A Whiff of Courage in the Air
Despite the furious assaults by the Trump project, some of our institutions are holding. Others are fighting back.
Thanks to everyone who came out to see the Bulwark show in Chicago last night:
Next stop: Nashville tonight. Happy Thursday.
Liberals Fighting for Liberalism
by William Kristol
Lots of us have had occasion in recent years to quote Robert Frost’s 1961 comment and lament, that “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
But could things be changing? Aren’t there signs that some liberals, confronted by the present danger of a real and vicious authoritarian threat, are beginning to take their own side? That side is the side of liberalism broadly construed; the side of the principles and practices of a free society.
What are the signs of hope?
In the midst of a complete takeover and weaponization of the executive branch of government by the authoritarians, and the complete collapse into timid passivity of the legislative branch, the third branch (the courts) is at least trying to step up. Yesterday’s unanimous decision from the Court of International Trade striking down as unlawful Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs was the most recent and one of the most striking examples.
We’ll see how that decision fares upon appeal. But the decision was a unanimous one, from a panel consisting of a Reagan, an Obama, and a Trump appointee. As in other cases in areas ranging from tariffs to immigration to executive governance, federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties have done a lot to remind us that we live—or should live—under a Constitution and the rule of law.
Yes, there’s plenty to worry about when these cases make it to the Supreme Court, as they seem destined to. But as someone who’s warned that we can’t count on the courts alone to save us—and as someone who still thinks that’s the case—I have to acknowledge that so many federal judges have done their best.
So have some other civic leaders, from outside the government. After an initial near-collapse of many private-sector institutions before the Trump administration, we’re now seeing at least some resistance. Some law firms are fighting the bullying. Some universities, most notably Harvard, are fighting not just for their own rights and interests but for the principles of the rule of law and free society.
And beyond the borders of the United States there is cause for hope and inspiration. Despite every indication of a willingness—even an eagerness—by the Trump administration to betray this gallant nation under brutal assault, Ukraine still fights, and is holding its own. President Zelensky stands tall. Europe is stepping up more than one might have expected.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I wouldn’t have expected a decade ago to be writing in praise of federal judges, the administration of Harvard, and a president of Ukraine. But times change. And those who are fighting for us, for our Republic and our liberties, deserve our admiration and support.
During the 2024 campaign, many of us said that democracy—by which we meant liberal democracy—was on the ballot. I believe subsequent events have proven us right. Democracy lost. We have already paid a great price for that defeat. More, perhaps much more, damage will be done. But at least there are those fighting back in defense of liberalism.
Frost made his caustic remark about liberals in 1961 in the course of defending John F. Kennedy from criticism from the left that the tough-minded new president wasn’t the kind of liberal they were comfortable with.
Kennedy had, that same year, invited Frost to be the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration. Frost wrote a new poem, “Dedication,” for the occasion. He intended to read “Dedication” and then his 1942 poem, “The Gift Outright.” But when he made his way to the podium on January 20, 1961, and began reading, the sun’s glare on the manuscript was too bright for the 86-year-old. Vice President Lyndon Johnson tried to block the sun with his hat, but Frost abandoned the effort and instead recited just “The Gift Outright” from memory.
But if the audience had heard Frost’s unread poem, they would have heard a tribute to “freedom’s story/ Right down to now in glory upon glory.” They would have been urged to “To break with followers when in the wrong,” to show “a healthy independence of the throng,” And they would have been told that, “Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs.”
Perhaps today we too can sense bracing whiffs of courage in the air.
Will Trump Take the Courts’ Tariff Lifeboat?
by Andrew Egger
In theory, the Court of International Trade’s decision yesterday to block Trump’s sweeping tariff regime could be a massive political gift to the president.
Before, Trump was trapped between his own bombastic promises that tariffs would usher in an American golden age and the cold hard facts of the economic damage those tariffs were wreaking. Now, he has a reprieve: the tariffs will have to come down, at least for now, without Trump ever having to admit to backing off. He can slip straight back into the warm bath of tariff nostalgia, telling mournful stories to his base about how much better the economy was going to get before the busybody judges got in the way. How could anybody say any bad economic developments after this are his fault, really? He was just days away from striking the Deals of the Century! He’s not the cowardly one, out here fostering the TACO trade! It’s the damn judiciary that wouldn’t let him cook!
But will Trump be able to make himself take this off ramp?
There’s a whole host of reasons why he hasn’t been persuadable about the downsides of his tariff regime until now. There’s his almost religious devotion to tariffs as good economic policy, which long predates his political career. There’s his deep love of being the guy on the throne, to whom all other leaders—representatives of other nations and great businesses alike—must come and supplicate themselves. And there’s his inflated self-image as a master negotiator: Trump believes that he’s guaranteed to come out the winner of any deal, so anything that brings others to the negotiating table is inherently good strategy.
More than anything else, Trump craves dominance—and not merely to dominate, but to be seen by others as dominating all around him. Any narrative of the trade war that doesn’t cast him as the Great Man Astride the World is abhorrent to him.
Yesterday, a reporter asked Trump a question about the TACO trade. The idea, increasingly popular on Wall Street, is that Trump Always Chickens Out—that traders can make a buck buying the dip on new tariff actions, because the White House has shown a repeated inability to stick to them.
Trump went ballistic. “Oh, I chicken out. Isn’t that nice? I’ve never heard that,” the president said, before proceeding to rant on the topic for several minutes. “Six months ago, this country was stone cold dead. We had a dead country. . . . And you ask a nasty question like that. It’s called negotiation.”
The chest-beating, lizard-brain machismo play here isn’t to let the courts take the fall for the end of the trade war. It’s to go to war with the courts to save the tariffs, no matter the cost. And, indeed, the administration has already appealed the ruling.
There is, of course, another possible play here: Trump could just decide the whole thing is too depressing to pay much more attention to and retreat to the more cheerful world of bright shiny distractions in which he spends more and more of his time. The president hasn’t yet posted about the court’s decision to rip up his entire tariff regime—but he did take the time last night to weigh in on a small procedural development in a different case.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Corrupter-in-Chief… Trump is encouraging American troops to be loyal to him, not to the Constitution, argues WILL SALETAN.
How Bruce Springsteen Gave Us a Roadmap for Surviving Trump… The Boss has always understood the undercurrents of America. His words now provide a way through this mess, writes JENNIFER PALMIERI (in her Bulwark debut!).
Remembering an Act of Conscience and Courage… Seventy-five years later, Margaret Chase Smith’s example is more important than ever, remembers DALE OAK.
He Saved Americans’ Lives in Afghanistan. Then an American Took His Life in Texas. Why was the war hero’s killer allowed to walk free? JILLIAN BUTLER and WILL SELBER investigate.
Quick Hits
Yesterday was one of those days that makes you wonder whether there’s any such thing as a “news cycle” anymore. Any one of these stories from yesterday would deserve the front page treatment; now it’s all we can do to note them as they go hurtling by. So here’s a Quick Hits lightning round:
MARCO, NO GO: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the United States will “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students. It’s the latest volley against China and against academia’s freedom of self-determination. You can read Rubio’s post here, but be warned: The specifics of the policy were left unclear. It will be interesting to see who gets the inevitable carveouts, though.
MUSK YOU GO?: Elon Musk is officially ending his time at DOGE, with his brand tarnished and his companies struggling in the aftermath. In reality, Musk has been gradually stepping away from politics for weeks. And it’s clear that he’s disappointed, as he has been trashing Republicans for days now for passing a budget bill that doesn’t codify DOGE cuts. But like a fired employee raiding the supply closet one last time, Musk has been sure to try and get whatever goodies he can on his way out the door. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that he tried to block a deal by rival artificial intelligence company OpenAI to build a data center in Abu Dhabi unless it included his own AI startup. He was unsuccessful.
BIRD (FLU) MAN: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not be content until we have all the diseases. The Department of Health and Human Services is reportedly pulling millions of dollars it was slated to give Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine. The reason: The company was developing vaccines using mRNA, which Kennedy and his ilk insist hasn’t been properly safety tested. (Narrator: It has been.) From the Washington Post: “On Wednesday, Moderna announced it had received positive interim data about immune response and safety from an early-stage clinical trial of roughly 300 healthy adults aged 18 years and older. The move by HHS throws the future of the effort into uncertainty, and the company said it will explore alternatives for late-stage development and manufacturing of the vaccine.”
AND WHILE WE’RE AT IT: Kennedy is just racking up the hits this week. His big MAHA study appears to rely on fabricated sources and misrepresented material. We know: So out of character! Here’s NOTUS with what should be a blockbuster:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.
Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.
THE COST OF HUMILIATION: Entertainment giant Paramount is trying to find an amicable way to settle a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against CBS’s 60 Minutes only to discover, shockingly, that he’s as interested in their degradation as he is in their cash. The company, which owns CBS, reportedly offered $15 million to settle, according to the Wall Street Journal. But Trump’s team wanted more than $25 million. In addition, they wanted an apology from CBS. And they threatened another lawsuit on top of that. Paramount has shown a very limited desire to actually tell Trump to pound sand because it wants to see its planned merger with Skydance Media go through. We may soon have our answer for how much it costs to bribe a president into getting a merger approved and how much ritual humiliation a major company is willing to endure along the way.
SHAKEDOWN AIRLINES: A week or so ago, former Rep. Tom Malinowski suggested to us that the infamous transfer of a Qatari airliner to the United States (and, from there, to Donald Trump) was not in fact a gift but a shakedown. Trump demanded the plane and Qatar felt obliged to give it to him for . . . something. Well, Tom may be right. Here’s the Washington Post: “Qatar is insisting that a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Doha specify that the aircraft’s transfer was initiated by the Trump administration and that Qatar is not responsible for any future transfers of the plane’s ownership, these people said.” Relatedly, the deal for the plane has not actually been finalized, per the report.
BOVE-INE: Remember Emil Bove III? Trump is nominating his lawyer-henchman to be a federal appeals judge. Bove, as you may recall, has been the stooge Trump has deployed to reshape the Justice Department into an extension of Trump’s agenda, most notably by orchestrating the vanishing of federal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. He is a loyalist. He’s also 44. And if confirmed for a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, he will likely be there for some time. Gregg Nunziata, friend of the site and a former top GOP Senate staffer involved in judicial confirmations, has a compelling thread as to why Senate Republicans really should say no. He makes the case largely on philosophical and jurisprudential grounds. But he does reserve one dig for Bove, who he says “has proven he cannot honor his oath or put law before politics.”
DANGEROUS IDEAS: There’s saying the quiet part out loud, and then there’s whatever this was from Education Secretary Linda McMahon yesterday: “Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.”
Hear that, Harvard? Are you listening, Johns Hopkins? MAGA-approved research—into the perils of biological males in girls’ sports, say, or perhaps racial disparities in crime statistics—can carry on with no worries. You wouldn’t want to get crosswise with “what the administration is trying to accomplish,” though. What are you, some sort of commie subversive?
Cheap Shots
Why are the markets so reluctant to see America enter its Golden Age? Does the NASDAQ have Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Great one today. Andrew as ever demonstrates his uncanny inside knowledge of trump's mental processes. And by god, RFK Jr. has to be the most scientifically illiterate person in the country outside of trump himself. Has no idea, repeat, no idea, what messenger RNA is or its role inside the cell. Unbelievable. Will we ever wake up from this nightmare we're living through ?
“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” - Albert Camus