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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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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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“We will win!” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chanted at a rally last month protesting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service infiltrating Treasury Department payments systems. If Democrats want to win, though, they’ll have to fight first, and they don’t seem totally ready for that.

Schumer says that his caucus will refuse to vote for a short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (In the House, all but one Democrat—Jared Golden of Maine—voted against the funding patch, but Republicans were unexpectedly united and passed the bill.) But no one seems to completely believe that Democrats will keep up their unified opposition. Politico reports that Democrats may instead settle for a symbolic vote on a shorter-term bill that they know they’ll lose: A White House official told the publication, “They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it. They’re totally screwed.”

Democratic leaders have been insisting that the nation is facing a serious crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg demolition of the executive branch and rule of law. But they have also complained that they have few paths to stop Trump. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have?” Now Senate Democrats have leverage, and what they do with it will show whether they mean what they say.

This is a strange situation for Democrats: As the party that likes to keep government running, even entertaining the idea of a shutdown is novel. But they have reasons related to both policy and politics to take a hard line here. First, if they’re concerned with protecting government services that are essential for citizens, they need to find some way to slow Trump down, because he’s using his power to slash them already. If the government shuts down, some services will be briefly cut. If Democrats keep the government open, some services will be cut—perhaps permanently. The deadline gives them a chance to demand that the White House agree to limitations on DOGE or other Trump cuts in exchange for funding the government. (Complicating the calculus, the White House recently deleted guidance from its website on how a shutdown would work.)

Even if Congress passes the GOP’s short-term funding patch, there’s no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have argued that the president should be able to impound funds—in other words, to treat congressional appropriations as a ceiling rather than a requirement, and thus be able to cut funding for whatever they don’t like. (This is plainly illegal, but Vought and others believe that the law that bans it is unconstitutional, and they hope to challenge it in the courts.) This means that simply continuing to fund the government doesn’t guarantee that key programs will stay running, and that extracting concessions from the White House now is crucial.

Cautious Democrats worry that the party will be blamed if the government closes. But blamed by whom? Republicans have taken the political hit for previous shutdowns, because the GOP has openly clamored for them. Maybe Democrats would take the hit if they refused to help Republicans, and maybe they wouldn’t; voters surely understand that Democrats are the party of government. But in standing up to Trump’s GOP, they’d be taking the side of most of the public. One new CNN poll found that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest mark of his career; another found that 55 percent believe that the cuts to federal programs, which Democrats want to stop, will hurt the economy.

Regardless of how independents and Republicans would react, the consequences of not putting up a fight now would be catastrophic for Democratic-voter morale. During Trump’s first two months in office, party leaders have seemed flat-footed and meek, subscribing to what I’ve called a “No We Can’t” strategy. Polling shows that approval of the party and its leaders among Democrats is awful, and the idea of a liberal Tea Party—furious about the Trump administration but nearly as disgusted with Democratic leaders—suddenly seems plausible.

Few Democrats envy the chaos and disorder of the post-2010 Republican Party, but they’ve also seen GOP leaders take risks while their own party avoids them. That’s gotten Republicans control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, while Democrats have little to show for their gingerly approach. If Democratic leaders abdicate the chance to take charge now, many in the voting rank and file may not give them another chance.

The biggest risk for Democrats is that they’ll try to take a hostage by shutting down the government and discover that they are the hostage: Trump continues to do whatever he wants, and they end up folding in a few days, having obtained no concessions. That’s how most shutdowns end. As a matter of policy, however, this wouldn’t change anything. As a matter of politics, Democrats would at least get caught trying.

And if Democrats do take a hit with voters as a whole, so what? If they keep their political standing but lose all of the substantive battles, they won’t have much use for that standing. The longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, last seen misjudging the 2024 election, now says his party should just get out of Trump’s way. “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote in The New York Times last month. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Carville might be right that this would be an effective electoral strategy; Trump seems determined to make unpopular cuts and tie himself ever closer to the ever-more-unpopular Elon Musk, and the more voters see of Trump, the less they tend to like him. But playing dead makes sense only if one’s opponent is making garden-variety bad policy moves. This is different: Democratic leaders have said that the nation faces a historic crisis prompted by unprecedented and unconstitutional actions from the president. Did they really mean it?

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Kryssia Campos / Getty; Mimi Haddon / Getty; Tooga / Getty.

Academia Needs to Stick Up for Itself

By Nicholas B. Dirks

The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Yesterday marked four months since Election Day, but North Carolinians somehow still don’t know who will fill a key seat on the state supreme court.

The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987. That tally has been confirmed by two recounts. But certification is paused while Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, asks courts to throw out roughly 60,000 votes and put him on the state’s highest court.

The votes that Griffin has challenged fall into three groups. Most are from North Carolina residents whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or Social Security numbers. Although this is now required by law, these voters registered using old forms that did not require either; the state never asked these voters to reregister. The second set belongs to overseas residents who have never lived in the state, such as the adult children of North Carolinians who live abroad; state law entitles them to vote in-state. A third consists of overseas voters, including some members of the military, who didn’t submit photo identification with their ballot, again because it was not required.

Griffin doesn’t allege that these voters did anything wrong; in fact, as ProPublica’s Doug Bock Clark reported, Griffin himself twice voted under the overseas-voting law while deployed in the National Guard. But now he argues that their votes should be junked for administrative and clerical discrepancies that were not their fault, and he did not express any concerns about these votes until after he appeared to have lost the race.

“What Judge Griffin is asking is for the courts to change the rules of the election after the election has already happened, and for the courts to allow him to hand-select the votes that shouldn’t count, so that he can be declared the winner,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel who works on voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “That is absolutely unprecedented.”

I wrote about the legal wrangling over the election early this year. At the time, the delay seemed long, but I assumed it would be resolved shortly. Instead, it’s now March, and no end is in sight. Griffin petitioned the state supreme court to hear the case directly, skipping over lower courts, but its justices declined. The North Carolina State Board of Elections, the defendant in the case, attempted to move the case to federal court; a federal judge bounced it back to state courts. A trial court then heard the matter and quickly ruled against Griffin. After he appealed, the state board requested that the supreme court bypass the state appeals court and hear the case quickly, but was rebuffed. So now it’s before the appeals court, with no schedule yet set. The federal court could still reclaim the case later, too. (Yes, this is all incredibly confusing. The News & Observer is maintaining a helpful timeline.)

For North Carolina voters, justice delayed is a justice denied. Sweren-Becker told me that Brennan filed an amicus brief on behalf of voters at risk of disenfranchisement, because these people don’t otherwise have a voice in the case as either plaintiff or defendant.

The decision is now essentially up to Republican jurists. The appeals court has a 12–3 GOP majority, though Griffin is recused from the case. Riggs has also asked that Judge Tom Murry be recused, because Murry contributed $5,000 to Griffin’s legal fund in this case, but Griffin has indicated that he’ll oppose the request. Once the appeals court rules, the case may go to the supreme court, where the GOP has a 5–2 majority (and a recent history of intense partisan acrimony); Riggs, too, is recused from this case. Griffin appears to be asking his own party members to hand him a seat—an impression not helped if Murry stays on the case. (Griffin has declined to comment while the case is in court.)

All of this may be an affront to North Carolinians, but voting experts told me that the outcome matters for America as a whole as well. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA who has contributed to The Atlantic, told me it could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Many of us were worried about subverted election outcomes at the presidential level starting in 2020,” he wrote in an email. “But this is the first serious risk at a lower level. Raising these kinds of issues after the election to disenfranchise voters and flip election outcomes risks actual stolen elections potentially blessed by a state supreme court.”

North Carolina has historically been an early indicator for future national voting battles. It has long seen some of the more preposterous congressional maps in the United States. When the Supreme Court struck part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, North Carolina Republicans moved within hours to change laws. An effort by Republican Governor Pat McCrory to challenge his 2016 election loss presaged Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” push. North Carolina also sent important cases about partisan gerrymandering and the controversial “independent state legislature” theory to the Supreme Court. If Griffin prevails, his playbook could go national as well.

In some ways, the effect of this protracted litigation on the workings of the state is contained. The state supreme court has seven members, and Riggs remains on the court for other cases while hers is resolved. But imagining a case with a more direct impact—say, a governor’s race—isn’t hard. A world in which losing candidates can indefinitely delay the certification of elections with ex post facto challenges is one that could paralyze democratic government. Given the contempt for voters on display here, maybe that’s the point.

Related:

Stop the (North Carolina) steal. Election officials are under siege. (From October 2024)

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American allies don’t trust Trump with their secrets. The advice Elissa Slotkin didn’t take This is what happens when reality TV comes for democracy.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that a range of goods coming from Mexico and Canada will be exempt from his administration’s latest 25 percent tariff until April 2. Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would start the process of dismantling the Department of Education. Ten Democrats voted with House Republicans to censure Representative Al Green, who spoke out in protest during Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: Generations of Americans have questioned the role of the wealthy few who govern the many, Russell Berman writes.

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What Alito’s dissent fails to understand Russian state TV is very happy with the Trump administration. The Supreme Court foreign-aid ruling is a bad sign for Trump, Stephen I. Vladeck writes. Why Trump thanked John Roberts What does Dan Bongino believe?

Evening Read

Nina Westervelt / Redux

Cling to Your Disgust

By Spencer Kornhaber

A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.

It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Pursue happiness. The happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks explains the ultimate German philosophy for a better life.

Examine. Artists’ attempts at activism often meet mockery on social media. One actress figured out a better way to do it, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Yesterday, I had some harsh words about directionless Democrats. Today, several members of Congress picked a perplexing direction. The group collaborated on a TikTok video playing on a viral trend based on the video games Mortal Kombat and Super Smash Bros Melee. (No, the Trump administration still has not followed through on a law forcing the app’s sale.) “Choose your fighter,” the clip says, before the participants—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minority Whip Katherine Clark—stream through, posing as fighters to be selected in the game. Some are less awkward than others, but the whole thing is pretty cringe. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone some harmless fun, but I’m perplexed by the message. While Democrats are asking people to choose their fighter, voters just want Democrats to pick some fights. It doesn’t look like the party is anywhere close to a flawless victory.

— 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.

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.

Somewhere, Richard Nixon is raging with envy. Nixon was twice left for politically dead, after the 1960 presidential election and then the 1962 California governor’s race, but Watergate proved too much for even him to overcome. (Not that he didn’t try, as Elizabeth Drew reported in The Atlantic in 2014.)

Andrew Cuomo, inheritor of Nixon’s resting scowl face, may have found a way to do what the 37th president couldn’t: come back from an apparently career-ending scandal. Over the weekend, the Democrat launched a campaign for mayor of New York, and polling right now shows him with a wide lead, thanks to the corruption allegations plaguing the incumbent and newly minted Donald Trump ally Eric Adams.

The idea that Cuomo is the man to clean things up, however, is ridiculous. He was forced to step down as governor of New York in 2021 after revelations that his administration covered up mishandling of COVID and multiple allegations of sexual harassment. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing but did admit to instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”) Cuomo’s candidacy is an indictment of New York City politics: A city so eager to tell the rest of us how great it is should be able to produce a better class of mayoral contender (a point made pithily by The Onion with this parody headline: “De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’”).

The nascent comeback is also a sign of the weird amnesia some Americans seem to have developed about the past few years. After his resignation, Cuomo followed his brother, Chris, into the media, launching a podcast where he assailed cancel culture. The implication was that he was a victim; his reemergence as a candidate suggests that the podcast successfully spread that idea, but Cuomo is a victim of nothing except his own bad behavior.

In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuomo’s clear, consistent briefings made him a media star, and they provided a counter to then-President Trump’s erratic statements. As it turned out, though, New York wasn’t especially effective at fighting the virus, and Cuomo’s administration went to great lengths to cover up the number of deaths in nursing homes.

Then, in August 2021, the state attorney general’s office released an investigation finding that “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.” The probe found 11 credible accusers who brought allegations against Cuomo.. He denied wrongdoing, though he admitted to making at least some of the alleged statements. “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” he said.

It is true, and irrelevant, that Cuomo was not ultimately charged with any crimes. The facts in either of these scandals still ought to disqualify him from holding public office, and his resurrection represents a failure of the Democratic Party.

“Parties help to make political choices legible for voters, and, even more importantly, they organize politicians in pursuit of collective policy goals,” Jacob M. Grumbach, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies state-level politics, wrote to me in an email. The system is working if “the goals of the group come before the ambitions of individual politicians,” Grumbach said. The Democratic Party knows there are potential candidates who would be better than Cuomo for the party as a whole, but it’s “unable to coordinate to stop Cuomo from using his political capital to enter and likely win the NYC mayoral elections,” he said.

Instead, Democrats seem to be either acquiescing or openly backing him. Representative Ritchie Torres, a young moderate who has become prominent for criticizing the party’s progressive wing, endorsed Cuomo—in an exclusive given to the conservative New York Post, no less—as someone who would battle extremists on the left and right. Torres refused to “relitigate” Cuomo’s resignation, telling the Post: “America loves a comeback, New York loves a comeback.” Okay, but doesn’t it matter who’s doing the comeback, and what they’re coming back from? Cuomo is likely benefiting from a broader societal backlash to cancel culture and “wokeness.” But if, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?

This kind of selective amnesia about the recent past is not exclusive to New York or to politics—it’s afflicting many areas of American culture. The film director Brett Ratner, who faced multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct in 2017 (which he denied, and for which he wasn’t charged), released a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump that received a reported $40 million licensing fee from Amazon. Jon Gruden, a football coach who was forced to resign for emails that used homophobic language, among other things, has been restored to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Ring of Honor. The late Pete Rose, who in 2022 blithely dismissed the allegation of having had a sexual relationship with a 14- or 15-year-old girl by telling a reporter, “It was 55 years ago, babe,” is in line for a presidential pardon and possible reinstatement in Major League Baseball after he was barred for gambling.

But politics is where voters and institutions seem most ready to ignore the past. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote last week, the whimpering end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia has led many on the center and left to pretend that no scandal existed. “But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing,” Jonathan wrote.

In some Trump-related cases, his administration is trying to force the country to forget what happened. The most maddening of the Trump scandals was his alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The president escaped a trial on the case by winning the election, but the basic facts were not really in dispute: He possessed boxes and boxes of documents, he had no credible claim to them, and he didn’t give them back when asked to by the government. Now the FBI has handed the materials back over to Trump. And as my colleague Quinta Jurecic recently wrote, Trump and his administration are trying (in vain) to pretend that the January 6 insurrection never happened, yanking down government webpages and issuing pardons.

At the peak of social-justice activism in America, critics complained that pulling down statues of Confederates or removing the names of tarnished figures from institutions was tantamount to erasing history. Now, as the movement wanes, a different message is emerging: Some parts of history are apparently fine to erase.

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Portrait of a leader humblebragging (From 2021) January 6 still happened.

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Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post Trump’s cultural revolution The man who would remake Europe Conan O’Brien understood the assignment.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that 25 percent tariffs will be imposed on Canada and Mexico tomorrow, and that there is “no room left” for last-minute deals. In the first full month of Trump’s presidency, the number of migrants illegally crossing America’s southern border hit a new low not seen in at least 25 years, according to preliminary government data obtained by CBS News. Israel will stop all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza until Hamas accepts the new terms for an extension of the cease-fire agreement, Israeli officials said yesterday.

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Work in Progress: With the best intentions, the United Kingdom engineered a housing and energy shortage that broke its economy, Derek Thompson writes. The Wonder Reader: Shan Wang compiled Atlantic articles about why the egg is a miracle.

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Evening Read

lllustration by Katherine Lam

Migrants Prepare to Lose Their American Lives

By Stephanie McCrummen

At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.

Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: NEON; Patrick T. Fallon / Getty; Trae Patton.

Watch. Anora (available to rent online) swept the Oscars, proving that Hollywood’s biggest night can still recognize indie movies, David Sims writes.

Examine. The trend known as “anti-fan art” hinges on irony: The creators’ best works are inspired by the pop culture they disdain, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If I invoke the musical style called Americana, who comes to mind? Jeff Tweedy? Tyler Childers? Jason Isbell? As Giovanni Russonello wrote in 2013, the genre is heavily white and male, in contrast to its influences. I’ve been listening a lot over the past week to “Cry Baby,” a song by Sunny War that features Valerie June. It’s a summit of two young Black women from Tennessee who are making music—and a reminder that there’s no American music, or Americana, without Black music. Sunny War’s Anarchist Gospel was one of my favorite records of 2023, and Armageddon in a Summer Dress, which features “Cry Baby,” is one of my favorites of 2025 so far.

— 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.