Department of Government Embezzlement
Trump opposes government charity . . . unless it’s for him.
How about some good news for a change? The Wall Street Journal reports that an immigration court has dropped the deportation case against Turkish grad student Rümeysa Öztürk, who became one of the earliest victims of the Trump administration’s swerve into cartoonishly evil immigration enforcement last year when plainclothes officers were caught on video forcing her into an unmarked van. The State Department, it later came out, had tried to revoke her student visa over an op-ed she’d co-written in a Tufts University student paper.
“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Öztürk said in a statement yesterday. Happy Tuesday.
This Just In: Charity Good Again
by Andrew Egger
When Donald Trump told an interviewer last week that the American people shouldn’t mind him ordering his IRS to pay him $10 billion in their money because he’d “give it to charity,” it wasn’t just an instant contender for the most ridiculous policy pitch he’s made in his decade in political life. It was also the last nail in the coffin of the spirit of DOGE.
This time last year, with the new-look Trump administration only a couple weeks into action, the Department of Government Efficiency was dominating both the headlines and the White House’s attention. DOGE was pitched as One Weird Trick to solve America’s decades-in-the-making deficit crisis. Elon Musk’s band of merry hackers, the right believed, was going to go through the world of government contracts like a cleansing fire, rooting out billions or even trillions of dollars a year of fraud and silly spending.
Musk approached this project in his usual way: as a series of manic fixations. Within days, he’d zeroed in on what he believed to be the main culprit in federal overspending: the dastardly behavior of NGOs—or as some like to call them, charities. While he never delivered the trillions in federal savings he’d promised before flaming out of DOGE far ahead of schedule, Musk did manage to blow up the government’s system of giving billions a year to causes like fighting hunger and disease in impoverished and war-torn places abroad.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk tweeted just over a year ago. “Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Before DOGE’s arrival, USAID spent about $21 billion a year on foreign aid and development. This time last year, MAGA considered it a great triumph that the White House was taking that money out of the mouths of widows and orphans to restore it to its rightful owner: the U.S. taxpayer. Now, as Trump lays the groundwork to grant himself roughly half that sum from the Treasury, he seems to have rediscovered the American people’s affection for philanthropy: “Nobody cares how much [I pay myself],” he said this month, “if it goes to a good charity.”
The sentiment is all the more outrageous given Trump’s own personal history with self-dealing “charitable” contributions. It’s too bad Musk and DOGE weren’t around to audit the Trump Foundation a decade ago: Trump had been using his personal charity, it came to light after a lawsuit from the state of New York, to pay his business debts, make political contributions,1 and buy things for himself. He eventually settled the suit in 2019, admitting he had failed to comply with basic laws governing charitable organizations, paying $2 million in damages, and dissolving the Trump Foundation for good. (All a witch hunt, if you ask him.)
Despite all this, the Republican party’s hardest-nosed fiscal hawks don’t seem eager to object to Trump’s personal payout. Yesterday, I reached out to the offices of the three co-chairs of the Congressional DOGE Caucus, GOP Reps. Aaron Bean of Florida, Pete Sessions of Texas, and Blake Moore of Utah, asking what they made of the possible $10 billion bonanza (for charity!). None responded.
It’s hard to know which is more galling: Trump’s own obvious contempt for his own supporters, whom he expects to share exactly his own protean, vibes-based approach to every policy issue and fall into line behind him wherever he happens to land, no matter how nakedly self-interested his own motives may be—or the fact that those supporters keep proving they deserve that contempt in spades.
You believe charity is a crock and a swindle and a waste of taxpayer money, Trump spent the entire DOGE era telling his people.
God, yes, we sure do!, they replied.
Can you believe the lib media wants you to be mad that I’m giving money to charity? Trump all but asks today.
The nerve of those guys!, they say.
Still, there are consolations. Trump’s mass hypnosis of his closest supporters may be as strong as ever, but it’s only getting clearer to everyone outside the spell how insane the status quo has become. As Nate Silver noted, “the share of Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump broke 46 percent for the first time yesterday.” Hey, it’s a start.
In a post-Trump world, what do we do about all the corruption? Assuming we can’t get the money back—at least, not all of it—how do we ensure this doesn’t happen again? Share your ideas.
The People Are Leading
by William Kristol
Every day and in almost every way, from special elections to national polls to citizen mobilization, we see an American public is increasingly aware and alarmed about the dangers of Trump and Trumpism.
The latest piece of evidence: In a new survey by Data for Progress voters—who we’re often told only care about their own narrow self-interest and can only grasp what’s right in front of them—turn out to be clear-eyed about and opposed to Donald Trump’s plans for election interference in November.
When asked, “Do you think President Trump will or will not attempt to deploy immigration enforcement agents to prevent participation in the 2026 midterms,” 64 percent of likely voters said Trump would attempt to do this, and only 21 percent thought he would not.
When asked whether they support or oppose the federal government blocking ICE enforcement actions at polling locations or other election-related sites, 56 percent of likely voters support blocking ICE from election-related sites, while 34 percent oppose.
This survey adds to a growing mountain of evidence that “kitchen table issues” are not, in fact, all that matters to voters, and that they care about their rights and freedoms and our democratic system as well.
Good for the voters. But the elites are slower. You might think congressional Democrats would be doing more to highlight the issue of election interference in the current discussions of ICE funding. You might think our political, business, and civic elites would be doing more to mobilize on the subject of election interference. They may be getting there, at long last—but reluctantly and hesitantly. Their behavior brings to mind the alleged remark by the French politician, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, in 1848: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
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AROUND THE BULWARK
JAGs Shouldn’t Be Civilian Prosecutors… The mass deportation policy is a legal mess—and reassigning military lawyers to support it would only create more problems, argues MARK HERTLING.
Lutnick Lied About Epstein. Why Don’t Republicans Care? On Bulwark+ Takes, SAM STEIN and CATHERINE RAMPELL give their takes on why Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick faces zero consequences for lying about his contact with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Why Minneapolis Gives Hope… On The Mona Charen Show, the Atlantic’s PETER WEHNER joins MONA CHAREN to discuss the psychology of MAGA and why defeating them must be the precursor to depolarization.
Quick Hits
BRINGING IN THE BIG GUNS: Another one for the I’m sure it’s fiiiiiine midterm-elections file, per Politico:
President Donald Trump has directed top U.S. spy agencies to share sensitive intelligence about the 2020 election with his former campaign lawyer, known for pushing debunked theories of electoral fraud, according to four people with knowledge of the effort.
The intelligence that top U.S. spy agencies are furnishing to Kurt Olsen—now a temporary government employee in the White House—is meant to support a probe he is leading into whether Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was the result of fraud or other electoral irregularities. . . .
It’s unclear whether there are any limits to the types of sensitive materials Olsen has access to. Two of the people familiar with Olsen’s work specified that he has at least reviewed some sensitive compartmented intelligence programs, which are among the most highly classified material stored by U.S. spy agencies. One of the people said he leans on Trump when he needs something—including access to highly classified intelligence reporting—from different spy agencies.
“Every time he hits a roadblock, he just calls POTUS,” said the first person familiar with Olsen’s work.
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND: The constant parade of new White House outrages can make it hard for us to keep our eyes on the ones that merely persist. But conditions in America’s immigration detention facilities remain appalling for the people stuck there—and even continue to provoke the occasional international incident. The Irish Times reports on Seamus Culleton, an Irish national who has lived in the United States for two decades, is married to a U.S. citizen, and was in green card proceedings when ICE scooped him up last September. Culleton has been languishing in a Texas ICE facility ever since:
He said he has been locked in the same large, cold and damp room for 4½ months with more than 70 men. He said detainees are constantly hungry because meals served at tables in the centre of the room offer only child-sized portions. Fights often break out over food, “even over those little child-sized juice containers”. Toilet areas are “filthy”.
He said there is little to do but lie on a bed all day. Most detainees do not speak any English. He said he has been allowed outside for air and exercise fewer than a dozen times in nearly five months. The atmosphere is full of “anxiety and depression”, he said.
At a November bond hearing, a judge approved his release on a $4,000 bond, which his wife paid. When nothing further happened towards his release, they learned the US government had denied the bond, initially without explanation.
In a follow-up article, the Irish Times reported that the government of Ireland has attempted to intervene in Culleton’s case: “Our Embassy in Washington DC is also engaging directly with the Department of Homeland Security at a senior level in relation to this case,” a spokeswoman said. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
Including, amazingly, a $25,000 donation to a PAC for then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.
I read that Irish Times story yesterday. The US government is running concentration camps, and everyone in this country needs to wake up to that.
I saw the article about Seamus yesterday on The Guardian and was appalled — these stories are all disturbing. But let me get this straight. The wife paid a $4,000 bail and then the government denied the bail? In this case what happens to the $4,000 paid? If they didn’t hear anything back then it sounds like she didn’t get her money back after the denial — what a racket.
The conditions described should make all Americans embarrassed for their country. There is no need to treat people like animals. But of course the good senator from Florida Rick Scott saved his outrage for the US athletes who have the temerity to speak out against the Orange Julius. As Gary Kasparov said yesterday, the current administration wants our athletes to have minders as he did in the Soviet era.