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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.

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Today’s News

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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.

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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.

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Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all deaths. In 2023, after a brief hiatus, tuberculosis regained from COVID its status as the world’s deadliest infectious disease—a title it has held for most of what we know of human history.

Some people die of TB when their lungs collapse or fill with fluid. For others, scarring leaves so little healthy lung tissue that breathing becomes impossible. Or the infection spreads to the brain or the spinal column, or they suffer a sudden, uncontrollable hemorrhage. Lack of appetite and extreme abdominal pain can fuel weight loss so severe that it whittles away muscle and bone. This is why TB was widely known as “consumption” until the 20th century—it seemed to be a disease that consumed the very body, shrinking and shriveling it. On a trip to Sierra Leone in 2019, I met a boy named Henry Reider, whose mix of shyness and enthusiasm for connection reminded me of my own son. I thought he was perhaps 9 years old. His doctors later told me that he was in fact 17, his body stunted by a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis.

The cure for TB—roughly half a year on antibiotics—has existed since the 1950s, and works for most patients. Yet, in the decades since, more than 100 million people have died of tuberculosis because the drugs are not widely available in many parts of the world. The most proximate cause of contemporary tuberculosis deaths is not M. tuberculosis, but Homo sapiens. Now, as the Trump administration decimates foreign-aid programs, the U.S. is both making survival less likely for people with TB and risking the disease becoming far more treatment-resistant. After decades of improvement, we could return to something more like the world before the cure.

[Read: The danger of ignoring tuberculosis]

Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, a quarter of all humans living now, including an estimated 13 million Americans, have been infected with the bacterium, which spreads through coughs, sneezes, and breaths. Most will only ever have a latent form of the infection, in which infection-fighting white blood cells envelop the bacteria so it cannot wreak havoc on the body. But in 5 to 10 percent of infections, the immune system can’t produce enough white blood cells to surround the invader. M. tuberculosis explodes outward, and active disease begins.

Certain triggers make the disease more likely to go from latent to active, including air pollution and an immune system weakened by malnutrition, stress, or diabetes. The disease spreads especially well along the trails that poverty has blazed for it: in crowded living and working conditions such as slums and poorly ventilated factories. Left untreated, most people who develop active TB will die of the disease.

In the early 1980s, physicians and activists in Africa and Asia began sounding the alarm about an explosion of young patients dying within weeks of being infected instead of years. Hours after entering the hospital, they were choking to death on their own blood. In 1985, physicians in Zaire and Zambia noted high rates of active tuberculosis among patients who had the emerging disease now known as HIV/AIDS. TB surged globally, including in the U.S. Deaths skyrocketed. From 1985 to 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World War I, and many of them also had HIV. In 2000, nearly a third of the 2.3 million people who died of tuberculosis were co-infected with HIV.

[Read: Tragedy would unfold if Trump cancels Bush’s AIDS program]

By the mid-1990s, antiretroviral cocktails made HIV a treatable and survivable disease in rich communities. While a person is taking these medications, their viral levels generally become so low as to be undetectable and untransmittable; if a person with HIV becomes sick with tuberculosis, the drugs increase their odds of survival dramatically. But rich countries largely refused to spend money on HIV and TB meds in low- and middle-income countries. They cited many reasons, including that patients couldn’t be trusted to take their medication on time, and that resources would be better spent on prevention and control. In 2001, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development had this to say when explaining to Congress why many Africans would not benefit from access to HIV medications: “People do not know what watches and clocks are. They do not use Western means for telling time. They use the sun. These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence of time during the day and when you say take it at 10:00, people will say, ‘What do you mean by 10:00?’” A 2007 review of 58 studies on patient habits found that Africans were more likely to adhere to HIV treatment regimens than North Americans.

In the mid-2000s, programs such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund finally began distributing antiretroviral therapy to millions of people living with HIV in poor countries. PEPFAR, a U.S.-funded initiative, was especially successful, saving more than 25 million lives and preventing 7 million children from being born with HIV. These projects lowered deaths and infections while also strengthening health-care systems, allowing low-income countries to better respond to diseases as varied as malaria and diabetes. Millions of lives have been saved—and tuberculosis deaths among those living with HIV have declined dramatically in the decades since.

Still, tuberculosis is great at exploiting any advantage that humans hand it. During the coronavirus pandemic, disruptions to supply chains and TB-prevention programs led to an uptick in infections worldwide. Last year, the U.S. logged more cases of tuberculosis than it has in any year since the CDC began keeping count in the 1950s. Two people died. But in some ways, at the beginning of this year, the fight against tuberculosis had never looked more promising. High-quality vaccine candidates were in late-stage trials. In December, the World Health Organization made its first endorsement of a TB diagnostic test, and global health workers readied to deploy it.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Now that progress is on the verge of being erased. Since Donald Trump has taken office, his administration has dismantled USAID, massively eliminating foreign-aid funding and programs. According to The New York Times, hundreds of thousands of sick patients have seen their access to medication and testing suddenly cut off. A memo released by a USAID official earlier this month estimated that cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis will rise by about 30 percent in the next few years, an unprecedented regression in the history of humankind’s fight against the disease. (The official was subsequently placed on administrative leave.) Research on tuberculosis tests and treatments has been terminated. Although the secretary of state and Elon Musk have assured the public that the new administration’s actions have not disrupted the distribution of life-saving medicine, that just isn’t true. A colleague in central Africa sent me a picture of TB drugs that the U.S. has already paid for sitting unused in a warehouse because of stop-work orders. (Neither the State Department nor DOGE employees responded to requests for comment.)

Last year, roughly half of all international donor funding for tuberculosis treatment came from the U.S. Now many programs are disappearing. In a recent survey on the impact of lost funding in 31 countries, one in four organizations providing TB care reported they have shut down entirely. About half have stopped screening for new cases of tuberculosis. The average untreated case of active tuberculosis will spread the infection to 10 to 15 people a year. Without treatment, or even a diagnosis, hundreds of thousands more people will die—and each of those deaths will be needless.

By revoking money from global-health efforts, the U.S. has created the conditions for the health of people around the world to deteriorate, which will give tuberculosis even more opportunities to kill. HIV clinics in many countries have started rationing pills as drug supplies run dangerously low, raising the specter of co-infection. Like HIV, insufficient nutrition weakens the immune system. It is the leading risk factor for tuberculosis. An estimated 1 million children with severe acute malnutrition will lose access to treatment because of the USAID cuts, and refugee camps across the world are slashing already meager food rations.

For billions of people, TB is already a nightmare disease, both because the bacterium is unusually powerful and because world leaders have done a poor job of distributing cures. And yet, to the extent that one hears about TB at all in the rich world, it’s usually in the context of a looming crisis: Given enough time, a strain of tuberculosis may evolve that is resistant to all available antibiotics, a superbug that is perhaps even more aggressive and deadly than previous iterations of the disease.

[Read: Resistance to the antibiotic of last resort is silently spreading]

The Trump administration’s current policies are making such a future more plausible. Even pausing TB treatment for a couple of weeks can give the bacterium a chance to evolve resistance. The world is ill-prepared to respond to drug-resistant TB, because we have shockingly few treatments for the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Between 1963 and 2012, scientists approved no new drugs to treat tuberculosis. Doing so stopped being profitable once the disease ceased to be a crisis in rich countries. Many strains of tuberculosis are already resistant to the 60-year-old drugs that are still the first line of treatment for nearly all TB patients. If a person is unlucky enough to have drug-resistant TB, the next step is costly testing to determine if their body can withstand harsh, alternative treatments. The United States helped pay for those tests in many countries, which means that now fewer people with drug-resistant TB are being diagnosed or treated. Instead, they are almost certainly getting sicker and spreading the infection.

Drug-resistant TB is harder to cure in individual patients, and so the aid freeze will directly lead to many deaths. But giving the bacteria so many new opportunities to develop drug resistance is also a threat to all of humanity. We now risk the emergence of TB strains that can’t be cured with our existing tools. The millennia-long history of humans’ fight against TB has seen many vicious cycles. I fear we are watching the dawn of another.

This article has been adapted from John Green’s forthcoming book, Everything Is Tuberculosis.