Marco Rubio, Velociraptor
Life finds a way and the administration is learning.
Donald Trump never met a war he wouldn’t pretend he could easily solve, but it seems he’s getting tired of talking about only the current ones. Here he was yesterday rolling back the clock: “I wonder if—you know, the Civil War, it always seemed to me maybe that could’ve been solved without losing 600,000-plus people.” Happy Thursday.
Hold On to Your Butts
by Andrew Egger
It’s never good to see an opponent learn from his mistakes. So here’s some unsettling news: Like the Jurassic Park velociraptors opening the kitchen door, the White House is learning.
That’s one takeaway from the news yesterday, first reported by the Washington Post, that the administration will resume interviews for student visas for foreign students, but with more stringent requirements. All applicants will now be obliged to make their social media accounts public “to be scrutinized for hostility toward the United States.”
It’s a significant drawdown from the maximum-hostility interim posture the White House announced last month, when it canceled the issuance of all new student visas while it developed the policies announced this week. That change, in turn, came on the heels of the administration’s iron-fisted first iteration of the policy, which involved canceling current students’ visas on often flimsy pretexts before sending masked plainclothes officers to bundle them into unmarked vans and whisk them away.
The new policy represents a canny political retreat from such excesses. On the merits, it’s far more defensible. It’s hard to imagine the median voter objecting to the sentiment: We shouldn’t invite in immigrants, on student visas or otherwise, who openly profess hatred of America.
But while the new policy is less nakedly hostile than the former maximalist one, its impact may prove to be much the same. The State Department cable announcing the change, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, requires students’ online presences be screened to “identify applicants who bear hostile attitudes toward our citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles; who advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to U.S. national security; or who perpetrate unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence.” There’s obviously a massive amount of discretion here, and it’s not clear yet how stringently U.S. embassies and consulates, which are responsible for processing and distributing student visas, will apply the new standards.
But what is clear is that these requirements will greatly increase the administrative burden of the student-visa process. “If everyone has to now have their social media scrubbed for derogatory information,” a State official told the Post, “officers do not have that time.” Indeed, Rubio’s cable cautioned consulates that they “should consider overall scheduling volume and the resource demands of appropriate vetting” and should schedule fewer student visa cases as necessary.
The new policy is thus still a clampdown on the issuance of new student visas—and, therefore, foreign students studying in the United States. Instead of outwardly denying them entry, the government is now just tripping them up with endless red tape. And if the red tape isn’t enough, then it could very well be a stray online post—open to interpretation by someone at a consulate who has never talked to that person in real life—that does the trick.
That this change comes at this moment is no coincidence. The first few months of the second Trump administration, with everyone involved hopped up on victory and imagining they possessed a massive popular mandate for whatever they might feel like doing, was one big act-first-and-ask-questions-later power trip. The entire federal government seemed organized around the Fyre Festival philosophy of let’s just do it and be legends, man.
Then came the hangover. As Trump’s popularity came crashing down, we started seeing a new level of policy hesitation and uncertainty: Sometimes they were charging ahead, sometimes they were scurrying back.
This latest student-visa policy reflects a White House that’s starting to get its feet back underneath it. It’s taking fewer wild swings—the kind that can draw unnecessary political blowback (see: DOGE cuts and RIFs, reversed). It’s recognizing that popular support for anything it might try doesn’t extend as far as it might have assumed. In some ways, that could be for the good—a more cautious Trump administration is better than a reckless one. But it also shows you can still do plenty of damage (arguably more) when you get a bit creative about it.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Juneteenth: ‘The Day of Freedom Came.’ Read the first-person accounts of emancipation from BOOKER T. WASHINGTON and others.
Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Making Us More Vulnerable to Domestic Terrorism… Law enforcement can only do so much at once, writes WILL SELBER.
Donald Trump’s Non-Protection Racket… He’s leaving his former national security officials unshielded against Iran’s assassins. That he’s not protecting his fellow Americans demonstrates that he fails to understand what patriotism is, argues WILL SALETAN.
Can Trump TACO His TACO? On The Next Level, TIM, SARAH, and JVL discuss Trump continuing to TACO costing him support, more Democrats getting arrested over immigration policies, the mixed feedback from Tim’s interview with NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on FYPod, and Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz’s heated conversation.
Quick Hits
PINCHING PENNIES AT THE NATIONAL SUICIDE HOTLINE: The White House announced this week it would stop a crisis program aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, sparking intense backlash from Democrats and even a smattering of elected Republicans.
Since 2022, the National Suicide and Crisis Hotline has devoted specialized resources to young LGBT people, based on data showing that they face an elevated suicide risk and often struggle with a different set of mental health issues than others. Going forward, the White House said these specialized services will end. The hotline will “no longer silo” LGBT callers, but direct them to the suicide hotline’s general services instead.
The change is a gift to social conservatives who have criticized the hotline’s partnership with the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that works to prevent suicide among LGBT youth. Republicans have castigated the Trevor Project as an activist group working to instill “gender ideology” in young people. And while the White House said its decision was motivated by budgetary concerns, a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget derided the LGBT hotline just last week as “a chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents.”
Not all Republicans are on board. Rep. Mike Lawler, who represents a purple New York district, called the change “wrong,” saying, “According to studies, LGBTQ+ young people have an elevated risk of suicide and are more likely than their peers to attempt it. We should ensure they have the resources necessary to get help.”
WHO HATES WHOM?: The most notable thing about Donald Trump’s suggestion yesterday that he might hold back disaster funding for California because he was beefing with Gov. Gavin Newsom wasn’t that he said it. We all know by now he’s the kind of jerk who’d be glad to hurt a blue state to get back at a politician he doesn’t like. What’s particularly remarkable is how he said it.
“You know, hatred is never a good thing in politics,” Trump said. “When you don’t like somebody, you don’t respect somebody, it’s harder for that person to get money if you’re on top.”
That’s right, folks: In Trump’s mind, his relationship with Newsom is one defined primarily by the hatred flowing from Newsom’s side. It’s a jawdropping lack of self-reflection coming from a guy who can’t even mention the California governor without calling him “Newscum.”
It’s also become a weirdly recurring theme.
For anyone outside the MAGA bubble, it’s blindingly obvious that a healthy supply of hatred is a core part of Trump’s political appeal. When Trump rages online against the “Radical Left Lunatics, Maniacs, and Perverts,” or spends every holiday lovingly writing lengthy diatribes against his enemies, it isn’t some ancillary part of his character; it’s the bedrock sentiment that drives his political project.
But don’t you dare tell Trump or his supporters that. Suggesting Stephen Miller was driven by hatred is what got Terry Moran canned at ABC this month following a MAGA outcry that featured Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt calling Moran “unhinged and unacceptable.” In their view, to suggest they’re motivated by hatred is to indulge in an intolerable smear.
WHAT’S A STRONGER WORD THAN ‘DISARRAY’?: Back in February, the Democratic National Committee elected Ken Martin as its chair to shoulder the unenviable task of bringing the party out of the wilderness after a shocking repeat loss to Donald Trump. Now, less than five months later, the party is threatening to collapse into infighting, with one vice chair, David Hogg, having been run out of town on a rail and knives coming out against Martin from every direction. These aren’t the headlines Trump opponents want to see:
Politico: ‘Weak,’ ‘whiny’ and ‘invisible’: Critics of DNC Chair Ken Martin savage his tenure
New York Times: The D.N.C. is in Chaos and Desperate for Cash Under Ken Martin
Washington Post: Democrats want to fight Trump, but they can’t stop fighting each other
CBS News: Two large labor union leaders leave DNC over disagreements
And yet, we can’t help but be struck by a bit of déjà vu. Consider the following news reports:
A party chair under fire after he cleaned house, “pushing out many old hands and replacing them with his own political allies.”
That same chair being forced to respond to critics from within the party who don’t like his “managerial style.”
Serious questions being paid to how that chair was spending his time and personal resources.
Headlines calling his chairmanship a “failed experiment.”
That same chair telling his critics to fire him or “shut up.”
The year is 2010, not 2025. The chair is Michael Steele, not Ken Martin. The party is not the Democrats, it’s the Republicans—and they’re about to absolutely tear it up in the midterm elections.
SKRMETTI: SCOTUSBlog reports on yesterday’s Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender teens:
By a vote of 6-3, the justices rejected an argument by three transgender teens (along with their parents and a Memphis doctor) that the law violates their constitutional right to equal protection and should be scrutinized using a more stringent standard than the one used by a federal appeals court in Cincinnati.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that the dispute “carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field.” But the court’s only role, he said, is to ensure that the Tennessee law does not violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. “Having concluded that it does not,” he wrote, “we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”
The court’s Democratic appointees dissented from the decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s ruling “authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them.”
Cheap Shots
>”You know, hatred is never a good thing in politics,” Trump said.
Why would you say that? It helped you win two elections!
🤮
After Senator Lady G revealed her true colors I stopped expecting honesty and decency from anyone in the GOP who supports Trump. I sleep better accepting the truth than worrying over them.
Americans are a lot more fascistic than we want to admit. It is the reason why a true labor party has never materialized in the wealthiest nation on earth. Every other major industrialized country has a labor party, and universal healthcare, but not America.