The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

US college students detained in Denmark after alleged Uber driver dispute
Two students traveling on spring break were arrested and charged with assault in Copenhagen, police say

Two American college students traveling for spring break were arrested in Copenhagen, charged with assault, and held in a Danish prison for two weeks following an alleged dispute with an Uber driver, Danish police said.

The family of Owen Ray, a 19-year-old studying at Miami University in Ohio, said he and an unnamed friend have been forced to forfeit their passports and remain in the country.

Ray and his friend were visiting Denmark in March when they entered the wrong address for their destination on the Uber app, his family and attorney said.

An altercation allegedly occurred when the driver refused to take them to the alternate destination, and the two students exited the car, they said. They said the driver threatened the boys and assaulted Ray.

“A scuffle ensued, culminating in the boys fleeing due to fear. This is all captured via the Uber’s dash cam video, which is now part of the legal proceedings in Denmark,” according to Erin Pelton, a PR manager representing Ray’s family.

The two students were detained at Copenhagen airport the next day while trying to return home to the US, she said. Danish police confirmed that two US citizens were charged with common assault.

A Copenhagen police spokesperson told multiple outlets: “The Copenhagen Police can confirm, that on March 31, two American citizens were arrested in Copenhagen, and on March 31 they were brought before the court charged with common assault.

“They were sentenced to 10 days pre-trial detention. This verdict has since extended until April 24.”

Ray has been released from a Danish prison but authorities will not allow him to return to the US, his family said on Monday. The status of the other student is unclear.

“We are relieved that Owen has been released from a Danish prison following the unprovoked assault he and his friend suffered at the hands of an Uber driver on March 31,” a statement by Ray’s parents, Andy Ray and Sara Buchen-Ray, said.

“However, we remain deeply concerned that Danish authorities have confiscated his passport and will not allow him to return to the United States – something we understand is unusual in Danish court proceedings.

“The facts make clear that Owen is the victim in this case, and we urge Danish officials to allow him to return home to the United States without delay.”

The US state department said it is aware of the situation and is providing the citizens with consular assistance. “The Department has no higher priority than the safety and security of US citizens abroad,” it said.

A spokesperson for Uber told outlets that the company “take reports of violence very seriously”. “Any additional questions about the investigation should be directed to the Danish police,” the statement added.

The arrests took place amid heightened political tensions between Denmark and the US over ownership of Greenland. Relations between the two traditionally close Nato allies have soured since Donald Trump’s repeated threats to acquire Greenland, a resource-rich, semi-autonomous Danish territory.

Harvard Letter
By Josh Marshall
|April 14, 2025 7:15 p.m.

You’ve likely seen that Harvard officially and publicly refused the Trump White House’s latest set of demands. You can see the letter HERE. I would say that if you’re going to read only one letter, it should actually be the one the White House (notionally the GSA, HHS and Education) sent to Harvard, which the university published along with its response.

It’s a very clarifying letter. It’s not too much to say it essentially demands operational control over the whole university or perhaps more specifically a kind of receivership of the sort police departments sometimes go into under consent to decrees after they’re caught framing or torturing prisoners. When I first read it I was not … well, certainly not happy to see it but it occurred to me that the demands were not only substantively of an indefensible character but also very tenuous legally. It’s good to have this fight on these grounds because, as I said, they demand to put the entire university under the direct control, down to hiring, curriculum, admissions and more, of MAGA operatives. It’s been suggested to me by one person familiar with the university’s decision-making that waiting for the White House to spell out all its demands on paper may have been by design to put the university’s refusal on the surest legal footing. If that’s the case, it was smart to wait.

I’d really recommend reading the letter. Among other things it requires the University to hire a cadre of White House approved commissars to ensure that MAGA conservatives are equally represented not only at the University level but at each individual department, teaching and research ‘unit’ – both in hiring and admissions. The White House demands that every department and unit be “audited” by the outside commissar group for “viewpoint diversity.” Each department or unit found not to have sufficient MAGA representation (defined as “viewpoint diversity”) “must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty” to “provide viewpoint diversity.” Same language but with respect to admissions. Any department or unit which lacks MAGA representation must admit a bunch of new MAGA “viewpoint diverse” students. Again, it’s just one example.

I’ll also note that as of today the University’s webpage has been remade into essentially an advertisement for the societal/human impact of university research. The splash headline is ‘Research Powers Progress’ followed by the tagline line: “Research at Harvard—from medicine to technology to education and business—touches countless lives, moving us closer to disease cures, next-generation technology, and a more secure future for millions of people.”

I don’t want to be too fawning. But this is how you do it.

Today, U.S. president Donald J. Trump met in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, along with a number of Cabinet members and White House staff, who answered questions for the press. The meeting appeared to be as staged as Trump’s February meeting with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, designed to send a message. At the meeting, Trump and Bukele, who is clearly doing Trump’s bidding, announced they would not bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home, defying the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bukele was livestreaming the event on his official X account and wearing a lapel microphone as he and Trump walked into the Oval Office, so Trump’s pre-meeting private comments were audible in the video Bukele posted. “We want to do homegrown criminals next…. The homegrowns.” Trump told Bukele. “You gotta build about five more places.” Bukele appeared to answer, “Yeah, we’ve got space.” “All right,” Trump replied.

Rather than being appalled, the people in the room—including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi—erupted in laughter.

At the meeting, it was clear that Trump’s team has cooked up a plan to leave Abrego Garcia without legal recourse to his freedom, a plan that looks much like Trump’s past abuses of the legal system. The White House says the U.S. has no jurisdiction over El Salvador, while Bukele says he has no authority to release a “terrorist” into the U.S. (Abrego Garcia maintains a full-time job, is married to a U.S. citizen, has three children, and has never been charged or convicted of anything.) No one can make Trump arrange for Abrego Garcia’s release, the administration says, because the Constitution gives the president control over foreign affairs.

Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel noted that “all the people who should be submitting sworn declarations before [U.S. District Court] Judge Paula Xinis made comments not burdened by oaths or the risk of contempt, rehearsed comments for the cameras.” They falsely claimed that a court had ruled Abrego Garcia was a terrorist, and insisted the whole case was about the president’s power to control foreign affairs.

As NPR’s Steven Inskeep put it: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”

On April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for [Abrego Garcia’s] arrest, detention, or removal.… Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” The Supreme Court agreed with Xinis that Abrego Garcia had been illegally removed from the U.S. and must be returned, but warned the judge to be careful of the president’s power over foreign affairs.

At the Oval Office meeting, when Trump asked what the Supreme Court ruled, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said it had ruled “9–0…in our favor,” claiming “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously.” Legal analyst Chris Geidner of Law Dork called Miller’s statement “disgusting, lying propaganda.”

He also noted that when the administration filed its required declaration about Abrego Garcia’s case today, it included a link to the Oval Office meeting, thus submitting Miller’s lies about its decision directly to the Supreme Court. Geidner wished the administration's lawyers: “Good luck there…!”

Legal analyst Harry Litman of Talking Feds wrote: “What we all just witnessed had all the earmarks of a criminal conspiracy to deprive Abrego-Garcia of his constitutional rights, as well as an impeachable offense. The fraud scheme was a phony agreement engineered by the US to have Bukele say he lacks power to return Abrego Garcia and he won't do it.”

As Adam Serwer wrote today in The Atlantic, The “rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.”

Serwer notes that if the administration actually thought there was enough evidence to convict these men, it could have let the U.S. legal process play out. But Geidner of Law Dork noted that Trump’s declaration this morning that he wanted to deport “homegrown criminals” suggests that the plan all along has been to be able to get rid of U.S. citizens by creating a “Schroedinger’s box” where anyone can be sent but where once they are there the U.S. cannot get them back because they are “in the custody of a foreign sovereign.”

“If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box,” Geidner writes, “the plan does not work.”

On August 12, 2024, in a discussion on billionaire Elon Musk’s X of what Trump insisted were caravans coming across the southern border of the U.S., Trump told Musk that other countries were doing something “brilliant” by sending streams of people out of their country. “You know the caravans are coming in and…who’s doing this are the heads of the countries. And you would be doing it and so would I, and everyone would say ‘oh what a terrible thing to say.’”

He continued: “The fact is, it’s brilliant for them because they're taking all of their bad people, really bad people and—I hate to say this—the reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they’re also taking their nonproductive people. Now these aren’t people that will kill you…but these are people that are nonproductive. They are just not productive, I mean, for whatever reason. They’re not workers or they don’t want to work, or whatever, and these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans…and they’re also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people….”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained the larger picture: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.” He compared it to the Nazis’ practice of pushing Jews into statelessness because “it is easier to move people away from law than it is to move law away from people. Almost all of the killing took place in artificially created stateless zones.”

Yesterday, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) requested a meeting with Bukele today “to discuss the illegal detention of my constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.” He said that he would travel to El Salvador this week if Abrego Garcia “is not home by midweek.”

Judge Xinis has set the next hearing in Abrego Garcia’s case for tomorrow, April 15, at 4:00 p.m.

Today, Dauphin County Magisterial District Judge Dale Klein denied bail for Cody Balmer, the 38-year-old man charged in connection with the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro on April 13, saying he is a danger to the community. Balmer allegedly set alight beer bottles full of gasoline in the same room in the governor's mansion where, just hours before, the family had held a Passover meal. Shapiro and his wife Lori, their four children, and another family were asleep in the house. Emergency personnel rescued the people and pets, but the historic mansion sustained significant damage.

Balmer said he has a high-school education. He is currently unemployed, does not have any income or savings, and has been living with his parents. Balmer was charged with assault in 2023, allegedly punching both his wife (from whom he is now separated) and their 13-year-old son in the face during an argument. He was due in court this week. His mother says he has mental health issues.

Balmer said he “harbor[ed] hatred” for Governor Shapiro and would have beaten him with a hammer if he had found him.

Governor Shapiro called it “an attack not just on our family, but on the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania…. This type of violence is not okay. This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society. And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, or one particular person or another. It is not okay and it has to stop. We have to be better than this. We have a responsibility to all be better.”

Some of Donald Trump’s biggest campaign donors and investors, who collectively have hundreds of millions of dollars in financial ties to the US president, are positioned to potentially profit from any American takeover of Greenland, raising even more ethical questions around Trump’s controversial pursuit of the Arctic territory.

President Trump came into office sounding as if he were eager to deal with President Xi Jinping of China on the range of issues dividing the world’s two biggest superpowers.

He and his aides signaled that they wanted to resolve trade disputes and lower the temperature on Taiwan, curb fentanyl production and get to a deal on TikTok. Perhaps, over time, they could manage a revived nuclear arms race and competition over artificial intelligence.

Today it is hard to imagine any of that happening, at least for a year.

Mr. Trump’s decision to stake everything on winning a trade war with China threatens to choke off those negotiations before they even begin. And if they do start up, Mr. Trump may be entering them alone, because he has alienated the allies who in recent years had come to a common approach to countering Chinese power.

In conversations over the past 10 days, several administration officials, insisting that they could not speak on the record, described a White House deeply divided on how to handle Beijing. The trade war erupted before the many factions inside the administration even had time to stake out their positions, much less decide which issues mattered most.

The result was strategic incoherence. Some officials have gone on television to declare that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Beijing were intended to coerce the world’s second-largest economy into a deal. Others insisted that Mr. Trump was trying to create a self-sufficient American economy, no longer dependent on its chief geopolitical competitor, even if that meant decoupling from the $640 billion in two-way trade in goods and services.

“What is the Trump administration’s grand strategy for China?” said Rush Doshi, one of America’s leading China strategists, who is now at the Council of Foreign Relations and Georgetown University. “They don’t have a grand strategy yet. They have a range of disconnected tactics.”

Mr. Doshi says he holds open the hope that Mr. Trump could reach deals with Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan and the European Union that would allow them to confront Chinese trade practices together, attract allied investment in U.S. industry and increase security ties.

“If you are up against someone big, you need to get bigger scale — and that’s why we need our allies to be with us,” said Mr. Doshi, who in recent days published an article in Foreign Affairs with Kurt M. Campbell, the former deputy secretary of state, arguing for a new approach. “This is an era in which strategic advantage will once again accrue to those who can operate at scale. China possesses scale, and the United States does not — at least not by itself,” they wrote.

Mr. Trump insisted on Monday that his tariffs were working so well that he might place more of them on China, among other nations. Just 48 hours after he carved out a huge exemption for cellphones, computer equipment and many electronic components — nearly a quarter of all trade with China — he said he might soon announce additional tariffs targeting imported computer chips and pharmaceuticals. “The higher the tariff, the faster they come in,” he said of companies investing in the United States to avoid paying the import tax.

So far, the Chinese response has been one of controlled escalation. Beijing has matched every one of Mr. Trump’s tariff hikes, trying to send the message that it can endure the pain longer than the United States can. And in a move that appeared to experts to have been prepared months ago, China announced that it was suspending exports of a range of critical minerals and magnets used by automakers, semiconductor producers and weapons builders — a reminder to Washington that Beijing has many tools to interrupt supply chains.

The result, said R. Nicholas Burns, who left his post in January as the American ambassador to China, is “one of the most serious crises in U.S.-Chinese relations since the resumption of full diplomatic relations in 1979.”

“But Americans should have no sympathy for the Chinese government, which describes itself as the victim in this confrontation,” said Mr. Burns. “They have been the greatest disrupter in the international trade system.” He said the challenge now would be “to restore communications at the highest levels to avoid a decoupling of the two economies.”

So far, neither side wants to be the one to initiate those communications, at least in public, for fear of being perceived as the one that blinked. Mr. Trump often insists he has a “great relationship” with Mr. Xi, but he gave the Chinese leader no direct warning about what was coming — or a pathway to head it off. And Mr. Xi has pointedly avoided joining the ranks of what the White House insists are 75 countries that say they want to strike a deal.

There are flickers of back-channel communications: Cui Tiankai, who served as China’s ambassador to the United States from 2013 to 2021, was in Washington as the tariffs were rolling out, talking to old contacts and clearly looking for a way to defuse the growing confrontation. Though retired, Mr. Cui is still among the Chinese with deep connections in both capitals — he is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and American officials still use him as a conduit to the Chinese leadership.

But recent history suggests that freezes in the U.S.-China relationship can be long-lasting and that relations never quite get back to where they had been before. The August 2022 visit to Taiwan by a congressional delegation led by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who at the time was still the speaker of the House, led China to send its air and naval forces on military exercises over the “median line” in the Taiwan Strait. Nearly three years later, those exercises have only intensified.

The following winter a high-altitude balloon, which China claimed was a weather balloon and U.S. intelligence officials said was stuffed with intelligence-gathering equipment to geolocate communications transmissions, crossed over the continental United States. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ultimately ordered it shot down off the South Carolina coast.

Again, it took months to get past the mutual recriminations and set up a summit meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden. That encounter resulted in some modest agreements on cracking down on fentanyl precursors, along with a joint statement that A.I. technologies should never be used in nuclear command-and-control systems.

But the stakes in those confrontations were not as high as they are in the emerging trade war, which could help push both countries to the brink of recession — and could ultimately spill into the power plays happening each day around Taiwan, in the South China Sea and just offshore of the Philippines.

Among the questions hanging over the administration now is whether it can put together a coherent approach to China at a moment when key members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle are arguing in public about the right strategy. Elon Musk, who relies on China as a key supplier to his companies Tesla and SpaceX, called Peter Navarro, a top White House trade adviser, a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Mr. Navarro shrugged it off during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying, “I’ve been called worse.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed back Monday on a Chinese commerce official who dismissed the tariffs as a “joke.”

“These are not a joke,” Mr. Bessent said in Argentina, where he is on a visit. But then he added that the tariffs were so big that “no one thinks they’re sustainable.”

But whether they are sustainable is a different question than whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Xi can afford, politically, to be the first to back away from them. And then the administration will have to decide what its priorities are when it comes to China. Will the United States declare that it will defend Taiwan? (Mr. Trump clearly has his hesitations, based on his public statements.) Will it seek to find common projects to work on with Beijing?

It is hardly unusual for an administration to spend months, maybe more than a year, debating how to navigate a relationship as complex as the one with China. President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger spent years plotting out their approach to what was still called “Red China,” resulting in Mr. Nixon’s historic trip to the country and the yearslong diplomatic opening it triggered. President Bill Clinton entered office having campaigned against the “butchers of Beijing,” a reference to the killings in Tiananmen Square and the crackdowns that followed, and he ended his term ushering China into the World Trade Organization. President George W. Bush courted Chinese leaders to join the battle against terrorism.

Mr. Biden had to get beyond the Covid era before he settled on a strategy of denying Beijing access to critical semiconductors and other technology.

But none was trying to overcome what Mr. Trump faces. He has unleashed an act of economic confrontation so large that it may poison the relationship with a country that is deeply intertwined with the American economy. In the end, Mr. Trump may have to choose between an unhappy marriage or an abrupt divorce.

Polling Canada@CanadianPolling
3h
Federal - The French Language debate will start at 6PM ET instead of 8PM, due to the Montreal Canadiens hockey game

Chinese state media tells Trump to ‘stop whining’ as trade war spirals
China Daily, the ruling Communist party’s English-language mouthpiece, says the US ‘has been living beyond its means for decades’

The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalisation train”, China’s official state media has said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral.

Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff hikes appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up.

On Tuesday evening China Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) English-language mouthpiece, published an editorial saying Donald Trump’s frequent claims of the US being “ripped off” were “hoodwinking the US public”.

“The US is not getting ripped off by anybody,” it said. “The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalisation train.”

It added, “The US should stop whining about itself being a victim in global trade and put an end to its capricious and destructive behaviour.”

The CCP has refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands to come to the table and renegotiate their terms of trade.

In a statement delivered by the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, Trump said on Tuesday “the ball is in China’s court”.

“China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them,” the statement said. “There’s no difference between China and any other country except they are much larger.”

Analysts and officials expect the trade war to have significant impact on both economies – China was already struggling to rebound since the pandemic with low consumer spending and high youth unemployment.

On Wednesday, Beijing announced better-than-expected economic figures, driven in large part by exporters rushing to move products to the US before the tariffs came into effect.

China’s national bureau of statistics said the economy grew 5.4% in the first quarter, above analyst predictions. Sheng Laiyun, a senior official at the statistics bureau, warned however that the US tariffs “will put certain pressures on our country’s foreign trade and economy”.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is now visiting several Asian nations, on a trip that, although planned before the tariff war, has served to boost Beijing’s public and private efforts strengthen trading relationships with other countries.

“China would be willing to partner with Malaysia and other Asean countries, following the trend of peace and the development of history, fend off the undercurrent of geopolitics and tribalism, break the unilateralism and protectionism, and create high-level strategic alliance between China and Malaysia that leads to a close community of common destiny,” Xi said in an editorial published ahead of his arrival in Malaysia on Wednesday.

While tariff rises appear to have paused at 145% on Chinese imports to the US and 125% on US imports to China, the two governments are finding other ways to raise the stakes.

China has reportedly ordered its airlines to pause purchases of aircraft-related equipment and parts from American companies, including Boeing. It was also reportedly considering ways to support airlines that lease Boeing jets and are facing higher costs.

About 10 Boeing 737 Max jets are being prepared to join Chinese airlines, and if delivery paperwork and payment on some of them were completed before Chinese “reciprocal” tariffs came into effect, the planes may be allowed to enter the country, sources told Bloomberg.

On Wednesday the Hong Kong postal service announced it would stop accepting US-bound packages. When sending items to the US, people in Hong Kong “should be prepared to pay exorbitant and unreasonable fees due to the US’s unreasonable and bullying acts”, Hong Kong Post said in a statement. Other postal items containing documents only, without goods, would not be affected.

Hong Kong is subject to the same tariffs as mainland China, although has not imposed any retaliatory tariffs of its own.

Meanwhile, Trump has announced an inquiry into further tariffs on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors – which would affect many of the US’s trading partners – and ordered a probe that may result in tariffs on critical minerals, rare-earth metals and associated products such as smartphones.

China dominates global supply chains for rare metals and has imposed export controls on several rare earth elements since the trade war with the US erupted.

Additional research by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu

A large crowd of protesters calling for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the Trump administration sent to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador, milled around the courthouse this afternoon where U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis held a hearing on the case.

Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Ben Wittes of Lawfare watched the hearing and explained that Judge Xinis is now building the evidence to determine whether individuals in the administration have acted in contempt of court. The court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., as well as to give updates on what they are doing to make that return happen. To date, Judge Xinis said, “what the record shows is nothing has been done.” She dismissed the administration lawyer’s argument that yesterday’s Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele was part of the effort to “facilitate” the case.

As Bower said, we all know what’s going on, but it’s impossible right now to know which individual is responsible for the stonewalling. For that matter, Bower added, those speaking for the administration usually deny personal knowledge of the case, simply saying they have been made aware of the facts they are representing. Judge Xinis called for two weeks of fact finding to determine if the Trump regime is following her orders that it facilitate his return. The judge told Abrego Garcia’s lawyers that they may conduct four depositions and apply for two more, make up to 15 document requests, and up to 15 interrogatories (these are lists of written questions that must be answered under oath and in writing).

Xinis noted that “every day Mr. Garcia is detained in CECOT is a day of irreparable harm.”

Bower added that the Trump regime is likely drawing this out in part because it permits them to showcase the one part of their agenda that is still polling well. The staged meeting with Bukele enabled officials to get widespread media coverage for the straight-up lie that Abrego Garcia has been found to be a member of the MS-13 gang. As Greg Sargent reported today in the New Republic, this story came from a police officer who, just weeks later, was suspended for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.”

The Oval Office event also enabled White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller both to lie that the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision against the administration was actually in favor of it, and to rerun the litany of heinous crimes he associates with immigrants. The attention to the case has also gotten Miller airtime on news shows, where he repeats those lies.

The administration needs the immigration issue to play to its base, but it’s actually not clear that Americans like Miller’s approach to immigrants. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers that while polls say Americans generally like Trump’s approach to immigration—a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said 49% were in favor—they hate the specifics.

The same Reuters/Ipsos poll says that 82% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, think “the president should obey federal court rulings even if he disagrees with them.” Only 40% think he “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” although 76% of Republicans think he should violate a court order.

The questions specifically about immigration are even starker. Trump promised during the campaign that he would deport undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes, and people like that plan by an 81-point margin. But according to Morris’s crunching of polls on the subject, U.S. adults oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived more than 10 years in the U.S. by a 37-point margin. They oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens by a 36-point margin. By an 18-point margin, they oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have broken no laws in the U.S. other than immigration laws.

The more visible Abrego Garcia’s case becomes, coupled as it is with the idea that it is a precursor to sending U.S. citizens to CECOT, the less likely it is to be popular. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) got an earful from his constituents on the topic. “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” one man asked, to applause and calls of “Yeah!” from around the room. When Grassley said no, because that wasn’t a power of Congress, the man replied: “The Supreme Court said to bring him back!” and others chimed in, “They’re defying the Constitution.” “Trump don’t care,” the first man said. “If I get an order to pay a ticket for $1,200 and I just say no, does that stand up? Because he’s got an order from the Supreme Court, and he just said no! He just said ‘Screw it!’” “It’s wrong,” someone in the crowd said. The first man concluded: “I’m pissed.”

This evening, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “[f]ollowing his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release, which is why tomorrow I am traveling to El Salvador…to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release. We must urgently continue working to return Kilmar safely home to Maryland.”

Trump’s losing ground on his other major selling point in the 2024 election: that he would improve the economy. He promised to bring prices down “on Day One,” but backed off on that almost immediately. Then an utterly chaotic trade war, tariffs on and off and on again, and a dramatic drop in the bond market as well as the stock market suggesting that the U.S. is losing its status as a safe haven made April an economic disaster. JPMorgan said this week that Trump’s tariffs mean that he is “on track to deliver one of the largest US tax hikes on record,” taxes that will fall on poorer Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations.

Under Biden, Vietnam and the U.S. had strengthened economic ties, but yesterday, China and Vietnam signed dozens of cooperation agreements to combat disruptions caused by Trump's trade war. Today, Chinese officials stopped accepting Boeing jets or U.S. airline parts. China has also stopped accepting U.S. beef, turning instead to Australia. U.S. beef exports to China have been worth $2.5 billion annually. Last Thursday, Gustaf Kilander of The Independent reported that “fund managers quietly fear Trump doesn’t have a tariff plan and that he ‘might be insane.’”

Meetings in Washington this week did little to calm the situation. Jordan Erb of Bloomberg reported that Maros Sefcovic, the trade chief for the European Union, left yesterday’s trade meeting in Washington unclear about what the U.S. even wants. Erb notes: “The uncertainty around Trump’s chaotic tactics, replete with delays, retreats, new threats and sudden exceptions and trial balloons, hasn’t helped.”

Trump also promised he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine immediately. But it has become obvious that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is using Trump’s desperation to deliver a peace deal to strike harder at Ukraine. Just after a visit to Moscow by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, the Russians struck the Ukrainian city of Sumy during Palm Sunday celebrations, killing at least 35 people and injuring another 119, including children. European leaders called the attack a war crime, Trump said it was likely a “mistake.”

After Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night that U.S. officials are echoing Russian disinformation, Trump called for CBS, the channel on which 60 Minutes appears, to lose its license.

Bloomberg reports that the U.S. refused to support a statement by the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of seven of the countries with the world’s most advanced economies, condemning the Sumy attack. The U.S. said it wouldn’t condemn the mass killing of civilians because it is “working to preserve the space to negotiate peace.”

One of Trump’s key attacks on the Biden administration before the election was his lie that it had shortchanged the North Carolina victims of the devastating Hurricane Helene by sending money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to undocumented immigrants, likely to buy their votes (it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections). In fact, the Biden administration and FEMA had been in the state since the start and approved FEMA’s reimbursement for 100% of disaster relief, particularly emergency protective services and the removal of debris, renewable after six months.

Trump won North Carolina by more than 3 points, but on Saturday the Trump administration denied North Carolina’s application for that extension. “The need in western North Carolina remains immense—people need debris removed, homes rebuilt, and roads restored,” North Carolina governor Josh Stein said. “I am extremely disappointed and urge the President to reconsider FEMA’s bad decision, even for 90 days. Six months later, the people of western North Carolina are working hard to get back on their feet; they need FEMA to help them get the job done.”

Trump’s approval ratings are dropping steadily, with even Republican pollsters showing him “underwater,” meaning that more people disapprove of his presidency than approve of it.

Part of Trump’s fight with the Supreme Court is an attempt to demonstrate dominance as his numbers drop, but institutions, as well as the courts, are standing up to him. With Trump having won concessions from Columbia University and then announced those concessions were only the beginning of his demands, other universities are banding together to defend education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech.

On Monday, Harvard University took a stand against the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract. Harvard is the country’s oldest university, founded in 1636, and in 2024 had an endowment of more than $53 billion.

In a letter noting that the administration’s demands undercut the First Amendment and the university’s legal rights, Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

But Harvard didn’t stop there. It turned its website into a defense of the medical research funded by the federal grants Trump is threatening to withhold. It explains the advances Harvard researchers have made in cancer research, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, obesity and diabetes, infectious diseases, and organs and transplantation. It highlights the researchers, shows labs, and presents readable essays on different scientific breakthroughs.

As the administration slashes through the government with charges of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber has made a stand on what he calls “the promise of higher education.”

“Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he wrote. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.”

As a result, the role of the press is fundamentally changed. It essentially consists of no longer discussing but interpreting and helping to underpin the government's decisions with the arguments it is able to provide.