so long as they fear."
...So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end.
Leaders who have been worse—more ruthless and more skilled than Trump—have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost…
—Peter Wehner, "America's Mad King"
Also worth your time:
A Loophole That Would Swallow the ConstitutionUNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT, April 17, 2025 (pdf)
If Donald Trump can disappear people to El Salvador without due process, he can do anything.
By Jonathan Chait
Donald trump’s most frightening power grab was undertaken with an undertone of sinister jocularity. There was no column of tanks in the streets, no burning of the legislature. The president and his partner in despotism, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, were bantering amiably in the Oval Office in front of the press corps, mocking the American court system with evident delight.
Trump’s ploy is almost insultingly simple. He has seized the power to arrest any person and whisk them to Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they will be held indefinitely without trial. Once they are in Bukele’s custody, Trump can deny them the protections of American law. His administration has admitted that one such prisoner, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was sent to El Salvador in error, but insists that it has no recourse. Trump, who has threatened the territorial integrity of multiple hemispheric neighbors, now claims that requesting the return of a prisoner he paid El Salvador to take would violate that country’s sovereignty…
…The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.
The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?∗ And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning….
The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate…
It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.
In sum, and for the reasons foregoing, we deny the motion for the stay pending appeal and the writ of mandamus in this case. It is so ordered.
Smackdown? Well, we'll see where that goes from here.
UPDATE:
REALLY SICK OF ALL THIS TRUMP STUFF THIS WEEK
Some new readings...
Came on to Becker via a Science Magazine Review. The Amazon blurb for More Everything Forever:
forThis "wild and utterly engaging narrative" (Melanie Mitchell) shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future.
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.
In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
Comes out April 22nd. I also had to go after heis earlier book.
apropoa of the new one:
Came to this via Substack.
Careless People: The Book Meta Doesn’t Want You to ReadStay tuned...
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams could almost be one of Christopher Buckley’s Beltway satires. Like Thank You for Smoking or The White House Mess, the first-person protagonist takes the reader on a journey from dream job to absurd nightmare—each chapter an ironic critique of the powerful characters depicted. Except Wynn-Williams is real, and so are the truly awful people and events she describes. “…like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them,” she writes in the prologue.
The subtitle, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism aptly describes this memoir, which begins with Wynn-Williams’s story of surviving a shark attack at the age of 13 in her native New Zealand and ends with her being escorted by security from the shark-infested headquarters at Facebook twenty-five years later. Hired in 2011 as the Manager of Global Public Policy, Wynn-Williams conveys her initial enthusiasm as a true believer in the power of Facebook to be a force for good and, on that basis, how she pitched the idea of a policy role for herself at a time when the leadership did not yet grasp why the company would need to build relationships with state leaders...
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