It seems as if the Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.
Today, members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” team showed up at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which helps to fund libraries and museums across the country and whose elimination Trump called for in an executive order last week. They sent employees home, swore in a new acting director in the lobby, and proceeded to cancel contracts and grants.
Even as this dismantling was going on, District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander was blocking the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing data at the Social Security Administration and ordering them to destroy copies of any personal information they have already accessed. “The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
Also today, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who said the government could not use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify sending migrants to a prison in El Salvador, appeared to be out of patience with the government’s obfuscation of what actually happened in the process of that rendition last weekend. Boasberg’s order today laid out that he had repeatedly asked the government to provide information about the flights but that the government had “evaded its obligations,” providing only general information about the flights and appearing to cast about for further delays.
“This is woefully insufficient,” Boasberg wrote. He required that the government explain by March 25 why its failure to return the flights as ordered did not violate the court order to do so. Far from backing down, the administration appears to be considering escalating its fight with the courts. Devlin Barrett of the New York Times reported today that lawyers in the Trump administration believe the 1798 Alien Enemies Act Trump used to deport migrants also permits federal agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant, an assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Trump White House and its MAGA supporters appear to be trying to cement their power to control the government by undermining the rule of law and the judges who are defending it. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday called Judge Boasberg a “Democrat activist,” although he was originally appointed by President George W. Bush, and badly misrepresented Boasberg’s order. She also attacked Boasberg’s wife for her political donations.
In Talking Points Memo this morning, David Kurtz recorded how MAGA supporters Elon Musk and Laura Loomer have attacked Boasberg’s daughter, and in Rolling Stone, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng noted that that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, accused Boasberg of “attempting to meddle in national security,” adding: “This one federal judge thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country, and he cannot.”
Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” trying to obscure that it is the role of courts to determine whether or not the power the executive is claiming is, in fact, legitimate. On the Fox News Channel, “border czar” Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Kurtz noted that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings on the many injunctions against the Trump administration. Kurtz also noted that angry Trump supporters have called in bomb threats against judges who have stood against Trump’s excesses, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and have sent anonymous pizza deliveries to the homes of judges and their relatives as a way to demonstrate that “we know where you live.”
Perez and Suebsaeng reported that the White House’s strategy is to “move fast” before courts can stop them. In the end, one source close to the president told them that the president’s ultimate power over judges comes from the fact that they do not command an army, while he does. “Are they going to come and arrest him?” the advisor asked, apparently confident that the answer is no.
The attack of Trump and his MAGA supporters on the courts and the rule of law has illustrated how quickly the United States is sliding from democracy to authoritarianism. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky told Amanda Taub of the New York Times. Along with his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote How Democracies Die. “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” Levitsky said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”
President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the courts, and thus the country’s legal system, appears to have kicked the alarm about the dismantling of the U.S. government into a new phase. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times ran op-eds today from law professors detailing the lawlessness of the Trump administration and warning that the courts will not be able to stop Trump and his administration from their authoritarian takeover of the government.
In the New York Times, Georgetown University professor of law Stephen Vladeck has faith that the courts will try to rein Trump in, while in the Washington Post, Harvard Law School professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale University professor of law and history Samuel Moyn are less convinced that the judges Trump himself appointed will stand against him, but all three of them warn that stopping Trump will require the people to demand “far more aggressive oversight from members of Congress,” as Vladeck puts it. Doerfler and Moyn wrote that “real resistance must take place in Congress, at government workplaces, and in the streets.”
That the courts are in the position of trying to stop a president who is ignoring the Constitution reflects that Republicans in Congress appear to have taken off the table impeachment, the political remedy the Constitution’s framers put into our system for such a crisis.
There has been remarkably little pushback from Republicans about the changes being made to the country in their names, but the news that dropped on March 18 that the administration is considering giving up a key role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has sparked public objection from Republicans who care about the nation’s global role. Since NATO organized, the role of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, known as the SACEUR, has been filled by an American.
Now the Trump administration is considering relinquishing that position as part of a massive restructuring plan that could save up to $270 million of the Defense Department’s $850 billion annual budget, or about 0.03% of it. The U.S. is also considering stopping its expansion and modernization of U.S. Forces Japan, which would save about $1.18 billion, according to Courtney Kube and Gordon Lubold of NBC News, but would weaken the cooperation designed to counter China.
“For the United States to give up the role of supreme allied commander of NATO would be seen in Europe as a significant signal of walking away from the alliance,” retired Admiral James Stavridis, who served as SACEUR and head of European Command from 2009 to 2013, wrote to Kube and Lubold. “It would be a political mistake of epic proportion, and once we give it up, they are not going to give it back. We would lose an enormous amount of influence within NATO, and this would be seen, correctly, as probably the first step toward leaving the Alliance altogether.”
House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) issued a joint statement saying they are “very concerned about reports that claim [the Department of Defense] is considering unilateral changes on major strategic issues, including significant reductions to U.S. forces stationed abroad, absent coordination with the White House and Congress. We…will not accept significant changes to our warfighting structure that are made without a rigorous interagency process, coordination with combatant commanders and the Joint Staff, and collaboration with Congress,” they wrote. “Such moves risk undermining American deterrence around the globe and detracting from our negotiating positions with America’s adversaries.”
Their concerns about protecting their power to have a say in U.S. foreign policy and to make sure that policy serves the American people are unlikely to be assuaged by events tonight.
Eric Schmitt, Eric Lipton, Julian E. Barnes, Ryan Mac, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that the Pentagon has scheduled a briefing tomorrow for billionaire Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s top-secret plans for any potential war with China. As the reporters noted, this information includes “some of the nation's most closely guarded military secrets.” Musk’s largest Tesla factory is located in China—Chinese lenders contributed $2.8 billion to it—and as Joshua Keating of Vox explained two days ago, China is the only EV market where Tesla sales are continuing to increase. Keating also pointed to a Financial Times report that Chinese investors have been funneling money into Musk’s other businesses.
After the New York Times story broke, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.” About an hour later, the reporters note, he posted on X: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
Then Trump added: “The Fake News is at it again, this time the Failing New York Times. They said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China.’ How ridiculous?’ China will not be even mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue.”
Shortly after Trump posted, Alexander Ward and Nancy A. Youssef of the Wall Street Journal confirmed the story, adding that their sources told them that Musk had asked for the briefing. They also reminded readers that Musk “has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close partner of China, the country that has supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz told Rachel Maddow tonight he was “speechless.” “I don’t know how to convey…how far out of the norm this is…. These are closely guarded secrets because our national and our global defense depends upon them…. I don’t understand where…are the Republicans? Where are Lindsay Grahams? Where are these people who know how this works? To not be terrified of where this is at…. Sharing our most guarded secrets on global conflict with a truly unstable private citizen who has no authority…. This is chilling…. Republican senators need to put a stop to this and pull this back.”
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Today the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped the story that senior members of the Trump administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is most decidedly not part of the United States national security system. The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.
According to Goldberg, the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.
The use of Signal to plan a military attack on Yemen was itself an astonishingly dangerous breach, but what comes next is simply mind-boggling: the reason Goldberg could report on the conversation is that the person setting it up included Goldberg—a reporter without security clearance—in it.
Goldberg reports that on March 11 he received a connection request from someone named Michael Waltz, although he did not believe the actual Michael Waltz, who is Trump’s national security advisor, would be writing to him. He thought it was likely someone trying to entrap him, although he thought perhaps it could be the real Waltz with some information. Two days later, he was included in the “Houthi PC small group,” along with a message that the chat would be for “a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis.”
As Goldberg reports, a “principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The other names on the app were those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Brian McCormack from the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, perhaps White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Trump’s nominee for head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.
Goldberg assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign, although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that “Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”
And then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”
In the messages, with a reporter on the line, Hegseth promised his colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack, Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
Two hours after Goldberg wrote to the officials on the chat and alerted them to his presence on it by asking questions about it, National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes responded: “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
When asked about the breach, Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?” There is nothing that the administration could say to make the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is evidently going to try to bully his way out of this disaster. When asked about it, he began to yell at a reporter that Goldberg is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Hegseth looked directly at the camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” But Goldberg has receipts. The chat had “the specific time of a future attack. Specific targets, including human targets…weapons systems…precise detail…a long section on sequencing…. He can say that it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.”
Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction... was 'what absolute clowns.' Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”
Many observers have noted that all of these national security officials knew that using Signal in this way was against the law, and their comfort with jumping onto the commercial app to plan a military strike suggests they are using Signal more generally. “How many Signal chats with sensitive information about military operations are ongoing within the Pentagon right now?” Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted. “Where else are war plans being shared with such abject disregard for our national security? We need answers. Right now.”
National security journalists and officials are aghast. Former commanding general of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army Mark Hertling called the story “staggering.” Former CIA officer Matt Castelli posted: “This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships’, this is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning involving VP, SecDef, D[irector of the] CIA, National Security Advisor—all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.” Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who spent seven years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, posted: “From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f**kup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”
Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: "If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen. The carelessness shown by President Trump's cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately." Armed Services Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE), a former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios that “sending this info over non-secure networks” was “unconscionable.” “Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”
That the most senior members of Trump’s administration were sharing national security secrets on unsecure channels is especially galling since the people on the call have used alleged breaches of national security to hammer Democrats. Sarah Longwell and J.V. Last of The Bulwark compiled a series of video clips of Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and especially Pete Hegseth talking about the seriousness of handling secret information and the need for accountability for those who mishandle it. When they were accusing then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton of such a breach, they called for firings, accountability, and perhaps criminal charges. Indeed, Trump rose to power in 2016 with the charge that Clinton should be sent to prison for using a private email server. “Lock her up!” became the chant at his rallies.
Today, for her part, Clinton posted a link to the story along with an eyes emoji and wrote: “You have got to be kidding me.”
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