Editorials from The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and others
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April 10 – The Washington Post says anti-DEI policies take power away from local schools
During her confirmation hearing to become education secretary, Linda McMahon promised she would work to "send education back to the states." Already, she is doing the opposite.
Last week, McMahon's department issued an ultimatum to state education officials: Certify within 10 days that their school districts have eliminated all diversity, equity and inclusion programs or lose education funding from Washington. This is a straightforward assault on the federalist nature of the U.S. education system.
McMahon's threat attempts to create an atmosphere of fear within local schools. Some state officials, including those in New York, have said they won't comply. But many low-income schools that rely on Title I funding - and disproportionately educate students of color - might understandably go out of their way to avoid a collision with federal officials. The danger is that programs to recruit Black teachers for inner-city schools, for example, will be cut or that instruction on slavery or other complicated aspects of U.S. history will be considered too risky to continue.
The administration's directive leans heavily on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which protects students from discrimination based on race, color or national origin, as well as on the Supreme Court's ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which bars schools from using race as a criterion for admissions. The administration argues that, together, these benchmarks authorize the Education Department to police " DEI practices " that it believes privilege disadvantaged students.
This power apparently extends to micromanaging classroom activities. In a Dear Colleague letter in February, the Education Department accused schools of having "toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon 'systemic and structural racism' and advanced discriminatory policies and practices." Separately, the department released an FAQ saying schools that "shame students of a particular race or ethnicity" or "deliberately assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives in other areas of the world" could face civil rights investigations.
The department also has vowed to go beyond the Supreme Court's ruling on school admissions policies. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the court's opinion against race-conscious policies should not be "construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise," leading many schools to shift toward a more holistic evaluation process that takes an applicant's background into account through personal essays. But Education Department officials have called such practices illegal, noting that "nebulous concepts like racial balancing and diversity are not compelling interests."
These are not idle threats. Just one week after Inauguration Day, the Education Department targeted the Ithaca City School District in New York for hosting its annual Students of Color Summit, which seeks to "support and affirm" minority students, though all were welcome to attend.
McMahon is overextending her authority. Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at Education, said in a statement to The Post that the administration is merely "actively holding states accountable" and making sure taxpayer dollars "do not sponsor discrimination." But Congress has repeatedly passed laws limiting the federal government's interference in local schools' curriculums, instructional programs and administration - for good reason.
In the U.S., local and state governments have always controlled education. This system grants parents maximum influence over what their children are taught. The federal government has a responsibility to ensure minimum educational standards are met and to protect civil rights in schools, but members of both political parties have bristled at federal attempts to meddle with lesson plans. President Donald Trump's allies chastised the Biden administration merely for recommending the use of anti-racism texts in U.S. history and civics courses.
The Education Department's new threat to local schools also breaks the president's manypromises to end "censorship" by the government. Similar laws in some states that limit classroom discussions on race and gender issues have already had a chilling effect in free speech. A Rand survey conducted in 2023 found that two-thirds of K-12 teachers have opted to limit discussions of social and political issues in the classroom. The new federal anti-DEI directives stand to worsen this trend.
This will mean teaching children less and exposing them to fewer ideas and opportunities as they hone their critical-thinking skills. McMahon and her boss might want to eliminate the Education Department, but they clearly have no interest in ceding power to the states. They should drop the flimsy pretense.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/10/dei-education-trump-mcmahon-school-funding/
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April 12 – The New York Times says Trump’s tariff policies are misguided
Presidents who make big changes in government policy usually lay their plans with care. They game out what might happen next. They sweat the little things. Richard Nixon did not just decide one morning to fly to China. Ronald Reagan's tax cuts were the better part of a decade in the making. The details of Barack Obama's expansion of health insurance emerged from countless public debates.
President Trump prefers to shoot before aiming. Declaring that he intends to reboot America's relations with the rest of the world, he has imposed tariffs on imports with abandon, demonstrating a disregard for the details or the collateral damage. His careless conduct of the public's business has roiled stock and bond markets, threatened to cause a recession and damaged America's global standing. The president's decision-making has been so erratic that at one point this week, the administration's top trade official was interrupted in the middle of testimony before Congress because the president had just changed the policy the official was defending.
The original version of Mr. Trump's plan, which he paused on Wednesday, imposed tariffs on foreign nations at rates that bore no apparent connection to America's national interests. The highest tariff rate, 50 percent, applied to Lesotho, a tiny and impoverished nation in southern Africa.
The latest version isn't much better. Mr. Trump is imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports from most nations, along with higher rates on imports from America's three largest trading partners: Canada, Mexico and China. The average tax on imports will rise to the highest level in more than a century, raising the prices on many consumer goods. The 145 percent maximum rate on Chinese imports is intended to isolate that nation economically, but the simultaneous tariffs on everyone else will undermine that goal. And while the stated purpose of all the tariffs is to expand American manufacturing, putting them in place immediately doesn't give companies time to build factories. It will cause pain without any benefit.
We want to emphasize that Mr. Trump has a point about the pain caused by free trade. The decades in which the United States threw open its doors to imports from other countries left many Americans without jobs and decimated the nation's industrial heartland. Washington's naïveté about China's rise, accomplished partly through its own trade barriers and theft of intellectual property, is particularly regrettable.
A revival of American manufacturing is a worthy goal. It would not heal past wounds, but it could provide a basis for future generations of Americans to build lives and to rebuild communities that are more prosperous and more secure.
That is the tragedy of Mr. Trump's trade war. Instead of addressing the ills he has diagnosed, he has embarked on a reckless campaign that threatens to discard the benefits of trade without delivering a meaningful economic revival.
From the end of World War II until the beginning of Mr. Trump's first term in office, American leaders of both political parties sought to expand trade, believing that it would increase the nation's prosperity and help to maintain peace among nations.
The benefits of their efforts have been substantial. Globalization has lifted billions of people from poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It has also enriched the United States, spurring innovation by increasing both competition and the rewards for success. Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have all reaped the benefits of global markets. So have American farmers, weapons makers and pharmaceutical companies. Nine of the world's 10 most valuable companies today are American, in part because of this country's openness to trade.
But the benefits accrued disproportionately to the affluent. In theory, the government could have redistributed those benefits more equitably; in practice, it did not. For many Americans, especially those who lost factory jobs, the availability of cheap goods at Walmart was an inadequate recompense. A widely cited academic paper by the economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson estimated that expanded trade with China alone resulted in the loss of 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011. Many of the communities hit hardest by those job losses still have not recovered. Many former factory workers never returned to work.
Tariffs could be deployed as part of a broader strategy to expand the nation's manufacturing base and create more inclusive growth. Taxing imports protects domestic manufacturers from foreign competition at the expense of domestic consumers, who must pay higher prices as a consequence. That trade-off is sometimes worth it.
There is a good case for imposing tariffs on carefully defined categories of products, including those that are necessary to maintain the nation's security. Tariffs can also protect American industry from unfair competition, as when other countries are subsidizing exports. And tariffs can be effective as a shield for emerging industries, like electric vehicle manufacturing. Under President Joe Biden, the United States sought to expand manufacturing of green energy technologies by combining targeted tariffs with funding for research, investment in infrastructure and incentives for consumers. The result was an increase in factory building.
It is a bitter irony that even as Mr. Trump raises tariffs, he is axing federal support for these technologies, which are among the most promising areas of domestic manufacturing. Some companies are already abandoning their building plans.
Mr. Trump's use of tariffs is indiscriminate. He is imposing tariffs on goods that the United States does not and cannot produce, like manganese from Gabon, which American companies need to make steel. He is imposing tariffs on nations that buy more goods from the United States than they sell to the United States, like Australia, and on nations that have offered to remove all their tariffs on American goods, like Israel. Even after Mr. Trump paused some tariffs under pressure from investors and members of his party, the measures he has imposed have raised the average effective tax rate on imports to the United States to 27 percent, the highest since the early 20th century, according to Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Yale University.
In addition to raising prices, tariffs are likely to slow economic growth. And another danger looms: There are warning signs that Mr. Trump's provocations are reducing demand for Treasuries, forcing the government to offer higher interest rates to investors. If that continues, the federal debt will become even harder to repay.
Mr. Trump and his advisers say that the pain caused by tariffs is necessary to revive domestic manufacturing. But factories take years to build, and companies have good reason to doubt that his successors will maintain his policies. Companies have little basis for confidence that Mr. Trump will keep his tariffs in place. The president has made clear, in word and deed, that his commitments are at best negotiable and at worst fickle.
Mr. Trump, of course, could return to the drawing board at any time. But Congress and the nation cannot afford to wait. The president's behavior makes clear that Congress has ceded too much authority over trade, as it has on so many issues, and it should act to correct his course and to curb his trade powers.
One sensible reform is a bill introduced by Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, under which tariffs would expire if they did not receive congressional approval within 60 days. That would preserve a president's ability to respond to emergencies while preventing a president from causing emergencies. Moreover, congressional approval would demonstrate the broad political support necessary to give companies the confidence to make long-term investments.
Mr. Trump extols tariffs as a miracle cure for a wide range of economic ailments. He still seems to believe his first-term declaration that "trade wars are good and easy to win." The truth is that tariffs can help the United States or they can hurt the United States. Unless the president changes course or is forced to do so, these tariffs will hurt - and the pain is going to get worse.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/opinion/trump-tariffs-free-trade-economy.html
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April 13 – The Wall Street Journal on Trump and Iran’s nuclear program
The U.S. has begun indirect talks with Iran over its nuclear program, and the question is whether this will be one more run-around to a bad deal. That's the way it has worked for more than two decades, and it will be the goal of the regime again. The question is whether President Trump settles for it.
Iran so far has been the best of his second-term foreign-policy initiatives. He is restoring the "maximum pressure" sanctions campaign from his first term, which will shrink the regime's income.
Mr. Trump has also laid down a tough marker that Iran must dismantle its nuclear program, a la Libya in 2003, if it wants to avoid a military attack. "If they don't make a deal, there will be bombing," the President said recently. "It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before."
An ostentatious lineup of B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia spotted by civilian satellites drove home the warning. This is the opposite of the Obama-Biden appeasement strategy that yielded more Iranian nuclear progress and Iran-backed proxy wars across the Middle East.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump's de facto Secretary of State, is his lead negotiator on Iran and suggested a more modest U.S. goal ahead of weekend talks. "I think our position begins with dismantlement of your program. That is our position today," Mr. Witkoff told the Journal. "That doesn't mean, by the way, that at the margin we're not going to find other ways to find compromise between the two countries."
He added that "where our red line will be, there can't be weaponization of your nuclear capability."
Iran will insist it is already meeting that "weaponization" standard because it hasn't built a bomb. If that's where talks end up, it won't be much better than Barack Obama's 2015 deal. In that deal Iran retained its uranium enrichment capacity, refused inspections to key nuclear sites, and expanded its ballistic missile program.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's goal will be to get the same deal. That's why foreign-supervised dismantlement and intrusive, on-demand inspections are essential. John Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 deal, argues nearby that a far better deal is possible because Iran's regional position is so much weaker. If even he thinks so, Mr. Trump would be widely criticized if he settled for less.
Israel is also a player here, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his position after meeting Mr. Trump in Washington. "We agree that Iran will not have nuclear weapons. This can be done in an agreement, but only if this agreement is a Libya-style agreement; that they go in, blow up the facilities, dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision and American execution-that's good."
"A second option, that it won't happen. They'll just drag out the talks, and then the option is military. Everyone understands that. We discussed that at length," he said.
A dismantlement deal is preferable to an attack on Iran that would have uncertain consequences, but the military destruction of most of Iran's program is better than a deal that leaves Iran able to build a bomb after it has had time to rebuild its military strength and proxy network. That's the test for Mr. Witkoff and the President.
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April 13 – The Guardian on Trump’s minerals-for-protection deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo
"The vilest scramble for loot that has ever disfigured the history of human conscience" is how Joseph Conrad described colonial-era concessions granted to private companies for Congo's natural resources in Heart of Darkness. Under Donald Trump, that scramble may be back. If news reports are right, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is offering the US a blunt deal: minerals for military help - a slice of sovereignty traded for a shot at stability.
The concern is this isn't a return, it's a sequel. For three decades, Washington supported Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a cold war ally and brutal dictator who looted the Congo until his 1997 fall. That history of power politics still casts a long shadow. The Trump administration openly favours muscle over diplomacy. Fadhel Kaboub, an associate professor of economics at Denison University, notes that Biden-era talk of partnering for clean energy has been shelved, with the US driven less by green goals than by copper and cobalt for missiles and microchips.
The logic is bleak but clear. Since 1996, the Congo's wars have drawn in foreign armies and proxies, leaving over 5.5 million dead. The DRC faces a worsening security crisis driven by armed groups like M23, allegedly backed by Rwanda and other regional powers. Western governments lament the violence, but focus on securing access to minerals vital to their industries. Kinshasa, seeing appeals to multilateral justice achieve little, has turned to dealmaking. If dependency is inevitable, it might as well be leveraged.
The DRC's leadership is not naive. They know Mr Trump sees Africa not as a partner but as a warehouse of strategic materials, and Ukraine as proof that he will turn weakness into American gain. They know China won't send troops - citing non-interference - even as its firms dominate Congolese mining. With Russia and Gulf states offering assistance, Kinshasa pushes for US bases to guard "strategic resources" - like cobalt, 70% of which comes from the DRC and is essential to smartphones and Nato's defence industry. Congo may want boots; Washington prefers business.
The proposed deal with the US seems desperate and strategic: security support in exchange for mining rights. Don't call it protection money. After Mr Trump's Africa envoy signalled a deal was coming, the DRC repatriated three Americans tied to a failed coup, and a tin mine, which is controlled by US investors, began reopening as M23 rebels pulled back - a fragile win in a volatile landscape. Kinshasa hopes either to have Washington broker a peace that forces the rebels into retreat or to gain the firepower to crush them outright.
It might also unlock IMF funding and widen access to western capital markets. But at what cost? The likeliest outcome is that the DRC will receive just enough to remain dependent. Its mineral sector will be dominated by foreign firms, its fiscal autonomy eroded by conditional loans and its economy locked into the old pattern of subservience - supplier of cheap inputs, consumer of expensive outputs.
Calling this colonialism isn't quite right. Empires ruled by decree, with no pretence of consent. Today's coercion is more subtle: a sovereign state cornered, at a weak moment, into accepting colonial-style terms without soldiers or flags. The tools are different - security deals, trade exemptions, private investment. But the logic is familiar. The irony is that this is being pursued voluntarily by a government with few alternatives. What will history say about that?
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April 10 – The Houston Chronicle asks why the U.S. won’t bring back legal immigrant mistakenly sent to Salvadoran prison
"How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?" Franz Kafka's famous fictional character, Josef K, asks the two men who show up at his apartment early one morning.
"We don't answer such questions," the men tell him.
"You're going to have to answer them," K responds. "Here are my papers, now show me yours, starting with the arrest warrant."
Actually the two agents who have arrived at his door to take him away do not have to answer. And they don't. In "The Trial," perhaps the most "Kafkaesque" of the celebrated Czech author's early 20th-century novels, Josef K goes to his eventual death by execution without knowing how or why he got caught up in a bewildering bureaucratic nightmare. Neither does the reader.
Kafka himself died a century ago, but in recent weeks he's come back to life, so to speak. For that, we can thank President Donald Trump and his plans to carry out mass deportation. Designed by White House advisor and anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller and implemented by Trump's border czar, Tom Holman, who prefers the brutalist approach to immigration-law enforcement. "I don't care what the judges think, I don't care," Holman has said. Due process, as far as this trio is concerned, is pretty much an afterthought.
Consider a real-life Josef K, a Salvadoran native living in Baltimore, legally, who on March 12 fell into the clutches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. On a Wednesday afternoon, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a sheet metal worker, left work as usual and drove to his mother-in-law's house to pick up his 5-year-old son, an autistic child who has a hearing deficit and is unable to communicate effectively.
On the way home, an unmarked vehicle pulled Abrego Garcia over. According to court documents, men identifying themselves as ICE agents with Homeland Security Investigations told him his "status has changed." Within minutes and without a warrant, he was handcuffed and detained in one of several ICE vehicles on the scene. The agents gave him 10 minutes to call his wife to collect the mute and terrified little boy watching everything from the backseat. Otherwise, they told him, his son would be handed over to Child Protective Services. She arrived to find her husband distraught and in tears. With no explanation for why or where he'd be taken, Abrego Garcia was promptly hauled away.
Shuttled between detention centers from Maryland, to Louisiana to Texas, Abrego Garcia managed only a few disoriented calls to his wife, his confusion palpable. He was being accused of gang affiliations. Both Abrego Garcia and his wife pleaded with ICE, explaining that he had fled gang threats as a teenager, earned U.S. protection and had already disproven baseless accusations of ties to MS-13, the notorious Salvadoran gang. According to court filings, ICE repeatedly assured him he'd get his day in court.
Then, from a detention center in La Villa, Texas, came Abrego Garcia's final, urgent call. He was being sent to El Salvador, to "CECOT," he told his wife. The next day, a news photo showed men kneeling, heads shaved, arms locked overhead - faces hidden. But she recognized those scars, those tattoos. There was her husband. Exiled to a hellish megaprison for terrorists, shoulder-to-shoulder with the " worst of the worst " in the country he'd worked so hard to escape.
Three days after Abrego Garcia's arrest, the federal government admitted that he had been imprisoned by mistake. It was "an administrative error," an ICE official conceded, relying on the type of bloodless phrase perennially favored by faceless, "bootlick bureaucrats," to borrow Timothy Synder's description in his book "On Freedom."
Too bad about that administrative error. In a cruel twist, attorneys for the government told Abrego Garcia's wife and her own attorneys there's nothing they can do to free him, now that he's in Salvadoran custody. Trump's "primacy in foreign affairs" - whatever that means - is more important than Abrego Garcia's family or his freedom, Trump's attorneys argued. If the government - our government - prevails, the man could be in the Salvadoran hellhole for the rest of his life.
Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, has no known connections to a gang and checked in with ICE regularly as part of his protected status. His wife and child are both U.S. citizens. As Abrego Garcia's attorneys, in their filing, put it: their client "sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafkaesque mistake." He ended up behind bars, even after a U.S. district judge told the Trump administration to halt flights of detainees to El Salvador, an order the administration ignored. El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, a Trump acolyte, offered up a callous response on social media: "Oopsie...Too late."
Abrego Garcia is not the only one victimized by the misrule of law. There is also Rumeysa Ozturk, a student jailed for writing a pro-Palestine op-ed; Dr. Rasha Alaweigh, deported despite a court order; and Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who remains detained without evidence. Both Ozturk and Khalil were surrounded by a pack of plainclothes agents, like wolves moving in for the takedown. Both were denied the privilege of an explanation as they were handcuffed and taken away in an unmarked car.
"Unlike with other categories of immigrants," Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, "revoking the status of legal permanent residents generally requires evidence of wrongdoing."
"Generally" is not an apt description of life in the U.S. these days (in all sorts of ways), as New York Times columnist and Russian emigre M. Gessen suggests. "Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can't shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity," Gessen writes.
Gessen knows the fear of unmarked SUVs, the knock that shatters all peace, the shadow of secret lists. Now, fellow Americans are learning it too. Plainclothes agents circle churches, schools and hospitals like vultures. ICE turns neighbor against neighbor, encouraging suspicion and snitching. People feel it - the unease, the panic - when they check in at an airport, knowing they're at the mercy of a bureaucrat obeying an executive order. They cautiously eye the green-striped Border Patrol vehicle that pulls up at the gas station where they're filling up. (Sure, my papers are in order, but what if I can't prove it? Do I end up in a Salvadoran prison?)
Literature, like history, is replete with warnings about human nature and our inclination, if given the opportunity, to wield unchecked power mercilessly. Machiavelli, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn and, of course, Kafka - they all saw it. So did the Founding Fathers, who built constitutional guardrails to stop tyrants, real or aspiring. They anchored us to the rule of law, not the rule of a future Trump and his 100-plus (and counting) executive orders, or the world's richest man or some concoction called DOGE.
Trump and company, either ignorant of the Constitution or disdainful, have smashed guardrails. They don't care that due process is an essential building block of democracy and that without it, it's not only a foreign-born resident like Khalil who can be deprived of life or liberty. It's also the rest of us.
With its mass-deportation crusade, the Trump administration is following a well-worn path. "Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend," Serwer of The Atlantic points out. Label them criminals or deviants or outcasts or traitors, and they become convenient scapegoats. (Server notes that the label "traitor" is a favorite of Musk and the president he serves alongside.)
U.S. district court judges in Washington and Maryland attempted to resist our tumble into a Kafkaesque nightmare. On Monday, however, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can go ahead with deporting Venezuelan immigrants under the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act. At least the justices decided that the men can challenge their deportations in court. But only in Texas, where they were last detained. It just so happens federal courts here are under the jurisdiction of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is so far to the right that their rulings exasperate even the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. A federal judge in Brownsville has moved to block the removal of any Venezuelans held at the El Valle Detention Center
In a separate decision, Chief Justice John Roberts paused a lower court ruling that would have required the Trump administration to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. The justices need time to ponder the maddening legal loophole the White House created by violating court orders and sending an individual to a foreign prison outside the court's jurisdiction. The father will have to wait in prison while they think.
Evidently, saving the rule of law desperately requires not just the courts, but also the attention of Congress. Its Trump-compliant members still sleep. That leaves the most important citadel of resistance: the people themselves. Fortunately, Americans seem to be shaking off a stunned period of post-election hibernation in protests, town halls, election booths and financial markets. Although Kafka's hapless Josef K could not control his fate, we the people still can.
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