Brian Beutler has a good post today about the right’s deployment of the “South African refugees” to stimulate their base. He thinks it might be a bridge too far:
Republicans presumably believe they’ve found a winning issue by importing white South Africans to the U.S. on the flimsy pretext that they’re refugees, and offering them a shortcut to citizenship. They don’t view the backdrop of a mass federal dragnet targeting (mostly) Latin American immigrants and foreign Muslim students as some embarrassing hypocrisy. The double standard is the point. Democrats will go to bat for the brown ones, but not the white ones. Some progressive activist somewhere might even make hostile comments about whiteness. Trumpists can transform this into online propaganda aimed at white independents and swing voters, and ride it to higher poll numbers.
That’s the cynical underpinning of their gambit.
I think they’ve miscalculated. Casual onlookers might have missed the part where the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, donned a tie honoring apartheid South Africa, and asserted that white Afrikaners would “assimilate” more easily than Afghan refugees and other non-whites.
But I suspect most people will still see a racist double standard, and most of them will disapprove. I suspect many of the disapprovers will view it as a revelatory expression of Republican values, and reject it. And that’s before we get to the part where MAGA influencers ditch the pretext and announce that the move is driven by their own hatred of non-whites.
This happens over and over again. They believed rounding up tattooed brown men and flying them to a concentration camp in shackles would be a big political winner, but it quickly ignited backlash—both against the subversion of due process and the cruelty to immigrants—and turned into the biggest rule-of-law test of the second Trump presidency.
I think he’s probably right? But I do worry that the firehose of atrocities may be numbing all of us to the horror a little bit. I hope not.
If this blatant, racists double standard doesn’t make people see these people for what they are I’m not sure what would.
Mr. Kleinhaus was part of this initial tranche of 59 Afrikaners. He has two thumbs, a Twitter account, and a lot of opinions.
Most of his opinions are garden-variety MAGA. Despite being a South African citizen, about half of Kleinhaus’s tweets are about the greatness of Donald Trump; how awesome Teslas are; and the woke mind virus (he’s against it).1
But there’s also some . . . other stuff.
In one case, Kleinhaus advocated for physical assault on an American citizen. Retweeting a story about a guy who had been given a citation for his part in a road-rage incident with another driver, Kleinhaus wrote, “He needs a beating urgently!” (Kleinhaus was upset because the other driver involved in the incident was driving a Tesla.)
But most importantly, Kleinhaus has also posted about Jews and Israel in the kind of way that might get someone who wasn’t a white South African deported—calling Jews “untrustworthy” and “dangerous.”
In April 2023, Kleinhaus responded to video of Christians scuffling with Israeli police on the way to the Church of the Nativity by saying Jews are naturally “untrustworthy.”
Five days after the October 7th attack, Kleinhaus posted a link to another video, hosted by a Facebook account called “Israel Is a Terrorist State,” that showed clashes between Christians and Israeli police. Kleinhaus wrote: “Jews attacking Christians!”
Its interesting that these freedom loving MAGA alpha males want to institute this deeply creepy 3rd world culture where we have a national daddy that must be obeyed. https://t.co/mEFiHynIx6
I’m so old I remember when the right used to get soooo angry when a president would go overseas and “apologize” for America failing to live up to its ideals. Trump’s innovation is that he’s apologizing for America having ideals in the first place. Republicans seem to like that much better.
I must confess that I didn’t expect to see a GOP president cozying up to a former al Qaeda leader quite this soon but here we are:
As an elder millennial it’s really something to have see the coda to the War on Terror era being the U.S. president shaking hands with the former head of Al Qaeda in Syria and then building a Trump Tower in Damascus. pic.twitter.com/4kEdmQfEjY
He calls his terrorist resume a “strong past” and admires him for being a ‘fighter.” I’m also so old I remember when he used say he was going to torture terrorists to death. But, of course, he never really cared. It was just a way to demonstrate his sadism, always a big selling point on the right.
He really likes the looks of these Middle Eastern leaders which I do find a little odd. I guess they’re all his type?
Trump to the Emir of Qatar: "We came from Saudi Arabia where we have another great man over there that's a friend of yours. You guys get along so well and like each other. You sort of remind me a little bit of each other…both tall handsome guys who happen to be very smart."🤡 pic.twitter.com/cuWvrjgw6j
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) May 14, 2025
If it’s not enough that Elon Musk’s DOGE has been taking a chainsaw to the federal labor force, about three weeks ago, the Trump administration announced that it is going to begin implementing “Schedule F” the creepy huxleyan name for the Executive Order they’d produced at the end of the first term to make it easier to fire civil service employees they deemed disloyal. President Biden threw it in the trash but, as expected, it’s back. After all, it’s Russell Vought’s tools of the trade, and now that he’s back at the Office of Management and Budget he’s been itching to use it.
It’s estimated that 50,000 people will be subject to the law once they are re-classified from civil service protections to “at will” policy employees. It’s pretty obvious that a witch hunt for personnel that any rando MAGA appointee suspects of being a turncoat (or just a Democrat) will soon be fired. The whole idea was to fill the jobs with the kind of people Russell Vought thinks have America’s best interests at heart. That means white, Christian nationalists.
The Washington Post reported on this back in 2024, in anticipation of his expected influence in a Donald Trump second term:
Vought also embraces Christian nationalism, a hard-right movement that seeks to infuse Christianity into all aspects of society, including government. He penned a 2021 Newsweek essay that disputed allegations of bias and asked, “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’” …
Looking at immigration through that lens, Vought has called for“mass deportation” of illegal immigrants and a “Christian immigration ethic” that would strictly limit the types of people allowed entry into the United States.
Essentially Vought takes the same position as Trump adviser Stephen Miller but he comes at it from a Christian Nationalist perspective. All roads lead to persecution of immigrants in the Trump administration.
Vought believes that we are in a “post-constitutional” time which explains a lot about how the administration is going about its work through the courts. In a piece he wrote back in 2023, Vought laid out his critique of what the MAGA types refer to as the “deep state” insisting that a federal government staffed with experts and bureaucrats had taken over the government and usurped the will of the people. It’s a bit confusing since he seems to also think that “The Left” has been degrading the constitution for over a hundred years and that the congress needs to have more power but maybe not so much. In any case he concludes with this rousing cri de guerre:
But the long, difficult road ahead of returning to our beloved Constitution starts with being honest with ourselves. It starts by recognizing that we are living in a post-Constitutional time. Our need is not just to win congressional majorities that blame the other side or fill seats on court benches to meddle at the margins. It is to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it. That and only that will be how American statesmanship can be defined in the years ahead.
A big part of Vought’s strategy, as with Miller’s, was to legally challenge the prevailing meaning of precedents, rulings and words themselves.
I was reminded of all this when I read this piece by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo about the coming implementation of Schedule F. As he rightly points out, “it’s absurd to think that Congress would create the Civil Service system in such a way that a President could simply reclassify people and suddenly the whole system of protections would disappear.” Why would they even have bothered to do it at all?
Marshall observes that such actions as Schedule F (or DOGE or the use of the Alien Enemies Act) rests on “the assumption (quite possibly right) that the federal judiciary would dispense with the plain meaning of the relevant federal workforce laws and substitute novel definitions of key phrases put forward by Trump administration lawyers.” I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is their intention. But Vought, at least two years ago, understood that it might not be that easy.
In that essay about radical constitutionalism, he wrote at length about immigration and how it should be understood as an “invasion” which he believed should empower border Governors to apprehend migrants and deport them according to Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution. (It does no such thing.) Vought complained:
My point in bringing this up is that you would be surprised at how hard it has been to get conservative lawyers to see this for no other reason than its novelty. That is what has to change. This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.
It doesn’t seem to be taking, at least not in the way Vought hoped. Ian Millhiser of Vox attended a Federalist Society gathering and found the conservative legal community “far more ambivalent about their president’s second term than one might expect after such a fruitful partnership.”
“They are going to have the same level of success they had in the last administration” with getting rid of long-standing rules and regulations, George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce told the conference, “which is virtually none.”
Implicit in this critique is a belief that the web of procedural barriers, bureaucratic trap doors, and paperwork burdens that prevent any presidential administration from changing too much, too fast will survive the second Trump administration more or less unscathed. Pierce predicted that many of Trump’s deregulatory efforts would simply be struck down in court.
Millhiser says that some of this can be attributed to a turf war — the conservative legal community is not happy with the cavalier treatment of the judiciary by the Trump people. Evidently, they are feeling a bit stroppy about all this unitary executive business now that it’s being wielded by an elderly con man and a car manufacturer with a chainsaw.
So far, most judges have been similarly unwilling to go along with Russ Vought and Stephen Miller’s mad schemes. But last night a district judge in Western Pennsylvania did give them some succor. She held that the Alien Enemies Act had originally applied to pirates and robbers so it does apply to foreign gang members. (She did say they have to be given a hearing within 21 days so at least there’s no grant to just shoot them as one imagines would have been allowed in one of those 18th century pirate invasions.)
The case is headed to the Supreme Court where we will almost assuredly see at least two, probably three, of the justices uphold this cockamamie definition. And there are many more cases coming based upon Vought’s “radical constitutionalism” which rely on the Supreme Court throwing out the plain meaning of the English language and adopting MAGA extremists’ definition of the constitution.
I wish I could say with confidence that they won’t. Perhaps we just have to hope that Millhiser’s observation that the conservative legal fraternity isn’t happy about Trump and company treading on their turf will get us out of this mess. For now anyway.
Republicans imagine a return to halcyon days when America once was “great.” But they are rather vague about when that was, who it was great for, and what was so great about it.
There are clues, of course. Movement conservatism arose in the 1970s to roll back the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s: to before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts ended Jim Crow, before Medicare and Medicaid. Conservative moneyed elites have worked to roll back the New Deal since the 1930s: to before the U.S. banned child labor, before the minimum wage and the 40-hour week, and before Social Security. The felon-in-chief imagines a return to the Gilded Age of William McKinley over a century ago, a time when tariffs were big and beautiful. Before the income tax. Before direct election of senators. Before women could vote. Read between the lines.
But about Medicaid. While Donald Trump gushes with envy toward the Gulf State potentates pouring billions into his pockets, Republicans supporting Trump 2.0 are hard at work trying to make American non-billionaires’ lives nasty, brutish, and short again. Their proposed cuts are part of a bill the president himself named big and beautiful. But then, beauty is in the eye of the bondholder.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid in a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
“The math is not adding up. They’re trying to convince people that they are cutting millions of undocumented people from [Medicaid],” Ocasio-Cortez said. She noted that the GOP is claiming that one million undocumented immigrants are collecting Medicaid payments, but their cuts would result in 13.7 million people losing their health insurance.
“They’ve asked us to read this bill, and we have. This bill bans the people that they kick off of Medicaid from even buying their own insurance from the Affordable Care Act exchange,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, adding that the bill “increases costs for people they do deem eligible and who are low income and forces them to pay even more.”
AOC: The math is not adding up. Their claim is that one million undocumented people are on Medicaid. So why are they trying to cut 13.7 million Americans off their healthcare?
It’s almost as if punishing people for needing health care is the goal.
The work requirements in the proposed bill, argue researchers Michelle Miller-Adams and Beth C. Truesdale, “will only achieve one goal: Kicking people off coverage.” As if in the minds of Republican authors that’s a bad thing.
“Under the proposed rules, states would also be allowed to ask recipients to document their eligibility every six months instead of annually and to remove people’s benefits if they do not comply,” the pair elaborate. “But the reality is that requirements like these move people off programs not by requiring work but by requiring more reporting of work.”
“And your point is?” the GOP might say. Anyway, all this is just misinformation (another from The New Republic):
Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee went back and forth Tuesday on who exactly would be affected if conservative lawmakers trudge forward with $880 billion in cuts to the public health insurance coverage. At one point, a wheelchair-bound protester identifying herself as from Youngstown, Ohio, interrupted Alabama Representative Gary Palmer to express her fears.
“You will kill me, I’m HIV-positive,” she shouted as security rolled her out. “I have survived on my meds that are $10,000 a month.”
This woman yelled “you will kill me!” at Rep Gary Palmer (R-Ala) after he said Republicans aren’t targeting the disabled with their cuts.
Bill doesn’t target disabled beneficiaries but advocates they’ll get caught up in more frequent eligibility checks, could lose benefits pic.twitter.com/uEldAUYBql
— Arthur Delaney 🇺🇸 (@ArthurDelaneyHP) May 13, 2025
“It’s unfortunate that people are so enraged by the misinformation that they’ve been given,” Palmer said once security removed the woman and her wheelchair. “It’s a commentary on this Congress and how we treat people.”
No, congressman. It’s a commentary on you:
The Republican bill would kick 8.6 million Americans off Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (Republicans offered their own numbers, revealing shortly before the committee meeting was scheduled to begin that at least 7.6 million Americans would be affected.)
But not only recipients of care under Medicaid. Reduced funding means reduced work (and jobs) for caregivers. American health care workers who see the writing on the wall are leaving for Canada where care is universal:
More than 100 U.S. nurses are headed north to help alleviate B.C.’s shortage of health-care workers, after the province announced a new program last month that takes advantage of the “chaos” south of the border by streamlining credential checks.
Premier David Eby and Health Minister Josie Osborne said Monday that 113 nurses have already received registrations to practice here after the government made changes in April to make it easier for U.S.-trained health-care workers to work in the province.
They told reporters in Victoria that a total of 1,200 individuals have expressed interest, including 573 physicians, 413 nurses, 133 nurse practitioners and 39 other health professionals.
American health researchers are fleeing to Europe. Salaries there may be lower, but “Europe’s more generous social safety net can make up for a large part of the salary differential.” That’s beginning to look like a better deal for Ph.D. or postdoctoral students who wish to peruse their vocations now that Trump 2.0 policies treat them with disdain. But America’s most educated are not the only ones Trumpism treats with disdain.
Therefore, Democrat’s challenge is to paint for voters a vision of America where life is not as nasty, brutish, and short as Republican retrograde policies would make it again. But neither can Democrats defend what is not working. People see the game stacked against them and the so-called America Dream as a tired joke. The Great Recession wiped out what little wealth tens of millions of Americans had scraped together before 2008, and left Americans born in this century with a denuded future. The Gilded Age repeats itself, this time as farce.
Barack Obama promised “Change We Can Believe In,” and he delivered the Affordable Care Act with all its flaws. But he also bailed out the banking industry while average Americans paid for banker’s perfidy with their homes. Voters declared a plague on both major parties and voted in a clownish billionaire who promised to upend the system that failed them. He’s doing a bang-up job. Whether or not people will appreciate what they wished for when their children start dying of preventable diseases and their lives become still more brutish is doubtful.
What’s not in doubt is that Democrats will not save them (or themselves) by offering more of the same and less Trumpism. They must offer something better that’s not a return to the New Deal past. For that, they’ll have to start empowering younger people who will shape and own the future.
It is a mistake to attribute a calculated strategy to Donald Trump’s moves in his second term. Yes, he has ideologically driven advisers such as Stephen Miller and Russ Vought pulling his strings from behind the proscenium arch. But Trump otherwise operates more by instinct than intellect (what intellect?). He doesn’t have a “strategy,” per se. That doesn’t mean his actions don’t fit recognizable patterns.
Over at The Atlantic, Andrew O’Donohue names Trump’s approach to the courts, advanced in the name of popular policies (gift link):
The pattern I have seen as I’ve studied democratic backsliding globally is what I call “court-baiting.” To undermine public support for the judiciary, political leaders adopt policies that are popular but very likely illegal. Many courts then rule against the executive, and the executive uses their unpopular decision to condemn the judiciary writ large. Court-baiting is a potent strategy because it puts judges in a lose-lose position: Either strike down a popular policy and face public backlash, or allow the policy and erode legal limits on executive power. Such tactics are tailor-made to undermine judges’ legitimacy, because elected leaders can claim to represent the “will of the people”—and thus democracy—when the courts block popular policies. Even when losing, these would-be authoritarians win.
This strategy of court-baiting is difficult to defend against because political leaders determined to weaken the courts hold a key strategic advantage. The executive branch sets the policy agenda, whereas the judiciary is a reactive institution. Presidents can thus choose favorable terrain on which to do battle with the judiciary, challenging the courts on policy issues that are popular with voters. In the United States today, by clashing with the judiciary on numerouscases involving immigration, the president is following precisely this court-baiting playbook.
The rest of the piece examines how this strategy has worked for “several would-be authoritarians—such as those in Turkey, Mexico, and El Salvador.” The results are sobering.
A federal grand jury indicted Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan on Tuesday on charges of helping an immigrant living in the country illegally to evade immigration officers who were looking to arrest him.
The grand jury hit Dugan, a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge, with two counts. She was accused of “knowingly” concealing a migrant and telling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that they needed a warrant to carry out their search. Dugan was also charged with directing the migrant and his counsel to leave the courtroom through a “non-public” jury door to avoid immigration authorities.
If convicted on both counts listed in the two-page indictment, she could face up to six years in prison.
As you’ve heard, MAGA activist Ed Martin, the former acting D.C. U.S. Attorney who behaved like Laura Loomer on meth during his short tenure, has been “promoted” to the Department of Justice where he’s in charge of the “weaponization group” looking at all the enemies within who had the nerve to try to investigate his Dear Leader. Here’s what he had to say today about his new duties:
“There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed. And that’s a fact. That’s the way things work. And so that’s, that’s how I believe the job operates.”
Lol. A “culture that respects shame?” That may be the funniest thing I’ve heard all week, especially coming from a hardcore MAGA cultist.
“Derogatory information sometimes is disclosed in the course of criminal investigations and prosecutions, but we never release it gratuitously,” then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote in a memo, adding that he believed Comey had given a “textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”
This piece by Noah Feldman in the NYRB discusses the legitimacy of the court and exhorts liberals and conservatives alike to refrain from degrading its reputation since it’s all we’ve got if we want to preserve democracy. (It’s thought provoking, to say the least, although I find it hard to agree with the notion that holding the court to some kind of ethical standards equals President Trump calling judges communists and blatantly defying the rule of law.)
He’s a liberal who disagrees with many of the Court’s decisions but he holds out hope that they will adhere to the founders vision for the court, who he says saw its primary function was to simply protect the rule of law.
His conclusion:
The chief justice is right to be concerned about Trump’s antijudicial language, which points to the most serious danger that may lie ahead: the administration’s overt defiance of a judicial order. This would amount to denying that the courts have the final authority in the interpretation and application of federal law.
If such an overt defiance were to occur, the courts have some measures available to them, but they may in practice be of limited utility against a determined executive branch. In the event of a judicial finding that an official who knowingly violated a court order was guilty of criminal contempt of court, the official might be pardoned by the president. A civil contempt finding could impose monetary fines on an official, and in theory a court could order the official detained until payment is made. But the arrest would ordinarily be made by the US Marshals, part of the executive branch and housed in the Department of Justice, and they might be directed by Trump not to cooperate with the judiciary. The courts could potentially direct some other person to enforce their orders against an employee of the executive branch. But if Trump were to direct other executive branch personnel to protect the official held in civil contempt, it seems unlikely that a third party could coerce the official into court-ordered custody.
A situation like this, in which a court ordered the Trump administration to act and it flatly refused, would almost certainly qualify as a genuine constitutional crisis. The term “constitutional crisis” is descriptive, not legal. No official definition appears in the Constitution or federal law or Supreme Court precedent. I define a constitutional crisis as a situation in which the Constitution does not provide a clear, definitive answer to a basic problem of governance and the political figures in conflict are ready to press their competing courses of action to the limit.2
The classic American example was Richard Nixon’s refusal to honor parts of the subpoenas served on him for the Watergate tapes.
In such situations, no one can say for certain what the outcome will be. A compromise may resolve the crisis, or one of the two sides may prevail. Congress impeached Nixon, charging him with ignoring the order, among other high crimes and misdemeanors. He turned over some parts of the tapes but not others and subsequently resigned. That outcome seems vanishingly unlikely in any conflict between Trump and the courts.
If Trump were to prevail in a confrontation with the courts, it would be devastating to the rule of law. Perhaps some members of the public would protest. But it is hard to imagine that affecting Trump’s course of action. People in other countries might express shock and condemnation, but again, Trump seems unlikely to care. One would think, indeed hope, that the markets would respond with serious concern. The rule of law protects not only persons but property. Yet it is also conceivable that the markets might think Trump’s (still hypothetical) disobedience would be restricted to noneconomic matters and remain unmoved. After all, markets function even in many autocratic countries. And partial rule of law, restricted to economic matters, is not unknown in the world, historically or today.
If the courts were to prevail, and Trump bowed to their pressure with respect to a given order but remained in office, he might pay very little price. His opponents already see him as a potential dictator. His supporters might not care about his disobedience, especially if he backed down. Trump may have little to lose in experimenting with disobeying judicial orders, even if he precipitates a crisis. As Alexander Hamilton famously observed, the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse…and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” That means, ultimately, that the Supreme Court needs the president to believe, or at least to act as though he believes, that violating its interpretation of the law would break the constitutional order. Like it or not, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is now the most important bulwark of our delicate constitutional democracy.
For some reason that doesn’t make me feel any better. Our norms have eroded so completely that I think half the country (and all of the Republican establishment) no longer believes in any of this and Donald Trump is clearly losing any inhibitions he might had had about respectability, which is what this comes down to. And that’s assuming the court does the right thing in the first place. There’s a very good chance that rather than put this to the test, they will give Trump what he wants in order to preserve a pretense of their own relevance.
I wish I was more optimistic about this but … sigh.
1. A 30 percent tariff is still really, really high, especially combined with the 10 percent tariff we’re imposing on everyone else. The back of my envelope says that the average U.S. tariff rate will now be around 13 percent, up from around 3 percent when Trump began his trade war. Before all this drama that would have been seen as wildly protectionist.
2. This wasn’t a case of both sides backing down. China only imposed its tariffs as a response to Trump’s gambit, and has reduced them only because he retreated. And retreat he did. This was basically Trump running away from the killer rabbit.
3. The prohibitive tariff has been paused, not canceled. Nobody knows what will happen in 90 days. I’ve long argued that the uncertainty created by Trump’s arbitrary, ever-changing tariffs is at least as important as the level of those tariffs. Well, the uncertainty level has arguably gone up rather than down.
4. This retreat probably hasn’t come soon enough to avoid high prices and empty shelves. Even if shipments from Shanghai to Los Angeles — which had come to a virtual halt — were to resume tomorrow, stuff wouldn’t arrive in time to avoid exhaustion of current inventories.
I guess we all knew it. But it’s probably important to document it. I see far too many MSM pundits saying we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the trade war is over.
The inflation report today was very good. But all it says is that inflation was going down and things were going very well until “liberation day” ffucked the whole thing up. If Trump wasn’t a demented narcissist he would have ridden the Biden soft landing to victory. Instead, we’re looking at recession. Heckuva job.
🚨 BREAKING: A very confused Trump just saluted Saudi military officials at the Royal Court in Riyadh—a blatant breach of U.S. presidential protocol.
Imagine for one second if Joe Biden had done that. Fox News would have a week-long meltdown and demand hearings. But when it’s… pic.twitter.com/KAPP72JsTM
