Articles about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness, sexual assault and suicide prevention are among the tens of thousands either removed or flagged for removal from Pentagon websites as the department has scrambled to comply with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to scrub “diversity” content from all its platforms.

A database obtained by CNN shows that more than 24,000 articles could be purged, with many gone already. The scrub goes well beyond just the removal of images from the Pentagon’s visual database, known as DVIDS, and includes articles from across more than 1,000 websites hosted by the department.

The Pentagon previously said in a memo last month that it would be removing news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.

Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said in a statement Wednesday that the Defense Department was “pleased by the rapid compliance” across the Pentagon with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.

In 1996, Congress created the "Alien Terrorist Removal Court" to provide expedited (and secrecy-protecting) procedures for removing non-citizen terrorism suspects based on classified information.

And yet, even *that* statute, which has never been used, requires judicial review.

I'm trying to think of a coherent defense for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging the public to buy a specific stock tied to the president's top campaign donor.

Nothing is coming to mind

At a recent White House event, Donald Trump told reporters that he hoped the stock price for Elon Musk’s Tesla would go up, but the president did not explicitly urge the public to purchase shares in the company.

A member of the Republican’s Cabinet, however, was far more direct. As The New York Times noted:

The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, followed President Trump by supporting Elon Musk, urging people to buy shares in Tesla, Musk’s car company. ‘It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again,’ Lutnick said Wednesday on Fox News. ... Tesla’s stock price has plummeted in the last two months as it faces backlash, including protests and vandalism, over Musk’s role in the Trump administration.

The Cabinet secretary did not appear to be kidding.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:t46sqvutibvsmjgwn6r6izve/post/3lkrjpgi3bc2w
https://x.com/yashar/status/1902528110064791821

I’m mindful that breaches of norms and ethical limits have become routine over the last two months, but this was an egregious display, even by 2025 standards.

Right off the bat, let’s note that it’s not the commerce secretary’s job to give the public investment advice. But given the relevant circumstances, that’s where the problems start, not where they end. Making matters far worse, Lutnick — who was confirmed by the Senate and holds an important position of public trust — took it upon himself to urge a national television audience to buy a specific stock tied to the sitting president’s top campaign donor.....

If there’s a benign defense for all of this, I can’t think of it.

As Trump tries to use the Alien Enemies Act, foundational questions go unanswered.
The Trump administration has not earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to flying alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.

The core elements of the story are relatively straightforward. The Trump administration, eager to advance the president’s deportation agenda, announced that it had used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a war measure with a tragically ugly history — to fly alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. The whole thing was filmed as part of a camera-ready spectacle......

But while that controversy is adjudicated, and questions about a possible constitutional crisis grow louder, there are related concerns about the White House’s case at a foundational level. The New York Times reported:



Those inclined to take the White House’s claims at face value have been presented with a simple story: The administration successfully rounded up immigrant members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, put them on a plane, and sent them to a prison in El Salvador, where local officials have agreed to take these gang members off our hands for a price......

Vice President JD Vance, amplifying an Axios report on the Trump administration allegedly violating a court order on the Alien Enemies Act, wrote online this week, “There were violent criminals and rapists in our country. Democrats fought to keep them here. President Trump deported them.”

It’s very easy to imagine members of the Republican base nodding along in agreement when reading missives like these, but the vice president’s demagoguery rings hollow: Neither Vance nor any of his colleagues have proven — to anyone — that the deportees were violent criminals and rapists, and no Democrats have "fought to keep them" in the United States.

By all appearances, the White House appears to be operating under the assumption that Trump and his team have earned the benefit of the doubt. Given the president’s staggering record of brazen lies and deceptions, and Trump's Justice Department clinging to secrecy, that assumption is plainly ridiculous.

As GOP lawmakers face angry voters, Trump doubles down on another unpopular policy

The American people are against Putin. The American president is very much for him. That should be unsustainable in a democracy.

But for all the different ways that Trump and Musk — his top campaign donor and now one of his top advisers — are terrifying and turning off their own voters, there’s one element of what the president is doing that is so radically out of step with the American people that I don’t think it’s sustainable in normal democratic terms.

According to a new NBC News poll, 61% of Americans say they sympathize more with Ukraine, while only 2% say they sympathize with Russia. When those same Americans were asked where they believe Trump’s sympathies lie, 49% said Russia and just 8% said Ukraine. Overall, Trump is underwater 13 points on his handling of the war between Russia and Ukraine.

When asked about their view on Russia generally, the proportion of Americans who view the country positively is 6%. The proportion of those who view Russia negatively, according to the poll, is 68%. Only 3% of Americans have a positive view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, while 84% have a negative view.

Those are the views of the American people. Keep that in mind when you consider Trump’s phone call with Putin this week. Amid all the other chaos Trump has been wreaking on our government — the administration’s crackdown on Social Security, which an internal memo says could force up to 85,000 retired and disabled Americans to physically go in person to Social Security offices every week; the disaster scene at Food and Drug Administration headquarters, where they told 10,000 people to show up at an office that has 6,000 parking places and no chairs and limited office supplies; and the news that the administration fired hundreds of operators and engineers servicing hydroelectric dams in 17 states — amid all of that chaos, the president chose to spend over two hours Tuesday on the phone with Putin. A man who, again, has a 3% approval rating with the American people.......

When that NBC News poll came out this week, pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the survey along with GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, talked about those Putin and Russia numbers, noting how far apart the American people are from their president on this one, honestly bizarre issue.

“I cannot recall a moment in history when American public opinion and voters’ views of a president, as to which country they are more aligned with, have been more in conflict with each other,” he said.

The American people are against Putin. The American president is very much for him. This, amid everything else, is a test for us — because that should be unsustainable in a democracy.

An executive facing federal bribery charges fired his lawyers at Paul Weiss days after President Donald Trump targeted the firm in an executive order.

Steven Schwartz cut ties with his lawyers ahead of trial in the Justice Department’s criminal case against him, Paul Weiss told a federal court in New Jersey Wednesday. He cited Trump’s March 14 order against the firm, threatening to scrap government contracts for Paul Weiss clients and suspending lawyers’ security clearances.

“Mr. Schwartz is concerned that the firm’s continued representation of him may negatively affect his ability to obtain a favorable review of his case, or, due to the Executive Order, otherwise create potential conflicts of interest as between Mr. Schwartz and Paul, Weiss, that Mr. Schwartz is not prepared to waive,” the lawyers said in a court filing. “Regardless of whether or not the government is permitted to engage with Paul, Weiss in the ongoing review, Mr. Schwartz is concerned that Paul, Weiss’s ongoing involvement in the matter could in and of itself prejudice the review of his case.”

Trump has launched attacks on several of the nation’s biggest law firms in recent weeks. He went after Paul Weiss because of its ties to Mark Pomerantz, a former partner who led a Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Trump, and the firm’s pro bono work on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

The executive order also authorized agencies to limit Paul Weiss employees’ access to federal buildings. It came just two days after a federal judge blocked a similar order against Seattle-founded law firm Perkins Coie.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer defended federal judges and backed up Chief Justice John Roberts’s rare public statement this week after President Trump took aim at the judiciary.

“You decide what you think is correct in the law. Period,” Breyer told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday. “You don’t want a judge to be looking over his shoulder to public opinion.”

Breyer, 86, retired from the court in 2022, paving the way for then-President Biden to appoint Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He recently released a book about the Constitution and his approach to handling decisions, but his CNN interview coincided with Trump’s latest clash with a judge as he tests the limits of his authority early in his second term......

Breyer said Roberts’s memo was “informative and educational” because most of the public isn’t immersed in the minutia of the judiciary.

“He’s trying to explain to the people of this country how the legal system works and how it doesn’t work,” Breyer said. “It doesn’t work by impeaching a judge because you don’t like his decision.”

In response to a judge blocking President Donald Trump’s order banning transgender people from military service, Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform: “This is a judicial coup. We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”

Putting aside the subjective assessment that rulings against the Trump administration constitute a “judicial coup,” the impeaching body is the House of Representatives. If a House majority votes for impeachment, then the matter moves to the Senate, where two-thirds of senators — that would be 67, not 60 — are required to vote for conviction (which, for example, they declined to do for both of Trump’s impeachments in his first term).

Musk’s writing on Wednesday follows Chief Justice John Roberts’ rare public statement a day earlier that rebuked the notion of impeaching judges based on disagreement with their rulings. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said.

It’s not the first time that Musk’s public pronouncements have suggested that the powerful government employee and world’s richest person could benefit from a better understanding of basic government functions. Last month, for example, he proposed “that the worst 1% of appointed judges, as determined by elected bodies, be fired every year.” That proposal was in tension with the Constitution’s provision that federal judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” which has been taken to mean life tenure.

Among the many problems with Trump firing the FTC's Democratic members:

This was a legally dubious power-grab launched by a White House that's indifferent to both the rule of law and the existence of independent federal agencies.

Almost immediately after returning to power, Donald Trump and his administration got to work firing thousands of federal employees as part of a larger effort to dismantle much of the federal government. Many of these layoffs were legally dubious, which is one of the key reasons judges keep telling the White House to bring back officials who were ousted unjustly.

The Republican president, however, appears undeterred. Reuters reported:

President Donald Trump fired two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, in another major test of the independence of regulatory agencies. A White House official confirmed the firings of Democratic Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter after they were first reported by Reuters, but had no additional comment.

Part of what makes developments like these important is the real-world impact the move will have. “By illegally firing two senate-confirmed Democratic commissioners, Trump has given a green light to businesses across the country to gouge consumers and skyrocket prices for American families,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. The New York Democrat added, “Make no mistake about it: this decision will directly lead to higher prices for Americans.”......

The Times added that Trump and his team planned to “centralize more power in the Oval Office ... increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

The 2023 article specifically referenced the Federal Trade Commission as an independent agency that Trump and the Project 2025 authors wanted to bring “under direct presidential control.”

Nearly two years later, we now know how serious Team Trump was, and is, about this goal. Indeed, we’ve effectively reached the point at which the White House, for all intents and purposes, hardly recognizes any governmental entity as independent.

Even if one were inclined to shrug their shoulders about the fate of a couple of FTC commissioners, moves like these should be seen for what they are: power grabs from a president who appears increasingly indifferent to institutional limits and the rule of law.