Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
On the way to Independence Day weekend, the United States Department of Education announced that, “thanks to the leadership of President Trump,” the University of Pennsylvania had agreed to retroactively change the results of 100-, 200-, and 500-meter women’s freestyle swimming races from the 2021–2022 season. Penn removed Lia Thomas, the trans swimmer who had set school records in those events, from the university’s record books—and, according to the announcement, agreed to “send a personalized letter of apology” to each swimmer who had competed against Thomas.
Against the other enormities of the week, this was a minor piece of Donald Trump news. The president was busy with his ongoing speedrun through the grievances of the Declaration of Independence: making the House hold open the voting on his budget bill for hours while he pressured a handful of Republicans who’d voted against slashing Medicare or adding $3.4 trillion to the national debt into flipping their votes to yes (“fatiguing them into compliance with his measures”); opening a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades to showcase his anti-migrant cruelty (“refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither”); announcing a 20-percent tariff against Vietnamese imports (“cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”); dumping eight migrants in the war zone of South Sudan, a country none of them had any connection to, with no due process, after the Supreme Court majority allowed him to directly violate a lower court order (“transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offence”).
But the pettiness of the Penn swimming story was the thing that made it matter. One side of Trump’s presidency is his taste for grand tyranny, for wielding the vast powers of the United States in the most lawless and ugly ways he can. Congress and the Supreme Court have given up their own prerogatives to him, granting the White House illegal but effective license to dictate how the country spends its money, what its trade agreements are, who can work in the civil service and under what conditions, which niceties of the Bill of Rights his law-enforcement agents may choose to ignore.
The other side of Trump’s rule, though, is his equally relentless insistence on meddling in things that are none of the president’s business at all. Why should the president be in charge of collegiate swimming records? Formally, there was a chain of argument under it all about federal funding for higher education, the duty of institutions that receive such funding to ensure nondiscrimination, the contention that women assigned female at birth were being discriminated against by competing with and against a trans woman—but that was put together to justify what Trump wanted to do anyway. The federal government has enough obligations and enough opportunities to interfere that Trump can almost always find some lever to pull.
Four days before the Penn swimming records were rewritten, the president of the University of Virginia, Jim Ryan, announced he was resigning. The alternative, Ryan said, would have been “a unilateral decision to fight the federal government.” The Trump administration had accused the university of being inadequately committed to abolishing its diversity programs and opened an investigation into supposed racial discrimination—an investigation that it reportedly offered to drop if the university board would force Ryan out. Before Trump loyalists won control of the House in the 2022 midterms, the idea that the federal government would dictate who runs a university was unimaginable. Now it’s routine business.
Meanwhile, the same day that Penn gave the administration what it wanted, Paramount, the parent company of CBS, announced that it was going to pay the president $16 million. Trump had filed a lawsuit against Paramount last year, accusing 60 Minutes of unfairly editing an interview with his election opponent, Kamala Harris, to make her look good. Factually and legally, it was as frivolous as a case could be—an attack on the core freedom of the press in the name of a dumb conspiracy theory.
This country isn’t governed by law, however. It’s governed by Donald Trump. CBS had the absolute right to edit and broadcast the Harris interview; there was not anything even slightly unusual about it. But for the past year, Paramount has been trying to complete a merger with Skydance Media, and Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, which controls the transfer of broadcast licenses in such deals, had opened an investigation into CBS.
So Paramount paid the money. The $16 million figure matched the amount that ABC had paid Trump in January to settle a suit over George Stephanopoulos using the word “rape” to describe Trump’s sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll. “Paramount’s board was concerned that paying a higher amount to settle the case could increase the company’s exposure to potential legal actions from shareholders accusing it of bribery,” the New York Times reported.
The president gets what the president demands. Last month, he forced ABC to terminate reporter Terry Moran after Moran posted on X that Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the engine of his most malicious policies, used hatred for “spiritual nourishment,” while Trump used hatred “for his own glorification.” That same week, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, an institution over which the president has no legal control, resigned after briefly trying to hold out against Trump’s public declaration that he had fired her.
There are no limits. The Department of Justice is investigating how the student staff of the Harvard Law Review elects its officers and chooses which articles to publish. PepsiCo abolished the position of Chief DEI Officer under White House pressure. Google Maps relabeled the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” to comply with Trump’s declared name change. Major League Baseball bowed to Trump’s wishes and reinstated Pete Rose. Pete Rose’s ban was supposed to last forever, as a matter of principle. That was exactly why Trump made it go away.
Here is the complement to the roving gangs of goons snatching people off the street, the Marines on the streets of Los Angeles, the night flights to foreign torture prison. Millions and millions of Americans are still safe—most likely, physically, for now—from Trump’s worst impulses. But no one, and nothing, is truly secure. There isn’t anything too big or too essential for the president to meddle with; there isn’t anything so minor or irrelevant he’ll leave it alone.