The Ugly
Trump downplays economic concerns as he looks to cut trade deals (WSJ)
Not everyone in Trump’s camp is as bullish as he is, according to the senior administration official, but top advisers don’t see a recession coming. Trump’s team continues to field calls from business interests worried about the impact of tariffs; Trump recently said he would soften the blow of tariffs on the auto industry, preventing duties on foreign-made cars from stacking on top of other tariffs he has imposed and easing some levies on foreign parts used to manufacture cars in the U.S.
The U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of 2025, as businesses rushed to stock up on imports ahead of the Trump administration’s tariffs and consumer spending slowed. Democrats are portraying Trump’s trade policies as chaotic and have seized on rising prices.
Trump, asked if he has to ‘uphold the Constitution,’ says, ‘I don’t know’ (NBC)
“But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Welker asked.
“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
The Supreme Court has already made it clear to the Trump administration in three different recent decisions that it has to allow basic due process rights for immigrants based on the long-standing understanding of the laws.
Is the U.S. Becoming an Autocracy? (The New Yorker)
It’s what happened in Turkey after 2013, in India after 2014, in Poland after 2015, in Brazil after 2019—countries that had gone through the long and difficult process of achieving a consolidated liberal democracy, then started unachieving it. “Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Democracies still die, but by different means.” Some of this may happen under cover of darkness, but much of it happens in the open, under cover of arcane technocracy or boring bureaucracy. “Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts,” the authors write. “They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy.”
The first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term have been enervating, bewildering, almost impossible to parse in real time. The Administration has used some degree of brute force to accomplish its aims, but it has relied more often on ambiguity, misdirection, and plausible deniability.
Trump administration plans major downsizing at U.S. spy agencies (WaPo)
The administration recently informed lawmakers on Capitol Hill that it intends to reduce the CIA’s workforce by about 1,200 personnel over several years and cut thousands more from other parts of the U.S. intelligence community, including at the National Security Agency, a highly secretive service that specializes in cryptology and global electronic espionage, a person familiar with the matter said. The person, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
How Trump’s second term has affected elections around the world (WaPo)
Australia’s center-left prime minister, Anthony Albanese, won a second term Saturday after months of lagging in the polls. While other factors were at play, Trump’s tariffs on Australia appear to have boosted the incumbent’s prospects, analysts say — echoing the results of Monday’s election in Canada, where voters seeking an answer to Trump elected Mark Carney.
From Germany to Greenland, the U.S. president has become a key factor in global electoral politics, as some voters added to their long-standing concerns a new question: Who will stand up to Trump?
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America
Trump Battles Academia, but Especially the Ivy League (NYT)
Trump’s attacks on this elite group — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania — have endeared him to his political base. He is withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars in federal funding from six of the eight schools because, he says, they are citadels of antisemitism and liberal indoctrination.
The Trump administration has targeted many other colleges and universities for potential antisemitism, some 60 in all. And yet the eight Ivies are cultural touchstones for Mr. Trump. Beyond the politics is a complex brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never really accepted him.
“They don’t return the love to him,” said Alan Marcus, a business and political consultant who oversaw Mr. Trump’s public relations from 1994 to 2000.
