Trump's Tariffs

 

Are we liberated yet?

People of a certain age will remember Yosemite Sam chasing Bugs Bunny around with a shotgun, blasting holes in walls, ceilings, and windows while completely missing his target. It’s the perfect metaphor for Trump’s tariff policy announced yesterday.

Trump is acting as if tariffs were a form of warfare, and he’s “fighting back” against the countries that have “taken advantage of us.” This is how he’s behaving like Yosemite Sam with his blunderbuss, shooting everywhere and just making a mess while missing the target altogether.

He’s not only throwing wild tariffs on every country that trades with America (except Russia), but he also put a flat 10% tariff on every product imported into the United States (except from Russia).

Additionally, this sort of rhetoric — and making tariffs country-specific instead of product-specific — is what drives trade wars that also run the risk of increasing the danger of actual wars.

“Shooting” at countries instead of at products is not only hostile; it’s also generally counterproductive except, literally, during time of war.

Further demonstrating Trump‘s ignorance about the difference between business-based tariffs on products and war-based tariffs on countries, his commerce secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, is warning countries not to engage in reciprocal tariffs or trade restrictions.

The second solid criticism of Trump’s tariff plan is that only Congress has the legal power to impose them, and that’s a good thing.

No manufacturer is going to invest billions of dollars and years of construction to build a factory here in response to a tariff thrown up on the whim of a mercurial president; they want to know that that tariff will be there for decades so they can earn back their investment.

Which is why, outside of wartime, tariffs should be specific to products, not countries.

Our Department of Commerce specifies over 17,000 separate categories of products that tariffs can be attached to, and they’re often startlingly specific. Steel, for example, has 740 sub-categories ranging from rolled steel to ingots to hundreds of items as specific as “Semi-finished iron/nonalloy steel, ≥ 0.25% carbon, rectangular/square cross-section, width ≥ 4x thickness.​”

Products that we make in America, or want to make here again, should be the targets of tariffs, not the countries that make them. And while there are thousands of product categories that are amenable to tariffs, there are also things it would be stupid to put tariffs on because we don’t make them here — and don’t plan to.

For example, we don’t grow coffee in the US, but they do in Mexico; that’s why we imported 65.5 million kilograms of unroasted beans from that country in 2022. Slapping a tariff on all Mexican goods will sweep up coffee, which will only succeed in driving up inflation here, as the cost of the tariff is added to every cup in every kitchen and restaurant across America.

Bringing back manufacturing also a really good thing to do, because it’s historically been one of the most important ways that workers can find entrée into the middle class without a college education.

Sadly, though, Trump may be doing more damage than good to the cause of the middle class with his bizarre country-based tariff policy.

Trump is able to do his uninformed tariff song-and-dance because there’s a loophole in our tariff laws that allows the president — during a time of national emergency — to impose emergency tariffs. It makes sense that the president should have that flexibility in the event of another Republican Great Depression or World War III, but that isn’t what’s happening today.

Trump declared a state of emergency at the beginning of his administration specifically so he could put his tariffs into place — which means the next president can simply reverse them. Again, no CEO in her right mind is going to invest billions based on that level of uncertainty.

At least four Republican senators get this; Tuesday night, Trump did one of his signature weird 1 am screeds on his Nazi-infested social media platform, calling out Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski by name because they’re supporting a Democratic effort to end the state of emergency so Congress can reclaim its trade authority. They voted with Democrats last night and the resolution passed; it goes to the House now, where Mike Johnson will probably kill it.

If Trump had any understanding of tariffs outside of his simplistic “you hurt us, we hurt you” worldview, he’d realize the best way to accomplish his stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to this country can be tariffs, but only when they are done carefully and selectively.

But, no; understanding anything other than how to cheat on golf and your taxes, screw vendors, stiff workers, and sexually assault women is beyond his limited abilities. And, of course, running companies into bankruptcy and being bailed out by Russians. Repeatedly.

When Congress imposes tariffs there’s a far better chance, they’ll stay in place long enough to assure American companies it’s worth building new factories. Instead of imposing his tariffs by fiat, Trump should have put them into the form of a proposed bill that he’d then submit to Congress.

Sadly, he’s not that smart or well-informed about history, and apparently neither are his advisors.

So, here we are with actions taken that may throw the entire world into recession, or possibly even a second Republican Great Depression.

That said, there’s also a huge risk to any Democrats who might want to play Yosemite Sam themselves, blasting away at Trump’s tariffs and missing the nuance — and the multiple truths — that make up today’s trade situation.

The simple reality is that tariffs do work to protect domestic manufacturing; they have since the founding of our republic, and are used today by every country in the world (including the US) for that purpose. (There’s a great explainer of all this, including the American history with tariffs going back to George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, here.)

And, when Reagan embraced neoliberal cuts in tariffs, negotiating the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 — which led to the WTO and NAFTA (also negotiated by Reagan and Bush respectively) — those two Republican presidents began the long slide of American manufacturing.

As the union guy who spoke at Trump’s event yesterday noted, anybody over 50 can remember when everything in Walmart — and pretty much everywhere else, including the cars on the dealership lots — was made in America.

Hell, Sam Walton started Walmart with the slogan “100% Made in the USA” which is also the title of his autobiography; it was only when those tariffs collapsed as a result of Clinton signing off on Reagan’s/Bush’s NAFTA and the WTO that Walton’s stores began to import from cheap-labor countries and stopped stocking American-made products.

Because of this simple reality, Democrats who simply fall back on the old neoliberal talking points that tariffs are sales taxes and that countries that trade with each other are less likely to go to war with each other (the original explicit neoliberal rationale for tariff-free trade) are risking political suicide.

It’s hard to make political arguments that use nuance, but in this case, Democrats really don’t have a choice. Having grown up in the Midwest (Michigan) I can tell you that most anybody who hails from a former manufacturing region is cheering Trump on right now.

Regardless of party.

And today’s Democrats haven’t been all that hostile to tariffs: Not only did President Biden keep Trump’s tariffs from his first term in place, he added additional tariffs of his own (although almost nobody knows it).

Biden increased tariffs on steel and aluminum products from 7.5% to 25% in 2024; his tariffs on semiconductors will rise to 50% by the end of this year; Democratic tariffs on some electric vehicles (EVs) hit 100% last year; Biden’s tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries and magnets for EV motors will go up by 25% by 2026. After the Covid crisis, the Biden administration even put a 50% tariff on syringes and needles to jump-start domestic production, and personal protective equipment (PPE) tariffs went up 25%.

(Notice that none of those are tariffs on countries, just on products. The only country-specific tariffs Biden approved were against Russia, in response to their invading Ukraine, as a form of economic warfare.)

Opposing tariffs just because Trump loves them, in other words, isn’t just ineffective politics; it doesn’t even conform to Biden’s new Democratic trade policy.

So, here’s how modern Democrats need to talk about this situation. It’s not only good political messaging; it’s also good trade policy, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

First, Democrats need to answer the question, “Why tariffs, particularly if they act as taxes on imported goods?”

That answer is easy; it’s an accurate explanation of what Trump is totally garbling: Tariffs encourage manufacturers to produce their products here in the USA instead of in cheap labor or high pollution countries.

But the “how to do it” is the critical part.

Democrats, in other words, need to differentiate between “smart tariffs” and “stupid” or “wartime tariffs,” advocating the former while ridiculing the latter.

“Put tariffs on products, not on countries” would be a great start, for example.

Our dim-witted president is being called out on his shoot-from-the-hip tariff policy from both left and right. The country is confused and needs to understand what is going on and how it will impact their future.

Democrats must therefore take a clear position in favor of smart, targeted tariffs — on individual products rather than countries — like Biden did.

And then they must point out that Trump’s obsession with slapping punitive tariffs on countries (except on Russian products) stupidly risks utterly crashing our economy — and possibly even the world’s economy — while starting a trade war that nobody will win.

And, tragically, it’s all being done not for any good reason, but just because Trump is not that bright.

 

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The American Age Is Over

 

The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War—a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.

Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.

The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of good and services—is over. 

While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality. And just like that, the age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended. 

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We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.

He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.

He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.

There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:

1. they wanted what he promised.
2. they didn’t believe what he promised; or
3. they didn’t understand what he promised.

Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.

And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people.

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2. No Going Back

Understand this: There is no going back.

If, tomorrow, Donald Trump revoked his entire regime of tariffs, it would not matter. It might temporarily delay some economic pain, but the rest of the world now understands that it must move forward without America.

If, tomorrow, Donald Trump abandoned his quest to annex Greenland and committed himself to the defense of Ukraine and the perpetuation of NATO, it would not matter. The free world now understands that its long-term security plans must be made with the understanding that America is a potential adversary, not an ally.

This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.

Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.

Europeans are moving ahead with their own security plans because they realize, as a French minister put it, “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” He was right.

The Canadian prime minister declared the age of American leadership over. He was right. Instead of arguing with this reality, or denying it, we should face it.

It’s bad enough being a failing empire. Let’s not also be a delusional failing empire. Let’s at least have some dignity about our situation.

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The world will move on without us.

Economically this means that international trade will reorganize without the United States as the central hub. Relationships will be forged without concern as to our preferences. The dollar may well be displaced as the world’s reserve currency. American innovation will depart for other shores as the best and brightest choose to make their lives in countries where the rule of law is solid, secret police do not disappear people from the streets, and the government does not discourage research and make economic war on universities.

There’s a reason why countries like Belarus and El Salvador aren’t tech hubs.

All of this will mean slower growth at home and declining economic mobility. The pie will shrink and people will become more desperate to hold on to their slices.

If you want a small preview, look at what has happened to the British economy since Brexit. The drag we experience will be much greater, because we had much further to fall.

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In the security space, Europe will organize apart from us. The Europeans will create a separate nuclear umbrella and will likely include Canada, Japan, and Australia in their alliance. The “free world” as we have understood it for the entirety of our lifetimes will no longer include America.

As a result, America will either drift, or find itself becoming more closely allied with the world’s authoritarians. We may become closer with Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. We may find that we need them—Russia as a counterweight to democratic Europe and China as a source of cheap manufacturing to relieve some of the price pressure on American consumers.

The end of the American era doesn’t mean everything will become chaos overnight. We aren’t going to wake up tomorrow to the sound of the blaring war rig horn from Mad Max. We are still a rich country, with momentum carrying us forward. But in ways that will soon be perceptible and eventually be undeniable, things will get worse. And facts about America and the world that we have taken for granted since the end of the Second World War will no longer hold true.

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3. Idiots

On the day that Trump’s tariffs collapsed America’s position in the world, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to Brussels to demand that NATO allies increase defense spending to 5 percent of their budgets.

But here is how utterly stupid and unserious our government is:

Europe is going to rearm. And they are going to do so by building up their internal defense industries so that they do not have to rely on America, which is in the process of threatening military action against a NATO member.

And the American response to this has been to cry foul.

U.S. officials have told European allies they want them to keep buying American-made arms, amid recent moves by the European Union to limit U.S. manufacturers’ participation in weapons tenders, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The messages delivered by Washington in recent weeks come as the EU takes steps to boost Europe's weapons industry, while potentially limiting purchases of certain types of U.S. arms.

Our government thinks it can simultaneously:

• demand that Europe re-arm.
• threaten our European allies with territorial annexation; and
• demand that Europe buy American weapons.

We have a deeply stupid government—from our economically illiterate president to our craven and foolish secretary of state, from the freelancing billionaire dilettante who is gutting American soft power to the vaccine-denying health secretary who is firing as much talent as he can. From the senior economics advisor who thinks comic books are good investments, to the senators who voted to confirm this cabinet of hacks, to the representatives who stumble over themselves justifying each new inane MAGA pronouncement.

But also, we have the government we deserve. The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.

-Jonathan V. Last

The Bulwark

"Massive cuts to Health and Human Services’ workforce signal a dramatic shift in US health policy" -Dr. Simon F. Haeder

 

On March 27, 2025, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced plans to dramatically transform the department. HHS is the umbrella agency responsible for pandemic preparedness, biomedical research, food safety and many other health-related activities.

In a video posted that afternoon, Kennedy said the cuts and reorganization to HHS aim to “streamline our agency” and “radically improve our quality of service” by eliminating rampant waste and inefficiency. “No American is going to be left behind,” the health secretary told the nation.

As a scholar of U.S. health and public health policy, I have written about administrative burdens that prevent many Americans from accessing benefits to which they are entitled, including those provided by HHS, like Medicaid. Few experts would deny that the federal bureaucracy can be inefficient and siloed. This includes HHS, and calls to restructure the agency are nothing new

Combined with previous reductions, these cuts may achieve some limited short-term savings. However, the proposed changes dramatically alter U.S. health policy and research, and they may endanger important benefits and protections for many Americans. They may also have severe consequences for scientific progress. And as some policy experts have suggested, the poorly targeted cuts may increase inefficiencies and waste down the line.

Health and science in a big-budget agency

HHS is tasked with providing a variety of public health and social services as well as fostering scientific advancement.

Originally established as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953, HHS has seen substantial growth and transformation over time. Today, HHS is home to 28 divisions. Some of these are well known to many Americans, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Others, such as the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the Administration for Community Living, may fly under the radar for most people.

With an annual budget of roughly US$1.8 trillion, HHS is one of the largest federal spenders, accounting for more than 1 in 5 dollars of the federal budget. Under the Biden administration, HHS’s budget increased by almost 40%, with a 17% increase in staffing. However, 85% of that money is spent on 79 million Medicaid and 68 million Medicare beneficiaries. Put differently, most of HHS’ spending goes directly to many Americans in the form of health benefits.

A new direction for Health and Human Services

From a policy perspective, the changes initiated at HHS by the second-term Trump administration are far-reaching. They involve both staffing cuts and substantial reorganization. Prior to the March 27 announcement, the administration had already cut thousands of positions from HHS by letting go probationary employees and offering buyouts for employees to voluntarily leave.

Now, HHS is slated to lose another 10,000 workers. The latest cuts focus most heavily on a handful of agencies. The FDA will lose an additional 3,500 employees, and the NIH will lose 1,200. The CDC, where cuts are steepest, will lose 2,400 positions.

In all, the moves will reduce the HHS workforce by about 25%, from more than 82,000 to 62,000. These changes will provide savings of about $1.8 billion, or 0.1% of the HHS budget.

Along with these cuts comes a major reorganization that will eliminate 13 out of 28 offices and agencies, close five of the 10 regional offices, reshuffle existing divisions and establish a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America.

In his latest message, Kennedy noted that this HHS transformation would return the agency to its core mission: to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans”. He also announced his intention to refocus HHS on his Make America Healthy Again priorities, which involve reducing chronic illness “by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

How HHS’ new reality will affect Americans

Kennedy has said the HHS overhaul will not affect services to Americans. Given the magnitude of the cuts, this seems unlikely. HHS reaches into the lives of all Americans. Many have family members on Medicaid or Medicare, or know individuals with disabilities or those dealing with substance use disorder. Disasters may strike anywhere. Bird flu and measles outbreaks are unfolding in many parts of the country. Everyone relies on access to safe foods, drugs and vaccines.

In his announcement, the health secretary highlighted cuts to HHS support functions, such as information technology and human resources, as a way to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies. But scaling down and reorganizing these capacities will inevitably have implications for how well HHS employees will be able to fulfill their duties – at least temporarily. Kennedy acknowledged this as a “painful period” for HHS.

However, large-scale reductions and reorganizations inevitably lead to more systemic disruptions, delays and denials. It seems implausible that Americans seeking access to health care, help with HIV prevention or early education benefits such as Head Start, which are also administered by HHS, will not be affected. This is particularly the case when conceived rapidly and without transparent long-term planning.

These new cuts are also further exacerbated by the administration’s previous slashes to public health funding for state and local governments. Given the crucial functions of HHS – from health coverage for vulnerable populations to pandemic preparedness and response – the American Public Health Association predicts the cuts will result in a rise in rates of disease and death.

Already, previous cuts at the FDA – the agency responsible for safe foods and drugs – have led to delays in product reviews. Overall, the likelihood of increasing access challenges for people seeking services or support as well as fewer protections and longer wait times seems high.

A fundamental reshaping of American public health

The HHS restructuring should be viewed in a broader context. Since coming to office, the Trump administration has aggressively sought to reshape the U.S. public health agenda. This has included vast cuts to research funding as well as funding for state and local governments. The most recent cuts at HHS fit into the mold of rolling back protections and reshaping science.

The Trump administration has already announced plans to curtail the Affordable Care Act and roll back regulations that address everything from clean water to safe vaccines. State programs focused on health disparities have also been targeted.

HHS-funded research has also been scaled back dramatically, with a long list of projects terminated in research areas touching on health disparities, women’s and LGBTQ-related health issues, COVID-19 and long COVID, vaccine hesitancy and more.

The HHS reorganization also revamps two bodies within HHS, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, that are instrumental in improving U.S. health care and providing policy research. This change further diminishes the likelihood that health policy will be based on scientific evidence and raises the risk for more politicized decision-making about health.

More cuts are likely still to come. Medicaid, the program providing health coverage for low-income Americans, will be a particular target. The House of Representatives passed a budget resolution on Feb. 25 that allows up to $880 billion in cuts to the program.

All told, plans already announced and those expected to emerge in the future dramatically alter U.S. health policy and roll back substantial protections for Americans.

A vision for deregulation

Regulation has emerged as the most prolific source of policymaking over the last five decades, particularly for health policy. Given its vast responsibilities, HHS is one of the federal government’s most prolific regulators. Vast cuts to the HHS workforce will likely curtail this capability, resulting in fewer regulatory protections for Americans.

At the same time, with fewer experienced administrators on staff, industry influence over regulatory decisions will likely only grow stronger. HHS will simply lack the substance and procedural expertise to act independently. More industry influence and fewer independent regulators to counter it will also further reduce attention to disparities and underserved populations.

Ultimately, the Trump administration’s efforts may lead to a vastly different federal health policy – with fewer benefits, services and protections – than what Americans have become accustomed to in modern times.

Dr. Simon F. Haeder has previously received funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) .

 

Chris Arsenault

 

Medford, Long Island (WABC) -- The owner of a cat sanctuary and an unknown number of cats were killed in a fire on Monday morning.

The blaze broke out around 7:15 a.m. at the Happy Cat Sanctuary on Dourland Road. The home served as a safe haven for hundreds of cats.

Officials say owner Chris Arsenault, 65, was found on the main floor in the back of his home. Roughly 100 cats have been found so far -- both dead and alive.

Friends say Arsenault went back into the home to rescue the animals after the fire broke out.

"This man lived in an 8x10-foot bedroom with a mini fridge and a microwave, every dime he made, everything he collected went toward the animals, he was selfless, he took nothing for himself, this is just so unfair," said friend Lisa Jaeger.

Pope Francis unleashed a historic attack on the Trump administration over its cruel treatment of migrants — and takes specific aim at remarks made by J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert

The Pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church, issued a rebuke of Donald Trump's mass deportation plan, stating that it removes the migrants of their inherent dignity as people and "will end badly."

Usually, one to abstain from commenting directly on the internal politics of individual countries, Pope Francis made his new remarks in a letter addressing U.S. bishops. In it, he invoked the Bible's Book of Exodus and said that God is "always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee" and pointed out that Jesus Christ was "expelled from his own land" when his family fled to Egypt and had to "take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own."

Putting fake Christians to shame, Pope Francis went on to state that Jesus loved "everyone with a universal love" and taught us to see the "dignity of every human being, without exception. Thus, all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.”

He then turned his pen towards addressing the United States directly:

"I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”

It was the next part of the letter that has really infuriated MAGA supporters. Recently, Vice President J.D. Vance — who was baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church in 2019 — attacked the Church's compassionate teachings on immigration. Proving that he either doesn't understand Catholic theology or would prefer to cherry pick what he likes and doesn't, Vance butchered a medieval concept known as "ordo amoris" or the "order of love."

"As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens," Vance told Fox News. "That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world."

Of course, the idea that one should love those closest to you doesn't mean that you shouldn't love people from other countries. Vance shamelessly twisted the meaning to suit his party's xenophobic views. St. Augustine, who pioneered the concept that Vance was referencing, certainly didn't advocate for an authoritarian mass migration program.

In his letter, Pope Francis wrote that "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the 'Good Samaritan', that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception."

Francis warned against deploying "an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth." He went on to urge the bishops in the United States to continue working "closely with migrants and refugees, proclaiming Jesus Christ" and "promoting fundamental human rights. God will richly reward all that you do for the protection and defense of those who are considered less valuable, less important or less human!" he added.

Pope Francis then turned his attention to the entire Catholic Church, urging its followers "not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters." He concluded by calling for all of us to work towards a "a society that is more fraternal, inclusive and respectful of the dignity of all." In other words, we need to build a world where MAGA is not the law of the land.

 

Trump's Deportations

 

The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry. Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify.

But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legal filings, news accounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook.

That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Lala broke the rule about talking to detainees. The parents told Lala their daughter had a history of asthma. The mom, who Lala said had epilepsy, seemed on the verge of her own medical crisis.

Lala placed the oxygen mask on the girl’s face. The nurse removed her socks to keep her from further overheating. Lala counted down the minutes, praying for the girl to keep breathing.

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The stories shared by ICE Air flight attendants paint a different picture of deportations from the one presented to the public, especially under President Donald Trump. On social media, the White House has depicted a military operation carried out with ruthless efficiency, using Air Force C-17s, ICE agents in tactical vests and soldiers in camo.

The reality is that 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. Military flights have now all but ceased. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members on board are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.

When the flight attendants joined GlobalX, it was a startup with big plans. It sold investors and new hires alike on a vision of VIP clients, including musicians and sports teams, and luxury destinations, especially in the Caribbean. “You can’t beat the eXperience,” read a company tagline…

-ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ice-air-deportation-flights?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=toc

She Connected the Dots before the Rest of Us Even Found the Pencil

Heather Cox Richardson just handed us the clearest, most unflinching blueprint of how the U.S. government is being dismantled under the second Trump administration—and she backed every word with receipts. Her March 27, 2025, dispatch isn’t analysis. It’s evidence. It’s a field report from the front lines of a soft coup.

The scale of what she wrote felt too outrageous to be real. Venmo payments with eggplant emojis tied to a Signal chat about bombing the Houthis? A Department of Government Efficiency that’s already cost the U.S. $500 billion? The IRS gutted. HHS torched. Social Security collapsing? Surely this was speculative—some dystopian metaphor.

It wasn’t. Every detail she cited came from real reporting by real journalists in Wired, The Washington Post, Reuters, NBC News, The New York Times, and more. Richardson didn’t theorize—she documented. And the result is devastating.

Here’s just a fraction of what she laid out:

• DOGE, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” has cost $500 billion—10% of all IRS revenue from last year.

• 20,000 IRS employees fired, especially in enforcement. Billionaire audits? Gone.

• HHS cut $12 billion in mental health and disease tracking grants, then laid off 10,000 more workers, including 3,500 from the FDA and 2,400 from the CDC.

• Social Security’s website crashed 4 times in 10 days. New rules require in-person ID checks for people without internet.

• A Tufts student was detained by ICE after writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed.

• The Department of Education is being shut down.

• FEMA is next.

• Columbia University had $400 million withheld until it complied with Trump’s cultural directives.

• Mike Johnson is openly floating the idea of eliminating federal courts.

• Words like “climate crisis,” “diversity,” “segregation,” and even “peanut allergies” are being purged from federal communications.

• And J.D. Vance is now in charge of purging the Smithsonian of what the administration calls “anti-American ideology.”

This isn’t dysfunction. It’s doctrine. It’s Project 2025, written by Russell Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget, and championed by Vance, who once said: “Unless we overthrow [the current ruling class] … we’re going to keep losing." and “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”

Heather Cox Richardson took that ruthlessness seriously. She traced it from the eggplant emoji to the ICE van. From the IRS to the Smithsonian. From the layoffs to the list of banned words. She didn’t write a warning. She wrote the truth. And she deserves our full attention. Read it. Share it. Archive it. Then ask what you're willing to do now that you know.

-Fear & Loathing: Closer to the Edge

 

"There is no national security information more sensitive that the discussion of war plans"

 

We know that Donald Trump is not fit to be sitting in the White House.  He is a dangerously disordered president, and we have observed enough aberrant behavior to fill a psychiatric textbook.  We know from his exchanges with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that he has been quick to brandish his “bigger (nuclear) button” that has the unilateral power to kill us all. 

And now we know that he is surrounded by a national security team whose members are totally unfit to serve and are willing to lie to an American public and an American Congress that has yet to come to grips with the normalization of Trump’s “no rules” presidency.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already lied to the press about the nature of the group chat involving war plans, and on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe couldn’t recall any discussions of weaponry or targets, not even generic targets, in their testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  So don’t expect any accountability as the president and his national security team do their best to vilify an excellent journalist invited to the chat.

We can be thankful that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic and an outstanding journalist for decades, responded to a call on the messaging app Signal that involved every member of Trump’s national security team, including the vice-president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and leading intelligence and military officials.  We are fortunate that Goldberg, sitting in his car on a Safeway parking lot, took a call that he initially believed to be bogus or simply part of a disinformation campaign.

Goldberg was invited by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who may have intended to invite U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer (JG), who had no more need to be in such a group chat than did the Atlantic’s JG.  Typically, the trade representative would never be part of the Principal’s Committee.  Conversely, Goldberg probably has a better idea of overall U.S. national security than Greer, who is obsessed with tougher export controls and sanctions against China, and little else.

Every government official with a high-level security clearance is inundated with warnings against using personal cell phones in discussing government matters.    Nevertheless, one of the participants in the chat, special envoy Steve Witkoff, was on the call on his cell phone while in Moscow. 

Russian intelligence has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, and Witkoff’s outrageous use of his personal cell phone for any discussion, let alone a discussion of precise military information dealing with the use of force.  The make-up of this particular group suggests that some or all of these members have been using Signal regularly for sensitive discussions.  It is particularly odd that not one individual questioned the presence of a journalist on the chat!

There is no national security information more sensitive that the discussion of war plans, which requires the highest level of operations security.  These discussions must be held in a sensitive and security facility that can be found at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or throughout the intelligence community. 

If an individual cannot be present at such a facility, at the very least he or she must be in a SCIF (a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to prevent unauthorized physical or electronic access.  The high-level members even travel with their own classified communication systems. Electronic surveillance and penetration have a long history. 

When I was the intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1971-1972, all professional matters were discussed in a SCIF that was flown to Vienna, Austria.  When I was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1976, I had to keep my office shutters closed because the KGB was targeting embassy windows to gather the signals emanating from the IBM Selectric typewriters that were used in the day.  In my 25 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, I was not permitted to bring a cell phone into the building because of the ease of foreign electronic penetration.

The group of misfits who occupy the highest national security positions that exist in Washington were simply too unwilling on a Saturday morning to travel to a SCIF.  It is highly likely that these Signal chats have been a regular feature of this particular team for the past two months. 

We know that Donald Trump has no understanding or appreciation for intelligence security because of the case of the United States of America v. Donald Trump that filed 40 criminal counts related to his removal of sensitive classified materials from the White House to various insecure locations at Mar-A-Lago, including a bathroom, a ballroom, and a utility closet.

In the first months of his first term, Trump revealed a highly sensitive document—obtained from Israeli intelligence—to the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador.  Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State and led Mossad—Israel’s CIA—to withhold the sharing of sensitive information for a period of time. 

A U.S. official stated that Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”  It must be added that some of our best intelligence on foreign terrorism comes from foreign liaison sources, including intelligence sources that can be found in adversarial countries.

Finally, it must be noted that the participating members of the group chat, with the exception of Goldberg, were members of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, which is the senior interagency forum for consideration and decision making of the most sensitive national security issues.  The NSC was created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy. 

The intelligence services in Moscow and Beijing probably cannot believe their new form of access to such decision making.  Unfortunately, nothing will stop Trump from concentrating on his revenge tour and his campaign against the rule of law, not even the mishandling of Washington’s most sensitive intelligence information.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

 

Noem’s choice of watch

 

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem visited El Salvador’s most notorious mega-prison on Wednesday, she sported an eye-catching piece on her wrist that experts have identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that sells for about $50,000.

The high-end Swiss watch lent a striking contrast to Noem’s tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where imprisoned men watched silently from a crowded cell as she recorded a video for a social media post warning undocumented immigrants not to enter the United States. “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem said.

Noem’s choice of watch kicked off a race among internet sleuths to identify it and infuriated immigration advocates, who said the juxtaposition was insensitive to the harsh reality of mass imprisonment and deportation.

“You’re in front of all these people in a very poor country, who are in the bottom 10 or 20 percent of their country … and it looks like you’re just flaunting your wealth while you flaunt your freedom,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group…

“For a public servant to be wearing it is quite the statement,” said Alan Bedwell, a vintage watch dealer and the owner of Foundwell in New York, who compared it to a “flag-waving exercise.”

“To be wearing that in El Salvador while visiting a” maximum-security prison, he said, “is kind of like a big F you.” […]

The Washington Post

Plutocrats Are Attacking Your Social Security

 

Insults, slurs, nasty comments and contempt for Social Security sprout up everywhere these days in Washington. Although Trump himself insists he will protect the program, his underlings sure hate it, and by extension, the nearly 70 million elders who rely on it; and “Rely” is an understatement – for many it’s their sole lifeline. These people voted for Trump in their multitudes.

But now they hear from his advisor Elon Musk that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” or from billionaire financial services CEO turned commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that only “fraudsters” cash their social security checks.

It’s hard not to conclude that these haughty plutocrats want to snatch grandma’s money and leave her destitute. Of course, this has long been official GOP policy. Just look at what the Republicans want to do to Medicaid. The House passed a bill in January to gut it, even dispensing with the prolonged, mendacious and de rigeur [required by etiquette] campaign to tar it with fraud. That’s the big lie about Social Security – that it’s riddled with fraud and therefore must be not just trimmed but slashed.

I suppose Medicaid, like food stamps, so offends multimillionaire GOP House members that they figured they could dispense with the propaganda campaign and just ravage it.

Besides, all Medicaid recipients are poor, thus easily bullied by the mega-rich. And with its Medicaid bill, the Republican House revealed that it’s full of bullies, who’d like nothing better than to ditch Medicaire, Medicaid, Social Security and of course food stamps, so that the indigent can skip doctor’s visits, ration their chemo and their insulin, eat fewer, smaller meals and sleep under the stars. ‘Cause that’s where all this is heading – dispossessing tens of millions of people and shoving them into the ranks of the homeless.

Add the 70 million Americans on Social Security to the 90 million on Medicaid and you’re looking at 160 million people rendered destitute by snobs like Musk, Lutnick and GOP House leader Mike Johnson.

These honchos of the Trump Sanhedrin apparently hate anyone who’s not rich. Lutnick best exemplified this vile disdain in a recent TV interview, where he proclaimed that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t mind if she didn’t receive her Social Security check and only loud-mouthed “fraudsters” would grip about that.

Well, I don’t know how wealthy Lutnick’s mother-in-law is, but I’d bet she has a lot more cash on hand than your average Social Security recipient, so it sure would be nice if these Beltway plutocrats would stop bashing Social Security. Trump could snap a leash on them if he wanted, but he hasn’t.

Meanwhile lots of us are so grateful he ended the threat of nuclear annihilation via a U.S./Russia blow-up that frankly, that’s rather distracting. Nevertheless, this ferocious combat against the poor’s skimpy sources of sustenance is hard to ignore.

Yes, we’re happy we won’t be incinerated in Biden’s insane attack on Russia and we hope there will be no World War III sparked by a U.S. assault on Iran, which could quickly turn radioactive and would bust the global economy. Also on the wish list is a halt to the Gaza carnage, something Trump did once with his ceasefire/hostage deal and could easily do again, if he wants.

But now that the Atomic Apocalypse is off our bingo card and we are permitted to survive, for lots of members of the working class the next question is, how? If aristocrats like Musk and Lutnick keep trashing ordinary peoples’ means of subsistence, are they paving the road to a hell of illness, hunger and destitution for 160 million Americans? That’s not much of a platform for the GOP to run on in two years.

Some weeks back, Musk pronounced Social Security a Ponzi scheme. This is false. It is not investment fraud. It is a government-run insurance annuity; the citizens make a series of payments in return for a stream of income later in life. Insurance annuities are used for retirement planning all the time, and if Musk regards that as fraud, then he not merely slanders Social Security but an entire financial industry.

Does he regard a pension as fraud? Because that’s another comparison that Social Security brings to mind. Possibly he considers anything other than a retirement 401k in the stock market as some sort of cheat – a scam against Wall Street, which has lustfully eyed Social Security income since it was first christened by FDR.

As billionaires wage savage class war against the rest of us, where are the Dems? Largely mute, licking their self-inflicted wounds from the Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden fiasco. In fact, any party that could foist a monumental deceit like that presidency on the American people deserves to be demolished, then rebuilt, from the ground up, with new people.

But there’s no evidence of such efforts anywhere; the feckless Democrats, after nearly bumbling the world into nuclear Armageddon, under the “leadership” of a ruler who probably would have been happier in an old folks’ home, which they assiduously concealed, those Dems can’t seem to muster the will to rally for the great social programs they invented.

Why? Because snotty social climbers who advocated – Biden is Exhibit A – dismantling those programs long ago captured the party. Maybe just skip the Democrats altogether. Time for a new People’s Party.

In a country where, as of 2023, 36.8 million people live in poverty, where 56 percent of Americans cannot afford a $1000 emergency, where 22 percent of tenants spend ALL their income on rent and where even the phony, manipulated, government labor statistics – which don’t count as unemployed the hordes of people who gave up looking for work years ago – reveal that officially almost 7 million people lack employment while nearly 9 million work multiple jobs, in such a country, you would think that politicians with their eyes on the history books would be falling all over themselves to boost social welfare programs. But no! What was once called economic freedom, namely freedom from want, is today merely the freedom to starve and sleep under an overpass.

The infamous truth is that the U.S. is a nation of very few fabulously rich oligarchs who hog all the resources and hundreds of millions of ordinary people struggling to get by. Stealing their skimpy subsistence – and we PAY for our Social Security, it’s not a gift – is not only a way to lose votes, it will earn its promoters the condemnation of history. Trump evidently knows this. But his advisors? That’s another story.

CounterPunch: Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.

 

“His behavior shocks the conscience, risked American lives and likely violated the law"

 

Monday’s astounding story that the most senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration planned military strikes on Yemen over an unsecure commercial messaging app, on which they had included national security reporter and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, has escalated over the past two days.

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looked directly at a reporter’s camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” Throughout the day Tuesday, the administration doubled down on this assertion, apparently convinced that Goldberg would not release the information they knew he had. They tried to spin the story by attacking Goldberg, suggesting he had somehow hacked into the conversation, although the app itself tracked that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz had added him.

Various administration figures, including Trump, insisted that the chat contained nothing classified. At a scheduled hearing yesterday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats, during which senators took the opportunity to dig into the Signal scandal, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said: “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.” 

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe agreed: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.” In the afternoon, Trump told reporters: “The attack was totally successful. It was, I guess, from what I understand, took place during. And it wasn’t classified information. So, this was not classified.”

After Gabbard said she would defer to the secretary of defense and the National Security Council about what information should have been classified, Senator Angus King (I-ME) seemed taken aback. “You’re the head of the intelligence community. You’re supposed to know about classifications,” he pointed out. He continued, “So your testimony very clearly today is that nothing was in that set of texts that were classified.... If that’s the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion. It’s hard for me to believe that targets and timing and weapons would not have been classified.”

Meanwhile, reporters were also digging into the story. James LaPorta of CBS News reported that an internal bulletin from the National Security Agency warned staff in February 2025 not to use Signal for sensitive information, citing concerns that the app was vulnerable to Russian hackers. A former White House official told Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico, “Their personal phones are all hackable, and it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones watching them type the sh*t out."

Tuesday night, American Oversight, a nonprofit organization focusing on government transparency, filed a lawsuit against Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—all of whom were also on the Signal chain—and the National Archives for violating the Federal Records Act, and suggested the administration has made other attempts to get around the law. It notes that the law requires the preservation of federal records.

Today it all got worse.

It turned out that administration officials’ conviction that Goldberg wouldn’t publicly release receipts was wrong. This morning, Goldberg and Shane Harris, who had worked together on the initial story, wrote: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. 

There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.” The Atlantic published screenshots of the message chat.

The screenshots make clear that administration officials insisting that there was nothing classified on the chat were lying. Hegseth uploaded the precise details of the attack before it happened, leaving American military personnel vulnerable. The evidence is damning.

The fury of Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Army pilot who was nearly killed in Iraq, was palpable. “Pete Hegseth is a F*cking liar,” she wrote. “This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.” Legal analyst Barb McQuade pointed out that it didn't even matter if the information was classified: it is “a crime to remove national defense information from its proper place through gross negligence…. Signal chat is not a proper place.”

The screenshots also raise a number of other issues. They made it clear that administration officials have been using Signal for other conversations: Waltz at one point typed: “As we stated in the first PC….” Using a nongovernment system is likely an attempt to get around the laws that require the preservation of public records. The screenshots also show that Signal was set to erase the messages on the chat after 4 weeks.

The messages reveal that President Trump was not part of the discussion of whether to make the airstrikes, a deeply troubling revelation that raises the question of who is in charge at the White House. 

As the conversation about whether to attack took place, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote about Trump’s reasoning that attacking the Houthis in Yemen would “send a message”: “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.” Later, he texted to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again. Let’s just make sure our messaging is tight here. And if there are things we can do upfront to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities we should do it.”

Hegseth responded: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”

The decision to make the strikes then appears to have been made by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who ended the discussion simply by invoking the president: “As I heard it,” he wrote, “the president was clear: green light, but we soon make it clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement.” 

If Europe doesn’t cover the cost of the attack, “then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” “Agree,” Hegseth messaged, and the attack was on.

Also missing from the group message was the person who is currently acting as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Christopher Grady. In February, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., who took on the position in 2023 having served more than 3,000 hours as a fighter pilot, including 130 hours in combat, and commanded the Pacific Air Forces, which provides air power for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region; the U.S. Air Forces Central Command, responsible for protecting U.S. security interests in Africa through the Persian Gulf; the 31st Fighter Wing, covering the southern region of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the 8th Fighter Wing, covering southeast Asia; U.S. Air Force Weapons School for advanced training in weapons and tactics for officers; and 78th Fighter Squadron.

Hegseth publicly suggested that Brown had been appointed because he is Black. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” Hegseth wrote. With Trump’s controversial replacement for Brown still unconfirmed, Admiral Grady, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, is fulfilling the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But he was not in the chat. The Pentagon's highest-ranking officer would normally be included in planning a military operation.

Also in the chat, participants made embarrassing attacks on our allies and celebrated civilian deaths in Yemen in the quest to kill a targeted combatant.

Attempts to defend themselves from the scandal only dug administration officials in deeper. On Monday night, independent journalist Olga Lautman, who studies Russia, noted that Trump’s Russia and Ukraine specialist Steve Witkoff had actually been in Russia when Waltz added him to the chat, underscoring the chat’s vulnerability to hackers. By Tuesday, multiple outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, picked up Lautman’s story.

Witkoff fought back against the Wall Street Journal story with a long social media post about how he had traveled to Moscow with a secure government phone and now it was not until he got home that he had “access to my personal devices” to participate in the Signal conversation, thus apparently confirming that he was discussing classified information with the nation’s top officials on an unsecure personal device.

Tonight, news of other ways in which the administration is compromised surfaced. The German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed that the contact information for a number of the same officials who were on the Signal chat is available online, as well as email addresses and some passwords for their private accounts, making it easy for hackers to get into their personal devices. 

Those compromised included National Security Advisor Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth. Wired reported that Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Walker Barrett of the National Security Council, who was also on the Signal messaging chain, had left their Venmo accounts public, demonstrating what national security experts described as reckless behavior.

In the New York Times tonight, foreign affairs journalist Noah Shachtman looked not just at the Signal scandal but also at the administration’s lowering of U.S. guard against foreign influence operations, installation of billionaire Elon Musk’s satellite internet terminals at the White House, and diversion of personnel from national security to Trump’s pet projects and advised hostile nations to “savor this moment. It’s never been easier to steal secrets from the United States government. Can you even call it stealing when it’s this simple? The Trump administration has unlocked the vault doors, fired half of the security guards and asked the rest to roll pennies. Walk right in. Take what you want. This is the golden age.”

Trump today did not seem on top of the story when he told reporters: “I think it’s a witch hunt. I wasn’t involved with it, I wasn’t there, but I can tell you the result is unbelievable.” When asked if he still believed there was no classified information shared, he answered: “Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know, I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask the various people involved. I really don’t know.” 

He [Trump] said the breach was Waltz’s fault—“it had nothing to do with anyone else”—and when reporters asked about the future of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who uploaded the attack plans into the unsecure system, he answered: “Hegseth is doing a great job, he had nothing to do with this…. How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it. Look, look, it’s all a witch hunt. I don’t know that Signal works. I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you….”

The administration appears to be trying to create a distraction from the damning story. Yesterday evening, Trump signed an executive order that would, if it could be enforced, dramatically change U.S. elections and take the vote away from tens of millions of Americans. 

But, as Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it, the order is “confused, rhetorical and—in places—nonsensical. It asserts facts that are not true and claims authority he does not possess. It is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Rather, it is the empty threat of a weak man desperate to appear strong.”

After today’s revelations, Trump announced new 25% tariffs on imported cars and car parts including those from Canada and Mexico, despite a deal worked out earlier this month that items covered under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement Trump signed in his first term would not face a new tariff levy. The 25% tariff is a major change that will raise prices across the board and hit the automotive sector in which more than a million Americans work. Upon the news, the stock market fell again.

And yet, despite the attempts to bury the Signal story, the scandal seems, if anything, to be growing. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote a public letter to Trump yesterday calling for him to fire Hegseth, accurately referring to him as “the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history.” Jeffries wrote: “His behavior shocks the conscience, risked American lives and likely violated the law.” “[H]ey Sen[ator Joni] Ernst and Sen[ator Thom] Tillis,” Jen Rubin of The Contrarian wrote tonight, “proud of your votes for Hegseth? This is on [you] too as much as Hegseth. You knew he was not remotely qualified.”

—Heather Cox Richardson