Trump is turning all his dogs loose on Harvard. He can’t believe Harvard is standing up to his threats, and he is determined to crush the nation’s most prestigious research university.
Whatever happened to small government? Republicans used to believe that the federal government should leave the private sector alone. Trump believes in big government, big enough to interfere in every institution, even into private medical decisions. He wants to be the emperor.
Clearly, he never read the U.S. Constitution. He knows nothing about checks and balances. Nor did he read Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle; Yertle wanted to be the master of all he could see. Read it to see what happened to him.
CNN reports:
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is threatening to strip Harvard University of its ability to enroll international students if it doesn’t turn over records on international students’ “illegal and violent activities,” the agency said Wednesday.
Noem “wrote a scathing letter demanding detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities by April 30, 2025, or face immediate loss of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification,” DHS said in a news release.
The certification allows universities to issue forms to admitted international students that they can then use to apply for visas to enter the United States, according to DHS.
CNN has reached out to DHS for additional information.
A Harvard spokesperson said in a statement that the university is aware of the letter, but they stand by their previous statement that they “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
Trump hates Harvard. It refuses to follow his orders. Harvard’s President Alan Garber flatly refused to let the Trump goons take control of the university. Trump wants to show Harvard who is in charge. He said Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status. This is an unprecedented show of force. The president is not allowed to interfere with IRS decisions. But he appointed a new IRS leader. Nobody says no to Trump. But Harvard said no.
When Harvard’s President, Alan Garber, resolutely refused to accept the Trump administration’s demand to oversee its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring practices, Trump was furious. He lashed out and threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. By law, the President is not allowed to direct the IRS to investigate anyone. But lo and behold, the IRS commissioner absurdly claimed that it was already investigating Harvard, the nation’s most prestigious university. Sure.
Academic freedom hangs in the balance. Big government wants to control what universities teach, who they admit, and who they hire.
This is the worst attack on the independence of universities since the McCarthy era. it is actually more dangerous than McCarthy, who picked out individual professors. This is the President of the United States declaring war on America’s universities.
The Internal Revenue Service is weighing whether to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, according to three people familiar with the matter, which would be a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s attempts to choke off federal money and support for the leading research university.
President Trump on Tuesday publicly called for Harvard to pay taxes, continuing a standoff in which the administration has demanded the university revamp its hiring and admissions practices and its curriculum.
Some I.R.S. officials have told colleagues that the Treasury Department on Wednesday asked the agency to consider revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status, according to two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
An I.R.S. spokeswoman declined to comment. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Federal law bars the president from either directly or indirectly requesting the I.R.S. to investigate or audit specific targets. The I.R.S. does at times revoke tax exemptions from organizations for conducting too many political or commercial activities, but those groups can appeal the agency’s decision in court. Any attempt to take away Harvard’s tax exemption would be likely to face a legal challenge, which tax experts expect would be successful.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the I.R.S.’s scrutiny of Harvard began before the president’s social media post.
“Any forthcoming actions by the I.R.S. are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to the President’s TRUTH,” Fields said in a statement, referring to Mr. Trump’s website Truth Social.
In a statement, Harvard said there is no legal basis for rescinding its tax status.
“Such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission,” the university said. “It would result in diminished financial aid for students, abandonment of critical medical research programs, and lost opportunities for innovation. The unlawful use of this instrument more broadly would have grave consequences for the future of higher education in America.”
Even an attempt at changing Harvard’s tax status would signify a drastic breach in the independence of the I.R.S. and its historic insulation from political pressure.
The Trump administration has cleared out much of the agency’s senior leadership in the last few months, installing allies to temporarily serve as the commissioner and its top lawyer. Its newest acting commissioner, Gary Shapley, was an I.R.S. agent who has said that the investigation into the taxes of Hunter Biden, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, was not aggressive enough.
Anand Giridhadaras is a brilliant thinker and writer. He did all of us a service by seeing a therapist to get advice about how to survive the return of Trump, the Abuser-in-Chief. His blog is called “The Ink,” where this post appeared.
We’ve gotten ourselves into an abusive relationship, and it’s one we can’t escape.
The abuser in question is Donald Trump. And by abuse, we’re not talking about abuse of power, real as that may be. We’re talking about emotional abuse, doled out by a narcissist with an unstoppable need to rebuild the world in his image and to use the most powerful office in human history as a treatment center for his wounded ego.
Whether Trump suffers from a real disorder — malignant or traumatic narcissism has been floated — is a matter of debate among psychiatrists and psychologists. Most professionals have refused to make a diagnosis without a clinical interview (the so-called “Goldwater rule”), though before the 2024 election 225 experts felt Trump presented clear enough signs that they published an open letterwarning of his threat to the nation since, in their estimation, if it quacked like a duck, it was a duck:
Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” “antisocial personality disorder,” and “paranoid personality disorder,” all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism. This psychological type was first identified by German psychologist Erich Fromm to explain the psychology of history’s most “evil” dictators.
We’ve talked often in the newsletter about the way autocrats can build support even without offering anything to their supporters by way of real material improvements, playing on the same deep emotional needs exploited by abusers within relationships and families.
Earlier this year we also looked back to Erich Fromm’s work to understand how Trump’s cultlike appeal depended on a bond of mutual emotional dependence between abuser and abused and against a threatening world — a bond Fromm called “group narcissism.”
“Even if one is the most miserable, the poorest, the least respected member of a group, there is compensation for one’s miserable condition in feeling ‘I am a part of the most wonderful group in the world. I, who in reality am a worm, become a giant through belonging to the group,”
The situation today is even more complex — and dire — than most expected early in the campaign, as Trump competes for power and attention with fellow narcissists: the oligarchs. And chief among them is the shadow president, Elon Musk, whose sense of his own omnipotence and importance is even stronger than Trump’s, and his vision of the future far more dystopian, and his disregard for humanity even more total.
To better understand the situation facing Americans (and, to be honest, everyone around the world) our Nastaran Tavakoli-Far talked to therapist Daniel Shaw about how we can use the techniques that have helped people survive cults, abusive relationships, and toxic families to face and process and maybe even transcend the second Trump administration.
As someone who’s done a lot of reporting on topics involving narcissists and cults, something that’s really striking to me is that the advice given to the people suffering is to get out, go “no contact,” or have as little contact as possible. If you need to speak to this problematic individual do it via a lawyer, you know that kind of thing of just staying as emotionless as possible and not getting involved.
Now, what I always wonder is, because I think a lot of people when they look at Trump and MAGA, I mean a lot of people have said to me, “This is similar to what happened in my family.” A lot of these dynamics, if you’ve been exposed to narcissism, it’s actually very relatable to a lot of people.
But this isn’t a situation where you can go “no contact” because these are the people in power. You’re in a situation where you actually have to engage with these people. You can’t just leave the cult and try and heal. So what is your advice in this sort of scenario?
Stay sane, stay humane, and don’t isolate, would be the three phrases I would use.
Going “no contact” is sometimes a very good idea, but not always. And it’s also an idea that’s been turned around by abusive narcissists who isolate victims from their own families. You know, it’s the same thing that happens in Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you criticize the community, you are disfellowshipped and nobody, not your children, your spouse, your parents, or anybody is allowed to ever talk to you.
In terms of going “no contact” in a political situation, well, you don’t have that option. What are you going to do if, for example, the government benefits that you’ve paid into the system are suddenly turned off and there’s no more Social Security? Are you just going to say “Well, I’m not going to have anything to do with that bad president who just did that to me?” Or are you going to get involved in whatever way possible to fight against it?
Going “no contact” in this situation could be enabling the perpetrator, enabling the autocrat and I think that’s important to understand. If we’re enabling the autocrat, we’re complicit in the autocrat’s abuse.
So what can we do right now? If I wanted to ask for some practical advice?
One of the things that I’ve taken to heart about the current situation is the advice of Timothy Snyder, the historian who has studied the rise and fall of democracies and autocracies in Eastern Europe. One of the things he says is to not submit in advance.
Now, in the case of traumatizing narcissists, having managed a successful seduction they will begin to then create more dependence and they do that paradoxically through becoming more belligerent and belittling and more humiliating or shaming. What that does is create a state of constant intimidation at the same time increasing the sense of dependence the victim has on the narcissist.
In the current situation, it’s clear that everyone who is an opponent of the Trump administration is meant to feel horrified, shocked, belittled, and intimidated. That is what I believe is important: not to submit to the intention to terrify, intimidate, and make people feel powerless and small. So not to submit to that means that I don’t allow myself to be paralyzed with fear. I don’t allow myself to be boiling with rage, and I don’t isolate myself. I remember and connect to what I love about being in the world, about being a person, what I love about other people, and to the people who love me. Staying connected, not isolating, and not allowing yourself to drown in fear or rage is not submitting in advance.
So that’s my sense of what’s important right now.
You mentioned staying sane and about keeping connections. This time around it seems a lot of people are either kind of checking out or not checking the news every day. A lot of people are saying “I just want to do something positive in my community or be there for my family.” and things like that. What do you think about that? Why aren’t people protesting?
Right. I think everybody got exhausted, those who voted against Trump were exhausted by the amount of energy and effort spent hoping to elect Harris. I do limit my exposure so that I can keep my sanity for the time being. I don’t think that’s wrong and I encourage people who need to do that to do it.
So staying sane and humane, having those connections, and speaking up, speaking to our political representatives and pushing them.
People who care about these issues, who do not want to enable autocracy in this country or in general, exist at every level of society, and each of us has a certain amount of power.
I speak primarily to other psychotherapists but some of my ideas can be useful in thinking about the political, so I try to speak where possible within my community. Each of us has a community, and if we can be vocal within our communities at least we can hope to make an impact, even on one person.
Groups will form that we may want to lend our support to, either financial support or volunteer support. I’m currently supporting Democracy Docket, for example, where Mark Elias has been conducting so many successful lawsuits against a lot of abuses of government. I am not a millionaire elite, so I make small donations on a regular basis. People can do that.
People can volunteer, they can protest and demonstrate. All of these things are happening. They will happen, I believe, to a greater extent.
We may be under the threat of martial law in Trump’s world. We’re under the threat of having the National Guard tear-gas us if we take to the streets. He’s already demonstrated that he will do that and he’s saying he’ll do it again. But to whatever extent possible we need to speak, whatever our community might be, no matter how small. If you hold beliefs about injustice, it’s worth speaking out.
So what, exactly, is a traumatizing narcissist?
The traumatizing narcissist is a person who — for various reasons, based on their developmental history — has developed what starts out as a fantasy of omnipotence.
Did you ever buy a lottery ticket? That’s a fantasy of omnipotence. We all have them. It was said by Freud that we start out as babies with a sense of omnipotence because everybody adores us. And that we have to grow up and lose that sense of omnipotence so that we don’t become narcissists.
A traumatizing narcissist doesn’t lose that infantile omnipotence. They go through some kind of traumatic humiliation growing up, and that leads them to the fantasy that they can be the most powerful person in the world and nobody can hurt them or humiliate them or make them feel small or weak. As that fantasy becomes a delusion, they start to be absolutely convinced of their superiority, of their infinite entitlement, and of their greatness.
Some traumatizing narcissists focus on an individual or a family. There they can exercise their delusion of omnipotence over a small group of people or over just one person. But their delusion can be so powerful that it invites others to join in. Often the delusion makes them charismatic and persuasive. They can become, in some cases, autocratic politicians. In other cases, they can become gurus, or they can become internet influencers. They have so much conviction in their own delusion of their own omnipotence that they persuade others to join.
Could you briefly describe the kind of people who join in? Who get into these kinds of relationships?
When people speak to me about having been in this kind of a relationship, they’re often full of shame and trying to understand what’s wrong with them. What I’ll say is, “Well, you were being vulnerable, which is very human.”
There is nobody who volunteers to be groomed and the traumatizing narcissist grooms people. We don’t volunteer for that. Some people may be more vulnerable to grooming than others but I’ve seen some very together, high-functioning people who got groomed by traumatizing narcissists, it’s not about being weak or unstable as a person. Look at Bernie Madoff, who convinced some of the most wealthy, creative, high-functioning people in the world that they should give him all their money.
I was very inspired when I left the cult I had been part of when I was younger by Erich Fromm’s book Escape from Freedom. He tried to understand what was happening in Germany which led people to believe that Hitler was a savior.
I think in a similar vein, people believe that Donald Trump is a savior, and part of the problem is that they are only being exposed to the information that Donald Trump wants them to have, which is the propaganda that is funded by millions and millions and millions of dollars by fossil fuel oligarchs and digital oligarchs. There is extraordinary support for Trump as the CEO and them as the board of directors of the new world they think they’re creating. It’s frightening because it is like they read Orwell’s 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother.
I would call these people malignant narcissists rather than traumatizing narcissists because they’re not just narcissistic, they’re also sociopathic and they believe that there is no law that they should have to obey, that they make the laws.
Sorry, when you say these people, do you mean Trump, or do you mean Trump and the tech bros and fossil fuel bros?
The group of elites who support autocrats. The autocrat and the elites that support the autocrat are people who see themselves as a superior race of people, entitled to rule over everyone else. Their solution for poor people is to create a jail system.
One of the major thinkers in the tech world has proposed that poor people be made into biofuel, that the prison system could become a factory for creating biofuel out of human beings. These things sound unbelievable. But they are being said publicly.
Yes, that’s the person. He’s extremely influential over Vice President JD Vance, and Peter Thiel is a big disciple of his, as are quite a few other billionaires in the tech world.
So we have an elite oligarchy in support of an autocrat. But why do people view Donald Trump as a savior?
There are a lot of reasons. But what Erich Fromm said is that people are afraid of freedom. They are uncertain of how to be free. And when they feel that there is a powerful leader, it’s like that becomes a magical person who they can feel safe and protected by. The allure of somebody promising absolute total protection, who seems very strong and very powerful and very certain, that is a very powerful allure.
To be a free person means that you have to provide yourself with a sense of safety and you have to create safety in your community.
Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post wrote about the efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite American history. Trump wants “patriotic history,” in which evil things never happened and non-white people and women were seldom noticed. In other words, he wants to control historical memory, sanitize it, and restore history as it was taught when he was in school about 65 years ago (1960), before the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and other actions that changed what historians know and teach.
Dvorak writes:
A section of Arlington National Cemetery’s website highlighting African American military heroes is gone.
The participation of transgender and queer protesters during the LGBTQ+ uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn was deleted from the National Park Service’s website [nps.gov] about the federal monument.
And the Smithsonian museum in Washington, which attracts millions of visitors who enter free each year, will be instructed by Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology.”
In a series of executive orders, President Donald Trump is reshaping the way America’s history is presented in places that people around the world visit.
In one order, he declared that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts “undermine our national unity,” and more pointedly, that highlighting the country’s most difficult chapters diminishes pride in America and produces “a sense of national shame.”
The president’s orders have left historians scrambling to collect and preserve aspects of the public record, as stories of Black, Brown, female or LGBTQ+ Americans are blanched from some public spaces. In some cases, the historical mentions initially removed have been replaced, but are more difficult to find online.
That rationale has galvanized historians to rebuke the idea that glossing over the nation’s traumas — instead of grappling with them — will foster pride, rather than shame.
Focusing on the shame, they say, misses a key point: Contending with the uglier parts of U.S. history is necessary for an honest and inclusive telling of the American story. Americans can feel pride in the nation’s accomplishments while acknowledging that some of the shameful actions in the past reverberate today.
“The past has no duty to our feelings,” said Chandra Manning, a history professor at Georgetown University.
“History does not exist to sing us lullabies or shower us with accolades. The past has no obligations to us at all,” Manning said. “We, however, do have an obligation to the past, and that is to strive to understand it in all its complexity, as experienced by all who lived through it, not just a select few.”
That is not to say that the uncomfortable weight of difficult truths isn’t a valid emotion.
Postwar Germans were so crushed by the burden of their people’s past, from the horrors of the Nazi regime to the protection of war criminals in the decades after the war, that they have a lengthy word for processing it: vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means the “work of coping with the past.” It has informed huge swaths of German literature and film and has shaped the physical way European cities create memorials and museums.
America’s version of vergangenheitsbewältigung can be found across the cultural landscape. From films to books to classrooms and museums, Americans are learning more details about slavery in the South, the way racism has affected everything from baseball to health care, and how sexism shaped the military.
Trump, however, looks at the U.S. version of vergangenheitsbewältigung differently. “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” said the executive order targeting museums, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
That is what “fosters a sense of national shame,” he says in his order.
Historians take exception to that. “I would argue that it’s actually weird to feel shame about what people in the past did,” Georgetown history professor Katherine Benton-Cohen said. “As I like to tell my students, ‘I’m not talking about you. We will not use ‘we’ when we refer to Americans in the past, because it wasn’t us and we don’t have to feel responsible for their actions. You can divest yourself of this feeling,’” she said.
Germans also have a phrase for enabling a critical look at their nation’s past: die Gnade der spät-geborenen, “the grace of being born too late” to be held responsible for the horror of the Nazi years.
Benton-Cohen said she honed her approach to this during her first teaching job in the Deep South in 2003, when she emphasized the generational gap between her students and the history they were studying.
“They could speak freely of the past — even the recent past, like the 1950s and 1960s, because they weren’t there,” she said. “They were free to make their own conclusions. It was exciting, and it worked. Many told me it was the first time they had learned the history of the 1960s because their high schools — both public and private — had skipped it to avoid controversy. We did fine.”
Trump hasn’t limited his attempt to control how history is presented in museums or memorials. Among the first executive orders he issued was “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Another one sought to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in the nation’s workplaces, classrooms and museums. His version of American history tracks with how it was taught decades ago, before academics began bringing more diverse voices and viewpoints into their scholarship.
Maurice Jackson, a history professor at Georgetown University who specializes in jazz and Black history, said Black Americans have fought hard to tell their full story.
Black history was first published as “The Journal of Negro History” in 1916, in a townhouse in Washington when academic Carter G. Woodson began searching for the full story of his roots. A decade later, he introduced “Negro History Week” to schools across the United States, a history lesson that was widely cheered by White teachers and students alongside Black Americans who finally felt seen.
“Black history is America’s history,” Jackson said. And leaving the specifics of the Black experience out because it makes some people ashamed gives an incomplete picture of our nation, he said.
After Trump issued his executive orders, federal workers scrambled to interpret and obey them, which in some cases led to historical milestones being removed, or covered up and then replaced.
Federal workers removed a commemoration of the Tuskegee Airmen from the Pentagon website, then restored it. They taped butcher paper over the National Cryptologic Museum’s display honoring women and people of color, then uncovered the display.
Mentions of Harriet Tubman in a National Park Service display about the Underground Railroad were removed, then put back. The story of legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson’s military career was deleted from the Department of Defense website, then restored several days later.
Women known as WASPs risked their lives in military service — training and test pilots during World War II for a nation that didn’t allow them to open a bank account — is no longer a prominent part of the Pentagon’s digital story.
George Washington University historian Angela Zimmerman calls all the activity. which happened with a few keystrokes and in a matter of days, the digital equivalent of “Nazi book burnings.”
In response, historians — some professional, some amateur — are scrambling to preserve information before it is erased and forgotten.
The Organization of American Historians created the Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative, which is a callout for content that is in danger of being obliterated
This joins the decades-long work of preserving information by the Internet Archive, a California nonprofit started in 1996 that also runs the Wayback Machine, which stores digital records.
Craig Campbell, a digital map specialist in Seattle, replicated and stored the U.S. Geological Service’s entire historical catalogue. His work was crowdfunded by supporters.
“Historical maps are critical for a huge range of industries ranging from environmental science, conservation, real estate, urban planning, and even oil and gas exploration,” said Campbell, whose mapping company is called Pastmaps. “Losing access to the data and these maps not only destroys our ability to access and learn from history, but limits our ability to build upon it in so many ways as a country.”
After astronomer Rose Ferreira’s profile was scrubbed from, then returned, to NASA’s website, she posted about it on social media. In response, an online reader created a blog, Women in STEM, to preserve stories such as Ferreira’s.
“Programs that memorialize painful truths help ensure past wrongs are never revived to harm again,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nevada), said on X, noting that presidents are elected to “run our government — not rewrite our history.”
Authoritarian leaders have long made the whitewashing of history a tool in their regimes. Joseph Stalin expunged rivals from historic photographs. Adolf Hitler purged museums of modernist art and works created by Jewish artists, which he labeled “degenerate.” Museums in Mao Zedong’s China glorified his ideology.
While this may be unfamiliar to Americans, Georgetown University history professor Adam Rothman says that in the scope of human history, “these are precedented times.”
It’s not yet clear what the real-world effect of Trump’s Smithsonian order will be or exactly how it will be carried out. Who will determine what exhibits cause shame and need to be removed? What will the criteria be? Will exhibits that discuss slavery, for instance, be eliminated or altered?
“Our nation is an ongoing experiment,” says Manning, the Georgetown history professor, who has written books about the Civil War. “And what helps us do that now in 2024 compared to 1776 is that we do have a shared past.
“Every single human culture depends upon, grows out of, and is shaped by its past,” she said. “It is the past that has shaped all of us, it is our past that contains the bonds that can really hold us together.”
It’s what makes the study — and threat to — American history unique among nations. Benton-Cohen said that is what she sees happen with her students.
“The American striving to realize the democratic faith and all the difficulties it entailed and challenges overcome should inspire pride, not shame,” she said. “If you feel shame, as the kids would say, that’s a ‘you’ problem. That’s why I still fly the flag at my house; I’m not afraid of the American past, I’m alive with the possibilities — of finding common cause, of fighting for equality, of appreciating our shared humanity, of upholding our freedoms.”
Joyce Vance was US Attorney for Northern Alabama and a steady voice of reason. She wonders in this post what it will take to awaken Republicans to Trump’s erosion of the Constitution and our rights.
She writes:
Why doesn’t any of this break through? Why do Republicans still support Trump?
The reporting in The Atlantic on the Signal chain? The voter suppression executive order Trump issued…? The foul-ups in deporting supposed gang members who turn out not to be? Why aren’t Americans out on the streets protesting in massive numbers like we have seen people in other countries doing—Israel, Georgia, Turkey, South Korea, and others? In part, it’s because a large number of people who are Trump supporters just don’t care. Their guy can do anything, and they don’t care. They’ll believe any lie, and they’ll ignore any horrible; they’re all in for Trump for reasons the rest of us still struggle to understand.
The question is, how many of the rest of us are there? By that I mean Americans who, regardless of party affiliation, still care about truth and democracy. Those words are no longer just philosophical notions to be bandied about, an elite construct. They are the reality of what we are fighting a rearguard action to try and save.
Statistics from the last election provide reason for some optimism. Donald Trump won with 49.9% of the popular vote. Although he has claimed he has a mandate for a radical transformation of government, the numbers just don’t back that up. And they don’t suggest there’s a mandate for putting out military information on a Signal chain being used on personal phones, rather than on secured government systems. If there ever truly was a mandate for Trump, the reality is, it’s evaporating day by day as egg prices stay high and people lose their jobs. And now, there’s this, a cavalier disregard for the safety of our troops, lax security with one member of the Signal group apparently in Russia while communications were ongoing, what looks like an effort to do an end run around government records retention procedures.
Will the Atlantic story break through? It should. Trump’s Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, his CIA director, his DNI, all put American pilots in harm’s way. If that’s not enough for Senate Republicans to break ranks with Trump, especially those on subcommittees that have oversight into military and intelligence community operations, it’s hard to imagine what would be.
Why use Signal in the first place when American leaders have some of the most secure communications technology in the world available to them? Is it just for convenience? If so, that’s sloppy, and they should be committing to do better, not arguing over whether the information was classified or not. (But if it looks like a duck…)
The truth is that by going to Signal, they avoided leaving a paper trail. No annoying records that could be unearthed down the road. Remember Trump’s first impeachment? It came about in large part because after the call where he threatened Ukraine’s president with withholding security aid if he wouldn’t announce his country was investigating Joe Biden for financial misconduct, records of the call were buried inside a classified information system where they didn’t belong. That was what got the ball rolling. It was about trying to hide records of an official call that everyone knew was wrong.
As far as we know at this point, there was nothing improper about the attack on the Houthis. So why were high-ranking members of the Trump administration communicating off the books? How pervasive is the practice, and who knows/authorizes it? We are a government of the people. Transparency isn’t optional. There are rules about public records that have to be followed, and this president who likes to operate in secret and at the margins of our laws has frequently tried to skirt them.
It’s hard to imagine that the Signal chain for the Houthi attack was just a one-off, that they only went to Signal for this moment. Is this how this new government is operating routinely—off the books, in a hidden fashion designed to avoid scrutiny and accountability?
It may seem like a minor point with everything else that’s going on, but this is how autocrats work, not how a democracy operates. That’s the danger we are now facing, and this is another marker on the path to tyranny.
Calls are mounting for Hegseth and others to resign. Anyone who would engage in this kind of behavior and then argue that it was not improper rather than apologizing and promising to do better should leave government, whether voluntarily or not. But they should never have been confirmed in the first place. There is a cancer on the heart of the presidency, to quote from the Watergate era, and it’s infecting all of us.
Trump is following through on his frequent threats to punish anyone who crossed him in the past. He recently ordered his compliant Attorney General to investigate two men who were critical of him during his first term. Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, wrote about the tyrannical nature of this action and about Pam Bondi’s willingness to do whatever he wants.
Donald Trump’s presidential payback tour rages on, and now it’s personal. It’s one thing to target multi-billion dollar law firms, universities, and media outlets for organizational retribution; those efforts, aimed at stifling and punishing any criticism or dissent, are reprehensible in their own right. But now Trump is going after individual private citizens, using the might of the Executive Branch to potentially throw his detractors in prison.
In a pair of official proclamations – rendered no less unhinged by the use of official fonts and White House letterhead – Trump identifies two targets who worked in the federal government during his first tenure and dared to speak out publicly against him. First: Chris Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from 2018 to 2020 and made headlines when he publicly contradicted Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. For this act of heretical truth-telling, Trump labels Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor” – whatever the hell that means – who poses grave “risks” to the American public.
And then there’s Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official who publicly criticized the President in an anonymous book and various media appearances. Taylor, like Krebs, purportedly poses “risks” to the United States, is a “bad-faith actor” (though apparently not a significant one like Krebs) and “stoked dissension” with his public commentary.
Are you scared? Don’t you fear the “risks” posed by these two monsters?
True to the form he has displayed when going after disfavored law firms, Trump hits below the belt. The President orders security clearances stripped not only from Krebs and Taylor but also from everyone who works with them (Krebs at a private cybersecurity firm, Taylor at the University of Pennsylvania). He’s punishing his targets – plus their employers and colleagues, First Amendment freedom of association be darned.
It gets worse. In a separate set of orders, Trump directed the Attorney General to open criminal investigations of Krebs and Taylor. Notably absent from the orders is any plausible notion that either might have committed a federal crime. This hardly needs to be said, but it’s not a federal crime to be a “bad-faith actor,” to “stoke dissension,” or even to be a “wise guy,” as Trump called Krebs from the Oval Office.
The next move is Pam Bondi’s – and we know how this will go.
Any reasonable, ethical attorney general would follow the bedrock principle that a prosecutor must have “predication” – some kernel of fact on which to believe a crime might have been committed – to open a criminal investigation. The bar is low, but it serves the vital purpose of preventing precisely the baseless retributive inquests that Trump has now ordered up. In observance of this foundational precept, even Bill Barr – the subject of sharp criticism in my first book, Hatchet Man – generally ignored Trump’s public pleas for the arrests of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and others. Like the exhausted parent of an unruly toddler, Barr would mostly sit back and let the tantrum pass.
Don’t count on Bondi taking the same course of passive resistance to the President. She has already shown her true colors, and they’re whatever shade Trump pleases. For example, despite the distinct possibility of criminality by top administration officials around the Signal scandal, the AG refused even to investigate. Instead, she decreed – after zero inquiry, with zero evidence – that information about military attack plans was somehow not classified, and that nobody had acted recklessly. Case closed, no inquiry needed.
Bondi no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. She’s in the bag for Trump. The question now is whether she’ll cross the line that even Barr, her crooked predecessor, would not, and use the Justice Department’s staggering investigative power as an offensive weapon.
Even if DOJ investigates but concludes it cannot bring a criminal charge, the threat to Krebs and Taylor is real. Any criminal inquiry takes an enormous toll on its subject; subpoenas fly, friends and colleagues get pulled into the grand jury, phones get seized and searched, legal costs mount, professional reputations suffer, personal ties fray. Ask anyone who has been investigated by the Justice Department but not indicted. They’ll tell you it’s a nightmare.
If Bondi does somehow convince a grand jury to indict somebody for something, Trump has unwittingly handed both Krebs and Taylor a potent defense: selective prosecution, which applies where an individual has been singled out for improper purposes. Exhibit A (for the defense): Trump’s own grand proclamations, which openly confess to his personal and political motives for ordering a Justice Department inquiry. Selective prosecution defenses rarely succeed, often because prosecutors typically don’t commit their improper motives to paper. But this would be the rare case where the evidence is so plain – it’s on White House letterhead, signed by the President – that a judge could hardly overlook it.
Trump has long made a habit of threatening his opponents with criminal prosecution through social media posts and by spontaneous outbursts from the lectern. Until now, it was mostly bluster, a public form of scream therapy for the capricious commander-in-chief. But now it’s in writing, from the president to the attorney general, who typically jumps to attention to serve whatever suits the boss, prosecutorial standards be darned. Trump’s dark fantasies are coming to life.
Elie Honig served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for 8.5 years and as the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice at the Office of Attorney General for the State of New Jersey for 5.5 years. He is currently a legal Analyst for CNN and Executive Director at Rutgers Institute for Secure Communities
In his vendetta against law firms who represented his opponents, universities whose high standards offend him, and anyone who dared to stand up to his lies, Trump has selected two former government employees for retribution. These actions are typical of dictators. Trump is wannabe dictator. He certainly aspires to be a full-fledged fascist. He has a compliant Departnent of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi thinks she works for Trump, not the people of the United States.
President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive ordering the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him.
Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.
Taylor, who served as the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering, New York Times Op-ed, titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“, and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous,” detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump
“You can’t have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he’s guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we’ll find out.”
The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”
Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”…
It’s almost funny to see Trump criticize anyone for failure to be faithful to their “constitutional oath,” since he has violated his own constitutional oath on a daily basis.
Last weekend, the Network for Public Education hosted its conference in Columbus, Ohio. Since our first conference in 2013 in Austin, everyone has said “this is the best ever,” and they said it again on April 7.
The attendees included the newly re-elected State Superintendent of Schools in Minnesota, Jill Underly. The Democratic leader of the Texas House Education Committee, Gina Hinojosa. Numerous teachers of the year from many states. Parent leaders from across the nation.
The Phyllis Bush Award for grassroots organizing was won by the Wisconsin Public Education Network, a parent-led group, who have stood firm for their public schools.
The David Award for the individual or group who courageously stands up to powerful forces on behalf of public schools and their students was won by Pastor Charles Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children, whose organization has fought against Governor Greg Abbott and the billionaires who want to impose vouchers, despite their failure everywhere else and the harm they will wreak on rural schools.
The last speaker was Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota and former Democratic candidate for Vice President in 2024. He was warm, funny, and inspiring.
Nearly 400 educators attended the conference from all across the nation, and everyone stayed to hear Governor Walz, who was wonderful. In time, I will post videos of the main presentations, including his. April 7 was his birthday, and it was too late to get a birthday cake. But two veteran educators left the hotel to find a bakery and returned with a cake.
I introduced Randi Weingarten and reminded the audience that Mike Pompeo had called her “the most dangerous person in the world,” which she should wear as a badge of honor.
Randi gave a rip-roaring speech that brought the audience to its feet. She presented Governor Walz with his birthday cake and everything sang “Happy birthday.”
He was fabulous. He was supposed to slip away at the end of his speech, through a private back door but someone caught up with him and asked for a selfie. Of course, he obliged. Within minutes, it appeared that at least 250 or more people were standing in line for a selfie. He did not leave. He signed autographs and posed for selfies with everyone who wanted one.
He is humble, self-effacing, has a crackling dry wit, and is most definitely a people person.
In the opening session on Friday night, I engaged in a Q & A with Josh Cowen about his recent book: The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Again, the room was overflowing. Josh was excellent at explaining the terrible results of vouchers and how they turned into a subsidy for wealthy families. Why do politicians continue to promote them. The billionaire money is irresistible.
The panels were fabulous. I participated in one about the close link between public schools and democracy. The room was packed, and we had people lining the walls. A panel led by Derek Black, law professor at the university of South Carolina, and Yohuru Williams, dean of the University of Saint Thomas in St. Paul, talked about the history of Black education, inspired by Derek’s new book Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.
Public schools are in the crosshairs of the Trump Administration. The fact that they have failed matters not at all to religious zealots and libertarians. The fact that they bust state budgets doesn’t matter. The fact that they are a subsidy for rich families doesn’t matter. Those rich families will vote for the politicians who gave them a gift.
The urgency of standing up for public schools, defending their teachers, protecting their students, and fighting censorship of books and curriculum has never been more important than now.
The Network for Public Education is committed to stand up for kids, teachers, public schools, and communities. .
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