Demonstrators took to the streets in cities and towns across the U.S. to protest Trump. Also More Trump News

Demonstrators took to the streets in cities and towns across the U.S. to protest Trump.


They came out in defense of national parks and small businesses, public education and health care for veterans, abortion rights and fair elections. They marched against tariffs and oligarchs, dark money and fascism, the deportation of legal immigrants and the Department of Government Efficiency.

Demonstrators had no shortage of causes as they gathered in towns and cities across the country on Saturday to protest President Trump’s agenda. Rallies were planned in all 50 states, and images posted on social media showed dense crowds in places as diverse as St. Augustine, Fla.; Salt Lake City and rainy Frankfort, Ky.

While crowd sizes are difficult to estimate, organizers said that more than 600,000 people had signed up to participate and that events also took place in U.S. territories and a dozen locations across the globe.

On Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the protest stretched for nearly 20 blocks. In Chicago, thousands flooded Daley Plaza and adjacent streets, while, in the nation’s capital, tens of thousands surrounded the Washington Monument. In Atlanta, the police estimated the crowd marching to the gold-domed statehouse at over 20,000.

Mr. Trump, who was playing golf in Florida on Saturday, appeared to be largely ignoring the protests. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


The Department of Justice building in Washington. Sarah Silbiger for The New York Times

The Trump administration suspended a senior Justice Department immigration lawyer after he questioned the decision to deport a Maryland man to El Salvador.

President Trump’s firing of the head of the National Security Agency, on the advice of Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, has rattled some lawmakers.

The ousting of the N.S.A. chief is one of several moves that have eroded U.S. cyberdefenses at a moment of rising danger.

Trump administration officials have fired workers for the main American aid agency who were sent to Myanmar after the deadly earthquake there.

Trump Tariffs

Trump’s tariffs will wound global free trade, but the blow may not be fatal: Other countries could find a way to maintain the system without the U.S., Mark Landler writes.

Vietnam, a manufacturing destination for U.S. brands, faces a potentially devastating 46 percent tariff. Its leader is asking Trump for a delay.

Trump’s political strength is built on the economy. If it sinks, he could drag Republicans down with him, Nate Cohn writes.

Baseball is enjoying a sort of renaissance.

Shohei Ohtani Darryl Webb/Associated Press


A new baseball season is underway, and the sport is enjoying a sort of renaissance.

Baseball is making more money than it ever has. The addition of a pitch clock has made games quicker and created more action on the field. Attendance and ratings are on the rise.

But the sport also faces a possible long-term problem: the widening gap between its haves and have-nots.

Baseball’s future, both good and bad, is on display in California.

It’s a glorious moment for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won the World Series last year and have baseball’s biggest star, Shohei Ohtani. After winning the title, the Dodgers added even more talent to their roster — the team will spend well over $300 million this year on player salaries.

A few hundred miles up Interstate 5, in Sacramento, that kind of money feels almost unfathomable. There the Athletics, who left Oakland after 57 years, are playing their home games at a minor-league ballpark as they prepare to move to Las Vegas in three years. The A’s entire payroll is only slightly more than what Ohtani alone is owed each year.

Money doesn’t win games. It’s baseball, after all. And the A’s are scrappy. Even if they aren’t as well compensated, they can beat anyone on any given day. But the imbalance of resources, over time, tends to offer richer teams an advantage.

For today’s newsletter, The Times spoke with the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, about the state of the game.
Payroll disparity

Unlike other major American sports, baseball does not have a salary cap, which is used to narrow the gap between the richest and poorest teams. Some M.L.B. owners are pushing the league to adopt a salary cap as part of their next contract with the players’ union.

Manfred told us in an interview at his office in New York that he believes the financial imbalance is an existential problem for the sport. “We sell entertainment that’s based on competition,” he said. “If people don’t believe there’s competition, you’ve got a product problem.”

The problem: Players vehemently oppose a salary cap and many insist that they would never agree to play under one. Their union argues that players deserve to be compensated, without restriction, for the work they do.

Last time the owners made a real push for a cap, in 1994, it resulted in a 232-day strike, a canceled World Series and years of fan frustration. The current contract is set to expire after next season. If the owners make another push for a cap, another painful work stoppage could follow.
Baseball’s future

In his interview with The Times, Manfred also spoke about a range of other topics concerning the present and future of the sport, including:

Torpedo bats: The new, oddly shaped bats that caused a frenzy when the Yankees used them to hit several home runs are legal and “absolutely good for baseball,” Manfred said.
Robot umpires: “The experiment was really successful,” Manfred said about the computerized challenge system for balls and strikes that the league tested during spring training. He hopes to use it in the regular season as soon as next year.
Pitching injuries: Manfred warned that pitching “is getting taught in a way that emphasizes velocity and spin rate,” which puts additional strain on pitchers’ elbows. “By the time we get guys,” he said, “they’re already damaged goods.”
What would make the game better: Recent rule changes have led to more action on the field, which Manfred thinks is key to the sport’s future. “Action, movement, the ability to show how athletic you are,” he said. “Any changes that allow the showcasing of the athleticism of your players is huge.”


Read the full interview with Manfred here.

Adams will run for re-election as an independent instead of as a Democrat.

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City said on Thursday that he would not run for re-election in the Democratic primary in June, an acknowledgment of the growing backlash against his embrace of President Trump and his record-low approval ratings.

Mr. Adams said he would instead run as an independent in the general election in November — an uphill battle in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one.

His announcement comes a day after the five-count federal corruption indictment that he faced was dismissed by a judge, following the Trump Justice Department’s decision to abandon the prosecution.

Mr. Adams released a six-minute video saying that the case had made it difficult for him to run in the June 24 primary. He said that he was still a Democrat but that he would “appeal directly to all New Yorkers” as an independent in the general election.

In the video, Mr. Adams again denied the corruption allegations, but acknowledged that he had made mistakes.

“I know that the accusations leveled against me may have shaken your confidence in me and that you may rightly have questions about my conduct,” he said. “Let me be clear, although the charges against me were false, I trusted people that I should not have and I regret that.”

The collapse of the mayor’s primary campaign was a stunning setback for a charismatic leader who once called himself the “future of the Democratic Party.” But in recent months, as Mr. Adams publicly avoided criticizing Mr. Trump, he began to distance himself from party orthodoxy.

“People often say, ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat. You seem to have left the party,’” Mr. Adams said in a January interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality. “No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.”

The decision by Mr. Adams to abandon his bid for the Democratic ballot line, which was first reported by Politico, would seem to significantly dampen his hopes for a second term.

Trump insists in the long-term tariffs will be worth the pain. The S&P 500 dropped nearly 5 percent Worst since the pandemic.

China announced a 34 percent tariff on American imports, matching Trump’s 34 percent tariff.


Markets fell for a second day in Asia and Europe. The S&P 500 dropped nearly 5 percent yesterday, its deepest retreat since the height of the pandemic.


Shares of Apple, which makes most of its iPhones, iPads and Macs overseas, fell 9 percent. Other big tech stocks, including Microsoft and Amazon, also slumped.


Trump insisted that the long-term payoff of the tariffs would be worth the pain. “The markets are going to boom,” he said. “The country is going to boom.”


Trump’s tariffs are estimated to cost American importers nearly $800 billion. These charts explain the costs.


Countries that built their economies on manufacturing goods for the U.S., like Bangladesh and Sri


Lanka, face the greatest risk from the tariffs. See where tariffs will hit hardest.

Canada introduced a 25 percent tariff on cars and trucks made in the U.S. in response to Trump’s auto tariffs, which took effect yesterday.

Trump’s tariffs could slow the shift to renewable energy: They affect most components of clean-energy production, from wind turbines blades to electric vehicle batteries.

Trump closed a loophole that had allowed retailers like Shein and Temu to ship Chinese goods directly to American shoppers without paying tariffs.

He imposed tariffs on Antarctic islands with more penguins than people.

Trump has been angry for decades about trade. He started talking publicly about tariffs in 1988, when he lost an auction for a piano used in the film “Casablanca” to a Japanese trading company. Read the story from 2019.

Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski, and Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post reported how Trump came to impose the tariffs. After aides from a number of different government agencies came up with options for Trump to review, he decided instead on a different option, one that has drawn ridicule because it is crude and has nothing to do with tariffs at all. He reached the amounts of tariff levies by dividing the trade deficit of each nation (not including services) by the value of its imports and then dividing the final number by 2.

The reporters note that Trump didn’t land on a plan until less than three hours before he announced it, and made his choice with little input from business or foreign leaders. Neither Republican lawmakers nor the president’s team knew what Trump would do. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f*ck anymore,” a White House official told the reporters. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f*ck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

While right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have worked hard to spin the economic crisis sparked by Trump’s tariffs, Financial Times chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch used charts on social media to show that Americans are not happy. Consumers give Trump’s economic plan the worst ratings of any administration’s economic policy since records began. He has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as the global coronavirus pandemic did. Almost 60% of Americans expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, and they are very worried about job losses.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said today that Trump’s tariffs are “highly likely” to increase inflation and risk throwing people out of work. Economists at JPMorgan now place the odds of global recession at 60% unless the tariffs are ended.

Burn-Murdoch noted that despite the attempt of right-wing media to hide the crisis, more than half of Americans have heard unfavorable business news coverage of the government’s policies. While MAGA continues to approve of Trump, he’s rapidly losing support among the rest of the coalition that put him into office.

In Europe, Welfare Vs. Warfare

Secretary of State Marco Rubio Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times

	By Katrin Bennhold I cover international politics from London.

As the United States deserts Ukraine, and Europe with it, leaders on the continent are closing ranks and arming up to defend their democracies against Russia. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer elicits comparisons to Winston Churchill. In France, President Emmanuel Macron is channeling Charles de Gaulle’s argument for independence from Washington. Germany changed its strict budget rules to spend more on defense. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, came to Brussels yesterday to urge them on.

But Russia isn’t the only threat to democracy in Europe. Far-right and autocratic parties here have gained ground for a decade. They’re already part of the government in six capitals. And the impulse to ramp up defense may energize their voters.

Europe is rearming to battle fascism and autocracy abroad. Unfortunately, this may also empower fascism and autocracy at home.

Welfare vs. warfare

To understand why, remember the state of European politics: Economies are stagnating, governments are unpopular and efforts to keep the far right out of coalition governments are barely holding. Now, as critics see it, leaders want to spend money containing Russia instead of helping their citizens.

In Britain, Starmer plans to increase military spending from 2.3 percent of the economy today to 3 percent early in the next decade. At the same time, he plans to cut Britain’s annual welfare bill by some 5 billion pounds (about 6.5 million dollars) a year. It’s a risky proposition after the economy shrank in January and at a time when the hard-right Reform U.K. party is snapping at Labour’s heels in some working-class regions. British voters say welfare spending is more important than military spending. “Welfare Not Warfare,” read a banner at protests last week.

Outside Parliament in central London. Benjamin Cremel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Macron faces similar headwinds in France. Voters say they support a stronger military but don’t want to pay for it by increasing taxes, decreasing social spending or raising the retirement age. Macron has already promised not to raise taxes, so some cuts to social spending seem likely. Now parties on the far right and the far left smell blood: Macron is using the Ukraine war to “justify the destruction of the welfare state,” wrote one right-wing lawmaker on X. Cutting back the social services in favor of defense is “psychosis,” said the leader of one of France’s most powerful unions.

Already, France’s deadlocked Parliament struggles to govern. The political dysfunction — and the notion that it might slash popular programs — will only help the extremes. No wonder Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, retains a comfortable lead in polls for the next presidential election. (An embezzlement conviction means she can’t run, but she is appealing it.)

Daring or deceptive?

The critique from the right isn’t just about unpopular budgetary choices. There is also a sense that mainstream politicians don’t listen to voters — and don’t keep their promises.

Before his conservative party came first in Germany’s snap election last month, Friedrich Merz said he wouldn’t alter the budget rules. But after the election, he pushed through a constitutional amendment that will let his future government spend nearly a trillion euros on the military and other things. He had to rush it through the outgoing Parliament because, in the newly elected chamber, pro-Russian parties on the left and the right gained enough seats to block the move.

The right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in particular has spent years arguing that mainstream parties adhere to a sort of elitist, trans-Atlantic centrism that gives voters little say in how their country is governed. Then Merz used departing lawmakers to enact a policy he had campaigned against. The AfD quickly branded the maneuver as “gigantic voter deception.” Three in four German voters agree, as do almost half of the supporters of Merz’s own conservative camp.

The political cost was immediately apparent: Approval ratings for the conservatives fell, while those of the AfD, already the second-biggest party in Germany, rose.

Ten years too late

If Europe’s rearmament push had come a decade ago — if Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea had served as a wake-up call — the trade-offs would have looked different. Back then, Europe’s economy was growing twice as fast as it is now. Barack Obama was in the White House. Brexit had not happened. The AfD was a one-year-old fringe party. Le Pen was nowhere near as popular. Europe’s big liberal democracies were in fighting shape.

Rearmament is still the only way Europe can deter Vladimir Putin at a time when Washington has abandoned it. But now governments are fighting for democracy at home as well as abroad.

Leaders hope that voters will ultimately rally behind them in the face of threats from Putin and President Trump. They also hope that rearmament will boost growth and manufacturing jobs. (Experts say that this is plausible but far from certain.) Yet because they waited, they may pay a steep price: Voters may punish those who push for a stronger military. Leaders may need to backpedal.

There’s another possibility, too. Rearming in the name of democracy today could leave the far-right governments of tomorrow — many with close ties to Moscow — in charge of big, muscular militaries.

America Has Never Been Wealthier. But It Doesn’t Feel That Way.

A surge in U.S. wealth has been driven by stock and home values. But the gains are concentrated at the top, leaving others in a sour economic mood.

America is more prosperous than ever.

U.S. household net worth reached a new peak at the end of 2024. The unemployment rate has levitated just above record lows for three years. The overall debt that households are carrying compared with the assets they own is also near a record low.

But even a land of plenty has its shortcomings, influencing both perceptions and realities of how Americans are doing.

The U.S. economy remains deeply unequal, with vast gaps in wealth and financial security persisting even as inflation has ebbed and incomes have risen. And data designed to capture the overall population may be obscuring challenges experienced by a broad range of Americans, especially those in the bottom half of the wealth or income spectrum.


The share of wealth held by families in the top 10 percent has reached 69 percent, while the share held by families in the bottom 50 percent is only 3 percent, according to the latest reading from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. (When future income claims from Social Security benefits are included, the bottom 50 percent hold 6 percent of total wealth.)

And while wealth has risen for the less wealthy half of the population in recent years, much of the uptick has been locked up in what financial analysts call “illiquid assets” — gains in home prices and stock portfolios — which are not easily translated into cash to pay for bills and expenses that are much higher than they were a few years ago.

Although the bottom 50 percent holds only a 1 percent share of all financial market wealth, six in 10 adults report owning some amount of stock. A broad range of Americans may be frustrated by the inaccessibility of this illiquid wealth, said Daniel Sullivan, research director at the JPMorganChase Institute, which tracks the finances of millions of U.S. bank account holders.

“‘Massive home equity gains, and my 401(k) is way up, but I can’t touch that, either!’” Mr. Sullivan explained, channeling the tension many people feel.“Higher-income people drive most of aggregate spending,” said Joanne Hsu, an economist and director of the Michigan survey. “They were on an upward surge of sentiment between 2022 and 2024, and that’s consistent with their strong spending.”

Part of the disconnect may stem from the tendency among economists to track income progress primarily through percentage change rather than dollar amounts.

Even when inflation was peaking around 9 percent and diluting income growth, Ms. Hsu explained, “a 10 percent boost to middle and especially higher incomes is money that feels real, like you can do something with it.”

For someone making $100,000, that means a $10,000 raise. But a 10 percent increase at the bottom, perhaps to an hourly wage of $16.50 from $15, “means you’re still living hand-to-mouth,” she added.

In a recent report, Matt Bruenig, the president of the People’s Policy Project, a liberal think tank, evaluated the long-running question in U.S. economics of how many adults are living paycheck to paycheck — a term plagued, he said, by “inherent ambiguities.”Drawing on data from the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, conducted annually by the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. Bruenig noted that “if we define someone as living paycheck to paycheck if they either say they do not have three months of emergency savings or say they cannot afford a $2,000 emergency expense,” then 59 percent of American adults are “living paycheck to paycheck.”

Here Is the Real Route to Freeing Palestinians

Credit..


By Bret Stephens


Opinion Columnist


The world should remember the name of Odai Al-Rubai. The 22-year-old Palestinian man joined protests in Gaza last week to demand an end to 18 years of Hamas’s violent misrule in the territory. Demonstrators could be heard shouting, “Out, out, Hamas get out,” and “Hamas are terrorists,” while displaying banners saying “Hamas does not represent us.” In retaliation, Al-Rubai’s family says, he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by members of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades. Then his body was dumped in front of the family home.

Did the “Free Palestine” protesters of Columbia, U.C.L.A. and other campuses gather to pause for a moment of silence for Al-Rubai? And was there an additional prayer for the recovery of Hussam al-Majdalawi, another dissident whose views reportedly got him kidnapped by Hamas, shot in the legs and left in a square as an example to others?

Last week’s protests are not the first time Gazans have tried to rise against Hamas: There were also major protests in 2019 that were bloodily suppressed yet went almost unreported in Western media. Some of us have been writing about the plight of Palestinians under their own rulers for decades — the struggle of Palestinian journalists to write freely; the tragedy of gay Palestinians seeking to live freely — only to be met with a collective yawn.

For too many, including those who call themselves “pro-Palestinian,” Palestinian misery seems to matter only when the blame can be pinned on Israel.

The difference now is that Hamas may no longer be able to deploy its full apparatus of repression, at least not while it must spend much of its time hiding underground from Israeli strikes. Those attacks are both the impetus and the means by which Gazans are demanding their freedom: impetus, because a growing number of Palestinians in the territory recognize that there will be no end to wars with Israel so long as Hamas continues to drag them into those wars; means, because it’s only on account of Israeli attacks on Hamas that the protesters stand a chance of overthrowing that tyrannical regime.And what a tyranny it has been. Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacres and Hamas’s leader in Gaza until he was killed last year, rose through the ranks by killing other Palestinians he suspected of disloyalty. Once in power, he set up a Stasi-like network of domestic surveillance and torture chambers. Sinwar also described the thousands of civilian Gazans killed in the conflict as “necessary sacrifices” to his cause. Images of muscled Hamas fighters at hostage-handover ceremonies are further evidence that the group’s leaders divert food aid to themselves at the expense of hungry Palestinians.

Whatever else that is, it is not a route to a free Gaza, much less a free Palestine. That concept of freedom might be better exemplified by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, another third world death cult that promised liberation and promoted slaughter — and that came with its own prominent apologists on American college campuses.

The real route to freeing Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, must begin with the elimination of Hamas as a military force, something that, for now, only Israel has the power and the will to accomplish. Among other necessaries will be Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor separating Gaza from Egypt, to ensure that Hamas can’t resupply itself with weapons. Longer term, an Arab Mandate for Gaza, complete with a security force from moderate Arab states, may be the best solution for preventing the resurgence of Hamas and avoiding the need for a long-term Israeli reoccupation of most of the territory.

But even that won’t work if a broad majority of Palestinians isn’t willing to unshackle themselves from Hamas’s political and ideological grip. In that sense, it isn’t enough for Gazans to revolt against the group for being the prime instigator and perpetuator of the last 18 months of war and misery, a fact the Gazan protesters seem to understand far better than their mindless champions abroad.What matters even more than overthrowing Hamas is overcoming the mentality of the so-called Resistance on which movements such as Hamas (but not only Hamas) were built. If the core Palestinian demand is not the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel but rather of one in place of Israel, then the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bound to continue.

For Palestinians, that will mean not only abandoning terrorism or guerrilla warfare but also the more insidious forms of seeking Israel’s destruction, such as the spurious call for a “right of return” for the descendants of Palestinian refugees — a right whose main purpose is to swamp Israel demographically so that it will no longer be able to maintain a Jewish majority.

As for Israelis, last week’s protests represent both a hope as well as a challenge. Hope: Ultimately, the protests suggest the possibility that, eventually, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians will never again allow themselves to be ruled by revanchist tyrants of any shade. Challenge: If and when that happens, there will be no plausible argument against a Palestinian state.

The sooner Hamas is defeated, the sooner the day might come.

California Governor Newsom Says the Democratic Brand Is ‘Toxic’

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California described Democrats as being stuck in an “echo chamber” while getting crushed by Republican opponents.Credit...Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press

By Laurel Rosenhall

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Friday that the Democratic brand was “toxic” and that his party had to admit its own mistakes, delivering tough love as Democrats struggle in their fight against the Trump administration.

Mr. Newsom, once considered a liberal combatant, has embarked on a political soul search in the months since President Trump won the White House and Republicans won both houses of Congress. On Friday, he used his strongest language yet to criticize his own party during an appearance on “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

“The Democratic brand is toxic right now,” he said, pointing to a recent NBC News poll that showed Democrats with a 27 percent favorability rating, the lowest in at least a generation.

Mr. Newsom, a possible 2028 presidential candidate, blamed his fellow Democrats for his party’s woes. He criticized Democrats for being judgmental, staying in an echo chamber and resorting to “cancel culture” to ostracize people whose views they find abhorrent.

“We talk down to people,” he said. “We talk past people.”

The governor found in Mr. Maher a sympathetic figure who for decades has questioned Democratic orthodoxy despite his liberal leanings.

Mr. Newsom this month launched a new podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” on which he has interviewed guests from across the political spectrum to discuss, in part, what went wrong for Democrats in the 2024 elections. Early episodes featured conversations with Charlie Kirk, who leads the youth organization Turning Point USA, and Steve Bannon, an architect of President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Those guests in particular drew fierce criticism from Mr. Newsom’s liberal allies, who accused the governor of legitimizing right-wing views and failing to correct inaccuracies expressed by his guests.

“This idea that we can’t even have a conversation with the other side?” Mr. Newsom said with incredulity Friday.

“You have to. They won,” Mr. Maher replied.Democrats have split over how best to confront the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, most notably this month when Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, delivered the votes to avoid a government shutdown. Mr. Schumer defended his decision as a responsible, if unpopular, choice. But many Democrats saw it as a sign that their party was weak.

Internally, Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong last year and how they can retake Congress in 2026.

Mr. Newsom hosted Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate last year, for a conversation released last week about “where the hell our party is right now,” as Mr. Newsom put it.“This is an existential moment, and our unity against Trump is not increasing our trust, it’s not helping the Democratic brand,” Mr. Newsom told Mr. Walz.

Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, also criticized his party on Friday, saying in an interview with Politico that the party would be in a “permanent minority” if it did not get its act together.

On Friday, Mr. Newsom told Mr. Maher: “We need to own our mistakes. We need to own what’s wrong with our party.”

Mr. Newsom’s comments were reminiscent of the time that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told his own California Republican Party members in 2007 that they were “dying at the box office.” Nearly two decades ago, Mr. Schwarzenegger urged his conservative base to move toward the center to gain relevance in California, at a time when Democrats controlled the legislature and nearly all statewide offices there.

California Republicans for the most part ignored the advice, lost even more seats and have never won statewide office since then. State party activists have taken comfort in the national success of Republicans, who have shifted rightward and made gains elsewhere.

On Saturday, Representative Ro Khanna, another California Democrat who may run for president in 2028, issued a rebuttal to Mr. Newsom and said the Democratic Party was “not ‘toxic.’”

“This is not the time to join the chorus in bashing our party,” Mr. Khanna said on X. “The rage should be about what Trump is doing TODAY. Let’s share what our party has done & offer a forward vision for the future.”

Mr. Newsom surprised Democrats this month when he said on his podcast that it was “deeply unfair” for transgender athletes to play in female sports. He reiterated that stance on Friday night, to the approval of Mr. Maher.

The host, however, pressed Mr. Newsom on a California state law that prohibits school districts from requiring teachers to tell parents when a student asks to change their gender identity at school. The Trump administration asserted on Thursday that California’s law violated federal law, and Mr. Maher has taken the position that parents should be informed when their children seek an identity change.

Mr. Newsom defended the law as sound policy, saying that California simply wanted to protect teachers who “did not report or snitch on a kid talking about their gender identity.”

“What is the job of a teacher? It’s to teach,” Mr. Newsom said. “I just think that was fair.”

Mr. Maher has repeatedly expressed his desire to see Mr. Newsom run for president. On Friday, he put the question to his guest: “Are you going to do it or not? Just come on, tell us.”

Mr. Newsom left plenty of room to maneuver after his final term as governor comes to a close in early 2027.

“I deeply respect the question,” he said, “but I don’t have any grand plans as it respects that.”

MAGA worldview: Some people are better than others and have the right to rule.

The Trump regime is the result of at least 45 years of Republican rhetoric that undermined the idea of a government that worked for the good of everyone by claiming that such a government was “socialism” or “Marxism.” That argument had nothing to do with actual Marxism, which called for the people to take over farms and factories, and everything to do with America’s peculiar history.

That rhetoric that tied racism and taxes elected Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, and it has since metastasized until the top seven donors to the 2024 political cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Trump’s government is also firing women, Black and Brown Americans, and gender minorities from public positions and working to erase them from our history. MAGA Republicans have fired up their base against immigrants they claim are “invading” the United States,

Just how profoundly the administration is violating civil rights came through today when news broke of an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The guide lays out a point system by which officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if an immigrant is eligible for rendition to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. The guide tags people as members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang if they reach 8 points on a point system in which officers determine what seems to them a “gang tattoo” or a gang sign, or interact with those ICE says are gang members.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that nearly all of the criteria on the list are subjective, which helps to explain why so many people who are apparently unaffiliated with TdA were swept up in the rendition. “With this checklist,” Reichlin-Melnick writes, “ICE can declare any Venezuelan an ‘Alien Enemy’ without ANY concrete evidence—based solely on an ICE officer's interpretation of tattoos and hand signs which may be completely innocent or the bad luck of having a roommate ICE thinks is TDA.”

The MAGA Republicans’ worldview is the same as that of the Confederates who preceded them: some people are better than others and have the right to rule.

DOGE’s cuts likely to fall short.

All of the other programs you hear about (schools, welfare payments, foreign aid, medical research) make up roughly 30 percent of the federal budget. Trump would have to eliminate all of those to balance the budget without touching the programs he has deemed untouchable.

Trump and Musk claim they can eliminate most of the deficit by downsizing the federal work force — the Times is tracking the firings here — and ending waste and fraud. This is the work DOGE says it’s doing. But these efforts, too, are likely to fall short.

Presidents and Congress have launched many initiatives over the past few decades to tackle waste and fraud. They did not find significant savings. Watchdogs also track improper payments, which include fraud, duplicate charges and payments to ineligible recipients. These made up $149 billion in the most recent fiscal year. Even if DOGE managed to root out all of these payments — a difficult task for many technical reasons, The Wall Street Journal reported — it would shrink the deficit by only 8 percent.

Similarly, shrinking the federal work force can do only so much. Even if Musk managed to fire every civilian employee and cut their benefits — an outlandish scenario — he would reduce the deficit by just 14 percent.

Some layoffs could even increase the deficit. The Biden administration wanted to hire more workers at the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax cheats. Experts said the plan would bring in $2.5 in tax revenue for every $1 spent. Trump wants to get rid of the new employees anyway.

DOGE claims it has slashed $130 billion in spending. But its ledger is filled with errors, my colleagues David Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine reported. The agency has revised its estimate downward multiple times, in acknowledgments of mistakes.

In the end, the debt problem remains what it has long been: Republicans and Democrats refuse to cut popular but expensive federal programs and don’t want to raise taxes on most Americans. As long as that’s true, the federal government will remain in the red.

Related: Musk has made sweeping claims about fraud in government spending. Read a fact-check.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

A Paris court found the French far right leader Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement. This endangers her plans to run for president in 2027.

The chair of a charity founded by Prince Harry accused him of harassment and bullying to force her out of her post.

The number of Black men attending four-year colleges has fallen, with a drastic shift at historically Black colleges and universities.

Myanmar Earthquake Death Toll Passes 2,000 as Rescuers Race to Find Survivors - Rescuers raced against fears that the death toll could rise sharply as the end of a 72-hour window in which most people trapped in rubble are reasonably expected to survive neared.

The Wall Street Journal has a worrying report about the ways the administration is coming after the mainstream press with lawsuits and other acts of aggression, like booting The Associated Press from the Oval Office because it won’t refer to the “Gulf of America.”

Bret Stephens: I’m no fan of the college campus protests against Israel, too many of which veered into outright antisemitism. And I think there should be swift and stern consequences for bad conduct, like taking over buildings, bullying other students or lying on immigration forms. On the other hand, the right to speak freely is the most elemental right of all, which we should honor for citizens and noncitizens alike. If the administration can’t offer better reasons for arresting foreign students than not liking their opinion pieces, they should be freed. Anything less is un-American.

Trump Administration Imposes Auto Tarriffs. And Other Moves.

An all-electric Porsche in Leipzig, Germany. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images


Shares in automakers around the world, including many in Germany, Japan and Korea, fell after Trump announced tariffs on imported cars and car parts.

Shares in Tesla — which makes all the cars that it sells domestically in the U.S. — rose almost 3 percent.

Trump’s tariffs are likely to encourage more domestic car production in the long run, economists say. But in the short term, they will probably hurt the economy.

Experts say the tariffs will raise the average price of a car by thousands of dollars.


A federal judge ordered several Trump administration officials to preserve the messages from the Signal group chat planning attacks in Yemen.

Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested there probably would not be a criminal investigation into the Yemen chat.

The Health and Human Services Department plans to lay off 10,000 employees. The cuts will be especially deep at the F.D.A. and the C.D.C.

Self-deporters increase, but most illegals are staying.

Jesús, 25, arrived last year from Venezuela. Jimena Peck for The New York Times

It is incredibly hard to deport 14 million people — the estimated number of immigrants in the United States unlawfully. First, the government has to find them. For many, it has to pry them from their lives, their jobs, their communities. That’s why the Trump administration has deported only a few thousand migrants so far, focusing mostly on those it says are criminals.

To make a real change, as Trump has promised to do, millions of people would need to leave voluntarily. So the administration is urging them — in some cases, trying to scare them enough — to “self-deport.” The Homeland Security secretary tells them in TV ads to “leave now” or be hunted down. Those who comply “may have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American dream.” (This is unlikely, because anyone who has been in the country illegally for a year is ineligible to return for a decade.)

Self-deportation, a longtime fantasy for immigration hawks, was popularized by Mitt Romney in a 2012 presidential debate and often mocked. But for the first time in my 15 years of reporting on this topic, immigrants tell me they’re considering it. Some have already followed through. If the climate here becomes intolerable — if the risks of being caught and severed from their families seem too high — it’s possible many more migrants will abandon the United States. Today’s newsletter is about what I’ve heard in my reporting.
Who wants to go

Migrants in Denver, Colo., in 2023. Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post, via Getty Images


In recent years, Denver has absorbed 40,000 migrants — the most per capita of any city. Most of the newcomers are Venezuelans who fled their broken country. But the city is also home to many Latino immigrants who came long ago. I visited last week to take their temperature.

Most are not inclined to bolt. Two-thirds of undocumented immigrants have been in the country for a decade or longer. Most pay taxes. They’re people like Mirna, a Mexican who crossed the border 28 years ago. Her husband owns a house-painting business. They bought a mobile home and have three American children, including a daughter serving in the Navy. Mirna, who speaks English fluently, told me she wouldn’t go back to Mexico because it would mean leaving her kids.

But recent border crossers are much more likely to consider departing. I interviewed several young men from Venezuela who are among them. They see footage of shackled migrants shuffled onto deportation planes. They watch the videos of more than 200 Venezuelan men, accused by the Trump administration of gang affiliation, being flown to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Reporting suggests that some of them may not have been gang members.

Rather than risk subjecting themselves to that ordeal, they want to leave on their own terms.

Since arriving in Denver in 2023, Cristian, 29, has delivered meals and worked on construction sites. (Like other migrants I interviewed, he worried that immigration agents would find him and spoke on the condition that I identify him only by his given name.) He sends money to his wife and children in Venezuela. Cristian does not have any tattoos, a customary gang indicator, he said. He possesses a work permit and an active asylum application, which theoretically protects him from imminent deportation.

But the enforcement climate since Trump took office has changed Cristian’s calculus “360 degrees,” he told me. With the help of an American friend who escorted him to several immigration offices, he made an appointment to appear before a judge today so he could request a voluntary departure from the United States. (Immigrants who receive formal permission to leave have an easier time returning later.)

Other Venezuelans contemplating an exit were released into the United States by border officials with orders to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement every few months. Recently, officials have detained and deported people when they’ve shown up for their check-ins.

ICE agents and the local authorities detain a person in Denver. Chet Strange for The New York Times


Jesús, 25, has his next ICE appointment in early May and sees the writing on the wall. After arriving last year, he languished for months in detention until officials turned him loose, probably to make room for others. He found work remodeling homes in Denver. Now he’d rather return voluntarily to Venezuela than be confined again. “I came here to work to help my family,” said Jesús, the sole brother to five sisters. “I just hope to manage to leave before they deport me.”

He has enough money to buy an airline ticket. But, like others, he told me that the U.S. authorities had confiscated his passport. How can he board a plane without it?

American women in Denver formed groups in late 2023 to help recent arrivals from Venezuela. But more recently they also share tips about how to leave because the bureaucracy can be hard to navigate. A mother with a U.S.-born child needs to get a passport for her child, for instance. But his father, who needs to sign forms, has been deported. The local volunteers have researched what happens if migrants leave without an ID — and whether it’s safer to depart by air or over land.

The departures are not exclusive to Denver. A family in Chicago recently left for Mexico, according to their lawyer. People have abandoned Springfield, Ohio — the town where Trump claimed Haitians were eating their pets — employers there told me. Others are contemplating leaving from elsewhere, like Houston.
The right moment

For now, most migrants are staying put. They’ve trekked through jungles and cartel territory to get here. Instead of giving up, they limit their outings and keep a low profile.

What could change their minds? The job market, several told me. A crackdown on U.S. businesses that employed undocumented workers would drive many into the shadows and others back home. A recession would have the same effect. Wayne Cornelius, an immigration scholar at the University of California, San Diego, has found that bleak job prospects are most likely to impel undocumented immigrants to leave.

Take Karla and Ender, a Venezuelan couple with four children. They worry about immigration enforcement. But they have plenty of work, and their family is thriving in Colorado. Since arriving in late 2023, they have relocated from a rundown apartment complex, acquired two cars and bought their kids cellphones.

“You can barely make enough money to feed your family in Venezuela,” Karla said. “We live much better here.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Teams of masked agents in masks have approached foreign students, zip-tied them and bundled them into unmarked vehicles. These tactics are usually reserved for criminal suspects.

Trump gives power to a CEO, to run Gov't without any interference from Cong or courts, shutting most public institutions.

The craziness going on around us in the first two months of the second Trump administration makes a lot more sense if you remember that the goal of those currently in power was never simply to change the policies or the personnel of the U.S. government. Their goal is to dismantle the central pillars of the United States of America—government, law, business, education, culture, and so on—because they believe the very shape of those institutions serves what they call “the Left.”

Their definition of “the Left” includes all Americans, Republicans and Independents as well as Democrats, who believe the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights and who support the institutional structures Americans have built since World War II.

In place of those structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

This plan is central to Project 2025, the plan President Donald Trump insisted before the election he knew nothing about but which, now that he’s in office, has provided the blueprint for a large majority of the administration’s actions. Project 2025 author Russell Vought, who is now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, called for a “conservative President” to “use…the vast powers of the executive branch” aggressively “to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”

Last month, journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that Curtis Yarvin, a thinker popular with the technological elite currently aligned with the religious extremists at Project 2025, laid out a plan in 2022 to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.

Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts…. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”

Earlier this month, Yarvin cheered on the idea of hacking existing infrastructure “to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect,” and complimented DOGE for the way it has hacked into existing bureaucracies. The key performance indicator of DOGE, he wrote, “is its ability to take power from the libs, then keep it.”

Far from saving money for the United States, as Jacob Bogage at the Washington Post reported on March 22, billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has cost the government $500 billion, 10% of what the Internal Revenue Service took in last year. Bogage reports that the administration has demolished the IRS, firing nearly 20,000 employees, especially in the divisions that focus on enforcement, and dropping investigations of corporations and the richest taxpayers. Officials project that these changes will result in more tax evasion, and they are expecting a sharp drop in tax revenue this spring.

If the administration is working not to save money but rather to destroy the government, the cuts that threaten the well-being of American citizens make more sense. Today, Emily Davies and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that Trump officials are looking for cuts of between 8% and 50% of the employees in federal agencies. They obtained an internal White House document that calls for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be cut in half, the Interior Department to lose nearly 25% of its workforce, and the Internal Revenue Service to lose about one third of its people. The Justice Department is set to lose 8% of its workforce, the National Science Foundation 28%, the Commerce Department 30%, and the Small Business Administration 43%.

Cuts to the government have led to the Social Security Administration’s website crashing four times in ten days this month, and there are not enough workers to answer phones. Yesterday, Sahil Kapur and Julie Tsirkin of NBC News reported that lawmakers, including Senate Finance subcommittee on Social Security chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA), have been kept in the dark as the men working for DOGE have cut SSA phone services and instituted new rules requiring that beneficiaries without access to the internet prove their identity with an in-person visit to an SSA office.

Washington Post reporters Lisa Rein and Hannah Natanson warn that “Social Security is breaking down.” Senator Angus King (I-ME) told them: “What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating…. What they’re doing now is unconscionable.”

In a televised Cabinet meeting on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she planned to “eliminate FEMA,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency that responds to national emergencies like hurricanes. This news comes on top of Trump’s executive order last week calling for the Department of Education to be shuttered, along with cuts of about half of its workforce.

Yesterday, Apoorva Mandavilli, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Jan Hoffman reported in the New York Times that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has suddenly cancelled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states. That money supported mental health services, addiction treatment, and programs to track infectious diseases. Today HHS announced it will be cutting 10,000 employees on top of the 10,000 who have already left and the more than 5,000 probationary workers who were fired last month. These cuts will include 3,500 full-time employees from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and 2,400 employees from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition to slashing and burning through government agencies, the administration is trying to undermine the rule of law. Trump has signed executive orders suspending security clearances for law firms that represent Democratic clients and barring the government from hiring employees from those firms.

Trump and his team have challenged the judges who have ruled against Trump, working to destroy faith in the courts. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has suggested that Republicans in Congress could eliminate some federal courts, telling reporters: “We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things.”

Trump’s administration is also working to take over colleges and universities, beginning with a high-profile fight against Columbia University in which the administration withheld $400 million in grants, allegedly over antisemitism at the school, until the university bent to the administration's will. Columbia’s leaders did so, only to have the administration say the changes are only “early steps” and that Columbia “must continue to show they are serious in their resolve to end anti-Semitism…through permanent and structural reform. Other universities…should expect the same level of scrutiny and swiftness of action if they don’t act to protect their students and stop anti-Semitic behavior on campus,” a member of the administration said.

Chillingly, on Tuesday federal authorities in plain clothes took Tufts University international student Rumeysa Ozturk into custody on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, saying she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” apparently a reference to a pro-Palestinian op-ed she had written for the Tufts newspaper. On Wednesday the Department of Homeland Security said she was being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Louisiana.

The administration is also working to reshape American culture according to their vision. The project of stripping words like “climate crisis,” “diversity,” “health disparity,” “peanut allergies,” “science-based,” “segregation,” “stereotypes,” and “understudied” from government communications are an explicit attempt to reshape the way Americans think. Today, in an executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” Trump tried to change the ways in which Americans understand our history, too. He called for Vance, who as vice president serves on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”

The problem for those who embrace this vision of America is that it is not popular. Before the election, only 4% of voters liked Project 2025, and it has not gained in popularity as the dramatic cuts to the government have hurt farmers by killing grain purchases for foreign aid, cut funding for cancer research, and thrown people out of work. Because Republican-dominated counties rely more heavily on government programs than Democratic-dominated counties do, cuts to government services are hitting Republican voters particularly hard.

Today, Wired reported that it had found four more Venmo accounts associated with the Trump administration officials who participated in the now-infamous Signal chat about a planned military attack on the Houthis in Yemen. A payment on one of them was identified only with an eggplant emoji, which is commonly used to suggest sexual activity.

On Tuesday, Democrat James Andrew Malone won a special election for a state senate seat in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won in November with 57% of the vote. Today, Trump was forced to withdraw New York Republican representative Elise Stefanik’s name from consideration for ambassador to the United Nations out of concern that a Democrat might win her vacant seat, although Trump won her district in 2024 by 21 points.