Trump admits his own idiocy

From immigration to foreign policy, Washington repeats a pattern of foolish policy pronouncements revealing governance by opinion ignoring facts and reality

America’s descent into madness continues to accelerate. Many of us incensed by the Trump administration’s mendacity, and the horrifying complicity of Democrats who helped put him in office before enabling his agenda and appointments, might find some solace in an emergent pattern repeating itself in policy areas including international trade, immigration, and war.

One hopes the press and international community might finally learn something from it—but I would not counsel anyone to hold their breath. If nothing else, I’m grateful that one of the many concerns I’ve raised in this column appears to have been heard, and that the administration walked back one of its signature policies after hearing other voices share it.

Immigrant scapegoats

For years, scapegoating immigrants has been an integral part of the president’s personal brand. He has incited violence in communities reeling from mass shootings, like El Paso, Texas. He has spread false rumors about immigrant communities repudiated even by fellow Republicans, such as those in Ohio responding to his lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly eating pets.

His use of divisive lies, however, is far from Trump’s only action aiming to build his own power by demonizing immigrants. After the outrageous examples above, he sparked a more recent witch hunt targeting immigrant communities across the country. He ordered federal officials to arrest undocumented Americans even at courthouses, and to go far beyond his rhetorical focus on immigrants who commit crimes to include those simply looking for work.

Even non-immigrant citizens are at risk. As his policies grew increasingly controversial, the president effectively invaded the union’s most populous and prosperous state with federal shock troops deployed to violently suppress even citizens invoking their constitutional rights to dissent.

I—and many others—have written about the predictable results of a policy dividing communities, deporting essential workers, and splitting families apart. Never has there been any plausible case that any of these results would help American workers, as we continue to suffer under the economic predation of businesses supported and enabled by both major political parties.

Yet, after ignoring pleas for rationality, or recognition of international rights steamrolled by ICE agents acting like a gestapo around the country, the administration suddenly reversed course recently, announcing that it would no longer deploy ICE agents to raid businesses including farms and restaurants. Those were two of the critical industries I identified in an earlier column explaining some of the ways in which Trump policies are destroying America’s economy.

I’ve started another post in that series that I hope to publish at some point, although current events have overtaken that vision and forced me to write on these other subjects first.

For now, the point is that advocates for immigrant rights can celebrate a hard fought victory, even as we recognize a pattern of institutional mania and foolishness.

Wielding executive power based on whims

Trump adopted his immigration policy based on a political strategy aiming to curry favor with rural & working class communities, only to reverse course once those same communities expressed their alarm at the results that many of us saw coming. After all, until Los Angeles was recently invaded by ICE agents and U.S. Marines deployed to quell constitutionally protected dissent supporting human rights, it was MAGA-supporting regions that suffered the worst under Trump’s policies.

This pattern reveals the instability of governing according to opinions, ignoring facts and analysis. Trump boasted about his witch hunt, ignoring that immigrants are the economic backbone of many communities that have suffered as their workers (and their families’ breadwinners) have been detained or deported. Once the results became clear to his rural supporters, their voices more or less forced Trump to reconsider.

That is not a rational pattern. It is one revealing institutional ignorance responding only to the whims of MAGA supporters (and their enablers in the Democratic Party) who have repeatedly revealed themselves to be more interested in lies and misrepresentations than anything resembling reality.

Beyond the flip-flop on immigration enforcement, and the continuing demonization of immigrants within the limits of the administration’s new policy, two aspects of the pattern especially warrant attention.

First is its sheer irrationality. It would be nice to imagine that the world’s greatest superpower has at least the deliberative capacity of the average American family, but it’s clear that it sadly has less than the average patient at a mental institution.

There is no reason or sanity driving federal policy in any arena. The entire landscape is driven by changing whims. It reflects neither democracy nor true autocracy, so much as institutional insanity.

What constitutional rights?

Second, despite all of the president’s rhetoric about supposedly protecting “free speech,” it is quite clear that this administration and its supporters understand nothing of it.

That ignorance is no less outrageous just because the same can be said of every Democratic president over the past generation. What that bipartisan failure ultimately indicates is a country that has lost any awareness of its own founding ideals, one making major collective decisions based on irrational hunches ignoring facts and reality.

This is far from the first time we have seen the U.S.—not just a tacky president who has failed upwards his entire life—reveal this unfortunately widely shared and sadly recurring mania.

Paid subscribers can access an additional section previewing my next post, addressing foreign policy and the disturbing repetition of well-worn patterns in the American-Israeli axis’ emergent war on Iran.

A pattern visible from Iraq to Iran, and the decades between America’s wars

A generation ago, I cut my teeth as a grassroots organizer by building a movement on the west coast to challenge the internationally illegal invasion & occupation of Iraq. At the time, the American press reduced itself to becoming a mouthpiece for warmongering propaganda, before a predictable series of human rights abuses revealed the racism and belligerence defining U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.

In the mid-2000s and 2010s, voices across the American press establishment claimed to embrace an awakening, renewing their commitment to holding power accountable rather than enabling its abuses.

That era of accountability appears to have been short-lived.

As if enabling a still-unfolding genocide were not enough, journalism in the U.S. managed to reduce itself to a new low over the past several weeks, deferring to the White House and its right wing proponents rather than reporting well-established facts.

Yet again, the coverage dominating cable and newspaper news emphasizes proverbial trees, allowing the forest to be obscured. For example, voices featured by news outlets have discussed ad naseum whether recent U.S. & Israeli airstrikes debilitated Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity, while ignoring entirely that the offensive launched against Iran was initiated by an international war criminal lacking support even among his own people.

Similarly, while addressing concerns that the region’s escalating violence could lead to an eventual Third World War, few voices appearing on mainstream outlets have considered the disturbing fact that it seems to have already begun.

Similarly, I have long watched ignorant journalists write about fascism in the U.S. as a hypothetical future possibility, as if this country had not:

• imprisoned more people than any other country on Earth

• been the only country to ever use weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations

• successfully engineered a continent-wide genocide deemed by the Nazis to be too brutal to replicate

• duped the rest of the world into following a rapacious economic model that has, in turn, accelerated the mass extinction crisis and will inevitably threaten human life on Earth.

• pioneered new human rights abuses, from random & arbitrary drone strikes to waterboarding, as well as legal contortions to justify them

When journalists in the U.S. finally begin reporting on facts, rather than spinning reality to serve the whims of Washington & Wall Street, I’ll hang up my pen. Until then, I’ll keep working to do the work they have sadly abdicated.

Thank you for helping make that work possible.