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Category: Politics

Trump’s defiance of courts is worse than in other authoritarian states such as Hungary

Trump’s defiance of courts is worse than in other authoritarian states such as Hungary

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.” “We look at these comparative cases…

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Musk and Trump have chosen chaos

Musk and Trump have chosen chaos

Brian Barrett writes: Two months into the second Trump administration, the United States is in pure chaos mode. Tens of thousands of workers are fired one week and forcibly rehired the next. Tariffs rise and fall based not on strategy but on one man’s ire. Deportations fly in the face of judicial orders, careening the country toward a constitutional crisis. The only constant is the volatility itself. On paper, that may be surprising. A central premise of Donald Trump’s appeal…

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Federal workers push back against threats: ‘We are public servants, not Elon’s servants’

Federal workers push back against threats: ‘We are public servants, not Elon’s servants’

Politico reports: The pervasive fear and anger that have been rippling through federal agencies over Elon Musk’s slashing approach to shrinking government deepened even further on Friday over the billionaire tech mogul’s threat to root out and punish anyone who is leaking to the media. They’ve already taken every precaution they can for fear of retaliation: setting Signal messages to automatically disappear, taking photos of documents they share instead of screenshotting, using non-government devices to communicate. But disclosing the chaos…

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Acting head threatens to shut down Social Security Administration after court ruling

Acting head threatens to shut down Social Security Administration after court ruling

The Washington Post reports: Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek said Friday that he is consulting with agency lawyers and the Justice Department as he threatens to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s team from accessing sensitive taxpayer data. Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a two-week temporary restraining order Thursday that prohibits Social Security officials from sharing personally identifiable information with Musk’s U.S….

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Universities are capitulating to Trump’s demands with a stunning speed and scope

Universities are capitulating to Trump’s demands with a stunning speed and scope

Politico reports: Colleges and universities across the country are capitulating to President Donald Trump with staggering speed, moving to slash progressive policies and crack down on student activism as they face compounding threats from an administration hellbent on reshaping higher education. Columbia University on Thursday appeared poised to submit to a list of Trump administration demands that threaten core tenets of the school’s mission in an attempt to release itself from a $400 million federal funding freeze. The University of…

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I negotiated for Israeli prime ministers. Netanyahu is lying

I negotiated for Israeli prime ministers. Netanyahu is lying

Daniel Levy writes: It has taken less than two months for normal service to be resumed – a White House that is the plaything of the prime minister of a client state, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Having briefly flirted with leading the ‘ceasefire over war’ camp, the US is back to bombing Yemen, threatening Iran with military action, and undermining its own negotiations in the service of greenlighting Israel’s resumed bombing of Gaza. Trump has apparently been reminded who is the…

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FedEx is the latest company to sound the alarm on the U.S. economy

FedEx is the latest company to sound the alarm on the U.S. economy

CNBC reports: FedEx lowered its full-year profit and revenue forecasts on Thursday, as the parcel delivery firm battles stubbornly soft demand and uncertainty in the U.S. industrial economy as President Donald Trump imposes tariffs on trading partners. “Our revised earnings outlook reflects continued weakness and uncertainty in the U.S. industrial economy, which is constraining demand for our business-to-business services,” Chief Financial Officer John Dietrich said in a statement. FedEx shares fell 5.3% to $232.29 in after-hours trade, while rival United…

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Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world as the U.S. falls to its lowest-ever position

Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world as the U.S. falls to its lowest-ever position

The Associated Press reports: Finland is the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row, according to the World Happiness Report 2025 published Thursday. Other Nordic countries are also once again at the top of the happiness rankings in the annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Besides Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden remain the top four and in the same order. Aino Virolainen, a digital commerce director, has lived…

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Venezuelan migrant deportations based on conjecture instead of hard evidence

Venezuelan migrant deportations based on conjecture instead of hard evidence

Slate reports: After the Trump administration rounded up hundreds of Venezuelan migrants around the country—without notice or court hearings—and sent them off to a prison in El Salvador, we’re finally getting details on who was deported and why. And the more we learn, the more obvious it becomes why the government is so eager to expel these individuals without any semblance of due process. It claims that these men are terrorists by virtue of their alleged membership in the Tren…

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Michael Lewis: There’s more fraud on Wall Street than in the federal government

Michael Lewis: There’s more fraud on Wall Street than in the federal government

  Janet Hook writes: “Bureaucrat” is a really loaded pejorative. There’s no flattering use of the word. No child says, “I want to be a bureaucrat when I grow up.” Government workers are saddled with a stereotype of being faceless, lazy, unaccountable, corrupt paper pushers in a vast, wasteful machine of government.  That caricature is one reason President Donald Trump has been able, so far, to get away with slashing the federal workforce with relatively little outcry from the public….

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The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom

The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom

Christopher L. Eisgruber writes: The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security. They are magnets for outstanding talent from throughout the country and around the world. The Trump administration’s recent attack on Columbia University puts all of that at risk, presenting the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Every American should be concerned. The rise of…

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Israel’s return to war is a prelude to mass expulsion

Israel’s return to war is a prelude to mass expulsion

Ben Reiff writes: Two months after agreeing to a ceasefire deal that should have ended the war, Israel has resumed its bombardment of the Gaza Strip with an intensity that recalls the earliest days of the onslaught. Israeli airstrikes have killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more since the early hours of this morning, and the army has ordered thousands of residents of the towns and neighborhoods spanning the perimeter of the Strip to flee their homes. Israel has again fully sealed off Rafah…

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Tesla and Musk face a ‘brand tornado crisis’ as 46,000 Cybertrucks are recalled

Tesla and Musk face a ‘brand tornado crisis’ as 46,000 Cybertrucks are recalled

The Guardian reports: Tesla and Elon Musk are embroiled in a “brand tornado crisis moment” and the electric carmaker’s chief executive needs to cut back on his work for Donald Trump to stem the damage, one of the company’s biggest supporters has said. The warning came as Tesla announced a recall of 46,000 Cybertrucks in the US on Thursday to fix an exterior panel that could detach while driving. It came as protesters announced on Wednesday they were planning what…

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Some Democrats start to echo Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric

Some Democrats start to echo Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric

The New York Times reports: When he took the stage in downtown Eau Claire, Wis., on Tuesday night to rev up Democrats ahead of a critical State Supreme Court race, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said he didn’t think name-calling would help things. Then he called Elon Musk a “dipshit” and, later, a “South African nepo baby” with the power to cut government programs. The crowd roared. Mr. Walz, his party’s nominee for vice president last year, is one of…

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After Roberts’ rebuke, Trump responds with weasel words

After Roberts’ rebuke, Trump responds with weasel words

USA Today reports: The growing clash between President Donald Trump and the judiciary took a major turn Tuesday as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked Trump’s call for the impeachment of a federal judge. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a rare public statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” Trump’s call for impeachment escalated his increasing…

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Top IRS lawyer warned that Trump firings, based on false statements, were a ‘fraud’ on the courts

Top IRS lawyer warned that Trump firings, based on false statements, were a ‘fraud’ on the courts

By Andy Kroll This story was originally published by ProPublica On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance. Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office. But according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the IRS warned…

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