How Alarmed Should We Be?

Stay focused.

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele meets with Donald Trump in the White House.

It matters what goes before and after the “but.”

I don’t mean to be pedantic or obscure here. As you know, I think it’s important to keep multiple — even conflicting thoughts in your head at the same time. You can recognize that we have deep trade problems with China, without supporting a reckless trade war; acknowledge the need for immigration reform without supporting a bogus border wall. And recognize that the politics of Trump’s predations are complicated — while not losing sight of the enormity of crisis.

This is where we come to the placement of the “buts.”

In any analysis or punditry, the placement of that “but” defines what matters most. It shapes the argument and focuses on what is really the crux of the threats we face.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about from yesterday’s NYT. (This isn’t intended as criticism, since the article is quite good.) But note the framing.

The headline reads:

Harvard’s Decision to Resist Trump Is ‘of Momentous Significance’

Followed by the “but” sub-head:

But a fight with the nation’s oldest, richest and most elite university is a battle that President Trump and his powerful aide, Stephen Miller, want to have.

That “but” could easily have been flipped around:

The fight with Harvard is a battle that Trump and Miller want to have… BUT… Their attack on academic freedom is of momentous significance for Constitutional rights.

See what I did there? There are lots of things that Trump and his demented homunculus want to talk about and lots of things they want us to ignore. (Pay no attention to that man in shackles over there; or that outbreak of measles.) But that’s not the point, is it? The point is the danger itself.

I could have picked any one of dozens of examples like this. We could frame the issue this way:

The assault on due process rights is a constitutional nightmare…. BUT… polls show support for Trump’s harsh immigrant policies.

Or we could flip that around:

Polls may show support Trump on immigration… BUT… Trump is edging us toward a police state.

This isn’t simply a matter of semantics: Do we recognize the actual threat we face; or are we distracted by horse-race punditry and whataboutism? Are we distracted by the faux-normality?

This shouldn’t be hard, but I regret to tell you that there is an entire pundit class out there that rushes to what comes after the “but” — that thinks that Trump’s attack on Harvard is “smart” politics, or that wants to focus on polls/focus group reactions to the defiance of courts, deportations, and El Salvadoran gulags

But this is how we miss the point. This is how we normalize the abnormal. This is how frogs get boiled. And constitutional republics die in complacency.

Happy Wednesday.

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How alarmed should we be?

I am old enough to remember back a few months ago, when the political illuminati began to sneer that Never Trumpers had exaggerated the threat to democracy.

Yes, Trump was sounding increasingly fascistic on the stump …. but… the smart kids assured us, voters didn’t care. It was a mistake, they said, for Kamala Harris to raise the issue and to make common cause with folks like Liz Cheney to sound the alarm.

And yet, here we are.

UPDATED: We're (Way) Past the Tipping Point

So how bad is it? Read Ed Luce in the Financial Times:

At around noon on April 14 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government.

Some would argue that had already happened on January 20, when Donald Trump was inaugurated.

On Monday, however, Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man. He even claimed the judges ruled in his favour. The US president’s middle finger to the court was echoed by his attorney-general, secretary of state, vice-president and El Salvador’s vigilante president Nayib Bukele. The latter is playing host to what resembles an embryonic US gulag.

In terms of clarifying moments, Trump’s meeting with Bukele compares with his dressing down of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late February. Zelenskyy was berated for being insufficiently thankful for US military aid and for failing to wear a suit. A tieless Bukele, by contrast, got royal treatment. Trump’s team nodded when Bukele said he would not consider returning the wrongly deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. All baselessly agreed that Garcia was in fact a terrorist.

The Oval Office drama offered a civics lesson to the world: America’s government pays greater respect to a foreign strongman than its own Supreme Court.

Read the whole thing here.

Harvard Fights Back

Very good news (but keep reading for a caveat).

As many of you know I have been a longtime (and rather vocal) critic of higher education. So I’m willing to acknowledge that universities like Harvard have quite a few problems, including their protection of free speech.

But.

What’s happening now has little or nothing to do with wokeness, undergraduate teaching, or speech. Instead, the Trump Administration is cutting off funding for research on things like tuberculosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and radiation sickness. Via the Harvard Crimson: Stop-Work Orders Roll In For Harvard Researchers After $2.2 Billion Pause in Federal Funds

[The] grants and contracts now receiving stop-work orders do not appear to have any clear connection to those previously targeted themes.

HMS Professor Donald E. Ingber also received stop-work orders on two contracts related to his work on human organ chips — microfluidic devices lined with living human cells — to find new therapeutics to treat Acute Radiation Syndrome and reduce non-human primate testing of drugs and vaccines. The most valuable of the terminated contracts was worth over $15 million.

**

The Harvard story also reminds us that courage can be contagious. Here is the statement issued by 60 past and present college and university presidents:

The Trump administration has recently escalated its destructive and illegal attacks on the core freedoms of American colleges and universities, which we have called on it to halt (Fortune, April 8).

The demands issued to Harvard University (in an April 11 letter), followed by the freezing of $2.2 billion of federal research funds along with threats to Harvard’s tax-exempt status, violate no less than the freedom of all colleges and universities to admit students, hire faculty, and govern themselves consistently with the law, the First Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and long-standing principles of academic freedom. As current and former presidents of academic institutions, we strongly support Harvard’s President Alan Garber, who has rejected the demands on these grounds while the Trump administration threatens to demand control of numerous other schools. Just over three miles from Harvard Square is the Boston Tea Party site where, in 1773, American patriots fought government tyranny.

When the Trump administration conditions federal grants and contracts to universities on these demands, it threatens all Americans. Higher education is the greatest source of U.S. global competitiveness, cultural enrichment, and learning. By partnering with the federal government for decades, American universities have made lifesaving discoveries and increased the prosperity, safety, security, and creativity of our country. When the Trump administration insists on anyone’s compliance with likely illegal and unconstitutional conditions, it is threatening everyone’s freedom from arbitrary rule. When it insists on controlling the admission of students, faculty hiring, and governance of a university, it is also threatening a prime source of the opportunity and economic prosperity of all Americans. We all know from Martin Neimoller’s haunting lament, this authoritarian incursion does not end with Harvard

**

One caveat is in order: Bob Bauer writes that Harvard has left the door open to some sort of negotiated settlement, and notes that the university has hired attorneys with close ties to TrumpWorld.

You can read his whole analysis here.

Meanwhile

FFS. Really: The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers - WSJ

Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire.

During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.”

He has recruited potential mothers on his social-media platform X, according to some of the people.

Musk has used his wealth to buy the silence of some women who have his kids, according to St. Clair as well as other people, text messages and documents reviewed by the Journal.

**

Surprised? Really?

Law Firms Made Deals With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them. - The New York Times

When some of the nation’s biggest law firms agreed to deals with President Trump, the terms appeared straightforward: In return for escaping the full force of his retribution campaign, the firms would do some free legal work on behalf of largely uncontroversial causes like helping veterans.

Mr. Trump, it turns out, has a far more expansive view of what those firms can be called on to do.

Over the last week, he has suggested that the firms will be drafted into helping him negotiate trade deals.

He has mused about having them help with his goal of reviving the coal industry.

And he has hinted that he sees the promises of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services that he has extracted from the elite law firms — including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes.

Exit take: Fuck you, and all your contumacious works, you cowardly brood of white-shoed lickspittles. But I repeat myself.

Wednesday dogs

Buddies. Eli and I go for a burger.

Five years ago today. Baby Eli was growing.