David Brooks, Trump’s Single Stroke of Brilliance. Lots of food for thought. (Shared link)
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David Brooks, Trump’s Single Stroke of Brilliance. Lots of food for thought. (Shared link)
“When we are born, people make a guess about our gender and label us ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ based on our body parts. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. Our body parts do not decide our gender. Our gender comes from inside — we might feel different than what people tell us we are. We know ourselves best,” -
A teacher’s guide in Maryland public schools, indoctrinating children as young as 3 years old that being a boy or a girl has nothing to do with biology.
“There were 210 new drugs approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016. Every single one was associated with NIH-funded research. This is what Trump, Elon, and the DOGE bros decided to try to destroy. They’ll destroy medical progress so nobody will ever announce their pronouns ….”
“The Trump administration operates, in many ways, on a mix of cruelty and incompetence,” she said. “It’s hard to know what the exact process was by which I happened to receive that email in the middle of the night, East Coast time.”
Steele said the notice was indicative of “this fear that the Trump administration is attempting to create” — both for immigrants and even for lawyers. Citing “rampant fraud and meritless claims,” the administration last month issued a memo ordering sanctions and stricter oversight of immigration attorneys.
Andrea Castillo, ‘It is time for you to leave’: DHS mistakenly sends notices to U.S. citizens
Top Trump administration officials and the president himself insist the executive branch must have the power to deport illegal immigrants without minimal due process under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act because it’s the only practical way to carry out mass deportations.
The alternative to such sweeping power, White House adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News earlier this month, is that “every single invader that Joe Biden let in should get their own individual judicial trial before they’re deported … each one gets a million-dollar trial in front of a communist judge to decide whether or not we can send them home.
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Trump himself wrote earlier this week in response to a Supreme Court order temporarily halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act: “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
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[C]ontrary to the claims of Miller, Vance, and Trump—nothing supports the notion that illegal immigrants are entitled to million-dollar jury trials that would take centuries to carry out.
The entire budget for the immigration court system was $840 million in 2024. If all illegal immigrants were given million-dollar trials as Miller claims, that budget would allow for the deportation of 840 people. The actual number of deportations carried out by the Department of Homeland Security in 2024 totaled more than 271,000 people. “The idea that it is going to cost a million dollars per case is just Stephen Miller being a propagandist,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of American Immigration Council, an organization that advocates on behalf of immigrants, told The Dispatch.
John McCormack, An Absurd Rationale for Provoking a Constitutional Crisis - John McCormack
There are crude expressions for this level of incompetence
Also Presented Without Comment Los Angeles Times: ‘It Is Time for You to Leave’: DHS Mistakenly Sends Notices to U.S. Citizens
It’s getting to the point where staying in the Trump 2.0 administration is incompatible with legal ethics:
Three federal prosecutors who worked on the criminal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—and were subsequently placed on administrative leave—announced their resignation on Tuesday, accusing Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche of attempting to compel them to “confess wrongdoing” in the case. Earlier this month, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Adams following a request by Justice Department officials that the case be dropped. The prosecutors—Derek Wikstrom, Celia Cohen, and Andrew Rohrbach—opposed dropping the charges and were put on leave “ostensibly to review our … handling of the Adams case,” they wrote in a letter, but were later told that they “must express regret and admit some wrongdoing” to be reinstated. “We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” they added.
Donald Trump says he stands behind Pete Hegseth, our entirely unqualified secretary of defense, a former Fox News weekend morning-show clown and future Brylcreem model who is in the habit of treating sensitive military information as though it were knitting-circle gossip …
The president says he has complete confidence in Hegseth. So, he’s probably cooked.
Kevin D. Williamson, All the Best People, Cont’d
A few days into the president’s first term, his new executive orders banning certain foreigners from entering the United States were described by Lawfare founder Benjamin Wittes as a case of “malevolence tempered by incompetence.”
In many ways, there’s less incompetence in Trump 2.0; a bunch of the tribe formerly known as conservatives have become ass-kissers and co-conspirators, looking for legal loopholes with some success.
But the malevolence remains, in saecula saeculorum (that’s “forever,” you jack- and jenny-asses in the White House faith office).
So comprehensive are Trump’s outrages that it’s easy to overlook an important facet. For instance, his threats to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption is not just obnoxious, it’s a federal crime that theoretically could land him in jail for five years.
Someone should let Pam Bondi know. I’m sure she’ll get right on it.
(H/T In Trump Attack on Harvard, Punishment Before Proof - The New York Times)
A reminder that we’re now living in a police state: How to Protect Yourself From Phone Searches at the US Border
The second Trump administration is trying to undermine the Constitution on so many fronts that it’s hard to keep track. But three are particularly dangerous: the usurpation of Congress’s spending power; unconstitutional measures against immigration justified by bogus claims that the U.S. is under “invasion”; and assertions of virtually limitless presidential power to impose tariffs.
A primary means by which Trump has implemented this political vision is to make the Department of Justice an extended arm of the White House. The attorney general has always been accountable to the president, but DOJ has long enjoyed considerable day-to-day operational autonomy. That separation has been driven by the concern to avoid both the appearance and the reality that the White House’s political interests are distorting the administration of justice.
The Trump White House has no such concern. On the contrary, it wants it known that DOJ is pursuing the White House’s political interests. So the de facto attorney general—to whom nominal attorney general Pam Bondi and other top DOJ officials answer—appears to be White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a non-lawyer whose sharp political skills include an inclination to utter brazen falsehoods.
We need to recognize—and name—the form of government we are living in right now. Its closest analogue is the Mafia. President Trump is using extortion to achieve his objectives. Too many are yielding to his extortion because they believe that to be the less costly alternative. For some it is; for the world, it is not. The only way to respond to a Capo-in-Chief is through full-on resistance, regardless of the cost, for however long it takes.
Note to the U.S. Department of Justice: send this woman a job application. She has mastered your lower-court stylesheet already.
a core tenet of Trumpism is that shame and self-reflection are for losers
When I hear rich dorks like Scott Bessent sneer about low-priced imports—“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream”—I want to pull their $2,500 John Lobb oxfords off their soft little feet and shove them down their goddamned throats.
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If you want that postwar, golden age standard of living, you can have it—cheap. You can buy a little house like the one my parents lived in—and both the houses on either side of it, too—for less than the price of a really nice pickup. If you want to eat like they ate, you can probably get by on less than $100 per head in the monthly food budget, and even have it delivered—Jeff Bezos is ready when you are. Cornmeal is about 80 cents a pound if you buy in bulk. You won’t need to add any oil–you’ll save the grease from your hamburgers and bacon in an old coffee can.
In some ways, the core character of the Trump administration can be seen in two Oval Office press conferences with two young, informally-dressed foreign leaders. The first was with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of a country invaded and now partly occupied by Russia, who has courageously kept his country free from total Russian domination. The second was with Nayib Bukele, a man who governs in a permanent emergency, has seized 83,000 people with no due process and put them in brutal gulags, strong-armed his Supreme Court to gain an unconstitutional second term, and is one of the worst human rights violators in Latin America.
So it’s obvious which one Trump and Vance prefer, isn’t it? They humiliated Zelensky while lavishing Bukele with encomiums for his collaboration in providing an extra-territorial, extra-judicial, concentration camp for whomever in America Trump wants to grab off the street, bundle into an airplane, and get Stephen Miller to call a terrorist. What’s not to like?
President Donald Trump, on Truth Social:
Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing — But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!
(Via The Morning Dispatch)
[T]here’s so much cosplay out there about the authoritarian hellscape we live in in American because Joe friggin’ Biden was President or that Barack Obama was President — that it gives permission to do all sorts of things that are illiberal, that are disdainful of the rule of law and the constitutional order …
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Among the stupid, terrible, illiberal things coming out of Washington are the ominous mockery of due process and the faux outrage at people who believe that even people suspected of heinous crimes are entitled to due process.
Here’s a statement from Trump’s “Counter-terrorism” tsar, Sebastian Gorka:
It’s really quite that simple. We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists.
Go to any dictatorship and you will find identical rhetoric. For his part, Yale law grad Vance has argued that providing due process for illegal immigrants means, in his words, “the ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.” Due process is governed by “the public interest” and “a function of our resources.” So habeas corpus only applies if it doesn’t contradict an election promise, and if we can afford it (of course we can afford it, if it’s a priority).
Sure, you could legally expand the numbers of immigration judges and courts, you could legally expedite removals, and you could pass a mandatory e-Verify law to ensure that no illegals could find work. But why bother with the hard work of democracy and legislation when you can just seize extra-constitutional powers?
… Trump’s enablers have … told us quite clearly who they are. And they are not that worried about public opinion, because, as Steve Bannon just told us, they intend to stay in power indefinitely like Bukele … As Trump’s OMB director, Russell Vought, asks: “Do you know what time it is?” For him and core MAGA, what he means by that — and has always meant by that — is that we are now in a post-liberal order, and the Constitution is no longer in effect.
For nine years or so, I’ve been calling Mafia Don a “toxic narcissist.” But if ChatGPT can be trusted, he’s closer to sociopath (and the distinctly sociopathic tendencies are what I was calling “toxic”).
There’s a good reason not to engage in amateur psychology.
Make of it what you will.
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