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Trump’s Tariffs: A Global Mess?

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2025 //
8

Yesterday after the stock market closed, Trump held a press conference to announce his much-ballyhooed tariff plan. He used the opportunity to insult other nations, as is his custom. Commentators noted that he slapped tariffs on uninhabited islands. Trump believes that the greatest period in the American economy ended in 1913, when the federal government adopted the income tax. When I was a junior in high school in high school, I learned that the enactment of a federal income tax was progressive because it reduced the vast gap between the very rich and everyone else. I also learned about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which set off a global trade war and contributed to the Great Depression. Apparently, these topics were not taught in Trump’s elite military academy. His history classes must have been taught from the perspective of the robber barons.

The Washington Post wrote:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will impose a new 10 percent tariff on all imported goods along with higher import taxes tailored for each of about 60 countries that his advisers say maintain the largest barriers against U.S. products, in a sharp turn toward the kind of protectionism that the United States abandoned nearly a century ago.

To impose the new tariffs, the president declared a national emergency, citing the annual merchandise trade deficit that the United States has run each year since 1975.

“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump said. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”

The tariff increases that the president announced had little modern precedent and would erect towering impediments to products from dozens of foreign countries, many of them poor nations that embraced exporting as a tool to escape grinding poverty….

Speaking in blunt, sometimes intemperate language, the president assailed the nation’s trading partners, including some of its closest allies, as “foreign cheaters” and “foreign scavengers” who had “ripped off Americans” for 50 years. Trump’s tone echoed the dark portrait of “American carnage” that he had sketched in his first inaugural address in 2017….

“In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States,” said economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, warned that his members operate on thin profit margins and cannot absorb the tariffs. Small businesses and restaurant owners issued statements decrying their added costs.

“This is catastrophic for American families,” said Matt Priest, president of the Footwear Retailers and Distributers of America.

********************************

Daniel Dale of CNN fact-checked only a few of Trump’s outlandish statements during his press conference about his tariffs. He imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands, populated only by penguins.

Dale wrote:

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about tariffs and trade – most of which he has made before – in the Wednesday speech in which he announced a sweeping set of global tariffs.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks.

Canada’s dairy tariffs

Trump correctly noted that Canada has tariffs exceeding 250% on some US dairy products. However, he falsely claimed that merely “the first little carton of milk” exported to Canada faces a “very low price,” but “then it gets up to 275, 300%.”null

In reality, Canada has guaranteed that tens of thousands of metric tons of imported US milk per year, not merely a single carton, will face zero tariffs at all; Canada conceded a certain guaranteed level of tariff-free US access to its dairy market as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that Trump’s own first administration negotiated.

Trump also didn’t mention something the US dairy industry acknowledges: The US is not hitting its zero-tariff maximum level of exports to Canada in any category of dairy product, so the Canadian tariffs aren’t being applied; with regard to milk in particular, the US isn’t even at half of the tariff-free quota. (There is a vigorous US-Canada debate about why the US is so far from the maximum, with each country blaming the other. Regardless of who’s right, the tariffs aren’t hitting US milk.)

Trump has persistently omitted key facts about Canada’s dairy tariffs. You can read more here from a previous CNN fact check.

US trade deficit with Canada

Trump, claiming “we subsidize a lot of countries,” falsely said “it’s close to $200 billion a year” with Canada. Trump has repeatedly used this $200 billion figure to describe the US trade deficit with Canada in particular, which is actually far lower than $200 billion; official US statistics show the 2024 deficit with Canada in goods and services trade was $35.7 billion and $70.6 billion in goods trade alone.

Trump didn’t mention the trade deficit in particular this time, but even if he was intending to use the word “subsidize” more broadly, there is no basis for the claim.

Who pays tariffs

Trump repeated his frequent false claim that, because of the tariffs he imposed on China during his first term, the US “took in hundreds of billions of dollars” that “they paid.” In fact, US importers, not foreign exporters like China,make the tariff payments, andstudy after studyhas found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China; it’s easy to findspecific examplesof companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers.

Previous presidents’ tariffs on China

Trump also repeated his frequent false claim that, before his first presidency, China “never paid 10 cents to any other president” from tariffs. Aside from the fact that US importers make the tariff payments, the US was actuallygenerating billions per year in revenuefrom tariffs on Chinese imports before Trump took office; in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese imports since1789. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama,imposed additional tariffson Chinese goods.

US wealth

Touting the supposed benefits of tariffs, Trump claimed that “the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” from 1789 to 1913, when tariffs made up a higher percentage of federal revenue before the passage of a 1913 law reestablishing the federal income tax.

Trump didn’t explain what he meant by “proportionately the wealthiest,” but by standard measures, the US is far wealthier today than it was in the early 20th century and prior. Per capita gross domestic product isnow many times higherthan it was then.

Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economics professor who studies the history of US trade policy, said in February after Trump had made similar claims, that if Trump’s unclear comments are interpreted to be about per capita income, as “economists usually take this,” it is “obviously not true,” since “real per capita income and standards of living are so much higher today than the past. … It is nice to have indoor plumbing, running water, not outhouses, etc.”

This is only part of the article. Open the link to finish reading. Dale reviews inflation, the cost of gasoline, and other issues.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Extremism, International, Lies, Stupid, Trump

Trump Wants to Control How Americans Vote

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2025 //
3

Dan Balz of The Washington Post writes about Trump’s executive order seeking control of elections. Trump has complained about election fraud since he won in 2016; he couldn’t believe that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, so he insisted that millions of undocumented immigrants had illegally voted. Although he set up a commission to find election fraud, it found none. When he lost in 2020, he shrieked again about a “stolen” election, but no one ever found any evidence of fraud that would change the outcome, and even his close associates disagreed with him. But after four years of lying about 2020, he recently issued an executive order to change state election laws, which are embedded in the Constitution.

Balz wrote:

Almost no part of government is immune from President Donald Trump’s thirst for power and control. Last week he signed executive orders aimed at the Smithsonian Institution, the District of Columbia and the administration of elections. No president has sought more change in more institutions more rapidly, through executive orders than Trump.

The order on elections is more than 2,500 words and at times densely written. It may have received less attention than warranted as it was issued amid the controversy over how sensitive military operational details were shared in a Signal chat group that accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic.

The order is illustrative of how the president is attempting to govern, largely through dictates rather than legislation. It is rooted in Trump’s long-standing, though false, claims that the election system is rife with fraud. Its legal foundations are questionable. But like other executive orders the president has signed, it could produce chaos and change before it is fully litigated.

Trump’s reach for power overrides any ideological consistency, though there is nothing new in that. He is dismantling the Department of Education, arguing that states and local governments should run the nation’s schools (which they already do). Now he is attempting to order state and local election administrators to adopt his rules for running future elections.

The Constitution grants most power over elections to the states. When Democrats were pushing a multifaceted voting rights bill known as H.R. 1 during the administration of President Joe Biden, conservative opponents decried the measure as a federal takeover. So far, there’s been no notable public outcry on the right over the federal takeover that Trump is seeking.

“This is clearly an attempt to federalize election administration to a historic degree, as was H.R. 1,” said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Certainly liberals and Democrats are going to press the federalism button really hard. And you will get probably some Republican secretaries not pressing it quite as hard, but privately, many of them are going to be pushing back.”

Another election analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid opinion described what he saw as the goal of the order: “It is to reduce turnout by people he thinks won’t vote for him,” the analyst said.

As we can see, billionaire publisher Jeff Bezos has interfered on the opinion pages, but not the news coverage.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Lies, Trump

Trump Assigns Task of Revising the Nation’s History to Vance

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2025 //
12

When Trump took control of the Smithsonian Institution and its multiple museums yesterday, his executive order pledged to purge the museums of unpatriotic exhibits (WOKE ideology and DEI), the targets of Trump’s rage. Trump gave the job to Vance, who will presumably clean up the nation’s history and make it as inspiring (to white males) as it was before the 1960s.

Remember the halcyon days before the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and other “blemishes” on our national history? Trump does. That’s the story he wants in The Smithsonian: heroes, accomplishments, triumphs! When men were men, and everyone else was in the background.

The Washington Post reported:

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday evening promising to eliminate “divisive narratives” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” that have been removed over the past five years.

The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order directs Vice President JD Vance to eliminate what he finds “improper” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo. The White House fact sheet describing the order said it will focus on removing “anti-American ideology.”

The institution, the official keeper of the American story, has operated independently as a public-private partnership created by an act of Congress in 1846. The order is an unprecedented act to edit an institution that has been expanding over many decades to include a wider, richer and more diverse telling of the nation’s history.

“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,” the executive order says. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

Trump’s order calls the museum’s evolving approach a reconstruction of history that is “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

Historians were immediately dismayed.
“Attacking the idea that telling the whole story of the United States is an ideological plot to cast the United States in a negative light testifies to a stunningly brittle insecurity about our nation and its past,” said Chandra Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University.

“It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that,” Manning said.

Trump’s executive order demands an “ideological purity test” and “restores neither truth nor sanity,” said Adam Rothman, an American history professor at Georgetown University. “The president’s proclamation disrespects the thousands of sincere and dedicated researchers, curators, scientists, guides, interpreters, docents and countless other people who work hard every day to preserve and tell the nation’s story truthfully, and in ways that educate and inspire the American public.”

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, History, Lies, Trump, Vance, J.D.

The SignalGate Scandal, the Lies, and the Text Messages

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2025 //
28

In the first big scandal of the Trump administration, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic was invited to participate in a top-secret texting session about bombing the Houthis. Jeffrey Goldberg first thought it was a joke or a scam, but he joined the group and discovered it was real. He wrote about it in The Atlantic (“The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me It’s War Plans”), and the story went viral. But everyone involved other than Goldberg said that it was not a top-secret meeting, that no confidential information was discussed, and Pete Hegseth insulted Goldberg by suggesting he was lying. The messaging used an app called Signal, which disappears after a certain period of time and is not secure. One participant, Steve Witkoff, was in Russia at the time of the exchange.

So Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris wrote up the conversation and published it.

So, about that Signal chat. On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.

Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

We sent our first request for comment and feedback to national-security officials shortly after noon, and followed up in the evening after most failed to answer.

Late yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.” (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was “completely appropriate” to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

At 11:44 a.m. eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”

The text beneath this began, “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. The Hegseth text continues:

  • “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
  • “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The Hegseth text then continued:

  • “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
  • “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
  • “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
  • “MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”
  • “We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security.
  • “Godspeed to our Warriors.”

Shortly after, Vice President J. D. Vancetexted the group, “I will say a prayer for victory.”

At 1:48 p.m., Waltz sent the following text, containing real-time intelligence about conditions at an attack site, apparently in Sanaa: “VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job.” Waltz was referring here to Hegseth; General Michael E. Kurilla, the commander of Central Command; and the intelligence community, or IC. The reference to “multiple positive ID” suggests that U.S. intelligence had ascertained the identities of the Houthi target, or targets, using either human or technical assets.

Six minutes later, the vice president, apparently confused by Waltz’s message, wrote, “What?”

At 2 p.m., Waltz responded: “Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

Vance responded a minute later: “Excellent.” Thirty-five minutes after that, Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wrote, “A good start,” which Waltz followed with a text containing a fist emoji, an American-flag emoji, and a fire emoji. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

Later that afternoon, Hegseth posted: “CENTCOM was/is on point.” Notably, he then told the group that attacks would be continuing. “Great job all. More strikes ongoing for hours tonight, and will provide full initial report tomorrow. But on time, on target, and good readouts so far.”

It is still unclear why a journalist was added to the text exchange. Waltz, who invited Goldberg into the Signal chat, said yesterday that he was investigating “how the heck he got into this room.”

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All those who participated in the meeting lied.

Stupid, incompetent liars are in charge of our national security.

Categories Accountability, Lies, Media, Scandal, Trump

Thomas Friedman Does Not Believe a Single Word from Trump or Putin about Ukraine. Why?

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2025 //
13

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman smells a rat in the bilateral talks between Trump and Putin about the war in Ukraine. He’s been watching both of them for years, and he knows they are both lying. Putin is using Trump for his own ends. Trump wants to please Putin.

He writes:

Ever since President Trump returned to office and began trying to make good on his boast about ending the Ukraine war in days, thanks to his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, I’ve had this gnawing concern that something was lost in translation in the bromance between Vlad and Don.

When the interpreter tells Trump that Putin says he’s ready to do anything for “peace” in Ukraine, I’m pretty sure what Putin really said was he’s ready to do anything for a “piece” of Ukraine.

You know those homophones — they can really get you in a lot of trouble if you’re not listening carefully. Or if you’re only hearing what you want to hear.

The Times reported that in his two-and-a-half-hour phone call with Trump on Tuesday, Putin agreed to halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to the Kremlin, but Putin made clear that he would not agree to the general 30-day cease-fire that the United States and Ukraine had agreed upon and proposed to Russia.

The Kremlin also said that Putin’s “key condition” for ending the conflict was a “complete cessation” of foreign military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv — in other words, stripping Ukraine naked of any ability to resist a full Russian takeover of Ukraine. More proof, if anyone needed it, that Putin is not, as Trump foolishly believed, looking for peace with Ukraine; he’s looking to own Ukraine.

All that said, you will pardon me, but I do not trust a single word that Trump and Putin say about their private conversations on Ukraine — including the words “and” and “the,” as the writer Mary McCarthy famously said about the veracity of her rival Lillian Hellman. Because something has not smelled right from the start with this whole Trump-Putin deal-making on Ukraine.

I just have too many unanswered questions. Let me count the ways.

For starters, it took Secretary of State Henry Kissinger over a month of intense shuttle diplomacy to produce the disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria that ended the 1973 war — and all of those parties wanted a deal. Are you telling me that two meetings between Trump’s pal Steve Witkoff and Putin in Moscow and a couple of phone calls between Putin and Trump are enough to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine on reasonable terms for Kyiv?

Trump couldn’t sell a hotel that quickly — unless he was giving it away.

Wait, wait — unless he was giving it away. …

Lord, I hope that is not what we’re watching here. Message to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance: If you sell out Ukraine to Putin, you will forever carry a mark of Cain on your foreheads as traitors to a core value that has animated U.S. foreign policy for 250 years — the defense of liberty against tyranny.

Our nation has never so brazenly sold out a country struggling to be free, which we and our allies had been supporting for three years. If Trump and Vance do that, the mark of Cain will never wash off. They will go down in history as “Neville Trump” and “Benedict Vance.” Likewise Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Michael Waltz.

Why else am I suspicious? Because Trump keeps saying that all he wants to do is end “the killing” in Ukraine. I am with that. But the easiest and quickest way to end the killing would be for the side that started the killing, the side whose army invaded Ukraine for utterly fabricated reasons, to get out of Ukraine. Presto — killing over.

Putin needs to enlist Trump’s help only if he wants something more than an end to the killing. I get that Ukraine will have to cede something to Putin. The question is how much. I also get that the only way for Putin to get the extra-large slice that he wants and the postwar restrictions that he wants imposed on Ukraine — without more warfighting — is by enlisting Trump to get them for him.

Why else am I suspicious? Because Trump has left all our European allies on the sidelines when he negotiates with Putin. Excuse me, but our European allies have contributed billions of dollars in military equipment, economic aid and refugee assistance to Ukraine — more combined than the United States, which Trump lies about — and they have made clear that they are now ready to do even more to prevent Putin from overrunning Ukraine and coming for them next.

So why would Trump enter negotiations with Putin and not bring our best leverage — our allies — with him? And why would he visibly turn U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine off and then on — after shamefully calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator”?

Sorry, that doesn’t smell right to me, either. What made Kissinger and Secretary of State James Baker particularly effective negotiators is that they knew how to leverage our allies to amplify U.S. power. Trump foolishly gives the back of his hand to our allies, while extending an open hand to Putin. That’s how you give up leverage.

Leveraging allies — the biggest asset that we have that Putin does not — “is what smart statecraft is all about,” Dennis Ross, the longtime Middle East adviser to U.S. presidents, told me.

“The key to good statecraft is knowing how to use the leverage that you have — how to marry your means to your objectives. The irony is that Trump believes in leverage — but has not used all the means that he has” in Ukraine, said Ross, the author of the timely, and just published, “Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World.”

What also smells wrong to me is that Trump appears to have no clue why Putin is so nice to him. As a Russian foreign policy analyst in Moscow put it to me recently: “Trump does not get that Putin is merely manipulating him to score Putin’s principal goal: diminish the U.S. international position, destroy its network of security alliances — most importantly in Europe — and destabilize the U.S. internally, thus making the world safe for Putin and Xi.”

Trump refuses to understand, this analyst added, that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping both want to see America boxed in to the Western Hemisphere rather than messing around with either of them in Europe or Asia/Pacific — and they see Trump as their pawn to deliver that.

Finally, and pretty much summing up all of the above, it smells to me that Trump has never made clear what concessions, sacrifices and guarantees he is demanding from Russia to get a peace deal on Ukraine. And who goes into a negotiation without a very clear, unwavering bottom line in terms of core American interests?

There are sustainable ways to end a war and keep it ended and there are unsustainable ways. It all depends on the bottom line — and if our bottom line departs fundamentally from that of Ukraine’s and our allies’, I don’t think they are going to just roll over for the Trump-Putin bromance.

Putin wants a Ukraine with a government that is basically the same as his neighboring vassal Belarus, not a Ukraine that is independent like neighboring Poland — a free-market democracy anchored in the European Union.

What kind of Ukraine does Trump want? The Belorussian version or the Polish version?

I have absolutely no doubt which one is in Ukraine’s interest, America’s interest and our European allies’ interest. The thing that gnaws at me is that I don’t know what Donald Trump thinks is in his personal interest — and that is all that matters now in Trump’s Washington.

Until it’s clear that Trump’s bottom line is what should be America’s bottom line — no formal surrendering of Ukrainian territory to Putin, but simply a cease-fire; no membership for Ukraine in NATO, but membership in the European Union; and an international peacekeeping force on the ground, backed up with intelligence and material support from the U.S. — color me very, very skeptical of every word Trump and Putin say on Ukraine — including “and” and “the.”

It is clear to Friedman that Trump sides with Putin. But why? Why is he eager to satisfy Putin? Why does he behave like the wimpy little brother when he talks to Putin?

Categories Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Lies, Trump

Mark Zuckerberg Abandons Fact-Checking on Facebook

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2025 //
10

Oliver Darcy, media journalist, reports that Mark Zuckerberg has followed the lead of Elon Musk by abandoning fact-checking.

The No-Fact Zone: Meta announced Thursday it will launch its forthcoming “community notes” feature next week to replace fact-checkers, once again going to Fox News for the rollout as the Mark Zuckerberg-led social giant runs to the right. Joel Kaplan, Meta’snew global affairs officer, blasted the company’s own longstanding fact-checking program, telling Fox’s Brooke Singman it “proved to be really prone to partisan political bias” and was “essentially a censorship tool,” echoing false claims parroted by right-wing media figures and lawmakers. Unlike the fact-checking program, Meta’s community notes will rely on users who are not bound by ethical guidelines to police content for fairness and accuracy, taking a page straight out of Elon Musk’s X. Kaplan told Singman that posts with a community note applied will not be penalized and will continue to thrive on the platform, setting the stage for viral misinformation. While Zuckerberg and Kaplan are portraying the move as a win for free speech—earning praise from Donald Trump—it will surely serve to muddy the waters on some of the world’s biggest social platforms.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Ethics, Fake News, Ignorance, Lies, Media

ALERT! Teachers College Faculty Opposes Trump Attacks on Higher Education and DEI

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2025 //
4

The following statement was drafted and signed by faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The Trump administration is cynically using the pretext of “fighting anti-Semitism” to attack universities and control them. It has withheld $400 million from Columbia University and demanded changes to its curriculum and other policies.

This is outrageous. It is fascistic. It is an attack on academic freedom. Columbia University is a private university, one of the best in the nation. It should rebuff this repellent effort to strip it of its independence and academic freedom.

A Statement by Teachers College, Columbia University Faculty

The Attack on American Education, from our Perspective as Teachers College Faculty

March 19, 2025

We are a group of Teachers College faculty with expertise in the areas of education, health, and psychology. We write in response to the attacks by the federal government on Columbia University, and education. Teachers College is an independent institution, with its own charter, president, board of trustees, and regulations, yet we are also affiliated with Columbia University and are thus deeply affected by the current moment. We emphasize that this statement is not an official response by Teachers College, and represents only the views of its authors.  

As researchers and teachers, we share with our colleagues in higher education a deep concern about the many ways that higher education is under threat at this moment. But as scholars at a graduate school of education, whose work covers the lifespan, from infants to elders, we have a distinct perspective. We see the attack on Columbia as part of a larger offensive by the Trump administration and the Republican party against education at all levels. An attack on academic freedom and the First Amendment is taking place on multiple fronts, all of which impact the basic human activity of learning in all of its forms and meanings. 

Efforts to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, erase curricular content that speaks to our nation’s true and difficult past and its ongoing inequities, and intrude into the processes by which educational institutions from local school districts to universities make decisions on what and how to teach: all are connected to a desire to stifle critical thinking and prevent us from actively participating in our democracy. The intention of the Trump administration is clear. By gutting important systems of education, they can shape our thoughts and words, creating a new generation without the skills required to actively participate in our democracy and push back against oppression.

 At Columbia University specifically, the Trump administration has cancelled over $400 million in research and intervention funding and is threatening further action unless the university caves to a series of demands that would radically transform the institution and undermine its fundamental role in a democracy, as our colleagues in the Columbia chapter of the AAUP detail in this letter. Such actions also violate the constitutional law and the substance and process of TItle VI, as detailed by several of our colleagues in the Columbia Law School.

The broad strategies of the administration’s attack on higher education were outlined earlier in Project 2025, but the particular tactics have been shaped by both world and local events since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the Israeli war on Gaza that followed and continues. The accusation that Columbia is unable and unwilling to protect its Jewish students is being used to strip it of funding, especially for research in its medical school, as well as other areas of the institution. Several funded projects in education, health, and psychology at Teachers College have already been cancelled, affecting research and programs ranging from higher education access, graduate training for much-needed school psychologists, social services  for students, and more.

We recognize that Columbia, like many institutions, has much ongoing work to do to ensure campus is a place that can foster and support everyone’s learning, by actively addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of discrimination and hatred. Yet the disproportionate response to anti-war protest on our campus must be acknowledged. We take note of the “Palestine exception,” which blocks discourse by treating Palestine and Palestinians as topics beyond First Amendment and academic freedom protections. Such a pattern has barred necessary speech and difficult dialogues on our campuses, causing division and fear amongst students, staff, and faculty members. To be sure, maintaining space for anti-war protest and other forms of political dissent within a community needs to be done with sensitivity and care, alongside respect for the rights of students to challenge one another and express ideas, including deeply controversial ones.

While this week’s education news has been dominated by Columbia, previous weeks focused on the K-12 landscape. Developments included the appointment of a Secretary of Education with no education expertise, unable even to correctly identify the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) – one of our nation’s largest pieces of federal education and civil rights legislation, which she is charged by Congress to administer. The administration laid off half of the Department of Education’s workforce. The firings have all but shuttered the more than 150 year old National Center for Education Statistics, on which countless areas of education research, including “The Nation’s Report Card” via the National Assessment of Educational Progress and studies that focus on measuring equity, rely. These are the staffpeople who ensure that Congressionally-approved funds for Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (for children living in poverty), the IDEA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act for disabled students, and federal financial aid to higher education make their way to their intended students, families, and communities. Major staff reductions at the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights intentionally impede this division from ensuring equitable treatment of children in our nation’s schools. 

As in higher education, the Trump administration not only seeks to usurp the Congressional power of the purse but does so in the name of false and misleading representations of the state of our educational institutions. Whatever claims to the contrary, American public education is governed chiefly by state constitutions and local school districts. They decide what students learn, how teachers teach, and how student success is measured. When, for example, executive orders seek to disregard that law and tradition, we applaud leaders who, like Maine Governor Janet Mills, respond with “See you in court!”.

As experts on teaching and learning, we know that the most profound moments of learning are usually uncomfortable, as they may lead people to question taken-for-granted assumptions about themselves and the society they inhabit. The goal of good teaching is not to eliminate that discomfort, but to give it a productive use. The barrage of Executive Orders, threats to the Department of Education, and mandates such as the March 13 letter are aimed at restricting discourse and generating fear in teachers and students, especially those most vulnerable: non-US citizens, racially or ethnically minoritized populations, gender and sexually diverse and expansive people, and disabled people. Teaching and learning are much more difficult when one is afraid, and pedagogy can easily turn to rote memorization and repetition in order to avoid controversy.

While the White House accuses elementary and secondary schools as well as higher education of indoctrinating students, against the evidence, what we see is an attack on the capacity for criticism — paving the way for authoritarianism and fascism. The idea that directing criticism at the US or its geopolitical allies is un-American runs counter to much of the history of this nation. As James Baldwin once stated, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” It is extremely hard, if not impossible, for people of any age to do the difficult work of learning, of understanding multiple perspectives on an issue, of offering counterpoints to commonly assumed views, when people are scared of losing their livelihoods and/or their visas, being arrested or deported, or being deemed enemies of the state by the highest office in the land.

As educators and researchers concerned with justice and equity, we cannot stay silent.  What becomes of the University if it succumbs to the demands of a political party or leader and cedes its rights of free speech, free expression, and free inquiry? What becomes of research if its pursuit of truth is shaped by what faculty are not allowed to say, and the topics they cannot investigate? What becomes of our students if they are only permitted to think, speak, and be in ways that follow the political winds? 

We call on university leaders, on our campus and beyond, to use all of the tools at their disposal, including collective efforts across the sector and litigation, to stand for academic freedom, and for First Amendment rights of free speech, inquiry, and debate, and thus to stand for our democracy.

And we pledge, as faculty members in an institution of higher education, to recognize that the challenges facing us are not unique to our institution or to higher education. They are shared challenges that at this moment link us to all those devoted to education and to learning at all stages across the life span. We celebrate the efforts such as the suit filed by the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union to stop Trump administration efforts to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. We must find ways to work with one another for our students, our communities, and our still-developing democracy. 

Daniel Friedrich, PhD, Associate Professor of Curriculum, Department of Curriculum and Teaching

Ansley Erickson, PhD, Associate Professor of History and Education Policy, Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis

Melanie Brewster, PhD, Professor of Counseling Psychology, Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology

Ezekiel Dixon-Román, PhD, Professor of Critical Race, Media, and Educational Studies Director, Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study. 

Kay James, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience & Education, Department of Biobehavioral Sciences

Additional signatures, added at 6pm daily. 

Anonymous (11)

Jennifer Lena, PhD, Associate Professor of Arts Administration, Department of Arts and Humanities

Brandon Velez, PhD, Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology, Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology

Luis A. Huerta, PhD, Professor of Education and Public Policy; Chair, Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis

James Borland, PhD, Professor of Education, Department of Curriculum and Teaching

Nathan Holbert, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design

Sonali Rajan, EdD, Professor of Health Promotion and Education, Department of Health Studies and Applied Educational Psychology

Carolyn Riehl, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology and Education Policy 

Beth Rubin, PhD, Professor of Education, Department of Arts & Humanities

Lucy Calkins, PhD, Robinson Professor of Children’s Literature, Department of Curriculum & Teaching

Gita Steiner-Khamsi, PhD, William H. Kilpatrick Professor of Comparative Education, Department of International and Comparative Education

Mark Anthony Gooden, PhD, Christian Johnson Endeavor Professor of Education Leadership, Department of Organization & Leadership

Sandra Schmidt, PhD, Associate Professor of Social Studies Education, Department of Arts & Humanities  

Haeny Yoon, PhD, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education, Department of Curriculum and Teaching

Judith Scott-Clayton, PhD, Professor of Economics & Education, Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis

Alex Eble, PhD, Associate Professor of Economics & Education, Department of Education Policy & Social Analysis

Prerna Arora, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education, Department of Health Studies & Applied Educational Psychology

Megan Laverty, PhD, Professor of Philosophy and Education, Department of Arts and Humanities 

Ioana Literat, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design, Department of Math, Science, and Technology

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D, Professor of English Education, Department of Arts and Humanities

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Higher Education, Lies, Trump

Can You Trust Government Data Anymore? NO!

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
6

This may be one of the more ominous moves in a deeply troubling environment. Trump officials killed a low-cost statistical advisory committee at the Department of Commerce. This could be the beginning of a trend where MAGA is free to doctor economic data. Remember how Trump used to complain that he didn’t trust the government data, produced by nonpartisan statistical agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics? In the future, government data will be produced by MAGA partisans. Will we get regular reports showing that everything is great and getting better every day? Will statisticians who tell the truth be fired?

The title of the article is: “The War on Government Statistics Has Quietly Begun.”

Claudia Sahm is the chief economist at New Century Advisors and a former Federal Reserve economist. She is the creator of the Sahm rule, a recession indicator.

Claudia Sahm writes in Bloomberg News:

In a time of great economic uncertainty, President Donald Trump’s administration quietly took a step last week that could create even more: Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.

I realize that the shuttering of an obscure statistical advisory committee may not strike anyone as a scandal, much less an outrage. But as an economist who has presented to the committee, known as FESAC, I know how it improved the information used by both the federal government and private enterprise to make economic decisions. Most Americans do not realize how many aspects of their lives rely on timely and accurate government data.

One of FESAC’s official responsibilities was “exploring ways to enhance the agencies’ economic indicators to make them timelier, more accurate, and more specific to meeting changing demands and future data needs.” In the complex and highly dynamic US economy, this is an ongoing effort — not a one-time task that has been “fulfilled,” which was the Commerce Department’s stated reason for terminating the committee.

The 15 members of the advisory committee, who were unpaid, brought deep technical expertise on economic measurement from the private sector, academia and the non-profit world. They were a sounding board for the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produce much of the nation’s official statistics.

If statistics fail to keep up with the changing economy, they lose their usefulness. When the committee last met in December, one focus was on measuring the use and production of artificial intelligence. Staff from the agencies shared existing findings on AI, such as from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey that began in 2022, and outlined new data collection efforts. AI’s current use among businesses has nearly doubled since late 2023, and even more businesses expect to adopt AI in the next six months.

Categories Data, Economy, Ethics, Lies, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: Trump Is Coming for Your Social Security

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
10

With Trump, there are no guardrails. The Republican-dominated Congress has given him permission to eliminate agencies and cut budgets and fire people. Normally, under the Constitution, Congress makes the laws and controls the purse, but not now.

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times warns that Trump will go after Social Security, despite his promises:

Perhaps the most frequently cited quote from Donald Trump relevant to his purported efforts to root out government waste has been “we’re not touching Social Security,” or variations thereof. 

I expressed skepticism about this pledge shortly after the election by listing all the oblique ways the Trump administration could hack away at the program. 

It gives me no pleasure to update my observation with the words, “I told you so.”

“We’re not touching Social Security.”

— Donald Trump makes a false promise

Among the weapons Trump could wield, I wrote, was starving the program of administrative resources — think money and staff. Sure enough, on Friday the program, which is currently led by acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, announced plans to reduce the program’s employee base to 50,000 from 57,000. 

Its press release about the reduction referred to the program’s “bloated workforce.”

To anyone who knows anything about the Social Security Administration, calling its workforce “bloated” sounds like a sick joke. The truth is that the agency is hopelessly understaffed, and has been for years.

In November, then-Commissioner Martin O’Malley told a House committee that the agency was serving a record number of beneficiaries with staffing that had reached a 50-year low.

I asked the Social Security Administration to reconcile its claim of a bloated workforce with the facts. I got no reply.

Nearly 69 million Americans were receiving benefits as of Dec. 31, according to the agency. That figure encompassed 54.3 million retired workers, their spouses and their children, nearly 6 million survivors of deceased workers and more than 8.3 million disabled workers and their dependents. Agency employment peaked in 2009 at about 67,000, when it served about 55 million people.

“Without adequate staff at the agency,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said at a news conference Monday, “there will be people who can’t get their benefits, period.”

Not only beneficiaries could be affected by Trump’s raid on Social Security. About 183 million people pay Social Security taxes on their earnings. Their right to collect what they’re entitled to based on their contributions is dependent on the system recording those payments and calculating their benefits accurately, to the last penny. Any incursion by DOGE into the program’s systems or the scattershot firings that Dudek forecasts puts all that at risk.

In his testimony, O’Malley talked about how the agency had struggled to establish an acceptable level of customer service. In 2023, he said, wait times on the program’s 800 number had ballooned to nearly an hour. Of the average 7 million clients who called the number each month for advice or assistance, 4 million “hung up in frustration after waiting far too long.” The agency had worked the wait down to an average of less than 13 minutes, in part by encouraging customers to wait off the line for a call back.

Disability applicants faced the worst frustrations, O’Malley said. The backlog of disability determinations, which often require multiple rounds of inquiries, hearings and appeals, had reached a near-record 1.2 million. The program estimated that about 30,000 applicants had died in 2023 while awaiting decisions.

O’Malley had asked for a budget increase in fiscal 2025 to add at least 3,000 workers to the customer-service ranks, but it wasn’t approved.

Make no mistake: The starving of Social Security’s administrative resources, which is currently taking place under the guise of ferreting out fraud and waste, is no accident. It’s part of a decades-long Republican project aimed at undermining public confidence in the program. 

Back in 1983, for example, the libertarian Cato Institute published an article by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis calling for a “Leninist” strategy to “prepare the political ground” for privatizing Social Security on behalf of “the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public.” Political opposition, as it happens, resulted in the death of George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security in 2005.

Germanis has since become a fierce critic of conservative economics and politics. Butler, who had spent 35 years at the right-wing Heritage Foundation before joining the Brookings Institution in 2014, told me by email he now advocates a private retirement system as an “add-on” private option rather than an alternative to Social Security. He also said he thinks “cutting staff and the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud and abuse are both ridiculous.” 

The Trump acolytes have already taken an ax to some Social Security operations, as announced by Dudek — a former mid-level agency worker who stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of several managers who had dustups with Elon Musk’s DOGE outfit and by a delay in Senate confirmation of Commissioner-designate Frank Bisagnano, a banking and Wall Street veteran.

Last week, Dudek closed the agency’s office of transformation, which he called “wasteful” and “redundant.” The office was engaged in helping to keep the agency’s website operational and to develop usable online resources for beneficiaries and applicants. He closed its office of civil rights and equal opportunity, certainly functions relevant to the program’s operations. Employees in both offices were laid off or fired, and their pages on the website were removed.

On Monday, Dudek bragged about having “identified” some $800 million in cost savings, including through the cancellation of contracts that, for all he knows, may be crucial to the agency’s functioning. The largest “savings” came from a freeze on hiring and overtime in disability determination services, worth $550 million, according to Dudek. 

But that’s an area where hands-on contact between applicants and the agency is indispensable. Academic researchers reported in 2019 that the closing of field offices dealing with disability applications led to “a persistent 16% decline in the number of disability recipients in surrounding areas, with the largest effects for applicants with moderately severe conditions and low education levels.”

In an appearance Friday on Joe Rogan’s webcast, Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a repetition of an ancient meme that demonstrates only that he knows nothing about Social Security, and nothing about Ponzi schemes. The program boasts an 85-year unbroken record for paying beneficiaries what they’re owed, and currently holds a reserve of nearly $2.8 trillion in Treasury securities, all publicly disclosed.

The GOP brain trust has accepted the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud without devoting a moment’s thought to it. House Speaker Mike Johnson absurdly claimed Sunday on “Meet the Press” that Musk’s “algorithms crawling through the data” are “finding enormous amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.” 

There’s absolutely zero evidence for that. Can we trust Musk to find it? This is the guy whose claim that “millions” of people aged 150 or older were receiving payments was decisively debunked — the notion that benefits were going to people that old was merely an artifact of the software program used by the agency. No payments are going to anyone in that category; Social Security automatically ceases payments to anyone who has reached the age of 115. The chief bug in the system is Musk’s ignorance. 

By the way, the search for waste, fraud and abuse — call it WFA — has a long and discreditable history. Ronald Reagan pledged to ferret out enough WFA to cut the federal budget by more than 6% (sometimes he said 10%). One of his first steps, however, was to fire 15 departmental inspectors general, whose jobs involved finding WFA. Sound familiar? One of Trump’s first orders upon taking office was to fire inspectors-general at 17 federal agencies. 

Reagan impaneled the so-called Grace Commission, whose chairman, industrialist J. Peter Grace, promised to unearth billions of dollars of the elusive WFA. The commission’s eventual proposals included taxing Social Security benefits, adding soy meat-extender to school lunches ($84-million savings over three years), and eliminating the regulatory agencies that oversaw industries represented by the panel’s members.

The truth is that Social Security is one of the most efficient agencies in the federal government. Its administrative costs are one-half of one-percent of its total costs, which include benefit payments. 

What’s the goal of this raid on Social Security, the nation’s premier anti-poverty program and one whose beneficiaries live by the tens of thousands in every congressional district in the land? 

It’s as if Trump and Musk are intent on staging a natural experiment on whether Republicans can tick off or terrify 69 million Americans at one fell swoop by taking away their sustenance in old age or disability — and still win election. 

They’re bound to learn, to the contrary, that there isn’t a federal program that Americans value more than Social Security. Are they dumb enough to try killing it? We shall see.

Categories Accountability, Lies, Trump

Sherrilyn Ifill: Do Not Be Silent!

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2025 //
3

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.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon, Racism, Resistance, Trump
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