The ongoing Republican effort to steal last year’s North Carolina Supreme Court race — the only 2024 race that has not yet been certified — continues this week after a federal court ordered the State Board of Elections to comply with a state court order that could potentially disenfranchise thousands of overseas and military voters.
Continue reading “‘This Is About Much More’ Than Riggs: The Latest In The North Carolina GOP Judge’s Attempt To Steal An Election”What’s Really in the White House Law Firm Agreements?
Last week I asked some questions about the law firm “agreements” with Donald Trump that seem very unclear from the available news coverage. Namely, where are the agreements? Are they formal agreements committed to writing? Who are the parties? Are they signed?
Sources from the Big Law firms who inked (maybe?) new agreements last week gave me a lot more visibility into what these deals are about. So I want to share that with you.
First, I want to renew my request to lawyers at the big firms to reach out and share information. I can not only protect your confidentiality, I can keep your firm anonymous as well. See more in the addenda at the end of this post.
Now let’s get down to business. Let’s start with what and where are the agreements?
Continue reading “What’s Really in the White House Law Firm Agreements?”Trump II Hits A New All-Time Low In Oval Office Debacle
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Defiance And Mendacity
I want to begin today by setting the stage for the hearing scheduled this afternoon at 4 p.m. ET in federal court in Maryland in the case of mistakenly deported and wrongfully imprisoned Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
We’re five days and counting into the executive branch engaging in ongoing contemptuous behavior toward the judicial branch by refusing to abide by a district court order backed by the Supreme Court. The Trump administration’s conduct has been on brand: egregious, contemptible, and brazen. It has refused to comply with deadlines; rebuffed the judge’s repeated demands for information; shifted its arguments and positions in an attempt to re-litigate already-decided matters; and sent DOJ lawyers into court to absorb judicial fire unarmed with facts or legitimate legal arguments.
And that’s just touching on how the Trump administration has conducted itself in court.
On the underlying case itself, the Trump administration mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia in contravention of an existing order from an immigration judge; it sent the El Salvadoran to a brutal prison in his home country, where he’s been for a month as of today; and there is no evidence of any kind that the Trump administration has lifted a finger to correct its error and to try to retrieve him.
This was all true even before yesterday’s historically grim Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, in which the two heads of state and top Trump officials chortled, bragged, and postured in front of cameras about never releasing Abrego Garcia. To justify defying the courts, human rights, and basic decency, the mendacious cabal in the Oval Office invented, distorted, and disregarded facts about Abrego Garcia, the legal background of his case, and the court orders the administration is currently defying.
But I go back to the Trump administration’s conduct in U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’ court. At a hearing in the case on Friday, April 4, a Justice Department lawyer admitted the administration’s error in deporting Abrego Garcia and expressed frustration to Xinis about his client’s conduct since then. By the next day, that lawyer and his supervisor had been taken off the case and placed on administrative leave for what Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed was insufficient advocacy on the administration’s behalf.
The following Friday, after the Supreme Court intervened to uphold Xinis’ order save for one word – “effectuate,” which she subsequently dropped when issuing a new order – a replacement DOJ lawyer was in court refusing and unable to provide even the most basic information about Abrego Garcia’s current status, what the administration had already done and what it planned to do to try to facilitate his release. That lawyer told the court the administration needed until today to provide full answers to those question, and suggested it might be able to provide them by the close of business yesterday. Unsatisfied with that response, the judge ordered daily status updates.
The daily status updates – two of which were filed after deadline – have failed to answer the judge’s questions, except to confirm that Abrego Garcia is alive and in the CECOT prison. Yesterday’s Oval Office set piece now renders suspect almost anything the Justice Department says in court about the case because the President himself has made the administration’s position clear.
What does this leave for Judge Xinis to do? The short answer: It’s not clear. The combination of defiance and mendacity in pursuit and defense of extra-constitutional ends may be unprecedented in our history. Xinis may summon Trump officials to testify, she may find the administration in contempt, she may try to impose fines or take other punitive actions against specific officials. But I wouldn’t be under any illusion that there’s a magic bullet here for her.
But let’s also be clear that this is about far more than Abrego Garcia.
The Supreme Court weighed in once already, but in a way that tried to sidestep a direct confrontation with the President. At an institutional level, it tried to create some space for the President to right the wrong done to Abrego Garcia and to the rule of law without inviting additional attacks on the constitutional structure. That failed.
President Trump – apparently at the urging of non-lawyer Stephen Miller – has twisted the Supreme Court decision that was unanimous against him into an unrecognizable ruling that was unanimous for him. But he is fundamentally defying the Supreme Court now. Only additional intervention from the Supreme Court can potentially resolve this matter, but whether the Roberts Court will clip Trump’s wings, I hardly need to tell you, is not a sure thing.
‘Homegrowns Are Next’
Trump’s broader scheme to use El Salvador as a extra-legal dumping ground – beyond the reach of U.S. law – for people Trump deems undesirable isn’t going to be limited to El Salvadoran migrants or alleged-but-unproven Venezuelan gang members:
Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 14, 2025 at 12:50 PM
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Reaction To The Latest Oval Office Debacle
- Adam Serwer: “This 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.”
- Jonathan V. Last: “The real question is: Does the chief justice understand this state of affairs? Or is he blind to reality?”
- Timothy Snyder: “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.”
- Chris Geidner: “[I]t appears that the administration — likely led by Stephen Miller, based on who is and how he performed in the Oval Office on Monday, with a pliant Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem helping him — has centered in on an approach to get out from under these pesky federal courts by shoehorning all manner of illegal and even unconstitutional actions into “foreign relations” and beyond the reach of the courts.”
- Joyce Vance: “If there were a map that showed democracy slipping into dictatorship, we would be at the spot marked “You are here.” We shouldn’t sugarcoat the danger. Due process matters to immigrants and Americans alike. When the presidency refuses to honor it, we are all in danger. Donald Trump could snap his fingers and secure Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. We all know that’s true, no matter what pretense this administration assumes.”
CODA: Another Form Of Court Defiance
The Trump White House denied the Associated Press access to the President’s Oval Office meeting with Bukele despite a court order forbidding the Trump administration from punishing the AP for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
Another Pro-Palestinian Student Stripped Of Legal Status
The Trump administration has unilaterally revoked the green card of another pro-Palestinian Columbia student and detained him for deportation. Mohsen Mahdawi was detained when he showed up at a Vermont immigration center for what he was told was an interview related to his naturalization. A federal judge in Vermont quickly ordered the Trump administration not to deport Mahdawi while his case is pending.
Harvard Holds Firm Against Trump Attack
Three things you need to know about Harvard University’s decision to refuse to comply with the demands from the Trump administration to essentially give up its independence in order to continue to receive federal funding:
- How arbitrary and off-the-cuff President Trump was in targeting Harvard.
- How extreme the demand letter from the administration to Harvard was.
- How the anti-DEI administration demanded Harvard institute DEI for conservatives.
Following Harvard’s refusal to comply, the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in federal funding to the university.
DOGE Watch
NPR: A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data
Don’t Sleep On North Carolina Supreme Court Race
Rich Hasen: We’re Getting Dangerously Close to a Losing North Carolina Candidate Being Declared the Winner
What It Feels Like, Right Now
Chuck Wendig: “It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants.”
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Harvard Letter
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.
Continue reading “Harvard Letter”Just Another Lawless Monday
On a particularly lawless Monday, President Trump defied a Supreme Court order on live TV, barred the Associated Press from that event in defiance of a different court order and prompted a fired agency chair to ask for intensive questioning of officials under oath following the government’s alleged violation of yet another court order.
Continue reading “Just Another Lawless Monday”Bukele’s Offense Against the American People
Here’s how I look at today’s White House spectacle.
I don’t really care what these two men say. The only next step I’m focused on is the one that now faces the Supreme Court. The White House is now brazenly ignoring the crystal clear import and goal of the Court’s order which is not to facilitate merely the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia, but his “release from custody in El Salvador.” The Court will now rapidly have to decide whether to knuckle under to this institutional humiliation or stand its ground. I don’t know which course it will choose. But I am very eager to find out.
Nayib Bukele is actively and publicly conspiring not only to violate American domestic law but the orders of American courts. El Salvador is a minor power, essentially a city-state, which even in our current degraded state requires the friendship and almost always the aid of the United States. Bukele is interfering not only in American domestic politics but the American legal and constitutional process. These are grave offenses against the sovereignty of the American people and the American constitutional order.
Trump won’t be in power forever. The next Democratic administration won’t be like the last one. He needs to know that, and the consequences of that, today.
Any Democratic politician who doesn’t understand this and say as much publicly should have no future in elected office.
What Are Universities Supposed to Do?
I’ve heard from a number of you in response to my posts about the fate of universities in the Trump era. I’ve published a couple of these responses below and I’ll post more. They are fascinating and illuminating replies. Most are generally supportive. A few are in the category of “Dude, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” But there are a number which I would put in the category of, “I agree. The universities have to fight. But I’m not sure you get how big a bloodbath we’re talking about.”
I wanted to expand on those earlier posts. And much of this will be meant to address that last category of responses.
I haven’t been directly involved in university life for a couple decades. So there are lots of details I don’t know, and plenty of things I didn’t learn during my time as a grad student and TA. But I think I do get the broad outlines. I know that what we’re talking about is full of risks, probable damage and levels of damage that are existential. So let me expand on what I’ve said by distilling points I’ve made in most of these email exchanges with readers over the last several days. To be clear, this isn’t meant as any sort of manifesto: just a distillation of what I think and some additional detail that expands on those earlier posts.
Most of what I said in these exchanges came down to five points.
Continue reading “What Are Universities Supposed to Do?”Trump, Bukele Condemn Abrego Garcia to Prison On Live TV
It defies a Supreme Court ruling, flouts a lower court ruling, and undermines the basic principle that the government must provide due process before depriving someone of their freedom. Yet the man wrongly deported to a Salvadoran prison will remain there indefinitely, President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said during a Monday Oval Office meeting.
Continue reading “Trump, Bukele Condemn Abrego Garcia to Prison On Live TV”Sneaky Math Gimmicks Foreshadow Republican Plans To Run Roughshod Over The Senate
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Senate Republicans have passed a budget resolution that sets in motion their plan for gigantic tax cuts, skewed heavily toward billionaires, and that heralds their intent to pass it by breaking the budget rules. In order to cloak the massive increase in the deficit that would come along with skewed tax cuts, the resolution cheated. The first tranche would extend the temporary 2017 tax cuts, the proudest accomplishment of President Trump’s first term, which are set to expire this year, and another tranche would lay the groundwork to grant his wish to make his tax cuts permanent, that is, to make trillions more in skewed tax cuts after 2034.
As this plan advances, Senate Republicans are not passively looking the other way and doing nothing as they are with Trump’s tariffs. Rather, the Republican Senate is trampling its most basic budget strictures to swell the public debt for many years to come. After the budget resolution passed 51-48 this week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who voted for it, wrote on X that “there are serious shortcomings within this resolution that gave me considerable pause.” She said these “include the adoption of a current policy baseline . . . [and] the setting of a path that will result in more than $50 trillion in federal debt within a decade . . . .” That $50 trillion figure put a number on the cost of making the Trump tax cuts permanent.
This is only the beginning of the rule-breaking. As this package continues through the rest of the budget process, it may presage Senate Republican willingness to break Senate rules about requirements for 60 votes to pass other legislation too. If Senate Republicans can pass the permanent tax cuts with a slim 50 votes in support, they may assert the power to move other radical MAGA measures on that same bare majority.
Here’s how they’ve gone about this so far: In order to get the tax cuts through the Senate in a way that circumvents a Democratic filibuster — so, in a way that requires only a bare, 50-vote majority, not the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster — Republicans are using a process known as “budget reconciliation.” The Senate Republicans apparently could not face scoring all these trillions in tax cuts as increases in the deficit. So, rather than being transparent, they pulled off the first stage of a two-stage maneuver to first bend and then break the rules. The Senate Budget Committee manufactured a gimmick that apparently eased the consciences of more fiscal-minded senators who might have balked at an initial honest accounting of a deficit of $4 trillion. A budget measures deficits from a “baseline.” The chair of the committee, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), asserted the power to engage in a “current policy baseline” for the budget resolution. This mild-sounding trick meant taking the “current policy” — Trump’s temporary 2017 cuts — as the “baseline.” That sleight of hand would mean that extending the cuts would not be deemed to be cuts which add to the deficit, but just more of the current (albeit temporary) policy, meaning, following the make-believe math, it would not add to the deficit.
Initially, it was expected that this trick would come to an early ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. That could have turned ugly, because if she ruled against it, Senate Republicans would have to vote to overrule her and some would balk at that raw breach of the rules. Instead, the Senate Budget Committee plugged the phony “current policy” baseline into the budget resolution, and bypassed the parliamentarian, asserting that Graham had, for now, the power to make the determination himself and did not need a ruling from the parliamentarian. So much for that rule, and so much for the integrity of the Congress as an institution.
The skewed Budget Resolution then passed the Senate on April 5. The House passed it on April 10. Now, the Senate will then have a period of time to work on reconciliation. Eventually, the Senate may come back to that potentially ugly moment of overruling the parliamentarian. The budget resolution is a short concurrent resolution, not a tax law. It sets the stage and commands that the rest of the process go forward.
Then the Senate (and the House) must pass the tax cuts in the form of a law (the “budget reconciliation law”). That law will come to the Senate floor for a vote. Nothing is certain in advance in the world of Republican congressional budgeting, but one may consider that the Senate parliamentarian may make a ruling about that law. Namely, the parliamentarian will rule whether the permanent Trump tax cuts in it, notwithstanding the claim of “current policy baselines,” violate a very important budget procedure rule known as the Byrd Rule. (I wrote of the role of the Senate parliamentarian in the Budget Act, notably in the “Byrd Rule,” in Congressional Practice and Procedure 893 (1989).) That rule dates back to the 1980s. It is meant to preclude using the slim 50 vote path of reconciliation to enact tax cuts outside the ten year period set by the Budget Act as the window for reconciliation action. That precludes tax cuts now for after 2034.
If MacDonough were to advise the Chair that the rule is being violated, Majority Leader Thune would then turn to his 53 Republican senators and ask them to vote to overrule her. Will they? Will they overrule her? It is more likely he can assemble the 50 votes he needs at that late point, than if the issue had been put before the Senate in the last few weeks, much earlier in their consideration of the budget resolution.
Now, by the point MacDonough weighs in, the 53 Republican senators will have spent months bargaining among themselves over the shape of the tax cuts — and the spending cuts in the same bill. Each and every Republican senator will have been offered an opportunity to weigh in, and to seek to get things the way they want. They will understand how important it is for most of them to use that powerful tool for cheating, namely the current policy baseline. And, of course, they will have come to understand how important it is to Trump to make his tax cuts permanent.
Once Trump has succeeded in taking the Republican Senate down the path of overruling the parliamentarian as to the permanent tax cut, he may continue on that path. A slim, 50-vote majority of Republican senators could be used, for instance, to break Democratic filibusters if they were willing to overrule the parliamentarian and allow majority cloture on a particular bill. That is how the Senate chose to break filibusters on judicial nominations.
So, after a vote to have 50 votes pass permanent Trump tax cuts, they might go on to give Trump other bills. Who can say at this point which those would be? Permanently eliminating the Department of Education? Attacking birthright citizenship? Both of these are steps that would be much stronger by legislation than by mere executive order, but would face Democratic filibuster.
Even without looking that far down the path, the Republican Senate has already gone very far by breaking the bars to let loose the danger of the “current policy baseline.” It is an understatement to say that we will be paying for it for a very long time.
A Slo-Mo Constitutional Clash Is Already Well Underway
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Stonewalling At The Highest Level
President Trump’s open defiance of the judicial branch isn’t happening with a thunderclap and banner headlines. It’s a slow, grinding, make-me-if-you-can refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the district court handling the mistaken deportation case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has been wrongly imprisoned in El Salvador since March 15.
I ventured out to suburban DC Friday for what was shaping up, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling the prior evening, to be an epic confrontation between the executive and judicial branches. It did not feel epic. It felt dreary and exasperating. Instead of a titanic constitutional clash, it was bureaucratic stonewalling by the President using the many layers between him and a willing stooge of a DOJ official to tell the court to pound sand.
Initially, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis seemed willing to push back hard against Trump’s recalcitrance. But over the course of a few minutes, she went from adamant to head-in-hand frustrated to asking opposing counsel to give her a way out of the impasse. I felt the air leave the room when Xinis shifted the burden from the government to comply with her order to the lawyers for Abrego Garcia to argue what should be done about the government’s failure to comply. “It’s your case,” she told them.
Xinis settled on a dissatisfying half measure: requiring daily status updates from the government providing answers to the three questions she had posed in her order the night before and which the Trump DOJ had refused to answer in writing or in person at the hearing. It will not surprise you that the status updates Saturday (which was late-filed after her deadline) and Sunday did not answer the judge’s questions.
The status updates came in the form of declarations from administration officials that were not forthcoming and continued to argue the legal merits of the case (even though she had asked for attestations based on personal knowledge). The only new news was the first U.S. government confirmation that Abrego Garcia is in fact alive and confined at El Salvador’s brutal CECOT facility.
In the meantime, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys filed a follow-up motion seizing on Trump’s comments about the case late Friday: “If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that,” the president said. “I respect the Supreme Court.” That forced Trump to do some hasty cleanup work in a social media post on Saturday, declaring that the detainees like Abrego Garcia “are now in the sole custody El Salvador,” suggesting the United States can’t get them back if it tried. More stonewalling.
Against this backdrop, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele visits President Trump in the Oval Office this morning. The Trump DOJ used the presidential visit in opposing Abrego Garcia’s request for specific concrete steps to facilitate his release and expedited discovery: “That request is particularly inappropriate given that such discovery could interfere with ongoing diplomatic discussions—particularly in the context of President Bukele’s ongoing trip to the United States.”
Heads we win, tails you lose.
Khalil Loses In Immigration Court
Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate whose green card was unilaterally revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was declared eligible for deportation by an immigration judge in Louisiana. The Trump administration met the low standard for establishing removability. Khalil’s claims are still alive in federal court in New Jersey, where a court order blocking his deportation remains in effect.
Exclusive
A State Department memo in March subsequently described to the WaPo determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.
Unreal
The North Carolina Supreme Court may have done just enough Friday to overturn the results of the 2024 election for one of its own seats. In narrowing a state appeals court decision that effectively threw out 60,000 already-cast ballots, the Supreme Court still put enough ballots in jeopardy to throw the close race from incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs to Republican Jefferson Griffin. Riggs imediately took the case to federal court, where a judge allowed the state Elections Board to proceed in accordance with the state court orders but barred it from certifying the results of the election while the federal case proceeds.
Five More Major Law Firms Reach Deals With Trump
The capitulators: Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that Boris Epshteyn – Trump’s private lawyer – has been the President’s point person on the shakedown of Big Law. Epshteyn doesn’t work for the White House or any other component of the federal government, so it’s unclear on whose behalf he is negotiating, other than Trump personally.
The Corruption: Trump DOJ Edition
The Trump DOJ is corruptly shifting the department’s approach to the case of the former FBI informant who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in a smear of the Biden family – a con that current FBI Director Kash Patel amplified while he was out of government. The Trump DOJ said in a court filing that it is reviewing the basis for Special Counsel David Weiss’ prosecution of Alexander Smirnov and has asked for his release from custody while his appeal proceeds. Senior DOJ officials ordered the move, the NYT reports, and the prosecutors on the case withdrew on the day the motion was filed.
Trump DOJ Sinks Further Into The Abyss
- In a highly inappropriate move, acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba of New Jersey went on Sean Hannity’s program late last week and publicly announced she was targeting two Democratic state officials: Gov. Philip D. Murphy and Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin over whether they’re providing sufficient assistance with President Trump’s mass deportations. Habba said the investigation is a “warning for everybody” that “I will come after them hard.”
- “The Trump administration is retreating from some types of white-collar law enforcement, including cases involving foreign bribery, public corruption, money laundering and crypto markets,” the WSJ reports.
- The FBI suspended analyst Brian Auten, who had appeared on Director Kash Patel’s so-called enemies list, the NYT reports. It’s not publicly known why Auten, who worked on the Trump Russia and Hunter Biden cases, was suspended.
ICYMI
I can’t think of any historical precedent for this: Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday used a cabinet meeting while TV cameras were present to engage in performative law enforcement in front of President Trump. The obsequious tone, the braggadocio, the politicization of prosecutions are precisely what nearly every other attorney general has assiduously avoided:
Bondi: "Within the next 24 hours you're going to be seeing another huge arrest on a Tesla dealership, president. And that person will be looking at at least 20 years in prison with no negotiations."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 10, 2025 at 1:11 PM
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DOGE Watch
- WaPo: Trump administration overrode Social Security staff to list immigrants as dead
- Wired: Palantir Is Helping DOGE With a Massive IRS Data Project
- Politico: Inside the DOGE immigration task force
- WaPo: DOGE takes over federal grants website, wresting control of billions
The Destruction
- The Trump administration is considering eliminating NOAA’s research arm, which has historically done critical work to improve weather forecasting.
- The U.S. Department of Education is moving to cut off all federal funding for Maine public schools in retaliation for ignoring President Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams.
- Just as important as which books were banned from the library at the U.S. Naval is which books were allowed to remain.
What Can You Do?
The New Yorker has an interesting piece on dissent in an era of rising “competitive authoritarianism”:
We analyzed the literature of protest and spoke to a range of people, including foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We asked them for their advice, in the nascent weeks of the Trump Administration, for those who want to oppose these dramatic changes but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom, their way of life, or all three. There are some proven lessons, operational and spiritual, to be learned from those who have challenged repressive regimes—a provisional guide for finding courage in Trump’s age of authoritarian fear.
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