In case you wondered, I now call DOGE something else. I call it DOGS, although truthfully that’s not fair to dogs. Dogs are wonderful creatures; In my experience, dogs give you unconditional loyalty and love. These DOGS are loyal to one man, Elon Musk. They are shredding the federal government, destroying the careers and lives of tens of thousands of professional civil servants. They have gathered our personal data. They are embedded in high-level positions across the government. They should all be fired and sent back to Elon Musk.
But the bigger risk to our democracy is Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, one of the most powerful positions in the federal government. He is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist. He is working in opposition to the Founding Fathers, who made clear their intention to keep religion out of government.
Though Elon Musk is leaving the White House, DOGE isn’t going anywhere.
It appears that Russell Vought — Trump’s budget hawk and one of the chief architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — is stepping in to become DOGE’s new power broker.
With Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, at the helm, the slash-and-burn effort against the federal government may be on the cusp of an even darker turn.
In many ways, Vought is what Musk is not. After working at public policy organizations for nearly two decades, he has a far better understanding of how the government works — and how its weaknesses can be exploited. Despite advising Trump for almost 10 years, he’s also kept a fairly low profile, rarely giving interviews or speaking in public.
And Vought appears to be motivated first and foremost by creating a Christian nation controlled by an overtly Christian government.
Last year, Vought told undercover journalists with the Centre for Climate Reporting that he wants “to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation.”
“And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism,” Vought said. “That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”
To achieve that, Vought said in the interview he seeks to replace the non-partisan and merit-based federal civil service with a bureaucracy in which employment hinges on allegiance to Trump. He said he also seeks to impound congressionally approved funding, help coordinate mass deportations and find ways to let Trump use the military to put down protesters.
As former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently told The Atlantic, “Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer.”
Federal agencies, in particular the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), have already implemented numerous policies that Vought drafted to achieve those goals.
Earlier this year, OPM proposed new regulations that would formally revive Schedule F, a key tool developed by Vought to gut the federal government and replace career public servants with partisan ideologues.
In another move championed by Vought, the personnel office last week also announced a s0-called “Merit Hiring Plan” that would, if implemented, ask prospective hires for the thousands of DOGE-induced vacancies across the federal government to write short essays explaining their levels of patriotism and support for the president’s policies.
“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired,” reads one of the essay prompts.
Vought, too, has recently taken steps to impound funds.
This week, the White House sent Congress proposed spending cuts — also called a rescission package — that’s been backed by Vought in order to formalize cuts made by DOGE. The $9.4 billion package targets funding for NPR, PBS, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other foreign aid spending.
The rescission process allows a president to avoid spending money on discretionary programs, and since rescission bills only require simple majority approval in the House and Senate, there’s a chance some of the proposed cuts will become law. If they do, they will be the first presidentially proposed rescissions accepted by Congress since 1999.
If Congress doesn’t pass the package, the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which restricts when and how the president can delay or withhold federal funds, requires Trump to release the funds — that’s assuming that the administration follows the law.
The same day the White House sent Congress the package, Vought threatened that if lawmakers don’t pass the rescissions, the executive branch would find ways to override Congress’ constitutional authority to allocate funding.
“We are dusting off muscle memory that existed for 200 years before President Nixon in the 1970s and Congress acted to try to take away the president’s ability to spend less,” Vought said.
When asked by CNN whether he was attempting to tee up a legal fight to challenge the Impoundment Control Act as unconstitutional, Vought implied he was.
“We’re certainly not taking impoundment off of the table. We’re not in love with the law,” Vought said.
Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, stops a student while they are walking to class and asks how their day is going.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Across the Oakland Unified School District, the mantra for school staff is to call city police only as a last resort. If a disturbance occurs, they should rely first on in-house staff who don’t carry guns and can’t arrest anyone.
Since voting in June 2020 to disband its police department, Oakland has pursued one goal — to defuse conflict and avoid bringing in police and exposing students to the possibility of arrest. Oakland’s preference is for restorative justice, which emphasizes circle-of-trust interactions to improve how students treat one another.
“Most of the time, it’s just having conversations with them (students),” said Eddie Franklin, a former security guard who is now part of the district’s new police-free staffing. “Let them authentically be themselves, and the goal becomes to chip away at the rough edges they might have.”
It’s a strategy credited by the district with drastically reducing the 911 calls to city police from 2,128 during the 2019-20 school year, the last year the Oakland district had its own police department, to 200 in 2022-23.
But an EdSource analysis of data from the police shows a higher number of calls from just eight of the district’s 18 middle and highschools in half a year. The period from January to June 2023 shows those schools made 225 calls, with 105 considered “serious” for reasons including assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.
The Oakland data was part of a statewide investigation of school policing across California. EdSource gathered nearly 46,000 police logs of calls from and about 852 schools. The data collection was designed as a representative sample of California schools.
Police track all calls from and about eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools, while the district’s data captures calls made to police from all 106 schools.
Misha Karigaca, Oakland Unified’s director of student support and safety, could not fully reconcile the differences between the police call logs and the district’s record of internal calls to police for the same time period.
“If a 911 call comes from a cell phone and the call doesn’t get reported to my department, we will not have information about the call which can also account for significant discrepancies,” he said.
Karigaca and Board President Sam Davis acknowledged that while staff are trained when not to call 911 and to report any calls that they make, it doesn’t always happen.“We don’t capture every call in our data as (school) sites are required to notify us if law enforcement comes on campus; but we know of times when this hasn’t always happened,” Karigaca said.
Davis said it’s also possible other staff are calling 911 for nonemergent reasons because “a lot of people reach the end of their rope for all sorts of reasons.”
The Oakland schools included in EdSource’s data are McClymonds, Castlemont, Fremont, Oakland, Skyline high schools and Montera, West Oakland and Westlake middle schools.
“We’re not in a place where we can have completely police-free schools. That is our goal and what we’re working towards, but unfortunately, there are times when we do need police support,” Karigaca said. “It was our conditioning, whatever we needed they (police) would respond. It’s almost similar to our communities and our society — there’s not many other options. Anything that revolves around safety, we’re conditioned to call police.”
In place for two school years, the new police-free plan is being evaluated locally and nationally on whether it is achieving what it set out to do.
The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, in describing its study, put Oakland on the “leading edge of an emerging violence-reduction practice” happening in schools across the country, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the institute. Study results are expected in August.
Not everyone supports the decision to disband the district’s police department.
Board member Clifford Thompson said it was wrong for Oakland to disband its police department. “There’s little benefit to not having police at schools,” he said. “Totally eliminating the force without having a backup for those who need that type of force, it might not have been the best thing to do.”
Getting to police-free
The Black Organizing Project, a Bay Area community organization focused on racial, social and economic justice, has been advocating for the end of the police department since 2011. It finally happened in June 2020 with a unanimous vote of the school board.
Oakland has had a fraught and violent history of racism and police abuse of Black people for nearly 80 years, which factored greatly into the final push to disband the department following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.
The city’s Black population increased dramatically during World War II when slave descendants migrated west from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Police officers from those states were quickly recruited and stationed in Black neighborhoods. In 1950, a civil rights leader told the state Assembly that Black people lived “in daily and nightly terror” of Oakland police, according to a 1950 State Assembly report. The police department in Oakland Unified was born in 1957.
After more than 60 years of having an embedded police department in Oakland schools, educators, city officials and community partners are working to untangle the decades of policing culture and running its own police department.
There’s no contract or memorandum of understanding with the Oakland Police Department, but the district shares what staff are taught about when to call 911 and how to interact with police.
Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention recently reported to a joint council-district committee on the plan’s progress. The city of Oakland invested $2.4 million in the 2022-23 school year to address violence in schools by creating a School Violence Intervention and Prevention Program and hiring life coaches, violence interrupters and gender-based violence specialists to four comprehensive high schools and three continuation high schools.
Gender-based violence specialists are unique to Oakland, Jannetta said. The specialists have workshops about dating violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation.
Through surveys, officials found these extra staffers have more relatability to students, can focus on individual needs, and alleviate some of this work from teachers.
It’s too early to evaluate whether it is working, but the district is going in a positive direction, said Jessica Black, director of administration for the Black Organizing Project.
Getting to a police-free school environment also faces challenges. City and school officials say violence especially among 14 to 18-year-olds in the city bleeds into the school district.
During the 2022-23 school year, there were more than 600 high school suspensions and two shootings at OUSD high schools, according to the report. One of last year’s shootings was at Skyline High School, and just last month, another shooting occurred during the high school’s graduation that injured three people.
The city’s analysis of school violence puts some of the blame on the heightened crime in the city. According to the report, there’s been an increase in violence on campuses “that is related to community conflicts as well as an increase in instances of non-students showing up at school campuses with weapons to fight students.”
Despite the challenges, the school board has not considered reinstating the district’s police department, Davis confirmed. Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell declined to comment through a district spokesperson.
When to call police
One of the Black Organizing Project’s goals was to “uproot the security structure,” said Jasmine Williams, development director. With community support, the project pushed to restructure campus police, including getting rid of badges or anything that emulates the police and installing new titles, training, and redesigning the shirts they wear.
“The district is not coming up with this stuff on their own,” the project’s Jessica Black said. “We’re literally pushing the district to think differently.”
Oakland administrators can call for “nonviolent de-escalation support” from staff known as culture and climate ambassadors when there are fights, a student is causing harm to themselves or others, or unwelcome visitors are on campuses, according to the School Administrator Guidance to Police Free Response. There’s a nonemergency line administrators can call to dispose of firearms or illegal drugs, when there’s suspicion of a crime, or during lockdowns. For mental health crises, administrators also have different people to reach out to depending on the situation.
Students can still be disciplined, including suspended, but that’s rarely the first option, Karigaca said. Most of the time, interventions take place.
“It’s offering a conduit of other opportunities, such as a restorative session, once both parties are in a place to have a restorative session,” Karigaca said. “Sometimes it’s going to take a walk or going to a different office; sometimes it’s calling parents or connecting with a community resource.”
District police-free guidelines give a variety of reasons when calling 911 is appropriate: active shooters, fire, medical emergencies, a person with a gun or explosive, bomb threats, serious injuries, hostage situations, abduction or kidnapping, violent crimes, death at a school site, emergency evacuations, or any situation posing danger to health or safety.
Students can be arrested for some of these incidents, Karigaca said, but usually students aren’t arrested as a result of staff calling 911. There are about four to five arrests every school year, and it’s typically because police are arresting students for something they did outside of school, he said.
The district partners with organizations for alternative support, but sometimes they can’t immediately respond, Karigaca said.
“When we call CPS (Child Protective Services) or any other mental health crisis response folks, a lot of times their staff is also under-resourced and they aren’t able to respond,” Karigaca said. “Even they will tell us, ‘Call law enforcement.’”
New titles for security guards
As Eddie Franklin walked down the hallway of Bret Harte Middle School, it was as if every student knew who he was. Most would fist pump him or shake his hand and he knew every student’s name.
Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, shakes a student’s hand while walking down the hallway. Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Franklin has been at OUSD for seven years and used to be a security guard who worked with police and used handcuffs for detaining students. He became a culture keeper four years ago. Now he’s what’s called a culture and climate ambassador.
Franklin said he brings “an unbiased approach” to every situation even if the student is acting negatively. “Your goal is to actually make them (students) see and critically think about what’s in the best interest of both sides.”
Security guards were replaced with culture keepers and culture and climate ambassador who have leadership roles and assist culture keepers when needed, Karigaca said. The main priorities for all roles are to de-escalate violence and create positive relationships with students and staff.
The 63 culture keepers are spread around the district: up to three in middle schools; up to six in most high schools. Five elementary schools also have culture keepers.
When Franklin was a culture keeper, he said his day-to-day work evolved into understanding the different personalities on campus to get a better understanding of student behavior.
“So you don’t overreact when they do some of the things they do,” Franklin said. “But also try to give them an idea of what they can do differently.”
As a culture and climate ambassador, Franklin is deployed to different schools when extra support is needed, Karigaca said. Most of the time, they roam around different schools building relationships.
Franklin said he oversees 13 middle schools and does check-ins with staff to talk about what kind of support they need. A big part is building trust, he said.
When Franklin goes to a school, he said, his goal is “to act like a parent, a positive parent, let them know I actually care about you and support you in whatever you do, and I’m not going to be over the top if I react to something that you did negative.”
To other districts looking at Oakland as an example, Williams, of the Black Organizing Project, said she doesn’t want the message to be “all you have to do is implement a policy.”
“It took us 10 years of fighting to get here, and we are still fighting within the district,” Williams said. “It takes community to have even this much progress.”
EdSource reporters Thomas Peele; Daniel J. Willis and Andrew Reed contributed to this report.
Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe asked why Trump and Melania are attending the funeral of Pope Francis, since the two men disagreed about almost everything. He thinks it is Trump’s way of consoling his Catholic base. The Pope and Trump exchanged harsh words. The Pope was a man of faith who called on the faithful to welcome immigrants. Trump hates immigrants. The Pope called for mercy and compassion. All Trump can give is hatred and vitriol.
Cullen writes:
There’s a great scene in “The Godfather,” when all the other Mafia bosses attend Don Corleone’s funeral.
Ostensibly, the Godfather’s rivals are there to show respect, but there’s the unmistakable reality they are not mourning a death so much as relishing an opportunity.
The image of Donald Trump sitting near the body of Pope Francis conjures the image of Don Barzini nodding to Corleone’s family as he calculates in his head how many of Corleone’s soldiers and contacts he can peel off now that the Godfather is dead.
Why, on God’s green earth, would Donald Trump deign to attend Pope Francis’ funeral? To show respect? To mingle with other world leaders? To get his mug on television?
In the aftermath of the pope’s death, Trump was uncharacteristically gracious, posting on social media that Pope Francis was “a very good man.”
Trump called that very good man “disgraceful” in 2016 after the pope dismissed Trump’s proposal to build a wall between the US and Mexico. The pope said that anyone who only thinks about building walls instead of bridges “is not Christian.”
Trump, whose base includes millions of evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics, hit back, saying, “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”
For all the kind words he showered on the pope in the immediate aftermath of the pope’s death, it’s hard to imagine Trump disagreed with the less than charitable assessment offered by Roger Stone, the Trump advisor who avoided 40 months in prison after Trump commuted his sentence for lying to Congress to protect Trump.
Stone, displaying the compassion of a viper, said this of the pope: “His papacy was never legitimate and his teachings regularly violated both the Bible and church dogma. I rather think it’s warm where he is right now.”
So gracious.
But, give Stone this much: at least he was honest.
Trump’s platitudes ring hollow indeed. But the death of Pope Francis offers Trump and MAGA Catholics the prospect, however unlikely, of replacing a progressive voice in the Vatican with someone more ideologically in tunewith the more conservative voices within the church in the US.
Either way, Trump, who describes himself as a non-denominational Christian, won the Catholic vote, decisively. The pope’s criticism of Trump when it came to the environment, the poor and especially immigration doesn’t appear to have dissuaded the majority of American Catholics from voting for Trump.
The 9-member US Supreme Court that has been deferential to Trump’s unprecedented claims and exercise of executive power is comprised of six Catholics, only one of whom, Sonia Sotomayor, is liberal and regularly rules against Trump. (You could argue there are six conservative “Catholics” justices, given that Justice Neil Gorsuch, now an Episcopalian, was raised and educated as a Catholic, and voted with the five other conservative Catholic justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.)
Thomas Groome, a professor of theology at Boston College, acknowledges that conservative Catholics in the US have been a boon to Trump, and suspects Trump show of respect to Pope Francis and the institution is keeping with his transactional approach to pretty much everything: that the conclave of cardinals who will elect a new pope will reward Trump with someone who thinks more like him.
Highly unlikely, says Groome.
“Francis appointed about two-thirds of the cardinals who will select his successor,” Groome said. “Trump may be hoping he’ll get a reactionary, a right-wing pope. But I don’t think that will happen.”
Groome said he was more concerned about Trump’s reaction when the president realizes that, following Vatican protocol, he won’t get the best seat in the house at St. Peter’s Basilica.
“My understanding is he’s been assigned to sit in the third row,” Groome said. “He’s not going to like that.”
Still, gripped by Christian charity, and influenced by an enduring belief in redemption, Groome holds onto the remote, infinitesimal chance Donald Trump could, on the way to Rome, have a Road to Damascus conversion, that some of Pope Francis’ empathy could somehow rub off on him.
“St. Paul fell off his horse,” Groome said. “Maybe Donald Trump will, too.”
The U.S. Department of Education announced that it is reducing its workforce by half, shutting seven of 12 regional branches of its Office for Civil Rights.
California has over 700 pending cases with the Office for Civil Rights. The Trump administration has not provided details on what happens to cases handled by the shuttered regional office in San Francisco.
The administration said this dramatic slashing would be followed by “significant reorganization to better serve students, parents, educators and taxpayers.”
Educators and civil rights advocates say that vulnerable students will not have recourse when schools violate their civil rights.
The announcement of a large-scale effort to reduce the workforce of the U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday — or nearly half of the agency’s staff — is raising concerns among California educators and advocates about the future of civil rights enforcement and funding for vulnerable students.
Seven of 12 regional offices that handle federal civil rights complaints were shuttered, including the Office for Civil Rights branch in San Francisco, which handles complaints filed in California.
“There is no federal presence enforcing civil rights in schools in California,” said Catherine Lhamon, the former assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. “Our country and California will effectively see an end to a federal backstop of harm in schools.”
While local and state governments provide the vast majority of funding and governance for TK-12 schools and higher education, the federal government handles key aspects of education in the U.S., including disbursing student loans and Pell Grants; funding programs for students with disabilities as well as schools serving low-income students; and overseeing national research that provides critical data for educators and policymakers.
The U.S. Department of Education is also tasked with enforcing federal civil rights laws, authorized by Congress, through its Office for Civil Rights in order to protect students from discrimination. California alone has more than 700 pending complaints of civil rights violations.
“I don’t know what is going to happen to those cases,” said an attorney who works in the San Francisco branch of the Office for Civil Rights. The attorney declined to be identified, citing concerns about retaliation for speaking out. “The students are going to suffer.”
McMahon said in a statement that the reduction in force reflects a commitment to efficiency and accountability, and that the department will “continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview, including formula funding, student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students, and competitive grantmaking.”
Some conservative groups, such as the Cato Institute, applauded the dramatic slashing of staff.
“We don’t know how many people are actually needed to execute (the U.S. Department of Education) jobs, and it’s time to find out if it’s been a bloated bureaucracy all along,” said Neal McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom.
But many educators and advocacy groups who work with students forcefully condemned the cuts.
The Los Angeles Unified School District board passed a resolution Tuesday condemning the cuts to the U.S. Education Department, as well as cuts to other federal funding for school meals and Medicaid. Board member Kelly Gonez called on legislators to “push back against this radical and cruel agenda.”
“The Trump administration and its allies in Congress are looking to decimate federal funding to schools, including cuts to school meals, MediCal, and education block grants,” Gonez said. “More threats are on the horizon due to Trump’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the Department of Education entirely. We will not stand by while this administration removes essential support for students.”
‘These are not minor issues’
After a student with autism died after being restrained, Davis Joint Unified agreed to change its policies and training related to secluding and restraining students in 2022. That same year, Los Angeles Unified promised to address the concerns of disabled students who said they received little legally required special assistance during the height of the pandemic.
These are just a few of the high-profile complaints that the Office for Civil Rights investigated and settled in California.
“These are not minor issues,” said Lhamon, who was then the assistant secretary for civil rights.
The Biden administration pleaded with Congress for additional funding to staff the Office for Civil Rights, which was facing a mushrooming caseload that reached an all-time high during his presidency, according to the Office for Civil Rights’ annual report. Now staff face the prospect of their caseload doubling from 50 cases per person to 100 cases — an “untenable” number, Lhamon said.
The increase in cases, combined with an existing staffing shortage has likely created a backlog, extending the wait time for investigations to be completed and findings issued, said Megan Stanton-Trehan, a senior attorney at Disability Rights California who represents students with disabilities.
“With increasing complaints and an idea that we want to increase efficiency, what we shouldn’t be doing is closing offices and decreasing the workforce, unless what we really want is to not enforce civil rights,” said Stanton-Trehan.
The federal government is sending the message that though students are required to attend school, there is no federal agency that will protect them from harm, Lhamon said.
“That’s dangerous for democracy; it’s dangerous for schools,” she said.
The U.S. Department of Education has not announced a plan for transferring cases from San Francisco or any other shuttered regional office.
“We are in this work because we care, and we are compassionate,” said the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights attorney. “We are devastated for our students.”
The Office for Civil Rights page listed 772 records of pending cases that the office is currently investigating in the state of California, though it does not include any cases filed after Jan. 3. Of those, 597 of the listed cases involved K-12 institutions, while another 175 involved post-secondary education. Many of the complaints — 388 pending cases — involve disability discrimination complaints.
The cases date back to complaints filed in 2016 on a range of topics, including discrimination on the basis of national origin, religion and English learner status, as well as allegations of sexual violence, racial harassment and retaliation.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced that it had sent letters to 60 universities to inform them that the Office for Civil Rights was investigating them for antisemitic discrimination. That list included Sacramento State, Chapman University, Pomona College, Santa Monica College, Stanford University, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley.
Ana Najera-Mendoza, director of education equity and senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Southern California, is concerned that these complaints may take precedence over others. Every complaint filed in the Office for Civil Rights deserves to be considered in good faith, she said.
Stating that a reduction in force doesn’t equate to a reduction in the department’s responsibilities, Najera-Mendoza said, “No administration should elect to enforce some complaints over others to enforce a specific agenda.”
Investigative reporters at the New York Times–Eric Lipton, Theodore Schleifer, and Zoltan-Youngs, with assistance from Maggie Haberman– were watching the busy scene at Mar-a-Lago during the brief period when Trump announced draconian tariffs on other economies (but not Russia, North Korea, Belarus or Cuba), but before his decision to postpone the tariffs for 90 days. Trump demonstrated that he could rattle the global economy with a statement, then shift gears a few days later. What fun he must have had! He knew he could crater the stock markets and he knew that he could make it soar.
The financial market meltdown was underway when President Trump boarded Air Force One on his way to Florida on Thursday for a doubleheader of sorts: a Saudi-backed golf tournament at his family’s Miami resort and a weekend of fund-raisers attracting hundreds of donors to his Palm Beach club.
It was a fresh reminder that in his second term, Mr. Trump has continued to find ways to drive business to his family-owned real-estate ventures, a practice he has sustained even when his work in Washington has caused worldwide financial turmoil.
The Trump family monetization weekend started Thursday night, as crowds began to form at both the Trump National Doral resort near Miami International Airport, and separately at his Mar-a-Lago resort 70 miles up the coast.
Mr. Trump landed on the edge of one of the golf courses in a military helicopter — just in time for a dinner at Doral. The next day, LIV Golf, the breakaway professional league backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, was scheduled to hold a tournament at the course for the fourth time.
On Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, hundreds of guests gathered for the American Patriots Gala, a conservative fund-raiser that featured Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Javier Milei of Argentina, who told his supporters back home that he was hoping to catch up with Mr. Trump while there, seemingly unaware that Mr. Trump was double-booked at two of his family properties that night.
And that was just the weekend’s lead-up.
Mr. Trump ordered a new set of global tariffson Wednesday from the White House using his trademark Sharpie pen, a version of which is on sale at Mar-a-Lago for $3.
The announcement set off one of the largest market crashes in American history, erasing $5 trillion in market value from companies in the S&P 500 in just two days. Mr. Trump has said his policy would reverse what he calls unfair trade practices, and that eventually the “markets are going to boom.”
On Friday, as markets continued to tumble, thousands of golf fans visited Doral, as did Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s son, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Al-Rumayyan is also the chairman of LIV Golf, and was there to see its stars compete.
“It is a nice club,” Mr. Al-Rumayyan said as he walked around the golf course watching the players tee off.
LIV Golf — a venture intended to lift the Saudi profile worldwide even as it has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds — is styled as a daylong party, with club music pumping out of speakers lining tournament courses and machines dispensing wine and large beers. On Friday, fans watched a bit of golf and danced on the edges of the course. Others in MAGA hats walked around smoking cigars.
In short, the economic turbulence seemed far away.
“You are all looking a little too stiff!” said Matt Rogers, a LIV Golf announcer, as he yelled into a microphone, blasting his message across the greens as the first group of golfers on Friday prepared to play with dance music blaring in the background. “You need to turn this up! This is LIV Golf.”
Every room at the 643-room Trump Doral, including the $13,000-a-night presidential suite, was sold out through the weekend. Not a seat could be found at the BLT Prime steakhouse bar, where a porterhouse steak cost $130.
“This is the perfect venue,” Eric Trump said as he strolled the golf course Friday.
He had driven his father in a golf cart from the military helicopter to the resort dinner the day before, as the festivities over the big moneymaking weekend were getting underway.
The president spent much of Friday at yet another Trump family venue, Trump International Golf Club, not far from Mar-a-Lago, sending out social media messages during the day, including, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE.” [Had he already decided to pause the tariffs?]
By Friday night, the center of attention had shifted back to Mar-a-Lago, as Mr. Trump held another in a series of $1 million-a-head dinners at his private club in Palm Beach.
Since he was elected in November, Mr. Trump has hosted at least four of the fund-raisers, including one in December, two in March and the one Friday night, with a fifth planned for April 24.
The fund-raisers unfold in similar ways, according to people who have attended them.
Roughly 20 people gather around a candlelit table with big white flowers in the club’s “White and Gold Room” after a photo session. Mr. Trump speaks, then listens to the guests discuss their businesses, one by one. In just an hour or two, he can raise as much as $20 million — a great return on his time investment, associates say.
Attendees at some of the post-election dinners at Mar-a-Lago hosted by MAGA Inc., one of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising political action committees, have included the casino owner Miriam Adelson, the sugar magnate Pepe Fanjul and James Taiclet, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, along with representatives from the cryptocurrency and energy industries.
On Friday, Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, and Steve Wynn, the former casino executive, both billionaires, were among the guests at the Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser, according to two people briefed on the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the event.
The dinners have been just the start. Mar-a-Lago remains a popular site for Republicancandidates to host their own fund-raisers, Federal Election Commission records show. It is not clear to some Republicans why Mr. Trump has been raising money so aggressively, according to eight people involved in conservative fund-raising who have kept track of his efforts. Never before has a president ineligible for re-election vacuumed up so much money for a super PAC.
Some of Mr. Trump’s associates believe it is prudent to fund-raise when the money is available, as corporate interests and others seek to get access to the president or make amends for perceived slights, people close to him acknowledge.
The packed agendas at the two Trump venues recalled the constant buzz and spending by lobbyists, members of Congress and foreign leaders at Trump International Hotel in Washington before the Trump family sold its lease after Mr. Trump’s first term.
In addition to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, top sponsors of the Doral golf tournament included Aramco, the Saudi oil company; Riyadh Air, the airline owned by the sovereign wealth fund; and TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media company whose fate Mr. Trump is helping to decide, according to a large billboard outside one of the event’s party tents.
Mr. Trump’s merchandise shops — there are at least three of them at Doral — were also doing swift business, selling everything from a $550 Trump-branded crystal-studded purse to $18 Doral-branded paperweights made in China. The store clerk said that he did not know if new tariffs on imported products would mean price increases.
Fans in the crowd said that they had traveled from as far as South Africa to attend the event. Some purchased special tickets that cost as much as $1,400 to enter exclusive party areas with free drinks and food — tickets that were sold out as of Saturday.
In interviews, tournament attendees and others said that they did not mind the disconnect between the Wall Street meltdown and the events at the Trump properties.
“The sky is falling every day,” said Mike Atwell, a Key Largo, Fla., restaurant owner who was attending the LIV event with his wife enjoying lunch and drinks. “When you are happy, you drink. When you are sad, you drink. It all works out.”
Tyrell Davis, a 39-year-old entrepreneur spending Saturday afternoon in Palm Beach, said that he admired Mr. Trump for focusing on his own businesses while also implementing tariffs that he believed would benefit Americans.
Mr. Davis said that the United States had given away money to other countries for years while not investing in American cities, and that it only made sense Mr. Trump would continue to bolster his own businesses while in office.
“It’s all about business and money,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s what it’s all about. America is a business. It’s a corporation.”
On Saturday, as the tournament continued at Doral, Mr. Trump showed up at yet another family golf course, in Jupiter, Fla., which is holding its own, more modest tournament.
Good news was announced by the White House staff: “The president won his second round matchup of the senior club championship today in Jupiter, Fla., and advances to the championship round on Sunday.” Reporters and photographers were prohibited from watching him play, and were held down the street at a coffee shop.
As Mr. Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, one of his political committees sent out an offer to his followers: They could buy a signed replica of his executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The minimum contribution was $50. “I want you to have a PIECE OF HISTORY in your home,” Mr. Trump said in the solicitation.
The White House then announced that there would be no more public events on Saturday.
