MAGA Rages at Amy Coney Barrett After She Turns Against Trump

In any sane reality, President Trump’s deportation of immigrants based on an eighteenth-century law, with no right to due process, would be swiftly remedied by the courts. But to conservatives, such an action is tantamount to treason.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the high court’s liberals Monday by dissenting against Trump’s use of the “Alien Enemies Act,” drawing the ire of the MAGA faithful. While the court still ruled to uphold the president’s deportation by a 5–4 margin, Barrett, appointed by Trump in 2020, still received vitriol from the right for her decision.

Even a U.S. senator got in on the attacks, along with tech oligarch Elon Musk.

A few commentators engaged in some thinly veiled racism targeting Barrett’s adopted children.

This isn’t the first time that Barrett has broken with conservative orthodoxy in her rulings, showing that at times she thinks for herself, much to the right’s consternation. The funny part is that she is still quite conservative, voting to overturn Roe v. Wade and reliably joining her fellow right-wing justices in rulings regarding religious freedom, capital punishment, and affirmative action. While her dissent Monday wasn’t enough to tip the court’s ruling, it shows that there’s a glimmer of hope on the Supreme Court that it won’t always rubber-stamp Trump’s abuses of power.

China has promised to “fight to the end” in the face of even more tariffs from President Trump.

“If China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday after China threatened retaliation against Trump’s tariffs. “Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!”

China’s Commerce Ministry matched that energy.

“The U.S. threat to escalate tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which once again exposes the U.S.’s blackmail nature,” the ministry said Tuesday. “If the U.S. insists on its own way, China will fight to the end.… China will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests.”

The Chinese Embassy in the United States responded with similar ire.

“The U.S. so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’ against China are groundless and a typical practice of unilateral bullying,” the embassy wrote on X Tuesday morning. “The countermeasures China has adopted are entirely legitimate actions aimed at protecting its sovereignty, security, and development interests, as well as maintaining a normal international trade order.

“There is no winner in a trade war and protectionism leads nowhere,” the embassy continued. “Pressuring and threatening are not the right way to engage with the country.”

If Trump goes through with all of his tariffs, the U.S. will levy a combined tariff of 104 percent on Chinese products: The new 50 percent tariffs, plus the 20 percent for alleged fentanyl trafficking, and then the 34 percent he announced last week.

Trump’s threats have already caused global stock markets to tumble and will likely only continue to erode confidence in the United States as a legitimate trading partner, as China and its massive economy look to less volatile actors like the European Union.

A mother and her three children were released from ICE detention Monday, after they were detained during an immigration raid in Sackets Harbor, New York, late last month.

Public outrage has overtaken the tiny town—which also happens to be border czar Tom Homan’s hometown—after a woman and three children, grades three, 10, and 11, were among seven individuals detained during a March 27 raid on a large dairy farm.

ICE officials said the raid had targeted a South African national who was charged with trafficking child sexual abuse material but that they had apprehended a total of seven people who lacked documentation. All seven people, including the family, were sent to a detention facility in Texas to await removal proceedings. Homan told the local news last week that the family had been moved to Texas for questioning and was being kept in an “open-air” residential facility, pending a decision on their removal.

“During investigations like that, we have to ensure that any children within that area are safe. There’s a process during these investigations where, could these children—could that family be a material witness in this horrendous crime? Can they provide information and evidence in this crime? Were they victimized within this crime? So the due diligence was done,” said Homan.

Sackets Harbor school Principal Jaime Cook wrote a scathing letter to ICE officials insisting that the children hadn’t done anything wrong. “They had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following the legal process. They are not criminals,” Cook wrote.

“They lived in a house on the same road as a house that ICE had a warrant for. The fact that ICE went to their door is unfathomable. The fact that our students were handcuffed and put into the same van as the alleged criminal from down the street is unconscionable,” Cook wrote.

The arrests sparked outrage across Central and Northern New York. Nearly 1,000 people gathered in Sackets Harbor on Saturday to protest the family’s detention by ICE. The population of Sackets Harbor is roughly 1,350 people.

The family was released from custody on Monday, according to a statement from Jennifer Gaffney, the superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District.

“My colleagues and I are relieved and grateful to share that, after 11 days of uncertainty, our students and their mother are returning home,” Gaffney said.

“In the midst of this difficult time, the strength, compassion, and resilience of our community have shone through. We are very thankful to everyone who has reached out with kindness and offered support.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed out that there was an obvious lesson from the family’s release. “This is a friendly reminder that ICE is not entirely immune to the court of public opinion,” he wrote on X Monday.

The European Union graciously offered to negotiate with Donald Trump on tariffs before retaliating, but the U.S. president is too blinded by his own conspiracy to even consider the deal.

On Monday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered the United States a “zero-for-zero tariff” on cars and industrial goods to avoid a trade war, a pretty generous offer given Trump slapped 20 percent tariffs on the EU—and pretty much everywhere else—last week.

“We have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods as we have successfully done with many other trading partners. Because Europe is always ready for a good deal. So we keep it on the table,” von der Leyen said in a statement.

Trump, however, told reporters Monday afternoon that the deal isn’t enough. “The EU has been very tough over the years, I always say it was formed to really do damage to the United States and trade,” Trump said. “That’s the reason it was formed.”

In case you forgot, the EU was not, in fact, formed to screw the United States but to foster peace and cooperation among European countries post-World War II. It was founded in 1992 and is made up of 27 countries and seven major institutions that manage a common budget, facilitate trade, and make laws.

The president continued his rewrite of European history, claiming the EU was formed solely “to create a unified force against the United States for trade.” He added that the union has used NATO—an alliance that the United States is a part of—to take advantage of the United States.

The outlandish rant is Trump’s way of saying, no, he won’t accept von der Leyen’s deal. It’s a refusal that will likely result in further retaliatory tariffs on the United States as an economic recession looms.

Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser put out a list of outrageous demands Monday for other countries inflicted by the president’s tariffs to start “burden sharing.”

Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute complete with a to-do list for other countries looking to lighten the load that “unfair barriers to trade” and “unsustainable trade deficits” have supposedly inflicted on the United States.

Miran said that these factors had led to a “decline of our manufacturing workforce by over a third since its peak and a reduction in our share of world manufacturing production of 40 percent.”

It’s worth noting that while manufacturing employment has gone down, U.S. manufacturing output is up and nearing its all-time high of December 2007. Who exactly will actually work all of these hypothetical manufacturing jobs? No one seems to know! Trump’s own secretary of commerce said earlier this month that he planned to use automation to replace cheap labor, and the treasury secretary suggested Monday that maybe ousted federal workers could pick up some shifts.

Other countries should work to improve “burden sharing” to address the issues, a process that could take many forms, said Miran.

For instance, countries could roll over and accept Trump’s tariffs without retaliation. “Critically, retaliation will exacerbate rather than improve the distribution of burdens and make it even more difficult for us to finance global public goods,” Miran said in his remarks.

Miran said that countries could “stop unfair and harmful trading practices” by buying more American products, specifically noting that countries could boost defense spending and procurement from the U.S. by “taking strain off our servicemembers and creating jobs here.”

He also suggested that countries invest in U.S. manufacturing and open factories in the U.S. “They won’t face tariffs if they make their stuff in this country,” Miran said.

Finally, Miran said that countries could “simply write checks” to the Treasury Department.

The CEA chair did not indicate whether compliance with these suggestions would alleviate the—in some cases—very steep tariffs imposed by Trump.

Miran argued that other countries ought to comply with Trump’s demands for more money because of the “global public goods” that the U.S. provides, including global security and the dollar and other reserve assets, “which make possible the global trading and financial system which has supported the greatest era of prosperity mankind has ever known.

“In my view, to continue providing these twin global public goods, there needs to be improved burden-sharing at the global level,” Miran said. “If other nations want to benefit from the U.S. geopolitical and financial umbrella, then they need to pull their weight, and pay their fair share. The costs cannot be solely borne by everyday Americans who have already given so much.”

But that’s not how public goods work: If you have to pay to use them, then they’re not actually public goods.

Miran singled out China as America’s “biggest adversary” responsible for weakening U.S. manufacturing, and even blamed it for the 2008 financial crisis. Trump is currently mounting a trade war with Beijing, and threatened a new round of tariffs Monday, bringing the total tariff rate on imports from China to 104 percent.

Miran insisted that the U.S. would somehow survive not being able to do business with its largest trading partners. “America has plenty of substitution options: We can make stuff at home, or we can buy from countries that treat us fairly instead of from countries that take advantage of us,” he said. But last week, Trump placed tariffs of at least 10 percent on nearly every country.

Trump said Sunday that he’d told global leaders that he wanted to erase the U.S. trade deficit because he viewed any deficit as a “loss,” though that’s not quite how economics works.

Donald Trump responded to a question about confusing tariff language from his administration by adding to the confusion. 

During a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office Monday, a reporter asked the president about “mixed messages from your administration. You’re talking about negotiations and yet others in your administration are saying these tariffs are actually permanent.” 

Trump’s response was anything but clarifying. 

“Well, it can both be true,” Trump responded. “There can be permanent tariffs and there can also be negotiations, because there are things that we need beyond tariffs. We need open borders.”

Is Trump actually going back on his vehement anti-immigrant, pro–border closure stances? His words seem to make little sense coupled with his mass deportation policies and attempts to restrict border crossings. Perhaps he’s referring to fewer restrictions on trade, which is probably how his surrogates and spokespeople will try to spin his remarks, and it could also be a slip of the tongue related to his ongoing cognitive decline. 

Trump’s tariff policy is so erratic and ill thought out that it’s nearly impossible to know what he actually means by “open borders.” In his bonkers remarks about trying to make Canada the fifty-first state, he’s complained about an “artificial line” separating the U.S. from its northern neighbor, but he has also long complained about crime, drugs, and rapists coming from Mexico through the America’s southern border. One thing is likely, though: The president will contradict his own remarks within days or even hours. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thinks that all the federal workers who were fired by DOGE will move to manufacturing and reinvigorate the domestic industry.

“We are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings.… That will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing,” Bessent said in an interview with Tucker Carlson released on Friday. “And we’re going to relever the private sector. So the private sector, in essence, has been in recession during the Biden years. And this is an opportunity to right-size the federal government and unleash the private sector again, because it’s been hemmed down by excessive regulation, and it’s been crowded out by the government.”

It sounds like Bessent—after weeks of federal DOGE layoffs and days of global market collapse from Trump’s tariff war—is suggesting that the federal bureaucrats who were formerly working at departments like Health and Human Services, Education, or Defense are willing and ready to do their best Rosie the Riveter impersonations in the name of restoring domestic manufacturing. This comes just days after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that it’d be robots that would bring back American manufacturing.

Bessent went on to dismiss the widespread economic anxiety that his administration has caused.

“I think one of the things that we won’t get credit for but that this administration will have done is avoiding a financial calamity,” he said to Carlson. “We’re putting on the reinforced doors before the crash.”

The former top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration says he was forced out of his job for trying to protect vaccine data from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Dr. Peter Marks told The Associated Press Sunday he refused to hand over unrestricted access to a vaccine safety database to the Health and Human Services secretary and his team, fearing that the information might be misused, manipulated, or deleted altogether.

Initially, Marks said that he tried to be on good terms with his vaccine-skeptic new boss regarding vaccine safety, making plans to develop a “vaccine transparency action plan.” Marks also gave Kennedy and his team the ability to view reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, but drew the line at allowing them to edit the data.

“Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust [them],” Marks said, using an expletive. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”

Marks’s interview came the same day that Kennedy visited Seminole County in Texas, where a young child became the third person, and second child, to die from this year’s measles outbreak. None of the three had received the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine. Kennedy has a long reputation of being anti-vaccine, which he tried to deny during his confirmation hearings.

But ever since Kennedy’s swearing in as secretary of Health and Human Services, his true colors have been on full display, as he has responded poorly to the initial deaths from the measles outbreak, expressed support for dubious measles treatments, ended support for vaccine initiatives, and even at one point claimed the measles vaccine was as bad as the disease itself.

Over the weekend in Texas, Kennedy attempted some damage control by saying, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” But, while on that visit, he also met with two doctors who claim to have treated children with measles using the steroid aerosolized budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin, calling them “extraordinary healers.”

Both treatments are considered unproven and aren’t accepted by the medical community, once again showing that Kennedy hasn’t actually given up his vaccine skepticism, even as the measles outbreak continues to grow and his government agency fires the people responsible for fighting diseases.

The Social Security Administration is falling apart at the seams as Elon Musk and his gang of reckless twentysomethings continue their never-ending pursuit to dismantle the federal safety net.

The agency’s website has crashed numerous times in recent weeks as people attempt to log into their Social Security accounts and access their benefits. Outages have lasted anywhere from 20 minutes up to a day, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The disastrous technical difficulties set off alarm bells for millions of Americans, and come as DOGE has cut more than 7,000 workers at the agency, including a 50 percent cut to the technology department. Musk and his cronies also plan to migrate Social Security data off its current programming language and rewrite the code in a matter of months, which could lead to further website outages, Wired reported last week.

The billionaire has long set his sights on attacking the program that provides benefits to more than 73 million Americans. He’s repeatedly called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and spread numerous baseless claims against the agency, including that Democrats are using Social Security to attract illegal immigrants.

“By using entitlement fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants and buy voters,” Musk said during a podcast interview with Senator Ted Cruz last month. “Basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat.”

The recent website outages are likely due to an untested fraud detector system put in by DOGE that couldn’t withstand such a high number of users, the Post reported. Though users received messages onscreen that said they weren’t receiving payments, their checks were still deposited—for now. Starting April 14, SSA identity certification will get a lot stricter: Recipients will have to verify their identity online or in person, which will supposedly limit fraudulent claims. People could previously verify their identity over the phone.

The unnecessary change will no doubt cause confusion and technical issues to an already overloaded system, putting millions of Americans’ benefits further at risk.

The Trump administration has removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, as first reported by The Washington Post. It also changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” and removed a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland in 1822 and escaped in 1849. She had the courage to come back and help 70 other enslaved African Americans escape via the Underground Railroad. She also served as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, leading the raid at Combahee Ferry that freed 700 slaves. She is one of the most heroic Americans to ever live.

The Trump administration is downplaying the removal of Tubman’s picture and the softening of historically accurate language.

“We have dozens of pages about Harriet Tubman celebrating and memorializing her impressive role in American history,” an NPS spokesperson told The Hill. “The idea that a couple web edits somehow invalidate the National Park Service’s commitment to telling complex and challenging historical narratives is completely false and belies the extensive websites, social media posts, and programs we offer about Harriet Tubman specifically and Black History as a whole.”

But this move clearly aligns with the administration’s spiteful war on whatever it deems “woke,” as outlined in the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History executive order that directs Vice President JD Vance to remove anything that portrays this historically racist country in a “negative light.” This is the same executive order that is bringing back Confederate statues that were removed in 2020.