Welcome to a bonus edition for this week — when we’ve seen more incoming from the administration, and more pushback from the rest of us.
Every day lately has come with stories that would earn banner newspaper headlines for days or weeks in another time. These days, many are just another snowflake in a blizzard of news. We’ll tick through a few of these stories, but then we’ll assess a key point about where matters stand as the Trump administration races toward its hundredth day.
The Rundown (Midweek Edition)
- The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to try to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status. CNN reported the pending move a day after President Trump bitterly posted threats along the same line to Truth Social . Earlier in the week, Harvard’s president had rejected demands by Trump administration officials to effectively hand administrative control of the university to federal officials.
Honestly I'm glad they picked Harvard to try out this novel "we're mad" legal theory of revoking tax-exempt status, given its infinite resources, deep network of powerful alumni, and law school attended by 142 sitting federal judges.Good luck! 🫡
— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) 2025-04-16T21:17:38.785Z
- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) joined the effort to shake down Harvard late on Wednesday — threatening to revoke the school’s ability to host international students unless it handed students’ disciplinary records over to the government. Considering four of the nine Supreme Court Justices received their law degrees from Harvard, it will be interesting to see how this blatant abuse of power plays out.
- Hours after the tax filing deadline at the stroke of midnight on April 15, news emerged that the IRS plans to kill off Direct File — a free, government-made system built to enable millions to file their taxes swiftly without handing data to a Silicon Valley company. Taxpayers who use private services like TurboTax spend about $140 annually. Golly: what bonafide government efficiency.
- The administration continued to defy a court order to facilitate the return of a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly expelled from the U.S. to a prison-labor camp in El Salvador. The president met with the Salvadoran president in the Oval Office on Monday and asked — before the official meeting, while a hot mic was on — for El Salvador to construct more camps to house U.S. citizens.
@pbsnews During a meeting with El Salvador’s president in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump said “homegrown criminals” should be sent to the Central American country. “Homegrown criminals are next. I said homegrowns are next. The homegrowns,” Trump told Nayib Bukele. “You got to build about five more places.” “Yeah, we’ve got space,” Bukele responded. After some laughter in the room, Trump responded, “It’s not big enough.” The visit comes amid the Trump administration’s ongoing deportation efforts, including invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants the administration alleges are gang members to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. The effort has been challenged in court and blocked in some instances, due to the lack of due process for those who are detained or deported. The administration also said it mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador who was living legally in Maryland, to that same prison. Also on Monday, Bukele said he won’t be returning Garcia, calling the question “preposterous.” Earlier this month, Trump told reporters that he would be willing to take up an offer from Bukele to house incarcerated American citizens in El Salvador. “We have some horrible criminals, American-grown and born,” Trump said. “I think if we could get El Salvador or somebody to take them, I’d be very happy with it. But I have to see what the law says.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said that “it’s an idea that [Trump] has simply floated and has discussed very publicly as in the effort of transparency.” According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, two federal agencies – U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection – “are to investigate and verify the citizenship of individuals their agents and officers encounter to ensure DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] appropriately applies U.S. laws related to immigration to foreign nationals—and does not take administrative immigration and removal actions against U.S. citizens.” #Trump #Bukele #Elsalvador #news #politics
- On Wednesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) flew to El Salvador to attempt to speak with Abrego Garcia — but was refused access and told by the Salvadoran vice president that Garcia couldn’t be released because the Trump administration was paying the country to keep him and the other prisoners in Salvadoran custody. Kafka couldn’t have scripted it better.A federal judge, meanwhile, has warned that administration officials could be held in criminal attempt for failing to turn around the expulsion flights that carried the Maryland man and dozens of others.
- Rather than comply with a court order by letting the Associated Press wire service to cover events in the Oval Office, the Trump administration banned all wire services from Oval Office coverage. In their place the president’s staff — which seized control of press operations at the White House from the White House Correspondents’ Association — invited the Daily Signal, the newsroom of the think tank that authored Project 2025, and the Eternal Word Television Network, a Catholic cable channel.
The Big Picture: Trump Aims to Criminalize Telling the Truth About Trump
Oscar Benavides was a Peruvian caudillo, or military strongman, who in the 1930s became president for a second time — after he led a coup to take over the country in 1914. What’s perhaps most famous about him now is something he said in his second time as president: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”
That line might as well be a motto for Trump, who’s wasted no time in turning the federal government into a tool of revenge while loosening or overturning anti-corruption laws that make it legal for him, his family and rich friends to smash and grab at will. Lashing out at law firms, institutions of higher learning, even a university that passed on buying a parcel of Manhattan he once sought to sell it: he’s done all that and more.
What stands out, though, is Trump’s zeal for inflicting harm on specific people. Sure, he took away a security clearance from a former House member, Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) — a panelist on the Jan. 6 committee — who no longer had any clearance anyway. He’s also gone to great lengths, however, to force two people into binds that could drain their wallets and keep them from earning a living.
In separate executive orders this month, Trump lashed out at:
- Christopher Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during Trump’s first term. In that role, Krebs had certified that the 2020 presidential election, when Joe Biden defeated Trump, was “the most secure in American history.” That outraged Trump, who still maintains (acknowledging loss privately to Bill Maher doesn’t count) that his defeat was the result of election fraud; Krebs “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen,” the executive order read, “including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”Trump’s order suspended the security clearance of Sentinel One, a cybersecurity company that bought Krebs’ consulting firm and made him its chief intelligence and public policy officer. This Wednesday, Krebs resigned from the company — a move described by CNBC as “the latest example of the effect Trump is having on the private sector when it comes to pressuring people and institutions that he personally dislikes.”
- Miles Taylor, a former DHS chief of staff who anonymously wrote a 2018 op-ed that dubbed him “part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.” Taylor revealed his identity in 2020, and endorsed Biden for election to the presidency; in his retaliatory order, Trump called Taylor a “traitor” and demanded the suspension of any security clearances for all of the University of Pennsylvania, where Taylor had worked as a lecturer.
Trump ordered “reviews” — in other words, investigations — of the work they did in their federal roles. Politico described these directives as “remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented,” adding that “Trump used the formal power of executive orders to effectively brand two individuals as subjects of criminal investigations.”
Now here’s the thing: as brash as Trump has been about using government power against his enemies, he’s been just as aggressive about using it to protect perceived allies from accountability to federal law.
Here’s one example. Cryptocurrencies — now notorious as vehicles for money laundering, a practice financial observers have long suspected Trump of — came under Justice Department scrutiny after several firms, notably FTX, defrauded consumers. Trump, who’s worked himself to earn money through Trump-branded meme coins, called that scrutiny off — ordering the Justice Department to stop investigatory work into the industry.
Bloomberg News added up the potential wealth that Trump and his allies might reap:
President Donald Trump and his family have taken [an] interest in just about every corner of the crypto industry.
There are nonfungible tokens and digital collectibles; a decentralized finance project; a proposed stablecoin; an effort at Bitcoin mining; and a pair of memecoins, one for the president and one for First Lady Melania Trump.
Taken together, the various projects are approaching $1 billion in paper gains even after accounting for the latest round of trade war-induced market gyrations, according to Bloomberg calculations based on publicly available data.
Also winning under Trump: corporate executives who’ve paid bribes in the course of doing business abroad. A federal law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, forbids the corporate use of under-the-table payments to get ahead. Trump “suspended” enforcement of it for 180 days while his administration “reviews” it — arguing the 47-year-old statute makes U.S. firms less competitive. In the meantime, the Justice Department said it would narrow its anti-corruption work to focus on drug cartels and organized crime networks.
In its analysis of the pullback, the Wall Street Journal was blunt: “political connections within Trump’s world seem to matter.” For Trump friends, everything, even including a helpful blind eye from the Department of Justice — and for his enemies, the brute and arbitrary force of law.
As if to emphasize Trump’s enthusiasm to punish political enemies with selective law enforcement, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) — the nominally independent body that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — referred New York state Attorney General Letitia James to the Justice Department this week for criminal investigation. James drew Trump’s ire over a 2022 lawsuit in which New York accused the Trump Organization of systematic financial fraud; in payback, the FHFA appears to have sifted through mortgage records from as long ago as 2001 to hunt for discrepancies.
“It unclear whether the allegations against Ms. James … are substantive enough to merit criminal charges,” the New York Times noted. The Times then added, drolly: “The president has promised retribution against his political enemies.”
A Few Things We’re Reading
- “How America Can Avoid Becoming Russia,” by Russian chessmaster and dissident Garry Kasparov:Based on polls, election results, and the markets, Americans seem to be awakening, if only slowly, to the magnitude and nature of the threat they face. President Donald Trump and his allies in power are trying to erect an authoritarian Mafia state like the one Vladimir Putin and his cronies established in Russia. The American opposition talks of “undermining democracy” and “constitutional crisis”—but for the most part, its legislators, activists, and political strategists are pursuing politics as usual. They shouldn’t be.
- “The Emergency Is Here,” by Ezra Klein of The New York Times:Donald Trump has systematically traded away popularity to do things that anybody anywhere in the world could have told him would be unpopular, like crash the global stock market, raise prices for everyday Americans. And it has been their relative — “immunity” is too strong — willingness to absorb that unpopularity and backlash that has made me rethink how sensitive they are to it. The only thing I have actually seen stop them is the beginnings of unraveling in the Treasury bond market. I don’t think they want to cause a genuine financial crisis. … But there are no brakes around him now. There is no one left to say no.
- “Absolute Power Can Be a Terrible Weakness,” by Johns Hopkins professor Henry Farrell:
Trump’s strategy has been much less effective than it might have been. Trump has shown he is unwilling to stick by deals. Law firms that have submitted find that they are on the hook for far more than they bargained for. Columbia University, after making humiliating and profound concessions, finds that it is expected to make far greater ones, with no guarantee that even these will satisfy the Trump administration’s demands.
- “The Death of Direct File,” by Georgetown professor Don Moynihan:
“The Trump administration is not serious about using technology to make services work better. Instead they will kill low-cost and high-value tech innovations within government, deliberately making services worse and more expensive. DOGE is in the business of enabling private sector wealth extraction from the poor. … [and] the private tax preparation industry’s years of lobbying to kill a public option [has] paid off.”
- “State Terror: A Brief Guide for Americans,” by Yale professor Timothy Snyder:
Horrible though all of this is, it is still state terror in outline, a test of how Americans will react. We can react by seeing all of this for what it is, and naming it by name: incipient state terror. We can react by associating ourselves with others [who] are repressed before we are. Only in solidarity do we affirm law. We can remind the other branches of government that their functions are being taken over by the executive. Citizens cannot do this alone; they have to remind the rest of the government of its constitutional functions.
- “Against the Doomsayers,” by organizer and activist Micah Sifry:
“It’s not crazy to worry about a possible Trump attack on dissent given all his authoritarian actions and tendencies. But catastrophizing is counterproductive. When people share posts … predicting the successful imposition of martial law on a date certain, with no possibility for resistance afterwards, they’re giving Trump power he doesn’t have.”
And Now, a Laugh …
… because if you made it this far, you’ve more than earned one. Here’s a shot-and-chaser, featuring U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — the shot:
… and the chaser:
That’s A-L-L for now. Keep up with the latest on Bluesky and Facebook, practice self-care — and watch for us in your inbox again on Sunday.
Until then—
The TrumpVersusUS team