Hello and happy Saturday. President Donald Trump’s reliance on executive power—not only to implement his policy agenda but also to pursue action against law firms with ties to lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him—has prompted scores of legal challenges in the early months of his second term.
This week, the Trump administration suffered legal setbacks on numerous fronts. On Tuesday, a federal judge struck down the president’s executive order targeting WilmerHale, a law firm affiliated with Robert Mueller, the former special counsel who investigated whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Also on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs extended a temporary restraining order she had issued blocking the administration’s effort to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students.
For the site, Gil Guerra detailed Trump’s previous actions against Harvard to put the latest legal skirmish into context, explaining that “without [Student and Exchange Visitor Program] certification, Harvard cannot issue the I-20 forms required for F-1 student visas or the DS-2019 forms for J-1 exchange visitors. Current students would need to transfer to another SEVP-certified school, switch to a different visa, or leave the United States.”
The administration did get one significant legal victory this week, albeit a temporary one. The Supreme Court ruled that the administration could revoke a Biden-era program that provided temporary legal status to migrants from countries facing war or other turmoil. The ruling means that more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua could face deportation while challenges to Trump’s revocation play out in court.
Trump, was, perhaps unsurprisingly, outspoken about his displeasure with the rulings against him. But he directed his ire not at specific judges but toward Leonard Leo, who as executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society during the president’s first term advised the president on judicial nominees. The president called Leo a “sleazebag” and said he “probably hates America.” In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio explained Trump’s ire. “Leo spent many years as the Federalist Society’s sherpa on judicial nominees. … With the exception of Mitch McConnell, no one has done more this century to build a federal bench of originalist judges. But Trump didn’t want originalists—he wanted flunkies—and so Leo’s influence, and the influence of the organization he serves, have gone up in smoke.”
In the Friday G-File, Jonah wrote that Trump’s legal losses can be explained by the fact that his justifications for his policies “are just BS.”
He invokes the Alien Enemies Act, which grants certain powers to the president during a war or invasion, when we’re not at war and not being invaded. … On trade, it’s the same thing. He invokes emergency powers to impose taxes on the American people when the “emergency” he has in mind is that the American economy isn’t structured the way he wants. That’s not an emergency. That’s the modern economy, which he fundamentally doesn’t understand. On trade, it’s the same thing. He invokes emergency powers to impose taxes on the American people when the “emergency” he has in mind is that the American economy isn’t structured the way he wants. That’s not an emergency. That’s the modern economy, which he fundamentally doesn’t understand.
Elsewhere on the site, David M. Drucker spoke with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro about his political future and the 2028 election, economist Jessica Riedl argued that farmers don’t deserve bailouts in response to Trump’s tariffs, and Yale professor Evan D. Morris wrote about how scientists can regain the trust of the public. Thanks for reading!
The governor knows who he is and what he believes, which was clear in a wide-ranging, 30-minute interview with The Dispatch inside Isaac Tripp Elementary’s school library soon after the public event. That he’s interested in shaping the future of the Democratic Party is apparent. And he’s the sort of relatively young and charismatic communicator who historically makes grassroots Democrats swoon (think John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.) But in an interview he is cautious and deliberate, even as he conveys the same engaging manner he demonstrated in the school gym. For instance, Shapiro would seem to have advice worth sharing as Democrats pick up the pieces from 2024. And yet: “I don’t think it’s my role to lecture other Democrats on how they should behave,” he said. “I try to lead by example.”
During President Donald Trump’s first term, farmers received $24 billion on top of their regular farm subsidies to compensate for the loss of access to foreign markets resulting from Trump’s trade war, such as China’s 25 percent retaliatory tariff on American soybeans. Then, in 2024, even as candidate Trump promised a more aggressive trade war that could cripple the farm economy, rural voters nonetheless preferred Trump to Kamala Harris by a 30-point margin. Trump earned a staggering 78 percent of the vote in the 444 counties most heavily dependent on farming. In short, farm country voted overwhelmingly to unleash a new trade war. And now these same farmers and their political leaders want taxpayers to finance another round of bailouts to protect them from the consequences of their own votes.
If scientists believe—as I do—that our research in medicine, physics, computer science, biology, and other disciplines is responsible for our high standard of living and our sophisticated understanding of the world around us, then we must do a much better job at explaining ourselves to our tax-paying, non-scientist friends. Consider how scientists communicate now. Most of us report our work in scientific journals for the consumption of our fellow scientists. Even if the public wanted to read our published academic papers, many (in final form at least) are behind paywalls. By and large, we rely on science journalists to translate our findings, with varying degrees of success and fidelity to the material. Some science journalists do the public a great service by explaining complex concepts in understandable terms. But qualified journalists can only take on so many topics. The majority of us scientists do essential and exciting work that will rarely, if ever, get covered in a newspaper or magazine if we wait for a science journalist to do it.
