The Department of Justice has declared war on the federal courts, conveniently omitting the Supreme Court. This is not the surmise of some liberal pundit. It is not an inference drawn from the rant of Emil Bove, now a federal judge, once Trump’s personal lawyer and a high-ranking Justice Department figure. Bove is said to have told his colleagues, after they had ruled against the government in a Venezuelan deportee’s case, “F… the courts.” Bove’s behavior raised eyebrows at the time, but the criticism largely subsided after the Senate confirmed him for the Third Circuit bench.  

But when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told the Federalist Society in November that we must declare war on the courts for bad decisions, there is reason to fear that the independence of the judiciary is seriously undermined. 

Specifically, Blanche attributed the Trump administration’s myriad losses in the lower federal courts to “rogue activist judges,” claiming that these “liberals” are “more political or certainly as political as the most liberal governor or D.A.” As Blanche continued, “There’s a group of judges that are repeat players, and that’s obviously not by happenstance, that’s intentional, and it’s a war, man.” Blanche called it a “war” three times in his speech.” He said we have a “travesty when you have an individual judge able to stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy that’s constitutional and allowed just because he or she chooses to do so.” But isn’t that precisely what judges are supposed to do? Nevertheless, Blanche thundered, “So, it’s a war.” 

The “war” is being fought on many fronts. Blanche speaks for Attorney General Pam Bondi, who filed a senseless misconduct complaint against Chief Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. district court; White House Rasputin Stephen Miller intermittently decries each adverse ruling against the Trump administration as a “judicial insurrection”; and, although it has been postponed, the Senate Judiciary Committee had been set to convene a hearing on claims of misconduct by two district judges.  

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said at a conference of judges and lawyers last May, “These attacks are not random; they seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity. The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. “And they ultimately risk undermining our constitution and the rule of law.” Jackson called on the judges in the room to show “raw courage” and dispense justice without fear of any outside consequences. “I urge you to keep going, keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service.”  

Court orders must be obeyed unless and until reversed. This is a particular duty imposed on Justice Department lawyers sworn to uphold the Constitution. When this obligation is repudiated, tyranny reigns. There is no reason for the executive branch to delegitimize the judicial branch unless it fears that judges will hold it accountable. Judges today face calls for their impeachment, threats of violence, and instances where their orders are not obeyed. 

One would have thought that political impeachment of judges was settled in 1805, when the Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson sought to impeach the Federalist Justice Samuel Chase. Chase had been a founding father and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Pre-Chase, there had been one prior Senate impeachment of a judge; in that case, the jurist was removed for drunkenness and insanity. The Chase case required the Senate to explore the meaning of impeachable crimes. 

The Senate record refers to Chase as “a staunch federalist with a volcanic personality.” His fiery rhetoric often drew public attention and criticism, particularly from the Democratic-Republicans who controlled Congress. His conduct, especially his partisan commentary during jury charges, further fueled calls for his impeachment. 

Jefferson became incensed when he learned that Chase had charged a grand jury in a way the president believed had an unfair political slant. So, he wrote to the House and asked them to impeach. The bill of impeachment accused Chase of acting with bias. The articles also addressed rulings he made in cases involving treason and sedition, including refusing to dismiss allegedly biased grand jurors and excluding or limiting defense witnesses in politically sensitive cases. The House impeached Chase for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and he stood trial in the Senate, declaring that he was being prosecuted for his politics rather than for any crime. The Senate presided over by Jefferson’s vice president, Aaron Burr, who was a fugitive from justice, having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel the preceding year, failed to convict, even though Jefferson’s party held a super majority. Chase resumed his judicial duties.  

The failed impeachment set a precedent. A federal judge, appointed for life, does not sit at the pleasure of the Senate. We have learned that the Constitution requires judges to tell us what the law is. They should not be impeached for rulings with which the party in power disagrees. Judges should be impeached for outright criminal behavior, such as, to use a true-to-life example, receiving extravagant gifts from parties with business before the court.  

Stephen Vladeck, the Constitutional scholar, called Blanche’s statements “shamelessly hypocritical; and profoundly dangerous.” He wrote in his Substack One First, “The galling part is that Blanche never actually explains which of the more than 100 federal district court judges (to say nothing of the dozens of circuit judges) to rule against the Trump administration are ‘rogue activist judges.’ And all he really could provide as support for why they are “rogue activist judges” is because they are … ruling against the Trump administration.” Blanche said that “these Article. III judges [are] literally telling the president, the executive, what he can and cannot do.” 

And that is precisely what Article III judges are supposed to do. Blanche reminds us of Louie, the corrupt police chief in Casablanca who cynically said as he collected his winnings in Rick’s café, “I am shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in here.”  

Blanche is parroting the “unitary executive theory” that the president has total power over the executive branch, and even the entire government. Nothing in the Constitution says that. The argument is that an untrammeled executive is implicit in the Constitution and is gathered from the provisions of Article II that the “executive power shall be vested in the president;” that he is “commander-in-chief” of the Armed Forces; that he has the appointment power; and that “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” These powers, however, are qualified. The appointment power often requires the consent of the Senate. The treaty-making power is subject to ratification by 2/3 of the Senate, and the power to declare war belongs to Congress, not Todd Blanche and not Pam Bondi. And until now, whoever heard of one branch declaring war on another? It is certainly no accident that these attacks on lower courts coincide with decisions that have proven to be the most effective brake on the lawless behavior of the Trump administration. 

 Autocracy is just around the corner. Checks and balances are a toothless tiger. A supine Congress has demurely handed over its authority to the president, and the Supreme Court has been Trump’s handmaiden. Consider that the oral argument this week presages that the Court may overturn a 90-year-old precedent and bless his firing of independent agency appointees under the unitary executive theory, which it has vastly overblown. Maybe it will come to its senses over Trump’s usurpation of tariff powers. And maybe not.  

But if there is war, only the lower courts, including judges appointed by Trump himself, have manned the ramparts. 

The post Our Heroic Lower Court Judges  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump, during his December 2 cabinet meeting, spewed among the most hateful remarks publicly uttered by a president, certainly in modern times. 

Referring to Somali immigrants and the Somali-American congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Trump raged, “I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country … We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage; she’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. These aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain.” 

A week prior, in reaction to the shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan immigrant, the Wall Street Journal editorial board rejected blaming all Afghan immigrants for the actions of one man. The policy architect of Trump’s mass deportation program, Stephen Miller, the obsessively anti-immigrant homeland security advisor, responded on X, “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” 

These bigoted statements would not have been embraced by the president Miller cites as an inspiration: Calvin Coolidge.  

Full disclosure: I was recently appointed president of the committee that oversees the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum, which is located near my home in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Please visit!) And while I am speaking for myself only here, I aim to fulfill our museum’s mission of providing objective information about the 30^th president and his times.  

Miller’s love of Coolidge is evidenced by a series of emails sent to Katie McHugh in 2015 and 2016, when she worked for Breitbart, and he worked for Senator Jeff Sessions before he became Donald Trump’s first Attorney General. McHugh was fired by Breitbart 2017 for racist social media posts. But in 2019, she leaked the emails to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and gave interviews in which she said she no longer subscribed to “white nationalist, white supremacist” views and Miller—who by then had joined the first Trump administration—was a “white supremacist” and that he had functioned as a Breitbart editor while he worked for Sen. Sessions. 

In one email thread, Miller responds to a colleague who said: “[Conservative radio host] Mark Levin just said there should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes.” Miller chimes in, “Like Coolidge did.”  

In another email, Miller proposes to “expose that ridiculous statue of liberty [sic] myth” about the famous pro-immigrant poem enshrined on the statue’s pedestal that welcomed millions of migrants processed on Ellis Island. But to Miller, “two decades after [the] poem was added, Coolidge shut down immigration. No one said he was violating the Statue of Liberty’s purpose.” 

Miller’s emails mock “diversity” as a “national religion. A news story about 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush speaking Spanish is a disturbing sign of “new English.” He recommends the novel Camp of the Saints—a story of French whites being overrun by Indian immigrants who eat human feces, which has been embraced by white nationalists as a cautionary tale. The Duke Law School graduate shares an article from the white nationalist website VDARE to warn about the possibility of Mexican hurricane victims migrating to America and receiving Temporary Protected Status. 

White nationalists have embraced Coolidge for signing the restrictionist Immigration Act of 1924, indefinitely extending and tightening a temporary quota system based on national origins, structured to clamp down on Eastern and Southern European migration associated with anarchy, socialism, and—during the Prohibition Era—alcohol. Much of the anti-immigrant hysteria of the time stemmed from political violence waged by anarchists, including the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by the son of Polish immigrants, and the wave of bombings tied to an Italian immigrant group. And fear of the spread of Communism following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia tarred Jewish immigrants who supported socialism. During congressional deliberations over the immigration bill, Representative Jasper Tincher of Kansas framed the debate as “On the one side— is beer, Bolshevism, unassimilating settlements, and many flags. On the other side is constitutional government, one flag, the Stars and Stripes, and American institutions.” 

The law also flatly banned nearly all immigration from Asia. The national-origin-based quota system remained in place for 41 years, slashing the share of America’s foreign-born population by more than half. 

Also, as Vice President in 1921, Coolidge made eugenic remarks—common for the time—on race in defense of immigration restrictions, in a 1921 Good Housekeeping article: “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With our races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” 

But reducing Coolidge’s views on immigration to those two data points—as, in modern times, both supportive white nationalists and critical progressives tend to do—oversimplifies the record. As president, Coolidge did not flog the eugenical statements from his 1921 article, but he did laud immigrants who embraced American ideals.  

Addressing veterans of the Great War at the 1925 American Legion Convention in Omaha, Coolidge praised the diversity that Miller fears: 

The bringing together of all these different national, racial, religious, and cultural elements has made our country a kind of composite of the rest of the world, and we can render no greater service than by demonstrating the possibility of harmonious cooperation among so many various groups. Every one of them has something characteristic and significant of great value to cast into the common fund of our material, intellectual, and spiritual resources. The war brought a great test of our experiment in amalgamating these varied factors into a real Nation, with the ideals and aspirations of a united people. None was excepted from the obligation to serve when the hour of danger struck… 

Well-nigh all the races, religions, and nationalities of the world were represented in the armed forces of this Nation, as they were in the body of our population. No man’s patriotism was impugned or service questioned because of his racial origin, his political opinion, or his religious convictions. Immigrants and sons of immigrants from the central European countries fought side by side with those who descended from the countries which were our allies; with the sons of equatorial Africa; and with the Red men of our own aboriginal population, all of them equally proud of the name Americans. 

We must not, in times of peace, permit ourselves to lose any part from this structure of patriotic unity… Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat. 

One month earlier, Coolidge spoke at a ceremony laying the cornerstone for Washington, D.C.’s Jewish Community Center, which still stands near Dupont Circle. Coolidge celebrated the Jewish contributions to the founding of America and, more broadly, the blessings of diversity: 

If our experiment in free institutions has proved anything, it is that the greatest privilege that can be conferred upon people in the mass is to free them from the demoralizing influence of privilege enjoyed by the few. This is proved by the experience here, not alone of the Jews, but of all the other racial and national elements that have entered into the making of this nation. We have found that when men and women are left free to find the places for which they are best fitted, some few of them will indeed attain less exalted stations than under a regime of privilege; but the vast multitude will rise to a higher level, to wider horizons, to worthier attainments. To go forward on the same broadening lines that have marked the national development thus far must be our aim… 

… Made up of so many diverse elements, our country must cling to those fundamentals that have been tried and proved as buttresses of national solidarity.  

Shortly after Coolidge signed the Immigration Act, he signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans. Later that year, ahead of a presidential election in which the Ku Klux Klan was an active presence in the Democratic National Convention, Coolidge publicly rebuked, via written correspondence, a constituent who wanted him to prevent a Black Republican congressional candidate from being nominated:  

I am amazed to receive such a letter. During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft, not one of whom sought to evade it. They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color…A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary as is any other citizen. 

Coolidge’s defense of equal rights and Native American citizenship doesn’t directly relate to immigration, but it shows he was no white nationalist. He would not have smeared an entire African nation in racist fashion as Trump did.  

The thread in Coolidge’s philosophy was a commitment to assimilation. Sometimes Coolidge is knocked for his 1923 presidential address, which sought to shape the pending immigration bill: “American institutions rest solely on good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.” Since the final bill Coolidge signed used the bigoted national origin system for its quotas, it’s easy to link Coolidge’s “America must be kept American” statement to bigotry. But that doesn’t align with his later statements, that many immigrants assimilate and embrace American ideals. Coolidge’s conservative biographer Amity Shlaes even argues he “was not a great a fan of quotas as [Representative William] Dillingham” of Vermont, who first introduced the quota concept, temporarily, in a bill vetoed by Woodrow Wilson then signed by Warren Harding. Moreover, writes Shlaes, a Wall Street Journal editorial page veteran, “Coolidge no longer spoke in the racialist tones of the unfortunate articles he had written as vice president. His position now was that he did not like to judge people by their race or creed.” 

Coolidge’s belief in assimilationism and celebration of diversity is starkly different from Miller’s fearmongering that the admission of one immigrant fleeing a troubled country imports “the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” 

Miller also doesn’t understand what the 1924 law did. It did not completely “shut down” immigration. In fact, it didn’t cap any Latino immigration from the entire Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, it did not authorize the sort of mass deportations that Miller has orchestrated at Trump’s behest in hopes of removing more than 10 million predominantly Latino undocumented immigrants and making America less diverse.  

Understanding the full Coolidge record does not obligate anyone to become a fan of Silent Cal. His assimilationist policies can be criticized. For example, some Native Americans opposed the citizenship law to keep their own sovereignty. And of course, whatever discomfort Coolidge had with national origin quotas, he signed them into law, and that had a lasting impact, including the inability of America to accept Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany and seeking refuge. (For a deeper exploration of Coolidge’s record on these issues, please see these panel discussions I moderated about the Indian Citizenship Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 sponsored by the Coolidge museum.) 

And if Stephen Miller and his boss are genuinely interested in Coolidge’s views, they will take a look at his complete record.  

The post On Immigration, Stephen Miller Is no Calvin Coolidge  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As part of his promise to restore American manufacturing and the fortunes of the working class, President Donald Trump pledged to expand trade apprenticeships. In an April executive order, Trump directed the Department of Labor to deliver within 120 days a plan “to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.”  

That deadline has passed, with no evidence of progress or even a plan to reach the one-million apprenticeship milestone.   

Instead, drastic layoffs, funding cuts, and a purge of “DEI”-related initiatives have sabotaged the emerging apprenticeship movement. Growth in apprenticeships is at its slowest in years, far more sluggish than during Joe Biden’s administration or even the president’s first term. At its current pace, former DOL senior staffer Nick Beadle told me, “I don’t see them getting to 1 million apprentices till 2032.”  

During Biden’s tenure, the government invested nearly $730 million to expand registered apprenticeships. But it was from 2016 to 2020, the last year of Obama’s administration and of Trump’s first term, that apprenticeships posted double-digit percentage increases each year, according to government data. By the end of Biden’s term, in fiscal 2024, there were more than 670,000 active apprentices—or nearly double the roughly 359,000 apprentices in fiscal 2015.  

But this year, the number of new apprentices has grown by only about 3 percent so far, according to Zach Boren, Senior Vice President of Apprenticeships for America and the former chief of registered apprenticeship and policy for the Department of Labor. “We’ve got a White House that has really good talking points on apprenticeship, but no road map,” Boren said.  

One major problem: the gutting of the DOL’s Office of Apprenticeships, first by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, and then by the exodus of key staff. There’s literally no one available to write a plan, let alone implement it.  

The office lost its national director and several division chiefs, and staffing levels are down by as much as 30 percent, Boren estimates. The website for the national office lists just three people, all of them designated as “acting.” “The Department of Labor, and especially the Office of Apprenticeship, are running on fumes,” said Boren. 

The Trump administration has also paused or canceled grants for apprenticeship programs and apprenticeship research, which means fewer resources for recruiting and preparing apprenticeship candidates, helping employers and community colleges launch apprenticeship programs, or evaluating their effectiveness.  

Beadle, an investigative journalist before his stint at the agency, told me that at least $30 million in funding appropriated by Congress last year was never spent and has expired. “I have not seen records that confirm they spent all of the $285 billion [allocated] last year on registered apprenticeship,” said Beadle, who writes about workforce development for the Substack “Jobs That Work.”  

In addition, millions of dollars in previously awarded contracts to nonprofits, researchers, and industry intermediaries have been canceled. Among the recipients whose grant was nixed is Reach University, a nonprofit institution that’s pioneering debt-free “apprenticeship degrees.” According to journalist Paul Fain, writing for Work Shift, DOL rescinded $14.7 million in grants to Reach University’s teachers college, including a nearly $10 million grant to one of the institution’s community partners in Louisiana, and another grant to a partner in Arkansas. Through a spokeswoman, Reach University President Joe E. Ross confirmed that as of this writing, the grants had not been reinstated. (Ross also said that “although the grant terminations caused a temporary financial impact, we were able to ensure there was no disruption to any current learner’s degree experience.”) 

Other organizations that didn’t receive anticipated funding include the Interstate Renewal Energy Council, which helps facilitate clean energy industry apprenticeships, and the Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP), which develops apprenticeships in health care, said Apprenticeships for America’s Boren. The administration has also ended research grants related to apprenticeships, according to Work Shift’s Fain, including a project to provide technical assistance to states expanding apprenticeships and evaluations of youth apprenticeship programs. The Office of Apprenticeship’s grants pages currently indicate “no funding opportunities” and “no active awards.” 

Given the vital role intermediaries play in creating apprenticeship opportunities, the lack of funding for these groups has effectively severed the pipeline. Boren reports “massive layoffs across the apprenticeship field,” with some organizations even shutting their doors. Boren also regrets the lost momentum among businesses. “We’ve had industry groups that have really gotten excited about apprenticeships, and there’ve been some big investments over the last 10 years,” he said. “Now my question is, how many folks like that are no longer interested?” 

Trump’s campaign against “DEI,” however, may prove the most destructive to his stated goal of expanding apprenticeship. While women and minorities are among those most likely to benefit from apprenticeships and to be interested in pursuing them, the Trump administration is committed to shutting them out. As a result, “one million apprentices” will be unattainable if half the workforce is discouraged from participation.  

Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs,” signed on his first day in office, has led to the wholesale purge of websites, data, and programs perceived to promote diversity. The Office of Apprenticeship saw the removal of guidance on affirmative action (“access denied,” the site now reads), regulations on equal opportunity hiring (“page under construction,” as shown by an error message), and even the 2024 report on National Apprenticeship Week, which reportedly included descriptions of recruitment efforts for women and minorities (“page not found”).  

The administration also canceled dozens of grants under the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) program established in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush, according to a letter sent to DOL by Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott and Rosa DeLauro in May. DOL has since reposted the grants, but the organizations whose awards were terminated are ineligible for this money, reports Mother Jones, and the program no longer prioritizes historically underrepresented groups such as women of color or women with disabilities.  

These actions could undo the progress made over the last decade toward making apprenticeships more accessible. While women have historically made up a fraction of apprentices, their ranks had been growing. Between 2014 and 2023, the share of women apprentices rose five percentage points, from 9.2 percent to 14.4 percent, according to a 2024 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the number of female apprentices tripled. Today, women in apprenticeships currently number fewer than 100,000, according to DOL’s latest data, and the number of Black Americans in apprenticeships is lower still—at under 90,000.   

Much as he did on his show, Trump seems to favor a particular kind of apprentice. A recent social media campaign by the Department of Labor featured what’s presumably Trump’s ideal: a blond, broad-shouldered, AI-generated Aryan avatar ripped straight from the manosphere, with a chiseled jaw and a cleft chin. Historians told the Washington Post that the style of these posts evoked “historical government propaganda, including posters from New Deal-era America and fascist Europe.”  

Ultimately, “propaganda” might be all that Trump’s apprenticeship initiatives turn out to be. Like so many of his promises to his working-class base, “one million apprenticeships” will likely prove hollow.  

The post Trump’s Broken Promise of “One Million Apprentices”  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

There’s a conundrum around the politics of “affordability.” The issue is that prices are rising while incomes are stagnating, a crushing combination for most people. But there’s little the government can do about either in time for the 2026 midterms, and even the 2028 presidential election. Exacerbating matters, the president and Congress insist on making it worse.  

President Donald Trump famously promised to lower prices “on Day One” in his 2024 campaign. That was bluster, of course, and to be charitable, he meant he would reduce the rate of inflation. Yet he’s dead set against the standard way to do it—keeping interest rates elevated to slow demand. The Federal Reserve hiked interest rates 11 times under Joe Biden, and it worked: inflation slowed from 9 percent to 2.9 percent. 

But cutting rates won’t satisfy voters, because recent inflation hasn’t disappeared from prices. From December 2019, just before the pandemic, to today, overall prices in America rose 25 percent, including 25 percent increases for eggs, pork, milk, cars and trucks; 30 or 31 percent increases for housing, rent, food overall, and bread; 37 percent increases for electricity; and 55 percent increases for beef. The relative bargains—items whose prices increased notably less—have been prescription drugs, up 6 percent; and medical care, gasoline, and potatoes, all up 15 to 17 percent.  

The government can make some purchases more affordable by subsidizing them, as it often does for health care, energy, and food. Yet Trump and Congressional Republicans have taken aim at those subsidies, making healthcare less affordable by cutting Medicaid and Obamacare supports, making food less affordable by cutting SNAP benefits, and making energy less affordable by cutting support for wind and solar energy.  

On top of that, Trump’s mindless tariff policies have increased prices on thousands of products. Inescapably, today’s MAGA government is really MALA, Make America Less Affordable.  

The other half of our affordability conundrum is income, because the median income of Americans, after inflation, has been stuck since 2019. In 2024 dollars, the median household income was $83,260 in 2019, and $83,730 in 2024—and prices for food, housing, rent, and electricity have risen faster than overall inflation.  

To more fully grasp the affordability story, consider that incomes have two major components: earnings from work (“labor income”) and income from assets (“capital income”).  

Typically, people earn more when they become more productive, and over the past five years, productivity has increased at a healthy rate. Those productivity gains depend on businesses investing in new technologies, equipment, and facilities, and workers making the best of those investments. The government does its part by subsidizing both business investment and people’s education and skills. The rise of the American middle class and decades of broad-based upward mobility have rested on wages and salaries rising with productivity.  

But here’s another affordability puzzle: Productivity increased 10.4 percent from 2019 to 2024, or about 2.1 percent per year, but incomes stalled. That’s stronger than the 1.7 percent average annual productivity gains in the 1980s, when incomes rose nicely, and nearly as strong as the 2.4 percent average gains in the 1990s, when incomes grew at the fastest rate in decades.  

In one respect, Americans’ earnings behave as expected—people with more education and skills continue to earn more. In 2024, real median earnings were 24 percent higher for people with advanced degrees than for college graduates, 66 percent higher for college graduates than for high school graduates, and 26 percent higher for high school graduates than for high school dropouts. 

But at every level of education, those real earnings increased from 2019 to 2024 not by 10.4 percent or even half that, but by a total of 0.7 percent for college graduates, 0.5 percent for those with some college but no bachelor’s degree, 1.5 percent for high school graduates and high school dropouts. And for those with advanced or professional degrees, real earnings declined 0.8 percent.  

Weekly Earnings by Education, 2019 to 2024, By Educational Attainment 

At the heart of the affordability problem: productivity gains didn’t translate into higher earnings.  

Why not? Incomes have two major parts: the earnings people receive from working and the interest, dividends, and capital gains they receive from their financial and other assets.  

While most Americans’ earnings after inflation virtually stagnated from 2019 to 2024, capital income after inflation increased nearly 30 percent over the same period. And while earnings in America are distributed unequally, capital income is in a class by itself. 

The Treasury reports that capital income in 2024 totaled $4.5 trillion, and that the bottom 50 percent of Americans received just 2.5 percent of it. But the top 10 percent pocketed 88 percent of that fast-rising capital income, including 52 percent ($2.3 trillion) for the top 1 percent and 32 percent ($1.4 trillion) for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.  

The uncomfortable irony is that most of the capital income came from businesses that increased their labor productivity by an average of 10.4 percent. Yet most of it did not go into people’s earnings but into capital payments to owners and shareholders.  

This is not new. Numerous economic studies have found that labor’s share of all national income—the earnings by working people—declined slowly and fairly steadily since the 1970s, while the shares received as capital income (or transfers, mainly Social Security) increased.  

It becomes the treacherous political problem it is today for the president and Congress when inflation keeps exceeding or matches income growth, and within incomes, gains in earnings slow or stop, while gains in capital income surge.  

And in this context, Trump has compounded his economic malpractice. His tariffs and subsidy cuts not only make America less affordable for most people; they also finance $1 trillion in tax cuts for the sliver of people who collect most of the fast-rising capital income.  

That’s today’s crisis of affordability in a nutshell. I was an architect of Bill Clinton’s economic program for ordinary people that produced the 1990s boom, which included market-based reforms and government investments. Yet when the economy shifts, new politics usually follow. Today’s affordability crisis is tailor-made for populism. Given the hollowness and failures of rightwing populism under Trump, the door is wide open for Democrats to champion populism from the left.  

The post Affordability: How Trump Has Made It Worse appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Before Donald Trump began his second term, we knew he was a hypocrite on crime. He has posed as a law-and-order champion while being a criminal convicted of fraud and found by a jury liable for sexual assault—and overseeing a business convicted of fraud. In his first term as well as his second, he violated established procedures when pardoning unrepentant criminals without proper vetting, some of whom violated the law again. But Trump’s hypocrisy on crime is most jarring when it involves drug trafficking. As I wrote last June during the 2024 campaign, during his first term, Trump proposed giving drug dealers the death penalty, then three months later, he commuted the life sentence of cocaine trafficker Alice Marie Johnson.  

The African-American grandmother was a cause célèbre on the left—a personification of what’s wrought by mandatory minimum sentences and whose freedom was sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Kim Kardashian. Still, she spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, then, about two months before the election, Trump pardoned her. In turn, few contemporaneously complained about Trump’s crass attempt to woo Black voters. But it was a sign that Trump’s anti-drug tirades were insincere. 

An even clearer sign appeared in May 2024, when Trump stumped at the Libertarian Party convention by promising to free Ross Ulbricht, who was serving two life sentences for facilitating over a million drug deals through his Silk Road website. Libertarians—who, unlike Trump, support broad drug legalization—had been vigorously campaigning for Ulbricht’s release.  Once again, Trump was trading the freedom of a drug dealer—the sort of person he claims to believe deserves the death penalty—to win votes.  

The transactional offer appears to have worked. The 2024 Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver was shunned some of his own party leaders for eschewing anti-transgender rights policies among other issues, and the party chair openly opined for Trump’s victory. Oliver’s vote share was about one-third of his 2020 predecessor, as Libertarian voters presumably gravitated to Trump. Trump followed through on his convention promise and then some, issuing a full pardon to Ulbricht on his second day back in office.  

Coincidentally, one month after Trump addressed the Libertarian convention, Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for using the presidency of Honduras to, in the words of a federal prosecutor, “facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States…” As reported by The New York Times, “The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández ‘a two-faced politician hungry for power’ who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers.” 

This is the same Hernández whom, on Friday, Trump said he would pardon. 

Trump announced in a social media post that also endorsed Hernández’s ally Tito Asfura in this weekend’s Honduran presidential election. On Sunday, he asserted without evidence that Hernández was framed by a “Biden administration setup.” 

A pardon for Hernández (which doesn’t appear to have been formally issued yet) would be the most glaring and disturbing act of hypocrisy by Trump, especially after 21 military strikes on boats in waters off Central and South America, killing at least 83 people who appeared to be unarmed. Trump has asserted the crews were “narco-terrorists” and “combatants” subject to military force, but has not provided evidence. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have scaled back their intelligence sharing from the region with the U.S., since they don’t want to be accomplices to illegal murders. 

Even some congressional Republicans are expressing concerns that the strikes amount to war crimes following a Washington Post report that on September 2, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal order to kill all crew members of a boat off Trinidad. This prompted a second missile strike after the first left two survivors. The Republican chair and Democratic ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a joint statement announcing they have “directed inquiries” regarding “alleged follow-on strikes” to the Department of Defense. Their House counterparts released a similar statement. Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told CBS’s Face the Nation, “Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act.” (On Sunday, Trump aboard Air Force One the president said of Hegseth’s alleged order: “He said he did not say that and I believe him.”) 

But while any spoken order to kill unarmed individuals could put Hegseth at legal risk, let’s not forget that the drug boat strikes are of dubious legality, and Trump’s commitment to them is bone-chilling. 

Presidents often feel compelled to issue military orders killing foreigners, such as to prevent a terrorist attack. Whether any order is truly necessary or legally executed can be debated. But in nearly every case involving previous presidents, the national security concern was genuine or at least plausible. While interdiction is a long-standing way of preventing drugs from entering the country, drug trafficking is not such a severe national security threat that warrants military force risking the murder of innocents who never got due process.  

Even as a crass political matter, Trump’s rationale is inexplicable. One can understand why Trump pardoned Johnson and Ulbricht to peel off African-American and Libertarian votes. But what political profit does Trump reap from killing Latin American boaters? He can’t run for a third term, despite what his merch says. There’s no reason to believe a drug interdiction effort would influence the 2026 midterm election when voters will likely prioritize the cost-of-living. And, as Trump knows well, there are ways to distract voters without deadly force. The boat strikes seem an attempt to paint Venezuela as a narcostate and justify ousting President Nicolás Maduro. While Maduro is no saint, Trump has no more political or moral duty to oust him than the dictators he embraces. 

Perhaps there’s more to Trump’s missile strikes than they appear. But based on what we can see, it seems murderously depraved. It’s sickeningly hypocritical: Trump’s plans to pardon a real narcostate president prosecuted by a Justice Department team that included one of his top lawyers (unlikely to have taken part in a Biden “setup”), and convicted by a U.S. jury.  

Comparing presidential scandals can be a fraught exercise. But a president killing boaters on specious claims of “narcoterrorism” while pardoning major drug traffickers is a scandal bloodier than Watergate. 

The post Trump’s Murderous Hypocrisy on Drug Trafficking Is Bone-Chilling  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This summer and fall, Donald Trump’s administration launched a multi-pronged attack on diversity in higher education, deploying lawsuits and cutting funding for minority-serving institutions, particularly those with high populations of Hispanic students.  

In June, a group of conservative plaintiffs took aim at the federal program that offers funding and support to Hispanic-serving institutions, or HSIs. The Department of Justice is declining to defend the program in court, a move that breaks with tradition and increases the lawsuit’s chances of success. 

In September, the Department of Education redirected $350 million in federal funding for HSIs to other priorities, like charter schools and American history education. As in the lawsuit, the Trump administration argued that sending this money to schools that primarily serve Hispanics would be racial discrimination. 

The latest campaign in Trump’s war against “DEI” has the potential to devastate universities that define themselves through their service to underprivileged minorities. It also could pose a threat to the financial survival of the university system as a whole. 

As the Washington Monthly noted this fall, Hispanic students are the main growth population in a time of enrollment slump. With the overall student population declining, the federal government could be encouraging colleges to better serve an underprivileged group while preserving their own bottom line. Instead, it’s punishing them for doing so, reasoning that to target any particular ethnic or racial group—for any reason—is illegal discrimination. 

Beyond that, what would happen to higher education and the law if it became widely illegal to acknowledge race? To understand these cases and the future they could lead to, we spoke with Reginald C. Oh, who teaches constitutional law at Cleveland State University. A Monthly contributor, Oh is nationally known for his expertise in what the Constitution says about race.  

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

RW: So, Reggie, hi. First off, there’s this lawsuit against the Hispanic-serving institutions program, which the Department of Justice is declining to defend. Can you talk us through what the plaintiffs, the state of Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions, are saying? 

RO: Okay, well, it really boils down to their argument that the HSI program is “illegal discrimination” in violation of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court’s decision from 2023 that struck down affirmative action. [Students for Fair Admissions was involved in both cases.] That’s the rationale both for the lawsuit and for the Trump administration saying, “Well, we don’t want to defend the lawsuit, because we also believe the program is illegal.”  

RW: Illegal how? 

RO: So that’s the key, right? When they say it’s illegal discrimination, what they’re really arguing is that it’s unconstitutional discrimination under SFFA v. Harvard. They’re substituting the word “illegal” for “unconstitutional,” which is a rhetorical move and an inaccurate statement of law. SFFA v. Harvard dealt solely with the admissions process, and whether race could be used as a criterion in admitting students. This issue has nothing to do with admissions or individual merit—it has to do with funding for schools that have a certain number of Latino or Hispanic students. [To be federally recognized as an HSI, a school must have at least 25 percent Hispanic students.] And that’s absolutely an open question.  

RW: Just to remind us, what part of the Constitution did SFFA v. Harvard say that affirmative action violated?  

RO: The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was intended to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. It says that states can’t deny the equal protection of the law to any person within their jurisdiction. The Court in SFFA v. Harvard held that the use of race in admissions was unconstitutional discrimination against Asian-American students in violation of equal protection.  

RW: What do you think about the norm-breaking aspects of this particular case? The federal government isn’t defending its own program, hoping it leads to the program’s demise. Still, this was duly passed by Congress. Are there any concerns about a future where, if you’re a president saddled with a program you don’t like, you invite a lawsuit and then sit back and do nothing? 

RO: The Trump administration’s refusal to defend the lawsuit is unprecedented. Their attempt to justify their inaction by saying, “We’re not going to defend the law because we agree with the plaintiffs,” raises serious separation of powers issues. We’re talking about Congress passing a statute that tells the executive branch, “Distribute these funds to those minority-serving schools,” and so when the president refuses to defend the law in the lawsuit, what he is actually doing is defying Congress. 

RW: Don’t presidents sometimes decline to enforce a particular law? And isn’t that a prerogative that’s been under debate, but there’s certainly precedent for? In what way is this different from President Obama’s DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which gave people who were in the country illegally a chance to stay?  

RO: Yeah, so those raise two separate issues. DACA is really about the president creating his own program, right? But creating a program like DACA is considered lawmaking or legislation, which is the job of Congress, not the president. The job of the president is to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress. Congress didn’t create DACA, though, Obama did. So, the legal fight over DACA was about whether the president had the authority to create that kind of program without congressional approval. 

The HSI case is completely different, because Trump does have congressional authorization to distribute funds to eligible institutions. In fact, by law, Trump is required to distribute the funds. The Constitution doesn’t say the president may execute the laws enacted by Congress only if he thinks it’s a good idea; it says the president shall or must execute congressional programs. So, what’s the legal basis for Trump’s refusal to distribute the funds?   

RW: This makes me want to get back to something in this lawsuit. The plaintiffs are saying that these minority-serving programs are illegal under the SFFA v. Harvard decision. They’re arguing that the precedent, which outlaws affirmative action in admissions and says nothing about anything outside of admissions, should also apply to these programs. Do you think the Supreme Court will be favorable to this argument about what it was really saying in its own decision? 

RO: Honestly, yeah, I think they would be favorable to it. The Roberts Court is pretty hostile to race conscious policies. However, I don’t think you can say the outcome is written in stone, especially since the HSI issue is not about college admissions and individual merit, but about serving disadvantaged institutions that serve disadvantaged populations.  

RW: Okay, let’s move to September. The Trump administration announced that it would withdraw approximately $350 million in funding, the vast majority of which was going to HSIs. Some of it is being redirected to charter schools. Some is being sent to American history and civics grants. Some of it—somewhat confusingly, given the administration’s espoused views on race—is being sent to historically Black colleges and universities as part of a one-time infusion of upwards of $400 million. What was the reasoning there? 

RO: Well, in refusing to distribute the funds to HSIs, Trump is claiming to do so would be illegal DEI under SFFA v. Harvard. In diverting the funds to other programs like charter schools, Trump doesn’t really offer any reason or justification other than he’s the president. 

I want to explain further why Trump’s claim about “DEI is illegal discrimination” doesn’t make any sense. Even if a law is technically discrimination because it’s race conscious, that doesn’t make it automatically “illegal.” There’s another step involved called strict scrutiny [a very high standard of proof] in which the government can argue that the use of race was necessary to achieve a compelling interest. If they can do that, then the discrimination would be legal. Trump, however, never mentions the second step.  

RW: Can we touch a bit on the future this is creating? You know, if we’re in a world where it is illegal discrimination to have a program or to have funding that names a group of people, what happens long term? 

RO: In the scenario where the argument that it is all illegal discrimination wins, the future is race-blind policies about basically everything. You wouldn’t be able to consider race in any aspect of U.S. policy making, federal, state, or local.  

It may seem implausible, but the ultimate implication is that race as a concept gets eliminated from political and legal discourse. Think about it. After SFFA v. Harvard, some schools adopted policies barring admissions officers from knowing the race of applicants to ensure a “colorblind” process. But don’t people’s names identify their race? Asian names certainly do. So now admissions officers can’t know the names of applicants? And what about student essays—they now can’t write about their life experience if it would identify their race, right? You see where this goes. We’d end up in a world where even thinking or writing about race would be deemed dangerous because it could lead to “illegal discrimination,” and race functionally would no longer exist.  

Now think about the implications of all that.  

RW: The Supreme Court did mention that this is something you still could do—write an essay about your life experience that mentions race. 

RO: Yes, Roberts did say that. But Trump’s “any consideration of race is illegal discrimination” argument simply ignores that part of Roberts’s opinion. It’s like Trump is telling Roberts, I know you didn’t really mean that and so I’m just going to pretend that part doesn’t exist.  

RW: This leads to a broader point, as you’ve mentioned to me, with some historical parallels to the era of racial segregation in America. If you make law and policy unable to acknowledge something that is a fact in the real world, what kind of scenario does that create? Law and policy are denying realities on purpose, pretending they don’t exist so as to enforce a desired outcome, but without stating it. 

RO: That’s absolutely right. The goal of erasing race out of policymaking is ultimately to deny the reality of existing racial inequality, racial disparities, and racial segregation in K-12, in higher education, and in housing. Think about it. If we can’t consider or count race, then how can we measure and document the racial disparities we know exist? We can’t, and we’d be forced to pretend that racial disparities don’t exist and be unable to address them. And according to the Trump, it’s the Equal Protection Clause which requires this, which is bizarre, even absurd.   

RW: It’s upside down. 

RO: Yeah, we’re in bizarro world with a bizarro Equal Protection Clause in which equity violates equal protection, and racial inclusion or integration is illegal discrimination. If integration is illegal under equal protection, doesn’t that mean segregation is legal? Yeah, it’s absolutely reversed. It’s unequal protection, not equal protection. 

Bringing it back to HSIs, to be eligible for funding, schools must be at least 25 percent Hispanic and serve low-income students. In alleging that the HSI program is “illegal discrimination,” Trump’s goal is to end a policy assisting disadvantaged Hispanic serving colleges. If a law seeking to end racial inequality violates equal protection, then what the Equal Protection Clause protects is racial inequality.  

You know Bizarro, right? Go look up Bizarro Superman. 

RW: I don’t know Bizarro Superman. Oh, my god. [The WM editor is looking at a picture of Bizarro, a zombie clone of Superman who is his opposite in every way—nourished by kryptonite, weakened by sunlight.] 

RO: Yeah, yeah. That’s it. The Trump administration’s Bizarro Constitution.  

The post The Quiet War on Hispanic-Serving Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The long-standing, stable partnership among local, state, and federal governments is dead. From withholding  funding from states to deploying troops to cities over the objections of mayors and governors, the unpredictability of Donald Trump’s administration didn’t help the GOP in this month’s off-year elections. And looming cuts to Medicaid and Head Start, along with the deliberate refusal to fund SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, suggest that the administration will continue to abandon traditional federal partnerships. While Democratic states and municipalities clearly bear the brunt of federal lapses, recent decisions to auction oil leases in Alaska and Florida over the objections of Republican lawmakers from those places demonstrate the broad ways in which Washington is now ingraining capriciousness into many federal policies.  

So, the newly elected leaders of New Jersey, Virginia, New York City, and others face a frayed relationship with the federal government—and need a blueprint for moving forward. The urgency of the moment was on full display in the extraordinary meeting between Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor-elect, and the 47^th president last week, in which the 34-year-old democratic socialist was eager to make sure the 79-year-old Republican president kept the federal spigot open to the president’s hometown.  

Until now, state and local leaders have often faced a false choice when navigating the unreliable federal partnership that marks the Trump era. On one hand, they can “cut a deal,” a euphemism for capitulating to the president. Alternatively, they can litigate and hope for a favorable ruling, or at least a stay that buys some time to evaluate options. The Supreme Court’s frequent rulings in favor of the administration, especially in cases on the Court’s shadow docket, highlight the limits of this approach.  

As researchers studying American federalism and intergovernmental relations, we believe there is a better way forward for states and local governments. While there is no reason to let the feds off the hook, governors and mayors can build partnerships to provide mutual aid and penalize the federal government for shirking its commitments.  

Already, state and local authorities are innovating and experimenting, developing new playbooks to stand up for their constituents. LA County’s Board of Supervisors declared a local emergency due to ICE activity, allowing it to seek state funding to help families and businesses in neighborhoods affected by raids. Delaware’s governor has used the same tactic to redirect state funds to fill the SNAP gap. In the Washington Monthly, Markos Kounalakis recently recommended that California, where he is Second Gentleman, try to join the G-7, the COP 30 climate summit, and other fora where the world’s fourth-largest economy could reestablish American leadership. 

Meanwhile, the gutting of many federal agencies has left states searching for new ways to deliver crucial services. Several states have united to fill the void left by a depleted CDC, such as the Northeast Public Health Collaborative and the West Coast Health Alliance. Legal scholars like Aziz Huq and Zachary Clopton have also catalogued numerous ways states might collaborate, from a mutual aid pact to allow for interstate borrowing to regional weather services to compensate for dramatic cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  

If handling a president weren’t enough of a challenge, congressional Republicans present another. The Republican budget, signed on July 4 at a ceremony for the One Big Beautiful Bill, is proving a disaster for state budgets. As a result, Massachusetts is exploring opting out of federal corporate tax changes in the bill. And New York has announced changes to state healthcare programs to preserve coverage.  

These examples highlight a range of pathways. But there are others. From the creation of the Uniform Commercial Code, which standardized commercial transactions in a fragmented country, to the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement forged between states and the big cigarette companies and which revolutionized tobacco-industry regulation, history abounds with examples of interstate collaborations that shape the policy agenda. By looking to the past, states and local governments can re-learn how to use federalism when the federal government reneges on its commitments.  

To succeed, local and state leaders must discuss the importance of these partnerships in terms that citizens can understand, emphasizing that cooperation is necessary to address many of the nation’s most pressing problems, from affordable housing to food insecurity to environmental issues. And while any intervention to these pressing problems will face significant practical and political hurdles, they nevertheless merit serious attention.  

Still, running a nation through redundant coalitions of states and territories is not sustainable. Washington must provide rigorous, uniformly collected employment statistics, public health data, and necessary information to support interstate commerce—something that was never really questioned until the administration began eliminating federal repositories of climate data, firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and delaying or redacting key reports that present inconvenient truths for the administration. 

An unpredictable federal government will leave officials at the state and local levels holding the bag. This has ramifications for the next presidential administration, no matter which party holds the White House. For instance, a Trump-proposed evisceration of HUD’s Continuum of Care, run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, would drastically redistribute $3.5 billion that state and local governments use to serve the homeless. The next presidential administration could reverse these moves or take a whole different direction; lurching back and forth requires states and local governments to invest more in operational agility rather than the services taxpayers expect. Relatively few states presently invest staff, time, and resources in plans to handle federal funding interruptions, but this will certainly exacerbate government dysfunction.  

As the shape of American federalism remains uncertain, state and local officials should constantly innovate, boldly interpret their powers, and learn from peers to stand firm against a federal government that increasingly exhibits arbitrary rule.  

The post Trump’s Washington Is Ghosting States and Cities  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A month after President Donald Trump abruptly ended trade talks with Canada over an anti-tariff ad featuring former President Ronald Reagan, the two countries have yet to resume negotiations. 

Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he’ll restart talks “when it’s appropriate,” telling Reuters that “he did not have a pressing issue to address with President Donald Trump.” Instead, Carney has been courting US rivals China and India to lessen Canada’s dependence on the United States, and the country has set a goal of doubling its non-US exports by 2035, according to the Washington Post.

The rift between America and its ally to the north is “the worst in modern history,” says former US Ambassador to Canada James Blanchard. And it’s no wonder. Trump has threatened to annex Canada as the “51^st state,” and mocked former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as its “governor.” He’s blamed the country for flooding America with fentanyl and illegal immigrants, though neither charge bears resemblance to reality. And he’s levied punitive tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, among other exports, all the while accusing Canada of “cheating” on trade. 

Canadians, meanwhile, have rallied to the cry of “Elbows Up” and boycotted American products. Canada-US travel is down by nearly a third compared to a year ago, resulting in billions of dollars for US companies. They also elected Carney this spring, in part for his anti-Trump views, and rejected Trump-lite conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre, who also lost his seat in Parliament. 

Even after Trump’s eventual departure from office, these wounds will be hard to heal, says Blanchard, who served as Ambassador to Canada under President Bill Clinton. Blanchard also served two terms as governor of Michigan and four terms in Congress. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: You were the U.S. Ambassador to Canada during the Clinton administration—in fact, during the ratification of NAFTA, which was incredibly crucial time in the relationship between our countries. And before then, you served two terms as governor of Michigan, a state that also has deep ties to Canada. How would you characterize the current state of US-Canada relations, especially as compared to what you experienced as ambassador?

Amb. Blanchard:  US relations with Canada are the worst in modern history, and there’s no one who has studied it that would disagree with what I’ve said, especially the Canadians. It’s tragic. It’s not just trade disputes, it’s the rhetoric of the president—whether he wants to refer to them as the “51st state” or to say they’re nasty or, you know, Vice President Vance saying the Canadians have treated us very badly these last few decades. He hasn’t even lived long enough to know that. Or Howard Lutnick’s foolish statements. It’s the tone and the attitude which has Canadians losing total faith in us and wondering what’s going on in the United States.

I do a lot of Canadian interviews, and I mentioned to Canadians that most Americans consider Canada our best friend and ally and partner, and they should disregard the rhetoric from the top. 

Garrett Epps: I think a lot of people in this country got a kick out of the elections in Canada and the idea that the slogan was “Elbows Up”—which of course Americans didn’t know what it meant until then. But the question is whether “Elbows Up” is going to work for Canada in the long term, and whether they really can withstand what’s coming at them. We have a situation where a president, if he doesn’t like a commercial on TV, tries to slap a 10 percent tariff on all your goods. The United States is obviously economically much more powerful than Canada. How is this going to play out?

Amb. Blanchard:  Well, it’s hard to know. Let me backtrack just one moment, though, to say relations were very good during the Clinton years. The Canadians didn’t know him when he got elected, and they were a little worried he was a Southerner. And they really liked Bush and Reagan. But their natural inclination is to be liberal, and once they got to know Clinton, they loved him. So it was great being his ambassador there. We dealt with NAFTA, we dealt with Open Skies, we dealt with the Quebec referendum. It was a critical time, and Clinton was fabulous. It was probably the golden era now that we look back. 

By the way, I love the Reagan commercial. And I think if they don’t get a deal, they ought to start playing it again in some key markets because that obviously was getting the Republicans in Congress rattled. 

We have an integrated economy with Canada. It’s not just autos. It’s energy, it’s agriculture, it’s steel and aluminum, it’s everything. And we actually have a surplus on trade with Canada on almost everything really except energy. And we need that energy. We’re the largest producer of crude oil on the planet now, but our refineries can’t use our new light crude, so we export it.

Our refineries are set up for Canadian heavy crude, so we’re dependent on Canada for energy. Canada could cause power outages in New England if they pulled Hydro-Quebec back. So they have cards to play, but they don’t want to do that. I mean, they’re 10 percent of our population. We simply have a lot more leverage than they do, and that makes it hard.

Anne Kim: What has been the impact of the tariffs on the Canadian economy? My understanding is that the Canadian economy is actually suffering fairly badly and that U.S. automakers are beginning to move production out of Canada back into the United States. What is the impact you’re seeing and is that going to affect the strategy long term for Canadians?

Amb. Blanchard: Well, I think it’s causing inflation in Canada and here, despite what the president says. There may be some movement from Canada to the U.S. There’s always shuffling back and forth. But when you have a totally integrated economy in terms of parts and suppliers, as well as assembly, a lot is still going to happen in Canada.

I don’t think you’re going to see any auto company wanting to build a new plant in the United States at the expense of Canada, because it takes several years, and the president, Mr. Trump, is not going to be there. It’s hard to believe any future president would be so foolish to deal with our number one customer that way. It’s just unrealistic. We’re too integrated.

And that’s not going to change. Geography is not going to change. Manufacturing is changing, but the major reason for the reduction in auto workers has been automation and to some degree bad management. It wasn’t nearly as much trade.

Garrett Epps: For all of the negative effects, Trump has really benefited some people. For example, Jimmy Kimmel, I think, is extremely grateful to the president. And another one might be Mark Carney, who was considered not to be a very strong candidate until Trump decided to involved himself in Canadian affairs. How do you rate his performance as prime minister in dealing with what is obviously a very serious crisis for that country?

Amb. Blanchard: It’s hard to find fault. “Steady as you go” is probably his motto, and I think that’s what Canada needs to do—not overreact to every little thing that comes up. It’s true he would not be prime minister but for Trump’s attacks on Canada. The Liberal Party last December was slated for a major defeat, and whoever was going to succeed Trudeau in the Liberal Party was going to lose by 20 points. 

But then Mr. Trump started attacking Canada and making jokes, saying they’re a national security threat—which of course is baloney—and all these other stupid remarks. Then Mark Carney gets the nomination at the Liberal Convention and his numbers just skyrocket. 

I don’t think there would have been a Liberal prime minister in Canada, but for Trump’s craziness. How’s he doing? He’s got a weak hand actually, just because we’re 10 times bigger, but I think he’s doing okay. I’m not sure I would have apologized, however privately, about the Reagan commercial because [Ontario Premier] Doug Ford has been his ally.

On the other hand, if they don’t get an agreement, they could start running that ad in New York and Florida and Texas and all over. It’s devastating, and they know it. I almost wish they would, but I think wiser minds say to let things cool off. 

The problem is that we have people around Trump who feed him so much misinformation. It’s crackpot economics. Trump is still out there trying to tell people that other countries pay the tariffs when of course we pay the tariffs as consumers.

He’s also still trying to act like Canada is a national security threat, which nobody believes. Or that the European Union was formed to take advantage of the U.S., which of course is not true. So, we have a problem.

Garrett Epps: Well, imagine what the trade situation would be today if the Blue Jays had won the series. 

Amb. Blanchard: Trump would have gone crazy. He would have called up the commissioner and asked him to remove the Blue Jays from the MLB. He would have gone nuts.

Garrett Epps: Exactly. He’d also ask for a recount. He’d say, you know, they counted the runs wrong.

Amb. Blanchard: It’s sad. It’s humorous. It’s tragic. I tell Canadians, you feel bad? What do you think we feel here in the United States? We have a guy who is not well. And even when he was well, he was acting crazy all the time. He doesn’t speak for us.

Anne Kim: How do you see the end game for the trade relationship, at least with the US and Canada? During his first term in office, Trump renegotiated NAFTA into what’s now USMCA, the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement. That agreement expires in 2036 unless the three countries agree to extend it next year for an additional 16 year period. Given everything that’s happening, what’s your expectation about the fate of those negotiations next year and the USMCA in general?

Amb. Blanchard: Well, no one really knows. The responsible officials, including our trade rep, know better. But it’s the whims of the people who prod Mr. Trump that are the problem. I think they’ll settle down and get what is a similar agreement to what they currently have. I think they will cite some U.S. auto companies who say they’re expanding in the U.S. And they’ll announce several billions of dollars of investment that he will hold up as a major victory, even though they probably were going to make those investments anyway. And we’ll get back to what I hope will be the normal trading relationship, which is very positive and very productive.

The big thing would be for them to drop the tariffs on steel and aluminum currently because all that’s doing is adding costs to the auto companies and car prices. It’s totally unnecessary. 

Garrett Epps: Are these tariffs helping anybody in the United States? Let’s leave Canada for one side because supposedly, we’re America first. The tariffs, from what you said, are not helping the auto industry. Is anybody benefiting?

Amb. Blanchard: No, they’re not helping consumers or the auto companies at all. And they’re probably going to end up hurting the auto workers because sales will drop and then layoffs will occur. I have heard from respected sources that steel workers, perhaps in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, will gain some thousands of jobs. But that will be offset by hundreds of thousands of layoffs and increased costs elsewhere. It’s bad. 

But I think Trump has convinced himself these foreign countries actually pay the tariffs, not us. 

Anne Kim: What will it take to rebuild the US-Canada relationship? Will the departure of Trump be enough to flip a switch so we’re back to the way things were? And what would your advice be to the next president, assuming it’s not JD Vance and that the restoration of US-Canada relationship is one of their goals?

Amb. Blanchard: The next president is going to have to get on a plane right away and fly to Ottawa, and say, “We’re back.” Now, Biden tried to do that with Europe right after he won, but people were worried that he would be the aberration, not Trump. 

And unfortunately, Canadians and Europeans and all of our friends everywhere are saying they’re worried about the American voter. We can have the best president on the planet go up there in three years, and they’re going to say, “We believe you, we love you, we’re glad you’re back, but we’re still going to worry about your voters until we see some continuity here of policy.” They loved Biden, but it’s the voters they worry about. 

The post US-Canada Relations Have Hit Rock Bottom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Monthly jobs numbers and the Census Bureau might be the first—and only—things that come to mind for many Americans when they think about federal data. But government data undergirds many of the everyday essentials Americans rely on, like weather forecasts and tornado warnings. Federal data keep track of crime and public safety, provide early warning of epidemics, and help farmers plan their crops. 

But all of that is under threat. 

To President Donald Trump, data are both a weapon and an enemy. 

On the one hand, Trump cites spurious—and often outlandish—numbers to justify his policies. He’s claimed, for instance, that as many as 20 million unauthorized immigrants are living in America—or about double the real number—to rationalize the intensity of his detentions and deportations. 

He’s also boasted of securing  “over $17 trillion” in new U.S. investments—presumably to validate his tariffs as a strategy for domestic economic growth. (The White House, however, claims $8.8 trillion in new investments, and even that figure is fiction).

At the same time, Trump is suppressing, disappearing and even altering data to fit his agenda or to hide inconvenient truths about the impact of his actions. Earlier this fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ended its annual survey of hunger in America, just weeks before the recent government shutdown that paused food stamp benefits for millions of Americans. This summer, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a weak jobs report he didn’t like. And as part of Trump’s campaign against “DEI,” government agencies have quietly altered at least 200 federal datasets to remove references to “gender” in favor of references to “sex,” according to an analysis by the Lancet.

These active assaults on federal data have also been accompanied by neglect. Drastic cuts to the federal workforce, including by Elon Musk’s DOGE, have hollowed out capacity at many agencies to collect and maintain data, including data vital to US industries, agriculture and ordinary citizens. 

Denice W. Ross, former Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer and U.S. Chief Data Scientist under President Joe Biden, is sounding the alarm on the degradation of America’s federal data infrastructure and the myriad risks that presents. She’s also spearheading an effort, EssentialData.us, to track and preserve disappearing data. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

Anne Kim: When most people think about federal data, there are probably only a handful of numbers that come to mind: Jobs and employment numbers from Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, the Census Bureau, maybe the weather. But there’s a whole lot more to federal data than that. I came across your post for the Federation of American Scientists, where you said there are more than 300,000 federal data sets, which is just an astonishing number.

Denice Ross: The federal data ecosystem is vast, and it’s so much larger than what we typically think of with jobs and weather data. One of my favorite data sets that’s really surprising is the US Geological Survey’s North American Bat Monitoring database.  What’s important about bats and why we need to monitor them is that they provide billions of dollars of free services to America’s farmers every year. 

If you want to continue that free service, you need to protect the bats. And if you want to protect the bats, you need to know where they are. So what this geospatial data set does is to identify the location and numbers of bats around America. 

That also makes it easier when development is happening. For example, if you’re building a highway bridge, or a mine, or a wind farm, you want to make sure that development is mitigating any harm against these bats. The developers need to know where the bats are. So rather than counting the bats themselves, they can go to this federal data set.

And then lastly, there’s some research that suggests that in places where bats do disappear—rural areas, farming areas—infant mortality goes up because farmers have to use more pesticides. That’s the working theory. So that just really ups the stakes for why these data are so essential.

That’s just one of hundreds of thousands of data sets across the federal ecosystem that at first glance might seem not important, but actually have really substantial consequences for American lives and livelihoods.

Anne Kim: How do these data sets come about? And is it immediately apparent that a data set will benefit industry and ordinary Americans, or is that something that evolves as the data set evolves and people find new applications for it?

Denice Ross: That’s a great question. Sometimes data sets are mandated by Congress. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the NAEP, or the “Nation’s Report Card,” is specified in law. It contains the details about what variables need to be collected, including race, ethnicity, gender,  and income levels. 

Most of the time, though, it’s just data that are collected because they are necessary to run government. Sometimes it’s surveys that are collected to inform policies and program design, and other times it’s administrative records. For example, people who are seeking disaster relief fill out a form that says where they live and what happened, and then that starts the process of getting benefits from FEMA. That creates administrative data behind the scenes.

Anne Kim: Step back to the big picture and talk about the big goals that all of this data collection does for Americans. With the bat monitoring program, there are clearly implications for industry and public health. But are there large policy pillars that define the function of all of these datasets and make the case to the public about why all this data is so important to collect and to maintain? 

Denice Ross: I’m so glad you asked that because data, and especially federal data, are a type of infrastructure that we really take for granted. Data help keep us healthy. They help keep us employed and safe. And data also support innovation and the economy at large. 

I can give you a few examples that are policy relevant. At the beginning of November, we were talking a lot about hunger in America, and there were already policy changes to the SNAP food stamps program that were likely to cause millions of Americans to lose their food benefits. 

How might we know the impact of that policy change? Well, there’s the food security supplement that is a collaboration between the USDA and the Census Bureau, and that’s been shining a light on hunger in America for the last 30 years. It’s the only data set that gives us a full picture of what’s happening at the state level, and what’s happening with children versus adult hunger. That was recently terminated by the USDA. 

There’s also another way of understanding what’s happening with food assistance. States are required submit to USDA their application processing timelines, with the goal being that it should take no longer than 30 days for a state to process a SNAP application, and seven days if it’s an emergency. You can imagine that if you’re a grandparent and you recently took custody of a grandchild, and now you need help putting food on the table, it would be really bad if it takes more than 30 days or even more than a week to get that assistance. 

This is a dataset that holds states accountable for processing those applications in a timely manner. Just the mere fact that it’s transparent and available to the public and the media helps increase the states’ ambition to meet those deadlines. 

Anne Kim: I want to talk more broadly about the current administration’s approach to data, and data preservation and collection. They’re certainly well aware of the power of data, which is why they are systematically suppressing it. You mentioned the survey of household food insecurity that’s no longer happening, just as there are going to be major cuts to the SNAP program as a result of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The administration has also challenged the accuracy of data. Most recently, they fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over numbers they just didn’t like. How would you characterize how the administration handles data, and what do you find most problematic about their approach?

Denice Ross: There are three main buckets of damage that we’re seeing to the federal data ecosystem. The first was very high profile, at the beginning of the administration, when many data sets were taken down at the end of January in order to be scrubbed of elements that did not align with administration priorities. This was gender, DEI, and climate. 

For the most part, those data sets went back up. There were a few data elements that did not. For example, the Bureau of Prisons had a data set on inmate statistics, and they removed the transgender category from the gender of inmates. Another example is the National Crime Victimization Survey. There were three questions there that were removed on gender.

Similarly, the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, has a really important data set called FedScope, which gives us a sense of the characteristics of the federal workforce, which are very policy relevant given the major shifts that we’ve seen in the federal workforce over the last few months. They deleted all of the race and ethnicity data going back years from that FedScope data.

And then what we’ve seen, which is more damaging and more like a death by 1,000 cuts, is the diminishment of the capacity of federal agencies to collect, protect, and publish data. That’s due to the cuts in staffing, the cancellations of contracts, and the terminations of the federal advisory committees that are so essential for helping data collections keep up with changes in modern society.

We’re also seeing that it’s just harder to get things done in government. For example, if the Secretary of the Department of Commerce has to personally approve every contract above $100,000, it’s just going to be so much harder to get work done, and there’s fewer people to do the work. That will manifest across so many different types of collections. 

For example, take the ground-based radar that protects rural America from tornadoes. Somebody’s got to fix that equipment if it starts malfunctioning, and if the staff or the contractors who do that work are no longer around, those sensors will start to decay over time. So the quality of the tornado forecasting will go down. It’s hard to even fathom the small bits of damage that are happening that will have such a large collective impact on the quality of the information that we need to just run a modern society. 

The third trend that we’re seeing, which started this summer in earnest, are the attacks on data that might reveal that administration policies are not working as promised. The first data set that I noticed was the Social Security Administration’s call center wait times data set, which was terminated right around the time when thousands of Social Security Administration employees were let go, field offices were closing, and increased fraud protection measures were going in place. So it would be likely that more Social Security recipients would be needing to call the call center to resolve any issues. But that data set disappeared right around that time.

And then, as you noted already, that when the jobs numbers came out this summer that did not align with the administration’s message, the BLS commissioner was fired. And then more recently, of course, that food security supplement was terminated right as millions of Americans were about to lose their food stamp benefits. So I expect to see more of those types of losses moving forward when the data are just sort of politically inconvenient.

Anne Kim: What about data integrity and accuracy, particularly in light of political pressure? We already know about the political pressure on BLS, but there’s going to be pressure on other agencies as well. I’m sure it’s happening all the time. Are Americans going to be able to trust the data they get from their government for the next few years?

Denice Ross: So far, we have not seen any direct manipulation of numbers. There’s one Lancet article that does an excellent job of cataloging changes to column headers in some datasets—health datasets in particular—where a survey might have collected the gender of a person, and that column header was changed to sex. And then that change was not included in the documentation about that dataset. That’s the closest thing to manipulation that we’ve seen so far. 

However, it’s worth thinking about the life cycle of data. You have primary datasets that only the federal government can produce, and then there are derivative works—the way that agencies might be interpreting that primary data that they’ve produced.

With the Department of Energy’s recent report on the impact of greenhouse gas emissions or the new recommendations for children and vaccines, for example, we’ve seen some interpretations of the data that are not as scientific as we would normally expect from the federal government.

Anne Kim: What about academic reliance on data too? There are many professors around the country and research institutes and think tanks that rely on federal data and interpret it. As the quality and quantity of data diminishes, what’s the downstream impact going to be on the quality of scholarship around all this data?

Denice Ross: The quality of scholarship will certainly be challenging. 

There are some stopgap measures in place. For example, there are partnerships already between federal agencies and universities to collect data like the Framingham Heart Study out of NIH. NOAA’s also got this fantastic fleet of floating buoys in the ocean that gives us ocean temperature conditions. 

These academic partnerships helps keep these datasets a little more secure because they might have multiple stakeholders and they aren’t necessarily in the .gov space. But over time, I think what we’ll start to see is a slow disintegration of the quality of the data coming in and the ability to keep hosting it. 

But even more critical are the downstream consequences—the impacts on the American people—when our nation’s research enterprise is so hobbled by these losses to data flows. What I’m telling my colleagues who are users of data right now is that if you are using data to do your work, now is the time to advocate for why those data matter. We, and I include myself in that, have not done a great job of talking about how federal data are absolutely essential for benefiting American lives and livelihoods. 

Anne Kim: That brings us to your website, essentialdata.us, which is something that you’ve created to catalog the data sets that are disappearing and to make the case to the public about the importance of data. I was looking at the site recently—this was around Halloween—and I noticed that one of the pages on the site is titled Dearly Departed Datasets.

It’s literally a graveyard for datasets, and you’ve got these little tombstones for the data that’s disappearing. This graveyard also seems to be growing. How are you keeping track, and what else is disappearing?

Denice Ross: The reason we decided to do this campaign to crowdsource the “dearly departed datasets” right before Halloween is that a lot of people, especially journalists, were asking which data sets have actually disappeared. 

It turns out that the number that are actually gone right now is relatively small. It probably numbers in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands. But that really understates the risk to the entire data enterprise. 

In addition to the examples already mentioned, another dataset that’s [gone] is the “drug awareness network”—DAWN. That was a health surveillance network that monitors drug-related visits to emergency rooms, and it serves as an early warning system when new forms of dangerous illicit drugs start to pop up in a community. Where it’s going to show up is in emergency rooms, and it really makes sense for the federal government to consolidate that information. 

Another example of a dataset that’s disappeared is EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program. It was imperfect, certainly, but it was the only way we had to get information on emissions from some of the nation’s largest emitters.

Anne Kim: Is this data gone forever? there anybody that’s been archiving the data? Is that even possible? Is there a plan for restoring the data someday?

Denice Ross: When we say a dataset “disappears,” the historical data so far are mostly still available in the federal web space. But the collection is terminated moving forward. Civil society has been really fantastic, especially with the leadership of groups like the Data Rescue Project, at archiving some of these key data. And I definitely sleep better at night knowing that there are archives, and in some cases, multiple versions of data sets, that preserve the snapshot in time. 

But the best outcome is that we keep these data flowing because the value of the data is in its continual update. That’s why it’s so important that people who are depending on the data make the case to federal data stewards and policymakers and elected officials about why these data matter.

Anne Kim: Even if you do have an opportunity to begin collecting the data again in a couple years, though, there’s probably been enough damage done to the infrastructure that it probably is a longer term project to rebuild it, right?

Denice Ross: We’re going to have to retool and figure out what the future of a more resilient national data infrastructure looks like. But for now, we have to protect the core, and the many data sets that only the federal government can produce. 

If we lose that continuity, we are going to be flying blind as a nation during a time when we are having so many really dramatic shifts in public policy. We’ve got the steady cadence of climate fuel disasters, we’ve got civil unrest, and we’ve got the transformation happening because of AI and new technologies. If we ever needed to be operating with all of our instrumentation, it’s now.

Anne Kim: Not to mention public health, crime…

Denice Ross: Absolutely. Public health, all the things that might keep one awake at night. Data usually has some foundational role in policies and our ability to prepare as a nation.

Anne Kim: Is there anything that ordinary citizens who are concerned about this problem can do?

Denice Ross: I would encourage you to check out EssentialData.us and talk to your friends and colleagues about how important these data are that we’re taking for granted. 

For example, one dataset that we take for granted is the heat index that comes from the National Weather Service. Football coaches use the heat index to know when to move football practice inside so their players don’t die of heat stroke.

When I take my kids camping, that wooden sign that tells me what the fire risk level is and whether or not we can light a fire comes from federal data also. Just be more aware about the role that federal data plays in your everyday life. 

The post Federal Data Are Disappearing appeared first on Washington Monthly.

 On October 31, President Donald Trump announced that in 2026, the United States will allow only 7,500 refugees to enter the country, marking the most drastic limitation on refugees since the United States adopted a formal refugee policy following World War II. Under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the U.S. admitted over 350,000 refugees from 1948 to 1952. Modeled after the United Nations definition established in 1951, the federal definition of a refugee is someone who “is of special humanitarian concern to the United States,” and can demonstrate they “were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.”  

In addition to slashing the number of refugees, the president declared he wants new policies that will favor Europeans (and people of European ancestry) and people who speak English. In a headline describing the new policy, The New York Times correctly declared that the new policy was to favor white people. This position dovetails with his 2024 campaign when he, at a fundraising dinner, asked, “Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries. . . . Nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland? . . . How about Norway?”    

One of Trump’s goals is to give refugee status to white South Africans who are uncomfortable living in a country where they are a racial minority and white Europeans who oppose the migration of non-Europeans into their countries. The proposal is racist and reflects a misunderstanding (at best) of who a refugee is. It does, however, reflect a policy that was created in the 1790s to protect slavery and discriminate against non-whites moving to the new United States. 

In 1790, the nation passed its first naturalization law. At one level, the law was remarkably progressive. It allowed people to naturalize regardless of religion, national origin, economic status, or gender. A woman could naturalize in the U.S. without “permission” from a husband, father, or other male family member. Jewish immigrants to the United States could naturalize under this law, but not if they moved to Great Britain or other European countries, which limited naturalization on religious grounds.  

But the statute was also racist, declaring that “any alien, being a free white person” could naturalize after residing in the United States for two years. The law did not prohibit non-white persons from entering the country, but it did prevent them from becoming citizens. Racial restrictions on naturalization would remain in American law until 1952.  

Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. established a pattern of limiting immigration and naturalization based on race, ethnicity, and geographic origin. In 1924, Congress severely limited total immigration, preventing it entirely from some countries, such as Japan and China, and dramatically curbing it from southern, eastern, and central Europe. For more than a century, the U.S. had been a haven for those fleeing persecution, war, famine, and disaster. The Statue of Liberty still had on her pedestal the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” However, the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the doors to America for most of those huddled masses.  

Despite the rise of fascism in Italy and Spain, Nazism in Germany, Japanese military aggression in Asia, and as murderous policies in the Soviet Union became evident, the U.S. kept its doors closed. As Benito Mussolini in Italy, Francisco Franco in Spain, and Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union increasingly arrested, harassed, murdered their opponents, or starved them to death, America looked the other way. Italian opponents of Mussolini could not come here, and many were killed. Ukrainians being starved to death by Stalin were not welcome here. Jews in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, trying to escape Adolf Hitler’s persecution before World War II began in September 1939, could not get into the United States, and soon perished. Millions of Jews in Eastern Europe, denied U.S. entry, ended up in the gas chambers. 

After World War II, the United States finally adopted laws allowing refugees desperate to live to immigrate. After the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union failed in 1956, the United States allowed more than 30,000 Hungarian refugees to enter the country. When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, we offered sanctuary to refugees. After South Vietnam fell in 1975, the United States gave sanctuary to more than 1,250,000 refugees.  

In all these situations, refugees were desperate, often facing torture, imprisonment, or death at home, or living in camps as displaced persons. Since World War II, when the “status” of refugee became part of our law, millions have come here based on the threats they faced, without regard to their race, religion, ethnicity, or how much money they had in their pockets.  

President Trump’s proposal will reverse this history. He talks about white South Africans as escaping persecution. We can only wonder what he means. The situation of whites in a post-Apartheid South Africa doesn’t bear the signs of oppression. There is no government-sponsored violence against whites, who constitute about 7 percent of its population but own 73 percent of privately held land. In 2022-23, there were 51 people murdered on white South African farms (although all of them may not have been white). These killings account for less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the 27,494 people murdered in the country that year. These murders, while deplorable, hardly constitute an official or even unofficial campaign to murder, kill, or commit genocide against the four and a half million whites in South Africa. Meanwhile, white South Africans remain at the very top of the South African economy. Sixty-two percent of the top positions in South African companies are held by white managers, while only 17 percent are held by non-white managers. With wealth, access to education, and public office, white South Africans can apply for a visa or come here as ordinary immigrants if they want to. But they are not refugees under U.S. law, even if some have been victims of racial attacks.  

Similarly, the president says that Europeans who oppose migration in their own countries should be welcomed as refugees. He focuses on the far-right German AfD party. The government does not threaten parties that participate in German elections. Members can organize politically; no one is dragging them to prisons or gulags. They are not refugees. Why a president who has sought to put many of America’s top universities under de facto federal control over antisemitism should welcome non-persecuted members of an anti-immigrant party as refugees is perplexing.  

Calling “English-speaking” people refugees makes a mockery of U.S. immigration law and, ironically, the English language. Many people in Europe speak English because it is one of the two languages (the other is French) that the European Union uses to conduct most of its business. It is the official language and spoken by the majority of the population in Ireland and the United Kingdom, as well as in non-European countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. But there are about 50 other nations in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America where English is an official language, taught in schools, and widely spoken, including the Bahamas, Belize, Fiji, Ghana, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tonga, and Uganda. English is a de facto language in at least nine countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including Bangladesh, Israel, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. There are also more than 20 places, colonies, or territories, such as Bermuda, Hong Kong, and many islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, where English is an official language. If the president really wants to open our borders to people who speak English by pretending that they are “refugees,” it will be a broad spectrum of persons from around the globe of all races, religions, and ethnicities. The president should be careful what he wishes for; he might get it. 

The post Why Trump’s White Refugee Gambit Could Backfire  appeared first on Washington Monthly.