The TACO Revolution

Coming soon to a city near you. (Source: Reuters)

The events of the past week indicate that the wheels are coming off the Trump administration—even as it becomes, in some respects, more dangerous. Let’s look at the pattern.

But before I start, check out an interview I did recently with L’Express, a well-known French newsmagazine. I know what I said in English, though I don’t read enough French to follow the translated result, but I thought I would pass this around for the benefit of my Francophone readers.

We Brought Kilmar Home

The most substantive thing that has happened is that the Trump administration has returned Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States, as repeatedly demanded by the courts.

Because I have commented on this case extensively, regular readers will know why this is important. In grabbing Abrego Garcia off the streets and sending him to be imprisoned in El Salvador—without trial, with no due process whatsoever, and in active violation of an immigration court ruling that barred his deportation—the Trump administration was throwing out a thousand years of basic protections against the arbitrary persecution of the individual by the state. As I have pointed out, that is a precedent under which none of us is safe. And despite being required very clearly by federal judges and the Supreme Court to return Kilmar, the Trump administration insistently claimed it had no ability to bring him back.

His return is an admission of what we already knew: They could have brought him back all along. It also means that the administration is backing off its defiance of the courts. As I pointed out before, this is just the beginning. There are many more unjustly imprisoned men—Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele refused to take the women—and now that the administration has given in on this case, lawyers will start to work on all of the others.

Moreover, while Kilmar has been kept out of the public eye and is only meeting with his lawyer today, this is unlikely to last. See also a series of other cases in which Trump has used his immigration police state to persecute university students for their political views, only to have the courts order and secure their releases.

You will note that the administration returned Kilmar supposedly in order to file some very heavy charges against him for “human trafficking.” This relates to a traffic stop of a van he was driving, which was allegedly filled with illegal immigrants, a case in which he was never charged before now. The case looks bogus, and there are reports that a well-respected veteran United States Attorney resigned in protest rather than sign off on this prosecution.

The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.

Schrader’s public statement is suggestive: “It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I've ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.” This implies that he left because he found himself being asked to do the wrong thing, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.

These trumped-up charges are quite obviously the administration’s attempt to save face. The case against Kilmar is unlikely to succeed in court, but it will serve for the moment to make the administration look like it’s not doing what it is actually doing: admitting defeat in its battle with the courts.

This sets a pattern that we’re going to see in the rest of the events of the past week: retreat on the substance, but lash out in an attempt to look strong, because what a would-be strongman fears above all is showing weakness.

---

The Wages of Compliance

Trump’s continuing losses in the courts—and the courts are just getting started—is reflected in the way some of his biggest power grabs are starting to fall apart.

For example, when Trump threatened big law firms in the first weeks of his administration, a whole slew of them caved in and made deals with the administration. The people who made these deals justified them by saying they were not really conceding very much. They were just promising the kind of charitable pro bono legal services they already provided. As I pointed out at the time, this revealed that a bunch of our nation’s top lawyers are credulous suckers. Naturally, what they found out is that the Trump administration and its hangers-on looked at these promises as a slush fund of unlimited, high-quality legal services for themselves and their pet causes.

[S]ome interest groups are trying to seize this unusual moment to obtain free legal work.

One of them is the Oversight Project, a conservative group affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. The group has sent letters to dozens of big law firms, including some that settled with the White House, asking each of them to provide up to $10 million in pro bono legal work to support litigation brought by conservative groups.

And it gets worse. It was obvious that if these firms would cave in to the government so easily—and if they would make such an obviously bad deal—they could not be trusted to advocate diligently and competently for their clients. It turns out that a bunch of big corporations figured this out.

At least 11 large companies—including Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, and Oracle—are cutting ties with law firms that caved to President Trump’s threats of political retribution, according to The Wall Street Journal.

General counsels for multiple companies told the Journal that the law firms’ willingness to cut deals with the president, rather than stand up for themselves, greatly eroded their confidence in the ability of those firms to represent them in court or in high-pressure negotiations.

These firms have also been losing some of their top lawyers. A few quit in protest early on. The rest have been bleeding away slowly as they put out feelers and find new jobs elsewhere.

Then there were the universities who caved in, with Columbia University leading the way. And what did they get in return? The Trump administration is now pressuring an independent organization to revoke Columbia’s accreditation. The key line from this report: After a previous attack by the administration, “Columbia followed up by enacting campus rule changes demanded by the White House, including the reorganization of its Middle Eastern studies department. The move was meant to appease the White House, but the deal appears to have had little impact.”

Compliance did not protect them, it made them more vulnerable—and I suspect this result will convince other universities that Harvard’s response is the correct one. The best defense against this administration is firm and early resistance.

---

The TACO Trade

I have been critical of Wall Street for being so blinded by Trump’s PR image as a successful businessman, and so wedded to the (not very accurate) idea that Republican are good for business and the stock market, that they bid up stocks after his election on wishful thinking that he would not attempt to do most of the things he was loudly promising he would do. Then the markets had to come back down to earth when Trump actually did impose massive tariffs.

Yet the markets do tend to figure things out eventually, and after a lot of crazy ups and downs as Trump imposed then delayed various tariffs, they discovered how to trade on Trump’s tariff news. They call it the “TACO trade.”

“Investors have kind of figured Trump out a little bit,” said Paul Nolte, senior wealth adviser and market strategist at Murphy and Sylvest in Elmhurst, Ill. “He’s like the poker player at the table that you know is making some bets and then when pressed by the other players at the table, he folds.”…

Some investors, after picking up on Trump’s ever-changing stream of tariff news, have invented a so-called “TACO” trade—an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out”—to deal with market fluctuations.

“Once he delivers bad news, investors are buying those stocks when they are beaten down waiting for him to chicken out and watching those stocks rebound in value,” Ted Jenkin, president of Exit Stage Left Advisors, told The Post.

In the last few weeks, the news has gotten even better for the markets, because the federal court that deals with trade issues very clearly and forcefully struck down most of Trump’s tariffs as unconstitutional. The ruling has been temporarily stayed for administrative reasons, but it is likely to go into effect soon.

In response, Trump lashed out by declaring massive increases in steel and aluminum tariffs that are imposed under a different legal justification. Yet we should start seeing the pattern by now. This is a small show of strength meant to cover up for a much more substantive loss. And if the markets are right, Trump will eventually chicken out on the steel tariffs, too, or lose in the courts again.

A few weeks ago, Trump was using his unilateral power over tariffs to shake down businesses and gloating that foreign leaders were coming groveling to him begging to make deals, which wasn’t really true—but now all of that is about to disappear as he is denied autocratic control of trade.

---

“The Girls Are Fighting”

The other thing that is happening as Trump begins losing battles is that he is beginning to lash out at and fight with his allies.

The ruling against his tariffs turned Trump against the Federalist Society, which he angrily denounced. Read a long and interesting analysis by David French.

Don’t underestimate the importance of this. When he first rose to prominence, Trump secured the support of the mainstream conservative movement by making a deal to appoint judges recommended by the Federalist Society. Somewhat to my surprise, he actually kept that promise.

The problem is that the Federalist Society was the part of the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, and for the most part, as David explains, they were sincerely devoted to specific ideas about constitutional interpretation, rather than being caught up in Trump’s cult of personality. The result is that Federalist Society judges, including ones appointed by Trump, have been ruling against him in his second term about as often as Democrat-appointed judges. Trump has begun to notice, and this goes against his code of subservience. I won’t call it a code of loyalty, as Jonah Goldberg does, in an otherwise good piece, because loyalty for Trump is never reciprocal. Rather, he believes if he does anything to aid or promote another person, they owe him unlimited personal fealty. If Federalist Society judges aren’t going to be lackeys who approve everything he does, that means war.

The more immediate battle Trump finds himself fighting is with Elon Musk. In my L’Express interview, I said I was surprised that the two men were parting ways without more fireworks. It turns out I was too early, because on Thursday, they lit up social media.

See Charlie Sykes for an overview.

Earlier in the day, during an Oval Office meeting with the German chancellor, Trump suggested that he was “disappointed” in Elon’s opposition to his BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL… and suggested that they wouldn’t stay friends.

Musk was triggered: “Without me,” he Xeeted, “Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

“Such ingratitude.”

Things escalated quickly. In the early afternoon, Trump posted:

The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!

Elon was “wearing thin,” I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!

Musk went to DefCon One, linking Trump to Epstein, who needs no introduction to the readers of this newsletter.

Time to drop the really big bomb.

@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.

Have a nice day, DJT!

Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out!

And here’s how far it has gone:

Steve Bannon is already calling for Musk to be investigated and deported. “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summed up the middle-school cattiness of it all: “The girls are fighting, aren’t they?”

The Trump-Musk breakup is surprising to no one. Two narcissists—two people who each seems to think that if he is not at the center of attention, he will cease to exist—are not going to be able to cooperate for long. Each will be jealous of the power and attention received by the other.

Part of what contributed to the split was Musk’s reported drug use, a story I’ve been tracking for a while but which the New York Times has broken wide open.

Mr. Musk had been using ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs, according to people familiar with his consumption. The line between medical use and recreation was blurry, troubling some people close to him.

I will refer you once again to an overview of the serious destructive effects of ketamine. See also a more personal accountfrom a former addict.

The Washington Post also has more on the behind-the-scenes backbiting.

In mid-April, Musk and [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent had gone into the Oval Office to make their respective cases about their preferences for acting IRS commissioner. Trump decided to support Bessent’s choice….

After Bessent and Musk exited the Oval Office and began walking down the hallway, the two men started to exchange insults, Bannon said, adding that Bessent brought up Musk’s claims that he would uncover more than $1 trillion in wasteful and fraudulent government spending, which Musk had not succeeded at doing.

“Scott said, ‘You’re a fraud. You’re a total fraud,’” Bannon said in an interview.

Musk then rammed his shoulder into Bessent’s ribcage “like a rugby player,” Bannon said, and Bessent hit him back. Multiple people stepped in to break up the scrum as the two men reached the national security adviser’s office, and Musk was shuffled out of the West Wing.

I should note that the most salacious details here come from Steve Bannon, so take them with a grain of salt.

The point is that once Trump got into power, all the various allies who helped put him there began to want things that are different from each other and from what he wants. This happens to every politician, and it happens especially sharply with an aspiring authoritarian, because what he wants is total power and to rule by whim. Eventually, he has to bring all of his allies to heel and turn them into totally compliant lackeys. But some of them will have actual ideals and convictions, as most of the conservative judges have proved so far (with the exception of at least two members of the Supreme Court). Others will believe that they were supporting Trump so that they could rule as the power behind the throne, and it will set off a showdown where one of them has to destroy the other. That’s what Hitler did with Ernst Röhm, what Putin did with Boris Berezovsky, and what Turkey’s Erdogan did with Fethullah Gulen. Why should Trump and Musk be any different?

---

When in Doubt, Send the Marines

As Trump loses battles with the courts and begins to fight with his allies, he may actually become more dangerous. In his fear of showing weakness, he will attempt to compensate with more and more extreme shows of strength. And some of them may become more than just symbolic.

That’s the significance of the anti-ICE protests this weekend in Los Angeles—and the administration’s histrionic response.

Many of us have been warning that Trump cannot impose mass deportations without a police state. Well, the immigration police state is already here. It’s not just cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It’s also immigrants being arrested when they show up for routine hearings because they are actually trying to follow the rules. And predictably, this police state is coming for US citizens, like this guy and this family.

The most ominous aspect is probably the administration’s insistence it can carry out warrantless searches. But the most enraging is the practice of ICE immigration agents showing up in full military gear and wearing masks. This is something we have never done before at any scale in the United States. It is literally a secret police, and it gives immigration enforcement not just the substance but the look and feel of a police state. This has, naturally, prompted the most resistance.

Some of this happened in my back yard, in Charlottesville, where masked ICE agents detained an immigrant at his court hearing, and then threatened to prosecute several bystanders who merely protested.

Recently, masked and heavily armed ICE agents showed at a restaurant in San Diego—looking like they’re ready to arrest Osama Bin Laden but actually trying to arrest the busboy—only to be chased away by a crowd of angry residents.

Then something similar happened in Los Angeles. This time, ICE fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades—grenades that generate light and concussive force but not shrapnel—at a gathering crowd of protesters.

Federal agents in tactical gear armed with military-style rifles threw flash-bang grenades to disperse an angry crowd near downtown Los Angeles on Friday as they conducted an immigration raid on a clothing wholesaler, the latest sign of tensions between protesters and law enforcement over raids carried out at stores, restaurants and court buildings.

The operation was one of at least three immigration sweeps conducted in Los Angeles on Friday. In another one, federal agents converged at a Home Depot where day laborers regularly gather in search of work….

It was an extraordinary show of force. Dozens of federal agents wearing helmets and green camouflage arrived in two hulking armored trucks and other unmarked vehicles and were soon approached by a crowd of immigrant activists and supporters. Some agents carried riot shields and others held rifles, as well as shotguns that appeared to be loaded with less-than-lethal ammunition.

The protests grew throughout the day and were eventually dispersed by Los Angeles police. According to the LAPD’s own statement, the anti-ICE protests were peaceful. The most violent thing I’ve seen in the coverage of them is that somebody lit a shopping cart on fire. [Update: Things seem to be getting more violent tonight.]

Donald Trump responded by calling out the National Guard.

Mr. Trump’s directive said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday night that Mr. Trump was deploying the National Guard in response to “violent mobs” that she said had attacked federal law enforcement and immigration agents. The 2,000 troops would “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester,” she said.

Although some demonstrations have been unruly, local authorities in Los Angeles County did not indicate during the day that they needed federal assistance.

It is true that rioting in the streets is bad and should be suppressed. That’s why I wish ICE would stop doing it.

Seriously, it is ICE that began firing on the protesters, not the other way around. Some people have noted the irony that Trump pardoned the January 6 rioters but then promises to unleash the National Guard on peaceful protests. But it’s not a contradiction at all. These are both insurrections.

On January 6, Trump instigated a mob of his supporters in an attempt to suspend the US Constitution by forcibly preventing Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential vote. This time, he is sending ICE and the National Guard to suspend the Constitution by cracking down on the First Amendment rights of US citizens to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. The only difference is that the first time, he summoned a mob from outside of the government, and this time he is attempting to use the full resources of the government to stage his insurrection. But the premise is the same in both case: Trump thinks his faction has the right to rule by force.

Given that Trump tried to order the National Guard to shoot nonviolent protesters in his first terms and has expressed the idea that every real leader needs to be able to clear the streets of political opposition, it’s clear that he has been itching to call up the troops and send them into the streets in a show of force. I can also guarantee you that the National Guard is not eager to do so, and that’s something to watch for as this unfolds.

But it’s important to grasp that this is all a pretext, and Trump gave that away when he tried to boast about suppressing protests that had ended of their own accord.

Shortly after President Trump praised the National Guard for their work in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass reminded residents that the troops had not arrived. “Just to be clear, the National Guard has not been deployed in the City of Los Angeles,” she said on social media.

Trump fears showing weakness, but the weakness is there, nonetheless. Keep pushing against him on all fronts, because the Wall Street guys have it right: Trump Always Chickens Out.

I have had my hair on fire for the past few months warning that Trump is establishing the structure of a dictatorship. But he was only able to do that, he was only able to go as far and as fast as he did, because a lot of people gave in easily and quickly. From university administrators to newspaper editors to big law firms to some opposition political leaders, they complied in advance. They bought into his illusion of irresistible strength.

The only way Trump can consolidate authoritarian rule is if people don’t see through this illusion—yet it is starting to crack wide open. This is why Trump’s people are blustering about sending in the Marines (yes, literally, the Marines) to pacify a major liberal city. It’s not a sign of strength, it’s a sign of panic.

Call that bluff and do it confidently, because in the end, Trump Always Chickens Out.