Donald Trump has almost certainly never read Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t in his 78 years heard and taken inspiration from “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (The New York Times):
President Trump broadened his campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes with a new memorandum that threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration.
The memorandum directs the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States” or in matters that come before federal agencies.
Mr. Trump issued the order late Friday night, after a tumultuous week for the American legal community in which one of the country’s premier firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, struck a deal with the White House to spare the company from a punitive decree issued by Mr. Trump the previous week.
Trump cannot obey the law and will not uphold the Constitution, but nobody knows more than him about “frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation.” He ran for president in 2024 to avoid spending the rest of his life in a jumpsuit matching his slathered-on complexion and to exact retribution against perceived enemies. He’s making good on both.
The biggest legal thorn in Trump’s side, attorney Marc Elias, had a pithy response last night to the “deal” Trump stuck with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
If a law firm won't risk everything to defend itself, what makes you think it will risk anything to defend you?My advice: Find a law firm that will not back down and will never bend a knee.
May we all be as defiant when the brownshirts come for us. Elias went further:
“Elias Law Group will not be deterred from fighting for democracy in court. There will be no negotiation with this White House about the clients we represent or the lawsuits we bring on their behalf."
Anna Bower, Senior Editor at Lawfare, posted a thread on Trump’s attacks on the legal profession:
THREAD: Law firm statements issued in response to Trump’s executive orders targeting lawyers.(This thread will be updated as additional statements are released. Want to flag something that I missed? DM me, email me at anna.bower@lawfaremedia.org, or send me a message on Signal at annabower.24)🧵⬇️
Keker, Van Nest, & Peters: “We encourage law firm leaders to sign on to an amicus effort in support of Perkins Coie's challenge to the Administration's executive order targeting the firm, and to resist the Administration's erosion of the rule of law."
Kwall Barack Nadeau PLLC: “Make no mistake, the goal of the Trump Administration is not only to punish specific lawyers or firms, but to chill the legal profession itself, until there is no one left willing to stand up in court and say, 'This is wrong.'”
Kwall Barack Nadeau PLLC: “Make no mistake, the goal of the Trump Administration is not only to punish specific lawyers or firms, but to chill the legal profession itself, until there is no one left willing to stand up in court and say, 'This is wrong.'”
Trump 2.0 started with non-citizens. Now it’s moved on to lawyers. Don’t think that if this administration sees you as an enemy, it won’t in time come for you on whatever they can “Trump” up.
So. There’s a lot of spooky stuff going around. People are worried. Thousands of Americans with means “are applying to visa programs abroad” or hedging, purchasing new passports in other countries. (I know several who’ve gotten out.) Donald Trump’s deportations in defiance of federal courts has people unnerved. “We’ll Always Have Las Vegas” from Thursday is about incidents like Canadian Jasmine Mooney‘s unwelcome encounter with DHS harming the tourism industry. As things go with Americans, it’s one thing for DHS to throw brown-skinned “foreigners” in prison. It’s another when it happens to someone who might be nice, white you.
On Friday I posted this (below) on Threads (where I have no followers) to see if I could stir up some shit. Guess I did. It’s gotten 11.5K views.
View on Threads
Friends ask me how I am and my stock reply is now “Managing my stress.”
The Good News
Nineteen-sixties leftovers tend to like big, high-profile actions on the Mall that get lots of one-day press. Gather with your tribe, make a lot of noise, and go home feeling better about an issue you’ve accomplished little to change. When we don’t see those actions today, we think nothing of consequence is happening to push back against the madness of King Donald. But Digby sent along a post you need to see. Sometimes smaller and everywhere is a better 21st-century strategy.
Many underestimate resistance to the current Republican administration because they view resistance through a narrow lens. The 2017 Women’s March in particular — immediate in its response, massive in its scope and size — may inform collective imaginations about what the beginning of a resistance movement should look like during Trump 2.0.
In fact, our research shows that street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest. Although it is true that the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025 — held on Jan. 18 — saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.
In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests. Coordinated days of protest such as March Fourth for Democracy (March 4), Stand Up for Science (March 7), rallies in recognition of International Women’s Day (March 8), and protests demanding the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil suggest little likelihood of these actions slowing down. These are all occurring in the background of a tidal wave of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s early moves.
This resistance movement is built upon but doesn’t look like past movements. “From mass refusals to boycotts to walkouts, regular Americans are bravely pushing back against the administration. Their actions are diverse and multiplying — and already having an impact,” reports Waging Nonviolence:
And about those mass protests of past decades. You and I both know that King Donald is just itching to have “his generals” shoot protesters. He just needs actions large enough that he can invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, declare martial law (he’ll call it marshal law), and send out troops (if they’d comply) to create the largest mass casualty shooting in American history.
A multitude of smaller Whack-a-mole protests by the thousands may frustrate Doanld’s wet dream and probably be safer for the resistance. Keep it up.
The Dolly Parton mural on Haywood Road near Beauty Parade Hair Salon now has a new addition: RuPaul! (Photo credit: WLOS Staff, 2021)
The Ink this morning offers weekend reads that for some reason include a 2021 essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom: The Dolly Moment. Meaning Dolly Parton. The singer both embodies southern woman and subverts it by portraying it in drag. She somehow effortlessly (with great effort and ambition).
As a Black fan of Parton’s, Cottom writes, “Being pretty got her out of the foothills, but her genius with embodying country music’s most oppressive forces — gender and class — was possible because of her ability to leverage race and gender. That is what us sociologists would call the place where self meets society.” She is rich and elite without the taint.
Parton performs blondeness, an unstated synonym for white while caricaturing Southern womanhood and being very un-Southern womanly ambitious. “Her authenticity rings with the charm we demand of Southern womanhood,” while she carries herself as a drag version, and people across race and culture love her for it. Besides, Cottom observes, “The woman can write her ass off.”
It is well worth a read. But the essay popped into my in-box while I was contemplating how Democrats fail at being authentic for many voters by trying too hard to please everyone. They’ve convinced themselves that to sell their inclusiveness and earn their big-tent bona fides, they must name-check every marginalized ethnic, racial, and gender subgroup, and taught those groups to listen for it (the way Democratic politicians name-check HBCUs). Not to hear themselves name-checked means they’ve been excluded and should seek allies elsewhere. Super-particularizing also leaves people who don’t see themselves falling into any of those categories (and who resist categorization) feeling left out even as Democrats mean to include them.
What that name-checking has also done is make many HDCW’s (historically dominant communities of white people) feel left out. The Republican Party has leveraged that to the hilt by stoking resentment.
What Dolly does effortlessly by singing of Home, Love, Longing, Desire, and Faith, Democrats fail at by trying too hard.
Bradley Bartell and his wife, Camila Muñoz-Lira. (Gofundme)
Back when I observed the New Age “manifest” in the early 1990s, I created a series of mock flyers for New Age services and workshops and posted them on bulletin boards beside the genuine articles. My difficulty was that as fake-crazy as I made them, I found that I couldn’t keep up with the real crazy. Recently, an interviewer asked a filmmaker how they could invent a credible dystopian world while living in one.
Some people of the people I met around town and at New Age expos, for example, were committed to natural healing to the detriment of their own well-being:
I knew a young woman with porcelain skin who contracted some common skin infection back in the 1990s. It was the sort of thing a physician might knock out with a prescription. But she didn’t trust western medicine. She went for months using “natural” remedies to heal herself as her face grew more mottled, swollen and pockmarked. It was a painful thing to watch and surely worse for her. When finally she became desperate enough to seek licensed medical help, the damage was done. The infection cleared up, but her face would never be the same. I don’t know if she chalked that up to the failure of western medicine or not.
Watching Trump 2.0 manifest carries echoes of that period 30 years ago. Today it’s vaccines:
The Texas parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from measles Feb. 26 told the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense in a video released Monday that the experience did not convince them that vaccination against measles was necessary.
“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”
Their 6-year-old is dead of a dis-ease we’d essentially eradicated with vaccines.
A Donald Trump voter from Wisconsin similarly stuck to his irrational faith in the face of family adversity and lived experience of his Peruvian wife:
A Wisconsin voter who backed President Trump in November is still sticking by the Republican — even after his Peruvian wife was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of a federal crackdown on illegal immigration last month.
Bradley Bartell is worried about the well-being of his wife, Sylvia Camilla Muñoz-Lira, locked inside a detention center — and is seeking donations — after she was nabbed by ICE agents Feb. 15 at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan. The pair were traveling home to Wisconsin Dells from their belated honeymoon in Puerto Rico when she was taken into custody.
[…]
Muñoz-Lira, 26, secured her temporary visa in 2019 after she was accepted to a work-study program in Wisconsin but was then unable to return to Peru a year later when the pandemic limited her ability to travel. She instead chose to continue working in the States and eventually met and married her husband in May 2024.
She’d overstayed her visa but thought it safe to travel within the U.S. while her citizenship case was under review. No, not under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy.
“It was kind of like a slap in the face,” Bartell, 40, told The New York Post. But Bartell doesn’t regret his vote for Trump. “I still support our president.” And he wouldn’t say otherwise in a media story.
The denialism at work here in both families, especially where it’s in submission to an authoritarian bully, is not funny. It’s disturbing. And disturbingly reminiscent of a Monty Python bit about a pair of English gangsters, the notorious Piranha brothers, Doug and Dinsdale. Look how submissive Stig is:
Presenter
Another man who had his head nailed to the floor was Stig O’ Tracey.
Cut to another younger more cheerful man on sofa.
Interviewer
Stig, I’ve been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.
Stig
No, no. Never, never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to give his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.
Interviewer
But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.
Stig
Oh yeah, well – he did that, yeah.
Interviewer
Why?
Stig
Well he had to, didn’t he? I mean, be fair, there was nothing else he could do. I mean, I had transgressed the unwritten law.
Interviewer
What had you done?
Stig
Er… Well he never told me that. But he gave me his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy. I mean, he didn’t want to nail my head to the floor. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off. There’s nothing Dinsdale wouldn’t do for you.
Interviewer
And you don’t bear him any grudge?
Stig
A grudge! Old Dinsy? He was a real darling.
Interviewer
I understand he also nailed your wife’s head to a coffee table. Isn’t that right Mrs O’ Tracey?
Camera pans to show woman with coffee table nailed to head.
Mrs O’ Tracey
Oh, no. No. No.
Stig
Yeah, well, he did do that. Yeah, yeah. He was a cruel man, but fair
How many like Bartell are taking Donald Trump’s word for it that every one of those Venezuelans sent to a notorious Slavadoran prison were violent gang members merely based on deliberately misinterpreting their tattoos? Because they must have transgressed the unwritten law. A cruel man, Donald, but fair.
NC Democrats are still fighting attacks on their win
I’ve got somewhere to be in a few minutes, so please excuse me. The NC Appeals Court hearing on the Griffin challenge is this morning at 9:45 a.m.:
Three judges on the state Court of Appeals will hear arguments on Friday in Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin’s effort to throw out votes so he can win a seat on the Supreme Court.
Griffin, himself an appeals court judge, is suing the state Board of Elections in his attempt to toss out more than 60,000 votes he claims were illegally cast. Griffin is seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. Riggs is ahead by 734 votes, a lead that has been affirmed in two recounts.
Slate reports that details are now emerging about the “evidence” the Trump administration used to round up and incarcerate 250 Venezuelans in a notorious Salvadoran supermax prison.
Trump 2.0’s PR strategy behind this roundup is to claim — without providing evidence or even deportees names — that each and every one is a violent terrorist present on U.S. soil illegally, trust us. And then dare human rights activists to defend not deporting the supposed threats to Americans’ safety. Except it’s the extrajudicial deportation of #Donalds_Desaparecidos that’s at issue.
Trump 2.0 has taken an illegal page from the Bush II administration’s “extraordinary rendition” campaign 20 years ago. As a result of a “a paper-thin evidential chain,” Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, endured 10 months of beatings in Syria after being detained while changing planes at JFK airport. He was later released without charge. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after enduring two years of torture in Syria over allegations of al-Qaida connections. According to the Guardian newspaper, El Maati eventually “reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal,” including Arar. (I wrote an op-ed on this at the time.)
Trump 2.0 claims that the Venezuelans it rendered to El Salvador “are terrorists by virtue of their alleged membership in the Tren de Aragua gang,” but as with the kidnapping the U.S. did during Bush’s “global war on terror” (GWOT), “evidence of this affiliation is weak to the point of nonexistence.”
Consider Jerce Reyes Barrios, one victim of the deportations: a professional soccer player who had fled Venezuela after protesting against dictator Nicolás Maduro and was living peacefully in the U.S. until the government snatched him up and deported him to El Salvador. Linette Tobin, Barrios’ attorney, submitted a declaration in federal court that detailed the disturbing reasons why her client was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After entering the U.S. last year, Barrios was scheduled to have an asylum hearing in April. But on Saturday, he was arrested and held at a San Diego detention facility after ICE agents accused him of being a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that President Donald Trump has been fixated on to fulfill his mass-deportation plan.
ICE’s accusations were based on two things. First, Barrios has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball that, federal immigration authorities allege, “is proof of gang membership.” In reality, Tobin wrote, the tattoo was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer team, which is also circular in shape and features a crown. Second, Barrios posted a photo of himself on social media in which he’s gesturing with both hands, with his middle fingers down. This, federal agents claimed, was also proof of gang membership—except that Barrios’ hand gesture actually means “I love you” in sign language and is also commonly used as a symbol of rock ’n’ roll.
In the second episode of Netflix’s “Adolescence,” the son of an English detective investigating a girl’s murder pulls him aside to warn him that his embarrassing misreading of emojis in social media posts has him completely misunderstanding the case he’s building. Dad simply has no clue how online youth code works. Neither do ICE’s flunkies regarding tattoos. Nor are they inclined to care. Not when the boss’ mandate is deport ’em all, let El Salvador sort ’em out.
Trump 2.0 has adopted strategies for avoiding judicial review of its disappearing any non-citizens it deems undesirable. They will get to you soon enough.
Slate ponders what’s changed:
It’s an open question whether ICE targeted these men because of their tattoos or whether agents detained them first, then fabricated a pretext later. Those details will hopefully be sorted out when lawyers for the victims can interrogate those who perpetrated this scheme. What matters most now is that judges have an opportunity to review the alleged evidence, in conjunction with the relevant law, and end this persecution before its test run is expanded into a full-blown suspension of all immigrants’ constitutional rights.
Access to USIP’s website (http://usip.org/) is blocked this morning.
Talking Points Memo has been following the story of DOGE thugs breaking into the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C. TPM has coverage here, and here after a court hearing
In a hearing in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, District Judge Beryl Howell asked Justice Department attorneys whether Donald Trump’s administration could enforce his executive order seeking to shutter the agency “without using the force of guns and threats by DOGE against American citizens.”
“I mean, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigations, using arms of law enforcement … probably terrorizing employees and staff at the institute, when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals … why?” she said. “Just because DOGE is in a rush?”
What’s changed (escalated) in the last week is that DOGE now has now forced its way into an independent, nonprofit, national institute separate from the Executive Branch, and did it by coopting D.C. Metro Police and Inter-Con, an armed, private security force with government contracts.
Inter-Con promotional photo. Armed man with brown gloves wears Inter-Con patch.
I want to draw out a critical element of what happened on Monday and which we learned today. DOGE went to the private security contractor working for USIP and essentially said, you don’t have a clear legal or ethical ability to do this. But if you don’t want to lose all your federal contracts, you have to. And they did.
BREAKING: DOGE Strong-Armed USIP Security Contractors to Switch Sides talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/break…
Really key stuff here. DOGE flipped the Institute's security contractors – Inter-Con – against them by threatening to cancel all their security contracts across the federal government. This is where DOGE's money meets up with guns and the lawyers are kicked to the side.
This cuts to the core of DOGE’s role as a rogue operation inside the federal government and critically one that very much by design engineered its ability to work across the entire federal government. One department or another … none of that matters. DOGE is operating everywhere.
The critical point is this: There are a lot of very large federal security contractors who wield violence and force on behalf of the US government. In theory, they do it under the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and under law. But those contractors are also extremely vulnerable to DOGE because DOGE can make contracts disappear, absent any kind of review process, beyond the reach of the clout of stakeholders within any one agency, anywhere in the government. So the basic transition that occurred here has many potential applications. Maybe DOGE says to a policing contractor. Look, it’s not pretty. But if you don’t want to lose your contracts you’re going to have to break up that protest. Or maybe you need to take the mayor into custody. Simple point: lot of capacity of state violence and a lot of cash. And DOGE operates front to back across the transaction.
2/ How much of a threat was this? According to USASpending dot gov Inter Con has $209 million in US govt work across 252 separate contracts. So I'd say DOGE made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
“Four out of every ten people who work for the U.S. government are private contractors,” according to the Project on Government Oversight (2017). U.S. government agencies employ thousands of contractors around the world, many of them provide private security services. They’d like to keep their lucrative contracts. So long as DOGE and its operatives inside the Trump administration exist, “Nice contract ya got there…” will provide leverage most won’t be able to resist when called on to do Trump’s pardon-powered bidding, even if the military under Pete Hegseth doesn’t. And we know what Trump wants done with protesters.
The Art Of Dealing a death blow to a $2.3T industry
“We’ll always have Las Vegas.”
Americans may not give a damn about foreigners, but they’ll damn sure take their money. And do each year:
Travel and tourism is the largest single services export for the United States, accounting for 22 percent of the country’s services exports and 7 percent of all exports in 2023. The travel and tourism industry contributed $2.3 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2022 (2.97 percent of the country’s GDP), supporting 9.5 million jobs.
And the industry supports many more indirect jobs, as it does in my tourist town. Western North Carolina tourism got hit by Hurricane Helene and then by Donald Trump.
Before Donald Trump took office again in January, the U.S. Travel Association reported that according to the National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO), “there were 66.5 million international visits the U.S. in 2023, reflecting 31% annual growth, but still at just 84% of pre-pandemic inbound visitation levels.” International travel to the U.S. was booming:
International visitors are vital to the U.S. economy. Visitors from many countries spend an average of over $4,000 per visit, and collectively contribute $155 billion in U.S. travel spending every year. International visits also help balance the U.S. trade deficit, as travel spending is one of the biggest export services for the United States.
And after a few weeks of Trump’s trade wars and harrowing stories of foreigners being detained and abused at U.S. airports and other points of entry? Well, Charlie Pierce reports at Esquire that Trump 2.0 has “done everything except hang a sign at every port of entry reading, CLOSED: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.”
Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead. International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”
All the 51st state talk from Trump is souring Canadians on visiting their southern cousins. A friend reports that Trump’s crackdown on foreigners who set foot inside our borders has scuttled plans for a Canadian friend’s 10th wedding anniversary party in Las Vegas. Months of planning, dozens of guests, a hotel block and entertainment reserved, etc. Canadian guests are bailing out. Tempers are flaring.
With insane stories like this from Jasmine Mooney back in Vancouver, a Canadian just trying to renew her U.S. work visa in San Diego, who wants to come here now?
There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.
Mooney had no idea why this was happening, and it just got worse. They gave her a space blanket and plunked her down in a frigid holding cell with no phone call for three days. Then they sent her to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, gave her a prison uniform and fingerprinted her.
Jasmine Mooney.
“How long will I be here?”
“I don’t know your case,” the man said. “Could be days. Could be weeks. But I’m telling you right now – you need to mentally prepare yourself for months.”
Months.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
Then they sent Mooney in a prison bus to the San Luis Regional Detention Center in Arizona. It made the last jail feel like the Four Seasons. It took Mooney two weeks to get released. She felt lucky. Many of the women she met with fewer resources had been there longer.
If the system seemed rigged against that happening, Mooney thinks it is: “These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.”
And the prison business is booming. On Monday, DHS detained Badar Khan Suri at his home in Arlington, Virginia. Suri is an Indian “teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa,” NBC News reports. DHS and the State Department did not comment on his detention or why his visa had been revoked:
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said on X in response to the Politico story that Suri was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.”
So they say. Suri has been sent to the Alexandria Staging Facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, the same as Mahmoud Khalil.
NBC News reports, “Last week, ICE arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who took part in protests at Columbia and who overstayed her student visa, officials said.” Zero tolerance. Overstay your visa by one day and it’s the gulag.
According to a report from Tourism Economics, “Canada accounts for the sharpest projected decline in travelers to the U.S., with the firm forecasting a 15% drop in the number of visits from the U.S.’ northern neighbor in 2025.” But that’s not all (CBS News):
Overall, international travel from all foreign countries to the U.S. is expected to drop by just over 5%, according to the report. Factoring in diminished spending by Americans traveling domestically this year, overall travel spending in the U.S. could drop up to $64 billion in 2025, according to Tourism Economics, a unit of investment advisory firm Oxford Economics.
“The negative effects of an expanded trade war scenario will reach U.S. hotel room demand in 2025,” Tourism Economics said in the report. “Domestic travel will be negatively affected by slower income growth and higher prices while international travel to the U.S. will be hit by a trifecta of slower economies, a stronger dollar and antipathy towards the U.S.”
People don’t want to come here any more. Come April, here in Boston, the administration may have a worse effect on international participation in the Boston Marathon than the pandemic did. In three years, Los Angeles is due to host the Olympics and the Paralympics, and it’s hard to imagine we’ll have regained the trust of the world by then.
And then there are all the other reasons people have to come to this country that, in its previous generosity, it shared with the world. No more Japanese people on the Freedom Trail up here. No more Brits visiting Independence Hall in Philadelphia to show they don’t hold any grudges. No more Brazilians, or Costa Ricans, or, God help us, Venezuelans staring awestruck into the Grand Canyon. And, what the hell, the government doesn’t care about national parks anymore anyway.
How about a nice, relaxing vacation in a U.S. private prison instead?
Yesterday, we once again discussed where the Digital Medicis want to take this country. Remake the United States in Silicon Valley oligarchs’ image is more like it. You won’t like it.
Ezra Klein summarized that vision in three words last night: Their visions sucks.
This is my grab a coffee and take the weight off clip for the day. Ezra Klein absolutely nails it.
Klein and coauthor Derek Thompson are on tour promoting their book, “Abundance.” I haven’t read it yet, but it seems like a “look yourself in the mirror” moment for Democrats wondering why voters are turning away from them.
The difference is Republicans have embraced autocracy while Democrats have embraced bureaucracy.
Klein and Thompson rightly argue that conservative politicians aren’t the only ones who have hobbled the government’s essential role in a dynamic and innovative society. In recent decades, Democrats across the country exchanged novelty for NIMBYISM, progress for process and roaring growth for regulatory government. An anti-growth mentality changed many cities into gilded lairs closed to newcomers priced out of inadequate housing. Meanwhile, risk-taking science devolved into grant-seeking for small gains as government support waned and research became less about breakthroughs than paperwork.
Even worse, Americans gave up the ability to follow through, failing to get the most out of what they had already invented. Cheap, multistory apartment buildings, made practical by the emergence of the elevator in 1850s New York, could help ease the housing crisis in big cities. But today, Klein and Thompson write, ungainly regulations and baroque production methods mean that an elevator installed in America costs four times more than its Swiss counterpart.
This story of how American originality lost its way is arresting and well told. On an alternate timeline without Donald Trump in office dismantling the American scientific establishment and Elon Musk kneecapping the American state, it might have been the manifesto of a new politics. Still, there could be life after Trump and, if so, “Abundance” might inspire a demoralized Democratic Party to think big again.
The “idée fixe” is a problem for politics on the left. Ideas that become dogmas that won’t let go. And fads that come and go. Remember safe spaces, microaggressions, call-outs, and tagging every bio with pronouns? For example:
I once asked my late mother-in-law, a Columbia-trained school librarian, how she and her colleagues navigated the educational fads that blew in and out of public education over the course of her career.
“We tried to ignore them until they went away.”
(That’s my approach too.)
Democrats prioritize process over outcomes, Klein and Thompson argue. In the process — very expensive process — they are not delivering for people and in that process pricing young people out comfortable lives their parents took for granted. Hence the “a plague on both your houses” response seen in voter registration.
A Facebook commenter this morning remarked that while her college-age kids are registered Democrats (because she is), none of their peers are. We need to have a serious conversation about why “without regurgitating tired talking points,” she wrote. In my bright blue island, our county is now 43% Unaffiliated, 34% Democrat, and 21% Republican. “We have to turn out our Democrats” is a losing strategy. The rest of the state is more evenly divided, just with independent registrants outpacing Democrats by a bit less. Statewide, they vote Republican. Democrats are figuring out they need a reboot.
It’s not that we can’t do things right (see below), but that we have to fight not only the well-funded, think-tank right, but the factions in the Democratic coalition that insist that if their concerns are not voiced expressly in every ppolicy decision, they’ll take their balls and go home. Except that’s happening despite Democrats’ efforts at inclusivity.
Klein and Thompson argue that delivering a physically better world will be more beneficial politically than ideological posturing. At least, that’s what I hear. Will have to read the book.
The article discusses the cases of Fabian Schmidt, Mahmoud Khalid, and Rasha Alawieh who we’ve discussed previously, and notes:
You have, at some point within the last week, probably broken the law. You jaywalked or smoked in a no-smoking park or ignored a stop sign or any of a thousand other daily things that we hardly think about but which are on paper illegal. The reason you most likely weren’t arrested or even ticketed for these things is because it would not be possible for police to spot every single one of these violations, and because even if the cops did witness it, they decided that it just wasn’t worth the bother (or the paperwork).
But now Trump 2.0 is hunting enemies hiding in woodpiles to detain, arrest, and extrajudicially punish.
For a long time, certain populations in particular have been used to generally favorable discretion. Undocumented immigrants—in particular those from developing countries—never could expect much grace, but high-skill work visa holders, international students, European tourists, Canadian day-trippers, and others in this higher-status sphere enjoyed a lighter touch. Perhaps if there was confusion around their visa, they would get directed to file paperwork to fix it and sent on their way, or at worst merely turned away at the border. But now, it seems, immigration agents are increasingly using the full statutory powers that they always had, choosing to detain, abuse, and deport these tourists and workers instead of working with them.
At this point, traveling outside the country is a risk for holders of visas and green cards if the Trump administration looks at them sideways. And a tourism industry dependent on foreign visitors to the U.S. will begin to collapse. But that’s just the beginning.
Consider this report from NPR on Tuesday’s sparring match between Trump Department of Justice lawyers and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg over their ignoring his Saturday order to halt their deportation of 250 alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. The DOJ sent the detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador without any court hearing to test evidence that each was associated with TdA as the DOJ claimed:
In court filings on Tuesday, the Justice Department complied with a judge’s order for a sworn declaration about how planeloads of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang landed in El Salvador — hours after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued emergency orders temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using wartime powers to quickly deport people.
The DOJ complied with Boasberg’s Monday order with a Tuesday “declaration from Robert Cerna, a top official at the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement field office in Harlingen, Texas” on what happened and when on Saturday. But Boasberg was unsatisfied. He gave the Justice Department by noon ET on Wednesday to provide a more detailed account of these flights before declaring the DOJ in contempt.
In his Monday filing, Cerna claimed that ICE had vetted each “to ensure they were in fact members of TdA,” but in effect asked the court to take his word for it. Now consider this part of Cerna’s declaration (brackets and bolding mine):
While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their [alleged] association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are [alleged] terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.
I lack a criminal record and complete profile! Likely, so do you.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of authoritarianism, warns:
When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption and sabotage against their compatriots.
We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.
The Trump administration is in open defiance of judicial branch scrutiny.
I don’t have to spell it out. The law no longer protects you.
