How about some good news for a change? The Wall Street Journal reports that an immigration court has dropped the deportation case against Turkish grad student Rümeysa Öztürk, who became one of the earliest victims of the Trump administration’s swerve into cartoonishly evil immigration enforcement last year when plainclothes officers were caught on video forcing her into an unmarked van. The State Department, it later came out, had tried to revoke her student visa over an op-ed she’d co-written in a Tufts University student paper. “Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Öztürk said in a statement yesterday. Happy Tuesday.
This Just In: Charity Good Againby Andrew Egger When Donald Trump told an interviewer last week that the American people shouldn’t mind him ordering his IRS to pay him $10 billion in their money because he’d “give it to charity,” it wasn’t just an instant contender for the most ridiculous policy pitch he’s made in his decade in political life. It was also the last nail in the coffin of the spirit of DOGE. This time last year, with the new-look Trump administration only a couple weeks into action, the Department of Government Efficiency was dominating both the headlines and the White House’s attention. DOGE was pitched as One Weird Trick to solve America’s decades-in-the-making deficit crisis. Elon Musk’s band of merry hackers, the right believed, was going to go through the world of government contracts like a cleansing fire, rooting out billions or even trillions of dollars a year of fraud and silly spending. Musk approached this project in his usual way: as a series of manic fixations. Within days, he’d zeroed in on what he believed to be the main culprit in federal overspending: the dastardly behavior of NGOs—or as some like to call them, charities. While he never delivered the trillions in federal savings he’d promised before flaming out of DOGE far ahead of schedule, Musk did manage to blow up the government’s system of giving billions a year to causes like fighting hunger and disease in impoverished and war-torn places abroad. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk tweeted just over a year ago. “Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” Before DOGE’s arrival, USAID spent about $21 billion a year on foreign aid and development. This time last year, MAGA considered it a great triumph that the White House was taking that money out of the mouths of widows and orphans to restore it to its rightful owner: the U.S. taxpayer. Now, as Trump lays the groundwork to grant himself roughly half that sum from the Treasury, he seems to have rediscovered the American people’s affection for philanthropy: “Nobody cares how much [I pay myself],” he said this month, “if it goes to a good charity.” The sentiment is all the more outrageous given Trump’s own personal history with self-dealing “charitable” contributions. It’s too bad Musk and DOGE weren’t around to audit the Trump Foundation a decade ago: Trump had been using his personal charity, it came to light after a lawsuit from the state of New York, to pay his business debts, make political contributions,¹ and buy things for himself. He eventually settled the suit in 2019, admitting he had failed to comply with basic laws governing charitable organizations, paying $2 million in damages, and dissolving the Trump Foundation for good. (All a witch hunt, if you ask him.) Despite all this, the Republican party’s hardest-nosed fiscal hawks don’t seem eager to object to Trump’s personal payout. Yesterday, I reached out to the offices of the three co-chairs of the Congressional DOGE Caucus, GOP Reps. Aaron Bean of Florida, Pete Sessions of Texas, and Blake Moore of Utah, asking what they made of the possible $10 billion bonanza (for charity!). None responded. It’s hard to know which is more galling: Trump’s own obvious contempt for his own supporters, whom he expects to share exactly his own protean, vibes-based approach to every policy issue and fall into line behind him wherever he happens to land, no matter how nakedly self-interested his own motives may be—or the fact that those supporters keep proving they deserve that contempt in spades. You believe charity is a crock and a swindle and a waste of taxpayer money, Trump spent the entire DOGE era telling his people. God, yes, we sure do!, they replied. Can you believe the lib media wants you to be mad that I’m giving money to charity? Trump all but asks today. The nerve of those guys!, they say. Still, there are consolations. Trump’s mass hypnosis of his closest supporters may be as strong as ever, but it’s only getting clearer to everyone outside the spell how insane the status quo has become. As Nate Silver noted, “the share of Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump broke 46 percent for the first time yesterday.” Hey, it’s a start. In a post-Trump world, what do we do about all the corruption? Assuming we can’t get the money back—at least, not all of it—how do we ensure this doesn’t happen again? Share your ideas. The People Are Leadingby William Kristol Every day and in almost every way, from special elections to national polls to citizen mobilization, we see an American public is increasingly aware and alarmed about the dangers of Trump and Trumpism. The latest piece of evidence: In a new survey by Data for Progress voters—who we’re often told only care about their own narrow self-interest and can only grasp what’s right in front of them—turn out to be clear-eyed about and opposed to Donald Trump’s plans for election interference in November. When asked, “Do you think President Trump will or will not attempt to deploy immigration enforcement agents to prevent participation in the 2026 midterms,” 64 percent of likely voters said Trump would attempt to do this, and only 21 percent thought he would not. When asked whether they support or oppose the federal government blocking ICE enforcement actions at polling locations or other election-related sites, 56 percent of likely voters support blocking ICE from election-related sites, while 34 percent oppose. This survey adds to a growing mountain of evidence that “kitchen table issues” are not, in fact, all that matters to voters, and that they care about their rights and freedoms and our democratic system as well. Good for the voters. But the elites are slower. You might think congressional Democrats would be doing more to highlight the issue of election interference in the current discussions of ICE funding. You might think our political, business, and civic elites would be doing more to mobilize on the subject of election interference. They may be getting there, at long last—but reluctantly and hesitantly. Their behavior brings to mind the alleged remark by the French politician, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, in 1848: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsBRINGING IN THE BIG GUNS: Another one for the I’m sure it’s fiiiiiine midterm-elections file, per Politico:
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND: The constant parade of new White House outrages can make it hard for us to keep our eyes on the ones that merely persist. But conditions in America’s immigration detention facilities remain appalling for the people stuck there—and even continue to provoke the occasional international incident. The Irish Times reports on Seamus Culleton, an Irish national who has lived in the United States for two decades, is married to a U.S. citizen, and was in green card proceedings when ICE scooped him up last September. Culleton has been languishing in a Texas ICE facility ever since:
In a follow-up article, the Irish Times reported that the government of Ireland has attempted to intervene in Culleton’s case: “Our Embassy in Washington DC is also engaging directly with the Department of Homeland Security at a senior level in relation to this case,” a spokeswoman said. Read the whole thing. Cheap Shots
1 Including, amazingly, a $25,000 donation to a PAC for then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletters or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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Department of Government Embezzlement
February 10, 2026
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