Latest news with #TrumpII
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Punishing Blue Cities Was Always On The Agenda
The Trump administration's decision to federalize the California National Guard to crack down on protesters demonstrating against ICE detentions in the city, absent a request from the state's governor — and even despite assurances from local law enforcement that things were, for the most part, under control — is itself the convergence of two threats Trump made on the campaign trail. There is, of course, Trump's vow to deploy the military domestically, an impulse he has been itching to act on since he first came back to office. Throughout the 2024 campaign cycle he repeatedly floated the idea of deploying soldiers against protesters. When he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris last fall, he daydreamed on Truth Social about his desire to bring in 'military assets' to help with his mass deportation agenda. He signed an executive order soon after his return to the White House that expanded the use of the military within U.S. borders, just one component of his early actions to push ICE to more swiftly round up and deport migrants — both those with legal status and undocumented immigrants. That came under the guise of a crackdown on supposedly violent gang members who entered the U.S. illegally, a blanket justification that has, of course, resulted in innocent people getting nabbed off the street daily for the past three months. When he issued the order over the weekend, purporting to federalize the California National Guard and directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deploy 2,000 troops to Los Angeles, it was the culmination of this vision he's held onto for years: bringing in the military to create a grand spectacle of immigration enforcement. But there's another Trump II agenda item the deployment ticks off by undermining the authority of California state officials and local officials in LA to determine when and how they might request backup in the face of unrest. The Trump administration has been searching for ways to punish blue cities and blue states since before he returned to office. Back in November, the Washington Post reported that Trump and his advisers were discussing how the then-president elect might strip federal funding from Chicago and other blue cities as punishment for getting in the way of his planned deportation program. One of the first actions taken by the new Trump Justice Department after the President was sworn in in January sought to warn local and state officials against protesting the new administration's immigration crackdown. In the memo, then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove warned that state and local officials who don't cooperate with Trump's deportation efforts could face federal prosecution. In late April, the administration sought to make good on that early scheme to strip funds from sanctuary cities when he signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Krisi Noem to pull together a list of 'States and local jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws (sanctuary jurisdictions).' In the order, Trump also directed his OMB Director Russ Vought to 'identify appropriate Federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions, including grants and contracts, for suspension or termination, as appropriate.' That list of supposed sanctuary cities was published last week, only to be taken down days later due to backlash — the administration had cast an overbroad net and included many municipalities that were not, in fact, sanctuary cities, angering local officials. Those are just some of the recent actions the administration has taken to punish state and local municipalities that refuse to cooperate with any one element of Trump's outrageous and sweeping deportation mandates. The effort, months back, to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams was reportedly couched in a scheme to force Adams to allow ICE to roam free in protected spaces across the city. Even Trump's allies in Congress have taken Trump's threats against blue cities into their own hands, as Republicans on the House Oversight Committee drag in blue city mayors to testify under oath about their cities' sanctuary policies, part of a messaging effort to turn the public against an attempt to make communities safe for migrants seeking asylum or working toward other forms of legal status. California in particular has been in the Trump administration's crosshairs. On Friday, before the decision to federalize the state's national guard was made, CNN reported that the Trump administration had been preparing to announce a sweeping cancelation of federal funding for the state over a litany of perceived crimes such as allowing a trans athletes to participate in a sporting event and having a governor whom Trump dislikes. The events over the weekend simply gave the President an opening to take another swipe at the blue state, and make a spectacle out of its largest blue city. Most of you are reading Where Things Stand from TPM's homepage. Or perhaps you found it on social media. Did you know you can now get it delivered straight to your inbox? It's a new thing we're launching literally today, so don't feel left out if this is the first you're hearing about it. That said, if you're a loyal WTS reader, it'd mean a lot to me if you subscribed on Substack as well. It's another opportunity to engage with TPM on a new platform as we wade through the muck and try to meet this moment well. Sign up here! As we've been reporting for some time, it's unclear how willing Republican members of Congress will be to take up and pass the rescissions package that the White House sent to Congress last week. The package includes a small portion of the billions in federal funding that Elon Musk either canceled or rescinded in the last few months of DOGE's rampage through the executive branch, plus a few other Republican pet projects, like cutting PBS and NPR off from federal funds. Some whispers of resistance to the idea have surfaced in recent days, as some Republicans in the House facing tough reelection prospects raise issue with the sweeping foreign aid cuts outlined in the package. And at least one Republican is going to bat for public broadcasting. Per The Hill: Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) on Monday urged the Trump administration to reconsider a request to Congress for public broadcasting cuts, warning of the potential impact some local communities face if funding is yanked back. In a joint statement, Amodei and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), co-chairs of the Public Broadcasting Caucus, defended public broadcasting funding, saying local stations' ability to 'continue offering free, high-quality programming would be eliminated if the federal funding is rescinded.' Senate Finance Committee Democrats sent a letter to Chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID) on Friday demanding he schedule a public markup 'so that the members may serve their role in considering' the committee's portion of the reconciliation bill before it moves to the Senate floor. The Finance Committee is in charge of the part of the text that is causing the most tension among Senate Republicans, including cuts to Medicaid, the clean energy tax credits and other key tax breaks. 'If Trump and Republicans in Congress are going to deprive millions of Americans of their health care so that millionaires and rich corporations can get massive tax cuts, it should not be done in secret backroom negotiations. It should be done in the light of day, including through a full markup in the Senate Finance Committee,' Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote in the letter. The letter comes amid questions around if Senate Republicans will hold traditional, open-to-the-public markup hearings or skip markups altogether and bring the revised version of the reconciliation package straight to the floor. 'My opinion is the reason they haven't wanted a markup is because they know that they'll walk into the committee and try to defend the indefensible,' Wyden told reporters on Wednesday, just two days before the letter was sent. 'And the American people are going to be furious.' 'Their positions on Medicaid are indefensible, their positions on clean energy tax incentives, which I wrote, are indefensible,' the Oregon Democrat added. 'These kinds of issues are going to be what they'll have to deal with in an open markup, and that's why they're doing such somersaults to do other things.' — Emine Yücel Trump Has Long Been Itching To Use The Military On American Streets Catch up on TPM live coverage here: Trump Admin Calls In National Guard Against LA Protestors From TPM Cafe: Los Angeles Guard Deployment Raises Specter Of Kent State More Thoughts on the Unfolding Crisis in CA Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted, Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82 Guide to Invocations of the Insurrection Act The National Guard in Los Angeles
Washington Post
a day ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Trump's second-term agenda is an attack on his first term
It's not unusual for a president to undo the work of his predecessor. It's less common when the president and the predecessor are the same person. But Trump II is turning out to be, in large part, a repudiation of Trump I. Consider the following examples: All of these turns have an obvious explanation. In 2017, Trump still felt it necessary to reassure old-line Republicans that he would be their ally. By 2025, most pre-Trump Republicans have either left the party, become Trump Republicans or resigned themselves to being at best junior partners in Trump's coalition. Trump no longer needs to cater to the party's old sentiments. Perhaps Trump has also gotten more confident, or stubborn, in his own preferences; and maybe he enjoys disrupting the status quo even when it is one he made. While we have gotten used to Trump's inconstancy, the scale of the transformation is nonetheless impressive. What Trump is in effect saying is not just that he let others restrain him too much during his last stint in office but that they led him to pursue mistaken policies and hire the wrong people. Trump appears to believe that he would have been better off — more capable of defeating his enemies and realizing his vision — if he had been more willing or able to shed the remnants of the old Republican Party. Many of his advisers and congressional allies now have the same mindset. The contrary perspective, that Republicans with different instincts from Trump saved him and the country from costly errors, is less well represented. (Though Trump still occasionally makes tactical retreats, as he has on tariffs.) And so far, the new approach is working for Trump, in part because his opposition is divided and demoralized. 'At one point, people were embarrassed to say they supported Trump,' an old Republican hand tells me. 'Now, they're embarrassed to say they're Democrats.' The main cause of Democrats' disarray is that they lost the popular vote last November, which they did not expect. Many of the people who voted for Trump did so because the state of the country from 2017 to 2019 seemed better than it did during the Biden years. (The public does not seem to hold Trump's last, covid-ridden year against him.) But the irony is that, by voting for Trump, Americans emboldened him to give them a very different presidency.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
This Russian Dissident Won Political Asylum. ICE Refuses To Release Him.
Two months ago, 25-year-old Ilia Chernov beat long odds and convinced an immigration judge to grant him political asylum in the U.S. Normally, that finding would have been enough for Chernov to obtain legal status and live freely in the U.S. Chernov's judge told him that he would soon be released. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has refused to free Chernov, stranding him in detention. Immigration law experts that TPM spoke with could not recall another case that matches this set of facts. ICE will, on rare occasions, keep people who have received asylum detained during appeal if they have a criminal record or present an alleged threat to public safety. But ICE isn't claiming that here. The only suggestion that Chernov has a criminal record comes not from the United States, but from Russia, his home country: there, Russian cops raided his apartment as part of an investigation relating to Chernov's support for the now-dead opposition leader Alexei Navalny and opposition to the war in Ukraine. 'Keeping him detained is extremely unusual,' Maryellen Fullerton, a professor of immigration law at Brooklyn Law School, told TPM. Chernov's background is what you might expect from a political asylum seeker. In Russia, he says that he staged a series of demonstrations that put him on the radar of local law enforcement. What prompted him to flee was a 2023 incident that Chernov recounted to immigration officials and to TPM: he placed anti-war flyers at a military recruitment office, attracting the attention of Russian prosecutors. He's buttressed his asylum claim with other episodes: traffic police once threatened him with prosecution for 'extremism' over a pro-Navalny sticker on his car. Chernov is resourceful and a quick learner: he applied for asylum himself while he was being held in immigration detention in the U.S. and commissioned translations to bolster his case; when a national immigration nonprofit took up his case, its lawyers declined to amend his asylum petition because they found the work he did on his own sufficient. All this helped persuade an immigration judge, in March, to buck the Trump II trend of declining asylum grants and approve Chernov's claim. But ICE soon appealed his case — and, unusually, kept him in detention while it did it. It's emblematic of the new, hardline approach that the Trump administration is bringing to cases it loses, and to high-profile detentions: in cases like the Alien Enemies Act removals and green card revocations over political beliefs, government officials have pushed as hard as possible against the line set by the courts and administrative law judges, making an example both of the people affected and of their unwillingness to help migrants enter the U.S. To understand Chernov's case — and his continued detention despite a successful asylum claim — TPM reviewed Russian and American court records, spoke with immigration attorneys and former ICE officials, and interviewed Chernov over hours of phone calls placed from the privately run detention center where he is being held. An ICE spokesman declined to comment. Chernov arrived at the San Ysidro border crossing — located along the highway between Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California — for his pre-scheduled CBP One appointment with U.S. immigration authorities in May 2024. It was a long journey to get there. Though he fled Russia when he was 22 years old, Chernov told TPM he had first run afoul of the Russian state while he was in high school. He posted a video made by Navalny's team criticizing corruption in the Russian government; school officials reported him to law enforcement, Chernov said. After that, he was required to check in regularly with a local police officer. Chernov grew up in the south Russian city of Krasnodar. It's balmy, by Russian standards: home to some resorts, the city sits around 150 miles from the bridge connecting Russia to the illegally annexed Ukrainian region of Crimea and, beyond that, to Ukraine. For Chernov, opposition to the government wasn't entirely a choice. The way he tells it, the government came to oppose him: Chernov identifies as non-binary. That put his gender expression in conflict with Russian society, including a Kremlin set on prosecuting members of LGBT organizations as 'extremists.' 'Because of the fear that all these laws would be used against me, at first I didn't go out of my way to reveal myself,' Chernov said. 'But some friends were still able to guess about me.' In 2020, Chernov visited the headquarters of an organization run by Navalny in Moscow and joined. He later attended protests organized to support the opposition politician. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the political atmosphere in the country became more tense. Chernov opposed the war, and stuck 'Free Navalny' and 'No Mobilization' stickers on his car. Traffic police eventually pulled him over and demanded that he remove them, while threatening him with 'extremism' charges; he did. He appeared alone in the city center carrying anti-war and pro-Navalny signs for 'solitary protests,' a means of evading the government's near-impossible-to-meet permitting requirements for mass demonstrations. The next year, Chernov received a draft notice for the country's mandatory military service. He was ordered to appear at a military recruiting center for a fitness check. Instead, Chernov told TPM, he decided to stage a mini-protest in the recruitment office. He printed out flyers that read, 'Let's think before signing a contract with the Russian Army. You'll kill or be killed.' 'I decided to put up an alternative so that people might think about what they were about to go do,' he said. At the same time, friends of Chernov's were coming under increasing pressure from law enforcement. One friend, Chernov said, was hauled in for questioning over a tattoo of a dog with a pride flag labeled 'gay dog.' Weeks after his recruitment center protest, Russian police raided Chernov's home and seized his laptop. A Russian search warrant reviewed by TPM said that investigators were searching for records that would confirm Chernov's 'involvement in an extremist organization, namely 'Navalny's Headquarters,' and discrediting the activities of the Russian Armed Forces.' Charges stemming from those accusations could yield a 15-year prison sentence. Chernov was asked to appear before investigators: there, Chernov said, he was fingerprinted and told that if law enforcement could prove that he was the one who placed the flyers, he would be charged with 'discrediting the Russian armed forces.' For Chernov, that was the sign that it was time to leave. Fearing that his fingerprints on the flyers would match those that investigators took, he hid out for a month in a hotel and sold as many of his belongings as he could to raise money for the trip to come. After a few weeks, he and a friend traveled by train to Belarus, a neighboring country that has limited border controls with Russia but which is governed separately, making it easier to leave without detection. From there, he flew to Dubai, and then to Mexico. In May 2024, after eight months in Tijuana, he arrived for a CPB One appointment at the U.S. border. Chernov was immediately detained. Which asylum-seekers ICE detains at entry remains a mystery. Chernov traveled with a friend whose CBP One appointment was a few months earlier; that friend was not detained. The government had, for a time, been letting many Russian asylum seekers through without detaining them. ICE statistics show that detentions spiked in summer 2024. Since then, the Trump administration has also pressured immigration judges, administrative magistrates who work for DOJ, to approve fewer asylum applications. The administration entered office by firing dozens of the judges. In April, after Chernov's petition was granted, the DOJ directed immigration judges to fast-track dismissals of asylum cases. According to TRAC reports, an immigration monitoring website, less than one quarter of asylum claims heard in March 2025 were granted. Data from the same source shows that immigration judges granted around half of asylum claims heard in March 2024. Nevertheless, Chernov won his asylum case in March. ICE signaled that it would appeal. 'I just want to tell you good luck and that I hope that you do take the opportunity that's been given to you and use it wisely,' the judge told him at the hearing, reminding him that the decision was not final as ICE was appealing, and that he needed to check in with the government after his release until the case concluded. But then something happened that surprised Chernov, his lawyers, and independent experts TPM spoke with: Chernov was never released, stranding him in detention in Louisiana's Winn Correctional Facility. His continued detention raises a simple question: Why? Chernov has legal status per the judge's ruling. The Board of Immigration Appeals can take months to hear a case; why keep him inside? Some immigration law practitioners said that DHS had been known to detain people who won asylum cases — but only if they had a criminal record or were otherwise deemed a threat to public safety. If someone is let go and commits a crime, lawyers explained, DHS wouldn't want to be on the hook for having released them. But there isn't anything like that in Chernov's case. The only accusations of criminality are those coming from the Russian government: a search warrant saying he's being investigated for supporting Navalny and discrediting the Russian armed forces. 'I can't see any possible justification to keep holding this guy,' David Leopold, an immigration attorney and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told TPM. Chernov told TPM that he tries to stop the days from blurring into one by studying English in the detention center's library, and by following whatever news he can get. The facility shows CNN and Fox News. The conditions are poor. Privately operated, Winn is one of ICE's largest detention facilities —– and among its most notorious. A series of exposés, including one in 2016 by a Mother Jones reporter who went undercover as a guard at the facility, documented systemic abuse and failures to provide basic hygiene, clean water, and unspoiled food to inmates. Chernov described leaving his belongings on the floor in his first week at Winn, and noticing that, within days, black mold had begun to spread across books and clothing. Water flows yellow from the taps, he said; food sometimes appears spoiled. He described worsening, increasingly crowded conditions as the government detained more people while releasing and deporting fewer than previous administrations. 'After a long time, people start to go crazy here,' Chernov said. The immigration judge did not find that Chernov had been persecuted during the portion of his life that he spent in Russia. Rather, she ruled that he faced a credible risk of future persecution if he returned. ICE has tried to undermine that conclusion in its appeal by arguing that Chernov wasn't credible for two reasons: he allegedly omitted key evidence, and his testimony allegedly conflicted with evidence in his file. The omission argument focuses on Chernov purportedly failing to disclose a second raid that Russian law enforcement conducted on his home after Chernov had fled, and a supposed omission that he feared persecution based on his non-binary orientation. Chernov mentioned his fear of gender-based persecution in his asylum application. Some other claims by ICE here are similar in scope: they accuse Chernov of failing to mark the hotel he hid out in for one month before fleeing as a place of residence, for example. ICE also alleges that Chernov has told one critical part of his story inconsistently, to different people. That claim goes to the core of his petition: whether he was charged, and whether he placed anti-war flyers in the military recruitment office. Chernov provided his attorneys with a Russian search warrant for 'discrediting the armed forces'; the document does not provide details about what event prosecutors were investigating. Interview transcripts in Chernov's case indicate that he told DHS officials during a credible fear interview that he was charged over the incident. Chernov blames this on a translation error, and a transcript shows other communication issues between Chernov and the translator; early on in the interview, Chernov told his translator that he 'was feeling a little uncomfortable because you were saying you couldn't hear me.' Later, he told the immigration judge in his case that Russian authorities did not reach the point of charging him. He was only investigated, he told the judge. ICE has seized on this difference in the record. The question of whether Chernov was or wasn't charged aside, what helped persuade the immigration judge was that Chernov made a key admission about the facts Russian prosecutors had been interested in: while Chernov denied to Russian law enforcement that he placed the fliers, he admitted to U.S. immigration officials that he had. He would later, also, admit it to TPM. The immigration judge cited Chernov's admission in her decision granting him asylum. 'They have threatened him specifically with prosecution,' the judge wrote. 'And in fact, he himself admits that he has taken steps that would be a violation of these laws, and that he has distributed pamphlets.' In some ways, these admissions are an act of desperation, given what the future may hold for Chernov: He fears that the U.S. government will, eventually, deport him to Russia. If it does, all of his efforts to secure asylum in the U.S. by telling his own story would then backfire: his admission to spreading the flyers, his open support of Navalny — Russian authorities could use it all against him upon return. TPM asked Chernov why he was taking such a big risk. He had no choice, he replied: 'There's no way back at this point.'
Time of India
7 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
India getting under US skin by buying Russian arms, says Trump surrogate
TOI correspondent from US: The Trump administration on Monday laid out what is virtually a "you are either with us or against us" policy on India, warning New Delhi about buying Russian arms and being part of BRICS group of nations. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "That's a way to kind of get under the skin of not really the way to make friends and influence people in America," US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at discussion hosted by the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum. Asserting that "there were certain things that the Indian government did that generally rubbed the United States the wrong way," Lutnick suggested that New Delhi was falling in line, saying President Trump "calls that out directly and specifically, and the Indian government is addressing it specifically." Lutnick's remarked irked the traditionally non-aligned foreign policy establishment in India, with some commentators asking if friendship with the US requires New Delhi giving up control of its foreign policy and have no national interest outside friendly ties with the US. "India has far greater reasons to feel wronged by the US for decades and even today in some ways. From what Lutnick is saying the condition for making friends with the US is for India to shed its defence ties with Russia and not join any organisation that US does not like," noted former foreign secretary and ambassador Kanwal Sibal. Lutnick, Sibal said, "is ill informed, has not adequately studied the history of India- US ties, and has little grounding in geopolitics." On his part, Lutnick, one of several billionaires in the Trump cabinet with little grounding in politics and diplomacy, talked up his close personal ties to India and Indian-Americans, recounting his friendship with Nikesh Arora, a former senior executive at Google and CEO of Palo Alto Networks. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "(He's) one of my best friends, Nikesh Aurora... When I would go to India, we'd go to house parties, we played cricket, we just had fun, " Lutnick said, claiming it gave him a different perspective of India. "I am a great fan of India, and even the people in the government know that that's true," he maintained while dissing New Delhi for not aligning fully with Washington. In a post on X following the event, Lutnick wrote: We have a great relationship between our countries. I'm optimistic for a trade deal soon that will benefit both nations. Trolls on social media taunted the Trump surrogate for his remarks, with one post reading: In so many words, Lutnick wants India to gift a plane to Taco Trump. Pakistan has given crypto deal to Trump's sons. While the Trump II dispensation began its term appearing to continue with its warm relationship with India forged during the first term, matters have gradually gone south with the MAGA supremo clearly displeased with New Delhi not addressing tariffs and other issues with the urgency he would like. From the get-go he expressed suspicion about BRICKS seeking to undermine the US dollar's status as a global reserve currency, and jarringly in recent weeks, took credit for defusing India-Pakistan tensions, claiming he had mediated a truce using trade as a carrot. New Delhi has trashed the claim.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Appeals Court Tries To Get To The Bottom Of A 4th Wrongful Deportation
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. On May 7, just 28 minutes after a U.S. appeals court ordered that a Salvadoran man not be removed from the United States, the Trump administration deported him to El Salvador. The Trump administration told the Second Circuit in a filing last week that the wrongful deportation was the result of 'a confluence of administrative errors.' The fourth known wrongful deportation in the opening months of Trump's anti-immigration jihad was first reported by the nonprofit news outlet Investigative Post. The Trump administration's admission that the deportation of Jordin Alexander Melgar-Salmeron was in error came only after the appeals court had ordered the government to respond to a list of nine questions about what had happened in the case. Among the pointed questions posed by the appeals court: 8. What is the Government's overall understanding as to why Petitioner was removed on May 7, 2025 despite an express assurance made to this Court that the Government would forbear from removing Petitioner until May 8, 2025? 9. What is the Government's overall understanding as to why Petitioner was removed at 10:20 a.m. EST on May 7, 2025 despite an existing order from this Court staying removal pending consideration of his Petition for Review? Politico has a good rundown on the specific details of the underlying case. But for our purposes, the apparent violation of the appeals court order (the administration argues it was not a violation because it was an error …) is front and center. The appeals court has given both sides additional time to propose what the next steps in the case should be. A lawyer for Melgar-Salmeron told Politico that he intends to ask the court to order his client's return from El Salvador and to hold Trump administration officials in contempt. With the Kash Patel era at the FBI in full swing, the bureau is shifting significant resources to immigration enforcement and away from other high priority cases, but agents have been told by higher-ups not to document the shift in order to avoid creating a paper trail, CNN reports. AP: Kristi Noem said an immigrant threatened to kill Trump. The story quickly fell apart NYU law professor Ryan Goodman goes deep on the Trump administration's invocation of the state secrets privilege. The TL;DR: 'It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Trump administration is invoking the doctrine here to impede accountability and judicial remedies for official conduct that courts have found unlawful.' As the House GOP megabill that enshrines the Trump II agenda heads to the Senate, a closer look at the provision that appears intended to weaken the federal judiciary by making it harder to enforce contempt of court violations. Henry Farrell, on the apparent rupture between President Trump and the Federalist Society: I am not the kind of expert who can provide plausible predictions about whether the Federalist Society will prevail over the Trump administration, or vice-versa, or what terms they might meet if they find some compromise. My best guess – and it is just a guess – is that Emil Bove's confirmation process will tell us a lot about what happens afterwards. But which side wins and which loses in the bigger contest will have important consequences for the kind of conservatism that prevails, and for the kind of America that we're going to live in. WSJ: 'At least 11 big companies are moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving—or intend to give—more business to firms that have been targeted but refused to strike deals, according to general counsels at those companies and other people familiar with those decisions.' CNN: The White House is looking to strike a deal with a high-profile school, said the first source, who is involved in the higher education response. 'They want a name-brand university to make a deal like the law firms made a deal that covers not just antisemitism and protests, but DEI and intellectual diversity,' this person said. 'They want Trump to be able to stand up and say he made a deal with so-and-so – an Ivy League school, some sort of name-brand school that gives them cover so they can say, 'We don't want to destroy higher education.'' Asked if any of the schools are inclined to make such a deal, the source said, 'Nobody wants to be the first, but the financial pressures are getting real.' We always knew the Trump purges were merely the first step in a plan to install loyalists throughout government, though 'loyalist' doesn't fully capture the mix of unqualified, deeply compromised, and/or unfit candidates Trump is selecting: Inspectors General: After his mass purge of inspectors general, President Trump is turning to people like former Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-NY), who was defeated for re-election in 2024 after he was accused of putting his mistress and his fiancée's daughter on his payroll. D'Esposito is Trump's nominee for Labor Department inspector general. State: 'If you want to know who's running the State Department these days, it helps to peruse the website of a relatively new, conservative-leaning organization called the Ben Franklin Fellowship,' Politico reports. U.S. Office of Special Counsel: After terminating the U.S. special counsel without cause, Trump has nominated conservative lawyer Paul Ingrassia, 30, who has ties to antisemitic extremists. A thoughtful reflection by M. Gessen as we settle in for the long haul: 'As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.' The COVID vaccine remained on the CDC's schedule for healthy children 6 months to 17 years old despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s earlier public announcement. The Guardian: 'Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.' After her epic town hall face plant dismissing concerns about Republican Medicaid cuts with the memorable line – 'Well, we all are going to die.' – Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) doubled down with a creepy af video shot in a cemetery:
