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    Trump white-collar criminal pardons cost public $1bn, says ex-DoJ official

    The justice department’s pardon attorney, who was recently fired, has claimed on social media that Donald Trump’s recent wave of pardoning white-collar criminals has erased more than “$1bn in debts owed by wealthy Americans” to the public purse.In a TikTok video, Liz Oyer, who has said that she was terminated in March after refusing to comply with an order to restore the gun rights of the actor Mel Gibson – a supporter of Trump’s – explained that “when you’re convicted of a financial crime like fraud or embezzlement, the law requires you to pay back the money that you stole. It’s called restitution.”However, she said, “the president has the power to pardon which can wipe out your entire sentence including your obligation to pay back the money.”Oyer alleged: “In total, Donald Trump has granted pardons that have wiped out over $1bn in debts owed by wealthy Americans who have committed fraud and broken the law.”In the video, Oyer highlights the case of Michele Fiore, a former Republican politician from Nevada, who was convicted of wire fraud last year.She was accused of misusing more than $70,000 she raised to build statues in honor of two slain police officers. Instead of building the statues, prosecutors said that she used the funds on “personal and political expenses”.The White House pardoned Fiore, and according to Oyer, this released her from repaying those funds.In a different video, Oyer pointed to Trump’s pardon of Trevor Milton, the founder of an electric vehicle startup, who was convicted of fraud in 2023 and sentenced to four years in prison.The Washington Post reported that the judge had not yet determined the restitution amount, but that federal prosecutors estimated that Milton owed more than $680m to defrauded shareholders.Notably, Milton and his wife contributed more than $1.8m to a Trump re-election campaign.Oyer said his pardon erased the restitution being sought.The Post reported that Oyer added up the alleged restitution amounts for the relevant individuals convicted of stealing.The newspaper also noted that some of Trump’s pardon recipients had not yet been sentenced, so their owed amounts had not been finalized by the courts.Additionally, the Post reported that Trump pardoned the cryptocurrency exchange HDR Global Trading (BitMEX), which eliminated a $100m fine against the exchange for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Trump also pardoned several company executives who had pleaded guilty to financial crimes.Oyer told the Post it was “unprecedented for a president to grant pardons that have the effect of wiping out so much debt owed by people who have committed frauds”.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.Last month, Oyer, who served in Joe Biden’s administration, testified before Congress about her termination and the Trump administration’s treatment of the justice department and law firms.According to Oyer’s lawyer, the justice department had planned to send armed US marshals to deliver a letter to her home warning her about testifying. More

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    One hundred days in, Donald Trump faces a problem: he can rage, but he can’t govern | Jonathan Freedland

    He says it’s the “best 100-day start of any president in history”, but you can file that along with his boast about crowd sizes and his claim to have won the 2020 election. In truth, the first three months of Donald Trump’s second presidency have been calamitous on almost every measure. The single biggest achievement of those 100 days has been to serve as a warning of the perils of nationalist populism, which is effective in winning votes but disastrous when translated into reality. That warning applies across the democratic world – and is especially timely in Britain.Start with the numbers that matter most to Trump himself. A slew of polls appeared this week, but they all told the same story: that Trump’s approval ratings have collapsed, falling to the lowest level for a newly installed president in the postwar era. He has now edged ahead of his only rival for that title: himself. The previous low watermark for a president three months in was set by one Donald Trump in 2017.Back then, 42% of Americans approved of the way Trump was doing his job. The latest Ipsos survey for the Washington Post/ABC News has Trump at just 39%. This, remember, is meant to be the honeymoon period, yet Trump is 10 points behind where Joe Biden stood at this point, 30 points behind Barack Obama and 44 points behind Ronald Reagan. Remember: US presidents tend to get less, not more, popular as time goes on.Perhaps most significant is that Trump is weak even in those areas where he’s meant to be strong. Confidence in his ability to handle immigration has tumbled and the same is true, even more critically, of his management of the US economy. On the latter, just 37% back Trump, a depth he never plumbed during his first term, even as the economy seized up under Covid. For the first time since 2001, a majority of Americans believe their economic situation is getting worse.With good reason. Because the economic data is almost as troubling for Trump as his poll numbers. This week, official figures showed that the US economy contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year, further fuelling fears of a recession. Trump wasted no time in blaming the shrinkage on Biden, who was in charge for just 20 days of the first three months of 2025, an argument only slightly weakened by the fact that the last quarter with Biden in charge saw growth of 2.4%.It’s a precipitous drop, and the cause of it is hardly mysterious. Economists agree that the culprit is Trump’s tariffs, which prompted a surge in imports, as companies scrambled to buy in goods from abroad before the president’s on-again-off-again levies kicked in. Because those imported goods and services are not produced in the US, they’re subtracted from the headline GDP figure. Hence the contraction. Meanwhile, the chaos and volatility unleashed by Trump’s tariff policy has dented consumer confidence, now down to its lowest level since the recession of 1990, leaving Americans hesitant to spend money amid so much uncertainty. Even though the latest job numbers look healthy, analysts say the underlying picture is alarming. As Bloomberg reports, “corporate investment plans and expectations for growth and jobs have all plummeted – and the key reason is Trump’s trade war.”Trump knows that the warnings from retail giants Walmart and Target, of empty shelves as supplies from heavily tariffed China dry up, have cut through. He addressed that anxiety this week, but in a way that should make even Trump’s admirers, those who usually praise his ability to connect with ordinary folk, worry that he’s losing his touch.Asked about potential shortages of toys at Christmas, Trump said, “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.” Bit late in his career for Trump to don the saffron robes and preach a Zen flight from consumerist materialism. His two-toys remark – which strangely did not feature as one of his campaign pledges in 2024 – has already cast him as the Grinch set to ruin Christmas.“BE PATIENT!!!” he urges on his social media platform, as he insists that the vertiginous downward slide of the stock market either doesn’t matter or is all Biden’s fault. But the whiff of desperation is strong as Trump begins to see why the one idea he actually believes in and has believed in for decades – tariffs – is an object of near-universal contempt among economists. Yes, tariffs may have succeeded in persuading Apple to shift manufacturing away from China. But those jobs are not about to move to the US. Apple has announced instead that it will assemble its US-bound iPhones in India. Better restitch those red baseball caps with a revised slogan: make India great again.By now, you’ll recall, Trump was meant to have ended the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, indeed he promised to do that by 21 January. But after a brief ceasefire, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has resumed, the Trump administration having apparently lost interest. As for Ukraine, Trump got to brag of a breakthrough this week, with an agreement that gives the US a stake in Ukraine’s mineral wealth. But it’s far from the deal he sought.The case he always made was that the US had to be reimbursed for the billions it had given Ukraine in military support under Biden – plucking the entirely bogus figure of $350bn out of the air. But this week’s arrangement includes no such payback. On the contrary, the deal is one Kyiv can look on with quiet satisfaction. It seems the Ukrainians could smell Trump’s need to have something to shout about in time for his 100th day, and they leveraged that eagerness to their advantage.As for his expansionist threats to gobble up Panama, Greenland and Canada, the only concrete result those have brought is defeat in Canada’s general election for the pro-Trump Conservatives and a back-from-the-dead success for the Liberal party that vowed to defy him. Such is Trump’s narcissism that he even boasted about that, citing it as evidence of how much he matters in the world. As he put it, just before Canadians voted: “You know, until I came along, the Conservative was leading by 25 points,” he mused. “I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I’ve thrown the election into a close call.”The promise was that this second Trump term would be different, that the chaos and churn of Trump 1.0 would be gone. But on Thursday, we were back to the good old days, with the firing of his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, partly for his accidental admission of a journalist into a Signal group chat that discussed attack plans for Yemen, partly for advocating a tougher stance on Vladimir Putin, and partly for earning the hostility of far-right conspiracist Laura Loomer, who has the ear of the president.So it’s fair to say the 100 days have not gone as Trump would have wished. And thanks to those serial failures, you can see the first, small signs that his power to terrify is fading. Witness the handful of senate Republicans who voted with Democrats against his tariff policy. And note how the reliably rightwing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is now a fierce critic, slamming Trump as a “bully” and denouncing tariffs as “the biggest economic policy mistake in decades”. For a few short hours, even Jeff Bezos seemed ready to take a stand, amid reports that Amazon was about to itemise the cost of tariffs to US customers, before the company backed down.Of course, none of this should be a surprise. Trump’s conman promises and delusional dreams of turning the clock back were always bound to fail. This is the nature of nationalist populism, whether it wears a red cap in Michigan or a turquoise rosette in Runcorn. It is expert at turning grievance, division and nostalgia into votes. But when it comes to governing, it will always fail. It offers an outlet for complaint – and has no answers at all.

    Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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    ‘He loves us and he’s doing it’: Trump fans’ faith undimmed by first 100 days

    In Trump they trust. While pundits and protesters have called it 100 days of hell, talk to Donald Trump’s most faithful supporters and you will hear them use words such as “amazing”, “fantastic” and “ecstatic” about his presidency.The Trump base, that amorphous group that has long intrigued pollsters, remains rock solid in its support for the 78-year-old and quite ingenious in finding new ways to eulogise his leadership.Interviews with 10 Trump fans at a campaign-style rally in Warren, Michigan, on Tuesday seemed to occupy a different planet from opinion polls that give him the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president in the past 80 years.Seen through the lens of Maga, Trump is steering the economy to a new golden age, making streets safer by expelling illegal immigrants and protecting rather than undermining democracy. Short-term pain, his supporters insist, is a price worth paying for long-term gain.“The first 100 days have been fantastic,” said Dave Bono, a construction manager. “He’s gotten so much done in that amount of time, more than any other president for sure. I know there’s differences on his policy positions but overall, as somebody who’s supported him, I think he’s spot on.”View image in fullscreenThe 60-year-old added: “He’s done what he promised he’d do in the campaign, which is far and away different from most politicians. Like it or not, he’s doing what he said he would do and that’s all anybody can ask for.”Elsewhere at the rally Matt Ball, 53, a commercial driver, was wearing a red “Make America great again” cap and a “Fight, fight, fight” T-shirt showing Trump with fist raised after last year’s assassination attempt. He said: “A lot of things I don’t think can be accomplished in a hundred days but what I’ve seen the first hundred days is what I voted for.”The US economy shrank in the first three months of the year, according to official data. Despite acknowledging the potential for short-term price increases, Trump’s supporters generally back his use of tariffs as necessary for the return of manufacturing jobs to the US in general and Michigan in particular.Ball commented: “It can’t be any worse than the chaos we lived through with Joe Biden for four years so I’m willing to take a chance.”Suzanne Jennings, 65, wearing a “Trump 2024 The Sequel” cap, agreed. “I trust him and I totally trust his cabinet,” she said. “People just need to have a bit of patience. Our country was ruined over the past four years. I totally believe he loves America. He loves us and he’s doing it.”Jennings described Trump’s first 100 days as “fantastic because he’s delivered everything he said he would and he’s making our country great again”.All those interviewed by the Guardian expressed admiration for Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, which has taken a chainsaw to federal departments.Lynn Mills, 70, said: “Find the waste. Cut it out. I’m not allowed to run my house with money flying out the windows. Close the window. Turn down the air conditioning. Do you have a budget in your household? We have to adhere to the budget and let’s run this country efficiently.”Trump’s personality cult endures. He is no longer running for office yet Tuesday’s rally came with the familiar paraphernalia. A truck parked outside Macomb Community College proclaimed “Trump won” and “Make America great again” and was adorned with a motorbike, mini Statue of Liberty and signs such as “Build the wall” and “I’m voting for the convicted felon”.Blake Marnell, 60, known as “Brick Suit”, from San Diego, California, has attended numerous Trump campaign events and wore his distinctive brick suit again at Tuesday’s rally. He described himself as “ecstatic” about Trump’s first 100 days.“He’s done an excellent job under the limitations that have been placed upon him. And by that I mean if you look at an area in which he has had unfettered ability to implement his policy, such as reducing the influx across the border, the results are night and day versus the Biden administration, with up to 95% fewer people crossing.”View image in fullscreenTrump has been widely condemned for a draconian immigration policy that has seen alleged gang members snatched off the streets and sent to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador without due process. The president has suffered a series of rebukes and setbacks from judges. But followers such as Marnell are willing to accept this as collateral damage.He added: “The concerns about due process and deportations are largely coming from the political left and what I would consider to be judicial overreach and unnecessary injunctions. But let’s be realistic. We’ve got 10 million people top end and 8 million people low end that probably should be deported who are here illegally. Statistically, there will be people where there are problems. To expect absolute 100% perfection in 8 million people leaving United States is probably unrealistic.”More than one interviewee contended that the standard of due process is lower for noncitizens. And support for Trump’s approach to border security and immigration was overwhelming. That included Amy Lee, an immigrant from Vietnam who works in insurance and was wearing a Maga hat, a Trump badge and a Stars and Stripes dress that said: “Big tech fake media are the virus.”The 63-year-old said: “Of course you want to vet those people that come in. You want to welcome everyone but then do you want criminals, do you want terrorists to be in your country? You want them to be in your home? Do you want them to be taking over? The crime rate is unbelievable.”View image in fullscreenTrump has sought to expand presidential power at the expense of Congress and the courts and hinted that he could seek a third term in violation of the constitution. This week the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released a survey of more than 5,000 Americans that found 52% agree Trump is “a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy”.Attenders at the rally scoff at such criticism. RJ Fishman, 26, who works for a property acquisitions and advisory firm and rates Trump’s start as “amazing”, said: “A dictator doesn’t tell you what he’s going to do and then do it. President Trump said everything he planned to do, from using the Alien Enemies Act, tariffs, down the list, you name it, so to suddenly be surprised?“What dictators do is lock up their political opponents. One party’s been locking up their political opponents. I don’t see President Trump – as much as they accuse him of wanting to – locking up people other than federal judges and state judges who are harbouring illegal aliens. He’s not locking up political opponents.”Ball, the commercial driver, concurred. He said: “I know Donald Trump didn’t force anyone to get a vaccine so, if you’re going to talk about a dictator, then I would say he didn’t force me to get a vaccine when he was president. I haven’t seen any dictatorship.”And noting the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, Lee recalled her family’s experiences under communism to contend that such comparisons are misplaced. “How could people call him a dictator? Look at Mao Zedong from China. Look at Hitler and Fidel Castro. If people lived in a communist country then they would know what dictatorship is. I escaped communism and I know what communism is like.“They dictate how you live your life, where you can go, what you can eat. Rice, sugar and salt: you are limited to buy so much in a month. That’s dictatorship. Here President Trump is wanting to get freedom for the people to live the American dream. If we don’t fight to restore it we’re going to lose it and, once we lose it, kiss it goodbye.” More

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    Woman in Florida deported to Cuba says she was forced to leave baby daughter

    A mother deported to Cuba reportedly had to hand over her 17-month-old daughter to a lawyer while her husband, a US citizen, stood outside unable to say goodbye.Heidy Sánchez was told she was being detained for deportation to Cuba when she turned up at her scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) check-in appointment in Tampa, Florida, last week.She was told her child, who has health problems and is still breastfeeding, had to stay in the US but could visit her in Cuba, NBC reported.The Trump administration is embroiled in controversy for removing children who are US citizens from the United States with a parent when the adult is deported. In this case, the child was reportedly not allowed to leave with her mother even though it was what both parents said they wanted.The administration’s anti-immigration crackdown has put many people in a difficult position because they risk being summarily detained and deported when turning up for routine Ice check-ins. Many people have followed this process without issue for years, and do not have a criminal record – but failing to turn up can bring an order for forcible removal from the US.“They never gave me the option to take my daughter,” Sánchez told NBC.Sánchez’s husband, Carlos Valle, is a US citizen. Both parents separately told NBC that their daughter is now crying all the time and calling for her mother, while Sánchez struggles to get wifi service in Cuba to sing her daughter to sleep.Valle was not allowed into the room where Sánchez was being interviewed by Ice agents with their daughter, attorneys told NBC. When told she was being deported, she was denied the chance to see her husband or hand over their daughter to him, with a lawyer having to fulfil that role instead.Claudia Cañizares, a Miami-based attorney for the family, said she tried to prevent the deportation but was given “the runaround” by the authorities. The Florida Democratic congresswoman Kathy Castor has said she is lobbying the administration on the family’s behalf.Ice did not respond to a request for comment from NBC. The Guardian has submitted a request for comment. More

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    Pam Bondi turning DoJ into Trump’s ‘personal law firm’, top experts warn

    Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has taken radical steps to target his political foes, back a harsh agenda against undocumented immigrants and help business allies – steps which underscore its politicization under the attorney general Pam Bondi and undermine the rule of law, say ex-prosecutors and legal experts.Some even say that the department has in effect become Trump’s “personal law firm”.Since taking office a second time, Trump has relied on staunch loyalist Bondi and an elite group of justice department lawyers to investigate critics from his first administration plus political opponents and curb prosecutions of US business bribery overseas.Ex-prosecutors point to how Bondi and the department’s top lawyers have halted some major prosecutions, fired or forced out lawyers who didn’t meet Maga litmus tests, and were instructed by Trump to investigate a key Democratic fundraising vehicle as examples of how Trump and Bondi have politicized the justice department.Critics note that once Bondi became attorney general, she issued a memo establishing a “weaponization working group”, which pushed a false narrative that investigations by a special counsel into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election and his improperly retaining classified documents were politically motivated.The transformation of the Department of Justice under Bondi has put a premium for staff on “personal loyalty” to Trump, say ex-prosecutors, which has damaged the rule of law and provoked multiple rebukes from courts and the resignations or firings of veteran prosecutors.“The steps Trump and Bondi have taken using DoJ to punish enemies and reward allies while firing those who object radically transforms and politicizes DoJ in a way that not even the worst who have gone before them ever contemplated,” the former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig said.“Trump’s transmuting DoJ into his personal law firm is, in effect, a rejection of the founding principle of the rule of law.”Other ex-prosecutors see the department marching in dangerous legal lockstep with Trump’s agenda and damaging its mission to protect the rule of law.“Bondi and DoJ lawyers have certainly tried to make personal loyalty to Trump the justice department’s guiding principle,” said the Columbia law professor and ex-federal prosecutor Daniel Richman.Critics note Bondi has also echoed Trump’s dangerous rhetorical blasts against judges who have ruled against his administration’s sweeping and haphazard drive to deport undocumented immigrants by labeling them “low-level leftist judges who are trying to dictate President Trump’s executive powers”.After the FBI arrested a Milwaukee judge for allegedly obstructing the arrest of an undocumented immigrant, Bondi went on Fox News to threaten other judges who may defy their agenda. “They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. We will come after you and we will prosecute you,” she said.Hundreds of lawyers and staff in the justice department’s civil rights division are now leaving the storied unit as its focus has shifted to Trump priorities such as pursuing cases against elite universities and student protesters, while curbing some civil and voting rights cases it has traditionally pursued, say critics.Other actions by the department under Bondi, an ex-Florida attorney general who later worked on Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial in 2020, and some elite justice department lawyers reflect its strong allegiance to Trump and have sparked strong criticism.They include an investigation of two officials, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who served in his first term and clashed with him for, respectively, not backing his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and for voicing strong concerns in a 2018 New York Times op ed about how Trump threatened democracy.In another radical move, Trump issued an executive order in April telling the justice department to investigate unverified allegations that ActBlue, a major Democratic online fundraising vehicle, had engaged in improper fundraising schemes.Trump also reportedly prodded the Department of Justice to drop a five-count criminal fraud prosecution of the New York mayor, Eric Adams, that the elite justice department southern district had worked on for months, as Trump was eager to secure public support from Adams for his immigration agenda in the city.Some actions also appear aimed at helping allied business interests. In April, the justice department abruptly closed a cryptocurrency unit that was launched in 2022 and had successfully prosecuted dangerous criminal schemes involving North Korean hackers and other fraudsters, but which had come under fire from cryptocurrency leaders who helped fund Trump’s campaign last year.Trump’s justice department also has paused for six months prosecuting businesses that have been charged with violating the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which bars paying bribes to win deals abroad.Other moves seem to reflect Trump’s enmity towards journalists who report critically about his administration. In a reversal of recent department policy, Bondi revoked journalists’ free-speech protections by greenlighting authorities to force journalists to reveal confidential sources in leak investigations. Meanwhile, Bondi also seems willing to protect political allies, such as when she declined to open an investigation into “Signalgate” despite extensive documentation that top national security officials had improperly shared classified information as an attack was imminent in Yemen against the Houthis.Ex-prosecutors say that Bondi and the justice department’s willingness to make personal loyalty to Trump paramount damages the rule of law.Critics note the justice department has been rebuked by federal courts for stonewalling court orders and questions about some of its deportation actions and for not bringing home a Maryland man originally from El Salvador who was sent to a notorious Salvadorian prison as a result of what Ice has called an “administrative error”.“Never in history has DoJ broken so defiantly from respecting, as it’s obligated to do, the decisions of federal courts,” said the former prosecutor Ty Cobb, who was a counsel in the White House during Trump’s first term. “This is a war that Trump and Bondi are waging against the rule of law.”Richman noted more broadly that “outside the immigration area, most of what Bondi has actually done so far, however, has been negative – like dropping the case against Mayor Adams and cases against FCPA defendants and firing prosecutors”.Richman added: “We will soon see how this administration fares when it actually seeks a result in court, even if it’s only defensive. As the proceedings in the recent Maryland deportation case highlighted, courts demand a candor and respect for law that the justice department’s leadership finds inconsistent with the loyalty it demands.”Some veteran prosecutors who quit the department after Trump and Bondi took office say that the pair’s first moves raised red flags that prompted their departures.“Bondi has made clear – before becoming attorney general, and since – that she wants the Department of Justice to support President Trump unconditionally,” said Mike Romano, who resigned from the department in late March.Before he quit, Romano spent almost four years working on the prosecutions of Trump allies who stormed Congress on 6 January 2021 in an effort to thwart Joe Biden’s certification by Congress.Romano said that the night Bondi was confirmed “she issued a memorandum to all justice department employees in which she threatened to fire employees who refuse to defend the Trump administration’s actions, advance its arguments or sign its briefs. She and her subordinates have made good on those threats by firing people and forcing them to resign.”Romano stressed that “some of my colleagues were fired, and others were demoted, because they prosecuted people who rioted at the Capitol. At the public integrity section, four of my managers resigned, in lieu of being fired, when they refused to sign a motion to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams. These actions send a clear message to people still at the department: if you want to keep your job, disagreement won’t be tolerated.”Similarly, Barbara McQuade, a former prosecutor for Michigan’s eastern district who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, warned that Bondi’s memo setting up a “weaponization working group” actually “weaponizes law enforcement and undermines public confidence in government” because it pushes a “false narrative” about the two investigations of Trump by the former special counsel Jack Smith.McQuade emphasized that “in fact federal grand juries returned indictments in both cases, meaning that they found probable cause that the crimes were committed. DoJ’s Principles of Federal Prosecution prohibit prosecutors from making charging decisions on the basis of partisan politics.”Pointing to a further symbol of the justice department’s politicization under Bondi, McQuade cited her statement that a federal judge “supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” and charged he “cannot be objective” because he issued a temporary restraining order blocking deportation of Venezuelan men to El Salvador without due process.“There is no evidence to suggest that the judge did anything other than apply the law to the case,” McQuade stressed. “He was applying the law to a highly suspect use of the Alien Enemies Act, a statute to be used during wartime.”Assessing Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice, Rosenzweig said the department was betraying its historic mission to protect the rule of law.“DoJ isn’t just another department like agriculture or HHS. It has a unique place in the US government as the home of the ‘rule of law’ and the guardian of what makes America special,” he said.“Thomas Paine said: ‘In America, the law is king.’ Trump wants to make his word the law and himself the king.” More

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    Canada has long been seen as the cool cousin next door. Here’s the truth | Noel Ransome

    Canada has been canonized – safely, predictably.It’s the great, grave story we’ve exported – retold in economic rankings, stitched into tourism ads, held up in classrooms and cable news panels. We’re the cooler, mellower cousin nextdoor. The country that has it figured out. Where healthcare is universal, democracy is calm and diversity is politely managed.This image has been shared like a TikTok meme for decades – forwarded, favourited, lightly interrogated. Over time, we’ve become more vibe than nation; contradictions, history and horrors flattened into brand energy. Place that flag in your Twitter bio, mention how “we’ll never become like America,” and you’ve bought into the sauce. You’re not the problem, you’re proof the problem lives somewhere else.This kind of deception has always been fundamental to our story. But we need only a glimpse at our neighbour’s constitutional preamble – “We the people of the United States” – to get a hint of the delusion. Canada’s constitutional language, by contrast, never used the populist “we”. From the start, there was no sweeping assertion of collective identity. Instead, the Constitution Act, 1867, opened with:
    Whereas the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland …
    Granted, Canada’s constitutional framework evolved. But from the beginning, the difference in language spoke to the shaping of our identity – through agreements, compromises, legal frameworks, not a people-centered vision. This historical nuance, while subtle, now echoes in modern politics.All that to say: times are spooky for the average Canadian forced to define and defend Canada’s sovereignty. Spooky in ways that can cause one to reflexively feed into a myth, rather than confront the truth of who we are. The gap between our negotiated past and our branded present has never been more plain. Our current leaders are no exception.To any Canadian progressive, it’s stating the obvious to say that Justin Trudeau, the figure most associated with Canada’s progressive identity, was more committed to feeding the myth than confronting it. With his well-timed, photogenic smile – post-blackface, naturally – Trudeau was the perfect mascot. Our self-image personified: tolerant, polished, unthreatening. But branding aside, his government sidestepped moral clarity at home – from pipeline expansions and broken promises to Indigenous communities, to a foreign policy on Gaza that rarely strayed from Washington’s script. In moments that demanded progressive definition, he was formless.It would have been naive to think many Canadians would take Donald Trump seriously when he half-jokingly suggested in November 2024 that Canada become the 51st state. After all, those words came from someone familiar to us – a man and a Maga movement forged in the belief that something sacred was always being stolen. The enemy, the fuel for his fervor, shifted with the news cycle: migrants, trans youth, teachers, climate scientists, Muslims, Black Americans, DEI initiatives, and the very idea of truth.But the speaker of those words wore the same jacket as Pierre Poilievre, who, just before Trump’s threat, was the undeniable favourite among Canadians to become the next prime minister.His rhetoric tapped into the same fears and scapegoating, presenting itself as the antidote to a broken system. Poilievre ticked off his own list of Trump-style grievances: DEI initiatives? “Garbage.” Trans women in women’s spaces? “No place at all.” Immigration policies? “Destroying” a system that requires caps over compassion to curb economic and social pressure. It’s as if he were part of the same tired flock – one that targets the marginalized while promising to fix what he claims is broken. The popular sentiments of a supposedly morally superior land.And this isn’t new. In 2008, as the country prepared to confront the brutal legacy of residential schools, Poilievre dismissed the moment sanctimoniously, arguing that Indigenous people needed to learn “the values of hard work” more than they needed compensation for past abuses. That’s who was in line to lead the country, as anointed by our polls.In the end, his opponent Mark Carney was victorious. But it should be clear that a shift toward the Liberal leader isn’t clarity about who we are, as much as it is a hedge against a man who seeks to claim us from afar.Carney is no antidote – just a bandage. Cutting ministries for gender equality and disability rights isn’t healing; it’s harm. His economic nationalism is safer than the far-right’s bluster, but it’s closer to US centrism than a remedy.As one union representing more than 80,000 educators put it, the move signals “an unwise change of direction” for a country where vulnerable groups are already living in fear. And while Carney served as an executive at Brookfield Asset Management, the company faced accusations of violating Indigenous rights.What Canadians and others need to confront is that the Trump machine wasn’t purely fueled by cultural resentment. It was powered, in no small part, by the United States’ historic desire to promote and believe the best of itself – even when the evidence said otherwise.For me, as a Black Canadian, home has rarely been the gentle myth so many sing about. Always polite and tolerant it wasn’t. I’ve seen just as much of the opposite: unmarked graves, flickers of grief, and then silence. I’ve seen headlines and acknowledgments of systematic racism turn to indifference: police brutality, missing Indigenous women, gone like breath during our winters. And yes, I’ve seen the Proud Boys, too. Their founder, Gavin McInnes? Canadian.Canada holds beauty, but it harbours moral rot just as much as the neighbour it claims to rise above. Myth-making can’t save us. If we want to hold onto our sovereignty in this moment, maybe it’s time we stop lying like them – to others, and most of all, to ourselves.

    Noel Ransome is a Toronto-based freelance writer More

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    The way universities can survive the Trump era? Band together in an alliance | David Kirp

    Higher education is under attack from the person who inhabits the White House. Universities are being threatened with an array of punishments, including the cutoff of their federal contracts and grants, the loss of their nonprofit status and a tax on their endowment. The Trump administration is demanding a say in whom they admit, whom they hire and even what courses they teach.It’s a grim message – abandon your fundamental values, or else. The idea of an “existential moment” has become a cliche, but this situation warrants that grim description. Academic freedom, the lifeblood of higher education, is being threatened.How should these colleges and universities respond?Columbia University has learned the hard way that you can’t negotiate with an autocrat – give an inch and he’ll just come back for more. Harvard has been widely praised for saying “no” to Trump, and justifiably so. But Harvard couldn’t have done anything else. The demands were so outrageous that if the university had capitulated it might as well have closed its doors.The cutoff of $2.2bn in federal contracts and grants, as well as the threat to rescind the university’s tax-exempt status, will take a bite out of research, teaching and financial aid, if ultimately upheld by the courts. But Harvard is, far and away, the richest university in the world, with an endowment north of $50 billion. That’s larger than the gross domestic product of nearly 100 countries. With its deep pockets, it is uniquely situated to carry on, while its phalanx of best-in-the-nation lawyers do battle in the courtroom.Other schools in Trump’s sight include far less wealthy private universities like Northwestern, as well as flagship public universities like the University of California-Berkeley, which have a comparative pittance to draw on. If they say shut the door when Trump & Co. come calling, the consequences would doubtlessly be devastating. But the Columbia debacle shows that there is really no option.Universities compete on many fronts. They vie for contracts and grants, professors and students and endowment contributions. Because they fetishize prestige, they take aggressive action to boost their place in the US News pecking order.But in these desperate times such competition is a ruinous course. The only strategy with a prayer of succeeding is for universities – public and private, well-endowed and scraping by – to come together, making it crystal-clear that they won’t give in to assaults on academic freedom.That’s precisely what happened last week, when more than 200 college and university presidents signed a statement, issued by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which forcefully condemns the federal government’s “political interference” and overreach” for “endangering higher education.”Stanford, Chicago and Dartmouth are among the top-ranking schools that didn’t sign on. Perhaps their presidents believe that “duck and cover” is their best strategy. As Columbia – which did sign – can tell them, good luck with that.Higher education has long rested on its laurels, confident that Americans appreciate its intrinsic value, but that hasn’t been true for years. The just-issued statement of principle should be coupled with a full-throated campaign to make their case—to demonstrate the importance of universities and colleges in preparing the coming generation to contribute to society as well as carrying out essential, cutting-edge research.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe AACU manifesto makes a great start, but more is needed to win this war. Well-off universities need to come to the aid of their financially weaker brethren, underwriting essential and expensive legal support, when the anti-university forces come calling.“Nato for higher education” – a mutual defense pact is a long-shot approach, but it might just convince the bully in the White House to back off. The tariff mess is just the latest example of how the Mister “Art of the Deal” turns tail when confronted with strong opposition.What’s more, colleges and universities have no viable option – to borrow a line from Benjamin Franklin, they can “hang together or hang separately.”

    David Kirp is professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of The College Dropout Scandal More

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    Trump 100 days: White House action plan makes Project 2025 look mild

    When Donald Trump chose a Project 2025 author to lead a key federal agency that would carry out the underpinnings of the conservative manifesto’s aims, he solidified the project’s role in his second term.Shortly after he won re-election, the US president nominated Russ Vought to lead the office of management and budget. Vought wrote a chapter for Project 2025 about consolidating power in the executive branch and advances a theory that allows the president to withhold funds from agencies, even if Congress has allocated them. Consolidating power, in part through firing a supposed “deep state” and hiring loyalists, is a major plank of the project – and of Trump’s first 100 days.Trump tried, repeatedly, to distance himself from the project, led by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, on the campaign trail after the left used it as shorthand for the dismantling of government that would take place if he won. Since he’s taken office, the illusion that his ideas were drastically different from the project has fallen.“The whole distancing themselves from Project 2025 may have pulled some voters,” said Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, but “my sense is that they’re going to try and push all the items within Project 2025 as much as they can.”Many of Trump’s moves in his first 100 days come directly from Project 2025, which involved more than 100 conservative organizations and represented a sort of consensus among the Trumpist right about what he should do in a second term. In some instances, he has gone beyond the project’s suggestions. And in other cases, because the project was written in 2023, subsequent policy ideas from the Heritage Foundation have shaped his actions and goals.For instance, the project predated Elon Musk’s outsized role in the election and then in the Trump administration, but the goal to slash government programs using the so-called “department of government efficiency” fits the spirit of the project. It also predates the war in Gaza and the crackdown on speech in the US in the name of antisemitism, but Heritage’s Project Esther laid out a strategy to crack down on civil society groups that support Palestinian rights.Trump’s campaign once said people associated with the project wouldn’t get jobs in his administration. Instead, several hold prominent roles, in some cases now carrying out the plans they wrote about in the project.He chose Peter Navarro as a trade adviser; Navarro wrote a chapter for the project that advocates for increased tariffs and a restructuring of US trade, which Trump is now working on. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, appeared in training videos for Project 2025. Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the chapter on the FCC.The former director of the project, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role amid concerns that the project was derailing Trump’s re-election effort. Dans told Politico in March that Trump’s second term was “actually way beyond my wildest dreams”.“What we had hoped would happen has happened. So I can’t imagine how anything could end really any better,” Dans said.Will Dobbs-Allsopp, policy director of Governing for Impact, and James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, have publicly tracked the executive actions suggested for 20 different agencies in Project 2025 as Trump has carried some of them out. Of the 532 proposals in the project that fall under these actions, Trump has already proposed, attempted or completed 153 of them – about 29%.The belief that Trump was not fully prepared, and the broader conservative ecosystem was not aligned completely with his agenda, underpinned his first term. For his second term, conservative donors put major money into efforts to get the right on the same page and to come up with plans and personnel who would stand ready to implement these plans immediately if Trump won.While thinktanks often seek to influence policymakers, the project stands out for its focus on Trump.“Really, it was written for Trump or Trumpism,” Goodwin said. “There really was an audience of one in mind … Trump had as much gravitational pull on Project 2025 as Project 2025 hopes to have on Trump. It’s just a very unusual thinktank-policymaker relationship.”Where Trump has used the projectThe threads of Project 2025 are visible across the federal government in Trump’s second term.He is in the process of firing people disloyal to the Trump agenda, a first step in creating a government more beholden to him. An executive order signed in April called for tens of thousands more roles being listed as political appointments rather than career civil servants, a move Project 2025 promoted as a way to drive out the kinds of people who stood in the way of success in his first term.Project 2025 called for dismantling the Department of Education, which would require congressional action. Trump signed an executive order calling on the education secretary to start the dismantling process by shutting down major parts of the department’s work.The project wanted to scale back the US Agency for International Development. Trump axed it.“Libs are realizing that Project 2025 was the watered down version of this White House action plan,” Tyler Bowyer, a leader with conservative youth group Turning Point, said on X in early February.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe project said that programs related to climate change should be ended; Trump has ended a host of climate programs and has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement.The Department of Justice should be reconfigured, ending a host of policies and enforcement that came during the Biden years, the project says. Trump has weaponized the department to achieve his goals and to go after his enemies.In nearly all agency recommendations, the project suggested scrapping any diversity efforts. Trump ended diversity, equity and inclusion programs government-wide. He has taken actions to prohibit transgender people in sports and in the military and limited access to gender-affirming care, which aligns with ideas in the project that seek to reinforce binary genders.The project recommended a host of ways to deport undocumented immigrants, end visa programs for people to come to the US legally, and restrict border crossings – a key part of Trump’s first 100 days, though the project didn’t suggest using the Alien Enemies Act, as Trump has, or going after birthright citizenship.Trump signed an executive order that would make states carry more of a burden for disaster relief, another idea suggested by Project 2025, which also said withholding disaster funds was one way to enforce immigration laws.The FCC, now led by a Project 2025 author appointed by Trump, is investigating National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System and will potentially defund them, which Carr wrote about in the project.What could happen nextThe first wave of Project 2025-aligned actions has been conducted largely by executive orders. A second wave of recommendations requires the rulemaking process at agencies and others would require congressional action.“They’re only just now starting their kind of policy, deregulatory effort, rescinding regulations in earnest. They haven’t even really gotten there yet. They’ve been so focused on agency operations and personnel for the past few months,” Dobbs-Allsopp said. “We would expect that at six months or a year, they will be even further along.”Sinha predicted that the full-scale dismantling of the administrative state, if successful, could bring the US “back to the era of tainted meat and lead in hot water”.Project 2025 represented the extreme version of what the Republican party has been selling since the Nixon and Reagan years, she said. It mixes the anti-government rhetoric with demonizing immigrants, poor people and people of color. “The Republicans have trafficked on this for a very long time,” she said.“The people who hate government basically are running government,” she said. More