Mentions Donald Trump

There can be no doubt that while Biden rhetorically discussed a more humane approach to the border, his actual tenure has been devastating for migrants. Biden deported 271,484 people in 2024 alone — the highest number of any year since 2014. He maintained Trump-era border restrictions, such as the misuse of the Title 42 public health statute to deny migrants access to the U.S. and violate due process of asylum seekers. In its opening days, the Biden administration detained 14,000 Haitian migrants seeking asylum, and summarily deported them en masse. The devastating episode involved U.S. border agents on horseback whipping Haitians, producing photos reminiscent of slavery.

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Will Trump be worse than Biden? This has been a complicated question to answer for many on the left in light of Biden’s unwavering participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For sections of the population, there will be a dramatic, catastrophic change from Biden to Trump. The new attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ folks and women, immigrants and Muslims should not be underestimated. We should also prepare for a new round of attacks on organizing, beginning with especially vulnerable activists, such as international students, Muslim and immigrant organizers. But such attacks are already happening under Biden, who has presided over mass arrests of student protesters and the criminalization of organizing for Palestine.

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This continuity between Biden and Trump — and convergence between the Democratic Party and MAGA — complicates an assessment of Trump and made it difficult for many progressives to support Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Bannon said after Zuckerberg’s visit, “the floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.” Bannon added, with a laugh: “They came and said: ‘Oh, we’ll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.’”

“I view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and he’s like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think it’s powerful”, Bannon added.

The comments come as Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy” and of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people”.

But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word “oligarchy” in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.

“It’s cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,” said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sanders’ last presidential campaign.

Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.

So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.

Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.

Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely. 

This quote is just so telling:

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It's pure nihilism. Nobody expects anything good. They just want to see people they don't identify with hurt more.

“The selectivity about whom the Fourteenth Amendment ought to apply to is stunning,” said Khiara M. Bridges, professor at University of California at Berkeley School of Law. “It’s not demanded by the text of the Constitution at all. Instead, these are political choices that are being made, and they’re elevating certain individuals’ rights.”

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The recent Supreme Court arguments about Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for adolescents underscored the selectivity in who gets to exercise Fourteenth Amendment rights. The conservative position in U.S. v. Skrmetti is that while parents typically get to argue a due process right to direct their children’s upbringing, that right does not extend to parenting that affirms their transgender child’s identity. Trans adolescents can’t access medical care that is legal for their cisgender peers, and Republicans claim this is a regulation, not discrimination based on sex. Under this interpretation, even trans and nonbinary adults could continue to see their rights diminished.

“This [incoming] administration would be interested in denying them health care and, if not criminalizing them, certainly banishing them from public spaces,” Bridges said. One conservative group says it will pursue a ban on federal insurance covering affirming treatments, akin to the Hyde Amendment for abortion.

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As far as immigrants are concerned, President-elect Trump has also said he wants to end birthright citizenship and start a mass deportation program, which would necessarily rope in U.S. citizens. While citizenship for people born on U.S. soil is written verbatim into the Fourteenth Amendment, conservatives have previewed an argument to gut it.

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Bridges said this country’s history of mass deportations is rife with evidence that legal residents will be caught up in the dragnet. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens with Mexican ancestry were deported during the Great Depression under President Herbert Hoover. (His slogan was “American jobs for real Americans.”) President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1950s deportation regime also wrongly removed American citizens of Mexican descent.

“This wasn’t about undocumentedness, and this wasn’t about immigrants. This was about non-whiteness,” Bridges said. Under Trump 2.0, she said, the U.S. would once again be removing people from the U.S. because they are not white. “We’re talking about building camps, right? That’s where we are.” 

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The groups of people whose Fourteenth Amendment rights to be recognized as full humans are under attack from Republicans are deeply connected to one another. “It’s an error to read these things separate from one another,” Bridges said, adding that the obsession with mass deportations is connected to the desire to end birthright citizenship, which are both tied to wanting to revert to traditional gender and family norms, and that’s linked to the interest in giving rights to fertilized eggs. “All of these things are part of the same project,” she said. “This is about whiteness and patriarchy. It’s about creating the U.S. as a nation for white men.” 

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition.

Ideologically, the Claremont Institute is the home of West Coast Straussianism, a term pointing to a specific school of thought on the Right that goes back to political philosopher Leo Strauss. His disciple Harry Jaffa, a famous Lincoln scholar and one of the most influential conservative intellectuals particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is a key figure in the West Coast Straussian intellectual tradition. It was Jaffa’s students who founded the Claremont Institute in the late 1970s.

West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding – and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timeless essence which it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism – ideologies that seek to remake man and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the Left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America – they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

Just mind-blowing.

Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.

I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.

What about those who do consider themselves Americans? By and large, I am referring to the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism. Regardless of Trump’s obvious flaws, preferring his re-election was not a difficult choice for these voters. In fact—leaving aside the Republican never-Trumpers and some squeamish centrists—it was not a difficult choice for either side. Both Right and Left know where they stand today… and it is not together. Not anymore.

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Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.

This recognition that the original America is more or less gone sets the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy apart from almost everyone else on the Right. Paradoxically, the organization that has been uniquely devoted to understanding and teaching the principles of the American founding now sees with special clarity why “conserving” that legacy is a dead end. Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.

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America, as an identity or political movement, might need to carry on without the United States. […] In the meantime, give up on the idea that “conservatives” have anything useful to say. Accept the fact that what we need is a counter-revolution.

 

 

Many have argued that the United States’ two major political parties have experienced “asymmetric polarization” in recent decades: The Republican Party has moved significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. The practice of consti­tutional hardball, this Essay argues, has followed a similar—and causally related—trajectory. Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican office­holders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of gov­ernance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal scholars, they have not done so with the same frequency or intensity.

Wait. "The Democratic Party has moved to the left"? When did this happen? Do you mean the Civil Rights Act?

The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base -  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.