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You’ve surely heard “First They Came,” German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the road to Nazi Germany. It’s one of those texts quoted so often that it can feel cliché. “First they came for the communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a communist” the poem begins, listing off other targeted groups before its widely referenced conclusion:

Yet despite its overexposure, there’s a subtlety to Niemöller’s poem that’s not often appreciated — something beyond the abstract “your rights depend on protecting others’” message. He is describing a specific strategy that Nazis used to dismantle German democracy.

There is a reason why the Nazis targeted the groups on Niemöller’s list: German politics made them particularly easy to demonize. They were either vulnerable minorities (Jews) or politically controversial with the German mainstream (communists, socialists, trade unionists).

After rising to power, Nazis pitched power grabs as efforts to address the alleged threat posed by menaces like “Judeo-Bolshevism,” harnessing the powers of bigotry and political polarization to get ordinary Germans on board with the demolition of their democracy.

What’s happening in America right now has chilling echoes of this old tactic. When engaging in unlawful or boundary-pushing behavior, the Trump administration has typically gone after targets who are either highly polarizing or unpopular. The idea is to politicize basic civil liberties questions — to turn a defense of the rule of law into either a defense of widely hated groups or else an ordinary matter of partisan politics.

The administration’s first known deportation of a green card holder targeted a pro-Palestinian college activist at Columbia University, the site of some of the most radical anti-Israel activity. For this reason, Columbia was also the first university it targeted for a funding cutoff. Trump has also targeted an even more unpopular cohort: The first group of American residents sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison was a group of people his administration claimed without providing evidence were Tren de Aragua gang members.

Trump is counting on the twin powers of demonization and polarization to justify their various efforts to expand executive authority and assail civil liberties. They want to make the conversation less about the principle — whether what Trump is doing is legal or a threat to free speech — and more a referendum on whether the targeted group is good or bad.

There is every indication this pattern will continue. And if we as a society fail to understand how the Trump strategy works, or where it leads, the damage to democracy could be catastrophic.

During the interview, Hunt repeatedly presses Miller on whether the administration violated a court order by sending alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador. Miller refuses to engage on that key issue of democratic principle. Instead, he repeatedly tries to reframe the debate around the necessity of confronting the gang, arguing that insisting on legal niceties means handing the country over to marauders.

“How are you going to expel illegal alien invaders from our country, who are raping [and] murdering little girls, if each and every deportation has to be adjudicated by a district court judge?” Miller argues. “That means you have no country. It means you have no sovereignty. It means you have no future.”

This, of course, is not a legal argument. If anything, it sounds like a parody of a political argument: “Oh, so you oppose sending people to be tortured in a Salvadoran prison camp without due process? Guess you must support Tren de Aragua killing little girls.”

But as absurd as this sounds, it’s proven to be a powerful form of logic — and not just in extreme cases like Nazi Germany.

In the years after 9/11, the Bush administration and its allies used similar arguments to discredit critics of its policies who have since been vindicated by events. Observers who warned of the threat to civil liberties from warrantless spying and Guantanamo Bay were dismissed as terrorist sympathizers. Iraq war skeptics were labeled Saddam apologists. This “you’re with us or against us” kind of moral blackmail worked on many, both at home and abroad.

Of course, this kind of thing worked in the Bush era because there was so much hurt and anger among ordinary Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As much as many Americans may dislike Tren de Aragua or pro-Palestine campus protesters, there’s nothing like the level of public hysteria that we saw in the wake of one of the country’s greatest disasters.

Which is why the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategy also taps into another kind of dividing logic — the all-powerful force of partisan polarization.

The Trump administration’s rhetoric doesn’t just attempt to link their opponents in general to gang members and terrorists. They also attempt to link judges and other nonpartisan authorities to Democrats. At a Wednesday press briefing, for example, press secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to the judge who weighed in on the legality of the El Salvador deportations as a “Democrat activist.”

The idea here is to assimilate a question of basic legal principles into a familiar partisan script — Democrats vs. Republicans. And by invoking the polarizing power of partisan politics, they portray what is really a fundamental clash over the rule of law as yet another spat between the two parties.

There’s substantial evidence that this approach could really work to legitimize Trump’s policies.

Eminent Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has written several essays in the New York Review of Books that document what he calls “troubling similarities” between interwar Germany and America today. One of Browning’s key points is that the rise of Nazism was, in large part, a cautionary tale about “hyperpolarization.” The German center-right elite hated the left parties so much that they preferred Hitler, who was extreme even to their tastes — and were willing to hand him exceptional powers to crack down on civil liberties in service of crushing socialism and communism.

While Browning focuses his ire on conservative elites — he compares Sen. Mitch McConnell to Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who made Hitler chancellor — social science tells us that polarization can have a similar effect on ordinary voters.

In a 2020 paper, political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik published a paper testing the effect of polarization on citizens’ views on democracy. Using unusually high-quality data, Svolik and Graham were able to show that vanishingly few Americans — roughly 3.45 percent — were willing to vote against a candidate from their preferred party even if that candidate engaged in clear anti-democratic behavior.

This, they argue, is a function of polarization. When you hate the other side enough, the policy stakes of elections feel really high — and voters are willing to overlook even egregious abuses of power.

“In sharply divided societies, voters put partisan ends above democratic principles,” they write.

This analysis was critically important to understanding why Trump could win in 2024 even after the stain of January 6. Today, it helps us understand how Trump’s rhetorical strategies hope to numb Americans — and especially fellow Republicans — to an assault on their fundamental liberties.

Two months into Donald Trump’s second term, his Republican attack dogs, including Elon Musk and his minions at DOGE, are still busy chewing into many parts of the federal government. But the Trump Administration continues to promise that it will protect three major entitlement programs that together account for nearly half of all federal spending. “The Trump administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid,” the White House wrote in a statement a couple of weeks ago. “President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).”

Of course, Trump says many things that bear little relation to reality. During last year’s Presidential campaign, he insisted that he had nothing to do with Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page blueprint to reshape the federal government, which describes Medicare and Medicaid as the “principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt.” Lo and behold, one of the authors of that report, Russell Vought, is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, where, according to his White House bio, he is “responsible for overseeing the implementation of the President’s policy, management and regulatory agendas across the Executive Branch.”

The alliance of radical conservative activists like Vought, who have long had entitlements in their sight, with Ayn Randian tech bros like Elon Musk, who enthuse about “efficiencies,” is perhaps the distinguishing feature of Trump 2.0. Project 2025 contains a number of proposals to reform Medicare and Medicaid, but it largely stays away from Social Security, which for years has been considered the third rail of American politics. Musk has shown fewer reservations. In an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, he described Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” In online posts and an appearance on Fox Business, he also claimed that there were more than twenty million people aged a hundred or older in the Social Security database, and he suggested that this could be evidence of pervasive fraud. (Trump repeated these allegations in a speech to Congress.)

It seems clear that Musk, Trump, and other Republicans have decided that the “waste, fraud, and abuse” narrative provides them with a more effective means of mobilizing support for cuts to entitlements than the traditional arguments about rising deficits and debt. After Musk and Trump made their claims about dead Social Security recipients, the acting head of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, had to issue a press release explaining that the data they cited came from people with Social Security numbers who “do not have a date of death associated with their record” but who “may not be receiving benefits.” In other words, Musk and Trump were spreading disinformation.

Dudek was promoted when his predecessor resigned, in mid-February, following clashes with DOGE staffers who were attempting to access information about Social Security recipients. Although Dudek has corrected some of Musk’s misstatements, he has also embraced the DOGE cost-cutting agenda. Since he took over, the Social Security Administration has announced plans to reduce its workforce by about twelve per cent. It is shuttering dozens of local field offices, even as it is changing its rules so that Social Security claimants who aren’t able to confirm their identities online are obliged to appear in person. (Until now, people could confirm their identities over the phone.)

With new developments practically every day, it’s hard to keep up with everything relating to entitlement programs. The key thing to remember is that there are two distinct but related stories unfolding. One is the ongoing campaign by Musk and DOGE to chip away at the Social Security Administration and other government departments. The other story, which has received much less media coverage, is playing out on Capitol Hill, where Republicans are looking for spending cuts to finance an extension of the feed-the-rich tax cuts they passed during the first Trump Administration. All the indications are that they are preparing to target entitlement programs that serve the poor, particularly Medicaid and food assistance.

The two stories intersect because any permanent savings that Musk and his colleagues would make could be applied to future budgets. Also, if DOGE did uncover genuine fraud and waste on a large scale, Republicans on Capitol Hill could conceivably exploit this to build public support for their own cuts. So far, however, the DOGE investigators have come up largely empty-handed, while the sight of the world’s richest man leading an assault on programs that serve some of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans has alarmed even some elected Republicans. “It doesn’t help the President,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said last week, referring to Musk’s role. She also registered concerns about the closure of Social Security field offices and the elimination of employees who answer call lines, warning, “I can tell you it’s not going to go over well.”

Meanwhile, economists and other number crunchers are analyzing the budget resolution that House Republicans passed late last month, which Trump endorsed, saying it “implements my FULL America First Agenda.” To make space for four and a half trillion dollars in tax cuts over ten years, the resolution instructs various House committees to find nearly two trillion dollars in cuts to programs that come under their purview. This figure includes eight hundred and eighty billion dollars from the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid, and two hundred and thirty billion dollars from the Agriculture Committee, which manages the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. Another five hundred billion dollars in cuts were left unspecified.

Some Republicans have denied that they are singling out Medicaid and SNAP for big cuts, but simple arithmetic undermines this claim. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Medicare and Medicaid make up more than ninety-seven per cent of the spending that the Energy and Commerce Committee oversees. Cutting Medicare, which is partly funded by payroll contributions from working Americans, is politically contentious. But, “if you don’t touch Medicare, the math doesn’t work without deep cuts to Medicaid,” the Democrats on the House Budget Committee noted. In theory, the Agriculture Committee has a bit more leeway to cut other programs aside from SNAP, but, in practice, the food-assistance program appears to be its main mark.

Medicaid, which was created in 1965 alongside Medicare, is administered by the states, but the federal government bears about seventy per cent of its cost. Once a relatively small program for the aged and impoverished, it is now a pivotal component of the nation’s over-all safety net. Under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, it was expanded to make it accessible to Americans of all ages with income of up to a hundred and thirty-eight per cent of the poverty line. By October of last year, enrollment in Medicaid had risen to about 72.1 million, which means that about one in five Americans depend on the program.

At the local level, nineteen states with Republican governors have chosen to participate in the Medicaid expansion. It’s a great deal for the states: in this case, the federal government picks up ninety per cent of the cost. At the national level, however, the G.O.P. has remained committed to chopping back the program. In Project 2025 and other venues, Republican policy analysts and legislators have suggested multiple ways to do this, including imposing strict work requirements on enrollees, capping spending on a per-capita basis, and pushing more of the costs onto the states. Republicans have claimed that reforms of this kind wouldn’t prevent eligible enrollees from receiving the health care they require. But this argument doesn’t stand up to inspection.

“Some policies Republicans are considering will directly and immediately reduce the number of people who receive Medicaid, which is how the policies save money,” Allison Orris and Elizabeth Zhang, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, pointed out in an analysis published last week. “Other policies will upend Medicaid financing and payment arrangements and may leave states with little choice but to cut eligibility, benefits, provider payments, or all three.” The biggest losers would likely include deep-red states and their low-income populations. A recent report from the Urban Institute shows that if Congress removed the extra federal money provided to states in the Obamacare expansion, North Dakota, Indiana, and Louisiana would be among the hardest-hit places.

At the national level, a new analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale, a research organization that dissects federal policy proposals, gives a broad picture of who the winners and losers would be, on average, if Congress met the goals set out in the House budget resolution. For illustrative purposes, the researchers determined the impact of four policies “consistent with the text” of that resolution: an across-the-board, fifteen-per-cent cut in spending on Medicaid; a similar thirty-per-cent cut in spending on SNAP; and the extension of various individual and business tax cuts that are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. In 2026, the researchers found, Americans in the bottom fifth of the income distribution would see their income (after taxes and government transfers) reduced by $1,125, or five per cent, whereas Americans in the top fifth of the income distribution would see their incomes rise by $6,220, or two and a half per cent. The poor would lose; the rich would gain. No great surprise there, perhaps, but it’s yet another example of how hollow Trump’s claims are that he’s a protector of the social safety net.

In an era when the American population is aging (life expectancy is about nine years higher than it was fifty years ago) and medical costs are rising, seemingly inexorably, there is—and has been for decades—room for legitimate debate about how to reform and preserve entitlement programs. But that is not the exercise that Republicans and the White House are engaged in. If it were, they would be contemplating options like raising the income limit for contributions to Social Security and expanding the Biden Administration’s efforts to control prescription-drug costs. Instead, they are ruling out revenue raising, rolling back some of Joe Biden’s initiatives, and targeting for cuts programs aimed at assisting the poorest—all to make room for the preservation of their previous handout to corporate America and the wealthy. It is, through and through, an unedifying spectacle. ♦

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reportedly nearing a deal to allow immigration officials to use tax data to support Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, according to reports by the Washington Post.

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Under the proposed data-sharing agreement, said to have been in negotiations for weeks, Immigration And Customs Enforcement (Ice) could hand over the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants to the IRS, raising concerns about abuse of power from the Trump administration and the erosion of privacy rights.

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If access to this confidential database is agreed upon, it would mark a significant shift, likely becoming the first time immigration officials have relied on the tax system for enforcement assistance in such a sweeping way.

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Under the agreement, the IRS would cross-reference names of undocumented immigrants with their confidential taxpayer databases, a move that would breach the longstanding trust in the confidentiality of tax information. Such data has historically been considered sensitive and thereby closely guarded, so the reported deal has raised alarm bells at the IRS, according to the Washington Post.

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Greenlandic leaders have criticised an upcoming trip by a high-profile American delegation to the semi-autonomous Danish territory that Donald Trump has suggested the US should annex, Reuters reports.

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The delegation, which will visit an American military base and watch a dogsled race, will be led by Usha Vance, wife of vice-president JD Vance, and include White House national security adviser Mike Waltz and energy secretary Chris Wright.

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Greenland’s outgoing prime minister Mute Egede called this week’s visit a “provocation” and said his caretaker government would not meet with the delegation.

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“Until recently, we could trust the Americans, who were our allies and friends, and with whom we enjoyed working closely,” Egede told local newspaper Sermitsiaq. “But that time is over.”

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The Greenlandic government, Naalakkersuisut, is now in a caretaker period after a 11 March general election won by the Democrats, a pro-business party that favors a slow approach to independence from Denmark.

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Jens-Frederik Nielsen, leader of the Democrats, called for political unity and said the visit by the US delegation during coalition talks and with municipal elections due next week, “once again shows a lack of respect for the Greenlandic people.”

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Waltz and Wright plan to visit the Pituffik space base, the US military base in Greenland. The White House said they will get briefings from US service members there. They will then join Vance to visit historical sites and attend the national dogsled race.

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Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said the US team is “confident that this visit presents an opportunity to build on partnerships that respects Greenland’s self determination and advances economic cooperation.”

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“This is a visit to learn about Greenland, its culture, history, and people and to attend a dogsled race the United States is proud to sponsor, plain and simple,” Hughes said.

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Trump has made US annexation of Greenland a major talking point since taking office for a second time on 20 January. Greenland’s strategic location and rich mineral resources could benefit the US. It lies along the shortest route from Europe to North America, vital for the US ballistic missile warning system.

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Maya Yang

Chuck Schumer defied calls to give up the top Democratic position in the Senate after he voted for Republicans’ funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, saying on Sunday: “I’m not stepping down.”

Schumer has faced a wave of backlash from Democrats over his decision to support the Republican-led bill, with many Democrats alleging that the party leader isn’t doing enough to stand up to Donald Trump’s agenda.

Explaining his decision during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer said: “I knew when I cast my vote against … the government shutdown … that there would be a lot of controversy.” He said that the funding bill “was certainly bad”, but maintained that a shutdown would have been 15 or 20 times worse.

Schumer has argued that billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) would have used a shutdown to “eviscerate the federal government”, which he said would have been “devastating”.

A delegation of officials from the United States will visit India from 25-29 March for trade talks with Indian officials, a US embassy spokesperson said on Monday.

Assistant US trade representative for South and Central Asia Brendan Lynch will lead the group. “This visit reflects the United States’ continued commitment to advancing a productive and balanced trade relationship with India,” the spokesperson said.

President Donald Trump is expected to impose reciprocal tariffs from 2 April on various nations, causing alarm among Indian exporters, Reuters reported.

India has an “obvious expectation”, a government source said, that the Trump administration could exempt it from reciprocal tariffs as the two nations continue talks on a bilateral trade pact.

The source said US vice-president JD Vance is also likely to visit India in April.

Sam Levine

Donald Trump’s second administration has shown an “unprecedented degree of resistance” to adverse court rulings, experts say, part of a forceful attack on the American judiciary that threatens to undermine the rule of law, undercut a co-equal branch of government and weaken American democracy.

The attacks, experts say, threaten one of the fundamental pillars of American government: that the judicial branch has the power to interpret the law and the other branches will abide by its rulings.

The attack came to a head this week when the Trump administration ignored an order from US district judge James Boasberg to turn planes carrying deportees around. “I don’t care what the judges think,” Thomas Homan, charged with enforcing Trump’s deportation agenda, said in a Fox News television interview on Monday as the decision came under scrutiny. The next day, Trump called for Boasberg to be impeached, calling him a “radical left lunatic”.

For months, the Trump administration has made it clear they believe they can ignore judicial orders. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” vice-president JD Vance tweeted on 9 February.

Elon Musk, Trump’s top adviser, has repeatedly called for impeaching judges, and is donating to Republicans in Congress who have supported doing so. House Republicans have introduced resolutions to impeach Boasberg and four other judges who have ruled against Trump.

IRS nears deal with Ice to share data of undocumented immigrants – report

Olivia Empson

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reportedly nearing a deal to allow immigration officials to use tax data to support Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, according to reports by the Washington Post.

Under the proposed data-sharing agreement, said to have been in negotiations for weeks, Immigration And Customs Enforcement (Ice) could hand over the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants to the IRS, raising concerns about abuse of power from the Trump administration and the erosion of privacy rights.

If access to this confidential database is agreed upon, it would mark a significant shift, likely becoming the first time immigration officials have relied on the tax system for enforcement assistance in such a sweeping way.

Under the agreement, the IRS would cross-reference names of undocumented immigrants with their confidential taxpayer databases, a move that would breach the longstanding trust in the confidentiality of tax information. Such data has historically been considered sensitive and thereby closely guarded, so the reported deal has raised alarm bells at the IRS, according to the Washington Post.

Donald Trump’s administration is likely to exclude a set of sector-specific tariffs while applying reciprocal levies on 2 April, Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal reported, citing officials.

Trump said in February that he intended to impose auto tariffs “in the neighbourhood of 25%” and similar duties on semiconductors and pharmaceutical imports, but he later agreed to delay some auto tariffs after a push by the three largest US automakers for a waiver.

Sector-specific tariffs are now not likely to be announced on 2 April, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing an administration official.

The official added that the White House was still planning to unveil reciprocal tariff measures on that day, although planning remains fluid.

Bloomberg News reported on Saturday that sector-specific tariffs would be excluded.

Danish police have sent extra personnel and sniffer dogs to Greenland as the icy island steps up security measures ahead of a planned visit this week by second lady Usha Vance, AP reports.

The extra officers, deployed the day before, were part of regular steps taken during visits by dignitaries to Greenland, a self-governing, mineral-rich territory of American ally Denmark, a spokesperson said.

Citing office procedure, Danish police declined to specify the number of extra police flown on the chartered flight. News reports put the number at dozens of officers.

Vance’s visit comes at a time when Donald Trump has suggested the United States should take control of Greenland.

Greenlandic news outlet Sermitsiaq posted images of two US Hercules workhorse military aircraft on the tarmac Sunday in Nuuk, the capital, adding that the planes later departed.

Vance will leave on Thursday and return Saturday, a statement from her office said. She and one of her three children will be part of a US delegation that will “visit historic sites” and “learn about Greenlandic heritage.”

Greenland leaders criticise US delegation trip as Trump talks of takeover

Greenlandic leaders have criticised an upcoming trip by a high-profile American delegation to the semi-autonomous Danish territory that Donald Trump has suggested the US should annex, Reuters reports.

The delegation, which will visit an American military base and watch a dogsled race, will be led by Usha Vance, wife of vice-president JD Vance, and include White House national security adviser Mike Waltz and energy secretary Chris Wright.

Greenland’s outgoing prime minister Mute Egede called this week’s visit a “provocation” and said his caretaker government would not meet with the delegation.

“Until recently, we could trust the Americans, who were our allies and friends, and with whom we enjoyed working closely,” Egede told local newspaper Sermitsiaq. “But that time is over.”

The Greenlandic government, Naalakkersuisut, is now in a caretaker period after a 11 March general election won by the Democrats, a pro-business party that favors a slow approach to independence from Denmark.

Jens-Frederik Nielsen, leader of the Democrats, called for political unity and said the visit by the US delegation during coalition talks and with municipal elections due next week, “once again shows a lack of respect for the Greenlandic people.”

Waltz and Wright plan to visit the Pituffik space base, the US military base in Greenland. The White House said they will get briefings from US service members there. They will then join Vance to visit historical sites and attend the national dogsled race.

Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said the US team is “confident that this visit presents an opportunity to build on partnerships that respects Greenland’s self determination and advances economic cooperation.”

“This is a visit to learn about Greenland, its culture, history, and people and to attend a dogsled race the United States is proud to sponsor, plain and simple,” Hughes said.

Trump has made US annexation of Greenland a major talking point since taking office for a second time on 20 January. Greenland’s strategic location and rich mineral resources could benefit the US. It lies along the shortest route from Europe to North America, vital for the US ballistic missile warning system.

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The tally of names read like President Trump’s enemies list, from Letitia James to Liz Cheney.

• Published March 21, 2025Updated March 22, 2025, 8:11 a.m. ET

President Trump issued a memo late Friday night rescinding security clearances and access to classified information for a slew of erstwhile opponents including Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and “any other member of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s family.”

Mr. Trump had said back in February that he planned to remove his predecessor’s access to classified intelligence briefings. It was payback — Mr. Biden had done the same to him after he left office in the days after the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol.

A variety of figures who’ve tangled with Mr. Trump at one point or another were named in Friday’s memo. Some had already been mentioned by Trump officials as people who would soon have their security clearances revoked, so their inclusion in Friday’s memo did not come as a shock. But taken together, the catalog of names read like an enemies list.

There were New York’s top two law enforcement officials, Letitia James (the New York attorney general) and Alvin L. Bragg (Manhattan’s district attorney), both of whom took on Mr. Trump.

There were prominent characters from the first impeachment brought against Mr. Trump in 2019, when he was shown to have tried to strong-arm Ukraine into helping him dig up dirt on Mr. Biden. Names included in Friday’s memo: Fiona Hill, a top foreign policy expert who testified during the impeachment hearings; Alexander Vindman, a lieutenant colonel who also testified; and Norman Eisen, a lawyer who oversaw that impeachment.

And there were the only two Republicans who served on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

“I also direct all executive department and agency heads to revoke unescorted access to secure United States government facilities from these individuals,” Mr. Trump’s memo stated. “This action includes, but is not limited to, receipt of classified briefings, such as the President’s Daily Brief, and access to classified information held by any member of the intelligence community by virtue of the named individuals’ previous tenure in the Congress.”

Since returning to office, Mr. Trump has used memos like the one he put out Friday to thwack at people who have tried to hold him accountable or who have otherwise crossed him. The memos have been wide-ranging in scope. Earlier this week, he put out one that pulled security protections for Mr. Biden’s adult children, Ashley and Hunter.

Last month, Mr. Trump nixed security clearances for Antony J. Blinken, the former secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the former national security adviser (both of whom were named again in Friday’s memo).

Mr. Trump has also stripped the security detail of his own former aides. Within hours of taking office, he targeted John Bolton, his former national security adviser turned enemy. Mr. Trump later did the same to Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, and a former aide, Brian Hook.

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Senator Steve Daines said in an interview that in meetings with Chinese officials, he called for talks between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

March 22, 2025, 9:01 a.m. ET

Since President Trump began his second term in January, no high-level officials from the United States have met with their counterparts in China, even as the world’s two largest economies have taken turns imposing steep tariffs on each other.

In the absence of official meetings, Senator Steve Daines of Montana has cast himself as a go-between. Mr. Daines met with Vice Premier He Lifeng, who oversees many economic issues for China, on Saturday and was set to meet Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official, on Sunday.

In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday after the meeting with Mr. He, Mr. Daines, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he urged China to take effective action to halt the export of chemical precursors for fentanyl.

“I met with President Trump a few days before I came over, and he was pleased that I was coming to communicate his ‘America First’ message and, importantly, to make sure that Chinese leaders knew the seriousness of the fentanyl issue, and the role that China can play in stopping the shipment of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” Mr. Daines said.

Chinese officials have said that the fentanyl crisis is rooted in an American failure to curb demand for the drug, and that Beijing has taken effective measures to limit shipments of fentanyl and its chemical precursors. China’s cabinet issued a report earlier this month on its fentanyl measures, and Mr. Daines said this was being studied by American officials.

Mr. Daines said he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. “This visit is the first step to arrange and set up the next step, which will be a very important meeting between President Xi and President Trump — when that occurs, I don’t know, where it occurs, I don’t know.”

The White House has not named Mr. Daines as acting on its behalf. But Mr. Daines is one of Mr. Trump’s top allies in Congress. He was the first member of the Republican leadership in the Senate to endorse Mr. Trump in 2023 for a second term at a time when many Republican senators were leery of seeing Mr. Trump return to the White House.

“Given Senator Daines’s relationship to Donald Trump, China certainly wants to learn from him about Trump’s China policy intentions — whether he still wants to make a deal with China, and if so, what the deal would look like,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

China also wants Senator Daines to “bring a message to Donald Trump that China wants to sit down to talk with the U.S. side and to avoid further escalation of the tensions,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Trump has imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more. China wants to head off further tariffs.

“There’s a window of opportunity before early April for China and the U.S. to engage each other, and Senator Daines’s visit could play a pivotal role,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Daines said that he was not focusing on tariffs with China, because the Office of the United States Trade Representative has not yet finished a policy review.

Mr. Trump has said he plans to meet with Mr. Xi, without specifying details. China has said nothing publicly about a meeting. But the contacts between working-level administration officials that typically precede such a meeting have been absent so far during Mr. Trump’s second term.

Mr. Xi makes all important decisions in China, particularly on foreign policy. That makes summits with American presidents particularly important in setting the trajectory of bilateral relations. The two leaders met in 2017 when Mr. Xi went to Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, and Mr. Trump went to China.

The lack of engagement with Washington until now has led some in Beijing to begin to doubt whether Mr. Trump is sincere in his expressed desire to meet Mr. Xi, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“They see him changing his position rapidly on a number of issues,” Ms. Sun said. “That translates into an almost fatalism for the Chinese, that they should aim to prepare for the worst case scenario, that’s their conclusion.”

Mr. Daines said he also expressed concern about China’s barriers to imports, beyond just tariffs, during his visit to Beijing. He declined to provide any specifics. But Montana politicians have long argued that China’s intermittent halts on imports of beef from the state are unfair trade barriers, and not the result of any actual concerns about mad cow disease, as Beijing contends.

Mr. Daines lived for six years in southern China in the 1990s as a project manager for Procter & Gamble, the American consumer products giant.

This weekend’s trip is Mr. Daines’s sixth to China since his election to the Senate in 2014, making him one of the few members of Congress who have continued traveling to the country even as relations have deteriorated.

Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic. More about Keith Bradsher

Meaghan Tobin covers business and tech stories in Asia with a focus on China and is based in Taipei. More about Meaghan Tobin

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Donald Trump expanded his retribution campaign against law firms on Friday night as he ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to refer what she determined to be partisan lawsuits to the White House and recommend punitive actions that could cripple the firms involved.

The directives were outlined in a sweeping memo in which Trump alleged that too many law firms were filing frivolous claims designed to cause delays. It came after a week of setbacks, in which a slew of judges issued temporary injunctions blocking the implementation of Trump’s agenda.

Trump’s memo directed Bondi to seek sanctions against the firms or disciplinary actions against the lawyers. But imposing sanctions are up to federal judges, and perhaps in recognition of the uncertainty that his attorney general would prevail, Trump also ordered referrals to the White House.

“When the attorney general determines that conduct by an attorney or law firm in litigation against the federal government warrants seeking sanctions or other disciplinary action, the attorney general shall … recommend to the president … additional steps that may be taken,” the memo said.

The memo, as a result, created a formal mechanism for Trump to unilaterally decide whether to impose politically charged sanctions through executive orders that strip lawyers of the security clearances they need to perform their jobs or prevent them from working on federal contracts.

Multiple legal experts suggested the memo would theoretically allow Bondi to decide a particular lawsuit that triggered a temporary injunction was causing an unnecessary delay, and refer the firm that filed the suit to face the hobbling effects of a punitive executive order.

That could cause a chilling effect and lead to the volume of litigation against the Trump administration to decline, the experts said. Even if the lawsuits are in fact for a legitimate purpose, there’s fear that their representation could put them in the president’s cross hairs and endanger their legal practice.

Trump also directed Bondi to open a review into the “conduct” of lawyers and their respective law firms in litigation against the federal government reaching back to the start of his first term in 2017 – and recommend whether it warranted additional punitive actions.

The memo comes as Trump in recent weeks has used executive orders targeting law firms to great effect.

Most recently, Trump stripped lawyers at the firm Paul Weiss of holding a security clearance and barred its employees from entering federal government buildings over his long-held complaint about a former partner, Mark Pomerantz, who tried to build a criminal case against him in New York.

The executive order targeting Paul Weiss was nearly identical to an order that punished the firm Perkins Coie over its ties to a lawyer who once worked with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and another aimed at Covington and Burling, which represented former special counsel Jack Smith.

Paul Weiss had its order withdrawn on Thursday after its chair, Brad Karp, offered a series of concessions including offering up criticism of Pomerantz apparently to appease Trump. He committed to providing $40m worth of legal services to causes that Trump has championed.

But Trump has stewed for days, according to people familiar with the matter, over a series of temporary restraining orders that have slowed the implementation of his political agenda and, in one instance, branded Elon Musk’s cost cutting drive as likely unconstitutional.

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The case that has aggravated Trump the most has been the challenge in a federal district court in Washington against his use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove hundreds of suspected Venezuelan gang members without due process as he seeks to ramp up deportations.

In that lawsuit, the US district judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to turn around any deportation flights that were in the air and temporarily barred any further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

The case has turned into a headache for the administration, after it failed to recall two flights on the basis that the judge did not replicate his verbal instruction in a written order, leading the judge to effectively open an inquiry into whether the White House flouted a court order.

“You felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order. That’s your first argument? The idea that because my written order was pithier so it could be disregarded, that’s one heck of a stretch,” Boasberg said at a recent hearing.

The administration has insisted it did not violate the order, but at the heart of the dispute is the administration’s belief that the judge lacked jurisdiction to hear the case in the first instance, ignoring the reality that federal courts can review whether statutes are properly invoked.

Against that backdrop, as Trump has continued to rail against the injunction itself, the administration has adopted an increasingly combative stance towards Boasberg and said it was considering whether to invoke the rarely used state secrets privilege to stonewall the judge’s inquiry.