‘We Won’t Know It’s a Different Country’
Trump is causing incredible harm. Whether we learn to live with it matters.
Another normal day in Trumplandia, where the president is scheduled to start feeding the Department of Education into the wood chipper today. Good thing we’re three and a half years into his second term and the end is in sight, huh? Happy Thursday.
What We May Forget
by Andrew Egger
In yesterday’s newsletter, Bill quoted Philip Larkin’s “Homage to a Government,” on Britain’s quiet post-WWII retrenchment: “Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home for lack of money, and it is all right.”
I want to dwell briefly on another line from the same poem: “Our children will not know it’s a different country.”
The damage being done today, the scope of the global cruelty and tragedy, is hard to take in. It is the sort of stain that should be remembered. Will it be?
For decades, U.S. aid in Africa—in HIV prevention and treatment, in vaccines, in clean water and food—has been a lifeline for millions. Now that aid has simply vanished, and experts estimate that, if Trump stays the course, millions may die within a year. There will be some news cycles, some indignant punditry, probably some harrowing Pulitzer-grade photojournalism. And then, a slow hardening into the new normal. The victims’ surviving families will remember them. Will we? Will our children?
For two years, the United States has spent millions tracking one of Russia’s vilest war crimes: The abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children into Russia for forced adoption by Russian families. The Conflict Observatory, a group funded by the State Department, had assembled a trove of data on missing children—crucial information for any future attempt to reunite them with relatives at home. But the State Department has now terminated their contract, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers fear that it may even have carelessly deleted the database. How many children’s best chance of seeing their families again may have vanished, just like that? Their families will remember, if they survive the war. So will the kids, the ones who are old enough. Will we?
We humans are master rationalizers; we adopt the new normal faster than we realize. Donald Trump rode a wave of forgetting back to the White House in 2024. His love affair with foreign dictators, his mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, his attempt to steal the 2020 election—all were washed away, in the minds of many voters. They were overshadowed by the irritations of the moment: the price of groceries, the price of rent. And he prevailed in no small part thanks to shocking strength with young voters who had no memory of a time before he dragged our politics down to his own base, amoral, post-truth level.
So Trump and his allies know that, as they work to build a future that is smaller and crueler, more paranoid and more violent, human nature is on their side. We rationalize the current, block out the past, and imagine something brighter can emerge in the future.
These days, those who don’t back Trump like to talk about “touching the stove.” If the American public couldn’t be talked out of its complacent, decadent willingness to give the guy another spin at the wheel, maybe they can at least be shocked out of it. Maybe veterans will turn on him once they see the cuts to the VA, or retirees will revolt when they can’t get a person on the line to help with their Social Security payments.
But even if this does happen, that doesn’t mean putting things back together will be simple. Whether it will even be possible remains to be seen.
The philosopher Roger Scruton said that conservatism starts in “the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” America as formerly constituted—warts and all—was a good thing. Its current demolitionists claim they’re trying to go back to that good thing. But really, they’re in the game of destruction, not reclamation. They go about their work cheerfully, glibly shouting that anything they break by accident, they’ll get around to unbreaking eventually. If only it were so simple, even if they really wanted to.
Getting out of this starts with remembering. It was good to be a country that cared about babies born with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, that was willing to save their lives for pennies a day. It was good to be a country that cared about Ukrainian children torn from their families by a hostile power, that strove toward a future that saw them home. Maybe someday we can claw our way there again—if we remember.
The Irony Of The Venezuela Deportations
by Cathy Young
The controversy over the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members has focused mostly on the Trump administration’s disgust with (and potential defiance of) a court order. But there is another aspect to this story: the administration’s war on Venezuelan-American immigrants.
Obviously, violent gang members should not be conflated with the community as a whole—but it seems very likely that at least some, perhaps many, of the 200-plus people the Trump administration deported under the Aliens Enemies Act were legal asylum seekers wrongly accused of gang ties. What’s more, this is just one way in which the administration has targeted the Venezuelan community: Just two weeks after Donald Trump took office, the administration revoked temporary protected status for some 350,000 refugees from Venezuela. Starting April 7, they will lose their work permits and be subject to deportation. And Trump’s proposed new travel ban would completely bar citizens of Venezuela from entering the United States.
This cruel situation has at least two darkly ironic dimensions. One is that the Venezuelan migrants are fleeing precisely the kind of far-left, socialist, anti-American dictatorship that American conservatives in particular have always seen as the enemy. The Trump administration itself has singled it out as a hostile and criminal regime. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently named Venezuela one of the “enemies of humanity.”) Many of the refugees who are losing their protected status—and probably some who have just been deported on a flimsy basis—have good reason to fear reprisals if they return to Venezuela. Yet the administration has pressured the country’s Marxist tyrant, Nicolás Maduro, to take them back.
No less ironic is the fact that the Venezuelan-American community, like many other immigrant groups coming from socialist or communist regimes (such as Cuba or the Soviet Union), skews heavily Republican. Last year, as many as 70 percent of Venezuelan American voters backed Trump. Many of those voters now feel cheated and betrayed.
The Trump administration’s callous treatment of Venezuelan migrants is a stark contrast to the welcome readily extended to refugees from communist regimes in the 1970s and later, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. (My own family came here in 1980 under such an admissions program for Soviet refugees.) These communities, too, had their organized criminal elements (the Russian mob in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach was notorious). But America was able to handle these challenges without treating criminal gangs like an invading foreign army or targeting entire communities for suspicion. The result was that millions of people were able to escape oppression, and the United States gained thriving immigrant communities—ones that, as it happens, also became fairly solid Republican constituencies.
But that was then. This is now.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Is your sheriff helping plan mass deportations? Jessica Pishko reports on the state-level cooperation agreements and years of targeted messaging that are providing the federal government with eager allies in local law enforcement across the country.
Therapy might be a better option… While on jaunts to D.C. and the Grand Canyon State, Adrian Carrasquillo’s Huddled Masses produced a scoop and some great reporting: Kari Lake got into a weird confrontation with Sen. Ruben Gallego at a swanky D.C. club. Adrian also documented the situation on the ground at a joint town hall in Arizona featuring Gallego and his Senate colleague, Mark Kelly.
Make Elon Musk Great Again? On Bulwark+ Takes, Sam Stein joins Tim Miller to talk about Fox News and the Trump administration’s odd fixation with promoting Musk’s businesses. Ethics schmethics, the Hatch Act be damned!
Quick Hits
THE BLOODTHIRSTINESS IS THE POINT: Here’s something else remarkable about the supposed gang members the White House has currently handed over to El Salvador. The White House hasn’t released any of the deportees’ names. The main reason we know anything about any of their identities is because the men’s families and friends saw them being shaved, chained, and perp-marched in the White House’s professionally produced sizzle reel.
If not for that video, the White House would be dealing with far fewer legal and media headaches. Fewer people would be stepping forward to contradict the administration’s claim that only the most hardened gangbanging terrorists were deported. From one point of view, it’s a major PR fail.
But not, we suspect, from the point of view the White House actually cares about. The isn’t-the-police-state-fun video wasn’t an incidental part of the El Salvador operation—getting that footage was one of its key goals.
The White House used the deportation flights as an opportunity to shoot a slick video paean to state violence, which it released to the hooting adulation of its supporters. And then it turned that adulation back around on the courts, demanding: Do unelected judges dare to oppose the will of the people?
“I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do,” Trump said Tuesday. “WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Who can forget the famous time when woke Major League Baseball rolled out the red carpet for subpar athlete Jackie Robinson out of concern there weren’t enough minorities in the game? All you can do is laugh:
A Department of Defense webpage describing baseball and civil rights icon Jackie Robinson’s military service was restored Wednesday after it was missing earlier in the day.
That development came after pages honoring a Black Medal of Honor winner and Japanese American service members were taken down—the Pentagon said that was a mistake—amid the department’s campaign to strip out content singling out the contributions by women and minority groups, which the Trump administration considers “DEI.”
The page on Robinson includes biographical information about his Army service during World War II, which occurred prior to his famously breaking baseball’s color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers. When that page’s address was entered Wednesday, a message showed up saying it “might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.” The letters “dei” were also automatically added to the URL.
Every time another of these stories emerges, spokesmen for the Defense Department respond with hilarious huffiness. “Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others,” Press Secretary John Ullyot said in a statement. “We salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop.”
How dare the public suggest they deleted these heroes’ pages on purpose!
NO LIBS ALLOWED: Remarkable how quickly low-level American functionaries seem to be adopting Trump’s posture that bullying is fun. Here’s the New York Times:
A French scientist was prevented from entering the United States this month because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration’s policies on academic research, according to the French government.
Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education and research, described the move as worrying. . . .
Mr. Baptiste did not identify the scientist who was turned away but said that the academic was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research and had been traveling to a conference near Houston when border officials stopped him.
The U.S. authorities denied entry to the scientist and then deported him because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his “personal opinion” on the Trump administration’s science policies, Mr. Baptiste said.
Cheap Shots
I am really tired of hearing the Trump was elected because of prices, blah blah blah. He won because he is a white supremacist/christian nationalist who was able to keep the mask up sufficiently (because America's real God is $$$) to con a whole bunch of people. He took all of the disparate group that individually hated their groups, and united them under one caustic mission - hate. People voted because of their biases - it is just politically correct to blame the "economy" as not being good enough. When really what they are mad at is not being far enough ahead of the people they don't like. They don't like that others they despise have as much or more than them.
I’m dismayed by those who don’t know history. This will not end well for us.