The justices treated Trump's solicitor general with great skepticism. He had to defend one of Trump’s executive orders, which would end automatic citizenship for large classes of American-born children with undocumented parents. https://trib.al/CZzzIVa
Good.
Trump’s presence will stamp his face all over this travesty. It will serve as a reminder that core to the Trump-MAGA project is the goal of ending the constitutional guarantee of equality of birth and replacing it with hierarchical citizenship dictated by heritage and blood.
Let Trump remain firmly associated with this effort forever.
Nicole Hemmer also explored the potent cocktail -- involving the president-elect -- that means "everything just feels worse all the time."
Lee Moran at HuffPost:
Nicole Hemmer — an expert on conservative and right-wing media, and the effect they have had on American politics — this week explained Donald Trump’s penchant for whipping up anger and causing division amid tragedies and disasters.
“It definitely is the case that this is something Trump does, right?” Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, asked The New Republic’s Greg Sargent in the latest episode of his podcast, “The Daily Blast,” which was released Thursday.
The president-elect has most recently sought to politicize the devastating California wildfires with repeated attacks on — and some false claims about — President Joe Biden and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he has derogatorily nicknamed Gavin “Newscum.”
The returning POTUS used the same playbook after Hurricane Maria barreled into Puerto Rico in 2017, during the coronavirus pandemic and on various other occasions.
Trump “takes these moments that used to be a time when people began to come together a little bit, at least in that period of immediate disaster when there’s shock and horror” and attempts to use it for political gain, Hemmer said.
Nicole Hemmer went on Thursday’s edition of The New Republic’s The Daily Blast podcast hosted by Greg Sargent detailing Donald Trump’s penchant to exploit natural disasters that stretch as far back as Hurricane Maria in 2017 that hurt US territory Puerto Rico.
From the 01.09.2025 edition of The New Republic's The Daily Blast:
How Congress can act in the lame-duck session to protect the nation.
Let’s hope that the Democrats keep the House, but if they don’t, these are some good suggestions by Greg Sargent to help protect us from the “Looney Tunes Squad” (led by GQP House members like Marjorie Taylor Greene) wreaking havoc on the nation.
“Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein calls this the “crazyproofing agenda.”
Sargent beliefs that not only Democrats but some more moderate GOP members of Congress could use the time before the next term begins to take five steps to “crazyproof” the nation against an out of control GQP:
1. Defuse future debt ceiling crises
House Republicans are already threatening to use potential breaches of the debt limit — which would trigger default and economic disaster — to extract policy concessions from President Biden and Democrats on other fronts.
Congress should neutralize this weapon of extortion, because even the mere playing of this game threatens severe damage. In the lame duck, Democrats in the Senate — joined by Republicans who recognize the threat — could raise the debt limit beyond what would be needed during the Biden presidency, or even much higher, rendering it void. Or Congress could transfer control of debt limit hikes to the treasury secretary.
[...]
2. Reduce the risk of a stolen presidential election
A GOP House takeover would make the case for revising the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which dictates how Congress counts presidential electors, even stronger than it already is.
In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, a GOP House could very well vote against counting legitimate electors from one or more swing states won by a Democrat. In this election, the ranks of election deniers in the House have grown.
In another scenario, if Kari Lake becomes governor of Arizona, she could certify sham electors for a losing GOP candidate. (Lake has explicitly said she wouldn’t have certified Joe Biden’s electors.) Or a GOP-controlled state legislature could defy a Democratic governor and try to appoint the loser’s electors by itself. A GOP House could count such sham electors, potentially meaning a constitutional crisis or stolen election.
Reforms advancing in the Senate and House would help avert such scenarios. They would require Congress to count the correct electors, mandate that governors certify electors in keeping with the rule of law and create frameworks for court challenges to abuses.
[...]
3. Avert chaotic gridlock on immigration
McCarthy has already threatened that a GOP House will refuse any action on immigration until Republicans deem the border secure — which they never, ever will.
But some Senate Republicans support a compromise that would pump new funding into adjudicating asylum claims at the border and also into removing migrants who don’t qualify. The lame-duck Congress could try to pass something like this combined with protections for hundreds of thousands of people brought here as children, which some Senate Republicans also support.
Current protections for “dreamers” are likely to perish entirely from court challenges, which would be an abominable humanitarian outcome. The asylum system badly needs more money and staffing.
[...]
4. Prevent defunding of aid to Ukraine
Many Republicans genuinely seem to be on the right side here. After McCarthy suggested a GOP House might end U.S. military aid to Ukraine, McConnell quickly declared Republicans would continue to support it. And the aid does have broad bipartisan support.
That said, the MAGA caucus in the House could grow more powerful. MAGA celebrities such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) are vowing total defunding, and a power struggle might unfold among Republicans over future aid if powerful right-wing media voices urge MAGA Republicans to oppose it.
[...]
Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein suggests another possibility: Republicans could withhold support for Ukraine aid as leverage to squeeze Biden for other concessions.
[...]
For these reasons, Ornstein suggests, Democrats should find 10 Republican senators now to support a long-term appropriation for Ukraine aid and, if that fails, pass one via reconciliation to “give the president more flexibility to do what’s necessary.”
5. Protect investigations of Trump
After the Mar-a-Lago search, numerous Republicans called for defunding the FBI. Though that seems outlandish, a GOP House might attempt to defund investigations or prosecutions of Trump in a more targeted way.
House Republicans are also expected to run hearings into ongoing law enforcement investigations of Trump. Here again, oversight could theoretically be exercised in good faith. But it can also be abused. And harassing or defunding investigations solely because they’re targeting Trump is not good-faith oversight. It’s precisely the opposite. And if those investigations become a more serious threat to Trump, House Republicans would likely exercise leverage to defund them, perhaps with government shutdowns.
So Ornstein suggests a longer-term appropriation for the Justice Department should be considered: “The lame-duck Congress should do everything they can to lock in funding.”
The first two of these are no-brainers no matter what happens in the House. The last three will be more urgent if Republicans do win control. Either way, Democrats should be ready to act — and prod serious Republican lawmakers to join them.
Tucker Carlson and others on the right are falsifying East Palestine's plight.
Greg Sargent discusses the ways that Tucker Carlson and others on the right have racialized the train disaster in East Palestine, not only to further their white nationalist agenda and to sow division in this country, but also in part to distract from the fact that Democrats are actually interested in doing more for white working class people.
It also seems to me that right-wing pundits are attempting to distract from the fact that in 2018 the Trump administration repealed a brake safety rule for trains carrying “highly flammable hazardous materials,” and that Norfolk Southern appears to have been more interested in profits than in safety. Finally, they might also be distracting from the fact that it was local conservative Ohio officials who made the decision to burn off the toxic chemicals.
“East Palestine is overwhelmingly White, and it’s politically conservative,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson recently said of the roughly 4,700 residents of the disaster zone. “That shouldn’t be relevant,” he added, but “it very much is.”
It very much isn’t. But ever since the Feb. 3 disaster, Carlson and his comrades have sought to transform East Palestine’s plight into a tale about “woke” Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland.
What this illustrates is how the right uses race-baiting to deceive people into forgetting that Democrats are now the far more committed party when it comes to investing in such left-behind communities.
Central to Carlson’s insinuation about the “relevance” of East Palestine’s Whiteness is the conduct of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Carlson cites recent remarks by Buttigieg about the construction industry’s racial makeup, sneering that Buttigieg has been neglecting East Palestine specifically to focus on a more “pressing problem,” that “we have too many White construction workers.”
Similarly, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) ripped Buttigieg for neglecting railroad safety while instead “talking about how we have too many White male construction workers,” adding in the “male” for good measure.
The relevant Buttigieg comments were about the importation of White workers to build projects in high-unemployment minority communities, and about how to create opportunities for minority construction workers. For Vance and Carlson, this apparently isn’t a concern. But even if you disagree with Buttigieg on this, it’s disgusting to link it to East Palestine: It’s meant to imply neglect of White disaster victims to serve a hidden agenda of preferring minorities over Whites.
Carlson ratchets up this vile game by saying that if the accident had happened in Philadelphia or Detroit — wink, wink — there would be no neglect. And the race-baiting gets worse. One Fox News host suggested the Biden administration is “spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people.” Far-right personality Charlie Kirk decried a “war on white people” waged by the “Biden regime,” which is supposedly allowing the “poisoning” of “citizens of eastern Ohio.” Note the hints of the ugly trope that elites are plotting to exterminate Whites, or at least allowing them to perish.
The next phase of ICE’s big ramp-up: a nationwide network of vast detention facilities. But guess what? Even parts of Red America are saying
"Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”
The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:
Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?
Favor: 35 percent
Oppose: 64 percent
Note that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline.
But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also opposing deporting noncriminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually OK with such a horror? Apparently it is.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. After Trump’s 2024 victory, some analysts suggested that his win reflected a decisive cultural shift in the direction of his restrictionist views on immigration, one that Democrats must accommodate themselves to going forward. Call it the “MAGA moment” thesis.
But it’s hard to square that idea with what we’re seeing now. As political scientist Julia Azari argues, notions of such a shift are bound up with the deeper idea that the culture is undergoing a meaningful conservative reorientation on race and nationalism. Yet that now looks baseless, Azari notes, because “the public seems to be turning against some of the hardcore principles of MAGA in that regard, especially on immigration.”
To wit: Trump’s overall approval on the issue is in the toilet, and ICE has become a pariah agency. Majorities oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record and view immigration as a positive good for the country. In that Pew poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose pausing visa applications for the 75 countries Trump has singled out, apparently in keeping with his hatred for “shithole countries,” and two-thirds oppose ending asylum applications for people fleeing horrors abroad.
So, at the most fundamental level, large majorities are rejecting both the Trump-Miller ethnonationalist reengineering of the country and their effort to choke off all humanitarian pathways for settling here. Such public sentiments seem very much at odds with diagnoses of a durable Trumpist-nationalist moment.
Relatedly, Substacker Brian Beutler recently argued that social signaling is generating opposition to Trump’s worst policies, as more and more ordinary people see them as shameful and heinous in the most basic moral and human terms. Something like that is helping drive opposition to detention centers: See this remarkable column in the Kansas City Star that seeks to shame warehouse owners into refraining from selling to ICE, arguing that doing so risks social ostracism. Similar efforts probably helped persuade owners to nix selling in Oklahoma and deep-red parts of Virginia. The growing opposition to ICE prison camps suggests much, much more of this to come.
In short: If there ever was a big “MAGA moment” cultural shift on immigration, well, it’s already long gone.
