What did Donald Trump do today?

He took the day off to play armchair architect and art critic.

Most or possibly all of Trump's work day was taken up with a visit to the Kennedy Center, the performing arts organization that Trump decreed himself the chair of after firing much of its board. He presided over a two-hour meeting of his new hand-selected board and posed for pictures in the presidential box, a space he never visited during his first term.

After a tour of the grounds, Trump declared that the Center was "in tremendous disrepair" and criticized the presence of "underground rooms" he didn't see the point of. (Like any large-scale performance space, the Kennedy Center has rehearsal areas, practice rooms, classrooms, and administrative space.) 

This is what the Kennedy Center looks like, including some of its "underground rooms:"

That said, Trump does know something about buildings in disrepair. During his first term, a man died in a fire at Trump Tower because the building lacked a sprinkler system and Trump had fought all attempts by the city to require him to install one. He deliberately allowed other rental properties he owned to fall into disrepair in an attempt to dislodge rent-stabilized tenants, allowing rats to proliferate and heating systems to fail in the middle of winter.

Artists have been leaving the Center in droves, dropping out of planned appearances in protests. Audiences aren't happy either: ticket sales have plummeted, donations have dried up, and Vice-President JD Vance was loudly booed when he showed up for a National Symphony Orchestra concert earlier this week.

Trump also signaled that he'd like to host the annual Kennedy Center Honors, and that he hoped to present an award to George Herman Ruth—better known by his nickname Babe, the New York Yankees slugger who died in 1948.

Why does this matter?

• The President of the United States has better things to do with his time.

• Believing you're an expert in everything is not a sign of good mental health.

• There's creative thinking, and then there's giving an arts award to a baseball player who retired in 1935.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He openly defied court orders—and, through surrogates, mocked the courts that issued them.

Yesterday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order forbidding Trump from exercising his dubious authority to singlehandedly deport or detain people under a 1798 law. In the course of hearings on the matter, District Court Judge James Boasberg learned that some people had been hurriedly loaded onto planes, and his order granting the TRO specifically ordered the government to recall any such planes. 

Judge Boasberg emphasized the urgency in his oral instructions, telling Trump administration lawers to inform ICE immediately that "any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. However that's accomplished, turning around the plane, or not embarking anyone on the plane. …This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately."

Today, the Trump administration openly admitted that it had disregarded the order, while claiming at the same time that it hadn't—just that it had decided the order didn't apply because, by the time it was formally communicated, the people subject to it were over international waters. White House spokesperson Karolina Leavitt then pivoted to an assurance that the Trump administration would win any such case at the Supreme Court, where Trump himself has appointed a third of the justices.

As legal experts immediately pointed out, that does not change the fact that the courts have jurisdiction over the actions of the government. The executive branch cannot ignore the laws and constitution just by moving its conduct offshore. Even more obviously, the executive branch doesn't get to overrule a judicial order simply because, in its own opinion, the order doesn't apply.

The rest of the administration went out of its way to celebrate the defiance of Boasberg's order. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted a social media post mocking the order by the right-wing president of El Salvador, and White House communications director Stephen Cheung recirculated it to reporters.

The Washington Post reported Sunday night that some 200 of those deportees, allegedly members of a Venezuelan gang, would spend the next year doing forced labor in an El Salvadoran prison, with the United States paying El Salvador. The Trump White House has not shown that they have been convicted or even accused of crimes in the United States (or El Salvador or Venezuela), which is the only circumstance under which forced labor is permitted since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. 

Meanwhile, a second judge in an unrelated case ordered the Trump administration to explain why it had "willfully disobeyed" his order regarding the deportation of a Boston physician with a lawful work visa.

In many recent cases, the Trump administration has pointedly refrained from offering any proof or allegations of bad conduct that would allow for deportation or arrest under the law. In some of them, that is almost certainly because there is no such allegation to be made. But Trump seems eager to assert that he, and not courts or Congress or the Constitution that gives Congress the power to make laws regarding immigration, is the only authority that matters.

Trump, who has recently floated the idea of selling American citizenship to the highest bidder, has some personal connection with the intricacies of immigration law. He's twice married women who appear to have broken immigration law en route to obtaining citizenship through him, and bent the rules to benefit his most recent set of in-laws who would otherwise be ineligible for citizenship.

Why does this matter?

• There is literally nothing in Trump's theory of his powers that would prevent him from deporting anyone to an El Salvadoran slave labor camp at taxpayer expense.
  
  
• No matter how many times he claims otherwise, the president is not a king.

• Claiming the power to expel "undesirables" without due process or put them in internment camps is textbook authoritarianism.

• Democracy is based on the rule of law—and respect for the law—not the personal desires or ambitions of one person.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried (and failed) to give himself power to unilaterally deport anyone for any reason.

Trump attempted to deport five Venezuelan nationals today, reportedly part of a much larger group, on the allegation that they were somehow connected to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. In a proclamation issued today, Trump declared that the gang was "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States." This was an attempt to invoke the only part of the Alien and Sedition Acts still on the books—the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Under the 227-year-old statute, written before there was a modern legal concept of citizenship or clearly established national borders for the United States, a president can detain or deport noncitizens when Congress has declared war, or when "any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States." Its most famous application came as part of the legal framework allowing for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. 

The law has never been invoked in peacetime, in part because the President has no inherent authority to unilaterally decide who may enter or remain in the United States. That power is given by the Constitution to Congress, which passes laws establishing an orderly and legal framework and empowers the executive branch to enforce only those laws.

As legal scholars were quick to point out today, if Trump's interpretation held, then he could deport any person of any immigration status on a whim simply by claiming they were part of a phony "invasion." The 1798 law does not require those detained or deported to have committed crimes, or entered the country illegally, or to have acted in any way against the United States. 

The Trump administration has offered no evidence that the targeted people are members of any gang, or that they have committed any crimes or status violations. If they had, it would be a routine matter to deport them using normal legal channels.

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport anyone for 14 days, finding that those targeted were likely to succeed in a legal challenge to their deportations. 

During a break in the hearing on the order today, the Trump administration apparently ordered planes carrying deportees to take off in an attempt to make the restraining order moot—in spite of the fact that the people involved will remain in the government's custody, meaning they posed no possible threat. The order that was issued required any such planes in the air to turn back.

Why does this matter?

• An executive branch that can't be trusted to respect the authority of the courts is a dictatorship in all but name.

• Presidents are not kings.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was illegal to criticize him.

Trump spoke at the Justice Department today. Presidents normally never do this, to maintain the separation of politics from prosecutorial decisions, and certainly not to give a campaign speech, which was essentially what Trump did.

In a meandering, stream-of-consciousness speech in which he frequently slurred or stumbled over words, Trump once again aired his grievances against the law enforcement and prosecutors who investigated the crimes for which he was indicted prior to being re-elected. (Most if not all of them have resigned or been fired.) Trump singled out for praise the one judge, his own appointee Aileen Cannon, who regularly and sometimes inexplicably sided with his defense team in the four separate criminal trials he was facing. 

He also said this, referring to two of the mainstream news channels he is not currently suing:

I believe that CNN and [MSNBC], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.

In the United States of America, it's not illegal to "write bad about" the president, or any other elected official.

 

Why does this matter?

• No, really: it is not illegal to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for individuals to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for corporate entities to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for permanent residents to criticize the president.

• It is not illegal for foreign diplomats to criticize the president.

• Criminalizing dissent is the foundation of every dictatorship.

• No one this emotionally fragile can handle the job of being president.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He was forced to rehire illegally fired workers, while his administration compared them unfavorably to Adolf Hitler.

Today, two federal judges in separate cases ordered the rehiring of thousands of workers unlawfully fired during Trump's attempt to rapidly purge the government of as much of its workforce as possible.

In both cases, the judges found what had already been widely reported—that the Trump administration lied about firing workers based on their performance. 

The permanence of the rehiring is not yet clear, nor is it known how many of the affected workers will be able to return. The disruption to the lives of workers and their families caused by Trump's summary firings has been enormous. 

Elsewhere today, Elon Musk—the person Trump entrusted with carrying out those mass purges—retweeted a post that said that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao weren't responsible for the murders they ordered, but "public sector workers" were.

Why does this matter?

• American federal workers are not the ones who invite comparisons with Nazis.

• It's wrong to destroy Americans' livelihoods for no reason.

• This might not happen in a presidential administration where anybody had ever had to work for a living.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He slandered fired federal workers.

Asked today if he took responsibility for the massive job losses his indiscriminate firing of federal employees has caused, Trump retorted that the American workers he fired weren't really workers. "Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work." He added that he was "keeping the best people" in what remained of the federal workforce.

To be clear: the charge that federal workers weren't working is a lie. Some were working remotely because they had no offices to return to after Trump canceled leases and tried to sell off government buildings. 

In fact, Trump is not firing people based on performance at all, but simply who lacks civil service protection by virtue of being in a new job within the civil service. These "probationary" jobs are not just for employees who entered the federal workforce for the first time in the past few years, but also include people with decades of experience who had recently been promoted to senior leadership roles.

The firings have been so chaotic and, in many cases, so unlawful that either the courts or the Trump administration itself have been forced to scramble to try to undo firings to avoid catastrophe. A small portion of the federal workers who were summarily fired and then rushed back to work include those responsible for keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal safe, calibrating x-ray machines and other medical devices, containing the current bird flu epidemic, and handing benefits for first responders with chronic health conditions because of their service after September 11th.

Trump, whose lackluster management of the billion-dollar real estate fortune he inherited meant that his business underperformed the overall economy during the biggest real estate boom in the history of New York City, addressed reporters after taking his sixth golf vacation in seven weeks on the taxpayer dime.

 

Why does this matter?

• A billionaire trust-fund baby saying that Americans in civil service jobs don't do work is beyond the pale even for Trump.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was illegal not to buy things. UPDATE: He said it was terrorism not to buy things.

In a post he made at 1:14 AM, Washington time, to his boutique social network, Trump complained that consumers were "illegally and collusively" refusing to buy Teslas to spite Elon Musk.

It is not illegal to not buy things.

If Trump is worried that consumers are punishing Musk for the job he's doing as the person to whom Trump has delegated apparently unlimited executive authority, he has good reason. Tesla's stock, the main bulwark of Musk's standing as the richest person in the world, took an absolute beating on Monday. Sales are plummeting, Americans are exercising their freedom of speech by protesting outside of Tesla dealerships, and Musk himself—who bought and paid for a reputation as an eccentric genius—has become even more polarizing than Trump, and even less popular.

One possible explanation for Trump's claim that it's illegal not to buy a Musk product is that Musk told him it was, and Trump believed him. Musk has made a similar claim about ads on Twitter, arguing that if companies had bought them before he bought Twitter, they're legally obliged to continue buying them indefinitely, no matter what else happens. Not long after buying the company and firing most of the content moderation staff in the name of "free speech," advertisers began pulling out in droves for fear that their product would be associated with, for example, posts written by out-and-proud Nazis. He publicly told advertisers to "go fuck yourself"—then sued them for not doing business with him.

At a White House press conference later in the day, where he appeared in front of a lineup of Tesla models with Musk, Trump labeled people who choose not to buy Teslas "domestic terrorists."

REPORTER: …Some say they should be labeled domestic terrorists—

TRUMP: I will do that. I'll do it. I'm gonna stop them. We catch anybody doing it—because they're harming a great American company. …Those people are gonna go through a lotta problems.

Musk also provided Trump with a sales pitch to read, complete with pricing information, which Trump did. Shortly afterwards, it was leaked that Musk will make a $100 million contribution to Trump's political action committee.

Why does this matter?

• Again: it is not illegal to not buy things.

• It is not terrorism to not buy things.

• Freedom of speech also means it is not illegal to encourage other people not to buy things.

• It's bad if the President of the United States can be made to read ad copy on demand for his political backers.

• People who don't want their politics to affect their business shouldn't mix the two.

• Asking Americans who may have lost months or years from their retirement savings over the past two days to feel sympathy for the financial plight of the world's richest person might be a bit much.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He confirmed that he'd ordered the arrest and deportation of a lawful permanent resident for holding political beliefs he doesn't like.

Yesterday, immigration officials arrested Mahmoud Khalil in New York and began attempting to have him deported. Khalil has a green card, meaning he is a legal permanent resident of the United States. Under all but the most extraordinary circumstances, he cannot be deported, and certainly not without extensive legal processes.

Khalil is the husband of an American citizen who is pregnant with his child. His family were not told where he was after his arrest, and were forced to resort to the extraordinary legal remedy of a habeas petition. It was eventually determined that he had been sent to a prison in Louisiana—but only after his lawyers had begun to ask about his whereabouts.

Today, possibly in an attempt to cover up the fact that Khalil had been arrested mistakenly on a false tip that he was overstaying a student visa, Trump announced in a post on his boutique social media site that ICE had "proudly" arrested Khalil, whom he called a "Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student." Trump also said that "This is the first arrest of many to come."

In a separate release tauntingly titled "Shalom Mahmoud," the White House claimed that Khalil's leadership of anti-genocide protests on Columbia's campus meant he was "aligned with Hamas." Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that the Trump administration would "be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported."

Under the First Amendment, it is not a crime to "be aligned with" Hamas or anyone else—not even, for example, neo-Nazis or white supremacist militias. More to the point, Trump says that kind of thing about anyone who disagrees with him. He said that Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, was a "proud member of Hamas" because Schumer opposed Trump's ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza.

A federal judge blocked the deportation order today. Khalil remains in custody but has not been charged with any crime. A huge crowd formed at the site of his arrest today, protesting his treatment. 

Trump has not commented on whether the people protesting in support of Khalil's civil and constitutional rights were also subject to arrest and deportation for their political "alignment."

Why does this matter?

• Saying things the president doesn't like isn't a crime or a deportable offense, because the president is not a king.

• Being arrested without charge for political speech the ruler finds threatening is what happens in a dictatorship.

• Nobody really thinks this is about Trump's deep and abiding commitment to fighting anti-semitism.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He shrugged at the prospect of a recession that will definitely not threaten him.

Appearing on Fox News this morning, Trump brushed off the suggestion that his policies were rapidly pushing the United States towards a recession, but didn't exactly deny it: "I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing. And there are always periods of, it takes a little time."

A "transition" away from a years-long period of economic growth, low inflation, and low unemployment is called a recession. The Federal Reserve is already warning that the American economy will contract in the coming quarter.

The US stock markets have given up all the gains since Trump's election, collapsing back to earth on fears of inflation and trade barriers, after rising on the expectation that Trump would slash corporate taxes.

Addressing this on Fox News this morning, Trump boasted that interest rates were down. He appears to be confusing the Federal Reserve rate with the yield on Treasury notes, which is down sharply in the past month—because that is what happens when investors flee from investment in businesses and park their money in government securities instead. 

Mortgage rates are down, too, and Trump has taken "credit" for that recently, but that's not good news either: banks are finding it harder to make loans because Americans are wary of making big purchases like a house.

Trump's estimated net worth is in the vicinity of ten billion dollars, which should leave him able to weather any recession somewhat more comfortably than most Americans.

Why does this matter?

• Recessions are bad and this shouldn't have to be explained to the President of the United States.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to bury a story about how people don't like Elon Musk.

The New York Times reported on Friday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had gotten into a shouting match with Elon Musk on Thursday. That meeting, which took place in private, had been scheduled as Trump tried to contain the fallout from his Cabinet meeting earlier in the week, at which Musk—dressed in a baseball cap and T-shirt—physically loomed over Trump and other officials and garnered the lion's share of press coverage.

The initial readout of the Thursday meeting was that Trump was taking some tentative steps to rein in Musk's control over the executive branch, telling cabinet secretaries that they—and not Musk—were ultimately in charge of deciding which federal employees could be fired as part of Trump's attempted purge of the civil service. But Trump immediately undercut that by saying that if the secretaries wouldn't do it, Musk would.

Rubio is not the first Trump official to have a problem with Musk's inexplicable dominance over Trump's White House. Even from the first days of the transition, Trump staffers have grumbled that Musk was trying to be "co-President," and that was before the full extent of the authority Trump was willing to let him exercise. 

In a post to his boutique social media site today, Trump called the report of Rubio's anger "FAKE NEWS" and said that "ELON AND MARCO HAVE A GREAT RELATIONSHIP!"

Trump watched the fight at the Thursday meeting, and ultimately intervened to stop it. But it's entirely possible that Trump now believes that Musk and Rubio "have a great relationship," if one or both of them told him they did. Much of his first term was marked by court intrigue between various factions who believed, not without justification, that Trump would simply do whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Staff manipulate him in any number of ways—showing him soothing positive news coverage on demand, concealing bad news to avoid a temper tantrum, or strategically leaking information to provoke a response from him. 

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if a president can be this easily manipulated.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to cheat Americans on their student loans.

The Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness Program was created during the George W. Bush administration to help Americans who went into jobs in the public or non-profit sectors. These jobs, which often provide critical local services like health care, counseling, drug rehabilitation, and education, often pay less than private sector work. Participants who worked in a qualifying job and made payments on the loan for ten years are eligible to have the rest of their loans forgiven.

During his first term, Trump effectively shut down the program through deliberate neglect, slow-walking applications so much that only 7,000 applications were processed in four years. The Biden Administration restored the program.

Today, Trump signed an executive order that, if upheld, would cancel it again—but this time explicitly for employees of organizations he deems "illegal." Neither Trump nor his staff would say what that meant, except that it had something to do with "improper activities" around immigration and "terrorism." 

This appears to mean that Trump will try to exclude people who work for organizations that oppose his immigration policy. That would include virtually every mainstream religious organization in the country, all of the many charities run by those religious groups, the American Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and city and state governments representing more than half of the country.

Why does this matter?

• It's wrong to screw over teachers and nurses who played by the rules of a program established almost 20 years ago.

• Presidents don't get to decide whether American citizens are entitled to the benefits the law provides for.

• Using power to punish citizens you imagine are your enemies is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to make it harder to sue his adminstration.

Trump has been in office for just over six weeks, but it is already almost impossible to keep track of the number of lawsuits filed against his administration. Most of these have to do with the extraordinary new powers Trump is trying to grant to himself to ignore budgetary laws, punish people he thinks are his enemies, redefine words in the Constitution, fire government workers without due process, or interfere in state and local government.

Even more remarkable than the number of lawsuits is how many have resulted in victories for the plaintiffs. Few of these cases are fully resolved, but judges have issued a steady stream of defeats for Trump in the form of restraining orders or emergency orders to comply with existing law. (Whether or not Trump is actually obeying these orders is another question.) Judges have issued utterly scathing rulings about Trump's illegal overreaches, in some cases bluntly accusing him of trying to take on the role of a king. 

The plaintiffs in these cases must pay for court fees and legal representation as they go, and may not be reimbursed for their legal costs even when they win. 

Today, the Trump administration told its lawyers to invoke a rarely-used federal court rule that would force plaintiffs to post an additional bond up front. The memo said that Americans who took the Trump administration to court to defend their rights were wasting its time with "frivolous" matters and that their "antics" and "misrepresentations" were somehow endangering the country. 

Judges will still need to grant the motion, which they are not obliged to do, and could set token amounts that would not deter Americans from holding the Trump administration to the law. But legal experts agreed that even the threat might be enough to deter plaintiffs who lacked the effectively infinite resources of the federal government from trying.

Why does this matter?

• An administration that obeys the laws of the United States and respects its courts has nothing to fear from the legal process.

• American citizens have a right to defend their rights in court, even if the president doesn't want them to.

• The president is not a king, and it shouldn't take a federal judge to point that out.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He confused Canada with Ukraine.

Trump posted this to his boutique social media site this afternoon:

Justin Trudeau, of Canada, called me to ask what could be done about Tariffs. I told him that many people have died from Fentanyl that came through the Borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped. He said that it’s gotten better, but I said, “That’s not good enough.” The call ended in a “somewhat” friendly manner! He was unable to tell me when the Canadian Election is taking place, which made me curious, like, what’s going on here? I then realized he is trying to use this issue to stay in power. Good luck Justin!

The slightly more charitable interpretation of Trump's claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau couldn't give him a date for the Canadian election is that the date has not been set yet, except that it will take place no later than October 20 of this year. This is normal for a parliamentary system like Canada. However, Trudeau has no power to delay the election past October 20, and has already resigned as leader of his party, effective later this month. 

The more likely and more troubling explanation is that Trump was conflating the upcoming Canadian elections with his talking point about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy being a "dictator." Ukraine is under martial law as a result of the Russian invasion, and cannot hold elections. The Ukrainian Parliament recently passed a resolution by a vote of 286-0 affirming the legitimacy of Zelenskyy's presidency while the emergency lasts. 

Trump himself was indicted for, and remains vulnerable to, criminal charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Virtually no fentanyl is smuggled across the Canadian border into the United States, although Trump has made clear he thinks that a return to the tariff-funded Gilded Age government would be a good thing. However, he doesn't appear to have the courage of his convictions: it took less than one day of stock market losses and tv spots with furious business owners for him to hastily backtrack on his Mexico and Canada tariff threats for the second time in a month.

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if the president can't remember which world leader he's talking to.

• People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

• Uncertainty, like whether goods will cost 25% more tomorrow, is bad for the markets.

UPDATE, March 5: Less than a day later, all 443 properties had been pulled from the site. Bloomberg News notes that one of the properties mentioned was "a northern Virginia campus that doesn’t appear in federal property records but has long been associated with the Central Intelligence Agency." The Trump administration continues to refuse to comment, either on the notice or the retraction.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He put more than 443 federal properties, some of them irreplaceable, on the market.

Today, the General Services Administration put 443 federal properties up for sale, including the Washington headquarters of the FBI and the Department of Justice, but also other purpose-built facilities across the country. They range from enormous office buildings to specialized facilities like a functionally irreplaceable nuclear waste treatment plant. 

It's not clear how much money the properties could raise, assuming they could be sold at all, but it's telling that the Trump administration cited "$430 million in [annual] operating costs." This is not a lot of money: the federal government takes in that much revenue about every 51 minutes.

Neither Trump nor anyone in his administration has offered any explanation for the move, to include where the employees who use those buildings would go. The Trump administration's return-to-office mandate has already produced some absurd results, with workers hired remotely "returning" to offices with no desks or electricity, and in some cases, no office left to return to.

If there is a plan, it's most likely that Trump intends to enter into a leaseback scheme, where private investors buy the buildings at pennies on the dollar and then lease them back to the federal government. This would, in effect, turn buildings that were costing the federal government nothing into a giant perpetual drain on the federal budget.

It's common for struggling, cash-poor businesses to enter into this kind of arrangement as a way to create cash flow and stave off bankruptcy. Troubled restaurant chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden, and the now-bankrupt Sears chain of department stores are familiar examples. That logic doesn't apply to the federal government.

This isn't the first time that Trump, who has owned many buildings but made money on very few of them, has used government real estate for his own profit. In 2012, the General Services Administration approved a plan to relocate the FBI to new custom facility while turning the site of the current J. Edgar Hoover Building into newly-built mixed commercial and residential space. But that would have brought competition to what was then the Trump International Hotel—which occupied the Old Post Office Building, of which Trump was simultaneously the tenant and landlord. Trump personally intervened to kill the project.

Why does this matter?

• One way to make government more "efficient" is to not hold a fire sale for the buildings where government employees work.

• A president who was familiar with how real estate markets work would probably try to avoid flooding the market with hundreds of properties all at once, driving down prices.

• It's bad to loot the government for the sake of private interests.

• Accidentally outing your secret CIA facility like this is pretty embarrassing.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He told farmers they were planting the wrong crops.

Trump tried to spin his on-again, off-again tariffs on the United States' largest trading partners this way in a post to his boutique social media platform:

There's no real mystery as to what will happen if retaliatory tariffs deprive American farmers of the natural market for their products, because it happened already in Trump's first term. Crop prices will drop, which will cause farms to fail. Businesses that rely on farms will fail too, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Massive bailouts will be required to prop up the entire agriculture sector. There was even a rash of suicides as a result of farm bankruptcies the last time Trump tried this.

Trump's post implies that farmers can simply sell the same products to domestic customers. This is, to put it gently, absurd. American farmers already sell their products in the United States, but almost $200 billion worth of products are grown with the export market in mind. Trying to flood the domestic market with these crops on short notice would force farms to sell at massive losses and wreck the agricultural sector outright. American producers could try to absorb the cost of retaliatory tariffs instead, but at 25% that would still be unsurvivable for many farmers.

It's not clear if Trump understands that, for example, Americans can't really serve cattle feed at the dinner table. Changing the crops a given farm produces takes years of advance planning and infrastructure investment, if it can be done at all. 

Even worse for American farmers, foreign producers will not face the same problems. Because the United States under Trump is starting a trade war with all four of its largest trading partners at the same time, there will be trade barriers against American farmers in all directions simultaneously. But Chinese agricultural producers, for example, will only be restricted in one market, and will find it easier to reach buyers in other countries (including Canada, Mexico and the European Union). 

Likewise, American consumers will see grocery prices go up more than consumers in countries that are not inviting tariffs from all their major trade partners. (Tariffs are taxes and are ultimately paid for by consumers in the form of higher retail prices.)

In other words, Trump is telling American farmers that they have already committed to planting the wrong crops, and that it will be their fault if they can't "have fun" with the resulting chaos. 

Why does this matter?

• When doing something once ended in disaster, it's really stupid to try it again but on an even bigger scale.

• Voters who eat food may not want Trump screwing up the food supply chain again.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got a good performance review, though not from the American people.

One of the effects of Trump's bizarre attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week was to strengthen the resolve of the world's remaining democracies, particularly in Europe, to support Ukraine against the Putin regime in Russia. Today, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced that the UK would commit to providing "boots on the ground, and planes in the air"—a substantial escalation from the indirect military and financial aid that European countries have been providing up to this point.

Russia, for its part, believes that Trump is "rapidly changing all foreign policy" obligations in a way that "largely aligns with [Russia's] vision," according to a government spokesperson speaking today on Russian state television. Finishing the war on favorable terms is a high priority for the Putin regime, but so is driving a wedge between the United States and its military allies, which Trump's actions are helping with.

A new poll released today indicate that Americans agree with the Russian government about Trump's allegiances—which is not to say they approve. Americans support Ukraine over Russia by a 13-to-1 margin. But the same poll shows that four times as many Americans believe that Trump favors Russia over Ukraine.

There has never been a situation in American history where the president and the public at large have been on opposite sides of a conflict. Even in situations where American involvement in a conflict became unpopular, such as the Vietnam War, there was never any real disagreement about which side the United States was aligned with.

Trump asked for and received help from the Putin regime to influence the 2016 election, and was impeached during his first term for withholding military aid to Ukraine as part of a scheme to force the Zelenskyy government to attack his rival for the presidency, Joe Biden.

Why does this matter?

• A president who can't submit himself to the overwhelming will of the American people shouldn't be in office.

• Doing what a hostile foreign power wants, and none of your allies do, is generally a bad idea.

• There's no difference between a president who is captive to the will of an enemy nation and one who simply acts like he is.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made a federal case out of a rant about baseball.

Today, Trump declared that he would pardon disgraced baseball star Pete Rose.

Rose's lifetime ban from baseball and exclusion from the Hall of Fame has long been a matter of legitimate debate among fans. Some feel, as Trump does, that Rose's on-field performance was too good to ignore even given that he admitted to breaking baseball's cardinal law against gambling. (Even diehard Rose supporters don't claim, as Trump did, that there was no issue with Rose betting on his own team.)

The only thing Trump can actually pardon him for are federal crimes, and Rose is known to have committed two. The first is tax evasion, for which he served several months in prison. 

The second is statutory rape, which Rose admitted to but was never charged for because his victim, who was 14 or 15 at the time Rose had sex with her, did not come forward until after the statute of limitations had expired. Rose admitted to having sex with her as a 32-year-old man, but claimed he thought she was 16 (the age of consent in Ohio) and denied her claim that they had had sex in places outside of the state of Ohio—which would make him guilty of federal child sex trafficking. 

Rose was a vocal Trump supporter, but more importantly for his posthumous pardon bid, the crimes he committed were of the sort that Trump is known or strongly suspected to have committed himself. Most of the pardons Trump issued during his first term fit that bill.

Trump has his own history with baseball, most of it fictitious. He played for his private boarding school's team. Box scores from newspaper accounts of those games give him an atrocious career batting average of .138. But his terrible performance at a small private school hasn't stopped Trump from pretending he was a major league prospect, though. He claimed to have been invited to a tryout with future Giants Hall of Famer Willie McCovey. (This is an obvious lie: McCovey is eight years older than Trump and was in the majors while Trump was still in junior high school.)

 

Why does this matter?

• Trump has already pardoned enough child sex abusers.