You can fight back.
Our Labour government has had to reverse cuts to the Winter fuel payment for pensioners.
Just a few weeks ago they were saying the cuts were here to stay.
It pains me to say it, but I agree with you that we Americans suck right now.
I’m going to take an early night tonight, but I want to record three things that jumped out at me today because they seem to tell a story.
After S.V. Date of HuffPost noted last week that the White House had published fewer than 20% of Trump’s speeches, the White House has stopped publishing a database of official transcripts of President Donald J. Trump’s announcements, appearances, and speeches altogether and has taken down those it had published. Instead it will just post videos. And yet it is publishing just a few of the videos of the president’s term: so far, fewer than 50 videos of the first 120 days of his term, according to Brian Stelter of CNN.
A presidential administration traditionally publishes the president’s words promptly to establish a record. The Trump White House, in contrast, says removing the transcripts will enable people to get a better sense of Trump by watching his videos. But it’s likely closer to the truth that Trump’s appearances since he took office have been erratic, and removing the transcripts will make it harder for people to read his nonsensical rambles.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The Trump White House is the most transparent in history,” but of course, it’s objectively not. White House officials have made it impossible to tell who is making decisions at the Department of Government Efficiency, for example, or who gave the order to render migrants to El Salvador. Now the president’s words, too, will be hidden.
Trump’s erratic behavior was on full display this morning when he announced that he will impose a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union on June 1, suggesting he is frustrated because his promises of a new trade deal have failed to materialize. Trump had threatened to stop negotiating and simply dictate terms, and that is apparently the direction he’s moving. “I’m not looking for a deal,” he said this afternoon. “We’ve set the deal—it’s at 50%.” Trump also threatened a 25% tariff on Apple products unless the company begins to make the iPhone in the U.S.
Elisabeth Buchwald of CNN reported that three major European stock market indexes fell after Trump’s threat. U.S. stock market indexes fell for the fourth day. They rose from their lowest point after the White House said Trump’s tariff comments were not a formal statement of policy.
So the president of the United States can tank world markets, only to have his own staff inform the media that his comments should not be taken seriously.
The third story is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has denied North Carolina’s request that it honor a commitment made by President Joe Biden to pay for 100% of the costs for removal of debris after Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state in September 2024. That storm killed 107 people in western North Carolina and destroyed or damaged 75,000 homes, as well as destroying roads and leaving mounds of debris.
As Zack Colman of Politico reported yesterday, the storm hit in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump undermined FEMA’s response, lying that it was not present and telling North Carolinians that the Biden administration could not help them because it had taken money from FEMA for undocumented immigrants. None of what he was saying was true, but MAGA mouthpieces picked up his criticisms and exaggerated them, claiming that the federal government intended to steal people’s land, that Biden had directed the storm to western North Carolina, and that 28 babies had frozen to death in FEMA tents—all lies, but lies that slowed recovery as riled-up people who believed them refused assistance, threatened officials, and demanded investigations.
Trump suggested he would respond more effectively to voters in North Carolina, and two of the hardest-hit counties there, Avery and Haywood, backed him in 2024 by margins of 75.7% and 61.8%, respectively, similar to those it had given him in 2016 and 2020.
Once in office, though, Trump began to talk of eliminating FEMA. Now the White House has told North Carolina residents they’re on their own as they try to dig out from Hurricane Helene.
Taken together, these stories from today seem to provide a snapshot of this moment in American history. They show an erratic president whose own officials discount his orders even as power is concentrating in the executive office and who won election through lies that are now being exposed as his policies disproportionately hurt the very people who backed him most enthusiastically.
Trump administration trying to dismiss MS-13 leader’s charges to deport him
Exclusive: Critics and defendant’s legal team accuse US president of trying to do favor for Salvadorian leader
Trump administration trying to dismiss MS-13 leader’s charges to deport him
Exclusive: Critics and defendant’s legal team accuse US president of trying to do favor for Salvadorian leader
José Olivares
Fri 23 May 2025 23.15 BST
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Donald Trump’s administration is attempting to dismiss criminal charges against a top MS-13 leader in order to deport him to El Salvador, according to newly unsealed court records – igniting accusations from critics and the defendant’s legal team that the US president is trying to do a favor for his Salvadorian counterpart, who struck a deal with the gang in 2019.
According to justice department records, the MS-13 figure in question, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, has intimate knowledge of that secretive pact, which – before eventually falling apart – involved Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s government ceding money and territory to the gang, who in return promised to reduce violence from its side and provide Bukele’s party with electoral support.
Attempts by the Trump administration to expel Arevalo-Chavez are part of its own deal with Bukele to allow for the US to incarcerate immigrants in a maximum security Salvadoran prison. CNN reported in April that Bukele’s government had specifically asked for nine top MS-13 leaders to be brought back to El Salvador from the US.
Critics of Trump who are defending Arevalo-Chavez’s rights see the move to deport him as a way to prevent him from testifying in a US court, or becoming a federal government cooperator, to limit disclosures about Bukele’s past ties to the gang as much as possible.
Arevalo-Chavez is a member of the “Ranfla Nacional”, which is considered to be a directors’ board of sorts for the MS-13 gang. Federal charges pending against him in New York include racketeering, terrorism and conspiring to commit narco-terrorism.
A filing from the US justice department – dated 1 April but not unsealed until Thursday – said federal prosecutors want to dismiss charges against Arevalo-Chavez for “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations”.
Prosecutors added that “geopolitical and national security concerns of the United States” and said permitting “the prosecution of the defendant to proceed in the first instance in El Salvador” was also a factor.
Arevalo-Chavez is still in the US, with his attorneys requesting more information about the reasons behind the dismissal of charges and the intended deportation.
The judge ruled in April to not relocate him anywhere, preventing his being placed into the custody of the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), which would lead to his deportation.
“The ‘geopolitical and national security concerns’ appear to be an effort by the government to support a ‘deal’ with El Salvador to assist Bukele in suppressing the truth about a secret negotiation he had with MS-13 leaders in return for our government using El Salvador prisons,” Arevalo-Chavez’s attorneys said in a separate filing also unsealed on Thursday. That filing in particular mentioned the notorious Cecot prison built to house alleged gang members.
The US attorney’s office for New York’s eastern federal district, where Arevalo-Chavez is being prosecuted, declined to comment Friday when asked by the Guardian. Arevalo-Chavez’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In mid-March, the US justice department quietly dismissed charges against another top Ranfla Nacional member and expelled him to El Salvador to be detained at Cecot, an acronym whose full name in Spanish means “the terrorism confinement center”. That other Ranfla leader, Cesar Humberto López-Larios, was facing similar charges in New York and also reportedly had insight about the deal Bukele previously struck with the gang.
“This is collusion between two governments, the US and El Salvador, to cover up a gang pact by dropping charges on known gangsters in order to disappear them before they can testify,” said political science professor Michael Ahn Paarlberg at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It’s a criminal conspiracy between the Trump and Bukele administrations.
“The irony is both of them claim to be tough on crime.”
According to a justice department indictment, in 2019, the MS-13 leadership forged a pact with top Bukele administration officials. El Faro, a Salvadoran news organization, first reported on secretive meetings during which Bukele officials would enter prisons in El Salvador to negotiate directly with the Ranfla leaders.
As part of the deal, MS-13 would receive certain money- and land-related concessions while agreeing to reduce the amount of violence they inflicted in El Salvador. Additionally, some top MS-13 leaders were released from prison – and the gang promised to leverage its networks to support Bukele’s political party in the 2021 legislative elections, according to prosecutors.
The pact purportedly collapsed in 2022, leading Bukele to engage in a massive offensive against gangs in the country. Critics say that so-called state of exception crackdown led to a trampling of due process and human rights in the Central American nation – while also allowing Bukele to further consolidate power there.
For years, Bukele has attempted to suppress any evidence of his ties to MS-13 by either attempting to recapture Ranfla leaders or by ignoring US extradition requests.
US federal law enforcement agencies have long pursued MS-13’s criminal networks. In 2020 and in 2022, two separate federal indictments in New York charging 27 leaders of the gang were handed up and unsealed.
In 2021, the US treasury department sanctioned two top Bukele officials for their alleged “corruption”, saying they engaged in “covert negotiations between government officials and the criminal organization” in order to secure the secret pact with MS-13. The treasury department also alleged that Bukele’s administration in 2020 provided financial incentives to MS-13 to reduce gang violence in exchange for “political support”.
Arevalo-Chavez, one of the co-defendants in the 2022 indictment, had “participated in negotiations with the government of El Salvador on behalf of MS-13”, said the justice department, then controlled by Joe Biden’s presidential administration. Arevalo-Chavez left El Salvador and went to Mexico, where he helped run the gang’s operations there.
The Mexican government arrested Arevalo-Chavez in February 2023 and quickly transferred him to the US, where the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) took custody. He is in custody in a federal detention facility while his case proceeds.
Relations between El Salvador and the US have improved since Trump took office. In 2021, tensions between Biden officials and the Bukele government flared when, despite an international arrest warrant and extradition request, Salvadoran officials quietly released Ranfla Nacional leader Elmer Canales-Rivera from prison. US prosecutors alleged in a 2023 letter that he was personally escorted out of prison by a high-level Bukele official, given a firearm and driven to the Guatemalan border for his escape.
The Bukele administration then attempted to recapture Canales-Rivera. According to reporting from El Faro, Bukele’s government discussed a plan to pay a Mexican cartel to find Canales-Rivera and return him to El Salvador. The Mexican government found him first, arrested him, and expelled him to the US in November 2023.
Eight Ranfla Nacional leaders remained in US custody after López-Larios one was expelled in March. Two of them pleaded guilty earlier this year.
On Thursday the Trump administration told Harvard University that because it had not handed over information on foreign students’ protest activities, violent activity, and coursework, the university had “lost [the] privilege” of enrolling foreign students. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said this decision was based on the administration’s determination to “enforce the law and root out the evils of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in society and campuses.”
This argument has always been a thinly veiled way to use actual antisemitism to destroy universities, a reality illustrated by Trump’s hosting last night of cryptocurrency investors whose coins are literally named things like “F*CK THE JEWS.”
Harvard promptly sued, noting that the administration has engaged in an “unprecedented and retaliatory attack on academic freedom at Harvard” and calling the attack “a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act.” “With the stroke of a pen,” the lawsuit reads, “the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission.”
Hours later, Judge Allison Burroughs of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted Harvard’s request for a temporary restraining order barring the administration’s change from taking effect. She wrote that the new policy would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to Harvard.
While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university famous for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States.
That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration.
One hundred years ago tomorrow, that cultural impulse surfaced in a national spectacle that would feed directly into today’s attacks on education.
On May 25, 1925, a grand jury in Tennessee indicted 24-year-old football coach and science teacher John T. Scopes for violating Tennessee’s law, passed in March of that year, that made it “unlawful…to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” In other words, Tennessee had banned the teaching of human evolution.
The law, known as the Butler Act, was sponsored by John Washington Butler, a farmer and head of the new World Christian Fundamentals Association, which sought to establish the word of God as revealed in the Bible at the heart of American life. Butler later said he didn’t know anything about evolution but had heard “that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense.” Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed the law to please rural Tennesseans and their representatives, but he allegedly did not think the law would ever be enforced.
The American Civil Liberties Union recruited Scopes to test the law just as a local man from Dayton, Tennessee, thought a trial there would give the town welcome publicity. The resulting Scopes trial became a national referendum on modernism and education versus a fundamentalist religious urge to move the country backward. Scopes ultimately was found guilty, but the trial showed religious fundamentalists as incompatible with the modern world.
While some fundamentalists backed away from the public sphere after the trial, others began to try to transform American business, just as Bruce Barton suggested could be done in his 1925 bestseller The Man Nobody Knows, which showed Jesus as “the founder of modern business.” In his 2016 The Blessings of Business, historian Darren Grem traces how fundamentalist leaders began to work with big business, especially as Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged traditional racial and gender lines.
The New Deal seemed to undermine the influence of the church by providing federal welfare policies. The Church League of America made common cause with the businessmen who opposed the business regulation in the New Deal, arguing that Christianity “elevates and dignifies human personality in contrast to the so-called ‘Collectivist’ or Marxian doctrines.” “Free Religion–Free Enterprise are Inseparable,” it said, “One Cannot Exist Without the Other.”
William F. Buckley Jr. applied this line of thinking to higher education in his 1951 God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. In it, Buckley argued that Yale University was corrupted by “atheism” and “collectivism” not because its faculty actually called for atheism and collectivism, but because their embrace of fact-based argument supported the government that had grown out of the New Deal.
Modern universities embraced the Enlightenment tradition of a free search for knowledge in the belief that informed discussion fed by a wide range of ideas was the best way to reach toward truth. As ideas were tested in public debate, people would be able to choose the best of them. This was the basis of academic freedom.
Buckley denied this “superstition.” Truth would not win out in a free contest of ideas, he said; students would simply be led astray. For proof, he offered the fact that most Americans had chosen the New Deal and continued to support its extension. He called for Yale to replace faculty that believed in academic freedom with those who would advance the causes of Christianity and free enterprise.
Government analyst McGeorge Bundy called the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” He recognized it as “clearly an attempt to start an assault on the freedom of one of America’s greatest and most conservative universities.”
America’s post–World War II university system was the envy of the world, driving innovation and medical and scientific research that made the U.S. economy boom and raised standards of living around the world. But the idea that the modern government imposed the will of what Ronald Reagan called “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital” on the laws of God and the natural laws of the United States was a powerful tool to undermine the modern government.
In a 1971 memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote that “the American economic system,” which he defined as the “free enterprise system,” “capitalism,” and “the profit system,” “is under broad attack.”
Powell identified college campuses as the center of this attack and called for setting up right-wing think tanks and speakers’ series to advance the interests of business, restoring what he called “balance” to textbooks, and for pressure on colleges to appoint right-wing faculty members, all in the name of “strengthening of both academic freedom on the campus and of the values which have made America the most productive of all societies.”
As Republicans embraced economic individualism and religion, they also embraced anti-intellectualism. Their version was not unlike that of the early colonists, in which rural Americans, especially those in the West, claimed their evangelical religion made them more worthy than the urban Americans in the East who far outnumbered them. When Republican presidential candidate John McCain tapped evangelical Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008, he acknowledged the growing power of that demographic.
Increasingly, far-right activists insisted that all of the pillars of society, including universities, had been corrupted by the liberal ideas behind the modern government and that those pillars must be destroyed. In 2012, college dropout Charlie Kirk and Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery formed Turning Point USA to purge college campuses of those faculty members they saw as purveyors of dangerous ideas. After Trump’s election in 2016, the organization launched the “Professor Watchlist,” which listed faculty members it claimed—without evidence—“discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” (I was one of the first on the list.)
That impulse to purge society of the institutions that support modern liberal government became a full-throated attack on universities. In a 2021 interview, then Senate candidate J.D. Vance said that the American right has “lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
The same year, Vance told the National Conservatism Conference that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” “We live in a world that has been made effectively by university knowledge” and to rebuild the nation along the lines of white Christian nationalism, the universities must be destroyed. Vance told the audience, “the professors are the enemy.”
On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court decided that an American president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties, and the next day, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the key organizer of Project 2025, went on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room to tell supporters that America’s radical white Christian nationalists were “going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” He said the country needed a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.”
And now the Trump administration is dismantling higher education. As Harvard said in its lawsuit: “There is no lawful justification for the government’s unprecedented revocation of Harvard’s [certification for accepting foreign students], and the government has not offered any.”
“[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” Roberts said last July, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
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.”)
Trump veered off into immigration and a chat about golf, then repeated a story about William Levitt, a real estate developer whose post–World War II housing developments became synonymous with suburbia, that he had told at a 2017 Boy Scout jamboree. On Saturday, Trump talked about Levitt becoming “very rich, a very rich man, and then he decided to sell. And he sold his company, and he had nothing to do. He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well, but it doesn’t—that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives. It doesn’t work out. But it made him happy for a little while, at least, but he found a new wife. He sold his little boat, and he got a big yacht, he had one of the biggest yachts anywhere in the world. He moved for a time to Monte Carlo, and he led the good life, and time went by, and he got bored and 15 years later, the company that he sold to called him, and they said, ‘The housing business is not for us.’ You have to understand when Bill Levitt was hot. When he had momentum, he’d go to the job sites every night, he’d pick up every loose nail, he’d pick up every scrap of wood, if there was a bolt or a screw laying on the ground, he’d pick it up, and he’d use it the next day and putting together a house.”
After his speech, Trump skipped the traditional shaking of each graduate’s hand, left the ceremony, and flew to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
At Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, the president veered off into a dig at his predecessor, President Joe Biden, then noted that he, Trump, will be president for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And, he added, “Most important of all, in addition, we have the World Cup and we have the Olympics. Can you imagine [if] I missed that four years? And now look what I have. I have everything—amazing the way things work out. God did that, I believe that too.”
Trump’s social media account was similarly inappropriate. His message on Memorial Day—a solemn day to honor those American military personnel who died in service to the country—began: “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS….”
But that message quickly took a turn toward his recurring attacks on judges. Trump claimed that “CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE” are entering the United States “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. HOPEFULLY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, AND OTHER GOOD AND COMPASSIONATE JUDGES THROUGHOUT THE LAND, WILL SAVE US FROM THE DECISIONS OF THE MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL.”
In February 2024, almost a year before Trump took office the second time, the country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general began preparing for a second Trump term. They listened to what he was saying on the campaign trail and read the plans in Project 2025, then wrote potential lawsuits against what he might try to put in place. Once he took office, they hit the ground running, banding together when they could to file lawsuits to bring the president’s unconstitutional and illegal actions before courts.
And they are not the only ones. On Friday, Alex Lemonides, Seamus Hughes, Mattathias Schwartz, Lazaro Gamio, and Camille Baker of the New York Times listed the many lawsuits against the Trump administration and noted that as of May 23, at least 177 rulings “have at least temporarily paused some of the administration’s initiatives.”
Those include cases involving the administration's attempt to fire large numbers of federal employees unlawfully, freeze federal funding required by Congress, refuse to recognize birthright citizenship, hand power to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” dismantle government agencies, take away civil rights from transgender Americans, revoke environmental policies, and use the federal government to punish individuals or organizations.
But it is the judicial orders and decisions concerning immigration that Trump and his administration are most vocally attacking. Their primary focus is on Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was rendered to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador on March 15 in what the administration at first called an “administrative error.” Nick Miroff of The Atlantic recorded that when Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit to get him returned, lawyers at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security quietly tried to secure his safety and bring him back to the United States.
But White House officials saw the case as a way to challenge the ability of the judicial branch to restrain presidential power. As Miroff writes, “Abrego Garcia’s deportation…developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process.”
They began to insist—without evidence—that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, a drug dealer, a terrorist, and a human trafficker. Despite orders from courts right up to the Supreme Court to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, they have publicly insisted that Abrego Garcia will never return to the United States. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a white-nationalist nativist, has said that the administration is thinking about suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would permit the government to throw people in jail without charge or trial. The Constitution specifies that Congress alone can suspend that writ.
Their attacks seemed designed to convince Americans that judges insisting on the rule of law are backing violent criminals. That, in turn, seems designed to encourage MAGA loyalists to threaten judges. And they are. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that a security committee at the judicial conference, the body that makes policy for federal judges, has floated the idea of creating an armed security force apart from the current U.S. Marshals Service that operates under the Department of Justice. Judges have expressed concern that Trump and loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi might withdraw protections from judges who have ruled against the administration.
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted: “It is an extraordinary and unprecedented development in American history that the Nation’s Federal Judiciary would have to consider having its own security force because federal judges cannot trust the U.S. Marshal’s Service under this President and his Attorney General. They cannot trust this president and this Attorney General to ensure their protection.”
He continued: “I had to admit that, given the continuing unprecedented and vicious personal attacks and threats on the federal courts and federal judges by the President, Vice President Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Donald Trump’s Cabinet and senior White House advisors, I would never rely upon the U.S. Marshal’s Service for my protection, were I still a sitting federal judge. How could anyone?”
Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.
The administration sustained more losses today.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional.
Today NPR and three Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration over Trump’s executive order that seeks to impound congressionally appropriated funds for NPR and PBS. The executive order said the public media stations do not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” NPR’s David Folkenflik reported White House spokesperson Harrison Fields’s statement today that public media supports “a particular party on the taxpayers’ dime,” and that Trump and his allies have called it “left-wing propaganda.”
The lawsuit calls Trump’s executive order and attempt to withhold funding Congress has already approved “textbook retaliation.” “[W]e are not choosing to do this out of politics,” NPR chief executive officer Katherine Maher told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “We are choosing to do this as a matter of necessity and principle. All of our rights that we enjoy in this democracy flow from the First Amendment: freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press. When we see those rights infringed upon, we have an obligation to challenge them.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis today denied the administration’s motion for a 30-day extension of the deadline for it to answer the complaint in the lawsuit over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man sent to El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error.”
Despite five hearings on the case, the administration’s lawyers didn’t indicate they needed any more time, but today—the day their answer was due—they suddenly asked for 30 more days. Xinis wrote that they “expended no effort in demonstrating good cause. They vaguely complain, in two sentences, to expending ‘significant resources’ engaging in expedited discovery. But these self-described burdens are of their own making. The Court ordered expedited discovery because of [the administration’s] refusal to follow the orders of this court as affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.”
Trump is well known for using procedural delays to stop the courts from administering justice, and it is notable that administration lawyers have generally not been arguing that they will win cases on the merits. Instead, they are making procedural arguments.
Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.
Political scientist Bonica notes that there is a script for rising authoritarians. When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.
The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.
On Monday, Trump issued a presidential pardon to former Culpeper County, Virginia, sheriff Scott Jenkins, a longtime Trump supporter whom a jury convicted of conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jared Gans of The Hill explained that Jenkins accepted more than $70,000 in bribes to appoint auxiliary deputy sheriffs, “giving them badges and credentials despite them not being trained or vetted and not offering services to the sheriff’s office.” Jenkins had announced he would “deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms,” if the legislature passed “further unnecessary gun restrictions.” Jenkins was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Although Jenkins was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just as the U.S. justice system calls for, Trump insisted that Jenkins and his wife and their family “have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice].” Jenkins, Trump wrote on social media, “is a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters,’ and ‘left for dead.’ This is why I, as President of the United States, see fit to end his unfair sentence, and grant Sheriff Jenkins a FULL and Unconditional Pardon. He will NOT be going to jail tomorrow, but instead will have a wonderful and productive life.”
Today Trump gave a presidential pardon to Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes in 2024. The pardon arrived after Walczak’s mother donated at least $1 million to Trump. The pardon spares Walczak from 18 months in prison and $4.4 million in restitution. Also today, Trump announced plans to pardon reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were sentenced to 7 and 12 years in prison for conspiracy to defraud banks of $36 million and tax evasion. Their daughter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Bonica notes that delegitimizing the judicial system creates a permission structure for threats against judges. That, too, we are seeing.
Bonica goes on to illustrate how this pattern of authoritarian attacks on the judiciary looks the same across nations. In 2009, following a ruling that he was not immune from prosecution for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi railed about “communist prosecutors and communist judges.” In 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye rejected the authority of his country’s highest court and purged more than 4,000 judges. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe pushed judges to stop protests, and the judiciary collapsed. In the Philippines in 2018, Rodrigo Duterte called the chief justice defending judicial independence an “enemy,” and she was removed. In Brazil in 2021, Jair Bolsonaro threatened violence against the judges who were investigating him for corruption.
But, Bonica notes, something different happened in Israel in 2023. When Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition tried to destroy judicial independence, people from all parts of society took to the streets. A broad, nonpartisan group came together to defend democracy and resist authoritarianism.
“Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took aim at reputed journals such as the Lancet and said the agency will create “in-house” publications instead.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he could bar government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, instead proposing the creation of “in-house” publications by his agency — the latest in the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific institutions.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA [published by the American Medical Association] and those other journals, because they’re all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast. He also described the journals as being under the control of pharmaceutical companies.
The three publications he named — which were established in the 1800s, and publish original, peer-reviewed research — play a central role in disseminating medical research worldwide. The Lancet and JAMA each say they receive more than 30 million annual visits to their sites, while the New England Journal of Medicine says it is read in print and online by more than 1 million people each week.
The journals did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Kennedy’s remarks.
Kennedy also accused several of the agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services — including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — of being “sock puppets” for the pharmaceutical industry.
On his plans for the agency to create its own journals, Kennedy said they are “going to become the preeminent journals, because if you get [National Institutes of Health] funding, it is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist.”
Adam Gaffney, a public health researcher and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in an email that “banning NIH-funded researchers from publishing in leading medical journals and requiring them to publish only in journals that carry the RFK Jr. seal of approval would delegitimize taxpayer-funded research.”
He said that while steps should be taken to ensure commercial interests don’t impact “the conduct or reporting of science,” and that drug approvals are based on sound science, this was unlikely to happen given the Trump administration’s cuts to public health and research funding, as well as Kennedy’s own anti-vaccine views.
Today’s news continues yesterday’s.
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.
Vietnam sends more of its exports to the United States than to any other country, and after Trump hit Vietnam with 46% tariffs, top officials in Vietnam ignored the country’s own laws to ink a hurried deal with the Trumps to head the tariffs off. The Trump Organization is also cutting deals in Serbia, Indonesia, and the Middle East.
Trump’s pardons also continue to be in the news.
Today the president granted clemency to 25 people, including former Representative Michael Grimm (R-NY) and former Connecticut governor John Rowland, both of whom were convicted of tax fraud. Trump also commuted the six federal life sentences of Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover, 74, who was convicted of murder, extortion, money laundering, and drug related offenses, and from prison ran a notorious drug gang that had about 30,000 members across 31 states and brought in an estimated $100 million a year. Hoover still faces what’s left of a 200-year sentence in Illinois for murder.
While Trump’s pardons of Republicans convicted of tax crimes seem in keeping with his favoring of the wealthy, Trump’s commutation of the sentence of a gang kingpin seems an odd counterpoint to his administration’s stance on undocumented immigrants. Administration officials insist they must be able to deport migrants they allege are gang members even if they have no criminal histories. They can ignore due process, they claim, because of the dangers those individuals present to the American people. And yet Trump has now commuted the sentence of a gang leader convicted of the very sorts of crimes the administration insists justify denying to undocumented immigrants the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Hoover’s pardon is reminiscent of Trump’s advice to the right-wing Proud Boys in September 2020 to “stand back and stand by,” as he courted the support of vigilante groups to help him steal the 2020 election. It is in keeping with Trump’s statement that he’s “looking at” pardons for the men convicted of conspiring to kidnap Democratic Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Tonight, after news broke that the judges had ruled his tariffs illegal and after he had reacted angrily to a reporter’s question about the “TACO trade,” a weakened Trump reached out to his alt-right base as he appeared determined to demonstrate dominance. He posted a meme on his social media account showing an image of himself walking toward the viewer on what appears to be a wet, nighttime city street. Pepe the Frog, a symbol of the far right, stands in the background.
Above Trump, in all capital letters, are the words: “He’s on a mission from God.” Below his feet, also in all caps, the message continues: “& nothing can stop what is coming.” This is a phrase from the right-wing QAnon conspiracy community and refers to the idea that members of the “Deep State” and its collaborators will soon be arrested.
