By Kenneth Tiven
I have had lunch in the White House mess hall. I can report that the food was good and inexpensive. That was then. What follows is the here-and-now “menu” of fresh items. The common ingredient? What a taste of power does to ordinary people thrust into command.
President Donald Trump is the poster image for this. He’s a big consumer of well-done red meat—burnt steak, fast-food hamburgers with fries, and a fizzy soda in a bright red can. His imagined political and mental schemes clearly exceed his simple diet.
Take his grandstanding plan for high tariffs on international trade—“we are getting ripped off in the USA”. It was announced with enormous fanfare, never actually implemented, then quietly postponed for at least three months. The entire premise revealed a basic misunderstanding of how trade works. Trying to rewrite 80 years of global trade by presidential decree was like a forgettable movie, a flop before it opened.
Yet, in full salesman mode at a cabinet meeting, Trump insisted: “We’re in great shape,” while warning there may be a “transition cost”. Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen didn’t buy it. She called his economic plan the “worst self-inflicted wound” an administration has imposed on a functioning economy. Larry Summers said nearly the same thing.
Meanwhile, two Trump advisors duked it out publicly. Elon Musk, now dubbed the “unelected prime minister,” called economic advisor Peter Navarro “as dumb as a bag of bricks” for his die-hard belief in tariffs. Navarro, recently out of jail for refusing to testify about Trump to a Senate Committee, may still have the edge—for loyalty. Musk, who reportedly funnelled nearly $300 billion into Trump’s campaign, seems to be on thinner ice now. Hints abound that his “chainsaw” deregulation spree may have crossed legal lines, leaving his standing in the White House diminished.
This cast of characters in the Trump cabinet is notable mostly because none are outstanding. Consider the administration’s actions on immigration and non-citizens—here, three cases stand out.
First, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and son of Cuban refugees, is overseeing an immigration crackdown with chilling implications. A foreign graduate student was detained and scheduled for deportation without due process. The justification? Rubio declared that Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil posed a threat based solely on his “beliefs, statements or associations”. That same day, ICE posted—then deleted—a statement claiming responsibility for stopping illegal “ideas” from crossing the border.
Then there’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a married man with a work permit who had lived in Maryland since 2019. ICE agents detained him on March 12 and swiftly deported him, citing alleged gang ties with no court hearing. The Supreme Court ordered the administration to bring him back—an unsigned ruling upholding a lower court’s demand that Trump’s team “facilitate and effectuate” Garcia’s return. The administration called it an “administrative error” that couldn’t be reversed. Really?
Here’s a thought: If the US government is paying El Salvador to house deportees, maybe Trump can call the Salvadoran president and undo the mistake. Surely, a man of Trump’s stature could swing that.
And then there’s Rümeysa Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Tufts doctoral student, snatched off the street by plainclothes agents. Since her detention, she’s had four asthma attacks due to medical mistreatment. Surveillance footage of the masked arrest has gone viral. DHS has provided no evidence for claims she supports Hamas—only that she co-wrote a student op-ed calling on Tufts to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies tied to Israel. Her lawyers, including the ACLU, say it looks like pure retaliation.
The courts aren’t stopping there. A judge upheld a regulation requiring immigration registration, dismissing a challenge from the National Immigration Law Center on the grounds it lacked standing. The DHS has since declared it will enforce registration to the fullest.
Meanwhile, investigative reporting has uncovered other buried horrors: The Washington Post found that over 6,000 mostly Latino immigrants were added to the Social Security database used to track dead people. The New York Times reports Trump’s team is working to cancel the Social Security numbers of immigrants with temporary legal status—cutting them off from banking and essential services. That’s the point.
Retribution is never far from Trump’s mind. The list of law firms he’s targeting grows each week. His latest target: Susman Godfrey, the firm that won Dominion Voting Systems its $787.5 million settlement against Fox News for spreading election lies. Trump’s response? Executive orders to sanction the firm financially and operationally—one of many he’s signed to punish those involved in cases he doesn’t like.
Retribution is deeply personal. He’s now going after two officials from his first administration:
Christopher Krebs, the senior cybersecurity official who oversaw the 2020 election.
Miles Taylor, former DHS chief of staff and author of a scathing anonymous op-ed in The New York Times.
Trump has instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to investigate them and report back. This tramples the foundational principle of separation of powers between the presidency, legislature, and judiciary.
This isn’t just intimidation—it’s the destruction of the rule of law, carried out openly and without shame. This is full-on dictator behaviour and was previewed in the 2024 election campaign—and ignored by voters as merely Trump being Trump.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels