You have insulted the wrong guy.

Judge Boasberg, in a NYT photo– he looks pretty stern to me.

(This essay was typed a week ago. On review, I had to enlarge the tale considerably and it is still not up to date. The bottom line is that Trump is a psychopath who is running amok with millions of followers in the United States. He has inspired deep alarm and revulsion in many parts of the world, recently provoking election losses by candidates sympathetic to him in Canada and Australia. On the other hand, Hungary is fully fascist and Germany is plagued by a neo-Nazi party that is extremely popular (and supported by our vice president). It reminds me of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”)

Judge Boasberg has been trying to stop the Trump administration from deporting alleged Tren de Aragua members to a prison in El Salvador. This has been going on since Saturday, March 15. Five of the deportees managed to get ACLU representation and contested their removal in Judge Boasberg’s court. Unfortunately, by the time he issued his order to stop the removals temporarily until he could consider the arguments in the case, the deportees were apparently in the air headed for El Salvador.

So Judge Boasberg ordered the government to turn the planes around. This they did not do. Eventually, it was revealed that a detainee on the flight overheard the officers discussing an order they had received telling them to turn around during the flight. This detainee was only able to report this because she and several other females were refused in El Salvador and had to be returned to the US (apparently only males were eligible for imprisonment in El Salvador). It is not known what the El Salvadoran officials would have thought had they been informed that the entire flight(s) had been ordered to turn around by a US judge.

Trump’s reaction to this was to call the judge a number of childish names and to press for the judge’s impeachment. Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court Roberts reacted by issuing a rare press release informing all and sundry that impeachment is not an appropriate response to rulings that one disagrees with. No, appealing to a higher court is the appropriate response. Justice Roberts pitched his press release as if he was speaking to a child.

Trump, of course, is the president who publicly thanked Justice Roberts for all he had done for him– he paused in the reception line after his first address to a joint session of Congress, and audibly thanked him “for all you have done for me.” He was referring to the decision rendered less than a year ago that conferred legal immunity on him for official acts. Trump has clearly misconstrued this decision as giving him carte blanche to do whatever he wants.

He hasn’t reckoned with the fact that the people he directs to do things can still be prosecuted for violating the law (although he can just pardon them). He also has mistakenly assumed that anything he proclaims is the law– not so, at all. The courts have retained the authority to tell him that his proclamations don’t have any effect if they are struck down, even if he’s not legally liable.

So Trump’s insults and the government’s stonewalling over the time the flight left and how many passengers there were, etc. have left a bad taste in Boasberg’s mouth. Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 is unlikely to stand in any case because there has been no declaration of war nor invasion of enemy soldiers to trigger its deportation provisions. Also, the last time the law was invoked (and supported by the court) the deportees were first given hearings and 30 days to contest the allegations that they were Nazis.

Judge Boasberg is a highly regarded individual in the court system. He is considered fair and impartial. He also has a hand in the top-secret Foreign Intelligence court that sits to approve warrants for wire taps and the like, so he’s comfortable with secret material. This is what makes the government’s invocation of the State Secrets gambit so laughable.

Another issue with this invocation is that most of the allegedly secret and sensitive facts that Judge Boasberg ordered the government to reveal are already public. We already know what time the planes left, how many people were under Alien Enemy authority (about 240), what time they arrived, and so on. We even know that they stopped to refuel several hours after the judge entered his written order.

The Appeals Court already met on Monday, March 24, and they issued a 2-1 ruling upholding Judge Boasberg. The judge that Trump appointed sided with him, but the Obama judge and the W. Bush judge shot him down. I don’t know how Trump’s judge justified his dissent in this case, but I’m sure it would make amusing reading.

Most importantly, the government hasn’t released a list of the people sent to El Salvador. People who viewed a video put out by El Salvador of the arrival of the deportees were able to recognize some of them, but not all– and of course they are completely incommunicado once in the Salvadoran gulag, I mean, terrorist confinement center.

The Supreme Court has weighed in on its shadow docket and ordered Trump to “facilitate” the return of a deportee the government admitted (at least at first) it had sent to a notorious terror prison in El Salvador despite a court’s saying he could not be deported there because of a risk to his life from a gang. Now members of the administration are badmouthing him and calling him a terrorist.

By sheer luck of the draw, Boasberg now has been assigned the Signalgate case, and is issuing orders for the government to preserve the entire text chain to which JG (Jeffrey Goldberg) was inadvertently added. Michael Waltz has taken responsibility to adding JG but denies he has ever spoken to or telephoned Jeffrey Goldberg. This is necessary because JG is the guy who outed Trump for calling soldiers losers and suckers.

Being the editor of the Atlantic, Goldberg is one of the journalists Trump hates the most. Now Waltz is out as National Security advisor and is slated to get the UN Ambassador spot.

Michael Waltz spent most of his time after admitting he was on the chain talking about what a liar Jeffrey Goldberg is, even blaming him for signing on to the “Russia hoax.” If you’ll recall, that’s the “hoax” in which Trump knowingly and willingly accepted Russia’s help in the 2016 election. An important point to remember is that several Trump aides (who were convicted of various crimes, like lying to Congress) stonewalled the FBI on their communications with Russian figures, so Mueller was never able to expose the smoking gun.

In Michael Waltz’s dictionary, a “lie” is any fact that makes Trump look bad. Mr. Goldberg has been instrumental in exposing or spreading the news about a number of Trump’s faults, so he’s bottom scum if you believe Mr. Waltz. It’s impressive how many of Mr. Goldberg’s “lies” that Mr. Waltz can remember off the top of his head:

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president, who has lied to Gold Star families, lied to their attorneys, and gone to Russia, hoax, gone to just all kinds of lengths to lie and smear the president [of the] United States, and he’s the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then get sucked into this group…”

The simplest explanation of the error would be that there is a “JG” on Mr. Waltz’s contact list pointing to Mr. Goldberg’s phone number, suggesting that Mr. Goldberg was one of Mr. Waltz’s contacts. That’s impossible, since speaking to a member of the press is one of the lowest forms of treachery if you’re a Trump appointee. So Mr. Waltz was forced to deny ever speaking to or meeting Mr. Goldberg. That’s odd, considering how well Mr. Waltz knows Mr. Goldberg’s suite of “lies.”

These fulminations obscure the fact that there’s no excuse for revealing the time bombing planes are due to take of from their aircraft carrier to attack Houthis in Yemen on Signal. Sure, it’s encrypted, but Russian or Chinese state hackers could have compromised the phone on which the chat was going out. State hackers greatly prize the opportunity to take over the phone of a high level government official.

There’s more, much, much more. Trump has issued executive orders blacklisting law firms that have represented any of his enemies or employed anyone who worked for one of the special prosecutors who were on his case. Even Mueller associates are on the hook. These orders have been and will be struck down because they violate the First and Sixth Amendments (freedom of speech and effective representation by a lawyer when in court). Despite this, nine law firms have already surrendered to this extortion. If the others don’t band together to fight back immediately, they will soon all be under Trump’s thumb.

I suspect that the $900 million in pro bono law work that the submissive law firms have pledged will evaporate once it becomes apparent that the courts will not abide this naked abuse of power. Already, injunctions are enjoining these extortionate demands clearly made on the basis of personal animus, not policy, besides being impermissible retaliation for First and Sixth Amendment-protected behavior.

Likewise, Columbia University has surrendered for fear that it will lose a billion dollars in yearly federal revenue (mostly for research). An article about the background of this case recently revealed that Trump is still angry because many years ago, Columbia refused to buy a plot of land in New York City from him. By some amazing coincidence, the asking price was 400 million dollars, which is the exact amount of money that Trump with-held from Columbia in his extortion demand– nowhere near the full billion that Columbia actually gets each year. Apparently, Columbia balked at buying Trump’s land because it was not contiguous with its campus and the price was too high. The land was sold to someone else a couple of years later.

The story of Harvard University is so broad as to defy depiction as it has careened from one outrage to the next, each worse than the last. The latest diktat from Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education is described as “deranged” and “barely literate.”

The story of the decimation of federal government and the elimination of entire departments by the unpopular Elon Musk has climaxed with the revelation that the Centers for Disease Control’s infection control committee has been shut down. The implications for infection control are staggering, at a time when the rate of whooping cough has doubled in a year and measles is breaking out again– all due to declining vaccination rates. The CDC, not to mention Health and Human Services, now run by worm in the brain RFK Jr, will do nothing to encourage vaccination– they’re too busy developing a database of autism patients.

So what is currently happening, if you’ve been keeping track, is that Trump is plunging at full tilt into the pages of the Project 2025 playbook (and adding his own revenge tour). This 900 page compendium or radical conservative wish list is looking more and more like a road map for much of Trump’s general policy. About half of his executive orders so far are ripped from its pages. In addition, in his revenge tour he has added extortion of his enemies in academia and the legal world to his radical deconstruction of the federal government.

It appears that Trump has blundered into a fascist dictator’s dream scenario. He has taken over the courts (he thinks), pushed the Legislature to the side, and has hired thousands of loyal apparatchiks to do his bidding. The nightmare for Trump is that Judge Boasberg does not look like a guy you want to mess with.

If the courts do not stop the weaponization of government, or if Trump ignores their strictures, we will be fully into a fascist state (fascism is essentially the takeover of government by a group of businesses that take direction from and support a charismatic leader whose whims dictate policy). The businesses in this case are easy to spot– the largest corporations in the world. They have remained entirely in the background, in part because they know large companies are resented by the typical Trump supporter.

We fought and over 400,000 Americans died to stop fascism in World War II. Sadly, we did not have the strength to take on communism then, but the capitalist world was able to outcompete the communist system by the end of the twentieth century.

Now, in the twenty-first century, we are confronted with the resurgence of fascism at a time of existential peril from climate change. Trump has proclaimed climate change to be a hoax, so in addition to destroying American civil society, he will be contributing to the destruction of world civilization. This is why I vacillate between thinking he’s a Russian asset and saying he’s just the AntiChrist. He is certainly a psychopath.