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On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered an unusual speech at the Justice Department. Between fulminating against his political adversaries and long digressions about the late basketball coach Bob Knight, Trump declared, “We’re restoring fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

Then his administration spent the weekend proving otherwise.

People who believe the press is overhyping the danger to rule of law posed by the current administration have pointed out that although administration officials have repeatedly attacked the judicial system, the White House has not actually defied a judge.

But that may not be the case anymore, or for much longer. On Saturday in Washington, D.C., Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order barring the federal government from deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, which it was seeking to do using a 1798 law that bypasses much due process by declaring an enemy invasion. Nonetheless, hundreds of Venezuelans alleged by the administration to be connected with the gang Tren de Aragua landed in El Salvador, where authoritarian President Nayib Bukele has agreed to take them. Separately, a federal judge in Massachusetts is demanding to know why Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor at Brown University’s medical school, was deported despite a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her removal.

The White House insists that it did not actually defy Boasberg’s judicial order, but its arguments are very hard to take at face value. “The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.” She’s trying to have it both ways—the order is unlawful, but also we didn’t ignore it. “The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict,” Leavitt said.

Although Boasberg’s written order did not specify, the judge told attorneys during the Saturday hearing that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.” Politico reports that the plane left during a break in the hearing, as though the government was angling to get out just ahead of any mandate. During a briefing today, Leavitt also questioned whether the verbal order held the same weight as a written order, which is a matter of settled law. During a hearing early this evening, Boasberg seemed incredulous at the Justice Department’s arguments, calling one a “heck of a stretch.”

In the Boston case, a Customs and Border Protection official said in a sworn declaration that the agency had not received formal notification of the judge’s order when it deported Alawieh. CBP said in a statement yesterday that “arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States.”

The statements of Trump administration officials elsewhere make it even harder to take their actions as anything other than attempting to defy judges. Salvadoran President Bukele posted a screenshot of a New York Post story about the judge’s order on X with the commentary, “Oopsie … Too late” and a laughing-crying emoji. Chief Bureaucrat Elon Musk replied with the same emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared Bukele’s post from his own account. “Border czar” Tom Homan appeared on Fox News this morning and said, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

These actions should be terrifying no matter who is involved. The fact that Tren de Aragua is indeed a vicious gang doesn’t nullify the law—the administration’s claim that the U.S. is contending with a wartime invasion is ridiculous on its face. Even more important is whether the White House decided to snub a ruling by a federal judge. Nor do customs officials’ claims in court filings that they found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders on Alawieh’s phone, or that she told them she had attended the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, mean the law doesn’t apply. For all we know, her actions may well justify her deportation. (Of course, we have little way of assessing any of these allegations clearly, because the administration has sidestepped the usual judicial proceedings in both cases. A lawyer for Alawieh’s family hasn’t commented on the allegations.) What matters is that the executive branch acted despite a judge’s order.

This is what we might call the Mahmoud Khalil test: No matter whether you think someone’s ideas or actions are deplorable, once the executive branch decides it doesn’t have to follow the law for one person, it has established that it doesn’t have to follow the law for anyone. After Khalil was arrested, Trump said that he was “the first arrest of many to come.” No one should have any illusion that the list will stop with alleged Tren de Aragua members. Throughout his career, Trump has tested boundaries and, if allowed to do so, pushed further. His actions at the start of this term show that he is more emboldened than ever, and traditionally institutionalist figures such as Rubio seem eager to abet him.

Watching Trump’s DOJ address, supposedly about law and order, offers some ideas of who else he might target while ignoring the law. So do his social-media accounts. This morning on Truth Social, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden’s pardons of Liz Cheney and other members of the House January 6 Committee were not valid. “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

Trump wouldn’t bother with this if he didn’t hope to prosecute the people involved. Although Biden’s pardons were controversial because they were issued preemptively, the idea that an autopen, which allows the user to sign remotely, would invalidate them is concocted out of thin air. (Nor has Trump provided evidence that Biden did in fact use an autopen in these cases.) The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a justification for the practice in 2005, and presidents have been using them to sign legislation since 2011, without serious incident. The Supreme Court could conceivably rule in favor of Trump’s view—the justices have adopted other long-shot Trump claims—but it is hard to imagine, and would be a real departure.

When Trump speaks about law and order, he means it very narrowly. He believes in swift justice for his adversaries, with or without due process of the law; meanwhile, he believes his actions should not be constrained by law, the Constitution, or anything else that might cause him problems, and he has used pardons prolifically to excuse the actions of his friends and allies, whether Paul Manafort and Roger Stone or January 6 rioters. Plenty of presidents have been frustrated by the limitations of the law. Richard Nixon even claimed, years after leaving office, that any action by the president, as head of the executive branch, is de facto legal. But no president until now has so aggressively or so frequently acted as though he didn’t need to follow the law’s most basic precepts.

Back in November, my colleague Tom Nichols invoked the Peruvian politician Óscar Benavides. Though he’s little known in the United States, here are a few striking facts about him: He served as president twice, first coming to power not through a popular election but through appointment by an elected assembly. Some years later, he returned to the presidency as an unabashed authoritarian. (Hmm.) “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,” goes a quote sometimes attributed to Benavides. It could be the motto of the Trump administration over the past four days.

Related:

The ultimate Trump story Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Franklin Foer on Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem The lesson Trump is learning the hard way How Republicans learned to love high prices

Today’s News

At least 42 people died after a powerful storm system hit central and southern U.S. states over the weekend, according to officials. The Energy Department, EPA, and NOAA started hiring back probationary employees after federal judges recently ruled that their firings were illegally carried out and ordered their reinstatement. Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to speak on the phone tomorrow about a cease-fire with Ukraine. Trump said yesterday that he expects the conversation to include discussions about Ukraine’s power plants, and that there have already been talks about “dividing up” Ukrainian assets.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “Buy, Borrow, Die”—this is how to be a billionaire and pay no taxes, Rogé Karma writes. The Wonder Reader: Finding love has never been easy, but this is a particularly tricky moment for romance, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Marsell Gorska Gautier / Getty; naumoid / Getty.

Sex Without Women

By Caitlin Flanagan

What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.

Read the full article.

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Olga Khazan: “How baby-led weaning almost ruined my life” John Green: The world’s deadliest infectious disease is about to get worse. The stain of betrayal in Afghanistan LeBron James and the limits of nepotism One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.

Culture Break

Zack Wittman

Batter up. Why aren’t women allowed to play baseball? They’ve always loved America’s pastime—but it’s never loved them back, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes.

It’s as easy as … Riding an e-bike. Getting around on one might be a bit slower than in a car, but it’s also “transformed my family’s life,” Elizabeth Endicott writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

Related:

DOGE’s fuzzy math Is DOGE losing steam?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Democrats have a man problem. There was a second name on Rubio’s target list. The crimson face of Canadian anger The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing.

Today’s News

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats will support a Republican-led short-term funding bill to help avoid a government shutdown. A federal judge ruled that probationary employees fired by 18 federal agencies must be temporarily rehired. Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister, succeeding Justin Trudeau as the Liberals’ leader.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The Trump administration is embracing AI. “Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient,” Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of literary work that takes on COVID, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by John Gall*

I’d Had Jobs Before, but None Like This

By Graydon Carter

I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars.

Read the full article.

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The kind of thing dictators do Trump is unleashing a chaos economy. RFK Jr. has already broken his vaccine promise. The NIH’s grant terminations are “utter and complete chaos.” Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out. Republicans tear down a Black Lives Matter mural.

Culture Break

Music Box Films

Watch. The film Eephus (in select theaters) is a “slow movie” in the best possible way, David Sims writes.

Read. Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting, Hillary Kelly writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Some films impart a message that lasts, especially if they offer another way to see the world. The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What is a movie that changed your mind?

The following contains spoilers for the films mentioned.

Priscilla (streaming on Max)

Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film about Priscilla Beaulieu’s relationship with Elvis Presley, is terrific to look at but hard to watch. Priscilla is 14 when she meets an already famous 24-year-old Elvis. While still a teenager, she moves with her future husband to Graceland, where she wears sophisticated clothes and sits in plush rooms. As the film critic Anthony Lane wrote in a New Yorker review, to call the movie superficial, “even more so than Coppola’s other films, is no derogation, because surfaces are her subject.”

Priscilla is a revisionist project: It aims to tell the other side of Elvis’s story, to convey another perspective on a beloved cultural figure whose life has been the subject of countless books and biopics. So I wasn’t surprised that I left the theater unsettled, with a darker view of this artist whose songs I’d sung in elementary-school revues and whose home I’d visited on a high-school-band trip. But beyond the straightforward record-correcting objective of the movie (which is inspired by Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me), Coppola’s choice to end the film on a stark, ambiguous note reminded me that an abrupt conclusion can be as satisfying as a tidy one. That, in a movie concerned with the way things seem, feels true to life.

— Lora Kelley, associate editor

***

The Death of Stalin (streaming on Pluto TV)

Totalitarianism, when it’s not terrifying, can be absurd—the constant bowing to a Dear Leader, the seemingly arbitrary list of enemies and outlawed ideas that change every hour, the silly pomp of statues and parading armies. It’s almost impossible to capture the humor without undermining the horror. But The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci’s 2017 satire, brilliantly reveals the ridiculous side of authoritarian rule, and it opened my eyes to the small, shuffling, utterly banal individuals who undergird even the scariest systems.

Iannucci makes little effort at historical accuracy—I mean, Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev—but he gets at deeper truths. The story takes place following the sudden death of the titular dictator. The power vacuum that opens is filled with scheming and backstabbing politicians, including Khrushchev, Lavrentiy Beria, and Georgy Malenkov. But Iannucci mines it all for laughs, and they are plentiful. The pettiness, the servility, the insecurity of these men are all on display as they spin around Stalin’s corpse. And watching this transfer of power reduced to a bizarre human drama reminds you about what makes tyranny possible: very ordinary people.

— Gal Beckerman, staff writer

***

Rivers and Tides (streaming on Tubi)

When a friend first showed me Rivers and Tides, I had never heard of Andy Goldsworthy, and I had surely never seen anyone do what he did. The documentary follows the British artist through fields, forests, and tidelands as he creates sculptures and ephemeral works from materials he finds, often challenging our assumptions of what those materials, and their environments, even are. One frigid morning, we observe Goldsworthy snapping icicles apart, and whittling them with his teeth, to reconstruct them into a fluid form that seems to cut back and forth through a boulder; when the rising sun finally hits the sculpture, it’s spectacular. Another day, we see him collect fallen autumn leaves and arrange them over a pool of water into a surreal graphic gradient. Witnessing his way of seeing and collaborating with the world around him transformed me. I haven’t looked at a leaf—or twigs, or snow, or even stone—the same since.

— Kelsey J. Waite, senior copy editor

***

The Devil Wears Prada (streaming on FuboTV and Prime Video)

The Devil Wears Prada came out in June 2006, the same month I graduated from college. I saw it in a movie theater a few weeks into my first full-time job, and it was a revelation to watch its portrayal of the compromises, disappointments, and small victories that come with pursuing a career. The Devil Wears Prada is heightened and fantastical and unbelievable in all sorts of ways: The protagonist, Andy (the role that made me love Anne Hathaway forever), wears over-the-top clothes in an impossibly sleek office and kisses a suave older man on a lamp-lit Paris street. But the film is remarkably realistic and perceptive about work. Andy makes professional choices that alienate her from her parents, her friends, and her boyfriend. Even she doesn’t seem to fully understand why she is so determined to succeed at a job she never wanted in the first place. The film ends with her throwing her phone into a fountain and taking a job that more clearly aligns with her values and goals. But what’s stuck with me are the scenes where she is trying as hard as she can to prove to her boss, and to herself, that she can do anything that’s asked of her. Her ambition is remarkable—and it’s served as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale to me in the many years since.

— Eleanor Barkhorn, senior editor

***

Anora (available to rent on YouTube, streaming on Hulu March 17)

Of all the sex workers depicted in films, the titular protagonist of Anora—a movie that deserves at least three of its five Oscars—might be one of the few who actually feels like a worker.

At the strip club, Anora has shifts, a boss, and a mean colleague. Although sex work is technically illegal (albeit somewhat decriminalized) in New York City, she seems to have a somewhat normal job—until one night, when she gets close to Vanya, a new client. The story progresses like “Cinderella,” except the prince is the mediocre son of a Russian oligarch. Vanya marries Anora and gives her a taste of his opulent life. But when Vanya’s parents find out about the marriage, the love story is over.

Before watching Anora, I’d imagined that if work conditions improved for sex workers, they would be treated humanely. But Anora showed me—or perhaps reminded me—that society’s contempt for women in this industry is profound, and that better policies, important as they are, might never change that.

The beauty of Anora is that it never occurs to her that she is less-than. That a scion of the Russian oligarchy was never going to stay married to her seemed obvious to all of the characters—and perhaps also to the audience—but not to her. Anora screams and fights back, but even she has a limit to the amount of humiliation she can take. At the end of the movie, unable to continue holding her head high, she collapses into tears.

— Gisela Salim-Peyer, associate editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage. Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain.

The Week Ahead

Snow White, a live-action remake starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot (in theaters Friday) The Residence, a murder-mystery show about an eccentric detective who must solve a murder at a White House dinner (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Red Scare, a book by Clay Risen about McCarthyism and the anti-Communist witch hunt (out Tuesday)

Essay

Pierre Crom / Getty

My Hometown Became a Different Country

By Tetiana Kotelnykova

Horlivka had always been a Russian-speaking city, but before 2014, our graduation ceremonies and school concerts were held in Ukrainian. We would sing the Ukrainian national anthem at the end of every event. Then, suddenly, the Ukrainian flags were taken down. The anthem was no longer sung. The Ukrainian language vanished from classrooms. The disappearance was so abrupt and absolute that it felt unreal, like a dream whose meaning was obscure to me. I remember asking my teacher why everything had altered so drastically. She didn’t have an answer—or maybe she was just too afraid to say.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Bong Joon Ho will always root for the losers. The man who owned 181 Renoirs Megan Garber: “I can’t stop talking about The Traitors.” An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery There’s nothing else like Netflix’s Mo. “Dear James”: I hate playing with my children.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run. Don’t invite a recession in.

Photo Album

A cheerleader entertains the crowd during the annual Moomba Festival, in Melbourne, Australia. (William West / AFP / Getty)

Take a look at these photos of the week, which show a cheerleader in Australia, a train-pulling record attempt in Egypt, Holi celebrations in India, and more.

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