Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is back in court to continue testifying in his corruption trial.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indefinitely delayed the release of what would have been the biggest group of Palestinian prisoners so far

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delays the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners abruptly putting the future of the truce into further doubt.

PM Benjamin Netanyahu delays the release until Hamas ends 'humiliating ceremonies' while freeing Israeli captives.

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“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”

Moonves appeared merely ghoulish then. He now looks both ghoulish and wrong. Trump has not been good for CBS, and the steps and statements he’s made since returning to the White House show that his campaign promises to restore and defend free speech were balderdash. His goal is to protect the speech that he likes and suppress what he doesn’t.

On Sunday, Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk attacked CBS’s flagship program. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This would seem less threatening if Musk weren’t running roughshod over the federal government, or if the president disagreed. But earlier this month, Trump said that “CBS should lose its license” and 60 Minutes should be “terminated.”

The source of their anger is an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris—remember her?—during the presidential campaign last year. Trump alleges that 60 Minutes improperly edited the interview. CBS denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment on Musk’s post. CBS said in a filing this week that it intended to seek information on Trump’s finances if the lawsuit proceeds. Even so, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is considering whether to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump to resolve a suit seeking $20 billion in damages. Interpreting such a move as anything other than paying off Trump to leave CBS alone is very difficult—in other words, it’s a protection racket. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that executives are concerned they could be sued for bribery if they settle. (Moonves is long gone; he was forced out in 2018 over a series of accusations of sexual assault and harassment. He denies any wrongdoing.)

Trump initially filed his suit last October and has since amended it. The crux of the claim is that CBS aired two different snippets from the same Harris answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like many past lawsuits from Trump, this one reads more like a political memo than a legal brief. He claims, without any evidence, that CBS edited the interview to help Harris’s electoral prospects. (Like other MAGA lawsuits, it was filed in a specific Texas court so as to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has delivered sweeping fringe rulings in the past.) The suit doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If CBS was trying to hide something Harris said, why did it broadcast the clip?

The Federal Communications Commission initially rejected a complaint about the interview, but Brendan Carr—Trump’s newly appointed FCC chair—reopened it and demanded that CBS release the transcript of the interview. CBS did so, and to my read, the transcript establishes that CBS’s use of the clips was not manipulative. (Judicious editing is essential. I’ve interviewed many politicians, and much of what they say is incurably dull, nonsensical, or both, sometimes by design.)

The charge of “election interference” doesn’t make any sense, either—especially coming from Musk, who both is the owner of a major media platform and spent nearly $300 million to back Trump and other Republican candidates. The position of the Trump GOP appears to be that spending any amount of money on politics is free speech, but press outlets covering the campaign are interfering with it.

The bombardment of CBS is part of a wide-ranging assault on free speech. Last week, the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because editors there have opted not to adopt Trump’s renaming of the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. In December, ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump even though almost no media lawyers thought the network would have lost; critics charged that ABC was trying to curry favor with the president-elect. (ABC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carr, the FCC chair, recently wrote a letter to NPR and PBS suggesting that by airing sponsors’ names, they may have violated rules against noncommercial stations accepting advertising, although the FCC has not objected to this practice in the past. He noted that the answer could help Congress in deciding whether to defund NPR and PBS. That’s a tight vise grip: Don’t take funding or we might take your funding.

Not all criticism of the press is media suppression. Politicians are free to criticize the press, just as all Americans are free to criticize their elected officials. And besides, if political leaders aren’t upset about at least some of the coverage they’re receiving, journalists probably aren’t holding them to account. At times during the Trump era, some members of the media have overreacted to flimsy provocations, like Trump’s posting a silly GIF that superimposed the CNN logo over someone being body slammed. Vice President J. D. Vance snarkily replied to the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Monday, “Yes dummy. I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Even if you’re willing to grant Vance’s premise that banishing the AP is no big deal—I am not—there’s a lot of territory between that and jailing people, and that’s the ground that Trump is occupying: using the power of the government to intimidate. Paramount, for example, is currently awaiting FCC approval for a merger with Skydance Media. A Paramount Global spokesperson told me the lawsuit is “separate from, and unrelated to” the merger, but the company’s leaders would be reasonable to be afraid that Trump might block the deal if they don’t cooperate. During his first term, Trump tried to block the acquisition of CNN’s parent company. Speaking about the AP’s banishment, one journalist told CNN’s Brian Stelter, “Everyone assumes they’re next.”

Threats to the press are not new for Trump, who has been critical of press freedom for years. But during his most recent campaign, he criticized “wokeness” and argued that he would be a voice for free speech by pushing back on what he characterized as attacks on constitutional rights from, for example, social-media companies that blocked or throttled content (such as suspending his accounts after January 6). On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order purportedly “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and announced that he was a “free speech absolutist,” but quickly disproved that, suspending reporters who criticized him and cooperating with foreign governments to suppress speech.

A news outlet that is afraid of the government is an outlet whose speech is only partly free. When media companies are afraid that the president will use regulators to punish their business, owners are anxious to protect non-media commercial interests. When journalists are wary of becoming targets for petty retribution, they may pull punches or shape coverage in ways that do not—and are not intended to—serve the public interest. Jeff Bezos’s decision to spike a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s attacks on his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, both look a lot like this, though the two owners insist otherwise.

Over the past few years, Trump, Vance, and others complained loudly about the government studying mis- and disinformation or pointing out instances of disinformation to social-media companies. They charged that this was censorship because even if the government wasn’t requiring those companies to do anything, its power made this an implied threat. Now that they are in office, they’ve had a change of heart. They’re perfectly happy for the government to try to tell private companies what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren’t. They never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own.

Related:

Intimidating Americans will not work. What conservatives mean by freedom of speech

Today’s News

The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director in a 51–49 vote. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell announced that he would not be seeking reelection.

The Trump administration removed protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in America, which puts them on track to be targeted for deportation this summer.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: “The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium,” Kat Hu writes. “As persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

George Packer: The Trump world order The secret that colleges should stop keeping The ultimate antidote to toxic behavior online Spared by DOGE—for now

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App

By Faith Hill

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Listen. Americans are stuck. Who’s to blame? Hanna Rosin talks with Yoni Appelbaum about the end of upward mobility in the United States.

Read. “The Moron Factory,” a short story by George Saunders.

“Is true: our office odd. No one stable. Everyone nuts in his/her own way. Usually, at work, I keep to self. Don’t socialize. Just do my work, head straight home.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Threats to free speech aren’t just a national problem, and they’re not just about the press—they’re about the public’s right to hear from and be involved in government. I was struck this morning by two different, appalling stories out of Mississippi. The Mississippi Free Press reports on how a chancery court judge has ruled that the state legislature is not a public body and therefore not subject to open-meetings laws. If the elected lawmakers of a state aren’t a public body, what is? Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on another judge in the state ordering a local paper to remove an editorial from its website criticizing Clarksdale officials for not issuing a public notice before a special meeting. The headline on the article: “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.” Perhaps the judge would have been well served to read it himself.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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US Secretary of State made no mention of Palestinians in a press conference with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

If President Donald Trump defies the courts by refusing to comply with their rulings, what will stop him? This question has suddenly become central to U.S. democracy, as federal judges have temporarily barred numerous administration actions, including ending birthright citizenship and granting Elon Musk’s team access to a Treasury Department payment system. Troublingly, Vice President J. D. Vance has repeatedly suggested that the executive should disobey the courts in certain cases, writing last weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Conventional wisdom, dating back to Alexander Hamilton, is that independent courts should protect democracy; the judiciary, Hamilton argued, is an “excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions” of elected politicians. Yet Hamilton also observed that “from the natural feebleness of the judiciary, it is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its coordinate branches,” meaning the executive and Congress. Hamilton’s paradox is that courts are designed to restrain a powerful executive but lack a clear basis for their own power. When and how, then, do courts prevail over an executive who threatens to flout their rulings?

[Read: The constitutional crisis is here]

As a political scientist, I have researched this question by interviewing high-ranking judges and lawyers in backsliding democracies, collecting original data in Turkey, Israel, and Brazil. The answer: When courts confront a powerful, noncompliant executive, three paths enable the judiciary to stop an executive power grab. Each path musters support for the courts from a distinct outside source: intrastate actors such as state governors and Congress, societal mobilization, or the armed forces. The first path is most effective; the second is costly and challenging to organize; the last is itself dangerous to democracy.

To ensure that powerful leaders obey legal limits, the first and most reliable path is to mobilize intrastate allies—that is, actors within the federal, state, and local governments who can implement the court’s decision over political resistance from the executive. Take the example of Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro. After Bolsonaro was elected, he clashed repeatedly with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal. Bolsonaro even threatened to close the court, impeach its justices, and refuse to comply with a judge’s rulings. But at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when Bolsonaro “systematically sabotaged” pandemic control measures, the high court successfully constrained an antagonistic president.

Why? Brazil’s high court ruled that Bolsonaro could not override state and local public-health measures, and that decision mobilized governors and mayors as intrastate allies. These subnational government officials put muscle behind the court’s decision by acting to implement their own public-health policies against Bolsonaro’s wishes. What is more, the court benefited from support in Brazil’s Congress, which swiftly passed legislation to recognize the pandemic as an emergency.  

[Read: What the rioters in Brazil learned from Americans]

The federal system in the United States provides some opportunities for state and local actors to push for compliance with the courts. For instance, to override a court ruling to protect birthright citizenship, the Trump administration would need cooperation from officials nationwide, who could choose to side with the judiciary. But concerningly, many court decisions require active compliance from the Trump administration itself, on issues such as limiting the powers of Elon Musk’s team or placing thousands of federal employees on leave. The governors of California or Texas cannot easily use their state governments to restore the U.S. Agency for International Development. On many policy issues that the administration could lose on in court, a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to intervene.

When intrastate allies are absent, the second, more costly path to protecting judicial power becomes the next-best option: societal mobilization. This was apparent in Israel in 2023, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proposed a package of changes to curb the judiciary’s power. The effort to block this judicial overhaul mobilized support from the streets, economic power brokers, and state officials.

At the street level, every Saturday night, Israelis protested by the thousands to oppose the judicial overhaul. To apply economic pressure, trade unions, business leaders, and top Israeli economists spoke out about the economic damage of curbing judicial independence. Among state officials, military reservists threatened to refuse to serve, and Netanyahu’s own defense minister opposed the judicial changes. Ultimately, this mass societal mobilization forced Netanyahu to suspend the overhaul—and empowered the high court to strike down a law limiting the judiciary’s powers.

Mass societal mobilization, however, was costly for Israel’s economy and arguably its national security. The protests closed banks, shops, ports, and Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. The contentious fight over the judicial overhaul reduced annual GDP by an estimated 2.8 percent. Societal divisions may also embolden geopolitical adversaries. In a survey after the attack of October 7, 2023, 70 percent of Israelis believed that the domestic discord over the judicial overhaul affected Hamas’s decision to attack.

Mass societal mobilization is also difficult to coordinate and sustain. In Israel today, many citizens are psychologically exhausted, and anti-government protests, although still significant, have become smaller. As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue, illiberal leaders can also use state power to inhibit opposition, as individuals and organizations come to fear that publicly opposing the executive will cause repercussions such as tax audits and lawsuits.

The third and final path to upholding judicial power is a dangerous one: military involvement in politics. In Turkey during the 2000s, after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party rose to power, the military served as the backstop for a powerful judiciary. Turkey’s generals and judges shared a militantly secular ideology, and the armed forces publicly backed judicial efforts to constrain Erdoğan’s religious conservative party. Because Turkey’s military had repeatedly ousted elected governments in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, the threat of military intervention put pressure on Erdoğan and his party to accept court decisions, rather than risk a constitutional crisis. Paradoxically, legal constraints on the executive—a hallmark of democracy—came from a deeply antidemocratic source, the threat of a coup.

Yet relying on men with guns to empower the judiciary was unsustainable, precisely because the military’s threat of coercion was democratically illegitimate. The military’s involvement enabled opponents of the judiciary to sell court reform to Turkish voters as democratic. Erdoğan argued persuasively that the military and judiciary were obstructing the “sovereignty of national will”—and won sweeping popular support for a constitutional referendum in 2010 that expanded the elected government’s influence over the courts. Key international players, including the European Union and President Barack Obama, praised the constitutional referendum as a step toward democracy. The referendum did improve a genuinely antidemocratic status quo, but it also created opportunities for Erdoğan to take control of the courts. In effect, the judiciary’s close relationship with the military enabled Turkey’s executive to cast himself as democratic when overhauling the courts—which severely eroded Turkish democracy.

[Read: Erdoğan is getting desperate]

Today, America’s judges face a dilemma that has more commonly confronted their peers in other embattled democracies: how to enforce their rulings against a president who is poised to challenge legal constraints on his power. Though Hamilton feared that “the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power,” courts elsewhere have sometimes proved surprisingly resilient. Judges can prevail over disobedient executives with support from a range of outside allies, but these methods of preserving the judiciary’s power are not created equal. For the future of U.S. democracy, it is not only whether but how the courts derive their power that will matter.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will end the ceasefire in Gaza if all captives are not released.

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During his most recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to “put unelected bureaucrats back in their place.” Apparently, that place is in the federal government, doing what they want with little accountability.

The most powerful unelected bureaucrat in the United States today—and perhaps ever—is Elon Musk. The social-media troll and tech mogul is currently a “special government employee” leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency, though it is neither a department nor, as far as can be ascertained, all that interested in improving efficiency. DOGE’s clearest goal seems to be getting rid of as many civil servants as possible, by whatever means possible—including cajoling, buyouts, and firings, some of which have drawn reproach from courts.

The assault on government workers has been a long time coming. In 2017, during his first term, Trump began referring to federal employees as the “deep state,” and he often accused them of undermining him or slow-walking his ideas. It didn’t help that he often asked for impossible or illegal things, though the most prominent examples of defiance came from Cabinet-level, Senate-confirmed officials whom Trump himself had appointed. While campaigning as a quasi-populist, Trump railed against unelected officials who he argued treated ordinary citizens with disdain, assuming they knew best, or who were deeply enmeshed in conflicts of interest and lining their own pockets. Trump and his allies repeatedly suggested that Joe Biden’s aides were running the government because the president was too checked out to manage.

Now an unelected aide, beset with conflicts of interest, seems to be effectively running the government. He’s barreling through carefully constructed guardrails, acting as though he knows better than anyone else how the government ought to run, while a passive president looks on. No one’s pretending that Trump is particularly interested in the software systems of the government, and he’s made clear that he’s pretty detached from it all. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go,” he said of Musk’s role recently. In short, Trump has set a broad direction and tasked Musk with executing the details. That’s what bureaucrats do.

Because this is exactly what Trump campaigned against, justifying it is challenging, though apologists like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk are game to try. “The American people quite literally voted for Elon Musk and DOGE when they elected Donald Trump with a historic mandate,” Kirk posted on X. But that’s absurd. Trump said on the trail that Musk would help him, but he didn’t outline this. The DOGE idea wasn’t formally announced until after the election, and Trump didn’t run on dismantling USAID or selling off half the government’s real-estate portfolio. Musk wasn’t elected, hasn’t been vetted or confirmed by the Senate, and didn’t even have to go through the standard hiring process. This is probably just as well; his admitted use of controlled substances might pose some challenges. He will reportedly not release a financial disclosure, and the White House says he’ll police his own conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, he has a long track record of questionable ethical decisions.

Democrats, otherwise reeling in the first weeks of the Trump administration, have picked up on the fact that Musk may be a useful target. Although most Democratic attacks on Trump’s populist persona have fallen short, this one seems more promising. Firing thousands of federal workers for nothing more than doing their job, while clinging to a self-described racist and a teenager nicknamed “Big Balls,” may not go over well with voters who just wanted inflation fixed. Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from a red district in Maine, reported that he was getting a flood of constituent calls about Musk.

Focusing on Musk’s outrageous abuse of power may not be as effective as Democrats hope. Musk obviously hates many of the same people whom Trump’s fans hate, and that’s a powerful bonding force. What sinks Musk may ultimately be not populist resentment but court rulings against him, Trump’s need to remain the center of attention, or backlash when the cuts he’s pursuing start affecting voters’ lives directly.

“An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. “Congress must take action to restore the rule of law.” (If only Schumer knew anyone in Congress!) Musk quickly replied: “This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.”

The most striking thing about this response—other than the world’s richest man adopting Leninist rhetoric about “the revolution of the people”—is its reversal of reality. Schumer won an election; Musk is just a bureaucrat.

Related:

Elon Musk is president. Elon Musk’s bureaucratic coup is under way.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Is this what cancel culture achieved? Trump says the corrupt part out loud. DOGE is failing on its own terms. What happens when bird flu gets worse?

Today’s News

Trump hosted Jordanian King Abdullah II at the White House, where they discussed the president’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Gaza cease-fire would end if Hamas did not go through with the hostage release scheduled for Saturday. The Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors yesterday to withdraw the corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

What an ‘America First’ Diet Would Really Look Like

By Yasmin Tayag

Trump’s stance on agriculture is the same as his stance on everything else: “America First.”

The notion that the country could produce all of its food domestically is nice—even admirable. An America First food system would promote eating seasonally and locally, supporting more small farmers in the process. But that is not how most people eat now.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The cruel attack on USAID Good on Paper: The great political sort is happening at the office. Blame Gerald Ford for Trump’s unaccountability. It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans.

Culture Break

Illustration by Panayiotis Terzis

Read. Mood Machine will make you marvel at how much effort Spotify puts into recommending a song that sounds like a different song you liked three months ago, Brad Shoup writes.

Ponder. “Should I leave my American partner?” one reader asks James Parker in the latest edition of “Dear James.” “I love him, but I don’t know if I can live in the U.S. forever.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

To me, Kendrick Lamar’s use of American-flag and Uncle Sam imagery at Sunday’s Super Bowl was fairly clearly political—and subversive. What it was not, however, was blunt. Perhaps the overly literal protest gestures of the first Trump administration have somewhat numbed viewers to anything more subtle. Regardless, I was amused and perplexed to see some commentators taking the flag’s presence as a signal of alignment with the president. “When backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political,” wrote The Free Press’s River Page, as though patriotism can ever be apolitical.

All of this reminded me of George Will’s review of a 1984 Bruce Springsteen show. “For the initiated, which included most of the 20,000 the night I experienced him, the lyrics, believe it or not, are most important,” Will observed. But apparently the famously erudite columnist’s insights failed him, as he badly misunderstood one of the sharpest critiques (and critics) of the Reagan era. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” So close, and yet so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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A Hamas official told Al Jazeera that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “sabotaging” the ceasefire.