The Daily Reid: Everything Trump Touches Dies

And what he's touched this time is America.

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With Trump back in office, we are running a series of live experiments in and on America.

One live experiment can be summarized as: what would happen if we just let measles run wild without federal government intervention or vaccines to slow it down or stop it? It’s an RFKinian, Vitamin A-as-medicine fever dream that ends with real fevers, and lots and lots of sick children, some of whom are dying. RFK Jr. has done it before and Trump unleashed him to do it again. The result has been entirely predictable.

A second experiment? What if we just opened our systems to Elon and Trump’s favorite autocracy: Russia, and let it rip?

A user with a Russian IP address tried to log into National Labor Relations Board systems just minutes after the Department of Government Efficiency moved to access and extract troves of sensitive data from inside the agency, according to an extensive whistleblower disclosure released Tuesday.

The whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, provided forensic evidence and internal documentation to Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, accusing DOGE of exfiltrating large volumes of confidential data and disabling various security monitoring systems used to scan for malicious behavior in NLRB’s networks, NPR first reported.

The user attempting to log in relied on a newly created DOGE email account and the attempts were “near real-time,” according to the Berulis disclosure. It’s not clear whether the user was actually in Russia because hackers often use techniques to remotely mask their true location.

The login attempts were blocked, but the person used a correct username and password, suggesting that adversaries may already be testing entry points potentially exposed by DOGE’s activities across the government.

The whistleblower’s disclosure was accompanied by a cover letter from his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of Whistleblower Aid, which said that, after he raised concerns internally about DOGE’s inroads into the agency, he received a physically taped threat on his door containing personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog.

And it is this very same unelected hacker army that Republicans are hiding behind in their endless quest to privatize and / or end Medicaid, Medicare and especially Social Security. They know they would not survive the electoral tsunami of shutting those programs down outright, so they are more than happy to let doge do it. They’re even happier to let Trump take the lead in mollifying their cult-captured base while doge is ripping away their fundamental economic security and dismantling democracy around them; while fanning the rhetorical flames against “bad Blacks (DEI)” … trans kids stealing women’s sports while cis women refuse to do their mommy duties and “scary brown migrant criminals” to keep working class ids active, occupied and off the billionaires who are robbing them.

Another live experiment: can a celebrity dictator convince enough Americans to give up on Social Security such that Republicans like Mike Lee and the various billionaires they serve, including Elon Musk, finally get their way? Remember when George W. Bush (unfortunately) got re-elected and said this about privatizing Social Security?

It never happened, because the American people wouldn’t stand for it.

A fourth live experiment we’re running: what if we replaced our democracy with a system that looks a lot like Russia’s? How would that go? Well … it would go a lot like this:

Trump has pardoned several fraudsters and embezzlers who have contributed money to his campaign or just spoken well of him. He has also suspended a law that requires an entity’s true owner to be named, and another that penalises US companies for foreign bribery.

Now he is unleashing the investigative dogs on critics. The latest targets include a former federal official, Chris Krebs, for having “falsely . . . denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen”. The media is also in his sights. On Sunday Trump issued a torrent of threats against CBS for running interviews critical of him. He called on Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, to revoke the network’s broadcast licence.

The 60 Minutes interview that angered Trump was with Zelenskyy. Ukraine’s leader said that “Russian narratives are prevailing in the US”. That was a fair point given Trump’s reversal of culpability for Russia’s Ukraine invasion. But Zelenskyy’s observation can be applied more widely. In Russia, dissent can cost critics their business licences, liberty and even their lives. It seems a matter of time before other less besieged western legal systems hear petitions by US citizens for asylum.

Not satisfied with wrecking the Kennedy Center, hijacking history, threatening museums and gutting the federal government at the behest and for the primary benefit of his biggest donor, Trump is also attempting to seize personal control of Harvard. Maybe his ego is smarting for not being a Harvard man, and not even being an Ivy Leaguer on his own merit (allegedly, his father and older brother helped get him into Penn, where he claims he was a super genius, while refusing to release his transcripts from the Wharton undergraduate school where he spent two years after transferring from Fordham in 1966.)

Well now, he finds himself in a position, thanks to John Roberts and 80 million American marks, to take control of not just Harvard, but potentially all the Ivies and every other university he chooses to mow down, to force them to abide by his donors’ personal rules of conduct — who they can admit, who they can hire, and who will be allowed to protest on their campuses. To their credit, Harvard, whose age exceeds that of the United States by 140 years, and whose $53 billion endowment affords it more latitude than your average college under seize by our would-be dictator (though not total protection) — said no. Decisively.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the community. He added: “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.”

Garber’s message was a response to a letter sent late Friday by the Trump administration outlining demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands include “audits” of academic programs and departments, along with the viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, and changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices.

Trump is now wielding the IRS as his latest cudgel, and threatening Harvard’s tax exemption if they fail to kneel in the following ways…

Later on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump wanted the university to apologise for what his administration says is continuing tolerance of antisemitism.

"[Trump] wants to see Harvard apologise, and Harvard should apologise," Leavitt said.

The sweeping changes demanded by the White House would have transformed Harvard's operations and ceded a large amount of control to the government.

Its letter to Harvard on Friday, obtained by the New York Times, said the university had failed to live up to the "intellectual and civil rights conditions" that justify federal investment.

The letter included 10 categories for proposed changes, including:

• reporting students to the federal government who are "hostile" to American values

• ensuring each academic department is "viewpoint diverse"

• hiring an external government-approved party to audit programmes and departments "that most fuel antisemitic harassment"

• checking faculty staff for plagiarism [BBC News]

Note that last bit is a direct allusion to the accusations made by billionaire Trump supporter, Israel war-on-Gaza superfan and anti-diversity, equity and inclusion zealot Bill Ackman (whose own wife happens to have been accused … of academic plagiarism…)

And the escalating threats against Harvard, including the threat to go full Nixon, using the IRS, come despite this inconvenient fact:

Federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations, and it is unclear whether the agency would actually move forward with an investigation. A spokeswoman for the I.R.S. declined to comment. [The New York Times]

But when you are a dictator, there is no federal law. You do what you want.

And it’s not just Trump. Right wing Republicans have long wanted to swallow America’s elite universities, which they blame for the “wokening” of American society. And Harvard, given its prestige, is a particularly juicy target:

Prominent conservative lawmakers, including Vice President J.D. Vance, have repeatedly used the tax system as a cudgel in their attack against Harvard by proposing a hike on Harvard’s endowment tax.

In a letter to Garber in January 2024, leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee Workforce warned that they were willing to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status over its response to pro-Palestine protests on campus. (The Harvard Crimson)

Harvard is an unlikely hero of the resistance

As an alum, it is strange watching Harvard put its foot down and stand fast in the face of a conservative revolution.

When I arrived on campus in September 1986, Harvard was still in the midst of a 40-year ban on ROTC officers training on campus, which began amid anti Vietnam War fervor in the 1970s, and then morphed as the gay rights movement in the U.S. flowered. From the Harvard Gazette back in 2011:

Among the top Harvard stories of 2011 was the return of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) to campus after an absence of 40 years. In March, the University signed an agreement with the Navy. By September, offices had opened in Hilles Hall for the Naval ROTC’s Old Ironsides Battalion.

ROTC was banned from campus in 1971 during the Vietnam War protest — though starting in 1976 Harvard ROTC students could train at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the mid-1980s, antiwar fervor at Harvard had been replaced by disappointment that gays and lesbians could not openly join the Armed Forces, a circumstance that kept ROTC from campus for decades more. That changed on Sept. 20. When the U.S. policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” expired, the doors of the military were opened to sexual diversity. Harvard captured the moment, thanks to initiatives begun years before by President Drew Faust, a Civil War historian and the daughter of a World War II veteran.

ROTC students at Harvard, present and past, are grateful that the military is back. “Every one at Harvard is serving their country in some way,” said Catherine Philbin ’14, midshipman third class with the Naval ROTC. “This is just the way we’re serving.”

Harvard’s “long crimson line” of military service stretches back to the 17th century, and includes 17 recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the most of any university outside the service academies. Harvard’s relationship with ROTC dates to 1916, the year Army ROTC was established. The University’s “Harvard Regiment,” mobilized that year with 1,000 students, was among the first ROTC units in the country.

The CIA was also actively recruiting on campus when I arrived, but that’s a whole other post…

Harvard in the 1980s and early 90s (I graduated in 1991) was not what you would call a “woke” environment. Instead of fraternities and sororities, which were also banned on campus (those who wanted to pledge Black Fraternities and Sororities did so at MIT. And instead of “white” fraternities there were the infamous “Finals Clubs” which had physical houses on campus… there were no “white” sororities. Where those organized themselves off campus, I cannot say.

I took the very famous econ course nicknamed Ec10 my freshman year, as did hundreds of other freshman — as I ran as fast as I could from my declared intention to be a pre-med in the months after my mother’s unexpected passing at age 57 from metastatic breast cancer. I figured as long as it wasn’t related to the medical profession, I could stand anything. Ec 10 was … well, let me allow the Harvardians themselves to describe it:

“For the umpteenth year in a row Economics 10, ‘Principles of Economics,’ led the list of largest courses taken at Harvard.” This reads like a Crimson headline from last semester, but in fact it’s from the Fall of 1978.

To the many undergraduates who take it, and the many graduate students who teach it, Ec10 is—for better or worse—a pillar of Harvard’s liberal arts education, perennially popular but oft-critiqued. The history of the course shows that the unbound textbook used today, priced at $131, was not always how Harvard students got their start in the discipline of economics.

“Contrary to popular belief, Ec10 was never designed to be a pipeline for lower Manhattan,” says David W. Johnson, a former head teaching fellow who taught sections from 1980s until 2014.

Indeed, lower Manhattan was the furthest thing from Harvard’s original introductory economics course, Economics 1. According to a 1896 syllabus entitled “Lectures on Economic Development,” students were required to read books on topics ranging from philosophy to anthropology. This interdisciplinary focus meant students had to consider why economic history was a useful topic of study.

Only three professors have led the course since the 1960s: Otto Eckstein, Martin Feldstein, and N. Gregory Mankiw. All were, at some point during their careers, either members or chairs of the government’s Council of Economic Advisors.

Starting in the 1960s, the curriculum began to focus more on giving students the tools to evaluate public policy. Lectures heard during the Cold War included Soviet Economic analysis. Otto Eckstein, the professor who taught the course until his death in 1984, considered different economic perspectives throughout his tenure. In 1979, students spent the first few weeks alternating between chapters written by classical economists and chapters writen by Karl Marx.

Under his tenure, the course name changed from Ec10 to Social Analysis 10 in 1977. But Eckstein, an advisor to Lyndon B. Johnson, became so associated with the course that he earned the nickname “Otto Ec-10.”

It was under his successor Martin Feldstein, though, that the curriculum began to resemble what it is today. While allowing students to use any mainstream textbook, he abolished separate sections for math-oriented students and for “radical” economics in order to make the sections “more homogeneous in ability and political interest.” He added guest lectures to increase variety.

Feldstein, who taught the course for 20 years, found that a pluralistic curriculum was impractical for beginner students. “Ec 10 doesn’t teach Marxist economics or Austrian economics or the economics of Catholic Social Teaching,” he says. “Those belong in a more advanced course on intellectual thought.”

I fell under the Feldstein era. And in truth, he only taught the big lecture course sometimes. Most of the teaching was handled by teaching assistants in smaller sessions. But the result was the same: we pretty much only learned only three ways to look at the economy: free markets, free markets, and free markets….

Besides exorbitantly priced textbooks, the greatest problem with Ec 10 is its curriculum — the singular approach to economics that is taught. Students are exposed to one framework for interpreting economic and policy principles, for evaluating economic failures, and for resolving economic problems. Students are taught that market efficiency is often fundamentally opposed to equity, the economy more often does better with the market regulating itself, and market competitivity always creates better economic outcomes. In his textbook, Mankiw argues that equity and efficiency are “two goals [which] often conflict,” that policies such as progressive taxation often sacrifice too much market efficiency to achieve more equality, and that free trade is beneficial for the development of all countries. Empirical evidence contrary to these neoliberal assertions exists in the mainstream, but fails to be discussed in the course unless individual TFs decide to mention different economic frameworks. Instead, neoclassical economic theories are posited as objective, universally true laws when they are not, while a wide variety of factors that influence economic behavior and phenomena are overlooked and discounted as economic systems and interactions are misleadingly oversimplified. It is reasonable that an introductory course simplifies material to build a foundational understanding upon which students can acquire more knowledge. But it is problematic when this simplification bends a particular way, implicitly and explicitly endorsing notions as objectively accurate when contradictory theories and interpretations exist in the mainstream.

Ec10 was the massive lecture course in which I had my first encounter with anti-affirmative action zealotry from my fellow (white) students. It was where I first learned that capitalism was meant to be utilitarian — that it had no other goal than to enrich those who could figure out how to use it to their advantage. And that the idea of diversity was an anathema to it. So you can imagine my surprise when the home of this kind of neoclassical economic absolutism said “no” to the Gilded Age king. Maybe it’s the tariffs? I mean, they’re even pissing off the irascible Mr. Ackman, Harvard class of 1988 (his thesis, interestingly enough being entitled: "Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions"and Harvard MBA class of ‘92.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad Harvard stood up. And filed under “courage is contagious”… cowardly Columbia aside, other universities are fighting back too, including forming mutual defense compacts to defend their independence from government control.

Cowardly early capitulators aside, some D.C. law firms are banding together to fight back, too.

Civil rights organizations filed suit in February over Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders, and are gearing up to defend vulnerable communities from regime attacks. They include the LDF, the ACLU, the NAACP, the Leadership Conference, the Alliance for Justice, and more.

And the State of California is suing the regime over the Trump tariffs and the nuclear bomb they’re wielding over our economy.

And when they bother to hold town halls, even Republicans like Chuck Grassley are feeling the heat.

That’s a good sign, and small sparks of life for what’s left of our democracy.

And now for the not so good signs

What on earth was Big Gretch thinking? Has she not heard the Rick Wilson truism — which turns out to be 100 percent true — that “everything Trump touches dies (ETTD)???”

Going to the Oval for a “private meeting with Trump” about [insert reason] is a political suicide mission. His only goal will be to humiliate you. And you will be humiliated. Everything Trump touches dies … including your reputation.

Worse, the regime is still refusing to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home. And they are out and out lying about him and about the Supreme Court 9-0 ruling demanding he be returned to his family in Maryland. Here’s a great fact check by CNN’s Daniel Dale:

Ed Luce, your witness:

At around noon on 14 April, 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government. Some would argue that had already happened on 20 January, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. On Monday, however, Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man. He even claimed the judges ruled in his favour. The US president’s middle finger to the court was echoed by his attorney-general, secretary of state, vice-president and El Salvador’s vigilante president Nayib Bukele. The latter is playing host to what resembles an embryonic US gulag.

In terms of clarifying moments, Trump’s meeting with Bukele compares with his dressing down of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late February. Zelenskyy was berated for being insufficiently thankful for US military aid and for failing to wear a suit. A tieless Bukele, by contrast, got royal treatment. Trump’s team nodded when Bukele said he would not consider returning the wrongful deportee, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. All baselessly agreed that Garcia was in fact a terrorist. The Oval Office drama offered a civics lesson to the world: America’s government pays greater respect to a foreign strongman than its own Supreme Court.

Trump knows how to deliver gripping television. He was also making history. The official position of the world’s oldest constitutional republic is that the courts should have no say in who its executive deports and on what grounds. Foreign travellers to the US should beware. They can be detained without recourse. Americans should too. Trump casually told Bukele he may need to build more supermax jails for “homegrown” deportees, which means US citizens.

If Trump deems that you are a gang member, pro-terrorist, or simply anti-national, he claims impunity over your liberty. The fact that one deportee was a hairdresser, not a gang member, and another target was an innocuous op-ed writing student, not a terrorist, is no protection.

Trump’s lawyers are barely even pretending to phone it in. Evidence can be withheld on national security grounds or seemingly invented, as it was on Monday with Garcia. A government lawyer who conceded that Garcia’s deportation was mistaken was placed on administrative leave. Should the wrong person be deported in shackles, the US can do nothing about it. That would interfere with another country’s sovereignty, they say. This is from the same administration that is demanding other countries’ territory. El Salvador is as sovereign as Trump chooses it to be. Bukele is Trump’s hemispheric sidekick.

Meanwhile today, the federal judge in the Abrego Garcia case, whose order to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return has been repeatedly defied by the regime, has now find them in probable contempt.

Also contemptible, people at Fox who are demonstrating in real time how the whole 1930s thing happened in Germany…

Stay strong, people.

What are we doing, America? And who is in control of this country?