Tag Archives: Trump

That Pesky Thing Called Reality

There’s an old adage that counsels us to be careful what we wish for.

Before our mad king’s ascension to a second term, lots of Americans held negative views of immigrants. Political pundits attributed a good deal of Trump’s support to his promise to rid the country of these terrible people, the majority of whom (he asserted) were criminals and rapists.

That’s one promise the Trump administration is trying to keep, unlike its promises to curb inflation and cut out government “waste and fraud.” ICE has sent masked, armed enforcers after those nefarious lawbreakers–well, really, after everyone who “looks” undocumented (basically, engaging in racial profiling, yet another Trump administration unconstitutional practice).

So, how much has the keeping of that promise– the delivery of a result that MAGA folks ardently wished for–increased support for the administration? Strangely enough, it turns out that reality has punctured the always dishonest portrayals of America’s undocumented immigrants.

Gallup polling has charted that unanticipated turnaround:

Just months after President Donald Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.

What has caused the shift? 

Well, first of all, despite Trump’s dishonest descriptions of an “invasion” of undocumented criminals, it turns out that there really aren’t many criminals out there. Experts have calculated that there may be–at most– only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with any sort of  criminal record, and of that number, only 14,000 have been convicted of violent crimes. Given Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day, ICE has turned its attention to farm workers and day laborers.

For example, multiple media sources have confirmed that the great majority of detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention center (concentration camp) built in the Florida Everglades, do not have criminal records or charges pending against them in the U.S. — despite Donald Trump claiming the facility would hold “the most vicious people on the planet.”

For that matter, in the case of immigrants who do have records, most of those records are for immigration violations, which are technically civil offenses.

Business owners–especially landscape companies, construction companies and restaurant/hotel owners–have lost significant segments of their workforces, as ICE has rounded up workers who may have been undocumented but who were anything but dangerous criminals. Grocers (and their customers) are dealing with increased prices, as farmers have lost numerous undocumented workers who picked their crops.

And as ICE has moved to deport their friends and neighbors, many more Americans have come to recognize the indiscriminate cruelty of these sweeps. It turns out that abstract promises about ridding the country of undocumented criminals is conflicting with the reality of these roundups.

Masked ICE agents have refused to show ID as they continue to engage in a variety of offensive and unconstitutional behaviors, sparking outrage.

Not only have ICE “enforcers” engaged in racial profiling, “immigration enforcement” is increasingly being used as a barely-veiled cover for efforts to chill the exercise of free speech. Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained by ICE, his student visa revoked, and he was threatened with deportation– not for criminal activity, but for involvement in pro-Palestinian protests. His arrest was widely–and accurately– seen as a part of Trump administration efforts to crack down on student activism. Another widely reported example was the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Tufts University student. She was taken off the street by masked ICE agents near her home. A court subsequently determined that her arrest had been prompted by her co-authorship of an article about the ongoing war in Gaza. 

There’s much more.

The bottom line is that there is a difference between fantasy and reality. When political promises are based on “alternate realities,” the effort to fulfill them can become an (unintentional) educational exercise. 

It turns out that the American economy is heavily dependant on immigrants, both documented and “illegal.” It turns out that constitutional guarantees for everyone are weakened when an administration decides that some people aren’t entitled to them.

It turns out that immigration enforcement is “more complicated than that,” and that pesky realities are significantly different from the racist fantasies that spawned them.

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The Guy In The Mirror

Welcome to what seems like a very bad dream…

Congressional Republicans have passed a spending bill that contradicts every principle that party has endorsed over the years.  Furthermore, it’s a measure that will disproportionately hurt their own voters–and we know that they are aware of that fact, because they carefully timed some of the bill’s most egregious elements, like the draconian cuts to Medicaid, to take effect after the midterms.

Those GOP “defenders of liberty” who sport “don’t tread on me” t-shirts and insist that the government lacked even the authority to require masks during a pandemic are nevertheless cool with providing massive new funding for ICE, whose masked thugs display a terrifying similarity to Germany’s SS.

The Republicans in Congress passed this monstrosity because they are in thrall to an ignorant buffoon with tacky taste and the vocabulary, intellect and emotional control of a developmently-delayed five-year-old.

It has become increasingly clear that on the ground, the MAGA movement is the reappearance of the old Confederacy. The voters who continue to support Trump are motivated by fear–fear of losing their status as the “real Americans,” fear that those “others” will actually manage to attain civic equality. But what can we say about the Senators and Representatives those voters sent to Washington? Some–like Indiana’s Jim Banks–are as ignorant and bigoted as those who voted for them, but it’s obvious that many others actually know better, actually realize that their submission to Trump is cowardly, and that they are rewarding the votes of their constituents by robbing them of the little security they have.

What explains those Senators and Representatives–those presumably “traditional” Republicans who talked endlessly about fiscal discipline and limited government, but who obediently bend the knee to a would-be autocrat who routinely trashes those principles?

A recent article by Jonathan Last in the Bulwark took a stab at answering that question. 

A sizable portion of elected Republicans hold on to a residual image of themselves as avatars of a green-eyeshade, business-first party that no longer exists. They’re like a middle-aged man standing in front of a mirror, sucking in his gut and smiling, imagining that he still looks pretty close to his college days.

It’s a lie they tell themselves.

The article raised an interesting question: why didn’t the Republicans just choose to have it both ways–extend the tax cuts for their deep-pocketed donors, but keep Medicaid funded, and just push the debt even higher. After all, they were willing to add over three trillion to that debt–why not just add another 930 billion, and avoid sticking it to their own voters?

This, finally, is the root of the problem. Some Republicans still view themselves as the good guys in the movie. They need to imagine that they’re on the side of the angels. That they are something other than what they’ve become. It’s the guy in the mirror, again.

Trump has no illusions. That is his strength. Some congressional Republicans are reluctant to embrace their roles as kleptocrats and pillagers. That is their weakness. And it’s why they haven’t said, “Fuck it. Let’s just spend all the money.”

Last reminds us that when things go wrong in a cult, no one blames the cult leader. (He points to an example, a MAGA-supporting man in detention due to Trump’s hardline immigration policies, who nevertheless blames the Biden administration for his arrest.)

When millions of Trump voters lose their Medicaid, they aren’t going to blame Trump, either. They’ll blame Congress.

And what does Donald Trump care if a bunch of Republican losers get tossed out of Congress? He has no use for congressional Republicans. He is an aspiring autocrat who rules by fiat. Passing legislation is not anywhere near his list of priorities. Whether or not the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans is of little importance to him.

All of which is why Trump’s party is about to stab millions of Trump-loving Republican voters in the back instead of just throwing more money at the problem.

Trump knows who he is, what he wants, and how to get it. His party, on the other hand, is a bunch of delusional sad sacks. Which is why he will win and they will lose. Again.

At least we can take some satisfaction from the prospect of those “delusional sad-sacks” looking in their mirrors and seeing a greying and flabby reality looking back.

I wonder if any of them will regret providing the Kool-Aid to the cult members who elected them…

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The Rhyming Of History

So much of what Trump and the GOP are doing right now defies logic, although it’s probably consistent with their twisted version of what would make America “great”–a country filled with people who are White, fundamentalist, and receptive to propaganda. The list of insanities is long, but today I just want to focus on the administration’s war on higher education. (Not that today’s Republicans don’t have contempt for education at all levels; they clearly do.)

In the decades following WWII, the best universities in the United States have been considered the best in the world, and that reputation, that prominence, has generated a wide array of economic, cultural, scientific, and geopolitical benefits.

For one thing, our universities generate a significant share of the world’s basic research. Federal funding supporting that research–funding that Trump has threatened to withhold– has given us everything from the internet to mRNA vaccines.

American universities attract and train a highly-skilled workforce. They anchor local economies. They promote economic growth through partnerships with industry. And universities have played a major role in research supporting military innovation, cybersecurity, and intelligence–something you’d think the GOP, with its military obsessions, would appreciate.

Of course, America’s universities also serve to promulgate “liberal” values like academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, democracy and human rights, so MAGA is willing to dispense with the other benefits in order to minimize the chances of creating an informed and thinking citizenry.

This assault on academia isn’t as obvious or remarked-upon as the other–frighteningly numerous– parallels to Germany in the 1930s, but those parallels are there. My friend Morton Marcus recently sent me a copy of an article titled How Universities Die. It began with a history that feels chillingly similar to the Trumpian effort to turn America’s universities into obedient organs of an autocratic, White Christian state.

In 1910, German universities were the envy of the world. They were the world’s center of scientific research, not only in the natural sciences but also in the study of history, politics, philosophy, and literature. Our modern scholarly disciplines were all first defined in Germany. The University of Berlin, founded a century earlier, was the Harvard of its day. Every serious American university, from Hopkins to Chicago, to Harvard and Berkeley, was made or reformed according to the “Berlin model.” Why else is Stanford’s motto (“Die Luft der Freiheit weht” — “The winds of freedom are blowing”) in German? Original research was prized over the mere transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. Faculty and students would learn together in seminars and laboratories. Professors would have “Lehrfreiheit,” or the freedom to teach, while students would enjoy “Lernfreiheit,” the freedom to learn, across multiple disciplines. Although supported entirely by the state, universities themselves would decide who would teach and what would be taught. If university rankings had existed in 1910, eight of the top 10 in the world probably would have been German — with only Oxford and Cambridge joining them in that elite circle.

As late as 1932, the University of Berlin remained the most famous of the world’s universities. By 1934, it had been destroyed from without and within.

Germany’s descent from a nation of “poets and thinkers” (“Dichter und Denker”) to one of “judges and hangmen” (“Richter und Henker”) ended its leadership in higher education.

When the Nazi regime came into power, it purged universities of non-Aryan students, faculty and political dissidents. Trump is trying to prevent foreign students from enrolling at Harvard, and ejecting foreign students enrolled elsewhere who dare to speak or write in support of Palestinians. International students have noticed; between March 2024 to March 2025, U.S. international student counts declined 11.3%.

The article tells us that leading scholars left Berlin in large numbers, beginning what would be a historic migration of brilliant thinkers to the United States and elsewhere. German universities were divested of capacity for self-government. Scholarship in search of truth was replaced by scholarship in service of the “Volk.” Faculties were purged of non-compliant members. (In Florida, Governor DeSantis has dutifully followed the Nazi model, and Florida has seen a similar migration of professors.)

German universities never regained their status or importance.

The Trump administration is intent upon destroying one of the few fields– higher education– in which this country is still the global leader. The intensifying assault on immigrants had already reduced applications from international students. Coupled with the escalating attacks on universities and DEI, the administration is crippling America’s capacity to recruit talent from all shores. We will decline.

History tells us that when universities die, nations decay.

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Ignorance And Stupidity

On this 4th of July, America is reeling under the combined threats of official ignorance and pervasive stupidity.

To be human, of course, is to be ignorant. There are all sorts of things that virtually all of us fail to understand. In my house, it tends to be most aspects of the emerging digital universe (I know AI is coming but have absolutely no idea how it works or what it portends, and my ability to understand the various devices my grandchildren grew up with is similarly limited). A depressingly significant portion of the population is ignorant of America’s legal framework and the most basic premises undergirding the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For millions of Americans, it’s ignorance of science and the significant difference between a scientific theory and the common use of the term “theory” as an unsupported guess.

Rather obviously, these knowledge gaps are not mutually exclusive….

Ignorance can be remedied. With proper motivation, most of us can fill in those empty spaces in our understanding. We can learn. Stupidity, however, isn’t amenable to similar correction. It’s defined as a lack of intelligence or understanding–an inability to reason or learn.

We are currently governed by people who exhibit both, elected by voters who–at the very least–were ignorant of both the nature of public service and the damage that predictably ensues when incompetent ideologues are placed in positions of authority.

America has a secretary of health and human services whose conspiratorial approach to reality and inability to understand science has led (among other appalling things) to a major outbreak of measles–a disease once virtually eradicated–and who has suggested that those afflicted take cod liver oil. We have an agriculture secretary whose “solution” to high egg prices is advice that we raise our own chickens. We have a secretary of defense–a dipsomaniac– who accidently included a journalist on an unsecured call in which national security matters were discussed. The list goes on…

The “Big Beautiful Bill” that contains MAGA’s policy priorities won’t just deprive millions of health care in order to line the pockets of our plutocrats– it will destroy this country’s storied educational institutions, and derail America’s scientific and technological progress.

The Trump administration’s fixation on ridding the country of immigrants–not simply those who’ve committed crimes, as candidate Trump promised, but any immigrant who lacks lily-white skin– is perhaps the best example of the profound stupidity that always accompanies racism.

Immigrants have been essential elements of American innovation and economic growth. Research conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy in 2010 documented their importance. More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, the companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

As we are discovering, America’s agriculture and construction industries overwhelmingly rely on immigrants, the majority of whom are undocumented.

MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria is part and parcel of its equally ignorant White Christian Nationalism. There has always been a nativist streak in America– Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free” was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

The animus isn’t new, but it rests on widespread ignorance. As David Brooks (no bleeding heart liberal) has observed, when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. “The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”

Trump’s fixation on immigration has consistently been both stupid and ignorant, as well as inhumane. Remember his first term promise to build a “beautiful wall” on our southern border? The vast majority of people who are in the country illegally flew in and overstayed their visas—something a wall would neither address or prevent. (It would, however, focus on those Brown people…)

MAGA’s slogan ought to be: “Owning the libs by cutting off our noses to spite our faces.” Unfortunately, we “libs” live here too…

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The Declaration Of Independence Sounds Awfully Familiar

Given the undeniable fact that the Republicans in Congress continue to ignore their Constitutional duties, it’s probably unproductive to suggest that they take a close look at another of our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence. If they did, however, they might notice that the document describing the behaviors of George III that impelled them to withdraw from the British empire are eerily similar to the behaviors of their MAGA cult leader.

You might think of the Declaration as the original “No Kings” statement, laying out America’s grievances against the actions of  George III that triggered the Revolutionary War. The list of those grievances was extensive, but several seem especially pertinent to the growing resistance to today’s would-be King. 

Consider, for example:

“He has refused his Assent to laws; He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither; He has obstructed the Administration of Justice; He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices; He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people; He has affected to render the Military independent and superior to the Civil power;

“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world; For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent; for depriving us in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury; For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

The Declaration isn’t law. It isn’t even a legal framework, as the Constitution is. But it is a statement of governing philosophy–a stirring declaration of what legitimate governance is and isn’t. Most schoolchildren are familiar with one of the opening paragraphs, an eloquent, “self-evident” description of the basic purposes of government:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Governments, the Declaration tells us, derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Thanks to decades of voter suppression and gerrymandering, the operation of the Electoral College, misuse of the filibuster, and population shifts that have made the Senate a massively unrepresentative body,  it is impossible to argue with a straight face that today’s federal government reflects the consent of the governed. 

We are currently being ruled, not governed, by an illegitimate gang of plutocrats and theocrats who are pursuing goals diametrically opposed to those expressed by the nation’s founders. Re-read that last quoted paragraph. Nowhere does it say that “all White Christian men are created equal.” It says that all men- which we now understand to mean all human beings–have “unalienable” rights. Unalienable rights are incapable of being surrendered, transferred, or taken away. They are rights that are inherently and permanently possessed. The Declaration tells us that protecting–securing– those equal rights is the purpose of government, and that when a government “becomes destructive” of that purpose, when it ceases to perform that fundamental task, We the People have the right to alter or abolish it.

It’s past time to alter a government that has drifted far from its original purposes. Look at the list of actions by King George that prompted rebellion–and think about their striking similarity to the policies being pursued by the Trump administration. Refusal to assent to law. Obstruction of immigration. Denial of due process. Insistence on personal loyalty. Misuse of the military. Interference with trade. Imposition of taxes/tariffs. Transporting people “beyond the seas to be tried for pretended offenses”…

It is past time to return this nation to the philosophy of government expressed in the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We have a delusional ignoramus in the White House, a cabinet filled with unqualified clowns and cranks, a Congress filled with cowards, bigots and Christian Nationalists, and a Supreme Court dominated by theocrats.

We got rid of King George and the Hessians. It’s time to get rid of Trump and MAGA.

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