Here is a topic that isn’t as consequential in itself as the wholesale and illegal reshaping of the federal government. But it is of a piece with it and captures the mood and pretensions of DOGE and Trumpism generally. News emerged a few days ago that the FBI has created a 20-person security detail for FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Bongino is the first deputy director who doesn’t come from within the FBI. That’s customary because often the director is a judge or a prosecutor who lacks knowledge of the agency from the inside. The director’s deputy, as a veteran of the bureau, provides that operational knowledge and thus a hands-on managerial control. Since Bongino has been a failed political candidate and podcaster for as long as he wore any kind of uniform, one might be tempted to ascribe this security detail to his personal quirks and pretensions. But it’s actually pervasive across the Trump administration, often especially within DOGE and with DOGE-adjacent appointees, whose firing squads often show up at target agencies with security details of uncertain origin.

In the mid-80s, when I was a teenager, I had a brief conversation with a successful, well-off doctor. I wasn’t a patient. This person was sort of a family friend. In that conversation he said matter-of-factly but with the air of a let’s-be-real statement that he wouldn’t want to treat AIDS patients because he didn’t want to run the risk of getting AIDS himself.

Some context is important. This was still very early in the AIDS epidemic. The first blood test for HIV only became available in 1985. This was not a callous or uncaring man. And, at least at the margins, it wasn’t yet as clear as it would eventually be just how much risk physicians faced. But the comment stuck with me and I kept thinking about it. I still haven’t forgotten it 40 years later.

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.

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?

Crain’s Chicago has a piece on the law firm deals. It focuses on Chicago-based Kirkland & Ellis. The conclusion is the same. There’s no written document. It’s only the bullet-pointed text they shared internally and which Trump posted on Truth Social. When I wrote about this yesterday I realized that there was something that seems so clear that I don’t seem to have said it explicitly enough. So let’s do that: the real goal here is to gain leverage over the firms – regardless of what these notional agreements say – and stop them from taking cases that are in any way unhelpful to Trump, including but not limited to lawsuits fighting his various illegal actions. But the most interesting new information I learned yesterday I found in this article in The Wall Street Journal, which explains that the entire negotiation process is being lead by Trump lawyer and fixer Boris Epshteyn.

We are now cranking up another edition of the “will he or won’t he?” Trump song and dance, this time about firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Trump manages to add an additional pungency to these dramas by trying to fire the guy who is actually his own Fed Chair. Biden renominated Powell. But Trump actually gave him the job. Axios just pushed a newsletter update that ran through this drama, first reporting the events of the day and then adding this: “What we’re watching: Federal law and Supreme Court precedent say presidents cannot fire the Fed chair over a policy disagreement.” It then goes on from there. But that’s actually the end of the story. The other possibilities are illegal.

It is critical to remember these things. I’ve often used the metaphor of a pilot’s flight instruments. Under flight rules, you’re taught only to follow the instruments. Your body and senses may be telling you you’re right-side up but actually you’re upside down. They may be telling you you’re going up but you’re actually going down. Your instruments are reality; your body and sensations are lying to you.

Since January 20th, and actually back into November, I’ve had a series of projects I’ve desperately wanted to see done. My first was a simple but clean and easily shareable site to track core economic statistics from the end of the Biden administration through Trump’s presidency. Simple, objective, core economic data — here’s where Biden left off, here’s where Trump is. At the time I envisioned a different start to the administration. I figured it would be like 2017 where Trump took the quite good economy he inherited, mostly left it alone, maybe juiced it with tax cuts and rebranded it as his own. I was pretty confident this was a good bet since most of the Biden numbers were about as good as they could be. For employment, inflation, growth they would be pretty hard to top. So there wasn’t much chance Trump would end up looking much better than Biden. You simply can’t get unemployment much lower than 3%. I saw it as a way of deflating what I figured would be the standard Trumpian rebrand, where he talked constantly of the catastrophic Biden economy and his own era of prosperity with data that was actually marginally worse.

I’ve been gratified at just how much response and interest I’ve got to my proposal for a DOJ-in-Exile project. I’ve heard from so many people either wanting to volunteer their time or work for such a project or help get it off the ground that I haven’t even been able to respond to everyone yet. But I’m very encouraged by the interest. As I said yesterday, this isn’t something I am envisioning running. I don’t have the expertise and I’m already doing something. I’m trying to bring together interested people and potentially funders and thus hopefully play some role in bringing it into existence.

To help bring the idea into more focus, I thought I’d try to flesh out the concept.

I wanted to point your attention to this recent article from the Times on the battle between Trump and Harvard University. It captures the Times’ feature quality. It contains good factual detail, but it radiates what I can only describe as a Chernobyl-level condescension and contempt, not so much for anything “liberal” but anything not conservative, or not in line with what it terms the “rightward shift of the country” — anything that can be construed as a posture of opposition to Donald Trump. The Harvard board is portrayed as reflexively and out-of-touchedly liberal, repeatedly shocked in a weak-kneed sort of way and yet also, paradoxically, headstrong in its inability to resist outmoded Trump I-era “resistance” thinking. In a few words, weak, out-of-touch and contemptible.

This morning, the White House announced that trade talks with China continue, albeit at a staff level. This came after a flurry of reports that Trump is planning to unilaterally ramp back the embargo-level tariffs he imposed on China earlier this month, advance notice that cheered Wall Street. Then Chinese officials said that the White House is wrong. There actually are no talks. And Trump must take the first step, unilaterally undoing the tariffs he had already imposed.

He appears set to do just that.

This comes just three days after the CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot met with Trump at the White House and reportedly told him that his tariffs would result in empty shelves and product shortages in as little as two weeks.

All of this is, to put it mildly, a humiliating climb down for the President. He upended the global economy and seems to have massively damaged the perception of American assets as a safe haven during times of economic uncertainty. The goal was to go toe-to-toe with China and see China blink. But it’s the U.S. that’s blinking. And that’s after the earlier reciprocal tariffs blink that already happened.