Yes, it’s been a big beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0., hasn’t it? In all fairness, let’s start with a real, substantive achievement. The Southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. Biden helped a lot with his belated executive orders, but reinstating Remain in Mexico and ending largely fraudulent asylum claims have been even more effective. In February 2024, Border Patrol picked up some 140,641 migrants between legal ports of entry; this February, it was 8,347. Huge success. And proof that previous administrations actively chose to keep the border open. But the rest is chaos, malice, revenge, and failure, tinged with levels of indecency never before seen from the Oval Office. Start with immigration itself. If the administration had wanted to, they could have hailed the quiet border and focussed on deporting illegal immigrants by usual means. But nah. Trump decided he wants to go after legal immigrants and even legal permanent residents who have been charged with no crimes or immigration violations — because they have criticized a foreign country, Israel. He’s deploying a McCarthyite 1952 law to target any legal noncitizen who has criticized or demonstrated against the Jewish state’s wiping of Gaza off the face of the earth, proudly gutting the First Amendment for no good reason. Wait, there’s more. Trump has also abandoned habeas corpus and due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to seize mere suspects off the streets and transport them instantly to a terrifying foreign jail in El Salvador. The law has only been used twice before in wartime, and, ahem, we are not at war. Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error? We therefore have no way of knowing if a makeup artist who legally sought asylum was rightly grabbed off the street to face certain rape and violence. And when Tom Homan was asked about due process in this case, he actually answered: “What due process did Laken Riley get?” Unbelievable that this thug is in charge of anything. Then the utter indecency. These wannabe fascists publicly delight and revel in their acts of domination in a manner that even despotic regimes avoid. For the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, to posture in front of a third-world gulag, with a $50,000 Rolex on her wrist, in order to scare any brown person with a tattoo in the US, is an exercise in authoritarian pornography. It is fascistic in its essence. For the White House to put out photographs of an obese criminal detainee, and add a cartoon of her in tears so that Trump can get a dictator’s boner, is pure depravity. No Christian, no believer in human dignity, no decent human being, would ever do such a thing. Now observe how this crew understands the Constitution. Elon Musk believes that in the American system, the president is the sole representative of “the will of the people,” and as such cannot be challenged by either Congress or the courts. Hence the calls to impeach and remove any judge who dares slow him down. Republicans who routinely practiced judge-shopping to stop or slow Biden now claim it is an outrage. There is no longer even a pretense of consistency. For Trump there is only power. On foreign policy, Trump has in two months ended NATO in all but name, turning it into a protection racket, as the Signal texts prove. It is becoming clearer and clearer that Trump’s aim for Ukraine is to divide it between him and his closest ally, Putin. The US claim to Ukraine’s mineral and energy assets is now being massively expanded: a unique form of reparations from an actual victim of aggression. And Putin was licking his lips yesterday: “Not long ago I said we’d grind them [Ukraine] down — now it looks like we’ll finish them off.” Anyone who believed Trump is merely trying to get a workable peace now looks stupid. He just wants to share in the Ukraine spoils Putin secured by invasion. With Russia as the new key world ally, Trump has — why not? — threatened to violate the borders with Mexico and Canada. He has backed full-on ethic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. He has alienated every European ally, and threatened Denmark with annexation of Greenland. These klutzy morons have even managed to diss and alienate the Poles. Their clownish incompetence means that our former allies in NATO will be very wary of sharing intelligence in the way they previously have. In economic matters, Trump is fast tipping the US and the world into a potential depression with a trade war as nutty as it is random. These tariffs are on, then off, then on again. They’re up, then down, then massively up, then suspended. They are deployed for “fairness” in trade and then also because of fentanyl and immigration policies. Next week, we get another big shock with the vaunted “reciprocal tariffs” against the entire world. You need a timeline and a computer to keep all this straight. And even if you support a tariff policy, no sane person can defend the sheer impulsivity of all this. It deprives businesses of any stability with which to plan, invest, hire, or fire. It’s the kind of whimsical behavior usually seen in monarchs or dictators. But on trade and foreign policy, that’s what we now have. The GOP Congress has long since become the equivalent of Putin’s Duma — a rubber-stamp body designed solely to support the executive branch. The King decides. And his mood varies. Then there’s the attempt to vandalize the government, particularly the parts that help Democrats. Break first, then fix is the Musk model, which is why he had to quickly rehire nuclear weapon experts and bird flu analysts after blithely removing them. Incompetence is also central here: the public accounting of DOGE’s cuts is filled with errors — claiming billions of dollars in savings which are, on inspection, millions. DOGE’s cuts to the IRS mean we could actually lose $350 billion in revenue over the next decade — about three times the claimed total savings of all the rest. Do I believe Musk’s claims of savings so far? Nope. Do I think he’ll have cut a trillion dollars in three months, as he claimed on state TV last night? Of course not. He’s a ketamine-addled sociopathic teenager who knows nothing about government. Even with the vital attempt to restore biological sex as a category in the law, Trump’s bigots have managed to bollocks it all up. The executive orders are dripping with so much gratuitous animus, they all but command even the more conservative judges to stop or slow them. On the EO to ban transgender people in the military, for example, a judge wrote: “Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.” This is the Trump way: vileness before effectiveness. The disaster this week with Mike Waltz’s astonishingly reckless Signal messaging brings it all together. This is a crew of bigots, sycophants, Fox News drunks and bimbos, Hollywood loonies, Claremont nutters, and uber-online edge-lords cosplaying as statesmen. But they aren’t even faintly serious — as Russia and China now fully understand. And their response to being found out was classic Trump: lie, lie, lie and call journalists scum. By any objective standard, this is a clown car. I’m not naive. As televised and online theater, the first two months have been worthy of Roger Ailes. Deporting foreigners, attacking college students, terrifying legal noncitizens, bullying other countries, brandishing brutality, and mocking left lunacy all have a real constituency. A state-sponsored cancel culture campaign against Israel’s critics gives the base and The *Free Press a real thrill. And I’ve been chastened by the obvious online enthusiasm for deporting foreigners. It appears that many Americans believe that noncitizens have no rights in this country and can be treated any way the government feels like. Suddenly, you see how fragile liberal democracy is in the hands of a duplicitous mob-boss like Trump. But this embrace of indecency, aggression, and lawlessness is also itself fragile. Trump has always known how to craft a reality show. But behind the curtain, there is still a small, bitter, vengeful, incompetent man, surrounded by third-rate sycophants and hacks with no coherent strategy for economic or political success, no serious experience in government, and a record of making enemies of everyone and losing long-loyal friends. A president who uses ancient laws and police-state tactics shows not only that he is a degenerate and a disgrace, but that he is too weak to do things the right way; he pushes executive orders because he doesn’t have the votes in Congress to achieve anything lasting; he has alienated allies he may well soon need; he has already had his lunch eaten by Putin and Xi and Netanyahu; and he is heading toward a period of tenacious stagflation when his most resilient advantage — that he manages the economy well — may evaporate overnight. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this shit-show is even worse than many of us expected. It is far more overtly authoritarian than in the first term, far more dangerous in foreign policy, far more reckless in economic policy, far more intolerant of opposing views, completely contemptuous of free speech and free trade and free markets. The two aspects of tyranny I did not see in the first term — war-like territorial expansionism and contempt for habeas corpus and due process — have now fallen into place. My 2016 essay, in fact, now reads as more prescient than at any time since I wrote it. I was wrong in hoping that First Term Trump gave us some reassurance about Second Term Trump. He is still the petty tyrant, corrupt bully, and depraved fool he always was — but now emboldened, unleashed, seeking true revenge. Our national character — the very meaning of America — is thereby being changed. Trump is now a textbook definition of a tyrant attempting to break a republic, propelled by propaganda, fueled by bigotry, contemptuous of law. And so, so many Americans are here for it. This, I truly fear, is not a drill. (Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my talk with Nick Denton on Silicon Valley and our new Chinese overlords; a bunch of dissents over my piece on Fauci and lab leak; 12 notable quotes from the week in news, including three Yglesias Awards from right-wingers criticizing Trump; 13 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break lampooning the Signal chat; a nighttime window from Porto; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!) From a new paid subscriber:
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New On The Dishcast: Nick Denton
Nick is an entrepreneur and journalist. He was the founder of Gawker Media, the publisher of Gizmodo, and the editor of Valleywag. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times — as a derivatives and tech correspondent — and later founded a Silicon Valley news aggregator called Moreover Technologies. He’s now working on Maze.com, which hosts a network map of near-future timelines. He is also a huge China enthusiast — and he believes that if the Twentieth Century was America’s, this one is very much China’s. We are a bit player and will soon be a distant second to the next true global hegemon. Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science and Covid, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid’s fallout, Claire Lehmann of the amazing Quillette, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. A listener writes:
Dissents Of The Week: Approximate OriginA reader responds to my lab-leak column:
I don’t know and do not claim to know for certain where this virus came from. I’ve always believed the natural origin as a default option but always knew it hadn’t been proven. Yet Fauci told us it had been proven in the “Proximal Origin” paper. Now, every Western and US intelligence agency believes it was most likely made in a lab. So I’m the one with an open mind. Fauci isn’t. Read the rest of my reply here, along with three other dissents. That debate continues on the pod page. As always, please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And follow more Dish discussion in my Notes feed. In The ‘StacksThis is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Gazans protesting Hamas, Jackie Robinson and DEI, and the great and powerful Bill Burr. A few examples:
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com. The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing! The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From last week’s contest, here’s the sleuth in Austin who creates an original cocktail every week — and this one is the most inspired so far:
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