The Trouble with Trump
A steadily growing batch of links, continually updated (most recently, 3-25-25)
• The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 3-24-25) U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling. This article is the first in a series about the Trump administration's use of Signal group chatting.
---Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal (Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, The Atlantic, 3-26-25) The administration has downplayed the importance of the text messages inadvertently sent to The Atlantic’s editor in chief.
• West Wing Playbook: Remaking Government (Adam Wren, Ben Johansen, Sophia Cai, and Irie Sentner, Politico, 3-28-25). Your guide to Donald Trump’s unprecedented overhaul of the federal government.
As DOGE continues to wreak havoc on the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk’s critics speculate his involvement in government work is tied to business interests. But his overtures in Wisconsin are the clearest evidence yet that his political work is fueled by his business interests. Musk first showed interest in the race earlier this year just days after Tesla filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s prohibition of vehicle manufacturers having dealerships.
• Trump's further descent into dictatorship (Robert Reich, 3-18-25) This morning, he issued a bellicose post against a federal judge who's trying to constrain him. It's part of an increasing attempt by Trump and Musk to threaten judges with violence. But today’s post by Trump was his first and most direct attack on the judiciary since he’s become president for the second time. Federal courts are now hearing more than 100 lawsuits challenging Trump’s and Musk’s initiatives. That's the issue: The collapse of the rule of law.
***• Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable (Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, 3-20-25) During his first official campaign rally for the 2024 Republican nomination, held in Waco, Texas, Donald Trump vowed retribution against those he perceives as his enemies. Sixty days into Trump’s second term, we have begun to see what that looks like.
The president fired the archivist of the United States because he was enraged at the National Archives for notifying the Justice Department of his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office following his first term. (The archivist he fired hadn’t even been working for the agency at the time, but that didn’t matter.)
U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as Elon Musk and other Trump-administration allies “ramp up efforts to discredit judges,” according to a Reuters report. On his social-media site, Musk has attacked judges in more than 30 posts since the end of January, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil,” and deriding the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.” ["Must" reading. Do read, or skim, the full article.]
---Trump Revokes Security Clearances for Biden, Harris, and More. Here’s the Full List and What That Means (Rebecca Schneid, Time Magazine, 3-22-25) President Donald Trump has made good on his promise of revoking security clearance for former President Joe Biden. Issued late on Friday night, a memo titled “Rescinding Security Clearances and Access to Classified Information from Specified Individuals” laid out Trump’s instructions for Biden, several members of the Biden Administration, and other political rivals to have their security clearances rescinded.
• One Word Describes Trump: Patrimonialism (Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, 2-24-25) Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones.
"Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a pliant big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution.
"In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity."
• How Trump’s Federal-Aid Fiasco Is Testing the Separation of Powers (Tyler Foggatt, New Yorker, 1-30-25) “We are in an era of a real reckoning with the relationship of the President to the other branches of government,” the Harvard Law professor and New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen says.
• The Unchecked Authority of Trump’s Immigration Orders (Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker, 1-24-25) The President is recasting migration as a form of “invasion,” broadening his already expansive powers and making anyone in the U.S. who’s undocumented a potential target.
• Trump moves toward a more efficient fascism (Lucian Truscott Newsletter, 3-23-25)
File under Getting Even. "Donald Trump is in the process of issuing a series of executive orders targeting law firms he doesn’t like. The orders strip partners and employees of the firms of their top-secret security clearances, bar the firms from doing business with the federal government, ban employees of the firms from federal office buildings, ban federal contractors from doing business with the firms, and initiate federal investigations of the firms for hiring and promoting people on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
"Trump’s first order was against Covington & Burling, a firm that had done legal work for Jack Smith, the Special Counsel assigned to investigate Trump for his theft of top-secret national security documents and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election."
• American Oligarchy (Tim Murphy, Mother Jones, 1-24) The US is finally taking Russia’s oligarchy seriously. "It’s time we started paying attention to our own."
• Donald Trump (Brittanica profile) An overview of his life and first presidency (especially his first term)
---Ukraine Scandal (Brittanica entry) This U.S. political scandal arose in the summer of 2019 from an attempt by Pres. Donald J. Trump to coerce the president of Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Trump’s political rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter for alleged wrongdoing in connection with a Ukrainian energy company. The scandal led the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach Trump in December 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.In December the Judiciary Committee drafted two articles of impeachment against Trump, one for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress. The articles were adopted in two party-line votes by the entire House on December 18, making Trump the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.
• Trump to declare “illicit” fentanyl “Weapon of Mass Destruction," per draft EO (Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, 3-18-25) The heads of the US Departments of Commerce, Defense, Justice and State received a copy of a draft executive order (EO) likely sometime last week stating that President Trump would be designating “illicit” fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, The Handbasket is first to report.
'The EO may be published as early as next week, the Department of State source tells me, but the timeline isn’t confirmed. The source speculates the purpose is a combination of designating fentanyl cartels as terrorist organizations and creating justification for conducting military operations in Mexico and Canada. They also suspect that it will be used domestically as justification for rounding up homeless encampments and deporting drug users who are not citizens.'
• There Is a Very Good Reason Why Donald Trump Thinks Everything Is Rigged (David Corn, Mother Jones, 1-24)
In business, he was a master of gaming the system.
"When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us.
"Donald Trump is not a typical oligarch. Before entering politics, he was not part of the small group of powerful and rich people who buttressed the ruling elite.... But essential to his own rise to wealth and power was a core component of oligarchy: exploiting a rigged system. And during both his private sector career and his time in the White House, he has been friendly to oligarchs, cutting deals with them, cozying up to oligarchic regimes, and stacking his own Cabinet with the superrich. It’s this world of immense wealth and power that Trump wishes to rule."
• The Claim Trump Is Making That 'Could Break the American System' (Jamelle Bouie and Aaron Retica, audio essay and transript, Opinion, NY Times, 3-24-25) More than two months into his second term, President Trump is testing the limits of the U.S. Constitution. But which of his executive actions are legally sound, and which defy constitutional principles? Understanding the president's shift from constitutional to anti-constitutional actions. (Gift link so nonsubscribers can read the article.)
• The Repercussions of Trump v. United States May Finally Be Hitting Roberts (Jamelle Bouie, Opinion, NY Times, 3-22-25) The Supreme Court’s decision last year in Trump v. United States gave the president of the United States criminal immunity for “official acts,” defined as anything that could involve or plausibly extend to the president’s core duties.
“The court,” Sotomayor wrote, “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.” She was right.
In his second term as president, Donald Trump has claimed royal prerogative over the entire executive branch. His lieutenants, likewise, have rejected judicial oversight of his actions, blasting individual judges for supposedly usurping the authority of the president. The president’s belief in his own absolute power and sovereign authority — “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he said last month in a post on his Truth Social network and on X, misquoting a line from the 1970 film “Waterloo” — has gone so far that he has begun to threaten judges who challenge him, calling it, as my newsroom colleague Peter Baker summarized the point, “a high crime and misdemeanor worthy of impeachment for a federal judge to rule against him.”
---Syllabus: Trump v United States
• ‘By the Time Trump Comes for Your University, It’s Probably Too Late’ (Patrick Healy and David Leonhardt, Opinion, NY Times, 3-27-25) And how universities can fight the president’s “destroying agenda.” Trump’s approach to power is through the domino theory. Trump makes an example out of one person or institution to send a message, and he’ll push until that one falls over, and then others fall in line.
He did this in business and lawsuits for years. Now we’re seeing it in his presidency and nowhere more than higher education. Trump has been quite clear that he admires authoritarians in other countries. The way he talks about Vladimir Putin, the way he talks about Xi Jinping in China, the way he talks about Viktor Orban in Hungary. Countries that were democracies or somewhat democracies and moved them toward more authoritarian forms of government. These leaders come from the political right have seen education as a source of empirical truth that can threaten these leaders’ attempts to essentially control truth.
• A Great Unraveling Is Underway (Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, 3-11-25)
"If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a Read More