Anywhere, nowhere in particular
I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.
Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
When I point at you, three fingers point back at me. Maybe this is why I so enjoy occasional travel, when devices and books stay home or in the hotel, and I go out on foot in some particular place.
Trump 2.0
I’m going to try to stop posting bilious attacks on Trump, however well-justified they may be — even in separate postings with trigger warnings. Apart from stopping the flood of illegal immigrants across the southern border and his impetuous pledge to end Daylight Savings Time (on which he has done nothing yet), you may take for granted that I detest all of his performative cruelty and protection-racket stunts.
But there are non-bilious things related to our current mess — typically context or gentler humor — that I’ll continue to share under the rubric “Trump 2.0.” If you don’t want to ready anything about it, although I think I curate some pretty good stuff, you can stop now because that’s all the rest of this post is about.
The due process situation
Due Process
Gessen: … For the record, while it’s very important to tell the stories of individuals subjected to injustice, it makes me uncomfortable when we focus on the man who had protected status, or the Venezuelan gay makeup artist, or the young barber, who were on those planes to El Salvador — when in fact every single man who was on those planes was put there without due process and is now confined to a prison, indefinitely …
French: I’m so glad Masha said that. Violations of due process are not unjust only when inflicted on the innocent. The Fifth and 14th Amendment due process protections apply to any “person” in the United States, not just to citizens or certainly not just to the innocent. Indeed, due process is how we try to discern guilt or innocence. Like Masha, I fear that by focusing on the terrible individual injustices, we might (perversely enough) send the message that a due process violation is only a problem when it inflicts harm on the innocent. Due process is a fundamental human right.
Masha Gessen and David French.
I’m not a violent man, but glibly dismissing due process because these are just a bunch of criminals and gang-bangers pushes many of the wrong buttons.
Rigorous vetting of Venezuelan gang members
- “Here’s an example of the ‘rigorous vetting’ of gang membership that the Trump admin claims it’s doing: A woman admitted that her dead ex-husband, who she left 10 years ago, had been a TdA member. From that — and nothing more! — ICE declared she ‘is a senior member of the TDA,’” – Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
- “A friend of Neri Alvarado, currently rotting in a Salvadoran prison on Trump’s orders, shares a video of him volunteering to help neurodiverse children learn to swim. Neri was seemingly sent there after someone at ICE thought his autism awareness tattoo was a ‘gang tattoo,’” – Reichlin-Melnick.
- “This is a terrible, terrible affidavit. If this were before me in a criminal case and you were asking to get a warrant issued on this, I’d throw you out of my chambers,” – Leonie Brinkema, a judge responding to ICE’s “evidence” of TdA membership.
Los desaparecidos
At least for now, one Danielle Harlow is tracking America’s summary renditions.
Do not change the topic. Do not assume that Trump’s victims are all violent criminals.
The topic is the lack of due process. Absent due process, I won’t give Trump 2.0 the benefit of the doubt about how bad the desaparecidos are. Due process is how the government avoids jumping to conclusions, and how the public is persuaded that it didn’t. Absent due process, I will assume (as some have reported) that people are being grabbed off the street and sent to offshore hell-holes on less-than-flimsy “evidence” like ambiguous tattoos or wearing too-nice clothes.
This and the attacks on the rule of law by attacking law firms are my biggest concerns so far.
It makes me queasy to think that I have, in my extended family, individuals who have turned themselves into trolls over the last nine years and would defend this. (The defense would include name-dropping Laken Riley, of course. She’s barely even a genuine murder victim any more; her mere name is the snake oil that fortifies xenophobia.)
Be it remembered
Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force.
M. Gessen, Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.
Not only was it so designed, there were a few voices loudly warning us.
Tariffs
Why tariffs will fail us (spoiler: an acrostic for the answer is “DJT”)
[R]ebuilding industry in America has two potential benefits even if it sacrifices some of the efficiencies offered by global trade. Factory jobs fill a particular socioeconomic niche that’s been filled instead by drugs, decline, despair. And having a real manufacturing base is essential if we’re going to be locked into great power competition for decades to come.
Under this theory, though, it would seem like tariffs would be most effectively deployed against China, countries in China’s immediate economic orbit, and developing countries that are natural zones for outsourcing. But the Trump administration has deployed them generally, against peer economies and allies. The policy seems much more sweeping than the goal, the potential damage to both growth and basic international comity too large to justify the upside.
With all due respect to Ross, the problem is deeper than mis-targeting:
Donald Trump had a plan. It was not a good plan, or even a plausible one. But it was, at least, a coherent plan: By imposing large trade barriers on the entire world, he would create an incentive for American business to manufacture and grow all the goods the country previously imported.
Whatever chance this plan had to succeed is already over.
The key to making it work was to convince businesses that the new arrangement is durable. Nobody is going to invest in building new factories in the United States to create goods that until last week could be imported more cheaply unless they’re certain that the tariffs making the domestic version more competitive will stay in place. (They’re probably not going to do it anyway, in part because they don’t know who will be president in four years, but the point is that confidence in durable tariffs is a necessary condition.)
Trump’s aides grasped this dynamic. “This is the great onshoring, the great reshoring of American jobs and wealth,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, declared on “Liberation Day.” The White House accordingly circulated talking points instructing its surrogates not to call the tariffs a leverage play to make deals, but to instead describe them as a permanent new feature of the global economy.
But not everybody got the idea. Eric Trump tweeted, “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump. The first to negotiate will win – the last will absolutely lose.”
Eric’s father apparently didn’t get the memo either. Asked by reporters whether he planned to negotiate the tariff rates, the president said, “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate. They always have.”
Someone seems to have then told Trump that this stance would paralyze business investment, because he reversed course immediately, writing on Truth Social, “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”
However, there is a principle at work here called “No backsies.” Once you’ve said you might negotiate the tariffs, nobody is going to believe you when you change your mind and say you’ll never negotiate.
Jonathan Chait. It’s a long quote, but I don’t know that anyone could have made it so vivid in fewer words.
Miscellany
The Dispatch downside
The only thing I dislike about working for The Dispatch is that I’m forbidden from using profanity, and even that barely qualifies as a complaint. “No swearing” is the lightest of burdens for a writer.
But it’s getting heavier every day.
On Tuesday, a.k.a. “liberation” eve, the president addressed an upcoming vote in the Senate to block some of his tariffs on Canada. Don’t do it, he warned Republicans. Americans will die if you do. Fentanyl is being brought into the country across the northern border, after all, and one way to discourage people from using it is, and I quote, “by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.”
The guy who just touched off a global trade war appears to believe that drug smuggling is taxed. How do you do justice to that without cursing?
… If you’re not moved to curse a blue streak by the thought of Laura Loomer arguing with the national security adviser in the Oval Office over whether his intelligence deputies are sufficiently “loyal” to the president, you’re well and truly boiled.
So if I oppose the tariffs, I love fentanyl? (And probably hate Laken Riley to boot.)
The Pax American is dead. And Marco Rubio is cheering.
The most poignant comment I’ve seen about the president’s groin-punch to the U.S. economy came from his secretary of state. During a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels on Friday, Marco Rubio told reporters, “We’re not the government of the world now.”
He said it triumphantly, I assume, which is part of what makes it poignant. In an alternate universe where ambition hasn’t rotted his brain, Sen. Marco Rubio is saying the same thing today, verbatim, about the first two-and-a-half months of Donald Trump’s second presidency. But his tone is entirely different.
Being the government of the world worked out okay for America, not to mention the world. Rubio circa 2016 would have been eloquent on that point. But he chose instead to be a cymbal-banging monkey for Trump, so now he’s required to say inane things about the nationalist virtues of immense wealth destruction.
At war with our darker nature
America has always been at war with its darker nature, and sometimes that darker nature wins. We are living in a period of profound national regression.
On a lighter note
DOGE in the eyes of history
I suspect historians will one day remember the Department of Government Efficiency the way we now remember lobotomies. It seemed, to some at the time, like a good idea.
Bret Stephens via Frank Bruni.
The hopeful note here is that sometimes the darker nature loses.
Just askin
Do you think Donald Trump has ever heard of Chesterton’s fence? Elon Musk?
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 