My laptop decided to stop working today and is now at a repair shop. Wish me luck. I am laboriously tapping this post out with one finger on my Kindle. But it is too aggravating to write much this way. It’s also not letting me add a title. So  Mahablog is temporarily out of order, Do keep commenting, though. I hope to be back in business by Monday if not tomorrow. If anyone wishes to donate toward repairs — and I don’t know what this will  cost yet — the donate buttons on the right should work.

So much is happening at once, and I regret I can only focus on one issue at a time without being overwhelmed. So here we go — the constitutional impasse between Trump and the courts is getting more intense. For example, this just happened:

D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg has found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for defying his order last month to turn planes around that were removing people to El Salvador under an Alien Enemies Act invocation.

In a Wednesday order, Boasberg gave the government a deadline of April 23 either to comply with his initial order and thereby purge the contempt or, alternatively, identify members of the administration who should be subject to individual sanctions for their role.

In doing so, Boasberg seems to be leveraging the threat of criminal contempt of court to secure the return of the more than 100 Venezuelan nationals imprisoned in El Salvador for the last month without due process.

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” the opinion reads.

And U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has launched an inquiry into the Trump administration’s refusal to seek the return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Regarding the case of Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration is digging in its heels and refusing to budge in spite of the Supreme Court decision that more or less said Abrego Garcia must be retrieved. Our so-called “attorney general” flat-out said, “He is not coming back to our country. President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story.” See also Trump Admin’s New Defense For Accidentally Sending Abrego Garcia To Salvadoran Torture Camp: We Meant To Do That at Techdirt.

The Trump administration has settled on a terrifying new legal theory: they can declare anyone a “terrorist,” ship them to an offshore torture camp without due process, and courts can do nothing about it because it’s “foreign affairs.” This isn’t speculation — it’s the actual argument they’re making to justify their “accidental” trafficking of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s CECOT facility.

After initially admitting in court this was an “administrative error,” the administration has pivoted to an even more disturbing stance: they meant to do it all along, and they can do it to anyone. And they’ll just fucking lie about everything to pretend this is all perfectly normal and acceptable.

Well, yeah, pretty much. “Homegrowns are next” to go to El Salvador, Trump said just the other day. He thinks can declare anyone a violent criminal and make them disappear, without that pesky due process thing. In Abrego Garcia’s case the MAGAts are continuing to insist he’s a gang member, criminal, and terrorist, even though they have no evidence. See Greg Sargent, Trump’s Case Against Man Deported in “Error” Just Took Another Big Hit at The New Republic. And see also The Trump Admin’s Lies About Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Debunked at Rolling Stone. The bit of hearsay evidence that Abrego Garcia was a gang member has been thoroughly discredited, and he has no criminal record in either the U.S. or El Salvador. And he certainly hasn’t been connected to terrorism.

Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times:

The Trump administration believes it can send anyone it wants, without due process or future legal recourse, to rot in a foreign prison.  …

…More than a constitutional crisis, this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power. To claim the authority to remand any American, citizen or otherwise, to a distant prison beyond the reach of any legal remedy is to violate centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition and shatter the very foundations of constitutional government in the United States. It is to reduce the citizens of a republic to the subjects of a king. It is, in the language of the American revolutionaries, to enslave the people to a singular, arbitrary will. It is not for nothing that among the accusations listed in the Declaration of Independence is the charge that the king is guilty of “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.”

The president’s rendition program constitutes a profound assault on American freedom as understood for the whole of this nation’s history. 

Do read the whole thing. It’s very powerful.

At Wapo, Philip Bump has an in-depth look at what Trump is actually doing regarding migrants, as opposed to what he says he is doing. As I wrote in an earlier post, Trump swore he would  immediately deport tens of millions of illegal and dangerous migrants as soon as he was back in office. He quickly learned that’s a thing easier said than done. Most of what Trump has been doing is about making a show of deporting any migrants he can get his hands on, preferably those that disagree with him. If any genuine criminals are being deported also, it’s probably accidental. Philip Bump writes,

The simple fact is that criminal immigrants are not as pervasive in the United States as Trump insisted on the campaign trail. (As though to emphasize that point, the Justice Department recently removed a link to a study demonstrating that immigrants were less likely to commit crimes than native-born U.S. residents.) Partly because of that, the administration’s high-profile effort to target the purported immigrant threat as a staggering success relies on a tried-and-true Trump tactic: using unverified, false or decontextualized datapoints as rhetorical anecdotes. …

… So, instead of (perhaps unflattering) verifiable data, we often just get anecdata, numbers from Trump and other officials aimed at reinforcing the idea that immigrants are being expelled from the United States at a staggering clip. Sometimes, those numbers are presented with dubious charts. Sometimes, they’re just thrown into conversations. Always, they are backstopped with videos, photos and other images showing how the administration is cracking down. The presentation from the White House is one of unrelenting strength — a presentation that appears to be a Potemkin one.

Bump pulls together as much data as is available to see exactly what Trump is doing, as opposed to what he is saying. Some of this data is from Tom Cartwright, a retired executive who has taken up the mission of tracking ICE flights. That’s an interesting story in itself. The point is that Trump is falling way short of his boasts, making him nearly frantic to round up as many bodies as he can (preferably in front of cameras) and send them where they can’t come back to sue him.

And if he’s allowed to get away with this, he’s not going to stop at immigrants.

Update: Sen. Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador today but was unable to see Abrego Garcia. He spoke to the Vice President of El Salvador and was told, as I believe we all know, that El Salvador has a contract with the government of the U.S. to keep prisoners. Which suggests that Trump could just ask El Salvador to give Abrego Garcia back, maybe paying El Salvador to pay their administrative expenses, or whatever.

While looking for something else I ran into an old interview with Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State. This is from the Houston Chronicle, December 2018, after Tillerson had been fired from the SecState job.

“What Russia wants to do is undermine our confidence and undermine the world’s confidence in us,” Tillerson said.

The comparison to the Great Leap Forward rings true for me. It was a nightmare time in China that brought about the deaths of an estimated 20 million Chinese, mostly by starvation. And it came about because Mao Zedong had absolute power and didn’t know what he was doing. Trump is being allowed to exercise absolute power, and he sure as hell doesn’t know what he is doing.

See Krugman again, The Trump Tariffs Just Got Even Worse. Late Friday night Trump abruptly rescinded the “reciprocal tariffs” on  smartphones, computers and other electronics. My impression is he was trying to do a favor for big tech companies like Apple that manufacture in China. And this is what Krugman is complaining about when he said it just made the tariffs even worse.

For electronics, at least, we’re now putting much higher tariffs on intermediate goods used in manufacturing than on final goods,” Krugman writes. “This actually discourages manufacturing in the United States.” This may be why Commerce Secretary Lutnick said today the tariff exemptions are temporary. And he also said they’d be subject to “semiconductor tariffs” expected to start in a month or two. (Update: Apparently Lutnick wasn’t supposed to talk about the semiconductor tariffs.)

Which takes us to Krugman’s next point, “Uncertainty created by ever-changing tariff plans is arguably a bigger problem than the tariffs themselves.” Businesses can’t plan ahead if they don’t know what the policy will be next week.

And, finally,

The stench of corruption around these policies keeps getting stronger. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence for massive insider trading around last week’s tariff announcement; the big beneficiaries from the latest move are companies that made big donations to Trump. Investing in plant and equipment looks like a bad idea given the uncertainty, but investing in bribes for the ruling family clearly yields excellent returns.

This is how Trump always has done business, like a mob boss, and he can’t imagine any other way to do things. He’s too stupid to learn. And even though he won’t be around forever, the rest of the world can’t trust U.S. voters to not elect another monster again.

The impasse, as I see it: Yesterday the Supreme Court sorta kinda ruled against Trump.

The Supreme Court on Thursday evening largely left in place an order by a federal judge in Maryland directing the government to return to the United States a Maryland man who is currently being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador as a result of what the Trump administration concedes was an “administrative error.” In an unsigned opinion without any recorded dissents, the court turned down the Trump administration’s request to block the ruling by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, which Chief Judge John Roberts had temporarily paused on Monday afternoon to give the justices time to consider the government’s request.

The justices agreed that Xinis could require the Trump administration to “‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to” that country. But the justices sent the case back to the lower court for Xinis to “clarify” her additional instruction that the Trump administration “effectuate” his return.

So, I take this to mean they agree with the lower court’s ruling but don’t want to directly confront the Frankenstein monster they created. So the can was kicked back to Judge Xinis. Note that Abrego Garcia was taken into ICE custody on March 12 and flown to El Salvador on March 15. Judge Xinis on April 4 ruled that the U.S. government acted illegally by deporting Abrego Garcia and ordered his return. Now it’s April 11. At this point Abrego Garcia could be alive or dead.

Per Joyce Vance, upon receiving the SCOTUS ruling, Judge Xinis wasted no time informing Trump’s people that she wanted an update on Abrego Garcia and what efforts they intended to make to bring him back by 9:30 this morning. (Here is her order.) And she scheduled a hearing for 1 this afternoon. Further, “the Court hereby amends the Order to DIRECT that Defendants take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible.”

Trump’s people responded by saying they needed more time. Maybe they could throw something together by 5 pm Tuesday or so. And then the afternoon hearing went like this:

At the court hearing, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis for the District of Maryland repeatedly asked a DOJ lawyer to provide basic information about the whereabouts of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported on March 15.

“I have a simple question: Where is he?” Xinis implored more than once.

Each time the judge asked, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign was unable to answer the question. He said he had no personal knowledge and that Trump administration officials were still assessing what they could and would tell the court about Abrego Garcia.

In one Kafkaesque exchange, the judge dropped her head into her hands when Ensign said, “The government does not contradict the plaintiff’s claim that he is imprisoned in El Salvador.”

Ensign told the court that the administration needs more time to “interpret” what the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. And when the Judge asked him what the government has done so far to retrieve Abrego Garcia, Ensign said he was not prepared to provide that information. Xinis ordered daily updates to begin this weekend. She set the next hearing for April 16.

I’ve just noticed that Trump actually said he doesn’t want Abrego Garcia back.

“We don’t want him back.”

Pres. Trump defends the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was sent in error to El Salvador.

A judge previously ruled that Abrego Garcia must be returned to the U.S. https://t.co/AiHiTi6c6Q pic.twitter.com/miZ3IS2Cs1

— ABC News (@ABC) April 8, 2025

Abrego Garcia has been accused — without evidence — of being a gang member. But he was in the country legally and as far as I know he has no criminal record anywhere. The administration has admitted he was deported “in error.”

I’m guessing either Abrego Garcia is already dead, or close to it, and the Trump administration knows this and doesn’t want to admit it. Or they don’t want him back in the U.S. to testify on the inhumane conditions at the El Salvador prison. Or Trump just doesn’t like being told what to do, nya nya nya. It’s expected that Trump’s people will invoke the state secrets act so they don’t have to comply with the order for daily updates.

Trump “paused” most of the tariffs for 90 days. I found this on Bluesky:

If I had to guess, I’d say that the tanking bond market scared the shit out of them. But it doesn’t look like this “pause” cured that one. It just makes investment in the U.S. even more precarious.

[image or embed]

— Nancy LeTourneau (@nancyletourneau.bsky.social) April 9, 2025 at 4:49 PM

This was not planned. Trump chickened out. Not that I’m sorry. He must be really pissed at China, though, as he’s keeping a 125 percent tariff on China.

Jamelle Bouie has a column at the New York Times that I highly recommend. It was written before the pause, obviously, but it still applies. This is something I’ve been saying too:

There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the president’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

There is no point looking for a plan or a “why.” He does what he does because it feels good for him at the time. It reverberates well with his ego. That’s all there is to know.

So let’s talk about stupid. The AP just reported this:

The Internal Revenue Service has agreed to share immigrants’ tax data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the U.S., according to a document signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The new data-sharing arrangement was signed on Monday in the form of a “memorandum of understanding” — found in federal court filings — and will allow ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records.

Bloomberg reported last year:

In total, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion, or roughly $9,000 per person, in taxes in 2022, the report shows. While their incomes are usually lower, they’re less likely to claim refunds or earn tax-preferred income.

About one third of the total dollars collected from undocumented immigrants funded programs they’re mostly barred from using, including $26 billion to Social Security and $6 billion to Medicare, the report said.

The taxes paid into Social Security and Medicare are all income for the government, since people without a valid Social Security number can’t get any of that money back. But also let me speculate that people who are working jobs (even with fake SS numbers) and apparently sometimes filing tax returns ARE PROBABLY NOT CRIME LORDS. Yeah, I can see some drug dealer taking a deduction for product confiscated during a police raid. But now a whole lot of basically honest folks are going to have to think twice about working at honest jobs.

Here’s some more stupid. Trump and Hegseth announced they have approved a $1 trillion budget for the Pentagon. The military budget for the current fiscal year is $892 billion. Why the big increase? It’s not clear if that’s what the Pentagon asked for, and if so why, or if Trump just thinks it sounds cool. Trump also wants an “iron dome” missile defense system like Israel’s, although a lot of smart people believe the project would be a massive boondoggle that wouldn’t work to protect the U.S. from, for example, nuclear-armed ICBMs. See the Union of Concerned Scientists on that point.

But at the same time they’re throwing money at the Pentagon, DOGE is looking to close the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office at Homeland Security. Jeez, remember when no Republican politician could get through a sentence without the phrase “weapons of mass destruction”? They keep telling us all these terrorists and crazy people and what not are crossing the borders. Are WMDs not a problem any more?

“This is the office charged with preventing chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons inside the United States,” Josh Marshall writes. “This is through a mix of intelligence, technology, preparedness, liaising with state and local policy, etc. (There’s more details on it here.) It’s an office with just over 250 federal employees and about twice that number of contractors.” It’s not as macho as an iron dome, granted, but it sounds more practical.

What’s missing in all this is what we might call comprehensiveness. We need someone who sees the big picture and also how all the parts work together. That would not be Donald Trump or anyone else in his administration.

I am too tired to deal with Supreme Court news. See Supreme Court Clears Way for Venezuelan Deportations to Resume, for Now at the New York Times. See also SCOTUS Launches Itself Into The Worst Of The Trump Cases by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo. I’m wondering if Chief Justice Roberts is afraid to cross Trump directly for fear that Trump will ignore the ruling and make SCOTUS irrelevant.

Whatever else you do today, do not look at the White House dot gov home page. Do not go there. I went over there this morning because I wanted a transcript of something Trump is alleged to have said in the Oval Office yesterday. It used to be that whenever the President issued some remarks about anything, by no later than the next day you could find a transcript of those remarks on the White House site. But no transcripts have been posted for about a month, it appears, just photos and videos. But it’s what’s been done with the home page that’s most disturbing. Don’t go there sober. Keep a barf bag handy.

For those still looking for the point in what Trump is doing, I give you a quote. This is from A scary quote for the GOP on Trump and tariffs by Aaron Blake at WaPo.  And here’s the quote.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told The Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f—. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

I don’t know how much of the current ongoing disaster really is about what Trump promised on the campaign trail. I do suspect he has some kind of notion about how all this chaos is going to work out, somehow. I don’t think he’s deliberately sabotaging his own administration. but Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. And Aaron Blake’s point is that when the tariff ship sinks (as it undoubtedly will) the Republican party is going to go down with it. The entire party has spend years protecting him and making excuses for him and Letting Trump Be Trump. When the ship sinks it will be too late for backsies.

But Trump doesn’t give a bleep what happens to them. He’s going to do what he wants to do, what feels good to do. So every government agency that ever in the least bit annoyed him,, which is probably all of them, is getting cut. Every program that doesn’t directly reflect glory and honor on him is being cut. He doesn’t give a bleep if they are popular or even if lives depend on them.

And I do think the tariffs are in part a power play. He thinks the world will come groveling to him. That’s what he most dearly wants, to be the capo dei capi of the whole planet. That is, I think, why he keeps changing his story about whether the tariffs are permanent or negotiable. If they are supposed to be protectionist and cause more goods to be manufactured in the U.S., they have to be permanent. Nobody is going to start building a new factory to relocate manufacturing to the U.S. if they think the stupid tariffs will end in a few weeks. Even Trump ought to be able to understand that. So Trump has to say the tariffs are around to stay. But what he really wants is the groveling. So then an hour later he’ll say they are negotiable.

But it’s not going to work. He doesn’t understand tariffs, and economies. He over-calculated America’s importance. Instead of making himself stronger, he’s leaving a power vacuum where the U.S. used to be, and sooner or later some other country, or perhaps the EU, will step into that void. Under Trump’s “leadership” the U.S. is becoming more isolated, and vulnerable, and dysfunctional, and quickly a whole lot poorer. So much winning. And as people lose their investments and FEMA doesn’t show up after a disaster and hospitals close and prices get ridiculous and unemployment goes up because nobody is hiring because consumers aren’t buying, Republicans who have hitched themselves to Trump will have no where to hide.

How bad is the tariff plan? Even the bleeping right-wing American Enterprise Institute says it makes no sense. See also There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.

Thompson is basically saying that the tariff policy is an extension of Trump’s chaotic psyche. No real thinking went into any of this. Nobody knows anything about how it’s supposed to work. It was just slapped together to please Trump. As Thompson says, we’re all living in Trump’s head.

On a brighter note, the Hand’s Off protests seem to have gone well yesterday. We need more of those. I was sorry to not go, but I’ve been dealing with a lot of arthritis pain and haven’t been all that mobile. Still, sitting out really bothers me.

It’s been another exciting day for investors.

The S&P 500 fell 6 percent by the end of trading on Friday, pulling the benchmark U.S. index closer to a bear market, Wall Street’s term for a decline of more than 20 percent from its latest peak in mid-February. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell 5.8 percent, pushing it into a bear market.

The U.S. rout followed falls in global markets, and worries about an escalating global trade war overshadowed a positive reading about the health of the U.S. labor market.

The problem with jobs reports is that they’re a lagging indicator. They’re a snapshot of the recent past, which may or may not show us anything about the future.

Meanwhile, the White House can’t seem to get its story straight about exactly what it’s doing. Today various spokespeople sternly told the press that the tariffs were not open to negotiation. Later in the day Trump said they were. In fact, he has decided that was the goal all along.

If it helps you feel better, Gallup now has Trump’s approval at 34 percent, which is equal to his lowest approval rating from his first term. If he drops to 33 percent, it will be his lowest Gallup approval ever. And speaking of dropping, the stock market is doing just that, big time. It’s been going lower all day, from what I can tell.

I can’t read the story at The Economist, but here’s the cover:

Here’s the first paragraph, which is as far as I can go:

IF YOUfailed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

Paul Krugman has been writing more than he did when he was a New York Times columnist. He has a lot to say. See Trump Goes Crazy on Trade  and Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? This is from the latter:

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down.

See also Trump’s Trade War Risks Forfeiting America’s Economic Primacy by Patricia Cohen at the New York Times (gift article):

The global economic system that the United States has shaped and steered for more than three-quarters of a century was animated by a powerful guiding vision: that trade and finance would be based on cooperation and consent rather than coercion.

That system, for all its faults, entrenched the United States as the world’s richest nation and its sole financial superpower. The rule of law and the stability and trust that this approach generated helped make the dollar the world’s go-to currency for transactions and America a center of global investment.

By provoking a worldwide trade war, President Trump risks abandoning that vision of shared interests and replacing it with one that assumes sharp economic conflicts are unavoidable.

Gone are appeals to a larger purpose, mutual agreements or shared values. In this new order, the strongest powers determine the rules and enforce them through intimidation and bare-knuckled power.  …

… But quarterly gains and losses are trivial, many economists and political leaders said, compared with the potential long-term damage to the unique power and privileges that the United States has built up in the postwar global order. At stake are the country’s unmatched influence over the world’s financial system, the advantages its businesses enjoy and a reputation that attracts investors and innovators.

It may be that future generations will divide American history into two parts: pre-Trump and post-Trump. And the post-Trump America will be considerably less great.

Congress could stop this. Already the Senate — with some Republican votes — rescinded some of the tariffs Trump put on Canada.  And today “A bipartisan pair of Senate lawmakers on Thursday unveiled legislation they said would reaffirm Congress’ role in setting trade policy, just hours after the Donald Trump administration rolled out a slate of import tariffs on some of the country’s closest partners in commerce,” it says here. But can these bills pass in the House? That’s very unlikely, according to just about everybody.

I haven’t yet written about the massive layoffs at Health and Human Services. If you missed the interview with Dr. David Kessler on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, do watch.

First, some celebration:

So we’ve been given a bit of light. Yesterday’s election results were as good as we could have hoped for. With 95 percent of the vote counted as I write, Susan Crawford is winning easily, 55 % to 45 %, over the Musk candidate, Brad Schimel, in Wisconsin. Elon spent a huge amount of political capital, along with real money, trying to elect Schimel. I’m reading that Schimel was running on how loyal he is to Trump, and how he would support Trump’s agenda, and Elon seems to have thought this would bring Trump supporters out to the polls. We see how that worked. From the New York Times:

Even more than Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk emerged in Wisconsin as the primary boogeyman for Democrats. His involvement altered the terms of the election. Instead of making the race an early referendum on Mr. Trump’s White House and abortion rights, Wisconsin Democrats pivoted to make Mr. Musk their entire focus, while Republicans rode the wave of his largess.

Don Moynihan writes on his Substack site, “All signs suggest that Musk was a drag, rather than a boost, to the candidate he invested so much personal and financial capital into.” Musk is a liability to Republicans rather than an asset, in other words. Also, while Republicans won, the results in the Florida House elections were a lot closer than the results in the same districts just five months ago. Republicans who are not in deep red districts and who face elections next year have got to be worried. Worried enough to take back some of Musk’s power? We’ll see. See also Elon Musk Can’t Take the Heat by Tim Murphy at Mother Jones

Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech turned into something genuinely inspirational. If you missed the closing moments, you can see them here. Frank Luntz, of all people, says the speech may have changed the course of political history. I think it’s a bit early to say that, but I do think it could have helped turn a corner for the Dems. They needed this.

Now on to freedom. There’s an article at The Atlantic by David Graham titled The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come. It begins:

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967, in his inaugural address as governor of California. Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, approvingly quotes the speech in his foreword to Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s blueprint for the Trump administration. Roberts writes that the plan has four goals for protecting its vision of freedom: restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”; dismantling the federal bureaucracy; defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”; and securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”

Now, what does this tell us about how people like Roberts define “freedom”? Is “restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life” freedom? What sort of family is being restored? Graham continues,

A focus on heterosexual, married, procreating couples is everywhere in Project 2025. “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-­ordered nation and healthy society,” writes Roger Severino, the author of a chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services and a former HHS and Justice Department staffer. … He argues that the federal government should bolster organizations that “maintain a biblically based, social-­science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” saying that other forms are less stable. The goal is not only moral; he and other authors see this as a path to financial stability and perhaps even greater prosperity for families.

So, apparently, “freedom” requires enforcing a rigidly narrow lifestyle that may work very well for some people, but it doesn’t work for everybody. Those who are not heterosexual or terribly interested in marriage or children just have to suck it up and, what? Give up their freedom?

In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers. “Without women, there are no children, and society cannot continue,” Max Primorac writes in his chapter on USAID, where he served in the first Trump administration. (Primorac calls for ridding the agency of “woke” politics and using it as an instrument of U.S. policy, but not the complete shutdown Trump has attempted.) Jonathan Berry writes that the Department of Labor, where he previously worked, would “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work” and seek to “understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.” (This sounds a lot like research predetermined to reach an outcome backing the traditional family.)

So we’re going back to stuffing all women into a rigidly narrow gender role that requires they give up personal aptitudes and interests so they can stay home and take care of children. I’ve got news for these people: This is not freedom.  It’s true that we’re still working to make the motherhood-and-career mix work a little more rationally. But I think we can get there.

The Labor Department would produce monthly data on “the state of the American family and its economic welfare,” and the Education Department would provide student data sorted by family structure. Severino suggests that the government either pay parents (most likely mothers) to offset the cost of caring for children, or pay for in-­home care from family members; he opposes universal day care, which many on the right see as encouraging women to work rather than stay home with kids.

This makes me crazy. First, I suspect nearly all families who need day care call on family or trusted friends to provide that care before they resort to paying for day care. But very often that’s not an option. Republican politicians don’t want to pay for reliable day care, but when jobs are going unfilled because women don’t have reliable day care they don’t like that, either, especially if the unemployed mothers need food and housing assistance. It can be a burden even for women who keep their jobs. I well remember having to spend time at work on the phone looking for day care  because of a school break or some other interruption in the usual arrangement. It cuts into productivity, and it’s a horrific expense.

The parts of this family-oriented agenda that the Trump administration has already moved to enact are some of those that enforce a strictly binary concept of gender, aiming to drive trans and nonbinary people underground; open them up to discrimination at work, at school, and in the rest of their lives; and erase their very existence from the language of the federal government.

And I’m still not seeing the “freedom.”

Trump has not yet made stricter abortion policies a focus in his new term. Though he has boasted about appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he seems wary of pushing further, for fear of political backlash. Project 2025 has no such qualms. Severino recommends withdrawing FDA approval for abortion drugs, banning their prescription via telehealth, and using 1873’s Comstock Act to prohibit their mailing. 

I’m not seeing pro-freedom agenda there, either. Not having a say over one’s own body is kind of not free.

I’ve been complaining about the Right’s misuse of the word freedom for years. It’s like that to be free, in their sense of the word, we have to agree to not be free, really. We give up our actual freedom to enjoy a kind of theoretical freedom. Or something.

And then there is their twitchiness about “government bureaucracy.” Sometimes the lack of it is a bigger threat to freedom. Just ask the people standing in lines outside Social Security offices these days. But, speaking of Reagan, I’m sure you remember what he said when the Medicare Act was passed way back when. “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” How “free” is it to not be able to afford health care? How “free” is it to have a debilitating illness or chronic pain that goes untreated or else puts you in debt for the rest of your life? Where is the “freedom” in that? If we citizens choose to spend our tax money toward providing access to medical care for everybody, as other nations do, how is that “not free”? I honestly don’t understand.

In brief, the Right’s idea of freedom has nothing to do with individual self-determination or being free from hindrances that keep you from fully living your life. What it means is that they want to live in a country that reflects their personal biases and that protects them from things that make them uncomfortable, like brown people, especially foreign ones, and assertive women of any color. That’s why they love Viktor Orbán so much. It’s the most corrupt country in the EU, and the people have no guarantee of civil liberties, but he’s doing a heck of a job shoving gay people back into the closet.