What did Donald Trump do today?

He promised to raise the amount of pollution cars can emit by about 54%.

Trump said today that he would roll back pollution emission standards for vehicles to what they were during his first term. The difference is dramatic: it would allow cars to emit 54% more greenhouse gases per mile traveled (204 grams per mile vs. 132) and SUVs and other light trucks to emit 52% more (284 g/mi vs. 187).

"It doesn't mean a damn bit of difference to the environment. It doesn't matter," he said of the regulations. Trump, who is 78, insists that climate change from the buildup of greenhouse gasses is a "hoax," and in fact may even believe it—although he's also taken every other position on the matter, too, depending on when he was asked.

In reality, climate change is a real and urgent problem, acknowledged by everyone from the United States military to Trump's own golf course in Ireland, and vehicle emissions contribute to it.

Trump claimed he would this as a favor to the American car industry, although they'll be unlikely to thank him for it. The existing standards are for models through the year 2026, which are already in production, and there wouldn't be much advantage to radically retooling later models that already have the fuel efficiency improvements spurred on by the current standards. 

It's more likely that Trump was caught flat-footed by the reporter who was asking him about his call with the CEO of Stellantis, the multinational company that makes Jeep, Chrysler, and Ram vehicles in the United States. The reporter asked if Stellantis executives had raised concerns about the massive tariffs Trump is about to impose on American car buyers—a subject on which the company has not been shy.

Trump denied it, and then insisted that the call had instead been about "trouble" that Stellantis had had with the environmental regulations all their cars and trucks already meet.

Why does this matter?

• Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.

• Scrapping environmental regulations to benefit industry isn't great, but if a president is going to do that, at the very least they should be regulations that industry wants to have scrapped.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pretended to be "very angry" at Vladimir Putin.

In a Sunday morning call with NBC News, Trump proclaimed himself "very angry" with Vladimir Putin, and said he'd impose sanctions on Russia if negotiations to end the war on Ukraine didn't improve.

Sanctions against Russia are, of course, already in place from the Biden administration—and Trump has been eagerly making plans to lift them as recently as a few days ago. Under Trump, the United States has effectively switched sides in the conflict—or rather, the White House has. The American public still overwhelmingly supports Ukraine.

It is unlikely that Trump is "very angry" with Putin, or that Russia will think that he is. It's difficult to summarize the full extent of Trump's entanglement with—and, at times, submission to—the Putin regime over the years. Money from Russian oligarchs propped up Trump's collapsing real estate business. Russia under Putin illegally intervened, both covertly and openly, on Trump's behalf in all of the last three presidential elections. Russian state TV routinely brags about Trump's subservience to the Putin regime, and Trump has routinely repaid them with thrilling content—most recently, a surprise Oval Office attack on the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And Trump, for his part, has been open in his genuine admiration for Putin, all the more for his ruthless and dictatorial approach.

That loyalty has paid off handsomely for Putin even in having peace talks in the first place. Virtually every foreign policy expert agrees that Russia has succeeded in crippling Ukraine's bargaining position by having the United States—its most important ally—threaten to cut off support if it doesn't participate on whatever terms Trump and Putin deem acceptable. But while Russia is by itself vastly militarily stronger than Ukraine, the war has gone remarkably badly for Russia, and it is unlikely Putin could have forced Ukraine to the bargaining table without Trump's assistance.

Even in today's "angry" remarks, Trump talked about the attempt to end the war as a joint project between himself and Putin, with Ukraine and Zelenskyy simply the subject of a US-Russian negotiation. For example, Trump said he'd impose sanctions on Russia "if Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine."

If Trump is actually angry about anything, it may be that it is increasingly obvious that he cannot keep his campaign promise to, in effect, sit both sides down and hammer out a deal. This was never likely; hundreds of thousands have died, and Russia has committed atrocities including the torture and indiscriminate targeting of Ukrainian civilians. But that didn't stop Trump, who may actually believe he is the "dealmaker" described in his ghostwritten books, from claiming he'd have smoothed that over within the first 24 hours of his presidency.

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if the President of the United States can't demonstrate any more personal independence from a hostile foreign power than this.

• The presidency is not a reality show.

• Diplomacy being harder than Donald Trump thought it would be is costing Ukrainian lives.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he "couldn't care less" if car prices went up because of his tariffs.

After months of chaotic back-and-forth, Trump's 25% tariffs on foreign automobiles are once again set to go into effect on April 2. As with all tariffs, that tax will be paid by American importers, who will then raise prices for consumers accordingly.

But cars manufactured in the United States will become more expensive, too—in part because of retaliatory tariffs on the oversea parts needed to make them, and in part because higher prices for foreign-made cars will give American automakers room to make greater profits by raising their own prices. 

In an interview with NBC News today, Trump was asked if he'd asked American carmakers to keep prices down. He replied:

No, I never said that. I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American-made cars. I couldn’t care less. I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty.

An aide later claimed that what Trump had meant to say was that he hoped foreign carmakers raised their prices, but in fact it will be Trump's 25% import tax that does that.

The effects on the economy are already being felt. In an alarming sign, used car prices are suddenly ticking up, as consumers—taking Trump at his word—have begun to look for bargains rather than pay the tariff-inflated prices for new ones. Used car prices also shot up during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the problem was lack of supply, and that helped make the ensuing inflationary cycle far worse than it otherwise would have been. 

As is typical, the worst effects of that inflation were felt only once the economy had begun to recover, meaning in this case during the Biden administration. Trump campaigned in 2024 on the claim that the inflation was Biden's fault—which may explain why he "couldn't care less" if it comes back.

Why does this matter?

• The President of the United States is actively rooting for Americans to have to pay massively inflated prices on a major purchase.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He forced out the federal government's top remaining vaccine official.

Dr. Peter Marks, who played a substantial role in developing the COVID-19 vaccine, was forced out by the Trump administration today. In his resignation letter, Marks said Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr., was backsliding on his confirmation hearing promises not to destroy what remains of the government's capacity to produce lifesaving vaccines.

Referencing Kennedy's beliefs about health and medicine, which are on the fringe even by the standards of most people who identify as "vaccine skeptics," Marks wrote: "It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."

Kennedy was appointed HHS Secretary by Trump as part of a political bargain in which Kennedy—whose few supporters were generally socially liberal—would throw his support behind the notionally conservative Trump.

In addition to his belief in an extreme version of anti-vaccine conspiracy, Kennedy also claims to believe:

• that toxic megadoses vitamin A can cure the infectious disease of measles—which has led to an outbreak of poisonings in areas affected by a measles outbreak Kennedy is trying to downplay

• that the COVID-19 virus was genetically engineered to spare Jews

• that a single fraudlent study, arguably the most widely discredited single paper in medical history, shows that vaccines cause autism

• that fluoridation of water is responsible for almost every form of human illness (the same belief that was parodied as an old-fashioned, paranoid delusion in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove)

• that pasteurized milk is unhealthy, but "raw" milk is not—in spite of countless outbreaks of salmonella, influenza, and other communicable diseases linked to it

• that the best way to treat an outbreak of bird flu in livestock chickens—which can be deadly to humans—is to let it rage through the entire American poultry system, in the hopes that the offspring of the few surviving birds will be immune

In addition to other massive cuts to federal health programs, Trump is in the process of firing as many as 20,000 other HHS employees.

Like Trump, Kennedy is vaccinated against all the diseases he now claims to believe that other Americans should not be—as are his children.

Trump himself did not comment on Marks' firing. He continued to remain out of public view today after a series of events earlier in the week in which he appeared confused, forgetful, or ill-informed. As is typical for Trump, he ended his workweek early this morning and will spend a  long weekend at his Florida compound.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents are responsible for the policies they let their staff implement.

• The overwhelming majority of Americans support vaccine research and expect the government to actually do things to combat infectious disease.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said op-eds in student newspapers were grounds for disappearance and deportation.

On Tuesday, Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was abruptly surrounded on a Somerville, MA street by ICE agents wearing masks and hoodies, but nothing to identify themselves as law enforcement. 

Video of her being swiftly handcuffed and hustled away was, for almost two days, the only information anyone—including her lawyers—had of her whereabouts. It later became clear that the Turkish student, a Fulbright scholar with a valid student visa to pursue a Ph.D. in child development, was shipped in haste to a Louisiana detention facility, apparently in defiance of a judge's order to keep her in Massachusetts. 

The Trump administration has been taking the targets of its most controversial and legally questionable detentions to that facility because that puts it in the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court, where it feels legal challenges are less likely to succeed.

Ozturk has not been accused of any crime, but she did co-write an anodyne editorial that appeared in the Tufts student newspaper last year. In it, she and other students called on the Tufts University administration to respect and engage with the requests of its student government, which had passed several resolutions regarding Tufts' approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ozturk wrote that Tufts' response to those resolutions was dismissive and condescending. The editorial did not discuss the conflict itself.

Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed on behalf of the Trump administration that Ozturk had been arrested, shackled, and hastily sent more than 1,000 miles away without legal counsel or any other form of due process because she caused "a ruckus." 

Rubio claimed, without evidence, that she had acted "in support of Hamas," but the Trump administration has said that about virtually everyone who has in any way deviated from its particular stance on Israel—including, for example, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat. 

“We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio added, apparently in reference to other people legally present in the United States whose views Trump disagrees with.

The protections of the First Amendment apply to non-citizens. Trump, however, insists that all non-citizens legally residing in the United States are there at his sufferance, and can be detained and deported to their home countries or unrelated third countries for any reason or no reason.

Trump himself has not been seen in public or made available to reporters since yesterday, when he became confused about the details of the unfolding security breach scandal and was unaware of the widely reported disappearance and apparent death of four American soldiers in Lithuania.

Thousands of people protested Ozturk's detention today at Tufts.

Why does this matter?

• The only reason to do this is to scare people into not exercising their freedom of speech.

• It is not illegal or disruptive to have opinions Donald Trump doesn't like.

• A government that cares about freedom is not afraid of the due process of law.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said that the COVID-19 pandemic never happened.

Today, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services stopped nearly $12 billion in grants to the states for disease prevention and control. Much of the money was being used to track, prevent, and control infectious diseases—such as the measles outbreak that started in Texas and is now spreading nationwide. (The Texas Health and Human Services Department is among the agencies affected.)

A statement from the department referenced the COVID-19 pandemic, a sensitive subject for Trump, and said that "HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago."

More than 1,200,000 Americans died as a result of the "non-existent" COVID-19 pandemic in just the first two years. Trump himself nearly died from it. Studies estimate that 40% of those deaths were avoidable but for Trump's policies, which treated it as a political crisis rather than a deadly infectious disease.

Trump also cut funds for state health programs that, at least in theory, he has no specific political agenda against, like mental health and substance abuse treatment. The official rationale is cost-cutting—that is, that the cost per American death or illness avoided by medical care is too high.

Trump's cuts to the IRS, also done in the name of cutting costs, are now expected to cost half a trillion dollars per year, mostly from extremely wealthy individuals and companies avoiding paying their share. That is about 42 times more than the cost of the medical services being cut today.

Why does this matter?

• Pretending that politically inconvenient infectious diseases don't exist was a bad strategy in 2020, and it is a bad strategy in 2025.

• Enabling tax cheats is a bad idea even when the president hasn't been repeatedly caught doing it himself.

• It is not a waste of money to keep Americans from getting sick.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He blackballed another law firm for employing one of the hundreds of lawyers involved in prosecuting him.

In recent weeks, Trump has issued a series of executive orders effectively blackballing specific law firms. The orders strip security clearances (often required for legal work involving the government), cancel government contracts, and even bar employees from entering government buildings. Three major firms in the DC legal ecosystem have been targeted, and today he added a fourth, Jenner & Block.

What these firms have in common is that they all employ or represented his political enemies and imagined persecutors. Perkins Coie represented the Hillary Clinton campaign. Mark Pomerantz, a New York prosecutor who investigated Trump's financial crimes, had previously been a partner at Paul, Weiss. Covington and Burling represented Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who brought two separate federal cases against Trump—though their work for Smith had nothing to do with the Trump trials. 

Jenner & Block, the target of today's order, has won several injunctions for different clients against the second Trump administration. It also employs Mark Weissmann, who worked for independent counsel Robert Mueller. Weissmann has appeared on television news and written a book discussing the Mueller investigation, which found that Russia illegally interfered "in sweeping and systematic fashion" in the 2016 campaign on Trump's behalf, and that Trump and his campaign knew about and welcomed that help.

Unlike many of Trump's other executive orders, which are symbolic or purport to do things he has no actual ability to do, these actually would have an effect if allowed to stand. Having large swathes of the federal legal community unable to take federal clients would create chaos and punish clients who had nothing to do with the targets of Trump's wrath.

Trump's executive orders do not attempt to conceal the rationale: they are explicit in their claims that Trump is punishing the firms for even indirect contact with the people who "politicized" the justice system.

For his part, Trump has appointed his personal criminal defense lawyers to the top three positions at the Justice Department, as well as the position of Solicitor General, and is attempting to install another one as a US Attorney. 

Why does this matter?

• Collective punishment and guilt by association is what dictatorships do.

• The government is not there to settle personal scores for the president.

• Trump was indicted for and convicted of crimes because of his own actions, not because prosecutors existed to make those cases.

• In a democracy, it is not illegal, unethical, or cause for punishment to file a lawsuit against the government.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pled ignorance of a massive national security scandal that broke today.

Today, journalist and editor Jeffrey Goldberg published a story in The Atlantic detailing how he was accidentally added to a private group chat between Trump administration officials on a commercial messaging service. The subject of the group was the U.S. military strike against the Houthi rebels in Yemen on March 15. 

After being added to the chat by Trump's national security advisor Mike Waltz, Goldberg was able to see detailed information that, "if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel."

The chat included Vice-President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and a number of other senior intelligence officials appointed by Trump. (The links in the previous sentence go to some of their comments on the importance of protecting classified information.) None of them noticed or questioned Goldberg's presence.

In addition to the leak being embarrassing, the very existence of the group itself is almost certainly illegal. Signal is a private commercial service, and it has not been approved for use by government officials. There are several secure electronic systems that are—but Trump's appointees may have been hesitant to use them because they create records that cannot be deleted without leaving tracks. (Messages in the chat Goldberg saw were set to delete after a period of time, which is illegal as they are government records.)

Gross negligence by government officials in exposing secret defense information is a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Asked about the matter today, several hours after the story broke, Trump said he'd never heard anything about it.

REPORTER: …your reaction to the story in the The Atlantic today that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides had been discussing very sensitive material on Signal… What is your response to that?

TRUMP: I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it's a magazine that's going out of business, I think it's not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had—what?

REPORTER: They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials.

TRUMP: Having to do with what? Having to do with what? What were they talking about?

REPORTER: The Houthis.

TRUMP: The Houthis? You mean the attack on the Houthis?

REPORTER: Right.

TRUMP: Well it couldn't have been very effective, because the attack was very effective, I can tell you that. I don't know anything about it. You're—you're telling me about it for the first time.

Goldberg's article makes clear that administration officials were asked for comment before publication, and the article as published includes confirmation from the National Security Council that the Signal thread was genuine. 

If Trump's apparent bewilderment was genuine, it means that he was never told about a massive security breach—or that he was, today, and had already forgotten.

Why does this matter?

• There's no functional difference between a president who is cut out of the loop by his own staff, and one who can't remember what they told him anyway.

• The president is responsible for the incompetence of the people he puts in charge of national security.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He fluffed the price of his fake money.

Hours before taking office for his second term, Trump issued a cryptocurrency token, $TRUMP. Like all cryptocurrencies, it has no inherent value. (Fiat currencies like the dollar do, because they are guaranteed to be accepted by the governments that issue them.)

In those first few days, the price of $TRUMP soared, either because it was a means of effectively registering a bribe to Trump without leaving an easy trace, or because buyers were pursuing the "greater fool" theory—hoping to immediately re-sell their stake in a worthless commodity at a higher price.

$TRUMP during the first two weeks of Trump's second term. The gray area at the bottom shows the trading volume, which surges at the start and then is reduced to almost nothing within a week.

(The bribery aspect is not hypothetical. Justin Sun, a financier who was facing enormous civil fines and quite likely criminal charges from the SEC for fraud, bought $75 million in another Trump cryptocurrency. This appears to be what secured him a sudden reprieve from those charges immediately upon Trump taking office.)

Immediately after $TRUMP was announced, seasoned cryptocurrency traders noticed that Trump stood to make a fortune on the coins, not simply because he owned most of them and could crash the market at any time by cashing out, but because he took a fee for each trade.

When the dust settled, it became clear that some 810,000 buyers had lost money on the coin—while Trump himself profited on the order of $100,000,000. 

Active trading in $TRUMP effectively stopped after that, meaning that Trump is making no further money on the "churn" of people foolish enough to buy his meme coin in the hopes of selling it for a profit. Today, he took action on that, "pumping" the stock on his boutique social media website in an attempt to goose trading.

It worked—for him. Trading volume soared, and with it, the fees that earn Trump money. Almost everyone who bought into the hype lost money, though, as prices crashed 7% from their momentary highs.

$TRUMP as it traded today.

Overall, Trump's market manipulation did increase the daily price by a few percent—but this will be cold comfort for the vast majority of buyers who paid six or seven times as much for it in the initial hype.

$TRUMP since inception. Today's "bump" is barely visible on the extreme right.

Why does this matter?

• If it were anyone else doing it, this would be a penny-stock scam—except penny stocks still represent real companies.

• There shouldn't be an untraceable pipeline to bribe the President of the United States.

• And if there is, it shouldn't work this well.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He decided his hurt feelings were more important than Maine schools.

This morning, Trump repeated a threat to withhold federal funds from Maine schools unless its governor, Janet Mills, makes a personal and "full throated apology" to him. Trump claims that Mills made an "unlawful challenge" to him when she said she would fight Trump's attempted purge of transgender students in court. Maine allows transgender girls to play sports, but it's not clear how many—if any—actually do.

Title IX, the section of federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any educational program, does not bar transgender students from participating in sports—although Trump has now decided that it does, which is the heart of the conflict. Earlier this week, a federal judge blocked Trump's most recent attempt to purge the armed forces of transgender servicemembers.

Trump has no legal authority to withhold funds appropriated by Congress until state government officials personally humble themselves before him. 

There is a history to Trump's demand that Mills personally soothe his feelings. Last month, at a White House meeting of state governors, Trump singled Mills out for criticism during his remarks to the group. Mills responded that Maine would abide by state and federal law, to which Trump responded "We are the federal law." Mills replied that she would see Trump in court. 

Visibly upset at being challenged, Trump said he thought Mills didn't have much of a future in politics and changed the subject.

Why does this matter?

• Trump is not a king, and state governors are not his vassals.

• Funding schools is more important than placating a president's hurt feelings.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He called anti-Tesla protestors "terrorists" and threatened to send them to the same Salvadoran slave labor camp he sent other "terrorists."

 

Trump has spent an inordinate amount of time in the last few weeks working to halt a crash in the stock price of Tesla, the car company owned by his apparently indispensable political patron, Elon Musk. He held what amounted to an all-day Tesla car show at the White House, culminating in him "buying" a new Tesla. He dispatched his secretary of the Treasury, Howard Lutnick, to urge Americans to buy Tesla stock specifically. (Promoting stocks purely to pump up their price is generally illegal, and so is using government office to promote one company's stock in particular.)

Trump has even suggested that boycotts of Tesla—which is to say, individual people choosing not to buy one and urging other people to do the same—are somehow illegal. 

It is not illegal not to buy a particular brand of car.

Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have also declared that actions against Tesla like vandalism or destruction of property are "terrorism" and will be prosecuted as such. Today, Trump posted this on his boutique social media website:

I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!

The mocking reference to El Salvador is significant. Trump recently sent some 300 Venezuelans to be imprisoned in an El Salvador slave labor camp, on unsubstantiated claims that they were members of a gang and hence a "terrorist" threat. (Many if not all of those claims now appear to be false.) Trump continues to maintain that he can do this to anyone he deems a "terrorist."

Putting it all together: Trump is lumping together calls to boycott Tesla and peaceful protests against Musk and Tesla with actual (but relatively minor) property crimes, calling the whole thing terrorism, and explicitly threatening to send Americans to the offshore labor camp he sent other "terrorists" to just this week.

Musk, ostensibly the world's richest man, has borrowed heavily against the value of his Tesla stock, meaning his business empire and political influence are threatened by a sudden drop in its price, as lenders will call in the debts faster than he can pay them back. As a result, he—and hence Trump, over whom he has enormous influence—are showing their desperation. In a recent companywide meeting, Musk himself practically begged Tesla employees not to sell their stock—or, in other words, to help keep its price propped up by passing on the chance to cut their losses. 

But company insiders, required by law to report trades of Tesla stock, aren't listening. In the last three months, company officials with access to insider information about Tesla's future have sold 745,228 TSLA shares and bought zero. 

Tesla protests are happening nationwide almost every day, mostly at dealerships. Those planned for tomorrow, March 22, include the following locations:

Tempe, AZ

Colorado Springs, CO

Seattle, WA

Renton, WA

Riverside, CA

Austin, TX

Liberty Lake, WA

Bellevue, WA

Portsmouth, NH

Chattanooga, TN

Rio Rancho, NM

San Jose, CA 

Houston, TX 

Devon, PA

North Hollywood, CA 

Tysons Corner, VA 

Rockville, MD 

Washington, DC

Louisville, KY 

Wexford, PA 

Dedham, MA

West Chester, PA 

Sacramento, CA 

Portland, OR 

Santa Monica, CA 

Vallejo, CA 

Delray Beach, FL 

Superior, CO 

Golden Valley, MN 

Indianapolis, IN

Owings Mills, MD

Raleigh, NC 

Santa Rosa, CA

Maplewood, MN 

Reno, NV 

Lisle, IL

Savannah, GA

Seaside, CA 

Loveland, CO 

New York, NY (Brooklyn and Manhattan)

Philadelphia, PA 

Kansas City, MO  

Pasadena, CA 

Eureka, CA 

San Francisco, CA

Corpus Christi, TX

San Antonio, TX 

Salem, OR 

Lynnwood, WA 

Northbrook, IL 

Boston, MA 

Long Beach, CA 

Alhambra, CA 

Cranston, RI 

Irvine, CA

Why does this matter?

• The government exists to protect the people and Constitution of the United States, not sell cars for the president's cronies.

• Nobody who threatens to send Americans to a foreign gulag is fit to serve the United States.

• Even by Trump's standards, this is dictator shit.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He failed in an attempt to give Elon Musk unfiltered access to the most sensitive information the government collects about its citizens.

A federal judge today blocked the Trump administration's attempts to allow his political patron, Elon Musk, to continue to access the most sensitive data that the United States collects on anyone with a Social Security number. Musk has made blatantly false claims about supposed fraud in how Social Security payments are made, apparently in an attempt to justify getting access to its "crown jewel" databases. 

Had that access been granted, Musk would have been able to personally review information about effectively any and every person living or working in the United States, including

• medical history
• mental health treatment records
• bank account data, including account numbers
• work history
• marriage and divorce records
• tax records
• lifetime address information

Unfettered access to this data, especially without any independent oversight by career government officials not reporting directly to Musk, represents a massive security risk. As with many other government systems that Musk has sought access to, the best case scenario is that he would gain a massive advantage for his private businesses over their competitors for the government contracts and subsidies.

A far more dangerous situation is that, accidentally or otherwise, Americans' most sensitive personal data could fall into the hands of hostile foreign governments. The source of most of Musk's wealth, his stock in Tesla, is highly dependent on maintaining the goodwill of the Chinese government. (Separately, the New York Times is reporting tonight that Trump plans to give Musk direct access to the United States' most secret military plans regarding China.)

In a 137-page ruling, Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander summarized the situation this way:

The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.  It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack. 

To facilitate the expedition, SSA provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.  

Yet, defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.  Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task.  Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud.  Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.  

As the judge noted in her ruling, there are situations where Musk is extremely concerned about privacy—specifically, in keeping the identities of the people drafted onto the DOGE team secret and unaccountable to the public. Journalists who figured out some of their names and reported on them faced immediate threats from Trump's Justice Department. That reporting on DOGE employees unearthed racist and misogynist posts on social media, lack of technical skills, security risks, and—in at least one case—someone being fired from a private sector job for leaking secret information.

Why does this matter?

• Unelected political donors shouldn't be able to buy access to Americans' most private and sensitive information.

• If this exact thing were happening without the compliance of the President of the United States, it would be the biggest cybercrime in history.

• This doesn't look like the kind of thing any president would permit a subordinate to do, if he were able to stop it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He took $175 million in research funds from a university for nonexistent violations of a policy he just made up.

In the 2021-2022 college swimming season, Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, joined the University of Pennsylvania team. A strong but not dominant swimmer by women's college standards, Thomas  had medically transitioned via hormone therapy when she joined the women's team, a process which caused her to lose muscle mass and added fifteen seconds to her 500m freestyle time. Her participation followed NCAA rules in place at the time.

Today, in 2025, Trump froze $175 million in federal research funds to Penn, most of which would likely have gone to medical research in the university's hospital system. A spokesperson confirmed that the abrupt cuts were due to Penn having "infamously permitted a male [sic] to compete on its women’s swimming team.”

There are currently no transgender athletes at Penn, and virtually none nationwide. Trump has issued an executive order attempting to force universities to adopt policies that would bar those ten or so athletes. That order is currently being challenged in court.

In other words, Trump—who shows little discomfort with gender fluidity in his personal life, but who has adopted transphobia as a culture war issue—is punishing Penn's hospital system because in 2022 its athletic department followed a different policy than the one he wants them to now.

Trump is a graduate of Penn's Wharton School, although he doesn't mention it as much as he used to. Trump has zealously policed the privacy of his student record from Penn—the last of several schools his family influence got him into—most likely because it would show up his claims to have graduated at the top of his Wharton class. In reality, he appears nowhere on any of the published honors lists from the years he attended.

In other sports news, Trump had a web pages celebrating baseball legend and WWII veteran Jackie Robinson taken off of the Department of Defense site, apparently because acknowledging that the man who broke the segregation barrier for major league baseball had also served honorably in the military was "DEI."

Why does this matter?

• It was not illegal to do things in 2022 that Donald Trump would decide in 2025 you shouldn't have.

• Punishing unrelated medical researchers for a sports issue is stupid and cruel.

• Governing erratically and punitively so that people are frightened into compliance is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lost just about every court battle he could in one day.

One federal judge blocked Trump's orders to purge the armed forces of transgender personnel. Judge Ana Reyes noted that the arguments Trump made against service by transgendered Americans were identical in structure and rationale to the ones that barred service by women and Black personnel. (Trump tried and failed to enact a similar ban during his first term.)

Another federal judge, Theodore Chuang, ordered the immediate restoration of USAID, finding that its shutdown was unlawful, harmful, and likely unconstitutional. In the process, Chuang also found that Elon Musk was the de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and not simply the supposedly powerless "advisor" that Musk has pretended to be in order to limit his own legal exposure.

In a third courtroom today, Judge Tanya Chutkan found that the Trump administration had failed to provide any proof of the supposed "fraud" that led to the EPA freezing some $20 billion in funds that Congress had appropriated and that had already been awarded in the form of grants and contracts to various organizations. "The government can’t just void contracts and void agreements and terminate things without following its own regulation," Chutkan said.

And in yet another federal court, Trump administration lawyers struggled to explain why the executive branch did not obey the explicit orders issued by federal judge James Boasberg in an immigration case in which Trump ordered Venezuelan nationals not charged with any crimes or immigration violations imprisoned in a slave labor camp in El Salvador. In what seems like an attempt to both openly defy the court while claiming that technically he wasn't, Trump has changed his story several times over the past few days: at various times his administration has said that the orders weren't issued in time, or that they didn't become official until they were in writing, or simply that judges have no authority over government planes once they enter international airspace. 

Trump responded by calling Boasberg, a conservative George W. Bush appointee, a "Crooked Judge" who needed to be "IMPEACHED!!!" in a post on his boutique social media website. 

Trump incorrectly identified Boasberg as an Obama appointee in that post, perhaps to suggest that there was some kind of judicial bias at work against him. (Going in the other direction, Trump sometimes brags that the conservative justices on the Supreme Court will do what he wants because they "owe" him.) But in fact, the federal judges who have rule against him in the vast majority of cases during his second term haven't needed ideology to do it: both liberal and conservative judges have slammed his quasi-dictatorial understanding of what a president is allowed to do.

Trump even drew an uncharacteristic rebuke from John Roberts, the conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts issued a statement condemning Trump's frequent calls to impeach judges who rule against him, writing that "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."

Why does this matter?

• The most likely explanation for why judges find your actions illegal and unconstitutional is that your actions are illegal and unconstitutional.

• Under the United States Constitution, no matter whether the judge interpreting it is liberal or conservative, the president is not a king.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He took the day off to play armchair architect and art critic.

Most or possibly all of Trump's work day was taken up with a visit to the Kennedy Center, the performing arts organization that Trump decreed himself the chair of after firing much of its board. He presided over a two-hour meeting of his new hand-selected board and posed for pictures in the presidential box, a space he never visited during his first term.

After a tour of the grounds, Trump declared that the Center was "in tremendous disrepair" and criticized the presence of "underground rooms" he didn't see the point of. (Like any large-scale performance space, the Kennedy Center has rehearsal areas, practice rooms, classrooms, and administrative space.) 

This is what the Kennedy Center looks like, including some of its "underground rooms:"

That said, Trump does know something about buildings in disrepair. During his first term, a man died in a fire at Trump Tower because the building lacked a sprinkler system and Trump had fought all attempts by the city to require him to install one. He deliberately allowed other rental properties he owned to fall into disrepair in an attempt to dislodge rent-stabilized tenants, allowing rats to proliferate and heating systems to fail in the middle of winter.

Artists have been leaving the Center in droves, dropping out of planned appearances in protests. Audiences aren't happy either: ticket sales have plummeted, donations have dried up, and Vice-President JD Vance was loudly booed when he showed up for a National Symphony Orchestra concert earlier this week.

Trump also signaled that he'd like to host the annual Kennedy Center Honors, and that he hoped to present an award to George Herman Ruth—better known by his nickname Babe, the New York Yankees slugger who died in 1948.

Why does this matter?

• The President of the United States has better things to do with his time.

• Believing you're an expert in everything is not a sign of good mental health.

• There's creative thinking, and then there's giving an arts award to a baseball player who retired in 1935.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He openly defied court orders—and, through surrogates, mocked the courts that issued them.

Yesterday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order forbidding Trump from exercising his dubious authority to singlehandedly deport or detain people under a 1798 law. In the course of hearings on the matter, District Court Judge James Boasberg learned that some people had been hurriedly loaded onto planes, and his order granting the TRO specifically ordered the government to recall any such planes. 

Judge Boasberg emphasized the urgency in his oral instructions, telling Trump administration lawers to inform ICE immediately that "any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. However that's accomplished, turning around the plane, or not embarking anyone on the plane. …This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately."

Today, the Trump administration openly admitted that it had disregarded the order, while claiming at the same time that it hadn't—just that it had decided the order didn't apply because, by the time it was formally communicated, the people subject to it were over international waters. White House spokesperson Karolina Leavitt then pivoted to an assurance that the Trump administration would win any such case at the Supreme Court, where Trump himself has appointed a third of the justices.

As legal experts immediately pointed out, that does not change the fact that the courts have jurisdiction over the actions of the government. The executive branch cannot ignore the laws and constitution just by moving its conduct offshore. Even more obviously, the executive branch doesn't get to overrule a judicial order simply because, in its own opinion, the order doesn't apply.

The rest of the administration went out of its way to celebrate the defiance of Boasberg's order. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted a social media post mocking the order by the right-wing president of El Salvador, and White House communications director Stephen Cheung recirculated it to reporters.

The Washington Post reported Sunday night that some 200 of those deportees, allegedly members of a Venezuelan gang, would spend the next year doing forced labor in an El Salvadoran prison, with the United States paying El Salvador. The Trump White House has not shown that they have been convicted or even accused of crimes in the United States (or El Salvador or Venezuela), which is the only circumstance under which forced labor is permitted since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. 

Meanwhile, a second judge in an unrelated case ordered the Trump administration to explain why it had "willfully disobeyed" his order regarding the deportation of a Boston physician with a lawful work visa.

In many recent cases, the Trump administration has pointedly refrained from offering any proof or allegations of bad conduct that would allow for deportation or arrest under the law. In some of them, that is almost certainly because there is no such allegation to be made. But Trump seems eager to assert that he, and not courts or Congress or the Constitution that gives Congress the power to make laws regarding immigration, is the only authority that matters.

Trump, who has recently floated the idea of selling American citizenship to the highest bidder, has some personal connection with the intricacies of immigration law. He's twice married women who appear to have broken immigration law en route to obtaining citizenship through him, and bent the rules to benefit his most recent set of in-laws who would otherwise be ineligible for citizenship.

Why does this matter?

• There is literally nothing in Trump's theory of his powers that would prevent him from deporting anyone to an El Salvadoran slave labor camp at taxpayer expense.
  
  
• No matter how many times he claims otherwise, the president is not a king.

• Claiming the power to expel "undesirables" without due process or put them in internment camps is textbook authoritarianism.

• Democracy is based on the rule of law—and respect for the law—not the personal desires or ambitions of one person.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried (and failed) to give himself power to unilaterally deport anyone for any reason.

Trump attempted to deport five Venezuelan nationals today, reportedly part of a much larger group, on the allegation that they were somehow connected to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. In a proclamation issued today, Trump declared that the gang was "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States." This was an attempt to invoke the only part of the Alien and Sedition Acts still on the books—the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Under the 227-year-old statute, written before there was a modern legal concept of citizenship or clearly established national borders for the United States, a president can detain or deport noncitizens when Congress has declared war, or when "any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States." Its most famous application came as part of the legal framework allowing for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. 

The law has never been invoked in peacetime, in part because the President has no inherent authority to unilaterally decide who may enter or remain in the United States. That power is given by the Constitution to Congress, which passes laws establishing an orderly and legal framework and empowers the executive branch to enforce only those laws.

As legal scholars were quick to point out today, if Trump's interpretation held, then he could deport any person of any immigration status on a whim simply by claiming they were part of a phony "invasion." The 1798 law does not require those detained or deported to have committed crimes, or entered the country illegally, or to have acted in any way against the United States. 

The Trump administration has offered no evidence that the targeted people are members of any gang, or that they have committed any crimes or status violations. If they had, it would be a routine matter to deport them using normal legal channels.

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport anyone for 14 days, finding that those targeted were likely to succeed in a legal challenge to their deportations. 

During a break in the hearing on the order today, the Trump administration apparently ordered planes carrying deportees to take off in an attempt to make the restraining order moot—in spite of the fact that the people involved will remain in the government's custody, meaning they posed no possible threat. The order that was issued required any such planes in the air to turn back.

Why does this matter?

• An executive branch that can't be trusted to respect the authority of the courts is a dictatorship in all but name.

• Presidents are not kings.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was illegal to criticize him.

Trump spoke at the Justice Department today. Presidents normally never do this, to maintain the separation of politics from prosecutorial decisions, and certainly not to give a campaign speech, which was essentially what Trump did.

In a meandering, stream-of-consciousness speech in which he frequently slurred or stumbled over words, Trump once again aired his grievances against the law enforcement and prosecutors who investigated the crimes for which he was indicted prior to being re-elected. (Most if not all of them have resigned or been fired.) Trump singled out for praise the one judge, his own appointee Aileen Cannon, who regularly and sometimes inexplicably sided with his defense team in the four separate criminal trials he was facing. 

He also said this, referring to two of the mainstream news channels he is not currently suing:

I believe that CNN and [MSNBC], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.

In the United States of America, it's not illegal to "write bad about" the president, or any other elected official.

 

Why does this matter?

• No, really: it is not illegal to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for individuals to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for corporate entities to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for permanent residents to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for foreign diplomats to criticize the president.

• Criminalizing dissent is the foundation of every dictatorship.

• No one this emotionally fragile can handle the job of being president.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He was forced to rehire illegally fired workers, while his administration compared them unfavorably to Adolf Hitler.

Today, two federal judges in separate cases ordered the rehiring of thousands of workers unlawfully fired during Trump's attempt to rapidly purge the government of as much of its workforce as possible.

In both cases, the judges found what had already been widely reported—that the Trump administration lied about firing workers based on their performance. 

The permanence of the rehiring is not yet clear, nor is it known how many of the affected workers will be able to return. The disruption to the lives of workers and their families caused by Trump's summary firings has been enormous. 

Elsewhere today, Elon Musk—the person Trump entrusted with carrying out those mass purges—retweeted a post that said that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao weren't responsible for the murders they ordered, but "public sector workers" were.

Why does this matter?

• American federal workers are not the ones who invite comparisons with Nazis.

• It's wrong to destroy Americans' livelihoods for no reason.

• This might not happen in a presidential administration where anybody had ever had to work for a living.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He slandered fired federal workers.

Asked today if he took responsibility for the massive job losses his indiscriminate firing of federal employees has caused, Trump retorted that the American workers he fired weren't really workers. "Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work." He added that he was "keeping the best people" in what remained of the federal workforce.

To be clear: the charge that federal workers weren't working is a lie. Some were working remotely because they had no offices to return to after Trump canceled leases and tried to sell off government buildings. 

In fact, Trump is not firing people based on performance at all, but simply who lacks civil service protection by virtue of being in a new job within the civil service. These "probationary" jobs are not just for employees who entered the federal workforce for the first time in the past few years, but also include people with decades of experience who had recently been promoted to senior leadership roles.

The firings have been so chaotic and, in many cases, so unlawful that either the courts or the Trump administration itself have been forced to scramble to try to undo firings to avoid catastrophe. A small portion of the federal workers who were summarily fired and then rushed back to work include those responsible for keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal safe, calibrating x-ray machines and other medical devices, containing the current bird flu epidemic, and handing benefits for first responders with chronic health conditions because of their service after September 11th.

Trump, whose lackluster management of the billion-dollar real estate fortune he inherited meant that his business underperformed the overall economy during the biggest real estate boom in the history of New York City, addressed reporters after taking his sixth golf vacation in seven weeks on the taxpayer dime.

 

Why does this matter?

• A billionaire trust-fund baby saying that Americans in civil service jobs don't do work is beyond the pale even for Trump.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was illegal not to buy things. UPDATE: He said it was terrorism not to buy things.

In a post he made at 1:14 AM, Washington time, to his boutique social network, Trump complained that consumers were "illegally and collusively" refusing to buy Teslas to spite Elon Musk.

It is not illegal to not buy things.

If Trump is worried that consumers are punishing Musk for the job he's doing as the person to whom Trump has delegated apparently unlimited executive authority, he has good reason. Tesla's stock, the main bulwark of Musk's standing as the richest person in the world, took an absolute beating on Monday. Sales are plummeting, Americans are exercising their freedom of speech by protesting outside of Tesla dealerships, and Musk himself—who bought and paid for a reputation as an eccentric genius—has become even more polarizing than Trump, and even less popular.

One possible explanation for Trump's claim that it's illegal not to buy a Musk product is that Musk told him it was, and Trump believed him. Musk has made a similar claim about ads on Twitter, arguing that if companies had bought them before he bought Twitter, they're legally obliged to continue buying them indefinitely, no matter what else happens. Not long after buying the company and firing most of the content moderation staff in the name of "free speech," advertisers began pulling out in droves for fear that their product would be associated with, for example, posts written by out-and-proud Nazis. He publicly told advertisers to "go fuck yourself"—then sued them for not doing business with him.

At a White House press conference later in the day, where he appeared in front of a lineup of Tesla models with Musk, Trump labeled people who choose not to buy Teslas "domestic terrorists."

REPORTER: …Some say they should be labeled domestic terrorists—

TRUMP: I will do that. I'll do it. I'm gonna stop them. We catch anybody doing it—because they're harming a great American company. …Those people are gonna go through a lotta problems.

Musk also provided Trump with a sales pitch to read, complete with pricing information, which Trump did. Shortly afterwards, it was leaked that Musk will make a $100 million contribution to Trump's political action committee.

Why does this matter?

• Again: it is not illegal to not buy things.

• It is not terrorism to not buy things.

• Freedom of speech also means it is not illegal to encourage other people not to buy things.

• It's bad if the President of the United States can be made to read ad copy on demand for his political backers.

• People who don't want their politics to affect their business shouldn't mix the two.

• Asking Americans who may have lost months or years from their retirement savings over the past two days to feel sympathy for the financial plight of the world's richest person might be a bit much.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He confirmed that he'd ordered the arrest and deportation of a lawful permanent resident for holding political beliefs he doesn't like.

Yesterday, immigration officials arrested Mahmoud Khalil in New York and began attempting to have him deported. Khalil has a green card, meaning he is a legal permanent resident of the United States. Under all but the most extraordinary circumstances, he cannot be deported, and certainly not without extensive legal processes.

Khalil is the husband of an American citizen who is pregnant with his child. His family were not told where he was after his arrest, and were forced to resort to the extraordinary legal remedy of a habeas petition. It was eventually determined that he had been sent to a prison in Louisiana—but only after his lawyers had begun to ask about his whereabouts.

Today, possibly in an attempt to cover up the fact that Khalil had been arrested mistakenly on a false tip that he was overstaying a student visa, Trump announced in a post on his boutique social media site that ICE had "proudly" arrested Khalil, whom he called a "Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student." Trump also said that "This is the first arrest of many to come."

In a separate release tauntingly titled "Shalom Mahmoud," the White House claimed that Khalil's leadership of anti-genocide protests on Columbia's campus meant he was "aligned with Hamas." Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that the Trump administration would "be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported."

Under the First Amendment, it is not a crime to "be aligned with" Hamas or anyone else—not even, for example, neo-Nazis or white supremacist militias. More to the point, Trump says that kind of thing about anyone who disagrees with him. He said that Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, was a "proud member of Hamas" because Schumer opposed Trump's ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza.

A federal judge blocked the deportation order today. Khalil remains in custody but has not been charged with any crime. A huge crowd formed at the site of his arrest today, protesting his treatment. 

Trump has not commented on whether the people protesting in support of Khalil's civil and constitutional rights were also subject to arrest and deportation for their political "alignment."

Why does this matter?

• Saying things the president doesn't like isn't a crime or a deportable offense, because the president is not a king.

• Being arrested without charge for political speech the ruler finds threatening is what happens in a dictatorship.

• Nobody really thinks this is about Trump's deep and abiding commitment to fighting anti-semitism.