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Presidency of Donald Trump

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The first presidency of Donald Trump began at noon EST on January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, succeeding Barack Obama, and ended on January 20, 2021, after Trump lost the 2020 United States presidential election to Joe Biden. Trump succeeded Biden to serve a second and final non-consecutive term beginning on January 20, 2025, after winning the 2024 United States presidential election.

Supreme Court eras are often identified with their chief justices, as is true of the current period that began with Roberts nearly two decades ago. But the Court can be measured also by presidential influence. Certain presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed eight justices in his twelve years in office, had a disproportionate effect on the Court. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon also stood out for their imprint. The Trump effect, especially in terms of the individuals chosen and the resulting shift in the balance of power, has been incomparable. He is gone from office and they are here for life. ~ Joan Biskupic

Quotes

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First presidency (2017–2025)

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2017

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  • Add to this mix the ascendancy of President Donald Trump, who won the 2016 election in part by courting a nativist, anti-immigrant constituency, and whose reticent condemnation of white nationalist protesters who held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that erupted in fatal violence in August 2017 drew howls of criticism from all but his most loyal supporters, and the urgency of sorting out these political associations begins to make sense.
    Nobody, least of all the millions of rank-and-file right-leaning Americans who voted for Donald Trump, wants to be lumped in with Nazis. It's a fact, however, that Nazi-friendly organizations, Nazi symbols, and Nazi gestures were in evidence at the disastrous Charlottesville event, whose unfortunate title was not "Unite the Left," but "Unite the Right."
    Although the terms "left" and "right" as used in American politics can be somewhat less than perspicuous, they are helpful in delineating the basic ideological divide between liberalism/progressivism (as embodied mainly by the Democratic Party) on one side ("the left"), and conservatism/traditionalism (as embodied mainly by the Republican Party) on the other ("the right"). Seen as a spectrum or continuum of ideologies, socialism/communism traditionally falls on the far left end of this scale, nationalism/fascism on the far right.

2018

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  • As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?
  • Having failed in efforts to control or curtail the president's tweeting, Priebus searched for a way to have practical impact. Since the tweets were often triggered by the president's obsessive TV watching, he looked for ways to shut off the television. But television was Trump's default activity. Sunday nights were often the worst. Trump would come back to the White House from the weekend at one of his golf resorts just in time to catch political talk on his enemy networks, MSNBC and CNN. The president and the first lady had separate bedrooms in the residence. Trump had a giant TV going much of the time, alone in his bedroom with the clicker, the TiVo and his Twitter account. Priebus called the presidential bedroom "the devil's workshop" and the early mornings and dangerous Sunday nights "the witching hour." There was not much he could do about the mornings, but he had some control over the weekend schedule. He started scheduling Trump's Sunday returns to the White House later in the afternoon. Trump would get to the White House just before 9 p.m. when MSNBC and CNN generally turned to softer programming that did not focus on the immediate political controversies and Trump's inevitable role in them.
  • Trump seemed to love the adulation but said to Graham, "You're a middle-of-the-road guy. I want you to be 100 percent for Trump." This resembled the loyalty pledge that then FBI director James Comey said that Trump had asked of him. According to Comey, Trump had said, "I need loyalty. I expect loyalty," during their now famous one-on-one Green Room dinner in the White House during the first week of the Trump presidency. "Okay, what's the issue?" Graham asked, "and I'll tell you whether I'm 100 percent for you or not." "You're like 82 percent," Trump said. "Well, some days I'm 100 percent. Some days I may be zero." "I want you to be a 100 percent guy." "Why would you want me to tell you you're right when I think you're wrong? What good does that do for you or me?" Graham asked. "Presidents need people that can tell them the truth as they see it. It's up to you to see if I'm full of shit."
  • But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying "Fake News," the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: "You're a fucking liar."

2019

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How Stephen Miller made immigration personal]" (April 22, 2019)

  • For all President Trump's talk these days about Democrats trying to make America socialist, the reality is that he is the king of big government. The federal bureaucracy is just as large, centralized, careless with spending, and intrusive under Donald Trump as it was when Barack Obama was in office. In many cases, it's bigger. This is an uncomfortable truth for Trump supporters. Rather than hew to traditional conservative beliefs about a limited federal role, Trump has allowed government to balloon. He's especially vexed when we inform him the government will never be large enough or powerful enough to execute his spontaneous propositions. The US federal budget deficit was actually declining under the Obama administration, from $1.4 trillion in 2009 when Obama took office to $587 billion in 2016, just before he left. Credit for the remarkable downward trend goes to congressional Republicans, who forced a standoff with the White House in 2011. They demanded a budget deal that would bring the deficit under control. This was the Budget Control Act, a law that slashed federal spending, put strict annual limits on future expenditures, and placed a cap on the government's "credit card." It was considered the conservative "Tea Party" movement's crowning achievement.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 99-100
  • Donald Trump was not interested in penny-pinching. He may try to project the image of a man working to save taxpayer dollars, and it's true that he can be talked out of stupid ideas if they cost too much. But that's not because he's trying to save money so it can go back to the American people. He still wants to spend the money, just on things in which he's personally interested, such as bombs or border security. Trump recoils at people who are "cheap." Today he is sparing no expense on the management of the executive branch, spending so freely it makes the money-burning days of the Trump Organization look like the five-dollar tables at a Vegas casino. As a result, the budget deficit has increased every single year since Donald Trump took office, returning to dangerous levels. The president is on track to spend a trillion dollars above what the government takes in annually. Just look at 2019. The president proposed a record-breaking $4.7 trillion budget. That's how much he suggested the federal government spend in a singe year. Since Trump took office, the US debt- much of which we owe to other countries that we borrow from- has grown by the trillions, to another all-time high of $22 trillion total. To pay off our debts today, according to one estimate, each taxpayer in the United States would need to fork over an average of $400,000. This should set off fiscal tornado sirens across America. We cannot keep borrowing money we can't pay back, otherwise our children will pay a steep and terrible price.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 100
  • Willful ignorance is the fairest way to describe the president's attitude toward our enemies. He sees what he wants to see. If Trump likes a foreign leader, he refuses to accept the danger they might pose or ulterior motives they bring to the table. That's what makes it so easy for him to offhandedly dismiss detailed US threat assessments about nation-states or urgent alerts from our closest allies.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 167-168
  • Our enemies and adversaries recognize the president is a simplistic pushover. They are unmoved by his bellicose Twitter threats because they know he can be played. President Trump is easily swayed by their rhetoric. We can all see it. He is visibly moved by flattery. He folds in negotiations, and he is willing to give up the farm for something that merely looks like a good deal, whether it is or not. They believe he is weak, and they take advantage of him. When they cannot, they simply ignore him.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 173
  • Donald Trump's words do more than drive his team crazy. They are dividing Americans. He may start fights on Twitter and at the microphones, but we are continuing them at home. Studies show that Republicans are becoming more partisan, unwilling to veer from the party line, and Democrats are doing the same. The one thing the two sides can agree on is that the phenomenon is real. A Pew Research Center survey released in 2019 found that a whopping 85 percent of US adults said that "political debate in the country has become more negative and less respectful," and two-thirds said that it is less focused on the issues. Where do they pin the blame? A majority believed President Trump "has changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse." The verbal acrimony has real-world consequences. Our divisions make us less likely to engage with one another, less likely to trust our government, and less optimistic about our country's future. When asked to look forward to the year 2050, Americans were deeply pessimistic, according to another survey. A majority of respondents predicted that the United States would be in decline, burdened by economic disparity and more politically polarized. Nearly the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans agreed on the last point. In the nation's capital, the president's bull-in-a-china-shop language is inhibiting his own agenda. He can't get consensus on Capital Hill, even on previously uncontroversial issues. Democrats aren't exactly trying to restore bipartisanship, but there might be hope if the figurehead of the Republican Party were not treating them as mortal enemies rather than political opponents. Instead, every big idea becomes radioactive upon release. Every line of the budget is a trench on the political battlefield. We constantly struggle to sell the president's priorities because he is his own worst enemy.
    • Anonymous, A Warning (2019), p. 191-192

2020

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  • Everyone knows Donald Trump is a sore loser, and the final precept of Roy Cohn's authoritarian instructions was, "If you lose, say you won." So if Trump loses in November he will probably claim it was a rigged election, and he will try to get it overturned. But a sufficiently overwhelming outpouring by Democrats, and Democratic-leaning independents, can send him packing and bring the moving vans to the South Portico of the WHite House on January 20, 2021. Trump's wretched mishandling of the COVID-19 and George Floyd tragedies has moved, perhaps only temporarily, some undecided voters into the Democratic camp, and even a handful of Trump's base appear (as of early June) shaken by how badly he has responded to these crises. The matter can be decided without doubt by young voters, who are the least prejudiced age group in the United States and strongly oppose Donald Trump on numerous grounds. Historically, persons eighteen to thirty years old vote less but they make up a majority of the crowds peacefully protesting against prejudice after George Floyd's murder. If the democrats run good registration campaigns among the young, and if Biden supporters can overcome all the vote-suppression barriers the Republicans will throw at them, and if Bernie Sanders' supporters can settle for half of what they want in order to have a certain chance to get the rest later on, rather than no chance at all if Trump wins, Democrats can win the White House and both Houses of Congress in November.
    Let us say that happens. The election is close, but even in the Electoral College the democrats post a winning total. Nonetheless Trump claims there was colossal fraud, and the election should not count. "It was a hoax," he claims for the umpteenth time. "It has to be fair!" he says, and his base takes to the street shouting support for Trump. No one should be surprised if Trump loses and refuses to leave. Michael Cohen, Trump's in-house attorney for many years who knows the man much better than most, said under oath on February 27, 2019, "Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 there will never be a peaceful transition of power." Trump's high-level staffer known as Anonymous for his/her New York Times OpEd and book, A Warning, says Trump "will not exit quietly- or easily," suggesting a "'civil war' in the offing." Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the New York Times in May 2019 that Trump's refusal to accept defeat in 2020 was something that concerned her, adding, "We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that."
  • Even if Donald Trump leaves office peacefully in 2021 his base will remain intact and be available to him to hobble his successor as it did his predecessor. Or, should Trump slip inexorably, that base is available to whoever can capture it for themselves. Someone smarter than Trump and championed by Fox News and the right-wing media echo chamber, could pose a much greater threat down the road. You can bet that various Double Highs have already begun thinking how to get incarnated as the next messiah. You can also bet the "king-makers" are studying the field right now too, including the leaders of the religious right who might sense Trump losing a bit of his hold on their believers.
  • Donald John Trump is way out of his league playing a clever usurper of power. If it appears that we have been hard on him, listen to the people who do. As humans being go, he is a sorry specimen. His driveway has not reached the main road for a long, long time. He is incapable of fixing his own life, which is deeply scarred by escarpments of chutzpah and pitted with bottomless potholes of ignorance and self-deception, so he is incapable of repairing the damage he has done. If he becomes a monarch, we can brag that it did not take us generations of inbreeding to produce an imbecile king. We shall have started with one. Even sadder, Trump might not be made dictator by a distinct minority of the country. Most Americans will not have voted for him; they simply did not vote. In short, we could lose what our forebearers fought for and won and preserved and rightly celebrated because most of us would not even go to the polls in 2020 to keep them.
  • It took me about a month after my arrival at the Trump White House to have any chance to assess systematically how things worked inside. Dysfunctionality arose in many ways, often unfolding through specific policy issues... During the last months of 2018 and early 2019, as Trump's second year in office came to an end- roughly eight to nine months after my arrival- several seemingly disparate issues and individuals converged to push the Administration even deeper into uncharted territory. In early June 2018, for example, Kelly tried a new tactic on Trump's schedule, beginning each day in the Oval, at eleven a.m., with "Chief of Staff" time, hoping to minimize the rambling lectures he delivered during his twice-weekly intelligence briefings. Of course, what most people found striking was that Trump's "official" day didn't start until almost lunchtime. Trump was not loafing during the morning. Instead, he spent considerable time working the phones in the Residence. He talked to all manner of people, sometimes US government officials (I spoke with him by phone before he arrived in the Oval nearly every day due to the press of events he needed to know about or I needed direction on), but he also spoke at length to people outside the government. It was an anomaly among contemporary Presidents by any definition.
    • John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020), p. 223
  • As it was, Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand. Trump's schedule was the easiest anomaly to deal with. One of the hardest was his vindictiveness, as demonstrated by the constant eruptions against John McCain, even after McCain died and could do Trump no more harm. Another example of his vindictiveness was Trump's August 15 decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance. Now, Brennan was no prize, and during his tenure the CIA became more politicized than at any other time in its history. He denied any improper behavior, but Trump was convinced Brennan was deeply implicated in abusing the FISA surveillance process to spy on his 2016 campaign, all of which was exacerbated by his constant presence in the media criticizing Trump after he took office.
    • John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020), p. 224
  • Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals, starting with Barbara Bush's in April 2018, which Trump did not attend (although four former Presidents and the First Lady did), and then at John McCain's in late August. Kelly opened the weekly White House staff meeting on August 27 by saying, "I'm in a bad place today," because of ongoing disagreements with Trump over whether to fly US government flags at half-mast and who would attend which services. McCain's family didn't want Trump at the services either, so the feeling was mutual. The final decision was that Pence would lead the Administration's representation at both the Capitol Rotunda ceremony and the funeral service at Washington National Cathedral. The service was extremely well-attended, with all the socializing that routinely accompanies even moments of passing. Among others I greeted were Bush 43 and Mrs. Bush, with Bush asking cheerily, "Still got a job, Bolton?" "For now," I answered, and we all laughed. When George H.W. Bush later died during the Buenos Aires G20, Trump declared a national day of mourning, issued a fitting presidential statement, and spoke cordially with both George W. and Jeb Bush during the meeting. He and the First Lady attended the National Cathedral service on December 5 without incident. It wasn't so hard to do after all.
  • John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020), p. 226
  • The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else. It's weakening our ability to be kind or believe in forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him. His administration and his party have become subsumed by his politics of grievance and entitlement. Worse, Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country's alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do. The costs and benefits of governing are considered in purely financial terms, as if the US Treasury were his personal piggy bank. To him, every dollar going out was his loss, while every dollar saved was his gain.
    • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 15-16
  • Although my my aunts and uncles will think otherwise, I'm not writing this book to cash in or out of a desire for revenge. If either of those had been my intention, I would have written a book about our family years ago, when there was no way to anticipate that Donald would trade on his reputation as a serially bankrupt businessman and irrelevant reality show host to ascend to the White House; when it would have been safer because my uncle wasn't in a position to threaten and endanger whistleblowers and critics. The events of the last three years, however, have forced my hand, and I can no longer remain silent. By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the alter of Donald's hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy.
    • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 16-17
  • It's easy to sound coherent and somewhat knowledgeable when you control the narrative and are never pressed to elaborate on your premise or demonstrate that you actually understand the underlying facts. It is an indictment (among many) of the media that none of that changed during the campaign, when exposing Donald's lies and outrageous claims might actually have saved us from his presidency. On the few occasions he was asked about his positions and policies (which for all intents and purposes don't really exist) he still wasn't expected or required to make sense or demonstrate any depth of understanding. Since the election, he's figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with "chopper talk" during which he can pretend he can't hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades. In 2020, his pandemic "press briefings" quickly devolved into mini-campaign rallies filled with self-congratulation, demagoguery, and ring kissing. In them he has denied the unconscionable failures that have already killed thousands, lied about the progress that's being made, and scapegoated the very people who are risking their lives to save us despite being denied adequate protection and equipment by his administration. Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership. And in the event that anybody thinks he's capable of being serious or somber, he'll throw in a joke about bedding models or lie about the size of his Facebook following for good measure. Still the news networks refuse to pull away. The few journalists who do challenge him, and even those who simply ask Donald for words of comfort for a terrified nation, are derided and dismissed as "nasty." The through line from Donald's early, destructive behavior that Fred actively encouraged to the media's unwillingness to challenge him and the Republican Party's willingness to turn a blind eye to the daily corruption he has committed since January 20, 2017, have led to the impending collapse of this once great nations' economy, democracy, and health.
    • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 203
  • Seven hours later, Trump gave a long statement at his first Coronavirus Task Force press conference in three months. He spoke alone at the White House. No Pence, Fauci or Birx. He also shifted tone. Everything was not rosy with the outlook for the virus. "It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better," Trump said injecting an unusual dose of realism. "Something I don't like saying about things, but that's the way it is." Previously Trump had been reluctant to wear a mask. "Get a mask," he said. "Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They'll have an effect and we need everything we can get." His comments were a tacit acknowledgement that his previous approach had not worked, and that, in fact, the virus was much worse. The day was a microcosm of Trump's presidency, veering from "We have it under control" to "worse before it gets better," all in the span of a few hours. It was just the most recent example- and the last before this book went to press- that Trump's presidency was riddled with ambivalence, set on an uncertain course, swinging from combativeness to conciliation, and whipsawing from one statement or action to the opposite.
  • After I finished reporting for this book on President Trump, I felt weariness. The country was in real turmoil. The virus was out of control. The economy was in crisis with more than 40 million out of work. A powerful reckoning on racism and inequality was upon us. There seemed to be no end in sight, and certainly no clear path to get there. I thought back to the conversation with Trump on February 7 when he mentioned the "dynamite behind every door," the unexpected explosion that could change everything. He was apparently thinking about some external event that would affect the Trump presidency. But now, I've come to the conclusion that the "dynamite behind the door" was in plain sight. It was Trump himself. The oversized personality. The failure to organize. The lack of discipline. The lack of trust in others he had picked, in experts. The undermining or the attempted undermining of so many American institutions. The failure to be a calming, healing voice. The unwillingness to acknowledge error. The failure to do his homework. To extend the olive branch. To listen carefully to others. To craft a plan. Mattis, Tillerson and Coats are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country. Imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the deep state. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment: The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country.
  • On January 28, 2020, when Trump's national security adviser and his deputy warned Trump that the virus would be- not might be, but would be- the biggest national security threat to his presidency, the leadership clock had to be reset. It was a detailed forecast, supported by evidence and experience that unfortunately turned out to be correct. Presidents are the executive branch. There was a duty to warn. To listen, to plan, and to take care. For a long time Trump hedged, as did others, and said the virus is worrisome but not yet, not now. There were good reasons to ride both horses, but there should have been more consistent and courageous outspokenness. Leading is almost always risky. The virus, the "plague," as Trump calls it, puts the United States and the world in economic turmoil that may not be just a recession, but a depression. It is a genuine financial crisis, putting tens of millions out of work. Trump's solution is to try to recreate what he believes is the economic miracle he created in the pre-virus time. Democrats, Republicans and Trump did agree to spending at least $2.2 trillion on recovery, which will create its own future problems with growing deficits. The human cost has been almost unimaginable, with more than 130,000 Americans killed by the virus by July and no real end in sight.
  • The dead-seated hatreds of American politics flourished in the Trump years. He stoked them, and did not make concerted efforts to bring the country together. Nor did the Democrats. Trump felt deeply wronged by the Democrats who felt deeply wronged by Trump. The walls between them only grew higher and thicker. My 17 interviews with Trump presented a challenge. He denounced Fear, my first book on him, as untrue, a "scam" and a "joke," calling me a "Dem operative." Several of those closest to him told him that the book was true, and Lindsey Graham told him that I would not put words in his mouth and would report as accurately as possible. Trump decided, for reasons that are not clear to me, that he would cooperate. To his mind, he would become a reliable source. He is reliable at times, completely unreliable at others, and often mixed... But the interviews show he vacillated, prevaricated and at times dodged his role as leader of the country despite his "I alone can fix it" rhetoric. As America and the world know, Trump is an overpowering presence. He loves spectacle. In a time of crisis, the operational is much more important than the political or the personal. For tens of millions the optimistic American story has turned into a nightmare.
  • For nearly 50 years, I have written about nine presidents from Nixon to Trump- 20 percent of the 45 U.S. presidents. A president must be willing to share the worst with the people, the bad news with the good. All presidents have a large obligation to inform, warn, protect, to define goals and the true national interest. Trump has, instead, enshrined personal impulse as a governing principle of his presidency. When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.


February 2020
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  • Even before Donald Trump’s election, only one-sixth of eligible families with kids received assistance for childcare and a paltry one-fifth got housing subsidies. Yet his administration arrived prepared to put programs that helped some of them pay for housing and childcare on the chopping block. No point in such families looking to him for a hand in the future. He won’t be building any Trump Towers for them. Whatever “Make America Great Again” may mean, it certainly doesn’t involve helping America’s poor kids. As long as Donald Trump oversees their race into life, they’ll find themselves ever farther from the starting line.
March 2020
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  • Most leaders lack the discipline to do routine risk-based horizon scanning, and fewer still develop the requisite contingency plans. Even rarer is the leader who has the foresight to correctly identify the top threat far enough in advance to develop and implement those plans. Suffice it to say, the Trump administration has cumulatively failed, both in taking seriously the specific, repeated intelligence community warnings about a coronavirus outbreak and in vigorously pursuing the nationwide response initiatives commensurate with the predicted threat. The federal government alone has the resources and authorities to lead the relevant public and private stakeholders to confront the foreseeable harms posed by the virus. Unfortunately, Trump officials made a series of judgments (minimizing the hazards of Covid-19) and decisions (refusing to act with the urgency required) that have needlessly made Americans far less safe. In short, the Trump administration forced a catastrophic strategic surprise onto the American people. But unlike past strategic surprises – Pearl Harbor, the Iranian revolution of 1979, or especially 9/11 – the current one was brought about by unprecedented indifference, even willful negligence. Whereas, for example, the 9/11 Commission Report assigned blame for the al-Qaida attacks on the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan through George W Bush, the unfolding coronavirus crisis is overwhelmingly the sole responsibility of the current White House. [...] The White House detachment and nonchalance during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak will be among the most costly decisions of any modern presidency. These officials were presented with a clear progression of warnings and crucial decision points far enough in advance that the country could have been far better prepared. But the way that they squandered the gifts of foresight and time should never be forgotten, nor should the reason they were squandered: Trump was initially wrong, so his inner circle promoted that wrongness rhetorically and with inadequate policies for far too long, and even today. Americans will now pay the price for decades.
April 2020
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October 2020
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  • As many have noted, Donald Trump has a startling inability to accept reality when he wants to believe something else, for reasons I tried to explain in Authoritarian Nightmare. He will seek out bizarre sources and toady yes-men to help him lie to himself. He wanted the virus to just go away, so he believed it would be killed by April warmth, or be cured by hydroxychloroquine, or destroyed by bleach, or be prevented by a vaccine that would be ready by October. And no sooner had he finally admitted how serious the situation was, he began pressuring states to “reopen” and return to normalcy, which some did to their sorrow. And he insisted on holding normal political re-election rallies and discouraging the wearing of masks and forcing schools to open in the fall and pushing poorly tested vaccines on the public to rejuvenate the economy and buoy his chances for re-election.
    Blaming China. President Trump needed a scapegoat as well as sacrificial lambs. He teed up China, saying he had secret evidence it had created the virus and then negligently allowed it to spread around the world. He had been deceived by China’s President Xi early on, he explained, who had assured him over the phone that the disease was under control. Trump called him on February 6, offering to send CDC scientists to China to help eradicate the disease. He thought Xi would agree to this previously rejected offer because he and the Chinese leader had a personal relationship. But Xi was uninterested. He did give the impression that everything was under control in China, according to Matt Pottinger, Deputy Director of the National Security Council who listened in on the call (Rage, pp. 241-243). But China had taken dramatic steps to control the disease. By February 6, Wuhan and the province it sat in had been isolated from the rest of China and locked down with stringent quarantine regulations for two weeks. Some 40,000 healthcare workers had been sent to the area, hospitals were being rapidly built, and the infection curve was flattening out.
    The Chinese government certainly did nothing to stop the spread of the disease abroad for a long time. But virologists around the world are virtually unanimous that COVID-19 evolved in nature, and was not manufactured in a laboratory. The United States became the world leader in coronavirus deaths not because Xi lied to Trump about how well China was containing the threat, but because Trump ignored for weeks and weeks the strongest warnings from his own experts to defend the country, and then most purposefully lied to the American people himself about what they should do. The blood is on his hands more than on anyone else’s, and deep down inside, beneath layers of excuses, denials, blame-shifting, and rationalizations, he probably knows it.
  • I think the American public has a right to rely upon what the president says about what his intent is. It seems to me that when a president makes an unambiguous statement of what his intent is, I can’t rely upon White House counsel saying, 'Well, that was not his intent.' Maybe White House counsel talked to the president. Maybe they didn’t, but I can’t tell.
November 2020
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  • People were upset about Trump's win in 2016 because he ran a campaign promising to implement policies that targeted racial and ethnic minorities with state violence (and he did not simply because he was mean or rude. In no sense is Biden's campaign comparable. Sorry! Biden won't be banning Christians, arbitrarily revoking the status of white immigrants here because of natural disasters, trying to sell off white populated parts of the country or encouraging police brutality against white people. Your disappointment is not oppression.
December 2020
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(in chronological order)

  • I am proud to be the U.S. Congressman for Texas' 5th Congressional District. I am also proud to stand with @realDonaldTrump by OBJECTING on January 6th. I call on every fellow member of Congress to do the same.
U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump-backed lawsuit to overturn Biden's election win
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  • If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!
  • America deserves an honest election, this is what they got: suitcases of ballots added in secret in Georgia, dead people voting in Wisconsin, money for vote scheme in Nevada, poll watchers denied access in Pennsylvania, second ballot dropbox found unlocked in Michigan, and clerk faces ??? in Michigan. The evidence is overwhelming. Call your legislators, demand they fight for honest elections
  • The case wasn’t rejected on the merits, the case was rejected on standing. So the answer to that is to bring the case now to the district court by the president, by some of the electors, alleging some of the same facts where there would be standing,” he said in a Friday interview on Newsmax.
  • There’s nothing that prevents us from filing these cases immediately in the district court in which the president of course would have standing, some of the electors would have standing in that their constitutional rights have been violated. 
  • We’re not finished. Believe me.
  • The fact that the Supreme Court wouldn’t find standing in an original jurisdiction matter between multiple states, and including the President of the States, is absurd. It is enumerated in the Constitution... .They just “chickened out” and didn’t want to rule on the merits of the case. So bad for our Country!

Post-presidency (2021–2025)

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  • BREAKING: The U.S. Capitol is on lockdown after pro-Trump protestors breached the building as Congress began to certify Electoral College votes for Biden.
  • Supreme Court eras are often identified with their chief justices, as is true of the current period that began with Roberts nearly two decades ago. But the Court can be measured also by presidential influence. Certain presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed eight justices in his twelve years in office, had a disproportionate effect on the Court. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon also stood out for their imprint. The Trump effect, especially in terms of the individuals chosen and the resulting shift in the balance of power, has been incomparable. He is gone from office and they are here for life.
    • Joan Biskupic, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and its Historic Consequences (2023), New York: William Morrow, first edition hardcover, p. 10-11
  • One day when I was about 6, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw his face grow dark with anger. “What is it, Papa?” “It’s a message from people who think that all Jews should be killed.”
    This would have been in the late 1950s, a time when the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews in Europe was still fresh in the American consciousness. Not, you might have thought, a good season for sowing murderous antisemitism in lower Manhattan. Already aware that, being the daughter of a Jewish father and gentile mother, I was myself a demi-semite, I was worried. I knew that these people wanted to kill my father, but with a typical child-centered focus, I really wanted to know whether the gentile half of my heredity would protect me in the event of a new Holocaust. “Would they kill me, too?” I asked. Yes, he told me, they would if they could. But he then reassured me that such people would never actually have the power to do what they wanted to. It couldn’t happen here.
    I must admit that I’m grateful my father died before Donald Trump became president, before tiki-torch-bearing Nazi wannabes seeking to “Unite the Right” marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” before one of them drove his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, and before President Trump responded to the whole event by declaring that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
    Maybe the grubby little group behind the tracts my father and I saw that day in New York would have let me live. Maybe not. In those days home-grown fascists were rare and so didn’t have that kind of power.
  • Why should it matter whether Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the Republican Party he’s largely taken over represent a kind of fascism? The answer: because the logic of fascism leads so inexorably to the politics of extermination. Describing his MAGA movement as fascism makes it easier to recognize the existential threat it truly represents—not only to a democratic society but to specific groups of human beings within it.
    I know it may sound alarmist, but I think it’s true: proto-fascist forces in this country have shown that they are increasingly willing to exterminate queer people, if that’s what it takes to gain and hold on to power. If I’m right, that means all Americans, queer or not, now face an existential threat.<br<For those who don’t happen to fall into one of MAGA’s target groups, let me close by paraphrasing Donald Trump: In the end, they’re coming after you. We’re just standing in the way.
  • Trump's advisers believed his ego and pride prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. His management style resembled a carnival ride, jerking this way and that, forcing senior management officials to thwart his inane and sometimes illegal ideas. Some of them concluded that the president was a long-term and immediate danger to the country that he had sworn an oath to protect, yet they took comfort that he had not had to steer the country through a crisis. Trump's actions and words nevertheless had painful consequences. His assault on the rule of law degraded our democratic institutions and left Americans reasonably fearful they could no longer take for granted basic civil rights and untainted justice. His contempt for foreign alliances weakened America's leadership in the world and empowered dictators and despots. His barbarous immigration policies ripped migrant children out of the arms of their families. His bigoted rhetoric emboldened white supremacists to step out of the shadows. But at least Trump had not been tested by a foreign military strike, an economic collapse, or a public health crisis. At least not until 2020.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 1-2
  • The year 2020 will be remembered in the American epoch as one of anguish and abject failure. The coronavirus pandemic killed more than half a million people in the United States and infected tens of millions more, the deadliest health crisis in a century. Through the administration's Operation Warp Speed helped produce vaccines in record time, its overall coronavirus response was mismanaged by the president and marred by ineptitude and backbiting. The virus was only one of the crises Trump confronted in 2020. The pandemic paralyzed the economy, plunging the nation into a recession during which low-wage workers, many of them minorities, suffered the most. The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white police officer ignited protests for racial justice and an end to police discrimination and brutality. Yet Trump sought to exploit the simmering divisions for personal political gain, quickly declared himself "your president of law and order" and relentlessly pressured Pentagon leaders to deploy active-duty troops against Black Lives Matter protestors. The worsening climate crisis, meanwhile, was almost entirely ignored Trump, who earlier in his term had rolled back environmental regulations and withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement. The president was instead preoccupied with stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the election. After he lost to Joe Biden, Trump fanned the flames of conspiracies and howled about fraud that did not exist. His false claims of a "rigged election" inspired thousands of people to storm the Capitol in a violent and ultimately failed insurrection on January 6, 2021.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 2
  • Trump's standard tool kit for getting out of trouble- bullying, bluster, and manipulation- was useless in managing the pandemic. He tried to cloak reality with happy talk. He promised cures that would never be realized. He floated dangerous and unproven treatments, such as injecting bleach into patients' bodies. He muzzled experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who challenged his shaky claims and became more popular than the president. He refused to lead by example and wear a mask. He picked feuds with health officials and state governors scrambling to respond to emergency outbreaks, striking out at those who didn't praise his haphazard response. Not only did he fail to keep Americans safe; he couldn't keep himself safe. Trump was hospitalized with COVID-19 in October 2020, zapping his false air of invincibility.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 5
  • The coronavirus changed the world, altering how people worked, how families lived, and what constituted a community. These profound changes were accelerated by the recession and heightened by the tensions in the aftermath of Floyd's killing. Trump, however, principally governed for a minority of the country- his hard-core political supporters- and chose neither to try to unite the nation nor to reimagine a postpandemic America. He egged on the anger and disaffection among many white people who felt economically threatened and culturally marginalized. He pitted groups of Americans against one another. He uttered racist phrases and used his immense social media platforms to spread messages of hate. "His view of America is provincial, it's parochial, it's sullied, it's any other adjective that calls up a sense of narrowness and ugliness," said Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. "In so many ways, Donald Trump represents the death rattle of an old America, and it's loud and it's violent." A senior government official who worked closely with the president drew a parallel between Trump's handling of the Black Lives Matter protests and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Nazi Germany.
    • Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021), p. 5
  • The New York Times published an article Monday that's bone-chilling for anyone who cherishes our freedom, democracy and constitutional governance. The story recounted, with full cooperation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, his plans to eliminate executive branch constraints on his power if he is elected president in 2024.
    The obstacles to be eliminated include an independent Justice Department, independent leadership in administrative agencies and an independent civil service. Richard Neustadt, one of the country’s best known students of the American presidency, has said that in a constitutional democracy the chief executive “does not obtain results by giving orders – or not. ... He does not get action without argument. Presidential power is the power to persuade.”Trump’s plan would substitute loyalty to him for loyalty to the Constitution. This vision is simultaneously frightening and unsurprising. In 2019, he said, “I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” And in December, Trump called for the “termination of ... the Constitution.”
    In effect, he attempted to do exactly that in the run-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by pressuring state officials to reverse President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, attempting to weaponize the Justice Department and bullying Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election.
  • The Times story outlined his 2025 road map to implement this command-and-control model of executive authority and centralization of power if he’s returned to the Oval Office. In effect, the article described how his team would replace our constitutional republic with an authoritarian state. Such a state seeks to eliminate the independence of civil servants. Saying good things about bureaucracy may be unpopular, but federal employees' competence, expert judgment and commitment to governance by law is essential to democratic government.
    One definition of an authoritarian state is that it is characterized by the consolidation of power in a single leader, "a controlling regime that justifies itself as a 'necessary evil.'" That kind of control necessarily features "strict government-imposed constraints on social freedoms such as suppression of political opponents and anti-regime activity."
    Those characteristics describe the contours of the 2025 blueprint that the Trump campaign wanted the public to see via the Times' report. As the story notes, they are setting the stage, if Trump is elected, “to claim a mandate” for the goal of centralizing power in him.
    The Times quoted John McEntee, Trump’s 2020 White House director of personnel, defending the rejection of checks and balances on a president: “Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. ... What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
  • In fact, the executive branch, like the two other branches, was devised by the framers of our Constitution, to limit power by dividing it. Even Alexander Hamilton, who defended energy in the executive branch, suggested that the path to tyranny was marked when government officials are “obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man.”
    James Madison joined Hamilton in warning in The Federalist 48 that “power is of an encroaching nature.” For that reason, The Federalist 51 states, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
    It described the paradox facing the framers as this: One must “enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
    Trump’s 2025 blueprint would end governmental control on a president so he can dominate and control the governed.
  • Along with divided power, the central constraint that our founding documents create is the overarching legal institution known as the rule of law. That is why Trump’s plan for a radical reorganization of the executive branch starts with ending “the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.”
    Controlling the prosecutorial power allows a president to use it to favor friends, destroy enemies and intimidate ordinary citizens tempted to speak out.
    That would sound the death knell of American freedom. As John Locke, the 17th century political philosopher who inspired the authors of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” Or as Blake Smith put it in an article in Foreign Policy last year, “The bureaucratic ethos is essential to the functioning of the state and the preservation of private life as a separate, unpolitical domain of tolerated freedom.”
    At the close of America’s first decade as a constitutional republic, George Washington voluntarily chose not to seek a third term as president to avoid setting the country on the road to the tyranny of lifetime rule by a president. He understood from the revolution against a king that retaining the personal power of one person is the central goal of authoritarianism.
    If voters elect Trump president in 2024, he will implement the plan his campaign has purposefully leaked. The outcome is easy to foretell. A bureaucracy purged of those loyal to the Constitution rather than to Trump will send free and fair elections to history’s landfill, along with the Bill of Rights and the freedoms they were designed to protect.

Second presidency (2025–present)

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This is about authoritarian tendencies. This is about command and control. This is about power. This is about ego. This is a consistent pattern. ~ Gavin Newsom
It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. ~ Donald Trump
  • The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.
    But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.
  • It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
  • Without DEI, we are told, hiring and promotions will be merit-based. Make no mistake though, merit has traditionally been liberally peppered with cronyism and good-ol’-boy-ism. Now add to that fealty to the Trump Administration rather than the Constitution.
    The reality is that Fagan’s firing has nothing to do with bolstering national security. Just the opposite. It is part of a regressive social agenda to put women back in their place, misogyny being the glue that holds together the many racist, anti-immigration, LGBTQ+ and other hate groups that have been unleashed in America.
  • It is worth noting as well that it was President Donald Trump who signed the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Act in 2017, mandating the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) that recognizes the links between gender and security and therefore seeks to bolster women’s participation in security affairs. UNSCR 1325 is built upon four pillars: participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery efforts. WPS emphasizes the need for inclusive diversity (women having not just a seat, but a voice at decision-making tables) and consideration of how policies and programs affect men, women, boys and girls differently.
  • Her firing was an insult to Fagan’s career and legacy and will have significant negative national security implications.
    The Trump Administration has vowed to end “radical and wasteful” government DEI programs. “A woke military is a weak military” DEI critics like to say. Actually, however, a well-executed DEI program can address challenges being faced by the military. Those challenges are sometimes referred to as the “5 Rs”: recruitment, retention, readiness, resources and risk to force/risk to mission.
  • Firing Fagan was likely just the first salvo in ridding the Pentagon, and the government generally, of individuals who support diversity. What’s the next chapter? The path forward is no longer visible, just like the Coast Guard web page that used to feature Fagan’s photo and biography.
  • Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
    This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.
    Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.
  • “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.
  • Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.
  • By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
    Section 1. Policy and Purpose. Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
    Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.
    Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.
  • The phrase “chemical and surgical mutilation” means the use of puberty blockers, including GnRH agonists and other interventions, to delay the onset or progression of normally timed puberty in an individual who does not identify as his or her sex; the use of sex hormones, such as androgen blockers, estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone, to align an individual’s physical appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex; and surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex or that attempt to alter or remove an individual’s sexual organs to minimize or destroy their natural biological functions. This phrase sometimes is referred to as “gender affirming care.”
  • Sec. 3. Ending Reliance on Junk Science. (a) The blatant harm done to children by chemical and surgical mutilation cloaks itself in medical necessity, spurred by guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which lacks scientific integrity. In light of the scientific concerns with the WPATH guidance:
    (i) agencies shall rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance, including WPATH’s “Standards of Care Version 8”; and
    (ii) within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.
    (b) The Secretary of HHS, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall use all available methods to increase the quality of data to guide practices for improving the health of minors with gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion, or who otherwise seek chemical or surgical mutilation.
  • Sec. 4. Defunding Chemical and Surgical Mutilation. The head of each executive department or agency (agency) that provides research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, shall, consistent with applicable law and in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, immediately take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving Federal research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
  • Sec. 6. TRICARE. The Department of Defense provides health insurance, through TRICARE, to nearly 2 million individuals under the age of 18. As appropriate and consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of Defense shall commence a rulemaking or sub-regulatory action to exclude chemical and surgical mutilation of children from TRICARE coverage and amend the TRICARE provider handbook to exclude chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
  • Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children not only violates longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law in many cases, but usurps basic parental authority. For example, steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement or allowing males access to private spaces designated for females may contravene Federal laws that protect parental rights, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), and sex-based equality and opportunity, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX). Similarly, demanding acquiescence to “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias,” actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.
  • Within 90 days of the date of this order, to advise the President in formulating future policy, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide an Ending Indoctrination Strategy to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, containing recommendations and a plan for:
    (i) eliminating Federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology
    (ii) protecting parental rights, pursuant to FERPA, 20 U.S.C. 1232g, and the PPRA, 20 U.S.C. 1232h, with respect to any K-12 policies or conduct implicated by the purpose and policy of this order.
    (b) The Ending Indoctrination Strategy submitted under subsection (a) of this section shall contain a summary and analysis of the following:
    (i) All Federal funding sources and streams, including grants or contracts, that directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology:
    (A) in K-12 curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities; or
    (B) in K-12 teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, or training;
    (ii) Each agency’s process to prevent or rescind Federal funds, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, from being used by an ESA, SEA, LEA, elementary school, or secondary school to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology in:
    (A) K-12 curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities; or
    (B) K-12 teacher certification, licensing, employment, or training;
    (iii) Each agency’s process to prevent or rescind Federal funds, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, from being used by an ESA, SEA, LEA, elementary school, or secondary school to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of a minor student, including through school staff or teachers or through deliberately concealing the minor’s social transition from the minor’s parents.
  • By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Policy and Purpose. In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports. This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.
    Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy. It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.
  • The Secretary of State, including through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ Sports Diplomacy Division and the Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations, shall:
    (i) rescind support for and participation in people-to-people sports exchanges or other sports programs within which the relevant female sports category is based on identity and not sex
  • WASHINGTON − Progressive firebrand Sen. Bernie Sanders said he believes President Donald Trump is “moving this country rapidly into authoritarianism" after Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to help quell immigration protests in Los Angeles. “This guy wants all of the power. He does not believe in the Constitution. He does not believe in the rule of law. My understanding is that the governor of California, the mayor of the city of Los Angeles did not request the National Guard, but he thinks he has a right to do anything he wants,” Sanders, a Vermont independent, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
  • The protests come as the Trump administration has taken stronger actions to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. Demonstrators allege the administration's immigration enforcement has violated civil and human rights. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement on June 7 that Trump signed a memo deploying the guardsmen “to address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester.” Both California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, however, have criticized the move, saying it would only escalate tensions in the area. “I would say that to a large degree, the future of this country rests with a small number of Republicans in the House and Senate who know better, who do know what the Constitution is about, and it’s high time they stood up for our Constitution and the rule of law,” Sanders said.
  • President Donald Trump’s deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles is stretching the legal limits of how the military can be used to enforce domestic laws on American streets, constitutional law experts say. Trump, for now, has given the troops a limited mission: protecting federal immigration agents and buildings amid a wave of street protests against the administration’s mass deportation policies. To justify the deployment, Trump cited a provision of federal law that allows the president to use the National Guard to quell domestic unrest.
    But Trump’s stated rationale, legal scholars say, appears to be a flimsy and even contrived basis for such a rare and dramatic step. The real purpose, they worry, may be to amass more power over blue states that have resisted Trump’s deportation agenda. And the effect, whether intentional or not, may be to inflame the tension in L.A., potentially leading to a vicious cycle in which Trump calls up even more troops or broadens their mission. “It does appear to be largely pretextual, or at least motivated more by politics than on-the-ground need,” said Chris Mirasolo, a national security law professor at the University of Houston.
  • At issue is the president’s authority to deploy the military for domestic purposes. A federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, generally bars the president from using federal troops — the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force or Space Force — to enforce domestic laws. But there are exceptional circumstances when the president can use troops domestically. The most prominent exception is the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the president to deploy the military to suppress insurrections, “domestic violence” or conspiracies that undermine constitutional rights or federal laws. At the end of Trump’s first term, some of his most ardent supporters urged and expected him to invoke the Insurrection Act to push aside state election authorities and essentially void the 2020 presidential election results, although he never did so. During his 2024 campaign, he said he would invoke the act to subdue unrest if reelected.
    But so far, Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act. Instead, in a Saturday order, he cited a different statutory provision: a terse section of the U.S. code that allows the president to use the National Guard — but not any other military forces — to suppress the “danger of a rebellion” or to “execute” federal laws when “regular forces” are unable to do so. Notably, his order did not outright declare the unrest in L.A. to be a “rebellion,” but suggested it was moving in that direction.
    “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” the order said.
  • California authorities and Trump critics say that local law enforcement was effectively managing the L.A. protests. And despite the National Guard’s purportedly defensive role of protecting federal property and personnel, some experts see the deployment as throwing a lit match into a tinderbox. If the troops are drawn into violent confrontations, Trump might use the clashes as justification for invoking the Insurrection Act, which would pave the way for active-duty military forces to take more aggressive actions to subdue protesters and engage in law enforcement. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday said Marines could be mobilized to L.A. if unrest continues, writing in a post on X that the troops “are on high alert.”
    “The laws in this area are somewhat unsettled and untested,” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor who served as a counselor to the undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama. “Federalizing Guard troops in this situation — and raising the specter of also sending in active duty military personnel — is a political stunt, and a dangerous one.”
    Experts are also eyeing whether the Guard members accompany immigration authorities when they venture away from federal buildings — a move that could signal a willingness to use troops to actively aid immigration enforcement, rather than simply protect agents from protesters.
  • Trump is not the first president to deploy the military over a governor’s objection. But it’s the first time since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson ordered troops to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama. President Dwight Eisenhower similarly overrode objections from Arkansas’ governor, deploying troops to help enforce the desegregation of public schools. When presidents view state and local authorities as being ineffective or recalcitrant, those steps may be justified, some experts say. “Usually the President calls out the troops with the cooperation of the governor, which happened in LA itself during the Rodney King riots,” said John Yoo, a legal counselor to President George W. Bush. “But there have been times when governors have been tragically slow, as during Hurricane Katrina, or actually resistant to federal policy, as with desegregation, or, arguably, in this case. “Trump, when speaking about the decision with reporters Sunday, said he warned Newsom a few days earlier of the possibility. “I did call him the other night,” Trump said. “I said you’ve got to take care of this, otherwise I’m sending in the troops.”
    Newsom has railed against Trump’s unilateral action, saying it will inflame rather than ease tensions on the streets and that state and local law enforcement were appropriately responding to the unrest outside federal buildings. Newsom got backup from Democratic governors across the country, who signed a letter calling Trump’s National Guard deployment an “alarming abuse of power.”
    “The military appears to be clashing with protesters in the streets of our country. That’s not supposed to happen,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security law expert at New York University’s Brennan Center. “It’s such a dangerous situation. It’s dangerous for liberty. It’s dangerous for democracy.”
  • A purported member of the U.S. Army openly joined the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Dallas and has called on others in the military to "resist evil." Newsweek has contacted the Pentagon for comment via email.It comes as protests that erupted in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement raids that prompted President Donald Trump to mobilize National Guard troops and Marines have begun to spread to other cities nationwide, including Dallas, Chicago and New York. Many have been peaceful, but some have resulted in clashes with law enforcement as officers made arrests and used chemical irritants to disperse crowds. The Trump administration has said it would continue its program of raids and deportations despite the protests.
  • "We are not pawns for [President] Donald Trump," said the uniformed woman in an unverified video posted to social media by the leftist activist channel BreakThrough News. Newsweek could not independently verify the veracity of the video and has contacted BreakThrough News for clarification. The woman was not fully identified, but a patch that read "Colado" was on her chest where troops wear their last names. She said she had joined the protests after Trump deployed Marines to Los Angeles. "Why now? It's because the military was called upon against the protesters. We, in our oath to serve, we serve the people of the United States, the Constitution," she said. "These constitutional rights are being stripped and just denied. And the military will not be pawns to that." In the interview, the woman also called on "the conscience of military members who served previously and now."
    She said: "We have a conscience, a mind and we have a duty and moral obligation to say no and resist evil." Trump has activated more than 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines in Los Angeles over the objections of city and state leaders. However, the Marines have not yet been spotted in the city and the Guard troops have had limited engagement with protesters, according to The Associated Press.
  • There was black smoke in my rearview mirror on the drive back, and I thought, Well, that ain’t good. It wasn’t until I got home and turned on the local news that I found out it was Waymo driverless cars being burned. Five of them. When I turned on the national news after dark, that was pretty much all I saw: the black smoke and flaming carcasses of five empty cars owned by Google or something. Not the concerned citizens that showed up for their neighbors just to be greeted by flash grenades and rubber bullets. If you got all of your information from cable news, burning cars would be all you’d think happened.
    Donald Trump called in the Marines the next morning, and they drove in from Twentynine Palms. Right now the local news is doing a segment on Father’s Day gift ideas. The president thinks the situation is dangerous enough to require the military, but KTLA does not think it is important enough to preempt a piece on backgammon sets and coffee mugs repurposed from MLB game bats. They’re here now, I guess, 700 strong, and nobody seems to know what they’re going to do, or even where they’re going to stay or what they’re going to eat, because now we know that nobody budgeted for the lodging or meals of the 2,000 National Guard members who’ve been sent here, who woke up this morning on the cold stone floor of some federal building.
  • The ICE activity we are protesting is allegedly being directed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Miller called a meeting of ICE officials last month and directed them to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” Not to target “the worst of the worst,” as the president had indicated. Not even to target criminals or gang members at all. But to roll up to a Home Depot where day laborers gather. To post up outside of a grammar school graduation in a neighborhood with a high percentage of undocumented residents. Just go and grab them and pull them away from their homes and their babies and their lives. Just lock them up. Now that’s what they’re doing. That’s what we’re protesting. And if it turns out their papers actually are in order, which it has more than a few times, then tough shit.
  • Los Angeles is crazy vast. Santa Monica High School is 12 miles from where I sit writing. If I left right now, I’d be there in an hour. But do you know what’s one half of one mile, one ten-minute walk away, from Santa Monica High School? The beach. A really nice, clean, and well-maintained beach, as a matter of fact. Miller could have been taking a surf lesson, eating some Dippin’ Dots, or watching a majestic sunset over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, he’s sneering to a crowd about his right as a white person to leave his mess behind for a brown person to clean up.
    This behavior is rancid. This rancid behavior is motivated by a rancid worldview that is the kind of rancid you really don’t grow out of. This is rancid, and now it’s backed up by the United States government, and now the United States government has lined the United States military up against its own citizens. These raids are the acting out of that entitled and bigoted and absolutely rancid worldview. That’s what we’re protesting. And on the whole we’re doing it more peacefully than most groups of people who take to the streets after their city’s team wins or loses the Stanley Cup.
    We do not need your help.
  • With President Donald Trump's deployment of 700 Marines to Los Angeles, Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the internet to offer his own thoughts. In a video posted to his X account, Sanders said the message he wishes to impart is not about the protests or the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the California city but something that affects all Americans everywhere. "What's going on is all about Trump's never-ending desire for more and more power," Sanders said. The Vermont senator said that the 45th and 47th president is overriding the California governor's authority in order to consolidate more power with the U.S. military. Sanders also said that Trump is trying to wrest control from the judicial and legislative branch of government as well as stamp out universities' independence and private law offices. "Now is the time for us to come together and stand against authoritarianism and for democracy," Sanders said.

See also

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