The title of this article was inevitable, I suppose. Most of the Donald Trump’s worst policies (so far) are ones that he has been promising or threatening for a long time and in many cases attempted to do in his first term. So they have been discussed in detail by myself and others years ago. We literally told you so.
To cover these issues, all I need to do is to dig up those old articles and provide a few key excerpts. We can cover a lot of ground here, because we’ve already done the work, and we just need a refresher.
The TracinskiCoin Fundraiser
But first a note about my new fundraiser, which is what I am doing instead of joining the political grifter complex and issuing a totally fraudulent memecoin.
The response so far has been terrific, and thanks to those of you who have contributed. At this point, I’m about two-thirds of the way to the minimum target I set. Please help me push this over the goal and see how far we can go.
In the comments field, a subscriber suggested that this hybrid of paying subscriptions and donations is a “new business model for ideas that don't simply confirm our pre-existing biases.” That is exactly the way the media works now. So let me put it this way. If only ten percent of my paying subscribers donate $100, then I can reach the target I’ve set for this fundraiser. Every little bit makes a difference, but if you can afford to give more, I would appreciate it.
That support, in turn, radiates outward. For every paying subscriber, I reach more than ten times as many people who are on my free list and get regular teasers and samples. Then there are even more readers who see the pieces I publish outside of this newsletter, which reach a much larger audience yet somehow don’t pay as well. SO I can only do it because I have this newsletter as a base of support.
All of this is part of my plan to prepare for what will be a difficult and precedent-setting start to the Trump administration. This year, possibly just the next six months, will determine exactly how much Trump can get away with.
That’s why I couch my plan for this year in terms of resistance to Trump first and foremost. Yes, there are a few things he is doing that I might approve of, particularly in some areas of regulation and environmental policy. (Though I don’t like the form in which he is doing it, and I will comment on that in the next few weeks.) But the big question for this year is how far he can go with the worst, most authoritarian parts of his agenda. That will be determined by how much resistance he encounters.
It hasn’t been much, so far, so our priority is to rally more of it. Please help out with that.
The Party of Dred Scott
The worst thing Donald Trump has done so far is an executive order telling federal agencies not to recognize the citizenship of anyone who was not born to either a US citizen or whose parents were both permanent legal residents of the US. Excluded are not just children born in the US to illegal immigrants but also the children of foreigners here legally on a temporary visa.
Incidentally, we just had a debate over H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers, which Trump seemingly promised not to restrict. But I can tell you that it will be a massive barrier to these workers to tell them that their children will never be US citizens and will face deportation from the only home they’ve ever known—which is what Trump’s executive order implies. So say goodbye to a bunch of scientists and tech workers.
The important thing about this executive order is that it is completely invented out of thin air. The conditions it gives are nowhere to be found in the Constitution and are flatly contradicted by the 14th Amendment. It’s no wonder the first judge to hear this challenge—an old Reagan appointee—dismissed it as “blatantly unconstitutional,” commenting, “I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear.”
To know why he said that, check out something I wrote all the way back in 2015. At the time, I was trying to make the case for birthright citizenship to conservatives by pointing out its ancient roots. As I wryly put it, “there are plenty of ‘conservatives’ who want us to stick to the Constitution and time-worn legal traditions—so long as this supports the things they like. But if the Constitution and the thousand-year history of English common law get in the way of their nativist prejudices, then to heck with them.” Boy, did that hold up.
Here's the basic story.
What we call “birthright citizenship” is an ancient principle of English common law called jus soli. This principle was so widely accepted at the time of America's founding that it was never explicitly affirmed, even as it was followed in practice (with one huge exception, which I will get to in a moment). America at its founding was a nation eager to grow and expand. Not only did it place no limits on immigration, but the Declaration of Independence had included such limits among the grievances against King George III: “He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.”…
For the Founders, rejecting jus soli or birthright citizenship would have meant either greatly restricting the growth and expansion of the new nation or, more likely, creating a system in which there was a large and growing sub-population of people who were disenfranchised in the land of their own birth—an idea totally incompatible with a government based on the consent of the governed.
Our forebears did create just such a sub-population: Africans who had been brought over as slaves, who continued to live in America for generations without even the most basic rights of citizens. It was specifically to redress this injustice that birthright citizenship was explicitly written into the Constitution in the 14th Amendment. The very first sentence of the 14th Amendment declares, “All persons born...in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”…
The purpose of birthright citizenship is precisely to achieve what its critics claim they want: to make it possible to absorb immigrants while keeping a nation whole. Without it, we might have ended up with a vast sub-population of Americans with names like Roark and Traczynski (my people) who are alienated and disenfranchised in their own land.
That last part is important. Ask yourself if you could demonstrate your own citizenship by the standards invented by Trump. There are many people who can’t, and the only limit on the executive order is that it declares it will apply only to people born thirty days after it was issued. But this is a purely arbitrary cutoff that exists only in an executive order. If people who don’t meet these criteria are not citizens, then it should apply retroactively as well—and eventually, it will.
We keep talking about the 14th Amendment in this context, but this amendment did not create birthright citizenship. It merely put into official words an ancient rule that had been followed for centuries—with one exception. The 14th Amendment was very deliberately meant to reverse the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott, which had denied birthright citizenship for African-Americans. I have also written about this legacy and how today’s Republicans have betrayed their heritage and become the party of Dred Scott.
I also pointed out how thoroughly dishonest the case against birthright citizenship is, requiring conservatives to literally re-write the Constitution.
The Amendment’s very first sentence, knows as the Citizenship Clause, reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”…
Erler and Anton want to push their own idiosyncratic interpretation: that those “not subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States include any foreigner living in the US. For the support of this interpretation, they summon a quote from the congressional debates over the amendment by one of its chief drafters, Senator Jacob Howard, who said that the Citizenship Clause did not apply to “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”
But wait, what is that word “or” doing there in brackets? It certainly changes our reading of the statement. With the “or,” we get the impression that “foreigners, aliens” are one category and “families of ambassadors” are another category. Without that extra word, the more logical interpretation is that there is only one category, and “families of ambassadors” is the most exact description of that category. It certainly is not the smoking gun quote Erler and Anton want it to be. And yet the “or” is their addition, summoned up solely for the purpose of leading the reader to the conclusion they want. They changed the quote to make it say what they wanted it to say.
There is one thing I wrote that doesn’t hold up: “I am confident that it would be struck down by a 9-0 ruling, including Trump’s own appointees.” Well, I was confident that they would do the same with presidential immunity, so as you can imagine, I am no longer sure how the court’s conservative majority will rule on this issue.
After all, why did the Supreme Court rule against birthright citizenship in Dred Scott? It was certainly not on the legal merits, but purely in response to political pressure, since ruling the other way would have declared the entire institution of slavery clearly unconstitutional. Today’s Supreme Court has been following in this illustrious tradition of judicial cowardice.
See also a good recent overview from David French, which raises this disturbing question.
Will Trump comply with the rulings of the Supreme Court? Or will he disregard rulings he doesn’t like, demand that the executive branch bend to his will, and then pardon the men and women who might criminally defy the Supreme Court?
And as Kim Wehle argues in the The Bulwark, Trump is already defying the laws and the courts on another issue: His extension of the TikTok ban was declared by executive fiat in defiance of the law.
The Francon & Heyer Subsidy
Another bad idea that made its way back from Trump’s first term in office is his mandate for “neoclassical” federal architecture, an executive order he previewed in 2020 and eventually adopted, only to have it almost immediately revoked by the Biden administration. Now it’s back on.
Five years ago, when this was first proposed, Sherri and I wrote about it. What we focused on was the subordination of art to politics, particularly revealed in the shallow understanding of architecture among people who suddenly had very strong political opinions about it. In their minds, “classical” architecture is just anything old and with traditional ornament and definitely anything with columns. “Modern” architecture is anything with glass and steel and no ornament. “Brutalism” is anything with exposed concrete. And you will meet people with strong opinions about this who have no idea, for example, who Louis Sullivan was. (This is literally a conversation I had with someone in the last six months, and if you want to correct that defect, start here.)
But the main practical impact of the executive order is to provide government support for a faction sympathetic to Trump. Along the way, it will produce a bunch of ugly federal buildings that are just ugly in a different way: They will be badly cobbled together, poorly understood copies of old buildings.
[D]on’t bother to examine a folly, ask only what it accomplishes. There’s no reason to believe this executive order would result in particularly beautiful buildings or a revival of American architecture. Leigh even anticipates the most likely result: “postmodern structures that, like the Reagan building, engage traditional forms and styles to some degree.” In other words, build a glass curtain wall, slap on some pilasters, and boom—you’ve fulfilled the government’s “classical” requirements.
What this mandate would definitely accomplish is to give jobs to the people who wrote it and promoted it. Leigh is pretty open about this.
A resolutely countercultural community of classical architects has emerged in the United States in recent decades. Nowadays, however, our classicists face overwhelming indifference, if not outright opposition, within the academy and from the AIA and the legacy media. Uncle Sam needs to put these classicists to work—not only on new buildings but on the classically informed reconfiguration, wherever possible, of its many modernist structures in need of renovation. Moynihan’s Guiding Principles should be rewritten with a view to setting federal patronage apart from the anomie of our postmodern culture.
As is par for the course in the Trump era, any patronage scheme run for the benefit of a politically connected clique has to be dressed up in loud populist rhetoric. So Catesby Leigh of the Ivy League rails against “elitist architectural pieties” and tells us that federal architecture should “register with normal people, as opposed to postmodern deipnosophists.” The point would probably have come across more convincingly without the ten-dollar word at the end.
In short, it’s a full employment guarantee for the firm of Francon & Heyer.
We know this because that’s exactly the kind of building the advocates of this executive order have been praising. My favorite line from this article is our conclusion after an analysis of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
So one of the buildings the administration’s classicists tout as an example of the timeless style appropriate to the American republic isn’t really Classical, isn’t American, isn’t republican, and was itself a fad of the day that was regarded as ugly by its contemporary audience.
This idea that modern architecture is bad and traditional architecture is good has really taken off in the last five years. I’ve been hearing it a fair bit from the Silicon Valley set, who also do not know anything about architecture. So I’m hoping we’ll be able to offer a little more commentary on this in the coming year.
Broligarchs
Seeing all the tech company CEOs lined up at Trump’s inaugural and put on display as his own personal collection underscored the extent to which Trump is trying to create a Putin-style oligarchy in the US. Or rather “broligarchs,” as some people are calling them. But people tend to misunderstand what an oligarchy is. Yes, a lot of these guys are lining up in the hope of getting government favors and support. But that’s not the essential aspect of an oligarchy. The oligarchs do not control the strongman who acts as their patron. They are controlled by him.
I warned about this when Trump Lite—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—tried to bring Disney to heel.
Contemplating Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Charlie Sykes recently asked whether America has an oligarch problem. He cites a definition of a Russian-style “oligarch” as “a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.”
But this misunderstands the role of the Russian oligarchs because while they have political connections, they have no political influence whatsoever. They are servants, not masters. Consider the case of the last semi-independent Russian billionaire, beer baron turned banking innovator Oleg Tinkov, whose holdings inside Russia evaporated overnight—sold off at fire-sale prices under the threat of nationalization—after he criticized Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Russia’s problem is not that it has wealthy people with political opinions. Its problem is that its billionaires’ ability to keep their businesses and their fortunes depends on how well they conform to the political views of the real oligarchs: the siloviki, the ex-KGB guys who hold political power. That’s why we do have to worry—because those are the conditions that some on the American right are attempting to create here.
I was particularly struck by this when I came across another, older article from 2017 about the phenomenon of “market-friendly Silicon Valley progressivism,” in which companies like Google accepted a basic deal: “be the left's enforcers against heretics and infidels in the culture wars, in exchange for (temporary) dispensation for your sins against the left in the realm of economics.”
This might seem like a change or contradiction from today, where guys like Mark Zuckerberg, the human weathervane, have switched from left to right and adopted a ridiculous right-wing culture war persona. But it’s really the same story. Our new oligarchs are followers, not leaders. Lured by the promise of government favors and the fear of government reprisals, they are blowing with the wind, which sometimes takes them one direction and sometimes takes them back the other direction.
Life in the Monkey House
The recent controversy over Elon Musk giving what sure-as-heck looks like a Nazi salute at an inauguration rally reminds me a lot of the reaction to Donald Trump calling Nazis in Charlottesville “very fine people.”
I have written what is probably the definitive piece about this, and there was really no question as to Trump’s meaning. He wasn’t saying that there are “very fine people” out there in the world in general. If you listen to his actual words, he was referring to people in a specific place at a specific time, and those specific people were Nazis. But there was just enough ambiguity—he also said he condemned the Nazis, in between expressing sympathy for them—that if you really wanted to come up with an excuse for him, you could. If you tried hard enough, you could even convince yourself that everyone else was totally wrong for thinking they heard Trump say what he said.
I feel the same way about the Musk salute. I’m only a few years older than Musk, and I can tell you that a boy growing up in the 1970s knew exactly what a “sieg heil” salute looks like. World War II still loomed very large in films, television, and global popular culture. So none of us would ever do it accidentally. Dubious excuses about Musk supposedly being “autistic,” as convenient as they are, don’t really wash. People who are “on the spectrum” may have difficulty picking up on subtle social cues and conventions—but this one isn’t subtle, and there’s no way a guy as intelligent as Musk could have missed its meaning.
I’ve been telling people that if they think this gesture is so innocuous, they should try doing it at the office and to their neighbors in the morning and see how it works out. That’s what a local politician in Pennsylvania did, and she was forced to resign.
Then there is the inconvenient fact that Musk has continued to back the AfD, a surging right-wing party in Germany. See a long and ominous overview of the AfD from Claire Berlinski. Seriously, you can’t go around pronouncing about the purity of Musk’s heart until you get the full picture on the organization he’s supporting.
Two incidents pop out. A few years back, the AfD commissioned an internal report on one of its rising leaders, and their own review concluded that he was a neo-Nazi and recommended expelling him. Instead, he rose higher in the leadership, while the people who asked for the report were the ones who left the party. The other incident is a secret conference attended by AfD leaders which presented a plan for the mass deportation of immigrants, including German citizens. So if it looks like a goose and steps like one—well, you get the idea.
But getting into this yet again after almost ten years—it was in 2016 that Trump retweeted an antisemitic meme created by a white nationalist—and after a long and steady drip-drip-drip—remember the neo-Nazi he had dinner with at Mar-a-Lago?—makes me wonder why we’re still arguing. One ambiguous statement or gesture might not be so bad if you squint at it just the right way. But after a whole stream of them, you can’t ignore the pattern.
That brings me to an article I wrote in 2017 that offered up a pungent analogy, borrowing the words of fashion competition host Tim Gunn.
I have this refrain about the monkey house at the zoo. When you first enter into the monkey house at the zoo, you think, “Oh my god, this place stinks!” And then after you’re there for 20 minutes you think, “it’s not so bad,” and after you’re there for an hour it doesn’t smell at all. And anyone entering the monkey house freshly thinks, “this stinks!”
You’ve been living in the monkey house.
I added to that.
If the dumpster fire was the signature analogy for 2016, evoking a particularly smelly and unpleasant kind of out-of-control disaster, then the monkey house should be the signature analogy of 2017—the pungent mental image most appropriate for the era in which we’ve become so used to the insanity that we no longer notice it.
Anyone entering freshly into the monkey house that is the Trump administration would be overwhelmed by the stench. But too many people who have been living with this day in and day out find their senses distorted by the weird priorities and mental habits they have grown accustomed to regard as normal over the past year and a half.
I’m trying to say this kindly, in that nurturing, nice-guy way Tim Gunn has, because it has happened to people I like, and I really want them to snap out of it.
In retrospect, when I wrote that, we had not yet begun to take up residence in the monkey house. But I can imagine that if I told you ten years ago that this is the sort of thing we would be debating all the time, you would have thought that the world was going mad. And so it has.
Help me make it a little more sane again.
I have a movie metaphor for Mark Zuckerberg. He is Zelig, Woody Allen's arch conformist. Zelig spontaneously changes physical appearance to fit in with and be liked by others. :-)
R.T. Anticipatory Contrarian here. Did I not say I told you already to pleazzze stop calling Trumpers “Republicans” and his died in the grey wool uniforms “conservatives”…Respectfully, I get your fear and loathing of Heat Miser, and your being a statist, anti-statist, pro abortionists…I mean you as one that has always been a true believer in a woman’s so called right to choice [death], as if it is a sacramental right that only a Republican can deny…again, I get your hatred for Idiocracy becoming based on a true story…as I have yet to read your lament about the loyal opposition literally nominating, strait outta central casting, a D.I.E., mean D.E.I. star of Home Boobtube Office Creep, I mean Veep show…but I digress, I mean run on
Thanks for your brilliant takedown of our wannabe Ill Duce/Sopranos like B.O., I mean revolting Executive Order over Birthright Citizenship and excellent brief history of a time lesson about when America literally did have an open border …and how our forefathers welcomed the stranger…as much out of self interest as it was ecumenical. My only real American beef is you speak of no legitimate cases that anyone would have with anyone and everyone winning the golden ticket to freedom by mere birth in the good ole U.S.A….for instance, the real, foul world of birther tourism, owned, ran and operated by our nations biggest enemies. You have nothing to say about many of a non citizen mothers really having none of American greatness in mind, or spirit…but whose mothers really only came here to use and abuse our generosity, tug at our heartstrings and welfare systems. You have nothing to say about these kids, in a mere 18 years will have the right to suffrage. You have nothing to say about how many of these kids will be raised by parents who came from subcultures that make Californians look downright red…Trump is a megalomaniac goon, but there are good reasons Americans are sick and tired of foreigners having babies born in the U.S.A. …and these children being instant equals under the law, entitled to all the entitlements the newborns parents paid not an fing dime into Robert!!! For f sake can you come up with nothing better than still painting The Orangeman with the Nazi card…respectfully, your takedown of Charlottesville hoax-hoax is not truly definitive as you might like to paint Trump as having racists sympathies…I fing hate how he does not tell the white trash element how much he would like to throw them out of our country…but need I remind you The Dons high class call girl wife has more melanin than you or I…and his daughter even converted to Judaism to marry a clever, despicable man who signed a multi billion dollar contract with a House of Fraud sherif oilman, who all of a sudden crime family is pro Israel as the sultan of swinger jihadists is anti Darth Vadar of Therroran. But Party of Dred Scott, really!? me thinks not, as much as I fing hate Trump. And forgive me Jesus, I HATE TRUMP And don’t get me started about what I think should be done with his soul, in the here and now, because I do not pray for shameless as he is unrepentant sinner (Ashli still cannot be reached for comment…anymore than you liked my former Preamble…which, unlike your suggesting Trump is a neo Nazi, everything in my former lament is true about The Don
Again, if I had Harlan Crow money, or had not had been an o.g. major lamenter about Bitcon since it’s inception , and been an eager investor when it still costs the chump change I had in my wallet…But, I am still eager to read an insightful article on how and why and what are the bitcon bros up to sucking up to a President …Given Satoshu Nakamoto’s Ponzi scheme, I mean blockchain would instantly fall down if the U.S.Treasury and Internal Revenue Service all of a sudden had a problem with Bitcon being backed up by the full faith and credit of the former, and the latter finally went after that which Bitcon investors were wanting to evade in the first place..The Man and his willing taxman collectors…Who, as much as it shocks the both of us, the former is Donald J Trump. We the people do live in interesting, distressing times. Here we are now, entertain U.S. DJT….It is Rally Monkey time. God help U.S. Gotta run on. Thanks for taking my rant R.T. Peace through superior mental firepower