Meet the New ICE Queen. Same as the Old ICE Queen.
Markwayne Mullin was brought in to stop the scandals and boost DHS morale. He’s not off to a great start.
The missiles keep flying in and around Iran: Central Command said it had carried out another round of “defensive” strikes on Iranian drones and launchers overnight, while Iran sent more attack drones into the Strait of Hormuz and launched a missile at a U.S. base in Kuwait. The missile was intercepted, but remains an inauspicious sign for the supposed ceasefire agreement that—as the White House keeps telling us—is basically 95 percent of the way there.
In other news, former First Lady Jill Biden opened up yesterday in a CBS News interview about her husband Joe Biden’s catastrophic 2024 presidential debate performance, saying that—
Just kidding! God knows we’ve all spent plenty of time already talking and thinking about that. Happy Thursday.
Special edition! MAGA Mondays has a special mid-week update today with Sam Stein and Will Sommer live on Substack and YouTube today at 11:00 a.m. EDT.
Markwayne Under Fire
by Andrew Egger
When Markwayne Mullin took the reins as secretary of homeland security earlier this year, we spent a lot of time pondering whether he would be a better or worse leader than his scandal-soaked predecessor, Kristi Noem. But here’s a possibility we perhaps didn’t spend enough time considering: What if he turned out to be exactly the same?
Okay, I’m overstating it. But yesterday, a new report in the Daily Mail1—a hotbed, recently, for scoops from leaky and disgruntled DHS employees—featured anonymous Mullin underlings griping about some remarkable parallels between life under the old boss and under the new boss. For one thing, Mullin is reportedly trying to get his wife Christie on the DHS payroll as a “Special Government Employee”—the same arrangement Noem once used for her boy-toy adviser Corey Lewandowski.
For another, Mullin appears still to be flying around in the same $70 million luxury jet that helped end Noem’s tenure—and using it to spend a good chunk of his working time in his home state of Oklahoma. “He leaves on Thursdays a lot at 11 in the morning and doesn’t fly back until Monday afternoon,” one source complained to the Daily Mail. “He is barely in the building.”
“Mullin seems to think ICE requires less work than a senator, and it shows,” griped another. “Meanwhile, ICE has no direction.”
Ordinarily, I’d be indignant to learn that a supposed public servant was approaching his charge with so much apparent nonchalance. But perhaps that doesn’t apply to Trump lackeys charged with stewarding his lawless immigration-enforcement mooks through their mass-deportation and protester-punching mission. Maybe a lazy, checked-out DHS secretary isn’t the worst thing to have, given the circumstances. Markwayne Mullin, the work-life-balance hero we didn’t know we needed!
Still, disgruntlement in the rank and file is never a good thing for a leader, and perhaps Mullin realizes his honeymoon period is coming to an end. Which might explain why, after a period of relative absence from the headlines, Mullin has been elbowing back into them lately to float a truly preposterous policy: refusing to process international flights into cities run by “radical-left Democrats.”
On Tuesday, the secretary was on Fox News complaining about weekend protesters outside an ICE facility in Newark, New Jersey—a protest at which Sen. Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed while trying to deescalate the tense situation. Was Mullin apologetic that his goons had roughed up a senator? Just the opposite.
“They’re barricading our employees from coming in and out of the facility,” he said. “Then why are we processing international flights into the airport there? We are currently—which we’re not initiating yet—but we’re currently drawing up plans to say, ‘Listen, these sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either.’”
It was a jaw-dropping statement in at least three different ways. It is, to begin with, flatly illegal. Trump has repeatedly tried before to pull government services from blue locales to punish them for various policies, including on immigration; courts have slapped him down every time.2
It also makes no sense as a punitive measure. If protesters outside an ICE facility overstep the bounds of legal protest, they can be arrested and charged with crimes. Jumping straight from there to blocking all international flights into a particular city’s airport is like addressing a turnstile-hopping problem on the subway by blowing up a train.
And then there’s the obvious economic devastation that would result. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can’t turn off the spigot of international travel into some of America’s busiest transit hubs without breaking a few eggs. The U.S. Travel Association is warning that “such a move would have devastating consequences for the travel industry and communities that depend on international visitation.” Even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy agrees: “We have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places. We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics,” Duffy told Congress last week.
The fact that Mullin keeps pitching the plan anyway shows how perverse the incentive structures remain for Trump’s underlings. You might think that Mullin, who was explicitly brought into DHS to stop the endless parade of scandals that followed Noem, would spend a bit more time working the kinks out of his plans before introducing them to the world. But that’s not how it works in Trump’s orbit: The only way to win currency with the emperor is to roll the ball forward in directions you think he’ll personally like, and to be seen doing so on TV if you can swing it. Trump hates blue cities and loves punishing them in performative ways. So forget the law, forget what’s fair, forget the economy, forget winning back disaffected voters, forget good policy—Markwayne’s going to dance for him the only way he likes.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Retired Judges Call Out Trump’s “Unprecedentedly Fraudulent Scheme”... Former federal jurists ask the court to void the dismissal that led to Trump’s giant slush fund, writes KIM WEHLE.
A Total and Complete Shutdown of Trump… On the flagship pod, ROBERT KAGAN joins TIM MILLER to discuss how Donald Trump is leading the collapse of the American-led world order.
Judge Nukes Trump DOJ’s “Vindictive” Prosecution… On The Illegal News, MARY McCORD joins SARAH LONGWELL to explain a series of jaw-dropping legal scandals surrounding Trump’s Justice Department.
Quick Hits
THE CORRUPTION. IT’S STAGGERING: Another day, another jaw-on-the-floor story about the Trump family looting our Treasury. This morning’s addition to the genre comes from ProPublica, which ran the traps on the Pentagon’s denial that anything untoward was behind the grant of a $620 million contract to Vulcan Elements, a company in which Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm is an investor. It turns out (and, please, if you need to, sit down for this) there was indeed pressure from Trump allies to ink the deal.
But interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.
Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.
After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.
“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.
Six hundred and twenty million dollars. That’s like one-third the J6er slush fund. We’re talking about real money here, folks.
—Sam Stein
TALARICO COPS TO ‘CRINGE’: Now that the brutal Paxton/Cornyn primary fight is over, Texas Republicans are turning to the next task: Getting their hilariously corrupt candidate over the bump by painting Democratic nominee James Talarico as too liberal for the state. Some of this requires some heavy-duty lying: Talarico is not, as Republicans are now claiming ad infinitum, an “open borders” Democrat, nor is he a vegan. But some Republican attacks against him simply involve replaying Talarico’s most out-there clips, particularly on matters at the intersection of his liberal Christian faith and politics—that, for instance, God is “non-binary,” or that there are six biological sexes.
Until now, Talarico has waved off these concerns. But now he’s feeling the need to do a bit of cleanup. “I know there are two sexes, men and women,” he told CBS News yesterday. “I also know that there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.” More broadly, Talarico admitted having made some “cringey comments”—while accusing Paxton of clipping them “to distract from his career of corruption.”
KAISER FAMILY FAREWELL: You may not recognize the name of Drew Altman, who on Wednesday announced his retirement. But if you’ve gotten an MRI or gone to a hospital or paid a medical bill, then you’ve been affected by his work, because few people have had the kind of sustained, indelible impact on American health care that Altman has.
He’s done it as the CEO and founding president of the policy research organization KFF, where he’s been since 1990—although, back then, it was a smaller operation known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, with origins in the fortunes of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Altman led its transformation into a fully independent entity that today has truly unrivaled influence in the field of health care policy research.
KFF’s data, analysis, and expertise are the coin of the realm in debates over everything from Medicaid to HIV treatment policy. Politicians, academics, journalists—they all rely on it. There’s also the KFF polling enterprise and KFF Health News, each with their own, distinct contributions.
KFF is known for its intellectual seriousness and firm nonpartisanship, plus an uncanny ability to anticipate where debates will go next. It’s all the doing of Altman and the talented people that he hired and mentored—including Larry Levitt and Mollyanne Brodie, who will now take the reins as chief executive and president, respectively.
Altman’s nearly lifelong crusade to help people get health care—which traces back to stints in state and federal government—might seem frustrating, even futile. But he has never stopped believing (which perhaps isn’t surprising, given that he is famously a Boston Red Sox fan), so if Altman keeps weighing in on policy, nobody in the world of health care will be surprised—or the least bit unhappy.
—Jonathan Cohn
Cheap Shots
It’s amazing how much bonus interesting stuff you learn every time the Daily Mail gets a big scoop. Did you know that Farrah Abraham has vowed to stop getting cosmetic procedures due to health issues? Or that Adam Sandler was slammed for an “embarrassing” display at his wife Jackie’s big movie premiere?
This is based on longstanding legal precedent: As the Supreme Court held in 1992 in New York v. United States, “the Federal Government may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.”
I'm not surprised Mullins is turning out to be Noem 2.0. They're both dumb as a damn rock.
"The only way to win currency with the emperor is to roll the ball forward in directions you think he’ll personally like, and to be seen doing so on TV if you can swing it." Hitler's biographer Sir Ian Kershaw dubbed this process "working towards the Fuehrer".