The Cosmic Watchdog

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From “The New York Times“, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily“. Over the past five years, the activist Christopher Rufo has spearheaded the conservative critique of and direct assault on critical race theory and DEI.

Organizing remarkably effective campaigns against government offices, corporations, and especially American universities.

In the process, Rufo has become an influential voice in the ear of the Trump administration, as it turns his strategy into a wide-ranging government crackdown on higher education.

On Wednesday, we spoke about that crackdown with the president of Princeton University. Today, we ask Rufo just how far it will go.

It’s Friday, April 11.

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Check, check. Can you guys hear me?

Is that Chris? Can you hear me?

I can hear you.

Well, Chris, welcome to “The Daily“. We appreciate you making time for us.

It’s good to be with you.

I’m curious, Chris, what it’s like for you in this moment to watch this activism that I know you’ve pursued for so many years, come to such full fruition under President Trump. Because in so many ways, your vision for how to challenge what universities in this country have become seems to have been adopted by the White House.

Yeah, I mean, it has been a journey. And some of the moments in the past few months have had a surreal feeling. I’ve been working on these issues for five years. At the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting.

And now, fast-forward five years, some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly become reality. They become policy. They affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds. And so that’s a great feeling. I think as an activist, there’s really nothing better than seeing the ideas that you fought for, against the odds, triumph and become reality.

I mean, just to put a fine point on the specificity with which what you have been advocating for is now happening. I was really struck by something you told my colleague, Ross Douthat, from the opinion side of “The Times“, not so long ago. And I’m going to quote you here. This is what you said.

“A medium or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, unless we change what we’re doing, we’re not going to be able to meet our budget for the year.” They’re going to have to make, you said, really hard decisions. I mean, that is what is now happening to universities under President Trump.

Well, it could happen to a larger number of universities. But what we’re seeing right now is, in fact, a prototype of that strategy. And if you take Columbia University as really the first trial of this strategy, we’ve seen an enormous payoff. And so what I’d like to see and why this is a medium and long-term goal is I’d like to see that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector.

All of them?

And I would like to see, in addition, a modification in about $120 to $150 billion a year from federal taxpayers to universities, used as leverage to extract significant reforms and to reduce the size of the sector itself. I think that is what is coming. It’s going to come either through the market mechanisms. But I think it could come even faster with good policy.

Well, I want to better understand, Chris, why it is you’ve come to see this strategy that you want to have implemented, not only on the scale it’s already being implemented on, but as you said, on an industrial scale, why you’ve come to see this as the right strategy for changing universities in a way you want to see them changed.

And I think to do that, we need to understand your motivation for seeing higher education in the way that you do, as a set of institutions that have been captured by leftist ideology, bureaucracy, practices, and incentives, and have spread those throughout American society. So tell us that story of how you come to see universities in this way.

Yeah, well, I mean, even in my own personal experience, I entered my university education with a far-left mindset and politics.

Yeah, how far-left?

Very far-left. I grew up, my formative political education was from my family in Italy. And my family in Italy is all unreconstructed communists. So my first exposure to political literature was and my aunt’s house in Rome and browsing through her collected works of Lenin. And so I grew up very committed to left-wing politics, getting out of high school wanting to be in politics, going to Georgetown in DC for that reason.

But the ideals that I had built up in my head as a young person through my own study, and experience, and conversations, once they made contact with the reality of left-wing politics in elite university milieu, everything just shattered. It broke apart. And what I found is that in America, left-wing politics is an elite venture geared towards social status. It’s not a popular venture geared towards material or psychic well-being of the average citizen.

And that led to a question, saying, all right, well, this doesn’t feel right. This seems empty. This seems cynical. And so what I decided was that I wanted to actually get a political education outside the university context, outside the academic context. And what I figured out was that producing documentary films was a good way to actually get out and see the world. So I did that for about 10 years, with the idea of really just testing my own ideas and my own questions against reality.

And so I decided to make a film about three of America’s forgotten cities — Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California. Really, three of the poorest, most violent, most destitute, and most forgotten places in America. And this is now about 10 years ago. And having actually spent three years in the field, in jails and prisons, in public housing projects, in abandoned steel mills, meeting people, understanding how the government operated in those communities, that’s when I really had my total crisis of confidence in not just this kind of revolutionary cosplay on campus, but actually the fundamental principles of the great society itself.

And at that point, I thought that the idea of the postwar left, could not withstand any scrutiny. And I think the reason that you get people retreating to campus is because their policies can only survive in that hothouse environment. And if you actually escape that hothouse, and you get into the actual real places that were supposed to b helped, you find that those policies can’t be defended.

So just to summarize, because I want to make sure I’m understanding this. You’re seeing what, to you, feels like a lot of empty virtue signaling on campus when you were a student. And it combines with this experience, making this film, that suggests that liberal politics and policies are not helping the lives of many working Americans. And together, you’re thinking this whole kind of project of the American left is not working and maybe even a little bit rotten.

Yeah. Rotten, absolutely corrupted. The entire project of the American government since the mid-1960s has been very self-consciously an attempt to recruit the so-called “best and brightest” from the Ivy League universities and to have them cook up policy ideas that will then be imposed on the rest of the country, in the name of equality, in the name of justice, in the name of all of these kind of high values. But what I learned through my experience in higher education and then my experience spending a number of years in American communities, especially in poor American communities, is that project has failed.

And those who hold responsible, it sounds like, are essentially left-leaning leaders and faculty of these colleges. And I just want to cite something from your book, which I happen to have in front of me.

Sure.

In your book, you describe, numerically, just how liberal, just how left-leaning the faculty have become at many of the biggest universities in the country. And you focus on the social sciences. And the data point that I found worth mentioning here is that the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty has reached, according to this research report, 8 to 1 in political science, 17 to 1 in history, 44 to 1 in sociology, 48 to 1 in English, and 108 to 0 in communications and interdisciplinary studies, which you note includes race and gender studies. That’s what you’re talking about.

Yeah, yeah. I think those are a really good snapshot statistics. And conservative academics have been talking about some of these broader trends for many decades — the long march through the institutions, the capture of the humanities, the extreme left-wing bias of university departments. What I think happened that was a decisive change was really in 2020, following the death of George Floyd. And all of a sudden, those ideas and that structure, that language, those symbols, those narratives, those arguments, they escaped the laboratory of academia and were then imposed throughout society via all of the surrounding institutions.

And so it was in your kids’ school curriculum. It was in your work’s HR training. It was in your television news program. And you have this sudden coherence of a replacement narrative about America, about our history, about our people, about our culture, about our politics. And so when you have this kind of ideology that had been, again, cooking in the universities for a long time, Americans could kind of ignore it, and say, well, that’s just the faculty at X, Y, and Z university, that’s just in some obscure academic texts.

But once it propagated and had become really ubiquitous within America’s institutions, that’s when things shifted for most people. That’s when there was an opening for some actual reform, and change, and discussion beyond what had become kind of a ghettoized discussion in the kind of intellectual right. We were able to actually bring these ideas and critiques into the mainstream in a way that had never been possible before.

So at this moment in your mind, where something that was living in universities spills out and becomes excessive, there’s an opportunity for folks like you to name it, call it out, and try to fight it. And, of course, I just want to pause here to ask, in your mind, was there anything about that was organic, and just a natural outpouring of grief and frustration over what had happened to George Floyd, and about the history of racism in the United States that lay behind that?

Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean, cancer is organic. Obviously, these are all human processes. So if you asked people, did they feel that way? Especially at the time, I think most of the people who were showing up for protests would say, yes.

And the truth is that you have a kernel of truth in a lot of these protests. You have what I think are some honest emotions at the heart of these protests. But none of these elite, left-wing initiatives come close to even identifying or offering even a plausible remedy for those problems.

And as you’ve said, so much of this for you goes back to the university, the incubation center, in your words, for these ideas. What exactly are these universities doing wrong, besides the virtue signaling in you’re telling, that you saw in 2020?

Take Harvard. Harvard’s DEI departments have been engaged in a level of race-based hostility, scapegoating, demonization that, in my view, constitute a violation of federal civil rights law.

What’s an example of that? Just so people can understand what it is you think has happened here.

Sure. You have discriminatory admissions.

At Harvard, I meant.

At Harvard, yeah. You have penalizing individuals because of their ancestry. And you have them doing that in a systematic way. You have discriminatory hiring and promotions. Hiring and promoting people on the basis of race, and punishing members of certain racial groups, simply because of who their parents were.

And you also have the ideological component, coming from the DEI departments, coming from HR, that speak of so-called whiteness as a pathology, as a kind of mark, a kind of stigmata that is not just at Harvard but at many universities. And the question is, well, how have they been getting away with it for so long?

And the answer is that they’ve never been held to account before. They paid no price for this kind of racialist discrimination. And so they continued to do so.

I just want to be clear, because some of this is fiercely debated, some of this is still in the courts. But you land on this very specific solution to address what you see as the excesses of the American left, which is to use the federal money that these universities depend on as a cudgel to force them to change. Why do you settle on that tactic?

For a simple reason, because money talks and because fear is a great motivator. Nice words, pleasing sounds, promises to change, all of those very pleasant and nonconfrontational proposals regarding academia have not worked. But what we’ve seen in dramatic fashion in recent months is that the other approach actually works much better.

And so look, reforming institutions, you have to deal with three things. The raw material of politics is money, power, and status.

And so as I run campaigns, for example, the successful campaign to oust the president of Harvard University at the beginning of last year, that’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about, how can we take away their money? How can we take away their power? How can we take away their status to the point that we’re causing so much pain to the decision-makers, in this case, the members of the Harvard Corporation, so that they have to change?

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We’ll be right back.

Well, I think that brings us to how the Trump administration is pursuing this playbook of yours, the Rufo playbook. So far, Trump has withheld $400 million from Columbia University, $500 million from Brown, $9 billion in funding from Harvard, several hundred million from Princeton. And the White House has so far framed this as being about antisemitism and to a degree about DEI on campus. And it’s made very specific demands of these universities for how students are to be disciplined, how campus rules are to be enforced, how certain departments, for example, Middle Eastern studies programs, are to be run.

But the context and the motivation seems to be bigger. It’s everything that you have been talking about here. And the president has talked about it even all the way back during the campaign, when he said he wanted to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left.

So what’s an ideal outcome of holding up this money in your mind? What should a university look like? What could it look like, when the Trump administration says, all those hundreds of millions, in some cases, billions of dollars that you were relying on, were holding it back, unless you change your culture, your practices, in some case, your curriculum?

Yeah, so there’s a short-term answer and there’s a long-term answer. In the short-term, I’d like to see the abolition of discriminatory DEI programs. I’d like to see colorblind admissions missions and a requirement that the universities publish disaggregated admissions and class-rank data at the end of each year.

So that you can see it for yourself.

Yeah, so that American taxpayers can have at least a proxy to determine whether or not universities are in the ballpark of colorblind admissions. I’d like to see an overhaul of university hiring, so that you have more philosophical balance on the faculty and you have an end to, again, illegal discrimination in hiring and promotions. I think also standards of civil discourse.

So for example, there should be significant federal financial penalties for any university that allows masked protesters to take over campus spaces, to any university that allows building occupations, illegal encampments, the disruption of the educational program, or violence, as we’ve seen, for example, in the wake of the Hamas terror attack against Israel, deplatformings, and shouting down speakers, that kind of thing, there should be strict penalties for that, because we can’t have a good university system without basic standards of civil discourse.

And in this version of a university, would anything on the curriculum be off limits? Or would you be open to leaving that and would the Trump administration be open to leaving that to the universities? I mean, could there be a critical race theory class, critical identities studies class, critical ethnic studies class? I mentioned those because you have talked about those as being very problematic.

Yeah, I mean, look, universities are ultimately going to have to decide what they put into the course catalog. I don’t think that the federal government should be micromanaging academic offerings to that extent. I think that’s counterproductive. I think it’s getting too far into the weeds.

So that’s where you draw the line, in terms of academic freedom. The universities need to have that.

So it’s a little bit nuanced. So what I would say from the federal government perspective, the most successful policy reform areas are on university administration. That’s where we have the most public support. That’s where we have the most legal authority. That’s where we have really the most defensible territory for engaging in these reforms.

That said, I think universities have to reform the structure of their departments. They have to reform their course offerings. And as a trustee at the New College of Florida, which is one of the public universities in the State of Florida —

Right. Governor Ron DeSantis asked you to be on the board.

That’s right. And so we did these administrative reforms. We fired the president. We got rid of the provost. We turned over the whole administration.

We abolished the DEI Department. We implemented a policy of colorblind equality. And all of those reforms, I think, are much-needed. But we went further than that, and I think with good reason.

And we looked at our course offerings, we looked at our departments, and we did a systematic study to just say, hey, which programs and departments are offering students a good value? Which programs and departments are oriented towards truth rather than ideology? And we concluded that our gender studies program did not meet any of those basic thresholds. And so we abolished the department, which established a new precedent.

And so I’d like to see some targeted defunding of compromised and nonscholarly academic departments, projects, research grants. We’ve seen that happening through DOGE. And I’d like to see that become systematized throughout the federal government.

You no doubt know that the leaders of a lot of colleges, especially private colleges, they do not share your goal and they fiercely believe that it would do serious damage to their institutions. And we just spoke with the president of Princeton University, Chris Eisgruber. And when presented with the challenges that he has been by the president, including the threat of hundreds of millions of dollars, he said very clearly to my colleague Rachel Abrams, he will not be making any concessions to the White House.

He was very clear about that and he cited a few reasons. And one of them was the subject we just spoke about, academic freedom. His belief that academics, academic researchers, administrators at the university, they should not have terms dictated to them by the government, that that’s a principle, a very high-level principle central to the operation of a university. Now I know just distinguished between the government calling the shots on what class gets taught or which department exists and the administration, but I think his point would cut through that distinction. And he would simply say, the government should not be telling us how to function.

I mean, Princeton has decided to take hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, but that taxpayer money comes with basic terms and conditions, basic rights and responsibilities. And so the federal government is well within its right to say, we’re not going to keep cutting you a blank check unless you meet certain basic standards and requirements that are necessary for the good stewardship of these public dollars.

And so Princeton had a choice many years ago to accept government money with the inevitable reciprocal responsibilities or to refuse government money and to maintain its academic independence and its academic freedom. Hillsdale College, where I’m a distinguished fellow, decided to reject public funding so that it could maintain its institutional independence. Princeton is at liberty to make the same choice, to refuse taxpayer money, and then to not have to negotiate with the taxpayers through the democratically-elected administration, to come to a mutually beneficial and mutually agreeable terms.

Well, can we talk about that money for a minute? Because the universities, when they receive that money, understood it to be intended for research and endeavors in the name of the public good. None of them, I think, would say that they were given the binary choice that you just outlined.

Well, they were all given the binary choice. They all can accept public funds or they can not accept public funds. And they still have that choice available. Forego public funding and gain more academic independence.

But the president of Princeton wants to have it both ways. He wants to have all of the entitlements without any of the responsibilities. And so that’s the mark of someone that is not looking at this in a mature way, but looking at this, I think, in a very greedy and very self-serving way.

I think the president and the secretary of Education should be fully ready to say, if you don’t want to make a deal, as you actually said, for the public good, I hope that the administration is ready to terminate that funding, not just on a temporary basis, but on a permanent basis. I think that’s when you get a cascade effect. You’re going to see other institutions recalculating in a very healthy way.

Well, the other argument that Princeton’s president made revolved around the idea of what the political complexity and complexion of a university is supposed to be. And the president of Princeton concedes that universities like his can and should do better when it comes to making conservatives feel more welcomed and should become, in his words, a place where conservatives feel they can speak up and where important conservative arguments can be heard.

But, and this is really interesting and I want to get your reaction to it, he said that is very different, making sure that there is a place for diversity of views on campus, that is very different than saying that a university should reflect the political ideology of the country. And he says, we shouldn’t actually try to do that. We’re not a Sunday morning talk show, is what he said, trying to achieve ideological balance.

And he went on to say, there are political divisions about things like climate and vaccines right now, but there is no obligation on the part of universities to reflect what is the political division of opinion on those subjects. So what do you say to that?

Well, so I actually would agree in part that, yes, obviously, it is not practicable and probably not desirable for universities to say, hey, we’re going to have an ideological quota to have balance, to have every right point of view represented, to have every religion. I mean, I would like to have a greater philosophical balance. But what I’m not calling for is like a one-to-one parity or that it has to reflect the particular political ideologies of the public.

I don’t think that is the best way to do it. So that’s why I say I agree in part. But what I don’t agree on, the lesson of the last few years is that the universities have not developed a sufficient and robust internal controls, internal critics, internal challenges.

And even at Princeton, for example — I actually know quite a few members of the Princeton faculty, some of whom are conservatives who are essentially in hiding, because the culture, and the administration, and the system of rewards and punishments are so openly and irrationally hostile to anyone that contradicts this kind of elite, left-wing consensus that they don’t even feel comfortable stating their opinions in public.

And so that’s not a university. That’s not academic freedom. That’s not a culture of civil debate. And so I don’t take his word for it. Either, he doesn’t know what’s happening on his own campus, which is bad, or he does know and he’s using this misdirection, positing elite, left-wing ideals while doing the kind of cynical work of institutional management.

So, Chris, I want understand the practical implications of, at the beginning of our conversation, what you call this industrialized effort to freeze, hold up so much money at these universities. If someone, like the president of Princeton, decides at the end of the day that they’re not going to make concessions to the administration, then this money doesn’t go to what it was designated for.

And in many cases, that is scientific research. And the president of Princeton spoke about this. When he talked about the impact of these dollars not reaching their designated endpoint, he wasn’t talking about the social sciences, where so many of the liberal ideas that you’re talking about would seem to have a natural home, but the hard sciences, right? Cancer research, medical research.

But again, this shows the remarkable level of egotism and entitlement.

What do you mean?

He’s taking money from taxpayers. You have a reciprocal obligation to taxpayers. This idea that I can enter into contract with you, you can pay me hundreds of millions of dollars, and then I say, I’m not going to do anything in a reciprocal manner to meet my basic responsibilities, is not academic independence. That’s kind of an academic entitlement.

And what I would say also is this. The political right has figured out how to use leverage effectively. The president of Harvard is gone. The president of Penn is gone.

The president of Columbia is gone. That’s a pretty good track record. That’s three for three. That’s a hat trick right off the bat.

Is that a threat? I’m serious.

That’s up for interpretation. But what I would say is that if it’s not a threat, and it could be, it’s just a demonstration of the facts. And the facts are that the political right has a greater understanding of institutional politics than at any time in the past half century. And we’ve demonstrated a willingness to not only talk about, but to use power to advance the public good. And we’re not going to be intimidated, or hamstrung, or led around.

How do you make sure that you’re not abusing that power? I mean, I know that what you may be about to say is that in your mind, universities have abused their influence in the culture when it comes to left-wing ideas. How do you know or make sure that you, Chris Rufo, with the tremendous power that you have achieved as an activist in this era, are not abusing yours and letting your instincts, your personal pique, your ego, and I don’t say that to be mean, dictate who lives and dies as the leader of these universities?

Well, the idea that I’m an equal power to the universities, which have collectively hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management. They have lawyers, and PR firms, and lobbyists, and other agents.

But you just described the power that you have discovered to rebalance those dynamics.

That’s right. But it’s a power, again, from leverage. And so keep the context in mind is important. But the second question is, how do I know that I’m not abusing that power? It’s a great question. It’s an important question. But what I always have done and I’m continuing to do is I’m always measuring the work that I do first against conscience, right? To make sure that my own moral intuitions, my own moral sense, keeps me in check.

But because we live in a democratic society, we have a constitutional republic, I also want to make sure that the policies that I’m advancing also have broad support from the American people. And so the president won the election. He has the democratic mandate. These ideas have broad public support. And I think they meet the test of conscience.

Got it. Chris, I want you to contemplate a scenario here where these universities decide to try to live without this federal money, which in some cases is significant when it comes to their operating budgets. And let’s say they walk away from some of the research that we have been talking about or they borrow a lot of money. I think Harvard is starting to contemplate that.

Is that a scenario where you end up losing your only real leverage over them? And would that mean that you have failed to achieve your original goal of having change these universities? You’ll have changed them because they’ll be smaller, they’ll be doing less research. But you haven’t necessarily changed them in the way that you intended. Would that be a failure or what would that be?

I mean, no, I think that would also be a success. And that’s what’s, I think, very —

But how would that be a success?

Because right now the calculation for university presidents is, in the back of their minds, they’re thinking the administration might fold. But if the administration doesn’t fold, I think we are entering a more serious politics. And so if let’s say Princeton very rashly says, we’re not going to reform our institution, we’re not going to implement these much-needed policies, no more federal funding.

I’m fine with that. That’s their decision. That’s fine. But I also wouldn’t see that as a loss of all of the leverage points.

The finances are one leverage point. But as I told you earlier, money, power, and status are the three predominant raw materials in this kind of activism. And we would still have other ways to pressure these places and to push through reforms.

But there would be this other casualty, right? Less cancer research, less obesity research, less scientific breakthrough and innovation.

I don’t think that’s accurate. Look, Princeton could raise private dollars to pay for whatever research they’re doing.

They would tell you that those private dollars are not readily available. There’s no substitute for the government’s power to foster innovation. I mean, the NIH, through universities, I’m sure you know this, has opened an unbelievable amount of space for medical innovation, for quantum computing, for AI.

Yeah, but look, I mean, the federal government is not obligated to fund a university that refuses to protect students from violence, that refuses to adopt common sense and broadly popular reforms. And so it’s up to Princeton. And if the president is willing to sacrifice these research programs, the blame would lie squarely with him. And so he’s going to try to play chicken. But I actually think that the reality of his position is much less powerful than his initial rhetoric.

I wonder how much time you’ve spent thinking about the Pandora’s box that may have been opened here at your urging and with your playbook here. I mean, the government now taking such a direct role in trying to influence the course of higher education for all the reasons you’ve just explained. It’s top down, right?

And one of the things that I detect in all of your activism and all of your writings is that you strongly dislike top down dictating of terms. So what happens if the next president is not a conservative and he doesn’t take his advice from Chris Rufo, but from an activist and an entirely different end of the political spectrum, who then turns around and says, no federal dollars for universities unless you become less like this, more like that? I don’t think we even need to specify what it is, because these universities became what they became through, whether you like it or not — I know you don’t like it.

No.

— a fairly organic process. Not through the hand of —

No.

Not through the hand of federal government.

No, absolutely. No. The premise of your argument is a myth. No the fact is that progressives within the federal bureaucracy, regardless of Democrat or Republican being in the White House, have been advancing left-wing, racialist ideologies and DEI programs for decades. And so I don’t have any doubt in my mind that what we’re doing is the right course of action. It’s defensible intellectually. And certainly, I think it is actually a minimal and very restrained response to a long-standing problem.

Chris, just define the word “restraint,” because I think many people inside these universities don’t see it as restraint. They see it as not incremental, but kind of an earthquake.

I would certainly like to see much more dramatic action. I would like to see — if they are anticipating this as a shock, I could easily imagine 10 times, 20 times, 50 times more dramatic action that is within the realm of possibility.

Like what?

I won’t telegraph that. We’ll see. I think one thing I’ve learned is that you want to keep the larger ideas close through the chest and you want to work incrementally up to them. And so we’re doing a A/B testing. We’re doing some prototyping.

And as those things gain traction, I think it’ll open up new lines of action. But what we’re doing is really a counter revolution. It’s a revolution against revolution. And so I think we are the responsible party in this.

But responsible doesn’t mean weak. It doesn’t mean self-effacing. It doesn’t mean playing nice. I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that, paradoxically, has to use what many see as radical techniques.

But what I want to restore is the university oriented toward truth and a university that contributes to the public good. That’s really what I want to see. That’s what I’ve always wanted to see. And I think that for the first time in many years, that’s a possibility that we’ll get closer to.

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Well, Chris, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

On Thursday, “The Times” reported that the White House is considering its biggest intervention so far into higher education, a consent decree that seeks to have a judge enforce any deal that Trump reaches with Columbia University.

Such an arrangement could ensure that the Trump administration has a hand in Columbia’s dealings for years to come.

We’ll be right back.

[THEME MUSIC]

Here’s what else you need to know today. In a major ruling against the Trump White House, the US Supreme Court has instructed the administration to take steps to return a migrant that it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Despite its error in deporting the man, the White House has claimed that federal courts have no power to tell it to retrieve him, a claim that the Supreme Court has now rejected.

And the stock market, once again, nosedived on Thursday as investors grew weary of President Trump’s aggressive new tariffs against China, which have reached 145 percent. The losses in the market erased the epic rebound that stocks made on Wednesday, when Trump announced that he would pause most of the tariffs. But with tariffs on China soaring, the S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent percent, the Dow Jones fell 2.5 percent, and the NASDAQ fell 4.3 percent. China has said that it wants to make a deal with Trump on tariffs, but not under duress.

Today’s episode was produced by Eric Krupke, and Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by Michael Benoist, contains research assistance from Susan Lee, original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily“. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.