I’d say Bryan the auto worker is very disappointed by how it all played out.
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Oh dear, sure Trump has been going on about trade and tariffs for the last 30 or 40 years. You’d think he should have had some idea of how it would work. 
What depends on what they are making? If the stuff they get up to ever saw the full light of day it would make The Post Office scandal seem tame
I think Trump thinks the exporter pays the tariff.
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He’s just asking Deepseek what to do.
He 100% does think this, he’s said it multiple times.
Can’t live with them can’t live without them. Apparently.
Nesrine Malik is a thoroughly excellent writer. We really now have to be thinking about where we go from here.
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This is kind of extraordinary and has passed a bit below the radar here. Law firms who have represented clients hostile to Trump are being blacklisted and effectively sunk. Some are fighting it (I wouldn’t have any great faith in the rule of law in the US just now), others (some of the biggest law firms on the globe) are doing deals to provide free legal services to Trump friendly causes.
“Five more prominent law firms facing potential punitive action by President Trump reached deals on Friday with the White House to provide a total of $600 million in free legal services to causes supported by the president.
Four of the firms — Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett — each agreed to provide $125 million in pro bono or free legal work, according to Mr. Trump. A fifth firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, agreed to provide at least $100 million in pro bono work.
With the latest round of deals, some of the biggest firms in the legal profession have agreed over the past month to provide a combined $940 million in free legal services to causes favored by the Trump administration, including ones with “conservative ideals.”
Mr. Trump announced the agreements between his administration and the law firms on Friday on Truth Social, the platform owned by his social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group.
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Top lawyers from each firm provided a statement to the White House, which was included in the social media posts. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported onnegotiations with four of the firms.
The deals were announced during a week in which Mr. Trump talked openly in the Oval Office about using the firms he has struck deals with to help negotiate trade agreements with other countries and even work on coal leasing deals.
Mr. Trump did not specifically mention potential work on trade deals or coal leasing agreements in his social media posts. Rather, the posts said the firms would devote free legal work to things like fighting antisemitism, helping Gold Star families, assisting law enforcement and “ensuring fairness in our justice system.”
The terms are similar to ones Mr. Trump previously announced with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; and Milbank.
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Law firms are settling with the Trump administration to head off executive orders that would make it difficult for them to represent clients with federal contracts or seek government regulatory approvals.But a few firms are fighting Mr. Trump’s executive orders in federal court, claiming the orders are unconstitutional and a form of retaliation for taking positions he doesn’t like. Judges have temporarily stayed the orders against Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block from going into effect.
A fourth firm, Susman Godfrey, was hit with an executive order this week and became the latest firm to take on the Trump administration. Late Friday the firm filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking to block the order from taking effect.
Lawyers from Munger, Tolles & Olson are representing Susman in the litigation. Munger is the same firm that helped organize an amicus brief filed by more than 500 law firms in support of Perkins Coie. But only a few large law firms signed on that legal filing.
Susman represented Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine manufacturer, in a major defamation case against Fox News. The conservative cable news channel agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion to resolve the lawsuit. Dominion filed the lawsuit over misinformation the cable network spread about its role in the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly said was stolen from him
If President Trump’s Executive Orders are allowed to stand, future presidents will face no constraint when they seek to retaliate against a different set of perceived foes,” Susman’s 66-page complaint begins. “What for two centuries has been beyond the pale will become the new normal. Put simply, this could be any of us.”
Mr. Trump is going after law firms that have hired attorneys he perceives as his political enemies, represented causes he has opposed or refused to represent people because of their conservative and right-wing political beliefs. Some firms are also being targeted for their hiring practices that advance the principle of having a diverse work force.
The president has said repeatedly that diversity, equity and inclusion policies in hiring are illegal and discriminatory and that he intends to get rid of them. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in what has been seen as a related move, sent letters to 20 law firmslast month requesting information about their D.E.I. practices.
Four of the firms that reached deals with Mr. Trump — Kirkland, Latham, Shearman and Simpson Thacher — had each received one of those letters. In settling, Mr. Trump said the E.E.O.C. had agreed not to pursue claims against those four firms. Later in the day, the E.E.O.C. announced a separate settlement with the four firms.
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Law professors and others in the legal industry have praised the firms that are fighting the administration while criticizing those that have settled. The critics say the law firms that settle have succumbed to pressure tactics by the administration. And each new settlement only encourages Mr. Trump to become even more emboldened in his demands for free legal work.
The Trump administration seems to believe it is “developing a war chest of legal enlistees or conscripts” to do work for it, said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, who was an author on a recently published paper that called the executive orders unconstitutional retaliatory measures.
“Every kid learns, on the schoolyard, if you cave to a bully they will come back to bully you some more,” said Mr. Koh.
But sure, there’s check and balances?
Going after the universities now.
Harvard Says It Will Not Comply With Trump Administration’s Demands
Federal officials said Harvard must enact “merit-based reform” in hiring and admissions and report international students who broke rules, among other steps. Harvard called the demands unlawful.
Listen to this article · 5:08 min Learn more
By Vimal Patel
April 14, 2025Updated 3:29 p.m. ET
Harvard University said on Monday that it had rejected policy changes requested by the Trump administration, becoming the first university to directly refuse to comply with the administration’s demands and setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university.
Other universities have pushed back against the Trump administration’s interference in higher education. But Harvard’s response, which essentially called the Trump administration’s demands illegal, marked a major shift in tone for the nation’s most influential school, which has been criticized in recent weeks for capitulating to Trump administration pressure.
A letter the Trump administration sent to Harvard on Friday demanded that the university reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse,” among other steps. The administration did not define what it meant by viewpoint diversity, but it has generally referred to seeking a range of political views, including conservative perspectives.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” said Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a statement to the university on Monday.
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Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has aggressively targeted universities, saying it is investigating dozens of schools as it moves to eradicate diversity efforts and what it says is rampant antisemitism on campus. Officials have suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds for research at universities across the country.
The administration has taken a particular interest in a short list of the nation’s most prominent schools. Officials have discussed toppling a high-profile university as part of their campaign to remake higher education. They took aim first at Columbia University, then at other members of the Ivy League, including Harvard.
Harvard, for its part, has been under intense pressure from its own students and faculty to be more forceful in resisting the Trump administration’s encroachment on the university and on higher education more broadly.
The Trump administration said in March that it was examining about $256 million in federal contracts for Harvard, and an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.” The announcement went on to suggest that Harvard had not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus. At the time, it was vague about what the university could do to satisfy Trump administration concerns.
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Last month, more than 800 faculty members at Harvard signed a letter urging the university to “mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.”
The university appeared to take a step in that direction on Monday. In his letter rejecting the administration’s demands, Dr. Garber suggested that Harvard had little alternative.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he wrote. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
The government’s letter to Harvard on Friday demanded an extraordinary set of changes that would have reshaped the university and ceded an unprecedented degree of control over Harvard’s operations to the federal government. The changes would have violated many principles that are held dear on colleges campuses.
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Some of the actions that the Trump administration demanded of Harvard were:
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Conducting plagiarism checks on all current and prospective faculty members.
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Sharing all its hiring data with the Trump administration, and subjecting itself to audits of its hiring while “reforms are being implemented,” at least through 2028.
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Providing all admissions data to the federal government, including information on both rejected and admitted applicants, sorted by race, national origin, grade-point average and performance on standardized tests.
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Immediately shutting down any programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Overhauling academic programs that the Trump administration says have “egregious records on antisemitism,” including placing certain departments and programs under an external audit. The list includes the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Public Health and the Medical School, among many others.
In Harvard’s response on Monday, its lawyers said that the university “is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
He’s going after the fat cat legal establishment who screw ordinary Americans and asking universities to comply with the law. What a horrible bastard
How does the fat cat legal establishment screw ordinary Americans and how is he asking universities to comply with the law?
The gist of the article is that this isn’t what he’s doing.
That is extremely grifty grift.
It’s making sure that the big dogs of the legal profession don’t represent any opponents of Trump and that those clients end up being represented by the equivalent of Paul Newman in the Verdict.
Burning of the books next. He’s a dangerous cunt and it’s amazing that anyone is still denying this.
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There’s checks and balances in place to thwart him.
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I waa talking to a chap in a large US Corpo. Advisory. They were big into DEI. They were told to drop the diversity stuff if they wanted to keep getting Government work. They rebranded it as “Wellbeing & Inclusion”.
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