A Permanent Stain on Our History

The Trump administration’s embrace of nativism is as shameful as it is self-destructive.

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May 23, 2025

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An Unprecedented Assault on American Greatness

by William Kristol

If the Trump administration’s sudden assault on thousands of foreign students legally studying at Harvard seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the abrupt abrogation of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans legally living and working in the United States seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the sudden arrests and deportations of law-abiding immigrants checking in as ordered at government offices seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the deportations of other immigrants without anything like due process and basically in defiance of court orders to prisons in third countries seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.

And if it all seems utterly stupid and terribly cruel and amazingly damaging to this country, it’s because it is.

But it turns out nativism is one hell of a drug. The Trump administration has ingested it in a big way, and it’s driving its dealers and users in the administration into a fanatical frenzy of destructive activity. And the Republican party and much of Conservatism Inc.—and too much of the country as a whole—is just watching it happen.

The United States has many problems. No one seriously thinks that Harvard’s certification to participate in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program is one of them. And the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement of the action against Harvard makes clear this isn’t just about Harvard: “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.” Are our other institutions of higher education suffering from their ability to attract and enroll students from abroad, if they chose to do so? Are the rest of us?

No. And to the degree there are some discrete problems, nothing justifies this kind of action against Harvard. As Andrea Flores, a former DHS official, told the New York Times, “D.H.S. has never tried to reshape the student body of a university by revoking access to its vetting systems, and it is unique to target one institution over hundreds that it certifies every year.”

Similarly, what’s the justification for the Trump administration’s unprecedented sudden and early abrogation of temporary protected status for 350,000 Venezuelans who fled tyranny and are now living peacefully and working productively in this country? There is no broad unhappiness at their presence, no serious case that they are causing more harm than doing good. Nor for that matter is there a real argument that the presence of 20,000 Haitians living and working in Springfield, Ohio, is a problem that required first lies to denigrate them and now attempts to deport them.

And this week, the nominee to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the Trump administration intends to end the well-established Optional Practical Training Program, which is the single largest channel for highly skilled immigrants to stay and work in the United States after finishing their education here. A study by a leading immigration scholar, Michael Clemens of George Mason University, finds that slashing that program would cause permanent losses to U.S. innovation, productivity, economic growth, and even job opportunities for native workers.

But here we are, with an administration where fantasy trumps reality, ideology trumps evidence, and demagoguery trumps decency. As the economist Dani Rodrik puts it, “Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.”

Foreigners studying and working here are not damaging the United States. A virulently nativist administration is what’s damaging the United States. It’s doing so in ways from which it will be difficult to recover. Just as important, it’s doing so in ways that will be a permanent stain on this nation’s history.

Fruit of the Poisoned Tree

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday, with much fanfare, the White House rolled out its “Make America Healthy Again” report, sketching out in broad strokes Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assessment of the systemic forces making Americans sicker today.

The report paints a dire picture of American children’s health, pointing to a host of metrics in which the U.S. both trails behind other high-income countries and is growing steadily worse: rates of childhood obesity, cancer, mental health problems, food allergies, chronic disease, and pharmaceutical interventions are all on the rise. So who’s responsible, and what’s to be done?

I mean this sincerely: There’s a lot of good stuff in this report, which focuses less on poor personal choices than on systemic corporate and regulatory issues—from a food supply oversaturated with ultraprocessed foods, to overmedication of children, to underregulation of a host of dangerous chemicals. All of these, the report argues, are outcomes shaped in part by lax regulatory regimes frequently captured by corporate interests.

Some of this is a welcome corrective for a Republican party that has long approached such public-health questions with a libertarian shrug: If Americans want to poison themselves with a diet of Pop Tarts and Cheez-Its, why does the nanny state have a right to get in their way?

But if the Republican government is planning to play a bigger role in limiting consumer freedom in food and medicine, then it’s crucial that they take a reasonable approach that follows the best available science. And unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine any effort spearheaded by conspiracy crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be anything other than fruit from a poisoned tree. Nowhere is this clearer than the frankly alarming way in which the report treats vaccines.

After acknowledging that “vaccines benefit children by protecting them from infectious diseases,” the authors go on to repeatedly suggest darkly that we should think of vaccines as part of the “threat of the potential over-utilization of medicine” and part of the barrage of dangerous chemicals to which our young people are currently subjected. Vaccines’ “possible role in the growing childhood chronic-disease crisis,” the report suggests, have not been adequately tested.

The authors write:

Our understanding of vaccine safety and any links to chronic disease would benefit from more rigorous clinical trial designs, including the use of true placebos, larger sample sizes, and longer follow-up periods. Many vaccines on the CDC’s childhood schedule involved small participant groups, had no inert placebo-controlled trials, and had limited safety monitoring, some lasting six months or less—raising concerns about the ability to detect rare or long-term adverse effects.

What would such an innocuous-sounding change look like in practice? We don’t have to speculate: Kennedy already took action along such lines for one vaccine this week, yanking FDA approval for COVID boosters for most adults under the age of 65 pending further long-term “placebo-controlled” trials.

Whether Kennedy actually plans to follow suit with any vaccines currently on the pediatric schedule remains to be seen, but the report plainly suggests once again that he believes he should. And we should be clear about what that would mean in practice. Any such testing of pediatric vaccines already on the market—vaccines that save lives, vaccines that have been shown over and over to be safe and effective, vaccines that have nonetheless been the subject of the rampant conspiracy-theorizing that Kennedy seems determined to indulge—would mean clamping down on access to vaccines for real American kids today. It would mean giving saline placebos to kids whose parents want them vaccinated.

“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” Kennedy said in November. We’re all waiting to see how big of a lie that will turn out to be.

Trump’s DOJ Plays Dirty—SCOTUS Isn’t Having It… GEORGE CONWAY joins SARAH LONGWELL on George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell) to explain the latest legal messes in Trump World—from Judge Ho’s cringe-worthy SCOTUS audition, to Kristi Noem’s complete ignorance of basic constitutional rights, to the potential bribery scandal involving Paramount and a bogus Trump lawsuit.
The Coldest Cold Warrior… How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union. AMB. ERIC EDELMAN reviews Edward Luce’s Zbig. And if you missed Luce on Shield of the Republic, be sure to watch that, too. It’s great.
The Party of ‘Denihilism’… Republicans are rejecting reality while embracing destruction—just look at the House budget megabill, observes JILL LAWRENCE.
Trillions spent on bunkers? Really? On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SOMMER joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss two wild stories: a viral conspiracy claiming elites built bunkers with trillions in stolen funds to survive an apocalyptic “geophysical event,” and a failed follow-up to a racist fundraiser, where the organizer got fired and rejected by the far right after posting his own slur-filled video.
Summer Movie Preview… Unsure of your summer movie plans? SONNY, PETER SUDERMAN, and ALYSSA ROSENBERG discuss what they’re looking forward to at the box office this summer.

Quick Hits

SOUTH SUDAN: Viewed in one light, the White House ignoring a judge’s order to ship just eight criminal migrants to South Sudan makes little sense: Why risk criminal contempt charges over a number of deportations you can count on two hands? But if you look at it as an attempt by the administration to reframe the debate about its mass deportation agenda, it becomes clearer.

Unlike with its deportation flights to El Salvador, during which the White House argued a judge had no authority over a plane already over international waters, the White House did divert the plane ostensibly bound for South Sudan, which landed in Djibouti instead.

And then the administration put its anti-judicial rhetoric into overdrive. “It is absurd that an activist judge is trying to force the United States to bring back these uniquely barbaric monsters who present a clear and present threat to the safety of the American people,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Wednesday. On Thursday, Trump went further, denouncing “a Federal Judge in Boston, who knew absolutely nothing about the situation, or anything else”:

The Judges are absolutely out of control, they’re hurting our Country, and they know nothing about particular situations, or what they are doing—And this must change, IMMEDIATELY! Hopefully, the Supreme Court of the United States will put an end to the quagmire that has been caused by the Radical Left.

With rhetoric like this, the White House seems to be trying to shift the national conversation about due process and defying judicial orders onto more favorable turf. Earlier, when Trump and his associates tried to argue that the Volk demanded they sweep aside migrants’ rights and judges’ objections, their argument was undercut by the obvious blunders they’d made in selecting the men to be whisked away to foreign prisons. The names of men like Andry Hernández Romero and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been charged with no crimes, became rallying cries.

This time around, the White House was more careful, making sure the men they were using to pick a fight with Judge Murphy had been convicted of heinous offenses.

At bottom, though, it shouldn’t matter. Due process must apply even to the worst cases if it is also to protect the innocent. No one should object to the administration removing foreign murderers, robbers, and pedophiles from the country with all speed—provided they follow the law as they do.

ELON BEGONE?: After weeks spent largely and uncharacteristically avoiding the political limelight, Elon Musk seemed to be eyeing the exits. Politico declared that he was fading “into the background.” Musk himself told the Qatar Economic Forum that he’d “done enough” in politics and would “do a lot less . . . in the future.”

And then Musk spent the rest of the week making one political appearance after another.

On Wednesday, Musk took trips to the Pentagon to discuss AI with Pete Hegseth and to the Oval Office to watch Trump browbeat South African President Cyril Ramaphosa about one of his favorite topics: the supposed “genocide” of white farmers. On Thursday, he headed up to the Capitol to meet with Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee for a discussion on AI and energy.

Musk is an impulsive billionaire who does what he wants, and Republicans still seem willing to humor him. But as his star has dimmed in Trump’s eyes, they don’t seem to feel the same need as before to gas him up with breathless praise.

“Just typical AI talk—how we need energy, what we’re going to need, how we’re going to get it,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) told Politico of the meeting. “Kind of boring, to be honest with you.”

‘WE DIDN’T EVEN GET TO SAY GOODBYE’: Who are the victims of this mass-deportation regime? Increasingly—and contrary to the White House’s rhetoric—it’s the most law-abiding migrants, who follow the rules and show up to their regularly scheduled hearings and are therefore the easiest to nab. The Mississippi Free Press has some Pulitzer-grade reporting on the case of Kasper Eriksen, a Danish citizen and father of four American children (with one on the way) who was on the verge of completing the process of becoming a U.S. citizen when ICE detained him over a single piece of paperwork he’d failed to file a decade ago:

Kasper and his wife, Savannah Hobart Eriksen, never submitted that form, which was due all the way back in 2015. She had suffered a stillbirth, losing their first child, and in the days of grief that followed, the deadline slipped right past them. But Kasper’s naturalization continued unimpeded. He corresponded with immigration officials numerous times over the next 10 years, and says agents never warned him that a critical document was missing. He paid taxes each year, reliably contributing a portion of his labor to the nation he already felt a part of. . . .
Until his detention, he had expected the appointment in Memphis to be the final step before his naturalization. Over the last year, the messages he received from their immigration portal seemed encouraging. “We are actively reviewing your Form N-400, Application for Naturalization,” a message on Sept. 12, 2024, read. “Our records showed nothing is outstanding at this time.”
Then, on March 7 of this year, “We scheduled an interview for your Form N-400, Application for Naturalization.” The meeting was only one month away.
Two hours after the Eriksens arrived at the office in Memphis, awaiting an early morning appointment with a case manager, the trap sprang. A law enforcement officer, whom Kasper recalled being a U.S. Marshal, was waiting for them when the meeting began.
The first stage was disbelief. Even the men who were about to collapse the Eriksens’s lives seemed mortified at the circumstances.
“I will say, the case manager in Memphis and the U.S. Marshal (had) a real sense of remorse because they realized it was an unfortunate circumstance,” Kasper said. . . .
ICE whisked him away to a holding facility in Memphis. And that was it. Both of the Eriksens, still in the early stages of denial, had no notion that this was the beginning of an odyssey.
“We’re still thinking this is one of those situations, like, where he got picked up and now we’re going down to court to bond him out and go home,” Savannah told the Mississippi Free Press on May 20. “Like it was a DUI or something.”
He was gone before the heartbreak set in. “We didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she said.

We mean it: Read the whole thing.

CAMPUS CONCERNS: The Department of Homeland Security’s announcement that it would block international students from attending Harvard, which Bill detailed above and which the university is now fighting with a lawsuit, has left those on campus in a state of distress. One international student shared his thoughts about the situation with The Bulwark:

For many of us the concern right now is whether we have any sort of a grace period before our status expires. The letter to Harvard offers surprisingly little clarify [sic] on this question. I (probably irrationally) fear that exiting the HU campus to go to Boston for an appointment I scheduled earlier may be more dangerous now. I imagine a hypothetical conversation with an ICE officer that does not end very well, but also am fully cognisant that this may be overdramatising the situation
I have a Russian friend who, because of their activism, is in a very complicated position right now with such an abrupt suspension of their visa status. The abrupt nature of the SEVP suspension puts many students who due to whatever circumstances cannot come home on a short notice in danger. While, of course, F1 is a nonimmigrant visa category, the sudden suspension means that some of us are in danger
Another point I've discussed extensively is that so many of us had to make huge sacrifices to get here- not seeing our families for months/years, losing friends, just the sheer amount of work that it takes to get to this place. . . . This is, of course, a very arrogant way to look at the situation, but many of us feel that these sacrifices might have been for nothing now that we cannot finish our studies.

This is just one story. We’re sure there are many many more. After all, about 27 percent of those enrolled at Harvard come from abroad. If you would like to share your story with us, do so here.