Elon Musk

Pentagon in “total chaos.” New reports that White House is looking to replace Hegseth

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 21, 2025

Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis performed his final public act when he waved to worshippers in St. Peter’s Square. He died today at 88. Born in Argentina, he was the first Pope to come from the Americas. He was also the first Jesuit to serve as Pope, bringing new perspectives to the Catholic Church and hoping to focus the church on the poor.

The stock market plunged again today after President Donald J. Trump continued to harass Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. The threat of instability if Trump tries to fire Powell, added to the instability already created by Trump’s tariff policies, saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 971.82 points, or 2.48%; the S&P 500 dropped 2.36%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.55%. The dollar hit a three-year low, while the value of gold soared. Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that since Trump took office, the Dow has fallen 13.8%, the S&P 500 is down 15.5%, and the Nasdaq is down 20.5%.

Hannah Erin Lang of the Wall Street Journal reported that “[t]he Trump rout is taking on historic dimensions.” She noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average “is headed for its worst April performance since 1932,” when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments, told Lang: “It’s impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure.”

The Trump administration announced on April 11 that it would withhold from Harvard University $2.2 billion in grants already awarded and a $60 million contract unless Harvard permitted the federal government to control the university’s admissions and intellectual content. Today, Harvard sued the government for violating the First Amendment and overstepping its legal authority under the guise of addressing antisemitism.

The complaint notes the “arbitrary and capricious nature” of the government’s demands, and says, “The government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”

University president Alan Garber explained that the freeze would jeopardize research on “how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.” He continued: “As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes. The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”

Harvard is suing the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, Energy, and Defense, the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, and the leaders of those agencies.

After news broke yesterday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed classified information on a second unsecure Signal chat—this one on on his unsecure personal cell phone—and his former spokesperson told Politico the Pentagon was in “total chaos,” and he fired three of his top aides, media articles today wrote that officials were looking for a new Secretary of Defense.

But Hegseth blamed the media for the exposure of his Signal chats, and Trump stood by Hegseth. According to Dasha Burns, Eli Stokols, and Jake Traylor of Politico, the president doesn’t want to validate the stories about disarray at the Pentagon by firing Hegseth. “He’s doing a great job,” the president told reporters. “It’s just fake news.”

While the visible side of the administration appears to be floundering, new stories suggest that the less visible side—the “Department of Government Efficiency”—has dug into U.S. data in alarming ways.

On April 15, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) arrived at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the DOGE team suggested something else was going on. They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system, turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks, all behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like “what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”

Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log in to the system using a newly created DOGE account with correct username and password, and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of DOGE himself could use the information for his own businesses. “All of this is alarming,” Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. “If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this [breach] to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats.

“If he didn’t know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia,” Jake Braun, former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, told McLaughlin.

McLaughlin noted that the story of what happened at the NLRB is not uncommon. When challenged by judges, DOGE has offered conflicting and vague answers to the question of why it needs access to sensitive information, and has dismissed concerns about cybersecurity and privacy. The administration has slashed through the agencies that protect systems from attack and Trump has signed an executive order urging government departments to “eliminate…information silos” and to share their information.

Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin: “There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that’s meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste and abuse…. The mismatch between what they’re doing and the established, professional way to do what they say they’re doing…that just kind of gives away the store, that they are not actually about finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.”

On April 18, Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that DOGE is building a master database that knits together information from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida. This appears to be designed to find and pressure undocumented immigrants, Kelly and Elliott reported, but the effects of the consolidation of data are not limited to them.

On April 15 the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, asked the acting inspector general at the Department of Labor and the inspector general at the NLRB to investigate “any and all attempts to exfiltrate data and any attempts to cover up their activities.” Two days later, he made a similar request to the acting inspector general for the Social Security Administration.

Connolly wrote: “I am concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware their data is being manipulated in this way.”

On April 17, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica reported that the administration is looking to replace the federal government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay, with a contract awarded to the private company Ramp. Ramp is backed by investment firms tied to Trump and Musk.

While administration officials insist that SmartPay is wasteful, both Republican and Democratic budget experts say that’s wrong, according to Bing and Asher-Schapiro. “SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” former General Services Administration commissioner Sonny Hashmi told the reporters. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems…with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”

“There’s a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here,” said Hashmi. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that’s being solved?”

Cleanup of Orange Vomit on Aisle 3

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 18, 2025

Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) posted a picture of himself with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration says it sent to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador through “administrative error” but can’t get back, and wrote: “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”

While the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, apparently tried to stage a photo that would make it look as if the two men were enjoying a cocktail together, it seems clear that backing down and giving Senator Van Hollen access to Abrego Garcia is a significant shift from Bukele’s previous scorn for those trying to address the crisis of a man legally in the U.S. having been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process.

Bukele might be reassessing the distribution of power in the U.S.

According to Robert Jimison of the New York Times, who traveled to El Salvador with Senator Van Hollen, when a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the [Department of Justice].”

Today a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it “take all available steps” to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “as soon as possible.” Conservative Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote the order. Notably, it began with a compliment to Judge Xinis. “[W]e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he wrote.

Then Wilkinson turned his focus on the Trump administration. “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.

Echoing the liberal justices on the Supreme Court, Wilkinson wrote: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” He noted the reports that the administration is talking about doing just that.

“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present,” he wrote, “and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”

After Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s warning yesterday that Trump’s tariffs will have “significantly larger than anticipated…economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth,” and his statement that the Fed would not cut interest rates immediately as it assesses the situation, Trump today began attacking Powell. Trump wrote on his social media site that Powell is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG.” His missive concluded: “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”

Firing Powell would inject yet more chaos into the economy, and the White House told reporters that Trump’s post “should not be seen as a threat to fire Powell.” Hedge fund founder Spencer Hakimian posted: “Cleanup of orange vomit on Aisle 3.”

There seems to be a change in the air.

Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”

Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”

Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.

That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”

Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”

We have been in a similar moment of shifting coalitions before.

In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers organized to take over the government and create an oligarchy that would make enslavement national. Northerners hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention to southern leaders’ slow accumulation of power and were shocked when Congress bowed to them and in 1854 passed a law that overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept slavery out of the West. The establishment of slavery in the West would mean new slave states there would work with the southern slave states to outvote the North in Congress, and it would only be a question of time until they made slavery national. Soon, the Slave Power would own the country.

Northerners of all parties who disagreed with each other over issues of immigration, finance, and internal improvements—and even over the institution of slavery—came together to stand against the end of American democracy.

Four years later, in 1858, Democrat Stephen Douglas complained that those coming together to oppose the Democrats were a ragtag coalition whose members didn’t agree on much at all. Abraham Lincoln, who by then was speaking for the new party coalescing around that coalition, replied that Douglas “should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Republican pollsters showing Trump “underwater,” as his tax plan will hit poor Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations.

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 15, 2025

A large crowd of protesters calling for the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the Trump administration sent to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador, milled around the courthouse this afternoon where U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis held a hearing on the case.

Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Ben Wittes of Lawfare watched the hearing and explained that Judge Xinis is now building the evidence to determine whether individuals in the administration have acted in contempt of court. The court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., as well as to give updates on what they are doing to make that return happen. To date, Judge Xinis said, “what the record shows is nothing has been done.” She dismissed the administration lawyer’s argument that yesterday’s Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele was part of the effort to “facilitate” the case.

As Bower said, we all know what’s going on, but it’s impossible right now to know which individual is responsible for the stonewalling. For that matter, Bower added, those speaking for the administration usually deny personal knowledge of the case, simply saying they have been made aware of the facts they are representing. Judge Xinis called for two weeks of fact finding to determine if the Trump regime is following her orders that it facilitate his return. The judge told Abrego Garcia’s lawyers that they may conduct four depositions and apply for two more, make up to 15 document requests, and up to 15 interrogatories (these are lists of written questions that must be answered under oath and in writing).

Xinis noted that “every day Mr. Garcia is detained in CECOT is a day of irreparable harm.”

Bower added that the Trump regime is likely drawing this out in part because it permits them to showcase the one part of their agenda that is still polling well. The staged meeting with Bukele enabled officials to get widespread media coverage for the straight-up lie that Abrego Garcia has been found to be a member of the MS-13 gang. As Greg Sargent reported today in the New Republic, this story came from a police officer who, just weeks later, was suspended for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.”

The Oval Office event also enabled White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller both to lie that the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision against the administration was actually in favor of it, and to rerun the litany of heinous crimes he associates with immigrants. The attention to the case has also gotten Miller airtime on news shows, where he repeats those lies.

The administration needs the immigration issue to play to its base, but it’s actually not clear that Americans like Miller’s approach to immigrants. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers that while polls say Americans generally like Trump’s approach to immigration—a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said 49% were in favor—they hate the specifics.

The same Reuters/Ipsos poll says that 82% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, think “the president should obey federal court rulings even if he disagrees with them.” Only 40% think he “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” although 76% of Republicans think he should violate a court order.

The questions specifically about immigration are even starker. Trump promised during the campaign that he would deport undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes, and people like that plan by an 81-point margin. But according to Morris’s crunching of polls on the subject, U.S. adults oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived more than 10 years in the U.S. by a 37-point margin. They oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens by a 36-point margin. By an 18-point margin, they oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who have broken no laws in the U.S. other than immigration laws.

The more visible Abrego Garcia’s case becomes, coupled as it is with the idea that it is a precursor to sending U.S. citizens to CECOT, the less likely it is to be popular. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) got an earful from his constituents on the topic. “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” one man asked, to applause and calls of “Yeah!” from around the room. When Grassley said no, because that wasn’t a power of Congress, the man replied: “The Supreme Court said to bring him back!” and others chimed in, “They’re defying the Constitution.” “Trump don’t care,” the first man said. “If I get an order to pay a ticket for $1,200 and I just say no, does that stand up? Because he’s got an order from the Supreme Court, and he just said no! He just said ‘Screw it!’” “It’s wrong,” someone in the crowd said. The first man concluded: “I’m pissed.”

This evening, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “[f]ollowing his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release, which is why tomorrow I am traveling to El Salvador…to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release. We must urgently continue working to return Kilmar safely home to Maryland.”

Trump’s losing ground on his other major selling point in the 2024 election: that he would improve the economy. He promised to bring prices down “on Day One,” but backed off on that almost immediately. Then an utterly chaotic trade war, tariffs on and off and on again, and a dramatic drop in the bond market as well as the stock market suggesting that the U.S. is losing its status as a safe haven made April an economic disaster. JPMorgan said this week that Trump’s tariffs mean that he is “on track to deliver one of the largest US tax hikes on record,” taxes that will fall on poorer Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations.

Under Biden, Vietnam and the U.S. had strengthened economic ties, but yesterday, China and Vietnam signed dozens of cooperation agreements to combat disruptions caused by Trump’s trade war. Today, Chinese officials stopped accepting Boeing jets or U.S. airline parts. China has also stopped accepting U.S. beef, turning instead to Australia. U.S. beef exports to China have been worth $2.5 billion annually. Last Thursday, Gustaf Kilander of The Independent reported that “fund managers quietly fear Trump doesn’t have a tariff plan and that he ‘might be insane.’”

Meetings in Washington this week did little to calm the situation. Jordan Erb of Bloomberg reported that Maros Sefcovic, the trade chief for the European Union, left yesterday’s trade meeting in Washington unclear about what the U.S. even wants. Erb notes: “The uncertainty around Trump’s chaotic tactics, replete with delays, retreats, new threats and sudden exceptions and trial balloons, hasn’t helped.”

Trump also promised he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine immediately. But it has become obvious that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is using Trump’s desperation to deliver a peace deal to strike harder at Ukraine. Just after a visit to Moscow by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, the Russians struck the Ukrainian city of Sumy during Palm Sunday celebrations, killing at least 35 people and injuring another 119, including children. European leaders called the attack a war crime, Trump said it was likely a “mistake.”

After Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night that U.S. officials are echoing Russian disinformation, Trump called for CBS, the channel on which 60 Minutes appears, to lose its license.

Bloomberg reports that the U.S. refused to support a statement by the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of seven of the countries with the world’s most advanced economies, condemning the Sumy attack. The U.S. said it wouldn’t condemn the mass killing of civilians because it is “working to preserve the space to negotiate peace.”

One of Trump’s key attacks on the Biden administration before the election was his lie that it had shortchanged the North Carolina victims of the devastating Hurricane Helene by sending money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to undocumented immigrants, likely to buy their votes (it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections). In fact, the Biden administration and FEMA had been in the state since the start and approved FEMA’s reimbursement for 100% of disaster relief, particularly emergency protective services and the removal of debris, renewable after six months.

Trump won North Carolina by more than 3 points, but on Saturday the Trump administration denied North Carolina’s application for that extension. “The need in western North Carolina remains immense—people need debris removed, homes rebuilt, and roads restored,” North Carolina governor Josh Stein said. “I am extremely disappointed and urge the President to reconsider FEMA’s bad decision, even for 90 days. Six months later, the people of western North Carolina are working hard to get back on their feet; they need FEMA to help them get the job done.”

Trump’s approval ratings are dropping steadily, with even Republican pollsters showing him “underwater,” meaning that more people disapprove of his presidency than approve of it.

Part of Trump’s fight with the Supreme Court is an attempt to demonstrate dominance as his numbers drop, but institutions, as well as the courts, are standing up to him. With Trump having won concessions from Columbia University and then announced those concessions were only the beginning of his demands, other universities are banding together to defend education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech.

On Monday, Harvard University took a stand against the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract. Harvard is the country’s oldest university, founded in 1636, and in 2024 had an endowment of more than $53 billion.

In a letter noting that the administration’s demands undercut the First Amendment and the university’s legal rights, Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

But Harvard didn’t stop there. It turned its website into a defense of the medical research funded by the federal grants Trump is threatening to withhold. It explains the advances Harvard researchers have made in cancer research, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, obesity and diabetes, infectious diseases, and organs and transplantation. It highlights the researchers, shows labs, and presents readable essays on different scientific breakthroughs.

As the administration slashes through the government with charges of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber has made a stand on what he calls “the promise of higher education.”

“Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he wrote. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.”

State Terror: A brief guide for Americans

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By Timothy Snyder 4/15/2025

Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.

This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.

So let’s begin with language, because language is very important. When the state carries out criminal terror against its own people, it calls them the “criminals” or the the “terrorists.” During the 1930s, this was the normal practice. Looking back, we refer to Stalin’s “Great Terror,” but at the time it was the Stalinists who controlled the language. Today in Berlin stands an important museum called “Topography of Terror”; during the era it documents, it was the Jews and the chosen enemies of the regime who were called “terrorists.” Yesterday in the White House, the Salvadoran president showed the way, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a “terrorist” without any basis whatsoever. The Americans treated him as a criminal, even though he was charged with no crime.

The first part of controlling the language is inverting the meaning: whatever the government does is good, because by definition the its victims are the “criminals” and the “terrorists.” The second part is deterring the press, or anyone else, from challenging the perversion by associating anyone who objects with crime and terror. This was the role Stephen Miller played when he said yesterday in the White House that reporters “want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.”

The control of language is necessary to undermine a legal or constitutional order. Our rule of law begins with notions such as the people and their rights. If politicians shift the framework to “criminals” and “terrorism,” then they are shifting the purpose of the state.

In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution. Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws.

Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by “legal” what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it.

It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse. State terror involves not just the malignant development of state organs of oppression, such as masked men in black vans, but also the withdrawal of the state from its role as a guardian of law. What aspiring tyrants present as “strength,” the ability to terrorize innocent people, rests on what might be seen as a more fundamental weakness, which is the withdrawal of the state from the principle of the rule of law. When we have law, we are all stronger; when we lack law, everyone is weaker except for the very few who can direct the coercive power of the state against the rest of us.

In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness.

The leader principle, or in German Führerprinzip, is the idea that a single individual directly represents the people, and that therefore all of his actions are by definition legal and proper. In discussions in the White House and thereafter, we see this notion being advanced. Trump’s advisors claim that what he is doing is popular. The claim (as in legal filings) that the president is acting from a personal “mandate” from the people has the same problem. Asked on Fox News about the abduction of Americans and their transfer to foreign gulags, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country.” If it comes down to what “he is saying,” then he is a dictator and the U.S. is a dictatorship. Trump spoke of the need to deport people who “hate our country” or who are “stupid.”

The second escape from law is the state of exception. In principle, the Soviet Union was governed by law. Before its greatest exercises of terror, however, the Soviet authorities declared for themselves states of exception. This meant that, on the territory of the Soviet Union itself, it was “legal” (in Bondi’s and in Trump’s sense) to abduct people and send them to concentration camps: authorities claimed that there was some sort of threat, and so protections could be withdrawn and procedures set aside. People could be abducted in black vans and executed or sent to a camp, “legally,” in the sense that the law had been set aside. The notion of the state of exception, important to Soviet practice, was at the center of Nazi theory. As the leading Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt argued, the sovereign is the person who can make an exception. If we are living in normal times, then we think we should be governed by law. But if politicians can use words to make us think that these are exceptional times, then we might accept their lawlessness.

A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one’s own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.

This exploitation of purported stateless zones was the main line of the history of the Holocaust. Under Hitler, the Germans did have concentration camps on their own territory, and they did reduce Jews to second-class citizenship, and they did live under a permanent state of exception. But, in the main, the mass murder of German Jews was achieved by their abduction and forced rendition to sites beyond prewar German territory where, German authorities claimed, there was no law.

A probing of this statelessness approach was on display yesterday, as Trump and his advisors claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of the United States whom US authorities abducted by mistake and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador, was now beyond the reach of American law. This is state terror: the state is presented as “strong” in its oppression of a person, but as weak in its ability to respect or enforce law. The idea that the United States can send you to places from which it cannot bring you back is the theoretical basis for a doctrine of statelessness. Call it the Rubio Doctrine: in the words of the secretary of state, “the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court.” But what that implies is that people forcibly transported beyond the boundaries of the United States can be incarcerated or killed for no reason. That would be “foreign policy.”

Will citizenship save people? Obviously it is better to be a citizen than not. Citizenship provides some protection, at least by comparison with its absence, or with statelessness. The problem, though, is that citizens can find themselves borne along with the rationales applied to non-citizens. If we accept that Trump exercises power because of the Führerprinzip, then what is to stop him from saying that the people want to see the forcible rendition of “homegrowns,” of “really bad people, every bit as bad as the ones coming in.” If citizens accept that we are living in a state of exception, then they are also accepting that they too can be treated exceptionally. Perhaps worst of all, if citizens accept the notion of stateless zones, of law that only functions as the servant of power, they are inviting their own deportation to places from which we will never return.

If citizens endorse the idea that people named by authorities as “criminals” or “terrorists” have no right to due process, then they are accepting that they themselves have no right to due process. It is due process, and due process alone, that allows you to demonstrate that you are a citizen. Without it, the masked men in the black vans can simply claim that you are a foreign terrorist and disappear you.

Horrible though all of this is, it is still state terror in outline, a test of how Americans will react. We can react by seeing all of this for what it is, and naming it by name: incipient state terror. We can react by associating ourselves with others are repressed before we are. Only in solidarity do we affirm law. We can remind the other branches of government that their functions are being taken over by the executive. Citizens cannot do this alone; they have to remind the rest of the government of its constitutional functions.

The president is claiming core congressional responsibilities when he asserts personal control of immigration policy, criminal law, and the funding of forcible renditions. Congress could very easily pass laws, if a few Republicans found the courage. The president is claiming core judicial functions when he defines himself as judge, jury, and, in the case for forcible renditions to El Salvador, de facto executioner. The phrase “contempt of court” took on vivid life in the White House yesterday.

Even these most basic institutions, the ones defined by our Constitution, do not act on their own. To a very sad degree, Supreme Court justices and members of Congress are already complicit in this experiment in state terror. They might find their way back to an America in which their offices have meaning, but only with the help of we the people.

© 2025 Timothy Snyder
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104