WaPo:

Trump administration officials said Thursday that they would investigate former FBI director James B. Comey, whom they accused of threatening President Donald Trump after Comey posted a picture of seashells on a beach arranged to spell out “86 47.”

Trump is the 47th president; “86” can mean banning or removing someone, but it can also be slang for killing a person.

“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Comey wrote in the original Instagram post, which he quickly removed after claims that the phrase communicated the threat of violence. In a follow-up post, Comey wrote that he assumed the shells he saw “were a political message” but said he was not advocating violence.

Trump insisted in a TV interview that Comey “knew exactly” what it meant.

“If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination,” Trump told Fox News in an interview scheduled to air Friday evening. “And it says it loud and clear.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem also accused Comey of calling for Trump’s assassination, writing on X on Thursdaythat the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service were “investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.” FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency would “provide all necessary support” as part of the investigation.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Fox News that she believes Comey should be in jail because of the post and accused him of “issuing a hit” on Trump.

Asked what he wanted to happen to Comey, Trump told Fox News host Bret Baier it was up to “Pam and all of the great people,” referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

It is the job of the U.S. Secret Service, which is part of DHS, to explore potential threats to the president, but in general such inquiries are launched only when a person is believed to be actively threatening harm.

Used as a verb, “86” originated in hospitality, meaning to refuse service to a customer or that a menu item was not available, and its use expanded over time to broadly refer to rejecting, dismissing or removing, according to its dictionary definition. It can also refer to killing something or someone.

“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” Comey said in his follow-up post. “It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”…

Political Wire:

Donald Trump is once again suggesting — this time while addressing U.S. troops in Qatar — that he might run for a third term in 2028.

Said Trump: “As you know we won three elections. And some people want us to do a fourth. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that. You saw the new hat? It says Trump 2028.”

It’s classic Trump: part trolling, part performance art, and wholly inappropriate in front of active-duty service members.

The line might have drawn laughs, but it puts a spotlight on a president who, despite maintaining a stranglehold on the GOP base, is already the most unpopular president this early in his term in modern polling history….

Judge Luttig in The Atlantic:

The 47th president of the United States may wish he were a king. But in America, the law is king, not the president.

Donald Trump may wish he could dictate his unconscionable global tariffs; dispense with due process and deport whomever he pleases, citizen and not; and vanish away huge swaths of the federal government without check or rebuke. He may wish he did not have to contend with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the free press, or the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship guarantee. He may wish he could ignore the Constitution’s elections clauses and run America’s elections from the White House. And he may wish he could intimidate the nation’s lawyers and law firms from challenging his abuse of power and commandeer them to do his personal bidding.

But it is these constitutional obstacles to a tyrannical president that have made America the greatest nation on Earth for almost 250 years, not the fallen America that Trump delusionally thinks he’s going to make great again tomorrow.

After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years. He will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”

From across the ages, Frederick Douglass is crying out that we Americans never forget: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

WaPo:

Federal judges say unsolicited pizza deliveries to jurists’ homes that began in February may number in the hundreds across at least seven states, prompting increased security concerns and a demand from a Senate leader for a Justice Department investigation.

Many of the deliveries have gone to judges presiding over lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s policies. The U.S. Marshals Service has been tracking the deliveries, and judges have been sharing details about their experiences in hopes of finding out more about what they call an ongoing attempt at intimidating the judiciary.

Some of the pizza deliveries have gone to judges’ relatives. In recent weeks, orders have been placed in the name of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, who was fatally shot at the family home in New Jersey in 2020 by an attorney who posed as a delivery person.

In an interview with The Washington Post, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, who serves in Washington, said she has received seven anonymous pizza deliveries at her home in the past few months — one shortly after she took part in a ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit over the firing of an independent government watchdog.

“It’s unsettling because I’d like to go to work every day, even with the hardest case, just feeling like there’s no sense of intimidation,” said Childs, president of the Federal Judges Association.

“It’s really an unnecessary and an unfortunate threat to our security when we’re trying to be judicial officers in a very neutral position with respect to our cases,” she said. “You need a strong judiciary for the system to work. This is infringing on democracy generally.”….

Steve Letvitsky, Lucian Way, and Daniel Ziblatt NYT oped:

How will Americans know when we have lost our democracy?

Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.

The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.

How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.

Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price. Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.

When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.

By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans….

NYT Editorial:

This past weekend, he seemed to both step back from the idea and reiterate it. “It’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to do,” Mr. Trump told NBC News. But then he once again claimed that the decision was his to make. “Well, there are ways of doing it,” he said. All the while, his website continues to sell “Trump 2028” merchandise, including baseball caps for $50 apiece and $36 T-shirts that proclaim, “Rewrite the rules.”

It may be that this talk is mostly a tactical attempt to ward off the stigma of being a lame duck. Congressional Republicans have responded partly by gently disagreeing and partly by downplaying the idea as a joke. “Not without a change in the Constitution,” Senator John Thune, the majority leader, told reporters in March. He added, “I think that you guys keep asking the question, and I think he’s probably having some fun with it, probably messing with you.”

But Mr. Trump’s third-term fantasizing is more dangerous than this response suggests, and it deserves more forceful pushback. He has a history, after all, of using seemingly outlandish speculation to push ideas he genuinely favors — such as overturning an election result — into mainstream discourse. He tests boundaries to see which limits are actually enforced. Even when he backs away from a provocation, he often succeeds in raising doubts about those limits. His behavior is consistent with a president who indeed wants to serve a third term, if not more, and who keeps raising the idea in the hope of getting Americans comfortable with it.

More broadly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his disdain for constitutional checks on a president’s power. He has ignored parts of judges’ rulings, deported immigrants without due process and tried to eliminate the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship through an executive order. All of this behavior suggests that he would prefer to wield power without limits.

The appropriate response from the rest of the political system — especially from Republican members of Congress, governors and others — is not to laugh off his musings. It is to assert the clarity of the law: Mr. Trump is barred from serving a third term, period….

Release:

uring the first months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration challenged constitutional and democratic norms on a wide range of issues, including the scope of executive power and the authority of courts to check it, individual freedom of expression, due process and habeas corpus, immigration, and academic freedom. 

As Trump completed his second first 100 days, we fielded parallel surveys of 760 political scientists (whom we refer to as “experts” below) and a representative sample of 2,000 Americans (whom we refer to as “the public” below). The expert survey was fielded from April 21–28, 2025 and the public survey from April 21–24, 2025.

Our key findings are the following:

Assessments of democratic performance

• Overall ratings of American democracy dropped significantly among every group surveyed — academic experts, the public overall, and Republican and Democratic members of the public. 
• For the first time since we began surveying in 2017, public ratings of democratic performance dropped below the scale’s midpoint, reaching 49 in April. Ratings dropped even among Republicans, decreasing from 59 in February to 56 in April. 
• Across 31 democratic principles, experts perceive the largest declines since Trump returned to the presidency in protections for unpopular speech or expression, government agencies not being used to punish political opponents, freedom of the press, the impartiality of criminal investigations, and judicial independence.

Threats to democracy

• Experts overwhelmingly rate the following federal actions as threats to democracy: Trump’s failure to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador after he was deported due to an administrative error, the executive order targeting the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, and the administration’s actions to withdraw funding from leading universities and to limit their academic freedom. In each case, more than three-quarters of respondents rate the threat as serious or extraordinary.
• Experts see Columbia University’s initial response to the Trump administration’s demands as a threat to democracy and Harvard’s refusal to concede as a benefit.
• Regarding future threats, experts are nearly unanimous in their view of Trump’s oft-discussed idea of sending American citizens to foreign prisons:  97% say it would pose a threat to democracy, and  78% say it would be an extraordinary threat. Almost all experts rate Trump’s plan to drastically increase the number of denaturalizations of American citizens as a threat to democracy. And almost all view partisan impeachment of a federal judge by Republicans as a threat to democracy. Nearly half rate denaturalization of citizens and judicial impeachments extraordinary threats….

WSJ:

President Trump on Sunday said he expects to leave the White House at the end of his second term without trying to run again, which would be prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. 

The 78-year-old had indicated in late March that he could be open to a third term, saying he was “not joking” about the possibility. “There are methods which you could do it,” he said at the time.

But in an NBC News “Meet the Press” interview that aired on Sunday, the president said he knows it is something “you’re not allowed to do.” A third term for Trump would be barred by the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution, which states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Trump said that many of his supporters are asking him to consider it, which he views as a compliment, but that he isn’t planning on extending his stay. 

“I’m looking to have four great years and turn it over to somebody, ideally a great Republican, a great Republican to carry it forward,” he told NBC News. 

A third term “is not something I’m looking to do,” he said….

NBC News:

When Welker tried to point out what the Fifth Amendment said, Trump suggested that such a process would slow him down too much.

“I don’t know. It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are — some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”

“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.

“But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Welker asked.

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

Reuters:

President Donald Trump said he was unsure whether people in the U.S. are entitled to due process rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution as his administration pushes aggressively to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally and other non-citizens.

Trump made his comments during an interview conducted on Friday that was set to air on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.” Welker asked Trump whether he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said last month that “of course” all people in the U.S. are entitled to due process, which generally requires the government to provide notice and a hearing before taking certain adverse legal actions.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump said, adding that such a requirement would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.”

Trump added that his lawyers “are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

NYT:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court’s newest member, denounced on Thursday what she described as “relentless attacks” on judges, and an environment of harassment that “ultimately risks undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.”

“ Across the nation, judges are facing increased threats of not only physical violence, but also professional retaliation just for doing our jobs,” said Justice Jackson, speaking at a conference for judges held in Puerto Rico. “And the attacks are not random. They seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity.”

Justice Jackson did not mention President Trump by name nor cite any specific attacks against judges. However, her remarks came as Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly targeted judges who have blocked key pieces of his agenda, even calling for judges who have ruled against him to be impeached….

Justice Jackson criticized the targeting of judges for doing their job, and said those attacks have a bigger, more structural impact for the democratic system.

“A society in which judges are routinely made to fear for their own safety or their own livelihood due to their decisions is one that has substantially departed from the norms of behavior that govern a democratic system,” said Justice Jackson, during her participation as keynote speaker at the First Circuit Judicial Conference. “Attacks on judicial independence is how countries that are not free, not fair, and not rule of law oriented, operate.”

She noted that May 1 is National Law Day, which was marked elsewhere by demonstrations of lawyers protesting Mr. Trump’s attack on the legal profession. Because of the occasion, she said, she was “taking this point of personal privilege to reaffirm the significance of judicial independence and to denounce attacks on judges based on their rules.”

Justice Jackson devoted most of her address to a less formal discussion of her life and her memoir released last year. But she came prepared with written remarks on the rule of law that she said she wanted to address first.