Trump Administration and Ethics

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Just a few weeks in, it is not only unethical, it is waging war on ethics.

 Jack Blanchard at Politico Playbook:

• The president signed a new executive order halting enforcement of the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which blocks American companies from offering bribes to foreign governments, per FT’s Steff Chávez. (“It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” he said.)
• The Justice Department moved to end the federal bribery case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams, Fox News’ Brooke Singman and colleagues scooped. Acting Deputy AG Emil Bove’s directive to the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office “raises urgent questions about the administration of justice during Mr. Trump’s second term and the independence of federal prosecutors,” NYT’s William Rashbaum and colleagues report.
• Trump pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who went to prison for eight years for trying to sell off a Senate seat, as Axios’ Alex Isenstadt scooped.
• Trump dismissed David Huitema as head of the Office of Government Ethics, even though he’d only recently begun his five-year term, CNN’s Fredreka Schouten reports. VA Secretary Doug Collins was tapped as interim head of the office — another instance of replacing an independent watchdog with a loyalist.
• Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, head of the whistleblower-protecting Office of Special Counsel — but a federal judge ordered Dellinger (who quickly filed suit) temporarily reinstated, per the AP.

Vance, Roberts, and the Constitution

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Charlie Savage and Minho Kim at NYT:

Vice President JD Vance declared on Sunday that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” delivering a warning shot to the federal judiciary in the face of court rulings that have, for now, stymied aspects of President Trump’s agenda.

The statement, issued on social media, came as federal judges have temporarily barred a slew of Trump administration actions from taking effect. They include ending birthright citizenship; giving associates of Elon Musk’s government-slashing effort access to a sensitive Treasury Department system; transferring transgender female inmates to male prisons; and placing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees on leave.

 Chief Justice John Roberts:

It is not in the nature of judicial work to make everyone happy. Most cases have a winner and a loser. Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.

Trump v. Freedom of the Press

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

At NYT, Jim Rutenberg briefly describes Nixon's war on the press and then writes:

The scandal he thought he had outrun, Watergate, would ultimately force his resignation. And his brazen anti-press moves, which initially appeared to cow journalists, would stall in an onslaught of revelations about his role in covering up wrongdoing in his West Wing.

That dark chapter in media history is suddenly relevant again, as the second administration of President Trump resorts to a heavy-handed approach to traditional journalists that has all the hallmarks of his predecessor’s attempted press crackdown some 50 years ago.

...

Much of the early action has emanated from the F.C.C., which is an independent agency with a bipartisan board whose chair is selected by the president. Mr. Trump named a longtime Republican commissioner, Brendan Carr, to the post in November, calling him a “warrior for free speech.”

Already raising Nixon-style threats to tie television-station license renewals to government determinations about content — which the agency has some leeway to do under regulations that still require licensed broadcasters to serve the “public interest” — Mr. Carr has revived previously dismissed complaints against the three traditional broadcast networks, and opened an investigation into PBS and NPR.

An inquiry into CBS played out in public in recent days when the network cooperated with the F.C.C.’s request for information relating to the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview last fall with Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump had accused the network, in his own multibillion-dollar lawsuit, of deceptively altering the interview to boost Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, which CBS denies.

Mr. Carr has said the outcome of the inquiry could factor in his agency’s review of a pending merger between CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and Skydance, creating a division between him and Democrats on the commission.

David Enrich at NYT:

The lawsuits are part of a broader campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to attack major news organizations. This week, the president and his close ally Elon Musk falsely accused media outlets, including The New York Times, of being government-financed organs of the state. (Some government agencies purchase subscriptions to the publications.) Some of Mr. Trump’s nominees for top administration jobs, as well as Mr. Musk, have threatened to sue media companies for critical articles. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating outlets including NPR and PBS.

...

Days before the presidential election, Edward Paltzik, a lawyer with a small New York law firm, sued CBS on Mr. Trump’s behalf in federal court in Amarillo, Texas. The suit argued that CBS “doctored” its interview with Ms. Harris to present her in a positive light, violating a state law against “false, misleading or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce.” It sought $10 billion in damages.

There was no evidence in the complaint that CBS edited the interview in a manipulative fashion, instead of for clarity or brevity. There was no evidence that the interview misled viewers or damaged Mr. Trump. And it was unclear what legal standing Mr. Trump had to bring a lawsuit in Texas, where he does not live and which was not the site of the interview.

But filing the suit in Amarillo meant it would be heard by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has been hospitable to conservative lawsuits that many lawyers regard as meritless.

About six weeks later, in December, Mr. Paltzik filed the suit against The Des Moines Register and Ms. Selzer in state court in Iowa, claiming that Ms. Selzer’s poll had been warped to harm Mr. Trump. The suit did not present evidence that the poll was deliberately skewed, that Mr. Trump had been hurt or that he had standing to file a lawsuit in Iowa.

 

The Coming Constitutional Crisis, Continued

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Brent D. Griffiths, Natalie Musumeci, and Laura Italiano at Business Insider:

Constitutional law experts warn that if a president chose to defy court orders, judges would have limited options. The consequences would likely fall on lower-level officials, not the president himself, said Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill.

"At the very least, you would have a possible contempt citation directed at a particular official who has refused to comply with a court order," Gerhardt told BI, "If they indicate they are defying it because of his order, then the court is going to include the president in the citation of contempt."

But enforcing even that would fall to the Justice Department — which answers to Trump.

Gerhardt pointed to recent examples of Trump testing limits: The president fired inspectors general without providing Congress the legally required notification and list of reasons for dismissal.

Some in Trump's orbit have previously said the president should actively confront the judiciary. Long before he was elected last November, Vice President JD Vance argued that Trump should forge ahead with bold actions and dare federal judges who try to stand in his way.

"I think that what Trump should, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state," Vance said in 2021 on a podcast. "Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'" (Many historians believe Andrew Jackson likely never said that.)

Eight years ago, Dahlia Lithwick et al. wrote:

The situation has forced observers to reckon with a question that has little or no precedent in American history: What happens when the federal government or its agents refuse to honor a court order handed down by a federal judge? By definition, it has to be different from what happens when, say, a state lawmaker flouts the word of a federal judge, since in the past, such cases have involved the president himself sending in the U.S. Marshals to enforce the law. But who will be on what side if things escalate, and the executive branch itself explicitly and continuously refuses to follow the rulings of the judiciary? At what point does the conflict turn into a full-blown constitutional crisis?

 

The Coming Constitutional Crisis

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

German Lopez at NYT:

In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful. President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.

The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.

In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked.

Calder McHugh at Politico:

Since President Donald Trump took office, federal courts have been busy hitting the brakes on the most ambitious parts of his shock-and-awe agenda. Courts have temporarily blocked the administration’s ability to implement a federal funding freeze, its attempts to cull the federal workforce, the president’s order ending birthright citizenship and even a plan to move three incarcerated transgender women to men’s facilities.

What it tells us is that Trump’s second term seems likely to be defined by a different kind of conflict than his first. This time around, he understands the gears and levers of government better. He’s surrounded by loyalists in every agency. Congress has bent the knee and shows zero interest in serving as a check on the executive branch. Now, it’s the judiciary, which is fielding a deluge of legal challenges against the White House agenda, that’s barreling towards a confrontation with a president who already holds it in low regard.

The contours of the fight between the two branches of government — and exactly how a newly emboldened Trump plans to take on obstinate judges — are just now coming into focus.

After a district judge issued a temporary restraining order on the Trump administration’s ability to implement a blanket federal spending freeze on Monday, many EPA climate and infrastructure grants remain frozen as of today.

The Justice Department has acknowledged receipt of the judge’s order. But the Trump administration has not yet complied with portions of the order. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), described the standoff this way: “It’s hard to tell what is incompetence and what is confusion and what is basically contemptuous trickery.”

The incident might be a one-off, an innocent oversight in the fog of assembling a new administration. But it might also be a preview of what’s to come. There are few enforcement mechanisms that the judiciary can rely on to make other branches of the federal government comply with their orders. If the Trump administration decides to willfully ignore orders from federal judges, it would, at minimum, present a constitutional crisis with no obvious solutions.

Walking Back the Walkback

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. After Trump proposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, his staff tried to walk his statement back.  He meant it.

Brazen

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Peter Baker at NYT:

Mr. Trump’s announcement that he intends to seize control of Gaza, displace the Palestinian population and turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was the kind of thing he might have said to get a rise on “The Howard Stern Show” a decade or two ago. Provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential.

But now in his sequel term in the White House, Mr. Trump is advancing ever-more brazen ideas about redrawing the map of the world in the tradition of 19th-century imperialism. First there was buying Greenland, then annexing Canada, reclaiming the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. And now he envisions taking over a devastated war zone in the Middle East that no other American president would want.

Never mind that he could name no legal authority that would permit the United States to unilaterally assert control over someone else’s territory or that the forcible removal of an entire population would be a violation of international law. Never mind that resettling two million Palestinians would be a gargantuan logistical and financial challenge, not to mention politically explosive. Never mind that it would surely require many thousands of U.S. troops and possibly trigger more violent conflict.

Hannah Knowles, Colby Itkowitz and Liz Goodwin at WP:

President Donald Trump’s administration launched one of its most brazen challenges yet to Congress’s authority this week when officials led by billionaire Elon Musk gutted and threatened to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development and suggested that other agencies should brace for overhauls.

But Republican lawmakers have raised few objections about the push to ax USAID, alarming Democrats who say the GOP is ceding power to the White House.

The Founding Fathers “set up a Congress. They set up debate,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Tuesday. “And the American people, mark my words, the American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant in the executive branch.”

Even as Democrats warned of a “constitutional crisis,” it was business as usual on Republican-controlled Capitol Hill on Tuesday, as two controversial Trump nominees, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, cleared Senate committee votes.

David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes:

The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.

The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.

The agency normally would prefer not to put these names in an unclassified system. Some former officials said they worried that the list could be passed on to a team of newly hired young software experts working with Elon Musk and his government efficiency team. If that happened, the names of the employees might be more easily targeted by China, Russia or other foreign intelligence services.

One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a “counterintelligence disaster.”