The bad polls just keep coming for Your Favorite President. The latest New York Times/Siena poll finds that only 32 percent of Americans believe the country is better off than a year ago, compared to 49 percent who believe it’s worse off. (Personally, we’d love to pick the brains of the 19 percent who clock it as “about the same.”)
“A majority of voters disapprove of how Mr. Trump has handled top issues including the economy, immigration, the war between Russia and Ukraine and his actions in Venezuela,” the Times reports. “And significantly, a majority of Americans, 51 percent, said that Mr. Trump’s policies had made life less affordable for them.” Happy Thursday.
Will Democrats Be as Strong as the Europeans?
by William Kristol
Can the Democrats in Congress match the performance of the Europeans in Davos?1 Will the Democratic opposition to Trump’s assault on liberal democracy here at home be as clear-eyed, as tough-minded, as unintimidated, as the European opposition to Trump’s attack on the liberal international order abroad? We’ll see when Congress returns next week and the battle over government funding comes to a head in Washington.
In the run-up to Davos, Trump blustered and threatened. He said that he needed full control of Greenland. He announced that he’d impose 10 percent tariffs on goods from eight European countries if he were denied that control. He refused to rule out the use of military force to obtain that control. “There can be no going back,” Trump posted on Tuesday.
But, as Joshua Keating put it, Trump “seemingly went back.” The “seemingly” is important: Trump didn’t entirely rule out the use of military force. And the fact that Trump may have pulled back for now doesn’t change the fact there’s been a fundamental rupture in the post–World War II global order. The spectacle of the United States behaving like an out-and-out mob boss can’t be unseen.
But at least the Europeans realized that further appeasement of Trump was untenable, and that refusing to face reality wasn’t working. Last July, the EU agreed to a one-sided trade deal with the United States in hopes of placating the bully—and, perhaps, buying time to think up better options. Now, French President Emmanuel Macron speaks for much of the continent when he says, “Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them.”
And so the EU announced that it would move to suspend parliamentary approval of that trade deal. It also indicated that reciprocal tariffs against American goods were on the table. And there was talk of denying American service providers, such as tech companies, access to the European market, and even of a refusal to buy more U.S. treasury bonds.
Europeans faced bullying with strength, and the bully at least temporarily backed down.
One of the most powerful statements of European resistance came from an unlikely source, the conservative populist and Flemish nationalist prime minister of Belgium, Bart De Wever. On a panel at Davos on Tuesday, De Wever was blunt:
Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House. We were very lenient, also with the tariffs, we were lenient, hoping to get his support for the Ukraine war. We were in a very bad position at the moment, we were dependent on the United States, so we chose to be lenient.
“But now,” he continued,
so many red lines are being crossed that you have the choice between your self- respect. Being a happy vessel is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else. If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, and that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy is your dignity.
The right-wing Belgian prime minister went on to paraphrase the famous remark by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “If the old is dying and the new is not yet born, then you live in a time of monsters.” “It’s up to [Trump] to decide if he wants to be a monster, yes or no,” De Wever concluded.
Of course Trump is a monster, and he’s not going to stop being one, and he has three more years in office in which to do great damage at home and abroad. But the lesson of this week was that if you want to defend the liberal international order, facing the truth works better than averting your gaze. Standing your ground is more effective than rolling over. Behaving with self-respect and defending your dignity is a better guide than calculating and calibrating various degrees of appeasement.
Do those who have the responsibility of defending liberal democracy at home understand these lessons? Will Democrats fund ICE and DHS without attaching any limitations or restrictions on their truly monstrous activities? For that matter, will they do nothing to insist on the overdue release of the Epstein files? And will they say nothing about Trump’s shameful betrayal of Ukraine?
In an age of monsters, one needs to hold firm to the guardrails of self-respect and dignity. Europeans now seem to understand that. Do Democrats?
Give our European friends some free advice: How can they be anti-Trump without coming across as anti-American? It’s a difficult balance—share your thoughts.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Greenland? Iceland? Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off…
JVL, SAM STEIN, and ANDREW EGGER break down Trump’s bizarre Davos stemwinder.
MARK HERTLING joins BEN PARKER to react to the speech and what it means for American national security.
CATHERINE RAMPELL joins SAM STEIN to talk about the market reaction.Wary Dems Weigh Working With Trump Team… They know there’s always a risk they’ll be burned, report LAUREN EGAN and SAM STEIN in The Opposition.
24 Hours Alongside an ICE Protester in Minneapolis… Carolina Ortiz, an immigrant advocate, is preparing for ICE’s next onslaught. ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO writes this edition of his Huddled Masses newsletter from Minneapolis.
A Night Out With the Manosphere’s Most Toxic Extremists… WILL SOMMER joins TIM MILLER to discuss a disturbing viral night out that brought together the worst corners of the manosphere and the alt-right.
Quick Hits
ICE VS. THE FOURTH AMENDMENT: Thanks to the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, agents of the government generally aren’t allowed to enter your home without a warrant signed by a judge. But according to a new whistleblower complaint provided to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the Department of Homeland Security quietly circulated a memo last year annihilating those protections, telling its officers a judicial warrant would no longer be required to enter homes in which immigrants flagged for deportation were suspected to be.
Instead, the memo signed by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, ICE agents could enter homes on the strength of just an administrative warrant—a lower-level warrant permitting the detention of a migrant that the agents themselves have the authority to sign. Even more alarmingly, the whistleblower alleges that the major change in ICE policy was deliberately kept as quiet as possible: “The May 12 Memo has been provided to select DHS officials who are then directed to verbally brief the new policy for action,” the complaint reads. “Those supervisors then show the Memo to some employees . . . and direct them to read the Memo and return it to the supervisor.”
Federal officials did not deny the authenticity of the memo yesterday. Instead, they defended the policy they’d deliberately hushed up: “Every illegal alien who DHS serves administrative warrants/I-205s have had full due process and a final order of removal from an immigration judge,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said. “The officers issuing these administrative warrants have also found probable cause. For decades, the Supreme Court and Congress have recognized the propriety of administrative warrants in cases of immigration enforcement.”
But that’s traditionally been in cases where migrants were arrested in public places, not their own homes. Nor is it only the homes of illegal immigrants that this change affects. Reporting suggests that the ICE agents who battered down U.S. citizen ChongLy Thao’s door and mistakenly arrested him this weekend in Minneapolis, dragging him half-naked out into the snow, were operating only on the strength of an administrative warrant.
THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT VS. THE FIRST AMENDMENT: The wheels are coming off everything so fast these days that we’ve barely had time even to mention the White House’s latest assault on press freedom: the seizure last week of a Washington Post reporter’s devices to gather information about her government sources. The Post sued, arguing that the seizures violated the First Amendment, and yesterday a judge ordered the government not to review the seized devices—at least for now. The New York Times reports:
The F.B.I. conducted the search at the home of Ms. [Hannah] Natanson, a prolific chronicler of the upheaval in the federal government under the second Trump administration. Ms. Natanson wrote a first-person article weeks earlier about how she had used the encrypted messaging app Signal to communicate with government sources. A colleague described her as the “federal government whisperer.” . . .
Though the government had drawn criticism in the past for trampling on the rights of journalists in seeking evidence to punish leakers, never before had the Justice Department “raided a journalist’s home in connection with a national security leak investigation,” according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The search of Ms. Natanson’s home was in connection with the government’s investigation of Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor in Maryland who held a top-secret security clearance. He is accused of taking home intelligence reports that were discovered in his basement and in a lunchbox. President Trump, in public remarks apparently about the case, referred to a “very bad leaker.”
DOGE VS. THE HATCH ACT: For months, the Trump administration has been denying an alarming whistleblower allegation: that members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team downloaded and shared sensitive Social Security data last year without the knowledge of Social Security Administration officials. Then, last week, the government abruptly admitted it was all true. Here’s the Washington Post:
The Justice Department submitted a court filing Friday in an ongoing case saying that the Social Security Administration had discovered a secret agreement between a DOGE employee and an unidentified political advocacy group. The agreement called for sharing Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states, according to the filing.
Social Security said it was not previously aware of the agreement and that it has made referrals for potential Hatch Act violations to the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates violations of the law barring political activity in the civilian workforce. The agency learned of the agreement in November, according to the court filing, but had “not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group.”
It’s an admission of staggering wrongdoing with a staggering aim: “overturning election results in certain states.” So naturally it will not shock you to learn that the Justice Department isn’t investigating the matter at all. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
I include Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in this category, because he shared the Europeans’ spine and spirit despite being North American.
I’ve lost count of the times in the past year when pundits have proclaimed dismal poll numbers for Trump - numbers that seem unrealistically rock solid to me. How can Trump’s support remain so steady is my question. The fact that his numbers aren’t much, much worse than the polls reveal is another clue to how we got here. Too many Americans are completely clueless, and probably locked in to right wing media.
Someone made a lot of money on the TACO trade the past couple of days. And it would be great if we had an independent SEC capable of investigating who made that trade. Good on Europe for standing firm. I’m waiting on Italy to revoke Rubio and Vance’s visas for the Olympics.
It’s fascinating then that Newsom is the only Democrat really challenging Trump every day. He’s in Davos right now going full Jim Halpert during a Bessent panel. Bashear is trying to get in on the act too. And these are governors that are actually going to need the federal government at some point or another. Why Senate Democrats haven’t found their spines is a mystery to me.