Closing summary
We have come to the end of another long day of chronicling the Trump restoration, but will return on Friday to keep at it. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Donald Trump has signed an executive order to greatly reduce the size of the federal Department of Education.
Elon Musk, who is definitely not the co-president, is reportedly visiting the Pentagon on Friday to get a briefing on the US military’s plans for fighting a war with China.
Trump said that he is rescinding an executive order targeting a Democratic-leaning law firm after the firm agreed to provide $40m in free legal services in support of his administration’s aims.
A federal judge blocked Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” from accessing social security records and ordered them to delete any previously obtained information.
Judge James Boasberg, a former law school housemate of Brett Kavanaugh, said the Trump administration “evaded” his order in the case of Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador.
Trump administration lawyers have embraced the view that the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang, permits immigration agents to enter homes without a warrant.
The justice department has brought charges against three unnamed individuals for using or planning to use molotov cocktails to attack Tesla automobiles and dealerships.
Immigration agents arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national with a valid visa doing research at Georgetown University, and are trying to deport him for alleged support of Hamas. A judge later temporarily barred DHS from deporting him.
Tim Walz, who Kamala Harris picked as her running mate, sees an ominous future for the country under Trump, but also opportunities for Democrats to regain their popular support.
Trump pushed the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, something presidents typically do not do. Yesterday, the central bank held rates steady while forecasting weaker economic growth.
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Musk to get briefing on secret US plans for war with China – report
The New York Times reports that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon on Friday for a briefing on the US military’s plans for how it might fight a war with China.
The unnamed officials did not say why Musk needs to know about such plans, but the Times notes that they are not usually widely shared, even within the government.
Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country was to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.
The top-secret briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.
A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to the Times that Musk will be meeting the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, at the US military’s headquarters, but said he is “just visiting”.
The briefing reinforces Musk’s clear conflicts of interest, as a government contractor with paid billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon and US spy agencies who is also heavily invested in China.
As Vox has explained, China is very important to Musk’s Tesla business.
The symbiotic relationship between Tesla and China almost can’t be overstated. In 2019, the company opened its Shanghai “gigafactory” with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Chinese banks. It was the company’s first factory outside the US, as well as the first wholly foreign-owned car company in China, where automakers typically enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies.
It is now Tesla’s largest factory, producing half of the company’s cars globally last year. Musk has praised workers at his Chinese factory for “burning the 3 am oil…whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.” The remark came at a time when the factory was literally having workers sleep in the factory due to Covid restrictions.
According to federal prosecutors who indicted Trump for illegally taking classified documents and showing them to people after his first term, Trump himself has been somewhat cavalier about the US’s war plans. The indictment described an incident in which Trump showed the ghostwriter of his former chief of staff’s memoir a copy of the Pentagon’s plan for war with Iran during a meeting near the swimming pool of his golf club in New Jersey.
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