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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.

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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.

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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.

Read the full article.

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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.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a “one-time price adjustment” from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, “We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.” And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put his own spin on the argument, telling NBC News that, yes, prices on imports will rise, but American-made goods will get cheaper, and that’s what matters. (In fact, tariffs generally lead to price increases for imported and domestic goods, because the latter face less foreign-price competition.)

It’s true that affordable goods and services are not, on their own, the definition of the American dream. But they’re a necessary component of it, and trade is one of the most important drivers of that affordability. Until recently, Republicans understood this quite well.

American workers are also American consumers who must devote a sizable chunk of their income to essential goods such as clothing, food, shelter, and energy—goods made cheaper and more plentiful by international trade. Produce and clothing from Latin America, lumber and energy from Canada, footwear and electronics from Asia, wine and cheese from Europe: All of these and more help Americans stretch their paychecks and live happier, healthier lives. Thanks to the internet, moreover, we benefit from internationally traded services too, whether it’s an online tutor in Pakistan, a personal trainer in London, a help-desk employee in India, or an accountant in the Philippines. And we gain from better or cheaper domestic goods and services that are forced to compete with imports on quality or price.

Overall, studies conservatively estimate that American households save thousands of dollars a year from the lower prices, increased variety, and global competition fomented by international trade. This increased purchasing power means not only that Americans have more “stuff” but also that their inflation-adjusted incomes are higher. As we just learned the hard way, bigger numbers on your paycheck mean nothing if you’re forced to spend even more on the things you need and want. In fact, one of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics. Money left over can also be saved for a rainy day or invested in things such as education and retirement.

[Rogé Karma: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

The counterargument—until recently associated with the political left—is that cheap and varied consumer goods are not worth sacrificing the strength of America’s domestic-manufacturing sector. Even if we accept that (questionable) premise, however, it doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs, because those tariffs will hurt domestic manufacturing too. About half of U.S. imports are intermediate goods, raw materials, and capital equipment that American manufacturers use to make their products and sell them here and abroad. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these imports increase domestic-manufacturing output and jobs. Thus, for example, an expanding U.S. trade deficit in automotive goods has long coincided with gains in domestic automotive output and production capacity, and past U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum caused a slowdown in U.S. manufacturing output. Even if domestic manufacturers don’t buy imported parts, simply having access to them serves as an important competitive check on the prices of made-in-America manufacturing inputs. This is why Trump’s recent steel-tariff announcement gave U.S. steelmakers a “green light to lift prices,” as The Wall Street Journal put it.

Imports such as construction materials, medical goods, and computers also support many U.S. service industries. And imports are important for leisure and economic mobility. By trading for necessities instead of making them ourselves, Americans have more free time to use for fun or self-improvement (and more disposable income to pursue such things). According to a new study in the Journal of International Economics, “between 1950 and 2014, trade openness contributed to an additional 20 to 95 hours of leisure per worker per year”—invaluable time we can devote to entertainment, family, community, or education.

“Access to cheap goods” isn’t the American dream, but it sure helps us achieve it. This is particularly true for low-income workers who have tight budgets and little leisure time. Shelter, food, transport, utilities, and clothes accounted for approximately 68 percent of the poorest 20 percent of U.S. households’ annual expenditures but just about half of the richest 20 percent of households’ spending. It’s easy for someone worth, say, $521 million, like Bessent, to pay a few bucks more for everyday goods and still achieve his goals and ambitions; it’s far more difficult for a single mom with four kids to do the same.

Democrats used to be the ones offering a false choice between Americans’ access to affordable (often imported) stuff and our economic well-being. In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama told a union-sponsored-debate audience in Chicago that “people don’t want a cheaper T‑shirt if they’re losing a job in the process.” And Bernie Sanders famously said in 2015 that Americans “don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”

Back in those days, Republicans defended the link between trade and American prosperity. Today, only a few party outcasts, such as Mike Pence, dare to do so. Trump’s allies have made very clear that they are trying to achieve a dream. It just isn’t America’s.