by “America” is a land of bigotry where your identity is determined by blood and soil, a land of closed borders and closed minds.

And they must be resisted to save the America I believe in.

New York Times, U.N. Condemns Israel’s New Aid Program in Gaza, After Chaotic Start, Aaron Boxerman, May 28, 2025. The new operation is intended to bypass both the United Nations and Hamas, but aid groups say even if it works as intended, it is dangerously inadequate.

A chaotic start to a heavily criticized food distribution system. Mounting anger from Europe over its threats to dramatically escalate a ground assault in Gaza. And growing pressure from the United States to reach a truce.

Israel is weathering one of its toughest weeks on the diplomatic stage since the start of the war in Gaza, as its allies, including President Trump, appear increasingly fed up with the protracted war, as well as Israel’s conduct of it.

 

Democracy Docket, Commentary: JD Vance and the gospel of unchecked power Mark Elias, May 28, 2025. JD Vance is a lot of things: Donald Trump’s loyal lap dog, an observant Catholic and a Yale-trained lawyer. During his recent interview with the conservative columnist Ross Douthat, the vice president made clear those are in descending order of importance.

Hours after meeting the new Pope, Vance, shown at left in a file photo by Gage Skidmore, explained how his faith might bend to the realities of his political position and why the rule of law should do the same. Never once did he suggest Trump’s grotesque behavior should ever be tempered, limited or even judged by standards of the law or moral teaching.

Indeed, it seemed clear that Vance’s Christianity ends at the point where Trump’s ego begins. The rule of law is useful so long as it enables rather than limits Trump’s exercising power. In this respect Vance is an ordinary sycophant in an extraordinary position of authority.His main complaint during the interview was that the courts are not rolling over for Trump. He chastised the Chief Justice for being “profoundly wrong” in believing the role of the judiciary is to check excesses of the executive branch. In fact, the Chief said it was to “check the excesses of Congress or the executive.”

This was not the only instance in which Vance apparently forgot the role of Congress or the idea of checks and balances. He repeatedly complained about judges blocking the administration’s unlawful and unconstitutional actions — casting them as undemocratic. He whined, “I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people.”

Later in the interview, he claimed that by “design” the courts “should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president of the United States.”

It was not long ago — when Joe Biden was in office — that Republicans routinely pointed out that we do not live in a democracy but rather a constitutional republic in which power is mediated through multiple layers of government and ultimately constrained by the Constitution. Now, Vance is suggesting that an unchecked president is a “small-d democratic principle that’s at the heart of the American project.”

Due process is the only thing that separates lawful governance from authoritarian overreach. That is why Vance sat in the Vatican to defend the indefensible. It is why we can never give up on defending it as a fundamental right owed to everyone.

New York Times, Israeli Jets Strike Yemen’s Main Airport Again After Houthi Attacks, Natan Odenheimer, May 28, 2025. Israel said the bombing of the airport, which was targeted for the second time this month, had destroyed the last plane used by the Iran-backed Houthi militia.

Israeli warplanes bombed the main international airport in Yemen again on Wednesday in retaliation for recent missile attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi militia.

A devastating Israeli airstrike earlier this month on the same airport, which serves the capital, Sana, caused extensive damage, and flights were suspended for more than a week. The latest strike destroyed the last remaining aircraft at the airport used by the Houthi government, according to Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, and the airport’s director.

“They destroyed it entirely,” the airport’s director, Khaled al-Shaief, said of the plane. He shared on social media a photograph of burning wreckage with fire trucks attempting to extinguish the blaze, saying the plane had been the last aircraft belonging to the national airline at the Sana airport.

The Sana airport is a vital link for more than 20 million Yemenis in Houthi-held areas, providing access to lifesaving medical treatment, medicine and aid.

The Houthis, who control most of northwestern Yemen, including Sana, have been launching rockets and drones at Israel and targeting ships in the Red Sea since October 2023, in what they call a campaign of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Both the Houthis and Hamas in Gaza are part of Iran’s network of proxy militias around the Middle East.

May 27

Democracy Docket, Pro-Democracy Voting Commentary: Ed Martin was too extreme for GOP senators. Now he’s at DOJ, targeting Trump’s enemies, Matt Cohen, May 27, 2025. When Trump withdrew Ed Martin Jr. ‘s nomination for U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, it came after a growing chorus of Republican senators who found him to be too extreme for the role. His work defending Jan. 6 rioters was a bridge too far for Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who said he wouldn’t be voting to confirm Martin.

But Martin, left, didn’t fall out of favor with Trump. The president replaced Martin’s nomination as top D.C. prosecutor with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, and appointed Martin to multiple roles in the DOJ — including the head of a new unit that aims to probe what Trump calls the political “weaponization” of the department under then-President Joe Biden.

Trump also appointed Martin as the pardon attorney at DOJ, meaning he’ll advise Trump on who he should pardon. His first pardon on the job? A former Virginia sheriff who was convicted of federal bribery charges. “No MAGA left behind,” Martin wrote of the pardon.

That post, which blatantly undermines the department’s longstanding commitment to apolitical law enforcement, will only add to the worries of some former DOJ attorneys. They say they’re concerned that Martin will use his new posts to spread disinformation, delegitimize future elections, and target leading Democrats and prosecutors who have pursued Trump. Indeed, it may already be happening.

As the head of DOJ’s nascent and vague “weaponization working group,” Martin is tasked with leading the department’s investigations into potential abuses of the criminal justice process by current and former officials.

In a February memo announcing the new group, Attorney General Pam Bondi named former Special Counsel Jack Smith and his staff as a primary subject of investigation, along with New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), and other New York-based officials.

The department recently launched an inquiry into Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic former New York governor, according to The New York Times. The inquiry comes a month after Martin, as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., opened an investigation into Cuomo for allegedly making false statements to Congress.

The flurry of probes “should alarm anybody concerned about the rule of law,” Stacey Young, the founder of Justice Connection and a former longtime attorney in the DOJ’s civil rights division, told me. “They seem to be targeting the President’s political enemies, which is antithetical to how the rule of law must work.”

New York Times, Opinion: The Flashing Signals That I Just Saw in Israel, Thomas L. Friedman, right, May 28, 2025 (print ed.). I just spent a week in Israel and, while it may not look as if much has changed — the grinding Gaza war continues to grind — I felt something new there for the first time since Oct. 7, 2023.

It is premature to call it a broad-based antiwar movement, which can happen only when all the Israeli hostages are returned. But I did see signals flashing that more Israelis, from the left to the center and to even parts of the right, are concluding that continuing this war is a disaster for Israel: morally, diplomatically or strategically.

From the political center, the former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote an essay in the newspaper Haaretz in which he pulled no punches against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and his coalition. “The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success,” Olmert argued. “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” His conclusion: “Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

From the right, you have the likes of Amit Halevi, a member of Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party, who is staunchly pro-war but thinks its execution has been bungled.

Virtually no independent foreign journalists have been allowed to report firsthand from Gaza — unescorted by the Israeli army. When this war is over and Gaza is saturated with international reporters and photographers free to roam, the level of death and destruction is going to be fully reported and pictured — and that is going to be a very bad time for Israel and world Jewry.

The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr.’s War on Vaccines Is Here, William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift, May 28, 2025. Anyone who thinks he’ll stop with COVID shots is deluding themselves. The time to raise hell is now.

Elon Musk’s bright-burning but brief turn as shadow president provided a lesson for other would-be revolutionaries in the Trump administration. Move too fast, break too many things, and you risk poisoning the public against you and your work.

It’s a lesson Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be taking to heart. Follow along to understand why — and why now is the moment for public pushback. You’ll be glad you did.

By now it should be clear to everyone, if it somehow wasn’t before, that the secretary of health and human services is gunning for America’s vaccines.

Kennedy, who just last year proclaimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” who has never stopped insisting that vaccines are connected to autism, and who has actively counseled people not to vaccinate their children for years, claimed implausibly after Trump’s reelection that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.” But since his confirmation, he has been busily laying the groundwork to do exactly that.

Weeks after Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he canceled the first of three yearly meetings of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, members of which he is also reportedly preparing to fire. He’s continued to claim that vaccines haven’t been “safety tested,” and his inaugural “Make America Health Again” report last week suggested that vaccines may play a role “in the growing childhood chronic-disease crisis.” Things look no better behind the scenes: HHS’s top spokesman quit in March after just two weeks on the job, and the FDA’s top vaccine official resigned a few weeks later, citing Kennedy’s avalanche of “misinformation and lies.” That same week, Kennedy brought prominent anti-vaxxer David Geier aboard to conduct a study hunting for a link between vaccines and autism.

In the last few days, Kennedy has started to make his anti-vaccine plans a reality. On Friday, his HHS announced that the FDA would revoke authorization for COVID boosters for most healthy Americans under 65 years old. And yesterday, Kennedy announced in a video posted to social media that the COVID shot would be removed from the vaccine schedule for healthy pregnant mothers and children—a change that will likely lead insurance companies to drop the vaccine from coverage for those groups.

In announcing the change, Kennedy didn’t just say he believed the COVID vaccine to be unnecessary for those groups. He said the change would bring the nation “one step closer to realizing President Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.” The implication was obvious: In Kennedy’s view, the COVID vaccine is an active threat to America’s good health.

As the New York Times’s Maggie Astor notes, this suggestion not only contradicts all available science—infants under six months old face as high a risk of hospitalization with COVID as do people who are 65 to 74 years old, and the best way to give them some protection is for their mother to get the shot while pregnant—it also contradicts the FDA and CDC’s own current guidance as of last week. When the FDA announced Thursday it would revoke the COVID shot’s authorization for most healthy people under 65, it specifically mentioned pregnant women as a group that would likely remain eligible. Even this morning, you can still visit the CDC page that describes pregnancy as a conclusive “higher-risk” condition for COVID, complete with a helpful link to the relevant meta-analysis and systematic review. The HHS website—for now—has some videos urging pregnant mothers to get the shot, too.

In many ways, the COVID vaccine is low-hanging fruit for RFK Jr. The novel coronavirus is no longer novel; many people perceive it to be yesterday’s problem. Others assess that their own current level of immunity—from former doses of the vaccine or brushes with the disease—is good enough. COVID booster uptake in particular remains low, with less than a quarter of Americans receiving the annual shot.

But anyone who thinks Kennedy will stop at the COVID shot is deluding themselves. The man was agitating against vaccines long before COVID arrived on the scene, and his spurious arguments against the COVID shot are arguments he’s deployed time and again against other vaccines as well.

May 27

 

Los Angeles Times, Trump lawyer in Harvard battle says DOJ intends to sue UC over antisemitism allegations,Jaweed Kaleem, May 27, 2025. A Justice Department official spearheading President Trump’s battle against Harvard University — which has led to multiple lawsuits and the school losing billions in federal funding — says the administration intends to take the University of California to court over alleged antisemitism.

Leo Terrell, senior counsel for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, is heading a multiagency task force on combating antisemitism and said in a Tuesday Fox News interview that there will be “massive lawsuits against [the] UC system” and other colleges “on the East Coast, on the West Coast, in the Midwest.”

“Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. Expect Title VII lawsuits,” Terrell added, referring to U.S. civil rights law that protects against employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” The task force has singled out UCLA, USC and UC Berkeley in addition to Harvard and six other U.S. campuses for investigations.

Speaking separately in an interview with Jewish News Syndicate, Terrell said the campuses — which also include Columbia, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, New York and Northwestern universities and the University of Minnesota — have rebuffed task force investigators. The task force, announced in March, has not made its intended visits to campuses, students and law enforcement because of “resistance,” he said.

Terrell, a civil rights attorney who previously worked in Los Angeles and is a former Fox News personality, did not elaborate on the “resistance” comment and did not respond to an email from The Times requesting an interview and details about the investigations and pending lawsuits.

In a statement, a UC spokesperson said the university “abhors antisemitism and is diligently working to address, counter and eradicate it in all its forms across the system.”

“We have been, and plan to continue, cooperating with the administration. Antisemitism has no place at UC or anywhere else in society,” said Rachel Zaentz, senior director of strategic and critical communications. “The university remains entirely focused on strengthening our programs and policies to root out antisemitism and all forms of discrimination.”

“The university continues to publicly and unequivocally denounce antisemitism in all its forms and has taken strong actions to protect all of our students — including members of our Jewish community — from illegal discrimination of any kind,” the university said in a statement. “USC is proud to attract one of the largest Jewish student bodies in the country. We look forward to engaging with the task force on USC’s efforts to combat antisemitism.”

Terrell’s group also said in February that it would meet with mayors of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Boston.

In March, the Education Department sent letters to sixty campuses warning them to “protect Jewish students” or “face potential enforcement.” They included four UC campuses — San Diego, Santa Barbara, Berkeley and Davis — as well as USC, Pomona College, Stanford, Chapman University, Santa Monica College and Sacramento State.

 

Associated Press via PBS News, Trump wants to investigate Democrats' fund-raising but his own campaignhas issues, Brian Slodysko and Steve Peoples, May 27, 2025. When President Donald Trump directed his attorney general last month to investigate online fundraising, he cited concerns that foreigners and fraudsters were using elaborate “schemes“ and “dummy accounts” to funnel illegal contributions to politicians and causes.

Instead of calling for an expansive probe, however, the president identified just one potential target: ActBlue, the Democrats’ online fundraising juggernaut, which has acknowledged receiving over 200 potentially illicit contributions last year from foreign internet addresses.

Trump’s announcement contained a glaring omission — his political committees also received scores of potentially problematic contributions.

An Associated Press review of donations to Trump over the past five years found 1,600 contributions from donors who live abroad, have close ties to foreign interests or failed to disclose basic information, often making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify them and verify the legality of their donations Among those was $5,000 linked to a derelict building, and $5,000 from a Chinese businessman who listed a La Quinta Inn as his address. Another sizable donation — $1 million — was made by the wife of an African oil and mining magnate.

It’s against the law for U.S. candidates and political committees to accept contributions from foreign nationals. Laws also place strict limits on donation amounts and prohibit the laundering of contributions to get around legal caps. For the most part, such donations have been policed by campaigns and the Federal Election Commission, with only the most egregious examples being targeted by federal law enforcement.

But after reclaiming the White House, Trump embarked on a campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies, launching broadsides against universities, law firms and his own former officials. If the Justice Department were to investigate ActBlue, it could imperil a key fundraising tool for Trump’s political rivals before the 2026 midterm elections, when Republicans’ threadbare House majority — and the president’s ability to pass an agenda through Congress — will be on the line.

“This is him taking direct aim at the center of Democratic and progressive fundraising to hamstring his political opponents,” said Ezra Reese, an attorney who leads the political law division at the Elias Law Group, a leading Democratic firm that does not represent ActBlue. “I don’t think there’s any question that they picked their target first. He’s not even pretending.”Trump’s committees collected scores of donations from people living overseas

The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump’s Dangerous Pardon Power, William Kristol, right, May 27, 2025. The president’s use of the power, which he deployed again over the weekend, is legal. It’s also a grave threat to the rule of law.

In the midst of his administration’s many attacks on the rule of law, Donald Trump’s pardon yesterday of one Virginia sheriff is barely newsworthy. But it is nonetheless a fire bell in the night, a reminder of the breadth and depth of the Trump administration’s assault on our free society.

Scott Jenkins, above, the former sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, was set to report to jail today. He’d been convicted in December 2024 by a jury of his peers on one count of conspiracy, four counts of honest services fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jenkins had accepted more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for appointing various untrained and unvettedindividuals to no-show jobs as auxiliary deputy sheriffs. The evidence was overwhelming, including video of Jenkins accepting bags of cash, the testimony of some of those involved in the scheme, and reports from two undercover FBI agents. In March 2025, Jenkins wassentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

“Scott Jenkins violated his oath of office and the faith the citizens of Culpeper County placed in him when he engaged in a cash-for-badges scheme,” acting United States Attorney Zachary T. Lee said at the time of his sentencing.

But Jenkins was a rabidly anti-immigrant, pro-Trump sheriff who’d become a minor celebrity in MAGA world. Trump himself may not have known of him, but Ed Martin did. Martin, you’ll recall, was made Attorney General Pam Bondi’s (shown at right) chief pardon attorney at the Department of Justice after failing to get Senate confirmation as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Martin, left, celebrated his achievement just after the pardon: “Thank you, President Trump! I am thrilled that Sheriff Jenkins is the first pardon since I became your Pardon Attorney.”

As for Trump, he claimed with no evidence that Jenkins was “persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters’” at the Justice Department and convicted unjustly by a “Biden Judge.” He called Jenkins a “wonderful person” who “doesn’t deserve to spend a single day in jail.”

Though the pardon is legal in the sense that it’s within Trump’s power, it is an affront to the rule of law.

New York Times, Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner, Kenneth P. Vogel, May 27, 2025. Paul Walczak’s pardon application cited his mother’s support for President Trump, including a connection to a plot to publicize a Biden family diary.

As Paul Walczak, left, awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated president.

Mr. Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.

Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.

Mr. Walczak’s pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother’s efforts for Mr. Trump than by his admitted use of money earmarked for employees’ taxes to fund an extravagant lifestyle.

Still, weeks went by and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Mr. Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.

Then, Ms. Fago was invited to a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.

It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.

_____

Editor's Note (compiled from wire services): Separately, Trump has also pardoned a Republican former Las Vegas city councilwoman and state lawmaker from Nevada who was convicted in October of embezzling funds.

Michele Fiore, right, was found guilty of six counts of federal wire fraud and one count of conspiracy for raising over $70,000 for the statue of a slain Las Vegas police officer and instead using the money to pay for rent, plastic surgery and her daughter’s wedding.

 

Democracy Docket, Commentary: "Never wrestle with pigs,” Marc Elias, May 27, 2025. It has been two months since Brad Karp, the Chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, sent an email to his law firm explaining his reasoning for capitulating to Donald Trump’s demands. Someday, universities will devote entire business and law classes to dissecting the immorality and stupidity of that email and the deals Paul Weiss and other Big Law firms cut.

For now, it’s enough to say that Karp failed to abide by the advice of George Bernard Shaw: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

Over the weekend, it was reported that conservative groups — including some representing veterans — are looking for Paul Weiss and the other law firms that entered into agreements with Trump to make good on their promise for tens of millions to provide pro bono legal services. This follows Trump’s public musings that he might task the firms with defending police officers accused of misconduct and supporting the coal industry.

While the collaborators who run these law firms might publicly insist that they control what work they accept, firm management is loath to say no to Trump. Skadden Arps reportedly suggested a non-public role in one case brought to them by a conservative media figure.

At some point, Trump will inevitably make such requests public — and Karp and the others will have no choice but to say: “Yes, sir.” They may even have tears in their eyes.

Conservatives and the Trump administration are not Paul Weiss's biggest problem, however. Key to Karp’s plan was the assumption that, as time passed, the political and legal establishments would look past his decision to cut a deal with Trump. Instead, anger and opposition have only stiffened.

Over the last two months, Paul Weiss has become to capitulation what Kleenex is to facial tissue: a generic term for an institution betraying its industry and its own ideals by making a deal with Trump.

People in higher education debate whether Columbia has become the Paul Weiss of universities. Harvard is lauded for rejecting the path charted by Paul Weiss. The media world is watching to see whether Paramount will take the Paul Weiss route by settling a meritless lawsuit rather than standing by 60 Minutes.

Things got worse for the firm on Friday when another federal court blocked an executive order targeting the law firm of Jenner & Block — identical to the one that led Paul Weiss to capitulate. Indeed, every law firm that has fought such executive orders has prevailed in court.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 26 [Trump Comments On Memorial Day], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 27, 2025. President Donald J. Trump’s erratic behavior was on display this weekend in two public speeches: one to this year’s graduates at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and the other at Arlington National Cemetery.

While both speeches are traditionally nonpartisan, Trump indicated he would make them partisan when he wore a red MAGA hat at West Point.

The president began both speeches by sticking to a script but then veered off course. At West Point on Saturday, his speech went on for over an hour. He attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and said: “The job of the U.S. Armed Forces is not to host drag shows to transform foreign cultures, or to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun,” he said. “The military's job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place.”

(In fact, the mission of the Department of Defense is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”)

Lincoln Square Media, Commentary: Tornadoes Don’t Take the Night off, Jennifer Schulze, May 27, 2025. Trump cut the weather experts who sound the alert when the rest of us are sleeping.

An EF3 tornado roared through the city of St Louis on Friday, May 16. The 152-mile per hour winds flattened buildings, ripped out power lines, uprooted trees, and even damaged the local zoo. It was the city’s first deadly tornado in 66 years – and it was just one of at least 7 tornadoes that hit multiple states that day.

A little further north, a dust storm reminiscent of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s engulfed Chicago.This multi-day run of severe storms- including over 60-tornadoes- has killed 40+ people and done considerable damage in 13 states and counting. The bad weather continued through Memorial Day Weekend.

Already this year, we’ve had 886 tornadoes, a 35% increase over last year. Plus, hurricane season is right around the corner,too. Seems like a really ridiculous time to be sabotaging the National Weather Service, doesn’t it? But Donald Trump is doing just that.

New York Times, Republican Crackdown on Aid to Immigrants Would Hit U.S. Citizens, Madeleine Ngo and Lydia DePillis, Madeleine Ngo and Lydia DePillis, May 27, 2025. The Trump administration’s efforts and the G.O.P.’s tax bill aim to restrict benefits for families that include immigrants without permanent legal status.

President Trump has vowed to end what he calls the “waste of hard-earned taxpayer resources” by cutting off federal benefits for undocumented immigrants and ensuring that funding goes to American citizens in need.

Administration officials have said they would root out “illegal aliens” who are living in federally-subsidized housing. The Agriculture Department has ordered states to enhance immigration verification practices used to determine eligibility for food stamps. And House Republicans just passed a tax bill that would limit certain immigrants from accessing Medicaid and Medicare, a popular tax credit for parents, and federal financial aid, among other benefits.

The actions amount to an aggressive attempt to curb immigrant families’ use of safety net programs. Although Republicans say they want to remove incentives for people to enter the country illegally, unauthorized immigrants generally do not receive federal benefits given efforts to chip away at their eligibility.

Immigration experts and advocates for immigrant rights say the changes would instead largely be felt by children who are U.S. citizens but whose parents are undocumented or immigrants who are authorized to live in the United States, such as refugees and people granted asylum.

Twelve percent of American children, or about nine million people, are citizens with at least one noncitizen parent. Children with at least one immigrant parent are twice as likely to live in poverty than those with native-born parents, according to a 2022 report by researchers at the Boston University School of Social Work.

May 26

 

 

Gravesite in Great Britain of World War II fatality Beau Bryant [Photo by Carole Green.]

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: May 25 [Memorial Day], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 25, 2025. Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.

For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.

When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.

Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.

When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed "Wray's Ragged Irregulars" after their commander, Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.

It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomber squadrons.

Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.

I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau's children weren't there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.

Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.

I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.

And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.

So Beau Bryant, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.

The Contrarian, Historical Commentary: What They Died For, Norm Eisen, right, May 26, 2025. Memorial Day has particular meaning for me. I would not be alive if it were not for the US military. It helped save both my parents in World War II—though in very different ways.

In spring 1945, my mom had been in Nazi captivity for a year—transferred from Auschwitz to a slave labor camp in Neuengamme Germany, packing (and when she could, sabotaging) ammunition. When she was flagging, a friendly jailer whispered to her to hang on—the allies were near. But for the US Armed Forces joining the fight, at terrible cost to so many American soldiers and families, my mom would not have survived.

My Dad’s connection was more direct: he actually served in those forces. He fled Europe for the US in 1940, arrived here with no papers, and enlisted in the Army to become a citizen. Who knows what would’ve become of him if the Army hadn't welcomed him. While my parents didn’t meet until years after the war (in Israel, of all places), the US military was their godsend, and so mine. 

I thought of all that this weekend, as I watched a group of veterans process at the Brown University commencement ceremony (I was there for my 40th reunion). The university has a program for veterans to get college degrees. The diverse platoon was composed of about twenty men and women; short and tall; black, brown, and white; all clad in gowns and mortarboards instead of uniforms or camouflage. They were greeted with cheers and whoops for their own accomplishments, of course, but also for the honor of the extraordinary institution they represent.

The American idea, which they and their absent comrades fought and died for, is being attacked from within this Memorial Day. How do we honor those who died for freedom when we see liberty under attack here at home? How do we salute the flag and that idea of America it stands for, when its meaning is being assaulted daily by the very administration entrusted with its care?

I know some might say we should simply remember our lost soldiers today, without tarnishing that tribute by addressing our political climate. But to my mind, looking away squanders their sacrifice. It is our responsibility to be candid about the crisis and to honor their service more urgently than ever.

We can do that by recommitting ourselves to defending our democracy. To memorialize our veterans’ sacrifices is to attend to the fragile, unfinished work of fighting autocracy and building a country worthy of their service. It is to hold tight to the idea of America, even when its practice falters. To do our part, as they did—not on distant battlefields, but on our streets, among our communities, and in our courthouses.

For me, that mission is informed by a Jewish aphorism that my parents, both saved by American soldiering, would sometimes say to me:

לֹא עָלֶיך הַמְלָאכָה לִיגמוֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חֹרִין לְחִבָּטֵל מִמֶנָה

“Your job is not to finish the work—but neither are you, the child of free people, not to do your share.”

 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Today in Politics, Bulletin 139, Ron Filipkowsk, right, May 26, 2025. Trump posted a Memorial Day message with this moving tribute to the men and women who paid the ultimate price serving their country in the military:

"HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE, THROUGH AN OPEN BORDER THAT ONLY AN INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT WOULD APPROVE, AND THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER, AND RAPE AGAIN — ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY." (Shown below:)

 

… He then made a post telling people to “ENJOY!!!” his speech at Arlington National Cemetery: “I will be making a Memorial Day Speech at Arlington at 11:00 AM. ENJOY!!!”

… Trump voter and former talk show host John Cardillo: “Sorry, but this is grossly inappropriate. There is nothing happy about Memorial Day. And the rest of it on this day is just unbecoming for a Commander-in-Chief. Sad part is pretty much everyone feels the same, but too many are terrified to speak up.”

… In his speech at Arlington before Trump, SecDef Pete Hegseth, who repeatedly expressed hostility in the past to women serving, refused to acknowledge them: “The American soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. We honor his sacrifice, his courage, his duty, and his love. The young men with hopes and dreams and loves is called by his country, leaves behind his hometown, his parents, his siblings, his sweetheart, all that he knows to go fight a war that he may or may not understand.” (Emphasis added.)

… Trump went about as far as he has ever gone towards criticizing Putin a little bit when he was asked about recent bombings after Ukraine signed the cease fire agreement: "I'm not happy with what Putin is doing. He's killing a lot of people and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin. I've known him a long time. We're in the middle of talking and he's shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don't like it at all. I'm surprised."

… If he really is surprised, he’s the only one who is surprised.

… Fox Chief Political Analyst Brit Hume: “Glad to hear President Trump say this, but Putin hasn’t changed. He’s always been a brutal tyrant.”

… In other words, Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign that he had a secret plan to end the war in 24 hours and he was just bullshitting everyone because he doesn’t have the first clue what to do, he gave away all negotiating leverage months ago when he agree up front to most of what Russia was asking for before negotiations even began, and his special envoy Steve Witkoff is a dope.

… Witkoff, the man Trump entrusted to negotiate an end to the war, has never been a diplomat, never served in the military, never worked in govt at any capacity, and is not a historian or expert on affairs in the region. He got the job because he is a wealthy real estate investor pal of Trump’s from NYC and Witkoff’s son is a major player in the crypto industry, which is now Trump’s largest source of revenue.

… Witkoff has also not taken a single person from the State Dept with him during any of his 4 meetings with Putin and even used a Kremlin translator because he didn’t bring his own. Why has this been a disaster? Because Trump and Witkoff are incompetent clowns.

 

U.S. Army Spc. Seth Wymer, with the 3rd Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), and a sentinel at the Tomb of the Unknowns, places a U.S. flag at the foot of one of four crypts at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., May 23, 2013. |Department of Defense photo by Staff Sgt. Megan Garcia, U.S. Army]

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Look in the Mirror: Are We Worth their Sacrifice? Evan Fields (a veteran who writes the News from Underground Substack), May 26, 2025. With our country adrift, Memorial Day is losing its meaning for too many.

A young soldier from the United States Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment — the Old Guard—stands beneath the blistering Arlington sun. His uniform is immaculate. His face unreadable. And on his shoulders: No rank. A silent gesture of respect to the men entombed behind him—unknown, unnamed, but never outranked. Three unknown young men who died in wars to protect the values and ideals the United States was founded upon.

The soldier walks the black mat in solemn rhythm — twenty-one steps, a pause, twenty-one seconds, a turn. Every movement is calibrated. Every count is deliberate. It’s a living tribute to the highest military honor we can render: the twenty-one gun salute. He commands silence and respect with his presence. Each step cuts through the stillness like a metronome of reflection. Reflection not just on the sacrifice, but on the values they died for.

Today, those values feel further and further away. A lack of political leadership, rising corporate greed, and late-stage capitalism have cheapened Memorial Day into an excuse to grill burgers, drink beer, and buy a discounted mattress. Across the country, people will enjoy the long weekend — rightfully using it to catch their breath from the stress of daily life. But in doing so, we risk forgetting what this day is actually for.

Memorial Day was never meant to be a celebration. It was meant to be a day to reflect on and honor not just the lives lost, but on the values and the country they died believing in. It’s a moment for those of us still living to examine our performance as Americans. The men and women who wear the uniform don’t serve politicians. They don’t lay down their lives for corporations. They swear an oath to an idea—a fragile, radical idea called America. An idea that too many people in power today have either forgotten or sold off.

Freedom. Justice. Accountability. Dignity. Democracy. These aren’t partisan ideals. They’re American ones. And they are the very ideals the fallen gave their final breath for.SubscribedA Mirror for the People

Memorial Day is an opportunity for us to reflect not only on the dead and their sacrifice, but on ourselves. An opportunity for us to look in the mirror and ask some uncomfortable questions:

• Do we vote in every election — or only when it feels urgent?
• Do we speak up when power is being abused — or wait for someone else to?
• Do we fight for truth — or just amplify outrage?
• Do we protect liberty and justice for all — or just those who look like us?

These holidays become a reminder that patriotism becomes performance and not a series of actions for the greater good. Patriotism doesn’t look like flags on trucks, slogans on shirts, or fireworks on the fourth of July. Patriotism is espousing and honoring the values that we are supposed to be reflecting on this weekend.

Citizenship in this country is not passive. Every civilian who lives here inherits a share of the burden that these soldiers carried. Reflection doesn’t just belong to the people though. It belongs to those we elect to lead in our name and too many of them refuse to look. Mike Simon, who served in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967, takes a rubbing of a fellow Marine’s name from the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall, Nov. 11, 2010. | U.S. Marines photo/releasedA Mirror for Our Elected Officials

Our elected officials swear the same oath as our service members — to the Constitution, not to themselves. But unlike the fallen, they seek power. They ask for it. Campaign for it. So their accountability should be even greater than what we ask of our men and women in uniform. Every single day on Capitol Hill and in the white house we are seeing silence in the face of authoritarianism, partisan obstruction over national interest, trading public services for private gain, and ripping away services that keep people alive.

The soldiers who lie in the Tomb of the Unknown asked for nothing. Maybe a hot meal and a paycheck. The elected officials in Congress continuously ask for everything and give nothing. Power, deference, reelection — they do nothing but take from us and hoard wealth and power. This isn’t just about inefficiency or poor leadership it’s a betrayal of the oath that they took. The same oath that countless men and women have died for in order to ensure a better future for us.What We Owe Them

Our country is at a tipping point. Political and racial violence dominates the headlines almost daily. Democracy is either under threat or completely obliterated depending on the day. And we are at risk for reaching a position where there is no turning back to how things once were. So what do we owe those men and women who sacrificed it all?

We owe it to them to put in the work in espousing the ideals and values that have built this country and made it survive for 250 years. We owe it to them to vote like democracy depends on it. We owe it to them to hold power accountable, even when it’s inconvenient. We owe it to them to protect the most vulnerable members of our population. To speak truth to power even when it costs you something. And we owe it to them to serve our fellow countrymen — not just ourselves.

This Memorial Day we honor the fallen not with words, but by picking up the burden they left behind — and carrying it forward.

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: Meidas Founder Delivers Memorial Day Message, Ben Meiselas, May 26, 2025. Today we honor the American soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

My grandpa Murray Golden (hence our slogan, “Truth is Golden”), who passed away almost 20 years ago, was a tail gunner in World War II. He was a Purple Heart recipient. When we would go fishing in his small pond in Boca, Florida, he would share with me the stories of those he served with who didn’t make it back home. It was very emotional and left a lasting impression on me. I always think about that on Memorial Day. I always reflect on the bravery of those who fought and died for our country, and I hope that in some small way I am making them proud by building out this network.

Memorial Day also marks the unofficial start of summer. You’ve heard me call it this before, but this will be known as “Democracy Summer.” We are going to see the largest mass peaceful protests in the history of the country. I can tell that’s where we are headed. The Trump regime has done so much to hurt the people of this country that we will need a collective release of our anger that will also be anchored by our love. The big protest coming up is the No Kings Protest on June 14, where I expect millions of people across the country will show up. Protests will continue to grow from there. We are in touch with all the organizers and will be on the frontlines and embedded to give you the coverage corporate news wants to cover up.

 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Commentary: The Economic Consequences of Destroying Harvard, Paul Krugman, rightl, May 26, 2025. Harvard is easy to dislike. It’s rich. It’s elitist. It rejected my application back when I was a high school senior.

But the Trumpist effort to destroy Harvard and other elite universities — for that is clearly their intention — will do vast damage to our nation’s future.

The most important aspect of this campaign of intimidation and disruption is, of course, the attack on freedom of thought. I hope that nobody actually believes the MAGA line that universities are indoctrinating their students in wokeness, DEI, Marxism, whatever. The real complaint, obviously, is that these institutions aren’t indoctrinating their students — that they are exposing young people to a variety of ideas and encouraging them to think for themselves, when they should be preaching right-wing dogma and obedience to whatever The Leader says they should believe.

Given this terrifying reality of the Trumpian war on learning, indeed on scientific thought itself, it may seem crass to examine the economic consequences of the attacks on higher education. Yet it’s important to understand that these consequences will also be disastrous – both for the current economy and for the economy’s long-term future.

Harvard is a major U.S. exporter. The foreign students that the Trump administration is trying to ban usually pay their own tuition — money that shows up as a credit in the US trade balance. But arguably the much larger issue is that Harvard is a crucial element within the Greater Boston economy. This regional economy is one of the crown jewels of the U.S. economy, one of the most important generators of high incomes, specialized knowledge and innovation.

Harvard is by no means the dominant player in this intellectual and economic universe. It may not even be the most important player. At a guess M.I.T. has, in a direct sense, been a larger incubator of new businesses than its neighbor two miles up Massachusetts Ave. But M.I.T. wouldn’t be what it is without Harvard nearby, and vice versa. The same goes for the dozens of other fine universities in the area, and the hundreds — probably thousands — of businesses nearby. The hospitals and the medical research are part of the same ecosystem.

So destroying Harvard, even if the campaign against intellectualism stopped there — which it wouldn’t — would be like pulling a crucial piece out of a Jenga tower. The odds are that the whole structure of the Greater Boston education and innovation ecosystem would collapse. Consequently, America would lose all that Greater Boston does to advance and enrich our nation.

Do MAGA types understand how much damage their campaign against universities will do to American prosperity and power? Probably not. But I suspect that it wouldn’t matter if they did. From their point of view, making America poorer, weaker and sicker is an acceptable price for keeping the nation suitably ignorant.

New York Times, Campus Crackdown: Trump Suggests Giving Trade Schools Money Taken From Harvard, Stephanie Saul, May 26, 2025. In a social media post, the president mused about redirecting $3 billion in research grant funding that his administration has frozen or withdrawn, but he gave no details.

President Trump floated a new plan on Monday for the $3 billion he wants to strip from Harvard University, saying in a social media post that he was thinking about using the money to fund vocational schools.

“I am considering taking THREE BILLION DOLLARS of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media platform.

The announcement, among the president’s Memorial Day social media messages, did not appear to refer to any new cut in funding, but rather to a redistribution of money the administration already announced it had frozen or stripped from Harvard and its research partners.

Mr. Trump gave no details about how such a plan would work.

The message was accompanied by yet another post accusing Harvard of being slow to respond to the administration’s requests for information on “foreign student lists.” Mr. Trump said his administration wanted them in order to determine how many “radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.”

The posts seemed intended to keep up public relations pressure on Harvard, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. Harvard is engaged in an epic battle with the White House, rooted in the administration’s claims that the university tolerates antisemitism and promotes liberal ideology.

Harvard declined on Monday to comment on the president’s post.

The university is battling the White House in federal court in Boston to secure the reinstatement of grants and contracts that the government has frozen or withdrawn, amounting to more than $3 billion. In a separate lawsuit, the university is also fighting Mr. Trump’s plan to take away the university’s right to admit international students.

 

President Trump and China's leader Xi Jinping at a 2019 meeting.

New York Times, Analysis: Trump’s Vision: One World, Three Powers? Edward Wong, May 26, 2025. President Trump’s recent actions and statements suggest he might want an arrangement where the U.S., China and Russia each dominates its sphere of influence.

The delay to July 9, from June 1, came after a request from the president of the European Commission. President Trump said trade talks would begin “rapidly.”h

For President Trump, anytime is a good time for deal-making, but never more so than now with the leaders of China and Russia.

Last week, Mr. Trump said he wanted to normalize commerce with Russia, appearing to lessen the pressure on Moscow to settle its war with Ukraine. And he is trying to limit the fallout from his own global trade war by urging China’s leader to call him.

“We all want to make deals,” Mr. Trump said in a recent interview with Time magazine. “But I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there.”

Mr. Trump may have something even bigger in mind involving Russia and China, and it would be the ultimate deal.

His actions and statements suggest he might be envisioning a world in which each of the three so-called great powers — the United States, China and Russia — dominates its part of the globe, some foreign policy analysts say.

It would be a throwback to a 19th-century style of imperial rule.

Mr. Trump has said he wants to take Greenland from Denmark, annex Canada and re-establish American control of the Panama Canal. Those bids to extend U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere are the clearest signs yet of his desire to create a sphere of influence in the nation’s backyard.High Confidence Data Only

 

A crater in a residential area in Odesa, Ukraine, after a drone strike, on Sunday (Reuters photo by Nina Liashonok)

New York Times, Russia Intensifies Attacks on Ukraine as U.S. Steps Back, Marc Santora, May 26, 2025. With diplomatic efforts to reach a cease-fire appearing remote, and President Trump apparently abandoning the process, Russia has been escalating its assaults on Ukrainian cities and on the battlefield.

Russia unleashed yet another massive aerial bombardment aimed at Ukrainian cities and towns before dawn on Monday, pressing its advantage as the United States increasingly removes itself from the conflict and diplomatic efforts to end it.

At least 355 Russian drones swarmed the skies across Ukraine and bombers unleashed nine missiles, Ukraine said. The attack followed criticism by President Trump of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom he accused on social media of going “absolutely CRAZY” in his bid to conquer Ukraine.

But Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One on Sunday, gave no indication that he is willing to provide Ukraine with military assistance. He also declined to answer questions about whether the attacks will lead to a change in policy.

Over the past week, Russia has directed at least 1,390 drones and 94 missiles at targets across Ukraine, the Ukrainian Air Force said. The attacks have killed at least 30 civilians and injured more than 163, Ukraine says.

The campaign comes a week after Mr. Trump spoke to Mr. Putin by telephone and appeared ready to abandon his efforts to secure a cease-fire.

New York Times, Analysis: Trump Delays Imposing 50 Percent Tariffs on E.U. Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson, May 26, 2025 (print ed.) President Trump said on Sunday that he would delay imposing 50 percent tariffs on all imports from the European Union until July 9 to allow more time for trade negotiations.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that he had spoken to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, about his recent threat to enact the tariffs on June 1 if a trade deal could not be reached in the next week.

Mr. Trump has expressed frustration over negotiations with the E.U., saying that the union has been slow to offer trade concessions during a 90-day window to reach a deal that satisfies the administration. But his threat to hit the union with a steep tariff raised the chances of an economically destabilizing trade war with one of the world’s largest economies.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump appeared to relent, at least for now.

“The Commission President said that talks will begin rapidly,” Mr. Trump wrote, referring to Ms. von der Leyen. The European Commission is the executive arm of the European Union.

Ms. von der Leyen, in a separate social media post on Sunday, said that she had a “good call” with Mr. Trump and had conveyed to him that the E.U. needed extra time to reach a trade deal. She said that talks would advance “swiftly and decisively.”

New York Times, News Analysis, For Trump, Civil Rights Protections Should Help White Men, Erica L. Green, May 26, 2025. Administration officials pick and choose which civil rights protections they want to enforce, and for whom.

In his drive to purge diversity efforts in the federal government and beyond, President Trump has expressed outright hostility to civil rights protections.

He ordered federal agencies to abandon some of the core tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the basis that they represented a “pernicious” attempt to make decisions based on diversity rather than merit.

But in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has turned to those same measures — not to help groups that have historically been discriminated against, but to remedy what he sees as the disenfranchisement of white men.

The pattern fits into a broader trend in the administration, as Trump officials pick and choose which civil rights protections they want to enforce, and for whom. Across the government, agencies that have historically worked to fight discrimination against Black people, women and other groups have pivoted to investigating institutions accused of favoring them.

“The plain message that they are conveying is: If you even think about, talk about or claim to be in favor of diversity, of equity, of inclusion, of accessibility, you will be targeted,” said Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“They’re conveying that white men are the most discriminated against people in American society,” she added, “and therefore entitled to affirmative action.”

s to undermine the rule of law and democracy.

 

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Why Corruption Always Breeds Tyranny: Lessons from Trump’s Second-Term Playbook, Thom Hartmann, right, May 26, 2025. The chilling similarities to past tyrants—and why America can’t look away anymore…

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” — George Orwell

It’s axiomatic that dictators are corrupt. But understanding the inevitable relationship between corruption and dictatorship — and how it flows in both directions — is essential to understanding the direction the Trump Crime Family is taking America.

First, it’s important to know that there’s no such thing as a dictator who’s not corrupt. Every dictator in world history, with the possible exception of Cincinnatus, has been massively corrupt.

To defy public opinion while skimming wealth out of the state’s coffers and public commons, national leaders must use the typical tools of dictatorship to intimidate good government advocates into silence: violence, threats, capture of police agencies and courts, intimidation of the press, cowing politicians, and prisons.

I’ve worked in and negotiated with governments in multiple countries where this was the plain reality: Uganda under Amin, Haiti, The Philippines under Marcos, Thailand during the military coup, Colombia, Peru, Russia, South Sudan, China in the 1980s, and a handful of others.

In every case the media was cowed, courts were run by sycophants loyal to Dear Leader, and the police were largely unaccountable to the people while kleptocrats shoveled fortunes into offshore banks and American or British real estate (we are only one of two developed countries in the world that allows anonymous shell companies to “invest” in real estate).

Less obvious, though, is how politicians in functioning democracies become dictators in order to protect their own corrupt attempts to profit off their leadership roles and loot the national purse.

Americans are particularly blind to this, as we’ve never had a president who publicly attempted to use his position of power to enrich himself (even Nixon had the good sense to try to hide the bribes he took from the milk lobby and Jimmy Hoffa).

Looking at how this works in other countries, however, reveals the pattern.

First, the democratically elected leader takes power, like Putin did in Russia and Orbán did in Hungary.

In the beginning, things seem relatively normal, although there’s an apparent zeal for “reforms” that seem questionable like replacing government functions with private contractors close to the leader, appointing incompetent but totally loyal toadies to run major essential agencies, and changes to election laws making it easier for wealthy people to buy elections and harder for democracy advocates to vote.

Those “reforms” are the early warnings that, if not stopped quickly, a dictatorship is being birthed.

Next come loud complaints about “fake news,” “enemies within the government,” and “activist judges”: This is the second major warning that the newly elected leader is trying to move the country toward authoritarianism.

Once the public is inured to these signals, the next step is for the leader to actively convert his position of political power into cash for himself, his family (inevitably: remember Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay?), and the oligarchs he’s brought into his circle of power.

He sells access to himself and the senior levels of his government using barely-legal schemes, bestows favors to corrupt foreign nations and their leaders in exchange for their enriching his family, and systematically replaces judges and agency heads with people whose first loyalty (and, often, financial interest) is to him personally rather than the nation or the rule of law.

This last point is key, and why virtually every senior official in every corrupt foreign government I’ve ever met or negotiated with wasn’t particularly bright and definitely wasn’t qualified to hold the position of power they did.

This is where we are now in America. Our:

— Secretary of Homeland Security doesn’t know what habeas corpus is,

— Secretary of State refuses to call Putin a war criminal (after demanding, years ago, that Rex Tillerson in that same position do so),

— Secretary of Education is a billionaire wrestling promoter,

— Lead negotiator with Putin about Ukraine is a real estate billionaire friend of Trump with no diplomatic experience,

— Secretary of Transportation is a reality TV star with no experience in that field,

— Secretary of Defense is a drunk and accused rapist who ran two tiny veterans’ organizations into the ground,

— Secretary of Health is a conspiracy-nut lawyer with no training in medicine,

— Social Security Commissioner is a former Wall Street executive who had to google his own new job description,

— EPA Administrator is a former congressman with deep connections to the fossil fuel industry,

— Secretary of the Interior was heavily invested in fossil fuels,

— US Attorney for New Jersey is a former parking garage lawyer, etc.

During his first term, Trump followed the advice of people entrenched in the federal bureaucracy and repeatedly appointed people with reasonable qualifications for their jobs. One after another, from Comey to Tillerson to Sessions and beyond, when they refused to swear personal loyalty to Trump or help him promote corrupt schemes he fired them.

This time, following what could be called the “Putin Rule,” Trump has put 13 of his billionaire buddies in his cabinet and stocked his seniormost roles in critical federal agencies with incompetent but reliably loyal bootlickers.

This illustrates how a wannabe dictator becomes a real dictator. If he’s committed to enriching himself at the public trough (as all dictators are), he really has no choice: he must crack down when his corruption and violations of law are called out.

This is how dictators are always created, at least every one in countries I’ve interacted with.

 

New York Times, Fetterman, Often Absent From Senate, Says He Has Been Shamed Into Returnin, Annie Karni, May 26, 2025 (print ed.). The first-term Pennsylvania Democrat, shown above in a file photo, said his openness about his mental health issues has been “weaponized” against him, prompting him to start showing up for votes and hearings he considers useless.

When Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, showed up at a hearing on May 8 with Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, his colleagues were surprised to see him. Until then, his chair on the dais of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee had sat empty all year.

But under intense scrutiny about his mental health and his ability to function in his job, Mr. Fetterman has been in damage control mode, attending hearings and votes that he had been routinely skipping over the past year. His colleagues, some of whom have privately described him as absent from the Senate and troubled when he is there, are trying to be supportive.

“Good thoughts, Senator Fetterman,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said encouragingly after Mr. Fetterman finished his turn questioning Mr. Altman.

Mr. Fetterman does not enjoy participating in these hearings that he has sat through in recent weeks as he seeks to prove that he is capable of performing the job he was elected to do until 2028. In fact, at a critical moment for the country, he appears to have little interest in the day-to-day work of serving in the United States Senate.

In an interview, Mr. Fetterman, who represents 13 million people, said he felt he had been unfairly shamed into fulfilling senatorial duties, such as participating in committee work and casting procedural votes on the floor, dismissing them as a “performative” waste of time.

Instead, he said he was “showing up because people in the media have weaponized” his absenteeism on Capitol Hill to portray him as mentally unfit, when in fact it is a product of a decision to spend more time at home and less on the mundane tasks of being a senator.

It is the latest chapter in Mr. Fetterman’s rocky time in the national political spotlight, where at the height of his popularity he harbored aspirations to run for president in 2028. Now, he is aggrieved that such a dream appears out of reach.

New York Times, Tech’s Trump Whisperer, Tim Cook, Goes Quiet as His Influence Fades, Tripp Mickle, May 26, 2025. Apple’s chief executive has gone from winning President Trump’s praise to drawing his ire, deepening the company’s woes in a very bad year.

In the run-up to President Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East, the White House encouraged chief executives and representatives of many U.S. companies to join him. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, declined, said two people familiar with the decision.

The choice appeared to irritate Mr. Trump. As he hopscotched from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Trump took a number of shots at Mr. Cook.

During his speech in Riyadh, Mr. Trump paused to praise Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, for traveling to the Middle East along with the White House delegation. Then he knocked Mr. Cook.

“I mean, Tim Cook isn’t here but you are,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Huang at an event attended by chief executives like Larry Fink of the asset manager BlackRock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Lisa Su of the semiconductor company AMD.

Later in Qatar, Mr. Trump said he “had a little problem with Tim Cook.” The president praised Apple’s investment in the United States, then said he had told Mr. Cook, “But now I hear you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India.”

On Friday morning, Mr. Trump caught much of his own administration and Apple’s leadership off guard with a social media post threatening tariffs of 25 percent on iPhones made anywhere except the United States. The post thrust Apple back into the administration’s cross hairs a little over a month after Mr. Cook had lobbied and won an exemption from a 145 percent tariff on iPhones assembled in China.

New York Times, Members Only: A New Trump Club, Ned’s Club and the Enduring Old Guard, Elisabeth Bumiller, May 26, 2025. In a Washington rived by political differences, four private clubs reflect the sorting of the city’s establishment into separate corners at a turbulent time.

President Trump’s White House crypto czar, David Sacks, says that Executive Branch, the upcoming Trump-aligned private club in Georgetown that costs as much as $500,000 to join, will be free of stuffy Washington insiders and any worry “that the next person over at the bar is a fake news reporter or even a lobbyist” who “we don’t know and we don’t trust.”

Gareth Banner, the director of the parent company of the sleek new Ned’s Club downtown, says his club members are a bipartisan “top 5 percent in their sector professionally," among them Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.

The old guard Metropolitan Club, whose past members include six American presidents, still has “Martini Fridays in the Library” and “Trap & Field News” in the club bulletin. The Cosmos Club, which encourages camaraderie among what it trumpets as “the greatest minds of our time,” displays photos of members who have won the Nobel Prize, among them the late Henry A. Kissinger.

In a 2025 Washington firebombed by political and ideological differences, all four clubs are growing, have wait lists or both. While they have varied levels of snobbery and exclusivity, Executive Branch is an outlier because of the price of its access to the White House and its enrichment of the Trump family.

But all four clubs reflect the sorting of the city’s establishment into separate corners at a turbulent time.

May 25

 

New York Times, Analysis: As Trumps Monetize Presidency, Profits Outstrip Protests, Peter Baker, May 25, 2025. President Trump and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant, normalizing activities that once would have provoked heavy blowback.

When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.

Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.

The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and is opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.

Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.

And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.

Lincoln Square Media, Legal Commentary: Can We Trust Courts to Stop Trump’s Lawlessness? Sam Bagenstos (Professor of  law and public policy, May 25, 2025. The harms that Trump is causing — to our people, our polity, our politics, and so much more — go well beyond any possible violations of law.

Just following the mass of litigation against the second Trump Administration can be a full-time job.

One leading tracker currently identifies 244 distinct cases filed against the administration. Many of these cases have been through multiple stages: temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, summary judgment motions, enforcement and contempt proceedings, and appeals (and requests for stays) at each stage — in a number of instances going all the way to the Supreme Court.

And Trump’s been back in office for a mere four months!

Even the past weeks have been dizzying. On May 16, the Supreme Court issued its latest ruling in A.A.R.P. v. Trump. (The letters “A.A.R.P.” here are the initials of the person who filed the lawsuit, not the well-known advocacy organization for older Americans.) The Court seemed to take a strong stand against Trump’s mass deportations. It issued an injunction preventing the deportation of immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act without due process, and it held that “notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.”

Yet on May 19 — the very next business day — the Court issued an order that had the effect of removing “Temporary Protected Status” from over 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants, thus clearing an obstacle to their deportation. As one leading immigration lawyer noted, “This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history. That the Supreme Court authorized it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking.” Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted her dissent.

And on May 22, the Court issued an order that all but overrules a 90-year-old precedent upholding statutes that protect the members of independent agencies from being fired at will by the President. The Court’s order aggressively supported Trump’s efforts to eliminate independent sources of authority within the government who might stand up to him.

Former General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden).

 

New York Times, Guest Essay: Why Is This Supreme Court Handing Trump More and More Power? Kate Shaw (law professor at the University of Pennsylvania), May 25, 2025. Since taking his second oath of office, President Trump has been on a firing spree. In violation of numerous laws or longstanding presidential practice (or both), he has ordered the removal of many high-level officials who normally retain their positions regardless of who is in the Oval Office.

Some of these high-level officials have successfully challenged their removal in the lower courts. But on Thursday, in a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority inside the executive branch.

The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the unsigned order noting concerns about the “disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.”

In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority.

Over the last four months, the legal world — and the country — has been plunged into chaos, and the Supreme Court bears a heavy dose of responsibility. Many of it decisions involving the presidency — including last year’s on presidential immunity — have enabled the president to declare himself above the law. The court’s latest order both enables the consolidation of additional power in the presidency and risks assimilating a “move fast and break things” ethos into constitutional law.

No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president’s ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But those recent decisions exist alongside another, older precedent, which until now has stood as a bulwark against any president’s ability to lay waste to independent agencies: the Supreme Court’s 1935 opinion in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. In that case, the court concluded that Congress could create expert agencies designed to enjoy a degree of independence from the president and could limit the president’s ability to fire at will the leaders of such agencies.

The court’s recent unitary executive cases, with their expansive vision of presidential control, haven’t formally overruled Humphrey’s Executor. In fact, they stated explicitly that they were not “revisit[ing] that case,” which involved an agency, the Federal Trade Commission, whose multi-member structure differed from the single-member leadership structure at issue in the court’s recent cases. To be sure, the logic of the recent cases cast considerable doubt on Humphrey’s Executor. But lower courts reviewing challenges to President Trump’s firings have concluded that those firings are unlawful under existing precedent, applying Humphrey’s Executor and leaving to the Supreme Court “the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.”

In the past four months, the lower courts have done more than other government entities to respond to the chaos emanating from the Trump administration. They have enforced constitutional guarantees, required compliance with statutes and insisted on the force of the decisions of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court, by contrast, has undermined lower courts seeking to protect the rule of law and emboldened an administration eager to trample it. You can see why White House lawyers could feel encouraged to advise Mr. Trump of the correctness of a claim he was once mocked for making: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The court may believe that it retains the ultimate authority to check presidential lawlessness, even as it signs off on the elimination of many other constraints on presidential power. The danger is that by the time the court actually tries to exercise that authority, it may be too late.

Kate Shaw is a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner.

New York Times, Trump Allies Look to Benefit From Pro Bono Promises by Elite Law Firms, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Matthew Goldstein, Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt, May 25, 2025. Veterans, in particular, are seeking free legal work from firms that cut deals with the White House like Skadden, Kirkland & Ellis and Paul Weiss.

President Trump has tossed around many ideas about how elite law firms can fulfill their commitments to provide free legal work for causes he supports, among them fighting antisemitism, negotiating coal leases, hammering out trade deals and defending police officers accused of misconduct.

Greta Van Susteren, the conservative media personality and lawyer, had her own idea of how one of those elite firms, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, could make good on the pro bono promises. She wanted the large law firm to help a friend of a friend sue a local Michigan judge.

So Ms. Van Susteren gave the head of Skadden’s pro bono practice a call about her friend’s friend, a 47-year-old veteran, who she said had been unfairly issued a protective order in his divorce proceeding that violated his civil rights.

Skadden, Ms. Van Susteren said, initially told her that it could not represent this person and later offered in an email to play “some sort of support role” in the case. The current Newsmax host, who formerly worked for Fox News, was not satisfied.

Ms. Van Susteren took to X, the social media site, to blast Skadden, calling it “disgraceful,” and tagged Mr. Trump.

“I was annoyed, ” Ms. Van Susteren said in an interview. “I wanted them to actually help this veteran.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration agreed to spare Skadden and eight other large law firms from executive orders that could have crippled their businesses in exchange for commitments from those firms to collectively provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal work and represent clients from all political points of view.

Now individuals and organizations allied with Mr. Trump are starting to request that the firms make good on the free legal work they committed to perform, according to 11 people briefed on the outreach, including some who requested anonymity to discuss internal law firm business.

New York Times, Russia Bombards Ukraine With One of Largest Air Assaults of the War, Constant Méheut, May 25, 2025. The overnight strikes, killing at least 12, further underscored how months of diplomacy aimed at brokering a cease-fire have failed to yield a breakthrough.

Russia targeted Ukraine overnight with one of its largest drone and missile barrages of the war, killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens in hourslong attacks on cities and villages across the country, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.

It was the second large-scale attack in two nights, part of a broader escalation by Russia in recent months that has brought a spike in civilian casualties despite cease-fire negotiations. Ukraine has also stepped up its own air attacks on Russian territory, though on a smaller scale and with far fewer civilian deaths.

The overnight strikes further underscored how months of diplomacy aimed at brokering a cease-fire have failed to yield a breakthrough as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has dragged his feet on agreeing to any temporary truce, adding conditions that he knows Ukraine will not accept. After threatening for weeks to walk away from the negotiations given a lack of progress, President Trump now appears to be doing exactly that, telling President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last week that Russia and Ukraine would have to find a solution to the war themselves.

Ukraine’s Air Force said on Sunday that Russia had launched 69 ballistic and cruise missiles along with 298 attack drones, adding that about two-thirds of the missiles and nearly all the drones were shot down. The Air Force spokesman, Yuriy Ihnat, said in an interview that it was the largest bombardment of the war in terms of the number of weapons used. Those numbers could not be independently verified.

MeidasTouch Network, Opinion: Bloomberg Just Gave US MIDDLE FINGER…I AM PISSED!! Ben Meiselas, May 25, 2025. I am pissed. I usually like the work of many Bloomberg writers, especially in the business and podcast space. But I just saw that one of their writers posted the most insane state regime propaganda for Trump, and I am livid!

A Bloomberg reporter whose beat is the environment and energy reported on Trump’s unhinged and barely coherent speech today before Army grads at West Point. She acted like Trump gave a normal speech and said Trump’s advice to the Army grads was “do what you love, think big, work hard and never give up…”

Here is her full post: Now, I watched that whole damn speech. I reported on it here.

It was unadulterated fascist insanity. He talked about “trophy wives,” lied about Obama and defamed him by claiming he gave hypersonic military secrets to Russia, said he doesn’t like stealth technology, and attacked the transgender community. Throughout the whole speech, Trump was wearing a red political campaign hat as well.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people?!!

If Biden or Obama said any of the stuff Trump said in this speech, there would be front-page articles calling for impeachment based on this speech alone!! We all know it.

I am just flabbergasted and aghast at the media impulse to take Trump’s sickening behavior and frame it through some normal lens while he tries to destroy our country and our free press. Are they auditioning for a job on Fox?!! Do they love his fascist, putrid scent?!!

May 24

 

The Hartmann Report Week In Review, Commentary: "An Orgy of Corruption," Thom Hartmann, right, May 24,2025. Trump creates another pump-and-dump opportunity for the billionaires in his cabinet and people close to him (including his kids).

It’s pretty well documented that just before many of Trump’s market-killing tariff announcements people around him take profits by dumping their stocks when the market’s at a high, then buy back in when it hits bottom, typically the day before he backs off and the market rebounds.

Yesterday, he did it again, this time threatening to impose a 50% tariff on goods exported from the European Union starting on June 1st. (Remember, he’s doing this entirely outside of the law and the Constitution itself, which gives the SOLE power to impose tariffs on Congress: he’s claiming “emergency” powers, but there hasn’t been an economic emergency in America since the last time he was president and he screwed up the response to Covid so badly that the market crashed worse than in 1929 and a half-million Americans died unnecessarily.)

It bears repeating: This is the most criminally corrupt administration in the history of America.

Well, so much for the lie that tax cuts for billionaires — including this $4 trillion one Republicans tried to pass in the dead of night — don’t do a damn thing for the economy other than running up the debt that we and our kids will have to pay off.

The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) is “a nonpartisan committee of the United States Congress, originally established under the Revenue Act of 1926. The Joint Committee operates with an experienced professional staff of Ph.D economists, attorneys, and accountants, who assist Members of the majority and minority parties in both houses of Congress on tax legislation.” The JCT just issued their detailed analysis of the GOP’s massive tax scam/gift-to-the-morbidly-rich and concluded that it’ll produce an increase in annual growth of 0.03%, an amount so small as to be meaningless. It will, however, ensure Republican politicians that the roughly 100 American billionaires who poured fully $2.6 billion into the 2024 election will show up in 2026 and 2028 to keep the gravy train rolling.

New York Times, Judge Orders Trump Officials to Seek Return of Guatemalan Man to U.S., Mattathias Schwartz, May 24, 2025. Judge Brian Murphy criticized the government for errors in the case and said the man, who feared persecution if he was deported, was likely to show “his removal lacked any semblance of due process.”

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration late Friday night to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan man who had been deported to Mexico, despite fearing persecution and having told U.S. authorities about the violence he had experienced there.

The man, known by the initials O.C.G., is gay and is now living in hiding in Guatemala, “in constant panic and constant fear,” according to a sworn declaration. “I can’t be gay here, which means I cannot be myself.”

The ruling, by Judge Brian E. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Boston, criticized the government for first claiming that O.C.G. had said he was not afraid of being sent to Mexico, where he said he was raped and held captive, but later admitting that it was “unable to identify” the officials to whom he had supposedly made that statement.

Judge Murphy also found that O.C.G. was likely to “succeed in showing that his removal lacked any semblance of due process.”

The decision added another flashpoint to the high-stakes battle over President Trump’s deportation policies playing out across the federal courts. A string of judges has faulted the administration for a lack of adequate due process or otherwise carrying out deportations in ways that exceed the president’s authority. Mr. Trump and his aides, in turn, have questioned the authority of courts to hear such cases and even called for the impeachment of judges who rule against them.

Perhaps the case closest to O.C.G.’s is that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a mistakenly deported Maryland man. It raises questions about the likelihood of O.C.G.’s return to the United States, despite Judge Murphy’s order. In both cases, a federal judge has instructed the Trump administration to correct its own admitted mistake and seek the men’s return. Mr. Abrego Garcia remains in a prison in El Salvador.

New York Times, Pivoting From Tax Cuts to Tariffs, Trump Ignores Economic Warning Signs, Tony Romm and Colby Smith, May 24, 2025. President Trump has fashioned himself as a shrewd steward of the economy, but his approach is rattling markets, businesses and consumers.

One day after House Republicans approved an expensive package of tax cuts that rattled financial markets, President Trump pivoted back to his other signature policy priority, unveiling a battery of tariff threats that further spooked investors and raised the prospects of higher prices on American consumers.

For a president who has fashioned himself as a shrewd steward of the economy, the decision to escalate his global trade war on Friday appeared curious and costly. It capped off a week that saw Mr. Trump ignore repeated warnings that his agenda could worsen the nation’s debt, harm many of his own voters, hurt the finances of low-income families and contribute far less in growth than the White House contends.

The tepid market response to the president’s economic policy approach did little to sway Mr. Trump, who chose on Friday to revive the uncertainty that has kept businesses and consumers on edge. The president threatened 50 percent tariffs on the European Union, and a 25 percent tariff on Apple. Other tech companies, he said, could face the same rate.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has raced to enact his economic vision, aiming to pair generous tax cuts with sweeping deregulation that he says will expand America’s economy. He has fashioned his steep, worldwide tariffs as a political cudgel that will raise money, encourage more domestic manufacturing and improve U.S. trade relationships.

But for many of his signature policies to succeed, Mr. Trump will have to prove investors wrong, particularly those who lend money to the government by buying its debt.

New York Times, Trump Gives Commencement Address at West Point, Stressing a New Era, Erica L. Green, May 24, 2025. The president said the graduating cadets would enter a service no longer subject to “absurd ideological experiments” or “nation-building crusades.”

President Trump told cadets in a commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Saturday that they were the first graduates to serve in a “golden age” of the nation that was a result of his efforts to rebuild the military and reshape American society.

Gone are the “nation-building crusades” in countries that “wanted nothing to do with us” and leadership that subjected servicemembers to “absurd ideological experiments here and at home,” Mr. Trump told the group of about 1,000 cadets.

Wearing his red “Make America Great Again” hat, Mr. Trump leaned into his aggressive agenda to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the government, military and virtually every facet of American life to make the pitch that the nation is worth fighting for again. He drew applause from guests at times, such as when he discussed the issue of transgender athletes playing in female sports and hiring on merit over diversity.

At the outset of his second term, he issued a spate of executive orders targeting programs and policies that have helped address systemic racism, which he deemed divisive and unpatriotic.

He claimed that his predecessors had “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars.”

“All of that’s ended. It’s ended strongly,” he said. ”They’re not even allowed to think about it anymore.”

Mr. Trump’s crusade against diversity has been particularly pronounced in the military, where there has been an aggressive erasure of the valor of Black, female and other groups, down to eliminating and obscuring content honoring those buried at Arlington National Cemetery.Image

CNN, Colleges are canceling affinity graduations due to anti-DEI policies, Nicquel Terry Ellis, May 24, 2025. Here is how students are preserving the traditions.

Harvard is among several universities across the country that have canceled affinity graduations amid threats from President Donald Trump to block medical research funding and revoke accreditation from schools that don’t end diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Trump decries these programs as “illegal and immoral discrimination.”

Affinity graduations are optional events typically led by students to celebrate different student identities and ethnicities. Commonly held ceremonies often honor Black, Hispanic, Asian, first-generation and LGBTQ+ students. Students say the events are significant because they honor the music, apparel, food, history, language and traditions unique to their identity.

May 23

New York Times, Trump Seeks Extensive Student Data in Pressure Campaign to Control Harvard, Michael C. Bender, May 23, 2025. Harvard and the federal government are locked in a battle that boils down to turning over records on international students. But Harvard says it is also about the First Amendment.

The latest confrontation between Harvard University and the Trump administration began last month with a far-reaching demand for data on international students.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, sent a letter to Harvard requesting, among other things, coursework for every international student and information on any student visa holder involved in misconduct or illegal activity.

Harvard rebuffed parts of the request, and the Trump administration retaliated on Thursday. In one of its most aggressive moves so far against the university, the government said Harvard could no longer enroll any international students, who account for about one-fourth of its total enrollment.

It also expanded its request for records to include any videos of international students, on campus or off, involved in protests or illegal or dangerous activity.

The conflict has only further raised the stakes over the future of America’s oldest and most powerful university.

The administration’s attempt to vacuum up vast amounts of private student data opens a new front in Mr. Trump’s crackdown on dissent from his political agenda. The strategy is aimed at realigning a higher education system the president sees as hostile to conservatives by stamping out what it says is antisemitism on campus and the transgender and diversity policies it says are rooted in “woke” ideology.

Harvard counters that it has provided all the data that is legally required and that the administration’s unrelenting pressure campaign — including the termination of billions in federal research grants — amounts to an attempted takeover of the institution, bullying the university into changing what it can teach and whom it can hire.

Harvard said the government’s latest action “is the culmination of an unprecedented and retaliatory attack” on the school’s freedom of speech.

New York Times, Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Bar International Students at Harvard, Stephanie Saul, May 23, 2025. Harvard sued and asked for a restraining order less than 24 hours after the Trump administration had said it would block current and future international students from attending the university.

Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious.

Later Friday morning, at the university’s request, a federal judge in Boston moved swiftly to block implementation of the federal government’s order.

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order against the federal edict, agreeing that Harvard had shown that its implementation would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to the university.

The administration action, and Harvard’s response, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.

In a letter to the Harvard community delivered Friday morning, Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote, “We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” adding that it “imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”

The lawsuit, which accused the Trump administration of a “campaign of retribution” against the university followed an announcement on Thursday that Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, halting the university’s ability to enroll international students.

The lawsuit was the second time in a matter of weeks the university had sued the federal government.

In the new lawsuit, the university accused the Trump administration of exerting “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission,” the lawsuit said. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”

The administration said Harvard had not complied with a list of demands sent on April 16 that contained records of protest activity dating back five years, including videotapes of misconduct and records of disciplinary actions involving international students.

Harvard’s lawsuit also said that the university had been working to comply with the April 16 request, along with a letter attacking the university for failure to condemn antisemitism.

• New York Times, Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Revoking Student Visas, Chris Cameron, May 23, 2025 (print ed.). Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California provided temporary relief to some international students while a legal battle continues.

The Bulwark, Opinion: An Unprecedented Assault on American Greatness, William Kristol, right, May 23, 2025. If the Trump administration’s sudden assault on thousands of foreign students legally studying at Harvard seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.

If the abrupt abrogation of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans legally living and working in the United States seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.

If the sudden arrests and deportations of law-abiding immigrants checking in as ordered at government offices seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the deportations of other immigrants without anything like due process and basically in defiance of court orders to prisons in third countries seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.

And if it all seems utterly stupid and terribly cruel and amazingly damaging to this country, it’s because it is.

 

New York Times, Hundreds Join Trump at ‘Exclusive’ Dinner, Dreaming of Crypto Fortunes, David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton, May 23, 2025 (print ed.). The guests were the biggest investors in President Trump’s memecoin. They were greeted with chants of “shame” as they arrived at his Virginia golf club.

President Trump gathered Thursday evening at his Virginia golf club with the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, promising that he would promote the crypto industry from the White House as protesters outside condemned the event as a historic corruption of the presidency.

The gala dinner held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington, where Mr. Trump flew from the White House on a military helicopter, turned into an extraordinary spectacle as hundreds of guests arrived, many having flown to the United States from overseas.

At the club’s entrance, the guests were greeted by dozens of protesters chanting “shame, shame, shame.”

It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J. Trump. Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.

“The past administration made your lives miserable,” Mr. Trump told the dinner guests, referring to the Biden administration’s enforcement actions against crypto companies.

New York Times, Who Won a Seat at Trump’s Crypto Dinner? David A. Fahrenthold, Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Elena Shao and Dylan Freedman, May 23, 2025. The New York Times reviewed a guest list and social media posts to identify who was invited to President Trump’s private event for customers of his cryptocurrency business on Thursday and a White House tour on Friday. Here are some of them.

New York Times, Crypto Investor Charged With Kidnapping and Torturing Man for Weeks, Maia Coleman and Chelsia Rose Marcius, May 24, 2025. The investor, 37-year-old John Woeltz, and another man abused their victim for three weeks in a Manhattan townhouse as they tried to get his Bitcoin password, prosecutors say.

A 37-year-old cryptocurrency investor was charged on Saturday with kidnapping a man and beating, shocking and torturing him for weeks inside a luxury townhouse in downtown Manhattan, all in a scheme to get the man’s Bitcoin password, the authorities said.

The crypto investor, John Woeltz, was taken into custody on Friday after the man managed to escape the townhouse and notify the police. Mr. Woeltz was arraigned on Saturday morning in Manhattan criminal court and charged with assault, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and criminal possession of a gun. He was ordered held without bail and forced to surrender his passport, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.

Another person, Beatrice Folchi, was also arrested on Friday and charged with kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, though her connection to Mr. Woeltz was not immediately clear. A third person, identified only as an “unapprehended male,” was also mentioned as a participant in the abuse during Mr. Woeltz’s arraignment.

Wayne Ervin Gosnell Jr., Mr. Woeltz’s lawyer, declined to comment on Saturday.

Many details of the violent, weekslong episode remained murky on Saturday, including how Mr. Woeltz and the man knew each other and what had brought them to New York City.

But on Friday just after 9:30 a.m., the man, a 28-year-old from Italy, ran out of the townhouse in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan and toward a traffic agent nearby, according to a law enforcement official.

The man, whose name has not been publicly released by the authorities, told the police that he had arrived in the city from Italy on May 6 and had gone to the townhouse. Mr. Woeltz, who is originally from Kentucky, had been renting the eight-bedroom home for at least $30,000 a month, the official said.

But when he arrived at the house, Mr. Woeltz and the “unapprehended male” stole his electronic devices and his passport and demanded that he tell Mr. Woeltz his Bitcoin password so they could steal his cryptocurrency, according to a criminal complaint against Mr. Woeltz.

When the victim refused, the two men took him captive and subjected him to weeks of torture, which included beating him, shocking him with electric wires, hitting him with a gun and pointing the gun at his head. At one point, Mr. Woeltz and his accomplice carried the man to the top of the stairs in the five-story home, suspended him over the ledge and threatened to kill him if he did not give Mr. Woeltz his password, the complaint says.

The episode in the upscale Manhattan neighborhood comes on the heels of two other imprisonment cases that have shaken the New York region this spring. Last week, prosecutors in southern New Jersey charged a couple with imprisoning an 18-year-old girl for seven years and locking her in a dog cage. In April, a 32-year-old man who had been held captive in a room by his father and stepmother escaped after setting fire to their home.

Mr. Woeltz’s arrest also follows a spate of jarring attacks against high-ranking crypto executives in the United States and elsewhere in which the victims and their families have been kidnapped or violently assaulted for ransom.

New York Times, Trump Administration Updates: Trump Turns Back to His Trade War, Threatening Europe and Apple, Staff Reports, May 23, 2025.

Trump tariffs: President Trump threatened to escalate his trade war, warning on Friday that he would impose 50 percent tariffs on products from the European Union because talks on a trade deal with the bloc “are going nowhere.” He also criticized Apple, telling its chief executive, Tim Cook, in a social media post that iPhones, which are manufactured outside the United States, would face a 25 percent tariff.

South Africa: Assertions that Mr. Trump made in his meeting earlier this week with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, aimed to support claims that white farmers there were victims of genocide. But several of Mr. Trump’s assertions were false or misleading. In one instance, a photo he said showed white victims being buried was taken in Congo, according to Reuters, the news organization where the image originated.

New York Times, Harvard Sues Trump Administration Over Move to Bar International Students, Stephanie Saul, May 23, 2025. Less than 24 hours earlier, the Trump administration had said it would block current and future international students from attending the university.

Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious.

The administration action, and Harvard’s response, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.

In a letter to the Harvard community delivered Friday morning, Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote, “We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” adding that it “imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”

New York Times, Campus Crackdown: How Can the Government Stop Harvard From Enrolling International Students? Miriam Jordan, May 23, 2025 (print ed.). The Trump administration is relying on an obscure bureaucratic lever to stop the school, the latest in a series of aggressive moves.

The government has enormous power over who comes into the United States, and who doesn’t. For college and universities, the Department of Homeland Security has a vast system just to manage and track the enrollment of the hundreds of thousands of international students studying across the country at any given time. But a school needs government certification to use this database, known as SEVIS, for the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. And this vulnerability is what the Trump administration is exploiting against Harvard.

 

President Trump and China's leader Xi Jinping at a 2019 meeting.

New York Times, In Attacks on Harvard, Chinese See Yet Another Reason to Write Off the U.S., Vivian Wang, May 23, 2025Beyond the shock for students, President Trump’s moves against higher education are being seen in China as a blow to one of the last admirable American institutions.

If the Trump administration succeeds in blocking Harvard from enrolling international students, the hardest-hit group would be students from China, who make up the school’s biggest share of current students from overseas.

The consequences are likely to extend far beyond those select few who could gain entry to the prestigious university. The move could reshape the broader relationship between the two countries by cutting off one of the few remaining reasons that people in China still admire the United States.

The flow of students from China to the United States has long been one of the most reliable ballasts in the two countries’ relationship, despite growing geopolitical tensions and China’s superpower ambitions. China until recently was by far the biggest source of international students to the United States, sending hundreds of thousands of people each year. Even as other symbols of the United States — Hollywood, for example, or iPhones — lost their cachet for many Chinese, American universities remained a source of aspiration, even veneration.

Elite universities like Harvard played a particularly important role in that admiration. In recent years, even student exchanges have started to suffer from the two countries’ frosty ties, as many have worried about anti-Chinese discrimination, difficulty securing visas or crime. But schools like Harvard were an exception: They remained as attractive as ever to Chinese students, who were willing to overlook other concerns for the promise of a best-in-the-world education.

Talking Feds via Substack, Opinion: Not normal, but very real, Harry Litman, right, law professor and former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, May 23, 2025. The Administration’s evisceration of norms of justice is now producing grave injustice in individual cases.

Veterans of the Department of Justice, including me, did our best to sound the alarm bell as the Trump/Bondi regime made clear its plans to do away with the professional norms that have guided prosecutorial behavior for generations.

It was a tricky argument. For the vast majority of people who haven’t served in the Department or internalized its virtually hallowed set of operating principles, the panicked cry that “the norms are falling” could be hard to appreciate. It sounds abstract and lawyerly.

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But now we are seeing the ground-level results of that demolition, driven by Bondi, Habba, and others. It is enabling the pursuit of cases against political opponents that no DOJ in at least the last 50 years would have touched, while masking the irregularity and unfairness from the American people.

1. The McIver Charges

Take the recent charges against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, left. The incident in question took place on May 9, but the real story begins earlier, on March 27, when newly appointed interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba proclaimed: "We could turn New Jersey red... hopefully, while I'm there, I can help that cause."

For a U.S. Attorney to openly declare her goal of using her office to shift political power is staggering. It’s the precise opposite of her sworn duty to pursue justice without fear or favor—like a doctor swearing to "first do harm."

That statement alone would disqualify her in any prior administration, or at minimum prompt a severe rebuke from the Deputy Attorney General. Here, it’s simply business as usual in a department whose leader, Pam Bondi, has redefined DOJ's mission as serving Trump rather than the Constitution and the law.

Habba (reminiscent of Ed Martin Jr., Trump’s initial choice for D.C. U.S. Attorney) has zero prosecutorial experience, which stands her in poor stead for exercising professional judgment in her new role. Moreover, she has a woeful record of unethical behavior as a lawyer, particularly in her representations of Trump. In the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, the judge repeatedly reprimanded her for improper conduct, at one point warning her, “You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockup.” She was sanctioned nearly $1,000,000 by a federal judge in Florida for filing a baseless lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. The judge called it “completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and… brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.”

Now to the incident in question. The alleged "assault" McIver committed involved her interfering with federal officers attempting to arrest the Mayor of Newark for trespassing. The charges against the mayor were later dropped, and DOJ issued a statement about doing it “for the sake of moving forward” that fooled no one. In reality, Habba had overreached and probably blundered as well: the attorneys for the mayor were about to bring a motion saying that the trespass actually didn't occur on federal land.

Moreover, the arrest was tawdry and nasty: agents handcuffed the mayor and detained him for four hours. In any professional DOJ, he would have received a summons. He posed no flight risk. This was not about law enforcement—it was about humiliating a Democratic official.

The case against McIver appears dubious. Her lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, called the charge "spectacularly inappropriate." Available evidence suggests the ICE agents lost control during the mayor’s arrest, leading to a general scrum. Afterward, McIver was given a facility tour with the agents—an odd treatment for someone supposedly posing a threat.

There's also a likely legal claim, if and when the case goes to trial, that her conduct doesn't qualify as "forcibly" within the meaning of the assault statute. The Third Circuit (which sits above the District of New Jersey) has held that the law “requires an ability to inflict harm, not merely interference with the performance of a duty… Section 111 is not meant to sweep in all harassment of Government officials.”

Finally, there’s the glaring irony of the prosecution of a congresswoman for pretty mild physical contact with a customs official by the same administration that trivialized far graver physical assaults on federal officers on January 6 by genuine thugs whom they later lionized as heroes.

Gareth Gore via Substack, Investigation: Pulling back the curtain on Opus Dei, Gareth Gore, May 23, 2025 It didn't take long for me to realise that Opus Dei’s public façade – that it was completely transparent and had nothing to hide – was a false oneGareth Gore

My contact with Opus Dei began in July 2022, when I flew to Madrid to conduct some research and interviews for my book. At that stage, I was mostly interested in the story of Luis Valls-Taberner, a former banker and numerary member of Opus Dei who had used – or abused, depending on your perspective – his position as chairman of Banco Popular, one of Spain’s largest banks, to syphon off hundreds of millions of euros to directly benefit the religious movement and bankroll its expansion around the world. That – and his wider life story – seemed like a fascinating tale.

Luis had passed away in 2006. But I managed to track down his younger brother Javier (see photo below - Luis is on the left and Javier on the right), who worked alongside him at the bank for forty years. He had some choice words about some senior Opus Dei members in Spain, who he accused of manipulating his brother’s illness and death to wrest control of the bank. He warned me not to trust any of them. So, when I met with these men to ask them about such accusations, I was on my guard. But my suspicions soon seemed misplaced. The men seemed amiable, forthcoming – and delighted that a foreign journalist was taking an interest in Don Luis.

But one thing struck me as odd. Almost every conversation would begin the same way: with the member of Opus Dei explaining how everyone within the organization acted with complete freedom and that anything that any of them did – whether that be in business, politics, or more generally – was of their own initiative and nothing to do with Opus Dei. After the fourth or fifth rendition of this spiel, I began to wonder whether they had been told what to say. The weird thing was that they would each offer up this statement unprompted, before I had asked any real questions.

I returned to London and made contact with Jack Valero, an official spokesperson for Opus Dei – and one of the “local directors” charged with overseeing its network of members in the UK. He would be my point of contact for the next two years. We arranged to meet at Opus Dei’s UK headquarters in Notting Hill, one of the city’s most expensive neighbourhoods. I couldn’t help but smile to myself as Valero – completely unprompted – began our conversation with the very same spiel about how everyone within the organization acted with complete freedom. Not again, I thought.

The meeting went well. It was clear that Valero was highly suspicious of me – and especially of my interest in Opus Dei. I surmised, from his questions, that he had been asked by his superiors in Rome to check me out. Still, like his colleagues in Madrid, he seemed happy to answer my questions – and agreed to forward my request to access Opus Dei’s archives, which are closed to outsiders. In the street, as we said our goodbyes, I asked about the building next door where a huge multi-million-pound construction project was underway. “Oh, that’s got nothing to do with us,” he responded glibly.

It was only after getting home that I realised I had been misled. I pulled up the land registry records and discovered that the building next door was, in fact, owned by Opus Dei – only by the women’s section and not the men’s. Valero had answered a very specific interpretation of my question. The building next door had nothing to do with “us” – if “us” meant the men’s section. But clearly that hadn’t been my meaning: I was asking whether it had anything to do with Opus Dei. Why mislead me over this minor detail? Was there anything else about what he told me I needed to question?

Our interactions became more frequent as the months went on. Valero offered to help arrange some meetings for me when I travelled to the US, to show how “transparent” Opus Dei was – and how it had nothing to hide. It soon backfired. Several prominent members, including the group’s most high-profile priest in Washington, a man close to many powerful Republicans, refused to meet me. He didn’t “trust” me, Valero explained. Why did a priest need to trust me just in order to agree to a meeting? Opus Dei schools also refused my requests to visit. So much for transparency.

A few months later, I announced that I was travelling to Argentina. I wanted to meet with a group of women (pictured below) there who alleged that they had been coerced into joining Opus Dei as young girls and then basically forced to work as slaves – for fourteen hours a day and completely without pay. Their case had triggered a federal investigation into human trafficking and labour abuses (investigators later formally accused Opus Dei of these crimes). Valero responded by announcing he had been asked by his boss to accompany me. “He does not want a repeat of what happened in the USA, which was embarrassing, to say the least,” he explained.

I didn’t need a chaperone and already had several interviews lined up. But I told Valero that, if he really wanted to help, then he could arrange for me to visit the residence at the centre of the scandal. Dozens of women still lived and worked there as “numerary assistants” – effectively as domestic servants. Opus Dei said these women were happy and that their lives bore no relation to the allegations made by former residents. There was also a clear link back to Luis Valls-Taberner: money from Banco Popular had paid for the residence. Let me visit and see it for myself, I said.

For the first five days of my trip to Argentina, I went about my own business. I also met Valero for coffee and reminded him of my request. On the sixth day, I brought it up again. He told me he was working on it. The next day, I received an email saying the women at the residence had considered my request but had turned it down – that the decision was theirs. I was offered a meeting with two selected numerary assistants at the Opus Dei press office. When I turned up and asked them about their decision not to allow me in, both of them looked at each other puzzled. Had I been played?

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At Ezeiza Airport the next day, as Valero and I awaited our fourteen-hour flight back to London (it was just coincidence that we were on the same flight) I vented my frustration with being unable to visit the residence. I had travelled halfway across the world to hear the testimonies of not just the women who were alleging abuses, but also to see – with my own eyes – what life was really like for numerary assistants today. I also vented my frustration that the Opus Dei “information office” refused to provide me with a complete list of its schools and youth programmes. Valero had little to say.

It was starting to become clear to me that Opus Dei’s public façade – that it was completely transparent and had nothing to hide – was a false one. A year into dealing with the organisation, it was blatantly obvious that, every time I asked a difficult question or requested some specific information or wanted to speak to anyone involved in anything controversial, then Opus Dei would throw some obstacle in my way. After giving the organisation the benefit of the doubt, it was clear I would now need to question everything they told me – and everything it did.

I’ll write more about that next time. You can also read more in my book.

 

New York Times, Under President Trump, a Mainstay for Small Businesses Clamps Down, Lydia DePillis, May 23, 2025. At the Small Business Administration, staffing cuts and stricter loan terms are making it harder for entrepreneurs to get access to capital and assistance.

For entrepreneurs who want a loan, a government contract or just some advice, the Small Business Administration is generally a first stop. But over the past few months, getting the agency’s help has become more difficult.

Under its administrator, Kelly Loeffler, right, a corporate executive turned senator from Georgia and vocal supporter of President Trump, the agency has aggressively cut staff. It is rolling back changes made during the Biden administration aimed at easing access to credit for the smallest enterprises, and has lowered targets for how much the federal government should buy from them.

The changes are especially problematic for Black, Hispanic and immigrant entrepreneurs. In the name of eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion practices, the Small Business Administration is shedding programs aimed at helping disadvantaged businesses, including those run by women.

While banks that administer the S.B.A.’s major loan programs have welcomed some of the changes, Democrats and small-business advocates have decried them — especially as the agency is also supposed to inherit a $1.66 trillion student loan portfolio from the largely dismantled Education Department.

“It’s unconscionable that the Trump administration would treat such a vital agency so callously,” said Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. 

Letters from an American, May 22, 2025 [U.S. House Budget MegaBill], Heather Cox Richardson, right, May 23, 2025. Just before 7:00 this morning, the House of Representatives passed the Republicans’ megabill by a vote of 215 to 214. All Democrats voted no. Two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, joined the Democrats in voting no. Chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present.” The measure now advances to the Senate.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the bill cuts at least $715 billion in healthcare spending, mostly from Medicaid, and $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, causing more than 2.7 million American households to lose benefits. Because the massive debt increase in the measure triggers a 2010 law requiring offsets, it will cut Medicare, as well, by an estimated $500 billion.

Economist Robert Reich points out that Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 will lose about $700 a year. On average, Americans with incomes of less than $17,000 will lose more than $1,000 a year. But if you are among the top 0.1% of earners, you’re in luck: you’ll gain nearly $390,000 a year.

The measure roughly doubles the current annual budgets of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in what Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes is “the single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States.” It increases ICE’s detention budget from $3.4 billion a year to $45 billion through September 2029, a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis that would permit ICE to detain at least 100,000 people at a time.

It increases ICE’s budget for transportation and removal operations by 500%, from the current $721 million to $14.4 billion. It also calls for $46.5 billion for construction of barriers at the border, including completing 701 miles of wall, 900 miles of river barriers, and 629 miles of secondary barriers, and replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers.” It calls for $45 billion for adult and family detention, enough to detain at least 100,000 people at a time.

This bill highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people.

By driving white fear of a darker-skinned other, elite southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement.

 

South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa (Reuters photo).

In an extraordinary meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office yesterday, President Donald J. Trump echoed the language of enslavers in 1859 almost explicitly when he insisted—falsely—that white South Africans are facing white genocide. As Tim Cocks and Nellie Peyton of Reuters explain, the conspiracy theory of white genocide in South Africa has circulated among fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It claims white deaths in a country with a high murder rate are deliberate ethnic cleansing, although data collected by white farmers themselves shows that since 1990, murders of white people make up only 1% of the total number of murders.

But Trump sidekick Elon Musk has embraced the theory, and Trump is pushing it, offering a fast track for asylum to white South African “refugees.” Yesterday, with Musk in the Oval Office, Trump showed to the cameras a picture of people moving body bags, and said “[t]hese are all white farmers that are being buried.” In fact, it was a picture from Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, showing humanitarian workers burying bodies in a war zone.

The administration's immigration policies exacerbate racism, using it to undermine the rule of law on which the Constitution rests. Notably, the administration has ignored the concept of due process guaranteed by the Constitution, with rendition of migrants to prison in El Salvador based not on a review of their cases but simply on the claim—without evidence—that individuals are gang members.

Stories of immigrants arrested by ICE without any criminal history continue to surface, even as administration officials insist those individuals are dangerous criminals. Fewer than half of those swept up outside of Nashville last week had criminal records, although U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin called them “violent criminal illegal aliens” and attacked Nashville’s Democratic mayor Freddie O’Connell as being “pro-open borders.”

OpEdNews, Advocacy: Calling All Youth to Save Our Vote--Time Is Not on Our Side! Marta Steele, May 23, 2025. At the Grassroots Election Protection (GREEP) zoom yesterday (May 19), Greg Palast joined other key election protection activists to discuss Election 2026 and how to combat the GOP's project to once again disenfranchise millions of likely Democratic voters.

Palast predicts 5 million illegal voter purges this year. In 2024 in Georgia hundreds of thousands of votes were purged and this year Georgia's secretary of state announced that .5 million voters will be purged in anticipation of Election 2026.

Palast's film Vigilantes Inc., which is still streaming on YouTube for free (visit gregpalast.com), was used as compelling evidence in the lawsuit Fair Fight v. True the Vote, but the film was ruled inadmissible and the suit was thrown out. It is now under appeal, with little press coverage. Previous legal action by Palast resulted in hundreds of thousands of voters being added back to the rolls in Georgia.

Replacing burning crosses and lynchings, methods of corrupting voter registration rolls, caging, and many other devices ushered in James Crow Esq. to replace Jim Crow years ago. A new blockade is called voter challenging. Initiated in Georgia by True the Vote, it allows anyone to challenge a registered voter's right to vote-- requiring the victim to prove that they're a US citizen and live at the address reported on the relevant registration record. This involves an in-person visit to official locations with proof, which may consist of a birth certificate or passport, both of which a sizable percentage of voters lack for many reasons, poverty prominent among them.

Voter challenging has spread all over the country from Georgia. Often voters don't even know they've been challenged until Election Day, when it's too late for them to do anything but go home in disgust, disenfranchised.

One challenged voter, Major Gamaliel Turner, who stars in Vigilantes Inc., was present at yesterday's zoom. He told us that, while stationed in California, he never received an absentee ballot to vote in his home state, Georgia, and found out after inquiring three days before Election Day that he had been challenged. With the help of election integrity attorney and activist Marc Elias of Washington state, he flew back to Georgia, where he had lived for at least thirty years and voted most recently in six out os seven elections, to prove his "legitimacy."

(Major Turner's father worked with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC] in 1957.)

Turner, now retired, said that when Vigilantes Inc. had its debut screening in Hollywood, it played to a packed house but that he was the youngest person there. To move forward, we need young people to continue the fight. He noted that most of us present at the zoom were of the two oldest generations. "Once were are gone," he said, "our democracy will be lost. Voting shouldn't be an issue. We're too great of a nation.... We must get youth involved."

Ray McClendon, former Political Action Chair of Georgia's NAACP and a frequent, highly respected presence at the Grassroots Election Protection zoom, said that the law is on the side of the Vigilantes and that election boards within the state are "adopting tactics to help [them] and make it difficult for residents [read: people of color and college students] to reject voter challenges." But county boards of election are more sympathetic and may even provide lists of those who are challenged.

It is imperative to reach "low-information voters," those unaware of possible challenges, and make sure all people in the targeted categories check and check again, on official websites, that they are registered and act quickly if they've been challenged. Many of those victimized don't live near official election centers, which are purposely situated inconveniently far from their neighborhoods, and hours open are limited, requiring time off from work, which many can't afford.

Donald Whitehead, Executive Director of the National Commission for the Homeless, who spearheads the "You Don't Need a Home to Vote" campaign, warned that an even worse development is the new constituency of the Department of Justice, where the civil rights division has been decimated and lawsuits relevant to election corruption consequently eliminated. We must mobilize and organize now, because the right candidates are running.

Meidas Touch Network, Advocacy: We Need YOUR HELP Meidas Mighty!! Ben Meiselas, May 23, 2025. The fight against the Trump regime is about to kick into a higher gear.

A few things are happening right now. I believe Trump is looking for an excuse to trigger martial law, and he will try to suspend habeas corpus soon. Trump is sending the FBI and Secret Service to harass and intimidate his opposition. Trump is coming after independent media. The disaster budget bill is going to cause societal unrest, and the peaceful protests are going to start getting massive this summer.

I’ve always believed there would be a democracy summer. The streets of America are about to look like the scenes we’ve seen before in mass peaceful mobilizations in foreign countries against authoritarian regimes.

Peaceful protests are key.

Trump will react the way authoritarian regimes do, and he will send his militias and insurrectionists and others against American citizens.

That’s where I believe we are headed.

Trump and MAGA will get wiped out in the midterm elections—if we have them. They don’t want midterms. They don’t want elections.

We must understand that the threat to free and fair elections is not hypothetical, but is already here right now.

The Trump budget bill is a murder bill.

It sets the foundation to turn America into Russia. It inflicts mass suffering by ripping away healthcare and killing people. It makes the purchase of weapons like silencers and suppressors easier. It tries to stop federal courts from issuing contempt rulings by making contempt unlawful. It steals from the poor and gives their money to the oligarchs. Project 2025 is Project Putin.

 

Billboard Magazine, Dan Storper, CEO & Co-Founder of Putumayo World Music, Dies at 74, Isabela Raygoza, May 23, 2025. The globetrotting entrepreneur (shown above) marked 30 years of his groundbreaking label in 2023.

Dan Storper, the co-founder and CEO of Putumayo World Music, died on Thursday (May 22) at 74, just two days after his birthday. Sources confirm that he passed peacefully at home in New Orleans, surrounded by family, after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jacob Edgar, founder of the label Cumbancha and Storper’s longtime friend and colleague, shared a heartfelt statement with Billboard Español: “Just three days ago, I posted birthday wishes to Dan Storper, the founder of Putumayo World Music and my colleague and friend for nearly 30 years. I knew then that Dan was in his last days, but I couldn’t imagine a world without him. He passed away yesterday after a battle with pancreatic cancer.”

Edgar, who began working with Storper in 1998 after being offered what he called “the dream job no one could dare dream of,” described the late visionary as “an exceptional human,” he wrote. “Funny, energetic, passionate, micromanaging, and compulsive. A workaholic to the extreme. He could drive you crazy, but you loved him anyway because his heart was in the right place, and he was a good soul.”

In 2023, the globetrotting entrepreneur marked 30 years of his groundbreaking label.

But Storper’s journey with Putumayo began long before the label existed. Originally launched in the 1970s in New York as a store selling handcrafted goods and musical finds from his travels in Latin America, Africa, India, and beyond, the shop gradually shifted its focus to music. By 1993, it had transformed into Putumayo World Music, a record label dedicated to curating global sounds for a wider audience, co-founding it with Michael Kraus.

The label became an international success, celebrated for its uplifting and culturally diverse compilations. Known for its signature brightly illustrated album covers and expertly sequenced playlists, Putumayo invited listeners to embark on musical journeys across continents, introducing many to the rhythms, traditions, and languages of faraway lands. Storper’s leadership helped bridge cultural divides through the universal language of music.

May 22

 

 

New York Times, Trump Administration Halts Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International Students, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender, May 22, 2025. The move was a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the college to fall in line with President Trump’s demands.

The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

The administration notified Harvard about the decision after a back-and-forth in recent days over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The latest move is likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to another person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” according to a letter sent to the university by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

About 6,800 international students attended Harvard this year, or roughly 27 percent of the student body, according to university enrollment data. That was up from 19.7 percent in 2010.

The move is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line. Tuition at Harvard is $59,320 for the school year that begins later this year, and costs can rise to nearly $87,000 when room and board are included. International students tend to pay larger shares of education costs compared with other students.

A spokesman Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ms. Noem posted the letter on social media later on Thursday.

In a news release confirming the administration’s move, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”

 

New York Times, Shock at Harvard After Government Says International Students Must Go, Jenna Russell and Miles J. Herszenhorn, May 22, 2025. Fear and confusion mounted quickly on Thursday as international students, who make up more than a quarter of the university’s enrollment, sought clarity or reassurance.

Just before the Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would bar international students from Harvard, staff members from the university’s International Office met with graduating seniors at the Kennedy School of Government, congratulating them on their degrees — and on surviving the chaos of recent months.

Then, within minutes of the meeting’s end, news alerts lit up the students’ phones. Chaos was breaking out again: Kristi Noem, right, the homeland security secretary, had notified Harvard that its permission to enroll international students was revoked. With that, the degrees and futures of thousands of Harvard students — and an integral piece of the university’s identity and culture — were plunged into deep uncertainty.

“There are so many students from all over the world who came to Harvard to make it a better place and to change America and change their home countries for the better,” said Karl Molden, a student from Vienna who had just completed his sophomore year. “Now it’s all at risk of falling apart, which is breaking my heart.”

The university has faced rapid-fire aggressions since its president, Alan M. Garber, told the Trump administration in April that Harvard would not give in to demands to change its hiring and admissions practices and its curriculum. After the government froze more than $2 billion in grants, Harvard filed suit in federal court in Boston. Since then, the administration has gutted the university’s research funding, upending budgets and forcing some hard-hit programs to reimagine their scope and mission.

Graduate programs would be hit especially hard. At the Kennedy School, 59 percent of students come from outside the United States. International students make up 40 percent of the enrollment at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and 35 percent at the Harvard Business School.

Because international students do not qualify for federal financial aid, and typically pay more for their education, they contribute disproportionately to the university’s revenue, in addition to bringing diverse perspectives that enrich campus life and classroom discussions.

“This will destroy the university as we know it,” said Kirsten Weld, a professor who specializes in Latin American history and the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “Harvard is situated in the United States physically, but its students and faculty hail from all over the world. That is fundamental to the work and mission of the institution. You cannot take that away and have an institution left at the end of it.”

Fear and confusion spread quickly on Thursday as international students flooded group message boards with anxious questions and refreshed their email inboxes.

 

Democracy Docket, Federal judge stops Trump from dissolving Education Department, Staff Report, May 22, 2025. A federal judge today blocked President Donald Trump’s plan to shut down the U.S. Department of Education. Trump’s executive order aimed to strip away critical services for students across the country while bypassing Congress.

The decision not only restores employment for over 1,300 federal workers but also halts Trump’s order from taking further effect, in a major check on Trump’s executive power.

In other legal news: When Trump withdrew Ed Martin Jr. 's nomination for U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. this month, he instead appointed Martin to multiple roles in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — including the head of the nascent “weaponization working group” and an associate deputy attorney general.

Some former DOJ attorneys are concerned Martin, an extremist who continues to question the 2020 election results and has defended January 6 rioters, will use his post to target Trump’s political enemies, spread disinformation and delegitimize future elections. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

Roll Call, Sweeping budget package passes House after weeks of arm-twisting, David Lerman and Caitlin Reilly, May 22, 2025. Last-minute lobbying by Trump, key changes to text woo enough rebellious conservatives.

House Republicans passed their “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill early Thursday morning, sending to the Senate a filibuster-proof package that would deliver the major elements of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, from tax cuts and border security to lifting the nation’s borrowing limit.

The 215-214 vote capped weeks of grueling negotiations behind the scenes between House leaders and warring factions of the Republican conference. While moderates in high-tax states sought additional tax relief, hardcore conservatives sought deeper cuts to federal spending, particularly on Medicaid, and a faster repeal on clean energy tax credits they dubbed the “green new scam.”

A 42-page manager’s amendment, released just hours before the final vote, gave both factions enough of what they wanted to turn undecided and dissenting lawmakers into supporters of the bill. While more than a dozen Republicans had threatened to vote down the bill in recent weeks, almost all agreed to support the final version of the sweeping package.

“Some good, some bad,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, right, one of the ringleaders among rebellious conservatives, said of the manager’s amendment before the vote. “We got some good cuts, but it just still blows a lot of deficits in the first few years.”

Roy helped secure a last-minute fix that would provide $12 billion to reimburse states like his for border security costs, even as he was unsuccessful in cutting funds to states that expanded Medicaid and currently receive a 90 percent federal match for covering adults without disabilities. He ultimately voted for the measure.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., had been leading opposition to the previous draft all day Wednesday, but ultimately was swayed by some in-person face time with Trump at the White House, the manager’s amendment and some unspecified promises of further executive action to rein in costs.

“I mean, now it might just be what the executive can do to, again, move the ball down the court, especially on making sure that we don’t have further Medicaid expansion that is honestly bankrupting my country,” Harris said before the vote. He ended up voting “present.”

No Democrats supported the measure, while two Republicans opposed it: Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio.

Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., who didn’t like last-minute changes in the manager’s amendment that would speed up the expiration of tax incentives for clean energy projects, sat out the vote. Big win for Trump, Johnson

Spanning more than 1,000 pages, the legislation would make permanent the 2017 tax cuts, provide new tax breaks such as exempting tips from taxes, slash federal spending by at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years, pump an extra $300 billion into defense and border security, and raise the nation’s $36.1 trillion borrowing limit by at least $4 trillion.

The vote marked the biggest political victory yet for Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., right, who has struggled to unite his razor-thin GOP majority since winning the speaker’s gavel in 2023. A defeat would have been seen as a major blow to his leadership after promising for weeks to pass the bill through the House before Memorial Day.

“Sometimes it’s good to be underestimated,” Johnson told his colleagues before the final vote. “What we are achieving here today is nothing short of historic.”

The vote was also a victory for Trump, who expended some political capital through public and private cajoling — and a visit to the Capitol Tuesday — to rally Republicans around what could be the most important legislation of his second term.

So much of his agenda was wrapped up in what he called his “one big, beautiful bill”: new and extended tax cuts, a more robust military, tougher border security measures and a downsizing of government through major spending cuts.

But for all the progress, the fate of the bill is hardly secure. The measure now goes to the Senate, where Republicans have already made clear they intend to give it a rewrite. Senate GOP tax writers have suggested they are eyeing more generous tax breaks, while party moderates in that chamber have expressed concern about the size of Medicaid cuts.Campaign fodder for Democrats

Democrats in both chambers, meanwhile, excoriated the bill as a fiscal boondoggle that would explode the debt and reward billionaires with more tax breaks while cutting off health insurance to millions of needy Americans.

They forced a 20-hour session debating the bill and amendments in the House Rules Committee, in a meeting that started at 1 a.m. Wednesday. Upon moving to the floor shortly thereafter, Democrats forced procedural votes using maneuvers allowed under federal budget law.

Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., joked that the GOP wanted to debate the bill during “prime time in Guam” so voters wouldn’t watch.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office offered a preliminary estimate that the measure would add about $2.3 trillion to deficits over 10 years, though it was incomplete and didn’t account for added interest payments on that extra debt.

“They’re patching it together in an effort to get through tonight. There’s nothing more to it than that. It’s chicanery. This has never added up,” said Massachusetts Rep. Richard E. Neal, the top Democrat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. “It’s an abomination.”Trump Administration

New York Times, Bond Market Shudders as Tax Bill Deepens Deficit Worries, Colby Smith and Joe Rennison, May 22, 2025. Financial markets are looking for more “fiscal discipline” from Washington, a top official at the Federal Reserve warned.

The bedrock of the global financial system continued to shudder on Thursday, as President Trump’s bill to extend expensive tax cuts and create new ones without significantly slashing spending passed through the House of Representatives. The bill has unnerved investors, deepening worries that the country’s debt is becoming unmanageable.

Yields on U.S. government bonds, which underpin consumer and business interest rates around the world, from mortgages to corporate loans, have been rising in recent weeks. Yields rise as prices fall, and the higher the yields, the more risk investors perceive in to lending to the government.

The 30-year Treasury yield on Wednesday rose as high as 5.15 percent in early trading, its highest since October 2023, before easing back later in the morning. The 30-year yield is trading about 0.7 percentage points higher than its low in April — a huge move in such a short time in that market.

Christopher J. Waller, an influential governor at the Federal Reserve, said on Thursday that financial markets are looking for more “fiscal discipline” from Washington, warning that investors will likely continue to demand higher yields in order to hold U.S. assets.

“We ran $2 trillion deficits the last few years. This is just not sustainable, and so the markets are looking for a little more fiscal discipline,” he said in an interview with Fox Business. “They’re concerned.”

Pro Publica: Investigation: More Than a Dozen U.S. Officials Sold Stocks Before Trump’s Tariffs Sent the Market Plunging, Robert Faturechi, Pratheek Rebala and Brandon Roberts, May 22, 2025. Records show well-timed trades by executive branch employees and congressional aides. Even if they had no insider information, ethics experts say such trading undermines faith in government and the markets.

The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.

Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.

And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.

More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

Using nonpublic information learned at work to trade securities could violate the law. But even if such actions aren’t influenced by insider knowledge, ethics experts warn that trading stock while the federal government’s actions move markets can create the appearance of impropriety. The recent trades by government officials, they said, underscore that there should be tighter rules on how, or if, federal employees can trade securities.

“The executive branch is routinely engaged in activities that will move the market,” said Tyler Gellasch, who, as a congressional aide, helped write the law on insider trading by government officials and now runs a nonprofit focused on transparency and ethics in capital markets. “I don’t think members of Congress and executive branch officials should be trading securities. To the extent they have investment holdings, it should be managed by someone else outside their purview. The temptation to put their own personal self-interest ahead of their duties to the country is just too high.”

There is no evidence that the trades by government officials identified by ProPublica were informed by nonpublic information. Still, when government officials trade stock at opportune times, Gellasch said, even if it was based on luck and not inside information, it undermines trust in government and the markets

“It then becomes a thing where our markets look rigged,” he said.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the officials who made the trades either said they had no insider information that would help them time their decisions or did not respond to questions about the transactions.

Questions about trades based on nonpublic information have swirled around Congress for years and began anew after Trump’s tariffs announcements led to wild swings in the market. Lawmakers’ trades are automatically posted online and, after multiple congressional stock-trading scandals, are widely scrutinized as soon as they become public.

But less attention is paid to the trades of executive branch employees and congressional aides whose work could give them access to confidential information likely to influence markets once made public.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. After the market closed that day, Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs, sending the market reeling. Bondi’s ethics agreement required her to sell by early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. She has yet to answer questions about the trades, and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, sold shares in almost three dozen companies on Feb. 11, two days before Trump announced plans to institute wide-ranging “reciprocal” tariffs. A Transportation Department spokesperson said Duffy’s account manager made the trades and that Duffy had no input on the timing.

Using insider government information to buy or sell securities could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.

Thousands of government employees are required to file disclosure forms if they sell or buy securities worth more than $1,000. In many cases, the records are available only in person in Washington, D.C., or through a records request. The documents do not include exact amounts bought or sold but instead provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

ProPublica examined hundreds of records for trades shortly before major tariff announcements or other key government decisions. Trump, of course, repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he intended to institute dramatic tariffs on foreign imports. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume that his campaign promises were bluster. Several tariff announcements by Trump early on shook the markets, but it wasn’t until he detailed his new tariffs on April 2 that stocks dived.

Steady, Political Commentary: Shameful, Dan Rather, May 22, 2025. Johnson pushes Trump’s policy bill through the House. We often find ourselves looking for ways to explain — or more aptly, rationalize — the behavior of our political leadership. After so many years of witnessing the same terrible treatment of the poor, the natural conclusion is that it is Trump being Trump — and his unquenchable thirst for power and money. But it’s more nuanced than that. New York Times columnist David Brooks had a thoughtful take on the supposedly conservative president:

“And when I look at the Trump administration, I see a massive attempt to return us to the life of dog eat dog, life of nasty, brutish, and short, where gangsters have maximum freedom to do what they want to do,” Brooks said on a podcast with Scott Galloway.

“And that is the evisceration of all the values of civilization that conservatism is supposed to transmit and preserve. And I think the raw lust for power that Donald Trump embodies has not only eviscerated conservatism, it’s eviscerated Christianity. Christianity is a system designed around the meek and service to the poor. Jesus never embraced worldly power; Donald Trump is completely about worldly power — for him it’s about domination.”

And so it’s always about getting his way — with everything, no matter the consequences to others. Despite Republicans’ best efforts to spin it, Trump and the Republican House just dealt a devastating blow to America’s poor.

At dawn on Thursday, the House narrowly passed a budget bill, 215 to 214, that strips away hundreds of billions of dollars in health care and food assistance to those who need it most. It is difficult to overstate the negative impact of this legislation, especially on women and children. The bill now goes to the Republican-controlled Senate, where it will likely face some changes. But the basic spirit, tone, and substance of it figure to remain what Trump demanded and got from the House.

 

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa listens as President Trump presents false claims of systematic genocide of whites in South Africa during a White House meeting on May 21, 2025.

New York Times, News Analysis: South Africa Collides Head-On With Trump’s Claims of White Victimhood, John Eligon, May 22, 2025. In a bruising Oval Office meeting, the visitors’ plan to keep President Trump from focusing on false accusations of white genocide backfired spectacularly.

For President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, the meeting in the Oval Office was meant to be a chance to hit the reset button.

He did everything to get the mood right. He got President Trump to giggle with a joke about golf. He offered him a book. And he kept the compliments flowing, thanking Mr. Trump for providing South Africa with respirators during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It really touched my heart,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.

In the build up to Mr. Ramaphosa’s meeting in the White House on Wednesday, South African officials stressed that they would not focus on Mr. Trump’s recent claims of white genocide, which are widely acknowledged as false. Instead they would talk about tariffs, South Africa’s valuable minerals and strengthening business ties between the two countries.

But Mr. Ramaphosa walked away from the meeting bruised and still carrying uncertainty over the future of his country’s crucial relationship with the United States. His effort to avoid the discussion of the so-called genocide and the recent arrival of 59 white South Africans labeled refugees by the Trump administration appeared to backfire spectacularly.

Now, South Africa finds itself with more work to do to avert steep tariffs, secure a new trade agreement and set the record straight on Mr. Trump’s continued accusations of racism against white people, who on the whole are much better off economically than the Black majority in South Africa.

“Today’s performance, if it does not lead to meaningful reconciliation, will only create more downward pressure on poor South Africans who struggle,” said Patrick Gaspard, the former United States ambassador to South Africa.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in South Afr1news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site

News.com Australia, ‘Terrified’: Ex-cop jailed and deported during holiday to US, Ella McIlveen, May 22, 2025. A former NSW Police officer has recalled the horrific moment she was jailed and deported while visiting her husband in the US.

A former NSW police officer has described the terrifying ordeal she faced after she was detained, jailed overnight and deported from the United States – despite travelling there legally on a tourist visa to visit her US military husband.

Nikki Saroukos from south-west Sydney says she was “treated like a criminal”, denied her rights and subjected to invasive searches, humiliating treatment and a night in federal prison – simply for trying to spend time with her American partner stationed in Hawaii.

Now back in Australia and still reeling from the trauma, Nikki and her mother are demanding answers – and warning others how easily international travel can turn into a nightmare.

Mrs Saroukos has visited Hawaii three times in recent months under the ESTA visa waiver program to see her husband, a US Army lieutenant she married in December 2024 after a whirlwind long-distance romance. The couple met through a dating app and quickly knew they wanted to be together.Nikki and her mother (pictured left) were expecting a three week holiday to Honolulu. Picture: SuppliedNikki and her mother (pictured left) were expecting a three week holiday to Honolulu. Picture: Supplied

He joined the army in 2022 and has been serving as a US Army lieutenant on the Pacific island and US state since August 2023.

“He’s serving their country,” Mrs Saroukos told news.com.au in an emotional interview.

“We sacrificed so much to make this work. To be mocked and detained like that – it’s appalling.”

Nikki and her mother arrived to Daniel K Inouye International Airport in Honolulu last Sunday for what was supposed to be a routine three-week holiday when things took a sharp and unexpected turn at the customs desk.

“The officer began to look troubled at his computer to which my mum offered to provide more information,” she explained.

“From there he screamed – “Shut up and get to the back of the line, go now” – at the top of his lungs.Nikki was departing on her fourth trip to visit her US Army husband. Picture: SuppliedNikki was departing on her fourth trip to visit her US Army husband. Picture: Supplied

“My fight or flight immediately kicked in. I’d seen horror stories about this stuff. I just bawled on the spot,” Nikki recalled.

“We were in such a vulnerable position. We didn’t know their rules well and he was obviously carrying a gun.”

Nikki, who lives with with anxiety and PTSD, and her mother were then taken to a holding area for questioning where she offered contact with her husband and to show her marriage certificate – to which they laughed in her face.

The pair were told, “Don’t say anything, don’t talk and don’t touch your phones,” by officers before their bags were tossed out and inspected along with their documents.

“I didn’t hide anything,” she said.

New York Times, Kennedy and Trump Describe U.S. Children as ‘Sickest Generation,’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Dani Blum, May 22, 2025. President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a report blaming a crisis of chronic illness on ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures and more.

The White House set forth its vision on Thursday for how to “make America healthy again” with the release of an expansive report that blames a crisis of chronic disease in children on ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures, lack of physical activity, stress and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants.

The report is the product of a presidential commission led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and does not offer specific policy prescriptions. Rather, it offers up carefully selected studies and proposes new research. But it is unmistakably Mr. Kennedy’s worldview, echoing many of the talking points — some intensely disputed — that the health secretary, a former environmental lawyer and outspoken vaccine skeptic, has repeated for decades.

The commission paints a bleak picture of American children, calling them “the sickest generation in American history.” It calls out undue corporate influence in federal policymaking, and makes the case that the government has invested far too much in research to develop treatments for chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, obesity and depression — and far too little in understanding the causes of disease and how to prevent it.

In some cases, the report misrepresents existing scientific consensus. It implies, for example, that the increase in routine immunizations given to children may be harmful to them, which many scientists say is based on an incorrect understanding of immunology. It calls for further scientific inquiry “into the links between vaccines and chronic disease,” despite dozens of studies that have failed to find a link.

It also assails “the overmedicalization of American children,” which it blames on pharmaceutical industry “capture” of the nation’s biomedical apparatus — including medical journals that publish the results of scientific studies — and “a critical policy failure where corporate profitability supersedes the health of children.”

New York Times, Live Updates: Shooting of Israeli Embassy Employees Shakes Washington, Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, Chris Cameron and Qasim Nauman, May 22, 2025. The shooting occurred on a street outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.

Several F.B.I. agents in tactical gear entered a Chicago apartment building on Thursday morning where a man suspected of fatally shooting two Israeli Embassy staff members is believed to live.

The close-range shooting occurred shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday in Washington, D.C., on a street outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The area is the heart of official Washington, packed with federal buildings, embassies and museums.

Yaron Lischinsky, 30, who grew up in Israel and Germany, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, who was from Kansas, were killed in the attack.

The suspect, identified as Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago, was detained shortly after the shooting. Pamela A. Smith, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, told reporters at a news conference late Wednesday that Mr. Rodriguez exclaimed, “Free, free Palestine,” after he was in custody.

 

New York Times, Divided Supreme Court Rejects Bid for Religious Charter School in Oklahoma, Abbie VanSickle, May 22, 2025. In a 4-to-4 decision, the court upheld a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that blocked the school.Listen to this article · 2:51 min Learn more

A divided Supreme Court rejected a plan on Thursday to allow Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school, which would teach a curriculum infused by Catholic doctrine.

The court split 4 to 4 over the Oklahoma plan, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, and the decision provided no reasoning.

That deadlock means that an earlier ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court will be allowed to stand. The state court blocked a proposal for the Oklahoma school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which was to be operated by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, and aimed to incorporate Catholic teachings into every aspect of its activities.

Because there was no majority in the case, the court’s decision sets no nationwide precedent on the larger question of whether the First Amendment permits states to sponsor and finance religious charter schools, which are public schools with substantial autonomy.

 

AlterNet via Raw Story, 'Gonna look kind of bad': ABC News head told 'The View' hosts to tone down Trump criticism, Carl Gibson, May 22, 2025. ABC News head told 'The View' hosts to tone down Trump criticism.

Hosts for one of the most-watched daytime news shows were recently asked to back off from criticizing President Donald Trump, according to a new report.

The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that both ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic and Disney CEO Bob Iger communicated to the hosts of "The View" that their political coverage should be toned down in favor of softer, more celebrity-focused segments. The Beast cited unnamed sources who confided that the hosts didn't take kindly to the suggestion, with co-host Ana Navarro pointing out that a major sector of their audience watches them for political analysis.

The source emphasized that the request to talk less about the Trump administration was not an "edict" and that the hosts still had free rein to decide what topics to discuss for each episode. But the show's on-air talent still reportedly bristled at the suggestion.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

"This is what our audience wants," one of the hosts reportedly said during the exchange with executives. "Isn’t it gonna look kind of bad if we’re all of a sudden not talking about politics?

"The View" co-host Ana Navarro reportedly had a private conversation with Iger in which she thanked the Disney CEO for allowing them editorial control. And while Iger communicated that he still supported the show and the hosts, he echoed Karamehmedovic's wishes that the show's five hosts tone down their Trump criticism.

The Beast's source said that the suggestion from network executives to focus less on political topics was "based on viewer feedback," but the outlet noted that "The View" was the #1 daytime news show for the first quarter of 2025, beating out its top competitor shows on Fox News and NBC.

ABC — which is owned by Disney — settled a defamation lawsuit that Trump filed against the network last year, agreeing to pay him $15 million (along with an additional $1 million for legal expenses) with Trump arguing that ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos defamed him when saying that Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll. Technically, the verdict was for sexual abuse rather than rape, though U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case, later clarified that in terms of the public's understanding, the two were the same.

 

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Reform Advocacy: Everything You Need to Know About Tonight's Memecoin Dinner, Staff Report, May 22, 2025. Tonight, Donald Trump is hosting a dinner with the top holders of the $TRUMP memecoin, including a private reception and White House tour.Here is everything you need to know about this unprecedented example of pay-to-play politics:

First off, memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke and are known for not having any value beyond speculation. Before Trump launched his own memecoin, he was a skeptic, saying the value is “based on thin air.” Evidently he was persuaded by the opportunity to profit, and launched $TRUMP days before his inauguration. The value skyrocketed and then quickly plummeted, causing investors to lose billions.

The project is run by a Trump Organization affiliate called Fight Fight Fight, which owns 80% of the coins. That means the Trump family benefits from increases in the memecoin’s price—as well profiting directly from trading fees.

In April, Trump announced the memecoin dinner at his club for the top 220 owners of $TRUMP and a private reception at the White House. More than 50,000 wallets purchased the coin in response, pushing its market cap to $2.7 billion at its peak. The scheme has been exceptionally lucrative for the Trump family, who’s made a total of $312 million in trading fees on the coin, and at least $3 million since the dinner was announced.

The top $TRUMP holders are anonymously being tracked, though as a nod at the significant national security risks at play, attendees must pass a background check and not come from a watchlist country. However, this stipulation is certainly not enough to resolve growing concerns over the national security implications and ethical violations of the dinner.

Reporting has revealed that most attendees of the events are likely foreign, with all but SIX of the top 25 holders and at least 56% of the leaderboard’s top 220 holders using foreign exchanges not available to Americans. Under federal law, foreign investors are barred from donating to a political campaign or a president’s inaugural fund, but there are no such restrictions on meme coins. Trump found a HUGE LOOPHOLE for any foreign interest looking to curry favor or gain influence with the administration.

The Trump family is directly profiting off the memecoin and allowing buyers to purchase access to the President in the process. For weeks, CREW has been commenting on the memecoin scheme to spread awareness on how blatantly corrupt the dinner is. You can read more in our MSNBC op-ed. Our warnings are accompanied by criticism from both sides of the aisle in Congress.

And yet, tonight, Trump is selling access to the American presidency. This isn’t just unethical—it’s dangerous.

 

Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times Sunday insert contains 10 AI-generated fake books in summer reading list, Robert Channick, May 21, 2025 (print ed.). A special section inserted into the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times featured page upon page of fun summer activities, including a list of 15 books to bring along while lounging by the pool or relaxing in a favorite reading spot.

The only problem: The authors are real, but most of the books don’t exist. Artificial intelligence, employed by a Chicago freelance writer, simply made them up.

Readers looking to fill their carts with titles such as “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende, “The Collector’s Piece” by Taylor Jenkins Reid or “Hurricane Season” by Brit Bennett were likely disappointed to find the elaborate plot summaries were themselves fictionalized.

Several news reports and a wave of social media backlash to the fake books followed, creating an early summer storm for the Sun-Times, which released a statement Tuesday.

“We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak,” the Sun-Times said. “This is licensed content that was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom, but it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate. We value our readers’ trust in our reporting and take this very seriously.”

The 64-page full-color Sunday insert, “Heat Index,” is a summer entertainment guide featuring stories about everything from outdoor cooking and camping tips to “8 unforgettable summer drives across America.”

The summer reading list contains 10 fictional fiction titles, including “The Rainmakers” by Percival Everett, described as a near-future story set in the American West where “artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity,” leading a “precipitation broker” to question the ethics of his profession.

Another fake book, “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir, is described as the latest science fiction thriller from the author of “The Martian” that “follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness — and has been secretly influencing global events for years.”

In a “Matrix”-like paradox, artificial intelligence played a key role in putting together the fake book list.

Veteran Chicago freelancer Marco Buscaglia, who wrote the entire “Heat Index” section for King Features, a syndicated newspaper content producer owned by Hearst, said he used AI to compile the summer reading list. He then made the mistake of trusting it to be accurate.

“I just straight up missed it,” Buscaglia, 57, told the Tribune on Tuesday. “I can’t blame anybody else.”

Buscaglia, who also contributes articles to the Sunday Careers section produced by Tribune Content Agency, among other publications, said he writes four seasonal sections for King Features each year. He put together the summer feature in February.

Unable to find early summer reading lists from Amazon or other sources, he said he turned to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, which churned out 15 potential blockbusters written by well-known authors. Buscaglia submitted the list without his byline, but unfortunately, the robot contributors made up most of the book selections.

“It obviously completely backfired,” Buscaglia said. “They must have had a hard time finding new books, too. So they just made them up.”

Beyond the fake plot summaries, the summer reading list did contain five actual books, including “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury and “Call Me By Your Name” by André Aciman.

While Buscaglia used AI to help gather material for other stories in the special section, he said he does not know if they contain similar errors.

A King Features spokesperson issued a statement Wednesday denouncing the use of AI in the piece and severing ties with Buscaglia.

“King Features has a strict policy with our staff, cartoonists, columnists, and freelance writers against the use of AI to create content,” the spokesperson said. “The Heat Index summer supplement was created by a freelance content creator who used AI in its story development without disclosing the use of AI. We are terminating our relationship with this individual.”

The fallout in Chicago media circles, however, is growing.

In March, more of than one-fifth of the staff at the Sun-Times, including some prominent journalists, took a buyout ahead of potential layoffs in a sweeping cost-cutting initiative by its nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media.

May 21

New York Times, House G.O.P. Races to Revamp Major Policy Bill, Grasping for Votes to Pass It, Michael Gold, May 21, 2025. A key committee met after midnight on Wednesday and worked through dawn as Republican leaders finalized changes aimed at winning over holdouts in hopes of bringing the bill to the floor in short order.

House Republican leaders labored on Wednesday to win over holdouts for their sweeping domestic policy bill to deliver President Trump’s agenda, slogging through a marathon overnight committee session to prepare the measure for a floor vote.

The powerful Rules Committee began meeting after midnight on Wednesday morning and continued debating the measure as morning broke, while Republicans worked behind the scenes to hammer out enough concessions to cobble together the votes in their fractious ranks to push it through the House.

But as the session dragged into its eighth hour, they had yet to release any new language and the panel had yet to vote to send the legislation to the floor.

Any changes to what Mr. Trump calls the “big, beautiful bill,” would spring from extensive negotiations between Speaker Mike Johnson, right, and Republicans from disparate factions who have so far refused to back the legislation.

“We’re meeting in the dead of night to consider a terrible bill, and you haven’t even drafted or shared some of the most critical parts of the bill,” Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said at 2:40 a.m.

Should the bill advance from the committee to the House floor, it could receive a vote as early as Wednesday. But as the panel’s work stretched on, it was not clear when Republicans would be able to call it up, and its prospects on the floor were far from assured.

 

The Hartmann Report, Investigative Commentary: The Biggest Political Con of the Last Century Unmasked, Thom Hartmann, right, May 21, 2025. Why the destruction of public institutions, the middle class, and government itself may not be a mistake — but the mission.

Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week:

“If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.”

Trump’s administration just said you can’t get the Covid vaccine unless you’re over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease. As Noah Berlatsky notes in his great Substack newsletter:

“This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump has also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.“

But why? What the hell is going on here?

Almost two-thirds of us Americans can’t afford the basic necessities of life, according to a new report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported by CBS News. Income for the bottom 60% of Americans, for example, actually declined by 4% in the years 2001 to 2023 while costs — particularly for healthcare, housing, food, and education (college tuition, for example, is up 122% since 2001) — have exploded.

Before the pandemic, half of all homes on the market were affordable to a family earning $75,000 a year; today it’s only one out of five houses that such a family could afford to purchase.

The initial result of this post-Reagan Revolution economy was to kneecap the middle class and working class; now Republicans are using the same strategy they employed to destroy our middle class to dismantle our nation’s government and its core functions to leave us vulnerable to the predation of foreign nations, vulture capitalists, and the morbidly rich.

And nobody’s sure why.

The history of how we got here is shocking. And the place it’s taking us — gutting government functions while handing our role in the world over to China and Russia — is downright scandalous.

At first, it was simply a political strategy to claim the mantle of Santa Claus from the Democrats by “gifting” America with tax breaks. Then it became a program to force Dems to kill off their own social programs by driving up the national debt. And now it’s being used to disassemble the American government itself, abandoning what’s left of the middle class while handing America’s dominant role in the world to China and Russia.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Economic Analysis: A Liz Truss Moment for America? Paul Krugman, right, May 21, 2025. Despite hitting a few speed bumps, Congress seems likely to pass Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” — legislation that combines big tax cuts for the rich with vicious cuts in social programs — within a few days.

This momentous move will take place with almost no public discussion; the final hearing of the House Rules Committee began at 1 AM this morning. That’s right, 1 AM. We’re clearly watching a bum’s rush, an attempt to ram this atrocity through before the public understands what’s happening.

I have already focused on the bill’s cruelty. It’s also deeply irresponsible, undermining America’s hard-won reputation as a country that honors its obligations. The cuts to Medicaid and food stamps won’t come close to offsetting the revenue loss from the tax cuts for the rich. Neither will revenue from tariffs. And can we all now acknowledge that DOGE’s promise to eliminate hundreds of billions in “waste, fraud and abuse” hasn’t just failed? It has ended up being a complete waste of time, which it has tried to conceal with fraudulent claims of achievement, all while abusing dedicated civil servants and driving them out of government in ways that will impoverish America in the long run — and maybe not that long. We’re a world leader in education, science and technology that is systematically destroying the very basis of our success.

So we’re looking at a large increase in an already high budget deficit when we’re already at full employment, interest rates are already at multiyear highs, and future growth prospects are declining.

Financial markets normally cut wealthy nations with stable governments a lot of slack, with reason. Rich, well governed countries have immense ability to raise revenues if needed, especially if, like the United States, you collect a smaller percentage of GDP in taxes than almost any other advanced economy: In other words, until now markets have believed that the U.S. has the resources to deal with its deficit whenever it musters the political will. And bond buyers have been willing to assume that we are a serious country that will eventually get its fiscal house in order.

But markets’ patience with American dysfunction isn’t unlimited. Consider how quickly things went wrong for the UK. In 2022 Liz Truss,Britain’s Prime Minister, announced a “mini-budget” that involved cutting taxes and blowing up the budget deficit. Markets freaked out: long-term interest rates soared and the pound plunged. The tabloid The Daily Star famously set up a webcam showing a photo of Truss next to a head of iceberg lettuce wearing a wig, and asked which would last longer.

The lettuce won, because Britain’s parliamentary system allowed it to get rid of a disastrous leader. We, unfortunately, can’t.

So are we facing a Liz Truss moment in America? Long-term interest rates are close to their highest level in many years:

The dollar, which rose after Trump’s election, has now fallen sharply:

These market movements, especially in combination, are disturbing and at least hints that something like a Truss moment may be looming. We saw a whiff of that after Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs;

 

South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa (Reuters photo).

New York Times, Trump Lectures South African President in Televised Oval Office Ambush, Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, May 21, 2025. Sitting alongside South Africa’s president, President Trump showed a video and waved printouts of what he said was evidence of racial persecution of white South Africans.

In an astonishing ambush, President Trump dimmed the lights in the Oval Office on Wednesday during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and showed what he said was video evidence of racial persecution of white South Africans.

The meeting started with pleasantries and discussions about golf and foreign policy, with the leaders at first seeming to glide over the issue of the fringe narrative that Mr. Trump has amplified, claiming that there was a genocide of white South Africans.

But the meeting took a turn when a journalist asked a what it would take for Mr. Trump to change his mind that there was no “white genocide” in South Africa.

Mr. Ramaphosa said that “it will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.”

The clash in the Oval Office centered on Mr. Trump’s insistence on false claims of land seizures and mass killings of white Afrikaners, members of a white ethnic minority group who ruled during the country’s apartheid era.

During the event, Mr. Trump largely dismissed Mr. Ramaphosa’s attempt to describe the situation in his own country.

Instead, Mr. Trump had at the ready a packet of printed articles that he said demonstrated the “thousands” of stories of racial persecution in the country, and cued up a video to make his case.

At least one of the scenes on the screen appeared to be the rallying cry of “Kill the Boer,” which U.S. officials and Afrikaner activists have cited as evidence that white South Africans are being persecuted. Boer means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans. The governing party of South Africa, however, the African National Congress, distanced itself from the chant, which was popularized by the leader of another political party, years ago.

“We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” Mr. Ramaphosa told Mr. Trump. “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”

By the end, with the stunned South African president looking on, Mr. Trump began flipping through his printouts repeating, “Death, death, death.”Editors’ PicksThis Was Odd: These Monkeys Kidnapped Babies From Another Species.A Long Life in Harlem, Made Possible by an Affordable ApartmentKristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice

There have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics show they are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans. And while the South African government did pass a law permitting the government to take land without compensation, the process is subject to judicial review.

The South African delegation continued to try to explain to Trump the situation on the ground in South Africa, but he remained unmoved. “Dead white people, dead white farmers,” he said.

Mr. Trump narrated one of the scenes, which he said were “burial sites of more than 1,000 white farmers” whose loved ones cars lined up on Sunday mornings to visit their graves. “It’s a terrible sight,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Mr. Ramaphosa turned to look at the screen as Mr. Trump narrated, and then questioned the location of the scenes in the video, saying he didn’t recognize them as in South Africa.

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump’s Oval Office Meltdown with South African President Was a Global Embarrassment, Ben Meiselas, May 21, 2025. From begging for a private jet to peddling racist conspiracy theories, Trump turned a diplomatic meeting into an unhinged spectacle.

I wish I were exaggerating when I say that Donald Trump just turned a presidential meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa into one of the most humiliating spectacles in modern diplomatic history—but no, this actually happened.

Let’s walk through this disaster together.

Trump sat down with President Ramaphosa in the Oval Office and immediately made it about himself, noting that unlike Qatar, South Africa didn’t offer him a gold-plated private jet.

Ramaphosa responded with the kind of awkward silence reserved for watching someone faceplant in public.

Trump followed that up with a straight-faced, “I would like another private jet.” I mean… seriously?

And then it just spiraled.

In front of Ramaphosa and the South African delegation, Trump went full scorched-earth on an NBC reporter. Not only did he scream and call him a “terrible reporter” and a “disgrace,” he dragged in Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, claimed the media should be investigated, and cut off all questions so he could start ranting about how someone gave the U.S. Air Force a jet.

It was full-on MAGA performance art, orange-faced and raging, right in front of a foreign head of state.

But that wasn’t even the most deranged part.

Trump began holding up right-wing propaganda claiming there’s a “white genocide” in South Africa. He showed Ramaphosa a video of what he described as “burial sites” for murdered white farmers, using the footage to push a conspiracy that South Africa is engaged in racially targeted killings.

Here’s the truth: Trump lied. Again.

Thanks to our researcher J.D. Wolf over at MeidasNews.com, we now know exactly what Trump was showing. It’s not a burial site—it’s a controversial private monument called the Witkruis Monument, located in Limpopo province. And guess what? There are no graves. Just a field filled with white-painted metal crosses meant to represent victims of farm attacks.

As J.D. reports for MeidasNews.com, the monument has faced years of scrutiny for only honoring white victims and ignoring the fact that rural violence in South Africa affects people of all races. In fact, the South African government has confirmed that Black farmers are disproportionately affected by stock theft and other forms of agricultural crime.

Making matters worse, online images show individuals at the Witkruis Monument flying the apartheid-era South African flag—further evidence that the site, and Trump's use of it, plays into a white nationalist narrative divorced from the facts.

Back in the Oval Office, Ramaphosa—joined by both Black and white ministers, including an opposition figure from his own cabinet—repeatedly and calmly debunked Trump’s claims. But Trump wouldn’t stop. He just kept going, kept lying, kept embarrassing this country.

And then he brought up Elon Musk, because of course he did, saying Elon “doesn’t want to get involved” but is “from South Africa,” as though Musk’s nationality somehow validates Trump’s conspiracy theory.

Then, out of absolutely nowhere, Trump attacked New York Attorney General Letitia James. Yes, during a foreign policy meeting.

This was not a presidential meeting. It was an international humiliation. And let’s be clear: this isn’t just about optics. This kind of behavior weakens our alliances, strengthens our adversaries, and makes America look more like a rogue state than a global leader.

You can bet the BRICS bloc—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was watching this closely. So was Xi Jinping. And you can be damn sure they liked what they saw: a chaotic, delusional America led by a wannabe dictator clutching racist tabloids and yelling at reporters.

New York Times, Trump Says the U.S. is Close to Brokering Peace Between Congo and Rwanda, Ruth Maclean, May 21, 2025. After decades of conflict between two African countries, President Trump and an adviser said the two sides, with U.S. help, had created an agreement that was now being finalized. President Trump claimed on Wednesday that his administration was close to brokering peace in the war between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, two African nations with a long history of conflict. He made the remarks at an Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa.

Mr. Trump said that Massad Boulos, the State Department’s senior adviser for Africa and the father-in-law to Tiffany Trump, had helped settle the war. Mr. Boulos, who was at the Oval Office meeting, said that Rwanda and Congo had both submitted draft peace agreements that had been evaluated and merged into one by the Trump administration, creating an agreement that was now being finalized.

The conflict between Congo and its much smaller eastern neighbor, Rwanda, has simmered for three decades. The latest invasion of Congo by the Rwanda-backed M23 militia started in late 2021.

In an interview in February, Felix Tshisekedi, the president of Congo, offered the United States and Europe access to his country’s vast mineral wealth while asking for help forcing Rwanda to withdraw from Congo’s east. Mr. Boulos traveled to Congo last month, after which Congo and Rwanda signed a document committing to work toward peace and to cooperate with U.S. investors, especially in mining and infrastructure projects.

Fighting is still raging in eastern Congo, where M23 has seized swaths of territory. During the meeting, Mr. Ramaphosa spoke of various international efforts to achieve a cease-fire, and said that South Africa, which had contributed troops to a regional force, was removing its soldiers so that peace could prevail.

 

A cropped version of the official portrait of Pope Leo XIV, published by the Vatican on May 10, 2025.

Foreign Policy Magazine, Commentary: The Meaning of the First Augustinian Pope, Mark Lawrence Schrad, (professor of political science at Villanova University), May 21, 2025. Pope Leo’s politics will be shaped less by his American nationality than his tradition of Catholic thought.

While the world is abuzz about the political prospects of the first American-born head of the Vatican, far more consequential may be that Leo XIV is also the first Augustinian pope.

While not predictive, a better understanding of the Augustinian tradition provides greater insights into the potential direction that the new pontiff may lead the church and its 1.5 billion Catholics globally, as well as opportunities for domestic political activism at home.

The armchair opining about whether the new pope is politically conservative or liberal—while understandable—belies the difficulties of cramming faith-based motivations into a left-right spectrum of secular political ideologies.

WMR Resistance: Vance embarrassing Pope Leo with his Florida Trumper brother, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 24 books and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, May 21, 2025. It is more than apparent that after it was reported that Pope Leo XIV had a Trumper older brother living in Port Charlotte, Florida the White House agitprop machine went into full drive.

Louis Prevost, a 12-year Navy veteran, was not only an ardent MAGA cult member but someone whose Facebook page was full of hateful diatribes against Democrats. Louis Prevost's posts served as potent ammunition to be weaponized against the new pontiff.

For Republicans, Louis Prevost was Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Malik Obama, and Hunter Biden all wrapped up into one political explosive. The Trump White House and particularly VP JD "Shady" Vance and Lil' Marco Rubio saw to it that the Pope's MAGA brother, Louis Prevost, would tag along with the official U.S. delegation to Leo's inaugural mass in the Vatican. In fact, Louis was in line right behind Rubio and Vance in St. Peter's Basilica to greet and, in Louis's case, hug the pope.

Louis Prevost and his wife Deborah, anxious to grant interviews just after Leo's election, said they weren't sure they could afford to fly to Rome for the papal inauguration. Travel expenses would not be a problem, especially after the U.S. delegation to the inaugural mass was cobbled together. As game show announcer Johnny Olson might have said, "You win an all expenses paid vacation for two to Rome, where you'll fly on Air Force Two to the Eternal City."

A few days after Louis's trip to the Vatican, where he and his wife were seated in the VIP front row next to Vance and his wife but in front of the Rubios, [left] Leo's brother was with his cult leader Trump in the Oval Office. Louis and Deborah, both dressed as if they were on their way to a Florida tiki-bar for some rum cocktails, were photographed with Trump and and Vance, the latter a recent convert to Catholicism who is more interested in expanding the influence of the right-wing Opus Dei than in doing good works for the church.

The Trump White House saw in Louis Prevost a political device to be used in retaliation against then-Cardinal Robert Prevost's social media posts condemning Vance's views on immigration.

Louis Prevost is viewed by Trump World as the gift that may keep on giving. His Facebook posts included referring to Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, as gay after Mr. Pelosi was clubbed in the head by a hammer-wielding MAGA home invader in San Francisco. Prevost wrote, referring to Nancy Pelosi, "Just listen to what this drunk cunt has to say in the mid-90s long before her husband had grindr [sic] dates.”

The post falsely insinuated that Paul Pelosi, the Speaker's husband, was gay. A more recent Prevost post stated: "These fucking liberals crying about tariffs is just unreal.” Other posts referred to Democrats as "Communists." Louis also believed that Democrats were "treasonous" for meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

One Louis posting appeared to stoke civil war desires. It urged his friends to "Keep [their] powder dry [citing a] war right here at home, a war for our streets and neighborhoods.“ Another post showed how far Louis had fallen into the MAGA cult, comparing in a favorable way Trump to Jesus Christ: "Maybe you should go to one of his rallies, talk to other real people. Maybe even meet him if you‘re lucky. I did.

Incredible man. Not comparing him to or saying he is like Christ, but both seem to be suffering the same treatment at the hands of the evil ones.”

A White House aide was quick to tag Pope Leo on a social media post of the Oval Office photo of his brother and sister-in-law with Trump and Vance: "Great meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and @Pontifex’s brother, Louis Prevost, and his wife Deborah."

There is little doubt that Louis Prevost, who was in high demand on Fox and Newsmax following his brother's election as pope, will continue to be a thorn in the side of the Vatican. The pope's other brother, John Prevost of New Lennox, Illinois, outside of Chicago, is a quieter man and more devout Catholic. He flew to Rome, likely on his own dime, to privately meet Leo without fanfare and just after the papal election and before the inaugural mass.

When Vance, who had met with Leo's ailing mentor Francis just before the pope's Easter Monday death, was ushered into the pontiff's office after the papal inauguration, the pope, without a favorable reaction, quickly set aside on his desk an invitation handed to him by Vance to visit the White House. After Trump's use of Louis Prevost to troll him and his new papacy, a papal visit by Leo to the White House or even Washington, DC does not seem to be in the offing anytime soon. As one might say, Trump doesn't "have the cards" for a papal visit.

New York Times, Opinion: Why Does It Matter Whether Covid Came Out of a Lab? David Wallace-Wells, May 21, 2025. In April, the Trump White House paved over the informational public health website Covid.gov with what can only be described as a splashy propaganda page. “LAB LEAK,” it shouted in large font at the top, movie-poster style, with Donald Trump’s image positioned between the enormous capital letters as an A-list star investigator. The tagline: “The true origins of Covid-19.”

Five years ago, this kind of conspiratorial slide deck would have scandalized normie liberals and dominated at least a news cycle or two. Even three years ago, it might have also been self-sabotage: If there were a genuine lab leak coverup, well, where had Trump himself been on all this in 2020?

But the tide has turned, so much so that we’ve moved on somewhat from debating the competing scientific claims to treating the origins of the pandemic primarily as a test of political independence and intellectual integrity that various people either passed or failed. Two-thirds of Americans believe the Covid-19 virus came out of a lab, and though those numbers have been high for a long time now, low-confidence intelligence assessments have moved in that direction as well.

 

New York Times, Judge Finds U.S. Violated Court Order With Sudden Deportation Flight to Africa, Alan Feuer, Tyler Pager, Hamed Aleaziz and Eric Schmitt, May 21, 2025. Lawyers for some of the eight migrants deported Tuesday said they were told they were being sent to South Sudan. People familiar with the plane said it had landed for now in Djibouti.Listen to this article · 7:25 min Learn more

A federal judge in Boston said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them an opportunity to object to their removal.

The finding by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, was one of the strongest judicial rebukes the administration has faced so far in a series of contentious cases arising from its sprawling deportation agenda. It was not immediately clear what punishment, if any, Judge Murphy intended to mete out against the administration or those who took part in the operation, but he asked for a list of names so he can notify them that they might all face criminal contempt penalties.

The judge’s decision came at a hearing in Federal District Court in Boston to consider an emergency motion filed by lawyers for a group of men who they said were deported after being told they were being sent to South Sudan, right.

As the hearing began, officials from the Homeland Security Department disclosed that eight immigrants had been deported Tuesday on a flight to a third country, but they refused to say where the men were going.

While much of the discussion at the hearing took place under seal, Judge Murphy said that the government had given the deported men little more than 24 hours notice that they were being removed from the United States — a time frame that he described as “plainly insufficient.”

“The department’s actions in this case,” he went on, “are unquestionably violative of this court’s order.”

Judge Murphy, who was appointed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said the administration’s violation could ultimately result in a finding of criminal contempt. He asked Homeland Security officials to quickly determine whether it was possible to hold hearings for the men while they remained in U.S. custody overseas.

According to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, the flight carrying the deportees had landed for now in the east African nation of Djibouti. U.S. military personnel in Djibouti were standing by to assist with securing detainees if needed, one U.S. official said.Editors’ PicksKristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too NiceThe Marine Veteran Who Counteracts Boot Camp With Ballet

New York Times, Trump asks high court to pause another suit against DOGE, May 21, 2025. The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning, once again asking the justices to take action on their emergency docket.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the court to temporarily pause an order by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that would require the Department of Government Efficiency to provide information in a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act. Sauer told the justices that requiring DOGE as a “presidential advisory body” to respond to the plaintiffs’ requests, a process known as discovery, “clearly violates the separation of powers” and “will significantly distract” from DOGE’s “mission of identifying and eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government.”

President Donald Trump created DOGE on Jan. 20 to “further the President’s agenda by ‘modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.’” DOGE is not a cabinet-level department but has had sweeping involvement in the president’s efforts to shrink the federal government across agencies since he took office.

The Trump administration’s request on Wednesday stems from a Jan. 24 request made under FOIA by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group. CREW sought, among other things, communications between the DOGE administrator, Amy Gleason, and DOGE staff, as well as financial disclosures submitted by DOGE personnel.

On Feb. 20, CREW filed a lawsuit under FOIA in federal court in Washington, D.C. It sought documents that, according to CREW, it wanted before Congress passed a bill to fund the federal government.

As the case comes to the court on Wednesday, it centers on CREW’s request for expedited discovery to determine whether DOGE is an “agency” that must comply with FOIA. CREW asked to depose Gleason as well as for a list of government contracts and grants that DOGE recommended be canceled, a list of employees and positions that DOGE recommended be terminated, and a list of current and former DOGE employees.

U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper largely granted CREW’s request, including the request to depose Gleason, and instructed DOGE to respond quickly.what happens when markets realize that the budget is, in its own way, just as bad?

 

New York Times, F.D.A. Poised to Restrict Access to Covid Vaccines, Christina Jewett and Apoorva Mandavilli, May 21, 2025 (print ed.).  Agency leaders said there was evidence to justify approval only for older people and those with medical conditions. Many others may not be able to get the shots.

The Food and Drug Administration will permit use of Covid vaccines by adults over 65 and those with certain medical conditions in the fall, but may require additional studies before approving the shots for healthy Americans younger than 65, agency officials said on Tuesday.

At this point, the additional doses offer “uncertain” benefits to many young and middle-aged people who have already been vaccinated or have had Covid, Dr. Vinay Prasad, the F.D.A.’s vaccine division chief, and Dr. Martin Makary, the agency’s commissioner, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“The F.D.A. will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the officials wrote.

Until now, annual Covid shots were recommended for everyone aged 6 months and older. Scientific advisers to the F.D.A. are set to meet Thursday to decide on the composition of the Covid vaccine to be made available in the fall.

During the pandemic, both Dr. Prasad and Dr. Makary sharply criticized vaccine mandates and other public health measures intended to turn back the coronavirus.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, is a longtime vaccine skeptic who spent years campaigning against the Covid shots, claiming falsely at one point that the Covid vaccines have killed more people than the virus.

As a measles outbreak spreads through Texas and other states this year, Mr. Kennedy has offered only muted support for vaccination and has repeatedly raised questions about the safety of the measles shot while suggesting falsely that miracle treatments like cod liver oil were available.

During a livestreamed “town hall” on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Prasad said he thought the new approach to Covid vaccination was “a reasonable compromise,” leaving the shots available to many Americans “but also generating evidence.

Letters from An American, Historical Commentary: May 20, 2025, Heather Cox Richardson, May 21, 2025. Today was a rough day for administration officials on Capitol Hill as Senate committees held hearings on the 2026 budget requests for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of State.

The Senate Finance Committee also held a hearing for Trump’s nominee to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue, former Missouri representative William “Billy” Long. Democrats came prepared and demanded answers that the department secretaries and nominee were either unable or unwilling to give.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security's budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.

“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”

Noem’s habit in these hearings is simply to ignore questions and to attack, and she tried that with Hassan, suggesting that the president has the right to suspend habeas corpus if circumstances require it. Her position echoes that of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, with whom she appears to be working to render immigrants to prisons in third countries, but it is dead wrong. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus; not the president.

While Republicans were generally supportive of the Republican officials in the hearings, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) used his time to beg Noem for help for Missouri. The state has suffered a number of natural disasters, including a deadly tornado last Friday, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has not shown up.

“The state has pending three requests for major disaster declarations from earlier storms,” Hawley told Noem. “[W]e’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri.” The Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, and Hawley asked Noem to expedite the requests and get them in front of Trump. “We are desperate for… assistance in Missouri,” he said.

When Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Noem how she planned to meet the needs of American people when the administration is cutting 20% of FEMA employees and the agency has lost most of its leadership, Noem talked over him and said the problem was that the Biden administration had failed the American people.

Over in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies, things didn’t go much better.

President John F. Kennedy, top left, shortly before he was assassinated during a trip to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963,thereby launching a long-running national debate on who killed him, for what reasons -- and why so many experts believe the Warren Commission investigating the killing covered up the answers.

JFK Facts, The Second Hearing: Declassification Task Force Hears from Living Witnesses on JFK, Chad Nagle, May 21, 2025. Congress achieves greater clarity on the 'Great Crime' of Nov. 22, 1963.

Dr. Don Teel Curtis (left) testifies to the U.S. House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, May 20, 2025. Former House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Dan Hardway is at right. (Credit: Chad Nagle)

On Tuesday, May 20, the U.S. House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held its second hearing on the JFK assassination, featuring living witnesses to the cover-up perpetrated by the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (the Warren Commission) in 1964 and perpetuated by the government over subsequent decades.

 

Former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden, above center, shown athis home, convicted by false testimony in 1964 and sentenced to six years in a maximum-security penitentiary for allegedly soliciting a bribe, testified by live feed. At age 90, he remained adamant — under oath — that he had been framed. Having attempted to report Secret Service negligence in protecting President John F. Kennedy to the Warren Commission, he was fired, arrested, and falsely accused of attempting to sell confidential documents to a counterfeiter.

Dr. Don Teel Curtis, an oral surgeon who was among the first medical personnel to enter Trauma Room One at Parkland Hospital after JFK was brought in, testified to having seen JFK’s throat wound before a tracheostomy was performed, and talked of how Warren Commission attorney Arlen Specter attempted to intimidate him into testifying that it was an “exit wound.” He also described JFK’s head wound — as conveyed by the chief of neurosurgery, Dr. Kemp Clark — as including a bullet hole near JFK’s right temple.

Dan Hardway, a former investigator and researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, told of the deception he had experienced at the hands of the CIA in 1978. Drawing “conclusions from the facts,” he said that “Oswald was being used in an operation in Mexico City,” likely a “dangle and propaganda operation used to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee” under the direction of CIA officer David Atlee Phillips. Hardway said the “exact same pattern” had been used in New Orleans in summer 1963.

Judge John Tunheim, former chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), told the task force that while federal agencies “largely complied” with the mandate of the ARRB, there were delays in producing records and “skirmishes.” The CIA, in several instances, “did not give us what we asked for.” With the latest releases of CIA records, he was now seeing a “flood of documents” on former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, for example, that were “not submitted to us for review.”

Douglas Horne, former senior military records analyst for the ARRB, noted that Americans remained “unsatisfied with the official conclusions” on the assassination. Based on his own work, Horne said, “there are ample reasons for the disquiet of so many of the American people.” Focusing on the sham autopsy on JFK, he said “eight different sets of photographs, known with confidence to have been taken during the autopsy on JFK, are not in the official collection today and never have been.” The skull x-rays were “not originals but rather are altered copy films,” and “many bullet fragments known to have been removed were never placed into the official record and are still missing.”

Minority witness Alexis Coe, author of an upcoming biography of JFK, denigrated the proceedings as an exercise in “cherry-picking with an agenda.” Asserting that “in the 132 days since the JFK assassination records were released, not even conspiracy theorists can claim that it upended the Warren Commission.” She cited “unredacted social security numbers” as something “unprecedented in these files,” and said she had “never seen anything like” the current release of “private information of living Americans.” The hearings, in her estimation, reduced a “consequential leader to a grotesque spectacle.”

JFK Facts will follow up with a more detailed analysis of the hearing, which can be watched at the link below. (Note: The audio is not working during Bolden’s testimony.)

May 20

New York Times, Guest Essay: The President Will Destroy You Now, Thomas B. Edsall, May 20, 2025. One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.

The targets of Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there has never before "been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been 'destructive,'” let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate."

Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.

Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals; and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.

“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science Magazine. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

New York Times, Live Updates: House Republicans Hunt for Votes on Policy Bill, Staff Reports, May 20, 2025. President Trump pressured Republicans to unify around a bill to deliver his domestic agenda, as party leaders haggled with holdouts over changes to the legislation.

President Trump pressured House Republicans to unify around a wide-ranging bill to deliver his domestic agenda, as party leaders haggled with important holdouts over changes to the legislation aimed at winning their votes.

Joining House Republicans at their weekly closed-door party meeting, Mr. Trump pushed them to drop their reservations about the legislation and embrace the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which leaders hope to bring to a vote by the end of the week. Later, negotiations with the holdouts appeared to be progressing.

New York Times, Justice Dept. Opens Inquiry Into Andrew Cuomo, Singling Out Another Political Target, Devlin Barrett, May 20, 2025.  After killing a criminal case against Mayor Eric Adams, the Trump administration has begun investigating his chief rival in the New York City mayoral race over his testimony about the pandemic.

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation of Andrew M. Cuomo, left, a front-runner in the New York City mayoral race, after Republicans accused him of lying to Congress about decisions he made during the coronavirus pandemic as governor, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, begun about a month ago by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, comes after senior Justice Department officials in February demanded the dismissal of an indictment of the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, on corruption charges.

That puts the Trump administration in the unusual position of having ended a criminal case against the leader of the nation’s largest city and opened one into his chief rival in the span of a few months. Mr. Adams is running for re-election as an independent, and Mr. Cuomo is leading the Democratic primary field in the polls.

The existence of the investigation is sure to fuel further criticism that President Trump and his administration are wielding the Justice Department as a cudgel to achieve political ends and punish his perceived enemies.

Democracy Project, Opinion: The political prosecution of Rep. McIver is just the beginning, Marc Elias, right, May 20, 2025. The weaponization of our government has officially begun.

Ever since he won the 2024 election, I have predicted that it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump used the full powers of the federal government to target his political opponents. Last night, time ran out.

In an oddly worded statement, the Department of Justice announced its first criminal prosecution of a political opponent. New Jersey’s Acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, revealed she was charging Democratic Congresswoman LaMonica McIver with assault related to her recent visit to a federal immigration detention center.

On May 9, McIver and two other members of Congress were making a routine, lawful oversight visit to a federal facility when they were blocked by federal agents for several hours. At first, the government tried to demonize Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, who joined the members of Congress on the visit — threatening him with criminal trespass charges. While those charges have since been dropped, the Trump administration isn’t backing down. The crisis has now escalated with the prosecution of a member of Congress for simply doing her job.

Habba, who has no prior prosecutorial experience, was previously general counsel to a parking garage company before joining the motley group of Trump lawyers representing him in various civil and criminal cases. In that role, she proved to be an incompetent but loyal foot soldier for Trump. After a brief stint in the White House, she was named Acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.

While McIver’s prosecution certainly isn't the first act of political weaponization from the administration, it is by far the most dangerous. Previously, the buffoonish Ed Martin – who was briefly the U.S Attorney for Washington, D.C., before he was replaced by Jeanine Pirro – sent out bogus letters with vaguely worded threats to various elected officials. But Martin never actually prosecuted anyone.

And though the White House has issued a series of threatening executive orders targeting individuals, none of those actions have yielded public criminal investigations, let alone charges. Even targeting law firms and universities, which imposed financial and business costs, did not include criminal prosecution.

While we’re only starting to see political prosecutions now, the alarm bells have been ringing since day one. Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t even try to feign independence from the White House and makes no secret of her loyalty to Trump. Several of her deputies, like Habba, are former members of Trump’s criminal defense team. The guardrails that once protected against misuse of the Department of Justice have been deliberately dismantled.

To top it off, it’s not surprising that the first prosecution targets a Black woman, recently elected to Congress, who was attempting to conduct lawful oversight at an immigration facility. The administration is no doubt hoping that the Congresswoman is too unknown to attract political support, and that the circumstances surrounding the incident are too murky to engage a distracted public.

We cannot allow that to be the case.

Only eight days after Trump took office, I warned that there would be political retribution and outlined a specific strategy that we must now deploy: “It is incumbent on the media, civil society groups, judges, and individual citizens to adopt a presumption of skepticism when it is told that a political opponent of Trump is under an ethical or legal cloud.”

For the courts, that means quickly resolving the inevitable motion to dismiss in favor of the Congresswoman. For the media, it requires covering this story as it would a strongman in a foreign country targeting political opponents. Civil society groups must lend their support and credibility to defend the Congresswoman now — not after she has been dragged through the mud by Trump’s right-wing allies.

Most importantly, the public needs to destigmatize those being attacked by Trump. We should not only give the Congresswoman the presumption of innocence — we should assume the U.S. Attorney’s office is acting with malice and in bad faith.

In his inaugural address, Trump declared: “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” What we suspected was a lie then has now conclusively proven to be one.

This is an early but vital test of the pro-democracy movement’s capacity to defend itself against the power of the state. Billionaire media owners have largely failed their test. So, too, has Big Law. Universities have fared somewhat better but remain under assault.

The ultimate test, however, will be whether the pro-democracy movement can defend its allies against the political use of federal prosecution. If we are successful now, it will set an important precedent for the next four years. If we fail, it will only embolden Trump and his cronies to expand their sinister efforts to undermine the rule of law and democracy.

 

The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Final Checkmate: Republicans Move to Destroy the Balance of Powers, Thom Hartmann, right, May 20, 2025. In a legal sleight of hand, Republicans want to strip judges of their power to enforce rulings — because holding Trump in contempt might actually work.

With almost no mention by our mainstream corporate press, Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing to end all checks on the power of Donald Trump, effectively ending the American experiment of a democratic republic. It’s shockingly anti-American.

Since the only branch of government standing against Trump right now is the courts, Republicans believe they’ve found a way to end that resistance. Here’s the backstory.

The grand invention of our Founders, cribbed from the Iroquois Confederacy and following an outline Montesquieu suggested (based on his reading about Native Americans), was a three-branches-of-government system where each branch would act as a check on the power of the other two.

Right now the Trump administration is pretty clearly in contempt of at least one Supreme Court order and several from lower courts around the issue of deporting Venezuelan nationals to a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador.

Again, the power of contempt is the only “real” enforcement power the courts have, the only way they can make their orders stick. They can start by fining or jailing Trump’s lawyers who are standing before them, and work their way up from there all the way, arguably, to the president himself.

So far, Trump has effectively neutered Congress; there’s not a single elected Republican who’s willing to seriously challenge his questionable actions, particularly his denial of due process to foreign students and undocumented aliens.

Which leaves only the courts as a check on his power.

Which is apparently why toady Republicans in the House have inserted the following language into their “Big Brutal Bill” (as Ro Khanna calls it) that provides for trillions in tax breaks for billionaires like Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc.:

“No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued….”

In plain language, what this says is that no court can enforce a contempt charge against Trump or his people unless the person or group who brought the charges against the president or his administration had first posted a cash bond.

So, here’s the kicker: in civil proceedings, like virtually 100% of the cases Trump is involved with regarding his abuse of power and refusal to acknowledge due process, there is no bond involved.

There almost never is bond in any civil cases like these, in fact.

Thus, if this becomes law, Congress will have stripped the courts — including the Supreme Court — of their ability to use the power of contempt to enforce their rulings. This is way beyond Andrew Jackson’s worst fever dreams.

With this single stroke, Trump will have crowned himself king. No congress and no court can stop him. Even if Congress were to try, it would take the courts to enforce their hearings, investigations, subpoenas, and laws, and without the power of contempt the courts will have lost that ability.

 

New York Times, Judge Says Deportation to South Sudan Appears to Have Violated Court Order, Hamed Aleaziz and Alan Feuer, May 20, 2025. The judge ordered a Justice Department lawyer to track down the plane apparently carrying a Burmese migrant and see whether it could be turned around midflight. He also threatened officials with contempt.

A federal judge in Boston said on Tuesday that the Trump administration had apparently violated an order he issued in April by flying a Burmese immigrant to South Sudan without first giving him enough time to challenge his removal over fears about being sent to a country not his own.

The stern remarks by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, came at a hearing in Federal District Court in Boston where immigration lawyers raised concerns that at least one other immigrant had also been flown to South Sudan without proper due process.

“I can tell you it sounds like this deportation would be a violation of my preliminary injunction,” Judge Murphy said.

During the hearing, Judge Murphy ordered a lawyer for the Justice Department, Elianis N. Perez, to notify everyone involved in the flight to South Sudan — from the pilot of the plane to officials at the Department of Homeland Security — that they could face criminal contempt sanctions if his ruling was not followed. He also instructed Ms. Perez to find out exactly where the plane was and whether it could be turned around midflight.

“Where is the plane now?” Judge Murphy asked at one point.

“I do not know,” Ms. Perez said.

It was not clear how many, if any, other migrants were on the plane or what their home countries were.Lawyers from the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project said that on Monday they were told that a client of theirs, a Burmese man, was informed that he would be deported to South Sudan. When the lawyers checked on the man on Tuesday, they said, they were told that he had already been deported. Elsewhere, they said, a Vietnamese man “appears to have suffered the same fate.”

They said they wanted Judge Murphy to demand that the Trump administration return the migrants, given that they “will be or have been removed.” The lawyers included a pair of documents in the filing, including one Department of Homeland Security document that listed South Sudan as the place of removal for one of the immigrants.

New York Times, Analysis: Trump’s New Position on the War in Ukraine: Not My Problem, David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Michael Schwirtz, May 20, 2025. President Trump appears to have backed off joining a European push for new sanctions on Russia, seemingly eager to move on to doing business deals with it.

New York Times, Republican Plan to Tax Elite Colleges Could Hit in Unexpected Places, Stephanie Saul and Steven Rich, May 20, 2025. A plan for a hefty new tax on university endowments was crafted to target “woke” schools, lawmakers said. But a small Kansas college and a Texas medical school might also be hit.

McPherson College, in the middle of Kansas wheat country, is a small school that accepts the vast majority of its applicants, many from surrounding towns. It is best known for its degree in classic car restoration.

The college might still end up a potential target in a Republican plan aimed primarily at the Ivy League, which would impose billions in taxes on the investment returns of several dozen private colleges and universities.

The goal of the proposal, laid out in a report last week from Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, is to hold accountable “woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations.” McPherson could be on the list because it has an endowment of $1.6 billion, thanks to an anonymous donation a few years ago.

An analysis by The New York Times shows that at least 58 schools would potentially be subject to the tax, based on the size of their endowments and enrollments. The list includes highly selective and wealthy institutions like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but also smaller schools like Berry College in Georgia and DePauw University in Indiana.

The tax idea has been discussed by Republicans since at least President Trump’s first term, when a 1.4 percent tax was imposed on some endowments. Momentum to broaden it grew in 2023, when JD Vance, then a senator from Ohio, proposed a 35 percent tax on endowments of $10 billion and larger.

Now, as President Trump has made challenging the nation’s wealthiest colleges a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, the endowment tax could become a potent weapon. During Mr. Trump’s second presidential run, his campaign promised to collect billions “by taxing the large endowments of private universities plagued by antisemitism.”

The tax, part of the House proposal that President Trump has called the “big, beautiful bill,” would be tiered depending on the size of the school’s endowment and enrollment, with a top rate of 21 percent for those with endowments of at least $2 million per student.

That rate would hit nine schools, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The proposal threatens to cost Harvard about $850 million a year, Yale $690 million year, and Princeton $586 million a year, according to estimates by Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, which would also be subject to the tax.

The stated aim of the tax, according to the proposal, is to ensure elite schools in the country “can no longer abuse generous benefits provided through the tax code.”

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Trump-Qatar Scandal Is Just What This Publication Revealed Last Week — But With What We Know Now, Considerably Worse, Seth Abramson, left, May 20, 2025. Recent reports about how the Trump administration found itself at the doorstep of the largest federal criminal bribe in the history of the U.S. makes the Trump-Qatar Scandal even worse than believed.

Last week, Proof detailed for readers how the current Trump-Qatar Scandal is the continuation of an earlier, first-term Trump-Qatar Scandal in which Trump and his family shook down the Qatari royal family for bribes at a time when Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner had it within their power to save the nation of Qatar from an imminent ground invasion by Mohammed bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Mohammed bin Zayed (the United Arab Emirates), Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (Egypt), and Sheikh Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa (Bahrain)—all close allies of Trump and Kushner, and in sum four of the six autocrats (with Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu) who conspired to steal the 2016 U.S. presidential election and install Trump as U.S. president via illegal foreign election assistance, a plot analyzed with meticulous sourcing across the nearly 600 pages of the 2019 New York Times bestseller Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan). All of that was entirely correct—as a recent breaking news report by the Times underscores—but it turns out that the full narrative is much worse than previously believed.2

Proof reported, last week, that what the Qatari royal family learned from the first Trump-Qatar Scandal was that Trump always needed to be bribed either directly, through a family member, or through a proxy (a close friend or top adviser). Under no circumstances could Qatar’s problems with its neighbors—particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two nations run by murderous pro-Trump autocrats whose despise democracy and transparent diplomacy—be solved through anyone outside Trump’s rather small circle of trust (“small” because, as the Proof Series explains, Mr. Trump demands not just absolute fealty but persistently odious malfeasance from his allies, meaning there are few individuals morally compromised enough to assent to aid him).

What the New York Times has now revealed is that the origins of the second Trump-Qatar Scandal are just as Proof has described them—though the Times offers new details that make the current Trump-Qatar Scandal much, much worse than most had believed. Whereas Trump told American voters that the offer of a $400 million gift to him from the Qataris was both spontaneous and a surprise, and therefore something whose motivation he couldn’t imagine and whose apparent generosity he couldn’t reasonably pass up, in fact what we now know is that this 2025 Bribery scandal is, in fact, a scandal of Trump’s own devising.

This is consistent with what Proof (and the whole Proof Series) have presented as a reliable maxim regarding Trump’s political career: “Every Trump political scandal is at its core a Bribery scandal,” for the reason that Trump believes Bribery should be legalized—he has said as much—and that, since he’s never been held to account for breaking the law the hundreds and hundreds of times he’s done so, he’s seen fit to conduct himself as a politician in such a way that every enemy of the United States well knows he can be bought.

While our allies know this as well, but they respect U.S. criminal statutes in a way neither our enemies nor our frenemies do, and understandably believe they can win America’s support to their side in various disputes through public diplomacy rather than clandestine graft. (To be clear, almost every personal as opposed to political Trump scandal is about Sexual Assault, as established by the 2024 Proof Series book Proof of Cruelty, which reveals Trump to be a profoundly violent sexual deviant who really does believe what he said on the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape that for several days in October 2016 seemed likely to disqualify him from a political career: that he’s entitled to sexually assault any woman he likes because his fame immunizes him from consequences for doing so.

In this respect, Trump is one of the most bracingly honest serial sexual predators ever to have hundreds of likely victims and yet never spend a day behind bars, when his actions warranted multiple consecutive life sentences without parole.)

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: CBS Gave US ALL the Middle Finger… MEIDAS RESPONDS!! Ben Meiselas, May 20, 2025. I am pissed off!!

It appears that CBS and its parent company Paramount are moving closer to settling a BS lawsuit filed by Donald Trump—to pay Trump directly as a quid pro quo for the U.S. government approving the merger between Paramount and a company called Skydance. The merger would put approximately $5 billion in cash into the hands of Paramount shareholders, including its controlling shareholder Shari Redstone.

Shari Redstone inherited Paramount—once called Viacom—from her dad, Sumner Redstone. Shari wants to sell her shares to Skydance so she can make billions.

The merger requires approval by various United States government agencies, like the FCC. Trump’s FCC has threatened to withhold approval of the merger.

Trump personally sued Paramount and CBS (which owns 60 Minutes) in Texas federal court, forum-shopping to get a Trump-appointed judge. He claims he was injured under Texas consumer laws because 60 Minutes lightly edited its interview with former VP Kamala Harris in October 2024.

Trump was too scared to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes in this election cycle. Yet he claims he was injured to the tune of $20 billion based on how CBS presented its interview with Kamala Harris.

May 19

Paul Krugman via Substack, Opinion: Attack of the Sadistic Zombies, Paul Krugman, right, May 19, 20225. The GOP budget is incredibly cruel — and that’s the point.

Republicans in Congress, taking their marching orders from Donald Trump, are on track to enact a hugely regressive budget — big tax giveaways to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans. True, the legislation suffered a setback last week, initially failing to make it out of committee. But that was largely because some right-wing Republicans didn’t think the benefit cuts were vicious enough.

But this reconciliation bill — that is, legislation structured in such a way that it can’t be filibustered and may well pass with no Democratic votes — is different in both degree and kind from what we’ve seen before: Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas.

And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.

To get a sense of how extreme this legislation is, do a side-by-side comparison of the impact on different groups of Americans between this bill and Trump’s one major legislative achievement during his first term, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It looks like this:

Paul Krugman is a Neo-Keynesian economist, Nobel laureate, academic, author, and media columnist, known for his work on international trade theory and economic geography. Considered one of the world's most influential economists, Krugman is renowned for redefining existing theories of international trade and either founding or co-founding several new disciplines in international economics, from New Trade Theory (NTT) and New Economic Geography (NEG) to models of financial crises and exchange rate movements.

Steady, Commentary: One Big Bad Bill, Dan Rather, right, May 19, 2025. Johnson is trying to sneak the shocking details past us.

Donald Trump and his MAGA buddies in Congress are attempting to slip one by the American people. The mega-spending bill that Trump calls “one big, beautiful bill” is 1116 pages long, contains huge spending and tax cuts, and was dropped on the U.S. House of Representatives just seven days ago. The first committee vote was taken on Sunday night, in case you missed it. And many Republicans hope you did.

Speaker Mike Johnson, below right, is pushing for a vote on the massive domestic policy bill by the end of the week, in time for Memorial Day.

Someone needs to call a timeout, or this massive remake of the federal government could be a done deal faster than you can say three-day weekend. The incredibly short timeline is no accident. Trump and Johnson don’t want to give anyone time to read the fine print.

Because then folks would know that the bill would cut $625 billion from Medicaid, pushing more than 8 million of our most vulnerable from its rolls.

People would also be aware that cuts to the food stamp program would target families with children, seniors, and veterans.

Voters would find out that someone making less than $15,000 a year would see their federal taxes increase by 74.3% by 2031. That is not a typo.Trump claims all of these cuts are necessary to make his $4.5 trillion tax cut for billionaires and corporations permanent.

Now you understand the reason for the rush. Get it signed, sealed, and delivered before the ink is dry, and Americans will be none the wiser. Though it will still have to be reconciled with the Senate bill.

The timeline is so short that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not had time to fully vet the bill and produce estimates of its budgetary impact. How can lawmakers read, research, and debate the bill in mere days? They can’t.

Even with the absurdly short timeline, Johnson is facing opposition from both ends of his party. Four hardline fiscal hawks stalled the bill in committee but ultimately allowed it to move to the full House. They didn’t vote in favor of the bill; they just voted “present.”This does not bode well for the speaker, who will have to make significant concessions to appease the hawks and get them on board. But every concession he gives them will likely mean a “moderate” Republican will balk. Republicans have only a seven-vote majority in the House.

May 16

 

White House Chronicle, Commentary: How Technology Built the British Empire, Llewellyn King, above,May 16, 2025. As someone who grew up in the last days of the British Empire, I am often asked how it was that so few people controlled so much of the world for so long?

The simple answer is technology underpinned the British Empire, from its tentative beginnings in the 17th century to its global dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries and most of the first half of the 20th century.

America filled the gap left by Britain as the dominant force in the world, admired, copied and envied. But underpinning that state of esteem and financial ease was tech leadership, medical leadership, and cultural leadership through film and television. America became the techno supremo.

Now government research funding is being butchered across the board from advanced energy to, most shameful of all, the philistine slashing of the National Institutes of Health’s research budgets. Changing times doomed the British Empire, America’s future is at stake and it will be determined by technology and medicine. If we underfund research, the future is known.

May 14

New York Times, Kennedy Clashes With Top Democrat Who Accused Him of ‘Destroying’ Health Agencies, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, May 14, 2025. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, whose drastic overhaul of the federal health apparatus has left scientists and patients reeling, clashed on Wednesday with a senior House Democrat, who accused him of “destroying the crown jewels of our health system” and of violating the law by cutting funding appropriated by Congress for lifesaving medical research.

“We are not withholding money for lifesaving research,” Mr. Kennedy insisted. After a fiery back and forth, Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, looked disgusted. “Unbelievable,” she said, shaking her head. “Unbelievable.”

He faced similar accusations from Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the former Democratic leader.

The sharp exchanges on Wednesday morning came during Mr. Kennedy’s testimony before the appropriations panel, his first appearance on Capitol Hill since becoming health secretary. He will also appear on Wednesday afternoon before the Senate health committee, whose Republican chairman will call on him to explain to Americans how his reforms “will make their lives easier, not harder.”

The back-to-back appearances were scheduled so that Mr. Kennedy could promote President Trump’s budget for the Department of Health and Human Services for the next fiscal year.

But he is also facing sharp questions about the huge reductions he has already imposed on research grants and jobs, which key Democrats have condemned as part of what they call Mr. Trump’s “war on science.”

The Bulwark, Commentary: Autocrats, Kleptocrats, Plutocrats… Oh My! William Kristol, right, May 14, 2025. What a spectacle! There they were yesterday, assembled in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, autocrats and plutocrats and kleptocrats, gathered to enjoy each other’s company under the benevolent patronage of their host, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Saudi Arabia was an appropriate destination for Donald Trump’s first foreign trip in his second term as president. He chose to visit not a democracy but a despotism; not a free nation but one of the world’s most unfree; not a land of tolerance but of repression.

And Trump made it clear yesterday that he did not consider these features unfortunate or undesirable aspects of life under the House of Saud. There was not a hint of criticism or even of hesitation in the fulsome praise Trump heaped upon his hosts. The American president admires the Saudi achievements in autocracy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy.

Lincoln Square, Commentary, Here is a specific thing you can do to fight Trump's politicization of public services, Don Moynihan, May 14, 2025. Feeling overwhelmed? That's OK. Here's your guide to fighting back against Trump's war on federal workers and basic competence.

Trump’s maximalist strategy of firing off one executive action after another seeks to overwhelm us. Finding some tangible way to respond sometimes feels impossible. So, here is something that you can do: Take the time you would have spent complaining about politics online, and use it to write a comment opposing the proposed Office of Personnel Management rule to politicize public services. You can do it in 5 minutes. Deadline is May 23rd!

Why should you do this? The proposed rule seeks to reinstate Schedule F, Trump’s never implemented plan to institutionalize political control and loyalty tests for the career bureaucracy by turning 50,000 or more career civil servants into political appointees. Federal comments really do matter. By law, they must be read by the administration, and substantive comments require a response. Failure to do so can see the rule tossed out by courts.

It’s easy: Enter a comment here. No log in. Just click on the “submit a public comment” button. You can enter text, or upload a document. The volume of opposing comments matters, so writing something short and sweet is great. You don’t need to read the rule in depth or be an expert. The proposed rule is bad and protecting nonpartisan civil servants is good. See more details below or take a look at the comments people have already posted.

More detailed and informed comments are even better. One thing that is different from the first time Schedule F was introduced is that we now have a track record showing how Trump’s much more politicized mismanagement of the federal government is having negative effects, and handing him more power would be a disaster. I am especially appealing to people with deep knowledge of policies and management to explain how Schedule F would hurt their domain of expertise. Please, please, please weigh in to provide actual information about how providing protections for career officials will protect against political abuses. If a bunch of people with real and credible experience comment, it becomes harder for the administration and judges to ignore us. I will leave comments to this piece open, so people can share their comments if they wish.

May 13

New York Times, Chasing Tax Cuts, Trump and Republicans Want to Make States Pay, Tony Romm, May 13, 2025. G.O.P. leaders are exploring cuts to federal aid, leaving some states fearful that their budgets cannot absorb billions of dollars in new costs.

Across the country, state leaders are beginning to express alarm about the budgetary fallout from President Trump’s economic agenda, warning that they will not be able to pick up the bill if the federal government reduces its funding for major public services.

To governors and other officials, many of whom are Democrats, the fear is that Washington could sharply curtail federal programs that help states improve their infrastructure, respond to natural disasters, expand education and provide a suite of health, housing and nutrition benefits to the poor.

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump Cuts Another $450M in Funding From Harvard, Troy Matthews, May 13, 2025. Yes, why would the U.S. want more doctors? The Trump administration announced it was pulling an additional $450 million in funding from Harvard University this week, after freezing $2.2 billion in grant funding last week. The White House called the cuts punitive as a result of a failure of Harvard to address race discrimination and antisemitism on its campus.

The cuts represent funding from eight different government agencies, including from the Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, which have typically given Harvard and other Ivy League schools funding for advanced research in medical sciences.

“There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support," the Trump Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said in a statement.

"Harvard, and its leadership group who are tainted by the egregious infractions under its watch, faces a steep, uphill battle to reclaim its legacy as a lawful institution and center of academic excellence." Harvard, "will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights," university President Alan Garber said recently. "Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government."

May 11

Robert Reich via Substack, Commentary: Moral clarity in a time of monsters, Robert Reich, right, May 11, 2025. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

We are living in a time when monsters roam the globe: Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Modi, Erdoğan, and others.

They are destroying countless lives, fueling hate, spreading fear.

What is our moral obligation as human beings in the face of this? How do we maintain integrity in a time of monsters?

Some people I know are in denial. They’ve stopped listening to the news. They’d rather not know what the monsters are doing.

I understand. It’s all too painful — the abductions and deportations in the United States, horrific deaths in Ukraine and Gaza, abuses of human rights in China’s Xinjiang region and in Turkey, violence in Kashmir.

Why learn of it? they ask. Nothing can be done anyway, they say.

Others are immobilized with grief. They cannot abide the inhumanity and suffering, so they’ve collapsed into despair.

Nothing will be done, they say.

Some others I know are resigned to what’s happening and believe their only real choice is to keep quiet. They don’t speak out against the monsters for fear of reprisal.

It’s the only practical choice, they say.

These are all completely understandable responses. If you are in denial, despair, or submissive silence, you should not feel guilty. You are only human.

But it’s also important to know that these attitudes help the monsters thrive and grow.

When most of us believe that nothing can be done, or assume nothing will be done, or think that silence is the only practical choice, we fuel more monstrosity.

We are in a national emergency, as is much of the rest of the world. If you are in denial or despair or in fearful silence, you are hardly alone.

But if enough of us stand up as Emily did, the monsters cannot win. We will prevail. We will end up with a democracy stronger than it was before the time of monsters.

Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, including as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century.

New York Times, How One Ivy League University Has Avoided Trump’s Retribution So Far, Vimal Patel, May 11, 2025. Some 600 college leaders recently signed a letter opposing the Trump administration’s interference in higher education. The only Ivy League president who did not sign the letter was Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College.

Dartmouth College is not on the Trump administration’s target lists and its funding remains intact, unlike the rest of its peers. Its president may be why.Instead, she wrote her own letter to her campus, saying that higher education institutions should strive to do better, “to further our standing as a trusted beacon for knowledge and truth.”

“Reflection does not mean capitulation,” she added.

It is the kind of message, her critics and supporters say, that has so far helped to keep Dartmouth out of the Trump administration’s cross hairs.

Six of the eight Ivies are facing major funding threats, to the tune of billions of dollars, as the federal government attempts to punish them over concerns about antisemitism and other issues. Harvard University alone could lose over $2 billion. And every Ivy but Dartmouth is being investigated over allegations that they have allowed antisemitism on campus.

The onslaught is unlike anything universities have experienced, academic leaders say. In addition to stripping schools of research money, the administration has threatened to increase taxes on university endowments, reshape college accreditation and even revoke tax exemptions from schools.

While Dartmouth hasn’t been targeted specifically, it would not emerge unscathed if the Republican administration gets its way. Higher endowment taxes could bring a significant financial blow, for example. And the administration’s visa crackdown has entangled some current and former Dartmouth students.

Dr. Beilock’s supporters see her as a champion of free expression and dialogue among people with different political viewpoints. They say she has been consistent, supporting these ideas long before the Trump administration or even the Hamas attack on Israel complicated campus politics.

May 8, 2025

Cornell University, overlooking Cayuga Lake in New York

Cornell University, Cornell President’s Message To Cornellians, Michael I. Kotlikoff, Ph.D., President, shown at right, May 8, 2025. Today, across all of our campuses, Cornell scientists are developing new technologies, finding better ways to treat and cure diseases, and continually expanding our understanding of life, on earth and beyond.

The real-world impact of this work is incalculable. It strengthens our national security, protects the safety and stability of our food supply, and ensures the progress and resilience of our nation.

For decades, federal agencies have relied on Cornell and other research universities to perform the highly specialized research and development work that improves and enhances our lives. This partnership has been critical to advancing and maintaining America’s economic, political, and military strength in the postwar era. Now, recent federal actions and funding freezes have imperiled that partnership—and the work on which so much of our national wellbeing and strength depend.

The impact of this funding freeze is immediate and devastating. Grants that support research to prevent midair airplane collisions, find new treatments for drug-resistant prostate cancer, develop new materials for jet fighter wings, and build a miniature heart-assist pump for infants with life-threatening congenital heart disease have all been halted.

To date, federal agencies have stopped work on or terminated more than 100 research projects at Cornell, abruptly ending ongoing research grants with no official notice of their future status. Media reports have suggested that more than $1 billion in federal funding to Cornell will be suspended.

While the university is doing what it can to protect the infrastructure of our research enterprise, finding stopgap ways to pay research faculty and staff and cover the expenses of running their labs, the financial loss is not sustainable. Every campus, every college, and every school at Cornell has been impacted.

• How Cornell is responding

• Three ways you can help

May 7

American Bar Association (ABA) Journal, BigLaw firms tell Democratic lawmakers they maintained independence in pro bono deals with Trump, Debra Cassens Weiss, May 7, 2025. Two Democratic lawmakers aren’t satisfied with answers from five BigLaw firms asked to provide information on pro bono deals that they reached with President Donald Trump to avoid punitive executive orders.

“The inability of the firms to provide serious answers calls for aggressive oversight and inspection of the president’s $1 billion shakedown for free legal services for pet causes,” said the lawmakers, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, in a statement provided to Reuters.

Publications covering the letters, in addition to Reuters, include Law.com and Law360.

The law firms are A&O Shearman; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. All said they did not compromise their principles when they agreed to provide millions of dollars in pro bono assistance to matters supported by Trump and the firms.

Kirkland & Ellis said in its letter it would “continue to provide pro bono and other legal services on a nonpartisan basis to a wide range of underserved populations,” according to Reuters. The other firms said they retained independence to pick their clients and cases.

Four of the firms also indicated that the deals resolved an inquiry into their diversity efforts by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A fifth firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, wasn’t subject to the EEOC probe.

The five firms are the latest to respond to information requests from Blumenthal and Raskin. Firms that received earlier requests for information about deals are Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Milbank; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

Blumenthal and Raskin “were similarly not enthused” with responses from the first group of firms that were asked for information, according to Law360.

The firms reached the deals to avoid executive orders that, among other things, call for the suspension of lawyers’ security clearances and imperil their clients’ government contracts.

May 5

The Bulwark, Opinion: Our Megalomaniacal President, William Kristol, right, May 5, 2025. Trump has always been a narcissist. But it’s gotten much worse. 

Why is Donald Trump’s second term so much more dangerous than his first? Trump has always been a narcissist. But what do you call it when success and power go to a narcissist’s head? Megalomania?

As Trump said in his recent interview with the Atlantic: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys . . . And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

Now, most presidents wouldn’t say in the first place that they “run the country.” They might recognize that other branches of government play a role, and that other national institutions matter. They might grasp the fact that this is a free country, not one the president “runs.”

So the narcissism is jarring. But Trump’s self-described progression from “I run the country” to “I run the country and the world” seems to represent a progression from narcissism to megalomania. Running the world sounds . . . God-like.

Tariffs are one of the miraculous ways that Trump believes will enable him to run the world. As he explained to Time magazine:

You have to understand . . . I’ve made all the deals. . . . The deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. . . . So I will set a price.

What an image: The United States as Trump’s department store. It’s a store where he sets the prices, where neither Congress nor companies nor markets nor other countries have any say. It’s all him.

Democracy Docket, Commentary: My time on 60 Minutes and why I refuse to stay silent, Marc Elias, right, May 5, 2025. I have been fighting Donald Trump nonstop for a decade. I officially became general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign on April 12, 2015. A month later, on June 16, Trump announced his campaign.

People often forget that in 2016, Trump and his campaign were fixated on undermining free and fair elections. I was equally determined to protect them. That year, I led litigation efforts in several battleground states aimed at defending voting rights. Our efforts were in vain. While we won some of the lawsuits, we lost the election.

Even after he won the 2016 election, Trump’s disdain for democracy remained central to his identity. Donald Trump became the 45th President as an avowed election critic, vote suppressor and someone who bore a personal grudge against me.

The basic outlines of his grievances against me are well known. He hates me for working for Hillary Clinton. He despises me for humiliating him in court after the 2020 election. He is livid that I call out his lies, refuse to back down and continue to defeat him and the GOP in court.

I have endured his scurrilous attacks for years. He has sued me for racketeering — and lost. He has unleashed his right-wing army of online trolls. Since his reelection, he has threatened me, defamed me and singled me out by name in two executive orders.

The latest development in this saga took place late on Friday, when a federal judge permanently blocked Trump’s executive order seeking to punish my former law firm for my work while I was a partner there. As the court dryly explained:

“Perkins Coie’s representation of President Trump’s political opponent in the 2016 presidential campaign and representation of other clients in connection with election litigation has drawn President Trump’s attention and ire, as reflected in his public statements and his filing of a lawsuit against the Firm.”

The judge offered several examples of those statements. For instance, the court noted that in March 2024, Trump posted an article on his social media platform entitled “Marc Elias Is Scared…And He Should Be.”

More ominously, the court noted that Trump twice, in the fall of 2024, posted “his intent, if elected, to investigate and prosecute ‘Lawyers’ and others he perceived to be helping political opponents and ‘involved’ in what he perceived to be ‘unscrupulous behavior.’”

Which brings me to my appearance Sunday night on 60 Minutes.

Several weeks ago, a producer from the broadcast reached out to say they were working on a story about Trump’s targeting of law firms. I had already written about the topic, expressing my outrage at Trump’s actions and my deep disappointment with the legal industry’s failure to unite behind the targeted firms.

After I shared my views, the producer asked if I’d be willing to discuss the topic on camera. I was unsure. I had previously appeared in a 60 Minutes episode in 2020 about GOP plans to attack voting rights, so I knew the drill — lots of time talking, for a clip or two in the final cut.

However, I quickly learned that few other lawyers — particularly partners at large law firms — were willing to speak on television. The same fear that had prevented Big Law firms from standing up to Trump was now making their partners unwilling to speak out publicly. Even the targeted firms remained quiet.

In 2020, I created Democracy Docket to expose Trump’s lies about elections and democracy in court. Over the years, it had grown into a full-fledged media company. In 2024, I began writing more frequently and doing more on its YouTube channel. It, too, faced a crossroads.

If Kamala Harris had won, I might have scaled back. I could have continued practicing law and writing, without maintaining the same grueling schedule I’d kept for three decades. I had even planned to take time off to write a book.

But with Trump back in office, I decided all of that would have to wait. I promised myself that I would continue to fight Trump and his authoritarian vision for this country with everything I have.

So, I agreed to talk to 60 Minutes, and I promised myself I would not pull punches.

From the opening words of Judge Beryl Howell’s opinion — “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit” — to the 60 Minutes closing credits, this has been an emotional weekend for me personally.I have no doubt that Trump’s hateful words are not behind me. I am certain he will escalate his campaign of political retribution. But, for my part, I will not stop fighting. I will never back down. And I will always speak out.

May 4

CBS 60 Minutes, How law firms targeted by Trump are responding to White House pressure, Anchor Scott Pelley, right, May 4, 2025. In recent weeks, President Trump has signed orders targeting several law firms. Some lawyers warn that the president's assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself.

New York Times, Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked About Due Process and Upholding Constitution, Jonathan Swan, May 4, 2025. President Trump repeatedly said he didn’t know when asked in a TV interview whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

President Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he did not know whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, despite constitutional guarantees, and complained that adhering to that principle would result in an unmanageable slowdown of his mass deportation program.

The revealing exchange, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was prompted by the interviewer Kristen Welker asking Mr. Trump if he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that citizens and noncitizens in the United States were entitled to due process.

New York Times, Trump Battles Academia, but Especially the Ivy League, Elisabeth Bumiller, May 4, 2025. Beyond the politics is a brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never accepted him.

There it was for all to see, President Trump’s tangled relationship with the Ivy League, delivered in a burst at his rally in Michigan on Tuesday night.

“He’s the top,” the president said of Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity doctor he chose to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. “I mean, he went to Harvard.” But then: “I shouldn’t even mention that anymore because that used to be a good thing. Today it doesn’t mean much.”

There was this about Gen. Mark A. Milley, the president’s first-term choice as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “You know, he went to Princeton,” Mr. Trump said in 2019. “And he went to Columbia.” But then: “I’m not sure, was that a good thing or a bad? Did I like it or not?” The president never answered, although he called General Milley, whom he has since reviled, a “smart cookie.”

And on Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “He was, I believe, No. 1 at Yale,” Mr. Trump said in 2018 of his Supreme Court nominee. “Is that a correct statement?” It was not, since Yale does not calculate class rank.

What is correct is that the president’s war on academia has focused intensely on the Ivy League, the richly endowed collection of eight schools, most founded in the colonial era, that cost $90,000 or more a year, send a disproportionate number of graduates into America’s leadership class and accounted for less than 1 percent of the nation’s undergraduate enrollment in the fall of 2022.

Mr. Trump’s attacks on this elite group — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania — have endeared him to his political base. He is withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars in federal funding from six of the eight schools because, he says, they are citadels of antisemitism and liberal indoctrination. Officials in higher education acknowledge failures, but call the president’s crackdown a perilous threat to academic freedom.

The Trump administration has targeted many other colleges and universities for potential antisemitism, some 60 in all. And yet the eight Ivies are cultural touchstones for Mr. Trump. Beyond the politics is a complex brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never really accepted him.

Timothy L. O’Brien, a biographer of Mr. Trump, said the president’s ire about the upper echelon of academia was not surprising. “He has a long track record of criticizing elites that he desperately wants to be accepted by,” Mr. O’Brien said. As far as the Ivy League, he said, “he could barely wait to get in himself.”

May 1

 

Cornell Daily Sun, Commentary: U.S. Universities in Crisis: The Implicit and Explicit Threat of Nationalization, Daniel R. Schwarz, right, May 1, 2025. Using the threat of withholding research funds and taxing endowments, Trump and his acolytes are trying to nationalize universities. Under the guise of fighting antisemitism, they want to put universities under the auspices of various kinds of monitors, perhaps in some cases judges, who will control what universities do.

Disregarding democracy, autocrats are bullies who stifle dissent and debate to impose their worldview. The Trump administration lives by intimidation, whether it be directed at the press, the legal establishment, cultural resources or the media.

Defending the right to express fact-based opinions and different interpretations of the same facts, universities must resist intimidation by an authoritarian regime that seeks compliant silence in the face of outrageous demands. Universities’ leadership must not follow the example of some leaders of the U.S. media, medical, educational, legal and corporate worlds who have been cowed into silence and succumbed to threats.

Despite Columbia University agreeing to his conditions, it still has not had its $400 million released because Trump’s end game is to continue making new demands on universities until they capitulate to his conditions on admission as well as his stipulations for muzzling free speech, hiring conservatives, testing the politics of foreign students and dismantling programs that encourage diversity and inclusion.

The failure of the GOP majority in Congress to resist or challenge Trump enables him to rule by executive order, which means ruling by decree. As Frank Bruni and others have remarked, we have entered a world of unpredictable darkness.

A personal note: When I was a guest at Peking University four years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protest demonstrations, which ended with the army massacring 200 protestors, the university was run by the army. Professors were humiliated when they came to work, having to show their credentials every day. I was told my lecture would be heard by party factotums whose reports could jeopardize my hosts. That is what happens when universities fall under government control.

U.S. universities must be independent of government control. Those who understand the role of universities in a democracy applaud Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, who refused to capitulate: “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” Nor, I would argue, can the great public universities submit to government interference even though they are vulnerable to state interference.

Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University where he has been a faculty member for 57 years.

 

April News

April 29

ABC News, HHS firings, questioning safety of vaccines: How the Trump administration may be 'attacking' science, Mary Kekatos, April 29, 2025. Officials have been questioning what is believed to be established science.

The first 100 days of President Donald Trump's second term have been filled with mass firings, cancellations of research grants, university funding cuts and questions over what should be studied.

Thousands of people have been let go at federal agencies and critical research has been put on hold. Additionally, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines and antidepressant medications despite dozens of studies proving they are safe and effective.

Doctors and public health specialists critical of the administration tell ABC News they view these actions as an "attack" on science, damaging the reputation of respected agencies and by questioning what is believed to be established science.MORE: RFK Jr. said HHS layoffs are needed as 'Americans are getting sicker.' Here's what the data shows.

"It's completely unprecedented," Steve Cohen, senior vice dean of Columbia University's School of Professional Studies and a professor of public affairs at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, told ABC News. "It's frankly a little unhinged. I've never seen anything like it."

The White House did not respond to ABC News' request for comment.

An HHS official told ABC News that framing the actions of the admiration as an "attack" is "fundamentally dishonest."

"Further reviewing pharmaceutical products with gold standard science and common sense is not an '"attack on science' — it's what the American people have asked for and deserve," the official said. " Let's be clear: Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability."

Earlier this month, HHS began to lay off 10,000 workers as part of a massive restructuring plan.

Sources previously told ABC News that affected offices included most of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health, key offices in the Center for Tobacco Products, most of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the entire assisted reproductive technology team at the CDC.There have also been local impacts in communities due to federal layoffs. ABC News previously reported in March, the CDC was poised to send its lead 'disease detectives' to Milwaukee amid an ongoing lead crisis in schools, but the entire division was cut under sweeping HHS layoffs, leaving local health officials without help they were relying on.

Scientists have also been laid off at NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cohen said these firings have put studies on hold and have greatly reduced the capacity of the federal government to review research.

"Scientists inside agencies, whether they're environmental scientists or medical scientists or people focusing on vaccines or drugs, are being fired, and so some of the research capacity in Washington, in the federal government is being eliminated, and also their ability to judge proposals from universities," he said.

"The only place I haven't seen [firings] happen yet are the laboratories," Cohen added.

Cuts that are currently proposed or have already been implemented include the elimination of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV Policy, created by Brett Giroir, the former U.S. assistant secretary for health.

Giroir, who helped convince Trump in his first term to set a goal to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S., wrote in a post on social media last week that the president could ruin his legacy and mission with such cuts.

Millions of dollars' worth of grants have been terminated at the National Institutes of Health related to studies involving LGBTQ+ issues, gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) because they do not "effectuate" the "priorities" of President Donald Trump's administration, according to copies of termination letters sent to grant recipients and viewed by ABC News.

Dr. Harold Varmus, a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and former director of the NIH, said these terminations are "detrimental" because they may be affecting people in the middle of clinical trials, or affecting the early stages of experimental work.

Research projects focusing on minority populations have major benefits, Varmus noted.

"The purpose of health research in this country is to address problems faced by everybody and to explore every facet of a population that may affect their health," he said. "To single out certain categories of individuals who would not be appropriate to study seems ludicrous to me ... one of the great strengths of America is that we are diverse."

April 18

Cornell Review, Why the Endowment Won’t Solve Cornell’s Problems, Staff Report, April 18, 2025.  Cornell is facing many challenges, particularly the Trump Administration is suspending $1 billion in federal research grants due to alleged antisemitism and improper diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

For the year ending June 30, 2023, Cornell received $157 million instate and federal appropriations, $826.5 million in federal grants, and $70.7 million in state grants. This compares with $307 million in grants from the private sector. Yet, all of these are small parts of Cornell’s $5.9 billion in annual operating expenses.

In response, many people are asking whether Cornell can withstand this challenge by using its endowment to fill the gap. As of March 2025, the endowment was worth $10,332,429,674, which is the 14th largest in the country. However, most experts claim that a better measurement is the endowment per student, and Cornell ranks 71st by that measure.

CBS News, Justice Department wants to step in for Trump in E. Jean Carroll appeal, Katrina Kaufman, April 17, 2025. The Department of Justice wants to stand in for President Trump in his ongoing appeal of a defamation case that could cost him tens of millions of dollars.

Lawyers for the taxpayer-funded agency and Mr. Trump's personal attorneys said in a filing on April 11 that the Justice Department believes the federal Westfall Act shields Mr. Trump in the case, which has pitted him against the writer E. Jean Carroll.

A federal jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in January 2024, after concluding that Mr. Trump made defamatory statements when denying that he sexually abused Carroll. That award came less than a year after a separate federal jury concluded Trump was liable for sexual abuse, and instructed him to pay her $5 million.

Mr. Trump has denied all of Carroll's allegations and appealed both cases.

The Justice Department asserts that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he made the allegedly defamatory statements about Carroll in 2019, and therefore the court is required to substitute the United States for Mr. Trump in the case. Under the Westfall Act, federal employees are entitled to absolute immunity from personal lawsuits for conduct occurring within the scope of their employment.

Legal scholar James Pfander said Mr. Trump still needs to show that his actions, publicly denying Carroll's claims, were within the scope of the presidency.

"As a legal issue ultimately for the courts, the [Justice Department's] certification alone does not decide the question," said Pfander, a Northwestern School of Law professor.

Pfander noted that the Westfall Act says it permits government employees to petition courts to certify they were acting within the scope of their office "at any time before trial."

"By allowing an employee to pursue certification but limiting the time to 'before trial,' the statute would seem to suggest that a motion to substitute at the appellate stage of the litigation comes too late," Pfander said.

A longtime advice columnist, Carroll published a book excerpt in New York magazine in 2019 accusing Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Mr. Trump denied the allegations and called Carroll a "whack job." He claimed he had never met Carroll, accused her of "totally lying" and said, "she's not my type."

Mr. Trump would go on to repeat similar denials in public appearances, social media posts and depositions.

The Justice Department initially supported Mr. Trump's effort to have the case dismissed, arguing the Westfall Act protected Mr. Trump from liability because he was acting as a federal employee when he denied Carroll's allegations.

A lawyer for the department argued in 2021 — while Mr. Trump was out of office after losing the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden — that even though Mr. Trump "made crude and offensive comments in response to the very serious accusations of sexual assault" the law protecting employees from such a suit should be upheld.

The agency reversed its position in July 2023. An official for the Justice Department wrote at the time that the decision factored in the jury's conclusion in the $5 million case that Mr. Trump was liable for sexual abuse.

"The allegations that prompted the statements related to a purely personal incident: an alleged sexual assault that occurred decades prior to Mr. Trump's Presidency," former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton wrote. "That sexual assault was obviously not job related."

Paul Figley, a former deputy director of the Justice Department's Torts Branch, said Boynton's decision was unexpected.

"I was very surprised by the withdrawal because we always viewed the president as behaving within the scope of office for anything he did," said Figley, an American University professor emeritus who worked at the Justice Department for more than three decades.

An exhibit included with the case's latest filing shows that the Justice Department, now under the purview of Mr. Trump, has again reversed course.

"I find that Donald J. Trump was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time of the incidents out of which the plaintiff's claims arose," wrote Kirsten Wilkinson, the director of the agency's Torts Branch Civil Division.

Columbia Law School professor Caroline Polisi said she believes the decision fits a pattern within the Trump administration.

"This is not at all a surprising move for this Justice Department. Trump has shown time and time again that he considers this DOJ to be his personal attorney," said Polisi, a federal criminal defense attorney

"On their face, the comments at issue were purely personal in nature, and therefore outside of his scope of duties as president, thus excluding him from governmental immunity," said Polisi. "However, the fact that the former administration took the same position - at least initially - shows that the argument is not entirely frivolous, and that a court may entertain arguments on the issue."

The highest ranks of the Justice Department are filled with lawyers who just last year were Mr. Trump's personal attorneys, but Figley said Wilkinson does not fit that description. He noted she's risen steadily while serving through multiple administrations, before being appointed director in January.

"That appointment was an obvious choice, she'd been the deputy director in that office for many years, and the previous director retired," Figley said.

A lawyer for Mr. Trump also argued last year that the case should be dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for "official acts"while they are in office.

April 8

New York Times, Trump Administration Freezes $1 Billion for Cornell and $790 Million for Northwestern, Officials Say, Michael C. Bender and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, April 8, 2025. The funding pause amid civil rights investigations into both universities sharply escalates the Trump administration’s campaign against elite colleges.

The Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern amid civil rights investigations into both schools, two U.S. officials said.

The funding pause involves mostly grants from and contracts with the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced decision.

The moves are the latest and largest in a rapidly escalating campaign against elite American universities that has resulted in billions in federal funds being suspended or put under review in just over a month. Other schools that have had funds threatened include Brown, Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.

Cornell and Northwestern are both facing investigations into allegations of antisemitism and into accusations of racial discrimination stemming from their efforts to promote diversity.

Cornell officials said in a statement that they had received more than 75 stop-work orders from the Defense Department on Tuesday, but that they had no information to confirm that more than $1 billion in funding had been suspended. The affected grants, they said, supported research that they described as “profoundly significant to American defense, cybersecurity and health.”

“We are actively seeking information from federal officials to learn more about the basis for these decisions,” said the joint statement from Michael Kotlikoff, the university president; Kavita Bala, the provost; and Robert Harrington, provost for medical affairs.

Jon Yates, a spokesman for Northwestern, said that the university had not been notified by the federal government that funding had been frozen.

Northwestern, a Big Ten university, is the first non-Ivy League school to have funding from the Trump administration targeted under investigations of alleged discrimination. The university issued a “progress report” last week that highlighted its efforts to protect Jewish students, including mandatory antisemitism training for all students, faculty and staff.

“Federal funds that Northwestern receives drive innovative and lifesaving research, like the recent development by Northwestern researchers of the world’s smallest pacemaker, and research fueling the fight against Alzheimer’s disease,” Mr. Yates said. “This type of research is now at jeopardy.”

 

March News

March 21

 

Michael I. Kotlikoff  (Cornell University Photo by Ryan Young)

Cornell University / Cornell Chronicle, Michael Kotlikoff named Cornell’s 15th president, David Nutt, March 21, 2025. The Cornell Board of Trustees today voted to appoint Michael I. Kotlikoff, who has served as interim president since July 2024, Cornell’s 15th president, effective immediately.

“Over the last eight months as interim president – and his 25 years on Cornell’s faculty – Mike has demonstrated the leadership and vision that the university needs right now,” said Board of Trustees Chair Kraig Kayser, MBA ’84. “His institutional knowledge, expertise and passion for our shared mission will continue to help him lead Cornell through a period of great uncertainty and provide much-needed continuity at a critical time.”

As interim president, Kotlikoff has sought to foster connection and dialogue on campus and to highlight the unique attributes of Cornell – including its history and its ethos.

“I’ve spent 25 wonderful years at Cornell, and serving this university is an honor and a privilege,” Kotlikoff said. “I’m committed to finishing my career here, leading an institution I love through these challenging times. As higher education across the U.S. navigates difficult political, financial and societal headwinds, I hope to guide Cornell in ways that reflect our core principles as an institution committed to doing ‘the greatest good.’”

A professor of molecular physiology, Kotlikoff arrived at Cornell in 2000 to build a new department in biomedical sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). He also launched and led the university’s Mammalian Genomics Life Science Initiative. He was named dean of CVM in 2007, and he became university provost in 2015.

“Mike has been a dedicated advocate and champion for Cornell for decades,” said Anne Meinig Smalling ’87, chair of the Board of Trustees Executive Committee and the incoming board chair. “His values, knowledge and insights are deeply appreciated by all who know him. I and the other trustees look forward to working with Mike in the months and years ahead.”

Previously, Kotlikoff was professor and chair of the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his B.A. in 1973 and VMD in 1981, with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1984. A professor of molecular physiology, Kotlikoff arrived at Cornell in 2000 to build a new department in biomedical sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). He also launched and led the university’s Mammalian Genomics Life Science Initiative. He was named dean of CVM in 2007, and he became university provost in 2015.

“Mike has been a dedicated advocate and champion for Cornell for decades,” said Anne Meinig Smalling ’87, chair of the Board of Trustees Executive Committee and the incoming board chair. “His values, knowledge and insights are deeply appreciated by all who know him. I and the other trustees look forward to working with Mike in the months and years ahead.”

Previously, Kotlikoff was professor and chair of the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his B.A. in 1973 and VMD in 1981, with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1984.

By the time he was hired at Cornell in 2000, his research interests had expanded from studying ion channel proteins that control muscle excitability to using genetics to understand the fundamental processes that underlie and limit repair of the damaged mammalian heart. His arrival opened new opportunities for studying mouse genetics at the university. His lab’s breakthroughs included developing optogenetic signaling molecules that can be expressed in mice to explore cell function; ways to use cell therapy to treat cardiac arrythmias in injured hearts; and an understanding of the limits of precursor cells in heart repair. He has published 152 papers and his lab, which he closed in 2021, was continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since he began his research career. He has served in numerous roles at the NIH, including chairing the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and serving on the NIH Council of Councils.

Kotlikoff also has the distinction of having been Cornell’s longest-serving provost and served as chief budget officer in addition to chief academic officer. As provost, he helped steward many large and complicated projects, such as the creation of the SC Johnson College of Business and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy; the Radical Collaboration initiative; the North Campus Residential Expansion; and the university’s COVID-19 response.

His wife, Carolyn McDaniel, retired in 2024 as a professor of practice in CVM. They have two children: Phoebe, a lawyer and former submarine officer with the U.S. Navy, and Emmett ’16, who graduated from Cornell with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and currently works for Google.