The Trump administration is quietly carrying out a plan that aims to kill hundreds of bans on highly toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” and other dangerous compounds in consumer goods.
The bans, largely at the state level, touch most facets of daily life, prohibiting everything from bisphenol in children’s products to mercury in personal care products to PFAS in food packaging and clothing.
If successful, the public would almost certainly be exposed to much higher levels of chemicals linked to a range of serious health issues such s cancer, hormone disruption, liver disease, birth defects, and reproductive system damage, the plan’s opponents say.
It’s been quite a week.
On Monday, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) began an epic speech in the Senate calling out the crisis in which the nation finds itself. He finished just over 25 hours later, on Tuesday, setting a new record for the longest Senate speech. In it, he urged Americans to speak up for our democracy and to “be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope.”
Shortly after Booker yielded the floor on Tuesday night, election officials in Wisconsin announced the results of an election for a seat on the state supreme court. The candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump and backed by more than $20 million from billionaire Elon Musk lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford, by more than ten points.
On Wednesday, April 2, a day that he called “Liberation Day,” President Trump announced unexpectedly high tariffs on goods produced by countries around the world. On Thursday the stock market plummeted. Friday, the plummet continued while Trump was enjoying a long weekend at one of his private golf resorts.
And then today, across the country, millions of people turned out for “Hands Off” protests to demonstrate opposition to the Trump administration, Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” that has been slashing government agencies and employees, and, more generally, attacks on our democracy.
In San Francisco, where Buddy and I joined a protest, what jumped out to me was how many of the signs in the crowd called for the protection of the U.S. Constitution, our institutions, and the government agencies that keep us safe.
Scholars often note that the American Revolution of 250 years ago was a movement not to change the status quo but to protect it. The colonists who became revolutionaries sought to make sure that patterns of self-government established over generations could not be overturned by officials seeking to seize power.
We seem to be at it again….
In San Francisco, where Buddy and I joined a protest, what jumped out to me was how many of the signs in the crowd called for the protection of the U.S. Constitution, our institutions, and the government agencies that keep us safe.
Scholars often note that the American Revolution of 250 years ago was a movement not to change the status quo but to protect it. The colonists who became revolutionaries sought to make sure that patterns of self-government established over generations could not be overturned by officials seeking to seize power.
We seem to be at it again….
After President Trump said last year that he wanted to be a dictator for a day, he insisted that he was only joking. Now he is saying that he may try to hold onto power even after the Constitution stipulates that he must give it up, and this time he insists he is not joking.
Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. Mr. Trump loves stirring the pot and getting a rise out of critics. Talk of an unconstitutional third term distracts from other news and delays the day he is seen as a lame duck. Certainly some in his own camp consider it a joke as Republican leaders laugh it off and White House aides mock reporters for taking it too seriously.
But the fact that Mr. Trump has inserted the idea into the national conversation illustrates the uncertainty about the future of America’s constitutional system, nearly 250 years after the country gained independence. More than at any time in generations, a president’s commitment to limits on power and the rule of law is under question and his critics fear that the country is on a dark path.
After all, Mr. Trump already tried once to hold onto power in defiance of the Constitution when he sought to overturn the 2020 election despite losing. He later called for “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to the White House without a new election. And in the 11 weeks since he resumed office, he has pressed the boundaries of executive power more than any of his modern predecessors.
“This is in my mind a culmination of what he has already started, which is a methodical effort to destabilize and undermine our democracy so that he can assume much greater power,” Representative Daniel Goldman, Democrat of New York and lead counsel during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, said in an interview.
“A lot of people are not talking about it because it’s not the most pressing issue of that particular day,” he said on Friday as stock markets were plunging in reaction to Mr. Trump’s newly declared trade war. But an attack on democracy, he added, “is actually in motion and people need to recognize that it is not hypothetical or speculative anymore.”
To Mr. Trump’s allies, such talk is hyperbolic, the over-the-top grievances of an opposition party that lost an election and cannot come to terms with it. Mr. Trump, who is 78, is not really going to run for a third term, they maintain, and even if he found a way around the Constitution, it would still be up to voters to decide whether to re-elect him.
While his allies contend that Mr. Trump is not serious, he has a way of throwing out ideas that seem outrageous at first, only to socialize them over time through repetition until they are treated as if they are somehow normal or at least no longer quite so shocking. There was a time it would have been unthinkable for a president to threaten to seize Greenland and Canada or to pardon rioters who stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power and beat police officers. But in the Trump era, the journey from unthinkable to reality has been remarkably short.
Mr. Trump’s autocratic tendencies and disregard for constitutional norms are well documented. In this second term alone, he has already sought to overrule birthright citizenship embedded in the 14th Amendment, effectively co-opted the power of Congress to determine what money will be spent or agencies closed, purged the uniformed leadership of the armed forces to enforce greater personal loyalty and punished dissent in academia, the news media, the legal profession and the federal bureaucracy.
The two-term limit on the presidency that Mr. Trump wants to contravene has its roots in the beginning of the republic when George Washington voluntarily stepped down after eight years as the country’s first president, setting a precedent for those who would follow.
A few of his successors toyed with breaking that precedent, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. But none actually took it all the way until Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, won a third term in 1940 as World War II raged overseas and then a fourth term in 1944.
In response, Congress, with strong Republican support, passed the 22nd Amendment declaring that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice,” a measure then ratified by the states in 1951.
Since then, some presidents have expressed second thoughts about the term limit. Ronald Reagan said in 1987 that he would favor repealing the 22nd Amendment, not for himself “but for presidents from here on.” Bill Clinton in 2003 mused that the Constitution should only limit a president to consecutive terms. “For future generations, the 22nd Amendment should be modified.”
No president has sought to circumvent it for himself, however, and it is unclear how Mr. Trump might proceed if he were to try. Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, has introduced a constitutional amendment allowing a president who did not win two consecutive terms to run again. But that is not a serious prospect since an amendment requires a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states.
Because of that, some Trump allies said it was pointless for them to advocate a third term for the president or for his opponents to worry about it. “If Congress passes a constitutional amendment by the necessary majorities and the requisite number of states ratify the amendment, then he could run,” said former Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Without that, it is a cocktail party conversation idea.”
Still, it is a cocktail party conversation that Mr. Trump likes to have. While asserting that for now “it is far too early to think about it,” he told NBC News recently that he is “not joking” about the possibility and claimed that “there are methods” to get around the constitutional limit.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, would not elaborate on what such “methods” might be and there was no sign that the administration is pursuing any at the moment. “He has four years,” she told reporters. “There’s a lot of work to do.”
Some have suggested that he could bypass the term limit by running for vice president in 2028 with a pliant candidate at the top of the ticket who could then resign and allow Mr. Trump to assume the presidency again without violating the ban on being “elected” more than twice.
Scholars debate whether the 12th Amendment would bar such a scenario because it says that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.” Would Mr. Trump still be “eligible” to be president if he could not be elected to the office again?
Such a debate is esoteric and, to some, a pointless distraction. “I don’t take Trump seriously about this,” said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and former Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “There are some outlandish ways he could serve another term, which no doubt were once plot lines on ‘24’ or ‘The West Wing.’ But none of them are realistic.”
Even some critics of Mr. Trump said the president’s musings about a third term should not consume much attention. “We have plenty of genuine threats to our constitutional order that Trump and his allies are posing, and I think we should be focused on those,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who specializes on democracy issues.
But other legal scholars said that Mr. Trump’s scorn for the law was made palpable by the third-term talk. “The president is, again, taunting and insulting the American people and mocking the Constitution of the United States,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appeals judge.
Most Americans do not support Mr. Trump trying to stay for a third term but they do not take it as a joke either. A YouGov survey last week found that 60 percent oppose him seeking another term even as 56 percent expect him to try nonetheless.
Mr. Trump has publicly teased opponents that he might stay beyond the limit as far back as his first term. At times, he has demonstrated willingness to disregard rules to retain office. In July 2020, he floated the idea of postponing the fall election, citing the Covid-19 pandemic, prompting unusually firm pushback from senior Republicans.
After losing to Joseph R. Biden Jr. that November, Mr. Trump pressured governors, state lawmakers, Congress and his vice president to toss out the results so that he could hold onto power, a scheme that got him indicted by federal and state prosecutors before his re-election last fall all but mooted those cases.
Lucian Ahmad Way, the author with Steven Levitsky of “Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism,” said Mr. Trump’s latest musings about ignoring the two-term limit should not be discounted.
“I can only assume that he is completely serious and that if his health holds that he will attempt to run for a third term,” said Mr. Way, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. “Efforts to avoid term limits have been a key component of fully authoritarian and competitive authoritarian rule in Belarus, Russia and a range of African states.”
Indeed, some of the world’s most notorious autocrats have found ways to circumvent constitutional provisions to stay in charge — among them, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus (now in power for 31 years), Vladimir V. Putin of Russia (25 years) and Xi Jinping of China (12 years), each of whom got around a two-term limit.
According to a 2019 study, one-third of the world’s incumbent leaders who reach the end of their constitutional terms try to keep power, a proportion that rises to one-half if the most advanced democracies are not counted. Among 234 incumbents in 106 countries examined, none explicitly ignored their constitutions, but sought to evade limits through supposed loopholes, novel interpretations or constitutional revisions.
Mila Versteeg, a law professor at the University of Virginia and the study’s lead author, said such leaders try to wrap their power grabs in the veneer of legality. “This is such a clear constitutional rule,” she said. “Four plus four is eight, and anyone who can count knows if you’re in year nine, you’re violating the Constitution.”
Some Trump allies have advanced ideas. Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, has suggested that Mr. Trump should be able to run again because his two terms were not consecutive. The 22nd Amendment makes no allowance for that, but just to be sure, Mr. Goldman introduced a resolution reaffirming that the two-term limit applies whether the terms were consecutive or not.
Others have suggested that Mr. Trump could run and essentially dare the courts or states to remove him from the ballot. The Supreme Court rejected efforts by several states to remove Mr. Trump from the 2024 ballot under a 14th Amendment provision disqualifying insurrectionists from public office. But the term limits in the 22nd Amendment are more clearly defined, and Mr. Trump’s chances of persuading the justices would seem more remote.
At the most extreme are fears that Mr. Trump would simply refuse to leave office, a scenario not dispelled by his replacement of the senior uniformed military leadership. During his bid to overturn his 2020 defeat, some allies urged Mr. Trump to declare martial law and rerun the election in states he lost, advice he did not follow knowing that the military leadership of that moment would not go along.
The United States is a more durable democracy than most, and Ms. Versteeg said she doubts Mr. Trump would succeed at staying in power after Jan. 20, 2029. Still, the desire is strong. “All these guys like their job, and they want to find a way to keep it,” she said. “That’s very, very common.”
After President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements on April 2 wiped $5 trillion dollars from the stock market, the Republican Party is scrambling.
Farmers, who were a part of Trump’s base, are “struck and shocked” by the tariffs, the president of the South Dakota Farmers Union told Lauren Scott of CBC News, saying they will have a “devastating effect.” Rob Copeland, Lauren Hirsch, and Maureen Farrell of the New York Times report that Wall Street leaders who backed Trump are now criticizing him publicly, with one calling for someone to stop him. The size of yesterday’s peaceful protests around the country, less than 100 days into Trump’s term when he should be enjoying a honeymoon, demonstrated growing fury at the administration’s actions.
Yesterday, in the midst of the economic crisis and as millions of protesters gathered across the country, the White House announced that “[t]he President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow.” This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump posted a video of himself hitting a golf ball off a tee, perhaps as a demonstration that he is unconcerned about the chaos in the markets.
When Trump administration officials Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett appeared on this morning’s Sunday shows, their attempts to reassure Americans and deflect concerns also sounded out of touch.
Bessent, a billionaire, told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press that the administration is creating a new, more secure economic system and that Americans “who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I think don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.” He went on to suggest that the losses were likely not that significant and would turn out fine in the long term.
Lutnick insisted that the tariffs are about national security and bringing back manufacturing, although the administration has frozen the Inflation Reduction Act funding for the manufacturing President Joe Biden brought to the U.S., overwhelmingly in Republican-dominated districts. Lutnick kept hitting on the MAGA talking point that other countries are ripping the U.S. off, and insisted that the tariffs are here to stay.
On This Week by ABC News, Hassett took the opposite position: that countries are already calling the White House to begin tariff negotiations. Host George Stephanopoulos asked Hassett about the video Trump posted on his social media account claiming that he was crashing the market on purpose, forcing him to say that crashing the economy was not part of Trump’s strategy. Hassett claimed that the tariffs will not cost consumers more and that Trump is “trying to deliver for American workers.”
The tariffs not only have forced administration officials into contradictory positions, but also have brought into the open the rift between old MAGA and billionaire Elon Musk.
Trump’s tariff policy reflects the ideas of his senior counselor on manufacturing and trade, Peter Navarro, a China hawk who invented an “expert” to support his statements in his own books. Musk, who opposes the tariffs, has taken shots at Navarro on his social media platform X. On Saturday, Musk directly contradicted Trump and MAGA when he told a gathering of right-wing Italians that he wants the U.S. and Europe to create a tariff-free zone as well as "more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America." On the Fox News Channel this morning, Navarro retorted that Musk “sells cars” and is just trying to protect his own interests.
Republicans also have to quell fires as the demands of the very different constituencies Trump brought into his coalition to win in 2024 are creating growing anger. A second child has now died of measles in West Texas, and as of this morning, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of opposing vaccines, had continued to call vaccines a personal decision. Although he is not a doctor, he pushed the idea that ingesting Vitamin A helps patients recover from measles. Since his suggestion, a hospital in Texas says it is now treating children whose bodies have toxic levels of Vitamin A.
During the confirmation process for his post, Kennedy seems to have promised Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chair of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and a medical doctor, that he would not alter vaccine systems, but since taking office he has made dramatic cuts. Today, Cassidy posted on X, “Everyone should be vaccinated!” and added: “Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.”
Evidently feeling the pressure as the measles outbreak spreads, Kennedy this afternoon conceded on X that “[t]he most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
Today, Dan Diamond and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported that cuts to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have even Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials from his first term worried that the country is at risk of food-related disease outbreaks like the 2022 contamination of infant formula. On April 4, Heather Vogell of ProPublica reported that the Abbott Laboratories factory at the heart of the 2022 crisis continues to use the same unsanitary practices. Employees told her that workers still take shortcuts when cleaning and checking equipment for bacteria as supervisors try to increase production and retaliate against those who complain about problems.
The White House told Diamond and Natanson that cuts to the FDA and other health agencies will make them more “nimble and strategic.” Abbott Laboratories told Vogell that the workers’ assertions were “untrue or misleading” and said it “stands behind the quality and safety of all our products.”
Diamond and Natanson note that experts who worked under both Republican and Democratic presidents, as well as former Trump officials and Republican lawmakers are also concerned about cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors atmospheric and ocean systems and predicts weather, and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that responds to disasters. Storms across the South have been wreaking havoc in the past days. Today alone saw deadly weather in Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma; the governors of Tennessee and Kentucky have declared states of emergency.
Reporter James Fallows notes that the U.S. senators from the states hardest hit—Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas—are all Republicans and are all backing Trump and Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is behind the cuts to NOAA and FEMA.
Today, Michael Sainato of The Guardian reported that workers at the Social Security Administration say that cuts to staffing and services along with policy changes have created “complete, utter chaos” at the agency that is threatening to cause a “death spiral.” Acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Leland Dudek told Sainato that “we are updating our policy to provide better customer service to the country’s most vulnerable populations.”
Late Thursday, Trump fired General Timothy D. Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and of the U.S. Cyber Command, as well as Haugh’s deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, and several staff members from the White House National Security Council. He apparently did so at the recommendation of right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. The NSA collects information from overseas computer networks, while Cyber Command engages in both offensive and defensive operations on them.
While Democrats are out front, lawmakers across the political spectrum are concerned about the firings. Senator Angus King (I-ME), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times: “Our country is under attack right now in cyberspace, and the president has just removed our top general from the field for no reason at the recommendation of someone who knows nothing about national security or even the job this general does.”
And then there is the crisis over the arrest and rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was in the U.S. legally, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of a U.S. citizen. In 2019 a court barred the government from deporting him to El Salvador. On March 31 an official from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told the court under oath that Abrego Garcia had been arrested and deported to prison because of an “administrative error.” And yet the government also said it could not get him back because he is no longer in U.S. jurisdiction.
After a hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States no later than 11:59 p.m. on April 7. The administration immediately filed an emergency motion to stop the order while it appeals her decision. Today, Xinis filed her opinion, which said that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the 'custodian,' and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”
Today, Cecilia Vega, Aliza Chasan, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Andy Court, and Annabelle Hanflig of CBS News’s 60 Minutes reported that 75% of the Venezuelans the Trump administration sent to prison in El Salvador “have no apparent criminal convictions or even criminal charges.” Another 22% have records for nonviolent crimes like shoplifting or trespassing. A dozen or so are accused of murder, rape, assault, or kidnapping. When the reporters reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about these numbers, a spokesperson said that those without criminal records “are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more; they just don't have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
This utter disregard for the constitutional right to due process is raising alarm among Americans who have noted that when Trump declared an emergency at the southern border on January 20, he ordered the secretary of defense and the secretary of homeland security to advise him whether they thought it necessary to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. That act allows a president during times of civil unrest to use the military against U.S. citizens.
U.S. stock futures plunged again tonight, with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures down 1,250 points, or 3.3%, S&P 500 futures down 3.7%, and Nasdaq futures down 4.6%. And yet Trump is doubling down on tariffs, posting that they are “a beautiful thing to behold…. Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!”
Republican leaders have not silenced the chatter about Trump serving a third term, despite its obvious unconstitutionality, at least in part because they know he is the only person who can turn out MAGA voters. But their calculations appear to be changing. Today, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News Sunday that Trump is a “very smart man, and…I wish we could have him for 20 years as our president,” but that “I think he’s going to be finished, probably, after this term.”
The stock market reacts immediately, the White House denies it.
In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.
“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”
They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.
The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.
Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.
Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.
Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.
She writes of Israeli autism:
This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.
Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.
