Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 32
May 3, 2025
May 3, 2025
I had thought to post a picture tonight and then realized that today was the 151st running of the Kentucky Derby. The event was launched in 1875 as horse racing—with its famous Black jockeys, who won more than half of the first 28 derbies—was gaining an audience in the U.S.
A horse-based event gives me the opportunity to repost a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. While it has no deep meaning, it does illustrate that there is history all around us, a theme you’ll hear more about from me soon. And it was totally fun to research, too. I spent hours watching Mr. Ed shows and reading entertainment theory, but the insightful detail—and the inclusion of Khartoum—is all Michael. This piece remains one of my favorite things I ever had a hand in writing.
So tonight, let’s take the night off from the craziness of today's America and recall past eras when horses could make history.
1) Traveller
General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general’s death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee’s hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.
2) Comanche
Comanche was attached to General Custer’s detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche’s taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.
3) Beautiful Jim Key
Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia—buttons, photos, and postcards—or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key’s popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: “I promise always to be kind to animals.”
4) Man o’ War
Named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in World War I, Man o’ War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss—to Upset—came after a bad start. Man o’ War sired many of America’s famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.
5) Trigger
Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is “Bucky the Bronco,” which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.
6) Sergeant Reckless
American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit’s nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.
7) Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan “Rocky” Lane, who made dozens of “B” westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle, homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.
8) Black Jack
Black Jack, named for John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack’s brands—a U.S. brand and an army serial number—recalled the army’s history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.
9) Khartoum
Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In one of the film version’s most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum’s head in bed with him…and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
10) Secretariat
Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, “The trees swayed.”
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Notes:
May 2, 2025
Yesterday I identified incorrectly the messaging app newly fired national security advisor Michael Waltz was using at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday as the unsecure Signal app. Joseph Cox of 404 Media identified the app as “an obscure and unofficial version of Signal” from “a company called TeleMessage which makes clones of popular messaging apps but adds an archiving capability to each of them.” As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, this third-party app introduces even more insecurity into those White House communications.
Today I spent time organizing the many tabs I had opened over the past six weeks. When they were grouped by topics, what emerged was the story of an administration that decided from the start to portray President Donald Trump as a king, creating an alternative social media ecosystem designed, as Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”
The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines. “We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
They are engaged in a marketing campaign to establish Trump’s false version of reality as truth. The White House has also brought into the press pool right-wing influencers, who are asking questions that tee up opportunities for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to push administration talking points, which the influencers then amplify on social media.
Trump’s aspirations to authoritarianism are showing today in the announcement that there will be a military parade on Trump’s 79th birthday, June 14, which coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Second Continental Congress’s establishment of the Continental Army in 1775. About 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 helicopters will proceed from near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, to the National Mall at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
Trump’s attempt to empower loyalists showed today in the news that the Trump administration has reached a settlement in principle with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Trump loyalist who was shot by Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd as she tried to breach the House Speaker’s Lobby on January 6, 2021. The right-wing Judicial Watch organization had filed a $30 million civil suit on behalf of Babbitt’s estate. A 2021 internal review determined that Byrd saved lives.
The administration’s hunkering down in right-wing ideology showed as well in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s public attack on U.S. ally Germany for declaring the German right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an extremist party that goes against Germany’s “free democratic order.” That designation is the result of a three-year investigation. It allows the government more leeway in monitoring the AfD.
Both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire White House advisor Elon Musk supported the AfD and backed it in a recent election. Rubio took AfD’s side today, writing on social media that that new designation was “tyranny in disguise.” He attacked the current government and urged Germany to “reverse course.”
The German Foreign Office responded publicly. “This is democracy. The decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”
It says something about the Trump administration that the German government is lecturing the U.S. government about the dangers of right-wing extremism.
Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan spoke to reporters yesterday, threatening Wisconsin governor Tony Evers with arrest after the governor issued a memo to state workers directing them to check with a lawyer before turning over documents or other items to officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Evers said Republicans were mischaracterizing his memo, which did not direct anyone to break the law.
"We now have a federal government that will threaten or arrest an elected official, or even everyday American citizens who have broken no laws, committed no crimes and done nothing wrong," Evers said. "And as disgusted as I am about the continued actions of the Trump administration, I'm not afraid."
Yesterday, at an event for judges, jurists, and lawyers, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke out against the attacks on judges currently plaguing the country. Judge Esther Salas, whose son Daniel was murdered by a man who came to their house looking for her, has been calling out the recent tactic of sending pizzas to the homes of judges or their children, making the point that right-wing opponents know where they live. Furthering their attempt at intimidation, the perpetrators have been using the name of Judge Salas’s son.
Judge Jackson began her remarks yesterday by saying she wanted to address “the elephant in the room”: the attacks on our legal system. Such attacks are not just on individuals, she said, but undermine the system itself. “Attacks on judicial independence is how countries that are not free, not fair, and not rule of law oriented, operate,” she said, and she told her colleagues: “I urge you to keep going, keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service.” According to Laura N. Pérez Sánchez of the New York Times, the audience gave her a standing ovation.
At least some of the administration’s intimidation is an attempt to cow opponents. It does not appear to be working.
Yesterday, about 1,500 lawyers and their allies packed the plaza outside Manhattan’s federal courthouse to defend the rule of law. According to Santul Nerkar of the New York Times, they held up pocket Constitutions, reaffirmed their oath to support and defend the Constitution, and chanted: “The rule of law protects us all. Without it we will surely fall.”
Speaking in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., constitutional law scholar and U.S. representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “The whole country needs a constitutional refresher.” He recited the Preamble of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
On March 6, Trump issued an executive order attacking the law firm Perkins Coie, which has represented high-profile Democratic individuals and causes, by barring the federal government from hiring the firm, suspending the security clearances of individuals working for it, barring its lawyers from entering federal office buildings, and preparing to end government contracts with any of its clients.
Rather than back down, as several other firms did, Perkins Coie sued the next day. Today, Judge Beryl Howell permanently barred any enforcement of Trump's executive order, saying it “violates the Constitution and is thus null and void.” In her opinion, Howell noted that “disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.” Trump’s executive order violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right to free speech, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, and the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of right to counsel.
She pointed out that the fair and impartial administration of justice has been part of the U.S. since John Adams “made the singularly unpopular decision to represent eight British soldiers charged with murder for their roles in the Boston Massacre.” “I had no hesitation,” Adams wrote in his diary, because “the Bar ought…to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance.”
Today, Riley Board and Dylan Tusinski of the Portland Press Herald reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state of Maine reached a settlement in the state’s lawsuit against the Trump administration after it froze funding to Maine education. The administration claimed the state violates the law because it allows transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams. Governor Janet Mills said she was following state and federal law and that Trump could not change the law by fiat. Maine attorney general Aaron Frey said the state had no choice but to sue in order to force the USDA to follow the law. The settlement restores the funding and establishes that the administration will go through the legally required process to pursue its policy.
When Trump tried to bully Governor Mills over the issue at a White House meeting in February, she told him, “See you in court.” Today she commented: “It’s good to feel a victory like this. I stood in the White House and when confronted by the president of the United States, I told him I’d see him in court. Well, we did see him in court, and we won.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched a different lawsuit against the Maine Department of Education that would pull funding primarily from poorer students and students with disabilities. “That’s a separate complaint they filed a few weeks ago, it’s only a one-page complaint that cites no authority, no case, no law,” Mills said. “We’ll see them in court on that one as well.”
Finally, tonight, Trump’s apparent determination to dominate the news and to project an image of leadership is overlapping with his increasingly erratic behavior. After suggesting on Tuesday that he’d like to be Pope, tonight the president of the United States posted on his social media site an AI-generated image of himself wearing papal robes and a miter.
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Notes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-signal-scandal-somehow-just-managed-to-get-much-worse
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/06/trump-white-house-media-social-influencers/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/02/white-house-influencers-propaganda-leavitt/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-army-military-parade-birthday-2f5cd12c8ccd4efddc29bfa3cf8f2705
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4vz9jed5lo
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/g-s1-64037/afd-germany-extremist-alternative
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/us/politics/supreme-court-justice-jackson.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/nyregion/national-law-day-courthouse-protests.html?smid=bs-share
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278290/gov.uscourts.dcd.278290.185.0.pdf
https://www.pressherald.com/2025/05/02/maine-settles-case-over-frozen-usda-school-funds/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, May 2, 2025, 10:29 p.m.
Bluesky:
vermontgmg.bsky.social/post/3lo7r6g5fqc2q
May 2, 2025
May 1, 2025
May 1, 2025
President Donald Trump waited until the 101st day of his administration to fire national security advisor Mike Waltz, the official responsible for including the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic on an unsecure Signal chat in which leaders shared classified information about a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who uploaded the classified information in that chat and shared it in another unsecure chat with his wife, brother, and personal friends, is still in the Cabinet.
On April 28 the U.S. campaign against the Houthis cost a $60 million F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet. The plane fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier when the vessel turned sharply to avoid fire from the Houthis while military personnel were moving the aircraft. Both the aircraft and the tow tractor moving it were lost, and one sailor suffered minor injuries.
The Signal scandal does not appear to have changed the Trump team’s communications habits. A Reuters photographer caught Waltz looking at his Signal messages during yesterday’s Cabinet meeting. The list of messages included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Vice President J.D. Vance, whose message began: “I have confirmation from my counterpart….” Although Signal messages appear to violate the Presidential Records Act that requires the preservation of documents from an administration, the Trump team apparently continues to use the app.
Trump announced that he will nominate Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the position Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) expected but that Trump pulled from her because the Republicans' majority in the House of Representatives is so slim. Secretary of State Rubio will assume the duties of national security advisor. Rubio is now serving as secretary of state, national security advisor, U.S. archivist, and head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). All of these jobs are high-level, work-intense positions.
A spokesperson for the State Department learned about the change in Rubio’s portfolio from a reporter during a press briefing.
At 101 days, the “Department of Government Efficiency” and its leader, billionaire Elon Musk, are also running into trouble. Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion from government spending, but that number kept dropping until he said DOGE will save about $150 billion. As David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine noted in the New York Times, that number is largely unsubstantiated. The DOGE team’s list of cuts is riddled with errors. In addition, the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE cuts have actually cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year, not including lawsuits.
Yesterday Musk told reporters that Congress will have to get to work to make the cuts he began permanent as he pulls back from government work to oversee Tesla. His foray into politics so badly hurt the company’s performance that it saw a 71% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2025. According to Emily Glazer, Becky Peterson, and Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal, Tesla’s board has begun looking for a new chief executive. While both Musk and Tesla’s board deny the report, Musk will move back toward company business. When asked if he needed a successor in the White House, Musk answered: “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
It’s not clear that Congress will, in fact, embrace the cuts DOGE has made willy-nilly throughout the government. Three days ago, a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that only 35% of Americans approve “of the way Elon Musk is handling his job in the Trump administration,” while 57% disapprove. “The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee told Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.”
As the damage it has caused becomes clearer, DOGE seems unlikely ever to become more popular. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has turned control of the Interior Department over to a DOGE operative, and Wes Siler reports tonight that DOGE is preparing a “reduction in force” for the National Park Service, bringing total workforce losses there to about a quarter of all NPS staff. According to a group of NPS employees calling themselves the Resistance Rangers, the cuts are directed at regional and national offices that support park-based staff in order to make the cuts less visible to the public.
As Siler notes in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter, the National Park Service is an important public-facing part of the federal government. Parks are “highly visible, and serve as symbols of national pride.” He notes that hurting “the visitor experience, attraction closures, and general bad news around NPS may serve to embarrass the administration more than news of, say, reductions to Internal Revenue Service staffing.”
Problems at DOGE continue to emerge. Jake Pearson of ProPublica reported yesterday that the DOGE employee who is working to shrink the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Gavin Kliger, owns stock in four companies the CFPB oversees. This conflict of interest potentially violates federal ethics laws.
Yesterday David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that the DOGE operative installed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Christopher Sweet, is an undergraduate with no government experience. He is using artificial intelligence to comb through the agency’s rules and regulations, compare them with the laws authorizing them, identify rules that can be relaxed or removed, and rewrite them.
A source from HUD told Gilbert and Elliott that such work is redundant: officials created the rules only after “a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder.” Another source told the Wired reporters they were informed that Sweet is refining a model “to be used across the government.”
As Trump’s poll numbers have dropped, Trump’s team has doubled down on immigration to energize its base. Today Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a federal judge Trump appointed to the Southern District of Texas, rejected the administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting Venezuelans from his district. This ruling may have implications for lawsuits elsewhere.
Rodriguez permanently prohibited the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelans from the Southern District of Texas under that law. He noted that the law authorizes such deporations only during wartime or a hostile invasion, and concluded that its “plain ordinary meaning” meant an invasion by military forces, not migration by alleged gang members.
Trump’s empowerment of heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics led last Thursday to a raid on a house in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in which agents who said they were U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI put a family outside in the rain in their underwear and then tore apart the house. They took the family’s phones, laptops, and life savings. But the people in the house were not the ones on the search warrant. They were all U.S. citizens, a mother and three girls recently arrived from Maryland.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” the woman told KFOR news. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
In his recent interview with Trump, Terry Moran of ABC News revealed that Trump has a problem with a disconnect between his actions and the country’s principles. Trump had a copy of the Declaration of Independence installed in the Oval Office, and Moran asked the president what it means to him. Trump’s answer made it clear he has never read the document. “Well, it means exactly what it says,” he answered. “It's a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity, and love and respect and it means a lot. And it's something very special to, to our country.”
Last night, former vice president Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president in 2024, gave her first major speech since losing the election. “Throughout my entire career…I have always believed in the ideals of our nation,” she began, “[t]he ideals reflected in the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. Ideals advanced and affirmed by the service and sacrifice of generations of patriots, the ideals that ground the Constitution of the United States, that here in our country, power ultimately lies not with the wealthy or well connected, but with all of us, with ‘We the People.’”
After excoriating the Trump administration’s “narrow, self-serving vision of America where they punish truth tellers, favor loyalists, cash in on their power, and leave everyone to fend for themselves, all while abandoning allies and retreating from the world,” Harris noted that “this is not a vision that Americans want.” She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn't belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”
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Notes:
https://people.com/marco-rubio-four-different-roles-trump-administration-11726691
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/politics/us-navy-jet-overboard/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contracts-savings.html
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-musk-ceo-search-board-0ce61af9
https://newrepublic.com/post/194659/melon-musk-report-tesla-looking-new-ceo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/28/elon-musk-approval-poll/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/01/trump-100-days-elon-musk-doge
Wes Siler’s NewsletterDOI Prepares To Fire 1,500 Further National Park StaffAccording to internal communications leaked to me, DOGE is preparing a “reduction in force” for the National Park Service that would remove a further 1,500 full-time members of that agency’s workforce. That would take total workforce losses to approximately 5,000, or one-quarter of all NPS staff. The cuts could begin as soon as tomorrow…Read more13 hours ago · 28 likes · 7 comments · Wes SilerWes Siler’s NewsletterEvery DOI Employee Asked To Justify Ongoing EmploymentThe Department of the Interior is asking every single one of its 70,000 employees to submit resumes supporting their ongoing employment, ahead of mass reductions in force. The measure includes employees at the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and more…Read more7 days ago · 87 likes · 16 comments · Wes Silerhttps://www.wired.com/story/doge-college-student-ai-rewrite-regulations-deregulation/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/us/texas-judge-trump-alien-enemies-act.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/doge-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-gavin-kliger-stock
Youtube:
Bluesky:
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lo4zxxvj5c2g
atrupar.com/post/3lo4x27g6vs25
April 30, 2025
April 30, 2025
This morning the Bureau of Economic Analysis released a report showing an abrupt reversal in the U.S. economy. Gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the total market value of goods and services, shrank from a healthy 2.4% in the last quarter of 2024 to -0.3% in the first quarter of 2025. The shift is the first time in three years that the economy has contracted. The slump appears to have been fueled by a surge in buying overseas goods before Trump’s tariffs hit.
The stock market plunged on the news. Although it would recover later in the day, the stock market during President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office has been the worst since the administration of Richard Nixon. Today Trump posted on his social media site: “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden “Overhang.” This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”
Observers noted that in January 2024, when the stock market was booming under Biden, Trump took credit for it, posting: “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP.”
Trump held a televised two-hour Cabinet meeting today, at which administration officials sat behind red MAGA hats and praised him so extravagantly that right-wing commentator Ann Coulter posted: “Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il–style tributes?” He blamed Biden for the contracting economy and told reporters that “you could even say” that any downturn in the second quarter is Biden’s fault, too. The White House put out an official statement blaming former president Joe Biden for today’s report of the shrinking GDP and saying the country’s underlying economic numbers remain strong.
In fact, Biden left behind an economy that The Economist called “the envy of the world,” showing on the cover of the October special issue about the U.S. economy a roll of $100 bills blasting off into space. As Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr wrote in that issue, the U.S. had “left other rich countries in the dust.” “Expect that to continue,” the headline read. In Biden’s four years, the U.S. had added 16 million jobs, unemployment was at its lowest rate in 50 years, real wages for the bottom 80% of Americans were increasing, and inflation levels had come down almost to the Federal Reserve’s target from their highs during the post-shutdown shocks.
The pain from Trump’s tariffs has already hit agriculture as China has largely stopped buying American products, from pork and soybeans to lumber. Peter Friedmann, executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, a leading export trade group for farmers, told Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC that the sector is already in “full-blown crisis” as farmers have sustained “massive” financial losses.
Economists expect the confusion and uncertainty of Trump’s tariffs to hurt growth more broadly in the second quarter of 2025 as container ships from China stop arriving in the U.S. in early to mid-May, about a month after Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” imposed a 145% tariff on goods from that country. Executive Director Gene Seroka of the Port of Los Angeles told CNBC’s Squawk Box yesterday that beginning next week, shipping volume at the port will drop over 35%. Executive Director of the Port of Oakland, California, Kristi McKenney noted that the lack of import trade will hurt exports as well, endangering the jobs of dockworkers, warehouse workers, and truck operators.
The East Coast ports will see similar drops a couple of weeks after the West Coast ports. United Parcel Service (UPS) has already announced that it is laying off about 20,000 employees and closing 73 of its buildings by the end of June. It says it anticipates lower volumes of shipping from its largest customer, Amazon, because of the tariffs.
Economists expect the lack of goods from around the globe, especially from China, to create shortages and higher prices. Notably, the tariffs will hit toys and Christmas items. China produces 80% of the toys sold in the U.S. and 90% of the Christmas goods. Ordering of inventory for the holidays is normally underway by now, Daisuke Wakabayashi of the New York Times reports, as it takes four to five months to make, package, and ship products to the U.S. from China. But currently the tariffs have shut down that trade.
Trump seemed to acknowledge that today when he said: “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff. Much of which—not all of it—but much of which we don’t need.”
Ironically, the Republican Party made accusations that Biden was “ruining Christmas” a central theme of political attack in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Chip Cutter, Bob Tita, and Stephen Wilmot of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that more than 80% of senior executives are worried about Trump’s tariffs and his other economic policies, and many companies say they are unable to predict future earnings. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that uncertainty is strategic, intended to give the administration a leg up in negotiations.
The Constitution gave to Congress, not the president, the power to set tariffs. Trump is taking that power to himself by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to enact his sweeping tariffs. This law authorizes a president to regulate international trade during a national emergency. On February 1, Trump declared such a national emergency to impose tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and on April 2 he again invoked it for his new blanket tariffs.
Congress could end Trump’s power over tariffs by cancelling the national emergency, a step Democrats were willing to take. But Republicans in the House used a procedural rule to make sure that Democrats could not cancel that emergency. A challenge to the president’s declaration of a national emergency must come to the floor for a vote within 18 days of the challenge. The House defanged that rule by declaring that each day for the rest of the congressional session will not “constitute a day for purposes…of the National Emergencies Act.”
In the Senate this evening, Republican leaders killed a similar Democratic measure. Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) said: “Republicans are trying to give the administration…some space to figure out if they can get some good deals and awaiting the results of that.” Three Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky—voted with the Democrats.
Other observers are less hopeful of a good outcome for Trump’s tariffs. Washington Post legal and economic columnist Natasha Sarin said: “It’s just totally bonker bananas. Where are we going?! Are we near trading deals with India and Japan? That means less tariff revenue. But Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, says the tariffs are going to produce lots of revenue for deficit reduction. So that must mean they’re staying high? It’s a constant yo-yo that is impossible to plan around and is leading to investors being down on America, and with good reason.”
“Bonker bananas” is an apt description for an interview Trump did last night with Terry Moran of ABC News. In a discussion of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the administration rendered to prison in El Salvador because of “administrative error,” Trump insisted that Abrego Garcia has “MS13” tattooed on his knuckles, for the gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. But the photo Trump held up for the cameras as “proof” of MS-13 tattoos was obviously photoshopped with letters and numbers apparently intended to be labels for Abrego Garcia’s actual tattoos.
As Moran repeatedly told Trump that the tattoos had been photoshopped, Trump got visibly angry, first suggesting that it was thanks to Trump that Moran got the interview, and complaining that “you’re not being very nice.” Trump then continued to insist that Abrego Garcia has MS13 tattooed on his knuckles and said that Moran’s refusal to agree to that “is why people no longer believe the news…. It’s such a disservice,” the president said. “Why don't you just say yes, he does[?]”
Trump couldn’t let it go. He brought it up again later in the interview, calling Moran “dishonest” for saying the tattoos were photoshopped.
Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, and experts on MS-13 say his tattoos are not tied to the gang.
That was not the only astonishing moment in the interview.
Although the Supreme Court unanimously agreed with a lower court that the administration must work to get Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, the White House has insisted that it cannot comply because only El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, can release Abrego Garcia. But when Moran said to Trump he could pick up the phone and get him back, Trump replied “I could…. And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.” When Moran replied “But the court has ordered you to facilitate that,” Trump replied: “I'm not the one making this decision. We have lawyers who don't want to do this.”
“You’re the president!” Moran replied.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/21/trump-tariff-recession/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 30, 2025, 9:13 a.m.
Paul KrugmanThe Noise Before the StormI’m traveling and won’t be able to get a proper post up until tomorrow. So just a quick comment on the GDP numbers released earlier this morning…Read morea day ago · 1277 likes · 212 comments · Paul Krugmanhttps://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/04/new-data-reveals-strong-economic-momentum/
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024-10-19
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/30/gdp-q1-economy-tariffs/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/28/trade-war-tariffs-full-blown-crisis-us-farm-exporters-say.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/us-economy-shrink-trump-tariffs/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/business/tariffs-china-ports-imports.html
https://www.aol.com/gop-attacks-bidenomics-ruined-christmas-151925616.html
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-12-01/how-joe-biden-plans-to-save-christmas
https://www.gop.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=34
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/business/trump-tariffs-christmas-china.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/30/ups-layoffs-trump-tariffs
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11281
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-04-08-can-congress-take-back-tariff-authority-from-trump/
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/30/senate-tariff-vote-gop
https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/earnings-trade-war-uncertainty-88edd369
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/30/trump-kilmar-abrego-garcia-deportation-case/
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April 29, 2025
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration’s direction. As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9 to address the emergency of the Great Depression. Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills and 77 other measures first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it. On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
In a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.
FDR was speaking on July 24 to urge Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about,” he said. “If I am asked whether the American people will pull themselves out of this depression, I answer, ‘They will if they want to.’”
Today is the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He marked it by delivering what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people…. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”
In fact, Trump has signed just five measures into law: the Laken Riley Act, which Congress passed before he took office; a stopgap funding measure; and three resolutions overturning rules set by the Biden administration.
But Trump’s administration does parallel FDR’s in an odd way. Trump set out in his first hundred days to undo the government FDR established in his first hundred days. Trump has turned the nation away from 92 years of a government that sought to serve ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and stabilizing global security and trade. Instead, he is trying to recreate the nation of more than 100 years ago, in which the role of government was to protect the wealthy and enable them to make money from the country’s resources and its people.
Trump set out to destroy the modern American state, gutting the civil service and illegally shuttering federal agencies, as well as slashing through government programs. His team has withdrawn the U.S. from its global leadership and rejected democratic allies in favor of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At home he has imitated those autocrats, ignoring the rule of law and rendering migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process, and using the power of the state to threaten those he perceives as his enemies.
As is typical with autocratic governments, corruption appears to be running deep in this White House. The president and his family are openly profiting from his office. And it would be hard to find a better example of a government letting cronies profit off public resources than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s relinquishing of control over the department to a DOGE operative, or of a government permitting businesses to profit from ordinary Americans than billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent creation of a master database of Americans’ information.
Trump’s dismantling of the modern American state has been a disaster. Trump spoke tonight in Michigan to tout his hope that his new tariffs will center auto manufacturing back in the U.S., but the economic chaos his tariff policies have unleashed has turned what was a booming economy 100 days ago sharply downward. That economic slump, along with Trump’s illegal renditions of men to El Salvador and the gutting of services Americans depend on, has given Trump the lowest job approval rating after 100 days of any president in 80 years.
And that suggests another way to look at the first 100 days of a presidential term. For all that the 100-days trope focuses on presidents, the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have shown Americans, sometimes encouraged by their allies abroad, pushing back against Trump to restore American democracy.
Democratic attorneys general began to plan for a possible Trump second term in February 2024, preparing for cases they might have to file if Trump followed through with his campaign promises or implemented Project 2025. California, with 5,600 staffers in its department of justice, and New York, with 2,400, carried much of the weight. They were able to file their first challenges to Trump’s January 20 executive orders on January 21. Their lawsuits, and those of others, have been so successful that they have sparked both Trump and MAGA Republicans to attack judges and even the judiciary.
Early observers of the movement to stop Trump’s destruction of the modern state argued that the opposition was too burned out to mount any meaningful pushback against a newly emboldened Trump. But, in fact, people were not in the streets because they were organizing over computer apps and at the local level, a reality that burst into the open at Republican town halls in late February as angry voters protested government cuts at the hands of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
On March 4, Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC), the head of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, told Republicans to stop holding town halls to stop the protests from gaining attention. So Democrats began holding their own packed town halls in the absent Republicans’ districts.
On March 20, 2025, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Las Vegas. Unexpectedly huge crowds flocked to their rallies across the West, revealing a deep well of unhappiness at the current government even in areas that had voted for Trump.
At 7:00 on the evening of March 31, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) launched a marathon speech attacking the Trump administration and imploring Republicans to defend democracy because, he said, he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.” Before he finished twenty-five hours later on April 1, his speech—the longest in congressional history—had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.
The quiet organizing of the early months of the administration showed when the first call for a public “Hands Off!” protest on April 5 produced more than 1,400 rallies in all 50 states and turned out millions of people. Organizers called for “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”
On April 11, Harvard University rejected the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract.
Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
Last Sunday, April 27, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire, telling them to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” he said.
“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact— because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”’
And so, even as Trump tries to erase the government FDR pioneered, Americans are demonstrating their support for a government that defends ordinary people, and proving the truth of FDR’s words from 1933, that when people act together they “can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”
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Notes:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-recovery-program
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5379554/trump-100-days-numbers-laws-immigration
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-100-days-speech-detroit/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-lowest-100-day-approval-rating-80-years/story?id=121165473
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/27/democrats-taking-trump-musk-winning-00206310
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/04/congress/gop-town-halls-richard-hudson-00210024
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/05/us/hands-off-protests-trump-musk/index.html
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/the-promise-of-american-higher-education/
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-surveil-track/
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5259589-interior-secretary-doug-burgum/
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