In the U.S., the law requires due process and a presumption of innocence. The Trump administration bypassed the rule of law so they could create the illusion of a crackdown on dangerous immigrants.
The Miami Herald said:
The day after he was arrested while working at a restaurant in Texas, Mervin Jose Yamarte Fernandez climbed out of a plane in shackles in El Salvador, bound for the largest mega-prison in Latin America. His sister, Jare, recognized him in a video shared on social media. As masked guards shaved detainees’ heads and led them into cells at the maximum-security complex,
Yamarte Fernandez turned his gaze slowly to the camera. “He was asking for help. And that help didn’t come from the lips. It came from the soul,” said Jare, who asked to be identified by her nickname because she fears for her family’s safety and who added her brother has no previous criminal record. “You know when someone has their soul broken.”
Yamarte Fernandez, 29, is among 238 Venezuelans the Trump administration accused of being gang members without providing public evidence and sent over the weekend to El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center, a prison about 45 miles from the capital designed to hold up to 40,000 people as part of a crackdown on gangs. They will be jailed for at least one year, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said in a statement on X, following a deal brokered between the two countries in February.
His sister identified him in a video shared on social media by the Salvadoran government. “He shouldn’t be imprisoned in El Salvador, let alone in a dangerous prison like the one where the Mara Salvatruchas are held,” his sister told the Miami Herald.
“These heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American people,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
But families of three men who appear to have been deported and imprisoned in El Salvador told the Miami Herald that their relatives have no gang affiliation – and two said their relatives had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. One has been previously accused by the U.S. government of ties to the feared Tren de Aragua gang, but his family denies any connection.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to Miami Herald questions about what criteria was used to select detainees sent to El Salvador, what the plan is for detainees incarcerated abroad, and whether the government had defied a federal judge’s orders to send them there.
Thom Hartmann asks a question that we should all ask? Why is there so much poverty in a land of plenty? Why is there such disparity in access to medical care? Why do working class people vote to elect a billionaire who is surrounded by other billionaires? Why did they think he had their best interests at heart when he has no heart?
Thom begins:
Welcome to America’s sickest reality show — where families turn to crowdfunding for cancer treatments while billionaires hoard obscene wealth. In no other developed nation do sick children depend on charity to survive, but here, it’s just another episode of our rigged system…
Consider the ubiquitous ad for the company that buys life insurance policies. The senior citizen in the ad says something to the effect of, “We learned that we could sell our policy when a friend did so to pay their medical bills.”
Wait a minute: we live in the richest country in the world, with the richest billionaires in the world, and we have people who must sell their life insurance policies — depriving their middle-class kids of an inheritance — because somebody got sick?
That sure isn’t happening in most European countries, Canada, Costa Rica, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea.
While every year over a half-million American families are wiped out so badly by medical debt that they must file for bankruptcy and often become homeless, the number of sickness-caused bankruptcies in all those countries combined is zero.
Another ad is for a company that sells “reverse mortgages” that let people strip equity out of their homes to cover living and medical expenses. Tom Sellick is a nice guy and all, but are there really that many seniors who are now destitute and thus must wipe out their largest store of wealth just to retire? And how much worse will this get as Elon Musk guts the Social Security administration?
Then there’s the ad for the Shriner’s hospital for children. One of the kids in the ad says to the camera that she was able to walk “because of people like you!” Here in American we must resort to crowdfunding medical care for children with deformities and birth defects? What the hell?
Why aren’t we all funding cancer cures and help for disabled for kids with our tax dollars? With, at the very least, the tax dollars of America’s billionaires?
Oh, yeah, that’s right: billionaires in America pretty much don’t pay income taxes any more, and haven’t since Reagan.
That ad is often followed by one for colostrum, a milk product that is supposed to help the immune system, with the ad’s pitch-lady saying something like, “There are over 90,000 chemicals in our environment that haven’t been tested for toxicity…”
Donald Trump had a long conversation with Putin. They agreed to terms for a ceasefire. The conversation did not include President Zelensky of Ukraine. The U.S.-Russia ceasefire plan was, of course, favorable to the invader. Trump has never felt that it was necessary to find terms that were acceptable to Ukraine.
Putin agreed to stop targeting energy facilities. Hours after agreeing to this, Russia bombed an energy facility, knocking out the energy in one of Ukraine’s major cities.
Viktor Kravchuk is a Ukrainian. He was born in Dnipro and now lives in Kyiv. He is a graphic designer whose posts are found on Substack.
They talked about Ukraine, but Ukraine wasn’t at the table. They spoke of peace, but the bombs kept falling.
They called it a ceasefire, but it’s nothing more than a gift to a war criminal.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had their little phone call, their moment of mutual admiration. Trump, a convicted felon. Putin, a wanted war criminal. And together, they came to an agreement: a ceasefire that Ukraine never asked for, that Ukraine was never even consulted on.
As they spoke, Ukraine was under massive missile attack. This is the “result” of their negotiations.
Trump calls it peace. But do you call it peace when entire families are buried under rubble? When stolen Ukrainian children are still trapped in Russia, renamed, brainwashed, erased? When the invader still occupies your home, your city, your country?
That is not peace. That is submission.
Trump says the war “should never have started”, as if it was some tragic accident. As if Ukraine had a choice in whether its cities were bombed, its women raped, its people abducted.
The war didn’t merely “start.” Russia attacked. Putin attacked.
And now Trump wants to reward him with a deal. Not a deal for Ukraine. Not a deal for justice. A deal for Putin, so he can stabilize his economy, sell his gas, stockpile his weapons, and prepare for the next round of war.
Can you believe that?
A ceasefire doesn’t mean Russian troops leave. It doesn’t mean war criminals face trial. It doesn’t mean justice for Bucha, for Mariupol, for every city turned to rubble by Russian bombs.
It means Russia gets time. Time to regroup, time to rearm, time to prepare for another slaughter, another invasion, another genocide.
Because let’s take things clear: this is a war of extermination.
Russia doesn’t just want land. It wants Ukraine erased. Our culture, our people, our history. Russia wants Ukraine to stop existing.
And Trump, whether through cowardice or corruption, probably both, is handing Putin exactly what he wants.
Trump’s plan is simple: protect Russian oil and gas so Putin can keep funding his war.
Not a word about returning abducted Ukrainian children.
Not a word about stopping Russian missile strikes on civilians.
Not a word about justice for those tortured in the occupied territories.
Because this was never about peace. It was about business.About “huge economic deals.”
About Trump’s personal interests.
About the wealthy few who stand to profit from Russian gas, from war, from suffering.
The mask is off. There is no diplomacy, no neutrality here. This is Trump openly doing Putin’s bidding, propping up a dictator who has spent the last 25 years waging war, silencing dissent, assassinating opponents, killing anyone who stands in his way.
We don’t need a ceasefire. We need Russian troops out of Ukraine.
We need war criminals on trial in The Hague. We need the return of every stolen Ukrainian child.
A ceasefire without withdrawal is surrender. Would you call it peace if an intruder broke into your home, killed your family, stole your belongings, then sat down at your table and told you to move on?
A ceasefire without justice tells every dictator that war crimes work.
That genocide is just a phase of war, not a crime.
A ceasefire without Ukraine at the table is an insult. As if Ukraine is some distant land, not a country of millions of people fighting for their lives.
No, we will not accept a “peace” that lets Russia keep its stolen land, its mass graves, its war crimes.
No, we will not pretend that Trump and Putin are negotiating peace when they are simply negotiating how best to carve up a nation that refuses to die.
They are making their choices. To accept occupation, to let war crimes go unpunished.
But we also need to make our choice.
We have already chosen to fight.
If this were your land, what choice would you make?
Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor at Howard University and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She writes a blog called Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, where this post appeared. Open the link to see her footnotes.
“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment. The time is always now.”
-James Baldwin
Illustration by Nick Liu
The past week has shown us in stark terms what it means to fight – to actually fight – to protect against the rise of authoritarians. This week we also saw that somehow, despite years of preparation, some of the leaders of our most powerful institutions seem unprepared for the particular nature of this fight. Others appear just…. unwilling to engage.
Last week the Trump Administration took its most bold actions yet. Through the actions of either Trump himself, Elon Musk or members of Trump’s cabinet, this Administration has:
· Unleashed an unprecedented attack on higher education, the centerpiece of which was a targeted attack on Columbia University. In a letter sent to the University, the Administration[i]demanded that university essentially turn over its decision-making to the Trump Administration, insisting that the University close the Middle Eastern Studies Dept, ban mask-wearing, expel students involved in pro-Palestine protests, and announced the withholding of $400 million in federal dollars until the University accedes to Trump’s demands, unless the University took these actions to address “antisemitism on campus.” The Administration underscored its intentions by entering student dormitories and arresting a Palestinian student who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. As his 8-month-pregnant wife looked on helplessly, ICE officers arrested Mr. Khalil and then disappeared him, moving him from facility to facility, and offering only vague and unsubstantiated justifications for his arrest. His central “crime” appears to be “advancing positions that are contrary to the foreign policy of this Administration,”[ii]– a concept so staggeringly outrageous it can scarcely be absorbed.
· Fired half the staff of the Department of Education[iii] – as a down-payment on the Administration’s vow to close the agency.
· Indicated its intention to “eliminate Social Security;”[iv]
· Continued firing government workers and removing funding from government agencies including NIH[v] and shuttering offices like the Voice of America.
· Intensified tariffs against Canada and rhetoric suggesting that the sovereign nation of Canada should be annexed to the U.S.;[vi] declared that the European Union was created to “screw the U.S.”; declared that the South African Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome,[vii] continuing the Administration’s Musk-inspired determination to recognize racist white settlers as victims of Black rule.
· Issued Executive Orders targeting law firms who have litigated cases against Trump in the classified documents cases and who provided pro bono counsel to Special Counsel Jack Smith, removing security clearances and blocking government connected work.
· Argued in court that transgender soldiers should be removed from the military.[viii]
· Removed information about Black, Asian American and women military heroes from the Arlington National cemetery website,[ix]disappearing the accomplishments of people of color and women from official recognition.
And that’s just part of it.
But the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule has been busy as well:
· Protests across the country have demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student taken into custody.[x]
· “Tesla Take Down” protests at Tesla dealerships across the country in protest against Elon Musk’s takeover of our government have been so effective in tanking the brand and its stock price,[xi] that President Trump turned the White House into a car lot and personally embodied the used car salesman he was destined to be (if not for his father’s money) in an attempt to gin up Tesla sales.
· Protests nationwide continue to demand an end to government worker firings.
· Voters have shown up at town halls across the country to express anger about proposed plans to cut Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security[xii].
· Lawsuits filed by parents,[xiii] and by a score of states[xiv] have challenged the closing of the Education Department.
· Perkins Coie, the law firm targeted by Trump boldly challenged the Trump administration’s effort to blackball the firm and imperil its business;[xv]
· Federal courts have required Trump to rehire thousands of federal employees fired by DOGE[xvi]
· Federal courts have enjoined Trump’s efforts to freeze spending on governments grants and other funding.[xvii]
· Federal courts enjoined the Administration from removing migrants targeted under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act – a decision the Trump Administration has defied.[xviii]
But the big stories last week were less about those who have protested and sued, and more about those among the most powerful institutional actors who appear to have lost the plot. Political scientists Steve Levitsky and Ryan Enos offered a blistering and spot-on condemnation of universities that have remained silent in the face of Trump’s authoritarian challenge to the freedom of universities.[xix]Calling out Harvard University specifically (where both scholars teach) for its silence in the face of the hideous attacks on Columbia University, Levitsky and Enos condemned the inaction of universities that have chosen a strategy of “lying low, avoiding public debate (and sometimes cooperating with the administration) in the hope of mitigating the coming assault.”[xx]
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has faced a wave of outrage and demands for resignation after his decision to vote in favor of cloture to avert a government shutdown. To be sure, the Democrats have few options for stopping the Republicans, who are firmly in the majority in the House and Senate from torching our government. But as many of us have been reminded ad nauseum during the years when Democrats controlled the Senate, the filibuster is one of the few procedural rules the party in the minority in the Senate has to counter being overrun by the majority.
But frustratingly, although Democrats were unwilling to abolish the filibuster in 2022 to advance their agenda, last week they were unwilling to use the filibuster to defy the Republican power grab. Heads the Republicans win. Tails the Democrats lose.
It was hard to understand the point of Democrats affixing their signature to a continuing resolution to fund a government that is being cut to the bone every day by Elon Musk – an unelected billionaire with no official government position – who has been permitted to usurp the appropriation power of Congress. When Trump and Musk lawlessly gut agencies and fire government workers, and Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus cede the power of Congress to the President, we are in a constitutional crisis.
Trump and Musk’s anti-constitutional usurpation of congressional power with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress is an emergency. It demands an emergency response. Minority Leader Schumer and 7 other Democratic Senators (and I suspect more who were covered by the Leader’s unpopular action) were unprepared to meet the moment in a way that would have upped the stakes. Sometimes when the game is fixed, you have to overturn the tables.
I will concede a serious point Schumer later offered that got lost in the Comms disaster of his Wednesday night statement that suggested there would be a shutdown, and then his Thursday morning announcement that he would vote to avert one. If the government shutdown happened, there would be little chance of obtaining judicial orders enjoining decisions by Trump/Musk to eliminate programs, because legally during a government closure, the President enjoys unfettered power to determine which functions of government are “essential” – standard to which the courts would likely defer. By contrast, with the government open, challenges to DOGE firings and closures continue to do fairly well in the courts and have slowed down the force of Musk’s chainsaw.
In any case, Schumer’s decision and perhaps moreso the clumsy comms that accompanied it have resulted in boiling outrage within the base of the party, including calls for him to step down from leadership.
Of course, none of this compares to the perfidy of the Republican Party. We must never forget the unconscionable and dastardly conduct of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans in the House and Senate – men and women who have abdicated their allegiance to this country and to democracy itself. Their cowardice and complicity in the destruction of this country must never be forgotten or whitewashed. Their betrayal is singular and historic.
But there’s another group that is failing to meet this moment. America’s corporate leadership has been nearly silent during one of the most volatile economic periods in years. Last week the stock market took a nosedive – entering “correction” status as a result of Trump’s manic and unhinged tariff announcements. [xxi] Trump’s erratic tariffs – up one day, down the next, up again two weeks later – are lunacy. Every rational business leader knows that.[xxii] The predictable market response to Trump’s irrationality threatens the retirement plans of older Americans hoping to retire and the American economy. America’s leadership in the world has been compromised by Trump’s saber-rattling, and his insistence on imperialist moves towards Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland, is destabilizing the integrity of perception of American stability. Combined with the massive government lawyers, Trump’s policies are bad for America and bad for business.
As Trump literally tanks the American economy and the trust of the international business community, where are the voices of America’s business leaders? Are they all hoping that Trump will do a commercial on the White House lawn hawking their products too? Are the leaders of the Business Roundtable (200 CEOs of the nation’s leading corporations) agnostic about the President’s stubborn insistence on policies that are wrecking the U.S. economy and our standing in the world?
These same business leaders enabled the lie that Trump is a “successful businessperson” – knowing full well that Trump does not seem to know what he’s talking about when he wades into economics, knowing of his six bankruptcies, knowing of his refusal to pay contractors, his false representations, and knowing that no responsible Fortune 500 CEO would ever have gone into business with Trump before he was elected President, or even after. Being wealthy is not the same as being a successful businessperson and they all know it.
In an interview on CNBC, even host Maria Bartiromo – a Trump sycophant – felt compelled to remind Trump that successful business leaders need predictability to make coherent decisions about investments, infrastructure, expansion, and product development for markets. She noted that the up-and-down tariff mania undermines predictability. Trump responded, “well they say that. It sounds good to say.” Really? Is that it? Or is it a fundamental tenet of business that even a first year MBA student would know? At other times last week he has repeated with “we’re gonna have so much money from the tariffs” with a desperate insistence that suggested mental instability.
American corporations have either tried to placate Trump by paying tribute,[xxiii] or have “crawled into a protective shell” like the university officials called out by Levitsky and Enos. In either case, it is utterly irresponsible. Their voices and influence – presented collectively and forcefully – are critical to protecting the economic interests of this country, and our democracy. Their failure to act is a betrayal of their responsibility as citizens.
Media owners have shamed themselves – whitewashing their teams,[xxiv] surrendering the independence and diversity of their editorial pages,[xxv] and taking a knee before Trump’s demands rather than standing firm in the face of the challenge to our democracy.[xxvi]
In the week ahead, there will be many additional opportunities for leaders from our most powerful democratic institutions to meet this moment. Already it appears that the Trump Administration has defied a federal court order to turn around planes taking Venezuelan migrants accused of being to El Salvador.[xxvii] The Administration announced that the first 250 migrants arrived in El Salvador.[xxviii] What does that mean? Two hundred-fifty Venezuelan nationals have been disappeared into the one of the world’s most notoriously abusive prisons in El Salvador, without judicially approved trials or due process.
What will judges do as Trump appears to defy judicial orders? This week will test the readiness of our judiciary to defend the rule of law.
Meanwhile ordinary people have been showing tremendous leadership, protesting, launching and participating in boycotts, conducting teach-ins, calling their elected representatives every week, sometimes several times a week, visiting district offices, participating in “die-ins,” writing letters and petitions, and building support for opposition candidates in special elections. A “mass march” has been announced by the organization Hands/Off for April 5th, although information is still spotty [please drop info in the comments]. Black churches have launched a 40-day Lenten boycott of Target for its obsequious abandonment of its DEI commitments.[xxix]
Every day we are called upon to meet the moment. As we see our neighbors seized by plainclothes agents without judicial warrants, and see our workplaces “obey in advance” – removing from websites, official policies and even mission statements expressing their commitment to equality and to inclusion, and as we see law firms crouch before this Administration’s threats, and media outlets silence voices that write the truth about this Administration, we have to decide how we will respond.
All over America ordinary people are looking into their toolboxes of non-violent actions and determining which ones they will use. It’s been beautiful to see.
But we must not absolve the leaders of our most powerful institutions – those who have the money and power, and influence to insulate themselves from the worst consequences of this Administration’s excesses – from their obligation to act and to meet the moment.
To those who are business leaders, captains of industry, university leaders, and media owners, decide who you will be at this moment. If we fully lose democracy in this country, it will be because the most privileged among us refused to accept the responsibility to speak out, to say “no more,” and to lead. History will not kindly remember those who left it to Americans with considerably less power and protection, to do the hard work of saving this country. Your tax cuts will not be large enough to cover your shame. And we will remember.
This speech by French Senator Claude Malhuret went viral. It has been translated and reproduced at least 1 million times. I personally have received several copies of his speech from friends and family. Recently, it has been translated and published in The Atlantic. Senator Malhuret expresses the shock and dismay that many of us feel about Trump’s decision to abandon Ukraine and Europe and to align the United States with Russia. Please read what he said. This is not normal.
Senator Malhuret said:
Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.
The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.
Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.
This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.
I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.
Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.
That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.
And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.
What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.
Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.
At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”
We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.
With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.
The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.
Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.
This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.
Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.
Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.
Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.
They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb. The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.
Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.
The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.
The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.
Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised at his confirmation hearings that he was no longer a vaccine-denier and swore he would follow the science.
He lied.
When addressing the death of a Mennonite child in Texas who was unvaccinated, Kennedy attributed the death to poor nutrition and lack of exercise, not to her parents’ failure to get her vaccinated. He emphasized that the choice to get vaccinated was personal, not a matter of public health. And he reiterated the risks of getting vaccinated. He is an unrepentant vaccine-denier. The Atlantic just published a story by Tom Bartlett, who interviewed the child’s father. Mennonites don’t trust vaccines. Bartlett points out that before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, 400-500 measles deaths occurred every year. Measles deaths are rare now.
In a sweeping interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas that strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments.
He issued a muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community, but said the choice was a personal one. He suggested that measles vaccine injuries were more common than known, contrary to extensive research.
He asserted that natural immunity to measles, gained through infection, somehow also protected against cancer and heart disease, a claim not supported by research.
He cheered on questionable treatments like cod liver oil, and said that local doctors had achieved “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.
The worsening measles outbreak, which has largely spread through a Mennonite community in Gaines County, has infected nearly 200 people and killed a child, the first such death in the United States in 10 years.
The interview, which lasted 35 minutes, was posted online by Fox News last week, just before the President Trump’s address to Congress. Segments had been posted earlier, but the full version received little attention.
Mr. Kennedy offered conflicting public health messages as he tried to reconcile the government’s longstanding endorsement of vaccines with his own decades-long skepticism.
Vaccines are “recommended” for West Texans, but the risks of immunization have been underestimated, he said.
Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that vaccines “do prevent infection” and said that the federal government was helping ensure that people have access to “good medicines, including those who want them, to vaccines.”
“In highly unvaccinated communities like Mennonites, it’s something that we recommend,” he said.
Mr. Kennedy described vaccination as a personal choice that must be respected, then went on to raise frightening concerns about the safety of the vaccines.
He said he’d been told that a dozen Mennonite children had been injured by vaccines in Gaines County. People in the community wanted federal health workers arriving in Texas “to also look at our vaccine-injured kids and look them in the eye,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Yet the M.M.R. vaccine itself has been thoroughly studied and is safe. There is no link to autism, as the secretary has claimed in the past. While all vaccines have occasional adverse effects, health officials worldwide have concluded that the benefits far outweigh the very small risks of vaccination.
Mr. Kennedy asserted otherwise: “We don’t know what the risk profile is for these products. We need to restore government trust. And we’re going to do that by telling the truth, and by doing rigorous science to understand both safety and efficacy issues….”
In later comments, Mr. Kennedy suggested that severe symptoms mainly affected people who were unhealthy before contracting measles.
“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” he said, adding later that “we see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen.”
West Texas is “kind of a food desert,” he added. Malnutrition “may have been an issue” for the child who died of measles in Gaines County.
Texas health officials said the child had “no known underlying conditions.”
Dr. Wendell Parkey, a physician in Gaines County with many Mennonite patients, said the idea that the community was malnourished was mistaken.
Mennonites often avoid processed foods, raise their own livestock and make their own bread, he noted. From a very young age, many members of the community also help with farming and other physically demanding jobs.
“They’re the healthiest people out here,” he said. “Nutritionally, I would put them up against anybody.”
Bill Kristol was a prominent conservative until Trump. He edited The Weekly Standard. Now he is an outspoken critic of Trump because Trump is betraying America and is destroying the Republican Party. In this post, he speaks out against Trump’s craven abandonment of Ukraine and his craven embrace of Putin.
He writes:
The betrayal of Ukraine continues apace.
On Friday, President Donald Trump stopped sharing American intelligence with Ukraine, and Russia responded by immediately stepping up its strikes on civilian Ukrainian targets.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk explained the situation succinctly: “This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians. More bombs, more aggression, more victims.”
But Tusk was being diplomatic. He was maintaining the pretense that Trump was merely foolishly or wishfully appeasing Putin. Trump isn’t acting foolishly or wishfully. He wants to help Putin.
Indeed, the distinguished military historian Phillips P. O’Brien wrote on Saturday:
What we have seen over the last few days is so extreme that it deserves to be said out loud and acknowledged as soon as possible. The United States has not just abandoned Ukraine, the United States is now actively helping Vladimir Putin and the Russian state kill Ukrainians to try and force Ukraine to accept a bad peace deal that very well might spell the end of their country. At the same time, the USA is now bending over backwards to help protect the Russian military.
O’Brien provides evidence for these charges, which you can and should read if you have the stomach for it. And since O’Brien’s newsletter, we’ve had reports that Trump won’t restore military aid with Ukraine even if there’s a deal on mineral resources, and that the Trump administration wants to depose Volodymyr Zelensky as president.
As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser remarks: “Trump’s demands right now are Putin’s demands.”
By Sunday night, Trump was telling reporters that the administration had “just about” lifted the pause on Ukraine intel sharing. But the details of the lift were left unclear. Indeed, the alleged willingness to lift the pause seems to be laying the groundwork for failing to do so, or for putting the pause on again, when Zelensky fails to make sufficient concessions for “peace.”
Those looking for optimism continue to try to advance the proposition that Trump is merely stepping back a bit in Europe to focus on the China threat. But there are reports that China, Russia, and Iran are now engaged in new naval exercises near Iran’s Chabahar port. This is only one of many instances of the autocracies of Europe and Asia working together.
And the fact is that Trump wants to cut deals with all the autocrats—with Russia, China, Iran, and for that matter North Korea. Those are the leaders with whom he wants to work to make the world safe for autocracy.
Not all Republicans are on board this agenda. The Reaganite pulse in the GOP still beats, if faintly. And so one reads about Hill Republicans having concerns about Trump’s policy. But as Adam Kinzinger mordantly remarked about his former colleagues: “If only they had votes in say, a legislative body, to do something about it. But no, they can only be ‘concerned.’”
Three House Republicans. Four GOP senators. That’s what it might take to stop or impede Trump’s sellout of Ukraine. They could vow not to support Trump’s agenda, and to vote with the Democrats if necessary, as long as the betrayal of Ukraine continues. They could start with the government funding bill that must pass by the end of this week.
But no, Hill Republicans are still bending the knee to Trump.
And so a Republican who’s been staunchly pro-Ukraine like GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick feels he has to pretend that cutting off intelligence sharing with Ukraine is :an escalate to de-escalate tactic by the administration to bring these parties to the table.”
An escalate to de-escalate tactic.
The mental gymnastics of Republicans who know better, but who do not want to confront Trump, never cease to amaze.
It’s all sickening. It’s sickening to see the betrayal of Ukraine, because one thinks of what will happen to the Ukrainian people.
But it’s also sickening to see the betrayal of Ukraine because of what it will say about what’s happening to us.
I don’t know if the Americans will grasp that in Mr. Zelensky’s dignity lies their “city upon a hill” creed and that American leaders, from the Founding Fathers all the way to Kennedy and Reagan, would have been proud of a deep bond with this leader.
I don’t know, really, if any of this will be properly understood after that incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity—call it what you will—in the Oval Office.
It’s proper to blame President Trump for the “incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity” in the Oval Office. But Trump’s our president. It’s our Oval Office. If Americans in both parties don’t do their utmost to check and overturn the president’s actions, we will all have been part of the betrayal of Ukraine. We will all have been part of a betrayal of America.
During his campaign, Trump pledged to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed. Trump didn’t care. He claims that the Department is filled with “radical Marxists” and “left wing lunatics” who are intent on indoctrinating children and promoting “gender ideology” that is sure to turn them gay or transgender.
This is absurd. About 99% of the employees of the Department process grants and contracts, oversee programs, and review submissions from the public and requests from Congress. They are not radical or Marxist. They have no influence on what is taught in the schools. None. A friend once quipped that the Department is a check-writing machine. It sends money appropriated by Congress to schools with large numbers of low-income students, it sends money to fund extra care for students with disabilities, it processes applications for college student aid. Its Office for Civil Rights investigates and acts on claims that students’ rights were violated.
I, along with many others, assumed that Trump would never be able to shut down the Department because he couldn’t do it without 60 votes in the Senate. He would never get 60 votes. There are only 53 Republicans in the Senate, and no Democrat would join them. Some Republicans might defect.
So Trump has taken an alternate route. Yesterday he fired about half the Department’s staff. Tomorrow he might fire more, maybe everyone but Secretary McMahon and her personal staff. The Department will be unable to function. It will be an empty shell.
And that’s how Trump gets what he wants. Not by following the law but by subverting it.
Despite the multiple pledges by Trump and Republicans that they would never custodial Security, don’t believe them. Republicans opposed Social Security when it was created by FDR, and many still thinks it’s socialism, even though it’s not a handout. People have paid for it throughout their working like.
Thom Hartmann says they are looking for ways to cut Social Security but to do it quietly, so you hardly notice. Trump’s Chief budget-cutter Elon Musk doesn’t understand why anyone needs Social Security. He was recently interviewed by Joe Rogan and said that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme.” It certainly is not. It’s not a grifter’s scheme to take people’s money. It pays out to everyone. Without it, very large numbers of older people would be impoverished.
Why would the world’s richest man know or care?
Hartmann warned:
The plan to “demolish” Social Security is underway right before our eyes: who will stop them?
The GOP’s plan to make Americans hate Social Security is well along in its execution. Their scheme — which they’ve been advancing in small increments for 44 years — is brilliantly simple: break the agency’s ability to respond to taxpayers, causing people to have to wait on the phone or travel for hours to stand in line for hours.
As complaints mount, Republicans will then point to the “broken Social Security Administration” and pitch a Medicare Advantage-like alternative: privatized “Social Security Advantage,” run by the big New York banks who are reliable GOP donors. Once a critical mass of seniors have moved from SS to the new privatized program, they’ll then just shut down legacy Social Security, arguing that “the free marketplace has spoken.”
The key to accelerating the process (Social Security’s administrative staff has been far too small for decades since Reagan first started cutting it) is a new demand from Trump’s acting Social Security Commissioner that the agency cut its workforce by fully fifty percent. Once that happens, all bets are off; the agency may not even be able to get checks out in a timely manner or process applications for new benefits, much less help SS recipients sign up or solve problems they may encounter.
As Congressman John Larson noted: “This is nothing more than a backdoor benefit cut and an insult to Americans who have paid into the system and earned their Social Security—all to pay for trillions in new tax cuts for the wealthy.”
Social Security Works president Nancy Altman was blunt: “Field offices around the country will close. Wait times for the 1-800 number will soar.” Larson added: “Let me be clear—laying off half of the workforce at the Social Security Administration and shuttering field offices will mean the delay, disruption, and denial of benefits.”
Meanwhile, Idaho’s Republican Senator Mike Crapo blocked Bernie Sanders’ attempt this week to give all seniors on Social Security a $2400 annual raise. Noting that the raise would be paid for by having people earning more than $250,000 a year start paying Social Security taxes on all their income above that amount (which is currently exempt from Social Security taxes), Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (a co-sponsor of the legislation) said, “The Social Security Expansion Act will protect the national treasure that is Social Security by extending the trust fund’s solvency for 75 years and expanding benefits by $2,400 a year so that everyone in America can retire with the security and dignity they deserve after a lifetime of hard work.”
But big banks and the morbidly rich object, and they own the GOP…
Trump often complained that the Biden administration had “weaponized” the Justice Department to persecute him. He has terminated everyone who had a role in the prosecution of federal charges against him. The boxes of classified documents that he took to Mar-a-Lago were returned to him.
So now he is actively politicizing the HR departments across the government. Most of those jobs were held by nonpartisan civil servants. They will be ousted and replaced with people loyal to Trump. The current occupants of these jobs are being punished for implementing the Biden administration’s DEI policies.
The Trump administration continued its efforts to politicize the upper echelons of the federal civil service Thursday, instructing agencies to reclassify chief human capital officer positions to allow political appointees to fill those roles.
The Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to agency heads Thursday recommending that all agencies where CHCOs are career-reserved positions—meaning only a career member of the Senior Executive Service can fill the post—request to change that designation to “SES general,” which allows either career executives or political appointees to assume the job. The federal government’s HR agency set a deadline of March 24 for agencies to comply.
In the memo, Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell argued that CHCO jobs have “become intensely politicized in recent years,” referring to the Biden administration’s efforts to boost diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
“It is hard to imagine a more vivid example of advocacy of the ‘major controversial policies of the administration’ than an HR leader and policymaker implementing and embedding DEIA policies throughout their agency and the government more broadly,” Ezell wrote. “By contrast, President Trump campaigned vehemently against government DEI programs.”
Although only a portion of CHCO positions are actually career-reserved, federal agencies have moved toward employing nonpartisan civil servants in those roles over the last two decades because of the technical expertise required. The move to re-politicize the CHCO corps comes just weeks after the Trump administration took similar action regarding chief information officers across government.
The memo’s publication comes just days after Traci DiMartini, human capital officer for the Internal Revenue Service, was put on leave Monday for alleged “ineffective management” of the administration’s implementation of the deferred resignation program and purge of recently hired, transferred or promoted employees, as well as “insubordination” toward DOGE operatives.
“That they’re accusing human capital officers of being partisan because we implemented DEIA under the Biden administration is so counterproductive to their own argument,” DiMartini said. “Our job is to follow the law and help implement the policies and programs of whoever is in charge.”
To DiMartini and other CHCOs, the memo reads as a pretext to getting rid of officials who refuse to circumvent laws governing the civil service.
“They’re trying to politicize human capital,” DiMartini said. “They want to be able to hire only loyalists, ignore Title 5 [of the U.S. Code] and commit flagrant prohibited personnel practices. When you look at the Merit Systems Protections Board and what the civil protections are, we’re supposed to have a nonpartisan civil service, and we have been completely whipsawed.”
“I think I just got a reverse two-week notice,” one currently serving CHCO told Government Executive.
DiMartini said that she believes her impending termination—the agency has indicated that it will not allow her to retire—stems from two incidents. The first was a refusal to call employees, who she said were already putting in “60-70 hour” work weeks—into the office over the weekend to onboard a DOGE operative.
And the second was mentioning that OPM had directed the probationary purge across government in a meeting intended to calm IRS workers. Unbeknownst to her, an employee had recorded the conversation, and her comments appeared in filings of a lawsuit seeking to overturn the probationary firings.
DiMartini said that although she doesn’t plan to return to government, she will challenge her firing. She said she has never been disciplined in her 21 years of service, and wants to preserve her professional reputation.
“As an SES-er, it’s my job to stand up and be the buffer between politicals and career employees, and I’m just trying to do my goddamn job,” she said. “They have no idea who they picked a f***ing fight with.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 