Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Feb. 7

The Washington Post says Trump's treatment of allies puts America's world standing in jeopardy

The Trump administration's deployment to Latin America in recent days offered a nugget of insight into the president's unusual worldview.

In Panama City, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sternly told President José Raúl Mulino that the United States would take ''measures'' if Panama did not reduce Chinese influence over the Panama Canal — an ominous warning, given President Donald Trump's avowed interest in taking over the canal.

Eight hundred miles to the east, in Caracas, meanwhile, a meeting between Trump's special envoy Richard Grenell and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was congenial. The United States got something from it: Maduro released six Americans held in Venezuelan prisons and agreed to take back Venezuelans deported from the United States. In exchange, Maduro got some priceless pics in Miraflores Palace smiling alongside the American diplomat. Granting an image of legitimate respectability, they offered the Venezuelan autocrat a future of promise.

The contrast here is alarming. Panama is a close ally of Washington. It has offered its help to stop migrants on their way to the United States. And Mulino is a self-avowed friend. Maduro, on the other hand, has a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head.

What's more troubling is that this asymmetry in treatment of friend and foe seems to be Washington's new norm. From his desire to take Greenland from Denmark and make Canada the 51st state, to his warning to Panama and his (postponed) tariffs against Mexico and Canada, Trump has dished out his bullying worst to America's allies. Next in line for the tariff treatment is the European Union.

China — a geopolitical rival and Trump's personal bête noire — was hit with tariffs for real, though lower than those threatened against Canada and Mexico. Russia, like Venezuela, is benefiting from Trump's softer side. Although the president has raised the prospect of unspecified new sanctions against Moscow if it doesn't negotiate a settlement with Kyiv, he has also taken positions that Russian President Vladimir Putin tends to agree with, including his opposition to Ukraine's joining NATO. ''We will be speaking,'' Trump said of Putin, ''and I think will perhaps do something that'll be significant'' toward ending the war.

Treating allies worse than adversaries is not in the standard diplomatic playbook, but it fits Trump's transactional approach. His diplomacy has no place for alliances based on shared values and bound by international conventions and legal frameworks. The deals he pursues are meant to achieve narrow goals. Trump will happily threaten to breach the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that he himself reached with those countries during his first term, in the interest of any short-term win.

This way of operating tends to suit the autocratic governments of America's foes. Rulers such as Putin, Maduro and Xi Jinping of China prefer to govern in the same way — unimpeded by human rights treaties, laws of war or other obstacles. They speak Trump's language. But they will never become trustworthy allies of the United States.

In contrast, America's erstwhile friends, the co-signers of the old liberal democratic order that Washington once took pride in leading — are recoiling from Trump's strategy. And this bodes ill for the world's stability and security. As the Trump administration transforms the nature of diplomacy, it risks isolating the United States.

A poll taken for the European Council on Foreign Relations after the November election found that only 22 percent of people in a sampling of nine E.U. countries consider America to be an ally ''that shares our interests and values.'' This is down from 31 percent two years ago.

President Joe Biden might have been as keen as Trump to antagonize China and to withdraw from the world economy into a protectionist crouch, but he also understood that taking on rivals as powerful and resourceful as China requires strengthening the country's most significant friendships, not dismantling them. Driven by disdain for the alliances, norms and institutions that shaped the West after World War II, Trump seems to believe that America is strong enough to bully its partners. Every ally he casts aside, however, is a win for Moscow and Beijing.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/07/trump-russia-china-allies-enemies/

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Feb. 9

The New York Times on Trump and transgender Americans

Some of the most deplorable episodes in U.S. history involve the government wielding the power of the state against minority groups: Black people, Indigenous people and gay people, to name just a few. Though these campaigns might have received popular support at the time, history has consistently judged them as immoral, illegal and un-American.

Rather than understanding this history, President Trump is borrowing from the worst of it. One of the very first acts of his second term was to order the government to view gender as immutable and discriminate against transgender citizens. ''As of today,'' he declared in his Inaugural Address, ''it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.''

The early days of Mr. Trump's second term have raised any number of concerns about actions that run dangerously counter to both the laws and the best interests of the country and its people. But the chaos of these past few weeks shouldn't mask that in this period, he has also waged as direct a campaign against a single, vulnerable minority as we've seen in generations.

Within hours, this language began to be codified in a series of executive orders and actions attempting to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.

The broadside against transgender people was not unexpected. Anti-transgender politicians spent at least $215 million to scapegoat transgender people for a variety of social ills. The Republican Party has increasingly viewed attacking trans rights as a political winner, much as it did attacking civil rights during Richard Nixon's presidency and attacking gay rights in George W. Bush's. That posture was disgracefully reflected in the speed and glee with which House Republicans barred transgender women from using women's restrooms on Capitol Hill after the election of Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress. As for Mr. Trump, he won power by caricaturing and demonizing trans people; now he is using that power to harm trans people.

The Trump administration's attacks come half a decade after the conservative-dominated Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ''It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,'' wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch.

It should be recognized that society is still grappling with the cultural and policy implications of the rapidly shifting understanding of gender. There are some issues — such as participation in sports and appropriate medical care for minors — that remain fiercely debated, even by those who broadly support trans rights. There should be room for those conversations. But what shouldn't be debated is whether the government should target a group of Americans to be stripped of their freedom and dignity to move through the world as they choose. This is a campaign in which cruelty and humiliation seem to be the fundamental point.

The fearmongering is all the more disproportionate, given how few people identify as transgender. They are a minuscule less than 1 percent of the American population. And they are 0.002 percent of college athletes — a population that's been especially incendiary in the culture wars.

In the U.S. military, slightly more than 1 percent of troops are transgender. That makes the Pentagon the largest employer of transgender people in the country, and that has made military service a prime target for the anti-trans movement.

So it was especially dispiriting, and symbolically important, that another of the new president's executive orders aimed to oust openly transgender soldiers from the armed services and bar others from joining. In this move Mr. Trump took aim both at people who have put their lives on the line for their nation and at an institution that has historically played a critical role in debates over the recognition and integration of minorities.

The order called for imposing federally mandated discrimination against the estimated 15,000 to 25,000 Americans who have agreed to put their lives on the line to defend the nation. He offered no evidence that this order would remove unqualified people from the armed forces or make the United States safer, because there is none. The language of the order was notable in part for its meanness.

''Expressing a false ‘gender identity' divergent from an individual's sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,'' the order said. ''Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life.''

Not only does this order erase the honorable service (and potentially the pensions ) of soldiers who led infantry patrols in Afghanistan and flew combat missions over Syria; it attempts to deny that they exist as transgender people at all. ''A man's assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,'' declared the order.

The thousands of transgender soldiers who have served with distinction and honor for nearly a decade easily put the lie to the idea that they are unfit for service. Meanwhile, the notion that the existence of openly transgender soldiers is harmful to unit cohesion — long the go-to excuse for opponents of allowing Black people, women and gay people to serve in the armed forces — is contradicted by numerous, rigorous studies. The most comprehensive, by the RAND Corporation, examined other countries that allow transgender soldiers to serve openly and found ''little or no impact on unit cohesion, operational effectiveness or readiness.''

The first Trump administration was thwarted in 2017 by the courts in its efforts to bar transgender Americans from serving their country. The Biden administration reversed that policy before the courts could rule. Transgender troops have served openly, many on overseas deployments, without incident for the past four years, much to the ire of conservatives. ''Transgender people should never be allowed to serve. It's that simple,'' Pete Hegseth, now the defense secretary, wrote in his most recent book.

Within hours of its signing, this executive order was challenged in court by six active-duty transgender service members and two seeking to re-enlist. Mr. Trump's executive orders have often been enjoined by the lower courts, and it is important not to overstate the power that the president has to make radical change absent a sign-off from Congress — even as he appears to be trying to erode those guardrails.

Yet it is difficult to imagine another cohort of thousands of service members, kicked out of the military for reasons totally unrelated to performance or a willingness to follow orders, with barely a whimper from the country's hundreds of pro-military and veterans' groups, pundits and elected officials.

It's true that Americans are divided by the new and shifting politics around gender identity. But most, regardless of party, have a shared respect for their fellow citizens who put on a uniform, pick up a rifle and travel around the world in defense of the nation.

Mr. Trump's targeting of transgender Americans will go far beyond the military. And his instinct for demonization, his habit of dividing the public into those worthy of protection and those who should be cast aside, his habitual cruelty to those who can be pushed around without others speaking up will go far beyond a campaign against this one small, vulnerable group. As these campaigns continue, Americans would do well to remember the hard-won lessons of our history.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/opinion/transgender-trump-orders.html

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Feb. 9

The Wall Street Journal on Justice Sotomayor, SCOTUS undoing precedent

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, appearing last week at the University of Louisville's law school, was asked about eroding confidence in the Supreme Court. ''I think my court would probably gather more public support if it went a little more slowly in undoing precedent,'' she said, according to the Associated Press. The public doesn't like it, she added, when the Justices move ''too quickly in upheavals.''

We'd like to submit a motion for reconsideration, Your Honor. A partisan media narrative claims that the current Court is overturning precedents in, well, unprecedented fashion. In precincts on the left, this is an article of faith. But it isn't true, according to an academic database of Supreme Court decisions from 1946 to last summer, available online from the law school at Washington University in St. Louis.

Under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-69), the rate of ''precedent alteration'' averaged 3.1 cases per year. Then came Chief Justice Warren Burger (1969-86), with 3.4 a year. Things slowed down after Ronald Reagan's elevation of Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1986-2005), with the figure falling to 2.4. How does current management compare? Under Chief Justice John Roberts (2005-present), the High Court has altered 1.6 precedents a year, through the term that ended in 2024.

In seven of his 19 years, the database shows the Roberts Court upending a single precedent, and none at all in four of those terms. Also, not every reversal is a heated national dispute with a hard ideological split. In a 2019 ruling on tribal hunting rights, Herrera v. Wyoming, Justice Neil Gorsuch joined four liberals to repudiate an 1896 precedent.

The current Court has overturned some major precedents, including with the Dobbs ruling in 2022 that ended the constitutional abortion right declared by Roe v. Wade. Yet this hardly fits Justice Sotomayor's thesis of acting ''too quickly.'' Roe was decided in 1973, and was one of the most controversial decisions in Supreme Court history, including when the High Court upheld it while rewriting it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). What would moving ''more slowly'' mean, with a precedent debated for almost 50 years?

Perhaps there are ways to quibble with the numbers in this database, but law professor Jonathan Adler has written that the Library of Congress's precedent tracker provides the same conclusion. It's no secret.

''Evidence tends to refute the notion that the Roberts Court has been any more inclined than prior Courts to overrule precedent,'' says a 2023 note in the Harvard Law Review. But maybe Justice Sotomayor doesn't read that; she's a Yalie.

The better answer on why polls show declining trust in the Court is that the Justices lately are under relentless ideological attack. It'd help if the people who ought to know better, including those with chambers in the building, would quit feeding the partisan PR campaign.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/sonia-sotomayors-elegy-for-precedent-law-supreme-court-history-40f84ffc?mod=editorials_article_pos2

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Feb. 7

The Guardian says Trump's ''vicious assault'' on ICC is no surprise

Donald Trump's vicious assault on the international criminal court is no surprise. His last administration slapped sanctions on it over its investigations into potential war crimes in Afghanistan, including by the US, and into the actions of Israeli forces. But his new executive order goes even further, attacking the fundamentals of the court and endangering its functioning.

The US never joined the ICC, fearing scrutiny of its own actions and those of its allies. Joe Biden damaged both the court and US claims of commitment to the ''rules-based international order'' when he justified the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin while attacking as ''outrageous'' the one issued for Benjamin Netanyahu.

But for Mr Trump it is not just about expedience. His loathing for the court speaks to something fundamental about this president. Ultimately, the law he believes in is that of the jungle. Naked transactionalism and coercion replace diplomacy and alliances. The biggest beasts are hungry and the rest must flatter or flee.

This credo can be seen at work again in the destruction of USAid. The callous disregard for life is sickening. As Gordon Brown laid out powerfully in the Guardian, this decision will kill. It is also shortsighted and stupid. USAid has been a shrewd, low-cost foreign policy tool. It cost less than 1% of the federal budget in the 2023 fiscal year – and much of the money went back to the United States. US foreign aid spending as a percentage of gross national income is far below that of most advanced economies. USAid helped to stabilise countries, contain diseases, and foster goodwill in places which will now look to other patrons.

Mr Trump's ''might-is-right'' doctrine can be seen most clearly in his reckless and immoral call to ethnically cleanse Gaza, so that the US could ''own'' a new ''Riviera of the Middle East''. This is the most disturbing element of his unexpected and repeated proposals for American territorial expansion, in place of the anticipated isolationism. He has even declared his willingness to use military force in other places.

No one expects US troops to march into Canada. His Gaza proposal is not realisable. At least some of his suggestions are surely wielded as the crudest available threat to achieve concessions on other issues. Yet a worrying consistency in the theme suggests that observers may need to take him literally as well as seriously, however ludicrous these ideas sound. He does not need to enact them exactly for them to prove hugely damaging. And whether or not the US expands its borders, there seems every prospect that Mr Trump will approve of Israel and Russia annexing land, emboldening others to use force to remake borders.

In the past, some have wondered how effective the ICC can really be: the work of bringing war criminals to justice has been slow, painful and often unsuccessful at the best of times. Mr Trump's attack is a perverse recognition of the importance of the court, and of international law more generally. It is alarming that influential voices within the British government appear inclined to lament the rigour of international law as an obstacle to domestic priorities, rather than celebrate its place in the architecture of a civilised world. Recoiling at Mr Trump's excesses is not enough. The UK and others have rightly expressed their ''unwavering'' support for the ICC. They must now defend it, and the values for which it stands, by whatever means they can.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/07/the-guardian-view-on-trump-and-the-international-criminal-court-following-the-law-of-the-jungle

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Feb. 6

The Boston Globe on Elon Musk, USAID

''USAID is a criminal organization,'' declared billionaire Elon Musk over the weekend. ''Time for it to die.''

By Monday morning the doors of the Washington headquarters of the nation's premier humanitarian aid organization were indeed shuttered, most of its personnel put on leave, and its programs largely halted.

And the world's richest man, having looked at what he had done to an agency that helps the world's poorest people, declared himself pleased.

''We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,'' Musk crowed on X at 1:54 a.m. Monday. ''Could gone (sic) to some great parties. Did that instead.''

Republicans who've supported the agency in the past should speak up, and fast, if they want to save it now. One reason they haven't: Musk, named by President Trump to head the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), insisted he had cleared his planned demolition of the US Agency for International Development with the boss ahead of time.

By Monday its website had ceased to exist, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared himself the ''acting administrator'' of the agency, naming Trump loyalist, Peter W. Marocco, to conduct an agency review with an eye toward potential cuts.

By Tuesday night the website came back long enough to inform thousands of workers they would be put on leave as of Friday and those posted abroad would have 30 days in which to return to the United States.

For decades USAID has represented the best of American diplomacy, feeding the hungry, delivering vaccines, treating malaria, and most recently providing medical assistance to war-ravaged Gaza. It's also been a way of projecting American influence; if it were to disappear, geopolitical rivals like China would be all too happy to fill the void.

Still, it has also been the bête noire of the political right — for reasons sometimes more mythical than real. For example Trump has often charged that the agency provided condoms for Hamas terrorists, despite the fact that the nongovernmental medical organization working in Gaza under USAID funding insists it has provided no family planning services.

And is it actually relevant that Samantha Power, USAID administrator during the Biden administration, met once or twice with George Soros' Open Society Foundations or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?

What isn't deniable is that the agency operates with a budget of around $43 billion — representing less than 1 percent of the federal budget. Most of its 10,000 employees work overseas — on the front lines of impoverished and war-torn countries from Sudan to Ukraine.

Surely there are targets more worthy if Musk is looking for real savings.

Trump, in keeping with his America First policy, has also ordered a 90-day halt to all foreign aid assistance delivered through the State Department and its contractors. A handful of waivers have restored a few programs, where indeed, US assistance means the difference between life and death, but most remain on hold.

''The previously announced 90-day pause and review of US foreign aid is already paying dividends to our country and our people,'' according to a statement issued by the State Department. ''We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot.''

Meanwhile, Rubio, traveling in Central America, said, ''In consultation with Congress, USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.''

Ah, yes, about that ''consultation with Congress.'' USAID was established as an independent agency with its own budget and mandate, to ensure that this nation ''can deploy developmental expertise and US foreign assistance quickly, particularly in times of crisis, to meet our national security goals,'' a group of 10 Democratic senators on the Foreign Relations Committee reminded Rubio in a letter sent over the weekend. The group, including New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, sought to remind the secretary that ''by law'' an effort to fold USAID into State ''must be previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress.''

Congressional Democrats, including those who protested in front of the USAID offices Monday, like Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern, have been clear.

''We live in the United States of America, and as much as Elon Musk and Donald Trump want, this is not a dictatorship, and we will not allow it to become one ever,'' McGovern said at a news conference outside USAID headquarters Monday.

However, little has been heard from the other side of the aisle about this utter disregard for the rule of law or the role of Congress in the future of an agency it created. Either their animus toward the agency is so strong or their desire to appease Trump so complete — or both — that no Republican has yet to stand up for an agency that is the very face of American mercy around the world.

This is how American power — soft power — and respect for its institutions dies.

ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/06/opinion/trump-presidency-and-elon-musk/