"Riches Are No Guarantee of Intelligence, Judgment, or Moral Clarity"

 

One of the greatest gifts Donald Trump and the 13 billionaires he pulled into his administration have given America is the reminder, finally and once and for all, that just because somebody is rich doesn’t mean they’re smart. Particularly if they inherited their starting capital from daddy, like Trump and Musk both did.

Wealth in this country has become so intertwined with our mythologies of genius, destiny, and merit that we’ve ended up elevating into near-sainthood (and electing to high office) some of the least thoughtful, least competent, and least self-aware people ever to walk a boardroom floor. It’s a dangerous confusion, and one with deep roots.

I still remember a conversation on my radio program back in 2009 with Bill Gates Sr., one of the kindest and most grounded men I’ve hosted on the air. He told me, matter-of-factly, that while his son Bill was indeed a very smart guy, he also had the sort of upper-middle-class safety net that most Americans could only dream about. Had Bill Jr. been born poor, Gates Sr. said, the trajectory of his life (and the existence of Microsoft) would likely have been very different.

Talent exists everywhere; opportunity does not. That’s true for the brilliant, and just as true for the average or below-average minds who happen to be born into staggering wealth. Privilege — not genius — is what insulates foolish people from the consequences of foolish decisions.

Trump’s casinos went bankrupt even though casinos are literally engineered to make money. He claimed windmills cause cancer. He altered a hurricane map with a Sharpie rather than admit he was wrong. His incompetent handling of Covid caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and now he’s up all night rage-tweeting.

Elon Musk blew $44 billion on a website he’s turned into a global punchline, called a Thai cave-rescue diver a “pedo” because the man contradicted him, and cheer-led the destruction of USAID, an act that has severely damaged America’s international soft power, handed a huge geopolitical gift to Russia and China, and already led to what could be millions of unnecessary deaths. Mark Zuckerberg spent tens of billions on a plastic cartoon “metaverse” almost nobody asked for or used.

These aren’t the moves of geniuses. They’re the stumbles of men surrounded by people too afraid to tell them the truth. But this isn’t just about today’s crop of oligarchs. We’ve seen this movie before.

The plantation oligarchs of the 1850s South — men who were some of the richest Americans ever to live — tried to build a continent-wide authoritarian slave empire. They launched a war against democracy itself in 1861 and almost 700,000 Americans died in that Civil War as Lincoln and the Union fought valiantly to preserve our democracy.

During the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age, the robber barons — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould, Vanderbilt — were worshiped as industrial gods. Tesla and Edison (genuine geniuses) were hailed as saints of electricity, but it was the financiers behind them who used their inventions to create monopolies and accumulate dynastic wealth.

Only later did America realize that many of these men were less geniuses than gamblers with armies of lawyers; that they built fortunes by crushing competition, often hurting communities, workers, and even the nation itself in their unquenchable quest for more, more, more money!

And then there was the Roaring Twenties, when the super-rich were again treated like royalty. The stock market was their playground, the nation their casino. Republican Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover gave them everything they asked for, from banking deregulation to massive tax breaks.

The result was the Republican Great Depression, and an entire decade of breadlines and collapsed banks. It took FDR and a generation of reformers to remind America that letting the wealthy run wild always ends the same way: with ordinary Americans paying the price.

After Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms, after the humiliation of the Depression, after decades of regulations and high taxes and guardrails to keep the oligarchs from crashing the system again, the morbidly rich mostly kept their heads down. For a while, at least.

But by the late 1960s and early 70s, something was happening: people were forgetting the damage that celebrating unrestrained wealth had done the last time it was allowed to dominate American politics. That’s when Lewis Powell delivered his infamous “Powell Memo” in 1971, a corporate call to arms urging the wealthiest Americans to seize control of the media, academia, Congress and the judiciary, public opinion, and the political system itself.

It worked. And over the following decades — with the morbidly rich funding right-wing think tanks, engineering media consolidation, and pouring rivers of dark money into our political system — America once again drifted back toward the worship of wealth as a sort of near-divine wisdom. We thus elected a corrupt, felonious billionaire to the presidency, twice.

Every time we let the morbidly rich take the wheel, our nation veers off the road. Part of the problem is psychological. Extreme wealth isolates people from reality. Studies on the wealthy show declining empathy, reduced capacity to recognize others’ emotions, and a dangerous overconfidence in their own intuition.

Research on CEOs finds that around 20 percent exhibit psychopathic traits — lack of empathy, superficial charm, impulsivity — compared to about one percent of the public. These aren’t qualities that make for wise leadership, but they do let people crawl over the bodies and lives of others to make themselves rich and powerful. They also can make for headline-grabbing blunders, cruel policies, and breathtakingly stupid decisions insulated from consequence only by inherited wealth and an army of sycophants.

And as I wrote in yesterday’s Hartmann Report about the “Great Secession of the Morbidly Rich,” once wealth reaches a certain scale it becomes indistinguishable from hoarding disorder. Billionaires don’t just accumulate money: they stockpile influence, lawmakers, media platforms, even entire political movements. They withdraw from the common good, then blame the rest of us for the social and infrastructure instability their own excesses have created.

The truth is that America has always been at its strongest when it remembers that great nations are built by great communities, not great fortunes. When we measure character by contribution, not by bank balance. When we demand guardrails, boundaries, and democratic accountability for everyone, especially those with the most power to do the most harm.

The morbidly rich won’t police themselves. They never have. It thus falls to the rest of us to stop confusing wealth with wisdom, and to stop granting automatic deference to people who’ve shown us, over and over again, that riches are no guarantee of intelligence, judgment, or moral clarity. If we forget that lesson again, they’ll be more than happy to remind us at our expense.

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How a bunch of high school misfits exposed a massive environmental scandal—and took on the mob

Back in the early ‘90s, Fred Isseks began teaching an elective course called “Electronic English” at Middletown High School in Orange County, NY, a largely rural area about 90 minutes from Manhattan. Students in the class learned how to be broadcast journalists by producing their own stories on subjects of local interest — ideally something anodyne and uncontroversial.      

But Isseks, an iconoclastic educator known for doing things his own way, had heard rumors about mysterious brown sludge spotted at the local landfill and urged his pupils to do some digging. 

Armed with cameras, microphones, and the naive confidence of youth, a ragtag group of students exposed a massive environmental scandal in their own backyard. Over the course of nearly a decade, Isseks’ students produced a series of probing investigative documentaries) including one with the irresistible title Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed).

Their muckracking crusade attracted national media attention and put the teenage reporters at odds with self-dealing politicians, dismissive journalists, and even the mafia. The wild-but-true story is the subject of a new documentary called Teenage Wasteland, in which Isseks and his former students look back on the toxic investigation that changed their lives.

Directed by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the film uses both contemporary interviews and archival video filmed by high school students thirty years ago that immediately transports viewers back to the era of flannel and Starter jackets.

But Teenage Wasteland, which opened Wednesday at the Film Forum in New York City, is more than just an exercise in ‘90s nostalgia. It’s also a funny, moving, coming-of-age tale about corruption, the critical role of local journalism, and the enduring impact of a single, unconventional teacher. (It will also screen Dec 5 in Middletown, NY and Dec 12 in Garrison, NY, with additional bookings expected soon.)

It all began five years ago when Moss and McBaine stumbled across an article about Isseks and his students in The Guardian.

“It was one of these hiding-in-plain-sight stories that seem to contain multitudes. It had a lot to say about journalism and democracy and having great teachers who change your life,” said Moss, speaking with McBaine via Zoom from their home in the Bay Area.

The documentarians have a knack for films about idealistic, politically-engaged young people: their recent efforts include Boys State, which followed a group of teenage boys building a mock government during a week-long summer program in Texas, and the follow-up Girls State, which chronicled girls in Missouri during the summer that Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court.

They found the student journalists at Middletown High School just as compelling.

“As storytellers, we’re always looking for a back door into a big issue and an unexpected way to bring people to a conversation,” Moss said. “Telling a story about garbage always seemed to us to be a sneakily radical act, because no one wants to think about their garbage. But if teenagers are talking about it, maybe they’ll listen.”

The filmmakers’ first step was getting in touch with Isseks. They had brunch with the now-retired teacher, and were impressed by his “wisdom, bravery, compassion, and intellect,” Moss recalled. “When we had that conversation with Fred, he talked about civic courage. We loved his spirit and wanted to introduce the world to Fred. This is a time in our politics and culture, where we’re looking to be inspired, looking for heroes.”

Isseks had kept — and was willing to share — almost everything connected to the original student documentaries, including a trove of VHS tapes in his basement. He’d even kept a detailed diary during the period. “Sometimes people guard their horde very closely, but Fred is an open book,” Moss said.

Isseks also helped the directors zero in on the former students who become the main characters in Teenage Wasteland. There is Jeff Dutemple, a handsome, misunderstood jock with a troubled home life; Rachel Raimist, a Latina goth who moved to Middletown from the city and enjoyed “making old white men squirm” by asking tough questions as a reporter; Michael Regan, an ROTC kid who wasn’t even technically enrolled in Electronic English but played a key part in the filmmaking anyway; and David Birmingham, the son of a police officer. (Many Electronic English alumni went on to work in TV and film production, including Raimist and Dutemple).

“Fred was a surrogate father figure for these young people at a vulnerable moment as they came of age,” Moss said. “It was so clear who still carried this experience with them, 30-plus years later, that it was still alive in them. We knew the audience would connect with those kids.”

Moss and McBaine spent about six months wading through all the material Isseks shared with them, which included about 400 hours of footage related to the original investigation plus 100 hours or so of MHSTV, Middletown High School’s news broadcast. “It was like Hot Tub Time Machine,” Moss said of the experience. But it was essential in order to figure out how to streamline a narrative as gnarled and complicated as Chinatown.

The footage captures a very specific window in time, “when cameras were shifting the culture” well before the advent of smartphones, McBaine said. In 1991, home video of police officers beating Rodney King triggered a national outcry. A few months later, The Real World premiered on MTV.

Moss and McBaine worried that the grainy VHS footage might be off-putting to contemporary viewers, but their 19-year-old daughter was instantly hooked on the story. “All the young people we’ve showed this movie to really connect to it,” McBaine said. “They see themselves, and that’s important.”

Reporting to you live from the ‘90s.

The video filmed by Isseks' students isn’t always polished or visually pleasing, but it’s often jaw-droppingly dramatic. In one tense showdown, the MHS journalists butt heads with the editor of a local newspaper, who is shockingly dismissive of what they’ve uncovered. There are also interviews with an array of colorful witnesses and experts who feel straight out of Central Casting — most notably “Mr. B,” a foul-mouthed whistleblower with information about illegal dumping at the landfill.

“They really did the shoe leather reporting and investigation,” Moss said. “I had a real fear in making the movie that we would just make a lesser work. We are updating their work 30 years later, and that’s an exciting opportunity. But I also thought, ‘If we can’t do better, we shouldn’t do it.’”

Ultimately, Teenage Wasteland does more than just rehash the details that Isseks’ students uncovered three decades ago. It also becomes a vivid lesson in the importance of what Isseks calls “civic courage.”

“When we talk about democracy, we focus on the big marble buildings in Washington, but we know that so many issues are fought locally,” Moss said. “The odds may seem insurmountable at the national level, but you can make a difference in your own backyard. That’s where things happen that really do matter in your life—the books that are going to be banned or the toxic waste that’s dumped in the water supply.”

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

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Ecological Disaster

 

Sri Lanka and Indonesia have deployed their militaries to help victims of floods that have killed more than 1,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia in recent days.

Millions have been affected by a combination of tropical cyclones and heavy monsoon rains, with ensuing flooding killing at least 502 in Indonesia, 355 in Sri Lanka, and 170 in Thailand. Three deaths have been reported in Malaysia.

The losses and damage are the worst in Sri Lanka since the 2004 tsunami that killed about 31,000 people and left more than a million homeless, while for Indonesia, it is the deadliest event since a 2018 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that killed more than 2,000 people in Sulawesi.

How many people remain missing? 508 people are missing in Indonesia and 366 in Sri Lanka. Our liveblog will bring you latest updates as rescue efforts continue.

-The Guardian

Consider Donating to These Charities

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-Glen Brown

“They’re not even hiding it anymore. A US-led regime change war abroad to line the pockets of Big Oil—where have we heard this one before?”

Amid mounting alarm that Trump may take military action, Salazar said there were three reasons why “we need to go in” to the South American country. The first, she said, is that “Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day.”

After journalist Aaron Rupar noted her remarks on social media, many critics weighed in, including Justice Democrats, which works to elect progressives to Congress. 

“They’re not even hiding it anymore. A US-led regime change war abroad to line the pockets of Big Oil—where have we heard this one before?” the group said, referring to the invasion of Iraq.

Fred Wellman, a US Army combat veteran and podcast host running as a Democrat in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District, replied on social media: “They are sending our troops to war for the oil companies and not even pretending to lie about it. These sick SOBs are going to get our kids killed and it’s all a big joke.”

Salazar also described Venezuela as a launching pad for enemies of the US and claimed the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, leads the alleged Cartel de los Soles, or the Cartel of the Suns—which the Trump administration on Monday designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

Venezuela’s interior and justice minister, Diosdado Cabello, has long claimed the cartel doesn’t exist, calling it an “invention.” As the UK’s BBC reported Monday:

Cabello, who is alleged to be one of the high-ranking members of the cartel, has accused US officials of using it as an excuse to target those they do not like.

“Whenever someone bothers them, they name them as the head of the Cartel de los Soles,” he said in August.

Gustavo Petro, the left-wing president of Venezuela’s neighbour, Colombia, has also denied the cartel’s existence.

“It is the fictional excuse of the far right to bring down governments that do not obey them,” he wrote on X in August.

The terrorist designation and Salazar’s comments came as the Trump administration is under fire for blowing up boats it claims are running drugs off the coast of Venezuela, and after a CBS News/YouGov survey showed on Sunday that 70% of Americans—including 91% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans—are against the “US taking military action in Venezuela.”

-Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams

"We Are Going to Have to Fight Three Wars" by David French

 

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the peace talks now underway to end the war in Ukraine. On one hand, the emerging military realities should tell us that this is exactly the right time to negotiate a cease-fire. The question, however, is whether Russia and, sadly, the United States are willing to agree to a just peace — one that keeps Ukraine free. But first, before we dive into the possibility of peace, let’s talk about the facts on the ground. Ukraine is under immense pressure. 

Russia is attacking relentlessly along the front in eastern Ukraine, and Ukraine is on the verge of losing an important battle — the city of Pokrovsk is in imminent danger of falling, and there is real concern that Ukrainian troops could get surrounded and trapped if Russia is able to take the city.

With its so-called Rubicon drone units, Russia has revamped its drone tactics and now might even be outpacing Ukraine in tactical innovation. The Russian war economy is producing huge numbers of Shahed drones — which Russia uses to attack Ukrainian cities and towns — and Ukrainian air defenses now face enormous swarms of attacking drones and missiles.

Ukrainian cities are being battered. The Ukrainian energy sector is under siege. At the same time, American financial support has almost disappeared (though we are still selling weapons purchased by Europe for use in Ukraine), and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government is mired in a corruption scandal (in which a number of Zelensky’s close allies have been accused of receiving kickbacks from a Ukrainian nuclear power company) that’s weakened his political standing, arguably to its lowest point since the war began.

But Russia is also under immense pressure. By any fair measure, its summer offensive — which continues into the fall — has been a costly disappointment. It has gained ground, but at a staggering cost. Russia has almost certainly suffered more than a million total casualties in the war so far, and — as Edward Carr explained in The Economist — at the present rate of advance it would take five more years for Russia to take the four oblasts (provinces) it’s seeking to conquer and cost a total of almost four million casualties.

In fact, as Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who is one of the foremost Western analysts of the war, has reported, Russia’s unrecoverable casualties are approaching its rate of recruitment. In other words, it is focused on replacing losses rather than expanding the force. Its new recruits are lower in quality, and desertion is a problem.

And while Russia has innovated tactically, there are no immediate prospects for a breakthrough. These new tactics involve infiltrating through Ukrainian lines in small groups at terrible cost — often on motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles — and then trying to build on the small footholds that they are able to achieve.

It’s a tactic that works for incremental advances, but there’s no feasible way (at least not yet) for Russia to shatter Ukrainian lines. Given the drone swarms that saturate the front, large-scale movements of tanks or troops are almost always immediately spotted and attacked with drones and artillery. At the same time, Ukraine has improved its long-range attack capabilities, both with Western-supplied weapons and with its own home-built drones and missiles. Ukraine has systematically targeted Russian energy infrastructure and oil refineries.

If you put all this together, you know that neither side seems to have any real hope of changing the underlying dynamics of the war. The Russians push forward, inch by inch. The Ukrainians make them bleed for every advance, and each side looks to the other to finally crack under pressure, collapse, and yield.

That’s the immediate backdrop to the peace negotiations that kicked off in Geneva and continued elsewhere, but there’s an additional reality, one that I learned when I talked to Ukrainian leaders during my visit to the country in 2023. “We’re going to have to fight three wars,” a senior member of the government told me, “and this is only the second.”

The first war, in this telling, was the Russian invasion of Crimea and parts of the Donbas region in 2014. The second war is the one raging now, the war that began with Russia’s attack on Feb. 24, 2022. The third war is the next war — the one that Ukraine fears Russia will launch once it has had a chance to pause and rearm.

Winning, or better yet deterring, that third war is one of Ukraine’s chief concerns. That’s why, for example, Zelensky has signed letters of intent to purchase hundreds of advanced fighters from France and Sweden, even though deliveries won’t be complete for at least a decade.

A free and independent Ukraine will be no more tolerable to President Vladimir Putin after a cease-fire than it was before, and any peace agreement now has to be evaluated on the basis of a single key question — can Ukraine remain free after the shooting stops?

That’s the core problem with the leaked 28-point peace plan that the Trump administration tried to impose on Ukraine earlier this month. Even if you assume that Ukraine might be willing to trade some land for peace (a cease-fire on current lines, for example), it still must retain the means of preserving its political independence, or any peace agreement is little more than a surrender document.

Trump’s initial plan yielded all of the Donbas to Russia — including the parts of Donbas that Russia hasn’t been able to seize from Ukraine — and tried to force Ukraine to accept a cap of 600,000 military personnel, a number substantially smaller than its current force. There is no chance that a mere 600,000 men and women could hold the long border against a vastly larger Russian force.

The plan contains no corresponding limitations on Russia’s much larger force. Russia has more than 1.3 million active duty troops, and it’s planning to expand the military to a total of 1.5 million. In other words, Trump’s plan would shrink the Ukrainian military at the same time that Putin is increasing the size of Russia’s force. The resulting power imbalance would be extreme.

At the same time, Ukraine would have to give up the prospect of joining NATO, and NATO troops could not be stationed on Ukrainian soil. As a result, any security guarantee in the agreement would be paper guarantees only, and Ukraine knows from bitter experience that a mere paper guarantee is no guarantee at all.

It’s no wonder, then, that Zelensky had an immediate negative reaction — casting the plan as a choice between losing Ukrainian dignity and losing American support. But given the battlefield situation, combined with the possibility of losing American aid, it’s also no wonder that Ukraine feels intense pressure to try to strike a deal of some kind. The only way that Ukraine can stay in the fight over the long term is to rely on the United States and Europe to function as arsenals of democracy, matching Russian industrial might with their own production and their own weapons.

If Ukraine loses American aid — as Zelensky plainly fears — it’s unclear that Europe can pick up the slack over the long term, especially as the European powers rush to rearm their own militaries. Without steadfast American support, Ukraine could well face two terrible choices — accept the Russian/American deal and live as Moscow’s vassal, or reject the deal and face a doomed struggle against a superior force.

And so, Ukraine is negotiating. On Monday, The Financial Times reported that a U.S. delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with their Ukrainian counterparts and hammered out a Ukrainian/American counterproposal to the Russian/American initial plan, including a potential increase of the Ukrainian troop cap to 800,000 (a number much closer to its present strength).

But the very elements that make a deal acceptable to Ukraine — such as ensuring that Ukraine has the ability to protect itself against renewed Russian aggression — are the same things that make it unacceptable to Russia. Its true war aims have never been solely about territory. Yes, it obviously seeks to exercise sovereignty over the Donbas, but it also wants Ukraine to be a rump state, a larger version of Belarus, a nation that is entirely in thrall to Putin’s Russia.

Putin doesn’t even view Ukraine as a legitimate country. He refuses to see Ukraine as a distinct nation with a distinct culture and history. For him, the only satisfactory conclusions to the war involve either the extinction of Ukraine or its total domination by Russia.

Ukraine might be too weak to retake the Donbas, but more than three years of war have taught us that Russia isn’t strong enough to take Ukraine. And since Ukraine understands that it can’t recapture the Donbas, the true path to peace lies in convincing Putin that he can’t seize control of Ukraine.

The fundamental objective of American diplomacy and the fundamental aim of American aid should be to deny Putin control of Ukraine. Rubio seems to understand this imperative, but much of the rest of the administration does not. If Trump uses the considerable economic, military and diplomatic power of the United States to coerce Ukraine into risking its independence, a cease-fire wouldn’t be a diplomatic achievement — it would be a national shame.

Actually, it would be worse than that. It would be a strategic disaster. We’d teach our NATO allies that we’re an unreliable partner, we’d teach Vladimir Putin that brute military force works, and we’d place NATO’s eastern flank at profound, immediate risk. We would have increased the chances of a wider war.

Russia can win the war two ways. It can continue to try to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield at immense cost. It can inch forward, day by day, in the hopes that someday Ukraine will finally collapse. But that course of action carries considerable risk. In the face of such horrific casualties, one wonders how long Russian society can carry that cost. The long stalemate in Afghanistan contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, and Russia is fighting a bloodier, much more costly war now. It’s far from clear that it can maintain its current military operations indefinitely.

The second way that Russia can win is by leveraging American influence to pressure Ukraine into concessions that Russia could not win — and has not won — on the battlefield. And Putin has far more hope in the short term that he can influence America than he can break through in the Donbas.

We can breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now, that Ukrainian diplomacy seems to have yielded a new plan, one that reportedly contains key differences with the old. In fact, there is even a degree of confusion as to whether the initial Russian/American plan had any American elements at all, or if it was simply a Russian plan delivered through the United States. Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican, said at a news conference that Secretary of State Rubio “made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives.”

“It is not our recommendation,” Rounds said, “It is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received, and as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it — and we did not release it. It was leaked.”

Rubio, however, tweeted, “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S. It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations. It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”

All this confusion led Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland and leader of a nation that has experienced recent Russian drone incursions, to respond with a tweet of his own — “Together with the leaders of Europe, Canada and Japan, we have declared our readiness to work on the 28-point plan despite some reservations. However, before we start our work, it would be good to know for sure who is the author of the plan and where it was created.”

This is not how American diplomacy should be done. Our support for Ukraine should be steadfast. Russia should be made to understand that we will not force Ukraine to yield its independence, and American arms and American support mean that Russia will continue to bleed itself dry if it pursues its maximal demands. At the same time, however, we have to deliver a hard message to Ukraine. Some of its territory is lost — perhaps not forever, but for the foreseeable future. Yet it has not shed its blood in vain.

When this all started, it was predicted that Ukraine would collapse in hours or days, but it has stood strong, inflicting devastating losses on one of the world’s most powerful nations. It would be an intolerable and catastrophic failure if the Trump administration delivers Putin a victory through diplomacy that he could not achieve in war.

-New York Times

-David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag). 

 

Trump's De-legalization

 

Donald Trump wasted little time exploiting the shooting of two National Guard troops to advance his lawless assault on immigrants and refugees, pledging on Thanksgiving Day to “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries” and expedite the removal of people his administration doesn’t see as “a net asset” to the United States.

The president announced his proposal in a series of unhinged, racism-laced posts on his social media platform a day after two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot in Washington, DC. The suspect was identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who worked with CIA-backed military units in Afghanistan and was granted asylum earlier this year by the Trump administration.

Trump ignored that fact in his Truth Social tirade, blaming his predecessor for Lakanwal’s presence in the US and using the shooting to broadly smear migrants and refugees.

“These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process,” Trump wrote. “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, highlighted Trump’s “outrageous claim” that most of the immigrant population in the US is “on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”

“As insulting as the ‘deplorables’ comment, and on Thanksgiving Day no less,” said Reichlin-Melnick. “This rhetoric is indistinguishable from the stuff you hear coming out of white nationalists. Completely identical language.”

How Trump’s rant will be translated into policy is unclear. Reuters reported Thursday that Trump “has ordered a widespread review of asylum cases approved under former President Joe Biden’s administration and Green Cards issued to citizens of 19 countries.”

Like the president, his administration did not provide a specific list of nations, but it pointed Reuters to “a travel ban Trump imposed in June on citizens of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Burundi, Laos, Togo, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, and Turkmenistan.”

Trump’s posts came days after US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced plans to reinterview hundreds of thousands of refugees admitted into the country under former President Joe Biden.

The advocacy group Refugees International condemned the move as “a vindictive, harmful, and wasteful attack on people throughout US communities who have fled persecution and cleared some of the most rigorous security checks in the world.”

“The decision retraumatizes families, undermines faith in the legal immigration system, disrupts integration, and misuses taxpayer dollars to scrutinize valuable new members of American communities,” the group added. “This is part of the Trump administration’s unprecedented de-legalization of people who arrived on humanitarian pathways and erodes the US as a nation of refuge.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams