Take-ing on the New Administration

A Trump hot takes megapost. (Once. As a treat.)

I allow myself to use Donald Trump’s face as a header image, at most, once per year. It is lazy, but I haven’t done it since 2023. Incidentally, don’t you think he looks tired?

From the De Civ mailbag, a few weeks ago:

Do you plan to write anything about the various imprudent and/or illegal actions committed by this administration? Been waiting to see literally anything on your blog that isn't about the MN legislature.

The cardinal rule of blogging is: don’t say anything that somebody else has already said better. If you can’t think of something fresh and interesting to say, keep your mouth shut. A lot of people are writing about Donald Trump and the new White House, and many of them are doing a better job than I would. My last interesting idea about Trump was “Greta Thunberg, Pretender to the American Throne,” back in December, so I wrote that and fell silent.

I don’t think that’s surprising. The President (even a de facto President) is at the center of American political discourse for four years. The competition for good takes is hotter than the surface of Venus. That’s why I wrote so little about President Biden.¹ In fact, I wrote a lot more about Donald Trump during the Biden presidency than I did about Joe Biden!

Mr. Trump seems to have that effect on people. Even when he’s not in the room, he’s everyone’s center of attention. People who love Trump crave Trump-related content like he’s Obama in 2008, which was sad enough in 2008. People who hate Trump are addicted to Trump-related content like my grandparents were addicted to nicotine. (It killed them both.²) I’ve been writing about (mostly against) Trump for nine long, unhappy years, and so has everybody else.

I used to write little articles I called my “Not-That-Bads”:

The rules of this game are simple: President Trump implements a bad policy, makes a bad decision, or says a bad thing, which is worthy of condemnation. The Cathedral then reacts by describing that policy, decision, or quote in apocalyptic terms, becomes hysterical, and then questions not the wisdom of the policy but its very legitimacy—its legality, its authority, and its membership in the set of things that may be reasonably discussed by reasonable people. In most cases, this overreaction is (in my opinion as a hardcore Rule-of-Law guy) more dangerous to the American system of government than the actual bad things Trump is doing. So then I need to stand up and say, “Hey, guys, it’s Not That Bad,” explain why it’s Not That Bad, and then remember to still mention somewhere that it’s still bad, because the last thing I want is for people to think I’ve turned into a pro-Trumper (or even an anti-anti-Trumper).

That got old by the end of 2017. There’s only so many times you can point out that the opposition is overreacting before you look like a simp, so I stopped, at least until Trump did something that really was That Bad.³

That was eight years ago. Yet still there’s that craving for another hit, another screed, another panic. People are going, “This is the time to stand up and be counted!” while others are poasting, “If you always wondered what you would have done during the Holocaust, it’s what you’re doing right now.” These people should receive nothing, except possibly treatment. This adds to my reluctance to write more about Trump.

That reluctance is already substantial. When all is said and done, I’ll have spent 12 years in the political wilderness… if I’m lucky. I thought for sure in February 2021 that we were free of The Donald’s baleful influence on American politics—a true Liberation Day on my calendar—so now I don’t count my chickens before they hatch. He might run for a third term in 2028, Twenty-Second Amendment be damned. Perhaps the best way I can contribute to the end of Trump is to just shut up about him. Deprive the fire of oxygen and it goes out.

On the other hand, Trump is the center of many political controversies at the moment. Some of them are very consequential for the economy, for the rule of law, for human flourishing, and other things that all reasonable people care about. There are lots of people out there who are indifferent to whether Trump lives or dies, but who want to understand what is going on and are craving candid thoughts from people like me who spend too much time reading the news. Does De Civitate not serve these innocents, too?

Furthermore, I admit that it has been hard for me (after spending too much time reading the news) to keep my Trump takes to myself, even though they are not interesting enough to merit their own article. I recently totaled up all my Facebook comments about the new Administration since Inauguration Day, and I was shocked to find that it ran to over 12,000 words. Clearly, I have my own case of TDS, and it seeks an outlet.⁴

While I was wrestling with this, it occurred to me that perhaps I could satisfy all my needs at once if I took all my Trump takes and combined them into a single hyperdense article, like a neutron star made of hot takes. I could get Trump out of my system and offer something for honest seekers, without turning De Civ into another Trump addiction blog.

Plus, maybe, even though none of my takes are especially “fresh and interesting,” perhaps if I combined all my takes into a Megazord like this, there might be enough interesting nuggets among them to justify an article!

That’s the theory, anyway. Let’s find out.

Table of Contents

1. Trump v. J.G.G. (the Alien Enemies Act case)

2. The Children Long for Project 2025

3. The Anxious Style in American Politics (women and Trump)

4. When to Panic

5. On Signalgate (The War Plans Group Chat)

6. A Roman Solution (federal downsizing)

7. Terror, Terror, They Say (anti-Tesla violence)

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Trump v. J.G.G.

Reno v. Flores (1993), 7-2 majority opinion. Due process in this case did not necessarily involve judicial review, but judicial review had to be available to the targeted alien minors upon their request.

I don't understand most media reporting about Monday night’s Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. J.G.G. (the Alien Enemies Act case). Nearly every source—right, left, or center—reported that the Supreme Court is "allowing [Trump] to proceed with deportations under the Alien Enemies Act." But this is not at all the case.

In a 9-0 ruling, the Court held definitively that everyone detained under the Alien Enemies Act is entitled to adequate notice, a hearing in front of a judge, and access to the appeals process where appropriate. Trump's whole purpose in invoking the Alien Enemies Act in the first place was to deport aliens without needing to hold a hearing with a judge with appeals! If he lost that, that's the ballgame for his Alien Enemies Act gambit! He might as well go back to deporting people the old-fashioned way!

It gets worse for White House: the AEA has significant constitutionality questions around it, especially given the wildly abusive way Mr. Trump invoked it. (He invoked it to address an alleged "invasion" by a foreign gang, but originalist judges are likely to strike it down, because that isn't what "invasion" meant in the original statute.) All those questions will be raised in every AEA deportation case, and, since they are major constitutional questions with no direct prior precedent being invoked in multiple cases around the country, they are all but certain to be appealed back to the Supreme Court for normal briefing and oral argument.

In other words, thanks to Monday’s ruling, the White House won't be able to deport anyone under the Alien Enemies Act, even with a slam-dunk case, for at least 18 months while they are tied up in court.

Sure enough, as I revised this item for the Hot Takes Megazord, “J.G.G.” (the anonymous plaintiff in this case) and two of his friends did indeed file a habeas in Texas, and a federal judge in Texas—a Trump appointee—duly issued a brand-new temporary restraining order protecting the plaintiffs and everyone else in their detention facility from deportation under the Alien Enemies Act.

Again, all this was held by the Supreme Court unanimously. The Administration’s deportation-without-due-process gambit is kneecapped.

The Division

The Court divided 5-4 on two much narrower questions, which boiled down to these:

• Do the five alleged illegal aliens⁵ in this case need to have their cases heard in the District of Columbia, or in Texas?

  • 5-4, the Court ruled “Texas.”

• Can other alleged illegal aliens (outside this case) be covered/protected by a temporary order in this case, or do they need to file their own cases?

  • 5-4, the Court ruled “their own cases,” at least to begin with.

The dissenters didn't argue that the Court's rulings were wrong. They instead argued that the Court's rulings were premature. The Court ruled without briefing and oral arguments on these questions, in order to get the cases moving again in the lower courts immediately.

Remember that delay means these alleged illegal immigrants remain in ICE detention and legal limbo for longer, so I suspect that aspect is largely good news for them. Also, since the temporary restraining orders were about to dissolve anyway, there could have been quite a lot of delay before SCOTUS got another bite at the apple, so this ruling may have been a big time-saver. I am not very familiar with this area of law. Most of what I know about the writ of habeas corpus is from the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, based on the arguments presented in this opinion, I think the majority is correct on the law.

Now the twist ending: I agree with the dissenters anyway. I think both the Court's rulings were probably correct as a matter of law, but it was inappropriate to rule on them on the emergency docket without briefing, oral argument, or a lower court judgment. These are controversial questions, not trivial ones that can be summarily dispensed, and now these answers are binding on the whole country, even though we haven't had the benefit of argument to prove that they are correct. Even if the majority was sure they were right, they should have waited.

If I were on SCOTUS, I would have voted with Justice Barrett. Barrett joined only two small sections of Justice Sotomayor's dissenting opinion, which said basically what I just said. She declined to sign on to the rest of the dissent's overheated rhetoric.

Double-twist ending! I think the dissent's overheated rhetoric is well worth reading, perhaps more than any other part of the opinion. It is overheated because it has very little to do with the actual disposition of this case, and therefore is inappropriately aimed at the Supreme Court majority.

However, Sotomayor's dissent (especially the beginning) provides a clear, step-by-step accounting of the actions the Administration has taken throughout this case in order to undermine the rule of law, strip alleged criminals of their rights, and evade judicial review. This account is sobering and casts a harsh light on several of the Administration's repellant actions. It seems likely to me that Sotomayor wrote it as a kind of essay against Trump, which is judicially inappropriate (because irrelevant to the decisive questions in this case), but it's still actually a pretty good essay. (I'm going to credit the other dissenters' editing for that, because Sotomayor on her own is a bad writer.)

Speculating on the Justices’ Motivations

Some commentators are praising the majority ruling as “Marbury-esque.” This is because the Marbury Court was in an extremely awkward position: they needed to assert their power of judicial review, or else be crushed forever by President Jefferson’s resistant executive branch… but asserting the power of judicial review against President Jefferson might easily lead to him ignoring the Court, thus crushing them forever. The Marbury Court escaped the quandary by exercising the power of judicial review and using that power to rule in favor of President Jefferson. The degree to which this was an honest judicial decision versus grubby political manipulation of the ruling has been debated for centuries, but there is no doubt that, whatever their rationale, the Marbury gambit allowed the Supreme Court to survive and (eventually) grow into the most powerful of the three branches.

There’s something to this. Based on the writing style, I am pretty confident that Chief Justice Roberts wrote the per curiam. Roberts is a political animal, except that isn’t quite right, because animals are usually fairly successful at adopting means that progress them to their goals. Roberts is like a political animal with a lobotomy, constantly cutting off his own fingers and then laughing in triumph like he’s really put one over on the rest of us. I have very little doubt that Roberts adopted the conclusion in this case specifically because of its “Marbury-esque” qualities. This is, of course, an abuse of the judicial power. As a seemingly wise man once said, judges are umpires, not players. They call balls and strikes, and to knowingly call a strike a ball for institutional expediency is a violation of the oath every judge makes to the Constitution.

Justice Kavanaugh is not nearly as bad as that, but he does have some hero-worship for Roberts and may have been persuaded into following the Chief down this road.

Justice Alito, like Justice Sotomayor, is a partisan justice. I’m not saying either of them are dishonest, and Alito in particular has earned his place in the judicial firmament regardless of my critique… but they both have a very hard time seeing the logic in an argument if they don’t like its conclusion. Alito’s no dummy and clearly saw, along with the rest of the justices, that the White House’s position on deportation without due process was completely indefensible, but he was always going to look for a way to throw a bone to the Administration in one way or another. I’m sure Alito was not hard to persuade into supporting this particular bone. Likewise, Sotomayor was always going to fight against any bones thrown.

However, Thomas and Gorsuch have little use for political considerations. Both are, in their own ways, judicial extremists of the best sort. For those two justices, I strongly suspect their conclusion in this case was completely sincere.

Justice Barrett stuck perfectly to form here. If there are two things Justice Barrett hates, it’s divisive rhetoric between justices, reversing lower courts on the emergency docket, and taking cases that target stable precedents even if the precedent is probably wrong. Shoot, that’s three things, let me come in again…

I’m sure she, too, was completely sincere.

I do not have a clear read on Justice Jackson yet. I just haven’t studied her enough.⁶ However, she has a sincere predilection for writing things that don’t need to be written, like her completely redundant dissent in today’s decision, which was so unnecessary I forgot it existed until I started writing this paragraph. She also hates when the Court reverses lower courts off the emergency docket, but, because she has been in the minority since she joined the Court (thus nearly always on the losing side of such rulings), it is hard to say for sure yet whether her opposition is sincere or not.

I don’t have an interesting take on Kagan’s role in this one, except that I bet Roberts would have liked to get her into his majority on this one. 6-3 with one conservative in dissent and one liberal in the majority would have looked a lot better in the press than a 5-4 with just the conservatives plus Lobotomy Roberts.

Why The Press Coverage Was So Bad

I think it's still fairly rare that the news simply misunderstands the effect of a decision as it did here. (The news butchers legal decisions in lots of ways, but this is an unusual one.) I think the probability of a screw-up goes way up under certain conditions, and this was a perfect storm:

• It's on the emergency docket, so reporters who normally have months to get acquainted with the details of the big cases had days or hours.

• The news media is left-wing. It is obvious that they read the left-wing opinions first, and I suspect they only skim the right-wing opinions before press time. Their reporting therefore tends to take whatever tone the lead left opinion takes. The lead left-wing opinion here was by Sotomayor, and she tends to adopt a tone of moral panic when she loses.

• One check against this tendency to adopt the left-wing view of a case is the official right-wing reaction. But, in this case, the right-wing White House also claimed a massive win, and the political incentives among right-wingers were to support the White House’s claim.

So reporters had (on the one hand) a left-wing opinion that made this sound like a huge defeat for the Left, and a right-wing infosphere that made it sound like a huge win for the Right, and very little time to understand the case themselves, so what conclusion are they to draw?

This does not excuse them for getting this wrong. They literally reported that the President would be able to continue deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act thanks to this ruling, whereas the reality is that he will not be able to do that for at least the foreseeable future, probably never. The press tend to see everyone, in every judicial decision, as a rank partisan out to rationalize their secretly-held political goals. They always say, “Court sides with Trump” or “Court sides with illegal immigrants” and never “Court sides with the law.”

Nevertheless, I think we can understand the poor decisions that led them into this mistake.

Final Notes on Trump v. J.G.G.

Anyway.

Here, again, is the full decision, including the dissent, Jackson’s bonus dissent, and Justice Kavanaugh’s typical “please don’t hate me, this is really nbd” concurrence. It is quite short. The controlling opinion (the Per Curiam at the start) would be 2.5 pages in 12-point double-spaced font if you removed the citations. That’s shorter than most five-paragraph papers you wrote as a student. (It is, literally, only four paragraphs.) All three opinions combined are still shorter than Poe's The Purloined Letter, and a lot of that word count is citations. I read it all in, I don’t know, half an hour? If you’re going to read a Supreme Court decision this year, this isn’t a bad one!

Other Good Reading on this Decision:

• “The Disturbing Myopia of Trump v. J.G.G.” by Steve Vladeck (best critical opinion I’ve read)

• “What Exactly Did Justice Barrett Disagree With The Majority About In Trump v. JGG?” by Josh Blackman (breakdown/summary/critique of the dissents)

• “The Supreme Court and the Second Trump Administration” by William Baude (general speculation/analysis on how SCOTUS is thinking about these cases)

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The Children Long for the Mines Project 2025

You know, if we were following Project 2025, we wouldn’t be in a trade war with Canada.

Oh, wait, sorry, I’m getting something on my earpiece… Oh, okay. Apparently, we are now in a trade war with… the world?!

Norm MacDonald’s Germany bit

Think of the top, I don't know, five things Donald Trump is most aggressively pursuing. Then check which ones are in Project 2025.

Here's my list of Trump’s Favorite Things:

• Indiscriminately firing all fireable federal employees, including those in probationary periods

• Bombing the Houthis

• Invoking the Alien Enemies Act

• Annexing Canada and/or Greenland (??!?)

• Canadian tariffs tariffs tariffs everywhere you’re gonna get wet⁷

• Negotiating a peace in Ukraine (that's rather favorable to Russia)

The first four aren't in Project 2025. Indeed, P2025 calls for deepening our friendships with Canada and Greenland, which is nearly the opposite of threatening them with invasion for no reason.

Project 2025 is so divided on tariffs that, rather than giving policy recommendations, its trade section is a debate between free-trader Kent Lassman and “fair-trader” Peter Navarro (pp765-824). Even Navarro is principally concerned with China and passing legislation to counteract nonreciprocal tariffs in an orderly fashion, not… whatever Senior Counselor to the President for Trade Peter Navarro is apparently advising the Administration to do now. Needless to say, even the “fair-trader” does not recommend “Declare Trade War on Canada and tell them it won’t end until they become the 51st state.”

The Russia/Ukraine War gets a brief discussion on page 182, which acknowledges the divide among conservatives on Ukraine policy, takes no specific position, and concludes:

Regardless of viewpoints, all sides agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have a right to defend their homeland. Furthermore, the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength and provided a boost to NATO unity and its importance to European nations.

This conclusion is... well, clearly the Trump Administration doesn't think very highly of it.

America would be much better off if the Democrats had been right and Trump had actually wanted to follow Project 2025. Even if you hate Project 2025, I think you should agree that it’s better than the Trump Administration!

Some Objections

There are three basic objections to this view:

First, it is incredibly unpopular. Virtually everyone who hates Trump also hates Project 2025, and most people who love Trump also abjure Project 2025 as a political albatross around Leader Trump’s neck. However, this only proves that it would be stupid to run an anti-Trump, pro-Project 2025 political campaign, because you would lose. I agree! Nevertheless, if, by some freak circumstance, this document came to rule the White House anyway (rather than Trump’s logorrhea), things would be better than they are today. I’m not claiming it’s a winning agenda, just that it’s a better agenda.

Second, many point out that Project 2025 suggested things that President de facto Trump later commanded through executive order—often using language that closely echoes language from Project 2025—so we are already living in a Project 2025 regime (and it sucks!). Hence Politico’s “37 ways Project 2025 has shown up in Trump’s executive orders.” These articles are used to vindicate last year’s conspiracy theory that, despite Donald Trump’s repeated repudiation of Project 2025, Project 2025 was nevertheless the secret blueprint of his administration. (I wrote about these and other P2025-related conspiracy theories last year.) Yet the presumption of all these articles is that, if Project 2025 suggested doing something and Trump subsequently did it, Project 2025 must be where the idea originated. That’s not remotely the case.⁸

In fact, for some ideas, it’s exactly the opposite: the first Trump Administration had an idea, then Project 2025 adopted it into their framework! Even though Trump later did these things, he obviously didn’t get the idea from Project 2025. In most cases (like DEI rollbacks), he actively ran on these ideas, and the American people voted for it.

For many ideas, Trump and Project 2025 were both drawing on long-standing conservative commitments. For example, it is true, as Politico alleges in a scandalized tone, that Project 2025 recommended Trump impose the Mexico City Policy to block U.S. subsidies for international abortion providers… and Trump did!⁹ However, it’s perfectly obvious Trump didn’t do it because Project 2025 suggested it; he also imposed the Mexico City Policy at the start of his first term… and so has every other incoming Republican president since Ronald Reagan. This is just something Republican presidents do. Treating this as proof that Donald Trump is secretly following Project 2025 is just as silly as treating it as proof that George H.W. Bush was secretly following Project 2025 more than thirty years before Project 2025 was written!

This gives us a fairly simple heuristic you can use to see whether it’s even plausible that Trump got one of his ideas from Project 2025:

1. Did he do it in his last term, before Project 2025 existed? If yes, then it obviously didn’t come from Project 2025.

2. Did he actively campaign on it in 2024, the same campaign where he repudiated Project 2025? If yes, then it obviously wasn’t a secret he foisted on an unsuspecting public, and he probably didn’t get the idea from Project 2025 at all!¹⁰

When you go through the 37 executive orders Politico cites as “evidence” that Trump was lying on the campaign trail, this simple heuristic eliminates 35 of them.

What’s left? What Trump policy proposals may have actually originated from Project 2025? Spicy stuff, believe you me:

• Closing the OFCCP (Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs)

  • I doubt President Trump knew then, nor knows now, what OFCCP is. It’s an anti-discrimination enforcement office, so it was in trouble no matter what, but it’s plausible that the idea to close it came from P2025.

• Shifting FEMA burdens to the states, with FEMA playing only a support role

  • Note that Trump already hated FEMA, and it’s easy to imagine Trump asking the office, “Hey, how can I crush FEMA under my heel,” and a P2025 staffer saying, “You know, I wrote down some ideas about that.”

I did always say that, since Project 2025 is very much a part of the (very small) conservative policy wonk world, it was inevitable that Project 2025 would have some influence in the Trump White House, as one faction among many. These data points seem to bear that out.

Broadly speaking, though, we do not live in a Project 2025 regime—to our great cost. We live in a revanchist-conservative regime with a bipolar disorder, which causes it to occasionally do Project-2025-like things. Things would be a lot better if we shed both the revanchism and the manic depression and just lived under Project 2025.

Third, Project 2025 aligns generally with Trump’s approach, and it provides both legal and rhetorical tools to the Trump Administration that Trump is delighted to use. In this way, Project 2025 still enables Trumpian abuses, even though those abuses are not specifically in Project 2025. For example, on immigration, Project 2025 didn’t suggest the use of the Alien Enemies Act, but did clearly support a significant increase in deportations. Even though Project 2025 would have been more disciplined and more concerned with following existing law, the end goal was the same: large-scale deportations.

To me, however, “more disciplined and more concerned with follow the law” is the whole ballgame. Anyone who believed in enforcing laws passed by Congress would necessarily increase deportations dramatically compared to the Biden baseline, as well as tighten a huge range of border controls. What I wanted, and what I think the American people voted for, was a disciplined approach that followed the law, tempered with mercy, but without injury to the law. Current law demands many, many deportations (because we have allowed many, many illegal aliens to enter). Current law also demands due process and Congressional appropriations and oversight. Priority should be catching criminal aliens, but, by law, non-criminal aliens should also be repatriated. That’s the Project 2025 approach, near as I can tell.

When we contrast this approach with Trump’s approach, three characteristics stand out: Trump’s lawlessness, Trump’s cruelty, and Trump’s recklessness. None of that came from Project 2025. He added all that on himself.

What Project 2025 was gunning for was more or less what I hoped to see. They talked a bunch about my favorite silver bullet: mandatory, universal E-Verify! They listed a bunch of reforms they hoped to see passed by Congress, the entity that ought to set our immigration policy! They never once mentioned revoking the green cards of legal aliens for supporting Hamas! (They did recommend winding down various Temporary Protected Status visas, which IMHO makes sense.)

What Trump has done instead has a similar end result in mind, but achieved by cruel and stupid means. That he uses any weapon ready to hand to aid his cruelty and stupidity—be it a Project 2025 idea or a repurposed Biden-era precedent—doesn't make Project 2025 or Joe Biden blameworthy for it. The voters demanded large-scale deportations, and so does the law, but what Trump is delivering matches up to that demand only in the way a distorted fun-house-mirror reflection matches the person standing in front of it.

One last time, then, even Trump’s harshest critics should agree that we would be much better off following Project 2025 than following the Donald J. Trump Agenda.

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The Anxious Style in American Politics

#if Substack supported emoji I would do this #…especially for this item #incel heritage post

Please ignore this section if you do not agree with the premise. The premise is a sweeping generalization based on limited data supplemented by my personal observations. I can’t prove it. It might be quite wrong. If it doesn’t sound right to you, set it aside. Here it is:

Donald Trump has activated the fight-or-flight response of specifically middle-aged White ladies.

I didn’t see this at first. At first, I thought that I was just seeing the typical gear-shift that happens whenever a new party takes power. Everyone who was content under the old party gets mad, and everyone who was outraged under the old party suddenly turns exultant—even though, as a practical matter, nobody’s life has actually changed¹¹ and the future looks just as grim overall as it did the day before. It therefore wasn’t surprising to see lots of people upset about the Trump Administration! Heck, I knew plenty of people who had been so upset about the Biden Administration they convinced themselves it was a stolen election! At least the anti-Trump crowd didn’t do that. So, at first, I didn’t give it a second thought.

Sure, middle-aged White ladies specifically seemed to be exuding a lot of anxiety, but that fit the pattern, too. Women are disproportionately left-wing. Middle-aged women are Millennials, which is shaping up to be the most left-wing generation alive. Moreover, nearly everyone I know or read about is college-educated,¹² and college-educated White women were the most left-wing White demographic in 2016… when they began a sharp move further left. They’re the Harris base, so we would expect them to be distraught. Given the well-known finding in social science that women are (on average) slightly more neurotic and anxious than men (on average!), we would expect them to express that distress in the form of anxiety. We would expect that distress to be worse than in other elections, because, let’s face it, Trump is a genuinely worse president than a replacement-level politician (say, Nikki Haley) would be. Indeed, we’ve saw exactly this after 2016!

Then… I gave it a second thought. Consider last week’s Hands Off! rallies around the country. Now, remember that, back in November’s elections, the gender gap was only about 10%, and that’s pretty consistent no matter how you slice it: 10 points among all voters, 8% among White voters, 10% among college-educated Whites. You would expect that a string of anti-Trump protests would reflect that gender gap, so you would expect the Hands Off! rallies to be about 55% women and 45% men, give or take a few percent.

Here’s the first screenshot I found online of the Hands Off! rallies, from the Tampa Bay instance:

Hard to be sure of gender from behind, but men can’t be more than 30% of that crowd, can they? Here, look at this one, too, from Louisville:

Again, counting is hard, that’s why Sister Keller invented calculators, but I don’t see that adding up to 40% boys.

I voted third-party last fall, and, as a third-party voter, I come into contact with other third-party voters all the time. These are people who are demonstrably not part of the Harris base, and who are demonstrably not on either political “team.” A priori, they are most likely to regard the change of administrations the way I did: with a despairing, “shame-they-couldn’t-both-lose” shrug.

I have no polls on this, because “White women who voted third-party” is a really tiny demographic, less than 1% of the electorate. Yet even among these women, who voted specifically a-plague-on-both-your-houses, I am seeing and sensing powerful anxiety and outrage that simply wasn’t there during the preceding four years under Joe Biden.

(There are a number of women of my acquaintance who are reading this and might suddenly be thinking, “Wait, is James writing sweeping generalizations about my gender because of that conversation we had last week?” Let me assure you: no. It’s because I had that same conversation a dozen times in the past few weeks, with all different women. I am not writing this about anyone specific, and I am relying as much as I can on polls, like this one:)

Shortly after, I started seeing polls like this one (look at 2:35 particularly), which showed that, among both college and non-college Whites, the Trump-approval gender gap has expanded from around 10 points last fall to around 30 points today. Even for Trump, this is unusual!

Conclusion: something about Trump II has activated a strong anxiety response in middle-aged women, much more than in any other demographic group with which I am closely acquainted.

Why?

I don’t know.

The go-to explanation on the Left is “something something trying to take away women’s rights,” by which they mean the right to kill a fetus. I’ve never thought that held much water, because, historically, the gender gap on abortion has been almost non-existent. For decades—despite what you read in the papers—men and women were about equally pro-life or pro-choice, supported about the same restrictions on abortion, and the main difference was that both pro-life and pro-choice women were more motivated by the issue. However, there is good reason to believe that, in 2019, that changed abruptly:

Note that this shift was not caused by Dobbs. In 2018, Gallup found 31% of women supported abortion under any circumstances. By 2021, it was 36%. In 2022, they happened to take the survey the same week the Dobbs draft leaked, and it didn’t spike; it held at 38%. It has continued steady growth to reach 42% today. This is a seismic shift in abortion polling, which has been notable over the past fifty years chiefly for its rock-steady stability.

If nearly half of American women are now committed to abortion on demand (and the shift started before Dobbs, for whatever reason), obviously women will also be disproportionately suspicious of Donald Trump, the man who appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe.

On the other hand, Trump ran in 2024 as the most abortion-moderate Republican presidential candidate in history, and early exits suggested that he had mostly neutralized the issue by Election Day. He has been pretty quiet on the pro-life front since taking office, and he installed pro-choicer Robert F. Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services, the single most important department for pro-lifers to control! Moreover, speaking from personal observation, anxiety about Donald Trump seems to include many pro-life women who would happily pass laws protecting fetuses from the moment of conception.

Another simple explanation: Donald Trump is an adjudicated sexual abuser who has in the past admitted to grabbing women “by the pussy,” so, obviously, women are particularly nervous about having him de facto in charge of the Executive Branch. I’m sure this is part of it, although, since Trump was already pretty obviously a Sex Villain during his first term, it may not explain any changes in female anxiety between the first and second terms.

A third idea: Trump has entered office much more, ah, robustly than he did the first time. He immediately sought the extreme limits of presidential power (as previously understood) in order to:

• Deport aliens

  • …including lawful permanent residents for conduct that would (for citizens) be protected by the First Amendment (like Mahmoud Khalil¹³).

  • …including to Central American prisons with shoddy safety records and ridden with apparent abuse.

  • …without following what has until now been understood to be the bare minimum for due process of law.

• Reshape the federal workforce

  • …including by abruptly shuttering services in vast layoffs.

  • …including by firing almost literally anyone he could fire through probationary-period layoffs.

• Seize control of historically bipartisan federal commissions (like the Federal Trade Commission and Equal Opportunity Employment Commission) by firing Democratic commissioners without other cause.

• Cancel grants and launch investigations of former recipients.

• Punish former political opponents through sanctions and investigations.

• Enact extreme tariffs

  • …which certainly violate the spirit of the law and likely violate the letter

  • …which caused vast economic turmoil and very possibly recession.

  • …and then he un-enacted them.

  • …and then enacted them again!

  • …and then he un-enacted some… again? What day is it?

Every single one of these actions was then challenged in court (as expected), and the outcomes of all these cases are currently unclear.

Set aside the political or legal merits of any of these actions. Maybe they’re bad, maybe they’re good,¹⁴ but what they all do is create uncertainty. Under Biden or Harris, you could take a pretty good guess at what the United States’s legal and economic environment was going to be in twelve months. Even if you were confident that things were going to get worse, at least you had a good idea of what “worse” looked like. We don’t have that anymore.

On its own, this theory explains general Trump-related anxiety being stronger in the second term, but it does not explain why that anxiety would be stronger among women, specifically. However, we have already seen that women are somewhat more vulnerable to anxiety (on average), so it seems to fit that a new source of society-wide anxiety would have somewhat disproportionate effects among women. This seems to fit, then: Trump’s First Hundred Days have greatly increased the amount of free-floating uncertainty about the future, which (on average) affects women more than men.

One more: to generalize, male-dominated social structures tend to be governed by intense competition and displays of strength to establish hierarchy,¹⁵ while female-dominated social structures tend to be governed by consensus and social approval, with less overt hierarchies. This emphasis on social conformity seems to make shame and ostracization a potent enforcement tool for women.¹⁶ Sure enough, women seem to be more shamed (on average) than men.

From this man’s perspective, Donald Trump does not present as especially threatening, because he is manifestly weak. He competes in a very male tenor,¹⁷ with his hyper-competitive rhetoric and ostentatious displays of strength, but he isn’t very good at it. Over and over again, Donald Trump picks fights that he does not win, and, indeed, could not possibly win. This goes all the way back to his very first day in office, when he insisted that his 2017 Inauguration Day crowd was the largest in history. It continues to this morning, when he shot the foot off his own anti-China tariff plan by exempting consumer electronics, thereby rendering the entire exercise (an attempt to reshore American electronics manufacturing!) completely futile. Even the time he tried to overthrow the government was laughably incompetent, the worst coup attempt since Fries’s Rebellion. Despite his uncanny talent for demagoguery and astonishing luck¹⁸ in drawing weak election opponents, Donald Trump is unlikely to accomplish any of his other goals, least of all his long-held dream of becoming dictator. If he does, he’ll blunder into it by accident.

However, Donald Trump is completely immune to shame. It is impossible to bring him into line using this weapon. He does not feel it. It passes through him like cosmic rays. He can’t even pretend to feel it in order to mollify people, like Bill Clinton used to do every couple years. I believe Trump is the first president since women’s suffrage who simply doesn’t care about at least appearing to conform with social norms. I imagine that women might be legitimately threatened by this, since Trump simply ignores their best weapons. Since Trump cannot be controlled by shame, I imagine that some women see him, on a gut level, like an uncontrollable maniac capable of anything—therefore far more dangerous than the bumbling egoist I described in the previous paragraph. In this way, he activates their flight-or-fight response, but avoids tripping mine.

I want to leave this unusual item with an important disclaimer: I’m not saying that the middle-aged White ladies are wrong. Their emotional reaction to the Trump Administration seems different from mine. I admit, my first instinct is that the “TRUMP IS THREAT” vibe is an overreaction.¹⁹ But that’s an emotional response as much as theirs is.

One way of reading this, then, is that middle-aged White ladies are the canaries in the coal mine, whose highly-refined Dangerous Man Detection Systems are allowing them to shout a warning that the rest of us should heed! If Donald Trump ends up deporting me to an El Salvadorean torture prison because I called him a traitor a few times, I am going to regret not listening to all you women who told me I should be scared!

So I am not judging who is right or wrong here. I am simply observing a phenomenon and trying to understand why so many women (including anti-Harris women) seem to be on the verge of something like panic, while so many men (including anti-Trump men) do not seem to feel the same way.

I have generalized here quite a bit. All generalizations are wrong, but some are useful. If these generalizations seem wrong to you, crumple it all up and throw it in the garbage can. More than usual, I could be wrong. But perhaps I was interesting.

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When to Panic

“Okay, James, if you’re so chill about Trump, what are your red lines? When would you panic?”

Fair question! It is important to remember that you are asking someone who has despaired of the American republic for quite a while, so it takes a lot to really make me feel fear. So much has already been lost. For example, I would not love a war with Iran, but we’ve fought a number of failed wars in the Middle East in my lifetime, including some illegal ones, so, I don’t know, what’s one more failed, illegal war worth? A heavy sigh, for sure, but it’s not going to affect me any time soon. A major recession, perhaps induced by tariffs? Sure, could easily happen, but big sigh it’s been almost twenty years since the last recession, which means we’re actually way overdue.

Still, I do have my red lines:

“The only winning move is not to play.”

The White House seems determined to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine. It is not doing this in an honorable fashion, but de-escalation in Eastern Europe would be a welcome change. Russia remains the world’s foremost nuclear power after the United States, the only nation with an arsenal that rivals our own, and war with Russia remains an existential threat to life on Earth. If that were to suddenly change direction toward a hotter conflict—and this is Trump, so it could—that would really worry me. (This is a minor concern I have about our growing conflict with Iran, a Russian client.)

Similarly, China has been maneuvering for a number of years to seize Taiwan, a crucial (and currently irreplaceable) international supplier of advanced computer chips. Now, China could easily attack Taiwan in any presidential administration, and I’m not sure whether it matters who the American President is. (I do not have much confidence in Kamala Harris’s ability to hold Taiwan, for example.) No matter what, this would be a panic-button situation. However, I’m more worried about it with Trump around. I don’t trust him to avoid irrational escalation, because he always escalates, often irrationally. That’s one thing when it’s a fight about DEI, but it’s quite another thing when the future of the country is in the balance. China has plenty enough nukes to kill a third or more of Americans, and it has the missiles to hit New York. A Taiwan conflict would be unavoidable but extremely delicate, and Donald Trump is not delicate. I hope that alone forestalls Chinese invasion plans until 2029.

“John Roberts Has Made His Decision, Now Let Him Enforce It”

If the White House resists or tries to get of or appeals or finesses judicial orders, that raises my anxiety level. However, if Mr. Trump directly refuses an order issued by the Supreme Court, even after the Supreme Court clarifies it, and/or he prevents the U.S. Marshals from carrying out the Supreme Court’s orders, I’m buying a gun.

And, no, the Supreme Court will not simply roll over in response to a rogue executive. They have immense authority to issue court orders to other entities that will obey them—for example, the State of California. Someone asked me today, and this is a direct quote, “How many divisions does John Roberts have?” The answer is quite a few. Blue states have about 200,000 militiamen under arms (they’re called the National Guard), and blue-state governors would be delighted to put every one of them at the disposal of John Roberts, pursuant to a court order, if necessary to stop illegal actions by Donald Trump.

It would almost certainly never reach that (insane) endgame, but, if it did, it takes no great leap of the imagination from there to see how it could lead to armed standoffs between federal and state law enforcement, or even between different parts of federal law enforcement. That’s how you get a civil war. If Trump falsely believes he will automatically win any game of escalation with the judicial branch, he could take us to the brink without even recognizing the danger.

So far, however, the Trump Administration is only playing footsie with the law, insisting that it is complying with court orders by interpreting them… creatively. This is bad, but it is not an especially new species of bad. Direct, categorial defiance of the Supreme Court, however, would be extremely dangerous.

On that note…

The Abrego Garcia Case

Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in El Salvador. His family fled to Guatemala while he was child. Garcia illegally immigrated to the United States around 2011, at the age of 16. He is now married to a U.S. citizen and has a five-year-old child (a citizen).

Garcia may also be a member of the very evil MS-13 gang. He was arrested for that reason in 2019, based on a report from an informant. The evidentiary record here is thin. I consider it a live possibility that Garcia is part of MS-13. On the other hand, he has never been charged with or convicted of any crime (other than illegal immigration). On the other hand, illegal immigrants have no constitutional right to the benefit of the doubt, nor any presumptive right to be in this country, so they can be removed on mere suspicion of gang activity.

After his 2019 arrest, Garcia was ruled removable from the United States. At the same time, a judge ordered that, if Garcia were deported, he must not be returned to El Salvador. ICE decided not to deport him at that time. He remained in the United States and checked in with ICE annually, as ordered.

In March 2025, ICE arrested and deported Garcia. As far as I can tell, this much is legal. Unlike the Alien Enemies Act case (Trump v. J.G.G.), there is no due process concern here. Garcia had already received due process in 2019, culminating in an order deeming him removable.

Unfortunately, the government deported Garcia to El Salvador—the one place on Earth they were specifically not allowed to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia. Specifically, they deported him to CECOT, the reputedly brutal El Salvadorean “anti-terrorist” prison. (From everything I have seen, it deserves its reputation.) The government is paying President Bukele of El Salvador $6 million to hold several hundred of our immigration prisoners in detention there for one year. This is extremely disturbing, but I don’t see it as obviously illegal.

The government claims they shipped Garcia to El Salvador because of a simple administrative error. I find that plausible. After that, though, the government’s case goes off the rails.

It is the government’s position that, yes, they illegally deported Garcia, whoopsie-doodle, but that, because Garcia is now in El Salvador, they can’t get him back. President Bukele now controls his fate, and the United States just doesn’t have any say in that. What are the courts going to do, order the President to invade El Salvador to get him back? That would violate the separation of powers!

Everyone else thinks the government might start by just… asking nicely? Bukele would almost certainly be happy to give him back, especially if he keeps the other prisoners and the money. However, to date, the government has refused to ask. At this point, they’ve shown such bad faith that, if they ever do ask Bukele to give back Garcia, I expect they’ll also shake their heads at Bukele to tell him that he should answer “no.” the executive branch admits it has made a mistake that deprived a man of his liberty, but is actively refusing to even attempt to fix it.

This is a terrifying position. As Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit (a respected Reagan appointee) put it in his concurring opinion (p18):

[I]f it is truly a mistake, one would also expect the government to do what it can to rectify it. Most of us attempt to undo, to the extent that we can, the mistakes that we have made. But, to the best of my knowledge, the government has not made the attempt here. The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done. It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.

The Supreme Court unanimously rebuked the White House’s position in Noem v. Garcia on Wednesday night, but the Administration has continued to play games on remand to the district court. Judge Xinis (who has the case in district court) is very understandably growing frustrated with the government’s recalcitrant lawyers, who seem determined to force the judiciary to make a choice:

1. Either gut the foreign-affairs power by putting courts directly in charge of executive-branch negotiations with a foreign government (in order to ensure good faith), or

2. Give every president, forever, the power to arrest anyone—including a U.S. citizen—for any or no reason, with or without an order of removal, and get away with it as long as the president can throw them in a foreign prison before U.S. courts get wind of it.

Any sane White House would bend over backwards to avoid forcing the courts into this choice. This White House seems to welcome it.

If the courts opt for #2, or if the White House succeeds at defying them (see above), I’m buying a gun. Not because I’m afraid I’ll be arrested and shipped to a CIA black site in Addis Ababa under Trump, no. I don’t fit the profile of people Trump dislikes.²⁰ But we will very likely have a Democratic president within ten years, and wouldn’t she love to have this legal hack in her back pocket so she can stick me in a hole somewhere forever without charge or trial.

“Civil libertarians hate this one weird trick!” It’s so obviously evil, but also so obviously stupid and self-defeating, that only Donald Trump could think of it. The most astonishing thing about it is that, if this weapon ever gets into the hands of the Democrats, the A-#1 most obvious target for it in the whole world is Donald Trump himself. He sows the seeds of his own extraordinary rendition! Joe Biden himself could not shoot himself in the dick this hard.

The Canadian Bacon Scenario

Michael Moore’s greatest movie was supposed to be a joke. “Surrender pronto, or we’ll level Toronto!”

I don’t think most Americans realize just how angry Canadians are about Donald Trump’s recent saber-rattling toward Ottawa. A few months ago, the Canadian Conservative Party was on the brink of an utterly crushing win in the forthcoming Canadian elections. They were ahead twenty points in the polls. They were expected to win a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Their chances of winning the election were rated at, literally, 100%. Then Trump was inaugurated, and started doing his tariffs-and-annexation spiel. Canadians were so revolted that, in just four weeks, Justin Trudeau’s depleted Liberal Party pulled even with the Conservatives. Today, the Liberals are all-but-certain to win back their majority (again), and they hold a comfortable lead in the polls. This aligns with what I hear from my Canadian friends. (One such friend has taken to signing every post, on any topic, with a French anti-American stanza.) They are angry about what they see as a total betrayal by the United States.

Meanwhile, most Americans are unaware of what’s even gone down between Trump and Canada.

In the end, I think Trump is, as usual, just blustering about things he doesn’t begin to understand. However, suppose we take seriously Trump’s claim that Canada simply won’t do as a sovereign nation:

We are subsidizing Canada to the tune of more than 200 Billion Dollars a year. WHY??? This cannot continue. The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians’ taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever — And Canada will be a big part of that. The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World — And your brilliant anthem, “O Canada,” will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!

These are seriously threatening words. No sane world leader would tweet that to another world leader without expecting to provoke a military response of some kind.

For now, Trump seems to have forgotten about Canada, and I expect that to continue. Quite frankly, I think he was joking, and was simply too stupid to realize what a sensitive topic it was and too much of an ass to back down once he did.

However, if Trump begins a military buildup clearly aimed at invading Canada (or, relatedly, Greenland), or there are credible reports of U.S. military operations over the border, I’m buying a gun.

…but not to bear arms against Canada! Needless to say, the only side I might fight against in such an unjust war would be the aggressor.

The Obvious One

If Trump declares martial law without adequate cause and abuses the commander-in-chief power over the military to illegitimately effect domestic political ends, buy a gun.

The catch is that “adequate cause” and “illegitimately” are very squishy concepts, which is why so many coups are successful. For example, in summer 2020, I think it would have been entirely legitimate for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to put down the ongoing riots—even though I did not trust then-President Trump, specifically, to use that power responsibly.

Basically, though, if you see Sen. Padme Amidala (R-Naboo) muttering about how liberty dies, book the next transport off this rock.

But Remember…

These are my red lines, but none of them has actually happened yet. I am reasonably sure that none of them is going to happen.²¹

It is worth noting that the White House’s most direct assault on the Constitution this year didn’t come from Trump at all, but from Joe Biden. The proposed “Equal Rights Amendment,” a not-even-that-stealthy abortion-rights vehicle, failed in 1979, was illegally extended to 1982, and failed again anyway. In January, President Biden decreed that the ERA was somehow magically part of the Constitution now. Had his declaration succeeded in having any kind of legal effect, it could have torn the nation asunder; you cannot have constitutional government when the country does not agree on what the Constitution says. It was insanely irresponsible for him to throw that match into the fuel room, and we're lucky it blew out harmlessly. Unlike my speculation about the White House defying the Supreme Court, this one actually happened.

As I’ve argued before, the ERA NOW people and the January 6 Eastman Memo people deserve each other, because they are equally lawless maniacs bent on seizing power through paper-thin legal pretexts. Not nearly enough people are nearly mad enough about Biden’s ERA stunt. I guess that’s because everyone pretty much agrees that January 2025 Joe Biden was irrelevant. He probably didn't even know he'd done it, having long since taken leave of his senses.

…which, by the way, was another absurdly dangerous thing we did last year. We all admitted the guy was non compos mentis, then pretended he was still functionally president. If there had been a crisis, if China had invaded Taiwan, who would have picked up the red phone at 3 A.M.? Not Joe Biden. His own aides told us in July that he was only “dependably engaged” from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.!

Now, I’m not trying to do a whataboutism. Biden is in the past and there is nothing we can do about him now. The Trump crises are real and they are today. They deserve your main attention. This is, rather, another reminder that a lot of the people who really want you to panic about Trump have a very selective ear for “constitutional crisis.” Weigh their words accordingly. Don’t assume a red line will be crossed until it’s crossed.

On Signalgate

History repeats: first as tragedy, then as farce.

Stole this from a friend.

IYKYK

If Clinton had been jailed, these men would have been jailed, too, because the precedent would have been set. That would have been good, and far less stupid. Please, more jail for federal officials.

I will not dignify this indignity with any more words. Instead, go watch the best documentary about the buildup to the Iraq War, starring Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who, since these characters so vividly resemble the incandescent morons we’ve placed in charge of our national security state:

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A Roman Solution

Originally, the word “decimate” was not just a synonym for “devastate.”

"Decimation" was a punishment the Roman army carried out on cohorts (480 men) or legions (~4500 men) that had, as a unit, committed capital crimes, such as rebellion or desertion.

Rome could not simply execute the entire formation, because it needed the manpower. Nor could it single out the innocent and execute only the guilty; proving who, exactly, had been a coward and who hadn't was too complicated. Neither could it simply let a unit off the hook for these serious crimes, since that could encourage further criminal behavior by other units.

So Rome, which did not have Christian morality and was ruthlessly pragmatic, would decimate the unit instead: each cohort would be divided into groups of ten. These were comrades who had lived and fought alongside one another for an extended period of time. The groups of ten would draw lots. The one who drew the short straw was sentenced to be executed by the other nine, typically by clubbing. There was no further due process. There was no discrimination by rank, by honors... or by individual responsibility for the crime. Decimation fell on the innocent and the guilty equally.

Thus disciplined, the unit's guilt was expiated and the unit was deemed fit for service once again. However, the completely random killing of experienced leaders and complete innocents alongside actual malefactors must have left the unit in diminished condition for many years after a decimation.

It is called "decimation" because "decim" means "ten" or "tenth" (like in "decimal").²² Decimation has been periodically used throughout Western history ever since. Wikipedia lists multiple examples during the 20th century.

This came to mind in late February, when I saw news report which stated that about 200,000 federal employees have lost their jobs (plus 75,000 who took a buyout). The number of total federal employees is hard to pin down, fluctuates a lot, and depends on how you define "employee," but, by many measures, it hovers around 2.7 million - 3.0 million most of the time.

It seems to me, then, that the current federal layoffs might be best understood as a Roman-style decimation.

Good Decimation or Bad Decimation?

It is, frankly, hard to argue that the federal government doesn’t deserve to be punished. The federal covid response turned out to involve rather a lot of politics and lies. CDC mask “recommendations” transparently rose or fell on the basis of political decisions. CDC vaccine recommendations did, too, but much less transparently. (I am vaccinated. Given the evidence, this was an objectively good choice. My kids are not vaccinated against covid. Given the evidence, this is also an objectively good choice.)

The bureaucracy as a whole made a concerted, collective decision to “#resist” Trump in 2017-2020 (to the great detriment of Trump’s effectiveness during his first term), and it was completely reasonable and predictable that, if Trump ever returned, it would be with vengeance on his mind. Moreover, this politicization of The Building was a betrayal, not just of Trump, but of the whole idea of a neutral civil service whose purpose is to faithfully execute the law according to the will of the executive.

On top of all this, there really is a lot of wasteful, stupid spending in government.

With all that said, I don’t think decimation ever really worked as a punishment. It destroys morale and cohesion, without punishing the guilty. Even if it did work in certain military formations, I think it’s the wrong approach to the federal government. The federal government used to do a lot of things by itself, but cuts (especially during the Clinton Administration) led to a lot of departments trying to do the same amount of work with fewer people.

They couldn’t streamline their business processes, because their business processes are set by Congress. If you have a hundred bureaucrats filling out a hundred forms mandated by Congress, getting rid of fifty bureaucrats just means it takes twice as long to fill out the same number of forms! (Scott Alexander recently explained this.) Instead, many federal agencies were forced to hire contractors. The dream of the 1980s and 1990s was that contractors would compete with one another to accomplish more tasks at a lower price. My own experience of contractors is that they accomplish fewer tasks at a higher price. (What contractors are good at is quantifying every single thing they do, so they look like a bargain, even though they waste a lot of time and money on all that quantifying.) My conclusion: the federal government today is actually understaffed, and should increase the number of federal employees in order to cut costs (while shuttering useless departments, such as the Department of Education).

This is not incompatible with my hawkishness on the national debt. According to a Cato Institute study²³ of data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. federal spending can be divvied up into five categories: transfers ($3,190 billion), followed by aid to the states ($1,150 billion), interest ($950 billion), purchases ($840 billion), and worker compensation ($560 billion). Notice that personnel are the smallest expense here. The deficit is $1.7 trillion, so a 10% change in worker comp either way is, alas, a drop in the bucket—but smart hiring could allow the government to accomplish tasks that would actually cut the deficit, like installing all those financial audit controls Elon “Sejanus” Musk²⁴ keeps telling us are missing.

I suppose this is not incompatible with decimating today’s federal workforce, either. You could fire a bunch of people now (as punishment) and then staff up later (to get things done). However, that isn’t really the messaging we’re getting from the White House, and, again, I don’t think it’s going to be effective.

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Terror, Terror, They Say

There’s been a string of illegal and/or violent attacks on Tesla cars, Tesla dealerships, and even Tesla owners. The Trumpian right immediately started calling this “domestic terrorism,” and I rolled my eyes, just as I did when the Democrats started trying to surveil gamers to stop the next January 6. (J6 was an insurrection, not a terrorism.)

However, then I got to thinking. Suppose anti-abortion activists started systematically blowing up abortion clinics. This is exceedingly rare and universally condemned within the pro-life movement—unlike the Tesla attacks, which have been met by much less than universal condemnation on the Left. Nevertheless, if there were a string of coordinated, successful clinic bombings, the government and the press would definitely call it “domestic terrorism.” We know this because the FBI has expressly defined “abortion-related violent extremism” as a major category of domestic terrorism for years, as have federal judges and law enforcement officials. The National Organization for Women tried to prosecute pro-lifers for non-violent civil disobedience using RICO statutes that had been designed to break organized crime!²⁵

If blowing up an abortion clinic in order to prevent abortions is “terrorism,” then, surely, blowing up an electric car in order to intimidate other owners of the brand to disinvest in order to hurt the brand’s profit margins in order to wound a political figure you oppose is, like, double terrorism. After all, this is obviously aimed at creating a climate of fear. Clinic bombers don’t usually care about the emotions they cause; they just want the direct impact of preventing a facility from performing abortions. The Tesla attacks are like if, instead of bombing abortion clinics, extremists started bombing grocery stores that sold Ben & Jerry’s (a brand which openly supports abortion rights). In colloquial terms, then, violent Tesla attackers clearly fall into the “terrorist” bucket.

However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to treat any of this stuff as “terrorism” for legal purposes. The U.S. anti-terrorism apparatus came into being after the 9/11 with a single, overriding purpose: prevent another 9/11. It is important to remember that, in 2001, the majority of Americans, me included, believed it was very likely that Al Qaeda would launch another successful attack on the homeland within twelve months, with as many or more casualties as 9/11. Nothing about America’s reaction to 9/11 makes sense unless you realize we were really afraid of a nuclear “dirty bomb” attack in Times Square, rendering Manhattan uninhabitable for a century. To that end, we built a system designed, not to punish crimes, but to prevent them. As Ken Klippenstein puts it:

[C]ounterterrorism doesn’t need a crime on which to predicate its activities. Counterterror personnel are not law enforcers investigating a crime after it has occurred. They look for predictors of an attack.

To that end, they constructed a vast legal and technical infrastructure whose purpose is not investigation, but surveillance.

Klippenstein thinks this is all-round bad. I don’t. We did not suffer another 9/11. Al Qaeda’s anti-homeland operations have been neutered for decades, and now AQI mostly engages in killing other Middle Easterners. I partly credit our counter-terror apparatus. There are ways in which it goes too far, but I do not want to tear it out root and branch.

On the other hand, these are very powerful tools, very dangerous to liberty. They are (largely) appropriate against mass-casualty events and, perhaps, large, well-coordinated adversaries. They are inappropriate against sporadic vigilante attacks that result in mostly property damage and (very rarely) a death or two.

We need a middle-ground approach here. The Tesla attacks, like clinic bombings, are not mere vandalism or arson. There’s a stochastic-terror political component to them that makes them more serious than that. Yet bringing the full force of the surveillance state against them threatens the liberties of the entirely peaceful, legitimate First Amendment movements, simply because of their violent fringes.

In sum: it is accurate, in current lexicon, to call the Tesla attacks “domestic terrorism,” but I discourage it anyway, because it fuels a generally destructive approach to dealing with domestic political violence.

Conclusion

Okay, that’s all you get! It was plenty! Hopefully my Trump takes collectively rose to the level of “interesting enough to justify exactly one article,” but I will now swear off them for a few months.

Some Trump-related discussion is inevitable, of course (e.g. the next Worthy Reads is shaping up to have a lot of tariff-related content), but you can expect De Civitate’s main focus to be elsewhere, as God intended.

UPDATE 17 April: I realized that my whole discussion of the Abrego Garcia case never mentioned his first name, Kilmar! I have retroactively added it.

1. I didn’t even mention President Biden’s presidency until June 2021, didn’t directly comment on any of his policies until February 2022, and didn’t run a full article on him until June 2024.

2. Even if you never knew her, you should never forgive the tobacco companies for killing Mercedes Maloney.

3. i,e, the January 6 insurrection.

4. On that note, many of these takes are cleaned-up versions of things I posted on Facebook. Apologies to De Civ readers who are also my Facebook friends, since some of this material will be familiar to you!

5. Use of the word “alien” is sometimes considered objectionable. I think its use here is appropriate and useful. First, because it was a non-pejorative legal term used for hundreds of years before it picked up its current connotation. It's also the term still in most of our laws, and, when in doubt or controversy, I think falling back on an unambiguous legal term is usually a good idea.

Second, because most of the alternatives confuse, at least in some contexts. Calling people “migrants” or “immigrants” instead of “aliens” blurs one of the most important distinctions: between citizens and non-citizens. Many citizens are immigrants! I think this blurring, which has gone on for a long time at the behest of those who want to kneecap immigration law, has been really bad for legal immigrants, and for the legal immigration process. There are contexts where I will happily use “illegal immigrants,” too, of course, but “undocumented worker” is just a euphemism. It is in some cases an eminently forgivable crime, but it’s still against the law, so name it.

Also, quite frankly, I stopped calling covid the “Chinese coronavirus” because I was told it was politically incorrect, and I am still kicking myself for backing down over that. It was a Chinese coronavirus, and, as it later turned out, it was likely born within, and leaked from, one of their government labs! We should call it the “China virus” just like the “Spanish flu” and the “MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) outbreak”! So I’m less inclined now to step away from a term simply because someone else uses it pejoratively.

6. I think I like her “progressive originalism,” though. I don’t usually agree with it, but it’s coherent enough that I can respect it.

7. This music video has popped into my head at least twice a week for 30 years, so you’re welcome. The television show feels today like a fever dream.

That said, if a bunch of kids went to their local community access station and asked to make a TV show, they’d probably say yes? That’s kind of what the PEG fees on your cable bill are for? Was KidSongs actually just a propaganda campaign for community access television in the wake of the Cable Act of 1984? The evidence is mounting!

8. I suspect this particular “confusion” on the part of the press is intentional.

9. Credit where it's due: I had serious concerns that the newly abortion-moderate Trump would fail to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, and I got more nervous when the March for Life passed without action... but it turned out that he DID reinstate it during the March for Life, and I just missed it.

It's hard to quantify the number of lives saved by the Mexico City Policy in every Republican administration. It's such a quiet thing, mentioned once in the first few days of a presidency then ignored domestically for four years, because there's no drama about it. It's a wholly unsexy but extremely important pro-life policy, like PEPFAR. Certainly our pals in academia do everything in their power to persuade themselves that, in defiance of Zeynep's Law, the Mexico City Policy actually causes abortions.

Yet, given what we know about the effect of funding on abortion incidence through, e.g., Medicaid, it seems at least reasonably possible that the Mexico City Policy saves more lives than any other single policy or legislation in a given GOP administration— and that the Democrats, who rescind it every time they take power, thereby help end so many lives it outweighs everything good they might do in their terms in office.

Thank you, Mr. Trump and Vice-President Vance.

Now please save PEPFAR.

10. He gets most of his ideas from Twitter and Fox News! We still have no firm evidence he can read!

11. Obviously, there are some exceptions to this. If you are an illegal immigrant, it seems quite reasonable to be more afraid today than four months ago! If you were a member of the U.S. military who did not want to take the covid shot, it was quite reasonable to be more afraid once Joe Biden took office! There are a number of other groups we could name here who had perfectly good reasons for their flight-or-flight responses to suddenly switch on with the change of administration. I am not talking about them.

12. …a huge personal blind spot!

13. It is often pointed out that Mahmoud Khalil isn’t just someone who speaks out on behalf of Gaza, Hamas, and Hamas terrorists. He also led a student group that extorted the Columbia University administration while engaging in criminal acts of occupation and vandalism, including specifically anti-Semitic protests that saw students barring Jews from university facilities.

He could probably be deported on these grounds. He could likely also be deported on the grounds that he advocated in favor of the October 7 attacks and or Hamas. Citizens are entitled, under the First Amendment, to advocate for terrorism, but green card holders are specifically denied that right by federal law, and the statute specifically mentions Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas. These are reasonably narrow grounds the Administration could use to deport Khalil without opening up giant loopholes that make lots of other legal aliens vulnerable to deportation. I wouldn’t be concerned about the Khalil deportation if they were. It would be a classic case of FAFO for an entitled student who thought he could facilitate crimes without consequence.

However, the Administration isn’t deporting Khalil on these grounds. It is instead deporting Khalil on the grounds that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has judged him a danger to U.S. foreign policy interests, without specifically citing any of Khalil’s wrongdoing. This is within the letter of the law, and may hold up in court, but is clearly beyond the spirit of what Congress intended and does make a ton of people vulnerable to deportation, as well as threatening the idea that legal aliens have any expression rights at all. They don’t have full First Amendment rights, but it’s strange to suggest that they could be deported for saying (or not saying) anything at all, as this order seems to. That’s what worries me about the Khalil case, and I am watching its progress through the judiciary closely.

14. I mean it! Some of the things on that list are good.

15. …physical strength, intellectual strength, whatever.

16. SOURCE: every high school movie

17. …assuming you accept my characterization of male hierarchies above.

18. A Christian might call it a “chastisement.”

19. Our institutions are weak, but Trump is weaker. I think they will hold, and they might even hold better than they would against a President Harris (because Harris would face zero resistance from many of them).

20. He probably won’t notice all the mean things I’ve written about him online, because, as noted several footnotes ago, it’s still not obvious Donald Trump can read!

21. …except the Taiwan War one, which is largely out of American hands.

22. Incidentally, a pet peeve: people often refer to things as "decimation" even though the proportion affected is nowhere close to a tenth. (Pompeii was not "decimated" by Vesuvius; it was annihilated. Way more than 10% of it and its population were destroyed!) If 90% of a population is destroyed, you’d be better off calling it an “anti-decimation.”

This is very pedantic of me and I have no right to complain about it. The English word expanded beyond the original Roman meaning literally centuries ago. Usually, I don't... but, when circumstances give me an excuse to talk about the whole history of decimation, I can’t resist.

23. You can trust this data, since Cato is no friend to federal employees!

24. Sejanus was Tiberius's head of the Praetorian Guard and a very highly trusted adviser. Tiberius withdrew to the isle of Capri after the death of his son Drusus. (It was later alleged that Sejanus had killed Drusus, his rival, by slow poison.)

Tiberius's withdrawal left Sejanus effectively ruling in Tiberius's stead. He eventually let it go to his head, allowed the Senate to treat him as emperor, had statues erected honoring himself (rather than the emperor), drummed up charges against his political rivals and had them put to death, and generally lived it up as emperor-in-all-but-name.

After several years of this, however, Tiberius finally got wind of just how puffed-up Sejanus had gotten, and it turned out that being emperor-in-all-but-name isn't a patch on being the actual emperor. Accounts conflict on the details, but Tiberius seems to have acted swiftly to sow confusion, alienate Sejanus from the Senate, and re-establish his own authority. By the end of the year, Sejanus had been arrested as a traitor, executed without trial, and given damnatio memoriae. Rioters murdered his allies. His wife committed suicide. His (adult) children were all executed. His fiancee (Tiberius's own daughter-in-law Livilla, implicated in the poisoning of Drusus) bought the farm, too.

(This happened in AD 31, so either shortly before or shortly after Jesus Christ's public ministry—depending on if you believe Jesus was killed on 7 April 30 or 3 April 33. I’ve tended to think 30 AD is more likely, but Jimmy Akin argues for 33 AD.)

Obviously, Elon Musk is not at risk of summary execution of his entire family and damnatio memoriae. But, given Trump's history, it does seem likely that Musk will eventually be defenestrated and blamed for all sorts of things. Hence, Sejanus.

25. The courts ultimately rejected the RICO approach.