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“Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan should not be faulted for her outreach to President Trump and her willingness to work with him where it makes sense. Doing so shows a pragmatism and an ability to rise above partisan politics,” Bruce Ellerstein writes in a letter to The Times.

“If the administration continues its defiance” of the Constitution, our columnist @davidfrenchjag.bsky.social writes, “then the country will face its greatest test to the rule of law since the Civil War.”

“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising,” our columnist David Brooks writes, adding: “Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

“One of the most consequential dynamics of this second Trump administration,” @frankabruni.bsky.social writes, is “the enlistment and indoctrination of aides who will validate every fiction that Trump asks them to, obey all of his orders and shield him from any accountability.”

“One very important thing for everybody to understand is federal courts have limited remedies. They cannot right every wrong under their proper doctrine,” the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says of Trump’s overreach on this episode of “Interesting Times With Ross Douthat.”

”Those of us who are critics of Trump, who find him at some level vomitous, are better critics when we concede from time to time that he has accomplished something,” Bret Stephens says on this episode of “The Opinions.”

“What the Trump administration is doing is acting as a quasi judiciary. They’re rounding up people and effectively being judge, jury and executioner,” Asha Rangappa tells Ezra Klein in this episode, regarding the president’s plan to send people to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

To understand global migration, you have to see it first. In these maps, Times Opinion provides the clearest picture to date of how people move across the globe, visualizing new estimates of global human migration from Meta, based on the location data of three billion Facebook users.

President Trump “says Beijing ‘played it wrong’ by retaliating against his tariffs. But he gave China no choice; showing weakness only emboldens a bully like him,” writes Robert Wu, a Chinese businessman and blogger.

“The president’s rendition program constitutes a profound assault on American freedom as understood for the whole of this nation’s history,” writes @jamellebouie.net. “While contemplating these removals, I am struck by the degree to which they aren’t completely foreign to the American experience.”

“This is why chaos is rarely the chosen strategy for a hegemon: Barring what Trump calls a ‘beautiful deal,’ the biggest single beneficiary of the whole crusade may well end up being its intended target,” David Wallace-Wells writes.

America is facing a great national test — “of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street,” our columnist @nickkristof.bsky.social writes.

“Bending the knee to authoritarians has never been the path to freedom, and we must not allow countering antisemitism to be used as a fig leaf for tyranny,” Ari Kermaier writes in a letter to The Times.

Was it coincidence, our columnist @zey.bsky.social asks, that after angering the anti-vaccine crowd, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “suddenly started talking about fluoride, another issue his fan base cares deeply about? Fluoride, fluoride, fluoride! Let’s talk about fluoride, people!”

Harvard’s refusal to submit can “light the way forward on a vital path to fighting President Trump’s war on the independence of higher education,” writes the New York Times editorial board.

Trump’s effort to reindustrialize America is behind so much of what his administration is doing, the author Kyla Scanlon writes. Will it work?

Anyone choosing to boycott Columbia over how it has tried to fend off the Trump administration is focused on entirely the wrong problem, writes the Columbia history professor Matthew Connelly.

“We just don’t know the details of the kinds of conversations that teenagers are having with their chatbots, or what the long-term drawbacks might be for their formation of human relationships,” writes Jessica Grose.

Amazon, Etsy, Temu and Shein are all dependent on millions of China-based sellers, says Moira Weigel with Harvard University. "This dynamic explains why the stiff China tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump are unlikely to achieve his goal of returning manufacturing jobs to the United States," she writes.

“Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law,” our columnist Thomas Friedman writes.

“If we ever wondered about Mr. Trump’s intentions to become a dictator, we should wonder no more," Susan Shelton writes in a letter to The Times. "What more effective way to claim power than to make innocent people realize they can be arrested and made to disappear with no recourse?”

It’s a mistake "to think that the Iran problem is fundamentally about nuclear weapons,” our columnist Bret Stephens writes. What sets Iran apart when it comes to its nukes: Its ideological character and geopolitical ambitions “might dispose the regime to brandish or even use them.”

“When corporate leaders can be reasonably confident that the business climate isn’t subject to a drastic policy shift, like revved-up tariffs, they’re more likely to invest,” @ericvannostrand.bsky.social writes. “Trump’s existing and threatened tariffs undermine these conditions.”

“China’s got a lot of goals in the world,” says our columnist Tom Friedman on this episode of "The Ezra Klein Show." “But one of them is not spreading authoritarian Marxism. OK? They’re trying to spread Muskism, not Marxism.”

“The accumulation of daily nightmares wrought by the famous Elon just makes me more determined to balance the cosmic books — or improve my Google search results,” writes Elon Green. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/o...

“Federal lands are a national resource, and the nation needs more housing,” writes Binyamin Appelbaum. “The proposal is easily caricatured as turning national parks into trailer parks, but there’s a lot of Western land that belongs to the government simply because no one else wanted it.”

"If Mr. Rubio really wants to help, he should make it U.S. policy to weaken gangs and strengthen Haitian institutions," writes Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network. "In the middle of the night, people should be able to call the police and get help."

"Danes were stunned and stung," last month when JD Vance said that Denmark is "not being a good ally" to the United States, writes Ida Auken, a member of the Danish Parliament. "Many of us felt as if we were losing a longtime friend — almost as if a brother were abandoning us."

"Should George Orwell’s novel '1984' be renamed '2025'?" writes Robert D. Greenberg in a letter to The Times.

"Never has an administration been more divorced from reality, and more determined to shove insulting ideological fictions down our throats, than Trump’s," writes our columnist Michelle Goldberg.

"The Trump administration, assuming it still considers peace between Israel and the Palestinians a top priority, will find it harder than ever to persuade Israel to convert its newfound military dominance into enduring political agreements," write Aaron David Miller and Steven Simon.

"If you look over the last 25 or 40 years, this past week was certainly among the top 1 percent in terms of scary developments," Larry Summers says on The Opinions. "Previous turmoil, previous crises, have come because something bad was happening in the world. This one is self-inflicted."

"Smoke and mirrors only work until you screw up so hard that no act of lunacy can pull the American people’s attention elsewhere," writes James Carville. "And boy, did the president just screw up royally."

"Mr. Gaetz is testing another central tenet of the MAGA-verse: So long as one obeys the first commandment of Trumpism — Thou shalt not betray the movement’s leader — political resurrection remains a possibility, no matter how low you go," writes Michelle Cottle.

“The Trump era has been full of rapid reversals, and perhaps the president will continue to reverse himself on this trade misadventure, too. But some broken things can never be repaired,” writes @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social.

“There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and it requires more than forming a united front,” writes M. Gessen. It’s been tried in other countries trending toward autocracy. “It works.”

“I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it,” Daniel Kahneman, shortly before his death, told the philosophers Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer.

“There is no magic cure for fear. But there is an antidote: rules,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal writes.

"As long as the regime was in power, Syrians lived in a story the regime told and controlled," Sarah Hunaidi writes.

In 2000, Roger Rosenblatt published a book called “Rules for Aging,” a sort of how-to guide for navigating the later years of one’s life. 25 years later, he’s written a sequel. Here are ten of his tips on how to get (very) old:

In a “remarkable act of judicial jujitsu,” our columnist David French writes, the Supreme Court “engineered an outcome that Trump celebrated, even as it diminished his freedom of action.”

In this cartoon submission from Stan Mack, a Times Opinion reader, he “imagines a time when many of us ordinary U.S. citizens (and cartoonists) may find ourselves in danger from our own government.”

“The greatest division in American life is not between so-called red and blue states, or between urban and rural citizens, but instead between those who own stock and those who do not,” Matthew Walther, a contributing Opinion writer, says.

“Trump is engaging the full power of the presidency to settle scores,” our columnist Maureen Dowd writes. “The White House was not meant for petty tyrants on revenge tours. In the biggest job in the world, Trump seems like a very small man.”

In upcoming negotiations with Iran, “the Trump administration must demonstrate it stands with the Iranian people by addressing Iran’s atrocious human-rights abuses,” Holly Dagres, Azadeh Pourzand and Kelly J. Shannon write.

“Unless the president changes course or is forced to do so, these tariffs will hurt — and the pain is going to get worse,” the New York Times editorial board writes.

“If you abuse millions of animals in a systematic, industrial process, you’re hailed for your business acumen. That’s an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of modern dining,” our columnist @nickkristof.bsky.social writes.

President Trump is on a very bad trajectory, our columnist Ross Douthat writes, “and the fact that Trump survived bad trajectories before doesn’t mean that this one is destined to reverse.”

“For many of us, the realization that people in power, regardless of political party, would belittle, name call and seek retribution has been a shock,” Carol Burton writes in a letter to The Times.