Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories, as litigants rush to settle their cases.

On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and Elon Musk’s company X, filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.

The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.

In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court, in some cases for years, have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant. The deal they struck, according to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, will cost Meta $25 million in damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs.

“We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.

These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.

Neither X nor the president’s legal team have publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Horltzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.

[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.

Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.

“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”

The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which had been sued by Trump for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanolopolous that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from parent company Disney to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” Paramount Global spokesman Justin Dini told me in a statement.

Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signalled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.

The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict of interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”

The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent company Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.

Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company too seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.

The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. This is why, just a few short days into his presidency, Donald Trump is already making good on his promise to persecute trans people zealously. On Monday, Trump issued an executive order purging trans service members from the military on the grounds that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” a statement belied by the thousands serving honorably until they were singled out for discrimination by their commander in chief. A day later, Trump issued a second executive order that could make gender-affirming care for young people unavailable in most of the country.

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

At issue in the case, United States v. Skrmetti, is whether Tennessee’s ban on medical treatments for gender dysphoria—the medical diagnosis for someone who believes their gender does not match their biological sex—unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of sex. The Tennessee bill declares that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” and therefore in preventing medical treatments that “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Implicit in this is the belief that if you don’t “appreciate your sex,” then the state should force you to. Beyond the legal jargon and pretext, the underlying conflict here is between conservatives who have concluded that trans identity is a social contagion to be eradicated and that using state power for this cause is legitimate, and their opponents, who believe that trans people are entitled to equal protection under the law.

[Read: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

Crucially, the law bans treatments—such as hormones and puberty blockers—only for the purpose of a minor’s gender transition; they remain legal to prescribe for any other reason. The law bans treatments that enable “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Because those same medications are available as long as they are not used for gender-affirming care, lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the ban constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex. The Biden administration’s position was that this kind of care can be regulated—then–Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar cited as a legitimate example a West Virginia law that requires two physicians to sign off—but that the regulation cannot be discriminatory. Not all measures that distinguish on the basis of sex are unconstitutional—see, for instance, sex-specific bathrooms—but they are subject to greater legal scrutiny; Tennessee is denying that it is engaging in discrimination, and thus not subject to that level of scrutiny.

One might question why this case matters if you are not yourself trans or do not have a loved one who is. The number of trans people is objectively small—less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. A recent JAMA Pediatrics study found that fewer than 0.1 percent of young people with private insurance received hormone treatments or puberty blockers during a five-year period—a limited number of patients overall, but one for whom the stakes are very high. The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

Much depends on the nature of the justices’ ultimate decision and how far-reaching it is. The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.” As Frederick Douglass once said, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

“One of the things that’s worth emphasizing is that for the people who brought the case, the movement that’s behind this litigation, there have long been anxieties about sex-discrimination jurisprudence, period,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, told me. “So if that’s the agenda that’s driving the litigation, and the Court is embracing the arguments behind that agenda, you have to wonder if this isn’t the end of the road.”

The harm to antidiscrimination law more broadly could be immense. Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. If they regain legitimacy, they could later be used to weaken other laws that protect Americans from bigotry.

[Read: Anti-trans discrimination is sex discrimination]

For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. “If we’re reinstating the equal-application theory … that was a theory that was used historically to uphold and justify race-based distinctions,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “I don’t know how you can wall off sex discrimination from race discrimination if you’re reviving this equal-treatment claim.”

Kavanaugh suggested that because the case involved medical science, the Court should just leave it to the “democratic process,” an approach that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointedly observed would have prevented the Court from striking down bans on interracial marriage, because at the time, Virginia had argued that the “science” regarding interracial marriage “was substantially in doubt,” and therefore banning it should be up to the voters. The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests—especially when, as Justice Sotomayor pointed out, the population at risk is so few as to be politically powerless.

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them. The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination. Trump has shut down the White House’s Spanish-language website, ended refugee- and humanitarian-parole programs, and unconstitutionally attempted to nullify birthright citizenship.   

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Even before Trump took office, Republican-controlled states passed laws that curtail women’s rights to free speech, privacy, and movement on the grounds that those restrictions are necessary to ban abortion—something that, as Justice Samuel Alito took pains to reiterate during oral argument in Skrmetti, neither he nor his colleagues in the conservative movement regard as sex-based discrimination.

This agenda has, by the Republicans’ own account, been partly enabled by their success at demonizing transgender people in the November election. Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss. One transgender congressional representative was enough for Republicans to demand that all of the Capitol’s bathrooms be restricted by “biological sex.” The tiny percentage of trans children receiving care is justification to ban them from accessing treatment they seek. A defense-funding bill passed with limited Democratic support and signed by President Joe Biden will ban gender-affirming care for the children of service members—for those with trans children, their reward for serving their country is that their children will be discriminated against. If they are stationed in states like Texas, which has no less than 15 military installations, they will have few options, if any, for care outside the military system.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

This is shameless bullying, but then, the president is himself a bully of the highest order, and presidents are moral exemplars, for better and worse. It is not necessary for one to approve of gender-affirming care in order to respect people’s right to make their own decisions about what medical care is best for them and their families, or to oppose this kind of outright, ideologically motivated state persecution.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

These days in Washington, D.C., among a class of Extremely Beltway types—the name droppers, the strivers, the media gossips—Donald Trump’s threats to exact revenge on his enemies have turned into a highly specific (and highly absurd) status competition.

Olivia Troye has heard the joke so many times that she already has a well-worn comeback prepared. When nervous journalists and teasing D.C. types crack to Troye—a lifelong Republican who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland-security adviser before becoming an outspoken Trump critic—that they might end up in adjoining Guantánamo Bay cells, she responds: “I had the Gitmo portfolio, so I can give you some tips.”

In a moment of deep uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where Trump took office promising vengeance but where the scope of his intentions remains nebulous, many of Trump’s known critics have unofficially divided into two adjacent camps: those, like Troye, who have real reason to be alarmed by the president’s threats and are quietly taking steps to protect themselves and their family, and those who are loudly—and often facetiously—chattering about how Trump and his posse might throw them in a gulag. (There are also those in Trump’s orbit who are joking, one hopes, about whom they might throw in the hypothetical gulag.)

Whereas many of those branded most prominently with the scarlet R of Resistance are now eager to stay out of Trump’s sight line, other figures in Washington are actively self-identifying as could-be Trump targets, in a very D.C. show of importance. And often the people talking openly about getting thrown in a gulag likely aren’t even important enough for the gulag.

At one of the many swanky parties in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration, a White House reporter confessed to me that during a recent meeting in outgoing White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’s office, the reporter had—mainly in jest—asked to get on the list for a preemptive pardon. In his final The Late Show episode during the Biden administration, Stephen Colbert also played with the gag, telling his audience, “The next time you all see me, Donald Trump will be president. And you may not see me! Next four years—next four years, we’re taking this one day at a time.”

If the classic “D.C. read” is scanning a book’s index for one’s own name and frantically flipping to the listed pages, then even a mention in Appendix B (“Executive Branch Deep State”) of Government Gangsters, written by Trump’s pick for FBI chief, Kash Patel, can serve as a status symbol in certain circles.

[Read: The sound of fear on air]

“For a lot of people, it’s a joke that is a thinly disguised flex—it’s joking about how important you are,” Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America who has been on the receiving end of such jokes many times, told me. “It’s sort of become a standard greeting in a lot of circles: ‘See you in the gulags.’ ‘I hope we get the nice gulag.’”

“Then every once in a while,” he added, “someone makes that joke to someone who is actually scared or has hired a lawyer, and it’s not so funny.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican turned ardent Trump critic who writes for The Bulwark, told me that he not only regularly hears the joke but also sometimes finds himself “reflexively making it,” the way remarking on the weather is an almost involuntary conversational crutch. “And then after I do, just clarifying that I don’t actually think I’m going to the gulag and that there are people who are at real risk from this administration, and we should probably focus on that,” he said.

On Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden issued a handful of preemptive pardons that included five members of his family, lawmakers on the January 6 House committee, and people Trump had threatened, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top public-health expert during the coronavirus pandemic, and retired General Mark Milley, whom Trump floated the idea of executing after The Atlantic published a profile of him. Others who have attracted Trump’s ire have both publicly and privately lamented that they were not on Biden’s pardon list.

Rachel Vindman, the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—who testified before Congress about a 2019 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during which Trump asked him to investigate Biden’s son Hunter—posted on social media after Biden’s pardons emerged, “Whatever happens to my family, know this: No pardons were offered or discussed. I cannot begin to describe the level of betrayal and hurt I feel.” Her husband appears in Patel’s appendix.

[Read: In praise of mercy]

In the early weeks of his second presidency, Trump has spoken ambiguously about plans to punish his perceived enemies, though he has already taken steps to root out those in the government he believes are part of the anti-Trump “deep state.” In some ways, the list in Patel’s book is instructive. The appendix mentions prominent figures whom Trump has already put on notice or begun targeting: Biden (“the funny thing—maybe the sad thing,” Trump noted in his first post-inauguration interview, with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, is that Biden failed to pardon himself); Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton (within hours of taking office, Trump pulled U.S. Secret Service protection from Bolton, who faces threats on his life from Iran); and Fauci (last week Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail). Yet the list also mentions people such as Elizabeth Dibble and Nellie Ohr, alleged deep staters who are hardly household names and whose alleged offenses are too complicated and obscure to quickly explain.

Patel also previously shared on social media a meme that featured him wielding a chainsaw and buzzing off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, ranging from “Fake News,” CNN, and MSNBC to people such as Biden, the former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.

Just before Election Day, the longtime Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren shared an X post from an Arizona reporter, writing, “He should be the first journalist sent to the gulag.” She later said she was joking. Mike Davis, one of Trump’s most vocal outside legal defenders, has led the unofficial social-media brigade threatening to toss reporters and other perceived enemies into the “gulag,” statements he described to The Washington Post as a “troll” to nettle the left.

But now that Trump, back in the Oval Office, continues to display a willingness to punish those who have crossed him, this sort of declaration from Trump allies can take on a more menacing edge. On Inauguration Day, Davis unleashed more than a dozen posts on X that, depending on the perspective, could be read as trolls or threats. “Dear Congress: We need a supplemental to feed the Vindmans in federal prison,” he wrote in one. “Dear Tony Fauci: Roll the dice. Decline the pardon. And see what happens,” read another. And in a third, using a format he repeated for many of Trump’s enemies, he addressed Biden’s former Homeland Security secretary by name, writing, “Dear Alejandro Mayorkas: No pardons for you and your staff?”

“Nobody is above the law,” Davis said, when I called to ask him about his public posts. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about, and if they’ve done nothing wrong, why did they need a pardon?”

Some of those squarely in the sights of Trump and his allies have begun taking steps to protect themselves. Troye, for instance, has retained a lawyer, and recently made sure that she and her family members had up-to-date passports. Rachel Vindman, meanwhile, told me that she and her family moved from Virginia to Florida two years ago—uprooting their daughter in the middle of sixth grade—in part because they “wanted to live somewhere a little bit more anonymous.” (She was also, she added, ready to leave the D.C. bubble and eager for a “fresh start.”)

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

In many ways, the fear that the mere prospect of retribution has struck in Trump’s opponents—prompting them to hire personal security or nervously bluster about the gulags—could be victory enough for MAGA world. After winning reelection, Trump posted on social media a list of out-of-favor individuals and groups—including “Americans for No Prosperity,” “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, and Pence, his former vice president—and said that prospective administration hires should not bother applying if they had worked with or were endorsed by anyone on the list.

“That’s the financial gulag,” one person told me, speaking anonymously because he has worked for three of the people or entities on Trump’s list, and doesn’t want his business to be blackballed. “It’s not quite a gulag, but it does have a chilling effect.”

Similarly, those who did not receive pardons from Biden worry about the financially daunting task of protecting themselves. “Did you not think of the people who are about to get destroyed, who defend themselves, who have no congressional coverage, who are not politicians, who are not millionaires, who don’t have dozens of PACs that are protecting them?” Troye asked. “There are people who worked on government salaries.” (A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on Biden’s relatively selective set of pardons.)

Vindman, who lived in Russia for several years, said that although no one knows exactly what to expect in Trump’s second term, her experience in Moscow might offer a glimpse: Colleagues policed themselves, and other Russians proactively took actions they believed would please Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It was never a direct ask,” she told me. “It was a more tacit thing.”

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Vindman, who has friends who regularly check in on her, said she spent Election Night wide awake. Her husband was in Virginia with his twin brother, Eugene Vindman, a Democrat the state’s suburban voters elected to the House, and the task of telling her daughter that Trump had won fell to her. “The hardest part of that was laying in bed awake, worrying,” she said. “She’s in eighth grade, and maybe the last four years of her with us will be marred by that, by this harassment.”

When, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk accused Alexander Vindman of “treason,” warning that “he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Rachel Vindman told me that her immediate concern was for her in-laws and her 98-year-old grandmother, who heard the comment and worried on her family’s behalf.

But personally, Vindman said she is working to find daily joy and maintain a sense of normalcy for herself and her family. Her husband recently turned his masters thesis into a book, The Folly of Realism, coming out at the end of February. When I asked her if she ever considered urging him not to publish, because it would thrust their family back into public view, she was emphatic: “Do you just say no to it because it might anger them or put you in the spotlight?” she asked. “It’s that kind of quiet defiance of living your life.”

“It could be a mistake. I guess we’ll never know.” She paused, then added, “Well, I guess we will know.”

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Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset. She believes that someone in the United States Air Force decided to interpret President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to terminate “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear,” just the way it was written.

No one is quite sure what happened, but somehow this order resulted in the excision from a U.S. Air Force training course of some materials about the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black World War II fighter pilots known as the Red Tails because of their aircraft’s distinctive markings. Air Force officials confirmed on Saturday that a video had been removed from the training curriculum but only because it was “intertwined in courses now under review,” and it is now back in the curriculum.

Britt referred to this kind of action as “malicious compliance,” meaning a kind of opposition through aggressive and sometimes overly literal implementation of a command or policy. Rather than refuse to obey, the person or group engaging in malicious compliance takes a kind of “monkey’s paw” approach, implementing the directives as destructively as possible. (Every teenager who has loaded the dishwasher improperly on purpose, hoping never to be told to clear the table again, knows what malicious compliance means.)

Britt also tagged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on social media. Hegseth, who was nominated for his position in part because of his vow to root out wokeness and DEI and to replace them with “lethality,” responded enthusiastically: “Amen! We’re all over it Senator. This will not stand.”

Britt’s complaint about malicious compliance is a diversion. Trump’s wave of executive orders is designed to be performatively malicious. My colleague Adam Serwer years ago noted that, for the MAGA movement, “the cruelty is the point,” and now Trump’s orders make clear that the malice is the policy.

The series of presidential decrees is largely intended to delight the Republican base; unfortunately, government workers cannot divine what Trump really meant. The president has not given any cue that his orders should be interpreted in some more generous way. In fact, days before the Air Force kerfuffle, federal workers received an email from their supervisors (based on a template provided by the Office of Personnel Management) that could have come straight from a party apparatchik in the old Soviet Union. This memo not only told staff to be on the lookout for attempts to hide DEI-related ideological contamination, but warned them of their obligation to rat out colleagues who did so or face “adverse” job consequences themselves.

The advisory, which has since been taken off a government website, continued: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024”—that is, since Election Day—“to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies,” employees must report it to OPM within ten days.

This is not exactly language that encourages anyone to use common sense and good judgment to decide what constitutes DEI contraband. This is a command that says, in effect: This could mean anything; if you don’t report it, and we find it, you’re in trouble. When government employees get a memo like that, they are not inclined to sit around wondering what counts and what doesn’t.

Trump’s other executive orders are likewise designed to show the GOP base that the new administration is doing all of the things that Trump promised he’d do—even if they’re things that, legally, no president can do. Trump had pledged, for example, to eliminate birthright citizenship, so he sharpied out part of the Fourteenth Amendment and declared victory. He froze federal grants and loans—an order now temporarily blocked by a judge—which could have endangered any number of programs, including school lunches. (And about time, according to Representative Rich McCormick, Republican of Georgia, who told CNN today that those indolent kids need to go get jobs—even, apparently, schoolchildren who aren’t old enough to work—instead of “spong[ing] off the government”).

What would non-malicious compliance with such a mandate even look like? Instead of a lunch, are schools supposed to hand poor kids a glass of water and then wish them luck in their job search?

Of course, the Trump administration knows that aid to states and localities will begin to flow again, that children will be getting lunches, and that babies born on U.S. soil are citizens. The goal of all these orders is not to implement policy, but to generate outrage, report the spasms of liberal apoplexy to the MAGA faithful, and then, when necessary, go to court. And why not? The president now has a politically sympathetic Supreme Court majority that worked hard to keep him out of prison while he was a candidate, and has functionally immunized him against almost any challenge now that he’s back in office. Trump’s people know that they cannot actually shake the Constitution like an Etch A Sketch and make birthright citizenship disappear, but why not give it a shot, especially if a trolling executive order makes the base happy?

Trump and his people may also believe that a sleet storm of executive orders, some of which might stick here and there while others melt on contact with reality, is a way to demonstrate competence. They are likely still stung by the fiasco over the 2017 travel ban that initially got swatted down in court, and this time they want to appear as if they know what they’re doing.

But this is merely mimicking competence and energy. The “return to work” order, for example, is a MAGA fan favorite, because it plays to a common stereotype among many Americans that federal employees who work from home are scamming goldbrickers plodding around the house in their bunny slippers and tapping the occasional key on a laptop. Although showing up to an office or worksite in-person is (and should be) a basic requirement of most jobs, remote work in many cases benefits the government and the taxpayer: It reduces congestion in cities, and it offloads a lot of overhead costs (heat, water, lighting, etc.) onto the worker. That’s why the government and private industry were trending toward remote arrangements long before the pandemic.

In any case, many federal offices don’t have enough space to bring everyone back, but Trump may be attempting to make government service onerous enough that some of them will leave anyway: All federal employees have until February 6 to accept a sizable buyout if they cannot or will not return to in-person work. In the end, the RTO power play isn’t really about trying to fill empty offices. Instead, Trump is telling federal employees that all of the arrangements they’ve made with their departments about schedules, child care, commutes, and staffing are now invalid, because their career and service matters less than making some red-state voter feel that the president finally stuck it to them and their co-workers.

Maybe a non-malicious way to enforce such orders exists. But that’s not the point.

Related:

The cruelty is the point. (From 2018) The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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