AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
Justice Dept. to End Oversight of Local Police Accused of Abuses
Days before the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, the Trump administration said that it would abandon efforts to reduce police violence there and in several other cities.
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Officials in Minneapolis said that they would go ahead with promised policy changes whether or not the agreement with the Justice Department was finalized. Credit: Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
by Jacey Fortin, Devlin Barrett and Ernesto Londoño
May 21, 2025
New York Times
The Trump administration moved on Wednesday to scrap proposed agreements for federal oversight of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. The action was part of a broader abandonment of efforts to overhaul local law enforcement agencies accused of civil rights violations and other abuses.
Justice Department officials said they planned to drop cases filed after incidents of police violence against Black people in the two cities. They will also close civil rights investigations into departments in Memphis; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Trenton, N.J.; and Mount Vernon, N.Y., as well as a case against the Louisiana State Police.
Officials are also reviewing federal oversight arrangements that are already in place with about a dozen other cities to determine if they should be abandoned, said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “I would get rid of some of them today if I could,” she told reporters.
Police departments in Baltimore, Newark, Ferguson, Mo., and several other cities remain under some federal oversight.
The administration’s announcement came four days before the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police. His death, caught on video, inspired national outrage and worldwide protests against police violence targeting Black people.
It also resulted in a withering federal report that found that the Minneapolis police routinely discriminated against Black and Native American people and used deadly force without justification. After nearly two years of negotiations, the Justice Department and the city submitted a court agreement in January calling for federal oversight of the Police Department’s efforts to address the issues.
That arrangement, known as a consent decree, was similar to court-approved agreements with at least 13 other cities whose police forces have been accused of civil rights abuses. The decrees set requirements for how officers should be trained and disciplined, with an outside monitor and a judge to ensure compliance, sometimes for years.
Ms. Dhillon called consent decrees a tool that “have been used badly” against police departments, arguing that they cost too much and last too long. But she told reporters that the Trump administration might decide to use that same legal tool against universities and school systems accused of failing to stamp out on-campus antisemitism.
The administration has already begun two of its own investigations that could lead to new consent decrees. Those involve examining whether gun ownership rights are too restricted in Los Angeles County, and whether Black defendants in Minnesota’s largest county are given an unfair advantage for reduced prison sentences.
The department’s arrangement with Minneapolis had yet to take effect, and the consent decree with Louisville was also awaiting a judge’s approval. The Police Department there was investigated after the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old medical worker who was shot in 2020 during the botched execution of a search warrant.
Leaders in Minneapolis and Louisville had been expecting the Trump administration’s actions, which are sure to be met with consternation by leaders of the movement for racial justice that the murder of Mr. Floyd intensified. The anniversary of his death is expected to be observed in Minneapolis this weekend with remembrances and vigils.
Ms. Dhillon said the timing of Wednesday’s announcement was not related to the anniversary, but to looming court deadlines this week in both the Minneapolis and Louisville cases.
Officials in Minneapolis have said that they would go ahead with the overhaul measures promised in the agreement, even without federal oversight. Since 2023, the city has also been party to a separate court-enforced agreement with the state of Minnesota to address race-based policing.
Still, proponents of consent decrees say that nothing works quite as well as federal oversight has. The agreements have been among the federal government’s most potent tools for overhauling law enforcement agencies that have been accused of civil rights abuses, experts say, and can result in lasting change.
Despite that, some cities, including Memphis and Phoenix, have resisted entering into such agreements, even after scathing Justice Department reports detailed histories of abuses and misconduct. Officials in those cities have said they could fix problems on their own, without federal oversight.
“On the one hand, consent decrees can be onerous, bureaucratic and costly,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research group in Washington. “And on the other hand, the irony is that cities that most need help to update their policies and training would not get the resources without the federal consent decree.”
He added that the agreements had enabled police chiefs in several cities to access federal money for policy updates and additional training.
Federal oversight of state and local police departments began during the Clinton administration, when legislation was passed in response to the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police in 1991. But support for oversight has seesawed depending on which party has held the White House.
Several major cities negotiated consent decrees with the Obama administration, prompted in part by widespread protests over police killings of unarmed Black people. The agreements called on officers to form partnerships with community groups in Ferguson, receive training on de-escalation tactics in Baltimore and work to develop unbiased policing policies in Cleveland.
The first Trump administration limited the use of consent decrees, but those restrictions were rescinded under the Biden administration. On the campaign trail last year, Mr. Trump repeatedly said that he wanted to give officers “immunity from prosecution, so they’re not prosecuted for doing their job.”
Mr. Trump paved the way for Wednesday’s announcement last month, when he signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all federal consent decrees and to “modify, rescind or move to conclude” them within 60 days.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis has said that his city remains committed to major changes that the Police Department adopted after Mr. Floyd’s murder. Those reforms include policies seeking to limit the use of force, improve training and restore residents’ trust.
“We will implement every reform outlined in the consent decree,” he said in a statement, “because accountability isn’t optional.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics across the country.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy.
See more on: U.S. Politics, U.S. Justice Department, George Floyd, Jacob Frey, Donald Trump, Breonna Taylor
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/us/politics/trump-ramaphosa-south-africa-visit.html
Days before the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, the Trump administration said that it would abandon efforts to reduce police violence there and in several other cities.
Listen to this article · 6:44 minutes
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Officials in Minneapolis said that they would go ahead with promised policy changes whether or not the agreement with the Justice Department was finalized. Credit: Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
by Jacey Fortin, Devlin Barrett and Ernesto Londoño
May 21, 2025
New York Times
The Trump administration moved on Wednesday to scrap proposed agreements for federal oversight of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. The action was part of a broader abandonment of efforts to overhaul local law enforcement agencies accused of civil rights violations and other abuses.
Justice Department officials said they planned to drop cases filed after incidents of police violence against Black people in the two cities. They will also close civil rights investigations into departments in Memphis; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Trenton, N.J.; and Mount Vernon, N.Y., as well as a case against the Louisiana State Police.
Officials are also reviewing federal oversight arrangements that are already in place with about a dozen other cities to determine if they should be abandoned, said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “I would get rid of some of them today if I could,” she told reporters.
Police departments in Baltimore, Newark, Ferguson, Mo., and several other cities remain under some federal oversight.
The administration’s announcement came four days before the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police. His death, caught on video, inspired national outrage and worldwide protests against police violence targeting Black people.
It also resulted in a withering federal report that found that the Minneapolis police routinely discriminated against Black and Native American people and used deadly force without justification. After nearly two years of negotiations, the Justice Department and the city submitted a court agreement in January calling for federal oversight of the Police Department’s efforts to address the issues.
That arrangement, known as a consent decree, was similar to court-approved agreements with at least 13 other cities whose police forces have been accused of civil rights abuses. The decrees set requirements for how officers should be trained and disciplined, with an outside monitor and a judge to ensure compliance, sometimes for years.
Ms. Dhillon called consent decrees a tool that “have been used badly” against police departments, arguing that they cost too much and last too long. But she told reporters that the Trump administration might decide to use that same legal tool against universities and school systems accused of failing to stamp out on-campus antisemitism.
The administration has already begun two of its own investigations that could lead to new consent decrees. Those involve examining whether gun ownership rights are too restricted in Los Angeles County, and whether Black defendants in Minnesota’s largest county are given an unfair advantage for reduced prison sentences.
The department’s arrangement with Minneapolis had yet to take effect, and the consent decree with Louisville was also awaiting a judge’s approval. The Police Department there was investigated after the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old medical worker who was shot in 2020 during the botched execution of a search warrant.
Leaders in Minneapolis and Louisville had been expecting the Trump administration’s actions, which are sure to be met with consternation by leaders of the movement for racial justice that the murder of Mr. Floyd intensified. The anniversary of his death is expected to be observed in Minneapolis this weekend with remembrances and vigils.
Ms. Dhillon said the timing of Wednesday’s announcement was not related to the anniversary, but to looming court deadlines this week in both the Minneapolis and Louisville cases.
Officials in Minneapolis have said that they would go ahead with the overhaul measures promised in the agreement, even without federal oversight. Since 2023, the city has also been party to a separate court-enforced agreement with the state of Minnesota to address race-based policing.
Still, proponents of consent decrees say that nothing works quite as well as federal oversight has. The agreements have been among the federal government’s most potent tools for overhauling law enforcement agencies that have been accused of civil rights abuses, experts say, and can result in lasting change.
Despite that, some cities, including Memphis and Phoenix, have resisted entering into such agreements, even after scathing Justice Department reports detailed histories of abuses and misconduct. Officials in those cities have said they could fix problems on their own, without federal oversight.
“On the one hand, consent decrees can be onerous, bureaucratic and costly,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research group in Washington. “And on the other hand, the irony is that cities that most need help to update their policies and training would not get the resources without the federal consent decree.”
He added that the agreements had enabled police chiefs in several cities to access federal money for policy updates and additional training.
Federal oversight of state and local police departments began during the Clinton administration, when legislation was passed in response to the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police in 1991. But support for oversight has seesawed depending on which party has held the White House.
Several major cities negotiated consent decrees with the Obama administration, prompted in part by widespread protests over police killings of unarmed Black people. The agreements called on officers to form partnerships with community groups in Ferguson, receive training on de-escalation tactics in Baltimore and work to develop unbiased policing policies in Cleveland.
The first Trump administration limited the use of consent decrees, but those restrictions were rescinded under the Biden administration. On the campaign trail last year, Mr. Trump repeatedly said that he wanted to give officers “immunity from prosecution, so they’re not prosecuted for doing their job.”
Mr. Trump paved the way for Wednesday’s announcement last month, when he signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all federal consent decrees and to “modify, rescind or move to conclude” them within 60 days.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis has said that his city remains committed to major changes that the Police Department adopted after Mr. Floyd’s murder. Those reforms include policies seeking to limit the use of force, improve training and restore residents’ trust.
“We will implement every reform outlined in the consent decree,” he said in a statement, “because accountability isn’t optional.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics across the country.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy.
See more on: U.S. Politics, U.S. Justice Department, George Floyd, Jacob Frey, Donald Trump, Breonna Taylor
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/us/politics/trump-ramaphosa-south-africa-visit.html
Trump Lectures South African President in Televised Oval Office Confrontation
President Trump showed a video and leafed through printouts that he falsely claimed showed widespread persecution of white South Africans. The country’s president tried to correct the record.
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Trump Repeats False Claims to South African President
President Trump shared a video with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa that he claimed showed evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans.
“Thank you very much.” “Well, I can answer that for president. It’s for him — [laughter] no, seriously.” “I’d rather have him answer.” “It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends.” “Turn the lights down and just put this on. It’s right behind you. Those people were all killed.” “Have they told you where that is, Mr. President? I’d like to know where that is because this, I’ve never seen. There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately through criminal activity, are not only white people. Majority of them are Black people.”
Trump Repeats False Claims to South African President
President Trump shared a video with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa that he claimed showed evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
by Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
May 21, 2025
New York Times
[Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-Youngs cover the White House]
Leer en español
In an astonishing confrontation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump lectured President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa with false claims about a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers, even dimming the lights to show what he said was video evidence of their persecution.
The meeting had been expected to be tense, given that Mr. Trump has suspended all aid to the country and created an exception to his refugee ban for Afrikaners, fast-tracking their path to citizenship even as he keeps thousands of other people out of the United States.
“We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries too, from people,” Mr. Trump said. “They say there’s a lot of bad things going on in Africa, and that’s what we’re going to be discussing today.”
The meeting quickly became a stark demonstration of Mr. Trump’s belief that the world has aligned against white people, and that Black people and minorities have received preferential treatment. In the case of South Africa, that belief has ballooned into claims of genocide.
At first, the two leaders seemed to glide over the most contentious issues, focusing instead on golf and a bit of foreign policy. Mr. Ramaphosa brought along two South African golfers, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, as guests, in a nod to the American president’s favorite sport.
But the discussions took a turn when a journalist asked what it would take for Mr. Trump to change his mind and see there was no “white genocide” in South Africa.
Mr. Ramaphosa, answering for the president, said: “It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.”
Mr. Trump was ready with his response. “Turn the lights down and just put this on,” he told his aides.
A booming video mash-up began to play, including footage of people calling for violence against white farmers in South Africa. One clip showed white crosses planted alongside a rural road stretching far into the distance, which Mr. Trump said were part of a burial site for murdered white farmers. The crosses were actually planted by activists staging a protest against farm murders.
Mr. Trump played a video during the meeting with Mr. Ramaphosa that made false claims about a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
By the end, with the stunned South African president looking on, Mr. Trump began flipping through a stack of papers, apparently showing white victims of violence in South Africa: “Death, death, death,” he said.
At least one of the scenes on the screen appeared to be the rallying cry of “Kill the Boer,” which U.S. officials and Afrikaner activists have cited as evidence that white South Africans are being persecuted. Boer means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans.
The governing party of South Africa, the African National Congress, distanced itself years ago from the chant, which was popularized by the leader of another political party.
Mr. Ramaphosa said the video did not show the full picture of his country.
“We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” he told Mr. Trump. “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”
Mr. Ramaphosa acknowledged his nation suffered from a crime problem. But his delegation tried to explain that it was widespread and not specific to white South Africans.
“We were taught by Nelson Mandela that whenever there are problems, people need to sit down around a table and talk about them,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.
There have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics do not show that they are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. White South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.
The encounter in many ways exemplified Mr. Trump’s selective concern over human rights in other countries.
While he showcased allegations of mistreatment of white people in democratic South Africa, just a week ago he traveled to three Middle East countries ruled by repressive regimes and told them he would not lecture them about how they treat their own people.
He cheerfully visited with and praised the Saudi crown prince who, according to the C.I.A., ordered the murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist during Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Trump did not offer a word of reproach.
Afrikaner refugees at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg preparing to leave South Africa for the United States this month. Credit: Ilan Godfrey for The New York Times
The encounter in some ways echoed the February visit to the Oval Office by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Mr. Zelensky in front of TV cameras, cutting short a visit meant to coordinate a plan for peace.
The meeting with Mr. Ramaphosa on Wednesday was also striking because of the ways in which Mr. Trump dismissed attempts to push back on his fringe claims by those who knew most about them.
Mr. Trump scowled and dismissed Mr. Ramaphosa and his delegates during the meeting, including a Black woman who tried to explain that brutal crimes happen to Black people in the country as well.
By contrast, Mr. Trump joked around and listened attentively as Mr. Els, Mr. Goosen and Johann Rupert, a white South African billionaire, said crime was prevalent across the board in the nation, not just against white farmers.
Mr. Ramaphosa entered the meeting seemingly optimistic about maintaining a cordial conversation with Mr. Trump. He offered olive branches to Mr. Trump, including a book about golf. He complimented Mr. Trump’s décor in the Oval Office.
He even tried to joke with the president, who had become irate when a reporter asked him about a free plane from the Qatari government.
“I am sorry I don’t have a plane to give you,” Mr. Ramaphosa said to Mr. Trump.
“I wish you did,” Mr. Trump replied. “I’d take it. If your country offered the U.S. Air Force a plane, I would take it.”
Mr. Trump seemed more intent on relaying the talking points from leaders of Afrikaner lobbying groups, who have traveled to the United States repeatedly over the years to gather support for their claims of persecution. When one of those groups met with Mr. Trump’s top aides this year, the White House identified them as “civil rights leaders.”
At one point, Mr. Trump referred to another apparently informal adviser on South Africa.
“Elon is from South Africa,” Mr. Trump said, waving at the billionaire Elon Musk, who was standing nearby, close to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
Mr. Musk has been among the most vocal critics of the South African government, and has lashed out at Mr. Ramaphosa on social media.
“Elon happens to be from South Africa,” Mr. Trump said. “This is what Elon wanted.”
Mr. Ramaphosa said he also wanted to discuss trade with the United States, and Mr. Trump looked visibly bothered as Mr. Ramaphosa talked about the benefits of U.S.-South Africa partnership. Mr. Trump shrugged and handed the South African president the articles he claimed detailed violence against white farmers.
“I want you to look good,” he said, as he turned back to his claims of land seizures in South Africa. “I don’t want you to look bad.”
John Eligon and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
President Trump shared a video with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa that he claimed showed evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans.
“Thank you very much.” “Well, I can answer that for president. It’s for him — [laughter] no, seriously.” “I’d rather have him answer.” “It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends.” “Turn the lights down and just put this on. It’s right behind you. Those people were all killed.” “Have they told you where that is, Mr. President? I’d like to know where that is because this, I’ve never seen. There is criminality in our country. People who do get killed, unfortunately through criminal activity, are not only white people. Majority of them are Black people.”
Trump Repeats False Claims to South African President
President Trump shared a video with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa that he claimed showed evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
by Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
May 21, 2025
New York Times
[Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-Youngs cover the White House]
Leer en español
In an astonishing confrontation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump lectured President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa with false claims about a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers, even dimming the lights to show what he said was video evidence of their persecution.
The meeting had been expected to be tense, given that Mr. Trump has suspended all aid to the country and created an exception to his refugee ban for Afrikaners, fast-tracking their path to citizenship even as he keeps thousands of other people out of the United States.
“We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries too, from people,” Mr. Trump said. “They say there’s a lot of bad things going on in Africa, and that’s what we’re going to be discussing today.”
The meeting quickly became a stark demonstration of Mr. Trump’s belief that the world has aligned against white people, and that Black people and minorities have received preferential treatment. In the case of South Africa, that belief has ballooned into claims of genocide.
At first, the two leaders seemed to glide over the most contentious issues, focusing instead on golf and a bit of foreign policy. Mr. Ramaphosa brought along two South African golfers, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, as guests, in a nod to the American president’s favorite sport.
But the discussions took a turn when a journalist asked what it would take for Mr. Trump to change his mind and see there was no “white genocide” in South Africa.
Mr. Ramaphosa, answering for the president, said: “It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.”
Mr. Trump was ready with his response. “Turn the lights down and just put this on,” he told his aides.
A booming video mash-up began to play, including footage of people calling for violence against white farmers in South Africa. One clip showed white crosses planted alongside a rural road stretching far into the distance, which Mr. Trump said were part of a burial site for murdered white farmers. The crosses were actually planted by activists staging a protest against farm murders.
Mr. Trump played a video during the meeting with Mr. Ramaphosa that made false claims about a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
By the end, with the stunned South African president looking on, Mr. Trump began flipping through a stack of papers, apparently showing white victims of violence in South Africa: “Death, death, death,” he said.
At least one of the scenes on the screen appeared to be the rallying cry of “Kill the Boer,” which U.S. officials and Afrikaner activists have cited as evidence that white South Africans are being persecuted. Boer means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans.
The governing party of South Africa, the African National Congress, distanced itself years ago from the chant, which was popularized by the leader of another political party.
Mr. Ramaphosa said the video did not show the full picture of his country.
“We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” he told Mr. Trump. “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”
Mr. Ramaphosa acknowledged his nation suffered from a crime problem. But his delegation tried to explain that it was widespread and not specific to white South Africans.
“We were taught by Nelson Mandela that whenever there are problems, people need to sit down around a table and talk about them,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.
There have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics do not show that they are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. White South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.
The encounter in many ways exemplified Mr. Trump’s selective concern over human rights in other countries.
While he showcased allegations of mistreatment of white people in democratic South Africa, just a week ago he traveled to three Middle East countries ruled by repressive regimes and told them he would not lecture them about how they treat their own people.
He cheerfully visited with and praised the Saudi crown prince who, according to the C.I.A., ordered the murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist during Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Trump did not offer a word of reproach.
Afrikaner refugees at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg preparing to leave South Africa for the United States this month. Credit: Ilan Godfrey for The New York Times
The encounter in some ways echoed the February visit to the Oval Office by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Mr. Zelensky in front of TV cameras, cutting short a visit meant to coordinate a plan for peace.
The meeting with Mr. Ramaphosa on Wednesday was also striking because of the ways in which Mr. Trump dismissed attempts to push back on his fringe claims by those who knew most about them.
Mr. Trump scowled and dismissed Mr. Ramaphosa and his delegates during the meeting, including a Black woman who tried to explain that brutal crimes happen to Black people in the country as well.
By contrast, Mr. Trump joked around and listened attentively as Mr. Els, Mr. Goosen and Johann Rupert, a white South African billionaire, said crime was prevalent across the board in the nation, not just against white farmers.
Mr. Ramaphosa entered the meeting seemingly optimistic about maintaining a cordial conversation with Mr. Trump. He offered olive branches to Mr. Trump, including a book about golf. He complimented Mr. Trump’s décor in the Oval Office.
He even tried to joke with the president, who had become irate when a reporter asked him about a free plane from the Qatari government.
“I am sorry I don’t have a plane to give you,” Mr. Ramaphosa said to Mr. Trump.
“I wish you did,” Mr. Trump replied. “I’d take it. If your country offered the U.S. Air Force a plane, I would take it.”
Mr. Trump seemed more intent on relaying the talking points from leaders of Afrikaner lobbying groups, who have traveled to the United States repeatedly over the years to gather support for their claims of persecution. When one of those groups met with Mr. Trump’s top aides this year, the White House identified them as “civil rights leaders.”
At one point, Mr. Trump referred to another apparently informal adviser on South Africa.
“Elon is from South Africa,” Mr. Trump said, waving at the billionaire Elon Musk, who was standing nearby, close to Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
Mr. Musk has been among the most vocal critics of the South African government, and has lashed out at Mr. Ramaphosa on social media.
“Elon happens to be from South Africa,” Mr. Trump said. “This is what Elon wanted.”
Mr. Ramaphosa said he also wanted to discuss trade with the United States, and Mr. Trump looked visibly bothered as Mr. Ramaphosa talked about the benefits of U.S.-South Africa partnership. Mr. Trump shrugged and handed the South African president the articles he claimed detailed violence against white farmers.
“I want you to look good,” he said, as he turned back to his claims of land seizures in South Africa. “I don’t want you to look bad.”
John Eligon and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
The Latest on the Trump Administration:
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The MAGA Movement’s Empty Vision of the Future
Learn more
by Jamelle Bouie
May 21, 2025
New York Times
It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward-looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.
This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full-spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.
In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.
“This is the new model,” the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month, “where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here.” The reality is that this particular campaign — this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States — is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosperity.
Not content to leave Americans without a meaningful democratic future or one of broad economic prosperity, the White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.
In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth. Theirs, instead, is an agenda of unlimited resource extraction, with little regard for the consequences. Upon taking office, the president issued an executive order directing federal agencies to allow drilling in formerly protected areas. This, despite the fact that American energy production is at an all-time high — and the United States is now a net exporter of oil and gas.
Trump is aiming to open national forests to logging and has issued an executive order that would expedite efforts to engage in deep-sea mining, despite the risks it poses to critical ecosystems. He is also openly hostile to renewable energy, despite its growing efficiency and declining cost. (Recall that during the campaign, Trump promised to act in the direct interests of oil producers, telling them outright that he would approve their projects and expand drilling, provided they funded his presidential effort to the tune of $1 billion.)
The White House wants to wipe out a large part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — slashing its budget by a quarter and shuttering programs in climate research — as well as obliterate a third of the budget of U.S. Geological Survey, an agency whose work is vital, notes Science magazine, “to efforts such as monitoring water quality, protecting endangered species and predicting landscape impacts from climate change.”
The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.
Whether under the guise of ending diversity efforts or in disciplining institutions of higher education or commandeering the federal administrative state for the president’s corrupt purposes, the White House has taken a buzz saw to billions of dollars in federal grants for research in medicine and the hard sciences. In the first three months of the year, according to a minority report of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion from the National Institutes of Health, including funds for biomedical research and experimental cancer treatments.
The Trump administration also seeks to slash the National Science Foundation by more than half, pushing a $4.7 billion cut in its preliminary budget request. Trump’s National Science Foundation administrators have also paused or terminated hundreds of grants, according to the science journal Nature. In addition, the White House wants to cut spending in the Department of Energy’s research wing — the nation’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, which supports efforts to translate basic research into new technologies and applications — and seeks to defund or eliminate global disease monitoring and health-tracking systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This is the wanton, pointless destruction of a MAGA cultural revolution. It serves no obvious purpose other than to shrink the government in the most arbitrary and capricious way imaginable. The federal government is the leading source of funding for science and technology research in the United States. How does one make America great again by destroying its capacity to develop advanced technology? Who prospers when we rob our scientists of the resources necessary to make breakthroughs that could transform our society for the better?
Even the most venal and shortsighted billionaire captains of industry should recognize how much their fortunes and influence rest on the work of countless researchers whose efforts often yield results that pay dividends for years. We can’t know, for certain, what technologies and treatments Americans will miss out on because the Trump administration decided it was too expensive to maintain the American science establishment or thought that science was too liberal, too woke. But there’s no doubt that we’ll be worse off. And this is to say nothing of the potential brain drain of scientists who will leave this country for greener pastures or those from abroad who will choose to remain in their home countries, where they live under governments that are at least a little less eager to give themselves lobotomies.
One war, four fronts. The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it and as they might have anticipated it.
In service of what, exactly? What vision does the MAGA movement have instead?
Here, an interesting debate has unfolded.
Writing in The Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that there’s no real vision at all. Instead, they write, “the governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.” This is an “end times fascism” that is taking advantage of social and environmental catastrophes and “simultaneously provoking and planning for them.” As for the ordinary people who form the base of the MAGA movement and its associated political tendencies, “End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.”
It is, Klein and Taylor write, a national bunker mentality — a way of being defined by plunder to prepare for the long night ahead and exclusion of those who don’t truly belong to the national community.
Responding in his Substack newsletter, Adam Tooze says, in effect, not so fast. Trump and his allies do have a vision of the future, albeit a retro one of self-sacrifice leading to new prosperity, brought on by the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. It is, Tooze writes, “a direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.”
Commenting on Klein, Taylor and Tooze, John Ganz — the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s” (and with whom I co-host a podcast) — makes a useful intervention, invoking the historian Jeffrey Herf’s notion of “reactionary modernism” to show how the MAGA movement is a “peculiar and perverse synthesis” of backward-facing nihilism and resentment and future-oriented utopianism. With Trumpism, Ganz writes, “there is the idea of production, national expansion, growth, development, but combined with a sharp restriction and rollback of who gets to share in the political and social bounties of citizenship.”
Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and, in particular, on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.
As Ganz observes, the Trumpist vision of the future is obsessed with heavy industry and defense-oriented technological development. It rejects “‘feminized’ service-sector capitalism,” he writes, as well as a concern with climate change that “seems feminine.” And it is not for nothing, Tooze notes, that when Trump speaks of sacrifice for his tariffs, he zeros in on “dolls” and “washing machines,” objects associated with girls, women and domestic labor.
This is the future that the MAGA movement has in mind, as revealed by its actions in power so far. It is a future in which the United States abandons its Enlightenment heritage and liberal aspirations in favor of a closed society made up of supposedly native people — recall JD Vance’s paean to the soil of eastern Kentucky in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination last year — and rooted in notions of dominance and zero-sum competition.
I find this account of Trumpism as a reactionary futurist movement persuasive. This year I wrote about Trump’s lack of future orientation with regard to the Constitution, a document written and ratified with posterity in mind. In fact, Americans have been preoccupied with the idea that their republic is a steward of sorts for self-government. You see it in the words of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and many other figures in the American political tradition.
Trump may reject this particular future orientation, but that doesn’t mean he lacks one. It does mean that his runs counter to what we expect to hear from an American political leader, especially one who occupies the Oval Office.
For those opposed to it, it is tempting to say that MAGA’s vision of the future is so unappealing — so profoundly unattractive — that most people will reject it. But Trump’s political longevity and success, even if they don’t translate to a full-throated endorsement of his entire movement, make clear that this is naïve.
There are no guarantees that the public won’t embrace Trump’s future, all the more so because there does not appear to be much of an alternative to his vision of closed borders and closed societies. There are few people with the reach to contest the president — and even fewer in the putative opposition — who have tried to speak to something more than simple maintenance of the status quo or who have tried to represent the aspirations of ordinary people with a transformative vision of what the future could be for everyone, not just a fortunate and select few.
We have, in this country, a powerful movement eager to summon an authoritarian future. What we need is a movement dedicated to an egalitarian one, to a future in which all Americans can live the lives they choose to make for themselves — a country that rejects walls and rigid hierarchies in favor of the democratic virtues and universalist ideals of this country’s best traditions.
We have names for this vision. Frederick Douglass called it the “composite nation.” W.E.B. Du Bois called it the “abolition democracy,” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a “beloved community.”
With these materials, we can imagine a better future and contest the dark dreams of those in power. And if our political leaders are too timid to embark on that task — too afraid of backlash to think beyond the familiar — then we, as citizens still and not yet subjects, have an obligation to do so.
More on Trump’s vision of the future:
![]()
Opinion | Thomas B. Edsall
‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’
May 20, 2025
![]()
Opinion | Michael Posner
Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.
May 18, 2025
![]()
Opinion | Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt
How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?
May 8, 2025
![]()
Opinion | The Editorial Board
There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab
May 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward-looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.
This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full-spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.
In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.
“This is the new model,” the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month, “where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here.” The reality is that this particular campaign — this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States — is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosperity.
Not content to leave Americans without a meaningful democratic future or one of broad economic prosperity, the White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.
In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth. Theirs, instead, is an agenda of unlimited resource extraction, with little regard for the consequences. Upon taking office, the president issued an executive order directing federal agencies to allow drilling in formerly protected areas. This, despite the fact that American energy production is at an all-time high — and the United States is now a net exporter of oil and gas.
Trump is aiming to open national forests to logging and has issued an executive order that would expedite efforts to engage in deep-sea mining, despite the risks it poses to critical ecosystems. He is also openly hostile to renewable energy, despite its growing efficiency and declining cost. (Recall that during the campaign, Trump promised to act in the direct interests of oil producers, telling them outright that he would approve their projects and expand drilling, provided they funded his presidential effort to the tune of $1 billion.)
The White House wants to wipe out a large part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — slashing its budget by a quarter and shuttering programs in climate research — as well as obliterate a third of the budget of U.S. Geological Survey, an agency whose work is vital, notes Science magazine, “to efforts such as monitoring water quality, protecting endangered species and predicting landscape impacts from climate change.”
The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.
Whether under the guise of ending diversity efforts or in disciplining institutions of higher education or commandeering the federal administrative state for the president’s corrupt purposes, the White House has taken a buzz saw to billions of dollars in federal grants for research in medicine and the hard sciences. In the first three months of the year, according to a minority report of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion from the National Institutes of Health, including funds for biomedical research and experimental cancer treatments.
The Trump administration also seeks to slash the National Science Foundation by more than half, pushing a $4.7 billion cut in its preliminary budget request. Trump’s National Science Foundation administrators have also paused or terminated hundreds of grants, according to the science journal Nature. In addition, the White House wants to cut spending in the Department of Energy’s research wing — the nation’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, which supports efforts to translate basic research into new technologies and applications — and seeks to defund or eliminate global disease monitoring and health-tracking systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This is the wanton, pointless destruction of a MAGA cultural revolution. It serves no obvious purpose other than to shrink the government in the most arbitrary and capricious way imaginable. The federal government is the leading source of funding for science and technology research in the United States. How does one make America great again by destroying its capacity to develop advanced technology? Who prospers when we rob our scientists of the resources necessary to make breakthroughs that could transform our society for the better?
Even the most venal and shortsighted billionaire captains of industry should recognize how much their fortunes and influence rest on the work of countless researchers whose efforts often yield results that pay dividends for years. We can’t know, for certain, what technologies and treatments Americans will miss out on because the Trump administration decided it was too expensive to maintain the American science establishment or thought that science was too liberal, too woke. But there’s no doubt that we’ll be worse off. And this is to say nothing of the potential brain drain of scientists who will leave this country for greener pastures or those from abroad who will choose to remain in their home countries, where they live under governments that are at least a little less eager to give themselves lobotomies.
One war, four fronts. The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it and as they might have anticipated it.
In service of what, exactly? What vision does the MAGA movement have instead?
Here, an interesting debate has unfolded.
Writing in The Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that there’s no real vision at all. Instead, they write, “the governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.” This is an “end times fascism” that is taking advantage of social and environmental catastrophes and “simultaneously provoking and planning for them.” As for the ordinary people who form the base of the MAGA movement and its associated political tendencies, “End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.”
It is, Klein and Taylor write, a national bunker mentality — a way of being defined by plunder to prepare for the long night ahead and exclusion of those who don’t truly belong to the national community.
Responding in his Substack newsletter, Adam Tooze says, in effect, not so fast. Trump and his allies do have a vision of the future, albeit a retro one of self-sacrifice leading to new prosperity, brought on by the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. It is, Tooze writes, “a direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.”
Commenting on Klein, Taylor and Tooze, John Ganz — the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s” (and with whom I co-host a podcast) — makes a useful intervention, invoking the historian Jeffrey Herf’s notion of “reactionary modernism” to show how the MAGA movement is a “peculiar and perverse synthesis” of backward-facing nihilism and resentment and future-oriented utopianism. With Trumpism, Ganz writes, “there is the idea of production, national expansion, growth, development, but combined with a sharp restriction and rollback of who gets to share in the political and social bounties of citizenship.”
Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and, in particular, on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.
As Ganz observes, the Trumpist vision of the future is obsessed with heavy industry and defense-oriented technological development. It rejects “‘feminized’ service-sector capitalism,” he writes, as well as a concern with climate change that “seems feminine.” And it is not for nothing, Tooze notes, that when Trump speaks of sacrifice for his tariffs, he zeros in on “dolls” and “washing machines,” objects associated with girls, women and domestic labor.
This is the future that the MAGA movement has in mind, as revealed by its actions in power so far. It is a future in which the United States abandons its Enlightenment heritage and liberal aspirations in favor of a closed society made up of supposedly native people — recall JD Vance’s paean to the soil of eastern Kentucky in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination last year — and rooted in notions of dominance and zero-sum competition.
I find this account of Trumpism as a reactionary futurist movement persuasive. This year I wrote about Trump’s lack of future orientation with regard to the Constitution, a document written and ratified with posterity in mind. In fact, Americans have been preoccupied with the idea that their republic is a steward of sorts for self-government. You see it in the words of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and many other figures in the American political tradition.
Trump may reject this particular future orientation, but that doesn’t mean he lacks one. It does mean that his runs counter to what we expect to hear from an American political leader, especially one who occupies the Oval Office.
For those opposed to it, it is tempting to say that MAGA’s vision of the future is so unappealing — so profoundly unattractive — that most people will reject it. But Trump’s political longevity and success, even if they don’t translate to a full-throated endorsement of his entire movement, make clear that this is naïve.
There are no guarantees that the public won’t embrace Trump’s future, all the more so because there does not appear to be much of an alternative to his vision of closed borders and closed societies. There are few people with the reach to contest the president — and even fewer in the putative opposition — who have tried to speak to something more than simple maintenance of the status quo or who have tried to represent the aspirations of ordinary people with a transformative vision of what the future could be for everyone, not just a fortunate and select few.
We have, in this country, a powerful movement eager to summon an authoritarian future. What we need is a movement dedicated to an egalitarian one, to a future in which all Americans can live the lives they choose to make for themselves — a country that rejects walls and rigid hierarchies in favor of the democratic virtues and universalist ideals of this country’s best traditions.
We have names for this vision. Frederick Douglass called it the “composite nation.” W.E.B. Du Bois called it the “abolition democracy,” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a “beloved community.”
With these materials, we can imagine a better future and contest the dark dreams of those in power. And if our political leaders are too timid to embark on that task — too afraid of backlash to think beyond the familiar — then we, as citizens still and not yet subjects, have an obligation to do so.
More on Trump’s vision of the future:
Opinion | Thomas B. Edsall
‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’
May 20, 2025
Opinion | Michael Posner
Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.
May 18, 2025
Opinion | Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt
How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?
May 8, 2025
Opinion | The Editorial Board
There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab
May 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/opinion/trump-musk-doge-government.html
Plennie Wingo
Sunny Florida
May 20
Plennie Wingo
Sunny Florida
May 20
New York Times
Comments Section
“The real crisis was re-installing the worst president of all time - an ignorant criminal rapist- due to greed and appalling ignorance. However, we did that - to our everlasting shame, and it will be a miracle if this country survives this stress test.”
–A reader from the comments section in the New York Times today in response to the following article by Thomas Edsall
Guest Essay
“The real crisis was re-installing the worst president of all time - an ignorant criminal rapist- due to greed and appalling ignorance. However, we did that - to our everlasting shame, and it will be a miracle if this country survives this stress test.”
–A reader from the comments section in the New York Times today in response to the following article by Thomas Edsall
Guest Essay
‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’
Credit: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Listen to this article · 14:27 minutes
Learn more
by Thomas B. Edsall
May 20, 2025
New York Times
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.
The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never
been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.
Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.
Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.
“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science magazine. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”
I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”
I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:
There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in and the scope of Trump et al.’s. intentions.
Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?
Wilentz’s reply:
Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.
I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts, the answer is already distressingly permanent.”
From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:
The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of nonpoliticization in government service have taken a huge hit.
I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:
The comp that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.
Another question: How much is Trump’s second-term agenda the invention of conservative elites, and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?
“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”
In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump or even Trumpism.
The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.
In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,
it has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.
One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged America’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.
Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:
The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.
Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security and the foundation for our democracy.
Trump is not unique in his destructiveness, in Rudman’s view,
but among the top four in U.S. News rankings (Buchanan, Pierce, Andrew Johnson), Trump was the only one not associated with the Civil War. He is proving to be superlative within that small club and may yet overtake his historical competition for the top ranking.
Trump’s second-term agenda, Rudman argued, is elite-driven:
There is no indication that these new Trump voters, his winning margin, voted for demolition of the basic structures of governance in this country as DOGE has done, impeding the services, e.g., Social Security and Medicaid, and the jobs upon which they depend.
Ideological loyalists such as Stephen Miller and Project 2025’s primary pen, Russell Vought, now O.M.B. director, seized a longstanding agenda and have the skills to implement it, Vought particularly so; recall pre-election when Vought boasted of inflicting maximum trauma on career civil servants.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares the belief that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to foreign relations. Cain emailed me his assessment:
What will be hard to fix from all of this is a substantial undermining of trust in American government that created important alliances and a strong economy. The poster child of ruined trust is Canada.
Canadians have been dependable allies and economic partners for decades, but President Trump’s preposterous ideas about taking over Canada have angered Canadians to a point of at least difficult return. Trust in relationships is easily lost and hard to regain.
Similarly, Cain continued,
The war on academic research will have long-lasting implications for technical innovation in America. Scientists who cannot support their labs while President Trump holds their funds hostage for the sake of MAGA theater over the next four years will take their labs elsewhere.
China will be a winner in this. Uncertainty about government commitments will make it harder for investors to take basic and applied research in universities and move it to market. The longer the time horizon for investments, the more trust and stability matter. In the end, disrupters like Trump and Musk leave us with a much bigger legacy of doubt and uncertainty than achievement.
Cain argued that in both economics and politics, destruction can have beneficial results, but not in the case of Trump.
Destruction has a role in both business and government. The creative disruption of technological innovation can destroy some businesses and elevate better ones. Similarly, political destruction such as democracy revolutions have dramatically improved the form and function of government.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are disrupters from the economic realm who have migrated into the political realm. The migration has been rocky for both.
Musk and Trump, in Cain’s view, “are driven more by instinct than knowledge, vindictiveness than good intentions and impatience than carefully designed plans.” They
may make enough money out of their deals to do well for themselves. The same cannot be said for the Republican Party. If things get bad enough, we could be looking at 1974 all over again.
In ranking the most destructive presidents, the scholars I contacted mentioned both Johnson and James Buchanan.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, the vice president for political studies at the Niskanen Center, a center-left libertarian think tank, wrote by email:
Will the Trump presidency be as destructive as James Buchanan’s presidency, which led directly to the Civil War?
What I think we can say with confidence is that no president in living memory has attacked the sources of American strength and dynamism in the way that Trump already has done. In particular, his withdrawal from American global leadership and his sabotage of American scientific and technological pre-eminence — at precisely the moment we are vying with China for superiority in those areas — has no parallel.
Paul Rosenzweig, a deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he feared that
the damage is permanent. Not because it cannot be fixed — it can be with effort. But rather because nobody will ever trust the United States again that something Trump-like won’t recur. Would you as a young person take a federal job today? Would you as a foreign student trust that you could attend university in the United States safely? Would you as a European government trust the United States to maintain the security of your secrets?
Rosenzweig continued:
Trump was elected to enrich and protect Trump. That was his only motivation. On issues of direct concern (e.g., getting a plane as a gift from Qatar or profiting off cryptocurrency), he has views. Otherwise, he is an empty vessel.
I asked the experts I contacted whether Trump was laying the groundwork for a more autocratic form of government in the United States.
Robert Strong, a professor of political economy at Washington and Lee, replied by email:
I previously felt that the predictions of authoritarian government in the United States were exaggerated. The pace and scope of actions in the early months of Trump 2 have changed my assessment.
The levels of open corruption, the direct challenges to the rule of law, the assaults on institutions have been larger and more consequential than I expected. We are in a period of grave political peril.
From a different vantage point, Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor emerita of history at the University of New Hampshire, questioned the value of trying to determine “whether Trump is the most corrupt and/or most destructive president in U.S. history.”
Fitzpatrick added that such evaluations
strip these individuals from their historical moment and context in ways that suggest they lived in similar times. “Most corrupt” and “most destructive” are hard to assess when we look at someone like Buchanan, who presided over the near sundering of the Union in the pre-Civil War era, and the fractious and dangerous political moment we are living through today.
Despite those cautions, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that “it’s fair to say that if we look at the arc of American history from Reconstruction to the current day, there’s no question that Trump is busily destroying much of what several generations of Americans worked very, very hard to achieve.”
“The anti-immigrant sentiment of the late 19th and early 20th century,” Fitzpatrick wrote, and “the rhetoric abroad in the land today” are
a shocking reminder of the distance the nation traveled over the course of the 20th century and how quickly those gains are being recklessly swept away. To see the effort to dismantle what was achieved with great difficulty in the realm of civil and voting rights in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and subsequent administrations is appalling.
Some of those I questioned argued that Trump’s assault on American institutions and values is not supported by most of his voters.
Russell Riley, a professor of ethics and co-chairman of the Miller Center’s presidential oral history program, took this view a step farther, noting that Trump explicitly dissociated himself from Project 2025 during the campaign and then, once in office, adopted much of the Project 2025 agenda:
Any president seeking fundamental changes in our political system needs to be empowered by the American people to take on that challenge. This typically comes from two principal factors historically: (1) a resounding electoral victory based on (2) a clear program openly taken to the voters.
Trump, in contrast, “barely won the popular vote, with just under 50 percent — hardly an electoral mandate, even for an incremental program. Indeed, as a candidate, Mr. Trump openly distanced himself from Project 2025.”
Lacking both a clear mandate and an electorate explicitly supportive of Project 2025, Riley argued, means
that the president is obligated to run that policy through the usual constitutional policy mills, respectful of the prerogatives of the legislature and the courts. That is not being done. A reliance on exceptional powers requires exceptional authorization. Normally a president may not mandate his own leadership.
The reality, however, is that the abdication of power by Republicans in Congress has allowed Trump to create a mandate out of whole cloth.
Where will this frightening development take us?
More on Trump and presidential power:
Opinion | Michael Posner
Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.
May 18, 2025
Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
They Were Waiting for Trump All Along
May 14, 2025
Opinion | Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt
How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?
May 8, 2025
Opinion | The Editorial Board
There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab
May 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/21/us/trump-news
Live Updated
May 21, 2025
Trump Administration Live Updates: Meeting With South African Leader Turns Contentious Over False Genocide Claims
President Donald Trump met with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in the Oval Office. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
Credit: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Listen to this article · 14:27 minutes
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by Thomas B. Edsall
May 20, 2025
New York Times
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.
The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never
been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.
Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.
Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.
“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science magazine. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”
I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”
I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:
There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in and the scope of Trump et al.’s. intentions.
Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?
Wilentz’s reply:
Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.
I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts, the answer is already distressingly permanent.”
From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:
The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of nonpoliticization in government service have taken a huge hit.
I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:
The comp that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.
Another question: How much is Trump’s second-term agenda the invention of conservative elites, and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?
“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”
In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump or even Trumpism.
The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.
In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,
it has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.
One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged America’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.
Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:
The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.
Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security and the foundation for our democracy.
Trump is not unique in his destructiveness, in Rudman’s view,
but among the top four in U.S. News rankings (Buchanan, Pierce, Andrew Johnson), Trump was the only one not associated with the Civil War. He is proving to be superlative within that small club and may yet overtake his historical competition for the top ranking.
Trump’s second-term agenda, Rudman argued, is elite-driven:
There is no indication that these new Trump voters, his winning margin, voted for demolition of the basic structures of governance in this country as DOGE has done, impeding the services, e.g., Social Security and Medicaid, and the jobs upon which they depend.
Ideological loyalists such as Stephen Miller and Project 2025’s primary pen, Russell Vought, now O.M.B. director, seized a longstanding agenda and have the skills to implement it, Vought particularly so; recall pre-election when Vought boasted of inflicting maximum trauma on career civil servants.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares the belief that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to foreign relations. Cain emailed me his assessment:
What will be hard to fix from all of this is a substantial undermining of trust in American government that created important alliances and a strong economy. The poster child of ruined trust is Canada.
Canadians have been dependable allies and economic partners for decades, but President Trump’s preposterous ideas about taking over Canada have angered Canadians to a point of at least difficult return. Trust in relationships is easily lost and hard to regain.
Similarly, Cain continued,
The war on academic research will have long-lasting implications for technical innovation in America. Scientists who cannot support their labs while President Trump holds their funds hostage for the sake of MAGA theater over the next four years will take their labs elsewhere.
China will be a winner in this. Uncertainty about government commitments will make it harder for investors to take basic and applied research in universities and move it to market. The longer the time horizon for investments, the more trust and stability matter. In the end, disrupters like Trump and Musk leave us with a much bigger legacy of doubt and uncertainty than achievement.
Cain argued that in both economics and politics, destruction can have beneficial results, but not in the case of Trump.
Destruction has a role in both business and government. The creative disruption of technological innovation can destroy some businesses and elevate better ones. Similarly, political destruction such as democracy revolutions have dramatically improved the form and function of government.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are disrupters from the economic realm who have migrated into the political realm. The migration has been rocky for both.
Musk and Trump, in Cain’s view, “are driven more by instinct than knowledge, vindictiveness than good intentions and impatience than carefully designed plans.” They
may make enough money out of their deals to do well for themselves. The same cannot be said for the Republican Party. If things get bad enough, we could be looking at 1974 all over again.
In ranking the most destructive presidents, the scholars I contacted mentioned both Johnson and James Buchanan.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, the vice president for political studies at the Niskanen Center, a center-left libertarian think tank, wrote by email:
Will the Trump presidency be as destructive as James Buchanan’s presidency, which led directly to the Civil War?
What I think we can say with confidence is that no president in living memory has attacked the sources of American strength and dynamism in the way that Trump already has done. In particular, his withdrawal from American global leadership and his sabotage of American scientific and technological pre-eminence — at precisely the moment we are vying with China for superiority in those areas — has no parallel.
Paul Rosenzweig, a deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he feared that
the damage is permanent. Not because it cannot be fixed — it can be with effort. But rather because nobody will ever trust the United States again that something Trump-like won’t recur. Would you as a young person take a federal job today? Would you as a foreign student trust that you could attend university in the United States safely? Would you as a European government trust the United States to maintain the security of your secrets?
Rosenzweig continued:
Trump was elected to enrich and protect Trump. That was his only motivation. On issues of direct concern (e.g., getting a plane as a gift from Qatar or profiting off cryptocurrency), he has views. Otherwise, he is an empty vessel.
I asked the experts I contacted whether Trump was laying the groundwork for a more autocratic form of government in the United States.
Robert Strong, a professor of political economy at Washington and Lee, replied by email:
I previously felt that the predictions of authoritarian government in the United States were exaggerated. The pace and scope of actions in the early months of Trump 2 have changed my assessment.
The levels of open corruption, the direct challenges to the rule of law, the assaults on institutions have been larger and more consequential than I expected. We are in a period of grave political peril.
From a different vantage point, Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor emerita of history at the University of New Hampshire, questioned the value of trying to determine “whether Trump is the most corrupt and/or most destructive president in U.S. history.”
Fitzpatrick added that such evaluations
strip these individuals from their historical moment and context in ways that suggest they lived in similar times. “Most corrupt” and “most destructive” are hard to assess when we look at someone like Buchanan, who presided over the near sundering of the Union in the pre-Civil War era, and the fractious and dangerous political moment we are living through today.
Despite those cautions, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that “it’s fair to say that if we look at the arc of American history from Reconstruction to the current day, there’s no question that Trump is busily destroying much of what several generations of Americans worked very, very hard to achieve.”
“The anti-immigrant sentiment of the late 19th and early 20th century,” Fitzpatrick wrote, and “the rhetoric abroad in the land today” are
a shocking reminder of the distance the nation traveled over the course of the 20th century and how quickly those gains are being recklessly swept away. To see the effort to dismantle what was achieved with great difficulty in the realm of civil and voting rights in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and subsequent administrations is appalling.
Some of those I questioned argued that Trump’s assault on American institutions and values is not supported by most of his voters.
Russell Riley, a professor of ethics and co-chairman of the Miller Center’s presidential oral history program, took this view a step farther, noting that Trump explicitly dissociated himself from Project 2025 during the campaign and then, once in office, adopted much of the Project 2025 agenda:
Any president seeking fundamental changes in our political system needs to be empowered by the American people to take on that challenge. This typically comes from two principal factors historically: (1) a resounding electoral victory based on (2) a clear program openly taken to the voters.
Trump, in contrast, “barely won the popular vote, with just under 50 percent — hardly an electoral mandate, even for an incremental program. Indeed, as a candidate, Mr. Trump openly distanced himself from Project 2025.”
Lacking both a clear mandate and an electorate explicitly supportive of Project 2025, Riley argued, means
that the president is obligated to run that policy through the usual constitutional policy mills, respectful of the prerogatives of the legislature and the courts. That is not being done. A reliance on exceptional powers requires exceptional authorization. Normally a president may not mandate his own leadership.
The reality, however, is that the abdication of power by Republicans in Congress has allowed Trump to create a mandate out of whole cloth.
Where will this frightening development take us?
More on Trump and presidential power:
Opinion | Michael Posner
Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.
May 18, 2025
Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
They Were Waiting for Trump All Along
May 14, 2025
Opinion | Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt
How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?
May 8, 2025
Opinion | The Editorial Board
There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab
May 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/21/us/trump-news
Live Updated
May 21, 2025
Trump Administration Live Updates: Meeting With South African Leader Turns Contentious Over False Genocide Claims
President Donald Trump met with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in the Oval Office. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
Where Things Stand:
South African visit: President Trump dimmed the lights in the Oval Office during a joint appearance with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa to show videos intended to back up his false claim there have been mass killings of Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that once led the nation’s apartheid government. Mr. Ramaphosa pushed back on Mr. Trump’s claims of genocide, and sought to articulate the reality on the ground in his own nation. Read more ›
Immigration fight: A federal judge delivered one of the strongest judicial rebukes yet to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, saying it had violated his order barring officials from deporting people to a third nation without giving them a sufficient opportunity to object. The judge asked for the names of those who were involved so he could notify them that they might face criminal contempt penalties. Read more ›
Qatari plane: The Defense Department accepted a luxury Boeing 747 from the Qatari government, a $200 million gift that raises serious ethics concerns. The plane, intended to eventually be used as a new Air Force One for Mr. Trump, was accepted “in accordance with all federal rules and regulations,” a Pentagon spokesman said. Read more ›
In Case You Missed It
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
Another extraordinary meeting just wrapped up in the Oval Office. The meeting between President Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa was a stark example of a foreign leader essentially trying to give a reality check to Trump, who instead amplified fringe theories. And it was striking how cordial he was to the white South Africans — two professional golfers and a luxury good magnate — while clashing with or dismissing Ramaphosa. When the South African leader tried to turn the conversation to trade or shared investments, Trump brought it back to the false claims of mass killings against white South African farmers. Notably, none of cabinet officials attacked Ramaphosa as they did during an Oval Office meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenksy of Ukraine.
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
Trump has criticized South Africa over its process permitting the seizing of land, subject to judicial review. But Trump himself has supported a similar American process — eminent domain — both as a realtor and as president. He used eminent domain powers to take private land from farmers in South Texas to pay for his border wall.
The process in the U.S. and South Africa are not the same: Property owners in the United States, for example, typically get compensation. I interviewed many landowners in Texas who refused the government’s offers and tried to fight the land seizures in court.
Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
The white golfers finished speaking and Zingiswa Losi, the Black president of of a group of South African trade unions, tried to explain to Trump that brutal crimes happen to black people in the country as well, making a throat-slitting motion at one point. Trump scowled as he listened to her.
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
The difference between Trump’s responses, demeanor and body language toward the white South African golfers in the Oval Office compared to the Black South African government officials is striking.
Trump’s former national security official, John Bolton, told me in an interview that the president’s views about South Africa were shaped largely by conversations he would have on his golf course. “I just put it as typical Trump,” Bolton said recently. “Some random person tells him something, and he’s obsessed with it.”
May 21, 2025
Maggie Haberman
White House reporter
Retief Goosen, a two-time U.S. Open golf champion, offered some credence to Trump’s claims about farmers under threat, but not about the notion that it constituted genocide. He described his own family’s experience running a farm and fending off what he said were efforts to scare them off the land.
May 21, 2025
John Eligon
Reporting from the Oval Office
Ramaphosa tried to to refocus the meeting on the economy. In the lead-up to this meeting, his team said he would not dwell on the Afrikaner issue.
May 21, 2025
Maggie Haberman
White House reporter
Trump appeared to calm down as Johann Rupert, a white South African billionaire, pleaded for help while saying that crime was across the board, not just against white farmers.
Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
In Case You Missed It
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
For those just joining us: This Oval Office meeting between President Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa began cordially, but devolved into Trump amplifying false claims of mass killings of white South Africans. Ramaphosa continues to try to explain to Trump the reality on the ground in South Africa.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
The South African delegation continued to calmly try to explain to Trump the situation on the ground in South Africa, but he remained unmoved. “Dead white people, dead white farmers,” he said.
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
South Africa’s minister of agriculture, John Steenhuisen, articulated a point that even Afrikaner lobbyists made to me during interviews. Leaders of the groups amplifying false claims of persecution against white South Africans told me they did not want to come to the United States as refugees. They rather wanted the U.S. to help their efforts within South Africa.
2 hours ago
John Eligon
Reporting from the Oval Office
Members of South African delegation appeared flabbergasted as the video played. Ernie Els had his hands on his hips, looking like he just carded a triple bogey.
May 21, 2025
Lynsey Chutel
The video played in the Oval Office meeting featured the utterances and slogans of Julius Malema, a firebrand opposition politician who has made land expropriation without compensation his campaign message. Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, was expelled from the African National Congress over a decade ago, and the ANC distanced itself years ago from the chant he cites, “Kill the Boer.”
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Rampahosa pointed out that his minister of agriculture is white, and “has joined my government at my invitation to address this very issue that you just raised.” He remained measured in his comments.
May 21, 2025
Maggie Haberman
White House reporter
“Apartheid, terrible,” Trump said, adding that apartheid “was reported all the time.” But he asserted that the current situtation facing white South Africans was not.
May 21, 2025, 12:58 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
“You’re taking people’s land away and in many cases those people are being executed,” Trump claimed without evidence.
There have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics show they are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans. And while the South African government did pass a law permitting the government to take land without compensation, the process is subject to judicial review.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Trump made reference to his friends from South Africa. “Elon is from South Africa,” he said, waving at Musk, standing nearby. “Elon happens to be from South Africa. This is what Elon wanted.”
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Trump’s posture became hunched and guarded and he hardly looked at the South African leader as he spoke. Trump seemed determined to have some kind of confrontation, cutting off Ramaphosa. “You’re taking people’s land away from them,” Trump said, insisting that white people are being executed.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Trump veered off on a tangent about Boeing and Air Force One and the jet he intends to accept from Qatari — he appeared furious that the moment of his video screening was stepped on by a question from NBC about the jet. The South African leader joked that he was sorry he didn’t have a plane to give to Trump.
2 hours ago
Maggie Haberman
White House reporter
Among the clips that Trump played appeared to be a rally of a minor political party. There is no evidence Trump has shown of a supposed genocide of white farmers. But he continues to insist it’s happening.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Ramaphosa tried to give Trump an education on criminality in his country, speaking slowly and in a friendly voice to explain to him the reality on the ground. Trump would have none of it, using a stern voice and evocative language about heads being chopped off.
Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
Ramaphosa was asked for his reaction to the videos. Before he could answer, Trump cut in: “When you look at the videos, how does it get worse?”
Ramaphosa eventually said: “We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themself,” and, “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
Ramaphosa is making a crucial point. Yes, there have been killings of South African white farmers. But police data in South Africa shows they are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans. Ramaphosa acknowledges South Africa in general has a crime problem. In fact, from April 2020 to March 2024, 225 people were killed on farms in South Africa, according to South African police officials. But many of the victims — 101 — were current or former workers living on farms, who tend to be Black. Fifty-three of the victims were farmers, who are usually white.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Trump held up printed out articles he said were on the killings of white people in South Africa. He flipped through them, repeating, “Death, death, death.”
May 21, 2025
Maggie Haberman
White House reporter
The question about the Qatari jet came from Peter Alexander of NBC. Trump declared that NBC should be “investigated,” which has become a common theme for him when challenged.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
The footage wraps up and a reporter immediately yells out a question about the Qatari jet — piercing through this incredibly awkward and charged moment that Trump has manufactured with an off-topic question. Trump erupts in anger at the reporter for ruining the moment.
May 21, 2025
Erica L. Green
White House reporter
Until this remarkable moment, it appeared that discussions about the alleged racial persecution against white South Africans would be held privately. But now, Trump is narrating a video of what he said were gravesites of white farmers, whom he has claimed died in a “genocide.”
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
This is an extraordinary scene. The Trump team clearly came to the meeting prepared to play videos backing up their false claim that there are mass killings against white South Africans. Ramaphosa began by turning to the video and smiling, visibly surprised. He had been sitting in his seat silently, keeping his eyes elsewhere.
May 21, 2025
Maggie Haberman
White House reporter
“I’d like to know where that is, because this I’ve never seen,” Ramaphosa says, suggesting without directly saying it that Trump is being misled and this video is from somewhere other than South Africa.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
The South African leader Ramaphosa looks uncomfortable and unsure how to react as this footage in the Oval Office continues to play. He’s rubbed his hands over his face a few times and shifted in his chair, staring at the floor.
“Now these are burial sites, right here,” Trump says as he points at the screen. The South African leader turns to look at him.
May 21, 2025
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Ramphosa explained to Trump how South Africans tried to impart some of Nelson Mandela’s wisdom about achieving peace to Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelesnky, but Trump seemed skeptical. “There’s a lot of hatred,” Trump said. “A lot of death, it’s a bloodbath.”
May 21, 2025,
Shawn McCreesh
White House reporter
Trump has just staged a video screening in the Oval Office showing some kind of documentary that purportedly shows violence against white farmers in South Africa. The delegation from South Africa in the Oval Office are sitting in silence watching, looking somewhat bemused and perplexed.
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
Both leaders have been cordial to one another so far, despite both the South African and American governments trading barbs in recent weeks. Besides Trump admonishing a reporter for NBC who asked about the administration accepting Afrikaners as refugees, the leaders have appeared to treat the subject as an elephant in the room. Ramaphosa has appeared to be more focused on discussing trade. Trump appears to be pleased with Ramaphosa’s compliments and choice to bring a gift of a golf book.
Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who orchestrated President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, is standing to President Trump’s left in the Oval Office meeting. So is Chris Landau, a deputy secretary of state, who defended the resettlement of white South Africans over other refugees when a group of Afrikaners landed in the United States last week. “One of the criteria was that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security and that they could be assimilated easily into our country,” Landau told reporters at the time. He did not elaborate on why other populations would not assimilate into the United States.
May 21, 2025
by Alan Feuer, Tyler Pager. Hamed Aleaziz and Eric Schmitt
A judge finds the U.S. government violated his court order with a sudden deportation flight to Africa.
A ruling which was handed down in April, ordered officials to provide advanced notice of at least 15 days to any immigrants being deported to a country not their own so that they had a chance to challenge their removal. Credit: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
A federal judge in Boston said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them an opportunity to object to their removal.
The finding by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, was one of the strongest judicial rebukes the administration has faced so far in a series of contentious cases arising from its sprawling deportation agenda. It was not immediately clear what punishment, if any, Judge Murphy intended to mete out against the administration or those who took part in the operation, but he asked for a list of names so he can notify them that they might all face criminal contempt penalties.
May 21, 2025,
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
“We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, and other countries too, from people,” Trump said when asked why he was welcoming white South Africans as refugees but not already vetted refugees from nations suffering from war or disaster. “When you say we don’t take others, all you have to do is take a look at the southern border,” Trump says.
A record number of people crossed the border in recent years, but that is entirely separate from the refugee system set up for those seeking to come to the United States from overseas.
Trump entered office and suspended refugee admissions for applicants across the globe, including Afghans who helped U.S. soldiers, families in the Congo who have waited for years and others who have been vetted. He then created a carveout for white South Africans, even though police data in South Africa counters Trump’s claims that there are mass killings of white South Africans.
May 21, 2025
Erica L. Green
White House reporter
Chatting about golf seemed to have set the tone for the meeting between the American and South African presidents. The session was expected to be tense, given the strained relationship between the two countries in recent months, but so far has been complimentary and collegial.
President Cyril Ramaphosa brought along two professional golfers and fellow South Africans, Ernie Els, the former world No. 1 golfer, and the two-time U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen. Trump thanked them for coming, saying it “really helps us in our thought process.”
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
President Ramaphosa so far is talking about opportunities for South Africa and the United States to collaborate on trade and investments, including critical minerals South Africa could sell to the United States. He appears focused on reframing the relationship between the two nations to focus on areas of collaboration, rather than points of contention — like Trump’s Afrikaner refugee program.
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
President Ramaphosa complimented the current decor of the Oval Office, which President Trump has expressed pride over. Ramaphosa also mentions speaking to Trump’s friend, the South African golfer Gary Player. This has to be the most a golfer has been mentioned in a Oval Office meeting in recent years.
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
“I don’t know where he got my number,” President Trump said of the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, joking about the leader reaching out to the White House to set up this meeting.
May 21, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
President Trump made mention of the renowned South African golfer Gary Player at the start of this meeting with the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa. In 2019, Trump told aides that he’d heard about the struggles and alleged persecution of Afrikaners while golfing with Player, but those aides limited his public airing on the topic to social media posts. However, in his second term, Trump and his loyalists have returned to the fringe ideas and have allowed some Afrikaners to come to the United States as refugees.
May 21, 2025
Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer
Glenn Thrush reported from Washington, and Alan Feuer from New York.
News Analysis
A Justice Dept. official plans to ‘shame’ Trump foes he can’t prosecute.
Ed Martin, the head of the Justice Department’s “weaponization” group, recently said he planned to use his authority to expose and discredit those he believes to be guilty, even if he cannot find evidence to prosecute them.
Credit: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press
President Trump has kept up a steady bombardment of suggestions, requests and demands to arrest, investigate or prosecute targets of his choosing — the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, various Democrats, officials who refuted his election lies, Beyoncé, the Boss.
But Mr. Trump’s directives have so far hit a stubborn snag. Few, if any, of those singled out have done anything to invite conventional prosecutorial scrutiny, much less committed prosecutable crimes to warrant an indictment under federal law.
But a Trump loyalist, given new, vague and possibly vast power, has found a workaround.
In recent days, Ed Martin, the self-described “captain” of the Justice Department’s “weaponization” group, made a candid if unsurprising admission: He plans to use his authority to expose and discredit those he believes to be guilty, even if he cannot find sufficient evidence to prosecute them — weaponizing an institution he has been hired to de-weaponize, in the view of critics.
“If they can be charged, we’ll charge them,” Mr. Martin told reporters before stepping down as interim U.S. attorney in Washington. “But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
He added, “That’s the way things work.”
President Trump has targeted several officials, including the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey. Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
That is not the way things have worked. The cardinal rule of prosecutors is to speak only through evidence and court filings. The department is supposed to abide by the dictum of charging crimes, not people. Naming and shaming is antithetical to its mission of pursuing justice impartially. And Mr. Martin’s statement appears to violate the department’s ethical and procedural rule book, which mandates “fair, evenhanded” investigations to safeguard “the privacy and reputation interests of uncharged” investigative targets.
“Outside of cases where you have someone whose conduct is open and notorious, the idea of targeting individuals is antithetical to the notion of the government investigating crimes, not people,” said Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia and a former federal prosecutor.
“And the person who will be picking out those people has no record of the prudential exercise of judgment in federal prosecutions, but in fact has a record of abusive invocations of government power,” he added.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has blurred, and at times obliterated, the line between personal score-settling and running a country — threatening law firms that harbor his opponents and using presidential power to punish or intimidate individuals and institutions, often using the threat of Justice Department action as leverage to extract concessions.
Mr. Martin, a cheerful but obdurate activist from Missouri, has often out-Trumped the Trump team. In his brief stint as U.S. attorney, he thrust himself into national politics by leveling threats against Democrats and academic institutions. His subordinates quietly urged him to pump the brakes — and had to stop him from indicting the Democratic leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, for making a vague threat at Supreme Court justices five years ago.
Some of Mr. Martin’s inquiries proceeded. One of them was an investigation into another New York antagonist of Mr. Trump’s, Andrew Cuomo, over congressional testimony about his response as governor to the coronavirus pandemic.
Nonetheless, it has all been a bit too much for many in his own party. Earlier this month, Republican senators blocked Mr. Martin’s nomination to permanently run the U.S. attorney’s office. In recompense, he was given control over the department’s pardon office and the weaponization group with authority to pursue Mr. Trump’s onetime investigators, including Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted him twice.
Image
Mr. Martin was given control over the department’s pardon office and the weaponization group with authority to pursue Mr. Trump’s onetime investigators, including Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Mr. Trump twice. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Martin has virtually no investigative experience. Instead he has signaled he intends to subject the president’s accusers to humiliations and inconveniences comparable to what Mr. Trump endured, to right perceived wrongs.
“They tried to bankrupt him, they tried to put him in prison for life for non-crimes, they tried to get him off the ballot,” said Mike Davis, a Republican and former Senate Judiciary Committee aide with close ties to the Trump White House. “They must be held accountable for this criminal conspiracy.”
A spokesman for Mr. Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though Mr. Trump and his team have said they are rebuilding, not destroying, the department.
“Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and good will built up over generations,” Mr. Trump told an audience of supporters at the department in March.
Yet there is a hollowness in the president’s effort to spin a vengeance trip as a path back to normalcy. It is undercut by calls to prosecute opponents that began with “Lock Her Up” chants about Hillary Clinton in 2016 and now encompass a breathtaking range of targets.
On April 9, Mr. Trump ordered the investigative review of Miles Taylor, a former official who had criticized him anonymously. On the same day, he directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an inquiry into Chris Krebs, a former cybersecurity official who refuted Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Mr. Trump then ordered an investigation of ActBlue, a Democratic fund-raising platform. That was followed this month by higher-profile, if less formal, accusations on social media against liberal entertainers — including Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey — for accepting fees to perform at Kamala Harris’s campaign events.
His appointees have followed suit. Richard Grenell, installed as the president of the Kennedy Center, recently called for a criminal investigation into the organization’s finances.
The Justice Department has declined to comment on the referrals.
But the threat of action is real, and the department has not been shy about opening investigations or arresting politicians and judges, including the Democratic mayor of Newark over a trespassing charge and a Wisconsin judge accused of shielding an immigrant from federal agents.
The administration has also dropped cases against Trump allies, most notably Mayor Eric Adams of New York, and pardoned Capitol rioters whose convictions were buttressed by evidence. At the same time, it has decimated units responsible for prosecuting white-collar and public corruption cases. That, combined with an energetic focus on vendettas, might create a vacuum of enforcement of real and provable crimes, according to former officials.
It is a sharp turnabout from Mr. Trump’s first term, when he accused the Justice Department of violating the protective norms by disclosing details of investigations into his conduct to harm him. It was his main justification for firing Mr. Comey in 2017, after the F.B.I. director publicly acknowledged that he was investigating the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia.
Last week, Mr. Comey returned to center stage after posting an image of seashells arrayed on a beach to read “86 47.” Mr. Trump prodded Ms. Bondi to investigate the quickly deleted post as an assassination threat.
Mr. Martin said during an interview without offering evidence that Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had given money to political parties to sway elections. Credit: Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
“That is going to be up to Pam,” the president told Fox News, adding, “If he had a clean history I could understand if there was a leniency, but I’m going to let them make that decision.”
It remains to be seen if Mr. Martin will be given full control over the weaponization initiative. Some administration aides think he talks too much and would better serve Mr. Trump by backing off, according to officials with knowledge of their dynamic.
But Mr. Martin, already the subject of investigation into his conduct as U.S. attorney, appears set on his course.
During a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, he mentioned that a whistle-blower informed him that Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had given money to political parties to sway elections in another country. He offered no evidence.
“The question is, are we going to get all of it, name it and then hold some people accountable?” Mr. Martin said. “People say, ‘Are you going to walk people out in cuffs?’ Right now, I’d be happy to just have people know their names.”
At another point, Mr. Martin said he viewed himself as being engaged in a “war over information.” He cited a letter he had written to Wikipedia accusing it of bias and improperly shielding itself from scrutiny through its tax-exempt status.
He never suggested that Wikipedia had broken the law. He indicated that his letter was to air his view of their actions in the public arena.
“A prosecutor saying that about Wikipedia is vastly different than Tucker Carlson saying it,” Mr. Martin said. “And that’s the point of the job.”
The role of a prosecutor, he claimed, “is not just to find the right guy to prosecute” but to publicize their purported wrongdoing in public.
In a landmark 1940 speech, a top Justice Department official offered another vision.
Robert H. Jackson, then the attorney general, told department employees that the “greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power” was when an official “finds some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense.”
May 21, 2025
Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt
Reporting from Washington
President Trump has kept up a steady bombardment of suggestions, requests and demands to arrest, investigate or prosecute targets of his choosing — the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, various Democrats, officials who refuted his election lies, Beyoncé, the Boss.
But Mr. Trump’s directives have so far hit a stubborn snag. Few, if any, of those singled out have done anything to invite conventional prosecutorial scrutiny, much less committed prosecutable crimes to warrant an indictment under federal law.
But a Trump loyalist, given new, vague and possibly vast power, has found a workaround.
In recent days, Ed Martin, the self-described “captain” of the Justice Department’s “weaponization” group, made a candid if unsurprising admission: He plans to use his authority to expose and discredit those he believes to be guilty, even if he cannot find sufficient evidence to prosecute them — weaponizing an institution he has been hired to de-weaponize, in the view of critics.
“If they can be charged, we’ll charge them,” Mr. Martin told reporters before stepping down as interim U.S. attorney in Washington. “But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
He added, “That’s the way things work.”
President Trump has targeted several officials, including the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey. Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
That is not the way things have worked. The cardinal rule of prosecutors is to speak only through evidence and court filings. The department is supposed to abide by the dictum of charging crimes, not people. Naming and shaming is antithetical to its mission of pursuing justice impartially. And Mr. Martin’s statement appears to violate the department’s ethical and procedural rule book, which mandates “fair, evenhanded” investigations to safeguard “the privacy and reputation interests of uncharged” investigative targets.
“Outside of cases where you have someone whose conduct is open and notorious, the idea of targeting individuals is antithetical to the notion of the government investigating crimes, not people,” said Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia and a former federal prosecutor.
“And the person who will be picking out those people has no record of the prudential exercise of judgment in federal prosecutions, but in fact has a record of abusive invocations of government power,” he added.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has blurred, and at times obliterated, the line between personal score-settling and running a country — threatening law firms that harbor his opponents and using presidential power to punish or intimidate individuals and institutions, often using the threat of Justice Department action as leverage to extract concessions.
Mr. Martin, a cheerful but obdurate activist from Missouri, has often out-Trumped the Trump team. In his brief stint as U.S. attorney, he thrust himself into national politics by leveling threats against Democrats and academic institutions. His subordinates quietly urged him to pump the brakes — and had to stop him from indicting the Democratic leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, for making a vague threat at Supreme Court justices five years ago.
Some of Mr. Martin’s inquiries proceeded. One of them was an investigation into another New York antagonist of Mr. Trump’s, Andrew Cuomo, over congressional testimony about his response as governor to the coronavirus pandemic.
Nonetheless, it has all been a bit too much for many in his own party. Earlier this month, Republican senators blocked Mr. Martin’s nomination to permanently run the U.S. attorney’s office. In recompense, he was given control over the department’s pardon office and the weaponization group with authority to pursue Mr. Trump’s onetime investigators, including Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted him twice.
Image
Mr. Martin was given control over the department’s pardon office and the weaponization group with authority to pursue Mr. Trump’s onetime investigators, including Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Mr. Trump twice. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Martin has virtually no investigative experience. Instead he has signaled he intends to subject the president’s accusers to humiliations and inconveniences comparable to what Mr. Trump endured, to right perceived wrongs.
“They tried to bankrupt him, they tried to put him in prison for life for non-crimes, they tried to get him off the ballot,” said Mike Davis, a Republican and former Senate Judiciary Committee aide with close ties to the Trump White House. “They must be held accountable for this criminal conspiracy.”
A spokesman for Mr. Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though Mr. Trump and his team have said they are rebuilding, not destroying, the department.
“Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and good will built up over generations,” Mr. Trump told an audience of supporters at the department in March.
Yet there is a hollowness in the president’s effort to spin a vengeance trip as a path back to normalcy. It is undercut by calls to prosecute opponents that began with “Lock Her Up” chants about Hillary Clinton in 2016 and now encompass a breathtaking range of targets.
On April 9, Mr. Trump ordered the investigative review of Miles Taylor, a former official who had criticized him anonymously. On the same day, he directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an inquiry into Chris Krebs, a former cybersecurity official who refuted Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Mr. Trump then ordered an investigation of ActBlue, a Democratic fund-raising platform. That was followed this month by higher-profile, if less formal, accusations on social media against liberal entertainers — including Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey — for accepting fees to perform at Kamala Harris’s campaign events.
His appointees have followed suit. Richard Grenell, installed as the president of the Kennedy Center, recently called for a criminal investigation into the organization’s finances.
The Justice Department has declined to comment on the referrals.
But the threat of action is real, and the department has not been shy about opening investigations or arresting politicians and judges, including the Democratic mayor of Newark over a trespassing charge and a Wisconsin judge accused of shielding an immigrant from federal agents.
The administration has also dropped cases against Trump allies, most notably Mayor Eric Adams of New York, and pardoned Capitol rioters whose convictions were buttressed by evidence. At the same time, it has decimated units responsible for prosecuting white-collar and public corruption cases. That, combined with an energetic focus on vendettas, might create a vacuum of enforcement of real and provable crimes, according to former officials.
It is a sharp turnabout from Mr. Trump’s first term, when he accused the Justice Department of violating the protective norms by disclosing details of investigations into his conduct to harm him. It was his main justification for firing Mr. Comey in 2017, after the F.B.I. director publicly acknowledged that he was investigating the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia.
Last week, Mr. Comey returned to center stage after posting an image of seashells arrayed on a beach to read “86 47.” Mr. Trump prodded Ms. Bondi to investigate the quickly deleted post as an assassination threat.
Mr. Martin said during an interview without offering evidence that Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had given money to political parties to sway elections. Credit: Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
“That is going to be up to Pam,” the president told Fox News, adding, “If he had a clean history I could understand if there was a leniency, but I’m going to let them make that decision.”
It remains to be seen if Mr. Martin will be given full control over the weaponization initiative. Some administration aides think he talks too much and would better serve Mr. Trump by backing off, according to officials with knowledge of their dynamic.
But Mr. Martin, already the subject of investigation into his conduct as U.S. attorney, appears set on his course.
During a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, he mentioned that a whistle-blower informed him that Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had given money to political parties to sway elections in another country. He offered no evidence.
“The question is, are we going to get all of it, name it and then hold some people accountable?” Mr. Martin said. “People say, ‘Are you going to walk people out in cuffs?’ Right now, I’d be happy to just have people know their names.”
At another point, Mr. Martin said he viewed himself as being engaged in a “war over information.” He cited a letter he had written to Wikipedia accusing it of bias and improperly shielding itself from scrutiny through its tax-exempt status.
He never suggested that Wikipedia had broken the law. He indicated that his letter was to air his view of their actions in the public arena.
“A prosecutor saying that about Wikipedia is vastly different than Tucker Carlson saying it,” Mr. Martin said. “And that’s the point of the job.”
The role of a prosecutor, he claimed, “is not just to find the right guy to prosecute” but to publicize their purported wrongdoing in public.
In a landmark 1940 speech, a top Justice Department official offered another vision.
Robert H. Jackson, then the attorney general, told department employees that the “greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power” was when an official “finds some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense.”
May 21, 2025
Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt
Reporting from Washington
The U.S. has formally accepted the gift of a luxury jet from Qatar.
The Boeing 747-8 from Qatar at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida after President Trump took a tour of the plane in February.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
The United States has accepted a 747 jetliner as a gift from the government of Qatar, and the Air Force has been asked to figure out a way to rapidly upgrade it so it can be put into use as a new Air Force One for President Trump, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday.
“The secretary of defense has accepted a Boeing 747 from Qatar in accordance with all federal rules and regulations,” the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a statement. “The Department of Defense will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered for an aircraft used to transport the president of the United States.”
The plane, which industry executives estimated is worth about $200 million, will require extensive work before it can be considered secure enough to carry Mr. Trump, Pentagon officials have acknowledged in recent days.
“Any civilian aircraft will take significant modifications to do so,” Troy Meink, the Air Force secretary, said on Tuesday during Senate testimony. “Based on the secretary’s direction, we are postured and we’re off looking at that right now, what it’s going to take for that particular aircraft.”
The plan has drawn concern from members of Congress, who worry that Mr. Trump will pressure the Air Force to do the work so fast that sufficient security measures are not built into the plane, such as missile defense systems or even systems to protect the plane from the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear blast.
“If President Trump insists on converting this plane to a hardened Air Force One before 2029, I worry about the pressures you may be under to cut corners on operational security,” Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, said as Mr. Meink was testifying.
The Pentagon has not given an estimate of when the work on the Qatari plane might be done, even though Mr. Trump and the White House have made clear the president wants it soon, perhaps even by the end of the year.
“We will make sure that we do what’s necessary to ensure security of the aircraft,” Mr. Meink said at the Senate hearing. “I will be quite clear and discuss that with the secretary up to the president if necessary if we feel there’s any threats that we are unable to address.”
The gift also has drawn questions from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who worry that Qatar may be trying to improperly influence Mr. Trump, or that the plane itself might have listening devices.
Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, publicly said on Monday for the first time that his government had approved turning over the plane as a gift, rejecting the idea of it being an attempt to influence the president.
“I don’t know why people, they are thinking,” he said, before continuing “this is considered as a bribery or considered as, something that Qatar wants to buy and influence with this administration. I don’t see any, honestly, a valid reason for that.”
He added: “We are a country that would like to have strong partnership and strong friendship, and anything that we provide to any country, it’s provided out of respect for this partnership and it’s a two-way relationship. It’s mutually beneficial for Qatar and for the United States.”
The new plane will be the third being retrofitted for use as Air Force One, replacing two planes that have been in use for 35 years and have had maintenance problems.
But maintaining the staff and equipment for three planes is extraordinarily expensive, an estimated $135 million a year for each plane, according to the Pentagon. And it could cost $1 billion or more to retrofit the Qatari plane to get it ready for use as Air Force One, a process that former Air Force officials said could take longer than finishing the job Boeing is already doing to deliver the first two planes.
The first of the Boeing planes is scheduled to be delivered in 2027, Air Force officials recently said.
It remains unclear where the money will come from to retrofit the Qatari plane or to maintain and operate it, once it is completed. Congress typically reviews and approves spending on any new major Pentagon programs. But Mr. Trump has already shown a willingness to spend federal dollars as his administration wants, often without consulting Congress.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said this month that Congress would be asking questions about any possible use of the Qatari plane as Air Force One.
“If and when it’s no longer a hypothetical, I can assure you there will be plenty of scrutiny of whatever that arrangement might look like,” Mr. Thune said.
The Qatari plane had its first flight in 2012, and then it was renovated with a luxury interior for members of the royal family in Qatar. But the government there has been trying to sell the plane for about five years.
One airline broker told The New York Times that he had a hard time finding a buyer, as 747 jets, which are no longer being manufactured, are expensive to operate. Even heads of state are increasingly using two-engine jet planes, unlike the 747, which has four engines, the broker said.
Marc J. Foulkrod, the chief executive officer of Avjet Global Sales, which tried to help Qatar sell the plane, said the United States would be better off working with Boeing to accelerate its work on the $3.9 billion contract to deliver the two 747 jets it has already been working on for the past five years.
“I’ve done completions on big airplanes, and there’s always ways to accelerate the program,” Mr. Foulkrod said in an interview. “That’s a better dollar value than trying to take an airplane from somebody else.”
The Qatari plane, flight records show, has been in San Antonio since early last month at an airplane maintenance facility. Trump administration officials have said they are considering hiring L3Harris, a military contractor, to handle the retrofit, but no formal contract has been disclosed publicly, at least so far.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Air Force said it is preparing “to award a contract to modify a Boeing 747 aircraft for executive airlift. Details related to the contract are classified.”
Congress also has not yet taken any formal vote to accept the plane as a gift from Qatar. The Constitution requires that Congress sign off on any large gift given to the president. Mr. Trump has said the gift is to the United States government, not him as president.
May 21, 2025
Erica L. Green
White House reporter
President Trump just greeted the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, at the White House. The two shook hands, ahead of a meeting in the Oval Office and a private lunch.
Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
May 21, 2025
by Lynsey Chutel
South Africa’s president is bringing pro golfers to the White House.
Ernie Els, left, and Retief Goosen at a World Golf Hall of Fame reception in 2019. The two pro golfers visited the White House with South Africa’s president on Wednesday.Credit...Don Feria/Getty Images
To temper diplomatic tensions, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa was accompanied by two South African champion golfers when he met with President Trump on Wednesday.
Ernie Els, the former world No. 1 golfer, and Retief Goosen, the two-time U.S. Open champion, joined the South African delegation alongside the typical assortment of cabinet ministers and other aides. Both men were well acquainted with Mr. Trump; in 2013, he posted a photograph of himself and Mr. Els to his Facebook page.
It seemed to work, at least in the beginning. As Mr. Trump teed up what he said would be “a nice conversation,” he introduced his South African counterpart and welcomed the golfers in the same breath.
“I really appreciate that you guys came along, it really helps us in our thought process,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he had a lot of friends who lived in South Africa.
“You two guys are fantastic,” Mr. Trump said, naming other prominent golfers. “What a group of golfers South Africa has had.”
Mr. Trump, an avid golfer whose golf resorts are the backbone of his real estate empire, has been known to invoke analogies from the greens in discussing other matters. And Mr. Ramaphosa — whose country has been at loggerheads with the United States for months, including over the granting of asylum to a group of white South Africans who say they are victims of persecution — added Mr. Els and Mr. Goosen to the delegation as a way of seeking common ground.
“They are South African, they know the truth about our country,” Vincent Magwenya, Mr. Ramaphosa’s spokesman, said in a text message. “They also have a close relationship with President Trump. Therefore, they’ve been vital in assisting with bridging the gap between the reality in South Africa and President’s Trump own view of the country.”
Mr. Ramaphosa also presented Mr. Trump with a compendium of South African golf courses, in a book weighing over 30 pounds and features writing by Mr. Els and a billionaire South African businessman, Johann Rupert, who was also in the meeting.
Mr. Rupert is the owner of the Swiss luxury house Compagnie Financier Richemont, the parent company of brands that include Cartier and Piaget watches and Montblanc pens.
Mr. Rupert is also South Africa’s richest man and an Afrikaner. Afrikaners are a white ethnic minority — descendants of mainly Dutch settlers — that long dominated South Africa’s politics and led during racial apartheid in the 20th century. Mr. Trump has amplified false claims of “genocide” against Afrikaners in the post-apartheid era.
The meeting began cordially, but quickly devolved into a back-and-forth between the two presidents about the claims about the targeted killings of Afrikaners. Mr. Trump played a video of race-baiting slogans from a firebrand opposition leader and handed over a stack of papers he said were the accounts of Afrikaner victims. As Mr. Ramaphosa repeatedly tried to debunk the claims, Mr. Trump dug in. Eventually he turned to the golfers to break the tension.
“I know there was a lot of anger through the transition, there was a lot of stuff happening in the apartheid days, we grew in the apartheid-era, but I don’t think two wrongs make a right,” Mr. Els said, pulling out his passport as a “proud South African” and invoking Nelson Mandela’s calls for unity.
“We really wanted to meet you, meet the administration, and see our way forward, because we still want to see our country flourish,” Mr. Els continued.
Mr. Goosen, for his part, shared that his relatives on farms lived behind electric fences in fear of crime, like many other South Africans. “But the guys live a great life, despite what’s going on.”
Mr. Trump was flanked by many who are sympathetic to the claims made by Afrikaners.
Elon Musk, a South Africa native and the world’s richest man who has led the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to overhaul the federal government, attended the leaders’ appearance before reporters but did not speak. Mr. Musk has been deeply critical of South Africa’s regulations on Black ownership. Also attending was Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who greeted a group of white South Africans welcomed as refugees when they arrived in the United States just over a week ago.
Another celebrated South African golfer, Gary Player, who still practices his swing with Mr. Trump, is said to have been among those who influenced the president’s thinking about the treatment of Afrikaners. Mr. Player has denied discussing the issue with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Ramaphosa said Mr. Trump had encouraged him to invite Mr. Player to the meeting too.
May 21, 2025
Erica L. Green
White House reporter
The meeting between President Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa scheduled for today will include some high-profile figures. One is Elon Musk, a fierce critic of South Africa’s racial equity policies, which Trump plans to discuss. And Ramaphosa, whose goal is to mend strained relations with the administration, is bringing with him two professional South African golfers — playing to Trump’s affinity for golf and for famous athletes.
May 21, 2025
Robert Jimison
Congressional reporter
Appearing before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio got into a heated exchange with Representative Bill Keating, Democrat of Massachusetts, who asked Rubio if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a war criminal.
“It’s not a simple answer,” Rubio said, conceding that Russia has committed acts that could be characterized as war crimes. He appeared hesitant to label the Russian leader as a war criminal and suggested that such a pronouncement would be antithetical to his department’s goal of ushering in a diplomatic resolution to the three-year-long war in Ukraine.
“Our goal is to end this war,” Rubio told the panel of lawmakers. “We have to be able to talk to both sides to do it.”
Credit: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
May 21, 2025
Jacey FortinDevlin Barrett and Ernesto Londoño
The Trump administration is pulling back oversight of local police departments with histories of civil rights violations.
Officials in Minneapolis said that they would go ahead with promised policy changes whether or not the agreement with the Justice Department was finalized. Credit: Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
The Trump administration moved on Wednesday to scrap proposed agreements for federal oversight of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. The action was part of a broader abandonment of efforts to overhaul local law enforcement agencies accused of civil rights violations and other abuses.
Justice Department officials said they planned to drop cases filed after incidents of police violence against Black people in the two cities. They will also close civil rights investigations into departments in Memphis; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Trenton, N.J.; and Mount Vernon, N.Y., as well as a case against the Louisiana State Police.
Officials are also reviewing federal oversight arrangements that are already in place with about a dozen other cities to determine if they should be abandoned, said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “I would get rid of some of them today if I could,” she told reporters.
Police departments in Baltimore, Newark, Ferguson, Mo., and several other cities remain under some federal oversight.
The administration’s announcement came four days before the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police. His death, caught on video, inspired national outrage and worldwide protests against police violence targeting Black people.
It also resulted in a withering federal report that found that the Minneapolis police routinely discriminated against Black and Native American people and used deadly force without justification. After nearly two years of negotiations, the Justice Department and the city submitted a court agreement in January calling for federal oversight of the Police Department’s efforts to address the issues.
That arrangement, known as a consent decree, was similar to court-approved agreements with at least 13 other cities whose police forces have been accused of civil rights abuses. The decrees set requirements for how officers should be trained and disciplined, with an outside monitor and a judge to ensure compliance, sometimes for years.
Ms. Dhillon called consent decrees a tool that “have been used badly” against police departments, arguing that they cost too much and last too long. But she told reporters that the Trump administration might decide to use that same legal tool against universities and school systems accused of failing to stamp out on-campus antisemitism.
The administration has already begun two of its own investigations that could lead to new consent decrees. Those involve examining whether gun ownership rights are too restricted in Los Angeles County, and whether Black defendants in Minnesota’s largest county are given an unfair advantage for reduced prison sentences.
The department’s arrangement with Minneapolis had yet to take effect, and the consent decree with Louisville was also awaiting a judge’s approval. The Police Department there was investigated after the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old medical worker who was shot in 2020 during the botched execution of a search warrant.
Leaders in Minneapolis and Louisville had been expecting the Trump administration’s actions, which are sure to be met with consternation by leaders of the movement for racial justice that the murder of Mr. Floyd intensified. The anniversary of his death is expected to be observed in Minneapolis this weekend with remembrances and vigils.
Ms. Dhillon said the timing of Wednesday’s announcement was not related to the anniversary, but to looming court deadlines this week in both the Minneapolis and Louisville cases.
Officials in Minneapolis have said that they would go ahead with the overhaul measures promised in the agreement, even without federal oversight. Since 2023, the city has also been party to a separate court-enforced agreement with the state of Minnesota to address race-based policing.
Still, proponents of consent decrees say that nothing works quite as well as federal oversight has. The agreements have been among the federal government’s most potent tools for overhauling law enforcement agencies that have been accused of civil rights abuses, experts say, and can result in lasting change.
Despite that, some cities, including Memphis and Phoenix, have resisted entering into such agreements, even after scathing Justice Department reports detailed histories of abuses and misconduct. Officials in those cities have said they could fix problems on their own, without federal oversight.
“On the one hand, consent decrees can be onerous, bureaucratic and costly,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research group in Washington. “And on the other hand, the irony is that cities that most need help to update their policies and training would not get the resources without the federal consent decree.”
He added that the agreements had enabled police chiefs in several cities to access federal money for policy updates and additional training.
Federal oversight of state and local police departments began during the Clinton administration, when legislation was passed in response to the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police in 1991. But support for oversight has seesawed depending on which party has held the White House.
Several major cities negotiated consent decrees with the Obama administration, prompted in part by widespread protests over police killings of unarmed Black people. The agreements called on officers to form partnerships with community groups in Ferguson, receive training on de-escalation tactics in Baltimore and work to develop unbiased policing policies in Cleveland.
The first Trump administration limited the use of consent decrees, but those restrictions were rescinded under the Biden administration. On the campaign trail last year, Mr. Trump repeatedly said that he wanted to give officers “immunity from prosecution, so they’re not prosecuted for doing their job.”
Mr. Trump paved the way for Wednesday’s announcement last month, when he signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all federal consent decrees and to “modify, rescind or move to conclude” them within 60 days.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis has said that his city remains committed to major changes that the Police Department adopted after Mr. Floyd’s murder. Those reforms include policies seeking to limit the use of force, improve training and restore residents’ trust.
“We will implement every reform outlined in the consent decree,” he said in a statement, “because accountability isn’t optional.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.
May 21, 2025
Erica L. Green and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House reporter
Trump lectures South Africa’s president in a televised Oval Office ambush.
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in Johannesburg in February. Credit: Kim Ludbrook/EPA, via Shutterstock
In an astonishing ambush, President Trump dimmed the lights in the Oval Office on Wednesday during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and showed what he said was video evidence of racial persecution of white South Africans.
The meeting started with pleasantries and discussions about golf and foreign policy, with the leaders at first seeming to glide over the issue of the fringe narrative that Mr. Trump has amplified, claiming that there was a genocide of white South Africans.
But the meeting took a turn when a journalist asked what it would take for Mr. Trump to change his mind that there was no “white genocide” in South Africa.
Mr. Ramaphosa said that “it will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.”
The clash in the Oval Office centered on Mr. Trump’s insistence on false claims of land seizures and mass killings of white Afrikaners, members of a white ethnic minority group who ruled during the country’s apartheid era.
During the event, Mr. Trump largely dismissed Mr. Ramaphosa’s attempt to describe the situation in his own country.
Instead, Mr. Trump had at the ready a packet of printed articles that he said demonstrated the “thousands” of stories of racial persecution in the country, and cued up a video to make his case.
At least one of the scenes on the screen appeared to be the rallying cry of “Kill the Boer,” which U.S. officials and Afrikaner activists have cited as evidence that white South Africans are being persecuted. Boer means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans. The governing party of South Africa, however, the African National Congress, distanced itself from the chant, which was popularized by the leader of another political party, years ago.
“We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” Mr. Ramaphosa told Mr. Trump. “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”
By the end, with the stunned South African president looking on, Mr. Trump began flipping through his printouts repeating, “Death, death, death.”
There have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics show they are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans. And while the South African government did pass a law permitting the government to take land without compensation, the process is subject to judicial review.
The South African delegation continued to try to explain to Trump the situation on the ground in South Africa, but he remained unmoved. “Dead white people, dead white farmers,” he said.
Mr. Trump narrated one of the scenes, which he said were “burial sites of more than 1,000 white farmers” whose loved ones cars lined up on Sunday mornings to visit their graves. “It’s a terrible sight,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Mr. Ramaphosa turned to look at the screen as Mr. Trump narrated, and then questioned the location of the scenes in the video, saying he didn’t recognize them as in South Africa.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in Johannesburg in February. Credit: Kim Ludbrook/EPA, via Shutterstock
In an astonishing ambush, President Trump dimmed the lights in the Oval Office on Wednesday during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and showed what he said was video evidence of racial persecution of white South Africans.
The meeting started with pleasantries and discussions about golf and foreign policy, with the leaders at first seeming to glide over the issue of the fringe narrative that Mr. Trump has amplified, claiming that there was a genocide of white South Africans.
But the meeting took a turn when a journalist asked what it would take for Mr. Trump to change his mind that there was no “white genocide” in South Africa.
Mr. Ramaphosa said that “it will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans.”
The clash in the Oval Office centered on Mr. Trump’s insistence on false claims of land seizures and mass killings of white Afrikaners, members of a white ethnic minority group who ruled during the country’s apartheid era.
During the event, Mr. Trump largely dismissed Mr. Ramaphosa’s attempt to describe the situation in his own country.
Instead, Mr. Trump had at the ready a packet of printed articles that he said demonstrated the “thousands” of stories of racial persecution in the country, and cued up a video to make his case.
At least one of the scenes on the screen appeared to be the rallying cry of “Kill the Boer,” which U.S. officials and Afrikaner activists have cited as evidence that white South Africans are being persecuted. Boer means farmer in Dutch and Afrikaans. The governing party of South Africa, however, the African National Congress, distanced itself from the chant, which was popularized by the leader of another political party, years ago.
“We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” Mr. Ramaphosa told Mr. Trump. “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”
By the end, with the stunned South African president looking on, Mr. Trump began flipping through his printouts repeating, “Death, death, death.”
There have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics show they are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans. And while the South African government did pass a law permitting the government to take land without compensation, the process is subject to judicial review.
The South African delegation continued to try to explain to Trump the situation on the ground in South Africa, but he remained unmoved. “Dead white people, dead white farmers,” he said.
Mr. Trump narrated one of the scenes, which he said were “burial sites of more than 1,000 white farmers” whose loved ones cars lined up on Sunday mornings to visit their graves. “It’s a terrible sight,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Mr. Ramaphosa turned to look at the screen as Mr. Trump narrated, and then questioned the location of the scenes in the video, saying he didn’t recognize them as in South Africa.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/nyregion/columbia-president-booed-commencement.html
Graduates Boo Columbia’s President at Commencement After a Fraught Year
Claire Shipman, the university’s acting president, noted the absence of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate who continues to be detained by immigration authorities.
Listen to this article · 5:49 min
Claire Shipman, the university’s acting president, noted the absence of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate who continues to be detained by immigration authorities.
Listen to this article · 5:49 min
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Claire Shipman spoke in favor of the rights of international students during Columbia’s main graduation ceremony on Wednesday. Credit: Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
by Sharon Otterman
May 21, 2025
Claire Shipman spoke in favor of the rights of international students during Columbia’s main graduation ceremony on Wednesday. Credit: Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
by Sharon Otterman
May 21, 2025
New York Times
Updated
Claire Shipman, the acting president of Columbia University, was met with a chorus of boos on Wednesday from some of the 12,000 graduates at the school’s main commencement ceremony as she took the podium to deliver remarks.
The graduates of Columbia’s class of 2025 had taken meaningful classes and made lifelong friends. But they had also lived through campus lockdowns, the arrests of hundreds of students at pro-Palestinian protests and a revolving door of university presidents.
So it was with a mixture of gratitude and relief that the graduates gathered for a massive ceremony in the rain. Last year’s commencement was canceled in the aftermath of pro-Palestinian encampments and police crackdowns.
Ms. Shipman kept talking over the boos, praising the families, teachers and graduates. “Graduates, it is time to give the world your gifts,” she said.
Amid a clampdown by the Trump administration on international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism, Ms. Shipman spoke in favor of the rights of those students, saying, “We firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to free speech as everyone else.” She said they should not be punished for exercising those rights.
The president noted that many graduates were “mourning” that Mahmoud Khalil, a new graduate who continues to be detained in Louisiana by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, was not there.
Through the jeers, many other graduates remained quiet as the rain soaked them and chants of “Free Palestine” rang out through the student crowd. Ms. Shipman managed to finish her remarks, which focused on the importance of democracy, and went on to officiate the ceremony, conferring degrees on the sea of graduates clad in light-blue gowns seated in front of her.
The celebrations at smaller graduation ceremonies on Tuesday were also punctuated by anger directed at Columbia administrators. At the graduation for Columbia College, the university’s main undergraduate school, some students repeatedly interrupted Ms. Shipman’s remarks with loud jeers. At one point, they chanted “Free Mahmoud.”
About 12,000 students graduated as rain fell.Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
Mr. Khalil’s name was announced on Tuesday as a graduate during the ceremony for the School of International and Public Affairs. While students cheered his accomplishment, several graduates wearing kaffiyehs refused to shake the hand of their dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, an Israeli who served in the Israel Defense Forces.
Jewish students who said they had been deeply hurt by antisemitism on campus during 19 months of protests against Israel also had profoundly mixed feelings about the day. Some Jewish students reported to Columbia’s antisemitism task force that they had been ostracized by their peers for supporting Israel, or had been expected to denounce the country before being accepted in student groups.
“To be honest, I’m so happy to finally be leaving Columbia,” said Eliana Goldin, who headed Aryeh, a pro-Israel student organization. “They’ve given me so much and I’m incredibly appreciative of the education I’ve received, but I’ve also reached my limit for how much antisemitism I can experience and how much backlash for standing up for Israel I can take.”
As graduates and their relatives filed out of the subway, they were met with the sound of drumbeats and protester chants. Demonstrators outside the university’s main gate chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Columbia will fall” and “One solution, revolution.”
By 11:30 a.m., about 100 to 125 demonstrators had gathered. A group of former students burned their diplomas. Small skirmishes with law enforcement officers broke out. The police said they had arrested two people at the protest; one was charged with reckless endangerment, while the other faced three charges, including resisting arrest.
The ceremony inside the gates went on interrupted.
Former students burned their diplomas during a protest outside the commencement ceremony.Credit...Alex Kent for The New York Times
Maryam Alwan, a graduating student who had been a leader of pro-Palestinian activism, explained the anger that she and her peers had expressed through booing.
“Over the past two years, I’ve been arrested, suspended, forcefully removed by Columbia Public Safety, put through a disciplinary trial for an anonymous political op-ed and left with no protection from death threats and harassment,” she said.
“But I am lucky to walk across the stage when every university in Gaza has been reduced to rubble” and Mr. Khalil cannot, Ms. Alwan said.
About 12,000 graduates and 25,000 guests attended Wednesday’s commencement at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus, on the same lawns where demonstrators erected tents last year. Graduates of Columbia’s 17 different schools held up symbols — including red inflatable hammers for engineering and inflatable owls for general studies — to represent their institutions as their degrees were conferred.
The Trump administration has pulled more than $400 million in federal grant funding from Columbia because of what the White House has called the university’s failure to crack down on antisemitism. The school has agreed to demands to tighten its student disciplinary procedures and increase oversight of its Middle Eastern studies programs, but the money has not yet been returned.
The president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, was also booed by some of the graduates as she got up to speak. Barnard, a Columbia affiliate school, had also suspended and expelled several students involved in pro-Palestinian activism.
Wesley Parnell contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-detention-judge.html
Updated
Claire Shipman, the acting president of Columbia University, was met with a chorus of boos on Wednesday from some of the 12,000 graduates at the school’s main commencement ceremony as she took the podium to deliver remarks.
The graduates of Columbia’s class of 2025 had taken meaningful classes and made lifelong friends. But they had also lived through campus lockdowns, the arrests of hundreds of students at pro-Palestinian protests and a revolving door of university presidents.
So it was with a mixture of gratitude and relief that the graduates gathered for a massive ceremony in the rain. Last year’s commencement was canceled in the aftermath of pro-Palestinian encampments and police crackdowns.
Ms. Shipman kept talking over the boos, praising the families, teachers and graduates. “Graduates, it is time to give the world your gifts,” she said.
Amid a clampdown by the Trump administration on international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism, Ms. Shipman spoke in favor of the rights of those students, saying, “We firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to free speech as everyone else.” She said they should not be punished for exercising those rights.
The president noted that many graduates were “mourning” that Mahmoud Khalil, a new graduate who continues to be detained in Louisiana by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, was not there.
Through the jeers, many other graduates remained quiet as the rain soaked them and chants of “Free Palestine” rang out through the student crowd. Ms. Shipman managed to finish her remarks, which focused on the importance of democracy, and went on to officiate the ceremony, conferring degrees on the sea of graduates clad in light-blue gowns seated in front of her.
The celebrations at smaller graduation ceremonies on Tuesday were also punctuated by anger directed at Columbia administrators. At the graduation for Columbia College, the university’s main undergraduate school, some students repeatedly interrupted Ms. Shipman’s remarks with loud jeers. At one point, they chanted “Free Mahmoud.”
About 12,000 students graduated as rain fell.Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
Mr. Khalil’s name was announced on Tuesday as a graduate during the ceremony for the School of International and Public Affairs. While students cheered his accomplishment, several graduates wearing kaffiyehs refused to shake the hand of their dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, an Israeli who served in the Israel Defense Forces.
Jewish students who said they had been deeply hurt by antisemitism on campus during 19 months of protests against Israel also had profoundly mixed feelings about the day. Some Jewish students reported to Columbia’s antisemitism task force that they had been ostracized by their peers for supporting Israel, or had been expected to denounce the country before being accepted in student groups.
“To be honest, I’m so happy to finally be leaving Columbia,” said Eliana Goldin, who headed Aryeh, a pro-Israel student organization. “They’ve given me so much and I’m incredibly appreciative of the education I’ve received, but I’ve also reached my limit for how much antisemitism I can experience and how much backlash for standing up for Israel I can take.”
As graduates and their relatives filed out of the subway, they were met with the sound of drumbeats and protester chants. Demonstrators outside the university’s main gate chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Columbia will fall” and “One solution, revolution.”
By 11:30 a.m., about 100 to 125 demonstrators had gathered. A group of former students burned their diplomas. Small skirmishes with law enforcement officers broke out. The police said they had arrested two people at the protest; one was charged with reckless endangerment, while the other faced three charges, including resisting arrest.
The ceremony inside the gates went on interrupted.
Former students burned their diplomas during a protest outside the commencement ceremony.Credit...Alex Kent for The New York Times
Maryam Alwan, a graduating student who had been a leader of pro-Palestinian activism, explained the anger that she and her peers had expressed through booing.
“Over the past two years, I’ve been arrested, suspended, forcefully removed by Columbia Public Safety, put through a disciplinary trial for an anonymous political op-ed and left with no protection from death threats and harassment,” she said.
“But I am lucky to walk across the stage when every university in Gaza has been reduced to rubble” and Mr. Khalil cannot, Ms. Alwan said.
About 12,000 graduates and 25,000 guests attended Wednesday’s commencement at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus, on the same lawns where demonstrators erected tents last year. Graduates of Columbia’s 17 different schools held up symbols — including red inflatable hammers for engineering and inflatable owls for general studies — to represent their institutions as their degrees were conferred.
The Trump administration has pulled more than $400 million in federal grant funding from Columbia because of what the White House has called the university’s failure to crack down on antisemitism. The school has agreed to demands to tighten its student disciplinary procedures and increase oversight of its Middle Eastern studies programs, but the money has not yet been returned.
The president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, was also booed by some of the graduates as she got up to speak. Barnard, a Columbia affiliate school, had also suspended and expelled several students involved in pro-Palestinian activism.
Wesley Parnell contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-detention-judge.html
Why Mahmoud Khalil Remains in Detention as Other Protesters Are Freed
The judge in the case, Michael E. Farbiarz, has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process as Mr. Khalil passes the weeks in Jena, La.
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The judge in Mahmoud Khalil’s case has moved methodically, as the justice system struggles to keep pace with the Trump administration. Credit: Adam Gray for The New York Times
by Jonah E. Bromwich
May 20, 2025
New York Times
Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was released after 58 days.
Rumeyza Ozturk, a Tufts doctoral student, was released after 45 days.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia undergraduate, was released after 16 days.
But 72 days after his arrest on March 9, Mahmoud Khalil — the country’s most prominent pro-Palestinian-protester-turned-prisoner — is still detained in Jena, La., waiting for a New Jersey federal judge to decide whether he can go free while his immigration case proceeds.
The Trump administration has invoked a rarely cited law to argue that Mr. Khalil’s presence in the country threatens its foreign-policy goal of halting antisemitism. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have argued that the government is retaliating against their client, a legal permanent resident, for participating in protests that shook Columbia University’s campus and that he should have his liberty while his immigration case is assessed.
The New Jersey judge, Michael E. Farbiarz, has been thoroughly engaged. But he has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process that have attracted enormous attention to Mr. Khalil’s case.
His meticulous approach has made the case an exemplar of Trump-era justice, in which the White House frequently moves with a speed that courts are not used to matching.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have repeatedly asked the judge to decide whether to release their client on bail, like the other students, before ruling on the issues at the heart of the case. The judge has responded that he must deal with the procedural basics first.
Judge Farbiarz has issued numerous orders and written two lengthy rulings: a 67-page determination that he had the right to preside over the case and a 108-page opinion asserting that his control over the case had not been stripped.
In the second ruling, he acknowledged that the law’s response to cases like Mr. Khalil’s “has been the same across the board: no unnecessary delay.”
That opinion was issued on April 29.
“Mahmoud is understandably frustrated that he was the first to be detained and nine weeks later is still in detention,” said Baher Azmy, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers and the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “But we remain optimistic that the court will see through the patent unconstitutionality of the government’s actions here and order him released soon.”
Legal experts acknowledged that Judge Farbiarz, 51, has proceeded more slowly than other judges. But they emphasized that each judge was different and said they believed it made sense, particularly for an early-career jurist like Judge Farbiarz, to be as thorough as possible.
“In a case that has gotten this much notoriety, I think there’s every reason if you’re the judge to make sure you have all of your ducks in a row,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. “Judge Farbiarz knows that there is a national spotlight, not just on him but on the ability of the federal courts to handle cases like these.”
Judge Farbiarz has a reputation for thorough, methodical preparation that borders on the obsessive. Before he ascended to the bench in 2023, he was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where he headed the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit.
As a prosecutor, he led a case against one of Osama Bin Laden’s sons-in-law, and another against the first Guantánamo Bay detainee to be tried in civilian court. He also prosecuted a Swedish citizen, Oussama Kassir, who was accused of plotting to set up a training camp for terrorists at an Oregon ranch.
Mark S. DeMarco, a defense lawyer based in the Bronx, represented Mr. Kassir. He was struck by the future Judge Farbiarz’s sense of fair play, and his thoroughness.
“All his bases were covered. There was no stone left unturned,” Mr. DeMarco remembered, adding, “He was probably one of the most prepared prosecutors I’ve gone up against as an adversary.”
After leaving the Manhattan office, the ex-prosecutor became a senior fellow at New York University’s law school, and worked on academic papers that focused on jurisdiction and due process issues involving defendants outside the United States — issues similar to those he has pondered at length in Mr. Khalil’s case.
“What’s really marked about those articles is they do not read as somebody straight out of the prosecutorial trenches,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University who is friendly with the judge. “They read as written by somebody who stepped back from his own practice and really tried to get it right in terms of the legal doctrine.”
People caught up in the legal system often find that judges do not rule quickly enough to account for rapidly unfolding events. The disjuncture has been particularly notable during the second Trump administration, during which courts have struggled to keep up.
“A lot of us on the outside expect federal courts to move with the same dispatch that the executive branch can move. That’s not practicable and it’s not wise,” Mr. Vladeck said. “What separates judicial power from political power is principled legal rationale. Sometimes it takes a little time to make sure that you’ve got the right principles to inform your position.”
In Mr. Khalil’s case, the administration moved with characteristic speed, both in initially detaining him and in rationalizing his arrest.
A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department quickly claimed he had led activities “aligned to Hamas.” And Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, accused him of “siding with terrorists,” and of participating in protests in which “pro-Hamas” fliers were handed out.
But in the weeks since, those allegations have not been substantiated. Evidence submitted in Mr. Khalil’s immigration case revealed no secretive support for Hamas. And his lawyers have pointed to comments he made on CNN saying that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement.”
His case continues to play out in two separate courts. Judge Farbiarz has the power to free him and to determine the constitutionality of the administration’s attempts to deport him.
An immigration court judge, Jamee Comans, is overseeing his immigration proceedings, which determine more narrowly whether the United States has met the legal burden for deporting him. Mr. Khalil’s next immigration court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Over the weekend, friends and supporters of Mr. Khalil held a “people’s graduation” event in Manhattan, acknowledging that if he were free, he would have walked in a Columbia University commencement this week.
Mr. Khalil’s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, was there with the couple’s infant son, Deen, who was born on April 21. Speaking through tears, Dr. Abdalla said she had looked forward to her husband getting to experience his commencement ceremony.
“Like witnessing the birth of our son, Deen, and the first precious month of his life, this moment was stolen from him,” she said.
Eryn Davis contributed reporting.
The judge in the case, Michael E. Farbiarz, has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process as Mr. Khalil passes the weeks in Jena, La.
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The judge in Mahmoud Khalil’s case has moved methodically, as the justice system struggles to keep pace with the Trump administration. Credit: Adam Gray for The New York Times
by Jonah E. Bromwich
May 20, 2025
New York Times
Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was released after 58 days.
Rumeyza Ozturk, a Tufts doctoral student, was released after 45 days.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia undergraduate, was released after 16 days.
But 72 days after his arrest on March 9, Mahmoud Khalil — the country’s most prominent pro-Palestinian-protester-turned-prisoner — is still detained in Jena, La., waiting for a New Jersey federal judge to decide whether he can go free while his immigration case proceeds.
The Trump administration has invoked a rarely cited law to argue that Mr. Khalil’s presence in the country threatens its foreign-policy goal of halting antisemitism. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have argued that the government is retaliating against their client, a legal permanent resident, for participating in protests that shook Columbia University’s campus and that he should have his liberty while his immigration case is assessed.
The New Jersey judge, Michael E. Farbiarz, has been thoroughly engaged. But he has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process that have attracted enormous attention to Mr. Khalil’s case.
His meticulous approach has made the case an exemplar of Trump-era justice, in which the White House frequently moves with a speed that courts are not used to matching.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have repeatedly asked the judge to decide whether to release their client on bail, like the other students, before ruling on the issues at the heart of the case. The judge has responded that he must deal with the procedural basics first.
Judge Farbiarz has issued numerous orders and written two lengthy rulings: a 67-page determination that he had the right to preside over the case and a 108-page opinion asserting that his control over the case had not been stripped.
In the second ruling, he acknowledged that the law’s response to cases like Mr. Khalil’s “has been the same across the board: no unnecessary delay.”
That opinion was issued on April 29.
“Mahmoud is understandably frustrated that he was the first to be detained and nine weeks later is still in detention,” said Baher Azmy, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers and the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “But we remain optimistic that the court will see through the patent unconstitutionality of the government’s actions here and order him released soon.”
Legal experts acknowledged that Judge Farbiarz, 51, has proceeded more slowly than other judges. But they emphasized that each judge was different and said they believed it made sense, particularly for an early-career jurist like Judge Farbiarz, to be as thorough as possible.
“In a case that has gotten this much notoriety, I think there’s every reason if you’re the judge to make sure you have all of your ducks in a row,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. “Judge Farbiarz knows that there is a national spotlight, not just on him but on the ability of the federal courts to handle cases like these.”
Judge Farbiarz has a reputation for thorough, methodical preparation that borders on the obsessive. Before he ascended to the bench in 2023, he was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where he headed the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit.
As a prosecutor, he led a case against one of Osama Bin Laden’s sons-in-law, and another against the first Guantánamo Bay detainee to be tried in civilian court. He also prosecuted a Swedish citizen, Oussama Kassir, who was accused of plotting to set up a training camp for terrorists at an Oregon ranch.
Mark S. DeMarco, a defense lawyer based in the Bronx, represented Mr. Kassir. He was struck by the future Judge Farbiarz’s sense of fair play, and his thoroughness.
“All his bases were covered. There was no stone left unturned,” Mr. DeMarco remembered, adding, “He was probably one of the most prepared prosecutors I’ve gone up against as an adversary.”
After leaving the Manhattan office, the ex-prosecutor became a senior fellow at New York University’s law school, and worked on academic papers that focused on jurisdiction and due process issues involving defendants outside the United States — issues similar to those he has pondered at length in Mr. Khalil’s case.
“What’s really marked about those articles is they do not read as somebody straight out of the prosecutorial trenches,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University who is friendly with the judge. “They read as written by somebody who stepped back from his own practice and really tried to get it right in terms of the legal doctrine.”
People caught up in the legal system often find that judges do not rule quickly enough to account for rapidly unfolding events. The disjuncture has been particularly notable during the second Trump administration, during which courts have struggled to keep up.
“A lot of us on the outside expect federal courts to move with the same dispatch that the executive branch can move. That’s not practicable and it’s not wise,” Mr. Vladeck said. “What separates judicial power from political power is principled legal rationale. Sometimes it takes a little time to make sure that you’ve got the right principles to inform your position.”
In Mr. Khalil’s case, the administration moved with characteristic speed, both in initially detaining him and in rationalizing his arrest.
A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department quickly claimed he had led activities “aligned to Hamas.” And Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, accused him of “siding with terrorists,” and of participating in protests in which “pro-Hamas” fliers were handed out.
But in the weeks since, those allegations have not been substantiated. Evidence submitted in Mr. Khalil’s immigration case revealed no secretive support for Hamas. And his lawyers have pointed to comments he made on CNN saying that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement.”
His case continues to play out in two separate courts. Judge Farbiarz has the power to free him and to determine the constitutionality of the administration’s attempts to deport him.
An immigration court judge, Jamee Comans, is overseeing his immigration proceedings, which determine more narrowly whether the United States has met the legal burden for deporting him. Mr. Khalil’s next immigration court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Over the weekend, friends and supporters of Mr. Khalil held a “people’s graduation” event in Manhattan, acknowledging that if he were free, he would have walked in a Columbia University commencement this week.
Mr. Khalil’s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, was there with the couple’s infant son, Deen, who was born on April 21. Speaking through tears, Dr. Abdalla said she had looked forward to her husband getting to experience his commencement ceremony.
“Like witnessing the birth of our son, Deen, and the first precious month of his life, this moment was stolen from him,” she said.
Eryn Davis contributed reporting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area's federal and state courts.
A version of this article appears in print on May 21, 2025, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Khalil Has Been Detained for Months While Others Are Free. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
See more on: Homeland Security Department, Donald Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/us/politics/qatar-plane-trump-air-force-one.html
U.S. Formally Accepts Luxury Jet From Qatar for Trump
The Air Force has been asked to figure out a way to upgrade it so it can be put into use as a new Air Force One for the president.
Listen to this article · 6:48 minutes
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The Boeing 747-8 from Qatar at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida after President Trump took a tour of the plane in February. Credit: Al Drago for The New York Times
by Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt
The Air Force has been asked to figure out a way to upgrade it so it can be put into use as a new Air Force One for the president.
Listen to this article · 6:48 minutes
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The Boeing 747-8 from Qatar at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida after President Trump took a tour of the plane in February. Credit: Al Drago for The New York Times
by Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt
Reporting from Washington
May 21, 2025
New York Times
The United States has accepted a 747 jetliner as a gift from the government of Qatar, and the Air Force has been asked to figure out a way to rapidly upgrade it so it can be put into use as a new Air Force One for President Trump, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday.
“The secretary of defense has accepted a Boeing 747 from Qatar in accordance with all federal rules and regulations,” the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a statement. “The Department of Defense will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered for an aircraft used to transport the president of the United States.”
The plane, which industry executives estimated is worth about $200 million, will require extensive work before it can be considered secure enough to carry Mr. Trump, Pentagon officials have acknowledged in recent days.
“Any civilian aircraft will take significant modifications to do so,” Troy Meink, the Air Force secretary, said on Tuesday during Senate testimony. “Based on the secretary’s direction, we are postured and we’re off looking at that right now, what it’s going to take for that particular aircraft.”
The plan has drawn concern from members of Congress, who worry that Mr. Trump will pressure the Air Force to do the work so fast that sufficient security measures are not built into the plane, such as missile defense systems or even systems to protect the plane from the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear blast.
“If President Trump insists on converting this plane to a hardened Air Force One before 2029, I worry about the pressures you may be under to cut corners on operational security,” Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, said as Mr. Meink was testifying.
The Pentagon has not given an estimate of when the work on the Qatari plane might be done, even though Mr. Trump and the White House have made clear the president wants it soon, perhaps even by the end of the year.
“We will make sure that we do what’s necessary to ensure security of the aircraft,” Mr. Meink said at the Senate hearing. “I will be quite clear and discuss that with the secretary up to the president if necessary if we feel there’s any threats that we are unable to address.”
The gift also has drawn questions from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who worry that Qatar may be trying to improperly influence Mr. Trump, or that the plane itself might have listening devices.
Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, publicly said on Monday for the first time that his government had approved turning over the plane as a gift, rejecting the idea of it being an attempt to influence the president.
“I don’t know why people, they are thinking,” he said, before continuing “this is considered as a bribery or considered as, something that Qatar wants to buy and influence with this administration. I don’t see any, honestly, a valid reason for that.”
He added: “We are a country that would like to have strong partnership and strong friendship, and anything that we provide to any country, it’s provided out of respect for this partnership and it’s a two-way relationship. It’s mutually beneficial for Qatar and for the United States.”
The new plane will be the third being retrofitted for use as Air Force One, replacing two planes that have been in use for 35 years and have had maintenance problems.
But maintaining the staff and equipment for three planes is extraordinarily expensive, an estimated $135 million a year for each plane, according to the Pentagon. And it could cost $1 billion or more to retrofit the Qatari plane to get it ready for use as Air Force One, a process that former Air Force officials said could take longer than finishing the job Boeing is already doing to deliver the first two planes.
The first of the Boeing planes is scheduled to be delivered in 2027, Air Force officials recently said.
It remains unclear where the money will come from to retrofit the Qatari plane or to maintain and operate it, once it is completed. Congress typically reviews and approves spending on any new major Pentagon programs. But Mr. Trump has already shown a willingness to spend federal dollars as his administration wants, often without consulting Congress.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said this month that Congress would be asking questions about any possible use of the Qatari plane as Air Force One.
“If and when it’s no longer a hypothetical, I can assure you there will be plenty of scrutiny of whatever that arrangement might look like,” Mr. Thune said.
The Qatari plane had its first flight in 2012, and then it was renovated with a luxury interior for members of the royal family in Qatar. But the government there has been trying to sell the plane for about five years.
One airline broker told The New York Times that he had a hard time finding a buyer, as 747 jets, which are no longer being manufactured, are expensive to operate. Even heads of state are increasingly using two-engine jet planes, unlike the 747, which has four engines, the broker said.
Marc J. Foulkrod, the chief executive officer of Avjet Global Sales, which tried to help Qatar sell the plane, said the United States would be better off working with Boeing to accelerate its work on the $3.9 billion contract to deliver the two 747 jets it has already been working on for the past five years.
“I’ve done completions on big airplanes, and there’s always ways to accelerate the program,” Mr. Foulkrod said in an interview. “That’s a better dollar value than trying to take an airplane from somebody else.”
The Qatari plane, flight records show, has been in San Antonio since early last month at an airplane maintenance facility. Trump administration officials have said they are considering hiring L3Harris, a military contractor, to handle the retrofit, but no formal contract has been disclosed publicly, at least so far.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Air Force said it is preparing “to award a contract to modify a Boeing 747 aircraft for executive airlift. Details related to the contract are classified.”
Congress also has not yet taken any formal vote to accept the plane as a gift from Qatar. The Constitution requires that Congress sign off on any large gift given to the president. Mr. Trump has said the gift is to the United States government, not him as president.
May 21, 2025
New York Times
The United States has accepted a 747 jetliner as a gift from the government of Qatar, and the Air Force has been asked to figure out a way to rapidly upgrade it so it can be put into use as a new Air Force One for President Trump, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday.
“The secretary of defense has accepted a Boeing 747 from Qatar in accordance with all federal rules and regulations,” the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a statement. “The Department of Defense will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered for an aircraft used to transport the president of the United States.”
The plane, which industry executives estimated is worth about $200 million, will require extensive work before it can be considered secure enough to carry Mr. Trump, Pentagon officials have acknowledged in recent days.
“Any civilian aircraft will take significant modifications to do so,” Troy Meink, the Air Force secretary, said on Tuesday during Senate testimony. “Based on the secretary’s direction, we are postured and we’re off looking at that right now, what it’s going to take for that particular aircraft.”
The plan has drawn concern from members of Congress, who worry that Mr. Trump will pressure the Air Force to do the work so fast that sufficient security measures are not built into the plane, such as missile defense systems or even systems to protect the plane from the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear blast.
“If President Trump insists on converting this plane to a hardened Air Force One before 2029, I worry about the pressures you may be under to cut corners on operational security,” Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, said as Mr. Meink was testifying.
The Pentagon has not given an estimate of when the work on the Qatari plane might be done, even though Mr. Trump and the White House have made clear the president wants it soon, perhaps even by the end of the year.
“We will make sure that we do what’s necessary to ensure security of the aircraft,” Mr. Meink said at the Senate hearing. “I will be quite clear and discuss that with the secretary up to the president if necessary if we feel there’s any threats that we are unable to address.”
The gift also has drawn questions from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who worry that Qatar may be trying to improperly influence Mr. Trump, or that the plane itself might have listening devices.
Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, publicly said on Monday for the first time that his government had approved turning over the plane as a gift, rejecting the idea of it being an attempt to influence the president.
“I don’t know why people, they are thinking,” he said, before continuing “this is considered as a bribery or considered as, something that Qatar wants to buy and influence with this administration. I don’t see any, honestly, a valid reason for that.”
He added: “We are a country that would like to have strong partnership and strong friendship, and anything that we provide to any country, it’s provided out of respect for this partnership and it’s a two-way relationship. It’s mutually beneficial for Qatar and for the United States.”
The new plane will be the third being retrofitted for use as Air Force One, replacing two planes that have been in use for 35 years and have had maintenance problems.
But maintaining the staff and equipment for three planes is extraordinarily expensive, an estimated $135 million a year for each plane, according to the Pentagon. And it could cost $1 billion or more to retrofit the Qatari plane to get it ready for use as Air Force One, a process that former Air Force officials said could take longer than finishing the job Boeing is already doing to deliver the first two planes.
The first of the Boeing planes is scheduled to be delivered in 2027, Air Force officials recently said.
It remains unclear where the money will come from to retrofit the Qatari plane or to maintain and operate it, once it is completed. Congress typically reviews and approves spending on any new major Pentagon programs. But Mr. Trump has already shown a willingness to spend federal dollars as his administration wants, often without consulting Congress.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said this month that Congress would be asking questions about any possible use of the Qatari plane as Air Force One.
“If and when it’s no longer a hypothetical, I can assure you there will be plenty of scrutiny of whatever that arrangement might look like,” Mr. Thune said.
The Qatari plane had its first flight in 2012, and then it was renovated with a luxury interior for members of the royal family in Qatar. But the government there has been trying to sell the plane for about five years.
One airline broker told The New York Times that he had a hard time finding a buyer, as 747 jets, which are no longer being manufactured, are expensive to operate. Even heads of state are increasingly using two-engine jet planes, unlike the 747, which has four engines, the broker said.
Marc J. Foulkrod, the chief executive officer of Avjet Global Sales, which tried to help Qatar sell the plane, said the United States would be better off working with Boeing to accelerate its work on the $3.9 billion contract to deliver the two 747 jets it has already been working on for the past five years.
“I’ve done completions on big airplanes, and there’s always ways to accelerate the program,” Mr. Foulkrod said in an interview. “That’s a better dollar value than trying to take an airplane from somebody else.”
The Qatari plane, flight records show, has been in San Antonio since early last month at an airplane maintenance facility. Trump administration officials have said they are considering hiring L3Harris, a military contractor, to handle the retrofit, but no formal contract has been disclosed publicly, at least so far.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Air Force said it is preparing “to award a contract to modify a Boeing 747 aircraft for executive airlift. Details related to the contract are classified.”
Congress also has not yet taken any formal vote to accept the plane as a gift from Qatar. The Constitution requires that Congress sign off on any large gift given to the president. Mr. Trump has said the gift is to the United States government, not him as president.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
See more on: U.S. Politics, U.S. Department of Defense, Donald Trump
