"Trump was wrong — monumentally, predictably, and inexcusably wrong"

 

(Dan Scavino, via Wikimedia Commons)

General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Donald Trump that an attack on Iran would provoke its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Every president contemplating war in the Middle East has known this and therefore avoided a full regional war. 

But Trump said he knew better and plunged into war. Of course, Trump was wrong — monumentally, predictably, and inexcusably wrong. Now, the Strait is mined and closed, the war rages out of control, oil prices have spiked, and the economy is teetering.

This catastrophic blunder stems from Trump’s delusion that a forty-seven-year-old Islamic regime insulated by layers of bureaucracy, an enormous military, an entrenched ideology, and a fervent national identity could be bombed out of existence. He convinced himself and his cult that — without adverse consequences — he could replace the mullahs with a friendlier regime (who, exactly, he never said). This madness, enabled by the phalanx of yes-men afraid to tell Trump he is wrong (even about their shoe size), was not unique to Trump.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another regime change fabulist, frequently insisted, as he did at the war’s start, that full-scale war would “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.”

Netanyahu is now back-pedaling furiously. “I can’t tell you with certainty that the Iranian people will bring down the regime,” Netanyahu said at his first wartime press conference last week. “If it doesn’t fall, it will be much weaker.” Oh, now he tells us.

The realization that regime change is a pipe dream, which U.S. presidents have learned repeatedly, has swamped Trump’s megalomania and Netanyahu’s dream of “forever” removing an Iranian threat. (The latter requires forever war.) By Friday, even Trump figured out that toppling the regime is a “very big hurdle.” He sounds as if he just discovered his goal’s impossibility: “Who’s going to do that? They literally have people in the streets with machine guns, machine gunning people down if they want to protest.” What did he think would happen?

On the American side, sane voices consistently have derided labeled regime change as a fantasy. The U.S. intelligence community reiterated its view that the Iranian government “is not at risk of collapse,” Reuters reported. It turns out that Trump’s “feeling” he could pull it off was baseless, perhaps a function of untreated malignant narcissism.

The reasons other presidents avoided war against Iran — economic cost to the U.S., bombardment of our Gulf allies, closure of the Strait of Hormuz and soaring oil prices, high civilian casualties, a vengeful regime still in place but more determined to pursue a nuclear weapon, and Russia’s economic bonanza — all have surprised Trump and his regime of lickspittles. 

“When past presidents balked at the possibility of war with Iran, they weren’t just dodging a hard choice; they were deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral,” Franklin Foer wrote recently. “Nobody should be shocked that the expected is now coming to pass.” Except the least competent president ever.

The annals of regime change are not littered with success stories. Wherever attempted (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), it begat endless, bloody war and an inconclusive outcome, at best. While we may wish for a better Iran regime, Phil Gordon at Brookings wrote early in the war: 

“By thinking he can defy deep historical lessons from the region, and by launching a war with no congressional mandate or significant public support, Trump is taking a massive and unnecessary gamble—not just with his presidency but with the lives of countless Americans, Iranians and others.” He is losing his gamble, with others to pay the price.

Atrocious economic news (“Fourth-quarter GDP revised down to just 0.7% growth; January core inflation was 3.1%”) makes the added economic pain that much harder to tolerate. Moreover, in past wars, the U.S. has restrained Israel; in this war, Netanyahu and Trump have egged each other on with no plan for when to stop or evident consideration of what happens afterward.

The war reminds us that the current right-wing Israeli government and the U.S. do not have identical interests, although Netanyahu and Trump personally are two peas in the autocrat pod (e.g., corrupt, contemptuous of the press, law, and public opinion; antagonistic toward democracy). Netanyahu, in search of his white whale of regime change/redemption for the October 7 catastrophe, might be content with perpetual war. 

The U.S. public and sane bipartisan foreign policy voices have limited appetite for casualties, soaring oil prices, and long-term strain on our other alliances. Israel’s right-wing government may want to turn Iran into a failed state. From the U.S. perspective, a failed state of 90M people will likely become a hotbed of terrorism, a source of mass migration and violence, a spur to regional instability, and an elevated risk of nuclear proliferation.

The two powers now differ even on targeting. Yousef Munayyer wrote for The Guardian: “Israel struck oil facilities in Tehran that led to apocalyptic scenes in the Iranian capital, heightened Iran’s resolve to target oil infrastructure in neighboring US allies, sent shockwaves into the oil market that puts the greatest pressure on Trump and poisoned the environment in a city of 10 million people.” 

(Of course, the Gaza War already demonstrated the countries’ divergent interests: Netanyahu’s one-state fantasy to completely subjugate the Palestinians without regard for civilians’ well-being is both unattainable and, to most Americans, reprehensible.)

Polls, oil prices, and/or casualties may force Trump to find an off-ramp. But after the fighting, the region will be more volatile, the human cost breathtaking, and the need for an agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear program that much more essential. To both allies and foes, the U.S. will appear unreliable and disingenuous.

This war may be an even greater strategic disaster than the Iraq War. “[I]t is really incredible malpractice that they have launched this war, created the set of circumstances in the region that has long-term economic and strategic consequences without fully thinking through the potential outcomes,” Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney observed.

Democrats need a different Middle East vision, one grounded in four principles:

1.) The U.S. does not unconditionally arm Israel or approve every Israeli action (as is true with all allies).

2.) The U.S, needs regional stability, which requires containing Iran, preventing more failed states, and protecting Israel’s legitimate security needs but restraining its regional aggression and working toward resolving the Palestinian crisis.

3.) A robust clean energy policy must weaken dependence on fossil fuel (while a net energy exporter, the U.S. is in a global oil market), and

4.) Wars (whether labeled “excursions” or without the malapropism, “incursions”) must be a last resort, never undertaken without public and congressional support.

In sum, only public pressure will force Trump to end his war. Going forward, policymakers should remember Trump’s blunders and do the opposite. Finally, voters must remember that regardless of what they say, Republicans cannot resist a Middle East war and invariably underestimate its cost in blood and treasure.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, enable our work, help with litigation, and celebrate those unafraid to call out senseless wars, please join the fight as a paid subscriber.

 

A brief update on some of the key events in Ukraine this week

🔥 Large-Scale Missile and Drone Attacks
Russia carried out another massive wave of missile and drone strikes across Ukraine this week. According to Ukrainian officials, around 430 drones and dozens of missiles were launched toward multiple regions, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipro. Many were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses, but some strikes damaged homes, schools, and energy infrastructure, causing casualties and power outages in several regions.

🛡️ Ukrainian Forces Strike Key Russian Military Facility
Ukraine also carried out a significant strike on a microelectronics plant in Russia’s Bryansk region that produces critical components used in Russian missile systems. The facility reportedly supplies parts for weapons such as the Iskander missile system, which has been used in attacks on Ukrainian cities. The strike was intended to weaken Russia’s ability to produce new missiles.

⚔️ Progress on the Front Lines
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in parts of southern Ukraine, pushing back Russian positions and reclaiming territory in some areas after weeks of fighting. Military leaders say these operations are aimed at disrupting Russian supply lines and preventing new offensives.

🌍 Ukraine’s Experience Helping Allies
Ukraine’s expertise in defending against drone attacks is now helping partners abroad. Ukrainian defense specialists have been sharing their experience with countries in the Middle East that are facing similar drone threats — demonstrating how the knowledge gained from defending Ukraine is contributing to global security.

Through every challenge, Ukrainians continue to stand strong — defending their country, rebuilding communities, and supporting one another. Thank you for standing with Ukraine. When you wear Ukrainian Apparel, you turn solidarity into action — helping support humanitarian aid, essential equipment, and relief for those who need it most.

Slava Ukraini!
— The Ukrainian Apparel Team

 

How to Feel Whole in a Broken World: An Astronaut’s Antidote to Despair

 

Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. 

As this cognitive corkscrew of rumination burrows deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer — the world of clouds and crocuses and flickering spring light — recedes further and further past the horizon of our awareness, isolating us from all that is beautiful and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment.

The more we unself by widening the aperture to let the world in, the less we suffer. This is why seeing with an astronaut’s eyes may be the most powerful, most salutary lens-clearing, for astronauts alone can widen the aperture enough to see the whole world, rising and setting against the black austerity of spacetime as a single blue marble, all of our sorrows and worries swirling there remote as the Cambrian.

View from inside the ISS. (Image: NASA)

While orbiting a war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from earthlings in a Reddit AMA. Asked for his advice to anyone on the brink of giving up and his own approach to those moments of darkest despair, he offers:

"I remind myself that each sunrise is a harbinger of another chance, and to take quiet, unrecognised pride in the accomplishments I get done each day. Each evening my intended list is unfinished, but I celebrate what I’ve done and resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. Keep at it with optimism — it is your life to tinker with, learn from, live and love."

This ongoingness of creation — the fact that this world is unfinished and our story unwritten — is nowhere more visible, life’s ceaseless insistence on itself nowhere more palpable, than when seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this elemental calibration of perspective:

"It’s endlessly surprising how continually beautiful our changing, ancient, gorgeous Earth is. Every one of my 1,650 orbits, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the seasons swap ends on the planet, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths."

A single gasp of elemental beauty is enough to reanimate the deflated lung of life, to undermine the narratives of despair. “They should have sent a poet,” gasps Jodie Foster’s astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, and it is with a poet’s sensibility that Hadfield describes one such living antidote to despair — the Bahamas, seen from space in all their “huge visual onslaught of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the ocean that gives it a butterfly-like iridescence of every blue that exists.”

The Bahamas seen from the ISS. (Image: NASA)

Before we lifted off from Earth toward the farthest reachable reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unexplored frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of Earth itself — the poles. Polar explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century. Many died to know the unknown. Many sank into “soul-despairing depression” during the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime. Over and over, they were saved by wonder.

Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.

In the first year of the twentieth century — that liminal epoch between the age of polar exploration and the age of space exploration — the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a polar expedition to study the aurora borealis — that elemental conversation between our planet and its star as fluctuations of the Sun’s corona send gusts of solar wind across the cosmos to ripple our Earth’s magnetosphere, exciting its electrons into magic.

Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.

Harald Moltke (left) with his companions.

Setting out to capture the ineffable majesty and mystery of Earth’s most otherworldly phenomenon, Moltke made a mobile studio of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his elaborate painting equipment. (“I realized that it had to be oil paint,” he wrote, “that could most closely reproduce these fantastic phenomena.”) He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for the embodied encounter.

Not a religious man, he found himself having a profoundly spiritual experience when faced with these “huge, luminous beams with folds… now shining brightly, now fading away to arise elsewhere… like keys on which invisible hands begin to play, back and forth, back and forth.” He writes in his memoir:

"The northern lights are like nothing else on our planet. They are breathtaking! They surpass all human imagination to such an extent that one cannot help but reach for notions like 'supernatural, divine, miraculous.' I, who had been so bold as to dare to portray these seemingly unreal visions, sank to my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I need not be ashamed of that… I had imagined the northern lights as clearings in the sky, luminous domes and twilights. And then they were independent phenomena with their own light, their own movement, their own emergence, development and movement, its own resurrection, development and ending and resurrection again, its own mysterious unfolding."

-Maria Popova, Marginalian

"Their failure to sufficiently fight back 'against a war-crazed Trump administration'"

 

A coalition of peace groups last Wednesday launched a new national campaign calling for the top Democrats in Congress—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—to resign from their leadership roles, citing their failure to sufficiently fight back “against a war-crazed Trump administration.”

The coalition, which includes Peace Action and RootsAction, launched a petition declaring that it is “time for congressional Democrats to replace Schumer and Jeffries with leaders who are willing and able to challenge the runaway militarism that has dragged our country into launching yet another insanely destructive war,” this time against Iran.

“Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries have not acted to prevent war on Venezuela or the current war on Iran,” the petition reads. “They worked to delay a vote on Iran until after the war had started, while failing to clearly oppose it before or after the launch of the war. Schumer and Jeffries have shown that they cannot be trusted to prevent more wars, more threats of wars, or the transfer of another half a trillion dollars a year into the war machine.”

Kevin Martin, president of Peace Action—the largest grassroots peace network in the US—said in a statement that he doubts “at this point whether many people look to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries for ‘leadership’ in Congress, but we would settle for them getting with the program and representing their base, and the majority of Americans, who want them to stand strongly against Trump’s illegal wars and domestic terror campaigns against the American people.”

“They need to speak out loudly and clearly, and get their caucuses in line, to oppose the upcoming $50 billion or more for Trump’s illegal war of aggression on Iran, and to cut off US weapons to Israel,” said Martin. “Failing to do so will only increase calls for them to step down or be replaced by colleagues who understand where the American people are on these and other critical issues.”

Since the start of the illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran, Schumer and Jeffries have focused largely on procedural objections to the war, the Trump administration’s incompetence, and the president’s failure to clearly articulate his objectives, rather than explicitly opposing the military onslaught.

In an appearance on NBC‘s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Jeffries declined to say whether he would oppose the Trump administration’s expected push for $50 billion in new funding for the unauthorized war on Iran. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Jeffries said, chiding the administration for failing to “make its case as to the rationale or justification for this war of choice in the Middle East.”

Sarah Lazare and Adam Johnson wrote for The Nation last week that “it’s not enough to check the box, to do the bare minimum, to reinforce every argument for war only to balk at the process and ask whether there’s a ‘plan’ for after the myriad war crimes have already been committed.”

“The only way to read this half-hearted response from the Democratic Party leadership,” they argued, “is de facto support.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

A Tale of Trump’s Wrongdoing and The Contrarian's Pro-Democracy Pushback

 

Two weeks of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, this much is clear: It is a colossal foreign policy blunder. The Iranian leadership seems substantially intact with another, and reportedly more fundamentalist, Khamenei at the helm. Collateral conflicts have been set off across the region, with hundreds of civilians and 13 U.S. service members dying. 

The Strait of Hormuz has been mined and turned into a missile proving ground. The price of oil soared to over $100 a barrel, staggering the world economy and worsening the affordability crisis for American families. For Americans, it’s among the most unpopular commencements of a war ever. And with no endgame in sight, Trump’s low polling numbers are likely to meet the same fate as oil shipping traffic: continued bombardment.

Iran is certainly the worst of Trump’s foreign policy fiascos, but it by no means is the only one. Indeed, there have been so many that it’s hard to keep track. That’s why I decided for this week’s column, I would catalog Trump’s Top 10 foreign policy failures as the latest entry in our Contrarian Top 10 lists. I drew on my experience as a U.S. ambassador among many other sources (including colleague Jen Rubin’s own version of this list for 2025).

As you will see when you look at the list, this is not only a tale of Trump’s wrongdoing – it’s also the story of our pro-democracy pushback. Despite the difficulty of litigating foreign policy snafus, with your support we have often found a way to do that in the courts of law as well as, of course, in the court of public opinion, including through our coverage here at the Contrarian. You make all of that possible with your paid subscriptions.

1. Insane Iran Illegalities

In a matter of days, Trump has somehow managed to combine the worst aspects of our most foolish wars, from Vietnam to Iraq. It is also outlandishly illegal, as I explained with a bipartisan group of experts last week in the Contrarian. We are working up a litigation rejoinder — stay tuned!

2. Terrible Tariff Troubles

Trump’s erratic and ill-defined tariffs policy has alienated allies, shaken the global reputation of the U.S. economy, and penalized millions of American small businesses and working families with an illegal tax, as the Supreme Court recently ruled. Because there is an enormous amount of damage to rectify, Democracy Defenders Fund and our wonderful partner Platkin LLP have filed a lawsuit against the government over the collection of tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. We will fight to recover funds that were unlawfully seized from our wonderful client Busy Baby LLC and its owner Beth Benike, fighting on behalf of all small businesses. And I hosted New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin and Benike at the Contrarian this week:

3. The Maduro Mess

Trump’s trial run on regime changes unilaterally began in our own backyard. Two months ago, the United States launched strikes against the Maduro regime, seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in the process and bringing him and his wife to the United States for trial. Whatever you think of that end, it should not be achieved by illegal means. At DDF, we filed a bipartisan ethics complaint from our all-star team of ethics experts, representing the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, seeking an investigation of the lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel who gave the wrong legal advice.

4. Maritime Massacres

The illegal use of power in Latin America began with strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that the administration claimed to be carrying drugs. Not only does it appear that some people on these boats may have been innocent civilians, but, even worse, defenseless survivors were apparently killed. We at DDF make sure that the rule of law is applied to everyone, and I, alongside fellow ethics experts Ginny Canter and Richard Painter, filed a complaint at the Justice Department demanding that this illegal advice be exposed to the public.

5. Undermining Ukraine

​​Despite Trump claiming he’d negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine within a day of taking office, the war between Russia and Ukraine has only intensified under his watch. In fact, 2025 was the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since the war began. For President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine, and Europe, Trump has been the worst of allies. That has sent a message to our friends everywhere that we cannot be trusted. But fortunately Trump does not speak for all Americans, and he certainly does not speak for the Contrarian, where we have been vocal in standing up for Ukraine and for American alliances.

6. Greenland Greed

Trump’s obsession with treating sovereign nations like real estate is nothing new. In his first term, he tried to buy Greenland — an idea that was quickly shot down by the Danish government. This time around, he decided to send Donald Trump Jr. to advance the deal in Greenland, during which the junior Trump met with locals with a message from his father promising that the United States would “treat [Greenlanders] well.” Unsurprisingly, Denmark and the rest of our NATO allies rejected the offers resoundingly.

Ultimately, at the World Economic Forum, NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte and Trump announced a “framework of a future deal” that would renegotiate American military presence in Greenland but ultimately prevent the United States from acquiring the territory. As I told the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the absurdity of acquiring another sovereign nation’s territory is only “made worse by allegations that Trump[’s] associates have ties to companies who could benefit from the president’s actions.”

7. Undoing USAID Unlawfully

The complete gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development has been nothing short of catastrophic. Once one of the world’s largest funders of disaster relief, food security, clean water, and disease prevention — credited with saving more than 90 million lives over two decades — it has been all but dismantled. According to estimates from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, more than 500,000 children died in the first year alone as a direct result of these cuts. This is abhorrent — a betrayal of every principle we claim to hold.

We at DDF were the first to sue over Elon Musk’s actions through DOGE and the legality of his appointment. The case is ongoing, and we are now fighting to take his deposition and prove the wrongdoing. We won’t stop until justice is done.

8. Canada Clown Show

Trump’s repeated attacks on our ally Canada are unhinged. He has battered our peaceful neighbor with a series of erratic tariffs, publicly ridiculed Canadian leaders, and even joked about taking over the country and making it the 51st state. In doing so, he has squandered the goodwill Canadians have long held toward the United States, turning a trusted partner into a wary skeptic increasingly inclined to distance itself from us. Just ask the bourbon industry — and many others.

9. A Chinese TACO

By contrast, Trump seems never to have met a dictator to whom he won’t kowtow. One of the more humiliating examples was his about-face on China. His initial tariffs on that nation were met with pushback, setting off an escalating trade war. Unfortunately, Trump neglected the fact that we need China’s rare earth minerals for a wide variety of U.S. uses. China cutting off those exports brought Trump to his knees. He ultimately made concessions, including dramatically cutting back the tariffs he had imposed. Who knew that TACO was Chinese food?

10. Voiding Voice of America

Voice of America and other U.S. government global media have long been crown jewels of American soft power around the world. Countless people have relied on the news our nation provides, particularly where free media is scant. As a former ambassador in Prague, I know this well. So many foreign friends told me how they counted on “the radios” broadcasting VOA and more.

Over the past year plus, that has been systematically dismantled, profoundly affecting our interests and reach as a nation. Here, too, with wonderful partners and clients, my democracy litigation colleagues and I have pushed back, with win after win. Most recently, we secured a court order that Kari Lake’s appointment as interim CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media was illegal and her actions invalid. The battle continues – thanks to your paid subscriptions.

11. Bonus: Donald’s Domestic Defeats

Of course, in a sense, all of our 267 legal cases and matters help counteract Trump’s foreign policy fiascos. That is because domestic victories also act as guardrails on Trump’s power, preventing him from veering even further off the rails. Conversely, when our allies see that the rule of law is holding, they are reminded of what really makes America great and that our nation will be back.

-The Contrarian

 

When will this war end? "When I feel it in my bones."

 

Donald Trump did not commit to a definitive timeline for the war in Iran, saying in a Friday interview that the fighting would end when he feels it “in my bones.”

Trump told Fox News Radio that he didn’t think the war “would be long.” But he suggested that only he will know when it will be over, saying the conflict will end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals on the length of the war, with senior administration officials suggesting at times that the war could last anywhere from days to months. Trump on Friday said he expected the conflict to end soon but added that it could also continue indefinitely if necessary. The president dismissed reports that the U.S. was facing a munitions shortage.

“Nobody has the technology or the weapons that we have,” Trump told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade. “We’re way ahead of schedule. Way ahead.” He later said the U.S. had “virtually unlimited ammunition. We’re using it, we’re using it. We can go forever.”

While the president suggested the decision to end the war will ultimately be based on his personal judgment, he said he was consulting with senior advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. “Operation Epic Fury will continue until President Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, determines that the goals of Operation Epic Fury, including for Iran to no longer pose a military threat, have been fully realized,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement when asked for comment.

Earlier on Friday, Hegseth suggested victory was a certainty and attacked the press for what he viewed as unfriendly media coverage about the war. Trump also sought to downplay any economic ramifications of the conflict, saying the U.S. economy was the greatest in the world and would “bounce right back, so fast.”

The Trump administration has sought to quell concerns over rising oil and gas prices after U.S.-Israeli military action against Iran began in February. The war triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history and cost $11 billion in its first week, according to the Pentagon. The president’s messaging around the run-up in crude prices has caused a potential public relations nightmare for the oil industry. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social. 

-Politico

Trump's "Concentration Camps" for "tens of thousands of immigrants — men, women, and even children"

 

Donald Trump’s brutal ICE detention facilities have been blasted as “concentration camps.” This is a freighted term — summoning more than a century of deplorable history. 

But experts in the field have no hesitation in using these words to describe the network of facilities that the federal government is using to literally warehouse tens of thousands of immigrants — men, women, and even children — snatched out of their communities by masked federal agents.

The activist group 50501 recently hosted a video call on this topic. It featured Andrea Pizer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, as well as journalist Frank Abe, co-editor of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration and a longtime activist in pursuing redress for the abuses of America’s World War II camps.

In his introductory remarks, Abe insisted that Trump’s new ICE warehouses “are nothing but 21st Century American concentration camps.” He added that the subject was personal to him: “I’m a third-generation Japanese American, and I know a concentration camp when I see one.”

The words “concentration camp,” for many, evoke the horrors of Hitler and of facilities like Auschwitz, where more than 1 million people were murdered by the Nazis. But Pitzer drew a firm distinction (as do other experts) between “extermination centers” and concentration camps. 

The latter are not synonymous with “death camps” — although people held in concentration camps often die by disease, deprivation, or indifference.

Concentration camps have been around since the 1890s and documented on six continents. Pitzer, who has traced that history, offered the audience her own general definition: “A concentration camp is a mass detention of civilians on the basis of identity — something you are, rather than what you’ve done,” she said. “It is generally used without due process. And it is done to entrench and expand political power for an authoritarian-style government.”

The label “concentration camp” has always been controversial. Nearly from the beginning, Pitzer explained, authorities running concentration camps have routinely denied that they are, in fact, running “concentration camps.” The first camps were established by the Spanish in Cuba — followed shortly by the British in southern Africa.

But even those Brits were adamant that their camps were different. “Literally from the beginning of concentration camp history, every country that had concentration camps would argue, ‘No. These aren’t really like those other camps,’” making the claim that their regime of mass-incarceration was somehow justified on the basis of public safety, rather than cruelty and control.

“This is a dialogue and a debate that still goes on today,” Pitzer underscored. “So, if you hear that about immigrant detention today — ‘Well, it’s not really concentration camps’’ — it is very much so.” 

A key indicator that Trump’s ICE camps fit the definition, for Pitzer, is the lawless way the administration is filling them. “You have masked secret police that don’t identify themselves on the streets, kidnapping people,” she described, “and taking them quickly from a local detention to a transit camp — so attorneys can’t find them to give them legal rights.”

And then there is the “dismal” reality of ICE camps themselves — where detention conditions are a threat to human health and so noxious that many detainees agree to deportation rather than pursuing their rights to due process. 

“People in feces [from overflowing toilets]. People without clean water to drink. People without adequate food,” Pitzer said, reeling off a litany. “They’re denied medical care. They’re denied their own medicine, even if they brought them in. There have been multiple deaths — with one of them even declared a homicide.”

Emphasizing that these are the early days of a system that is unlikely to improve, Pitzer added: “We are already looking at a tremendous amount of suffering” — including outbreaks of deadly disease ranging from measles to tuberculosis.

That suffering is attributable, in part, to a mad rush by the administration, and state allies like Florida, to expand detention capacity by erecting makeshift tent-walled camps. These include Camp East Montana — the largest facility in the ICE network, built at an El Paso military base that was previously the site of a Japanese “internment camp;” and Alligator Alcatraz, a Florida-state facility that operates in conjunction with the Trump regime. (Tallahassee and the MAGA administration are now feuding over who should pay for the $600 million camp.) 

The experience at both facilities have been hellish for detainees, but also logistically: “Hygiene, water, weather, disease outbreaks — different things [are] just going horribly for them,” Pitzer said.

The administration is now pivoting to more permanent facilities — seeking to spend as much as $38 billion to acquire new detention centers. Many of these will consist of caged bunkhouses, built inside huge industrial warehouses — with the goal of adding tens of thousands of additional bunks to the ICE system. The largest facilities, described by the government as “mega-centers,” — could house 10,000 people apiece.

That scale that would put ICE camps on par with the federal camps opened during World War II to incarcerate Japanese Americans. “That’s the size of a Manzanar or Tule Lake,” said Abe, naming two giant “relocation” facilities that have been acknowledged in federal records (and by the Truman Library) as “concentration camps.”

Abe helped secure a national apology during the Reagan administration to Americans of Japanese descent who were imprisoned at such camps, including his father and stepfather. “We won that in 1988. We thought, Mission Accomplished; America will never do that again,” Abe said. “And yet, here we are.”

ICE is currently detaining about 70,000 people, nearly three-quarters of whom have no criminal record, and whose only alleged wrongdoing relates to civil violations of immigration statutes. 

Nonetheless, the government is working overtime in the courts to prevent such individuals from being released on bond until their immigration cases are resolved. The number of ICE detainees has soared by about 75 percent since Trump took office. 

And if anti-immigrant zealots in the White House, like Stephen Miller, have their way, the administration is just getting started. “Their goal is to deport 15 to 20 million people,” Pitzer said. “For historical context, that is [the size of] the Soviet Gulag. The Soviet concentration camp system had 18 to 20 million people move through it in more than 20 years.”

The Trump regime is seeking to move much more quickly. “That is impossible to do without a tremendous amount of death and suffering — even if we never reach the stage of extermination camps that we saw in Nazi Germany,” Pitzer said, adding: “I don’t think that we are close to those.” But the concentration camp scholar emphasized that stopping short of Nazi crimes against humanity is a cold comfort. 

“There can be plenty of deaths without ending up with gas chambers and mass executions,” she said. “The system itself will do a lot of that.”

The hour-long 50501 presentation is well worth your time and includes success stories of local activists who marshalled their communities to block the administration’s planned acquisition of warehouse space. The video is available at the link below:

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Tim Dickinson is the senior political writer for The Contrarian