Steven Beschloss: Trump Broke What Wasn’t Broken
Canada’s Prime Minister says the “old relationship” with America “is over” and “the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner.” The road to repair will be long.
No one voted for Donald Trump to destroy America’s relationship with our good neighbor and top trading partner, Canada, but here we are. The words last week of Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, make clear that the road to repair will only reopen once Trump no longer occupies our White House.
“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said, following a meeting with his cabinet to discuss Canada’s response to Trump’s tariff threats. “It’s clear the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations, we could reestablish an element of confidence but there will be no going backwards.”
This comes in the wake of not only 25 percent tariffs affecting key industries and goods, but also Trump’s idiotic insistence that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state.
Prime Minister Carney was not done. “We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States,” he added. “We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere.”
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 31, 2025
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In other words, Seward proposed taking charge of the U.S. government from the elected president, and then bringing Americans together by starting a war with Spain, France, Great Britain, or Russia—who was on the other side really didn’t matter. A crisis could be created with any of them. The point was to quell dissent at home by turning Americans against another country.
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Closer to the Edge: FACEBOOK IS HIDING HEATHER COX RICHARDSON’S POSTS
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Public Notice: There’s no sum of money that will keep you safe from Trump
Corporations are learning this the hard way.
ABC News gave Donald Trump millions in the hopes he’d leave them alone. Needless to say, it didn’t work. But hey — at least it paved the way for others to try to soothe Trump with cash.It’s not clear if this is pay-to-play, a protection racket, or some combination of both. In any case, it’s not exactly the hallmark of a functional democracy, and Trump’s first presidency, with its self-dealing and Emoluments Clause violations, is now positively quaint by comparison.
ABC had the dubious designation of being one of the first companies to bend the knee after Trump won last November. The company paid $15 million, earmarked for Trump’s nonexistent presidential library, to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump brought against the network. But if ABC thought that payoff would keep them safe from capricious attacks, they were very wrong.
Last week, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr announced an investigation into whether Disney and ABC — which is owned by Disney — are “promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination.” In support of this, Carr’s letter cites Christopher Rufo, who has made a career out of creating moral panics over diversity, and Trump’s executive order that Carr says “will end the radical and wasteful DEI programs that have spread across the federal government.”
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Tangle: Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms.
- These orders undermine several key principles of the U.S. legal system.
- Trump has some legitimate grievances against individual attorneys, but punishing entire firms is nonsensical and likely illegal.
- The impact of these orders is already being constrained by the courts.
Politico: I Worked at a Big Law Firm. Here’s What to Know About the Surrender to Trump.
MSN: Mark Zuckerberg asks for favor from Trump to help protect Meta as company embracing president’s demands
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Bulwark: Innocent (in a Brutal Prison) Abroad
The Trump administration’s latest stain on our values: sending a man without a conviction to a country where a judge ruled he couldn’t be sent.
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In 2019, Abrego Garcia filed an application for asylum and an immigration judge granted him legal protection from being sent to El Salvador based on legitimate fears of persecution and torture.The administration admits in its court filing that it “was aware of this grant of withholding of removal” at the time it violated that court order and sent Abrego Garcia off to prison in El Salvador anyway.
And yet, the administration now claims that there is nothing a U.S. court can do to rectify their willful mistake. And they apparently have no intention of doing anything on their own to bring Abrego Garcia home.
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(more…)Bulwark: A Tale of Two Men
Slate: The Trump Administration Just Admitted It’s Creating a Black Site for Migrants
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Timothy Snyder: Civil Rights and Historical Honesty
The president has issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Like most of these executive orders, it seems illegal on its face: the president can only execute the laws; he cannot just himself decide how our museums and parks will work or look.
But perhaps the deeper problem is the implicit claim: that the president himself has a monopoly on truth and sanity, that we and a few others can serve as a ministry of truth, that all the experience and knowledge and research that the rest of us have is nothing more than “ideology.”
It maintains that the United States has always been a paragon of freedom and that anyone who denies its automatic progress is disloyal. But freedom always means liberation from the people who tell you that whatever you are experiencing now is liberty, and that really you must do nothing but admire your leaders. And progress, never automatic, comes from self-knowledge and from struggle.
I spent the morning today at the National Museum of Civil Rights in Memphis, which provides a firm reminder of the need for memory and for discussion of events that make us uncomfortable — as good history always will. We need history not to confirm that how we feel now is right, but rather to teach us more about where we come from than we can know ourselves. This involves recognition that our pasts can be different, which enables the empathy that we will need for democracy. I recorded a few thoughts along these lines in this video; please watch and share.
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Guardian: Trump signs order on Washington DC as Republicans exert control over city
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The president on Thursday signed an executive order he said would make Washington DC “safe, beautiful, and prosperous” by stepping up crime fighting, arrests of undocumented immigrants and the processing of permits to carry concealed weapons. Trump separately directed JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, which has many museums in and around the city.Weeks earlier, Republicans in Congress approved a $1bn cut to the city’s budget that the mayor, Muriel Bowser, warned would result in disruptive cuts to police, schools and health services.
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Bill Passes Allowing Concealed Guns in Bars and on Campuses & Trump Orders Elections “Fixed” to Break Democracy
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Lucian K. Truscott IV: Out of sight, out of mind: In Lithuania and Yemen, Trump is out of the loop on grave military matters
It is one of the tragic truths of military life that oftentimes a soldier has to die before anyone notices where the soldiers are and what they’re doing there. This was the case last week in Lithuania when four American soldiers from the First Armored Brigade of the Third Infantry Division went missing after their M88 armored recovery vehicle disappeared in what is described as a peat bog during a training exercise near the border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia.
The bodies of three of the four soldiers were recovered Monday after a week-long effort to pull the M88 from the swampy bog. Their names have not been announced by the army, and efforts continue to find the body of the fourth soldier who remains missing.
President Trump was asked during a press availability at the White House last week if he had been briefed on the disappearance of the soldiers in Lithuania. He replied that he had not, and the questioning from reporters moved on to other topics.
(more…)Closer to the Edge: INSIDE THE GROUP CHAT THAT EXPOSED TRUMP’S NATIONAL SECURITY MELTDOWN
Bulwark: The Trump Administration’s Use of Signal Puts Service Members at Risk
’Operational security’ is about reducing the danger for those in uniform.
AS A FORMER SOLDIER, I’d ask that no American believe the Signal chat scandal wasn’t a big deal. It was a very big deal, and we shouldn’t move on without accountability. The safety of our military service members—who will certainly execute more missions like the one described in the chat—the trust of the families who wait for their loved ones to return safely, the need to safeguard intelligence, and the demands of allies who depend on us require that we conduct a valid after-action review, discipline those who violated standards, and make sure something like this never happens again. That’s because the Signal chat scandal isn’t just a one-time communications issue. It was a shocking display of hubris, arrogance, and carelessness.
(more…)NY Times: The Message Pete Hegseth Sends the Troops
Verge: Trump advisor reportedly used personal Gmail for ‘sensitive’ military discussions
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Boing Boing: MAGA Senator slips — asks how DOGE is going to “cut Medicare” (video)
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TNR: The Trump Administration’s War on Activists Is Escalating
ICE’s detention of a Washington state union organizer, alongside other threats to activists, raises the question of how far the Trump team will go to stifle dissent.
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TNR: Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance
Ordinary people have more power than they know
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
That truism has been repeated by notables from Gen. Jim Mattis to Barack Obama to George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. But it’s fitting that the person credited with first saying it was a private citizen whom nobody particularly remembers.
Lotte Scharfman (1928–1970) was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who became president of the Massachusetts chapter of the League of Women Voters. Her cause was an obscure one: She wanted to reduce the size of Massachusetts’s bloated House of Representatives from 240 members to 160. The measure failed on its first vote in the House in 1970, for the obvious reason that no representative wanted to risk losing their own seat. But after several House members were voted out later that year for opposing the reform measure, it cleared the state legislature, and in 1974 it won overwhelming approval from Massachusetts voters.
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Closer to the Edge: CORY BOOKER GOES THE DISTANCE: “THESE ARE NOT NORMAL TIMES”
(more…)The Daily: Cory Booker And Democrats Have Disrupted The Senate For More Than 17 Hours To Protest Trump
Fast Company: Cory Booker’s 20 hour Senate speech is one of the longest on record — why he’s doing it
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Bulwark: Lawmaking Moms Hand Mike Johnson a Major L
NY Times: Johnson Fails to Kill Bipartisan Measure to Allow Proxy Voting for New Parents
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LifeHacker: What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The Most Influential Hoax in American History
How an obscure work of literary satire altered the course of our nation.
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The birth of Report from Iron MountainBack in 1966, Victor Navasky, editor of The Monocle, read a news item about a dip in the stock market caused by a cutback in military spending; Wall Street called it a”peace scare.” This inspired Navasky to commission writer Leonard Lewin, with help from economist John Kenneth Galbraith and others, to write Report from Iron Mountain, supposedly the leaked findings of “Special Study Group” tasked by the Kennedy Administration to plan the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Its conclusion: Peace would likely bring about the collapse of the USA.
Iron Mountain was edited by H.L. Mencken, and published as a work of non-fiction in 1967, but most reviewers and literary types recognized it as social commentary. Members of the general public were divided, however, so author Lewin dispelled all doubt by confirming Iron Mountain was a hoax in 1974. And that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t.
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Boing Boing: Musk’s own Grok calls him a “top misinformation spreader on X,” dares him to shut it down