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This morning, President Donald Trump used the standard diplomatic channel—his Truth Social account—to announce retaliation against Canada for Ontario’s new electricity tariffs, which were themselves retaliatory.

“I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th,” Trump wrote. The rest of the message is much stranger, again promising the annexation of Canada: “The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World.”

Earlier this evening, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, pulled back the electricity tariffs after securing a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the White House dropped its threat. Ford likely recognized that no matter how belligerent a stance Trump takes, he can be easily induced to change his mind.

Consider what’s happened with tariffs over the past 45 days. On February 1, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, to take effect on February 4. On February 3, he announced a one-month pause in implementation. On February 26, he said he might not actually impose the tariffs until April 2; the next day, he said they’d start on March 4. On March 2, Lutnick suggested that the tariff situation was “fluid.” On March 4, the tariffs went into effect after all.

Confused yet? We’re just getting started. That afternoon, with stock markets reacting poorly, Lutnick suggested that the tariffs might be rolled back the next day. Indeed, on March 5, Trump announced that he was suspending parts of the tariffs related to auto manufacturing until April. And then, on March 6, he suspended all of the tariffs until April. Trump once told us that trade wars are “easy to win.” Now he seems unsure about how to fight one, or whether he even wants to.

If the defining feeling of the start of the first Trump administration was chaos, its equivalent in this term is whiplash. The president and his aides have been changing their minds and positions at nauseating speed.

Many of the reversals seem to come down to Trump’s caprices. On February 19, he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator.” About a week later, he disavowed that. “Did I say that? I can't believe I said that,” he told reporters. “I think the president and I actually have had a very good relationship.” The next day, Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office, sent him packing, and began cutting off military help to Ukraine. This afternoon, the U.S. restarted military and financial aid once again.

Another leading cause of whiplash is Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. Last week, the General Services Administration put up a list of more than 400 buildings that the cost-cutting crew had deemed inessential for government operations. The inventory included some eye-raising entries, including the Robert F. Kennedy building—headquarters of the Justice Department—and the main offices of the Labor Department and the FBI, but also some peculiar ones, such as steam tunnels underneath Washington, D.C. (One imagines that the wrong buyer could cause a great deal of mayhem with those.) Within hours, more than 100 entries had been removed from the list; by the next day, it was gone entirely, replaced by a “coming soon” message—though not before revealing a semi-secret CIA facility.

DOGE and other efforts to slash the federal workforce keep overstepping and requiring reversals. In some cases, officials seem to be discovering that the things Trump wants are either impracticable or too politically toxic to effect. Musk posted on X that if federal workers didn’t respond to an email, it would be tantamount to their resignation. Then the threat was removed. Then Musk sent another email. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off, only to be called back to work. Some workers who accepted a buyout offer were then fired; others had the offer rescinded. Musk tittered over canceling and then uncanceling Ebola-prevention programs, though some officials dispute that they were actually uncanceled. The administration planned to shut down the coronavirus-test-distribution program, then ultimately suspended but did not end it; it killed but then resuscitated a health program for 9/11 survivors.

Trump isn’t just going back on specifics. Some of his core campaign propositions are also looking shaky. Despite campaigning on the deleterious effects of inflation, he now says that it’s not a top priority. He promised booming wealth for Americans; now he can’t rule out a recession and is warning that people will need to endure some pain (for what higher purpose, he hasn’t made clear). And even though Trump has long said that he won’t cut Medicare or Social Security, Musk is now targeting them and calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

This kind of vacillation creates an obvious credibility problem for the president and his administration. As I wrote during Trump’s first presidency, foreign leaders quickly concluded that he was a pushover, easily convinced by flattering words. Trump practically always folded in a negotiation. This history, combined with his mercurial moods, mean that counterparts don’t assume they can take him at his word. In the case of Canada, Trump seems to have come out with the worst possible outcome: Canadian leaders believe he’s deadly serious about annexing the country, a quixotic goal, but they have no reason to take his bluster about tariffs, which he can actually impose, all that seriously.

The situation might be even more dangerous if observers took Trump at his word. His dithering has given markets the jitters, but the economic impacts might be more dire if traders acted as though they expected him to follow through on all of his tariff threats. (After he said this past weekend that a recession is possible, markets plunged. Did investors believe he had some secret plan up his sleeve until then?)

Uncertainty is bad for markets, but the problem is larger than that. One of the most fundamental roles of the state is to create a sense of consistency and stability for society. That provides the conditions for flourishing of all kinds: economic, artistic, cultural, scientific. Trump is both seeking to seize more power for himself and refusing to exercise it in a way that allows the nation to flourish.

Today, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University who has not been charged, much less convicted, of any crime. This, too, calls into question the stability of the rule of law—specifically, the long-standing fact that the First Amendment and due process apply to legal permanent residents. (Last month, I wrote that Trump’s actions were showing that his commitment to free speech was bogus. He seems determined to prove me right.) The first months of the Trump presidency have been whiplash-inducing, but in the long term, the failure to set and follow consistent rules threatens national pain much worse than a sore neck.

Related:

Mahmoud Khali’s detention is a trial run. The free-speech phonies

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants. The only question Trump asks himself

Today’s News

Ukraine has agreed to an immediate 30-day cease-fire if Russia accepts the plan proposed by the United States. Ontario suspended its 25 percent electricity surcharge for some U.S. states after Donald Trump threatened a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum for Canada. The former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who started a widespread crackdown on drugs, was arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant for crimes against humanity.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing,” Annie Lowrey writes. Maybe don’t invite a recession in.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty.

Anti-Semitism Is Just a Pretext

By Jonathan Chait

The [Trump] administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A great way to get Americans to eat worse The way of the gun America is sleeping on a powerful defense against airborne disease. “Dear James”: I hate playing with my children.

Culture Break

Warner Bros. Pictures

Watch. Mickey 17 (out in theaters) is sad, strange, and so much fun, Shirley Li writes.

Read. Literature is still describing the experience of the coronavirus pandemic. Lily Meyer is still searching for a great COVID-19 novel that transforms that experience.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

On my evening to-do list once I finish this newsletter: Pick up my copy of my colleague Olga Khazan’s Me, but Better at my local bookstore. In 2022, she wrote one of my favorite Atlantic stories ever about her three-month attempt to change her own personality. In the book, which is out today, she goes deeper. Olga is a very funny writer and great at sorting through and explaining complicated science, but for me, what makes her such an outstanding journalist is her ability to see and question a lot of the things that most people take for granted. I feel safe guessing that her research didn’t change that part of her personality.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Last week, Mother Jones reported that Kingsley Wilson, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, has posted in recent years a long string of bigoted far-right posts—including endorsing the claim that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 in one of the most ghastly anti-Semitic killings in American history, was a rapist and a murderer.

In light of this disturbing news, the Trump administration leaped into action to combat anti-Semitism … on campus. The administration announced that it was slashing $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It followed up this action by detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia as a grad student last year. The arrest was carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

One can question the effectiveness of Columbia’s actions to combat anti-Semitism, but the allegation that it has failed to act is simply untrue. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks began tearing the campus apart, the school commissioned a task force on anti-Semitism. It called in police to clear out a building takeover by anti-Israel activists. Just a few weeks ago, two Barnard students were expelled after disrupting an Israeli-history course and distributing flyers depicting a Jewish star being stepped on by a jackboot.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

The Trump administration, by contrast, really has done nothing about anti-Semitism in its own ranks. The administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

If you wish to understand the thought process that led to this point, a good place to begin would be a short missive written last month by Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative activist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo argued that the ascendant right needs to reject left-wing “cancel culture,” but not settle for returning to liberal norms. “All cultures cancel,” he wrote. “The question is, for what, and by whom.” This echoed, either consciously or unconsciously, Vladimir Lenin’s famous dictum, “Who, Whom?,” by which he defined politics as entirely a question of which class would dominate the other, rejecting any possibility of liberal accommodation.

Rufo chose as his explanatory example the case of Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after his exposure for having written openly racist posts (including, literally, “I was racist before it was cool”), only to be rehired after a public intervention by Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. “The vice president rejected the calculus of left-wing cancel culture,” Rufo explained, “demonstrating instead that forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies.”

The key term here is loyalty. Protection would be afforded only to allies. “We should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward,” Rufo argued, which would enable the right to “protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts” and “enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

The sole guiding principle at work is the defense of allies and the punishment of foes. Trump and his allies may purport to be following other values, but they barely bother with even the pretense of consistency. Trump will claim to defend free speech while launching a campaign to punish campus demonstrators on the basis of their viewpoints. (Many anti-Israel protesters have espoused ghastly political views, including support for the October 7 murders, but free speech means nothing if not preventing the government from punishing ideas it disagrees with.) He will occasionally justify his repression as simply a crackdown on disorder and other forms of misconduct, while granting sweeping pardons to the perpetrators of a violent mob assault on the Capitol.

That spirit of pure will to power—who, whom—has defined the administration’s gleefully selective approach to “combating” anti-Semitism, which in practice seems to mean using anti-Semitism as a pretext to intimidate its opponents while simultaneously cultivating its own anti-Semitic faction.

Trump’s rise over the past decade has broadened the Republican coalition in many ways—including by pulling in far-right activists previously considered too racist to be permitted in the tent. During his first campaign and presidential term, Trump courted these factions with wink-and-nod rhetoric: calling his movement “America First” (a label previously used by the isolationist right before World War II), gesturing toward the “Great Replacement” theory (the idea, circulated by white supremacists, that mass immigration is a left-wing plot to transform American politics and culture), attacking his Republican critics as “globalists,” and refusing to denounce even virulently racist figures, such as David Duke, who supported him.

During his second term, the embrace is far less subtle. Winks and nods have been replaced by public Nazi salutes. Andrew Tate, the notorious manosphere influencer and alleged sex trafficker, recently received a special intervention from the White House allowing him to travel to the United States, presumably because he is loyal to Trump. (The president has denied involvement in that decision.) His extensive list of moral abominations includes overtly anti-Semitic statements, including praise for Hamas and the October 7 attacks.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump has turned the GOP into a white-supremacist or Nazi party. The still-disturbing reality is that he has brought white supremacists and Nazis into the coalition. As such, they receive his protection.

Right-wing anti-Semitism has exploded as a consequence of the Trumpist no-enemies-to-the-right principle. Elon Musk has made X both more central to conservative messaging and distinctly friendlier to anti-Semitic messages. Just this past week, the popular podcaster Joe Rogan credulously interviewed a notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.

It is true that anti-Semitism has also surged on the left, frequently disguised as anti-Zionism. The key difference is that it has utterly failed to gain legitimacy within the Democratic Party. Indeed, the movements that have given comfort to anti-Semitism on the left have exuded hostility toward the Democrats, sometimes even expressing a preference for Trump. Democrats have managed to keep left-wing anti-Semitism marginal because they recognize that it exists. By denying right-wing anti-Semitism, Republicans have allowed it to spread.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How colleges should address anti-Semitism]

Jew hatred is now crossing a threshold of political viability such that even prominent Republicans in safe congressional seats hesitate to denounce it. Consider this telling response by Senator Lindsey Graham to Kingsley Wilson’s anti-Semitic invective: “I’m not gonna tell them who to hire, but I do know that Trump doesn’t believe any of the things she’s talking about, and I’ll leave it up to them to determine if they think she’s the right spokesperson. If what you say about these posts are true, then she’s completely off-script with President Trump.”

Graham is trying to signal, as tepidly as possible, that the White House should fire Wilson by calling her “off-script with President Trump.” But by saying he won’t tell Trump whom to hire, he frees the president from any standard of accountability. Graham opposes anti-Semitism, but his opposition must yield to the highest imperative, Trump is always right.

The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy.

The federal government has provided no evidence that Mahmoud Khalil has committed a criminal offense, and yet on Saturday night, he was taken by agents of the state from his home and renditioned to a detention facility where neither his pregnant wife nor his lawyer have had access to him.

Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States and Palestinian activist who helped lead the protests at Columbia University over the Israel-Hamas war last spring, seems to have been disappeared by the U.S. government because of his political views. Khalil was among the students urging the university to cut financial and educational ties with Israel. (Unlike with other categories of immigrants, revoking the status of legal permanent residents generally requires evidence of wrongdoing.)

Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had “proudly apprehended” Khalil, describing him as a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.” A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson described Khalil as having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” There is, notably, not even a hint of an allegation of criminal behavior in that description. They do not accuse him of being a member of, fighting for, or providing material support to any terrorist group, all of which are prosecutable crimes. The phrasing aligned to implies that if Trump-administration officials think the views of a green-card holder are unacceptable, they can deprive him of his freedom. How does one even prove they are not “aligned” with Hamas, a subjective and arbitrary judgment that could be thrown at anyone deemed too critical of the Israeli government?

Government officials have told reporters that Khalil’s green card was revoked under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that authorizes the secretary of state to expel an “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Trump supporters have a remarkable ability to coalesce around whatever explanation they are told to repeat, so the arguments defending the detention are likely to orient around this justification. The idea that Khalil’s views might have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States is an obvious pretext for expelling him—and a message to others who might hold or express similar beliefs. Trumpists simply do not approve of his politics and have therefore resorted to using the power of the state to deport him. Trump has styled himself a champion of free speech, but this is what Trumpists mean by “free speech”: You can say what Trumpists want you to say or you can be punished.

[David A. Graham: The free-speech phonies]

Trump has announced as much, declaring that the administration would not tolerate “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” That is an admission that Khalil’s arrest is not about consequences for American foreign policy but about punishing speech. The administration is using the power of the state to silence people who express political views that Trump dislikes. And it is worth noting that Trumpists define any criticism of Trump as “anti-American.”

Due process is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. Without it, anyone can be arbitrarily deprived of life or liberty. Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist, and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend. They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants. They call someone a terrorist, and they dare you to defend the rights of terrorists. And if you believe none of these apply to you, another category might be “traitor,” the label that Trump and his advisers, including the far-right billionaire Elon Musk, like to give to anyone who opposes them.

Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them.

The Trump administration began its drive for absolute power by ignoring congressional appropriations of foreign aid, which are laws. It calculated that Americans would be callous enough not to care about the catastrophic loss of human life abroad and that the absence of backlash would enable the administration to set a precedent for defying duly passed laws without consequence. Trump began his assault on antidiscrimination law with a vicious campaign against trans people—but has already broadened that campaign into a sweeping attempt at a great resegregation of American life. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil begins a dangerous new phase, in which the Trump administration will attempt to assert an authority to deprive people of due process based on their political views.

The Anti-Defamation League, a pale shadow of its former self, enthusiastically endorsed Khalil’s detainment absent due process, saying it “appreciated” the Trump administration’s “bold set of efforts to counter campus anti-semitism” by “holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.” Although the statement includes the caveat that “any deportation action or revocation of a Green Card or visa must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protections,” praising the Trump administration for arresting Khalil absent any such process makes clear that the question of Khalil’s guilt is an afterthought. One source of legal authority that the administration appears to be citing is the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, whose co-sponsor Senator Patrick McCarran believed that Jews were “subversive rats that need to be kept out” of the country. If there is one obvious lesson of Jewish history, it is that when governments persecute people based on their political views and ethnic background, it is unlikely to end well for Jews. The ADL learned different lessons from that history, I suppose.

This sort of reaction, where a self-styled civil-rights organization endorses depriving people of their basic rights of speech and due process because they find the target unsympathetic, is what the Trumpists are counting on. Trumpists are counting on as many people as possible shutting off their conscience, because the administration has picked a target it hopes few will defend. They are counting on the public deciding that free speech and due process are optional for this category of people or that one, and that they will be safe, as they have done nothing wrong. The Trump administration wishes to lull people into this complacency until it is too late to react.

This kind of arrogance has a poor track record historically. Despots are always in need of powerful enemies to justify an insatiable drive for absolute power. Where none exist, they will invent them. Mass graves across the world are full of those who believed they had nothing to fear.

This is what is important: It does not matter if you approve of Khalil’s views. It does not matter if you support the Israelis or the Palestinians. It does not matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. It does not even matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala Harris. If the state can deprive an individual of his freedom just because of his politics, which is what appears to have happened here, then no one is safe. You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.

Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student at Columbia University, is challenging efforts to deport him over his role in student protests.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

As the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger had a triple target on his back from the start of Donald Trump’s presidency: He was a Joe Biden appointee, he was the head of one of the independent regulatory agencies that the Trump administration is targeting, and his duty was to fight to protect the jobs of tens of thousands of civil servants the president has tried to fire.

So when Dellinger received an email on Friday, February 7, telling him that he’d been dismissed, he wasn’t surprised. He also wasn’t going to quietly concede. Under a law that’s stood for decades, the special counsel serves a five-year term and “may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The following Monday morning, Dellinger filed a suit challenging his firing, and by that night, a federal judge had temporarily reinstated him.

During the following month, Dellinger led a bifurcated life that he joked was “like a Severance episode, except I was always at work”: one workplace “where I was advocating for others, and that was the place I wanted to be completely focused,” he told me on Friday. “But then the other side of it was trying to keep my job.”

OSC is a classic post-Watergate creation, designed to insulate the functioning of the federal government from political and other improper interference. It’s charged with protecting whistleblowers inside the executive branch and with identifying violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits politicking by government officials. If OSC believes that federal employees have been improperly fired, it can file a case with the Merit Systems Protection Board.

This makes an otherwise obscure office very important right now, because the Trump administration, with Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service leading the charge, has laid off huge swaths of the federal workforce in apparent defiance of laws designed to protect them, with more cuts promised. Last Wednesday, Dellinger won a major victory: The MSPB ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture must temporarily rehire nearly 6,000 probationary employees while an investigation proceeds into whether they were wrongfully fired. He told me that he was ready to try to get tens of thousands more probationary employees reinstated.

Instead, Dellinger found himself out of a job a few hours later. On Wednesday night, a panel of judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for the administration and against Dellinger, declaring that he would be removed while he pursued his appeal. The next day, Dellinger announced that he was ending his fight.

“I knew it would take at least a year to get a final decision” in court, he told me. “It may well have gone against me, and by that point, seeing the damage that’s taking place on a daily basis at federal agencies, I knew there would be almost nothing I could do should I ever get back into my job.”

In his statement ending his challenge, he wrote: “I strongly disagree with the circuit court’s decision, but I accept and will abide by it. That’s what Americans do.” That was a pointed response to comments by several government officials, including Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, who have questioned whether the executive branch has to follow judicial rulings. “I think the key to our country is respect for the rule of law, and I think there’s been too much disrespect of late,” he told me. “So I wanted to make it clear that just because I’m unhappy with the decision, I in no way contest its binding nature.”

What is at stake right now is not just the fate of whistleblowers and probationary employees but also the underlying principle of independent agencies within the executive branch. Such bodies have existed since the 1930s and are written into laws passed by Congress, but as I wrote recently, Trump allies have argued in Project 2025 and elsewhere that independent regulatory agencies are unconstitutional because they limit the president’s control of the executive branch. They have promised to politicize traditionally detached parts of the government.

If courts conclude that this independence is unconstitutional, then most existing protections for whistleblowing seem doomed. Congress concluded when passing these laws that the executive branch needed internal watchdogs. They are generally presidentially appointed—like Dellinger, and like inspectors general inside major departments—but, once in place, insulated from pressure. Without them, whistleblowers have no clear recourse besides going to Congress (no easy feat for all but the most major scandals) or the press. Either path is uncertain and fraught with dangers of retaliation.

Gutting the current regime may result in more of the problems that Musk is supposedly fighting, Dellinger argued. “I think it’ll mean that government is less effective,” he told me, because fewer routes will exist for employees to shed light on failures. “I think it may lead to an increase in waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think we’re not going to know for sure what it means, because you don’t have these independent watchdogs who are able to make their work public.”

The entire existing vision of the executive branch, constructed by an idealistic liberal vision of government held accountable by legal structures and processes, seems currently under threat. Dellinger is a fitting figure to be in the middle of this fight. He’s spent his career moving between government service and practicing law in the private sector. (He’s also contributed to The Atlantic.) His father, Walter Dellinger, served as the acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and was regarded as one of the most brilliant Democratic lawyers of his generation. Hampton Dellinger told me he remains hopeful that the decades-old vision of the federal government is not dying.

“The fact that people are resisting unlawful orders, I think, is vital,” he said. “I still have faith in the judiciary, even if my case didn’t succeed. I have faith in generations younger than me.” If the federal government is to run on anything other than patrimonialism, those generations will have to find a way to rebuild it after the current assault.

Related:

Trump tests the courts. “It feels like it’s chaotic on purpose.”

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The diseases are coming. Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump’s orders. Trump drops the mask.

Today’s News

The U.S. stock market plunged today amid concerns over the economic pain that President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies could bring.

ICE agents arrested the Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil over the weekend. According to Khalil’s lawyer, agents said that they were operating under State Department orders to revoke his green card. The State Department declined to comment on Khalil’s case.

Elon Musk blamed a “massive cyberattack” for a series of outages on X.

More From The Atlantic

DOGE’s plans to replace humans with AI are already under way. Europe can’t trust the U.S. anymore. Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage. Kara Swisher: Move fast and destroy democracy.

Evening Read

Lila Barth for The Atlantic

Turtleboy Will Not Be Stopped

By Chris Heath

On overpasses and by roadsides they gather, holding banners and placards. In the early days, only a few people showed up, congregating at chosen times and scattered locations around Boston. But their cause has grown and their numbers have swelled. For Labor Day 2024, plans were made for “standouts,” as the organizers called them, in more than 70 places—all over Massachusetts, yes, but also in Ohio, Kansas, Florida, California, and elsewhere.

These assemblies are the most visible manifestation of what is usually referred to as the Free Karen Read movement. If in the fullness of time it will seem strange that such unity and passion should have been mustered in defense of a 45-year-old Massachusetts financial analyst and adjunct college professor accused of killing her police-officer boyfriend by backing into him with her car … well, not to these people gathered today.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Theo Wargo / Peacock / Getty

Listen. Lady Gaga’s latest album, Mayhem, is “an ode to her early career—and a powerful demonstration of growth,” our music critic Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Read. Waste Wars, by the journalist Alexander Clapp, tracks how the garbage of rich countries ends up in some of the world’s poorest places.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This weekend, I drove to the North Carolina mountains with my family, and we spent most of the drive both ways listening to Big Ugly, the brand-new record by Fust, one of my favorite musical discoveries of the past year. The Durham-based alt-country band is led by Aaron Dowdy, who is a Ph.D. student in Duke University’s literature department but also firmly rooted in his native Appalachian Virginia. The lead track, “Spangled,” rhymes Route 11 with repossession and includes the memorable image of “feeling like a sparkler / that’s been thrown off a roof.” I’m obsessed.

— David

Isabel Fattal and Shan Wang contributed to this newsletter.

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