The Press Keeps Coddling Trump’s Tariff Lawlessness

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Here’s how Ana Swanson, one of NYT’s main reporters covering Trump’s trade war, referred to the legal judgment that Trump’s tariffs are unlawful in a post titled, “Bluffs and Bluster Aside, Trump’s Tariffs Are Here to Stay.”

One remaining factor that could significantly lower Mr. Trump’s tariffs are the challenges that are now proceeding through the legal system. Federal courts have called into question the legal authority that Mr. Trump has used to threaten his global tariffs, and they are expected to rule on that question this fall.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have said that they have other legal channels to impose tariffs if the courts rule against them, but those methods were not likely to give the Trump administration as much scope and flexibility as it currently has asserted. [my emphasis]

Courts have not “called into question” Trump’s legal authority to impose arbitrary sanctions. Two ruled that Trump’s tariffs were unlawful.

In a piece with Tony Romm today, noting that Trade Rep Jamieson Greer was initiating an investigation, “to determine whether certain policies and actions by the Brazilian government are unreasonable or have hurt U.S. businesses” — that is, to determine whether the complaints Trump made in a letter targeting Brazil last week were even true –they describe:

By targeting Brazil, Mr. Trump nonetheless has touched off complaints that he is using his trade powers to settle political scores, regardless of questions of legality. The president has claimed vast authority to issue steep levies even without the express approval of Congress, as he looks to combat the nation’s trade deficit, address security concerns and, at times, meddle in another country’s internal affairs.

Thus far, the questions have been answered: Trump’s usurpation of Congress’ authority is illegal, and Greer’s belated investigation — an attempt to retcon Trump’s claims with some flimsy findings to justify them — is itself proof of that lawlessness (and should be reported as such).

And that’s what Swanson says when she does mention the legal challenges. In a 1400-word piece titled, “Tariffs or Deals? Trump Seems Content With Punishing Levies,” she doesn’t mention the legal challenges — significantly lawyered and supported by right wing groups — at all, not even in her discussion “about whether any of the president’s supporters will break with him on his aggressive strategy.”

A story by Swanson’s NYT colleague, Jeanna Smialek, describing efforts by the EU to replace the US as a trading partner doesn’t mention the legal challenges. A piece on the chaos created by Trump’s prevarications, bylined by both Smialek and Swanson, doesn’t mention the legal challenges. A piece on the damage Trump’s trade war poses for Europe doesn’t mention them.

Romm seems to be the one person at NYT who wants to talk about the law. He partnered on the piece reporting the US Court of International Trade’s judgment that Trump’s tariffs were unlawful that Swanson linked above, included a longer discussion of the legal problems with Trump’s tariffs in the piece on Trump’s tariff threats against Brazil, linked in the second block quote above and by another story on the Brazil threat links.

But other than that, the abundant coverage NYT has given Trump’s trade war in the last week barely considers the legality of this all, or even the timing of Trump’s delayed new tariffs, scheduled to go in effect one day after the Federal Circuit considers the legality of the tariffs anew. This coverage repeatedly obscures what the CIT already found: that the tariffs are unlawful.

NYT is not alone. Over at the WSJ, right next to a story describing that Trump’s tariffs have begun to create inflation, Greg Ip has an 1100-word story declaring,

Forget TACO. Trump Is Winning His Trade War. The president wants tariffs, the higher the better. Whether that is achieved unilaterally or via deals is secondary.

Trump has won, Ip explains in ¶9, because the 10% tariffs he didn’t relinquish have started making money.

[D]espite the absence of deals, he has succeeded. In June alone, Treasury collected $27 billion in customs revenue, up $20 billion from a year earlier, a pace that would imply $240 billion more a year. That isn’t enough to eliminate most families’ income tax as Trump once promised, but it can still pay for plenty of other priorities.

Yet when Ip mentions the CIT ruling, in passing, over ten ¶¶ later (Ip makes a factual error here; two courts have declared Trump’s tariffs illegal, though Trump’s DOJ insists the CIT is the only court with jurisdiction) he doesn’t mention that Trump only got a stay by promising to pay all those tariffs back if he loses.

Many of those checks and balances and norms are now gone. Trump claims the authority to raise tariffs on anyone and anything indefinitely for virtually any reason under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law intended to sanction adversaries such as Iran or Venezuela. One court has declared his use of it illegal; that decision has been stayed.

If Trump eventually loses this legal fight — Trump’s DOJ posited to even get this stay — importers get a refund, with interest. All that money goes away.

If tariffs imposed on plaintiffs during these appeals are ultimately held unlawful, then the government will issue refunds to plaintiffs, including any postjudgment interest that accrues.

Consumers, mind you, would be fucked. They won’t get the taxes they already paid back. But the revenue from importers, and then some, would all disappear if SCOTUS eventually rules these tariffs are unlawful. Imagine the political headache that would cause?

The many stories yesterday about Mark Carney conceding that Trump will make no deals that don’t involve tariffs? No mention that the Federal Circuit Court will hear Trump’s appeal of the ruling finding the tariffs unlawful the day before Trump’s onerous new tariffs are set to start.

Even this celebrated Jonathan Karl interview with Kevin Hassett, in which Trump’s economic advisor babbles when asked about the Brazilian tariff threat, only questions on what authority Trump threatened that 50% tariff in passing, without mentioning the court ruling that Trump cannot use tariffs to pressure other countries, as the letter clearly does.

I’m increasingly mystified by the disinterest in the legal challenges to Trump’s authority to impose these tariffs at all, particularly in a piece like Ip’s that contemplates where or if any checks on Trump remain. There are still courts here.

It’s certainly possible that journalists assume, because the Federal Circuit Court stayed the injunction imposed by the CIT (citing the Wilcox decision I discuss below), they will rule for the government. That may be the case (though unless I’m mistaken the 11-judge en banc panel that will hear the case in a few weeks includes no Trump appointees, whereas one of the judges on the CIT panel was a Trump judge). But observing that, “these cases present issues of exceptional importance warranting expedited en banc consideration of the merits in the first instance,” the Federal Circuit committed to weigh in definitively and quickly, whereas most other Trump challenges have only just reached the merits stage in the District Courts (one exception — the challenges to Trump’s attempt to cow law firms — hasn’t even and won’t set an appellate briefing schedule yet). However they’re inclined to weigh in on the merits claim before them, the Federal Circuit does view this entire situation as exceptional.

It’s certainly possible that journalists assume, like a bunch of random social media people, that the Supreme Court will back the President on this as they have in many — but by no means all — legal challenges to his abuse of power. That’s perfectly reasonable. SCOTUS’ Republican majority has rubber-stamped unprecedented abuses from Trump already (even ignoring their opinion giving Trump criminal immunity that got him this far), so it is conceivable they’ll let Trump usurp Congressional authority to impose tariffs.

Yet several things distinguish the challenges to Trump’s tariffs from the other SCOTUS rulings, which have allowed Trump to dismantle agencies mandated by Congress or fire people Congress attempted to grant independence. The one area where SCOTUS has already invented an over-determined exception (in the Wilcox opinion the Circuit Court cited to explain granting a stay) to their general rule of granting Trump more power, in which they distinguished the hypothetical firing of the Federal Reserve Chair from the firing of officials mandated to protect labor interests, is understood to serve the stability of the economy. The same commitment to serving corporate interests may tip the scale against Trump on this point.

Furthermore, on the tariff challenges, SCOTUS will have to pick between those it normally caters to. A goodly number of right wing legal stars are arguing both the lead case and weighing in as Amici representing right wing entities like the Chamber of Commerce or AEI-linked economists, which may make SCOTUS’ right wingers weigh John Sauer’s claims more critically. This is the rare case where the right and left are unified in opposing Trump.

Plus, things have changed since the Circuit ordered an expedited schedule five weeks ago. Trump’s recent stunts may irk the courts. For example, to get the two month stay of the injunction that even permits him to keep sending out letters, Trump made the same claims his discredited economic advisors keep making on TV — that he was on the verge of dozens of deals, deals that might be be jeopardized by a stay.

As members of the President’s Cabinet have attested, the CIT’s order would irreparably harm the economic and national security of the United States. The Secretary of Commerce explained that the injunction “would undermine the United States-United Kingdom trade deal that was negotiated in reliance on the President’s emergency tariff authority,” plus the recent “China trade agreement,” and “would jeopardize the dozens of similar arrangements with foreign-trading partners that” are being negotiated. A76. “Each of these negotiations,” the declaration explained, “is premised on the credible threat of enforcement of the IEEPA tariffs,” and the injunction could compromise that threat, so that “foreign counterparts will have reduced incentives to reach meaningful agreements[].”

The declarations that CIT blew off but which the Federal Circuit apparently heeded in granting a stay brag repeatedly of the “dozens” of trade negotiations ongoing (though they point solely to the UK framework as proof that their tantrum is working). Howard Lutnick claimed that “scores of countries immediately reached out” on April 2, following Trump’s initial tariff panic. “[F]oreign-trading partners that have run trade deficits in goods for years, and helped hollow out the American manufacturing base, immediately came to the negotiating table.” He claimed, “an adverse ruling would jeopardize the dozens of [] arrangements [similar to the UK deal] that I am negotiating.” Marco Rubio claimed back in May, “In some cases, we have reached frameworks with our trading partners,” but in the time since, it appears that by “some” Rubio meant “two.” Rubio also warned of “diplomatic embarrassment” if Trump’s claim to have the power to set tariffs were rebuffed by courts, which I can understand posing a concern to Rubio but is not a legal principle. All these declarations claimed to be negotiating with Canada and Mexico, in addition to China.

But Trump has instead shown that he himself is disrupting actual negotiations in process to simply send his demands; he basically intervened to forestall a deal with the EU. As Trump confessed the other day, “Am I right when I say I don’t want deals, I just want the paper to get sent?” After laughing, he worried, “I don’t know if this is on television,” as if he has something to hide. Then later in the day, when asked if he would release details of the purported deal with Vietnam, Trump opined, “I don’t think it matters how much you release of the deal.” (There may be reason for that; as we get further from the deal with China that purported to be asymmetrical in US favor, China has both gotten Nvidia chips and imposed licensing on battery technology, meaning Trump continues to trade away America’s manufacturing strengths.)

That’s a point the Chamber of Commerce made in its amicus brief. The whiplash is “crippling” businesses.

These harms are compounded considerably by the unlimited, unilateral nature of the President’s asserted IEEPA tariff authority, which fosters deep uncertainty and makes it extremely difficult for American businesses—large and small—to plan for the future. And in business, uncertainty creates hardship.

[snip]

The President’s “pause” in enforcing some of these tariffs provides little reprieve for businesses. Because international orders must often be made far in advance, many businesses are holding off making orders fearing that, by the time the order arrives in the United States, tariff enforcement will have resumed. Recent statements by the President and his advisors have only magnified this uncertainty. Just this week, the President announced 25% tariffs against South Korea and Japan if they do not negotiate a trade deal by August 1. Elisabeth Buchwald & John Liu, Trump announces new tariffs of up to 40% on a growing number of countries, CNN Business (July 8, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/07/economy/trump-letterstariffs. Meanwhile, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent stated that the paused April 2 tariffs would “boomerang back” on August 1 for countries that do not negotiate a deal. Ari Hawkins, Trump team moves goalposts on tariffs again, Politico (July 6, 2025), https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/06/bessent-trumptariffs-deadline-august-00440522. For businesses, this uncertainty is crippling.

Trump’s demand letter to Brazil, with which the US has no trade deficit, is still worse. It aims to coerce an entirely personal goal, help for his fellow coup plotter — precisely the kind of arbitrary leverage the CIT used to distinguish Trump’s use of tariff threats from any limited use of tariffs under IEPPA. And the fact that Jamieson Greer is only now investigating whether the claims in the letter are true — normally the first step to imposing tariffs under an existing legal means — is a tell that Trump is simply making shit up.

The arbitrariness and coerciveness of the Brazil letter is a point that — as Romm reported in the NYT — plaintiffs plan to bring up during the appeal (which I also predicted here).

Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing a set of small businesses suing the government, said Mr. Trump’s renewed tariff threats seemed only to affirm their arguments in the case.

“This is exactly why these tariffs are a problem,” he said. “They can change at the drop of a hat, and our clients can’t keep track of what the tariffs are going to be because they change so quickly.”

Mr. Schwab said he also expected the political threat against Brazil, in particular, to come up during the legal challenge. He said that the president’s primary justification for issuing tariffs under the federal economic-emergency law is to respond to a trade deficit, and that Mr. Trump’s attempts to protect Mr. Bolsonaro had “nothing to do with that.”

Even after his tariffs were deemed illegal, even during this grace period where Trump is still permitted to negotiate tariffs already deemed unlawful, Trump is making his legal case far worse. At the very least, that may give either the Federal Circuit or SCOTUS the proof needed to declare that Trump is just making shit up. If not, if SCOTUS ultimately upholds his arguments, the sanction for Trump’s utter contempt for the law would be even greater.

But if they do that, they’ll do that in siding against the business community, right alongside ruling against Democrats in Congress and Democratic states.

And that’s the kind of drama that should present a hook for coverage — or at least careful consideration in coverage claiming Trump has no checks.

The business press has been publishing near daily stories about Trump’s attempt to bully Jerome Powell, most recently with plans to announce his replacement early, possibly with the babbling Hassett. But the principles underlying the legality of Trump’s tariffs are of equal import to the stability of the business world, and might resolve, one way or another, even before Powell is replaced next year. Yes, Trump’s sycophants have told people like Swanson they have other means via which Trump can set tariffs, but as I understand it those take time and require facts of the sort Trump wants to avoid. They don’t assert the same kind of unreviewable authority to just make shit up that Trump has so consistently relied on in his power grabs and is increasingly flexing here.

I’m not saying I have the answers to this question. I’m definitely not predicting how the courts will weigh in.

What I’m saying is that something almost unique is brewing in these dockets, with the business community standing up to Trump in ways more visible than in coverage — to say nothing of Congress.

Ultimately, within a year (even if SCOTUS takes the case without expediting it and stalls, like they did for Trump’s immunity claims), there will likely be a binary legal decision about whether or not the President can just make shit up to claim an economic emergency and in so doing, destroy small businesses and even enact his own personal vengeance. Or, SCOTUS will impose a check on Trump’s authority that will gut his bid to subjugate the rest of the world to a weakening US economy.

Whichever it is, it’s an eventuality far more certain than anything else Trump is up to.

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Old Man Chuck Grassley Got Snookered by Emil Bove’s Contemptuous Dodge

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Senate Judiciary Democrats asked Chuck Grassley to hold a hearing with whistleblower Erez Reuveni to learn about Emil Bove’s contempt in the face of orders Judge James Boasberg gave DOJ on March 15. In a letter that carefully dodges smoking gun proof that Emil Bove did command others to blow off Boasberg’s order, Grassley refused.

I’m going to assume that Chuck Grassley is just really old and so vulnerable to being duped by someone devious like Bove. Otherwise, of course, we’d have to conclude he’s complicit in a clear attempt to deport innocent men to a concentration camp at all costs.

Grassley’s three main rebuttals of Reuveni’s allegations are:

  • DOJ has gotten appellate relief on at least some of the misconduct Reuveni reported
  • Emil Bove made the comment about telling a judge “fuck you” before Boasberg issued any orders
  • Bove testified under oath that he did not order any DOJ lawyers to blow off Boasberg’s order

Grassley pretends that the files handed over by Reuveni include “almost none” that “include, reference, or even cite” Bove.

Almost none of the additional documents you published include, reference, or even cite Mr. Bove.

Almost none is not none, as I’ll show below.

Grassley further claims that most of the files reflect “litigation strategy about the scope of court orders.”

Most of the communications merely reflect Administration attorneys internally debating or discussing litigation strategy and the scope of court orders. Debate about the scope of court orders is fundamentally inconsistent with an intention to ignore them. Moreover, many of the legal positions discussed in the documents were ultimately advanced in federal court as the formal position of the United States, and the Administration has received at least some appellate relief in each of the cases described.

With regards to the JGG lawsuit to which the “fuck you” comment is pertinent, that relief consists of two Trump appointees stalling a contempt motion for months, as both TPM and NYT pointed out today. Here’s how TPM’s David Kurtz described it.

The DC appeals court — a three-judge panel composed of Trump appointees Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao and Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard (who opposed the move) — placed an administrative stay on Boasberg’s contempt proceedings way back on April 18. What is usually supposed to be a short-term pause in the case has now dragged on for nearly three months.

In that time, former DOJ career lawyer Erez Reuveni has revealed bombshell internal DOJ emails and texts. Those documents show that Bove, in his role as principal associate deputy attorney general, gave the green light for continuing with the March 15 removals of Venezuelan nationals to CECOT in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act in spite of Boasberg’s order blocking the deportations and directing the planes carrying the detainees to turn around. (For his part, Bove denies violating any court orders, and the Justice Department has made the preposterous argument that Boasberg’s written order didn’t include the direction to turn the planes around and that trumped his oral demand that they do so.)

In slow-rolling the contempt inquiry, the DC appeals court hasn’t just enabled Bove (who has engaged in other egregious conduct at DOJ). It has hung Boasberg out to dry, done nothing to staunch the Trump administration’s blatant defiance of court orders in other cases, and has left the judicial branch more exposed to a rogue executive determined to expand his power at the expense of the judiciary.

The relief Grassley is relying on is, in fact, partisan stonewalling.

That matters, because he is replicating a corrupt dodge that Bove — and DOJ itself — are both adopting.

That corrupt dodge starts, first of all, with his claim that Reuveni’s “fuck you” allegation — corroborated in four sets of texts exchanged with colleagues during the weekend in question — came before any judge had issued orders.

The gravamen of the allegations is that Mr. Bove directed Justice Department attorneys to ignore court orders, but (1) the meeting with Mr. Bove occurred before there was any litigation or court order to follow;

That’s true: Bove made the “fuck you” comment at a meeting on March 14. Boasberg issued the order not to unload any planes with Alien Enemies Act detainees on the evening of March 15.

Grassley makes much of the fact that August Flentje told DOJ HR that Bove told the lawyers to avoid an order prohibiting the AEA flights at all costs.

In an April 8th letter addressed to the Justice Department’s Human Resources Division, August Flentje—Mr. Reuveni’s former supervisor—stated: “The Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General [Bove] advised our team that we must avoid a court order halting an upcoming operation to implement the Act at all costs.”1 This statement was made under penalty of perjury months before Mr. Reuveni made the claims in his whistleblower disclosure, and directly contradicts his assertions. Mr. Bove’s comments to subordinate Justice Department litigators— made in advance of anticipated litigation—advising them to avoid a court order that would negatively impact a mission is inconsistent with instructions to ignore a court order, and entirely consistent with Mr. Bove’s sworn testimony.

But again, that was March 14.

They didn’t avoid an order prohibiting the operation. Drew Ensign tried his damndest to mislead Boasberg about flights in the air, but Boasberg nevertheless issued the order.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to turn the planes around, not to deplane the planes.

So, Mr. Ensign, the first point is that I — that you shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States. However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.

Boasberg did give the order that Emil Bove was so inexplicably desperate to avoid.

And that’s where Grassley gets either cute or duped. He quotes Bove stating, under oath, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order” (with equivocal comments, not under oath, from Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi).

At his hearing, under oath, Mr. Bove firmly stated, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.” The Deputy Attorney General issued a statement confirming that he also attended the meeting, and “at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.” In another statement, the Attorney General unequivocally said that “no one was ever asked to defy a court order.”

All very nifty, Senator, except when you consider the smoking gun that does name Bove by his title, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Yaakov Roth, a top Civil Division lawyer documented in an email to Reuveni and others that PADAG (Bove) “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior [sic] the court’s minute order was permissible under the law and the court’s order.”

Only it wasn’t.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to inform its clients to turn the flights around, not to deplane the planes.

And then Bove instructed DHS — not DOJ lawyers, but DHS personnel, possibly including lawyers — something different.

Bove instructed DHS they could do something impermissible under the order Boasberg gave. And that’s the core of the contempt for which Boasberg found probable cause that two Trump appointees have bottled up at DC Circuit.

By mid-Sunday morning, the picture of what had happened the previous night came into clearer focus. It appeared that the Government had transferred members of the Plaintiff class into El Salvador’s custody hours after this Court’s injunction prohibited their deportation under the Proclamation. Worse, boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully. The Secretary of State, for instance, retweeted a post in which, above a news headline noting this Court’s Order to return the flights to the United States, the President of El Salvador wrote: “Oopsie . . . Too late 😂😂.” Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele), X (Mar. 16, 2025, 7:46 a.m. EDT), https://perma.cc/Y384-4TDW, https://perma.cc/6VTW-5KRD (ellipses in original)

Bove may not have lied — this is not proof he told DOJ lawyers to fuck off a Boasberg order. But he did tell DHS to fuck off a Boasberg order.

Which is it, Senator Grassley: Are you old and confused? Or complicit?

Because Erez Reuveni supplied you the smoking gun proving that Bove blew off Boasberg’s order.

Grassley does one other dishonest thing in his letter. He makes much of the fact that Todd Blanche, not Bove himself, fired Reuveni.

The whistleblower also claims his termination was the result of his efforts to ensure agency compliance with court orders. The documents Mr. Reuveni produced, however, reveal that the ultimate termination decision was made and signed by Deputy Attorney General Blanche—not Mr. Bove.

Another of the “almost none” documents that Reuveni turned over showed that Bove was gunning for Reuveni just before he was ousted.

Days before Blanche put Reuveni on leave, April 1, Flentje texted Reuveni about “a nastygram from Emil Bove” conveyed by Roth, the same guy who sent the smoking gun email.

On April 5, a few hours after Todd Blanche did put Reuveni on paid leave, Flentje confirmed that at the meeting on March 15, he “told our host we would not violate a court order.”

That is, in response to Reuveni being placed on leave, Flentje confirmed there was a “through line” from questions about whether or not DOJ would follow an order to Reuveni’s suspension (and subsequent firing).

For Grassley, “almost none” is two too many to sustain his case, because the smoking gun documenting who defied an order after Bove proclaimed he might tell a judge “fuck you” is right there with Bove’s title on it.

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John Roberts Subjects America’s School Children to the Whims of a Wrestling Promoter

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Every time the Supreme Court does something outrageous to empower Trump’s fascism, as it did yesterday by letting Trump shut down a statutorily-mandated agency, Department of Education, I try to think of an area to politically organize around and push back on the action.

I do this not out of any pollyannaish desire to diminish how problematic the court’s actions are. Though Justice Sotomayor already enumerated those in her dissent.

The equities, too, cut against the Government. While “equity does not demand that its suitors shall have led blameless lives as to other matters, “it does require that they shall have acted fairly and without fraud or deceit as to the controversy in issue.” Precision Instrument Mfg. Co. v. Automotive Maintenance Machinery Co., 324 U.S. 806, 814-815 (1943) (citing Keystone Driller Co. v. General Ex- cavator Co., 200 U.S. 240, 245 (1933). The Government has continued to press a plainly pretextual explanation for the mass firings in court, even as the Executive makes inconsistent statements to the public. See supra, at 12-13, and n. 14. That the majority sees fit to repay that obfuscation with emergency equitable relief is troubling.

The relative harms to the parties are also vastly disproportionate. While the Government will, no doubt, suffer pocketbook harms from having to pay employees that it sought to fire as the litigation proceeds, sce App. 169a~170a, the harm to this Nation’s education system and individual students is of a far greater magnitude. The Department is responsible for providing critical funding and services to millions of students and scores of schools across the country. Lifting the District Court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended. The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fre than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues. Equity does not support such an inequitable result.

The decision was all the worse when you consider — as Chris Geidner and others have — that two years ago, SCOTUS overruled Joe Biden’s far more modest exercise of executive authority, student loan relief. This was SCOTUS putting their right wing thumbs on the scale to help Trump attack education.

I’m not turning to politics to ignore the damage of this ruling (though it does help to avoid despair). Rather, I do this because — as I tried to lay out in this post and this graphic — ultimately we need to win this battle politically.

Ultimately we need to convince robust majorities in the country that Trump’s policies are destroying their lives. In the case of destroying the Department of Education, we need people in school districts around the country to understand how Trump’s defiance of Congress harms local education.

Even the remedies for SCOTUS’ abuse of power that many advocate — expanding the court, impeaching the justices who rewrote the Constitution for Trump — would require far more political backing than any such effort currently has or could have had under Biden.

You have to fight and win the political battle.

The United States has had to fight back from disastrous Supreme Courts in the past. But it takes fighting the political battle.

And this battle is a particularly noteworthy one.

A lot of white extremism in the US arises from a backlash to integration (the rabid excuse for eliminated Department of Education). But Americans love their local schools; one of the few political bright spots last year came when Kentucky beat back a heavily funded constitutional amendment pushing school vouchers. The far right Moms for Liberty has suffered increasing setbacks in recent years, after an initial surge. More importantly, those two political battles show how, when schools are involved, previously apolitical people will come out and fight hard in their communities. A lot of the funding and programming targeted by this decision will hurt rural districts, so this fight will extend far beyond suburban school districts.

This has the possibility of mobilizing PTA moms who don’t think of themselves as political actors, the kind of civil society you need to fight fascism.

Plus, think of the optics of this! Trump has sicced a wrestling promoter currently fighting allegations of fostering sexual abuse of boys on school children. Let me repeat that: Trump has sicced a billionaire wrestling promoter, currently fighting allegations she overlooked sexual abuse of boys, who has absolutely no expertise on education, on school children. That’s the person who is going to start taking away educational opportunities for poor kids.

John Roberts just gave this billionaire wrestling promoter accused of letting an employee sexually exploit boys sanction to start destroying local school programs.

That’s a pretty easy story to get parents outraged about.

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The Allies Of the Billionaires

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In this post I offered a brief history of the efforts by the filthy rich to destroy the New Deal. Under Trump those attacks are now aimed at democracy. This post lays out the field of conflict between the filthy rich and normal people. Who are the allies of the filthy rich, and what can we do with that information?

Andrew Mellon stated the program of the billionaires after the 1929 stock market crash:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

That’s Trump’s program. In the 1930s, when the attacks began, that program got no traction. The only way the filthy rich could succeed was to find allies who would effectively shield their goals from view. It took a few decades, but they found or created those allies.

It seems to me that there are three groups of collaborators, Theists, Neoliberals, and Grifters. Their motivations are different, and in some ways radically different from the filthy rich, but they all benefit by tagging along with the billionaires.

Theists

There are several groups who teach that the US is a “Christian Nation”, and that it should be a theocracy, or at least that the “laws” of the Bible should govern all Americans, religious or not. Among them are Christian Dominionists, Christian Nationalists, and specific sects. They are supported by groups engaged in lobbying, litigation, and proselytizing. They have their own education structures, including universities and their own media.

There are a number of Christian sects that share some or many of their beliefs. For example, the Catholic Church agrees that all Americans should be governed by their moral teachings about abortion, and that Catholics should be exempt from lnsurance laws that relate to birth control; but retains some sense of the teachings of Jesus on other issues. There are lots of people who agree on specific issues, like equal marriage, and act on them, perhaps by home-schooling, or by supporting theistic lobbying and litigation groups.

The common thread among these groups is the belief that they know the moral truths of the universe, and that the rest of us should/must accept their views. They don’t want anyone reading or thinking anything but what they allow.

Neoliberals

Neoliberas see human beings as homo economicus. They say that human beings have a single goal, maximizing their personal utility. They think that life is a competition for scarce resources, and that the strongest will survive and get the most, and that is just fine. For more, and for a sane alternative, see this post.

Neoliberals fall into two groups. On one side are sellers of goods and services, that is, people who own a business. This group includes investors, the rich who don’t have to work for a living, and the theorists and teachers of this doctrine. The rest of us, the masses, the employees, the consumers, the users, we make up the other side.

The first class has specific goals, mainly getting rid of regulations, and cutting taxes. In this, they agree with the filthy rich. For the rest of us, neoliberalism only offers an explanation of our condition: it’s our fault.

Owner neoliberals differ from theists in two fundamental respects. First, they don’t care what people think or study or theorize about, except for economics. There, they rigidly push their own version, which you studied in Econ 101. Or maybe you learned it in high school, taught from a syllabus prepared by a neoliberal think tank like the Heartland Foundation , which is funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation and other right-wing operations.

They don’t want you to think clearly about economics, because you will see that they use it to preserve their power, and support the agenda of the filthy rich. They want you to ibelieve that their version of capitalism as foundational to democracy.

One of their tools is distraction. You do things you enjoy, whether it’s shopping, or going to the movies, or playing video games. These are fun and even necessary for a good life. But in excess they keep you from learning and thinking enough to participate in a democracy. You exist solely as a consumer. You work so you can buy entertainment and other stuff.

Expertise only comes with effort, even for the best of us. Here’s an example. At the top of this post is a painting by the American Thomas Kinkade. Take a quick look This painting is typical of the kind of art preferred by sellers of distraction. It doesn’t require anything of the viewer. It oozes with a brain-dead nostalgia, and hides every vestige of the reality of the era it depicts.

Now click through to this painting, Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, painted in 1610. Look closely at what’s happening Even if you don’t know the story (it’s Daniel 13 in the Catholic Bible ), and even if you don’t know the life history of Artemisia, you can feel the pressing weight of sexual menace. This painting requires attention, and is made more potent with context both of its time, the artist’s experiences, and our me-too age. (Side note: I saw this painting in Paris in May in an exhibit at the Jaquemart André museum. There is also a fairly good copy of Judith Slaying Holofernes,  and the original of Joel and Sisera. And this is a reminder that Wikipedia is a terrific resource and worth a contribution.)

The point here is that owner neoliberals benefit if you limit your thinking to conventional stuff. It’s easier to make and sell profitably. Distraction pacifies you, makes you think you’re living a good life, but hides all other possible ways to live. Those other lives include participating in a functioning democracy.

Worker neoliberals? The billionaires just want you to vote for their candidate, work for them, and buy stuff. People who blame themselves for problems created by the elites don’t demand change. And they keep getting screwed.

Grifters

This is a group of second-rate people who cling to the illusion of competence. There are two main groups here: politicians and their strategists, consultants, and sycophants; and faux intellectuals who swarm in think tanks and even a few universities. Neither group wants you to think clearly about what they are doing.

The politicians want to serve a small club and you aren’t in it. They pretend to serve the median non-thinker in their party, weirdos for the Rs, and centrists for the Ds. Rs fight for the crazies. Ds punch left. Both parties serve their donors first.

The faux intellectuals have all sold out. They surrendered the essence of both the intellectual life and the democratic life, openness to the full implications of life in our society. In exchange, they get money and security. They pretend to provide a principled justification for the policies preferred by their donors, but only the ignorant are fooled.

So?

In any conflict, the first step is to identify the enemy, and to identify those on your side. Then you look for the weak points in the enemy lines. I think this description points to a couple of weaknesses in the alliance against democracy.

1. People who claim to be love liberty don’t want to be ruled by Theists. That includes a lot of neoliberals, both owners and workers. The Theist image of human nature is radically different from that of neoliberals.

2. The interests of owner and worker neoliberals are wildly different. The trick, I think, is to persuade workers that they are entitled to fair treatment as of right, not out of charity.

3. Republican politicians have been pushed so far into lunacy that they are vulnerable to attack from the left by almost any sane politician. Even if Alabama won’t elect a Dem, they should be willing to elect a Republican who won’t hurt them as much as the far-right loon Tommy Tuberville.

4. I don’t think there’s much hope for leaders of the Theists. The combination of self-righteousness and graft makes them impervious to criticism. But that isn’t true of regular people. I think many of them understand the actual teachings of Christianity, and can see where this administration betrays that teaching.

5. In general, I think most of the leaders of the allies are incorrigible. But I also think many followers are reachable, perhaps by shame. I’ll take that up in a later post.

6. What else?

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Jeffrey Epstein Is about Trump’s Failing Ability to Command Attention

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The bubbling Jeffrey Epstein scandal is about two things: the underlying scandal and any ties Trump has to it, and the way it has disrupted Trump’s normal super power ability to command and direct attention.

His attack on Rosie O’Donnell yesterday shows that his ability to direct the attention of the left remains undiminished and makes clear why this power is so important to Trump.

Trump’s attack on the comedian, just hours before his latest inept intervention in the Epstein matter, came in the wake of a number of stories — the NYT story describing that key National Weather Service positions were vacant when the flood hit,  the CNN report on a three day delay that Kristi Noem caused in the search and rescue, reports on Kerr County’s refusal to accept a Dem-funded early warning system that Rayne wrote up here, the NYT story describing how Noem cut off funding to a call center while it was fielding calls from survivors — holding Trump’s Administration or Republicans accountable for exacerbating the impact of the flood.

When Trump tweeted that Rosie O’Donnell “is a Threat to Humanity” and claimed to be considering stripping her citizenship (she lives in Dublin but as far as I know does not yet have Irish citizenship), that post circulated wildly among journalists and the left, sometimes with commentary about how grave a threat it was that Trump would even make such threats (which he has no legal power to carry out).

But the people who gaped at his unfiltered tweet did not explain, much less link, the background.

Trump attacked O’Donnell as predictions she made on TikTok last Sunday, which the right wing has been trying to dismiss by shaming her, were being confirmed by those press reports.

What a horror story in Texas — the flash floods in Texas. The Guadalupe River. 51 missing. 51 dead, more missing. Children … at a camp. And you know when the President guts all the warning systems and the, uh, weathering [sic] forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we’re going to start to see on a daily basis, because he’s put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law. As Republicans cheered. As Republicans cheered. People will die as a result and they’ve started already. Shame on him. Shame on every GOP sycophant who’s listening and following the disastrous decisions of this mentally incapacitated POTUS.

Rosie O’Donnell made a powerful moral critique of Trump, and as that critique was bearing out, he responded to it by asserting to have power over her, power he doesn’t have. And rather than focusing on or even mentioning that moral critique — or even continuing to focus on the many ways the Trump Administration did exacerbate the flood — those who disseminated his tweet gaped in horror at his spectacular display of power, without identifying it as an attempt to avoid being held accountable.

Whether or not the US can restore democracy depends heavily on the success that Trump’s critics have in tying his failures to disasters like Kerr County. It depends on their ability to remain laser-focused on holding him accountable for the disasters his actions predictably cause. And Trump squelched the words of one prescient critic with a tweet. He did so with the willful cooperation of data mules on the left.

Trump’s ability to command and direct attention — his ability to rupture context and redirect attention to his own claims of authority — is his super power. It is how he has attained and remained in government; it is how he has beat back scandals that would have doomed others.

And that super power has been failing him as his DOJ and FBI reversed course on past fevered promises to disclose everything about the Epstein scandal.

That’s what, I have tried to argue, has always been missing from reporting on this exchange: how badly Trump flubbed a role, suppressing coverage by bullying a journalist, that is second nature to him.

Pam Bondi sets out to answer two questions from a journalist about Epstein. She’s actually good at this performed competence and had Trump just let her answer he might have avoided all the backlash. But Trump interrupts. He stumbles over delivery of the name, Jeffrey Epstein, as if he is trying to perform disgust, but it sounds hollow. He asks a question — “are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein” — that feigns ignorance of both the importance of the Epstein scandal to his base, to say nothing about how much his chosen aides, Bondi, Dan Bongino, and Kash Patel, have themselves never shut up about Epstein. Trump almost regains his footing when he complains that the journalist isn’t focused on Texas or “this” (huh? what is “this”?); Trump almost regains his footing by bullying a journalist, an easy trope for him. But then he tries to perform disgust again — “this creep” — and like the earlier mention of his friend, Epstein’s name, “creep” sounds forced, a badly delivered performance. Trump tries a familiar stance again — “I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein” — but this was a question about a release Bondi’s own DOJ orchestrated. He ends with feigned outrage, accusing the journalist of “desecration.” The whole performance lacked energy, exacerbated by the slurring Trump exhibited throughout the event.

What is a normal ploy from him — attacking journalists to bully them out of covering things — simply failed. The great Realty TV Show Star flubbed his part, as devastating as if his voice squeaked when declaring “You’re fired,” back in the day.

Both in content and performance, his bid to shut down this line of questioning made him look vulnerable, not strong. It raised questions rather than silencing them.

With each development since — the clash between Dan Bongino and Bondi over who would take the fall first revealed in reports of Bongino’s pouty refusal to go to work on Friday, the persistent backlash from some of the loudest voices among his Twitter mob, leading up to Trump’s lengthy tweet yesterday — Trump’s command of attention has slipped.

While folks finally recognized that something is failing in Trump’s normal ability to command attention, this time, by gaping at the length of this tweet, if you look closer, the tweet was even more delightfully ill-conceived.

Both right wingers and journalists have, I think correctly, conceived the purpose as an attempt to alleviate pressure on Pam Bondi.

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!

[snip]

LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!

But even there, Trump starts pathetically, by claiming that “my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?'” are leading the attack on Bondi. This attack, on “Blondi,” is being led by Laura Loomer, and suggesting that she’s following Trump’s “boys” on this betrays a reluctance to go after Loomer directly.

The defense of Kash Patel (right wingers correctly noticed that Bongino gets no mention) is secondary.

Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.

That mention builds on the drop dead stupidity of this post — one so stupid that even Benny Johnson noticed it.

For the first time ever, Trump claimed that the Epstein files were made up by Democrats — all Democrats, serially.

Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands.

To be fair, this is not an entirely new ploy. Last year, Trump explained his hesitation to release the Epstein files based on a claim that “it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”

I guess I would. I think that, less so, because, you know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.

Even then, he was preparing a defense that if something in there implicated him, it was phony, fake, fraudulent.

Still, the claim that Democrats — Obama, Hillary, John Brennan, and Jim Comey (who is not a Democrat, or at least wasn’t when this all happened) — created the Epstein files would normally be a reasonable ploy, given the disinformation he has long used to sustain loyalty. He attempted to tie the Epstein files to things he has trained his rubes to believe were hoaxes — the legal adjudications that Trump’s top aides lied to cover up his ties to Russia and false claims about what 51 spooks said about the Hunter Biden laptop — as well as an actual hoax (the Steele dossier) that he has blamed on Democrats rather than the Russians who larded it with allegations that closely match real things only the Russians knew.

These things — Russia Russia Russia — are a foundational element of his tweets (and one of the things data mules disseminate without debunking, thereby reinforcing as unquestioned). This was an attempt to add one more element, as he added the spook letter and Hunter Biden laptop after Russia Russia Russia was already established as his foundational disinformation.

So this might have been a reasonable attempt to discredit the Epstein files, the things he anticipated claiming were “phony” last year. Except you don’t attempt this after years of treating it as credible.

Worse still, you don’t do that and then immediately ask the question that MAGAts have long used to reassure themselves that Trump wasn’t in the Epstein files.

Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?

Why didn’t they, indeed?

Again, even Benny has seen the problem with this, and he is painfully stupid!

The reason Trump’s claims that the Russian investigation and the spook letter and the Steele dossier are hoaxes have succeeded is because they were made public, often with the involvement of Democrats. But if Democrats — even Hillary, whose spouse flew on his plane! — larded the Epstein files with things damaging Trump, right wingers’ biases dictate that the left would have released it.

Before Trump’s claims that these were fabricated, the logic made sense to right wingers: Democrats didn’t release the files because there’s nothing about Trump in them. But if the left allegedly fabricated them along with the Russian investigation and the spook letter, which Trump has falsely claimed were fabricated in an attempt to hurt Trump, then they would have released them.

Furthermore, he would order Kash to include the Epstein files among the witch hunts on which he wants FBI to focus. Instead, he’s arguing that Kash doesn’t have time to investigate this alleged hoax targeting him because he is too busy investigating other fabricated claims of a hoax, his desperate attempt to find some way to sustain the claim that he’s not a loser beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.

The entire post collapses in on itself. Even Benny sees this! 

And that’s before something else Trump attempted. Trump told his rubes — a huge cross-section of which is QAnon adjacent — that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein.

Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.

Crazier still, when he first attempted this complaint, he used a phrase that is bound to fuel conspiracists.

“selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?! Did you really say that? About a guy whose circumstances of death are a key part of this conspiracy theory? Hell, the most unhinged Epstein conspiracists (including a good number of Trump supporters) question whether he did die. And you just wrote down that Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?!

Trump’s supporters are in a cult. But many of them are also in the QAnon cult. And for those for whom the QAnon cult came first or remains predominant, telling them that “nobody cares about” Jeffrey Epstein ruptures the unity between Trump and them, because he is attacking one of their foundational beliefs. It’s like telling devout Christians that Jesus never walked the Earth. You have just assailed a foundational belief of those who believe — as proven by Epstein — that pedophiles control the powerful. So long as Trump flirted with QAnon conspiracies, he and his rubes shared that foundational belief; yesterday, he assailed it.

(Both Phil Bump and Mike Rothschild addressed what happens when you betray the trust of conspiracists back when Bongino first affirmed that Epstein killed himself; their descriptions really anticipated what we’re seeing this week.)

There certainly are questions about what aspects of Trump’s sustained fondness for Epstein remain in files that once might have been on Pam Bondi’s desk before they weren’t and never had been, according to Bondi. It’s certainly likely that something in them explains the failure of Trump’s super power here, his inability to deliver his long-practiced lines, first of bullying a journalist, then claiming Dems implicated him in a hoax.

But the reason why his super power is failing doesn’t matter so long as it does continue to fail, especially given that Epstein conspiracies were always non-falsifiable and Trump’s conflicting stories make them all the more so. Unless something drastically changes, every attempt Trump makes to squelch this focus will only exacerbate the growing cognitive dissonance his rubes have. And the underlying Epstein scandal is so spectacular — so unquestionably a case of injustice to the victims — that even feckless Dems have the means of keeping it at the forefront.

Trump survives based on that super power, on his ability (as he succeeded in doing with the Rosie O’Donnell tweet) to dodge accountability by distracting away from it.

If that super power starts to fail, though, so will his ability to avoid accountability.

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Trump’s Deep State Can’t Even Deep State Competently

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I was and still intend to write a post arguing that all of the coverage of this comment from Trump is wrong. As I rant on Nicole Sandler’s show today, what we saw in these few moments was Trump, whose super power is in being able to command attention, not only failing that, but flubbing his lines when he tried to reassert his command over attention focused on Jeffrey Epstein.

The conspiracy theorists who put Trump in office will not let him take ahold of this conspiracy.

What we see in this exchange is — more than at any time in the last ten years, I argue — Trump’s super power of commanding where people focus their attention failing him.

So I want to write about how everyone is getting this wrong.

But first, I want to talk about how Trump’s Deep State can’t even Deep State competently.

Trump’s attempt to tamp this down, predictably, had the opposite effect, both because infighting over who fucked up the incompetent attempt to tamp it down, and the conspiracy theories that have arisen in the void.

Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer is at the pivot of both worlds, and she’s playing her part to perfection. She started things today by revealing that Dan Bongino — who actually doesn’t like how hard he has to work at FBI anyway — complaining about how the memo that attempted but failed to tamp all this down happened.

That led Todd Blanche, fresh off his efforts to make the Erez Reuveni disclosures worse, to weigh in, claiming there was no dispute about how to release the Epstein memo.

Meanwhile, Marc Caputo — who has close ties with Susie Wiles from way back — debunks Blanche’s claim of harmony,  describing that Wiles and Taylor Budowich witnessed anything but.

The intrigue: MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a Bondi critic, first reported Friday on X that Bongino left work and that he and Patel were “furious” with the way Bondi had handled the case.

  • Some Trump advisers have criticized Bondi, but Trump “loves Pam and thinks she’s great,” a senior White House official said.
  • Those witnessing the Wednesday clash between Bondi and Bongino in the White House were Patel, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.

The more important part of Caputo’s report, though, is that insiders blame Bongino for the “missing minute,” which provided the nutters reason to doubt the entire effort to tamp all this down.

Zoom in: At the center of the argument: a surveillance video from outside Epstein’s cell that the administration released, saying it was proof no one had entered the room before he killed himself.

  • The 10-hour video had what has widely been called a “missing minute,” fueling conspiracy theories in MAGA’s online world about a cover-up involving Epstein’s death.
  • The “missing minute,” authorities say, stemmed from an old surveillance recording system that goes down each day at midnight to reset and record anew. It takes a minute for that process to occur, which effectively means that 60 seconds of every day aren’t recorded.
  • Bongino — who had pushed Epstein conspiracy theories as a MAGA-friendly podcast host before President Trump appointed him to help lead the FBI — had found the video and touted it publicly and privately as proof that Epstein hadn’t been murdered.

That conclusion — shared by FBI Director Kash Patel, another conspiracy theorist-turned-insider — angered many in Trump’s MAGA base, criticism that increased after Axios first reported the release of the video and a related memo.

  • After the video’s “missing minute” was discovered, Bongino was blamed internally for the oversight, according to three sources.

Only, complaints about the video are only going to get worse. Wired describes that the metadata shows the video has been altered.

The “raw” file shows clear signs of having been processed using an Adobe product, most likely Premiere, based on metadata that specifically references file extensions used by the video editing software. According to experts, Adobe software, including Premiere and Photoshop, leaves traces in exported files, often embedding metadata that logs which assets were used and what actions were taken during editing. In this case, the metadata indicates the file was saved at least four times over a 23-minute span on May 23, 2025, by a Windows user account called “MJCOLE~1.” The metadata does not show whether the footage was modified before each time it was saved.

The embedded data suggest the video is not a continuous, unaltered export from a surveillance system, but a composite assembled from at least two separate MP4 files. The metadata includes references to Premiere project files and two specific source clips—2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4 and 2025-05-22 16-35-21.mp4. These entries appear under a metadata section labeled “Ingredients,” part of Adobe’s internal schema for tracking source material used in edited exports. The metadata does not make clear where in the video the two clips were spliced together.

Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on digital forensics and misinformation, reviewed the metadata at WIRED’s request. Farid is a recognized expert in the analysis of digital images and the detection of manipulated media, including deepfakes. He has testified in numerous court cases involving digital evidence.

Farid says the metadata raises immediate concerns about chain of custody—the documented handling of digital evidence from collection to presentation in a courtroom. Just like physical evidence, he explains, digital evidence must be handled in a way that preserves its integrity; metadata, while not always precise, can provide important clues about whether that integrity has been compromised.

“If a lawyer brought me this file and asked if it was suitable for court, I’d say no. Go back to the source. Do it right,” Farid says. “Do a direct export from the original system—no monkey business.”

Farid points to another anomaly: The video’s aspect ratio shifts noticeably at several points. “Why am I suddenly seeing a different aspect ratio?” he asks.

It is abundantly likely that all of this is easily explained. I noted in my first post that the missing minute probably comes from MCC’s ancient surveillance equipment. And it sounds like someone packaged this up for Bongino.

Of course, none of that is going to matter if and when people confirm that the video doesn’t even show Epstein’s cell, as multiple people claim.

Every single wrinkle will only serve to feed the conspiracy theorists whose attention Trump cannot manage to command.

Here’s the thing, though. I think Bondi probably did shut down these investigations because they are inconvenient to Trump. Maybe it stems from nothing more than Trump’s demand to command attention; maybe it has to do with the known connections between Trump and the abuser looking damning no matter how close or far Trump is to the rape.

But because the Deputy Director of the FBI, an agency with thousands of people with expertise on this kind of thing, couldn’t manage to find someone who could hold his hand and explain basic things like chain of custody, they have all made it far, far worse.

Trump’s Deep State can’t even Deep State competently.

Update: The date of the saved video (May 23) was between the date when Bongino and Kash told Bartiromo that Epstein killed himself and the date when Bongino told Fox the FBI was going to release the video but first was, “taking time to clean up and enhance the video.”

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“Fuck You:” Todd Blanche Continues to Flopsweat over Emil Bove’s Contempt

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Among the flood of new developments (two sets of communications from Erez Reuveni corroborating his whistleblower complaint: one, two) and developments (DOJ’s continued obfuscation regarding the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia) detailing DOJ’s abuse of detentions, there are several details that put Todd Blanche in the thick of unlawful efforts to deport men with tattoos.

Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You

The communications Reuveni shared with the Senate Judiciary Committee that were released yesterday confirm that Reuveni has at least two witnesses with whom he discussed the “fuck you” comment Reuveni has attributed to Bove, which Bove, at his confirmation hearing, claimed he couldn’t recall but which he did not deny

For example, Reuveni produced texts between him and an unnamed colleague discussing Drew Ensign’s claimed ignorance of deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act at an emergency hearing before James Boasberg. Reuveni describes that they were “About to enter the find out phase following fuck around.”

Another set of texts reportedly shows August Flentje texting Reuveni an hour before the planes to El Salvador would land, quipping, “guess its time to find out on the “fuck you,” which Reuveni claims is proof that Flentje heard the “fuck you” comment.

Later that day, Reuveni texted his colleague saying, “Guess we are going to say fuck you to the court,” to which the colleague responds, “Well, Pamela Jo Bondi is.”

Another text exhange, from three days later, again with Flentje, shows one of them suggesting they just submit “an emoji of a middle finger as our filing” asking for a stay of his order. “a picayune middle finger.”

So Reuveni has brought the goods showing that he and his colleagues not just heard the “fuck you” comment, but continued to discuss it for several days.

Emil Bove in the thick of things

Reuveni also substantiated his claims about Emil Bove’s role in all this, notably in a substantive text exchange from the day when Todd Blanche first put Reuveni on paid leave. Days earlier, Flentje had texted Reuveni about “a nastygram from Emil Bove.”

On April 5, a few hours after Todd Blanche put Reuveni on paid leave, Flentje confirmed that at the meeting on March 15, he “told our host we would not violate a court order.”

Reuveni glossed that text this way:

The exchange demonstrates that Flentje was at the March 14 meeting during which Bove said the government might have to say “fuck you” to courts and that Flentje sees a connection between that meeting and Mr. Reuveni’s placement on administrative leave.

But the smoking gun putting aspiring Circuit Court Judge Emil Bove at the center of a decision to blow off Judge James Boasberg’s order is this email in which a top Civil Division political appointee, Yaakov Roth (the same guy who would pass on nastygrams from Bove weeks later), confirmed that he had “been told by ODAG that the principal associate deputy attorney general” — PDAAG, meaning Bove — “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior to the court’s minute order was permissible under the law.”

Reuveni described this email in his complaint, but here he has produced it.

Emil Bove gave the order to defy Boasberg’s order.

Notably, this email is unlike all others in the communications he turned over. It appears to be a paper copy. There are definitely questions about when and how Reuveni obtained all the other communications (remember that Flentje was put on leave for a while but not fired). Of some interest, Reuveni’s texts with Flentje are in a different format — perhaps a different app — than the ones he sent to other colleagues. But this communication, in which a very senior DOJ official names Bove as the guy who ordered DHS to unload the planes, was captured in paper, not digital, form.

So Reuveni appears to have substantially corroborated his claims, even if he had to resort, in one case, to a paper copy of an email to do so.

Todd Blanche’s flopsweat

That matters not just for Emil Bove’s bid to be a Circuit Court Judge (which sadly will likely still win the support of the GOP anyway), but also for Todd Blanche’s credibility.

Todd Blanche doesn’t tweet all that much, but each time Reuveni has made his case, Blanche has taken to Xitter to squeal loudly.

The day NYT first published Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint, Blanche labeled the formal whistleblower complaint as a leak to the press violating ethical guidelines. Then he claimed that “not a single individual” except Reuveni “agrees with the statements cavalierly printed” by the NYT, which I noted at the time suggested that Blanche had already tested these cover stories.

Well, that’s interesting, because Reuveni has now presented proof that Flentje and one other colleague at least used to believe it.

Yesterday, in the wake of the release of these communications, Blanche (and Pam Bondi) took to wailing on Xitter again, accusing Reuveni — even after he produced that paper email proof that Emil Bove ordered DHS to unload the planes — of falsehoods, even while accusing Reuveni of being fired not for refusing an illegal order, but for “breaching his ethical duties.”

Blanche keeps claiming there was no order to defy, even after Reuveni presented corroboration — even in the face of efforts to avoid putting anything in writing — that everyone at DOJ knew there was.

Which is why I find two other details of interest. As noted above, Blanche tried to deny that Bove suggested they would tell courts “fuck you” by claiming he had been at the March 14 meeting where, Reuveni alleges, Bove envisioned telling courts “fuck you.”

I was at the meeting described in the article and at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.

In his complaint, Reuveni did not include Blanche in the list of people who were at the meeting.

On Friday March 14 , 2025, Mr. Reuveni received notice ofhis promotion toActing Deputy Director ofthe Office of Immigration Litigation. That same day, following news reports that the President intended to sign a presidential proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), Mr. Reuveni was summoned to a meeting by Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) of OIL, Drew Ensign. At the meeting were Principal Assistant Deputy Attorney General (PADAG) Emil Bove, Counselor to the Deputy Attorney General James McHenry, Associate Deputy Attorney General (ADAG) Paul Perkins, DAAG Ensign, Acting Director for OIL and Mr. Reuveni’s direct supervisor, August Flentje, and other OIL attorneys.

Now, Reuveni’s original whistleblower complaint is almost entirely unredacted. The three exceptions — redacted because they might disclose materials that remain covered by a duty of confidentiality — are in a paragraph describing that March 14 meeting.

At the meeting Bove indicated to those in attendance that the AEA proclamation would soon be signed and that one or more planes containing individuals subject to the AEA would be taking off over the weekend – meaning Saturday, March 15 and Sunday, March 16. Bove did not provide further details and [half line redacted]19 Bove indicated [half line redacted]20 and stressed to all in attendance that the planes needed to take off no matter what.

Bove then made a remark concerning the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated. Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts “fuck you” and ignore any such court order. Mr. Reuveni perceived that others in the room looked stunned, and he observed awkward, nervous glances among people in the room. Silence overtook the room. Mr. Reuveni and others were quickly ushered out of the room. Notwithstanding Bove’s directive, Mr. Reuveni left the meeting understanding that DOJ would tell DHS to follow all court orders.21

19 This clause is redacted because it is not clear that an exception to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality applies here.

20 This clause is redacted because it is not clear that an exception to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality applies here.

21 Mr.Reuveni left the meeting with this impression because [redacted]. This clause is redacted because it is not clear that an exception to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality applies here. [my emphasis]

Reuveni and his attorneys view a lot of material that might qualify as attorney-client or deliberative privileged as exempted for some reason. But not these two passages and one footnote, the former of which seemingly relate to the reason why Bove said the planes had to take off. Bove insisted that the planes had to take off and said something that remains privileged, and then he said they might have to tell the courts, “fuck you.”

Perhaps any privilege covering those would fall under a different privilege?

Which is interesting because, in an interview with Devlin Barrett published yesterday, Reuveni clarified something about Blanche’s claim to have been at the meeting: According to Reuveni, Blanche came into the meeting, whispered something to Bove, then left, only after which did Bove start threatening to tell judges to fuck off.

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, has denied Mr. Reuveni’s account, asserting he was at the same meeting and never heard Mr. Bove suggest the department disregard court orders.

“The claims about Department of Justice leadership are utterly false,” Mr. Blanche has said.

Mr. Reuveni disputed Mr. Blanche’s account. The deputy attorney general, he said, briefly entered the conference room during the March 14 meeting, but only to speak privately with Mr. Bove. Mr. Blanche then left and did not participate in the meeting, Mr. Reuveni said.

Only after the one-on-one discussion between Mr. Bove and Mr. Blanche did Mr. Bove use an expletive to suggest the Justice Department might choose to ignore court orders, Mr. Reuveni said.

Blanche’s brief entry into that meeting seems to exactly coincide with those two still-privileged redactions.

Blanche doesn’t tweet much.

What he does spend a great deal of his time doing — which is appropriate, I guess, for Trump’s lead defense attorney — is try to cover up this entire corrupt scheme. First he launched a witch hunt into the sources debunking Trump’s false claims behind the Alien Enemies Act invocation, then Pam Bondi reversed the media guidelines in an effort to assist that fight.

One of the very first public things Todd Blanche did as DAG was to launch a witch hunt into NYT’s source debunking Trump’s claims in the Alien Enemies Act. Then, when Pam Bondi reversed the media protections put into place by Merrick Garland, she cited that story as well. The seniormost officials at DOJ are using the Department to hunt down evidence of their own complicity in human rights violations. And Blanche’s intemperate response to Reuveni’s allegations looks to be more of the same.

This whole scheme — in which DOJ cooperated with Nayib Bukele so Bukele could make damning witnesses unavailable to prosecutors in the US, so DOJ could plop a bunch of mostly-innocent Venezuelans in a concentration camp as bait that Trump could attempt to use to free prisoners in Venezuela (which raises questions about those detainees in Venezuela), which Stephen Miller could use to spin false claims that migrants are terrorists — is bullshit.

All of it.

All of it is wildly corrupt on its face, but there is something about the scheme that is even more dangerous for Trump and the various men who have served as his defense attorneys.

And Trump’s defense attorney turned DAG keeps piping up to discredit himself, emphasize his flopsweat, and invite further revelations from the guy he fired in hopes all this would go away.

Update, July 13: Corrected the number of redactions in Reuveni’s complaint.

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Trump’s Coffee for Coup Accountability Emergency

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As a reminder, the trade war Trump launched on April 2 purports to address an emergency created by trade deficits in goods (not services).

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) (NEA), section 604 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended (19 U.S.C. 2483), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, find that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners’ economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States. That threat has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States in the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system. I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to this threat.

[snip]

I have declared a national emergency arising from conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, which have grown by over 40 percent in the past 5 years alone, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2024. This trade deficit reflects asymmetries in trade relationships that have contributed to the atrophy of domestic production capacity, especially that of the U.S. manufacturing and defense-industrial base. These asymmetries also impact U.S. producers’ ability to export and, consequentially, their incentive to produce.

Specifically, such asymmetry includes not only non-reciprocal differences in tariff rates among foreign trading partners, but also extensive use of non-tariff barriers by foreign trading partners, which reduce the competitiveness of U.S. exports while artificially enhancing the competitiveness of their own goods. These non-tariff barriers include technical barriers to trade; non-scientific sanitary and phytosanitary rules; inadequate intellectual property protections; suppressed domestic consumption (e.g., wage suppression); weak labor, environmental, and other regulatory standards and protections; and corruption. These non-tariff barriers give rise to significant imbalances even when the United States and a trading partner have comparable tariff rates.

That claim seems to have been forgotten in discussion of the 50% tariff Trump just threatened to place on Brazil.

Trump barely focused on his claimed emergency in his letter — posted to Truth Social — to Lula da Silva. Rather, he mentioned:

  • The purported Witch Hunt against Jair Bolsonaro — the prosecution for Bolsonaro’s attempted coup — “that should end IMMEDIATELY!”
  • Efforts to regulate social media in Brazil (largely with the goal of investigating and cracking down on insurrection), which Trump called “hundreds of SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders to U.S. Social Media platforms, threatening them with Millions of Dollars in Fines and Eviction from the Brazilian Social Media market”

All that was in addition to (and before) the boilerplate language on goods included in the letter.

Mind you, that boilerplate would be nonsense in any case, because the US enjoys a trade surplus with Brazil. There could be no trade deficit emergency with Brazil because the US doesn’t have one.

Which is one of the points Lula noted in response (ironically, on Xitter). The US says the US has a trade surplus with Brazil.

In light of the public statement made by U.S. President Donald Trump on social media on the afternoon of Wednesday (9), it is important to highlight the following:

[snip]

The claim regarding a U.S. trade deficit in its commercial relationship with Brazil is inaccurate. Statistics from the U.S. government itself show a surplus of $410 billion in the trade of goods and services with Brazil over the past 15 years.

Therefore, any unilateral tariff increases will be addressed in accordance with Brazil’s Economic Reciprocity Law.

Sovereignty, respect and the unwavering defense of the interests of the Brazilian people are the values that guide our relationship with the world.

Which leaves solely the complaints pertaining to coup accountability: that Brazil fined Xitter when it refused to comply with legal and investigative demands, as well as the requirement that it have a local representative (through whom Brazil would enforce the law), as well as the complaint that Brazil is holding Bolsonaro accountable for the same crime that Trump himself committed.

Here’s how Lula addressed those complaints.

Brazil is a sovereign nation with independent institutions and will not accept any form of tutelage.

The judicial proceedings against those responsible for planning the coup d’état fall exclusively under the jurisdiction of Brazil´s Judicial Branch and, as such, are not subject to any interference or threats that could compromise the independence of national institutions.

In the context of digital platforms, Brazilian society rejects hateful content, racism, child pornography, scams, fraud, and speeches against human rights and democratic freedom.

In Brazil, freedom of expression must not be confused with aggression or violent practices. All companies—whether domestic or foreign—must comply with Brazilian law in order to operate within our territory.

This is not a trade emergency.

It’s a democracy emergency.

A sovereignty emergency.

A coup accountability emergency.

And even if those were emergencies to the US, Trump has not declared a separate, “OMIGOD an ally might hold someone accountable for the same crime I committed,” emergency to cover the real scope of this letter.

Trump’s trade war has already been declared unlawful. Trump’s attempt to use trade policies to help a fellow coup conspirator comes in the wake of a May 28 Court of International Trade judgement that Trump usurped the power of Congress in imposing these tariffs — the tariffs focused on trade deficits and fentanyl trafficking, as opposed to coup accountability.

Plaintiffs and some Amici argue that the Government’s interpretation transforms IEEPA into an impermissible delegation of power because “[t]he President’s assertion of authority here has no meaningful limiting standards, essentially enabling him to impose any tariff rate he wants on any country at any time, for virtually any reason.” Pls.’ V.O.S. Mots. at 25; see also Pls.’ Oregon Mots. at 19; Pls.’ V.O.S. Reply at 22. Similarly, Plaintiffs suggest that Congress’s use of the words “regulate . . . importation” does not indicate the clear mandate necessary to delegate “such unbounded authority to the President to make such decisions of ‘vast economic and political significance,’” as the wide-scale imposition of tariffs. Pls.’ Oregon Mot. at 18; see also Pls.’ V.O.S. Reply at 17; Inst. for Pol. Integrity’s Amicus Br. at 16–18. The Government counters that IEEPA contains sufficient limitations: the President must declare a national emergency, the emergency expires after one year unless renewed, the emergency must be declared with respect to an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” and the powers must extend only to property in which a foreign country or foreign national has an interest. Gov’t Resp. to V.O.S. Mots. at 28–29.

The separation of powers is always relevant to delegations of power between the branches. Both the nondelegation and the major questions doctrines, even if not directly applied to strike down a statute as unconstitutional, provide useful tools for the court to interpret statutes so as to avoid constitutional problems. These tools indicate that an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power to another branch of government. Regardless of whether the court views the President’s actions through the nondelegation doctrine, through the major questions doctrine, or simply with separation of powers in mind, any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional. [my emphasis]

The CIT distinguished past tariffs from these Trump tariffs — again, tariffs that were tied exclusively to a trade deficit, not a coup accountability emergency — because they didn’t entail imposing “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”

While the court in Yoshida II ultimately reversed the lower court’s decision and upheld President Nixon’s tariffs, it upheld the tariffs on the basis that they were limited, “which is quite different from imposing whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”

[snip]

Like the court in Yoshida II, this court does not read the words “regulate . . . importation” in IEEPA as authorizing the President to impose whatever tariff rates he deems desirable. Indeed, such a reading would create an unconstitutional delegation of power. See id. Importantly, President Trump’s tariffs do not include the limitations that the court in Yoshida II relied upon in upholding President Nixon’s actions under TWEA. Where President Nixon’s tariffs were expressly limited by the rates established in the HTSUS, see Proclamation No. 4074, 85 Stat. at 927, the tariffs here contain no such limit. Absent these limitations, this is exactly the scenario that the lower court warned of in Yoshida I—and that the appellate court acknowledged in Yoshida II.

In sum, just as the court recognized in Yoshida II, the words “regulate . . . importation” cannot grant the President unlimited tariff authority. [my emphasis]

And, in language addressing Trump’s drug trafficking sanctions, CIT also said the President could not use tariffs to pressure a country to do what he wants (in that case, to do more on fentanyl trafficking).

The Government’s reading would cause the meaning of “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to permit any infliction of a burden on a counterparty to exact concessions, regardless of the relationship between the burden inflicted and the concessions exacted. If “deal with” can mean “impose a burden until someone else deals with,” then everything is permitted. It means a President may use IEEPA to take whatever actions he chooses simply by declaring them “pressure” or “leverage” tactics that will elicit a third party’s response to an unconnected “threat.” Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers “may not be exercised for any other purpose” than to “deal with” a threat. [my emphasis]

The Court of International Trade has already said doing this is ultra vires, well beyond Trump’s legal authority, precisely because Trump claims to have unlimited unreviewable authority to usurp Congress’ tariff authority. And it said so precisely because the claimed authority Trump was invoking was so unlimited, extending even to coercion regarding things entirely unrelated to trade.

And it’s not just the court that said it. The captioned challenge here, from a wine importer and other small businesses, is being lawyered by CATO associates. Another challenge is being lawyered by recipients of Koch funding. Among the amicus briefs submitted to the CIT was one signed by a weirdly bipartisan group of muckety-mucks, including right wingnuts like Steven Calabresi. And in recent days, before the Federal Court of Appeals (which will hold a hearing on Trump’s appeal on July 31), the Chamber of Commerce and a bunch of economists fronted by the American Enterprise Institute weighed in. The latter debunks both Trump’s assertion of emergency and his claim that tariffs will fix the purported emergency.

First, IEEPA requires the President to declare a national emergency based on an “unusual and extraordinary threat . . . to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.” 50 U.S.C. § 1701(a). Trade deficits, however, have existed consistently over the past fifty years in the United States, for extended periods in the United States in the nineteenth century, and in most countries in most years in recent decades. They are thus not “unusual and extraordinary.” See Part I, infra. Second, the existence of these ordinary and recurring trade deficits is not in and of itself a “threat . . . to the national security, foreign policy or the economy” of the United States. See Part II, infra. Third, even if the current trade deficit constituted an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security or the economy as required by IEEPA, the tariffs imposed under IEEPA by the President do not meaningfully reduce trade deficits and hence do not “deal with” the deficits as IEEPA requires. See Part III, infra.

With his coup accountability emergency, Trump has taken his unlawful tariffs — already opposed by a wide swath of right wing intellects, who are represented by lawyers who’ll get a fair hearing at SCOTUS — and made them far more abusive.

And he has done so with a trade partner for whom threats tied to China may backfire. After all, China has long substituted agricultural imports from Brazil, notably in soybeans, to replace US imports when Trump stages a tariff tantrum.

Trump has staged his coup accountability emergency with a trade partner that provides a notable proportion of America’s coffee imports. 50% tariffs on Brazilian coffee will undoubtedly provide a jolt to the system, but probably not the kind that will help Trump.

Donald Trump has threatened to impose a 50% tax on coffee in the United States for little other reason than Brazil won’t let his buddy overturn democratic elections with impunity.

That’s outrageous. It is quite clearly an instance of Trump threatening “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable” with the goal of “inflict[ing ]a burden on a counterparty to exact concessions, regardless of the relationship between the burden inflicted and the concessions exacted,” both precisely the measure the CIT used to declare Trump’s trade deficits unlawful.

But it clarifies the legal stakes on the one legal challenge on which right wingers have joined Democrats in droves to oppose Trump’s abuses, because in this case the President is attempting to use tariffs completely divorced from a trade deficit to elicit concessions totally unrelated to the national good.

It was already the case that this is the legal challenge that plaintiffs had the best chance of winning — because SCOTUS treats economic stability differently, because right wing lawyers will argue it, because this is a clear separation of powers violation. Then Trump went and made the arbitrary, personalist nature of it far more explicit.

Update, 7/12: Ilya Somin, the lead lawyer on the existing challenge to Trump’s tariffs, makes this point here.

If the president can use IEEPA to impose tariffs for completely ridiculous reasons like these, he can use it to impose them against any nation for any reason. That reinforces our argument that the administration’s interpretation of IEEPA leads to a boundless and unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive. A unanimous ruling in our favor by the US Court of International Trade concluded that IEEPA “does not authorize the President to impose unbounded tariffs” and that such “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power to another branch of government.”

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Expecting Legislators to Lead the Resistance Is a Category Error

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On podcasts and in this post, I’ve been trying to make a point about how you resist fascism.

Americans have at least three tools to resist fascism: legal, legislative, and via political movement. A great many people have conflated legislative opposition with movement opposition, and based on that conflation, assumed that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries must be leaders of The Opposition.

But that’s a category error.

While there are a lot of things Schumer, especially, could do better, you shouldn’t want either Schumer or Jeffries to be the leader of the resistance. You shouldn’t want that because the goals of the movement and of an opposition party in Congress are not the same. You shouldn’t want that because having a Black guy and a Jew from New York leading your resistance will likely make it harder to do what you need to do, which is (in significant part) to build a political movement big enough to undermine if not overthrow fascism.

I’m sure I’ll need to tweak this illustration and table,  but here’s how I think about it: Democrats in Congress are part of the political movement, but that is different than their legislative role.

Start from the end goal: according to a contested theory from Erica Chenoweth, if a popular nonviolent movement comes to incorporate 3.5% of the population, you can achieve political change. G. Elliott Morris estimates that around 4 to 6 million people participated in the No Kings protests, so about 1.4 to 1.8% of the population (but that’s a one-time protest and you need to sustain such numbers). If you buy this theory, you need to at least double the popular opposition to Trump willing to take to the streets.

While it’s possible you could get rid of Trump via other means (maybe right wingers get sick of him and support impeachment in two years; maybe a Democrat beats him or his chosen successor in 2028; maybe he dies a natural death and JD Vance takes over, with less charisma to get things done), doing so would not be enough to reverse a number of institutional things, starting with the right wing majority on SCOTUS, that serve to protect the trappings of Christian nationalism anyway.

To do a lot of things people rightly believe are necessary — such as holding the ICE goons accountable — you’d need to do far more than just win an election, because unless something more happens, the goons will be protected by qualified immunity.

Now go back to how opposition to Trump’s fascism has grown.

The first things that happened were lawsuits, a flood of them (which continue unabated). While Democratic-led states have brought a number of important lawsuits, members of Congress have little standing to do so. Unions have brought many key lawsuits, as have Democratic groups, as have other members of civil society, including the law firms and universities targeted. I keep noting that some of the key lawsuits challenging tariffs have come from Koch or CATO-aligned non-profits (and the Chamber just filed an amicus), a fact that may get them a more favorable hearing at SCOTUS.

The courts help to buy time. They can provide transparency otherwise unavailable. They force the Trump administration to go on the record, resulting in damaging contradictions. Trump has, thus far, selected his targets very poorly, and so his persecution has and will created some leaders or political martyrs.

But the courts will not save us.

The courts won’t save us because, after some initial pushback on Stephen Miller’s deportation gulag, SCOTUS seems to have fallen into line, repeatedly intervening to allow Trump to proceed with his damaging policies even as challenges continue. The courts won’t save us because we fully expect SCOTUS to bless a lot of what Trump is doing, including firing everyone short of Jerome Powell.

Protests and loud opposition at town halls have been growing since the beginning. But these protests weren’t affiliated with the Democratic Party. That’s useful for several reasons. You’re going to find it a lot quicker and easier to target a well-funded corporate entity like Tesla without such affiliation. And protests will be more likely to attract defectors — former Republican voters or apolitical independents — in the numbers that would be necessary if they’re not branded as Democratic entities.

Plus, movement activities include far more than protests, and there are a number of things being done by people who want no tie to the Democratic Party. Some of the smarter pushback to ICE in Los Angeles, for example, comes from Antifa activists who are far to the left of the Democratic Party and have been doing this work even under Democratic Administrations. Some of the witnessing of abuse of immigrants comes from the Catholic Church, and I would hope other faiths might join in. Some of the political activism is focused on particular interest groups, like Veterans or scientists, which don’t and should not derive their energy from the party.

The political movement is and should remain a big tent because it affords more flexibility and provides more entrance points for people.

And so, even if Jeffries or Schumer were better at messaging, you wouldn’t want them to lead it.

Which brings us to what we should expect from them. A lot of the hostility to both of them derives from the Continuing Resolution in March, in which Jeffries kept all but one (Jared Golden) of his members unified in opposition, but then Schumer flipflopped on whether to oppose cloture. In my experience, the vast majority of people who know they’re supposed to be angry at Schumer for that don’t know what the vote was, don’t know the terms of government shutdown (for example, that Trump would get to decide who was expendable), and can’t distinguish between the cloture vote and the final passage (in which just Angus King and Jeanne Shaheen voted to pass the bill). They sure as hell have not considered whether keeping the government open resulted in things — like the emergency filings that prevented wholesale use of Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to CECOT — that really were a net good, to say nothing of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s challenge to his deportation.

The point being, much of the frustration with Jeffries and Schumer comes without a sophisticated understanding of their day job. For example, many people were complaining that Schumer was messaging about the Big Ugly bill when they wanted him to be messaging about immigration, and then, once they understood the import, started complaining that there hasn’t been enough coverage of the healthcare cuts in the Big Ugly (in my opinion both he and lefty journalists should have been focusing on the dragnet funded by it, as both David Dayen and I did, and as other journalists are only belatedly doing). But they often ignored the efforts made to thwart the bill with Byrd Rule exclusions, which in some cases excluded really toxic things from the bill (like restrictions on judicial contempt).

Jeffries and Schumer will continue to disappoint people wanting them to lead the resistance, because to do their day job — to try to win majorities in 2026 so they can do more to hold Trump accountable and, in the interim, to try — however fruitlessly — to coax their Republican colleagues to stop rubber stamping Trump’s authoritarianism, they have to do things like recruit challengers and help them raise money. There’s a lot one can explain — such as why, in the wake of the crypto industry flooding the Sherrod Brown race with funding, too many Democrats would support a bill the crypto industry wants — without endorsing.

But there’s a great deal that Jeffries or Schumer do that doesn’t get seen; each week of the last five, for example, one of the people whining about one or both Minority Leaders non-stop has falsely claimed they hadn’t done or said something they actually had; they were, in fact, whining because what Jeffries and Schumer did wasn’t easy for them to see without their having to work for it. An expert on parliamentary procedure just showed that Dems have made their colleagues work far more hours than in recent memory; Democrats have been using tools to stall, often with no notice, much less anyone mining their public comments for good attack footage.

More importantly, though, there’s a great deal that other legislators are doing that serves both political and legislative opposition. Hearings with Trump’s cabinet members, for example, are astounding, both in terms of content and conflict. While lefties don’t understand the potential use of Congressional letters like right wingers do, some of the ones Democrats have sent lay necessary foundation for ongoing pressure on the Administration, whether on immigration or Epstein or DOD waste. I’ve seen multiple people assume that members of Congress only attempt to do oversight of ICE detention if they get arrested, but far more members have tried; I would like Democrats to have already sued regarding DHS’ serial efforts to change the law on how they do that oversight, but I hope that will happen soon.

There’s a great deal of content for adversarial messaging. The failure — and this is only partly a failure of Congress itself — is in doing that messaging, in using what is out there. If a Minority Leader said something powerful but pundits were too lazy to watch CSPAN, did it really happen?

Therein lies the rub — and the area where the complaints at least identify the correct problem (while often lacking the mirror necessary to identify the cure).

There is broad and growing opposition to Trump’s actions. For privileged white people, at least, most still have courage to step up in both easy and more challenging ways. All around the country Americans are standing up for their migrant neighbors.

Leaders are stepping up to do the most powerful work, the political movement. And Leaders in Congress, as well as rank-and-file members, are doing a lot that’s getting ignored.

What is missing, in my opinion, is the kind of online messaging to make stuff resonate, yoked with an understanding of what Congress can and should do and what activists are better suited to do.

We — and I include myself in that we — are part of the problem.

What is missing is, to a large extent, the same thing that was missing last year, during the election, and was missing before that where Joe Biden’s son was destroyed with no pushback. What is missing is a feedback mechanism that can mobilize shame and accountability, so all the outrage can have some effect, both political and electoral.

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