“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” Estragon in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Theater of the absurd is a term coined by Martin Esslin in his 1961 book by that name. It describes a dramatic movement that started in Europe after World War II and moved across the theater world in the1950s and 1960s.
Playwrights associated with the movement include Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter. They wrote plays that looked very little like the three-act dramas audiences were accustomed to. The dialogue might not make sense, filled with non-sequiturs. The action might not follow a sensible pattern, if there was action at all.
In a word, absurd. Which might describe the world that hatched these plays, a world that followed a second world war following a first world war that was “the war to end all wars” but didn’t, a second world war that gave us human horror and a weapon that could be described as “the weapon to end all wars and everything else”. And in all spheres of politics, economics, technology, society and culture, things were changing at a pace unseen and unknown. Making sense of it seemed nearly impossible, so why bother trying? If all of it didn’t make sense, why should our plays, or our books, or our art? Or our government?
The most famous of these plays is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Two tramps engage in dialogues about nothing in particular, as they wait for the arrival of the mysterious Godot—who never arrives. In the end, the two of them stay exactly where they began on stage. One of them, Estragon, describes their situation perfectly: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”
American governments have been many things, as have governments around the world throughout history. Smart and stupid, honest and corrupt, benign and evil, successful and failed. Sometimes things in government might seem silly or nonsensical, but a closer look reveals an understandable motive.
What makes this moment in American government different, even if we attribute much of it to some master plan or to one man’s disorderly psyche, is that things simply don’t entirely make much sense. If you wrote a play that included the more outrageous monologues of the American president, you could easily categorize them as theater of the absurd. Or government of the absurd.
“A meditation on Judge Boasberg’s contempt ruling in increasingly run-on sentences.”
Lawfare is a publication about current events in the law, explained in ways that intelligent lawyers and non-lawyers can understand and appreciate. Benjamin Wittes is co-founder and editor in chief of Lawfare.
In a continuing series he calls The Situation, Wittes has been covering the accelerating crisis in American law under the Authority. As much as all the myriad battlefronts are important, this is the ultimate one that will decide whether the Authority has unfettered power.
This latest piece is about the ruling yesterday by Federal District Court Judge Boasberg. It is the case of J.G.G., et al. v Donald J. Trump, et al., where Judge Boasberg ordered the Authority to stop a plane carrying people to El Salvador, and the Authority defied the order and now defies the judge’s request for them to explain their defiance. The judge found probable cause to hold the Authority in criminal contempt.
Following is the piece, Vindicating the Semblance of Due Process, copied in whole. It is, as Wittes warns, written with “increasingly run-on sentences”, which is not his writing style. I suspect the breathlessness is a reflection of cautious if temporary relief, willing for the moment to exhale. As we all hold our breath to see if the law holds and the Authority loses at least this battle.
The Situation: Vindicating the Semblance of Due Process Benjamin Wittes April 16, 2025
A meditation on Judge Boasberg’s contempt ruling in increasingly run-on sentences.
The Situation on Monday ruminated on the tools in the hands of the two judges seeking to hold the Trump administration accountable for deporting people to Salvadoran prisons.
Today, one of those judges took his shot.
In case you’ve forgotten the J.G.G. case in a week of market turmoil, tariffs, and intense media interest in one man sent to a Salvadoran gulag on March 15, this is the case about those other guys sent to the same Salvadoran gulag on that same day—the ones sent under the president’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation and put on a pair of planes that were mysteriously not turned around when federal judge James Boasberg ordered that they be turned around so that the people on them could get some semblance of due process.
Remember that case? It has been a while—all of nine days since the Supreme Court vacated Judge Boasberg’s order because the case should have been brought in a different court and under a different statute even though the court also said that if the administration is going to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act, they are entitled to some semblance of due process.
But it turns out that federal district judges have long memories, particularly when you go behind their backs and pack two planeloads full of deportees before you issue your proclamation, conceal from them that you are planning to deport these people, stall for time, ignore their orders, transfer the detainees to foreign custody hours after they order you not to do so, and then stonewall them for a month about basic information about the flights, the preparation for the flights, the diplomatic arrangements, and your own legal arguments—even as you release pictures of the planes, mock the courts on social media, and show videos of the detainees, all of whom still have had no semblance of due process.
So today, Judge Boasberg dropped a 46-page opinion finding “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt” and that “The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it” and that “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself’” and finding, as well, that it does not matter that the Supreme Court later vacated the order that the government previously violated because “it is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’—no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’—until a court reverses it,” and finding that this means that Judge Boasberg’s order to turn those planes around, wrong as it may have been in terms of the venue of the district court that should have been entering it, was law unto those government officials who ignored it and failed to give those deportees any semblance of due process.
And thus did Judge Boasberg offer the government a simple choice: He gave the defendants until April 23 to propose a plan to purge their contempt or to identify the contemnor—the person who gave the order to not turn the planes around, and Judge Boasberg did not lay out what exactly purging the contempt would look like precisely, but he did say that “The most obvious way for Defendants to do so here is by asserting custody of the individuals who were removed in violation of the Court’s classwide [order] so that they might avail themselves of their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding” but he also says that, “The Court will also give Defendants an opportunity to propose other methods of coming into compliance, which the Court will evaluate,” and he did not say exactly what he would do to get to the truth, but he did say that “the Court will proceed to identify the individual(s) responsible for the contumacious conduct by determining whose ‘specific act or omission’ caused the noncompliance,” because either those deportees are going to get what they’re entitled to or he’s going to out and punish the miscreants who are keeping them from their semblance of due process.
And Judge Boasberg, I think, knows that the government has a third option, which is to appeal again and go up to the Supreme Court to complain that a single district judge is holding hostage the entire foreign policy of the United States and to complain in public that a single liberal district judge is trying to take over the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security and the foreign policy prerogatives of the president of the United States and wants to hold executive branch officials in contempt for failing to follow a lawless order that the Supreme Court already overturned and to have members of Congress introduce impeachment resolutions against this judge and to have other members of Congress talking about stripping the courts of jurisdiction over things and to do all of this knowing that while throwing up a lot of smoke won’t change the fact that the administration knowingly and intentionally and flagrantly violated a court order and Judge Boasberg’s opinion shows that conclusively, it will cause all kinds of people who should know better—not to mention even more people who probably can’t be expected to know better—to believe that the problem is the district judges who object to presidential lawlessness rather than to the lawlessness itself and the fact that his lawlessness has caused a couple of hundred people to rot in a Salvadoran prison with no semblance of due process.
And Judge Boasberg, I think, knows as well that the government has a fourth option too—and that that option is to stonewall this order, just as it stonewalled the one on which this order follows up—and that is to decline to “purge” its contempt because that would mean letting this unelected district judge run U.S. foreign policy and force the president of the United States to recover people he designated as gang members and terrorists from the sovereign government of El Salvador which doesn’t want to give them back because the president doesn’t want them back, and to decline to assist the judge in inquiring into the identity of the miscreant who caused this misadventure because, well, that person was—let’s just be honest about this—doing exactly what the president wanted, just as the president of El Salvador is now doing exactly what the president wants, and Judge Boasberg knows that this option is not incompatible with the third option—which is to say that the government could appeal the contempt order and go all the way up the appellate ladder once again and then, if and when it loses, stonewall anyway and drag things out for weeks or months more, during which time the deportees will continue to rot in the Salvadoran gulag with no semblance of due process.
And Judge Boasberg, I suspect, also knows that he has only a faint chance of getting the government to bring these people back, and he knows, I suspect, that he has only a slightly-better-than-faint chance of creating a clear record of who precisely the miscreant was who engineered this disaster, and he knows also—I’m fairly confident—that there’s a good chance that the government’s stonewalling will work, that he can’t force the American president to force the Salvadoran president to reload those planes and fly them back, and he might not even be able to force the government to reveal how this all came to pass and who is to blame for the violation of the court order and the deprivation to hundreds of men before deportation of any semblance of due process.
But damn it, he’s doing it anyway, because he’s a federal district judge, and the government defied his order, and Stephen Miller thinks that the administration’s gamesmanship with the most basic principles of the rule of law is just oh-so-clever, and the judge—with impeccable calmness and civility—is going to do everything in his power to remedy that, full well knowing that there are limits to his power, but knowing that his job is to make sure that someone asks every proper question, issues every reasonable order, and pulls on every available lever to vindicate that semblance of due process.
I eat a healthy diet. I do not overeat. I do not stress eat. I do not have a particularly sweet tooth.
Lately I’ve noticed a small increase in my cookie eating. Not a big increase, just a few more at a time. Small but noticeable.
It may be these times. Things are stranger than usual, probably stranger than they have been in a long, long time. All signs are that things may be getting stranger soon and for a while.
Oreos don’t correct or solve any of the strangeness. But as we look forward to things getting a lot less strange, a little more chocolate, a little more sweetness, can go a long way.
The I Ching, the venerable Book of Changes, is estimated to have first been composed around 1000 BCE. About 3,000 years ago.
The point is that China and its constituent states have been managing very complex and difficult governmental and social situations for millennia. Those who are leading contemporary China may face a lot of current challenges, as their ancestors have faced so many other challenges. They know their way around difficulties and difficult people. They have managed, starting in 1949, to build the world’s second largest economy. They have done it, by the way, paying close attention the I Ching. The Trump administration would do well to do the same.
Asking the I Ching about Trump tariffs on China it says:
52 Gen • Keeping Still
Mountain above Mountain below
NAME AND STRUCTURE
The attribute of Mountain is stillness. When Mountain is doubled, it is extremely still.
From the very beginning of Chinese culture, ancient sages emphasized keeping still. Keeping still is not keeping merely the body still but the mind and spirit as well, and is called “sitting in stillness” or “nourishing the spirit.” While sitting still in a lotus posture, one is shaped like a mountain. Sitting in stillness, or in meditation as Westerners call it, is a self-disciplinary training. While doing this, one is able to control the mind and the breath, to be introspective about one’s shortcomings and to cultivate inner strength and virtue. Mencius says, “I am skillful in nourishing my imperishable noble spirit.” When one is in a state of stillness, one is oblivious to one’s surroundings. This is the highest stage of nonattachment. In such a state there is no fault in one’s being. It is believed that when Heaven is about to confer a great mission on a person, it first exercises his or her mind and spirit with discipline. Keeping still is meant to prepare one’s mind and spirit to progress when the time comes.
Commentary on the Decision
Mountain. It is keeping still.
Keep still when it is time to keep still. Remain active when it is time to remain active. When action and resting do not miss their time, Their way becomes promising and brilliant.
SIGNIFICANCE
Keeping Still expounds the truth of knowing when and where to stop before one’s action goes too far. The key to success is to advance when it is time to advance and to stop when it is time to stop. Every action should accord with the time and situation. Never act subjectively and blindly. Keeping still means to be tranquil and stable. It is a phase of advancement. Advance and stillness complement each other. Keeping still is preparing oneself for a new advance. All the lines of this gua take images of different parts of the body to indicate particular times and situations.
When King Wen abolished slavery and reestablished the Jing land system, people were shocked, as if a thunderstorm had struck. Those who were liberated were happy, but not the slave owners—especially those who were close to the tyrant. Dangerous counterattacks were anticipated. King Wen retreated, sitting in stillness to contemplate the situation and foresee the future. The Duke of Zhou describes King Wen’s different stages and moods of stillness. Eventually his honesty and sincerity brought good fortune.
‘Nowhere on Earth is safe’: Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica Australian prime minister surprised after external territories – including tiny Norfolk Island and remote islands home to penguins – targeted by US president
A group of barren, uninhabited volcanic islands near Antarctica, covered in glaciers and home to penguins, have been swept up in Donald Trump’s trade war, as the US president hit them with a 10% tariff on goods.
Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which form an external territory of Australia, are among the remotest places on Earth, accessible only via a two-week boat voyage from Perth on Australia’s west coast. They are completely uninhabited, with the last visit from people believed to be nearly 10 years ago.
Nevertheless, Heard and McDonald islands featured in a list released by the White House of “countries” that would have new trade tariffs imposed.
We don’t think the penguins have heard about the tariffs. It will not affect them anyway, since they have nothing but fish, and they don’t trade that. They might be able to bribe Trump though, since it is reported that he is a fan of McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Like the penguins, he loves to eat.
While researching this, I came across the Penguin Foundation in Australia, which focuses on the Little Penguins on similar islands.
An oil spill led the Penguin Foundation to promote knitting sweaters (jumpers) for the Little Penguins of Phillip Island, to keep them from preening their feathers coated in toxic oil. (The knitting pattern is available on their site.)
Knitters have knitted enough sweaters for the current penguins and those that may be harmed in the future. Now the Penguin Foundation is asking knitters to knit sweaters for plush penguin toys to wear, which toys are being sold to raise money for the foundation.
Two reasons to mention all this here. One is that placing tariffs on “countries” inhabited by penguins is idiotic. Two is that thinking about penguins and particularly thinking about penguins wearing hand-knitted sweaters, even if meant to protect them from toxic oil spills, makes us smile. You do want a reason to smile right now—any reason—don’t you?
Years ago, when Trump first became president, mental health experts—including his own niece—believed he exhibited clinical personality disorders.
I am not one of those experts, but I was able to consult DSM-5 (Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the diagnostic bible of psychiatry. At the time I posted about the description of narcissistic personality disorder.
Here in the second Trump term, a new pattern is emerging. He is comparing himself to George Washington as the greatest American president. Some may believe this, some may say it is a legitimate matter of opinion, some may believe that objectively this is not true. For those who think it manifestly untrue, this might be considered a delusion. A grand delusion.
Grandiose delusions are part of various personality disorders described in the DSM-5 . Here is a description of Paranoid Personality Disorder:
Associated Features of Paranoid Personality Disorder
Individuals with paranoid personality disorder are generally difficult to get along with and often have problems with close relationships. Their excessive suspiciousness and hostility may be expressed in overt argumentativeness, in recurrent complaining, or by hostile aloofness. They display a labile range of affect, with hostile, stubborn, and sarcastic expressions predominating. Their combative and suspicious nature may elicit a hostile response in others, which then serves to confirm their original expectations.
Because individuals with paranoid personality disorder lack trust in others, they need to have a high degree of control over those around them. They are often rigid, critical of others, and unable to collaborate, although they have great difficulty accepting criticism themselves. They may blame others for their own shortcomings. Because of their quickness to counterattack in response to the threats they perceive around them, they may be litigious and frequently become involved in legal disputes. Individuals with this disorder seek to confirm their preconceived negative notions regarding people or situations they encounter, attributing malevolent motivations to others that are projections of their own fears. They may exhibit thinly hidden, unrealistic grandiose fantasies, are often attuned to issues of power and rank, and tend to develop negative stereotypes of others, particularly those from population groups distinct from their own. Attracted by simplistic formulations of the world, they are often wary of ambiguous situations. They may be perceived as “fanatics” and form tightly knit “cults” or groups with others who share their paranoid belief systems. (emphasis added)
Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)
The encounter in the White House was antisemitic….It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. There was no acknowledgement of Zelens’kyi’s bravery in remaining in Kyiv. Timothy Snyder, Antisemitism in the Oval Office
His post today, Antisemitism in the Oval Office, is about the inherent antisemitism of the recent confrontation between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office. It is Snyder’s view, and the view of other experts, that this was a clear example of public antisemitism. By the President of the United States.
Please read the post in its entirety. A brief excerpt below.
The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.
I am historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. He talked to me about antisemitism for decades, from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union until his death in 2018. The way that I reacted to the scene in the Oval Office, and how I have pondered and considered it since, have to do with my research, but also with him….
To conclude that the scene in the White House was antisemitic, one does not need to know anything further. It’s all right there: the demand for deference, the obsession with money, the claims of corruption and dishonesty, the encirclement, the loud voices, the bizarre grievances, the underlying sense that a Jewish person does not fit and must be expelled. The context was evocative enough, and nothing more is really needed: those historical markers of antisemitism; Zelens’kyi’s Jewish origins; the particular way he was treated by non-Jews.
If you didn’t vote in the last presidential election, but are very unhappy with the current administration, good news!
There is now a hybrid voting booth-time machine. You can now go back in time and actually vote in the last election, with a better chance that Trump does not win the presidency.
OF COURSE THERE IS NO HYBRID VOTING BOOTH-TIME MACHINE! THERE IS NO TIME MACHINE AT ALL!
Remember that next time you have the opportunity to vote but don’t.
Trump has friends or at least sympathizers on the Supreme Court. He is hoping to appoint more.
Already in the first few weeks, Trump has taken executive actions that are clearly unconstitutional. Then yesterday, Vance said that judges don’t have the right to control presidential power. Vance and other Republican lawyers know better. The Trump Justices of the Supreme Court know better.
Those Justices are scared.
Knowing that Trump will continue to act in unconstitutional ways that threaten the core concept of separation of powers and checks and balances, and knowing history, they are concerned about the trajectory of the republic.
As the constitutional challenges work their way through the judiciary, they know that the challenges—and ultimately interpretation of the Constitution—will end up on their bench. Whether or not they want to take on Trump, his Republican supporters, and tens of millions of Americans who believe that Trump should be able to do whatever he wants, they are going to have to.
Maybe they decide that centuries of precedent in interpreting the Constitution should stand, and these executive actions must stop. Or maybe they decide that these are extraordinary times, and under these circumstances, the constitutional structure must give way to the president.
Either way, as students of history, the Justices would rather not have to face that crossroad, since whatever they decide, they know the last time the Constitution itself was so deeply contested, the result was the literal division of America. They—at least one Justice—would rather be touring America in a luxury RV, rather than deciding the fate of the republic.
Will Elon Musk run against Cosmo Spacely for mayor of Orbit City?
There are many Americans unhappy with the return of Trump to the White House. While it is an extreme response, a small number have decided to leave the country to live elsewhere, or at least claim they will.
Surprisingly, two of the destinations for refugees may be Bedrock and Orbit City. These places are best known from the reality shows The Flintstones and The Jetsons. These popular programs followed the day-to-day lives of typical families in different eras—the Flintstones in a time when most things involved rocks and dinosaurs did much of the heavy lifting, the Jetsons in a time when people traveled by flying cars and both maids and dogs were robots.
Will it be better in Bedrock or Orbit City than it currently is in America? Only time will tell. However, it is thought that presidential advisor Elon Musk is seriously considering not only moving to Orbit City, but becoming its mayor. Is Musk unhappy? Will he end up running against Cosmo Spacely, George Jetsons’ boss and the wealthy CEO of Spacely Space Sprockets, Inc.? Once again, time will tell.
Bob Schwartz 