Littwin: While I was on spring break, Trump and Musk were busy breaking everything in sight

I was on vacation last week in Mexico City with my older bilingual grandson, who was on spring break. We had a blast. 

We did the things that tourists do — if you go, be sure not to miss the meso-American-age Teotihuacan pyramids — but with a twist. We were not just tourists dressed out in jeans and anti-authority T-shirts. We were on a semi-official Ugly American apology tour. We apologized to the many Mexicans we met for Donald Trump’s behavior, particularly on tariffs. And we apologized to the many Canadians we met who were vacationing in Mexico because, in part, they didn’t want to vacation in a country that demands Canada relinquish its sovereignty to become our 51st state.

The good news was that U.S. officials let us back into the country. The possibility that they wouldn’t, however, did cross my mind. So did the possibility of asking Mexico for asylum.

I was gone for a week, but to let you know how long that is in Trump/Musk/MAGA time, my last column was about Chuck Schumer and the Democrats folding on the GOP spending plan, which seems like so many scandals ago.

As I read my smartphone at poolside — because I’m an absolute junkie — new scandals came fast and furious. And since I didn’t have my usual outlet — writing this column — to process, say, Trump’s many-pronged assault on the rule of law, I kept a sort-of vacation diary to help keep me calm.

Mostly what I saw, in the style of  Schumer, was a week of capitulation in America. Paul, Weiss, a powerful, Democratic-friendly, New York law firm — targeted by Trump for the fact that one lawyer there once worked on a case against Trump — caved. This was a case that the firm, I was assured, would likely have won. It’s a firm known for its team of formidable litigators and one that had the resources to fight. In the big-law world, the reaction was one of shock that Paul, Weiss, of all firms, would give way.

And yet Paul, Weiss did cave — and the cave included an agreement to do $40 million of pro bono work in the next four years in causes of interest to Trump. So don’t be surprised to see Paul, Weiss soon bringing suit against Sarah Boardman, the Colorado Springs artist whose portrait of Trump hung in the state Capitol for six years, basically without complaint, until Trump insisted it be taken down.

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I don’t know who showed it to Trump, but he hated it immediately because, saying that it must have been “purposefully distorted,” by the artist, which could be taken to mean that the portrait “looks a lot like Trump.” The portrait has since been taken down, but you know that’s not good enough for the retribution guy, who blamed, naturally, Jared Polis for the portrait. Calling Polis a “Radical Left Governor” who was “extremely weak on crime,” Trump said on social media that Polis should be ashamed of himself.

Of course, Polis had nothing to do with the portrait. Colorado Senate Republicans raised the $10,000 for the portrait with a GoFundMe campaign and then celebrated it on the day it was hung in the Capitol. But we know how rarely, if ever, Trump lets facts get in the way. Now Colorado Senate Republicans asked for what was basically their portrait to be taken down because the last thing they want is to get on the wrong side of King Donald of Orange. No Trump scandal could possibly be smaller — smaller even than his hands — which is exactly how you know it’s true.

Like Senate Republicans, Paul, Weiss caved, we assume, out of fear. Many of the most powerful people in the world— take Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the powerful mega-rich tech bros — live in fear of Trump and his vows of retribution.

The people most outraged by Paul, Weiss, it seemed, were journalists and academics. But before Paul, Weiss gave in, very few law firms had rushed to their defense. Big Law has become Meek Law in the time of Trump, who has routinely attacked the rule of law from at least two flanks— the lawyers from one side and the judges from the other. 

And as in the case of the alleged Venezuelan gang members sent to the barbaric prison in El Salvador, Trump did so against a judge’s orders and without any semblance of due process. Citing the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — last used, I think, to intern Japanese Americans in World War II, Trump has refused, even now, to give up relevant information about the deportations to the judge he had defied and while he’s at it, defamed. That’s the same guy Trump said should be impeached.

If this is not a constitutional crisis — and I think it is — more sober, and possibly even more qualified, analysts have said it might be even worse than that.

Meanwhile, Columbia University — targeted by Trump for its alleged antisemitism — also caved in an attempt to win back $400 million of funding that the administration has withheld. It’s extortion, of course. And Columbia, which was getting little to no support from other major universities, was trying to change its status as Trump’s higher-ed whipping school. What did Columbia give up? A lot, but the worst of it was giving up faculty control of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department to a single source, presumably one to Trump’s liking. Trump has preliminarily targeted 60 other universities.

So, it’s fear again, and not unfounded fear. But, as of 2023, Columbia had a $13.64 billion endowment. If they don’t have the guts and means to fight, who will?

But then, miracle of miracles, the opposition came out by the thousands in Greeley and Denver over the weekend to hear Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (popularly known as AOC) on their anti-oligarchy barnstorming tour.

The estimated crowd at Civic Center park was as many as 34,000 people. Another 11,000 showed up in Greeley. Sanders would say the Denver crowd was the largest he’d ever addressed. The people had listened. And spoken.

These are the progressive Democrats who had come to town, and though Sanders refused to say this, it looked a lot like Sanders, 83, was passing the progressive torch to AOC, 35. Will she run in the progressive lane for president in 2028? The question is probably presumptuous until we know there will be an election in 2028.

Far more important for the moment, though, is that so many people — admittedly in a state where Sanders has twice won presidential primaries — came out in search of a way to protest the Elon Musk-led assault on democracy and good government. Sanders and AOC aren’t afraid. And they don’t believe in James Carville’s advice that Democrats should play dead for the near future. Maybe these rallies, and others across the country, will move people to move people to move people. That’s the dream, anyway.

But we knew — I had to know — that the news never stops, not even for a moment, in MAGA world. And before I could write the news about the rallies, the scandal broke that Trump’s intelligence team, which we had always assumed to be incompetent, had accidentally invited The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldberg to a meeting of principals, including the vice president and secretary of state, on their plans to bomb the the Houthis in Yemen.

I know Jeff Goldberg. He’s not just the Atlantic editor, but a great reporter, particularly in the area of national security, and he wrote a stunning article about how the team was meeting on Signal — a messaging platform that uses a powerful form of encryption, but does not have the security protections of government-held classified computers. I’ll bet you remember when there was this outrage about a certain Hillary Clinton and her emails on a private email server that Trump exploited, in the most base Trumpian way, on the path to victory in the 2016 presidential race.

When Goldberg was invited to be on this team, he figured it was a hoax, probably meant to entrap him somehow. Trump has hated him at least since Goldberg’s Atlantic story, later confirmed by John Kelly, the former Trump White House chief of staff, that Trump had called soldiers who lost their lives in war “losers” and “suckers.”

But when the time came and Goldberg was invited to be on the Signal chat, he wanted to see how it played out. Eventually, he realized that the people on the chat were not AI creations but the actual principals themselves. And when the details of the attack were being discussed — what weapons, what targets, what timing — Goldberg, who was in his car in a Safeway parking lot, signed off. And immediately, because he’s the reporter that he is, he tried to learn what the hell had just happened.

I guess it depends which person you asked. Most Trump officials dodged the questions, or tried to. Some pleaded ignorance, some said it was no big deal. You’d expect Trump to lie about it. At a congressional hearing Tuesday, some passed the buck. Some, like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, dismissed the whole thing.

But there was a call, as intelligence sources admitted. And if Goldberg was there by mistake, I guess a Chinese hacker could have been there instead, or maybe Putin if he wanted to hang out with his American pals. And if there was no sensitive information discussed — as Hegseth insists — why don’t they just release the details of the call? We’ll see who has credibility. 

Goldberg said he didn’t release the details of the coming attack because American lives would have been at stake. He didn’t name a CIA operative whose name was used by Ratcliffe in the chat. But Goldberg did say, when asked about it, that there might be a way to share what he learned in private with proper congressional leaders.

And when I look back on the week, it becomes ever more clear that fear is the subject before us, and that the fear is real. Not just the fear of extortion. Not just the fear of the attack on American democracy. Not just the fear that the free press and freedom of speech and the rule of law might not survive Trump. Not just the fear that oligarchs have taken charge.

But the greatest fear, as many of us warned, is this: That these are careless, and often dangerous, people who, with each passing day, prove they can never be trusted.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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