Yesterday, the Conference Board reported that in May consumer confidence surged by 12.3, the largest monthly increase in four years. Bloomberg said the surge was bigger than the estimates of any private-sector economists Bloomberg contacted for its survey. The data suggests consumer confidence was already moving up and then surged forward after Donald Trump made a series of “deals,” most notably with China, reducing the fear of tariffs or an economic slowdown tied to them. It’s important to note that these weren’t “deals” in any meaningful sense. He just agreed with the countries in questions, most importantly with China, to go back to the way things were before he introduced his tariffs, with small, continual, residual tariffs. In a way Trump is getting credit for caving. But in reality these shifts in consumer sentiment are rational reactions to Trump’s actions. The strangling tariffs were the problem. Trump decided to mostly get rid of them, at least for now. So people’s expectations about the economy improved. It makes perfect sense.

I want to start this week with a comment about the meta-news environment. It’s a point that may not surprise you. But it shapes everything we’re seeing today and does so with an uncanny silence. Quite simply, lots and lots of things are not being said or reported because people are afraid to say them. “Afraid” may be too strong a word in some cases, though the fuzzy, murky spectrum separating “fear” from something more like calculation is a key feature of what is happening. I’m far from the first to note this. But when people do note it it doesn’t get a lot of attention because there’s not a clear empirical basis for it. What’s your basis for noting, at a society-wide level, what people aren’t saying? How do you prove — or, perhaps better to say, illustrate — that reality? And yet it is happening and it’s not difficult to see it observationally if you look closely in any one place.

What interests me most about the Supreme Court’s telegraphed decision ending independent agencies is the ease with which they discard their governing theories (unitary executive) when the results are ones they find unpleasant (ending the independence Federal Reserve). Let’s make a note in passing that as long as they were going to make this disastrous decision, I’m glad they were also hypocrites and exempted (or suggest they are going to exempt) the Federal Reserve, because not doing so would have made it even worse.

It’s very much of a piece with 2024’s presidential immunity decision. It is demonstrably the case that the U.S. Constitution does not provide the President with any immunity from prosecution. You can argue this from absence (it literally doesn’t provide it); you can argue it from general logic, which is admittedly an inherently slippery kind of argument (no one is above the law); perhaps most convincingly you can argue by the fact that the Constitution writers very much knew how to provide immunity where they believed it should exist and did so in the case of members of Congress (speech and debate clause). They knew how to do it and decided not to for Presidents. The most generous reading of the aptly-named Trump vs. United States is that Roberts et al. decided as a matter of policy that such immunity should exist and therefore decided to create it. But it is entirely a 21st century creation with no basis whatsoever in the actual Constitution.

It’s become almost commonplace in recent years, and especially in the last four months, that the divisions among Democrats are less progressives vs. “centrists” or liberals than one between institutionalists and what we might call Team Fight. There’s a separate issue which is that there needs to be a lot more elaboration or articulation about just what “centrists” or “moderates” even are. The language is typically used as an electoral self-definition for the purposes of intra-party dynamics. But let’s leave that topic for another day. So we have the mounting knowledge that the divisions are more Team Fight vs. Team No Fight than the more ideological definitions. At the same time, though, you have non-progressives (see the problem of definitions?) worried that the highly polarized climate of 2025 will “push the party to the left.” (I have my own thoughts on that latter question.) A lot of those voices came to the fore during the Bernie and AOC barnstorming tour, which I guess is paused, at least for the moment. But for “centrists” or non-progressive liberals, if it’s really true that the real issue is Team Fight vs. Team No Fight (and I believe it is), you’ve got to get out there and do your own barnstorming tours or find other ways to demonstrate the fight.

This is just obvious. In a period of high polarization and high threat, the center of gravity of the party and inevitably the ideological center of gravity of the party will move to those fighting hardest, most successfully, with the fewest apologies.

Over the past four months, I’ve spoken to dozens of biomedical researchers either at NIH, other government grant-making agencies or at the various American research institutions which receive U.S. government grants. Over that time, I’ve developed at least a very rudimentary understanding of the nitty-gritty mechanics of the grant-making relationship between agencies and research institutions. What I’ve learned is a fascinating and critically important dynamic operating just beneath the surface of theWhite House’s whole war on biomedical research specifically and universities generally. The world of biomedical research actually has immense latent political power, albeit largely untapped. Researchers have a much stronger hand politically and the White House’s position, in terms of public opinion, is comparatively weak.

The problem is that the world of biomedical research has close to no experience operating in a political context and especially in the context of mass politics. Much of the world of biomedical research operates through channels of review and funding connecting a few government grant-making institutions to the nationwide archipelago of research institutions and universities. Operating within those channels is so basic to the mores and experience of the research and university world that researchers have in many cases kept trying to operate within them (rebooting them, checking them for unknown clogs) long after the White House has broken them and moved on. The White House has relied on researchers’ unfamiliarity with political fights, using their sole reliance on bureaucratic channels of funding and review — which the universities and the federal government set up together going on a century ago — against them. The only other pathways through which researchers tend to assert themselves are professional organizations, very non-mass politics entities which, in ordinary times, would speak to the relevant members of Congress.

You’ve seen our liveblog, which provides a detailed and technical look at today’s birthright citizenship oral arguments before the Supreme Court. I want to focus on a broad and critical issue. The Trump administration brought this to the Supreme Court. While the underlying or substantive issue is birthright citizenship, they were not seeking to have that issue resolved. They wanted the Court to address whether federal trial courts can issue national injunctions binding the hands of the incumbent administration. 

Just before the onset of the pandemic, I’d started researching a longer project about the personalization of global politics which was accelerated by but not started by Trump. In a way, personalization is the inevitable companion of authoritarianism and autocracy. If there’s one guy who runs the show in each country, then the affairs of that state inherently become indistinguishable from that of the autocrat and his personal checkbook. Relationships between states become those of individual people.

Early in Biden’s presidency, I spoke to one of the very high-end hedge funders who are in the class of people who get invited to the dinners and shindigs with Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh. This was around the time that Jared Kushner got that huge $2 billion investment in his new post-White House fund. This source described one of those dinners to me that had occurred not long before that investment. Kushner was seated to MBS’s right or left. I can’t remember which, but same difference. Given how much power MBS wields and his near unilateral control over hundreds of billions of dollars, people would probably literally kill for that level of preferment and proximity. But as it was conveyed to me, everything about that weekend or series of days suggested that Jared was just MBS’s guy. As in, MBS just loved Jared. And remember, Trump was out of power. And in early 2022 or possibly late 2021, it was by no means an obvious bet that he’d be returning to power. The relationship seemed to go far beyond a bet on the Trump family returning to power.

Since late in Donald Trump’s first term as President something called “Schedule F” has figured high in his plans to gut and/or make the federal workforce personally loyal to him as opposed to the constitution. The gist of it is that Schedule F would allow Trump to redefine large numbers of civil servants as the equivalent of “policy-making” political appointees who are fireable at will. After he was forced to leave the White House in 2021, Schedule F played a big role in plans for a second term. For a long time I hadn’t looked that close at the specific legal details of Schedule F as opposed to its potential impact. It was usually presented to me as a kind of ingenious bit of lawyering which allowed Trump to undo the Civil Service system from the inside. And I don’t mean Trumpers calling it ingenious I mean either by supporters of non-partisan federal employment and/or journalists who cover these matters.

Two days ago, I wrote about a pattern operating largely under the radar in the President’s war against higher education. We know about the general grant freezes on about half a dozen elite universities. Then there are countless other grant terminations across a much larger group of universities. One of the complexities of this story is that there are so many different versions of cancellations and terminations going on, it’s hard to figure out which is which. It’s just as hard deciphering to what extent the differences even matter. There are ones tied to prohibited words and concepts (DEI, transgender); there are ones tied to targeted universities; others are terminated on generic efficiency grounds; others are canceled for no clear reason. Are these categories even meaningful or is that all just more smoke and mirrors and distraction?

Here is a brief follow-up on the question TPM Reader MA addresses in an earlier post: why does the Trump administration have it in for biomedical/disease research? It’s a really good question and one I have not seen an adequate explanation for. But having been reporting on this for a few months now I think I do get the outlines of it.