When Will Trump Dump Pete?
Even for a drama-filled administration, this is getting to be a LOT.
This story from the New York Times this morning probably isn’t going to get a lot of pickup because every word of it is, in Trump’s America, so utterly predictable. But taken all together—wow:
Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime associate of President Trump’s, has been lobbying for a pioneering cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who is facing federal fraud and criminal tax charges, according to congressional filings.
Happy Friday.
Reading Trump’s Mind
by William Kristol
I guess I gotta dump Pete.
It’s too bad. Putting him there was a good idea. And we pulled it off at first. We pushed him through the Senate—which is pretty amazing, you gotta admit. Some 44-year old who hasn’t done squat, getting him confirmed to run the Pentagon. Those Republican senators had all kinds of “concerns.” But they folded like I knew they would.
And Pete got off to a good start. He fired the top brass—it’s amazing how little pushback there was to that—got rid of the JAGs, and was beginning to really get into the promotion system. He was willing to do what it takes to get a military that’s loyal to me. Which is goddamn important for 2028.
But he’s screwed up too many times. We could have toughed out that Signal crap. But now all his former staff are leaking against him, everyone in the building’s out to get him. To handle that, you gotta be tough and shrewd, like I am.
Pete’s not up to it. They tell me he’s looking over his shoulder all the time now. You can’t operate that way. You end up making even more mistakes.
So, sayonara, kid.
Should I dump him now, before all the media stories next Wednesday about the first 100 days? I probably should. Might as well get credit for fixing the problem. Roy Cohn—I really miss that guy, he was the best—used to like to say, in kind of a poetic way, If it were done, ’twere well it were done quickly. Roy really had a gift for words.
But, you know, all the other people I put in are doing fine. They’re not even really controversial anymore.
Pam and Kash are great. The whole Justice Department is now basically my personal law firm. They never tell me I can’t do anything, and they’re doing a lot to weaken my enemies and help my friends. Those executive orders are great. And meanwhile I’m getting away with stuff on the financial as well as the political side they told me I never could. And having Justice and the FBI at my disposal—that’s important for 2028.
Russ at OMB’s doing fine. Elon’s gotten all the publicity (what a relief it will be when he goes). But Vought is quietly pulling off that Schedule F thing so key people at agencies that matter are going to be loyal to me. Which is also big for 2028.
Kristi? Her judgment isn’t great. No, I’m not talking about Corey. I’m talking about getting yourself photographed in front of a bunch of horrible convicts? Who told her that was a good idea? You never see me in a photo like that. Roy had this expression he came up with, A photo’s worth a thousand words. Still, what matters is that the people under her at DHS are making sure that agency is loyal. They’ll be useful in 2028.
I got stuff going in the right direction. The polls are down some recently, but when Witkoff does the deals with Putin and Iran, and Tulsi says it’s all great and that we’ve avoided World War III, that’ll play well. I let Navarro talk me into going too far on the tariffs, but Bessent’s gonna start announcing a bunch of deals, so the markets can get back on track. And I’ll get that guy Kilmar back from El Salvador next week so I look like I’ve got a heart of gold sometimes. I gotta call Bukele tomorrow, make sure we have this all set up.
But I’ll need a replacement at Defense. It would be good to announce it the same day Pete goes.
Maybe Charlie Flynn? He just retired as a four-star, they tell me the regular military guys respect him—but Mike says he’ll be with us when it counts, if you know what I mean.
Or maybe Elise? The first woman secretary of defense! We don’t do DEI. But we’re just busting those glass ceilings on the merits. LOL, as Barron says.
Anyway, Elise is smart and tough. And she’ll do what it takes. Getting the right people in the right places in the military—it’s key for 2028.
But before that, think of the photos of Elise and Kristi and Tulsi and Pam standing behind me at the desk in the Oval. Donald’s angels!
Goddamn, Roy would love that. He’d laugh in that kind of evil way he had. I do miss him. I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell or all that stuff, and I don’t think Roy did either. But Roy had this expression he came up with that he loved to say: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
That’s my motto for 2028.
But first, I gotta dump Pete.
Why Fix What You Could Break Instead?
by Andrew Egger
As the legal roadblocks to his extralegal-deportation regime grow, Donald Trump has increasingly turned to arguments of expediency for why he should be permitted to skip due process for deported migrants. “We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” the president said this week. “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
Plenty who should know better have echoed Trump’s argument. “It is absurd that Biden allowed millions to violate our laws and enter our country illegally but Trump must give each one due process before they are expelled,” complained conservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen this week. “If the left can let millions in illegally and we must then litigate each deportation the left wins.”
These arguments try to brush aside legal realities in a supposed appeal to common sense: Why should illegal immigrants get as much due process as American citizens? But this is political sleight of hand. When we say migrants deserve due process, we mean they must receive the protections U.S. law guarantees them, even when the government would rather they didn’t. But the protections due process guarantees to migrants are far less than the protections guaranteed to Americans accused of crimes.1
An arrested migrant need not be advised of his Miranda rights. He has no right to an impartial jury trial; his case is decided by a judge who, like the officers arresting him, is an employee of the Department of Homeland Security. He may hire an attorney, but the state is under no obligation to provide him one.
The chief obstacle to accelerating legal deportations isn’t an overabundance of rights for potential deportees. It’s a shortage of immigration-court judges, which has bottlenecked the asylum process and caused wait times for immigration hearings to balloon enormously. If the Trump administration wanted to ratchet up expulsions without going to war with the law, it could press for Republican lawmakers to appropriate money to beef up the immigration courts in their federal budget this summer. Doing so would help accomplish one of the administration’s chief aims, and it would also help fix what lawmakers of both parties acknowledge is a gaping hole in our immigration system.
But of course Trump would no more adopt such a strategy than he could sprout wings and fly. Working within the system—relying on horsetrading and dealmaking to tune up the existing immigration apparatus—is antithetical to the ethos driving his second term: We’re gonna do what we want, and we’ll go to war with anyone who tries to get in our way. Far from calling for a dramatic increase in immigration judges, Trump has been busily firing the judges already on the job, including at least eight just this week. Instead of working to fix the system, Trump is deliberately breaking it further—then turning around and arguing that its brokenness justifies his tearing it down entirely.
AROUND THE BULWARK
GOP Election Tactic Coming for You! On Bulwark+ Takes, LAUREN EGAN is joined by N.C. Democratic Party Chair ANDERSON CLAYTON to talk about the dangerous tactic of throwing out votes and delaying results, which is happening in the Tarheel State right now.
Trump and His Billionaires Are Giving the Rich a Bad Name… So much corruption. So much greed. JILL LAWRENCE on so much chintzy gold in the Oval Office.
Cory Booker: A National Crisis and a Global Crisis… On the flagship pod, SEN. CORY BOOKER joins TIM MILLER to talk about the worst peace deal in 100 years, and the Trumpian challenges to the constitutional order, plus some diet and exercise tips, and a decade-old beef squashed.
Quick Hits
WHY DO WE EVEN HAVE THAT LEVER?: Sometimes, the Trump administration gets rid of lawyers for acting honorably, like truthfully admitting in court that certain migrants had been deported in error. Other times, they fire lawyers for what we must admit are perfectly good reasons. This, per the New York Times, is the latter:
The U.S. Department of Transportation on Thursday said it took the extraordinary step of replacing the federal lawyers defending it in a lawsuit over New York City’s congestion pricing program, after accusing them of undermining the department’s bid to end the toll.
The move came after the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District, which had been handling the case, said it mistakenly filed in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday night a confidential memo that questioned the department’s legal strategy and urged a new approach. . . . In the letter, dated April 11, the three assistant U.S. attorneys on the case warned that Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, was using a shaky rationale to end the tolling plan and was “exceedingly likely” to fail, the lawyers wrote.
Everyone screws up at work sometimes.2 But it’s not every day that a public screwup is so buffoonish and self-destructive that your clients insist you must have done it on purpose. (“Are S.D.N.Y. lawyers on this case incompetent,” a Department of Transportation spokeswoman mused in a statement, “or was this their attempt to RESIST?”) Still, we think the White House could cut the lawyers a break. They’re short-staffed since a good chunk of the office has had to resign in moral protest to how the Trump DOJ has conducted itself in other cases. And as they’ve discovered over and over since January: Mistakes happen.
PROBLEMS ONLY SNOWBALLED FROM THERE: SecDef Pete Hegseth’s month of headlines from hell continues. Yesterday, the AP reported that Hegseth “had an internet connection that bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols set up in his office to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer.” The report goes on:
The existence of the unsecured internet connection is the latest revelation about Hegseth’s use of the unclassified app and raises the possibility that sensitive defense information could have been put at risk of potential hacking or surveillance.
Known as a “dirty” internet line by the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain.
Other Pentagon offices have used them, particularly if there’s a need to monitor information or websites that would otherwise be blocked.
But the biggest advantage of using such a line is that the user would not show up as one of the many IP addresses assigned to the Defense Department—essentially the user is masked, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with military network security.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that the pressure is starting to get to the secretary, whose paranoia about leakers close to him is reaching a fever pitch. Last month, Hegseth reportedly accused Adm. Christopher Grady, then the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of leaking a classified briefing on China he was planning for Elon Musk, threatening him, “I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!” As the Journal observes: “Problems only snowballed from there”:
Hegseth’s anxiety only intensified after the leaks of Musk’s briefing, fueled by a string of new revelations that he brought his wife to sensitive meetings, that the White House asked the Pentagon to develop military options for the Panama Canal and that he shared sensitive information about U.S. strikes in Yemen on a second Signal chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
Every new leak of sensitive Pentagon operations or planning induce new concerns and fears in Hegseth, a senior defense official said. . . . On his end, Hegseth has become increasingly concerned about how Trump is perceiving the situation and the possibility of being fired, according to defense officials and people familiar with the Pentagon’s leadership.
It’s a dangerous world out there—sure is good to have a defense secretary with his eye on the ball.
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS: The Washington Post reports on “a burgeoning movement among Big Ten universities” that hopes to “create an alliance to counter government attacks on higher education”:
Several faculty and university senates have approved resolutions asking their leaders to sign a NATO-like agreement that would allow the institutions to share attorneys and pool financial resources in case President Donald Trump’s administration targets one of its members. . . .
The faculty and university senates at more than half a dozen schools—including Indiana University, the University of Nebraska, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Rutgers University and the University of Washington—have signed resolutions asking their administrators to join the effort.
On Thursday, special senate meetings at both the University of Minnesota and Ohio State University, the largest Big Ten school, ended with votes supporting the “mutual academic defense compact” proposal. The outcome at Ohio State was despite school spokesman Chris Booker telling The Post that “it is not legally permissible for the university to participate in a common defense fund.”
It’s a bizarre, humorous, and arguably heartwarming spectacle—college faculties charging the barricades while panicky administrators try to talk them down.
Cheap Shots
Except of course when the government tries to deport American citizens.
After years of slinging morning newsletters, we know all too well the sudden horror of discovering an error in work you just pushed out into the world.
Regarding the cheap shot: I want Sarah to convene a focus group of the 9% of poll responders who said they have a favorable view of the black plague. I'm assuming these people are imagining a plague that only affects black people rather than the one that killed nearly half of all Europeans in the Middle Ages.
“Instead of working to fix the system, Trump is deliberately breaking it further—then turning around and arguing that its brokenness justifies his tearing it down entirely.”
Bingo!!!