The Morning Sixpack - March 25, 2025
Everything Trump Touches Dies... revisited.
Are you all listening to the podcast? I’m thinking about returning the podcast to its old channel. Would you listen there? Let me know in the comments.
Trump’s War Plans, Straight to a Journalist’s Inbox
In a surreal blunder that seems pulled from a political satire, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally looped into a Signal group chat where Trump administration officials—including the vice president, secretary of defense, and other top national-security leaders—openly discussed highly classified military strikes on Yemen.
“I didn’t think it could be real,” Goldberg writes. “Then the bombs started falling.”
What started as suspicion of a prank turned into one of the most jarring national security breaches in recent memory—complete with real-time planning, policy arguments, and actual target coordinates.
The chaos began with a Signal request from someone posing as (or actually being) National Security Adviser Michael Waltz.
Within days, Goldberg found himself in a chat labeled “Houthi PC small group” alongside names like JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller.
These weren’t just avatars—participants exchanged detailed plans about an imminent strike, discussed global trade implications, and even debated Europe’s freeloading.
“Nobody knows who the Houthis are,” wrote one participant, “which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”
DUI SecDef Hegseth said this.
The final confirmation came when the bombs hit, exactly when predicted in the chat. Officials celebrated in the thread with emojis and congratulations like teenagers at a Taylor Swift concert.
After verifying the authenticity, Goldberg left the chat—without anyone ever realizing he was in it. The administration later confirmed the Signal group was real and claimed no operational harm was done.
Still, the recklessness stunned national-security experts, who noted potential Espionage Act violations and serious breaches of federal records laws.
“I have never seen a breach quite like this,” Goldberg concluded.
Source: The Atlantic
More: The Nation. American foreign policy is now all about incompetent shakedowns and cover-ups.
Judge: 'Nazis Got Better Treatment' Than Migrants Deported Under Trump’s Alien Enemies Act
A federal appeals court in D.C. is grappling with the Trump administration’s aggressive use of the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants accused—often without evidence—of gang affiliations.
At issue: the administration’s claim that it can deport individuals without notifying them they’ve been labeled “alien enemies” or giving them a chance to challenge that designation in court.
The assertion drew a jaw-dropping rebuke from Judge Patricia Millett, who said bluntly, “Nazis got better treatment.”
That quote didn’t just land—it exploded.
On March 15, over 130 migrants were deported, many to a Salvadoran torture prison, without advance hearings or any formal process.
A D.C. judge quickly intervened with a temporary restraining order, but the Trump government defied it mid-flight.
The administration argued that the judiciary had no authority to stop deportation planes already in the air and insisted that not all the deportees were removed under the Alien Enemies Act. Meanwhile, testimony from returned migrants suggests the administration’s own deportation logistics contradicted its legal stance, undermining claims that the planes couldn’t turn around.
The legal battle now centers on whether Judge James Boasberg overreached in pausing further deportations while litigation proceeds. Trump officials claim his order encroaches on presidential power, while civil liberties advocates warn of chilling precedent if due process is discarded. “The implication of not giving people a chance to contest it are extraordinary,” argued ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt. The outcome of this appeal may dictate how far executive power can stretch in defining and deporting “enemies”—and whether a centuries-old wartime statute becomes a modern-day weapon in immigration enforcement.
Source: WaPo (gift article)
Crockett Clocks Cruz—Figuratively, Of Course (But Try Telling Fox That)
You know this had to be a Fox News article. Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett made a metaphorical jab at Sen. Ted Cruz—something about how “this dude has to be knocked over the head, like hard”—and conservatives predictably lost their minds.
The usual suspects lit up X with cries of "violence!" and "investigate her!" because nothing says “calm, rational discourse” like pretending a figure of speech is a felony. “Nazis got better treatment,” may have been said in a courtroom this week, but this right-wing freak-out is really pushing the limits of performative outrage.
Let’s be real: Crockett was speaking metaphorically, you know, like Sarah Palin was when she put bullseyes on political opponents (but let’s not pretend that didn’t have some actual consequences).
Still, Crockett’s “knock him over the head” and “you punch, you OK with punching” comments gave MAGA media all the ammo they needed to go into full meltdown mode. Ted Cruz, never one to miss a meme opportunity, responded with an Inigo Montoya gif. Clever. Meanwhile, Libs of TikTok and Nick Sortor went full “this will activate the crazies!” mode, as if Crockett were personally handing out baseball bats at a Bernie rally.
Fox also breathlessly tied Crockett to vandalism and arson at Tesla service centers—because what’s a story without Elon Musk these days?
This is the same Crockett who once said on a Tesla protest call, “All I want to see happen on my birthday is for Elon to be taken down.”
Violent? Nah. Petty? Maybe.
But our president does this shit all the time and he’s rewarded for it. He’s tough. She’s a crazy bitch. Society has got to get real with stamping out misogyny.
Source: MDGN
Trump Lobs a Tariff Grenade—China’s Venezuelan Oil Deal Left in Limbo
The Trump administration’s foreign policy strategy appears to be: "Why have one trade war when you can have three?"
On Tuesday, the flow of Venezuelan oil to China—Caracas’ biggest buyer—was abruptly thrown into chaos after a surprise Trump executive order threatened 25% tariffs on any country importing Venezuelan crude.
Chinese traders and refiners are now in full pause mode, confused and waiting for Beijing to tell them whether to keep buying or hit the brakes.
“The worst thing in the oil market is uncertainty. We won’t dare touch the oil for now,” said one trader.
Translation: Thanks for the panic, Don.
Trump’s new tariff threat, set to kick in April 2, comes hot on the heels of sanctions against Chinese buyers of Iranian oil.
The timing, of course, couldn't be more disruptive. Chinese independent refiners—lovingly known as “teapots”—have been scooping up cheap Venezuelan heavy crude like it’s clearance day at the oil market.
And since most of it’s been laundered through Malaysia to dodge prior sanctions, the new U.S. pressure could squeeze their already razor-thin margins even further.
One exec didn’t mince words: “It’s a total mess… so be it.”
Beijing, naturally, pushed back, with a foreign ministry spokesperson saying the U.S. is “grossly interfering” and abusing its sanctions powers.
But unless China explicitly tells its refiners to stop buying, most industry watchers expect the teapots will eventually go back to their murky workaround ways—because cheap oil is still cheap oil.
For now, though, it’s all stalled ships and phone calls full of guesswork. Because nothing screams “stable global market” like a presidential tariff tweet that blows up multibillion-dollar supply chains overnight.
Source: Reuters
Trump to SCOTUS: Stop the Judges From Making Me Rehire People I Illegally Fired
The Trump administration is begging the Supreme Court to block a federal judge’s order to rehire more than 16,000 fired probationary federal workers, claiming the judiciary has gone rogue.
In the emergency filing, Acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris warned that this “extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers,” and griped that one judge “arrogated to a single district court the executive branch’s powers of personnel management.”
Translation: Trump’s mad the courts are making him undo his mass layoffs—and he's hoping the Supremes will bail him out. And they probably will.
The clash stems from a ruling earlier this month by Judge William Alsup in California, who called out the Office of Personnel Management for acting like it had firing authority over multiple agencies when it didn’t.
“Yet that is what happened here — en masse,” he wrote, ordering the reinstatement of employees across six major federal departments.
A separate judge in Maryland issued a similar order, leading to a pileup of legal headaches for Team Trump, who now face multiple overlapping mandates to undo their sweeping purge of federal workers.
As the lower courts continue to check Trump’s aggressive executive moves, the Trump administration is leaning hard on the high court to rein them in.
Harris warned the justices that “this court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s loyalists are framing this as another chapter in the saga of “deep state” resistance—except this time, the resistance is coming from the judicial branch.
Source: NYT
Louis DeGone: Postmaster General Bows Out as Trump Eyes USPS Takeover
Louis DeJoy is finally clocking out. After five chaotic years of leading the U.S. Postal Service through a pandemic, mail-in ballot wars, and peak Trumpworld drama, the embattled postmaster general resigned Monday—just as Trump is eyeing ways to dismantle or privatize the agency altogether.
DeJoy had pledged to stay until a successor was chosen, but let’s be honest: When the Trump administration starts floating executive orders to dissolve your board and hand your agency over to a billionaire commerce secretary, it’s probably time to hit “return to sender.”
Behind the scenes, it was classic DeJoy vs. MAGA. Trump’s DOGE squad (yes, that’s actually the acronym for his internal watchdog group) wanted unfettered access to USPS systems. DeJoy said: Not so fast.
Instead of rolling over, he forced them to sit through tedious PowerPoint briefings—an act of bureaucratic defiance that apparently did not endear him to the new regime.
“They were fed up,” one source said, which is D.C.-speak for “they wanted to fire him but had to wait for the paperwork.”
Pick up Everything Trump Touches Dies by Rick Wilson.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration was already in talks with Jim Cochrane—a guy with ties to Amazon, FedEx, and DHL—about taking over the whole mail show. Trump even toyed with an executive order to gut the USPS governing board and merge the agency with the Commerce Department.
Source: WaPo (gift article)