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Archive of "Trump" Category
Taiwan and Settled Diplomacy
Following the recent Trump-Xi summit there was something of an awkward silence over Taiwan. The island was conspicuous mainly by its absence from the summit. It did not need to be talked about, because Taiwan is what a lawyer might call settled diplomacy. The genius of the arrangement is that it does not resolve the Taiwan question. Instead it settles how three governments will live with the fact that it isn’t resolved. It does not need to be discussed much further; the U.S. and China got it more or less right in 1979. And despite the near-industry which has developed in America among the military, neocons, the media, and some academics, there is no war over Taiwan looming. That would be as unnecessary as it would be bad for business. Trump and Xi still have much to discuss about the evolving nature of the world’s most important bilateral relationship when they meet twice more before the end of the year, but Taiwan isn’t likely to be on the main agenda.
Wipe away what is often read as Tom Clancy fan fiction to understand the true nature of China-Taiwan-U.S. relations. The Republic of China, Taiwan, was for all real purposes formed on the island by the republican forces retreating in the face of Mao’s Communist revolutionary victory in 1949. Taiwan is a vestige limb left over from the greater conflict in Asia that included World War II, kept alive by the strategic demands of the Cold War. It is a leftover piece of history, by way of analogy, as if the American Civil War somehow left a tiny corner of Georgia slave territory secured by Britain. Everyone would like to conclude this history, and a brilliant piece of American diplomacy mostly did.
In the process of shifting its primary diplomatic and political relationship from Taipei to Beijing, the U.S. and China signed several diplomatic communiques, particularly the 1972 Shanghai Communique. The U.S. enacted the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. The communiques contain the carefully constructed language that “there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it.” That marvelously ambiguous phrase allowed all sides to “acknowledge” Taipei’s and Beijing’s competing claims to be the rightful rulers of the Middle Kingdom. The occasional rhetoric about reuniting the two China’s (more out of Beijing than Taipei these days) is not a threat. It is a restatement of the status quo. The genius of the arrangement was not agreement about Taiwan’s ultimate status. It was agreement on how to conduct relations while that status remains disputed.
Few pieces of Cold War diplomacy have aged as well. While the Middle East blows up in new and ever-more deadly ways, and somehow Russian tanks again roll across the Ukrainian plains as if it was still 1943, China has not tried to take Taiwan by force in the almost 50 years since the current framework has been in place. There were some sparks before the communiques and the Act, and each side seems to find the need for provacative acts on an irregular basis, but the peace has held. This fits with China’s world view that history will slowly but inevitably right all geopolitical wrongs. China has spent decades threatening Taiwan without invading it. China never moved militarily against British Hong Kong from 1841 forward, or Portuguese Macau from 1557. It peacefully regained control of the two areas from their colonial conquerors. China has proven to be a patient, pragmatic negotiator. Beijing has demonstrated that it can wait even hundreds of years when it believes historical circumstances are moving in its favor. There is no fierce urgency to reunification.
China has enormous financial reasons not to invade Taiwan. Historically, Taiwan’s investment in China totaled $176 billion, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. Total Chinese investment in the U.S. economy is over $145 billion. U.S. investment in China passed $1 trillion, all of which would be a risk if China moved against Taiwan. Economic integration has not only helped preserve the peace, it has proven darn profitable. China and Taiwan have spent years doing something strange for two governments supposedly preparing for war: getting rich together.
China regularly references a redline on Taiwan “independence.” The definition is very tolerant. Beijing lives with Taiwan forming one of Asia’s most robust democracies, with a multi-party system, regular, fair elections, its own courts, laws, and army, its own passports, currency, and national airline, even its own Olympic team. Most countries have steady albeit unofficial diplomatic relations with both entities, with Taiwan under the gossamer thin illusion of calling their embassy in Taipei something vague, such as the American Institute in Taiwan and the ambassador there “the director.” In my experience working for the State Department in Taipei, Beijing, and Hong Kong, the nomenclature often seemed more consequential politically than operationally.
It was not Sun Tzu who said “speak softly but have a backup plan” but someone thought of that on their own. The Taiwan Relations Act makes clear Washington will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States” and that the U.S. will “maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.” The language, unchanged since the roller disco era, was crafted specifically to incorporate flexibility, not signal weakness. Diplomats on all three sides understand this.
What has changed since the roller disco era is AI, and the super semiconductors which power it. Founded in 1987, TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces some 90 percent of the world’s cutting edge semiconductors. Those chips power nearly everything that matters, from AI to smartphones to most weapons systems. Like Saudi oil was to the 19th and 20th centuries, the world cannot function without TSMC. Doesn’t that make it — like oil once was — a resource a world hegemon must control? Won’t China invade Taiwan and seize control of the means of production as the West moved into the Middle East?
An oil field can be captured. A semiconductor ecology cannot; destroying TSMC would be a terrible way to acquire TSMC. An invasion of Taiwan to seize the plants would more likely end in their severe damage or destruction. It also may not be in Sun Tzu, but it is possible Taiwan is prepared to spike the works at TSMC if necessary. In addition, much of TSMC’s sophisticated manufacturing equipment comes from the Netherlands, and the ultra-pure chemicals it needs from Japan. Those two U.S. allies could certainly cut off supplies. You can control the factories with boots on the ground but not necessarily make chips. Never mind the need to somehow keep Taiwan’s educated and technically skilled chip workers on the job at gunpoint. TSMC is currently building massive plants in Arizona and other world locations, its first outside Taiwan. Meanwhile, China is in the early stages of building a large domestic semiconductor industry to reduce dependence on Taiwan. Long term, the TSMC connection to Taiwan sovereignty will diminish.
Presidents Trump and Xi have much to sort out, not the least of which is how to jointly manage AI. Their future agenda will no doubt also include a lot of talk about when oil can flow again freely through the Strait of Hormuz. There are those pesky islands in the South China Sea that are claimed by multiple nations. Rare earth minerals. But unlike the dark days of the Cold War, the U.S. and China are more competitors than enemies. Unlike with the Soviet Union, China, the U.S., and Taiwan swim in the same economic and technological ecosystems. Their supply chains, shipping, capital sources, and markets are fully intertwined. The U.S. and the Soviets were disconnected to the point where even every minor cultural exchange needed to be negotiated at high levels. That kind of thing hasn’t been part of U.S.-China relations since the ping-pong diplomacy of 1971.
The world is an evolved place. It is likely time to see Taiwan as something that has been managed well, and may only need ongoing pruning. The remarkable thing about Taiwan is not that the dispute has disappeared just because it was not publicly discussed at a summit. It is that despite regular predictions and preparations for conflict, three governments have spent nearly half a century learning how to live with it.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
“Public Charge” and Trump’s Immigration Reform
While ICE raids dominate headlines, another important reform has received far less attention: the Trump administration restoring the teeth to the public charge doctrine that has long been part of American immigration law. Aggressive street enforcement receives the noise and the headlines, but administrative changes to immigration law produce effects just as significant, just more quietly. The details matter.
The issue of immigrants (legal and otherwise) and public benefits has a long history. Strong sentiments opposing the immigration of “paupers” developed in the United States well before actual immigration controls. During the colonial period, several colonies enacted protective measures to prohibit the immigration of individuals who might become public charges. Since then, American immigration law has generally sought to exclude immigrants likely to become public charges, though enforcement has varied considerably over time.
From the earliest days immigrants were expected to earn their own living in their new country. Under the rules then in effect, those without cash in their pockets were expected to show at places like Castle Garden and later Ellis Island that they could work to support themselves. It was not too hard, as America was a booming nation, with factories and mines that needed untold numbers of unskilled workers, and vast tracts of land that must be farmed to feed the growing nation. The immigration system in place fit its times, a crucial lesson.
Government benefits barely existed. Needy immigrants relied instead on Dickensian poorhouses or private charities. In the near-complete absence of Federal assistance, receiving states like New York and Massachusetts established agencies like the New York Board of the Commissioners of Emigration in 1847 to inspect newcomers and provide temporary medical aid. Many states required ship captains to pay a “head tax” or post indemnity bonds for passengers deemed likely to need public assistance. If an immigrant ended up in a public hospital or poorhouse within a few years of arrival, the state used those bond funds to cover the costs. But the Supreme Court decided the state-imposed head taxes interfered with Congress’s authority to regulate commerce and struck them down. Concerns about poor immigrants led to the first general federal immigration statute of 1882, which excluded “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Later laws not only permitted those likely to become public charge to be refused entry to the U.S., but broadened to allow those who became public charges after entry to be deported. In 1924 the U.S. first began the wide-spread issuing of entry visas abroad to foreigners, with the same restrictions. This created the tri-level system — visa adjudication abroad, evaluation at the port of entry, and even years later, at a deportation hearing — that the Trump administration seeks to reinvigorate in 2026.
The system roughly in place during these boom years for immigration around the turn of the century worked in large part because of two factors: the relative absence of public benefits available, and the emphasis on immigrants who would get to work immediately. The first factor fell away with the creation of the modern American welfare state during the Great Depression. The many new welfare programs did not bar immigrants from federal assistance, right through the creation of the food stamps program, SNAP, in 1960. The second factor which had mediated benefits and immigration, that almost all immigrants worked, changed under The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The Act emphasized family reunification, dramatically shifting the demographic makeup of arriving immigrants, placing more emphasis on family relationships than ability or occupational skills or even grit. The opening of public benefits to immigrants was codified by the 1971 landmark case Graham v. Richardson, when the Supreme Court ruled laws denying welfare benefits to legal immigrant residents violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
For almost three decades after that, most immigrants had access to most public benefits. Consular officers adjudicating visas abroad, even in the developing world, were told to apply public charge questions lightly if they asked any questions at all. In my years of experience as a Consular officer, fake or exaggerated financial documents were to be ignored or taken at face value, and officers were trained not to even ask about past welfare use in the U.S. on the grounds that the law was “prospective” (i.e., the person was likely to become a public charge in the future) and any actual, earlier use of public benefits was to be handled by the immigration bureaucracy in the U.S. if ever. In Korea as visa officers we encountered a generation of well-to-do students paying full tuition at university while having their American citizen babies on public assistance; pre-social media, word of mouth passed on details of the scam. Elderly Chinese parents in California seeking “tourist” visas collected SSI cash and food stamps while actually living rent-free with their employed children; visa issued. Of course the vast populations of immigrants working off the books benefited from taxpayer largess with free public education and free school lunches for their kids and elderly, and subsidized childcare. New laws in the 1990s requiring Affidavits of Financial Support from American citizens for new immigrants had no enforcement mechanism built-in and were useless. In practice, requirements were rarely enforced for almost all those immigrants who would go on to use the system.
Over the years the intersection of rising immigration numbers and a larger welfare state fueled political anxieties. Critics argued the social safety net deprived Americans in real need, and acted as a “welfare magnet,” an argument that directly drove the federal restrictions in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) signed by President Bill Clinton. It appeared to end many of the New Deal-era entitlements, introduced work requirements, time limits, and created non-citizen restrictions. But because PRWORA only barred non-citizens from federally funded assistance, states retained the authority to spend their own tax revenues to support their residents, regardless of immigration status. Several states, notably California, New York, and Massachusetts, enacted legislation to build state-only versions of Federal programs like food stamps and welfare, paid entirely from state treasuries and high taxes. While federal law blocked new immigrants from standard Medicaid, many states used their own revenue to offer Medicaid-like substitutes such as Medi-Cal in California to groups entirely excluded from Federal definitions of “qualified immigrants,” such as temporary visa holders or individuals under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
The Trump Administration is now trying to stem the flow of immigrants who are or who are likely to become public charges. It froze all immigrant visa applications abroad in August 2026 to retrain (closer to reindoctrinate) its consular officers on the new philosophy of not streamlining the issuance of tourist visas to impoverished refugees claiming to be headed to Disney and the 9/11 hijackers. Only gradually now are some select embassies beginning to process cases again. Previously, before the new training and rules, visa officers and DHS officials processing deportations were limited in considering what benefits could count against the “public charge” rule to cash welfare payments meant to cover basic living expenses and long-term institutional care paid for by the federal government.
The new Trump rules, subject to the inevitable litigation of course, allow visa officers overseas and DHS domestically to conduct case-by-case reviews considering an applicant’s age, health, family status, assets, financial resources, education, skills and whether the person has previously received means-tested taxpayer-funded benefits, including food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. The new rules, when one includes the waves of visa seekers at every American embassy and consulate, will potentially affect millions of people and deter many more from even applying. The public charge test exempts some refugees, asylees, and those in humanitarian categories, meaning those truly in need should have help available to them.
After literally centuries of back-and-forth on this issue, the practical impact of these new Trump administration rules is that it will become easier for officers to deny visas, admission or permanent residence to applicants likely to become dependent on government assistance. This reinforces the longstanding principle that immigrants be self-sufficient and protects taxpayer-funded benefits. It may also help shift America’s focus away from family-based immigration toward highly-educated, highly-paid individuals with strong financial standing directly connected to the nation’s economic needs. Not bad for what may seem at first glance as a small step.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
New Values-Based Recruiting for State Department
Andrew Crapuchettes is a man with a mission. He wants to bring patriotic values to government employment recruiting, and, he wants to personally help implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s mandate to reform the Department of State to better represent those values abroad long past the end of the Trump/Vance/Rubio administrations. Can he do it?
Crapuchettes earlier this spring received an almost one million dollar contract to act as a recruiter for the Department of State for new Foreign Service Officers (FSOs). He intends to implement this contract for finding America’s next generation of diplomats via his existing employment search websites, RedBalloon and Military Hire. When he talks about values-based recruiting, Crapuchettes pulls no punches about what his intention for State is, saying a lot of State’s “recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.” He promises future recruits that “all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the U.S. government.” He even sat for an interview with podcast CrossPolitic titled “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”
The promised changes are in line with broader directives from President Trump and Secretary Rubio. In March 2025 Trump signed a memorandum directing the Secretary of State to remove “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) as a Core Precept that under Biden controlled Foreign Service promotions. Supervisors under Biden were required to list specific DEIA accomplishments for each diplomat on his yearly job evaluation. The Trump memo further directed State not base Foreign Service recruitment and hiring on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, nor embed discriminatory equity ideology within any element of the Foreign Service. Rubio was quick to act, firing some 1,300 State Department employees, including 246 Foreign Service Officers, and recalling many then-ambassadors seen as opposed to Trump’s foreign policy. Rubio wrote about the restructuring that “motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up… While the talented and loyal are driven into indifference. Radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the president and undermine the interests of the United States.”
Some of the first concrete steps to dismantle DEIA and chip away at State’s culture Rubio took after the initial firings already concerned recruitment; new officers offer a faster way to reshape institutional culture than attempting to change the outlook of an entrenched workforce. Rubio suspended the Charles Rangel and Thomas Pickering Fellowships. Both existed to provide an alternative pathway into the Foreign Service with benefits not available through the standard hiring process, with a focus on increasing representation of underrepresented groups. The programs were administered through Howard University, a historically black institution, and the recruited Fellows were estimated to be 80 percent black, multi-racial or Hispanic. Rubio also did away with diplomats in residence (DIR), a program designed to reach populations with lower percentages in the Foreign Service than their share of the general population. Many DIRs were based at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Today, almost everyone who enters State as an FSO must now pass the same rigorous vetting, leveling the playing racial field.
A look at Crapuchettes’ current job employment websites at RedBalloon and Military Hire offers some clues to how State’s FSO recruitment may work in the near future. The sites advise all employers must pledge to honor free speech and medical privacy, something that may challenge State with its complex restrictions on FSOs appearing on TV and even in social media. RedBalloon itself states it seeks “motivated job seekers who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition, and employers that respect their constitutional rights and provide a positive workplace where merit and achievement are honored.” MilitaryHire is much the same, but leans more heavily toward matching former military members with technical skills with businesses working alongside government. Crapuchettes is unabashedly Christian (this is of course what the MSM seized upon).
Browsing Crapuchettes’ employment sites shows they currently recruit for ICE and the Border Patrol. Some advertisements seek people who have or who will qualify for security clearances to work at Northern Virginia locations such as McLean, which may or may not be affiliated with the Intelligence Community or its network of contractors. One such ad is looking for people with proven lockpicking skills. Most other employers in the Washington, DC area appear to be well-known conservative or right-of-center groups and NGOs.
It is clear, in line with Rubio’s other changes, the change in recruiting venue is part of an all-out effort to radically change the culture of the State Department. Its last radical change, actually more of a lateral move, was during the Obama and Biden eras, especially under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Democrats expanded the traditional conception of diplomacy to include advocacy on LGBT rights, women’s rights, labor issues, and other social justice policy priorities. Critics argued recruitment favored applicants from elite universities and applicants who shared prevailing progressive assumptions within the foreign policy establishment. It is consistent with this former pseudo-ideological strategy that the new recruitment emphasis fits with the Trump administration’s own approach to foreign affairs.
Trump in his first term talked a good game about State Department reform, but he chose weak Secretaries of State who never understood they needed to affect change at all levels to alter State’s broader culture. The rank and file in an almost feral way understood this and stymied initiatives, slow-walked paper, and resisted initiatives until the changemakers ran out of time and likely interest. State successfully waited out its opponents in the first Trump administration because it did not believe it represents the Executive or even an America which it did not support politically. State instead had its own version of what the world really needs.
Things may be different now, as a growing cohort of conservative thinkers that will outlast Trump has come out of the closet inside State for the first time. Rubio’s changes reach into the hereto untouched recruitment, training, and promotion processes, the systems that shape institutional culture over the long run. Whether these reforms endure past the next Republican president is the central question. Personnel policies can be quickly reversed by future administrations. Rubio appears to be betting that changing who enters the Foreign Service will prove more durable than changing those already inside it.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Has Trump Helped Curb Illegal Immigration?
No one knows how many illegal immigrants (a catch-all term here for false asylees, visa overstays, border sneaks, the general undocumented, and the like) are in the United States, but various studies suggest it is a large number, maybe 18.6 million people, close to 6 percent of the entire population of the United States. For many years we had no mechanisms to count them, and in many instances the government did not really want to know. For example, despite issuing as many as 11 million visas a year, the State Department has avoided any comprehensive analysis on how many people overstay or misuse their visas as feedback to guide future decisions, claiming in a bureaucratic tussle the task belongs to DHS and isn’t any of their business. Even rudimentary immigration exit controls at airports, near standard world-wide, have only recently been deployed in the U.S. by DHS.
So any measurement of Trump’s attempts to lower illegal immigration begin with current, not historical, numbers. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded about 237,000 migrant “encounters” at the southern border in FY 2025, down from more than 1.5 million in FY 2024 and more than two million annually during the Biden peak years of 2022–2023. ICE reached a milestone this year of more than 10,000 foreign gang members arrested, many at the border. There are now more Border Patrol agents than any other time in the Patrol’s 102-year history. At the same time, Trump did away with the CBP One app which allowed would-be asylum seekers to begin the process by smart phone app even before they reached U.S. soil. Trump also restricted asylum processing and toughened standards against widespread fraud, even seeking to punish an American immigration attorney who (allegedly) filed false asylum applications, a rare Federal action.
Trump expanded expedited deportations and removals, reinstated tougher ICE deterrence policies and arrests, and made changes to the State Department visa-issuing system abroad to include new and higher fees and bond deposits, fewer visa posts issuing visas at all in fraud-plagued Africa, and stopped immigrant and non-immigrant visa issuance entirely in countries that do not cooperate with the U.S. on deportations and fraud prevention.
ICE arrests rose from a long-term average of roughly 350 per day to as many as 1,300 per day, increasing more than three times compared with the final year of the Biden administration. Deportations from within the United States increased by roughly 4.6 times during the first nine months of Trump’s second term. The use of third countries to accept deportees when their home country refuses to do so has increased significantly, with a new office at the State Department set up just to handle the details. Efforts to get illegals to self-deport have yielded almost 90,000 voluntary departures. ICE detention populations increased substantially, reaching nearly 70,000 detainees at one point, compared with roughly 39,000 when Trump returned to office. Congress also approved tens of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement and detention operations through 2029. Trump toughened up the civics test immigrants must pass in order to become citizens. The Justice Department launched legal challenges in states which allow illegal alien college students to pay the tuition rate reserved for legal in-state residents. Trump deincentivized working illegally in the United States while at the same time cutting into money laundering by Mexican and other drug cartels with a 3.5 percent remittance fee on the often untaxed money sent by aliens in the U.S. to their home country.
The administration’s changes were reinforced by two recent Supreme Court victories which allow Trump to regain substantial authority managing the border. In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado the Court ruled an undocumented person must be physically present in the United States to make an asylum claim. Asylum seekers who are stopped on the other side of the border (i.e., in Mexico, not actually admitted to America) are not “present” in the United States. If treated as inside the country as under Biden, despite being outside it, these individuals would be allowed to enter the U.S. and remain for years, with work permits, while their asylum claims pended. The eventual formal asylum approval rate was as low as 15 percent, even under Obama and Biden judges, and many asylum seekers simply disappeared into the United States as permanent illegals rather than face refusal and deportation. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found the immigration court system does not systematically track hearing attendance anyway, making it impossible to produce a real “no-show rate.”
The Supreme Court also gave DHS a powerful new tool in Mullin v. Doe, upholding the right of the administration to remove Temporary Protection Status (TPS) from more than 356,000 Syrians and Haitians now in the U.S. Congress created TPS in 1990 to allow temporary legal status and work authorization to nationals of countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other transient conditions that make safe return impossible. With TPS, Congress intended the emphasis to be on “temporary.” The alien would not be expected to return home in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, but was expected to return home as soon as possible. TPS as created by Congress never provided a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Yet hundreds of thousands of aliens stayed in the U.S. indefinitely under TPS, often vying for other immigration statuses like asylum when available. Many Haitians affected by the new Supreme Court ruling have been in the U.S. in “temporary” status since 2010, many Syrians since 2012. What was once intended as a temporary humanitarian gesture had been hacked into a new de facto permanent immigration status. The new Court ruling allows TPS to return to its original function. Elsewhere, Trump also seeks to end TPS for people, some 1.3 million of them, from 13 out of 17 countries holding the designation when Joe Biden left office. One TPS designation, for Somalis, has been in place for 35 years.
At the same time, Trump deportations, arrests, and detentions do continue to face significant legal and political constraints. This shows how deeply entrenched illegal immigration is in our society, and how easily it can be made into an emotional and political football. The article you are reading now, with its statistics about ICE enforcement growing, might be seen by The Atlantic as a call to arms against fascism. At The American Conservative, many of the same government actions are likely to get a nod of approval. Progressives are driven by the immigration myth that because their great, great grandpa immigrated to the U.S. from some eastern European shtetl that America is obligated forever to allow near-unfettered immigration. Others believe it is the right of any person living under less-than-ideal circumstances anywhere in the world to “have a better life” in the U.S., ignoring that every other nation instead tries to vigorously control its borders and interior with metered immigration.
Lastly, so much of the opposition to Trump’s immigration changes is simplistic Trump hatred. Reasonable Trader Joe-type suburban people are willing to suck tear gas and engage in street fights with armed Federal law enforcement over points of immigration law they had not heard of a few years ago. One resistor was just sentenced to 100 years in jail for trying to murder an officer in the midst of an armed assault on an ICE facility. The mayor of New York, unaware apparently of the importance of the Rule of Law in America, vows to not enforce a recent Supreme Court decision ruling because he feels it is anti-immigrant. These people’s apparent willingness to risk death or imprisonment over the fate of illegal aliens they do not even know is irrational. What they see as authoritarianism is simply the enforcement for the first time of laws on the books for decades. They don’t see immigration change in terms of something that might possibly help America, only in some schadenfreudian calculus that makes it seem Trump is losing a battle against them. Their way of thinking blocks any sensible discussion of immigration, one that ultimately could result in reforms to the law. Policies that might once have been debated on their merits are now interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of “resistance.” It is all America’s loss as chaos replaces democracy in the streets.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Do You Get It Yet? The State Department Rarely Matters Anymore
Has the State Department gotten the message yet?
Let’s try it by example. You meet a woman at a party. Even while you’ve telling her about your accomplishments she’s looking around the room. She reluctantly gives you her number before disappearing into the crowd. You text her 25 times telling her what a good romantic partner you are and after the first polite non-answers she stops responding. Is your next move to inform her further how essential you are to her life?
If you’re the U.S. Department of State being essentially declared irrelevant by the Trump administration, for the second time no less, you definitely go for it. You plan a rally with only Democratic Congressmembers a year after 1,350 employees were RIFed to declare the “cost is almost impossible to ignore.” You don’t offer any specifics about what that cost is besides “um, diplomacy is good.” You plant media puff pieces headlined “State is looking to rebuild,” and whining that instead of rehiring the RIFed old timers the organization is looking for new blood among former military specifically because they are not like you. You get MSNBC to write an article worrying about a leadership vacuum abroad as ambassador jobs are left unfilled, and then you cite off-the-grid Moldova, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Cyprus as critical examples, even when your own career Foreign Service people are left in charge (chargé d’affaires) but deemed inadequate to the jobs by your own words. You get pieces published about how State cannot respond to the Ebola crisis, without any details of what State might actually have to do with responding to a medical crisis that the UN or others are not already doing. You fill your yearly evaluations with talk about process, what you do, like writing papers and coordinating committees and delivering “strong” messages, without a word about outcomes, what you have actually achieved. And then you complain about new evaluations that require employees to be rated on a numerical scale and for supervisors to provide concise answers to written questions about performance to make the evaluations more data driven and less clubby and inside-baseball.
State can’t cite specifics and won’t embrace change. No one in the Trump administration is even listening, but you don’t get it.
Donald Trump appointed a strong Secretary of State, one who has the chance to be the next president and your next boss’ boss, and you miss the significance that he holds multiple important jobs in the administration, you’re just part of his day. A State Department that mattered would not be able to get by with a part-time secretary. You miss that he has created an exoskeleton of chosen advisors around himself, ignoring the bulk of State. The Financial Times writes “18 months into Trump’s second term the Department is not just sidelined; it appears under siege.”
You don’t seem to notice no one outside the Beltway really cares that a large number of embassies abroad have no ambassador (the administration has demonstrated through its actions that ambassadorial vacancies are a far lower priority than previously believed) and that many that do feature political appointees as personal mockery like former athlete Herschel Walker to conduct “diplomacy.” You miss that visa offices you used to run are being closed across Africa. You miss that a influential organization arose dedicated specifically to changing your internal culture (no such group exists to do the same for any other cabinet agency). You fail to see the impact of articles like those headlined “While America fights a war, the State Department is focused on dress codes.” It’s not a laugh line; it’s proof no one cares what you have to do with wars (and which State Department office is in charge of negotiating with Iran? Trick question, none, America’s most important diplomatic task is being done by appointed Special Envoys, as are Ukraine issues). After helping bungle the evacuation of Americans out of Afghanistan, you complain you weren’t given a big enough roll in evacuations prior to the current Iran War.
Why does the Trump administration ghost the State Department? A lot may go back to how State behaved during the first Trump Administration. State basically ignored his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, slow-walking any changes he proposed. In a leaked dissent memo, Foggy Bottom even claimed their boss violated a child soldier conscription law. The State Department legal office prepared another memo for Tillerson warning of the dangers of leaking by State Department employees, which was then promptly leaked to the Washington Post. State also opposed Trump’s next Secretary, Mike Pompeo, until he walled himself off from the institution. One expert said “Pompeo followed the model of most of his predecessors, whether Democrat or Republican, of ‘doing my thing and letting the department do its thing.”’
State personnel took a lead role in the Trump impeachment hearings over Ukraine. Vanity Fair summed it up better than the FSOs leaking across social media: “A hero is born as Ambassador Masha Yovanovitch gives voice to widespread rage at State. ‘I think people are feeling huge pride in Masha,’ says a former ambassador.”
Alongside Yovanovitch, bureaucrat George Kent issued pronouncements against Trump people he never met who ignored his advice. Ambassador Bill Taylor leaked hoarded text messages with Trump political appointees. Taylor’s deputy, David Holmes, appeared deus ex machina in front of the impeachment hearing to claim he somehow overheard both sides of a phone conversation between Trump and his political appointee ambassador. Holmes surreptitiously eavesdropped on a presidential call and dumped it in the Democrats’ lap as red meat. White Houses, Republican or Democrat, cannot function when career officials routinely leak internal deliberations. And nobody likes a snitch.
State’s Foreign Service Officers saw themselves as resistance superheroes who would take down Trump I. The organization flirted with the role even before the election; a 2016 “dissent” was designed to force the then anti-war Trump into conflict in Syria. Then another leaked “dissent” by over 900 State employees strayed close to insubordination opposing Trump’s so-called “Muslim Ban.” State was forced to settle with conservative media outlets that sued for censorship by the Department during the Biden administration. That court decree actually mandated training for State employees on their First Amendment obligations to all of the Americans they are supposed to be serving, despite those employees having already sworn allegiance to the Constitution which includes the First Amendment. Earlier, everyone remembers the Department’s delaying the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails (after helping hide the existence of her private server). The State Department turned a blind eye for years to Secretary Clinton’s nepotism hiring her campaign aide as a make-work State employee. State’s DEI programs, which grew under the Obama and Biden administrations, were declared discriminatory. Maybe the organization is deemed irrelevant by Trump in part because it has betrayed itself to partisan politics.
Institutions survive only if political leaders believe they advance elected policy rather than resist it. Too many of State’s employees exist in an adverbial relationship to the Executive, and are proud of themselves for it. No other Cabinet agency comes even close to that. The State Department’s challenge is not rebuilding its workforce, it is rebuilding the confidence of the elected government it exists to serve.
Of course there will always be some role for the State Department overseas at least, primarily in assistance to American citizens and the few traditional diplomats needed to handle the bureaucratic concierge work and VIP logistics handling State has always been good at. But we are questioning most of the rest. Being left functionally irrelevant is no fun. But it hurts even more when you slowly learn it was in large part your own fault. Face it, if you were Donald Trump, would you trust the State Department?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
State to Save Millions Closing Visa Offices Across Africa
Marco Rubio’s State Department will slash the number of U.S. offices in Africa processing visas for foreigners seeking to come to the United States. The almost 50 U.S. embassies and consulates that are currently processing visa applications will be reduced to 20 to take advantage of economies of scale. This will save taxpayer dollars maintaining offices and staff that mostly just refuse visas anyway, as well as likely slow the number of Africans who secure visas only to overstay in America. Donald Trump haters will call this racism. Supporters will call it saving taxpayer money.
The United States currently issues and refuses both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas at some 50 posts across Africa (out of 54 countries there.) Immigrant visas (IVs), also known as green cards, represent a relatively small amount of the business. The way immigrant visas are typically refused in Africa (officially called 221g) multiple times before finally being issued, sometimes years after the process started (as if your “Incomplete” in sophomore English Composition was still hanging over you years after graduation), the refusal rates appear artificially high and make for bad statistical comparisons. Also, the Donald Trump administration in January 2026 already suspended all immigrant visa processing for 26 African countries anyway, so these visas really are not of much concern here with this new development.
The nonimmigrant visas (NIVs) in Africa, mostly tourist visas, are overwhelmingly refused. To avoid complaints, the State Department closely holds actual refusal numbers per post. However, State is required to release refusal statistics by nationality, and that tells the tale. Some of the highest rates in Africa are Liberians 78.2 percent, Somalis 77 percent, Burundis 65.5 percent, and Beninese 61.5 percent, and Chadians 58.6 percent. And those numbers are pre-Trump II. In comparison, the historical refusal rates for most European countries were so low (below three percent) that the U.S. used that in part to give up even requiring visas from them years ago.
It is hard to say what the point of maintaining a visa office in a far-flung part of Africa is just to say “no” over and over again. State’s standard reply has to do with maintaining good relations with the host country (questionable on the face when there are so many refusals and immigrant visa processing is shut down completely). This also hints at an answer to why the U.S. has so many embassies and consulates in countries that arguably have little to do. Much of this network was established during the Cold War, when Washington viewed newly independent African states as key battlegrounds in its global competition with the Soviet Union. As African countries gained independence, both the United States and the USSR sought political influence, military access, and votes in international organizations. Establishing embassies also allowed the Americans to monitor Soviet activities and USAID contractors of varying sobriety and propriety. Although the Cold War ended in 1991, the diplomatic infrastructure remained in place as State resisted moves toward regional “hub” embassies brought about by the “peace dividend.” State currently still seeks to justify the mass of embassies, claiming they are there to counter the usurious Chinese Belt and Road Initiative without really explaining how they do that. Movie nights?
No need to worry, however, about the small percentage of Africans who might have succeeded in obtaining nonimmigrant visas in their home countries. Some 20 U.S. visas posts will remain open, and the applicants can apply there. The “closed” visa posts will still assist American Citizens and process special national interest visa cases and diplomatic applications. As for the rest, few African capitals have direct flights to the U.S. mainland anyway, so many travelers can apply enroute. Applicants must travel internationally to reach the United States anyway, so requiring some of them to travel to regional visa hubs is not an unreasonable burden. It’s an old system anyway; during my time processing visas in London, the embassy reserved a number of appointments for Iranian citizens, who would fly in on a weekly Swiss Air flight, get their visa, and head off to New York even as the U.S. maintained no diplomatic relations with Tehran.
There are two main reasons to shut down these African visa posts. Refusal rates are high enough to question maintaining separate processing facilities in every country. Maintaining an American diplomat overseas to process visas is expensive. He needs government housing, an office, a local staff, administrative support, security escorts, transportation, language training, education allowances for children, hardship and danger pay, and more (some of which albeit are fixed costs even if personnel headcount decreases), plus the actual sunk costs of his salary, benefits, and pension. There is no single official figure because costs vary widely by country, rank, and family size.
However, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the State Department spent about $3.1 billion on pay, benefits, and allowances for roughly 9,000 U.S. direct-hire employees serving overseas in FY 2023. That works out to an average of about $344,000 per overseas employee per year. An earlier 2006 GAO study estimated the cost of placing a U.S. Foreign Service officer overseas at approximately $400,000 annually. None of this even tries to calculate the lost cost of having that expensively-trained diplomat spend his time saying no to visas in Monrovia when he could be working on much more critical issues in Beijing.
The other reason to shut down these visa issuing posts is because it will likely slow down the number of visas issued to African travelers and thus the number of visa overstays in the U.S. Because the U.S. does not comprehensively track overstays, there is no single, reliable headcount. However, the best source is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Entry/Exit Overstay Report, which calculates overstay rates by nationality for visitors admitted as business or tourist travelers. It shows overstays for Africans ranged from a high of 49 percent for Chadians, to five percent for Ghana. Keep in mind this rate is not the percentage of a country’s citizens living illegally in the United States (no one knows that number because the census cannot by law ask about citizenship status). It is the percentage of a specific year’s visitor admissions that DHS could not confirm departed on time. Considering over 20,000 tourist visas are issued per year most every year just for Ghanaians, even five percent overstay by them represents a large and ever-growing number of actual people.
So what do we call the shutdown of visa posts in Africa? A good start.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Next Stage of U.S.-Iran Relations
The U.S.-Iran War may be dwindling its final phase, though the durability of any ceasefire remains uncertain. So who won? As the kids say, it’s complicated.
Much of the discussion of the war’s meaning, even as it drags on, focuses on how it has already damaged Donald Trump politically. Lost in that pile-on is a more important question: what did the war produce? The answer may lie in the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding that may still someday mark the end of the fighting. However, the talk now is almost exclusively and presumably about how the war’s failure will help crush the Republicans in November. That misses at first that any missteps or any failures, or any successes, are America’s to reckon with for now forever forward, not simply some trite shot at a hated President. Wars belong to the nation, not to a particular administration. It may have once been called Johnson’s and Nixon’s war, but the Vietnam vets who still suffer today are America’s. The outcome of the Iran War should not be hooted and cheered as if it was another simple downturn in the polls.
So what does a fuller look at the outcome of the war tell us? History as always will be the final judge (as it will on whose agreement, Obama’s or Trump’s, was better) but the text of the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Iran points in a possible positive direction. If the MOU can be translated into actual day-to-day relations, it opens the door for a new pattern for two countries which have been at war with each other for decades in a regional, multigenerational, power struggle.
Chief among the hopeful parts of the MOU is Paragraph Eight, which states in part “The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled, enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in Paragraph 7, with the minimum methodology to be down-blending on site under the supervision of the I.A.E.A.” If this works it means no nukes for Iran. It would sharply limit Iran’s ability to coerce its neighbors and alter the regional balance of power. It means ending the apocalyptic threat to Israel, always a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. It means no future strikes by the U.S. or Israel to brush back Iranian nuclear plans. It means no Iran with fissionable material to sell or barter globally. Yes, the MOU wording is vague in places (but quite specific in others) and yes the Iranians have cheated on past agreements. But if Paragraph Eight can be effectively implemented it will justify the recent war by preventing future ones.
Another critical part of the MOU is Paragraph 7, which explains “The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, I.A.E.A. Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal.” This paragraph joins with several others regarding the release of Iranian assets held in U.S. banks and the removal of restrictions on Iran selling oil on the global market, to be the carrot on the no nukes pledge (the stick of course being the reimposition of sanctions backed up by B-2s). The heavy sanctions Iran has faced since the 1979 Islamic Revolution have raised the price of everything inside the country, and basically control the consumer economy. For example, after the reimposition of U.S. sanctions in 2018, Iranian oil exports fell sharply from roughly 2.5 million barrels per day to well under 1 million barrels per day for a period. Sanctions have restricted Iran’s access to foreign currency and the international banking system, weakening the rial. This has made imports more expensive and fueled inflation. Sanctions have all but shut off large-scale foreign investment, restricted access to needed medical and civilian aviation technology, and reduced trade.
What decades of sanctions have not done is stop Iran from its nuclear ambitions. Removing sanctions, in measured stages as Iran complies piece-by-piece with the no nukes pledge, will reintroduce Iran into the world economy. Peaceful trading with other nations has been the center of the world order the United States created following World War II. Bringing Iran into the system can lessen its need to suffer as a pariah country. Success here could possibly replace Obama’s Libyan no nukes disaster (surrendering strategic weapons leaves a regime vulnerable to later coercion) with a lesson that Cuba and North Korea might take note of.
There does exist in the MOU one loaded gun, something which could cause the rest of the MOU to fail. One hopes the final agreement between the U.S. and Iran dramatically revises Paragraph 5, which states “Upon the signing of this M.O.U., the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf.” It is possible to understand the U.S. conceding to this faint language at this stage to secure the rest of the agreement, but it is critical that Iran in the end not control the Strait by any means, including some sort of fee, insurance or toll system.
Granting any measure of control of the Strait to Iran would set a catastrophic precedent. At the post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference, Washington created an economic system that depended in large part on the United States Navy safeguarding global freedom of navigation, a principle that underpins international trade and economic stability today. By maintaining a forward-deployed presence in key maritime chokepoints and with carrier groups in all oceans, the world’s most powerful navy ensures sea lanes remain open in accordance with international law. No other nation comes close to being able to play such a role. Europe’s sea power has not been able to do so since the collapse of the British Empire, and China still lacks the sizable blue water navy and extensive world-wide base network to try. It would be strategically devastating for America to follow the regional empowerment of Iran through its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan by handing over a global lever of control. The opening of the Strait of Hormuz cannot become a bargaining chip. The consequences will extend far beyond the Middle East, reshaping the global order in ways the United States may not be able to reverse.
This war with Iran is not over but it has reached a stage where its ultimate significance can be decided. The MOU and what happens next shows the war need not be a waste, and that the outcome is still in play even as the guns fall silent. The verdict lies not on the battlefield but in whether the MOU survives implementation. That verdict remains unwritten.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
For Springsteen Fans Now Angry with Bruce
Stephen Colbert is off the air. I waited to write this to make sure that our democracy, despite what Colbert and his regular guest Bruce Springteen are saying, remains intact. It does.
Colbert and the old Springsteen are mourned because the two saw a chance to make a very large amount of money telling people already pre-positioned to believe the sky has fallen. They are living embodiments of the blurring among entertainment, righteous protest, and partisan affirmation. Their audiences increasingly want just confirmation. Springsteen in particular sounds like he’s reciting some AI-scrubbed version of outtakes from the Declaration of Independence; the poetry that reached a hand across barriers seems lost.
They are men of their times. We live in a world of constant media stimulation, with every day being the day the doctor calls with the test results. Americans have convinced themselves they are living through a uniquely apocalyptic moment for freedom in general and the First Amendment in the particular. Every unpleasant event becomes evidence of democracy dying. Social media posts become the Reichstag Fire. A conservative commencement speaker becomes the death of free inquiry. A television cancellation becomes political persecution. It’s all about as shallow as a puddle.
Nothing can simply happen anymore. Not sure? One of the seemingly most critical issues facing our government today is whether to build a ballroom next to the White House. If every Trump-driven event is an existential threat, then every minor programming change must also be existential. Something as transient through our pop culture as a TV show can’t just have become old or irrelevant like “I Love Lucy” and “Father Knows Best”. Every era produces another so-called permanent cultural fixture that instead still ends up disappearing so completely younger people assume it was a local fast-food chain. Vaudeville disappeared. Radio drama disappeared. Video rental stores disappeared. And television shows end. They always end. That is literally the business model.
Instead, fascist, anti-democratic forces must be silencing truth-tellers. We’ll soon, it all suggests, be passing video loops of Colbert hand-to-hand like Soviet-era dissidents shuffling mimeographed manifestos around smoky coffee shops.
It’s funny the resistance chose as its spokesman Colbert, hardly a rebel broadcasting via pirate radio. He hosted one of the most expensive network television programs in the country. He operated with corporate backing and fawning celebrity access. This is a wealthy comic employed by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Springsteen is reputed to be a billionaire himself, and plays to audiences who can swing thousands of dollars for a ticket. But this isn’t an argument that only poor artists can discover truth, but instead a reminder that Colbert and his supporting acts are part of a system of money and influence and corporate greed as big or bigger than MAGA. Their comedy/commentary is no longer sharp or clever. It is simply mocking and humiliating, as crude as when Colbert called Trump “Putin’s c*ckholster” and Springsteen claimed (on Colbert’s show) that those who supported Trump were “small-minded people who got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.” It is likely Colbert could stand in front of an audience and just say “Trump sucks” over and over to applause. That takes no courage. Our American political culture is exhausted, and the progressive electorate is now dependent on such one-sided narration to tell it what to believe. That cheapens us.
Despite being a Springsteen fan since I was 17, and Bruce was not much older, I’ve never met him. But I suspect today if we met, he would not be interested in talking with a guy like me. Bruce at his angriest in songs like Born in the USA or The Ghost of Tom Joad, was an inclusive populist, talking about the hardships we all shared in one form or another as Americans no matter how we voted. In the blistering song about the death of industrialization in the Midwest, Youngstown, Springsteen does not ask if the forgotten steel workers are Republicans or Democrats. What if in the aftermath of 9/11 Springsteen wrote a song condemning half of all Muslims instead of the prayer that became The Rising?
In his very best music, like his own hero, Woody Guthrie, before him, Springsteen retains hope — at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe, everything that dies someday comes back, I believe there’s a promised land. Artists who once, like Guthrie, translated shared American pain into art now too often exploit partisan identity into dollars. Bruce once not too long ago allowed for sincere beliefs that differed between honest men and women without condemning those who disagreed, because what we shared mattered more than how we differed. He professed we need a conscience, not a party affiliation, to make America great. I am mourning here something larger than just celebrity political disagreement. I mourn the loss of a shared American vocabulary. Bruuuuce!!! Bruce?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why Does Media Misrepresent the Iran War?
Why does the U.S. mainstream media continue to mock America’s war efforts? Why does coverage of the Iran war appear to favor Iranian narratives?
The New York Times pulled no punches on where it thinks things stood just before the pre-cease fire. “A slurring Trump rehashed a bunch of his Truth Social posts, alternately boasting about America’s military progress while threatening war crimes… He showed us that he has no plan to get out of the mess he created. One way to judge how the war is going is to look at which side is trying to wrap it up. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that ‘the Iranian government believes it is in a strong position in the war and does not have to accede to America’s diplomatic demands.'” Even after the ceasefire and plans to reopen the Strait was announced, the Times could only sum up Trump’s power diplomacy as “the mark of an impulsive leader who is used to getting his way through coercion and unpredictability” and that he had “backed down.”
The Times goes on to review “American war crimes” and claims bombing only strengthened Iranian resolve. It concludes “all we know is that he [Trump] has managed to give Iran the upper hand in this conflict while tanking the global economy and shredding America’s most important alliances.” Another headline claims the takeaway from the earlier rescue of the downed American airman was all of “Trump is Emboldened” followed by “Trump Revels in Threats to Commit War Crimes in Iran” now that the missing airman is safe.
Another piece claims “Iran has now demonstrated de facto control over much of the global economy. Its Parliament is considering whether to formalize the charging of fees for passage, and an Iranian official warned earlier on social media that the United States would not regain access to the strait.” The article goes on to place suffering on a scale of justice, expressing regret over the civilian deaths in Iran without mentioning those in Israel. It cryptically refers to “displaced millions” across the Gulf without indicating who they might be. It blames all these problems and more on Trump personally.
An Op-Ed headlined “Remember the Oil Shocks of the ’70s? This Is Going to Be Worse. Much Worse” depicts the global economy spiraling out of control by citing the cost of a gallon of gas. It fails to note the price for gas peaked at around $5 per gallon in June 2022 under the worst of the Biden inflation, and almost $6 during COVID and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Crude oil, varying between $88 a barrel and over $100, hit $116 in 2022 without the media writing in apocalyptical terms, never mind blaming one man. It has already dropped to $93 following the ceasefire.
The prize for most egregious telling of the Iran War story pre-cease fire, however, goes to flagship Democratic journal Foreign Affairs, which features an article written by none other than Javad Zarif, the Islamic Republic’s former Vice President, Foreign Minister, and UN Representative. Zarif writes “…More than a month in, the Islamic Republic is clearly winning it. American and Israeli forces have spent weeks incessantly bombing Iranian territory, killing thousands of people and damaging hundreds of buildings, all in hopes of toppling the country’s government. Yet Iran has held the line and successfully defended its interests. It has maintained continuity of leadership even as its top officials have been assassinated, and it has repeatedly hit back at its aggressors even as they strike at its military, civilian, and industrial facilities. The Americans and the Israelis who started the conflict with delusions of forcing capitulation thus find themselves in a quagmire without an exit strategy. The Iranians, by contrast, have pulled off a historic feat of resistance.” He concludes the U.S. must now basically sue for peace with Tehran and remove the sanctions which have been in place for the 47 years, since Iran took over the American Embassy in Tehran and began asymmetric war across the Gulf. If not, Zarif warns, there is “reason to continue fighting until the aggressors are adequately punished rather than to search for a negotiated ending.” A companion article by a former State Department official claims “Tehran will now set the terms for peace.”
The dominant tone in high-visibility outlets frames Donald Trump’s decisions not just as controversial or risky, but as inherently unserious, worthy of ridicule, even dangerous. Late-night, top-tier Op-Eds, and even purported straight news analysis emphasize impulsiveness, strategic incoherence, or near-comedic personal motivations (the entire war is nothing but cover for the Epstein files!) behind decision-making. Thus every action is wrong, and every loss of American life, however tragic, is actually an exaggerated negative turning point. When a deadline is extended, it is seen as an example of weakness rather than a diplomatic tool. The troops, from the generals on down, once labeled by the media as the baby killers of Vietnam, have morphed into a sort of victim themselves, forced to commit war crimes in a meaningless struggle.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) accused media of engaging in selective coverage that benefited Iran during the first 30 days of the war. “I read the entire political spectrum on Epic Fury. Iran now loves and learns from the media,” Fetterman said. “The media’s selective coverage rewards and reinforces Iran’s strategy. Media amplifies the one percent chaos Iran creates, while ignoring the 99 percent of Iran’s beatdown.”
From an ironic point of view, based on American media coverage, one can’t help but be impressed by what the Iranians apparently have accomplished. Despite weeks of bombing, the destruction of over 12,000 targets, the loss of layers of tested leadership, the effective end of its navy and air force, the loss of oil revenue through the Strait, and the end of relationships with all the other Gulf states, it seems the Iranians have brought America down to its knees, stuck in a quagmire watching the world collapse around it. Iranian actions are admired as tactically clever, disciplined, and strategically effective as they take American military and Israeli civilian lives. There is almost respect for the plucky Iranian ability to harm our own people. All after only some six weeks.
Criticism often focuses on this being a war without end. In comparison, what did the media say about the Vietnam War (1,018 weeks), or Iraq II (about 416 weeks depending on who is counting)? America’s longest war, in Afghanistan, went on for some 1,040 weeks. The 1991 air campaign in Iraq, part of universally praised (at the time) Operation Desert Storm, lasted for approximately six weeks, about the same as today’s Iran war and needed to be followed by a massive ground invasion. The media initially celebrated each of those wars, and in the case of Iraq II and Afghanistan, tolerated true quagmires for decades across multiple presidencies, going as far as agreeing to label flat-out escalations as the nicer sounding “surges.” For years they allowed completely false claims about weapons of mass destruction to stand solidly as justification for war in Iraq, even as they have turned Trump’s own war objectives into an SNL skit.
During the Cold War, mainstream media often assessed the Soviet military and later the North Vietnamese with a degree of awe. The issue today is when only derision toward American leadership and blind praise for Iranian effectiveness are published. When a headline mocks a U.S. operation as chaotic while another describes Iran’s response as “measured” or “savvy,” the cumulative effect can feel less like reporting and more like an expectation. The United States, once the most powerful nation in the world with overwhelming technological capability, is recast as bumbling, while its adversary is granted the aura of competence and control.
Some tension among patriotism, objectivity, and partisanship is actually a good thing for the media to wrestle with. Intelligent skepticism is good. During the later stages of the Vietnam war, criticism centered on whether journalists had legitimately lost faith in U.S. policy. The debate was mostly whether the media turned against the war too soon, or did it simply reflect the emerging reality? A mostly shared narrative organically evolved over time. In contrast, criticism today is that the media purposely practices distortion with selective coverage that purposely highlights or creates failures while ignoring progress.
It is too early to know how this war ends, or even if the ceasefire will hold in the short term. But that is not the real issue here as revealed by the media. The coverage of the current war comes down to the desire to humiliate Trump. The mess, from the gas pump to the Middle East writ large, is entirely Trump’s fault. He is bleeding out American pocketbooks and American soldiers lives for some unclear personal gain (if not just being duped by Israel). His believed eventual failure with Iran, amplified in lockstep by the media, is what will finally bring down the King when lawsuits, impeachments, Russiagate, pussy hats, and the Epstein files failed. When audiences watch American actions mocked while Iranian actions are admired even as troops suffer, the distinction of whose side the media are on can become difficult to figure out. Helluva way to run a war.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Denmark’s Immigration Backlash: Lessons for America
What happens when a country with a long history of tolerance toward immigration and refugees has had enough? What happens when false asylum claims come to predominate, when immigrants resist assimilation? What happens when left-leaning politicians go too far in protecting the rights of immigrants and not far enough in assuring the rights of citizens?
You get Denmark. These are the real lessons for America in what happened to immigration and asylum policy there, showing immigration is a governance problem, not a moral abstraction.
Between 2019 and 2023, Denmark ushered in what is known domestically as the paradigm shift (paradigmeskiftet.) The policy framework prioritized return of asylees and temporary rather than permanent protection when asylum was granted. In 2021, Denmark became the first EU country to revoke Syrian refugees’ residency by claiming parts of Syria were safe to return to. The Danish reframed the debate and caused a rethinking of mass immigration into western Europe.
For years, Denmark was considered the European Union’s black sheep of migration policy. In the aftermath of the 2015-2016 Syrian migration crisis (driven in large part by the Obama administration’s misdeeds in that country), Denmark adopted increasingly restrictive rules to deter arrivals. The key event was in 2019, when Denmark approved its paradigm shift law that made temporary protection for refugees the new norm. Permanent residence was eventually still available, but subject to, among other criteria, full-time, stable employment. By limiting the duration of asylum (in the U.S. and most of Europe, a grant of asylum is indefinite) Danish authorities made it easier to check whether the grounds of protection were still applicable and, if not, whether deportation was feasible. Residence permits of hundreds of Syrian refugees were revoked. In 2021, Denmark signed a memo of understanding with Rwanda, under which the Danes would transfer asylum seekers to a reception centre in the African nation to wait for their applications, a kind of outsourcing strategy. Denmark later backed away from the plan under intense outside criticism.
These changes were justified by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who said mass immigration exerts undue pressure on the welfare state, particularly harming low-income and low-skilled Danes. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalization, mass immigration… is paid for by the lower classes,” she stated. “You cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” she added in a more recent interview. Other Danish officials say their approach is necessary to protect the welfare system and ensure that benefits are only being offered to residents who fully contribute to tax revenue and other social structures.
Changes to the asylum process were not the only measures a Denmark that had had enough put into place. One of the most controversial was Asset Confiscation (“Jewelry Law”) under which Danish authorities can seize valuables, cash, and jewelry from refugees entering the country. Used only in a few dozen cases to date, it allows police to confiscate cash and valuables worth more than about $1500 from arriving migrants and asylum seekers. This was followed by caps on non‑western immigration. The government required social welfare benefits recipients to work at least 37 hours weekly. Though enforced only spottily, legislation prohibiting niqabs and burqas passed. Residential areas with high proportions of non-Western residents were designated “parallel societies,” and subject to everything from economic redevelopment plans to actual bulldozing. Then there was the so-called “Ghetto Law” which allows authorities to forcibly remove foreigners from neighborhoods if the ratio of non-Western foreigners in those areas exceeds 30 percent. Obviously some of these things would never pass in the U.S., culturally and Constitutionally.
When migrants posing as students began streaming in around these tightened asylum rules, as of May 2025, international students enrolled in non‑accredited programs were barred from working, post-graduation job seeking, or family reunification. Generous cash subsidies (around $6000) are available to anyone agreeing to self-deport. Refugees without residence permits who refuse to voluntarily return to their country of origin are required to stay in departure centers without cash benefits or the right to work. By 2019 some 114 restrictions were enacted within immigration policy to deter would-be migrants.
Surprisingly, under these new rules the quantity of immigration increased but at the same time so did the quality, a critical lesson. In recent years refugees still comprised the largest share (35 percent as of 2022) of Denmark’s non-Western population. This is due to the Danish government recruiting targeted migrants, especially in the health and elder-care sectors, in response to declining birth rates. In 2022 the government introduced a fast-track procedure for certified companies to perform more flexible international recruitment, representing about a third of total worker intake. This is a far cry from the mid-2000’s when ten of thousands of Syrians were accepted without regard to job skills, as is the American system. “We’ll take all the refugees we can get,” a Canadian diplomat told me once, “as long as we can choose which ones.”
Denmark does not want to leave people outside to die. “We did not question that people fleeing need help, shelter, and to be protected. They are not fleeing for fun,” one center-left politician said, noting such an acknowledgement was vital to get fellow party members on board. “Migration numbers were simply so big that they could not be dealt with in a way that is sustainable for the welfare state of Denmark. We understood even then that the migration model was broken and we needed to come up with an alternative.” It was in fact the center-left party, not the right wing conservatives, that brought many of these changes into place while in power. By adopting tough policies, the center-left Danish Social Democrats took on the far-right Danish People’s Party, whose narrative they undercut. The strategy allowed them to reclaim working-class voters concerned about welfare pressures, job security, and cultural cohesion. The left-center party positioned itself as the choice for “ordinary people who play by the rules,” a far cry from supporting open borders and standing up for the rights of criminal aliens. Political support for the Social Democrats soared, while far-right parties dropped to low single digits. Immigration ceased to be a dominant public concern. Such buy-in was critical to addressing a massive problem for the benefit of the country over that of the party.
Could the lessons of Denmark be more obvious? Even the Washington Post editorialized positively about the Danish paradigm shift as a model for Democrats. But sadly, Democrats in the United States are not ready to follow the advice. This reluctance is all about Trump, the idea that whatever Trump supports, regardless of its merits, is wrong, and thus their failure to take seriously moderation. How many more elections will pass with one party actively promoting illegal immigration? How far toward the draconian moves of the Danes will America have to go before the Dems recognize what America needs done?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Pointlessness of Protest Culture
Days after President Trump called a reporter “piggy,” a group of women boarded a bus in Ohio for a 36-hour “turn and burn” trip to Washington DC to fight for “regime change.” At least a half dozen protesters were dressed as Miss Piggy. They carried handmade “Impeach, Convict, Remove” signs, transgender pride flags, and others wore the red hooded cloaks and white bonnets made famous by The Handmaid’s Tale. A mother of three teenagers, one of them transgender, explained “Something has to change, and we have to start somewhere.”
I feel bad for her, and the others. They just don’t understand how naive they sound, wanting to believe some signs and a long bus ride might affect anything, never mind something as extreme as forced regime change in a democracy. They are not alone in their naivety; elsewhere, colorful ribbons in the red and green of the Mexican flag weaved into twin braids have emerged as a new symbol of “resistance” among Latinas.
Part of the perceived pointlessness of such protests comes from how institutionalized protest culture has become. In the Midwest labor demonstrations and coal mine strikes of the 19th century, protesters risked their lives to hold up signs while hired Wells Fargo thugs beat them. In New York and elsewhere, draft protests during the Civil War were put down by having the regular U.S. Army fire indiscriminately into the crowd. Anti-war protests during the Vietnam era often turned violent, most notably in Chicago 1968, with phalanxes of helmeted cops breaking up crowds with batons and tear gas. And there was the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guardsmen used their service rifles to gun down four and wound nine unarmed college students in 1970. All those at any protest risked rough arrest.
For the women now seeking regime change, what once carried genuine risk turned into political pageantry. Cities now issue permits for marches, police escort crowds along predetermined routes, and the media broadcasts images of the wittiest signs and t-shirts. Everyone takes pictures and the whole typically dissolves into a carnival atmosphere. Bring your kids and the t-shirted dog.
Old protests were dangerous because they seriously threatened entrenched economic or governmental power. New protests are safe because they do not threaten power at all, because power does not take them seriously. Ask the Pink Pussy Hat marchers of 2017, whose efforts failed to stop Trump across multiple administrations. The question is if these actions (along with petitions, social media blasts, hashtags) never deliver outcomes, why do people continue to pour time and moral purpose into them? “This will probably end up in history books, if we have real history books,” said one of the Ohio protestors, dressed as a handmaiden. “I’m glad I was able to be a part of it instead of watching it on TV.”
They are united in a visceral hatred of Trump, and see him as a stand-in for everything they dislike or disagree with. It is not like they adore illegal immigrants, it is just that Trump is opposed to them. They protest seeking nothing short of “regime change” because calls for regime change are easier than the long, unglamorous work of civic participation. People feel they have done something, but the machinery they are pushing against barely notices. Sincerity alone is not a strategy. There is a brutal mismatch the protesters do not see between the scale of their efforts and the scale of actual power.
For example, when Marine One flew over the Ohio women as Trump returned to the White House, fists and middle fingers rose into the air. Though signing your name, holding a sign, or shouting in the street feels good, legislation, budgets, and institutions rarely move by feelings alone. The protest thus becomes not a strategy but group therapy. It is catharsis disguised as activism. The social reinforcement of gathering, even if it is just 36 women from Ohio, validates their own sense of moral vision, that they are part of something meaningful instead of residents in a decayed industrial wasteland.
Notice what the protesters are asking for: regime change here, “No Kings” before that, “End the Patriarchy,” amorphous issues like that. There is little anyone can do about those things, if they are even real. The pointlessness of the act of protest is built into the act itself. So when the next end-of-democracy event arrives, such as a Supreme Court ruling that goes against someone’s wishes, protest becomes a way of reconciling oneself to the absence of change and the reality of failure. Faced with no tools other than a vote statistically very few of them ever exercise, and that only available every few years, protests are a psychological palliative to nihilism. Like calling to make up new rules if a presidential election goes the wrong way, like the Electoral College should be done away with, or that the president should be chosen by the popular vote so Democratic Southern California will decide every election for Ohio women, it is all an alternative to doing truly nothing about the status quo.
The women protestors from Ohio have good reason to dislike the status quo, one enforced on them for the last several decades as the Heartland became the Rust Belt. One protestor, a 36-year-old from Georgia, said the president’s treatment of women was a big factor in drawing her to Washington for her first-ever protest. Yet she described herself as the wife of a disabled veteran and a mother of six who relies on SNAP. Another protester in the group was described as “currently unemployed after spending years on an assembly line building steering wheels for Ford vehicles. Her husband is a fully disabled Navy veteran dependent on benefits from Veterans Affairs. She said she is protesting for him and also for other women like her, for her LGBTQ+ family members, for immigrants in her community and for her 69-year-old mother, who relies on subsidized housing. A constant question that runs through her mind, she said, is, “When is it going to come for me?” Answer: it is already here.
Their socioeconomic precarity makes them vulnerable to political fear, while protest offers them some shred of meaning in a world where they feel little control. Their personal struggles only serve to highlight the unclosable distance between their needs and what symbolic activism can deliver. In the age of Trump, the real engine behind protest culture is not hope but fear. Some hope that their voices matter, sure, but with fear of discovering they do not at its heart. It was a 36 hour bus ride back to Ohio. Maybe they had time to think about some of these things on the way back, before the next protest.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
New Law Needed to Combat the Surveillance Deep State
Surveillance powers granted to the Deep State allow the FBI and others to spy on Americans as a method of control. Those worried about a slip into authoritarianism must look past whomever is in the White House at any one time and see what new technology and old laws has allowed us to become.
The latest example comes from an FBI document obtained by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) which reveals the FBI targeted eight Republican senators’ personal cell phones for “metadata” collection as part of its Arctic Frost investigation into the events of January 6. One Republican member of the House was also spied on. Metadata shows when and to whom a call is made. It also shows the duration of the call and the physical location for both ends of the call. It does not require a warrant. It does not require probable cause. The FBI can simply subpoena a company like Verizon or T-Mobile and demand they turn over all the metadata records they have on someone. The FBI teaches local law enforcement how to do it to spread the net.
Whistleblower disclosures to Grassley also revealed the FBI confiscated the government cell phones of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence during its Arctic Frost investigation. The FBI was seeking to uncover links among the elected officials and people associated with January 6. The goal was to prosecute if possible. To help keep the spying secret, the document detailing this all was stored in an FBI Prohibited Access file.
Grassley’s oversight exposed the existence of Prohibited Access files, a hereto unknown system the FBI used to hide access from most of its internal staff, including the Inspector General, and Congress. Information related to the election-year Crossfire Hurricane spying on Trump associates believed to be connected to Russia was also hidden away inside Prohibited Access files. Grassley is currently seeking more files. Of particular interest are those relating to FBI Special Agent Walter Giardina, who somehow (coincidentally?) played a role in the investigation of Trump advisor Peter Navarro, as well as Arctic Frost, Crossfire Hurricane, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of Russiagate, and the Dan Scavino, Roger Stone, and Hillary Clinton cases.
This information raises fundamental questions not only about the separation of powers, political neutrality of the FBI, and the role of congressional oversight, but also about the scope and strength of Fourth Amendment protections in the digital age. Specifically, should warrantless metadata collection be an unlawful search? What compels judicial oversight and safeguards against abuse? And how do we reconcile so-called investigative priorities with constitutional rights?
The old argument here is that the contents of the calls themselves were not accessed. This argument is hopelessly naive. It is dangerous for the FBI to collect phone metadata because such information, including who one calls, when, and for how long, can reveal deeply personal patterns of behavior, associations, and beliefs, even without the content of conversations. Metadata can expose a person’s political affiliations, medical conditions, romantic relationships, and religious practices through network analysis (Did you call your doctor? Then your boyfriend? Then the pharmacy?) When analyzed with AI, these patterns create a behavioral map more invasive than traditional surveillance, one that enables profiling, manipulation, and coercion. The very data once dismissed as “non-content” now serves as a digital fingerprint of private life.
Metadata can also serve as an “index” for the NSA and other agencies to go back and harvest the actual contents of the calls. Metadata is one of the most powerful spying tools available to the Deep State. One remembers former FBI Director Edgar J. Hoover, who in the 1950s and 60s used spy data showing powerful people in secret relationships as a tool to influence their decision making regarding his beloved FBI. Hoover had no idea what the crude surveillance tools of his day would morph into post 9/11.
Listening in on the actual contents of conversations still requires a court-approved wiretap. Yet the collection of metadata is still warrantless. In the pre-cell phone era landmark decision Smith v. Maryland (1979), the Supreme Court held an individual does not retain a reasonable expectation of privacy when dialing numbers from their telephone because the telephone user “voluntarily conveys” those numbers to the phone company, and thus they are “not privy to an expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment. That case concerned pen-trap data (dialed numbers, an olde-timey version of what is now part of metadata) not actual call content. The Court’s ruling has been interpreted to apply broadly to metadata held by third parties (e.g., telephone companies, internet providers, etc.) without accounting for the fact that modern day metadata based on cellular technology reveals far more today than it did in 1979.
A base tension in modern Fourth Amendment doctrine is when the collection of “low invasive” metadata becomes sufficiently revealing, pervasive, or targeted that it should trigger heightened protections akin to a “search” and thus require a warrant. Yet based on current law and practice, obtaining days of call data related to lawmakers’ political coordination in a high-stakes situation sits in the clear legally. The metadata collected during a hyper-sensitive time such as January 6 arguably could yield far more insight than the old Smith paradigm envisioned. At the very least it has a chilling effect on legislators’ free deliberation (the Constitution’s speech and debate clause) and information gathering, as well as risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch. At the extreme are things like blackmail.
Note only GOP senators and a congressman were targets in the January 6 metadata investigation. This makes obvious the partisan weaponization of law enforcement in this case, but leaves open the idea that the tools of surveillance are available in any administration. Even if legal authority exists, the decision to use it in politically sensitive circumstances by any party risks undermining faith in impartial justice and underscores the power of the Deep State to intervene in some of the more important events in our democracy. It pokes holes in the separation of the branches.
The technological and human factors constraining the gathering and processing of information in the past are gone. Many violations of the Fourth Amendment are held in check only by the goodwill of the Deep State, the ultimate nightmare for the Founders. The Fourth Amendment, based on 18th century paper searches, 19th century physical searches, and pre-cellular and pre-Internet 20th century changes, must evolve through legislative reform and judicial reconsideration to ensure digital surveillance is subject to the same constitutional limits as traditional searches and stem the ever-growing power of the Deep State. The elected officials swept up in the metadata investigation surrounding January 6 are just the latest canaries in the coal mine.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
No Kings Marches are Just Memes, Empty as Social Media “Content”
I’m behind on the news. Did the No Kings marches across America finally change everything? Did Trump vanish, Greta ascend, and democracy restore itself?
I actually swung by the local No Kings march. A lot of the crowd were seniors, almost all white in our blue state, decked out in tie-dye for the women, grey ponytails for the men, and bandanas for the dogs. To them he was Donny Dementia, Impotus, Orange Man (many variations), Mango Mussolini, Hitler stuff, The Lying King, Cheeto Benito, Comrade tRump, and many more unprintable here. Back in the day many of these same marchers could only come up with “Tricky Dick” to call out Nixon.
Their signs reflected the variety of issues under protest, including some oldies but goodies like reprising endless demands around abortion rights, freeing Palestine again, Defund the Cops and Black Lives Matter, Abolish ICE, of course, and multiple ones saying if Kamala or Hillary were president we’d all be having brunch now. One adjacent said “No Kings, Maybe a Queen Someday.” They don’t seem to fear dictators who’ll dictate the right way, I guess. Points for funny slogans to attract “likes” for the sign; there was a “No Kings But Burger King” and one which read “Tylenol Over Tyranny.” A favorite was “Ikea has a Better Cabinet.” Leftists could even get away with homophobic mockery about Putin they’d condemn from the other side.
It was clear almost anything fit under the No Kings meme. In fact the whole thing was simply a 3-D version of what Democratic social media has become. Everything was perfect until Trump and anything from your Netflix bill to war anywhere could be fixed today if Trump would disappear. Words like “fascism” were just pop synonyms for “stuff I don’t like.” What stood out most of all was the sense that the people may be united, not on the range of topics represented, but on their childish hatred of one man.
At the same time as all this righteous anger, the protests offered no road map for restoring institutional balance or civic trust. The lack of cause specificity in the signs was not accidental; it was integral to the movement as emotional glue to attract enough marchers to secure TV coverage. Like many modern protest movements, No Kings thrived as social media, where symbolism and identity matter more than outcomes. The movement’s decentralized nature allowed anyone to participate without hammering out a specific agenda. However, that same openness made it difficult to hold anyone accountable or to sustain pressure on political institutions. And once the marches ended, participants returned to comfortable partisan echo chambers.
It was thus no surprise that in the crowd ignorance was bliss, as random conversations with marchers suggested a wet blanket-like naivety about real Nazism and Hitler, or the mechanics of impeachment or the 25th Amendment, both of which had their supporters. Both crews seemed under-informed that successful employment of either would lead to an equally-hated President Vance that same day.
What made the protest’s moral certainty most jarring was how little awareness there was of how ongoing and bipartisan the “king problem” has been. There seemed no sense that Trump’s didn’t “create the danger of presidential dictatorship, he inherited it.” No one remembered any No Kings marches when George W. Bush granted himself vast powers of domestic surveillance, and to imprison people without due process after 9/11. No one protested much when Bush, without a word from the Supreme Court or Congress, tortured prisoners at secret dark sites and then allowed his CIA to destroy most of the evidence. Obama ordered wedding parties in Afghanistan drone killed while sipping coffee in the Oval Office, and authorized the assassination of American Citizens via those same drones without any due process. He started and/or continued undeclared wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. His use of the Espionage Act against journalists was egregious and authoritarian. Joe Biden essentially cancelled his party’s presidential primaries and tried to appoint a chosen successor. His FEMA workers improperly collected data about political affiliation of disaster victims. The politicized distribution of hurricane aid money before the 2024 election was no “isolated incident,” a Homeland Security report concluded. Nobody wants to admit America has a bipartisan comfort with executive over-reach on their side. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss, just at times poorly mannered.
“Millions flooded the U.S. streets for the No Kings protests,” wrote one Substack pundit, “to oppose a monarchy which does not exist without making a single tangible demand. Power was not challenged in any meaningful way. The status quo wasn’t disrupted in the slightest.” It was catharsis, self-therapy for political anxiety. It was theatre. It was a self-delusion that watching Gavin Newsom lose in 2028 would be an act of revolutionary resistance. The good news is the No Kings I observed broke up on time, as an unrelated Pride group had a permit to march right after them.
The sad thing is this group of people actually thought they represented moral America. They ignored with gusto the reality that roughly half of the nation voted for Trump and a large number continue to support Trump and his broader political philosophy, especially on immigration. There was no attempt among the marchers to persuade anyone, simply to condemn ideas, many deeply held by the Republican electorate. The marchers served as little more than a reminder of how the Democratic party lacks any real affirmative vision beyond opposition. Without sustained engagement in electoral politics or detailed proposals for reform, No Kings, like Occupy Wall Street and BLM before it, is just neo-hippie ritual rather than a catalyst for lasting change. Like the people who post nothing but AI-created anti-Trump memes repeatedly to their Facebook accounts (and this was indeed a Facebook crowd, not a Trader Joe one) there is an immediate sense of accomplishment, that infamous social media dopamine feedback rewarding performance over accomplishment. You know, like holding a march.
That all this is the face of the opposition party is news mostly only to the marchers. Democrats’ struggle to articulate an issues-driven agenda has created a dangerous dichotomy the Wall Street Journal already noted months ago: although many voters are unhappy with Trump, they trust Democrats even less. Only a third of Americans view them favorably, the lowest for decades.
“Who cares,” the White House deputy press secretary wrote about the marches. But the emptiness of No Kings matters because it mirrors the state of politics heading into an election year. If Democrats hope to win over a divided country, they need to move beyond memes and into policies that actually improve lives. Instead, they are deepening the hole by sustaining a government shutdown over an issue few Americans prioritize. If they want to win in 2026 and beyond, they must relearn how to govern for the majority, not just oppose on behalf of a minority. Otherwise it’s just talk — and noise isn’t power.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Yellow Supremacy in Japan?
When in doubt, blame the foreigners. Such is the case in Japan, undergoing a bout of what we’d in the U.S. call “Yellow Supremacy.” But is it more than an election season ploy to wind up a crowd? Is it a movement or a protest vote?
From its earliest contact with foreigners as dramaticized in Shogun, it has been love-hate superimposed on classic xenophobia. During my years in Japan, I remember sitting embarrassed on a crowded train, jam packed as only Japanese trains can be, with empty seats next to me. No one wanted to rub thighs with a foreigner. I watched taxis zoom past like I was a man of color in New York trying to hail a cab Uptown from 96th Street. At the same time I cannot forget an elderly Japanese woman walking several blocks out of her way in the rain to ensure I made it to my destination when neither of us had the language skills to fully communicate directions. It is a strange place, Japan, usually benign and eccentric if not occasionally annoying.
But recent developments indicate perhaps a return to a racist side of Japan that saw it slaughter Christians wholesale centuries ago, and stampede through Nanjing killing Chinese, seeing them as not worthy of even conquest and enslavement. The country that gives us Pikachu has a dark side that begs you to lock up the liquor when daddy comes home late.
An upstart political party gained support in the recent Upper House elections in Japan by railing against a “silent invasion” of immigrants, pushing the government and more middle-of-the-road parties to tackle fears about foreigners as it dragged into the mainstream rhetoric once confined to the political fringe. Birthed on YouTube during the pandemic spreading conspiracy theories about vaccinations, the party, Sanseito, recently widened its appeal with a “Japanese First” campaign. They are not alone. Naoki Hyakuta, leader of the minor opposition Conservative Party of Japan, said foreigners “disrespect Japanese culture, ignore the rules, assault Japanese people, and steal their belongings.” NHK Party leader Takashi Tachibana described black people and people of Islamic background as “scary.” A Komeito party candidate stated, “We’ll deport people staying illegally. We’ll say no to the abuse and misuse of refugee applications.”Sanseito is the biggest player in Yellow Supremacy. It is headed by Sohei Kamiya, a young politician who models himself after Donald Trump in style and message. For example, Kamiya faced a minor backlash for branding gender equality policies a mistake, as they encourage women to work and keep them from having children. His broader success, however, left many in Japan wondering if their country is seeing the angry populism that has visited the United States and other democracies. His core message is Japan has put the interests of foreigners over those of its own people.The message appeals to voters, especially males, frustrated with a weak economy that has lured tourists in record numbers, further driving up prices Japanese can ill-afford. Foreign-born residents in Japan hit a record of about 3.8 million last year. Although that is only three percent of the total population, a tiny fraction compared to the numbers in the U.S., in homogenic Japan with no sentimental history of immigration to fall back on, it is a lot.As immigration emerged as a top election issue as driven by Sanseito, a desperate Prime Minister Ishiba unveiled a new Hail Mary government taskforce made up of 78 employees, including officials from the Cabinet Office, the Justice Ministry, and other bodies to fight “crimes and disorderly conduct” by foreign nationals as his mainstream party promised to pursue a goal of “zero illegal foreigners.” The goal is wholly unrealistic; the sentiment however hits a population looking for scapegoats for its failing economy (the proportion of people in Japan who think living conditions are more comfortable than a year ago fell to the lowest level in over 15 years) and changing societal mores.The new task force, formally assuming the pseudo-Orwellian name of Office for the Promotion of a Society of Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals, will coordinate policies for foreigners. Among the areas it will cover are immigration, land acquisition, and unpaid social insurance. The latter particularly irks many Japanese, who religiously pay into a national health insurance program that basically results in minimum out-of-pocket costs for care, even into old age. Foreigners, outside the payment system, pay either the highly subsidized rates or simply skip out on large bills. In response, the government said last month it plans to ban tourists and foreign residents with unpaid medical bills from getting a visa or returning to the country. It is unclear how much money this change actually addresses, but it is the changing attitude that matters most to the public.Foreigners are very visible in Japan; they look different, talk loudly, and don’t always follow strict Japanese rules of etiquette. As tourism grows, many travelers have seen Tokyo and Osaka and are now branching out into the countryside in search of new experiences, driven by social media. The influx irritates local residents, whose lives have been disrupted by tourists flocking to their neighborhoods. In response, some tourist sites now have two prices for entry, the one for foreigners being notably higher than the Japanese price. Local officials for awhile blocked an Instagram-famous view of Mount Fuji from a convenience store parking lot due to a surge in residents’ complaints of overcrowding. One hot spring resort area warned against low water levels and shut down entry early after foreign visitors demanded private baths, shy about the Japanese communal style. Played as funny anecdotes online abroad, in Japan these rub against local concerns as headline stories.
Some Japanese also blame tourists for driving up prices and triggering inflation and for contributing to shortages of rice. Protecting nationally grown rice is the third rail of all Japanese politics, and suggestions the current shortages and high prices have anything to do with tourists (they likely do not) are designed to stir up animosity. Coupled with the Trump tariffs which target agriculture goods like rice, these are fighting words akin to “No Irish Need Apply” signs in 19th century Manhattan. Crime is another issue used to stir up emotions, even though only 5.3 percent of those arrested in 2023 were foreigners.
The obvious solution is shut the door to foreigners, as was done in the Sakoku period (Japan’s self-imposed policy of national isolation during the Edo period, 1603-1868.) This is unfortunately very costly. “As Japan faces the challenges of a declining birthrate and aging population, it is essential for us to incorporate the vitality of the international community, through the acceptance of a certain number of foreign workers and the expansion of inbound tourism, to ensure a smooth transition to a growth-oriented economy,” Prime Minister Ishida said. But how?
When actual election results were tallied, Sanseito scored a healthy 14 seats, way up from its pre-election single seat held and quite an achievement for a party that did not exist five years ago. Ishida’s Liberal Democratic Party suffered a major defeat, with voters broadly shifting to more conservative parties, including Sanseito. Ishida will likely form a coalition excluding Sanseito, but the trend in Japan is not going unnoticed — the mainstream Liberal Democratic Party also suffered an election defeat last year robbing it of a majority in the Lower House.What’s left for Japan to sort out is whether this anti-foreign sentiment was mostly an election year ruse, or an echo back to the darker episodes. Many working-class people face stagnant wages and feel dissatisfaction about inequality, said one Japanese university professor. “They perceive that support is being prioritized for foreigners, and that major political parties are neglecting Japanese taxpayers like themselves,” he said. Culturally, these people may feel “this country will no longer be ours” as the number of foreigners in Japan increases.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
It’s 2-0 for Trump on Immigration
With one quasi-win at the Supreme Court and one still evolving at a lower immigration court, it is safe to call it a soft 2-0 for Trump on immigration matters. The courts did not curtail significantly Trump’s power as desired by the Left, but also did not allow the creation of a Constitutional black hole in El Salvador that would have greatly increased his power. There are still big questions to be addressed as appeals play out.
An immigration judge recently ruled the Trump administration can deport Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a decision that comes a month after his arrest marked the start of the federal government’s crackdown on foreign students. The U.S. revoked Khalil’s green card under a little-used part of immigration law; the United States can take away green cards from legal permanent residents, as well as student visas, simply if “the Secretary of State determines that the applicant’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.”
No due process is directly provided by the law per se, though in the instant case Khalil’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus motion to stay his deportation, hence the recent trial before an immigration judge in Louisiana. Rubio accused Khalil of participating in protests he described as anti-semitic and supportive of Hamas. Foreigners who come to the United States and do such things, he stated, will have their visas or green cards revoked and be kicked out. “This is not about free speech,” Rubio said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.” Rubio has teed up some 300 foreign students to have their visas revoked.
Though Khalil has at least two appeals pending (one in front of the Board of Immigration Appeals and one in New Jersey, where he was first detained) the lower immigration court just sent a powerful signal to the Trump administration if you consider Khalil’s case a kind of “proof of concept” for the use of the Secretary of State’s unilateral power to revoke green cards and visas. The court did not challenge this, and in fact affirmed the Trump administration’s argument Khalil’s beliefs threaten national security and justify his deportation, in line with precedent. The court also ignored any larger First Amendment issues in its decision. The win though could be weakened overall by helping establish a right to habeas corpus for future cases (see Garcia, below.) You can expect the government to move quickly now to deport the remaining students whose visas have already been revoked.
The Supreme Court ruled on a companion case, creating another (though more arguable) “win” for Trump. The Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return to the United States of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error” and who remains locked up there. The Court wrote “The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen, entered the U.S. illegally 15 years ago and claimed asylum. A federal judge in 2019 granted him protection from being deported because of concerns for his safety if he were to return to El Salvador. Gracia had been accused of being a member of MS-13, a charge later dropped. He was granted some sort of status in the U.S. and married an American citizen. Then, just recently, Garcia was deported on a flight with men alleged by the Trump administration to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Though Garcia seems to ultimately albeit slowly be on his way back to the United States, the Court’s decision may still be seen as a win for Trump. As in the Khalil case, the Court left untouched the larger question of whether the Trump administration’s use of the two centuries old Alien Enemies Act was legal. That opens the door to future uses of the Act to speedily deport illegal aliens. The “loss” part of the decision is that the Court did allow that Garcia was entitled to some due process. The Act on its face provides for none, and that’s what makes it so attractive to the Trump administration with its plans for large-scale deportations. Unlike the 47,000 illegals now in custody, aliens rounded up under the Act did not appear due a day in court before an immigration judge to plead their case. The Act appeared to allow ICE to move arrestees straight from their apprehension to a flight out of the United States.
Not so, said the Supreme Court, in granting Garcia the right to challenge his detention via habeas corpus filed in the United States, even though he is actually in the custody of the sovereign nation of El Salvador (the habeas right generally supported by post-9/11 rulings for prisoners stuck in Saudi prisons by U.S. request.) That’s the bad news for those supporting Trump. The good news is the habeas petition must be filed where the alien is locked up in America (primarily Trump-friendly Louisiana and Texas), which seems to preclude broad injunctions from more liberal East Coast courts and ultimately narrow the scope of judicial review (cases will also need to be brought on an individual basis rather than as a class-action lawsuit.) And since even ICE admits Garcia was deported in error, it is good that he may eventually be released from El Salvador. The Trump administration does seem to be slow-walking that process, though.
There’s another “win” for Trump in the Court decision, about Garcia’s return to the U.S., a change in one word from the lower court decison. The lower court ordered Trump to “effectuate” Garcia’s return. The Supreme Court directed the Trump administration instead to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release. The wording change shows the Court still wishes to show deference to the administration on matters of foreign affairs, choosing a lower standard of action, and also removing the time limits to action the lower court tried to impose. “Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review,” the government’s lawyers argued. Weakened thusly, the case was returned to the lower court.
The Department of Homeland Security emphasized that latter portion of the order in its response. “SCOTUS agreed with us that the District Court improperly interfered with the President’s foreign affairs power. The District Court was overbearing and, as SCOTUS said, should clarify its directive with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” The justices “made clear that a district court judge cannot exercise Article II foreign affairs powers,” the White House’s Stephen Miller wrote.
This struggle between the Trump administration and the courts, with each side claiming authority over the immigration laws, is far from over. The recent decisions duck tough questions about First Amendment rights in the Khalil case and the validity of the Alien Enemies Act in the Garcia and other cases. Some of the ancillary issues, particularly the rights to an American court-based due process for persons held overseas, echo the legal struggles of the post-9/11 era, when the Bush administration unsuccessfully argued enemy combatants held in Gitmo and elsewhere abroad had no access to American courts. That case law may yet prove controlling in what is happening with deportations now from the United States to foreign prisons. It is clear enough the Supreme Court isn’t ready to rubber stamp either the lower courts’ or the administration’s positions.
“Beyond the specifics of implementation,” writes Politico, “the administration’s maneuvering appears to represent a concerted effort to evade longstanding American law by intentionally sending people to a legal black hole with no process, no rights and no recourse.” The government argued unsuccessfully at the time of 9/11 American courts lacked jurisdiction to review detentions at Guantanamo, and that the president was free to ignore both national and international law governing the treatment of detainees. We’ll see if that stands on immigration where it fell in the War on Terror.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Aliens and Deportations and Bigger Fish
What happens when two solid objects collide? And the immigration jails are full. Is that when you invoke the Alien Enemies Act? Or is there something bigger going on?
ICE announced in the first weeks of the Trump administration it made 32,809 illegal alien arrests. Officials also said they had maxed out detention capacity at 47,600 people as they work with the Marshals Service, Department of Defense, and Federal Bureau of Prisons to increase bed space even as they request more money from a tied-up Congress. But more detention capacity won’t resolve the biggest roadblock to Trump’s mass deportation plans — there’s an immigration court backlog, meaning the need to provide due process to those scheduled for deportation is colliding with the goal of clearing millions of illegals out of the U.S. Trump is the victim of his own success. So does that means it is time to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act?
The Alien Enemies Act, today known as 50 U.S.C. § 21, says
[W]henever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government… all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.
What’s missing from that summary of the Act? Due process. The Act provides for none and that’s what makes it so attractive to the Trump administration with its plans for large-scale deportations. Unlike the 47k illegals now in custody, aliens rounded up under the Act are not due a day in court before an immigration judge to plead their case (at least one of the recently deported Venezuelans appears to have an asylum claim pending.) The Act appears to allow ICE to move arrestees straight from their apprehension to a flight out of the United States.
There are a few technicalities to the Enemies Act; the aliens must be from a nation that launched an “invasion or predatory incursion” against the U.S., and there must be a declared state of war. Passed during a quasi-war with France, the Act was meant to give the President broad authority over potential spies and saboteurs at home. Until now, the Act has only been used during the War of 1812, and the First and Second World Wars. The latter was the most notorious use, the Act purposed to inter Japanese-Americans in remote isolation camps lest they turn against the U.S. while it was at war with the Empire of Japan.
There’s still that part of the Act, however, about an invasion taking place as part of a war. The United States is not at war with Venezuela. In his Proclamation invoking the Act, Trump tried to get around this by referring to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang as part of a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.” The government’s brief on appeal claims “TdA also operates as a de facto government in the areas in which it is operating.”
That is, politely, pretty damn thin soup to hang the deportation of several hundred people without due process on. But since the Act does not require anything but such as proclamation, and faced with a lack of bed space and overcrowded immigration courts standing in the way of getting rid of purported gangsters, the Trump administration went with it as good enough.
While the Venezuelan deportation flight was still in the air, and following a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg instituted a temporary restraining order preventing the deportation of the Venezuelans. He also demanded the plane turn around and return the gangsters to the U.S. Going with a specious legal argument the turnaround order was not in writing, Trump opted not to order the plane back and instead to deposit the gang members in an El Salvadoran prison (No one is clear on what legal grounds that happened.) Trump thus denies he deliberately ignored a court order; that’s not the legal ground on which he wants to fight this fight anyway.
Judge James Boasberg has given the government a second chance to respond, threatening contempt, and Department of Justice has already filed an appeal. It is almost certain the case will move upward through the court system and likely be heard in some fashion before the Supreme Court. The current appeal by the government offers a clue as to how this might play out, stating “Plaintiffs cannot use these proceedings to interfere with the President’s national-security and foreign-affairs authority, and the Court lacks jurisdiction to do so… the Court should vacate the hearing and de-escalate the grave incursions on Executive Branch authority that have already arisen.”
The Trump strategy is further revealed in a quote from Elon Musk: “If ANY judge ANYWHERE can stop EVERY Presidential action EVERYWHERE, we do NOT live in a democracy.” The Trump administration’s three emergency applications to the Supreme Court asking the justices to limit the scope of injunctions entered by district courts in Baltimore, Boston, and Seattle against the executive order on birthright citizenship repeated Musk’s words almost verbatim, asserting “the Executive Branch cannot properly perform its functions if any judge anywhere can enjoin every presidential action everywhere.” Constitutional authority Steve Vladeck wrote “Tellingly, the government is not asking the justices to put the executive order back into full effect. Rather, it’s launching a frontal assault on ‘universal’ injunctions — urging the Court to limit the district courts’ relief to the specific plaintiffs in those three cases.” Trump has said judges “want to assume the Powers of the Presidency” without getting elected.
The muscle tussle between Trump and the courts is not (just) about the legal technicalities of due process, the Alien Enemies Act, or birthright citizenship. Instead, they are means to an end. Trump is provoking test cases challenging the very power of any part of the judicial system to interfere with his executive power. He is seeking new constitutional ground for that executive authority, citing his unitary power over foreign affairs. The courts have traditionally shown deference on this issue (the court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld even sanctioned military detention as an “enemy combatant” of a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, the gift that, sarcastically, keeps on giving) and Trump wants to expand that. He likely could care little about the shell that idea will eventually inhabit, whether it be the Enemies Act and a few hundred gang members or something else out of the 150 lawsuits he now faces contesting his Executive Orders. It is about the case(s) that will form the eventual uber challenge in front of the Supreme Court over who if anyone can say no to President Trump.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Green Card Take-Away from Mahmoud Khalil
Whether you believe Mahmoud Khalil deserves to be deported for his anti-Semitic stance while a student at Columbia University, or whether you believe he was righteously exercising his First Amendment rights there, his green card revocation stinks. It is a perfect example of “we told you so” about powers granted so freely to the government, in this case by a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 covering deportable aliens and a similar one covering American citizens.
Donald Trump made it clear Khalil was arrested and his green card revoked because of his activism. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump in a Truth Social post. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.” The actions against Khalil are of a set; Axios reported on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to use AI to comb the social media accounts of student visa holders in a search of terrorist sympathies. The administration is determined to make an example of Columbia, announcing it was canceling $400 million in grants with the school. It has also warned 60 other colleges of possible anti-Semitism penalties.
In Khalil’s case, following a habeaous corpus petition filed by his lawyers, Khalil was granted a hearing challenging his arrest. The judge did not make any immediate decisions about his detention. He did temporarily bar the government from removing Khalil from the United States.
The significant First Amendment issues aside for now (a big aside) Khalil’s green card was revoked under a little-used part of immigration law. The Government of the United States can take away green cards from legal permanent residents, as well as student visas, if “The Secretary of State determines that the applicant’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” If the government feels it is against its interest for you to have a card or visa and thus the freedom to travel, to enter and depart the United States if you wish to, it will just take it away. The law allows them to do this prospectively, the “or are likely to cause…” part of the law, meaning you don’t need to have done anything. The government just needs to decide that you might.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Khalil of participating in protests that he described as anti-Semitic and supportive of Hamas. Foreigners who come to the United States and do such things, he said, will have their visas or green cards revoked and be kicked out. “This is not about free speech,” Rubio said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
It does not stop with aliens. The Secretary of State may also order the revocation of any U.S. passport for national security reasons, same as Khalil’s green card, albeit without the looming penalty of deportation. The legal authority for the U.S. Secretary of State is primarily found in 22 U.S. Code § 211a and 22 U.S. Code § 2705.
One of the most noteworthy cases of an ordered revocation based on the Secretary of State’s fiat was Phillip Agee. Agee, an ex-intelligence officer, in the 1970’s exposed CIA officers identities. According to the Supreme Court, “In 1974, Agee called a press conference in London to announce his ‘campaign to fight the United States CIA wherever it is operating.’ He declared his intent ‘to expose CIA officers and agents and to take the measures necessary to drive them out of the countries where they are operating.'” Agee, by his own assertion, devoted consistent effort to that plan, and traveled extensively to other countries to carry it out.
Agee’s case prompted the Supreme Court to review the Department of State’s ability to revoke U.S. passports simply because the government didn’t want someone to hold one for “national security” reasons. The Court upheld the government’s ability to do so after lower courts said no. The Court stated that “The right to hold a passport is subordinate to national security and foreign policy considerations.”
That last sentence took on chilling new meaning in the case of Anwar Al-Awlaki. We learned via a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request that prior to having him and his 16-year-old son murdered via drone in 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secretly revoked their passports, as Al-Awlaki was a Qaeda propagandist, and U.S. Citizen. The State Department tried to invite al-Awlaki into the U.S. Embassy in Yemen so they could hand him a letter announcing the revocation and so that they could encourage him to return to the U.S. to face charges. Six months later (al-Awlaki never dropped by the Embassy, by the way), the U.S. Government simply killed him. Two weeks later it killed his 16-year-old son via another drone strike.
Though the exact details of these types of revocation cases are classified, they typically fall under the broader legal framework of U.S. foreign relations and counterterrorism policies. In recent years, court challenges have been brought by individuals whose passports or visas were revoked. For example, individuals who have been denied passports or had them revoked argue violations of due process or freedom of movement. However, the courts tend to defer to the government in national security cases, allowing the executive branch wide discretion in handling these issues.
Depending on how his lawyers wish to present the case, Khalil’s revocation may end up at the Supreme Court as a First Amendment issue. It depends, like the old joke, which came first, the chicken or the egg. If the Court is willing to see the result of the revocation — the silencing of Kahlil and thus denial of his free speech rights — as predominant, new free speech legal ground may be broken and the deportation stayed. However, if the Court were to take the position this is just another national security case to be handled by an immigration judge and the revocation thus not reaching to offending the First Amendment (likely) Khalil will simply be deported under the sweeping, long-standing powers granted to the government to control the travel of both aliens and American citizens.
That will leave the biggest issue of the case unresolved. There are so many reasons not to listen to an anti-Semite like Khalil, but few to justify silencing him with an overly-broad law that pends on the Secretary of State’s personal decree. We are not obligated to defend Khalil’s beliefs, but are required to defend his rights. The responsibility for bringing that to the fore will ultimately rest with the Supreme Court if not with this case then the next..
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump’s Five Million Dollar Gold Card Visa
If you’re hung up on the idea of selling American citizenship, that horse left the barn decades ago. What’s left at issue is just how much it should cost.
“We’re going to be selling a gold card,” President Donald Trump said from the Cabinet Room recently. “You have a green card. This is a gold card. We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship. And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.” Highly skilled people can also get in on the deal if they can find a sponsor. “Companies can buy gold cards and, in exchange, get those visas to hire new employees,” Trump said. He estimates he can sell a million of them.
Trump is talking about changes to America’s current citizenship for sale scheme, the EB-5 visa. That visa, if it is held for six years, leads to citizenship. It requires a foreigner to create a new business through investment that creates or sustains at least 10 American jobs, or buy an existing business resulting in at least a 40 percent increase in the net worth or number of employees. In the case of a troubled business, an EB-5 investor may rely on “job maintenance,” that the number of existing employees is, or will be, no less than the pre-investment level for a period of at least two years.
What’s really required, in addition to the usual vetting, is money, at least $1,050,000 in most cases, $800,00 if the investment is in a rural or high-unemployment area (most investors go for the cheaper option, called a Targeted Employment Area.) The paperwork is significantly backed up, but after you invest the money and wait three to six years for adjudication, you’ve bought yourself a path to U.S. citizenship.
The problem is the scheme has not worked as well as it should have. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik stated the program is rife with “nonsense, make believe, and fraud.” He was likely referring to the many fraudulent investments marketed to EB-5 investors abroad, particularly housing developments and golf courses that absorb investment money but never seem to appear on the ground. He may also be referring to a U.S. government decision to allow overseas investors to pool their money for an investment, meaning no one person puts a million dollars at risk. Another decision allows the investor to borrow his million abroad, a loan to invest in the U.S., meaning if the loan went sour abroad so did the U.S. investment. Things got even shadier when promissory notes began being accepted in lieu of the bulk of the one million investment as cash. There were also some notable successes funded with EB-5 money, including Hudson Yards in Manhattan and the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn.
Overall the program suffered from a lack of transparency in what investment would be approved by the USG, and a lack of enforcement to ensure the investors followed through on their side of the deal after the visa was actually issued. Traffic was only so-so — desire for the visa peaked in 2015, when the minimum investment was only $500,000. At that peak the government approved about 15,000 visas a year, a long shot short of Trump’s projected million visas sold for his $5 million Gold Card. The long processing times have not helped business. Overall, 2020, 78,278 investors applied for the EB-5 program. Some 80 percent of those investors came from four countries, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom, with China clearly in the lead: in 2014, of the total of 10,692 EB-5 visas issued, 85 percent were for Chinese nationals.
The lack of broader interest in the American EB-5 has nothing to do with actual demand by the world’s wealthy.
The world’s wealthy love second passports, especially if the principal happens to have a lot of money but only a passport that opens few doors or can easily be taken away in a country like Nigeria or Vietnam. Brokers suggest passports from some 28 countries might be available, including NATO member Turkey (about $400,000) and EU member Portugal (roughly $541,000.) A number of smaller Caribbean nations like St. Lucius offer passports for sale, or, if a little lipstick is needed for the pig, passports for investment. Details and requirements vary greatly, as does cost, from a few hundred thousand to over one million dollars. To apply for a Portugal golden visa, for example, one qualifying option is to make a large non-refundable contribution to an approved cultural organization. In the Caribbean, you can make a contribution toward funds the government designed to help invest in varying sectors, like infrastructure. Some Caribbean countries also allow you to qualify for citizenship by purchasing real estate. One popular but pricey option is EU Malta’s Citizenship by Naturalization, which requires a $780,000 non-refundable contribution to the economy. Applicants must also pay $52,000 for each qualifying dependent, lease or purchase a property in Malta for six years, and donate to a Maltese charity. All of these options would compete with Trump’s Gold Card for buyers.
Desire for a second passport does not rest with Nigerian princes and Vietnamese oligarchs alone. Many wealthy Americans are in the market (though obviously would not be in the pool for a Trump Gold Card.) Henley & Partners, a law firm specializing in high-net-worth citizenships, said Americans now outnumber every other nationality when it comes to securing alternative residences or added citizenships.
Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire Peter Thiel (New Zealand) and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Cyprus.) The head of private clients at Henley & Partners added “If I’m wealthy, I would like to hedge against levels of volatility and uncertainty. The idea of diversification is well understood by wealthy individuals around what they invest. It makes no sense to have one country of citizenship and residence when I have the ability to actually diversify that aspect of my life as well.
“Globally, millionaire migration was expected to have hit a new high in 2024, as wars, government crackdowns on wealth, and political uncertainty drove more wealthy residents to other countries, with an estimated 128,000 millionaires forecast to move to a new country,” according to Henley. The U.S. remains a top destination for the global wealthy, with an inflow of 2,200 millionaires in 2023 and an estimated 3,500 in 2024. China remains the biggest source of out-migration, losing 13,500 millionaires last year.
So what might this mean for Trump’s Gold Card? There is first of all the problem of getting rid of the creaky EB-5 visa and replacing it with the Gold Card. Trump says an Executive Order will suffice, but most experts agree only Congress can revoke or create new visa categories. Assuming Trump can get past that hurdle (no small task), is his Gold Card in the clear?
On the plus side he is in fact marketing the U.S. as the world’s best destination. While someone may scoop up a Maltese passport for travel convenience, he is unlikely to want to move his fortune there, invest further or set up house. The U.S. is different, and the Gold Card on sale for a single fee, transactional and quick, no risky investing needed, no subjective adjudication. Despite Americans’ fears, the U.S. passport is still one of the most useable in the world, and for the rich, American wealth-creation, education, and medical care rank close to number one. The U.S. is a highly desirable location not just for a convenient passport but as a place of residence.
The problem is price. Trump’s Gold Card, if offered at $5 million, is dramatically more expensive than its competitors. The pool of potential buyers, though not small, is not that deep. Simply put, is the price too high?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump May Succeed Where Others Failed in Personnel Cutting
Disclaimer: Then-Vice President Al Gore awarded my State Department team in Seoul in the mid-90’s a Hammer Award for helping “reinvent government.” Gore was in charge of the Clinton-era plan to create a government that costs less and works better. The plan mostly depended on us run-of-the-mill employees to come up with cost saving hacks and strategies within our own offices.
The award, a mounted gold-painted hammer, was supposed to remind us of the expensive, wasteful procurements by the military, in this case an ashtray that would break into no more than three pieces when hit by a hammer. It’s true! So while as a Gore team award-winner I might seem a bit biased toward what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, the truth is actually the opposite. And that’s because one strategy failed while the other still has a decent chance of succeeding.
Trump is far from the first president to want to reform the Federal government. Ronald Reagan in 1982 launched a group led by 150 private sector CEOs to review federal agencies and make recommendations to reduce waste. “Be bold. We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency,” the president told commission members. Officially called the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, it was better known as the Grace Commission after its chair, Peter Grace. Grace was well-known at the time for a speech where he said food stamps were basically a subsidy for Puerto Ricans.
In due time, the Grace Commission issued a report suggesting over 2,500 recommendations to increase government efficiency. Most of them required Congressional action and so in the end not much was done.
As mentioned, led by former Vice President Al Gore, the National Performance Review had similar aims as the Grace Commission, but went about achieving them in a different way. Rather than bringing on private sector outsiders like Reagan, the Clinton administration relied on federal employees. “It is career bureaucrats who know, better than anyone else, what works and what doesn’t,” said a Gore aide. “A successful reform effort cannot take place without their wisdom and without their participation.”
Part of that wisdom was my team out in Seoul. We were then the busiest visa issuing embassy in the world, and were literally struggling for air amid Korean visa applications for travelers to the United States. Our rewarded hammer wisdom was to couple a hiring blitz with a range of kinda-makes-sense administrative changes to our workflow. Because we were processing close to a million visas a year, even small adjustments could have a big impact (a small thing times one million is a big number.) It made it all seem dramatic, and we wrote it up nicely, hence the award from Gore. We hung it on the wall near the restrooms where everyone could see it daily.
Gore’s program got a little help, I mean, besides from my team. Between January 1993 and September 2000, the federal workforce shrunk by 426,200, making it the smallest one since the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. The reduction was brought about through a large-scale buyout program and about 25,000 layoffs. Still, overall only $136 billion was saved and the workforce grew back again under subsequent administrations. A 2013 Government Executive article criticized how the shrinkage was achieved. “The reduction didn’t happen in a way that matched workforce needs because they used a strategy for downsizing to hit a target. The effort got in the way of the ‘making government work better’ piece. Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we’d have wanted to leave.”
Here’s where with lessons learned Trump may have a chance to succeed where Reagan and Clinton did not.
— No commissions or blue ribbon panels. One of Reagan’s mistakes was to create a commission with the power to peer into all aspects of government without the power to do anything about the problems they uncovered. A report was produced (purposeful use of the passive tense there) and dumped onto Congress’ lap where it slowly faded from memory. Though the wire diagram is a bit fuzzy here in 2025, Elon Musk clearly has more power in his hands than simply to produce a report. His ability to act, whether by ordering in Trump’s name actual de facto closures of agencies like USAID, or by offering government-wide buyouts ahead of a RIF, is significant. That alone may make DOGE more successful than its predecessors.
— Understanding people are the problem, unlike Gore. Gore made the mistake of handing over uncovering waste to the very people perpetuating it, trusting them to hack themselves into efficiency. Musk, instead of encouraging workers to flush out waste, assumes those employees are actually the drivers of it. The hammer this time is a pink slip. Gore did produce some nice optics and had a publicity-forward edge to it all, but resulted in little actual money-saving change or added efficiency. But contrast the media response to Gore’s approach versus Musk’s on-purpose bully-in-a-china shop tactics as an indicator to how long he’ll get away with what he is doing.
— But without some guidance as to who to cut, Musk risks the same problem Reagan and Gore had, throwing out the good, needed employees with the bad ones when the only criteria is headcount. You can bet that nearly every employee inside government is considering how to bail out right now. The problem is that given lucrative government retirement and pension plans, anyone close to “real” retirement is going to try and tough it out. These may not be the best employees, or maybe they are, but they’ll be the ones to cling to their jobs for another six months or a year or whatever. Statistically they are more likely to have a coronary at their desk then to leave without a fight.
The second group of government employees who will hang on like a dog with a turkey leg in its mouth are the worst of the worst, those employees who have no transferable skills into the private sector. They have nowhere to go and nothing to lose and unless identified and micro-targeted by RIFs may be who is left to turn out the lights in many government offices a year or two from now, the true Deep State, dug in even deeper.
Musk needs guidelines in his efforts beyond “move fast and break things” and creating some commission a la Reagan which will spend a year creating a report of little value. With that said, so far so good. Unlike Gore, who also just used crude headcount goals, Musk will need to engage departmental leadership for those agencies he hopes to redeem and make informed choices over which employees to RIF and/or which sub-departments to close. Of course none of that matters if your goal is to delete an entire agency, as with USAID or Education. The wood chipper has its uses, too.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Tough Times at Foggy Bottom
The DOGE tsunami is about to strike the U.S. Department of State, as well as other agencies. Let’s see what that means.
The day the music died was January 28, when nearly everyone at State, along with over two million other federal civilian employees, received an email referring to “A Fork in the Road.” The email offered qualifying diplomats and civil servants a choice ahead of planned Reductions in Force (RIFs, layoffs): resign now under a special program, don’t come to work for a few months while being paid, and then in September become eligible for whatever retirement benefits you would otherwise be eligible for, if any. State offers its diplomats a full retirement with pension after age 50 and 20 years of service, similar to the military, and after 30 years for civil servants, all with exceptions of course.
Despite the general sense the buyout was some sort of trick (workers questioned what legal authority allowed State and other federal agencies to pay people who technically resigned, then bring them back into the system to retire), across the government some 77,000 people signed up for the deal before it was brought to a pause by court action. For those with a long way toward formal retirement, it seemed like good enough; ahead of being RIFed, they’d pocket some seven months’ salary on top of whatever severance package might await them when actually let go. The Fork program, as it was commonly now called (alongside the new expression “to get forked”), acquired a formal name, “deferred resignation,” and the paid time off without working became “administrative leave.” An involuntary retirement is called the Orwellian “Discontinued Service Retirement.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and others sued to block the “deferred resignation” program, arguing that its chaotic rollout and shifting legal justifications constituted violations of the Administrative Procedure Act’s protections against “arbitrary and capricious” decision-making, and the promise to pay employees past the March 14 possible government shutdown deadline could constitute an Anti-Deficiency Act violation.
On February 12 the federal judge who had temporarily blocked the plan reversed course, ending the temporary restraining order upon concluding he lacked jurisdiction in the case. The deferred resignations would be allowed to go forward (though the sign up deadline has now passed) reducing head count at State and other federal agencies if everything went as planned. In his decision, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole wrote the unions’ challenges are of the type Congress “intended for review within the statutory scheme,” referring to the need to file administrative appeals before going to court. There were doubts the Trump administration would or legally could follow through as stated. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the plan “an unfunded IOU from Elon Musk.”
Then things started to get really interesting at State.
Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) February 12, stating inter alia “The Secretary [of State] shall, consistent with applicable law, implement reforms in recruiting, performance, evaluation, and retention standards, and the programs of the Foreign Service Institute, to ensure a workforce that is committed to faithful implementation of the President’s foreign policy… In implementing the reforms identified in this section, the Secretary shall, consistent with applicable law, revise or replace the Foreign Affairs Manual and direct subordinate agencies to remove, amend, or replace any handbooks, procedures, or guidance… Failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.”
Many at State read this as implementation of a “loyalty test” for continued employment. The full scope of the EO will depend on the actual steps taken after its signing, especially the admonition to revise or replace the Foreign Affairs Manual, the set of rules State functions under administratively and policy-wise. It could pave the way for a massive restructuring of State, consolidating power under political appointees and away from diplomatic staff.
Then things got really interesting.
Nearly concurrent with the February 12 EO, Foggy Bottom HQ sent out a message to all embassies and consulates warning outposts around the world to start planning for staff reductions, according to ABC News. Senior embassy officials were asked to provide comprehensive lists of all employees and their employment status as part of the process, sources said, explaining the request includes tenured, untenured, and temporary duty assignments. Embassies will be required to cut both American staff and employees hired locally, sources added. The edicts followed a decision by Secretary of State Rubio to not extend contracts for civilian personal services contractors (PSC) who provide housekeeping and maintenance at embassies. But PSCs also supplement diplomatic security; roughly half of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s contractors fall under the new directive. Contracts in the process of being signed are to be halted and any job postings made after the inauguration of Donald Trump are to be rescinded. Only State’s domestic passport PSC operations staff are exempted (a smart move in that it limits direct public impact from an otherwise nearly totally foreign-facing organization.)
Trump wasn’t finished. In another EO, he declared “Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs), consistent with applicable law, and to separate from Federal service temporary employees and reemployed annuitants working in areas that will likely be subject to the RIFs. All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law shall be prioritized in the RIFs, including all agency diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; all agency initiatives, components, or operations that my Administration suspends or closes; and all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website. This subsection shall not apply to functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.” The uniformed military and postal service employees are also exempt.
That means State, along with other agencies, is going to have to soon start firing people.
The EO led directly to State’s diplomatic union issuing an urgent message to its members explaining “Agencies have 30 days to submit reorganization plans to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The implementation of these plans will include RIFs. The executive order does not specify when RIFs will begin… Section 611 of the Foreign Service Act allows for RIFs. This section also requires the creation of rules for letting go of career and career candidate members under Chapter 3 of the Act. The regulations note that the retention hierarchy in the event of a RIF should be based on the following: organizational changes; employee knowledge, skills, or competencies; tenure of employment; employee performance, and military preference.”
Regulations allow for 120 days notice to the RIFed employee though note under some special circumstances the notice need be only 30 days. They go on to say while an employee may file a grievance against the RIF, the grievance will not delay separation and is limited only to cases of reprisal, interference in the conduct of the member’s official duties or similarly inappropriate use of RIF authority. The current understanding is that RIFed employees, if otherwise eligible, can receive their retirement pensions. Ineligible RIFed employees will likely lose their healthcare and life insurance as best as things are understood. But this is far from over and no one knows how it will end.
“We do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind. Just leave part of them behind. It’s easy. It’s kind of like leaving a weed,” Elon Musk said. “If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
Everything is in flux at present and no one should make any decisions based on this or any other article. But what is clear is that this time Trump means business. Unlike the small-scale RIF which took place at State during the Clinton administration, this time it’s for real, a seemingly determined effort to downsize the State Department both at home and abroad while at the same time likely increasing the authority of political appointees. It is both a paradigm shift and a power shift away from a more-or-less independent State Department (and other agencies) toward a concentration of power deeper inside the Executive Branch.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump versus the Visa Office
For all the emphasis on the southern border and The Wall, asylum procedures and criminal aliens, little ink has been spilled over the other side of immigration, the issuance of visas abroad to foreigners by the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. Literally millions of temporary nonimmigrant visas (tourist visas, students, temporary workers) are issued yearly, many of which go to foreigners who have no intention of ever returning home. They join the millions who flood across the southern border, entering quasi-legally and staying on indefinitely illegally. What reforms are due at State visa offices worldwide?
Project 2025 is harsh towards the State Department in general, citing one study which concluded the department is a “crippled institution suffering from an ineffective organizational structure in which regional and functional policies do not serve integrated goals, and in which sound management, accountability, and leadership are lacking.” The major source of the State Department’s ineffectiveness, Project 2025 believes, lies in its institutional belief “it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.” Strong medicine.
The Project contains many country-specific and region-oriented policy plans for State to follow to remedy all that. There’s always more to do, of course. For example, it is interesting how many major political events of the last few years crisscrossed the State Department: Hillary Clinton’s emails and Foundation shenanigans, the Steele Dossier and many things Russiagate, and the first impeachment and Ukraine. And never mind two Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton and John Kerry, found a home there. That’s an awful lot of partisanship for an organization which brags about being non-partisan.
Yet for all the policy and institutional changes proposed for State, it is the visa function which Project 2025 singles out as among the most important. The Project says “the department’s most noteworthy challenge on the global stage has been its handling of immigration and domestic security issues, which are inextricably related. The State Department’s apparent posture toward these two issues, which are of paramount importance to the American people, has historically been that they are of lesser importance than other issues and that they can be treated as concessions in broader diplomatic engagements. In other instances in which access to the U.S. in the form of immigrant (permanent) and nonimmigrant (temporary) visas could potentially serve as diplomatic leverage, it is almost never used. To some degree, the State Department and many of its personnel appear to view the U.S. immigration system less as a tool for strengthening the United States and more as a global welfare program. To ensure the safety, security, and prosperity of all Americans, “this must change.” Stronger medicine.
What the Project is getting at is visa issuance is typically divorced from larger policy issues and almost never used as a tool to gain concessions on other issues. It is instead given away, the mantra in the Bureau of Consular Affairs being each visa case is decided individually without reference to larger global issues. Yet in many countries, particularly in the developing world, visas are a form of currency, and possession of a full American tourist visa, or having a son at an American university on a student visa, are treated as much as a sign of wealth and status as a nice home or an imported car.
Upstairs in an embassy the ambassador and his staff may fret about trade deficits while downstairs in the Consular Section visa candy is handed out to locals as if nothing is the matter. Project 2025 wants this “Chinese Wall” knocked down. It would question why the U.S. imposes significant tariffs on China with one hand to pressure the CCP, while freely handing out 64,187 multi-year tourist visas in the month of September 2024 (latest statistics) alone. Similar statistics belie the leverage wasted in Russia (3,552 tourist visas monthly), Mexico (over 186,000 border crossing documents) and against Iran (1,092 tourist visas) just as examples. In most non-developed nations the burden of some sort of visa pressure would fall nearly completely on the elite as far as tourist visas, or on important companies with juice with their own governments in other cases (over 3,000 temporary worker visas were issued in China.) Exceptions could always be made for compelling American interests, such as Google’s or Microsoft’s H1-B workers. It would just drive home the point of using visas as a negotiating tool, as Project 2025 envisions.
For example, one could imagine the impact of withholding visa issuances on Central American nations unwilling to cooperate with the U.S. on returning migrants, or a recalcitrant Mexico looking at the “Remain in Mexico” plan likely to be a Day One proposal from the Trump administration.
Project 2025 also calls for the evaluation of national security–vulnerable visa programs to protect the American people. The State Department should evaluate several key security-sensitive visa programs it manages. These include the Diversity Visa program, the F (student) visa program, and J (exchange visitor) visa program. The State Department’s evaluation must “ensure that these programs are not only consistent with White House immigration policy, but also align with its national security obligations and resource limitations.”
Following the events of 9/11 a massive overhaul was done to the visa issuing system, and numerous steps were added to the process. These include fingerprinting and photographing all applicants, and coordinating file checks among State and the intelligence agencies. Supporters point to the apparent success of the program — no additional 9/11’s — but Project 2025 calls for a more detailed answer. The threat still remains — the U.S. issued over 1,000 student visas to Saudis in July 2024, 32 to Yemenis, and 338 to Iranians.
But in addition to the broader security questions about student visa issuance addressed by Project 2025, there lurks the individual case questions and whether or not these will be folded into the individual visa decision. For example, how many of those Iranian or Saudi student visas are issued to students planning to study STEM fields applicable to nuclear engineering? Such data are unavailable. While some cumbersome speed bumps for that sort of thing exist in the current system, State visa officers are not empowered, never mind not encouraged, to refuse such cases outright at first glance on national interest grounds in alignment with national security obligations. It ain’t rocket science, people.
Project 2025 seeks such change, change which will require serious new thinking in the Bureau of Consular Affairs and closer coordination between Consular and the so-called “political” side of State. State may have held paid “crying sessions” after Trump’s election win, but it looks like the tears are just getting ready to get started.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Showdown in DOGE City
The leaders of President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have been meeting with Republican lawmakers recently. None of those involved shared details from their meetings, which was by design to allow for brainstorming. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) did say “Government is too big. It does too many things, and it does almost nothing well,” adding Musk and Ramaswamy would help usher in change. But how will Elon and Vivek actually seek change? What are their tools to bring to bear?
In an op-ed laying out their strategy, the duo said they would link administrative reductions, regulatory rescissions, and cost savings.
Cutting back on the sheer numbers of government employees is a fine starting point for Elon and Vivek. Using the controversial Schedule F, they hope to do away with the unofficial lifetime employment most Civil Servants enjoy. Civil service rules make firing for cause extremely difficult, and grind broader layoffs to a crawl if not a full stop. If Schedule F could be implemented early in Trump 2.0 (the plan was started in Trump 1.0 but failed to get any traction) it would be a decisive tool in clearing out civil service deadwood. They will not go easily, and the terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon added.
Another strategy for lowering government headcount is attrition. Trump could impose a government-wide hiring freeze, as he did when he took office in 2017, though many feel this may be too blunt an instrument. Musk and Ramaswamy suggest the Trump administration lean instead on separation incentives to get federal workers to retire early or accept buyouts. Elon and Vivek also plan to relocate some agencies out of D.C. and to offer generous severance packages to drive workers into retiring instead of moving.
An attrition move which has widespread Republican support in Congress is to end or curtail telework, back to at least pre-Covid levels. Ramaswamy predicted requiring more federal workers to go into their offices more frequently would cause many of them to quit. “If you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won’t want to do that,” Ramaswamy said. “If you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That’s a good side effect of those policies as well.” How many Feds telework is itself the subject of much discussion; Speaker Johnson puts the figure at 99 percent of regular office workers, while the Office of Management and Budget claims 80 percent of the federal work hours are currently spent in-person and more than half of federal employees do not telework at all.
As for regulatory rescissions, the federal bureaucracy generates thousands of regulations and rules each year, another target for Elon and Vivek. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) who will co-chair the House DOGE Caucus, quoted Musk as suggesting the United States is “no longer a democracy, it’s a bureaucracy” and his commission would work to ensure Congress, not “unelected bureaucrats,” dictate regulation. Changing things will not be easy. Agencies generally must go through notice-and-comment rulemaking to amend or revoke rules, though Musk and Ramaswamy suggest Trump may be able to revoke some rules unilaterally via executive order. Musk and Ramaswamy also believe Trump could direct agencies not to enforce some cumbersome regulations or those he believes are unlawful in light of recent Supreme Court precedent. The duo says “we will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.” “He might get away with it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Congress’ power of the purse will turn into an advisory opinion.”
One obstacle the duo cannot overcome is the math of the federal budget. Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending — things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Trump promised to protect those programs. Another 10 percent of the budget is spent on paying interest on the national debt. That leaves around 30 percent of the budget “discretionary,” though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut. That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP.
That said, Musk and Ramaswamy identified a number of potential reductions. These include several specific appropriations or federal grants they consider to be wasteful, such as for NGOs, DEI training, PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, and $1.5 billion in grants to international organizations. Musk previously advocated removing subsidies from all industries. Ramaswamy said DOGE will closely review CHIPS Act contracts, especially those the Biden administration accelerated.
More generally, law firm Gibson Dunn notes Musk and Ramaswamy have said Trump may decline to spend appropriations for which Congress’s authorizations have expired (called impoundment, confounded by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.) The Congressional Budget Office has identified $516 billion in appropriations for 2024 associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations across a range of agencies, including a number of appropriations administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, State Department, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA. Withholding such funds is subject to legal challenge. It would be politically unpopular to cut a number of these programs, such as veterans’ healthcare benefits and Pell Grants.
Musk and Ramaswamy will also scrutinize federal contracts that have “gone unexamined for years,” and conduct “large-scale audits during a temporary suspension of payments.” Ramaswamy said to expect “massive cuts among federal contractors… who are overbilling the government.” Everyone has a list. Sources of potential cuts could also be the Government Accountability Office High Risk List, which identifies programs particularly subject to waste, fraud, and abuse, and a list of thousands of proposed cuts Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sent to Musk and Ramaswamy.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Syria: The View from 30,000 Feet
Originally published on Responsible Statecraft.
If a time traveler from 2024 went to the Middle East of some years ago with the intent of revealing the future, he might not be believed. He’d tell how the stalwart regimes of Quaddafi, Saddam, Pahlavi, and the Assad family were gone, their once stable countries now either in some level of chaos/failed state or under control of Tehran as proxies. Same for Lebanon and Hezbollah. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is gone, Hamas is beholden to Iran for its survival, and Egypt survives as a sort of U.S. ally, saved by American do-nothingism from the democratic possibilities of the Arab Spring.
When asked how all this could have happened, he’d explain with the exception of the Iranian Revolution and the PLO, it mostly had to do with the United States and its invasion of Iraq, the destruction of a stable (“evil” regime; they’re all evil) regime it turned out was a linchpin holding most of the whole Sykes-Picot world together. In 2003 the U.S. invasion began a process of inviting all comers to take hold of a piece of Iraq and see how far they might get with it. Many of the same ISIS and former al-Qaeda elements that now stand athwart Syria (and will no doubt soon begin fighting each other for control there) almost grabbed the entire country after the U.S.-trained and equipped post-Saddam Iraqi army ran from the field. It was left for the Iranians to take the reigns, fashioning Iraq into a client state after the U.S. cut its losses by cooperating with Iran to wipe out most of ISIS in Iraq and abandoning the Kurds who had foolishly believed the U.S. owed them a nation-state after all this.
American hubris led to the fall of Quaddafi after a U.S.-sponsored revolt of sorts ended up doing little more than creating a failed state in the once stable region. Pundits saw it, as they will wrongly see the fall of Syria, as a blow toward Russian ambitions in the area, not calculating the negative value of unleashing chaos in a region consumed by the Iranian-U.S./Israeli proxy war. As a side note, watching Quaddafi being sodomized on TV after he gave up his nuclear weapons assured the world North Korea would never do the same. But that’s another world away…
Nobody is going to miss the Assad family. Bashar’s father and the family ran Syria since a 1970 coup. Assad initially portrayed himself as a modern reformist, but he responded to peaceful protests during the Arab Spring with brutal crackdowns, sparking a nationwide uprising. As the ISIS rebels advanced, they took over many of the notorious prisons where the Assad regime had for decades tortured and killed political prisoners. As with Iraq being left open for anyone who wanted a piece of it and could find a way to hold it, Syria is going to dissolve. Israel already grabbed snippets of territory to round out its border with Syria, and destroyed the Syrian navy, rocket and chemical stores, and much of its air force because in chaos lies possibility if you have not already blown your money, lives, and goodwill in Iraq. Unlike in 2012, when Hezbollah came to Assad’s rescue against insurgents, Hezbollah today has few shock troops available to help. The internecine fighting among revolutionary groups will inevitably result in one of them seeking aid from Iran (who else? Turkey?), who’ll emerge as the victor of sorts in all this with another proxy statelet under its belt. A weakened Russia is out of the picture and appears to have already abandoned its naval base in Syria.
What’s left is to see what America has to say. There are 900 American soldiers on the ground today in Syria, and U.S. warplanes flew bombing missions accidentally in support of Assad against ISIS factions in their battles outside Damascus (strange bedfellows and all that.) Had all this happened a year ago, when Joe Biden was still nominally in charge of the U.S. military, you might have seen some sort of intervention, more of a blocking move really, to keep the ISIS factions from uniting, to limit their success or at least slow it down, and to interdict any Iranian help arriving from the east. Joe Biden is no longer really in charge of anything. He used up his Commander-in-Chief goodwill on two ugly proxy interventions, fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian and of course supporting Israel in Gaza. A year, or more realistically two or three years, ago Joe might have made the case for either direct involvement in Syria or hitching the old bull of America more directly to another proxy, maybe the beleaguered Kurds who still want a piece of Syria for their own. As it stands, Joe lacks the political oomph to do any of that in his final days in office and good riddance. We are in no position (and have no wherewithal) to take advantage of the situation in a positive way. This will be in spite of trying to claim the lead ISIS faction has a nice government on its mind. Any future expedient rehabilitation of the Syrian terrorists is analogous to the disingenuous glow up granted the Ukrainian Nazi militias (U.S. would recognize a Syrian government that comes from inclusive process, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says, uh oh.)
Incoming president Donald Trump has made it clear he wants no part of a war in Syria (and is not too enamored with continuing the one in Ukraine, either.) He tried in Term 1.0 to withdraw American forces from Syria and failed, and will likely try early on in Term 2.0 to pull them out. It would be the right thing to do and likely engender wide support. Americans getting killed in the Middle East for vague reasons is so-2003 and far from the mandate Trump was handed. Syria will sort itself out, with Israel on one side helping keep the fight inside existing borders (or less!) and Iran, if it is clever enough, siding with the ISIS group most likely to emerge as the most powerful in Syria, say Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whom the U.S. considers a terrorist group. If all that fails to come true, expect another failed state in the heart of the Middle East.
Our Middle East time traveler would certainly have some explaining to do.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Whither the Department of Education? Is DOE DOA?
What is to become of the Department of Education (DOE)? Trump promised to get rid of it, and Elon and Vivek say they will follow-through and “delete” it. What does the Department of Education do anyway and will it be missed?
First off, what does the DOE not do. It does not choose textbooks or curricula, and it does not hire teachers. That is and has for a long time been done on the local or state level. What DOE does, broadly, is administer various entitlement and grant programs, passing down federal funds to local schools and the states. That those funds are often contingent on schools following various social justice dictates, such as Title IX on discrimination in school sports and activities by sex, is where the rub lies. See Project 2025, below.
A good place to start in understanding what DOE does is with Sen. Mike Rounds’s (R-SD) Returning Education to Our States Act (S. 5384) which seeks to eliminate the DOE and “redistribute all critical functions under other departments.” Rounds said the department has moved beyond its mission. “The Federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic department that causes more harm than good,” Rounds explained. “Local school boards and state departments of education know best what their students need, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.”
Under his plan, DOE programs and presumably some of its 4,200 employees would be spread across the departments of Interior, Treasury, Justice, State, and Health and Human Services as follows:
— relocate all functions, programs, and authorities of the Secretary of Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to the Department of Health and Human Services;
— relocate each authority and program of the Office of Indian Education of the Department of Education to the Department of the Interior;
— relocate the Fulbright-Hayes program to the State Department;
— relocate each Impact Aid program to the Department of Health and Human Services;
— the Federal Pell Grant program, the Federal Family Education Loan Program, the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, Health Education Assistance Loan program, the programs under the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, the Educational Technical Assistance Act, and the Federal Perkins Loans Program will move to the Department of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury will make allocations to states to support elementary and secondary education, including career and technical education based on the number of kids enrolled in public, private, and home schools. States can use this funding for any purpose relating to early childhood, elementary or secondary education. Treasury should do the same for college and university money allocated by in-school population.
— The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice will become responsible for enforcing civil rights laws applicable to the grant programs (DOJ enforces civil rights through litigation, not through the threatened nonjudicial withholding of education funds as is the case with DOE.)
“For years, I’ve worked toward removing the Federal Department of Education,” said Senator Rounds. “I’m pleased that President-elect Trump shares this vision, and I’m excited to work with him and Republican majorities in the Senate and House to make this a reality. This legislation is a roadmap to eliminating the Federal Department of Education by practically rehoming these federal programs in the departments where they belong.”
Critics, particularly in Project 2025, see efforts like Rounds’s as doing too little to change the philosophy behind a federal role in education. Some might see Rounds’s rehoming bill as something akin to shuffling the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Trump himself has bigger plans, stating “On Day One, we will begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and that also includes others, and you know who you are. Because we are not going to allow anyone to hurt our children.”
Speaking of his Secretary of Education nominee, Linda McMahon, Trump said “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.” Taking education choices away from the DOE and handing them to parents is also a central focus of Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a focal point for DOE reform/elimination and goes further than Rounds. The Project says “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.” Title I is the largest portion of federal taxpayer spending under this federal education law, and the section provides additional taxpayer resources to schools or groups of schools in lower income areas. Over a 10-year period, Federal spending should be phased out and states should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families. Some big changes in there, particularly the use of ESA’s to hand control over education directly to parents, given DOE’s poor track record — Federal intervention, the Project states, in education has failed to promote student achievement. After trillions spent on the collective programs at DOE, “student academic outcomes remain stagnant.” The ESA’s would be usable at both public and private schools, a major win for religious education and home schoolers.
At its core, Project 2025 wants to reduce the Federal level of involvement in education to zero, especially administratively, and leave the states — if not the parents — responsible for funding and controlling education locally.
In addition, the Project wants to treat taxpayers like investors in federal student aid. Taxpayers should expect their investments in higher education to generate economic productivity. When the federal government lends money to individuals for a postsecondary education, taxpayers should expect those borrowers to repay. It says “the [Biden] Administration drastically expanded college student loan forgiveness. The new administration must quickly commence negotiated rulemaking and propose the department rescind these regulations. In fact, the next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin off FSA and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management.”
Project 2025 also gets into more “philosophical” areas, redefining sex strictly biologically for Title IX purposes, eliminating any benefits based on race, and establishing a Parental Bill of Rights for Education (“No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians,” “Prohibit accreditation agencies from leveraging their Title IV gatekeeper role to mandate that educational institutions adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies”) to push back on “woke” ideas in education.
There’s a bit of dissonance in Project 2025 regarding education that will need to be resolved. Its primary goal is the elimination of the DOE but at the same time secondary goals such as instituting a Parental Bill of Rights are exactly the kind of federal mandates requiring a bureaucratic vehicle such as the DOE to push them down into the recalcitrant states. It will be interesting to watch how this is resolved, and important to see what effect it has on the education of our children, and on the future of our country.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump Staffs Up for Immigration War
After Americans overwhelmingly give the White House, Senate, and House (you might as well count the Supreme Court in, too) to one party, which ran with a vow to limit illegal immigration on Day One of its control, what do you do if you’re governor of a liberal state? Why, you ignore the support Trump and the Republicans have in your state and try to work around the coming war on immigration in direct opposition to the Federal government in Washington. Might as well be 1860 all over again.
“Democrats,” says the New York Times, “envision flexing their power in these states to partly block the Trump administration’s policies — for example, by refusing to enforce immigration laws.” The Times claims some of the planning in blue states began in 2023 as a potential backstop if Trump won, but the preparations were largely kept quiet to avoid projecting public doubts about Democrats’ ability to win the election. The anti-populist Democratic effort will rely on the work of hundreds of lawyers being recruited to combat Trump policies. Advocacy groups are workshopping cases and recruiting potential plaintiffs to challenge expected regulations, laws, and administrative actions. For example, Democracy Forward, a legal group formed after Trump won in 2016, has a multimillion-dollar bank roll and more than 800 lawyers on call.
Governors Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois are mobilizing their Democratic-controlled legislatures to gird their states loins against the future Trump administration. Newsom’s legislature issued a proclamation to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration… bolstering California legal resources to protect civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, and immigrant families.” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker took a more direct stand, stating “You come for my people, you come through me,” apparently referring to migrant families and illegal alien criminals as “his people.” Pritzker and Governor Jared Polis of Colorado announced the formation of a group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey vowed to protect the state’s “citizens and residents.” While New York’s sanctuary city-loving mayor lies low in the face of ethics charges, Governor Kathy Hochul convened the Empire State Freedom Initiative to combat “threats” from the Trump administration, including on immigration. She and Trump-hating Attorney General Letitia James vowed to be warriors in the fight to, in Redstate’s words “stop what the American people just voted for.” Sanctuary cities and other localities across the U.S. have, since Biden took office, freed more than 22,000 criminal migrants wanted by federal immigration authorities, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.) The number of criminal aliens freed into the country by sanctuary authorities could potentially be much higher given many times local law enforcement releases criminal migrants before ICE is aware of them and files a detainer notice.
But it is not all bad news. Oklahoma is launching a program, Operation Guardian, to turn over illegal immigrants already in prison to ICE to jump-start Trump’s deportation effort. Governor Kevin Stitt shared with the Washington Examiner plans to expeditiously deport 526 convicted illegal immigrants as soon as Trump takes office. “We want to be the first state that works with President Trump,” Stitt said. “Right now, we have over 500 people incarcerated in Oklahoma who have broken the law, who are criminals, and they also are illegal. We would love to get them out of the state of Oklahoma, out of the country.” The state pays $36,000 to house them each day, according to the governor’s office.
Trump is staffing up for the war. In addition to Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, Trump is set to install an immigration hardliner in a major White House role, a position that does not require Senate confirmation and will enable him to enact Trump’s immigration agenda across the federal government. Tom Homan, who’ll be immigration czar, formerly headed (but was never confirmed as) the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) division responsible for arresting, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. The two men’s prompt installation in senior White House roles, says Politico, among the first personnel selections for Trump 2.0, signals immigration enforcement is a “top priority.”
Immigration is a complex affair in the U.S., with the immigration legal code longer and more complex than the tax code. Miller, Homan and their staffs will need to poke holes in various parts of DHS in general but also look deeper into the bureaucracy. There’s the Department of Labor, which issues work permissions for many visas (such as the H-1B likely of interest to Elon Musk), the Department of Justice, which runs the immigration courts, and the Department of State, which issues the actual visas themselves abroad. Project 2025 specifically calls out the “Diversity” Immigrant Visa lottery, and F and J student visas as in need of an overhaul. “This is the biggest national security vulnerability this nation has seen since 9/11 and we have to fix it,” Homan said.
But initially Trump’s immigration plan will focus on the reported 1.2 million illegal alien criminals loose across the U.S. This population was created by the Biden-Harris administration by allowing migrants to flow across the border without any vetting being done. The plan was especially egregious when dealing with citizens of places like Venezuela, which refuse to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement. Next in line may be military-age Chinese males. All of this targeted enforcement is a far cry from the “mass deportations” feared by the Left.
Trump is serious about all this, beyond personnel choices. Trump confirmed on Truth Social he will declare a national emergency and use military assets to help him carry out his deportation plans. Trump also pledged to continue building the U.S.-Mexico border wall, revive the Remain in Mexico program, hire more border patrol agents, and end birthright citizenship for those born on U.S. soil to illegal migrant parents.
“I’ve got to go back and help because every morning I get up, every morning I’m pissed off about what this [Biden] administration did to the most secure border in my lifetime. So I’m going to go back and do what I can to fix it,” said Homan. “I have seen some of these Democratic governors say they are going to stand in the way. They are going to make it hard for us,” he said. “Well, a suggestion. If you are not going to help us, get the hell out of the way. If we can’t get assistance in New York City, we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. We are going to do the job. We are going to do the job without you or with you.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump v. The Bureaucracy
The war has begun. It’s Trump, Elon, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their new Department of Government Efficiency versus the Federal bureaucracy in a no-holds barred cage deathmatch. The first punches have been thrown; who will win? At stake are your tax dollars.
U.S. election night 2024 was a somber affair in Europe, as U.S. officials in most European capitals abandoned the usual watch parties. Watch parties used to be a long-standing American diplomatic tradition, held at embassies with invited local guests to watch the election results dribble in, showcasing our democracy. Great care was taken to make the party patriotic but not partisan; both candidates were featured and usually a mock election was held, with host country government officials voting one way or another. About the only bad part of the night was listening to American diplomats like me struggling to explain the Electoral College system in bad Mandarin or high school Spanish.
But there were few parties this year, thanks to what some call “The Trump Effect.” Many officials are still hurting from the 2016 election that left many top members of America’s diplomatic corps exposed as they absorbed the killer election results in front of journalists, foreign diplomats, and local officials. “I don’t think there was appetite to watch another Trump victory,” said a senior American diplomat based in Europe, adding that the 2016 embassy events had been “calamitous.” “The decision to nix election night festivities may also reflect the unusually politicized nature of America’s diplomatic corps. There is deep unease about the strength of the U.S. democratic system after disputes about the outcome of the 2020 election led to an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters,” says Politico.
With that as a scene-setter, Washington bureaucracy is preparing for war. Months before the election, in April 2024, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued new protective guidance to agencies as they implemented regulations strengthening “guard rails” on the conversion of career federal workers out of the civil service and into the excepted service. This refers to the infamous Schedule F planned by Trump as one of his Day One initiatives. OPM’s regulations establish a definition of “policy-related” jobs, whittling it down to escape Trump’s campaign definition by referring only to noncareer political appointments, and stipulating when an employee’s position is “involuntarily” converted out of the Civil Service, they retain “the status and civil service protections they had already accrued,” which would render the new rules of Schedule F moot. OPM’s version also grants federal workers the right to appeal any job reclassifications resulting in the loss of civil service protections to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a creaky-slow agency which could tie up Trump’s changes for years, case-by-slogging-case.
But despite Biden’s OPM efforts to protect the federal workforce from any upcoming Schedule F changes, analysts say there may be little the bureaucracy can do to stop them. Even the April 2024 rule could easily be rescinded, either after a 90-day notice-and-comment period or immediately with a new interim final rule. Schedule F fights can be expected to get deep into the weeds of how the U.S. government system works (or doesn’t work) through its tangle of regulations and laws. Never mind snatching returning rockets from the air and self-driving cars, Elon Musk will have met the most complex challenge of his time. Give Elon a hand by delving into the dense OPM’s guidance on Schedule F yourself.
So what is Schedule F anyway? Though it failed to go into practice, in Term 1.0 Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped firing protections from many civil servants. This effort was labeled “Schedule F” because that is the name of the new employment category the executive order created (Schedules A–E already existed.) The administration created Schedule F based on language exempting positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees, Schedule C, not civil servants.
The civil service was once a good idea in theory to protect workers from politics and make sure the mail got sorted and the tariffs got collected. But fast forward to today and all sorts of employees, including many in organs like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Their protections against political interference have only grown stronger over the years, to the point where it is near impossible to fire one of them, even for cause. This leads to the legendary “lifetime jobs” most civil servants enjoy.
The problem is that some of those civil servants are in positions to oppose the president’s initiatives. They can block action relatively safely, protected as they are from being fired. This is what Trump wants to change in Term 2.0. He wants to be able to fire some of these servants at will. They will not go away easily. The terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon said.
Elon and Vivek are not fighting alone.
Some in Congress are already thinking ahead, anticipating the push-back from the affected civil servants. The Stop Resistance Activities by Federal Employees Act (STRAFE) would penalize federal employees if they obstruct a lawful order from administration officials. It requires agencies to report alleged violations to the White House every six months. Representative August Pfluger’s (R-Texas) Act directs OPM to craft new mandatory training for senior federal employees on the penalties imposed if they were to oppose, obstruct or impede directives from the president, vice president or any other political appointee. “Career unelected bureaucrats cannot be allowed to undermine the agenda of any future president,” said Congressman Pfluger.”We must ensure that the network of federal employees that brazenly carried out resistance activities under the first Trump Administration is not unleashed again.” The STRAFE Act is designed to mitigate resistance within federal agencies, ensuring a more cooperative and compliant federal workforce.
STRAFE has four components: 1) training for federal employees clearly outlining prohibited activities intended to obstruct or undermine the directives of the sitting administration; 2) penalties, on par with Hatch Act violations, for federal employees who engage in resistance activities (civil penalties can reach $1,000); 3) an external complaint reporting process, bypassing the traditional Inspector General channels within agencies, to ensure a more transparent system and 4) periodic reports from each federal agency to the Executive Office of the President, providing updates on complaints and status of actions taken against those engaging in resistance activities.
Needless to say, civil service advocacy groups oppose the STRAFE Act, saying STRAFE and Schedule F are just veiled efforts to politicize the federal workforce. “The election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States is not the result our union was hoping for,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said “it feels different—in 2016, he was still something of an unknown. Now we have Trump’s first term anti-union executive orders and Schedule F on top of that, and we have Project 2025, the blueprint of exactly what they’re going to do. So it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out exactly what they have planned. As a union that represents federal employees, we have to prepare to defend our members.”
Game on, Elon and Vivek.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What’s Changed?
Things don’t often change overnight. Change tends to happen slowly, then fast, in small increments and then big jumps, but rarely does one night matter that much. So it is with the election; American did not change the night it re-elected Donald Trump president but the election of Donald Trump did mark a significant change in America.
There are some quick and easy changes to note. Most polling shops should just close up, they are worthless. The election the polls told us would be down to a skin of our teeth tie ended up a solid blowout, with Republicans taking the presidency, the Senate, and (likely) the House. Polls are seemingly unable, now, after three presidential elections, to dig into the thoughts of Republicans in general and shy Trump voters in the specific. Whatever it is, whatever methodology is challenged by these voters, the polls are of little value. It’s a joke now to remember CNN the night before the election touting some “solid gold” poll showing Trump would lose Iowa.
Identity politics seems to have run its course. Kamala did not run heavily on her multiple identities as a BlackAsianWoman except until near the end, where she switched to her Sunday church accent (it was ripe for an SNL parody except SNL was fully onboard the Harris campaign bus and not willing to risk insulting anyone with an “edgy” parody) and dragged out a tired-looking Barack and a boyish-looking Michele to chew out black dudes for not voting for Kamala (as if being chewed out was a good election strategy.) There was barely a flamboyant gay or trans person in sight on Kamala’s team, unlike the showpiece drag queens Biden attached to himself last round — remember the guy in the red dress with the bright red lipstick and shaved head? And in the end America elected an old, wealthy, white Republican, Semi-Macho, Man. Read the room, Dems.
There’ll be changes in the bureaucracy of Washington, either via Elon Musk, RFK, Jr., or the use of Schedule F. Trump will again fill any Supreme Court vacancies, this time with a Republican Senate unlikely to challenge his choice in confirmation hearings. As in Term One, this may prove to be one of Trump’s most transformational accomplishments.
It’s doubtful the MSM learned anything from its work on 2024, given it did not learn much from its failures in 2016 and 2020, so change is unlikely. Across the mini-spectrum from CNN to The Atlantic, the MSM unabashedly promoted Kamala Harris at every chance, and bashed Trump whenever possible. All pretext was discarded, right down to dear SNL, who gave Kamala free, puffy air time the weekend before the election, a move so grotesquely out of line that parent network NBC was forced by FCC pressure to hand over two minutes of expensive commercial time to Trump to balance things out ahead of a spanking. Even as they were reporting Trump’s victory, CNN and MSNBC kept injecting little digs about him being a fascist and all that. In its obituary for the 2024 campaign, the New York Times wrote “for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact ‘retribution’ against his adversaries.” They still don’t get it.
The media and Democrats face a forced change of view over January 6. The events of that day never mattered much, despite efforts by the media/Dem establishment to replay things in every format possible. “The real America becomes Trump’s America,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “Frankly, the world will say if this man wasn’t disqualified by Jan. 6, which was incredibly influential around the world, then this is not the America that we knew.” Indeed, it was not the America they knew; it was an America more concerned about food prices and interest rates than settling political mud fights. The results of November 5 should be seen, among other things, as a referendum on things like J6. They never mattered except to some elites and their media. Can we hope never to speak of them again?
The election should hopefully change the view of those elites toward the more than half of America who voted for Trump. Unlike what is believed inside the Beltway, the election vindicates Trump’s argument Washington has grown out of touch, that America is a country weary of war, crazed immigration, and political correctness. Can we as a nation now stop being offended so readily and stop calling everything in turn racist or perhaps the new Trump magic word no one understands, fascist? Does every discussion need to include “but what about the trans people?” Maybe they can take care of themselves for awhile. “The Trump presidency speaks to the depth of the marginalization felt by those who believe they have been in the cultural wilderness for too long and their faith in the one person who has given voice to their frustration and his ability to center them in American life,” said Melody Barnes, the executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy.
Elections do indeed matter. The Democrats tried to defeat Donald Trump in ever way possible — by any means necessary — before the election. They impeached him twice, indicted him 88 times, and attempted to murder him twice. Despite efforts to force him off the ballot in multiple states, he stayed on the ballots, aided by a judicial system that in part had not fully drunk the Kool Aid.
One of the most significant things to have changed, or that we now acknowledge as changed, having had the MRI of an election with a clear outcome, is the permanence of Trumpism. There’ll be books and dissertations defining it, but it is clear whatever it is that Trump is, it is a large part of the American body politic now. Not only did Trump capture the usual red states, he flipped some blues and even in areas where he did not win, racked up high scores, 40 percent or more. The polls obviously missed all this, but the reality is there are a lot of Trump supporters –a mandate for change — and it even looks like he won the popular vote.
Trump is indeed about divisions in America, but more about understanding, acknowledging, and profiting from them than creating them himself. He is unlikely to know how to heal them; it is something it is time to learn to live with and govern over, not simply wipe away half the electorate as garbage or deplorables. They are us. There is little need to worry about Trump seeking retribution or misusing the military; much of that was theater, off-the-cuff remarks or attempts to rile up the crowds. Look to his first term and past the crying around J6 and you’ll see how he’ll govern in round two. And get used to it, because Trumpism is now the Republican party platform. The half-assed attempts to seize control of the party by the Never Trumpers and the neocons failed completely. With J.D. Vance as the candidate in 2028, the Trump legacy will dominate modern American politics well beyond that of Reagan. 2016 wasn’t a fluke, 2020 was.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why Kamala Harris Lost
This was an angry election; none of that “which candidate would you rather have a beer with” stuff here. Trump is an angry man representing angry constituents. Harris was angry things were not going her way and constantly expressed the Hillary-esque idea of “how could I possibly be losing to a guy like Trump?” Both sides prioritized personal attacks over policy. At times it felt like elementary school playground stuff, name calling, but in the end it was much more serious than that. Harris lost because she tried to make “Trump is a fascist” into her closing argument and no one was listening anymore. The girl had truly cried wolf for the last time.
Now to be fair Harris’ fate is also because she is wholly unqualified for the toughest job in the world, having distinguished herself as Vice President of Nothing. She was an empty suit and kept showing it. A candidate created whole from the womb by the media with a past that supposedly did not matter and a future as vague as her recollections of that past. As the saying goes, she had one job — the border — and made a royal mess out of doing nothing about the many problems there to the point where thousands of migrants (we use the word as a generic term because no one in the Harris house cared whether they were legal, illegal, asylees, protected peoples or whatever witches’ brew our immigration system could cook up) poured in.
Harris did nothing of substance as VP; she made matters worse by having no real plans or polices for her presidency but to give away money. Softball questions from the ever-so compliant MSM were met with ever-vaguer answers, bits of biography, and then some nasty remark about Trump. It was Orange Man Bad all over, and the electorate had had enough. Trump’s shortcomings were baked in after what seems like an eternity of campaigning, never mind years in the White House itself. The “Never Trumpers” had had their day four years ago. Most Americans had taken Trump’s measure, for good or ill. By contrast, many Americans remained unsure who Harris was and what she stood for. In the background, Biden’s inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s nagged. And working people worry much more about payday than they do J6.
J6 was an embarrassing day for America but given a) it had no chance of making Trump the election winner and b) two weeks later, with not much in between, Biden was inaugurated. It was all about a day of rage, an angry expression of an unfavorable situation not unlike the BLM protests one summer that burned down pharmacies and convenience stores but accomplished little more. The system worked. The riot was put down. Congress, including Republicans, reassembled and certified Biden as the next president. Rage is not insurrection and while the People seemed to have figured this out by election day 2024, Harris and her ilk never did. It made Harris seem uninformed and out of touch, desperate enough to get elected as to cry the sky is falling over and over. It was tactic that did not work in 2016, was not decisive in 2020, and had little air left in it for 2024 except for the MSM and the Harris campaign, basically one in the same anyway.
Still, some of it might have stuck had it not come on the heels of the seemingly endless and seemingly pointless lawfare campaign. Mollie Hemingway of Fox News wrote “This lawfare against Donald Trump has been their beginning argument, middle argument, and ending argument. It obviously has backfired completely. The whole goal was to make sure that Donald Trump would be imprisoned, bankrupted, so discouraged, so distracted by being off the campaign trail dealing with these various examples of lawfare from Democrat prosecutors at the federal and state and local level, that he wouldn’t win. Well, he’s about to win, most likely, and it is a stunning rejection by the American people of that lawfare campaign.” “Should Trump defy history and return to the White House as a convicted felon, he will send a message to the world that elections don’t matter,” added the Daily Beast, quite unaware how democracy and elections work.
There were other factors. History may regard 2024 as a peak for gender-based politics, wrote the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Trump’s all-out appeal to a controversial model of masculinity that emphasizes toughness and strength is mobilizing hard-to-reach men, including members of racial and ethnic minorities. This prospect obviously worried the Harris campaign, which rushed out an agenda for black men.”
The media has so little credibility left its endless formal and informal endorsement of Harris not only did not matter but was tiresome. So desperate for an October surprise, they beclowned themselves with stories like this. The Atlantic had published a similar “Hail Mary” story in September 2020 citing anonymous sources claiming Trump canceled a 2018 visit to a French cemetery where American troops are buried, declaring that they were “suckers” and “losers.” The credibility of that story has also been refuted, with former national security adviser John Bolton denying Trump uttered these words and asserting the former president did not visit the cemetery for reasons related to weather and security. So why not try a failed move again?
And Liz Cheney — in what alternate universe did it seem like a good idea to bring in the Cheney family to help support a Democrat with progressive followers? Dick Cheney is personally responsible for the deaths of millions and Liz does not believe in abortion. Where are the Democratic votes in that steaming pile of war-mongering neoconism?
But the worst was saved for last, a Harris campaign closing argument based on a coordinated effort to proclaim Trump is an actual fascist, a real-life Dr. Evil who seeks the presidency so that he can rule as a dictator, destroying the Constitution and the rule of law as he goes about his nefarious tasks. It is the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the ultimate Orange Man Bad. And it is what the Harris campaign chose to run on in the campaign’s final days.
The coordinated fascist line began with Generals Kelly and Milley announcing Trump is a flat-out fascist who seeks to be a dictator. Kamala Harris called an “emergency” press conference to tell the world that he is the second coming of Adolf Hitler. “Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution,” she said. “He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.” “He’s Talking Like Hitler’,” said The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who warned Trump wants ‘absolute power’ in his second term. She also spoke about the similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and what she found in her research from the Stasi archives of East Germany’s secret police. “Trump is Hitler,” claimed James Carville. “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden. There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the 1930s at Madison Square Garden,” Tim Walz said during a campaign stop. Other Democrats such as Hillary Clinton made similar comparisons. Liz Cheney declared with authority either you vote for Harris, or this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.” Whoopi Goldberg even explained how Trump is committed to being a dictator who will “put you people away… take all the journalists… take all the gay folks… move you all around and disappear you.” The October Surprise was the Dems ran out of ideas and could only fling around the “F” word. So much for the convention-era Harris’ promise of joy.
The public did not buy it. When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43 percent picked Trump while 40 percent chose Harris. This was the same result when Biden was the nominee. While over half said that threats to democracy were important to them, the voters trusted Trump (44 percent) more than Biden (33 percent) in protecting democracy. Voters, featured on Mark Halperin’s 2WAY platform, commented Harris’ Hitler remarks were off-putting or unlikely to help her win the November election, while none raised their hands when Halperin asked if the vice president should be campaigning on this issue.
Most damning of all, Harris’ Hitler remarks were called out by an actual Holocaust survivor. In a powerful video clip circulating on social media, Jerry Wartski, a Holocaust survivor, blasted Harris and her fellow Dems for comparing Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis. “Adolf Hitler invaded Poland when I was nine years old. He murdered my parents and most of our family. I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes,” he stated. “For Harris to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my 75 years living in the United States.”
When your campaign is based on insulting the memories of actual Holocaust survivors for political gain, your campaign has run out of gas. Kamala Harris ended up where she did most of all because she had no real connection to the American people. She was a manufactured entity, full of catchphrases at first, paranoid, bitter insults at the last. Her disappearance from public life will not be missed.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
For Next Time, Memo to Trump
If there is a next debate (you say no, but it depends on whether you’re ahead or behind in a month, and a fair choice of moderators being offered) it won’t be for a few weeks or so, leaving you, Trump, plenty of time to tidy up some of the missed opportunities from the first debate. Try some of these ideas. They’ll work on the trail, too.
For any of Kamala’s new programs under her “opportunity economy,” such as tax cuts for small businesses and a measly $25k for first-time home buyers (the average house costs $412k, so Kamala’s offer is only about half of the down payment. But try things in California where the average housing cost is $793k) punch back with “You’ve had three years, why haven’t you just done it?” and follow-up with “And how are you going to pay for that, with tax increases on the middle class?”
One of your most effective points in the first debate was in your closing statement, when you asked Kamala rhetorically why she did not initiate any of her special programs as Vice President. The question should next time be aimed directly at her, as it puts her in a real bind; either she can admit as VP she did very little and had power enough to do even less, or throw Joe under the bus and claim he stymied her initiatives. It is win-win for you. In addition, the question drives home the larger point of tying Kamala to the Biden administration. Harris needs badly to show something to the public to give them a reason to think she would be different than the last four years. She is desperate not to run as the pseudo-incumbent, all that “turn the page” and call for change stuff she borrows from Obama 2008, and you should be equally desperate to hold her to what has and has not taken place these last four years. Reminded the public the Biden-Harris administration created all the major issues Harris raised as problems (economy, immigration) during the debate.
On the economy, remind people food prices rose 5.3 percent under your administration while in Biden’s first three years food prices increased, conservatively, by 20.3 percent.
Almost 50 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a worse state now than it was when Biden-Harris took office in January 2021. It’s true; the Census Bureau released an update earlier this month on income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States. Income-wise many Americans were still not quite better off than they were in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, nor necessarily even than they were in 2020. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed you by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s one of the main reasons why she’s tied and not ahead of you in the race overall.
Create a simple app that calculates what groceries would have cost four years ago. People plug in their current register tape numbers and are told what a similar basket of goods would have cost under your administration. It actually looks like someone had once done most of the heavy lifting on this one already. One of your official Super PACs launched a website (now defunct) named “Biden-Mart” that let users compare Trump-era grocery prices to current costs under Joe Biden’s administration. Biden-Mart.com, published by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC, featured an interactive grocery checklist encouraging users to “check off the items… to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden.” There were over two dozen common food staples to choose from, including coffee, dairy products, and a variety of different fruits and vegetables. For example, a two-pound bag of apples, two pounds of ground beef, seven lemons, one gallon of milk, and one pound of sugar and coffee each totaled $30.07 — a killer 57.11 percent increase from the $19.14 it cost during your administration. Egg prices remain 72 percent higher today than when Biden entered office in early 2021. Biden-Mart used data mostly from the United States Department of Agriculture so it should be relatively quick to reconstruct the app.
And build a separate app that calculates gas and mortgage costs. It will remind people during your first three years in office, food prices rose by 5.3 percent as wages soared past them at 12.7 percent growth. Wages have not kept up with food prices during Biden-Harris. It is one thing to talk about inflation as this percentage or that, quite another to reach into a voter’s pantry and hit them with a specific dollar amount. As the Harris-favoring New York Times wrote “Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that a large majority of Americans feel about the economy.” Harris word-checks “freedom” with abandon, but never mentions freedom from debt, from living paycheck-to-paycheck because of inflationary practices under Biden-Harris. Harris, as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote economists point to as the cause of inflation — the ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” Remind the people they deserve better.
The Biden-Harris administration admitted some 21 million aliens, dramatically more than under the Vietnam War evacuation and the Mariel Boatlift combined. Will you Kamala admit another 21 million under a Harris administration? Talk about what that number means; in 2021, there were around only 3.66 million live births in the United States.
Focus on narrative, personal stories about ordinary Americans unfairly burdened by unchecked migration. Never mind the dogs and cats, Springfield, Ohio, a semi-rural town of only some 60,000 people, ended up playing host to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They overwhelmed the city’s medical and social services systems to the point where the governor had to send in state troopers and millions of dollars as a palliative. Still the poverty rate for the city is 22.7 percent, well-above the state average of 13.4 percent. Fatal car accidents in Springfield increased four-fold last year, due to a surge of Haitian migrants unfamiliar with U.S. driving rules.
Or the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants that employ migrant children. Talk about individual victims of migrant street crime in New York City, showing photos of a Midtown overtaken by homeless and drug users. The latter ties also in Harris’ time as a prosecutor and Attorney General in California where, same as in New York, many criminals who should have been taken off the street were given bail or simply released in the wake of “woke” law enforcement post-Floyd.
Whenever possible, follow Ronald Reagan, who at the close of his 1980 debate against President Jimmy Carter, asked simply “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” It is a rare American who will be able to answer unequivocally yes. The ones who say “no” are likely to be among middle-of-the-roaders who can swing your way in November.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden Impeachment Plan Has the Meat, Fizzles Nonetheless
House Republicans released a little-noticed 291-page impeachment report that should have exploded over the Democratic National Convention like an October Surprise, but in the end fizzled like a wet July 4th sparkler. The facts are there, largely thanks to Hunter’s laptop, but the drive to impeach a lame lame duck president seems to have lost its moment. The depth of the report and the impeachable offenses it delineates does add some interesting background as to why Joe Biden might have dropped out of the presidential race, however. It looks like he ducked a helluva punch.
The impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden found he committed several “impeachable offenses,” according to a report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees. Republicans have been investigating Biden for over two years, subpoenaing witnesses and riffing through documents pertaining to his family business. And of course, that laptop of Hunter’s.
— The report shows Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich himself and his family. Among other aspects of this conspiracy, the Biden family and their business associates received tens of millions of dollars from foreign interests by leading those interests to believe they would provide them “access to and influence with the Vice President.” (Many of these transactions were detailed previously by TAC.)
— As Vice President, Joe Biden attended dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and spoke to them by phone, often being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden. For example, in 2014, Vice President Biden attended a dinner for Hunter Biden with Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, whose husband was the former mayor of Moscow. Following the dinner, Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a front company created by Hunter Biden. Then, months later, as Hunter Biden and his business associates continued to solicit more money from Baturina, Vice President Biden participated in a phone call where he told Baturina, “you be good to my boy.” In April 2014, a Kazakhstani oligarch wired $142,300 — the exact price of Hunter Biden’s sportscar — to a bank account used by Hunter. Biden and his business associates leveraged the Vice President’s political power to obtain millions of dollars from a corrupt Romanian businessman. The report is chock full of such specific examples.
— Several witnesses testified Hunter Biden involved his father in business dealings with Romanian, Chinese, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian companies, resulting in $27 million flowing to the Biden family. For example, around 2014, Hunter Biden explored a joint venture with Chinese businessman Henry Zhao and his company, Harvest Fund Management, “a $300 billion Chinese financial services company closely connected to the Chinese Communist Party.” When it appeared the deal was not going through, he called his father for assistance. Similarly, while Hunter Biden served on the board of directors of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma from 2014 to 2019, he utilized his father’s position to relieve pressure the company was under from a government investigation. In doing so, Vice President Biden changed U.S. policy in order to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee until Ukraine stopped the investigation into the company affiliated with Hunter Biden.
— After leaving office, Joe Biden and his family continued their financial relationships with corrupt Chinese businessmen who would send the Biden’s millions of dollars. Some of the money was laundered through one of Hunter’s front companies and returned “clean” in part to Chinese entities in the U.S.
— The Biden family “leveraged Joe’s positions of public trust” to obtain over $8 million in loans from Democratic benefactors. Millions of dollars in loans have not been repaid and the paperwork supporting many of the loans does not exist.
— Biden knowingly participated in this conspiracy. It is “inconceivable” Biden did not understand he was enriching his family by abusing his office.
— The evidence also establishes the Biden family went to “great lengths” to conceal the conspiracy. Foreign money was transmitted to the Biden’s through complicated financial transactions. The Biden family laundered funds through intermediate entities including Joe’s brother Jim and broke up large transactions into numerous smaller transactions. “Substantial efforts were made to hide Biden’s involvement in his family’s business activities,” the report stated. While Jim Biden claimed he gave this money to Joe Biden to repay personal loans, Jim did not provide any evidence to support this claim.
— The report concluded “President Biden’s participation in this conspiracy to enrich his family constitutes impeachable conduct. By monetizing the Vice Presidency for his family’s benefit, he abused his office of public trust, placing the welfare of his family ahead of the welfare of the United States. He also put foreign interests ahead of the interests of the American people… Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family. Not one of these transactions would have occurred, but for Joe Biden’s official position in the United States government. This pattern of conduct ensured his family—who provided no legitimate services—lived a lavish lifestyle. The evidence uncovered in the Committees’ impeachment inquiry reflects a family selling the ‘Biden brand’ around the world with President Biden—the ‘big guy’—swooping in to seal the deal on speaker phones or in private dinners.”
The House Republican report also cites Joe for illegally retaining classified documents at his home and other locations and states under Biden’s presidential tenure, the FBI and the Department of Justice afforded “special treatment” to Hunter Biden regarding his criminal investigations. The FBI and DOJ allegedly “slow-walked” the investigation, interfered with routine investigative procedures and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious felony charges to benefit Hunter. The White House refuted the allegations, and called the report a “failed stunt.”
This was all supposed to be a bombshell, dropping on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. The problem was it was no longer Joe Biden’s convention — he had been removed from running for president via a coup within the Democratic party, leaving the report to fall on deaf ears. But before one gets too cynical over the timing of this report, remember the circumstances surrounding the initial report on Hunter Biden’s laptop (the contents of which formed the backbone of these conclusions.)
In Hunter’s case the laptop emails were buried by the establishment media. This power arose from interplay between the American intelligence services and corporate-media figures, working for the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party since 2016. That interplay came to maturity in 2020.
As the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files contained potential evidence of a pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter dutifully published by Politico claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The signers said their national-security experience made them “deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was an act of evil brilliance. It played off prejudices cultivated during 2016 that the Russians manipulated American elections. In fact, most of the signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC-server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. Among the establishment, the meme quickly became into “the laptop is fake.”
The report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees shows once and for all there was no fake, and that had the information on the laptop been looked into when it was first released on the cusp of the 2020 election, those election results would have been very different. As it is, Joe Biden and his son Hunter cheated the hangman. Joe is a lame duck, Hunter a forgotten tragic vaudeville act. The report, which should have set Washington on its ear, instead will fade into obscurity. Joe Biden not only cheated on his country and made millions, he got away with it all. Not a bad trade for giving up on an election he was sure to lose anyway.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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