What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to bury a story about how people don't like Elon Musk.

The New York Times reported on Friday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had gotten into a shouting match with Elon Musk on Thursday. That meeting, which took place in private, had been scheduled as Trump tried to contain the fallout from his Cabinet meeting earlier in the week, at which Musk—dressed in a baseball cap and T-shirt—physically loomed over Trump and other officials and garnered the lion's share of press coverage.

The initial readout of the Thursday meeting was that Trump was taking some tentative steps to rein in Musk's control over the executive branch, telling cabinet secretaries that they—and not Musk—were ultimately in charge of deciding which federal employees could be fired as part of Trump's attempted purge of the civil service. But Trump immediately undercut that by saying that if the secretaries wouldn't do it, Musk would.

Rubio is not the first Trump official to have a problem with Musk's inexplicable dominance over Trump's White House. Even from the first days of the transition, Trump staffers have grumbled that Musk was trying to be "co-President," and that was before the full extent of the authority Trump was willing to let him exercise. 

In a post to his boutique social media site today, Trump called the report of Rubio's anger "FAKE NEWS" and said that "ELON AND MARCO HAVE A GREAT RELATIONSHIP!"

Trump watched the fight at the Thursday meeting, and ultimately intervened to stop it. But it's entirely possible that Trump now believes that Musk and Rubio "have a great relationship," if one or both of them told him they did. Much of his first term was marked by court intrigue between various factions who believed, not without justification, that Trump would simply do whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Staff manipulate him in any number of ways—showing him soothing positive news coverage on demand, concealing bad news to avoid a temper tantrum, or strategically leaking information to provoke a response from him. 

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if a president can be this easily manipulated.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to cheat Americans on their student loans.

The Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness Program was created during the George W. Bush administration to help Americans who went into jobs in the public or non-profit sectors. These jobs, which often provide critical local services like health care, counseling, drug rehabilitation, and education, often pay less than private sector work. Participants who worked in a qualifying job and made payments on the loan for ten years are eligible to have the rest of their loans forgiven.

During his first term, Trump effectively shut down the program through deliberate neglect, slow-walking applications so much that only 7,000 applications were processed in four years. The Biden Administration restored the program.

Today, Trump signed an executive order that, if upheld, would cancel it again—but this time explicitly for employees of organizations he deems "illegal." Neither Trump nor his staff would say what that meant, except that it had something to do with "improper activities" around immigration and "terrorism." 

This appears to mean that Trump will try to exclude people who work for organizations that oppose his immigration policy. That would include virtually every mainstream religious organization in the country, all of the many charities run by those religious groups, the American Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and city and state governments representing more than half of the country.

Why does this matter?

• It's wrong to screw over teachers and nurses who played by the rules of a program established almost 20 years ago.

• Presidents don't get to decide whether American citizens are entitled to the benefits the law provides for.

• Using power to punish citizens you imagine are your enemies is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to make it harder to sue his adminstration.

Trump has been in office for just over six weeks, but it is already almost impossible to keep track of the number of lawsuits filed against his administration. Most of these have to do with the extraordinary new powers Trump is trying to grant to himself to ignore budgetary laws, punish people he thinks are his enemies, redefine words in the Constitution, fire government workers without due process, or interfere in state and local government.

Even more remarkable than the number of lawsuits is how many have resulted in victories for the plaintiffs. Few of these cases are fully resolved, but judges have issued a steady stream of defeats for Trump in the form of restraining orders or emergency orders to comply with existing law. (Whether or not Trump is actually obeying these orders is another question.) Judges have issued utterly scathing rulings about Trump's illegal overreaches, in some cases bluntly accusing him of trying to take on the role of a king. 

The plaintiffs in these cases must pay for court fees and legal representation as they go, and may not be reimbursed for their legal costs even when they win. 

Today, the Trump administration told its lawyers to invoke a rarely-used federal court rule that would force plaintiffs to post an additional bond up front. The memo said that Americans who took the Trump administration to court to defend their rights were wasting its time with "frivolous" matters and that their "antics" and "misrepresentations" were somehow endangering the country. 

Judges will still need to grant the motion, which they are not obliged to do, and could set token amounts that would not deter Americans from holding the Trump administration to the law. But legal experts agreed that even the threat might be enough to deter plaintiffs who lacked the effectively infinite resources of the federal government from trying.

Why does this matter?

• An administration that obeys the laws of the United States and respects its courts has nothing to fear from the legal process.

• American citizens have a right to defend their rights in court, even if the president doesn't want them to.

• The president is not a king, and it shouldn't take a federal judge to point that out.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He confused Canada with Ukraine.

Trump posted this to his boutique social media site this afternoon:

Justin Trudeau, of Canada, called me to ask what could be done about Tariffs. I told him that many people have died from Fentanyl that came through the Borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped. He said that it’s gotten better, but I said, “That’s not good enough.” The call ended in a “somewhat” friendly manner! He was unable to tell me when the Canadian Election is taking place, which made me curious, like, what’s going on here? I then realized he is trying to use this issue to stay in power. Good luck Justin!

The slightly more charitable interpretation of Trump's claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau couldn't give him a date for the Canadian election is that the date has not been set yet, except that it will take place no later than October 20 of this year. This is normal for a parliamentary system like Canada. However, Trudeau has no power to delay the election past October 20, and has already resigned as leader of his party, effective later this month. 

The more likely and more troubling explanation is that Trump was conflating the upcoming Canadian elections with his talking point about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy being a "dictator." Ukraine is under martial law as a result of the Russian invasion, and cannot hold elections. The Ukrainian Parliament recently passed a resolution by a vote of 286-0 affirming the legitimacy of Zelenskyy's presidency while the emergency lasts. 

Trump himself was indicted for, and remains vulnerable to, criminal charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Virtually no fentanyl is smuggled across the Canadian border into the United States, although Trump has made clear he thinks that a return to the tariff-funded Gilded Age government would be a good thing. However, he doesn't appear to have the courage of his convictions: it took less than one day of stock market losses and tv spots with furious business owners for him to hastily backtrack on his Mexico and Canada tariff threats for the second time in a month.

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if the president can't remember which world leader he's talking to.

• People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

• Uncertainty, like whether goods will cost 25% more tomorrow, is bad for the markets.

UPDATE, March 5: Less than a day later, all 443 properties had been pulled from the site. Bloomberg News notes that one of the properties mentioned was "a northern Virginia campus that doesn’t appear in federal property records but has long been associated with the Central Intelligence Agency." The Trump administration continues to refuse to comment, either on the notice or the retraction.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He put more than 443 federal properties, some of them irreplaceable, on the market.

Today, the General Services Administration put 443 federal properties up for sale, including the Washington headquarters of the FBI and the Department of Justice, but also other purpose-built facilities across the country. They range from enormous office buildings to specialized facilities like a functionally irreplaceable nuclear waste treatment plant. 

It's not clear how much money the properties could raise, assuming they could be sold at all, but it's telling that the Trump administration cited "$430 million in [annual] operating costs." This is not a lot of money: the federal government takes in that much revenue about every 51 minutes.

Neither Trump nor anyone in his administration has offered any explanation for the move, to include where the employees who use those buildings would go. The Trump administration's return-to-office mandate has already produced some absurd results, with workers hired remotely "returning" to offices with no desks or electricity, and in some cases, no office left to return to.

If there is a plan, it's most likely that Trump intends to enter into a leaseback scheme, where private investors buy the buildings at pennies on the dollar and then lease them back to the federal government. This would, in effect, turn buildings that were costing the federal government nothing into a giant perpetual drain on the federal budget.

It's common for struggling, cash-poor businesses to enter into this kind of arrangement as a way to create cash flow and stave off bankruptcy. Troubled restaurant chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden, and the now-bankrupt Sears chain of department stores are familiar examples. That logic doesn't apply to the federal government.

This isn't the first time that Trump, who has owned many buildings but made money on very few of them, has used government real estate for his own profit. In 2012, the General Services Administration approved a plan to relocate the FBI to new custom facility while turning the site of the current J. Edgar Hoover Building into newly-built mixed commercial and residential space. But that would have brought competition to what was then the Trump International Hotel—which occupied the Old Post Office Building, of which Trump was simultaneously the tenant and landlord. Trump personally intervened to kill the project.

Why does this matter?

• One way to make government more "efficient" is to not hold a fire sale for the buildings where government employees work.

• A president who was familiar with how real estate markets work would probably try to avoid flooding the market with hundreds of properties all at once, driving down prices.

• It's bad to loot the government for the sake of private interests.

• Accidentally outing your secret CIA facility like this is pretty embarrassing.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He told farmers they were planting the wrong crops.

Trump tried to spin his on-again, off-again tariffs on the United States' largest trading partners this way in a post to his boutique social media platform:

There's no real mystery as to what will happen if retaliatory tariffs deprive American farmers of the natural market for their products, because it happened already in Trump's first term. Crop prices will drop, which will cause farms to fail. Businesses that rely on farms will fail too, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Massive bailouts will be required to prop up the entire agriculture sector. There was even a rash of suicides as a result of farm bankruptcies the last time Trump tried this.

Trump's post implies that farmers can simply sell the same products to domestic customers. This is, to put it gently, absurd. American farmers already sell their products in the United States, but almost $200 billion worth of products are grown with the export market in mind. Trying to flood the domestic market with these crops on short notice would force farms to sell at massive losses and wreck the agricultural sector outright. American producers could try to absorb the cost of retaliatory tariffs instead, but at 25% that would still be unsurvivable for many farmers.

It's not clear if Trump understands that, for example, Americans can't really serve cattle feed at the dinner table. Changing the crops a given farm produces takes years of advance planning and infrastructure investment, if it can be done at all. 

Even worse for American farmers, foreign producers will not face the same problems. Because the United States under Trump is starting a trade war with all four of its largest trading partners at the same time, there will be trade barriers against American farmers in all directions simultaneously. But Chinese agricultural producers, for example, will only be restricted in one market, and will find it easier to reach buyers in other countries (including Canada, Mexico and the European Union). 

Likewise, American consumers will see grocery prices go up more than consumers in countries that are not inviting tariffs from all their major trade partners. (Tariffs are taxes and are ultimately paid for by consumers in the form of higher retail prices.)

In other words, Trump is telling American farmers that they have already committed to planting the wrong crops, and that it will be their fault if they can't "have fun" with the resulting chaos. 

Why does this matter?

• When doing something once ended in disaster, it's really stupid to try it again but on an even bigger scale.

• Voters who eat food may not want Trump screwing up the food supply chain again.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got a good performance review, though not from the American people.

One of the effects of Trump's bizarre attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week was to strengthen the resolve of the world's remaining democracies, particularly in Europe, to support Ukraine against the Putin regime in Russia. Today, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced that the UK would commit to providing "boots on the ground, and planes in the air"—a substantial escalation from the indirect military and financial aid that European countries have been providing up to this point.

Russia, for its part, believes that Trump is "rapidly changing all foreign policy" obligations in a way that "largely aligns with [Russia's] vision," according to a government spokesperson speaking today on Russian state television. Finishing the war on favorable terms is a high priority for the Putin regime, but so is driving a wedge between the United States and its military allies, which Trump's actions are helping with.

A new poll released today indicate that Americans agree with the Russian government about Trump's allegiances—which is not to say they approve. Americans support Ukraine over Russia by a 13-to-1 margin. But the same poll shows that four times as many Americans believe that Trump favors Russia over Ukraine.

There has never been a situation in American history where the president and the public at large have been on opposite sides of a conflict. Even in situations where American involvement in a conflict became unpopular, such as the Vietnam War, there was never any real disagreement about which side the United States was aligned with.

Trump asked for and received help from the Putin regime to influence the 2016 election, and was impeached during his first term for withholding military aid to Ukraine as part of a scheme to force the Zelenskyy government to attack his rival for the presidency, Joe Biden.

Why does this matter?

• A president who can't submit himself to the overwhelming will of the American people shouldn't be in office.

• Doing what a hostile foreign power wants, and none of your allies do, is generally a bad idea.

• There's no difference between a president who is captive to the will of an enemy nation and one who simply acts like he is.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made a federal case out of a rant about baseball.

Today, Trump declared that he would pardon disgraced baseball star Pete Rose.

Rose's lifetime ban from baseball and exclusion from the Hall of Fame has long been a matter of legitimate debate among fans. Some feel, as Trump does, that Rose's on-field performance was too good to ignore even given that he admitted to breaking baseball's cardinal law against gambling. (Even diehard Rose supporters don't claim, as Trump did, that there was no issue with Rose betting on his own team.)

The only thing Trump can actually pardon him for are federal crimes, and Rose is known to have committed two. The first is tax evasion, for which he served several months in prison. 

The second is statutory rape, which Rose admitted to but was never charged for because his victim, who was 14 or 15 at the time Rose had sex with her, did not come forward until after the statute of limitations had expired. Rose admitted to having sex with her as a 32-year-old man, but claimed he thought she was 16 (the age of consent in Ohio) and denied her claim that they had had sex in places outside of the state of Ohio—which would make him guilty of federal child sex trafficking. 

Rose was a vocal Trump supporter, but more importantly for his posthumous pardon bid, the crimes he committed were of the sort that Trump is known or strongly suspected to have committed himself. Most of the pardons Trump issued during his first term fit that bill.

Trump has his own history with baseball, most of it fictitious. He played for his private boarding school's team. Box scores from newspaper accounts of those games give him an atrocious career batting average of .138. But his terrible performance at a small private school hasn't stopped Trump from pretending he was a major league prospect, though. He claimed to have been invited to a tryout with future Giants Hall of Famer Willie McCovey. (This is an obvious lie: McCovey is eight years older than Trump and was in the majors while Trump was still in junior high school.)

 

Why does this matter?

• Trump has already pardoned enough child sex abusers.