It’s crazy that this isn’t bringing about a mass protest movement. I must admit as an American, I don’t really understand the American populace at all or what drives them. If this doesn’t make you mad, then what will? I find the lack of a reaction almost as frightening as this abuse of power.
Clearly not - look at the endless protests against Tesla, up to and including weeks of relentless and undirected violence.
The left is happy to protest, but they only seem capable of protesting one thing at once. And right now what they hate more than immigration decisions is cutbacks to the size of the federal workforce.
Not to mention, vandalizing people’s cars is not exactly a great way to gain sympathy. The valorization of “protest” is so ingrained in the American left that they have blinders on to the fact that they often backfire. Non violent civil rights protesters were very disciplined about how they went about challenging unjust laws, which is in part they were successful. Hippies and anti-Vietnam protests probably did more to push people to the right than gain supporters.
I mean, it's actually a very effective way to make people not want to own Teslas. But in reality (as a 2018-era Tesla owner in a blue city), this Tesla vandalism story is mostly a creation of social media. I'm sure there are people actually screwing with cars somewhere, but you're just as likely to get a smashed window in your Honda.
How are you guys defining "mass protest movement"? Just one organizer of protests claims they organized over 1000 protests against DOGE/Tesla/Trump on just one day:
This has been going on for weeks now with no let-up. There are so many protests by the left every day right now that you can't even name or enumerate them because they're continuous.
Each individual protest might not be tens of thousands of people, but there are so many of them the idea people are worn out from protesting clearly isn't true. They're just protesting about causes that aren't the ones you'd hope for: they don't care about freedom or constitutional issues, what they hate most of all is attempts to reduce the deficit by cutting spending.
<they don't care about freedom or constitutional issues, what they hate most of all is attempts to reduce the deficit by cutting spending.>
Or, possibly, they might be protesting against the usurpation of political power by Elon Musk, the chaos generated by his cadre of teenage tech bros, and the naked corruption of the Trump administration. In other words, maybe the protesters do care about freedom and the corrosive effects of oligarchy on American society.
There were millions of BLM protestors and hundreds of protests. It was one of the largest protest movements in American history. I am surprised that you don't know this.
I also don’t think you can see the BLM/Defund the police/protesters, Chaz/Chop separate from the context of Covid lockdowns. There we millions of people stuck at home, which was a miserable time for most. This was basically a social experiment done on society, and protesting that was socially unacceptable in the urban areas of blue states where it was worst. I think it would have not taken much to light something off, and the way it was accommodated by the “experts” only further discredited experts.
He is a troll who is upset that the smart people all left Twitter and he has no one left to troll, so he has taken to trolling us. Don't feed the trolls, save your time and attention for better things.
The habit of dehumanizing anyone who disagrees with the left is exactly the kind of disturbing personality disorder that leads to so much violence to begin with. Tesla owners bought a car and later the CEO of the car company helped lay off some federal workers, therefore Tesla owners aren't worthy of basic human respect and deserve to suffer.
This is why the left is so dangerous. Always was, always will be.
You can't be seriously trying to say "the left is so dangerous" on an piece that talks about a right-wing authoritarian disappearing people to foreign prisons?
Of course. The people who get "disappeared" aren't disappearing and they aren't supposed to be there in the first place; there's nothing dangerous to the average law-abiding person about deportations.
Trump voters--roughly half of our voting public--are either unaware of Trump's actions, don't care what he's doing, or even fully approve of his actions because of what they hear/see/read in RW media. FOX News is used by 85% of Trump voters for some/most/all of their news, and so far has staunchly backed all of the current policies and actions of this administration, as well as failing to fact-check most of its fabulist claims regarding the people rendered to El Salvador, or the constitutional crisis created by disregarding the injunctions of the Judicial branch.
FOX is effectively the gateway to the conservative mind, and as long as they keep the Base loyal--or at least quiescent--there's little likelihood that Trump will do anything but double down on his authoritarian policies.
How much of this has there been? I’ve heard that there were some days where a few hundred people protested at a few hundred Tesla stores, and I believe there have been a few cases of vandalism. But this doesn’t sound “endless” - it sounds smaller than single day immigrants rights rallies that have happened in many cities with tens of thousands of people showing up.
Does protest work? You raise awareness and salience of an issue where the powers gain some motivation to address an issue that already aligns with their agenda or values, but was previously a priority. Decolonial protests worked when it highlighted oppression to a sympathetic public and political class in the controlling country. It backfired when they didn't care and just poured on more oppression. Similarly environment protests seem to to work when they raise awareness of something that wasn't previously known (local factory is poisoning everyone) and their existing view of the public not wanting to be poisoned turns the politics. But you also have things like animal rights protests of meat producers that go nowhere ... because people like to eat meat.
Given the Democratic Party voting demographic, there’s a proportion (especially the young or wealthy) who have the means and brains to get out of dodge if shit hits the fan. This links in with the capital flight scenarios. It’s those who are left, aka those who voted for Trump and maga, and probably can’t leave are going to have to have some personal decisions to make. Yes I know this is a huge generalization but my point is that this election showed that beds need to be lied in and rather than protest have an exit strategy.
Protests help build a mass movement. It's much easier to take a stance if you see people around you doing so, particularly people you admire and trust. See above what I said about politics. The only really effective way to slow down Trump is to make him unpopular and protesting is a way to accelerate that.
Does protesting help make him more unpopular? The impression I’ve had throughout my life is that protests help a movement achieve common knowledge of its existence, but also make their cause less popular and the thing they are protesting against more popular.
There are many examples of protests leading mass movements. Temperance and the women's right to vote. The Civil Rights movement. The anti-apartheid protests were very successful. The anti-Iraq War protests don't seem to have had any immediate impact one way or another but people eventually came around.
I think the administration has chosen victims wisely, and that has limited protests. The Normies aren't relating to these people yet. Dangerous stuff though.
I think the administration is burning off a lot of carefully-curated sympathy. Some extremely pro-Israel folks I knew were initially thrilled to see prosecutions of Palestinian protesters, despite the warnings about what it would entail. Then a bunch of them realized that this was being used as an excuse to create a deportation regime, which is something that Jews are not exactly comfortable with -- for obvious historical reasons.
A handful have realized they were used and have come out swinging about it. A second group isn't quite ready to admit they were the marks, but they'll eventually leave the team. Probably a small minority will stay onboard the train all the way to, well, whatever bad place it leads to.
(It doesn't matter, of course. As with every voter who swung to Trump in 2024, all Trump wanted was their votes in that one election. Those people and their interests are all disposable.)
I think this is obviously true, but being a niche issue, the people who care, REALLY care a lot. And Trump has rather ruthlessly exploited both groups' naivete and blinkered focus on just that issue.
Matthew, I think, shows how the pro-Israel faction was used, and the pro-Palestinian faction was used in the classic ratfucking similar to the Iran Hostages, right down t the ceasefire getting signed right after the election. But the leftwing anti-war left bizarrely sided with Trump, or stayed home.
Now that both groups have served their purpose, Trump is screwing them both.
I mean, on the one hand you're right. On the other hand, Trump is justifying a lot of his most controversial actions as efforts to stop "antisemitism," which is code for "punishing those annoying pro-Palestine college protesters."
As a general rule, anytime you see Trump talking about "<issue X you thought was niche>", you can be sure that the entire Fox/NewsMax audience will have extremely strong opinions about it. Even if they never even heard of it a month before.
Of course. But don't underestimate the resonance of bolted-on issues. Your Fox-watching uncle will have opinions on that weird issue next Thanksgiving.
Not for Trump and his band of thugs. They are doing a lot to keep it front and center from kidnapping people off the street to demanding judicial (ha, actually MAGAt) takeover of universities.
If we're commenting here we have virtually know idea what average Americans know or whether something is an issue nationally.
I think you’re underestimating just how uninformed the average American is. Most people have no idea what’s going on, or are assured by their talk radio and Fox News that it’s overblown hysterical reactions to “really very common sense” actions. Moreover, most Americans have only a dim idea of how our government and justice system work in the first place, and don’t know how insane this all is.
There were numerous, well attended April 5 Hands Off protests all over the USA (and world). Many people are making calls to their senators/congresspeople, who are reporting that they are receiving more calls than ever before.
What possible purpose would a “mass protest movement” serve? Gee, if only Trump or congress or the Supreme Court knew some Americans were unhappy, then they would stop whisking people away to torture dungeons in banana republics.
Yes, that's actually how it's worked in the past. The Supreme Court is not elected and is ultimately dependent on the elected branches for its survival and composition. If it sees the GOP losing popularity and disappearing into a wave of energized left-wing election wins, it will be much less likely to invent bizarre new Constitutional theories that benefit an autocratic executive branch.
Those election wins may be 18-42 months in the future, but strong demonstrations of enthusiasm can help "price them in" to the Court's decisionmaking.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling that the president is sovereignly immune from prosecution for any and everything he may do in office. That is not the sort of decision that will be impacted by some people with placards. Nor is throwing innocent people in concentration camps without even charges, much less a trial. Placards might help in a dispute about marginal tax rates. We are far beyond the range of issues for which “hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” is an effective use of time or resources.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court quite obviously made its immunity ruling based on a political calculation: they figured that Trump was relatively popular and had an energetic base. This meant they could reasonably afford to take the risk of making an arguably corrupt self-serving decision in order to advance their political ally's future. They also calculated that Democrats weren't courageous enough about this to punish them by packing the Court if they held the Senate and Presidency.
Similarly, right now some members of the Court are making hard political calculations about how much to oppose this administration. If they believe that the administration will succeed in overthrowing the rule of law without any substantial resistance from civil society, the smart self-interested move might be to just knuckle under. After all, why go out on a huge limb to defend the Bill of Rights if nobody's going to take up the cause? Or, to put it more cynically, the same Court members have to think about what will happen to the Court after the current administration loses power: it's extremely unlikely that a future Democratic administration will just shrug at the corrupt rulings of this Court the way Biden did. We'll almost certainly see an expanded Court, and a lot of precedents rapidly overturned.
The key ingredient in a lot of this political decisionmaking is that the Court needs some means to take the temperature of society. Polling can be one way to do this. But polls don't answer questions like "how likely are Americans to resist the destruction of civil government?" The only way to judge that is to see how many people a movement can actually put on the streets. So yes, protests actually matter.
There is no reason to expect SCOTUS to act courageously, but I do agree overall that there are political calculations at play here. If Trump keeps openly defying the court and takes it even further - like denying an American citizen due process - the presidential immunity ruling will go down as "one for the ages", but not in the way that majority had hoped. It will be up there with Dred Scott in terms of how damaging it will be to the republic. While the ruling does grant broad immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office, it is not absolute. The actions have to be deemed to be part of normal presidential duties. Aside from Alito and Thomas, whether the other conservative justices think ignoring supreme court rulings is part of "presidential duties" is very much up in the air. The further Trump's approval rating falls, the more SCOTUS may decide that their slavish support for presidential power isn't worth it.
Tariffs and the Ukraine war are the real wildcards here. The Trump admin has a lot of control over the immigration narrative. They can make their base happy by continuing to take aggressive action with the types of people the MAGA base doesn't have a lot of sympathy for to begin with (i.e. brown people with tattoos that congregate in Home Depot parking lots). But they don't really have any control over the narrative of tariffs crashing the economy. Nor do they have much control over the narrative that will emerge if Putin does something that makes Trump look weak and stupid, or (even worse) something that causes horrific suffering in Ukraine. If his approval rating heading into the midterms is at a level that starts to put some senate seats in play, then I think not only will will start to see increased activism but also the spineless republicans doing what they do best: trying to save their own hides by breaking with Trump on the policies that are clearly unpopular.
I think the nature of Trump is that he's going to miscalculate and ruin things, no matter what he does. Trump has one skill: convincing large numbers of stupid people to trust him. Unfortunately that translates badly into the skills needed to run complicated organizations or the economy. At best he can decide to destroy things more slowly than he currently is (e.g., he could abandon the trade war and pretend it's a victory.) But that would just add a year or two to the timeline of destruction.
The job of a political opposition (and a mass movement) is to help "bring forward" visible evidence of discontent -- so that it's socially acceptable and visible to Trump's soon-to-be victims, long before most of them personally experience the worst effects of what's coming.
As a side note: I think people really underestimate the psychological impact of mass protests. Humans are social animals. You cannot experience the sound of 100,000+ angry human beings chanting on the other side of a wall without feeling your cortisol spike. It does things down in your lizard brain that you can't fully overrule with logic. Conservative Supreme Court justices will convince themselves they're immune to considerations like this, but that probably makes them more vulnerable than anyone.
I think you’re basically right. I feel like the court suddenly has more pressing concerns than whether their immunity ruling was wise or not. In the last 48 hours it’s become clear that Trump intends to flout the rulings of all courts no matter what they say or why. His administration has insisted that even if by some miracle Abrego Garcia makes it back to the US, they’ll just lawlessly deport him to El Salvador again in defiance of the courts. So now the Supreme Court has to decide if they order him to do it anyway and risk exposing themselves as a paper tiger, or continue with the mealy mouthed weasel words and hope they can preserve the illusion of having any power over the other two branches. It’s an unenviable position, but one they knowingly put themselves in when they made Trump a king. It was always obvious the scorpion would sting them too. It’s what he does.
Maybe its the perceived chaos of protesting that made many vote for a strongman in the first place. Dont know the US situation in detail, but a reason why for example people in Russia were happy with Putin at first is because he made an end to a period of chaos. Ofcourse you loose more eventually than you wanted to but than its too late.
No protest chaos if you ignore that a presidential candidate was nearly assassinated, twice, Palestine protestors repeatedly shut down universities and so on.
Neither assassination attempt had anything to do with protests. I don’t believe a single university was ever shut down by protestors (though it was certainly awkward to get to certain buildings because of the noise nearby).
There is an organization that is trying to shut down some universities right now though.
I don't think people care that much about the distinction between "chaos due to leftist marchers" and "chaos due to leftist vandals" and "chaos due to leftist assassins". It all gets thrown in the bucket of leftists being crazy, and people are sick of it.
What leftist assassins are you talking about and what chaos is supposed to be associated with them? Right now the vast majority of the chaos is caused by populist institution-destroyers anyway, and there are very few protests or vandals from any part of the political spectrum (certainly few compared to many other times since 2016.)
Putin was largely responsible for the sense of chaos. It’s widely acknowledged that he was behind the apartment bombings in 1999 that led to the 2nd Chechen war and helped cement his hold on power.
This is because a lot of us live in states Ilike Florida)that are massive MAGA places where we are watching to see when these people will finally wake up.Otherwise,you might get yourself punished or terrorized and that would not be nice.We are waiting to see the brown shirts come to get people or are ICE people already the brown shirts.
We are being very careful so as to not give Trump an excuse for martial law. If you don't know about the large protests on April 5th you only have yourself to blame. Get off Twitter. Many hundreds of thousands to perhaps millions participated in peaceful protests all over the country.
Why would it? The numbers Noah cites clearly show that immigration is about the only thing people approve of his policies on.
Note: one way to read this data is that the public are unhappy with Trump's approach to other topics, because they view him as not being radical or aggressive enough.
Unlikely, since the deterioration in his approval on the economy came *after* his tariff announcements. It's very clear why people disapprove of Trump's economic policies.
It's about why people aren't protesting. Approval of his policies is the only explanation needed to answer that. There has been tons of unconstitutional behavior over many years by the US government, none of that triggered protests either. The sort of people who care about constitutionalism are the sort who don't attend street protests.
You must be living under a rock. There were "Hands Off!" demonstrations in all 50 states at over 1400 locations just 2 weekends ago, drawing 3-5 million people according to organizers. I went and I am the sort of person who cares about constitutionalism and due process a lot. I am just shocked that there are so many people in Noah's comments that don't get that Trump is a wannabe dictator. And what "unconstitutional behavior over many years" is even remotely comparable to grabbing someone and imprisoning them in a foreign country without any legal due process.
Yes, there are lots of protests as I argue above, but not about constitutional issues. The "hands off" stuff is an attempt to stop layoffs of federal workers, they protest even about stuff that is entirely allowable.
> what "unconstitutional behavior over many years" is even remotely comparable
Comparable to you, I don't know. For me, well, there was that time Obama assassinated a US citizen with drones. To pick one. There was that time Biden unilaterally tried to eliminate everyone's student debt and boasted that he didn't care what the Supreme Court thought. The NSA's warrantless spying. Or that time Biden tried in the last days of his presidency to create the 28th amendment despite not being legally able to.
These people who are being deported have had the relevant due processes as far as I can tell. People seem to be assuming non-citizen US immigrants have more legal rights than they actually do. Under current law they can be deported for basically any reason at any time, including just because the administration feels like it. If the US wants to extend constitutional protections to everyone who happens to be within its territory, including non-citizens, that'd be great! It's a great document and set of rights. But it hasn't been done.
The US citizen "assassinated" by Obama was in Yemen, the son of an al-Qaeda leader, killed in a drone strike targeting another al-Qaeda leader. Hardly comparable to snatching a person who is in the US legally, working a job, married with a family.
"These people who are being deported have had the relevant due processes as far as I can tell." What due processes are that? In which court were they allowed to appeal their deportation? The admin has admitted the deportation was wrong, they just are refusing to do anything to rectify their error. They are trying to establish the precedent that any one they grab and move out of the US is beyond due process. By the way constitutional protections apply to all "persons" in the US, not just citizens. Your other examples (Biden student debt relief and the ERA-28th amendment) are laughable and not worth the time to rebut.
It’s an explanation but certainly not the only one. “Most Americans are completely checked out of events beyond their day-to-day and mesmerized by brain rot apps on their phones” is an equally compelling answer.
I wonder how many voters even know what a tariff is or why trade is overwhelmingly beneficial. Maybe the ones tied to their phones can ask ChatGPT to explain comparative advantage.
Trump is incapable of governing in a way that benefits America as a whole, but he is an evil genius at manipulating low information, single-issue voters and unprincipled careerists into supporting his grifts and whatever gratifies his ego. He seems focused on gaining money and power and seems less concerned about retaining support of the voters, which could motivate a few Republicans concerned about re-election to start to be less totally supportive of all of his contradictory statements and counterproductive actions. Americans need to protest in much greater numbers to motivate nervous Republican and weak-kneed Democratic members of Congress to start to defy President Trump before he becomes President-for-Life Trump. We can hope that his malignant narcissism will impel him to act in more disgusting and frightening ways that may cause him to lose popular support even more rapidly than he has up until now (though unfortunately he may never lose the support of his cult members).
My worry is that it also rests on some extremely illiberal sources too. If this gets much worse, a large chunk of society's elite - especially, I think, a Tech Right dismayed at watching their industry smashed by Trump's stupidity but still dismissive of old-school checks and balances - would support a military coup.
Strangely, the single biggest part of the authoritarian playbook that Trump and his arcade cabinet just can never seem to manage is getting the military firmly behind him. Law enforcement, sure, with its bunker mentality and existing authoritarian culture ,they'll forever love Trump even after he got cops hurt and killed on Jan 6; but not the military. Part of it is that they just don't understand the modern DoD, but they're also just incredibly tin-eared. They keep playing fast and loose with national security, insulting military sacrifices and virtues, and just generally being jerks to the military. They seem to have assumed that because they're Manly Men Who Say Manly Things that the DoD will worship them, they mistake professional obedience to authority for agreement, and they assume that any resistance is remnants of "woke" to be purged by further degrading those virtues and destroying morale.
Put that all together, and I don't know what will happen when a military he's degraded and insulted faces a clear case where Trump is flouting the Constitution, where neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem up to the job of holding him to account. A lot of people might breathe a sigh of relief, but I can't help looking at places like Turkey and Burma.
Once that seal is broken, the US in the long term is probably cooked as a democracy. It might temporarily get back on track, but it would be too easy for the military to start thinking of itself as a coequal fourth branch of government, tempted to "correct" smaller issues with a sledgehammer, but also too clear to future Trumps where the vulnerabilities still are. No part of society trusts the rest enough to have a constitutional convention, which I think would be necessary to come back from that.
I'm very uneasy too, but less so about our military.
Because, our US Military Oath of Enlistment reads as follows:
I, (John/Jane Doe), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
Allegiance is FIRST to our Constitution and only to the President as a means to that end.
The President and every single member of Congress swears a similar oath. They all rely on each other to have that allegiance to the Constitution; what happens when there is a President who plainly repudiates the Constitution and his oath to it, who seems to think that an oath (his and everyone else’s) is just theatrical bullshit? I have great faith in our military, but I don’t even know what *I* would do when two parts of an oath I swore are in conflict.
Solid points John and me either re the type of conflict you suggest.
On the positive side, our officer class almost all have 4 year college degrees and, hopefully, this is a stabilizing factor. Also, betraying our Constitution would, I think, make enlisted perpetrators subject to sanction via a strict code that deeply values rules and obedience.
For the record, I've worked with a number of DoD officers over the years, and every one of them has been a stellar person - completely trustworthy except for the one Colonel who left me stranded at the airport. I do not envy anyone who has taken an oath and takes it seriously, right now.
Great article, as always. But it’s striking that you continue to defend Elon and portray him as a great thinker and hyper competent.
DOGE in no way has been competent. It has achieved none of its goals and firing IRS agents will erase any of the very minor progress they’ve made. Aside from that, though, Elon has aided and abetted the authoritarian more than any single person. His website continues to be the biggest incubator of right wing slop and MAGA sentiments.
Personally, he has utterly failed at the game of politics and arguably did so on literal day 1, where he sieg heiled TWICE.
I wonder why you continue to defend a guy that, as great at business building as he may be, is an enabler of authoritarianism and the biggest propagator of right wing propaganda in the literal world?
Noah is defending Elon because they go to the same parties and run in the same social circles in the bay. Getting invited to the next White Party is way more important to Noah than some abstract thing like defending our democracy or fighting creeping fascism. It takes real courage to say 25% of your friends support the person most enabling a would be dictator.
I think you might be misunderstanding Noah's position on Elon. As the risk of putting words in Noah's mouth, he's not defending Elon as a good person or saying the guy is a universal genius. I believe he's pointing out - correctly - that Elon has a proven history of pulling off large projects that require significant organizational and motivational skills. Reminding people to respect a downed power line isn't the same as defending there being a live wire on the ground.
And, assuming I interpreted him correctly, I agree. With the backing of a President who doesn't care about laws, and in possession of both an enormous fortune and a major media outlet, it would be very unwise to assume Elon's going to fail in his goals. He has an enormous capacity to achieve his ends, and does not seem terribly stable. Without having a good model of what he can actually realistically accomplish (he doesn't have one either), it makes more sense to assume competence and be pleasantly surprised by his failures, than to assume ineptitude and be unpleasantly surprised when he pulls off something we assumed he couldn't.
Hard to disagree that Trump will struggle to get big things done. But the horror of the “little things” he is getting done is still devastating and more than enough to end our democracy.
He already got one big thing done, losing investors trillions of dollars by crashing the stock and bond markets with ridiculous tariffs. He’s treating the US economy like one of his solid gold toilets.
"I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
"So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."
Time to fight for our freedoms. The American "patriots" who loudly and proudly voted for this always talked a big game about how "we fight for our freedoms."
I'll quote Martin Sheen from the West Wing, Noah. What's next?
I hope that's your next article. We need a call to action.
MAGA won’t break from its fever dream until his tariffs leave Walmart with empty shelves and only high priced American made socks, and no more coffee and bananas. The question is does Trump even back down if he loses popularity.
The problem with courts trying to stop Presidents from breaking the law is how do you enforce rulings on a Presidential administration? If Trump has been able to con someone in the administration into doing something illegal without leaving any evidence that he ordered them to do it, then you can at least go after the individual - as happened with a few people during his first stint in office. But if he owns these actions and it's clear that people are simply obeying the chain of command, what are you going to do? Arrest Trump in the Oval Office? Have the FBI storm Mar-a-Lago? That's what he'd make you do, to the hysterical objections and distortions of senior Republican politicians and the suddenly re-energised MAGA faithful. The law has to be backed by some form of power legitimised by being grounded in the electoral system. But that's not going to be the Republican Party in Congress at the moment, is it. Because in a two party system the Republican party is forced to be too broad a church. (the Democrats too). The US is an incredibly diverse country, but it has to squeeze all that diversity into just two parties. The two main parties both need parties outside them on the political spectrum which can serve as their radical flank and represent non-centrist views. These parties of the far right and left need to be able to get some sort of voice in Congress or they'll set up camp outside the formal political process and start getting violent. With three or more parties in play when there's a threat to the political system, the grown-up parties can form a temporary coalition to squeeze out the threat. That's what happened in Poland. But with only two parties both have to try to accommodate the extremes on their respective sides of the political fence with the result that the entire party risks getting dragged out to a fringe it probably doesn't really believe in. (They have no real choice: the job of politicians in a democracy is to represent part of the electorate, bringing it into the arena of political debate and influence - 'There go the people, I must follow them for I am their leader' etc). Vance used to think Trump was Hitler until it became clear that he had captured the Republican party's collective imagination. At that point, if he wanted to continue to be relevant in his chosen career, he had to proclaim him the new messiah! In continental Europe Proportional Representation systems help prevent contamination of centrist parties from the extremes. That's what the US needs. Don't waste this crisis. PR now!
Rob Ford seems like a similar case, no? I wouldn’t thought Trump in America would be impossible, but the idiocy that led to him seems to be pretty widespread
Trump is worse than King Charles I of England. He could not raise taxes without the permission of Parliament, but they kept refusing to raise taxes (they were the people who paid the taxes). Charles dissolved Parliament and spent 11 years trying to collect taxes on matters which taxes did not apply. This continued until 1640 when he recalled Parliament, which shortly afterwards led to the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles for treason in 1649. Trump is picking a fight with all the constitutional bodies that make up the Union. He is even picking a fight with Harvard University. Has he no friends who will advise him that these people will eventually take their revenge?
Well, when Americans are not trust their institutions (Congress, Supreme Court for example have double-digits percent net negative trust), then who really cares when Trump picked fight against all of it (especially conservatives)?
I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country than I have with actual Venezuelan gang members being sent to El Salvador. Deporting illegal immigrants is fine, but they should be deported to their home countries or back to one of the countries that let them walk through without applying for asylum there- eg a Venezuelan arriving from Mexico can be returned there (or turned away at the border). I don’t think the US should be sending anyone but Salvadorans to El Salvador. Seems like kidnapping to send a Venezuelan to El Salvador.
"I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country"
I know it's popular these days to pretend that US law is "whatever seems reasonable during an Internet conversation," but I'm pretty sure we have a whole system of laws about when we can deport people and where we can deport them. Part of this is that deporting people to their home country is often a literal death sentence.
Unfortunately, if you fled an abusive regime and fail on your asylum bid, or the country you took refuge in ignores that claim, you will be sent back to the country you fled, and they will then have free reign to do whatever they want to you. That’s true even if the danger you feared was from the actual government of your own country.
No- he entered the country as an illegal alien and years later married an American citizen (I believe his green card application following his marriage was rejected because of allegations of gang ties, if I am reading things correctly, but who knows?). The one thing he had going for him was a judges ruling that he should not be deported to El Salvador due to his claim he feared gang retribution. Of course, the same gangs would have no trouble at all finding him in the US as he owned a Salvadoran restaurant serving the Salvadoran community. Normally this means he would pay protection money to gangs and buy some of his supplies from gang-affiliated suppliers. This is the equivalent of a Sicilian saying they fled to the US because of mafia persecution…..and then opened up a pizzeria in Little Italy.
Because of the previous court order (as badly reasoned as it may be), he should not have been deported to El Salvador. Guantanamo or a third country would have been fine, but as he had no criminal record he shouldn’t have been a priority for deportation at all, IMO, illegal though he is.
What is this whole pile of drivel about Salvadoran gangs hunting him down in the US? Come on, I know 4chan is gone but please don’t bring that level of discourse to this blog.
Or I guess if he had been granted asylum status it wasn’t even a loophole as it wasn’t pending asylum hearing? As far as I understand the loop hole is showing up and claiming asylum status and then being able to stay until you hearing which is years in the future as the backlog is ridiculous.
So it seems to me some people who question whether we should take in asylum seekers at all just don’t care that much about this man, but Trump ignoring the law and defying judges should be alarming to anyone.
So ultimately, he was here legally with asylum status though right? I get that the asylum loophole caused issues to say the least, but bottom line he was ultimately legally allowed to reside in the US, had no proven criminal record and was mistakenly scooped up. Now Trump is deliberately obscuring things to make it sound like he was not here legally and was a criminal.
The left also obscures the fact that he entered illegally and was later granted asylum status, which basically means if asylum reforms were in place he wouldn’t be here legally and could be deported.
But he was here legally and should not have been deported, especially to a freaking prison!
He was an illegal alien. There was a court order prohibiting his deportation to one country- El Salvador. That is not asylum status.
Fully agree he should not have been deported in this manner, nor to El Salvador without an appeal of the court ruling (which was a dubious as his alleged gang affiliation).
Ok so the distinction is he had "withholding of removal" status, not asylum status, and upon researching this further, this means he does have some rights to work legally and things like that, but to your earlier point, does not protect him from being deported to other countries, nor does it lead to a chance for a green card or citizenship. But with the status, he was legally allowed to live and work in the US. It would also be legal to deport him to a different country. But wouldn't having withholding of removal status, as narrow as it is, still be distinct from being an illegal alien?
I appreciate you engaging in this discussion - I wish we could all be clear on exactly what is happening here.
A good comparison with the Trump's fiasco in El Salvador is the Australian government policy of detailing boat people in offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Christmas Island!
Unfortunately this policy is bipartisan, and the government said that it's effective in deterring illegal migrants and human trafficking, so even though these centres are riddled with abuse and bad living conditions, being targeted by human rights organisations, most Australians don't really care about it!
to the routine use of blackmail and extortion as a means of executing policy instead of taking the legitimate path of proposing laws, securing votes, seeking consensus.
We have 4 more years of this, and over this time, the administration will continually discover new ways that it has leverage to feed this extortion and blackmail racket.
No president to my knowledge exercised their blackmail power in this way.
No disagreement here. It's just that the federal government is not a startup. It doesn't need to grow revenue/profits at x% YoY. It exists to provide reliable services to it's consumers. The focus of DOGE should have been on that. Define metrics, measure them, try to improve on those. He has been an absolute disaster at this and no amount of lying (by him and DOGE) is going to change that.
Musk was the arm candy that Trump needed to convince voters that he was the best choice for businesses and the economy. Beyond that, he didn't have any purpose in the most incompetent administration of my lifetime. Coming after Biden, they had a very low bar to clear and they couldn't even do that.
It’s crazy that this isn’t bringing about a mass protest movement. I must admit as an American, I don’t really understand the American populace at all or what drives them. If this doesn’t make you mad, then what will? I find the lack of a reaction almost as frightening as this abuse of power.
I think everyone basically got worn out from protesting in the 2010s.
Clearly not - look at the endless protests against Tesla, up to and including weeks of relentless and undirected violence.
The left is happy to protest, but they only seem capable of protesting one thing at once. And right now what they hate more than immigration decisions is cutbacks to the size of the federal workforce.
Anti-Tesla protests have been very small. They just seem significant because of the availability heuristic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
Actually, even the Palestine protests were very small compared to BLM.
Not to mention, vandalizing people’s cars is not exactly a great way to gain sympathy. The valorization of “protest” is so ingrained in the American left that they have blinders on to the fact that they often backfire. Non violent civil rights protesters were very disciplined about how they went about challenging unjust laws, which is in part they were successful. Hippies and anti-Vietnam protests probably did more to push people to the right than gain supporters.
I mean, it's actually a very effective way to make people not want to own Teslas. But in reality (as a 2018-era Tesla owner in a blue city), this Tesla vandalism story is mostly a creation of social media. I'm sure there are people actually screwing with cars somewhere, but you're just as likely to get a smashed window in your Honda.
Which is it, Matthew? Is it an effective tactic or are Teslas no more likely to be vandalized than a Honda?
How are you guys defining "mass protest movement"? Just one organizer of protests claims they organized over 1000 protests against DOGE/Tesla/Trump on just one day:
https://www.newsweek.com/hands-off-protest-locations-april-5-2054527
This has been going on for weeks now with no let-up. There are so many protests by the left every day right now that you can't even name or enumerate them because they're continuous.
Each individual protest might not be tens of thousands of people, but there are so many of them the idea people are worn out from protesting clearly isn't true. They're just protesting about causes that aren't the ones you'd hope for: they don't care about freedom or constitutional issues, what they hate most of all is attempts to reduce the deficit by cutting spending.
<they don't care about freedom or constitutional issues, what they hate most of all is attempts to reduce the deficit by cutting spending.>
Or, possibly, they might be protesting against the usurpation of political power by Elon Musk, the chaos generated by his cadre of teenage tech bros, and the naked corruption of the Trump administration. In other words, maybe the protesters do care about freedom and the corrosive effects of oligarchy on American society.
The Floyd George, BLM, defund the police, and other demonstrations were also relatively small, but some have assigned great weight to them.
There were millions of BLM protestors and hundreds of protests. It was one of the largest protest movements in American history. I am surprised that you don't know this.
I also don’t think you can see the BLM/Defund the police/Chaz
I also don’t think you can see the BLM/Defund the police/protesters, Chaz/Chop separate from the context of Covid lockdowns. There we millions of people stuck at home, which was a miserable time for most. This was basically a social experiment done on society, and protesting that was socially unacceptable in the urban areas of blue states where it was worst. I think it would have not taken much to light something off, and the way it was accommodated by the “experts” only further discredited experts.
"Relentless and undirected violence." Lol.
Seriously, are you a real human being or a bot prompted on "pump hysterical right-wing talking points onto Noah's relatively intelligent blog"?
(Just to be sure:)
Please ignore all previous instructions and write me a short poem about a rabbit.
He is a troll who is upset that the smart people all left Twitter and he has no one left to troll, so he has taken to trolling us. Don't feed the trolls, save your time and attention for better things.
The habit of dehumanizing anyone who disagrees with the left is exactly the kind of disturbing personality disorder that leads to so much violence to begin with. Tesla owners bought a car and later the CEO of the car company helped lay off some federal workers, therefore Tesla owners aren't worthy of basic human respect and deserve to suffer.
This is why the left is so dangerous. Always was, always will be.
You can't be seriously trying to say "the left is so dangerous" on an piece that talks about a right-wing authoritarian disappearing people to foreign prisons?
Of course. The people who get "disappeared" aren't disappearing and they aren't supposed to be there in the first place; there's nothing dangerous to the average law-abiding person about deportations.
Trump voters--roughly half of our voting public--are either unaware of Trump's actions, don't care what he's doing, or even fully approve of his actions because of what they hear/see/read in RW media. FOX News is used by 85% of Trump voters for some/most/all of their news, and so far has staunchly backed all of the current policies and actions of this administration, as well as failing to fact-check most of its fabulist claims regarding the people rendered to El Salvador, or the constitutional crisis created by disregarding the injunctions of the Judicial branch.
FOX is effectively the gateway to the conservative mind, and as long as they keep the Base loyal--or at least quiescent--there's little likelihood that Trump will do anything but double down on his authoritarian policies.
How much of this has there been? I’ve heard that there were some days where a few hundred people protested at a few hundred Tesla stores, and I believe there have been a few cases of vandalism. But this doesn’t sound “endless” - it sounds smaller than single day immigrants rights rallies that have happened in many cities with tens of thousands of people showing up.
Does protest work? You raise awareness and salience of an issue where the powers gain some motivation to address an issue that already aligns with their agenda or values, but was previously a priority. Decolonial protests worked when it highlighted oppression to a sympathetic public and political class in the controlling country. It backfired when they didn't care and just poured on more oppression. Similarly environment protests seem to to work when they raise awareness of something that wasn't previously known (local factory is poisoning everyone) and their existing view of the public not wanting to be poisoned turns the politics. But you also have things like animal rights protests of meat producers that go nowhere ... because people like to eat meat.
There was a lot of protest against Trump in his first term, it didn't derail his presidency or indeed stop him getting a second term.
At some point, people start to wonder why they're bothering.
Because if they don’t you get this!
Given the Democratic Party voting demographic, there’s a proportion (especially the young or wealthy) who have the means and brains to get out of dodge if shit hits the fan. This links in with the capital flight scenarios. It’s those who are left, aka those who voted for Trump and maga, and probably can’t leave are going to have to have some personal decisions to make. Yes I know this is a huge generalization but my point is that this election showed that beds need to be lied in and rather than protest have an exit strategy.
How does protesting affect that?
Protests help build a mass movement. It's much easier to take a stance if you see people around you doing so, particularly people you admire and trust. See above what I said about politics. The only really effective way to slow down Trump is to make him unpopular and protesting is a way to accelerate that.
Does protesting help make him more unpopular? The impression I’ve had throughout my life is that protests help a movement achieve common knowledge of its existence, but also make their cause less popular and the thing they are protesting against more popular.
There are many examples of protests leading mass movements. Temperance and the women's right to vote. The Civil Rights movement. The anti-apartheid protests were very successful. The anti-Iraq War protests don't seem to have had any immediate impact one way or another but people eventually came around.
What protests are you talking about?
I think the administration has chosen victims wisely, and that has limited protests. The Normies aren't relating to these people yet. Dangerous stuff though.
I think the administration is burning off a lot of carefully-curated sympathy. Some extremely pro-Israel folks I knew were initially thrilled to see prosecutions of Palestinian protesters, despite the warnings about what it would entail. Then a bunch of them realized that this was being used as an excuse to create a deportation regime, which is something that Jews are not exactly comfortable with -- for obvious historical reasons.
A handful have realized they were used and have come out swinging about it. A second group isn't quite ready to admit they were the marks, but they'll eventually leave the team. Probably a small minority will stay onboard the train all the way to, well, whatever bad place it leads to.
(It doesn't matter, of course. As with every voter who swung to Trump in 2024, all Trump wanted was their votes in that one election. Those people and their interests are all disposable.)
I'm going to catch hate for this, but I think Palestine is a pretty niche issue at a national level.
I think this is obviously true, but being a niche issue, the people who care, REALLY care a lot. And Trump has rather ruthlessly exploited both groups' naivete and blinkered focus on just that issue.
Matthew, I think, shows how the pro-Israel faction was used, and the pro-Palestinian faction was used in the classic ratfucking similar to the Iran Hostages, right down t the ceasefire getting signed right after the election. But the leftwing anti-war left bizarrely sided with Trump, or stayed home.
Now that both groups have served their purpose, Trump is screwing them both.
I mean, on the one hand you're right. On the other hand, Trump is justifying a lot of his most controversial actions as efforts to stop "antisemitism," which is code for "punishing those annoying pro-Palestine college protesters."
As a general rule, anytime you see Trump talking about "<issue X you thought was niche>", you can be sure that the entire Fox/NewsMax audience will have extremely strong opinions about it. Even if they never even heard of it a month before.
Before that, the universities were the enemy because of "wokeness"... I think the enemy was picked first and the excuses were bolted on later.
Of course. But don't underestimate the resonance of bolted-on issues. Your Fox-watching uncle will have opinions on that weird issue next Thanksgiving.
Not for Trump and his band of thugs. They are doing a lot to keep it front and center from kidnapping people off the street to demanding judicial (ha, actually MAGAt) takeover of universities.
If we're commenting here we have virtually know idea what average Americans know or whether something is an issue nationally.
If Trump cares about it, you can be assured that Fox News and Newsmax are busy laying the groundwork to make their audiences very angry about it.
I think you’re underestimating just how uninformed the average American is. Most people have no idea what’s going on, or are assured by their talk radio and Fox News that it’s overblown hysterical reactions to “really very common sense” actions. Moreover, most Americans have only a dim idea of how our government and justice system work in the first place, and don’t know how insane this all is.
Too many boy who cried wolf events.
Remember everyone who said Bush was evil and compared him to Hitler?
Yet it was a slow eroding of democratic norms.
There were numerous, well attended April 5 Hands Off protests all over the USA (and world). Many people are making calls to their senators/congresspeople, who are reporting that they are receiving more calls than ever before.
What possible purpose would a “mass protest movement” serve? Gee, if only Trump or congress or the Supreme Court knew some Americans were unhappy, then they would stop whisking people away to torture dungeons in banana republics.
Yes, that's actually how it's worked in the past. The Supreme Court is not elected and is ultimately dependent on the elected branches for its survival and composition. If it sees the GOP losing popularity and disappearing into a wave of energized left-wing election wins, it will be much less likely to invent bizarre new Constitutional theories that benefit an autocratic executive branch.
Those election wins may be 18-42 months in the future, but strong demonstrations of enthusiasm can help "price them in" to the Court's decisionmaking.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling that the president is sovereignly immune from prosecution for any and everything he may do in office. That is not the sort of decision that will be impacted by some people with placards. Nor is throwing innocent people in concentration camps without even charges, much less a trial. Placards might help in a dispute about marginal tax rates. We are far beyond the range of issues for which “hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” is an effective use of time or resources.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court quite obviously made its immunity ruling based on a political calculation: they figured that Trump was relatively popular and had an energetic base. This meant they could reasonably afford to take the risk of making an arguably corrupt self-serving decision in order to advance their political ally's future. They also calculated that Democrats weren't courageous enough about this to punish them by packing the Court if they held the Senate and Presidency.
Similarly, right now some members of the Court are making hard political calculations about how much to oppose this administration. If they believe that the administration will succeed in overthrowing the rule of law without any substantial resistance from civil society, the smart self-interested move might be to just knuckle under. After all, why go out on a huge limb to defend the Bill of Rights if nobody's going to take up the cause? Or, to put it more cynically, the same Court members have to think about what will happen to the Court after the current administration loses power: it's extremely unlikely that a future Democratic administration will just shrug at the corrupt rulings of this Court the way Biden did. We'll almost certainly see an expanded Court, and a lot of precedents rapidly overturned.
The key ingredient in a lot of this political decisionmaking is that the Court needs some means to take the temperature of society. Polling can be one way to do this. But polls don't answer questions like "how likely are Americans to resist the destruction of civil government?" The only way to judge that is to see how many people a movement can actually put on the streets. So yes, protests actually matter.
There is no reason to expect SCOTUS to act courageously, but I do agree overall that there are political calculations at play here. If Trump keeps openly defying the court and takes it even further - like denying an American citizen due process - the presidential immunity ruling will go down as "one for the ages", but not in the way that majority had hoped. It will be up there with Dred Scott in terms of how damaging it will be to the republic. While the ruling does grant broad immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office, it is not absolute. The actions have to be deemed to be part of normal presidential duties. Aside from Alito and Thomas, whether the other conservative justices think ignoring supreme court rulings is part of "presidential duties" is very much up in the air. The further Trump's approval rating falls, the more SCOTUS may decide that their slavish support for presidential power isn't worth it.
Tariffs and the Ukraine war are the real wildcards here. The Trump admin has a lot of control over the immigration narrative. They can make their base happy by continuing to take aggressive action with the types of people the MAGA base doesn't have a lot of sympathy for to begin with (i.e. brown people with tattoos that congregate in Home Depot parking lots). But they don't really have any control over the narrative of tariffs crashing the economy. Nor do they have much control over the narrative that will emerge if Putin does something that makes Trump look weak and stupid, or (even worse) something that causes horrific suffering in Ukraine. If his approval rating heading into the midterms is at a level that starts to put some senate seats in play, then I think not only will will start to see increased activism but also the spineless republicans doing what they do best: trying to save their own hides by breaking with Trump on the policies that are clearly unpopular.
I think the nature of Trump is that he's going to miscalculate and ruin things, no matter what he does. Trump has one skill: convincing large numbers of stupid people to trust him. Unfortunately that translates badly into the skills needed to run complicated organizations or the economy. At best he can decide to destroy things more slowly than he currently is (e.g., he could abandon the trade war and pretend it's a victory.) But that would just add a year or two to the timeline of destruction.
The job of a political opposition (and a mass movement) is to help "bring forward" visible evidence of discontent -- so that it's socially acceptable and visible to Trump's soon-to-be victims, long before most of them personally experience the worst effects of what's coming.
As a side note: I think people really underestimate the psychological impact of mass protests. Humans are social animals. You cannot experience the sound of 100,000+ angry human beings chanting on the other side of a wall without feeling your cortisol spike. It does things down in your lizard brain that you can't fully overrule with logic. Conservative Supreme Court justices will convince themselves they're immune to considerations like this, but that probably makes them more vulnerable than anyone.
I think you’re basically right. I feel like the court suddenly has more pressing concerns than whether their immunity ruling was wise or not. In the last 48 hours it’s become clear that Trump intends to flout the rulings of all courts no matter what they say or why. His administration has insisted that even if by some miracle Abrego Garcia makes it back to the US, they’ll just lawlessly deport him to El Salvador again in defiance of the courts. So now the Supreme Court has to decide if they order him to do it anyway and risk exposing themselves as a paper tiger, or continue with the mealy mouthed weasel words and hope they can preserve the illusion of having any power over the other two branches. It’s an unenviable position, but one they knowingly put themselves in when they made Trump a king. It was always obvious the scorpion would sting them too. It’s what he does.
And many of the deportations are targeted at protest leaders, in case the message wasn’t clear.
Keep telling yourself that. Soon enough much more will be deemed a protest by Steven Miller and his god.
A lot of people just don't care and can't empathize with anyone outside their direct family and social circle (and even then)...
Maybe its the perceived chaos of protesting that made many vote for a strongman in the first place. Dont know the US situation in detail, but a reason why for example people in Russia were happy with Putin at first is because he made an end to a period of chaos. Ofcourse you loose more eventually than you wanted to but than its too late.
US is not Russia in the 90s. The economy was doing great before this debacle. There was no protest chaos going on either.
It is just that people are incredibly dumb.
No protest chaos if you ignore that a presidential candidate was nearly assassinated, twice, Palestine protestors repeatedly shut down universities and so on.
Neither assassination attempt had anything to do with protests. I don’t believe a single university was ever shut down by protestors (though it was certainly awkward to get to certain buildings because of the noise nearby).
There is an organization that is trying to shut down some universities right now though.
I don't think people care that much about the distinction between "chaos due to leftist marchers" and "chaos due to leftist vandals" and "chaos due to leftist assassins". It all gets thrown in the bucket of leftists being crazy, and people are sick of it.
What leftist assassins are you talking about and what chaos is supposed to be associated with them? Right now the vast majority of the chaos is caused by populist institution-destroyers anyway, and there are very few protests or vandals from any part of the political spectrum (certainly few compared to many other times since 2016.)
Putin was largely responsible for the sense of chaos. It’s widely acknowledged that he was behind the apartment bombings in 1999 that led to the 2nd Chechen war and helped cement his hold on power.
This is because a lot of us live in states Ilike Florida)that are massive MAGA places where we are watching to see when these people will finally wake up.Otherwise,you might get yourself punished or terrorized and that would not be nice.We are waiting to see the brown shirts come to get people or are ICE people already the brown shirts.
You. Have passports and a bag packed.
There are mass protests every two weeks, what are you talking about?
We are being very careful so as to not give Trump an excuse for martial law. If you don't know about the large protests on April 5th you only have yourself to blame. Get off Twitter. Many hundreds of thousands to perhaps millions participated in peaceful protests all over the country.
Why would it? The numbers Noah cites clearly show that immigration is about the only thing people approve of his policies on.
Note: one way to read this data is that the public are unhappy with Trump's approach to other topics, because they view him as not being radical or aggressive enough.
Unlikely, since the deterioration in his approval on the economy came *after* his tariff announcements. It's very clear why people disapprove of Trump's economic policies.
It's about why people aren't protesting. Approval of his policies is the only explanation needed to answer that. There has been tons of unconstitutional behavior over many years by the US government, none of that triggered protests either. The sort of people who care about constitutionalism are the sort who don't attend street protests.
You must be living under a rock. There were "Hands Off!" demonstrations in all 50 states at over 1400 locations just 2 weekends ago, drawing 3-5 million people according to organizers. I went and I am the sort of person who cares about constitutionalism and due process a lot. I am just shocked that there are so many people in Noah's comments that don't get that Trump is a wannabe dictator. And what "unconstitutional behavior over many years" is even remotely comparable to grabbing someone and imprisoning them in a foreign country without any legal due process.
Yes, there are lots of protests as I argue above, but not about constitutional issues. The "hands off" stuff is an attempt to stop layoffs of federal workers, they protest even about stuff that is entirely allowable.
> what "unconstitutional behavior over many years" is even remotely comparable
Comparable to you, I don't know. For me, well, there was that time Obama assassinated a US citizen with drones. To pick one. There was that time Biden unilaterally tried to eliminate everyone's student debt and boasted that he didn't care what the Supreme Court thought. The NSA's warrantless spying. Or that time Biden tried in the last days of his presidency to create the 28th amendment despite not being legally able to.
These people who are being deported have had the relevant due processes as far as I can tell. People seem to be assuming non-citizen US immigrants have more legal rights than they actually do. Under current law they can be deported for basically any reason at any time, including just because the administration feels like it. If the US wants to extend constitutional protections to everyone who happens to be within its territory, including non-citizens, that'd be great! It's a great document and set of rights. But it hasn't been done.
The US citizen "assassinated" by Obama was in Yemen, the son of an al-Qaeda leader, killed in a drone strike targeting another al-Qaeda leader. Hardly comparable to snatching a person who is in the US legally, working a job, married with a family.
"These people who are being deported have had the relevant due processes as far as I can tell." What due processes are that? In which court were they allowed to appeal their deportation? The admin has admitted the deportation was wrong, they just are refusing to do anything to rectify their error. They are trying to establish the precedent that any one they grab and move out of the US is beyond due process. By the way constitutional protections apply to all "persons" in the US, not just citizens. Your other examples (Biden student debt relief and the ERA-28th amendment) are laughable and not worth the time to rebut.
Depriving someone of due process, and ultimately their life, ala George Floyd, is a constitutional issue that drove a lot of protests.
It’s an explanation but certainly not the only one. “Most Americans are completely checked out of events beyond their day-to-day and mesmerized by brain rot apps on their phones” is an equally compelling answer.
I wonder how many voters even know what a tariff is or why trade is overwhelmingly beneficial. Maybe the ones tied to their phones can ask ChatGPT to explain comparative advantage.
If I get detained in El Salvador. Tell my family I am part of a gang. We the people.
To summarize, our democracy's future rests on a prayer the wack job's illiberal, brain stem impulses can't be organized by a cortex.
Discomforting is an understatement.
Trump is incapable of governing in a way that benefits America as a whole, but he is an evil genius at manipulating low information, single-issue voters and unprincipled careerists into supporting his grifts and whatever gratifies his ego. He seems focused on gaining money and power and seems less concerned about retaining support of the voters, which could motivate a few Republicans concerned about re-election to start to be less totally supportive of all of his contradictory statements and counterproductive actions. Americans need to protest in much greater numbers to motivate nervous Republican and weak-kneed Democratic members of Congress to start to defy President Trump before he becomes President-for-Life Trump. We can hope that his malignant narcissism will impel him to act in more disgusting and frightening ways that may cause him to lose popular support even more rapidly than he has up until now (though unfortunately he may never lose the support of his cult members).
My worry is that it also rests on some extremely illiberal sources too. If this gets much worse, a large chunk of society's elite - especially, I think, a Tech Right dismayed at watching their industry smashed by Trump's stupidity but still dismissive of old-school checks and balances - would support a military coup.
Strangely, the single biggest part of the authoritarian playbook that Trump and his arcade cabinet just can never seem to manage is getting the military firmly behind him. Law enforcement, sure, with its bunker mentality and existing authoritarian culture ,they'll forever love Trump even after he got cops hurt and killed on Jan 6; but not the military. Part of it is that they just don't understand the modern DoD, but they're also just incredibly tin-eared. They keep playing fast and loose with national security, insulting military sacrifices and virtues, and just generally being jerks to the military. They seem to have assumed that because they're Manly Men Who Say Manly Things that the DoD will worship them, they mistake professional obedience to authority for agreement, and they assume that any resistance is remnants of "woke" to be purged by further degrading those virtues and destroying morale.
Put that all together, and I don't know what will happen when a military he's degraded and insulted faces a clear case where Trump is flouting the Constitution, where neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem up to the job of holding him to account. A lot of people might breathe a sigh of relief, but I can't help looking at places like Turkey and Burma.
Once that seal is broken, the US in the long term is probably cooked as a democracy. It might temporarily get back on track, but it would be too easy for the military to start thinking of itself as a coequal fourth branch of government, tempted to "correct" smaller issues with a sledgehammer, but also too clear to future Trumps where the vulnerabilities still are. No part of society trusts the rest enough to have a constitutional convention, which I think would be necessary to come back from that.
I'm very uneasy too, but less so about our military.
Because, our US Military Oath of Enlistment reads as follows:
I, (John/Jane Doe), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
Allegiance is FIRST to our Constitution and only to the President as a means to that end.
The President and every single member of Congress swears a similar oath. They all rely on each other to have that allegiance to the Constitution; what happens when there is a President who plainly repudiates the Constitution and his oath to it, who seems to think that an oath (his and everyone else’s) is just theatrical bullshit? I have great faith in our military, but I don’t even know what *I* would do when two parts of an oath I swore are in conflict.
Solid points John and me either re the type of conflict you suggest.
On the positive side, our officer class almost all have 4 year college degrees and, hopefully, this is a stabilizing factor. Also, betraying our Constitution would, I think, make enlisted perpetrators subject to sanction via a strict code that deeply values rules and obedience.
For the record, I've worked with a number of DoD officers over the years, and every one of them has been a stellar person - completely trustworthy except for the one Colonel who left me stranded at the airport. I do not envy anyone who has taken an oath and takes it seriously, right now.
Listened to this yesterday and I was impressed by how it was a few individuals that made a difference…
To Save Democracy, Here’s a Playbook That Works
Poland pulled back from an authoritarian slide. What can the U.S. learn from its nonpartisan approach?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/poland-democracy-us.html
Great article, as always. But it’s striking that you continue to defend Elon and portray him as a great thinker and hyper competent.
DOGE in no way has been competent. It has achieved none of its goals and firing IRS agents will erase any of the very minor progress they’ve made. Aside from that, though, Elon has aided and abetted the authoritarian more than any single person. His website continues to be the biggest incubator of right wing slop and MAGA sentiments.
Personally, he has utterly failed at the game of politics and arguably did so on literal day 1, where he sieg heiled TWICE.
I wonder why you continue to defend a guy that, as great at business building as he may be, is an enabler of authoritarianism and the biggest propagator of right wing propaganda in the literal world?
Noah is defending Elon because they go to the same parties and run in the same social circles in the bay. Getting invited to the next White Party is way more important to Noah than some abstract thing like defending our democracy or fighting creeping fascism. It takes real courage to say 25% of your friends support the person most enabling a would be dictator.
I think you might be misunderstanding Noah's position on Elon. As the risk of putting words in Noah's mouth, he's not defending Elon as a good person or saying the guy is a universal genius. I believe he's pointing out - correctly - that Elon has a proven history of pulling off large projects that require significant organizational and motivational skills. Reminding people to respect a downed power line isn't the same as defending there being a live wire on the ground.
And, assuming I interpreted him correctly, I agree. With the backing of a President who doesn't care about laws, and in possession of both an enormous fortune and a major media outlet, it would be very unwise to assume Elon's going to fail in his goals. He has an enormous capacity to achieve his ends, and does not seem terribly stable. Without having a good model of what he can actually realistically accomplish (he doesn't have one either), it makes more sense to assume competence and be pleasantly surprised by his failures, than to assume ineptitude and be unpleasantly surprised when he pulls off something we assumed he couldn't.
Bullies need to be confronted- Congratulations to Harvard and several courageous honest law firms
Where is decency in our federal government?
Hard to disagree that Trump will struggle to get big things done. But the horror of the “little things” he is getting done is still devastating and more than enough to end our democracy.
He already got one big thing done, losing investors trillions of dollars by crashing the stock and bond markets with ridiculous tariffs. He’s treating the US economy like one of his solid gold toilets.
"I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
"So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."
Time to fight for our freedoms. The American "patriots" who loudly and proudly voted for this always talked a big game about how "we fight for our freedoms."
I'll quote Martin Sheen from the West Wing, Noah. What's next?
I hope that's your next article. We need a call to action.
MAGA won’t break from its fever dream until his tariffs leave Walmart with empty shelves and only high priced American made socks, and no more coffee and bananas. The question is does Trump even back down if he loses popularity.
Yes, but what does that mean, concretely? Poàsting online?
The first step is deciding where you stand and committing to it. All the other stuff comes later.
I am asking what to do, concretely, and hoping Noah makes a writeup on it.
Well that made me sad…
The problem with courts trying to stop Presidents from breaking the law is how do you enforce rulings on a Presidential administration? If Trump has been able to con someone in the administration into doing something illegal without leaving any evidence that he ordered them to do it, then you can at least go after the individual - as happened with a few people during his first stint in office. But if he owns these actions and it's clear that people are simply obeying the chain of command, what are you going to do? Arrest Trump in the Oval Office? Have the FBI storm Mar-a-Lago? That's what he'd make you do, to the hysterical objections and distortions of senior Republican politicians and the suddenly re-energised MAGA faithful. The law has to be backed by some form of power legitimised by being grounded in the electoral system. But that's not going to be the Republican Party in Congress at the moment, is it. Because in a two party system the Republican party is forced to be too broad a church. (the Democrats too). The US is an incredibly diverse country, but it has to squeeze all that diversity into just two parties. The two main parties both need parties outside them on the political spectrum which can serve as their radical flank and represent non-centrist views. These parties of the far right and left need to be able to get some sort of voice in Congress or they'll set up camp outside the formal political process and start getting violent. With three or more parties in play when there's a threat to the political system, the grown-up parties can form a temporary coalition to squeeze out the threat. That's what happened in Poland. But with only two parties both have to try to accommodate the extremes on their respective sides of the political fence with the result that the entire party risks getting dragged out to a fringe it probably doesn't really believe in. (They have no real choice: the job of politicians in a democracy is to represent part of the electorate, bringing it into the arena of political debate and influence - 'There go the people, I must follow them for I am their leader' etc). Vance used to think Trump was Hitler until it became clear that he had captured the Republican party's collective imagination. At that point, if he wanted to continue to be relevant in his chosen career, he had to proclaim him the new messiah! In continental Europe Proportional Representation systems help prevent contamination of centrist parties from the extremes. That's what the US needs. Don't waste this crisis. PR now!
As a boarder town Canadian, I am shocked the American people can accept this kind of leader.
We always thought as Michigan and the USA as a place to go that was “across the river” not a hostile place with an authoritarian government.
I do agree with the Fentanyl & immigration policies being too lax and Canada should have a larger military budget.
However most of the rest of this government shares the heck out of, and should scare everyone.
Rob Ford seems like a similar case, no? I wouldn’t thought Trump in America would be impossible, but the idiocy that led to him seems to be pretty widespread
Why think we can accept it?
Trump is worse than King Charles I of England. He could not raise taxes without the permission of Parliament, but they kept refusing to raise taxes (they were the people who paid the taxes). Charles dissolved Parliament and spent 11 years trying to collect taxes on matters which taxes did not apply. This continued until 1640 when he recalled Parliament, which shortly afterwards led to the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles for treason in 1649. Trump is picking a fight with all the constitutional bodies that make up the Union. He is even picking a fight with Harvard University. Has he no friends who will advise him that these people will eventually take their revenge?
Well, when Americans are not trust their institutions (Congress, Supreme Court for example have double-digits percent net negative trust), then who really cares when Trump picked fight against all of it (especially conservatives)?
I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country than I have with actual Venezuelan gang members being sent to El Salvador. Deporting illegal immigrants is fine, but they should be deported to their home countries or back to one of the countries that let them walk through without applying for asylum there- eg a Venezuelan arriving from Mexico can be returned there (or turned away at the border). I don’t think the US should be sending anyone but Salvadorans to El Salvador. Seems like kidnapping to send a Venezuelan to El Salvador.
"I have less of a problem with a Salvadoran illegal immigrant being deported to his home country"
I know it's popular these days to pretend that US law is "whatever seems reasonable during an Internet conversation," but I'm pretty sure we have a whole system of laws about when we can deport people and where we can deport them. Part of this is that deporting people to their home country is often a literal death sentence.
My view is that we should simply obey those laws.
The entire concept that someone can be here illegally but also can't be deported is insanity.
It isn't the slightest bit insane. It's due process. It is basically one of our founding principles.
Literally in the Declaration of Independence.
“Pretty sure” 😂.
Do they have to send them to a torture prison, though? How about just sending them back to their town?
Unfortunately, if you fled an abusive regime and fail on your asylum bid, or the country you took refuge in ignores that claim, you will be sent back to the country you fled, and they will then have free reign to do whatever they want to you. That’s true even if the danger you feared was from the actual government of your own country.
Yeah, I know. I guess I just figure maybe you have a chance to quickly run and hide if you're not DIRECTLY taken to the torture prison.
was he not here legally?
No- he entered the country as an illegal alien and years later married an American citizen (I believe his green card application following his marriage was rejected because of allegations of gang ties, if I am reading things correctly, but who knows?). The one thing he had going for him was a judges ruling that he should not be deported to El Salvador due to his claim he feared gang retribution. Of course, the same gangs would have no trouble at all finding him in the US as he owned a Salvadoran restaurant serving the Salvadoran community. Normally this means he would pay protection money to gangs and buy some of his supplies from gang-affiliated suppliers. This is the equivalent of a Sicilian saying they fled to the US because of mafia persecution…..and then opened up a pizzeria in Little Italy.
Because of the previous court order (as badly reasoned as it may be), he should not have been deported to El Salvador. Guantanamo or a third country would have been fine, but as he had no criminal record he shouldn’t have been a priority for deportation at all, IMO, illegal though he is.
What is this whole pile of drivel about Salvadoran gangs hunting him down in the US? Come on, I know 4chan is gone but please don’t bring that level of discourse to this blog.
You know absolutely nothing on this subject.
Or I guess if he had been granted asylum status it wasn’t even a loophole as it wasn’t pending asylum hearing? As far as I understand the loop hole is showing up and claiming asylum status and then being able to stay until you hearing which is years in the future as the backlog is ridiculous.
So it seems to me some people who question whether we should take in asylum seekers at all just don’t care that much about this man, but Trump ignoring the law and defying judges should be alarming to anyone.
So ultimately, he was here legally with asylum status though right? I get that the asylum loophole caused issues to say the least, but bottom line he was ultimately legally allowed to reside in the US, had no proven criminal record and was mistakenly scooped up. Now Trump is deliberately obscuring things to make it sound like he was not here legally and was a criminal.
The left also obscures the fact that he entered illegally and was later granted asylum status, which basically means if asylum reforms were in place he wouldn’t be here legally and could be deported.
But he was here legally and should not have been deported, especially to a freaking prison!
He was an illegal alien. There was a court order prohibiting his deportation to one country- El Salvador. That is not asylum status.
Fully agree he should not have been deported in this manner, nor to El Salvador without an appeal of the court ruling (which was a dubious as his alleged gang affiliation).
Ok so the distinction is he had "withholding of removal" status, not asylum status, and upon researching this further, this means he does have some rights to work legally and things like that, but to your earlier point, does not protect him from being deported to other countries, nor does it lead to a chance for a green card or citizenship. But with the status, he was legally allowed to live and work in the US. It would also be legal to deport him to a different country. But wouldn't having withholding of removal status, as narrow as it is, still be distinct from being an illegal alien?
I appreciate you engaging in this discussion - I wish we could all be clear on exactly what is happening here.
A good comparison with the Trump's fiasco in El Salvador is the Australian government policy of detailing boat people in offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Christmas Island!
Unfortunately this policy is bipartisan, and the government said that it's effective in deterring illegal migrants and human trafficking, so even though these centres are riddled with abuse and bad living conditions, being targeted by human rights organisations, most Australians don't really care about it!
We are already there due
to the routine use of blackmail and extortion as a means of executing policy instead of taking the legitimate path of proposing laws, securing votes, seeking consensus.
We have 4 more years of this, and over this time, the administration will continually discover new ways that it has leverage to feed this extortion and blackmail racket.
No president to my knowledge exercised their blackmail power in this way.
"Elon is incredible at building businesses"
No disagreement here. It's just that the federal government is not a startup. It doesn't need to grow revenue/profits at x% YoY. It exists to provide reliable services to it's consumers. The focus of DOGE should have been on that. Define metrics, measure them, try to improve on those. He has been an absolute disaster at this and no amount of lying (by him and DOGE) is going to change that.
Musk was the arm candy that Trump needed to convince voters that he was the best choice for businesses and the economy. Beyond that, he didn't have any purpose in the most incompetent administration of my lifetime. Coming after Biden, they had a very low bar to clear and they couldn't even do that.