The Week Magazine April 11, 2025

You are Donald J. Trump, and you believe you can get away with anything. You have a cult following and a partisan propaganda apparatus that Republicans fear, and you are not bound by any law or the Constitution. No prosecutor, judge, or political opponent can stop you—not for long. You have a mountain of evidence for this belief. Escaping consequences is your life story. In your first run for president, you were seen bragging on a video that as a “star” you could sexually assault women at will. (More than two dozen women said you did just that.) When Russian dictator Vladimir Putin directed his intelligence services to help you win the 2016 election, two extensive investigations found, you eagerly welcomed this foreign interference and tried to cover it…

What happened Declaring “Liberation Day” from decades of free-trade policies that have allowed the U.S. to be “plundered” by other nations, President Trump this week upended the global trading system by imposing sweeping tariffs on every U.S. trading partner. Trump placed a 10 percent blanket tariff on all imports and additional import taxes on dozens of “bad actors” he accused of unfair trading practices. They include an extra 24 percent import tax on China—the country’s total rate will be 54 percent including previously announced tariffs—36 percent on Vietnam, 14 percent on Japan, and 10 percent on the European Union. Americans “have been ripped off for more than 50 years,” Trump said. “But it is not going to happen anymore.” He said tariffs would generate “trillions and trillions” of dollars,…

■ Flying above Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, pilot Terry Godes noticed that a dark spot on Tustumena Lake was in fact the wing of a plane that had gone missing the previous night. To his shock, the plane’s pilot and two young children had survived and were atop the sunken plane’s wing. Godes radioed in their location, and they were admitted to a local hospital with no life-threatening injuries despite the crash and their 12 hours in the elements. Godes called it a “miracle” that the family survived a “very cold, long, dark, wet night.” ■ In 2019, a Cambridge University archivist took a closer look at a book of property records from Tudor England and discovered a hidden treasure: a medieval manuscript from the 1200s that had been sewn…

What happened In a sign of brewing backlash against Republicans, a conservative backed by the wealth of Elon Musk suffered a resounding defeat in the race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, while the Republican margin of victory shrank dramatically in congressional races in two deep-red Florida districts. In Wisconsin, Susan Crawford defeated fellow judge Brad Schimel by 10 percentage points, allowing the state’s high court to retain its 4-3 liberal majority. Donors poured over $100 million into the race—with Musk coughing up $25 million of that—making it the most expensive judicial contest in history. The world’s richest man hurled himself into campaigning for Schimel, wearing a Wisconsin cheesehead hat at a rally and saying “the entire destiny of humanity” turned on the outcome of the race. To juice…

What happened The Trump administration admitted this week that it had shackled a Maryland father and shipped him off to a brutal prison in El Salvador by mistake, as concern grew that other immigrants were also deported erroneously. More than 200 Venezuelans and Salvadorans suspected of gang activity were flown in March to the Salvadoran facility—where shaven-headed inmates are warehoused in crowded, windowless cells for life and never allowed outdoors—after President Trump ordered their removal under the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act of 1798. One of those caught up in the sweep was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, a Salvadoran immigrant with a union job who has a 5-year-old autistic American son. In a court filing, the Trump administration conceded that Abrego Garcia had protected status barring his deportation and…

Welcome to “Trump’s America,” said Jonah Valdez in The Intercept, where “you can be disappeared for writing an op-ed.” If you haven’t yet seen the chilling surveillance camera footage, Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, a Turkish Fulbright scholar at Tufts University, was walking to meet friends last week when masked federal agents seized her on a street in Somerville, Mass., and whisked her away in an unmarked SUV. For nearly a day, no one knew where Ozturk was, until she surfaced at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana. She is now awaiting deportation for “activities in support of Hamas,” according to the Department of Homeland Security, or as Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, for “creating a ruckus.” Both allegations sound like references to last year’s campus protests…