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It’s Time to Protect America From Trump

With each passing day we are seeing the Felon launch more attacks on American institutions, ignore court orders and take actions cutting funding for medical research that over time will shorten American lives.  Add to this the lunatic in charge of America's health care system who is disputing research and proven science to push insane conspiracy theories and the work of charlatans.  We find ourselves with a would be mentally unhinged would be monarch or dictator who cares nothing for the harm done to everyday Americans as he seeks revenge and the manufacture of chaos.  Meanwhile, congressional Republicans sit on their hands - or worse, praise dictatorial actions - rather than find themselves targeted by the Felon's wrath and potential primary challenges.   The "adults in the room" that restrained the Felon during his first term have been replaced by crackpots, ideologues and sycophants who seemingly are as mentally unhinged as their fuhrer.  Only the courts have sought to block illegal actions, although I have little faith in the U.S. Supreme Court to act decisively - its presidential immunity ruling helped set the stage for the current nightmare - and affirm lower court rulings that have sought to uphold the rule of law.  A piece in The New York Times looks at where we are and the need for voters - the majority of whom did not vote for the Felon - to begin rising up to stop the slide towards something truly frightening.  Here are highlights:

America has periodically faced great national tests. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.

I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarianism in other countries, and I’ve seen all this before. The chummy scene in the White House this week with Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was telling. . . . . With chilling indifference, they discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen and who in 2019 was ordered protected from deportation by an immigration judge. The Trump administration nonetheless deported Abrego Garcia as a result of what it eventually acknowledged was an “administrative error,” and he now languishes in a brutal Salvadoran prison — even though, in contrast to Trump, he has no criminal record.

This is a challenge to our constitutional system, for the principal lawbreaking here appears to have been committed not by Abrego Garcia but by the Trump administration.

Appellate judges in the case warned that the administration’s position represented a “path of perfect lawlessness” and would mean “the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”

Then the Supreme Court ruled that Trump must obey the district judge’s instruction to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Trump and Bukele effectively mocked our federal courts by making it clear that they had no intention of bringing Abrego Garcia home.

A remarkable Times investigation found that of the 238 migrants dispatched to the Salvadoran prison, most did not have criminal records and few were found to have ties to gangs. Officials appear to have selected their targets in part based on tattoos and a misunderstanding of their significance.

This is the same administration that marked for deletion a photo of the World War II bomber Enola Gay, seemingly because it thought it had something to do with gay people. But this ineptitude is intertwined with brutality. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that those sent to the Salvadoran prison “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”

Trump’s border “czar,” Tom Homan, suggested that governors of sanctuary states should be prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned. “It’s coming,” he said.

Much of this echoes what I’ve seen abroad. In China, the government has cracked down on elite universities, crushed freethinking journalism, suppressed lawyers and forced intellectuals to parrot the party line. . . . In Communist Poland, in Venezuela, in Russia, in Bangladesh and in China, I’ve seen rulers cultivate personality cults and claim to follow laws that they concocted out of thin air. “We are a nation of laws,” a Chinese state security official once told me as he detained me for, um, committing journalism.

Trump’s defiance of the courts comes in the wider context of his attacks on law firms, universities and news organizations. The White House this week appeared to ignore a separate court by blocking Associated Press journalists from a White House event.

In the face of this onslaught, many powerful institutions have caved. Nine law firms have surrendered and agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for the administration’s preferred causes. Columbia University rolled over.

We needed a dollop of hope, and this week it came from Harvard University. Facing absurd demands from the administration, it delivered a resolute no, standing fast even as Trump then halted $2.2 billion in federal funding and threatened the university’s tax-exempt status. (A conflict alert: I’m a former member of Harvard’s board of overseers, and my wife is a current member.)

Yes, critics of elite universities make some legitimate points. . . . Too many university departments are ideological monocultures, with evangelical Christians and social conservatives often left to feel unwelcome.

It’s also true that there is a strain of antisemitism on the left, although Trump exaggerates it to encompass legitimate criticisms of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. . . . . Admission preferences based on legacy, sports and faculty parents perpetuate an unfair educational aristocracy.

Yet Trump is not encouraging debate on these issues. Rather, like autocrats in China, Hungary and Russia, he’s trying to crush independent universities that might challenge his misrule. One difference is that China, while repressing universities, at least has been smart enough to protect and boost academic scientific research because it recognizes that this work benefits the entire nation.

I hope voters understand that Trump’s retaliatory funding freeze primarily strikes not Harvard’s main campus but researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The university has 162 Nobel Prize winners, and scientists there are working on cancer immunotherapy, brain tumors, organ transplants, diabetes and more. It was a Harvard researcher who discovered the molecule that is the basis for the GLP-1 weight-loss medications that have revolutionized obesity care.

Programs now facing funding cuts address pediatric cancer and treatment for veterans. The federal government already issued a “stop-work order” on Harvard research on Lou Gehrig’s disease. The upshot is that Trump’s lust for power and vengeance may one day be measured by more Americans dying of cancer, heart disease and other ailments.

All this illuminates an administration that is not only authoritarian but also reckless; this is vandalism of the American project. That is why this moment is a test of our ability to step up and protect our national greatness from our national leader.

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First Came the Chaos; Next Comes the Retribution

The Felon has been back in office just shy of three months, yet it seems more like three years given the chaos being visited to federal government agencies and the ham handed manner in which fund is being cut to anything the Felon, Elon Musk, and/or the DOGE hacks - some of whom are seemingly not too bright since environmental bio-diversity grants were cut seemingly because some cretin thought it involved DEI - dislike.  The result has been chaos in many agencies and some worry that Social Security could collapse inflicting disaster on many older voters, including those who stupidly voted for the Felon.  Just as ominous are the signs that the Felon's regime is out to employ Putin like tactics (no one has "fallen" from windows at least yet)to silence critics through bogus investigations and prosecutions or simple intimidation. Frighteningly, too many Americans (including some individuals I know) seem blind to the reality that as a fascist dictatorship takes control, the circle of targets expands and that ultimately, no one is totally safe. The Felon wants to send "homegrown" criminals to El Salvador, with the Felon, of course, deciding who is a criminal.  American friends living abroad are looking on in horror at what is unfolding in America and some have urged us to devise an escape plan "just in case" things continue to worsen. Indeed, I have begun the inquiry of securing an other passport through my ancestry and we are nixing for now travel plans in 2026 to conserve funds for whatever we may face, especially since LGBT rights and individuals are targets of Project 2025 which the Felon continues to implement.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at what may be coming next:

During the first two months of his presidency, the prevailing theme of Trump’s White House was the Elon Musk–led attempt to drastically cut federal agencies. The purge is incomplete—the U.S. DOGE Service continues to seek cuts at more agencies, and litigation has slowed or blocked some of the cuts—but we seem to have already moved into the next stage: revenge.

Trump took one of his most chilling steps toward retribution last week, when he directed the government to investigate two officials in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. The reasons Trump is out to get these two men are clear enough. Krebs, whose work focused on election security, was fired for refusing to say that fraud tainted the 2020 presidential election; as I wrote back in November of that year, Trump targeted him “not because he did a bad job, but because he did too good a job and said so.” Taylor wrote a notable anonymous New York Times op-ed about administration officials resisting Trump, then published a book unmasking himself and worked to organize Republican opposition to Trump.

One might be tempted to think that Trump’s new orders rely on pretexts to target the duo, but they don’t even really bother: They’re pretty straightforward about the reasons. Trump is starting with a conclusion that the two men did something wrong and demanding the government work backwards to find some evidence to support it.

You don’t have to be a fan of either Krebs or Taylor to be alarmed by these actions, just as you don’t have to agree with Mahmoud Khalil’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to see why his detention is a danger to all Americans.

Any legal inquiries into Krebs and Taylor seem unlikely to go anywhere, beyond stripping their security clearance, which Trump has the power to do. But the two will have to hire lawyers, likely at significant cost, and go through the stress and fear of defending themselves. Even if they triumph, they will have been made examples; other would-be dissenters will see their travails and think twice before speaking, as Trump intends.

Trump has been quietly imposing retribution for some time, but the DOGE-led purges mean fewer longtime professionals who might object to or stand in the way of the latest revenge moves.

In January, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, fired several attorneys who had prosecuted cases related to the January 6, 2021, riots. Trump also stripped security details for officials who had served in his first administration but later criticized him—even though some face credible death threats from Iran because of actions they took on Trump’s behalf.

Meanwhile, in a sort of inverse retribution, the administration is rewarding its loyal allies. The Justice Department is pushing for the release of a man convicted of lying to FBI agents about the Biden family.

One prominent target for Trump’s retribution has been law firms. Trump has gone after a series of major firms simply because current or former attorneys there were involved in things Trump hated: his felony conviction in Manhattan, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work. Last week, he also assailed a firm that has represented plaintiffs in defamation cases related to 2020 election fraud. As the Atlantic contributor Paul Rosenzweig writes, the speed with which some of these firms have surrendered is deplorable.

In the settlements, these firms have agreed to provide a combined total of about $1 billion in “pro bono” work supporting causes the president backs. As The Wall Street Journal reports, these deals have been negotiated by Trump’s personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn, who is not a government employee—making clear that these causes relate to Trump’s personal revenge rather than some legitimate governmental purpose.

But then, Trump has never seen much distinction between his own interests and the power of the government. For him, revenge isn’t just a welcome adjunct to controlling the levels of government. It’s the reason to control them.

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Trump Is Exploring Ways To ‘Deport’ U.S. Citizens

For those who have never studied the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, they should do so quickly and, if they do so, I suspect they will see frightening parallels to what we are witnessing in 2025 under the Felon's malignant regime. One hallmark of the Nazis was the manner in which accusations were made against individuals who were then seized, given no due process or trial and then either sent off to concentration camps or simply murdered. Another was the manner in which the press and critics were labeled as enemies of the nation and/or the German people. A third was how a portion of the population shrugged and assumed they were unlike those targeted and safe from the abuses being visited on those labeled as Jews or opponents of the regime. Time proved many of those deliberately blind to what was happening proved their assumption wrong.

In America today, we are seeing foreign students and others being accused of being "terrorists" or as supporters of anti-Semitism seized on the streets by masked individuals and throw into unmarked cars and made to disappear, some in a horrific prison in El Salvador. Now, the Felon has indicated he wants to do the same to American citizens and is defying a unanimous ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court directing the Felon and his regime to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States. Lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so, and even though the government has admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error.” The excuse? He can't be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's defiance of the U. S. Supreme Court and what it could mean for American citizens:

Donald Trump took one step closer to openly defying an order from the Supreme Court today—effectively daring the justices to defend the law or pack up and go home.

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has emerged as a confederate of Trump’s, accepting planes full of Venezuelan citizens removed from the United States. Last month, the U.S. government deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man living in Maryland with protected legal status. As The Atlantic first reported, the Trump administration acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was “an administrative error”; last week the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the executive branch to “facilitate” his return to the United States.

Since then, the Justice Department has dragged its feet. It has filed required reports to a district court judge late, and has refused to say what it’s doing to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States. But whether this was defiance or merely delay was unclear until today. In an Oval Office press conference this afternoon, the White House revealed that the answer is defiance—at least for now. Both the U.S. and El Salvador are pretending that they have no power to do anything about Abrego Garcia, a performance of smirking, depraved, and wholly unconvincing absurdity.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Abrego Garcia “was illegally in our country,” despite her own department’s earlier admission of error. The Trump administration also alleged that he’s a gang member, based on a dubious 2019 accusation, but has provided no evidence.

And the idea that Trump couldn’t insist that the friendly leader of a client state return a single man would be an indictment of his abilities as a head of state—if it were true. One might say this leaves Abrego Garcia in a Kafkaesque limbo, but all reports about the Salvadoran prison, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), indicate that it’s more of a hell.

American citizens might like to reassure themselves that Abrego Garcia’s case is an outlier involving a Salvadoran citizen; surely they are insulated from such misfortune. But this would be a failure of imagination. First, as I have written, a government that can ignore court rulings in one sphere can ignore them in others, so no one is safe from a lawless government.

Moreover, an American citizen could find themselves in precisely the same vise as Abrego Garcia. During today’s remarks, Trump was asked whether he would be willing to deport American citizens convicted of violent crime to El Salvador. “I’m all for it,” he said. But convictions are overturned all the time. What would happen if an American citizen was found guilty, sent to CECOT, and then had their conviction overturned? We can guess: The White House would insist that they were in Salvadoran custody, beyond the government’s reach. Bukele would shrug and say he had no power to release them.

In their brief, unsigned order about Abrego Garcia last week, the Supreme Court justices seemed to be trying to say as little as possible, and today’s press conference showed how happy the White House has been to take advantage of their brevity and ambiguity. If the Court is unwilling to be more direct, it will surrender any power to act as a check on the other branches of government, thereby allowing authoritarianism.

Meanwhile a piece at Huffington Post looks at Trump's veiled threats to American citizens:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses.

Leavitt suggested the effort would be limited to people who have committed major crimes, but Trump has also mentioned the possibility of sending people who commit lesser offenses abroad.

Any such move on the part of the Trump administration is certain to be challenged in court. It is also not clear what legal authority could be used to justify expelling U.S. citizens from their homeland.

“These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders on American streets,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

“The president has said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that. He’s not sure, [and] we are not sure if there is,” Leavitt continued.

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that he “love[s]” the idea of removing U.S. citizens, adding that it would be an “honor” to send them to El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele — an eager partner in Trump’s schemes.

Trump also proposed the idea in March, when Tesla vehicles were being vandalized and set ablaze in protest of CEO Elon Musk’s heavy-handed involvement in the Trump administration. Musk has been running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, taking credit for huge cuts to the federal workforce and federal services.

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

The administration has argued that housing people in El Salvador saves taxpayer money.

Several planeloads of immigrants flown there last month remain incarcerated as a lawsuit challenging their deportation proceeds through the federal court system. The immigrants, mostly men from Venezuela, were accused of being gang members and deported without the chance to defend themselves. Court documents and reports that have emerged since their removal suggest many believe they will be targeted by the very same gangs Trump has accused them of being affiliated with.

Trump used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send the immigrants to El Salvador, officially categorizing the gang Tren de Aragua as a hostile power and the immigrants of being members. It is not clear whether he would attempt to use the same law or a different power to remove citizens.

Critics say the administration’s policy is a clear violation of due process protections enshrined in the Constitution.

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