DANA MILBANK

 

Trump’s corruption has become even more brazen. A website promoting Trump’s cryptocurrency “meme coin,” $TRUMP, announced that the top 220 investors in the meme coin — proceeds of which go directly to Trump and his family — would be invited to an “Intimate Private Dinner” with the president and a “Special VIP tour.” The Justice Department has stepped in to help Trump in his appeal of the $83 million jury award against him for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, which would amount to a gift by the taxpayers to Trump of millions of dollars in legal fees. A Trump political appointee at the Treasury Department has asked the IRS to reconsider audits of two “high profile friends of the president,” including MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, the Post’s Jacob Bogage reported. And Musk’s SpaceX is poised to be given a juicy contract by the Pentagon to build Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield.

Opinion

Dana Milbank

For the Trump administration, it’s amateur hour

I wish there were a Yiddish insult that captured the missteps we’re seeing from the White House.

April 25, 2025 at 7:15 a.m. EDTToday at 7:15 a.m. EDT

 

I love it when MAGA bros speak Yiddish.

 

“The president deserves better than the current mishegoss at the Pentagon,” John Ullyot, who just quit as a top aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, wrote in a takedown of his former boss in Politico this week.

 

Ullyot, who had been the department’s chief spokesman, described “a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,” a “near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks” and a “full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon,” and he alleged that “the Pentagon focus is no longer on warfighting, but on endless drama.”

 

Let me offer Ullyot a heartfelt mazel tov, both for his courage and for his use of the term “mishegoss” — which is on point, if not entirely precise. It means, literally, “insanity,” though as the late Leo Rosten noted in “The Joys of Yiddish,” mishegoss “is nearly always used in an amused, indulgent way” to connote tomfoolery. But there is nothing amusing about what these shmegegges are doing at the Pentagon. Their insanity is putting the lives of our troops and security of our nation at risk.

 

We now know the woefully unqualified Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, shared details of a military operation in a second Signal chat; this one, the New York Times reported, included his wife, brother and lawyer. He also had the app put on his Defense Department computer. Hegseth has purged his top staff — people he just hired — and blames them for a series of damaging leaks. He set up a top secret briefing on China for Elon Musk, ignoring an outrageous conflict of interest that even the Trump White House couldn’t stomach. He brought his wife to sensitive meetings. He had a makeup studio set up for TV appearances, CBS News reported.

 

Under Hegseth, the whole place has devolved into paranoia and vulgar recriminations. Hegseth’s ousted chief of staff, two of his former colleagues told Politico, “graphically described his bowel movements to colleagues in one high-level meeting.”

 

Oy gevalt.

 

It’s not just at the Pentagon. Across the executive branch, in agency after agency, it’s amateur hour under the Trump administration.

 

That titanic legal battle with Harvard University now underway over academic freedom and billions of dollars in grants? The whole thing might have been set off by mistake. The Times reported that the university, after announcing its intention to fight the administration, received a “frantic call from a Trump official” saying the administration’s letter full of outrageous demands that provoked the standoff was “unauthorized” and should not have been sent.

 

Likewise, in the celebrated case of Kilmar Abrego García, deported from Maryland to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the Trump administration blamed “an administrative error” and “an oversight” for the original deportation. Now, the administration is trying to justify Abrego García’s deportation retroactively with a statement from a disgraced police officer who claims the Maryland resident was an “active member” of the MS-13 gang in Upstate New York — where he has never lived.

And — oops — the administration did it again. On Wednesday, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the administration had deported another person, a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant, in violation of a court-approved settlement, and must facilitate his return.

 

There’s mishegoss at the IRS, which is now on its fifth commissioner in three months; the last one presided for only three days before being replaced last week, the victim of a power struggle between Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that exploded into a shouting match in the West Wing.

 

 

There’s mishegoss at the Department of Homeland Security, where Secretary Kristi Noem had her Gucci bag containing $3,000 in cash stolen from under her seat at the Capital Burger restaurant in D.C. on Sunday. This follows her recent visit to El Salvador, where she posed in front of imprisoned deportees while wearing a $50,000 Rolex.

 

There’s mishegoss at the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the ridiculous claims this week that “teenagers in this country have the same testosterone levels as 68-year-old men” and that diseases such as juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, which have been described in medical literature for centuries, “were just unknown when I was a kid.”

 

There’s mishegoss in the White House briefing room, where press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week gave a seat of honor and the first question to far-right influencer Tim Pool, who has various white-nationalist ties and was funded (unknowingly, he says) by a Russian propaganda outlet.

There’s mishegoss at the National Security Council, where national security adviser Mike Waltz, while promoting the fiction that the president’s unilateral executive orders are acts of Congress, claimed this week that Trump “just passed an amazing executive order” — as though it were a kidney stone.

 

But the meshuggener in chief resides in the Oval Office. There, Trump announced this week that “the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94 percent since we took office.” If that were true, eggs should now cost about 39 cents per dozen.

 

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

 

Trump edged closer this week to admitting that the centerpiece of his economic agenda — his trade war — was a mistake. Two weeks ago, Trump was still attacking China for its “lack of respect” and raising tariffs on Beijing to 145 percent. But as stock markets were finishing what would have been their worst April since the Great Depression, Trump did another about-face, as he had done earlier with his “reciprocal” tariffs. “We’re going to be very nice” to China, he said this week, and the tariffs “won’t be anywhere near” the current 145 percent. In China, which denied Trump’s claim that the two countries were in talks, analysts claimed victory, citing Trump’s “panicking.”

 

The markets also forced Trump to acknowledge error in his plans to oust Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Last week, Trump proclaimed that Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough” and Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, said “the president and his team will continue to study” the legality of firing Powell. But Trump reversed himself this week, saying he has no plans to fire Powell: “None whatsoever.

Never did.”

 

Why would anyone think otherwise?

 

 

The president can’t even seem to keep his endorsements straight. Back in December, he endorsed Karrin Taylor Robson’s candidacy for Arizona governor. But this week, he announced that he was also endorsing Robson’s opponent in the GOP primary, Rep. Andy Biggs. He offered “MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT TO BOTH.”

 

We are by now all accustomed to Trump’s amateurism. When he rolled out his “reciprocal” tariffs, they targeted penguin-occupied Antarctic outposts and the like. When his administration rolled out its memo requiring a government-wide spending freeze, the memo was quickly rescinded as White House officials claimed it (like the Harvard letter) hadn’t been approved.

 

The whole meshuggene administration could use some oversight. So what is Congress doing? Well, Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations announced this week that he would hold a hearing on ... his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were an inside job. “Start with Building Seven,” he said during a podcast, referring to a common conspiracy theory. He said that the World Trade Center structure collapsed because of a “controlled demolition,” that the evidence was destroyed, and that the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigation was “corrupt.” Quoth QAnon Ron: “My guess is there’s an awful lot being covered up in terms of what the American government knows about 9/11.”

 

Trump this week voiced his determination that “we’re not going to be a laughingstock” among nations. It’s a bit late for that.

 

Let’s review where Trump’s mistakes have left us over the last week.

 

The International Monetary Fund reduced growth forecasts for the United States to just 1.8 percent this year, down from 2.8 percent last year, in large part because of Trump’s trade war. After saying it would reach 90 trade deals in 90 days, the administration has yet to negotiate even one. The CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot warned the president that his tariffs would lead to empty shelves, as Axios first reported — part of what caused Trump’s latest surrender on China. Markets were pleased, but Americans have been deeply shaken. A Gallup poll found a record number of people saying their personal financial situation is deteriorating. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 37 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, lower than it ever was during his first term. Fox News found that Trump is lower in public esteem than any other president has been at the 100-day mark in more than a quarter-century.

 

Trump’s cruelty, by contrast, exceeds that of all others. The Gothamist, a publication of New York Public Radio, carried a heartbreaking account this week of migrant children at shelters in New York facing an immigration judge alone because the Trump administration has cut off the funding that provides them with lawyers. The judge explained why the United States wants to deport a group that “included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill.” The Gothamist report went on: “There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.”

 

In foreign affairs, Trump is proposing the most odious appeasement in Europe since Neville Chamberlain abandoned the Sudetenland. He is demanding Ukraine surrender the 20 percent of its country, including Crimea, that Vladimir Putin has seized, and abandon any hope of joining NATO. When Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky understandably protested, Trump dismissed him as a man with “no cards to play.” Putin continues some of his most savage attacks of the war (Russian strikes on Kyiv early Thursday killed at least 12 people and wounded about 90 others) in expectation that Trump will force Ukraine to give up even more. “Vladimir, STOP!” Trump pleaded in a Truth Social post on Thursday morning. (Trump simultaneously resumed his attacks on our former friend and ally Canada, saying it “would cease to exist” as a country without U.S. support.)

 

 

Trump’s corruption has become even more brazen. A website promoting Trump’s cryptocurrency “meme coin,” $TRUMP, announced that the top 220 investors in the meme coin — proceeds of which go directly to Trump and his family — would be invited to an “Intimate Private Dinner” with the president and a “Special VIP tour.” The Justice Department has stepped in to help Trump in his appeal of the $83 million jury award against him for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, which would amount to a gift by the taxpayers to Trump of millions of dollars in legal fees. A Trump political appointee at the Treasury Department has asked the IRS to reconsider audits of two “high profile friends of the president,” including MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, the Post’s Jacob Bogage reported. And Musk’s SpaceX is poised to be given a juicy contract by the Pentagon to build Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield.

 

To arrest Trump’s ongoing abuses of power, judges have now weighed in more than 100 times blocking his actions, at least temporarily. Though Trump officials, including an increasingly hysterical Stephen Miller, blame a “rogue, radical-left judiciary” and “communist left-wing judges” (as Miller screamed Wednesday night on Fox News’s “Hannity”), the judges include conservatives such as Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, who this week ordered the administration to restore Voice of America.

Lamberth said the administration’s attempt to shut down VOA was “a direct affront to the power of the legislative branch” and said it would be “hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary and capricious actions.”

 

Likewise, appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative icon, last week said the administration’s deportations without due process were a threat to “the foundation of our constitutional order” and should be “shocking not only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” Yet Trump continues to worsen the constitutional crisis by ignoring or slow-walking responses to court orders, not just in deportation cases but in cases where courts have blocked the firing of federal workers, such as those employed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

 

This largely illegal destruction of federal functions continues to pile up casualties and proposed casualties: Food-safety inspections. Efforts to make infant formula safer. Milk testing. Weather balloons. Monitoring of IVF treatment safety. Data on maternal health. The administration has even tried to sell off the Montgomery, Alabama, bus station where Freedom Riders were attacked in 1961; it now houses the Freedom Rides Museum. Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia proposed a plan that would sharply cut what the federal government spends on Medicaid. Happily, after a disastrous quarter for Tesla (net income fell 71 percent, largely because of its CEO’s antics), Musk said he would “significantly” reduce his time spent on his government work, calling the cost-slashing effort “mostly done.” His boss is apparently moving on. “He was a tremendous help,” Trump said on Wednesday, in an unmistakable shift to the past tense.

 

And Trump continues to Trump. Twice in the last week, he has posted a photo from the Oval Office of himself holding an image purporting to show the knuckles of deportee Abrego García, with a message saying “He’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles.” But the “MS-13” characters are obviously photoshopped, as clumsily done as Trump’s one-time manipulation of a government weather map with a Sharpie.

Surrounded by young children at the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump entertained them by showing them a different photo: that of him, bloodied, after last year’s assassination attempt.

 

Meshuggene doesn’t begin to capture it.

 

Trump is an Incompetent Moron and A Fool

 

Trump is fundamentally incapable of governing. That’s the theme that unites everything. 

ROBERT REICH APR 24

READ IN APP

Friends,

Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living. 

But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself. 

In his first term, not only did his advisers and Cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem. 

A sampling from recent weeks: 

1. The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth disaster. Hegseth didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of The Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. 

He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesman, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The Defense Department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.” 

It’s not just the Defense Department. The entire federal government is in disarray. 

2. The Harvard debacle. Trump is now claiming that the demand letter sent to Harvard University on April 11 was “unauthorized.” Hello? What does this even mean? 

As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.” 

Even though it was “unauthorized,” the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue. 

3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of our trading partners — based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone — than the U.S. stock and bond markets began crashing. 

To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145 percent — causing markets to plummet once again.

To stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs. 

Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target, and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero. It used to be zero.” Markets soared on the news. 

4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve — calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates — Trump unnerved already-anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.

Then, in another about-face, Trump said Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.

Bottom line: An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems. 

Who’s profiting on all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family. 

5. The Kilmar Abrego Garcia calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Abrego Garcia to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate his return. 

To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele — who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons with no due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (i.e., American-born) criminals or dissidents. 

Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of migrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the Supreme Court blocked it from deporting any more migrants. 

6. ICE’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, ICE has been arresting American citizens. One American was detained by ICE in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because ICE didn’t believe he was American. Meanwhile, ICE handcuffed and deported a group of German teenagers vacationing in Hawaii because they turned up without a hotel pre-booked, which ICE found “suspicious.”

Bottom line: Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigrants are threatening everyone. 

7. Musk’s DOGE disaster. Where to begin on his? Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated. Remember the claim that $50 million taxpayer dollars funded condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from DOGE, but as we know now, it was a lie. The U.S. government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50 million would buy a billion condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022, or 2023 fiscal years. 

Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after DOGE fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. A similar callback has ensued at the Social Security Administration, after fired workers left the agency so denuded that telephone calls weren’t being answered and its website malfunctioned. 

Bottom line: Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans — for almost no real savings. 

8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.”

In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Kennedy Jr. also says, “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. Before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, the U.S. saw some 3 million to 4 million cases per year. Now, it’s usually fewer than 200 in a normal year.

9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is now requiring households to resume payments. This has caused the credit scores of millions of borrowers to plunge and a record number to risk defaulting on their loans.

Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance into a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing Education Department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often-shifting rules of its myriad repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff. 

10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS has had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS ended DOGE access to the agency. 

What happened? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complained to Trump that Musk did an end run around him to install Shapley (who had been lauded by conservatives after publicly arguing that the Justice Department had slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes). 

Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half — starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are acts of sabotage against the very agency meant to keep billionaires accountable.

At the same time, trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks” and referring to Navarro as “Peter Retarrdo.”

The State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID. Career officials charged that Marocco, a MAGA loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s MAGA followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy. 

Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials on the advice of the far-right agitator Laura Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.

Bottom line: No one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention. 

**

All this ineptitude in just the last few weeks reveals that the Trump regime is coming apart. Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America. 

While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America. 

The Supreme Court Finally Takes On Trump

 

The Supreme Court Finally Takes On Trump

In an overnight ruling, the Justices defended the rule of law. Will their toughness last?

By Ruth Marcus

April 21, 2025

The most heartening, and maybe most important, event of the Trump Administration so far arrived just before 1 A.M., on Saturday, in the form of an unsigned order from the Supreme Court. The order—responding to an emergency request to prevent the immediate removal of Venezuelan migrants—was gratifyingly unambiguous. “The Government,” it said, “is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.”

Thank God for the Supreme Court. This is not a sentence that I have been accustomed to typing in recent years—not since President Trump, during his first term, engineered a six-Justice conservative super-majority. But, at a time when the legislative branch has been shamefully supine and the public has been alarmingly complacent, the federal courts represent the last best hope—at least, until the midterm elections—of combatting Trump’s outrages against the Constitution.

Lately, the federal judiciary has responded with impressive speed and fortitude to Trump’s fusillade of executive orders and other actions. Judges across the country—appointed by Democratic and Republican Presidents alike, even Trump himself—have rebuffed the Administration on its attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship, its effort to bar trans people from serving in the military, its crackdown on law firms whose attorneys and clients Trump dislikes, the moves by the Department of Government Efficiency to obtain personal information stored in government databases, and more. Though the courts have not invariably ruled against Trump, the Administration’s record so far is, to use one of the President’s favorite words, sad.

Bottom of Form

But it was not at all clear—in fact, it was disturbingly uncertain—how the Supreme Court would respond to this onslaught of cases. The conservative Justices may not all be fans of this particular President, but they are generally inclined to an expansive view of executive power. This is the Court that just last year gave us Trump v. United States, with its inflated concept of Presidential authority and extensive grant of Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. And, in the few cases challenging Trump’s executive orders that have made their way to the Court, its messages have been repeatedly—and, I believe, deliberately—muddled. The Justices give and they take, sometimes within the same opinion, as in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was deported to a prison in his home country in what the Administration admits was an error. Earlier this month, the Court said that an order by a federal judge “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” Then it left a loophole big enough for the Trump Administration to disregard the directive, making a distinction between whether the lower court could order the Administration to “effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return or merely “facilitate” it, and instructing the lower court to “clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Similarly, in an earlier chapter of the dispute that resulted in the Abrego Garcia order, over the use of the Alien Enemies Act to send Venezuelan migrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Court found that those detained under that order “must receive notice . . . within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek” court review. But it also said that the migrants had brought their cases to the wrong place (the District of Columbia, rather than Texas, where they were being held) and in the wrong legal form, sparking an angry dissent from the liberal Justices, which was joined in part by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Now, finally, clarity plus backbone. What happened? In all likelihood, the Trump Administration’s behavior became too much for the Court to ignore—that is, with the exception of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who dissented. In the first phase of the case, the liberal Justices had no difficulty recognizing what the Administration was up to, with its clandestine effort to rush the Venezuelan detainees out of the country before courts could intervene, followed by its flouting of a court order to have the planes carrying them return to the United States. Yet the Administration persisted with its disobedient, if not contemptuous, behavior. Attorney General Pam Bondi, in the Oval Office with Trump and the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele, last week, misstated the Court’s ruling in the Abrego Garcia case. (“The Supreme Court ruled that if El Salvador wants to return him . . . we would facilitate it: meaning, provide a plane,” she said.) In that same meeting, Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, falsely claimed that the ruling was a nine-to-nothing win. By then, Administration lawyers had returned to the lower court to argue that all the Justices meant by “facilitate” was “taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here.” In other words, the government was doing nothing. The Justices, most of them, must now understand: we are not dealing with an Administration that deserves the benefit of the doubt. And so, when A.C.L.U. lawyers raced to the high court with an emergency petition indicating that another group of Venezuelan migrants was receiving the scantiest semblance of due process—notices of removal in English only, with no information about how to contest designations as “enemy aliens” and no suggestion that there was any opportunity for judicial review—their pleas had new resonance. The ensuing 1 A.M. order represented the Administration reaping the results of its own bad-faith arguments and behavior with the Court.

Except, of course, for the two most Trump-inclined Justices. Alito, in a dissent joined by Thomas, accused the majority of providing “unprecedented and legally questionable relief.” In a particularly disingenuous passage, Alito quoted a government lawyer who assured a lower court that no deportations were planned for Friday or Saturday. In fact, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign had said, “I’ve spoken with D.H.S. They are not aware of any current plans for flights tomorrow, but I have also been told to say that they reserve the right to remove people tomorrow.” That is hardly comforting, especially considering that the government’s position is that once detainees are out of the country, they’re out of luck. Still, even Alito took pains to note the government’s responsibility. “Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law,” he wrote. The Court “should follow established procedures,” and the Administration “must proceed under the terms of our order” requiring due process for Venezuelans whom the Administration claims are “enemy aliens.” It is hard to see how even Alito and Thomas could argue that the Administration was faithfully following the Court’s instructions in its lead-up to a new round of deportations. It had people loaded on buses headed for the airport when the lawyers filed their request for emergency intervention.

Maybe I am being overly optimistic here. This could be the high-water mark of the Supreme Court’s resistance. The Justices have disappointed before and no doubt will again. And in the Venezuelan case, the protection the Court granted isn’t permanent—it will last only “until further order.” But after weeks of mixed and muted messaging, the Court has spoken, finally, with clarity and strength, in support of the rule of law. We should take heart that at least one branch of government has the courage to do so. ♦