On Immigration, Trump Is Weaker Than He Seems
At least on paper, voters like cracking down on illegal immigration—but the power-drunk White House is overreaching.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this morning he is suing the White House over the trade war: “the first challenge from a U.S. state,” Politico notes, “against Trump’s signature foreign policy cudgel”:
California, the world’s fifth largest economy, stands to lose billions to tariffs with major state industries from Silicon Valley to agriculture heavily dependent on global trade. . . . The move instantly reignites California’s war with Trump and cements its place atop the resistance, after Newsom spent months appealing to the president for federal disaster relief.
Hey, no harm in trying, yeah? Happy Wednesday.
On Immigration, Go on Offense
by William Kristol
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this:
I’ll acknowledge that in politics I’m sometimes wrong (though, as a friend once commented, almost never in doubt!). But in this case I do think I’m being proved correct.
Democrats are finally taking on Trump’s cruel and lawless attacks on immigrants—not of course because of anything I said, but because events have virtually compelled them to do so. Trump’s abuses have become so obvious that even self-doubting Democrats are having difficulty talking themselves out of doing the right thing.
And so we see them beginning to stand up for victims of Trump’s unjust and lawless policies. Today, Sen. Chris Van Hollen plans to fly to El Salvador to highlight the Trump administration’s abduction of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, sent to that country’s notorious CECOT prison because of an “administrative error” that the Trump administration has no intent to rectify.
Van Hollen is doing what’s right. But he’s also doing what’s right politically.
For one thing, as G. Elliott Morris shows in his latest Strength in Numbers newsletter, while Americans may still (narrowly) approve of Trump on immigration, when you get to the particulars of his policies, ranging from his deportations to his defiance of the courts, they disapprove, often by hefty margins. When you get beneath the surface of the immigration issue to its various policy components, Americans aren’t as anti-immigration as some think.
For another thing, even Trump’s general political strength on immigration isn’t what people think. In a new national poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Trump’s overall approval is at 44 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove. Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, at 50 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove. In other words, Trump does perform better on immigration than on his general approval rating—but only by about 5 percentage points. This should not be an intimidating margin.
Still, many a politician’s first reaction upon seeing these numbers will be to be a bit intimidated, and to choose to go after Trump on his weaker issues. That’s fine—to a point. But in politics, as in life, first instincts can be misleading. Indeed, it sometimes turns out that the right political strategy is to attack your opponent’s strength.
This can seem difficult, and it may in fact be difficult at first. But the payoff can be great. If you can neutralize your opponent’s best political weapon, he’s often left helpless.
I believe it was Clausewitz who called attention to the importance in war of attacking and disrupting—and if possible destroying—your opponent’s center of gravity. Immigration is Trump’s political center of gravity. It’s a weaker center of gravity than one would think. Attack him there, weaken him there, and he’ll be far easier to defeat overall.
Taking a Hatchet to the State Dept.
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump’s State Department is looking to dramatically reduce America’s global footprint, slashing funding for global health and engagement while entirely eliminating funds for international institutions and peacekeeping missions.
The plan was outlined in a non-final State Department memo obtained by several outlets, including The Bulwark. If greenlit by Congress, it would represent the most audacious drawback of U.S. international influence of the post-WWII era.
The proposed cuts total about $26 billion across the State Department, into which the administration has folded what remains of USAID. In addition to this cut of nearly half the department’s current budget, the memo also recommends a rescission of $20 billion of currently appropriated State Department money the White House has declined to spend.
A few particularly notable cuts:
$1.4 billion in cuts—a 90 percent reduction—in spending on international organizations, including “eliminating funding for the UN, NATO, OAS, and over 20 organizations.” (The United States currently funds about a quarter of the UN’s budget and about a sixth of NATO’s.)
$21.5 billion, or 56 percent, in cuts to all U.S. foreign assistance, including a $5.4 billion (54 percent) cut to global health programs.
A major cut to the global HIV-treatment program PEPFAR, with a proposed funding of $2.9 billion, down from $6.5 billion in 2024, and the full elimination of a number of other health programs, including “family planning and reproductive health, nutrition, vulnerable children, the Global Health Worker initiative, Neglected Tropical Diseases, GAVI, Maternal Child Health, or the Health Reserve Fund.”
A $4.8 billion (55 percent) cut to global humanitarian assistance.
A complete elimination of funding for international peacekeeping activities.
A complete elimination of all “Educational & Cultural Exchange programs”—including, most notably, the Fulbright Scholarship.
It’s not all cuts. The memo also suggests asking Congress to allocate $2.1 billion for a new America First Opportunities Fund, which “would provide targeted support for economic and development assistance for enduring and emerging Trump Administration priorities and include broad authorities and flexibility.” A foreign-aid slush fund, in other words, to be deployed at the broad discretion of the president.
Although the memo was prepared by State Department staff, what it describes is actually budgetary recommendations for the State Department prepared by the Office of Management and Budget. How these cuts are landing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio—a longtime defender of foreign aid—is unclear. Rubio’s name didn’t appear on the memo, a detail which sources tell The Bulwark has caused substantial chatter around Foggy Bottom about his level of contentment with the cuts. Another interesting wrinkle: One person who did sign the memo, USAID hatchet man Peter Marocco, abruptly exited the State Department on Monday.
But while the proposal isn’t final, it offers a glimpse into the White House’s plans to ask Congress to enshrine into federal law much of the ad hoc slashing carried out by DOGE. The administration has spent months claiming—with total disregard for current law—that it can simply decline to spend any and all congressionally appropriated funds that it wishes to withhold. Some orders to cease spending have come from the top, as with Trump’s executive orders bidding his agencies to stop disbursing money allocated by the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. Other impoundments have simply been ad-libbed by one contract-canceling DOGE engineer or another.
By asking Congress to take back the money the administration refused to spend—and use those unilaterally reduced spending levels as a baseline from which to make further cuts going forward—the White House is trying to make moot constitutional questions of whether it overstepped by making those cuts in the first place. On the one hand, it’s an open question whether Congress will bow to any of this—many of the programs on the chopping block are beloved by various lawmakers whose consent will be crucial to pass any budget bill. On the other hand, you can see how your median spineless Congresscritter might be grateful for the administration’s approach here: They’re not asking Congress to kill the programs; they’re killing the programs themselves and asking Congress to sign the coroner’s certificate.
AROUND THE BULWARK
America’s Shameful ‘No’ to the World… The risk of random, unaccountable detention and imprisonment is growing. Even Musk and Melania could have been detained under Trump’s rules, JILL LAWRENCE writes.
Trump Is Failing to End the War in Ukraine… But is he even trying? Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine STEVEN PIFER analyzes the state of play.
Harvard Makes a Stand Against Trump’s Crackdown… On Bulwark+ Takes, BILL KRISTOL and JONATHAN COHN break down the Trump administration’s move to cut funding from Harvard, what it says about the broader attack on universities, free speech, and biomedical research.
It Can Happen Here. It Is Happening Here… On Just Between Us, ANDREW EGGER joins MONA CHAREN to discuss the obscene spectacle of Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office as well as the attacks on Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor and what they mean for all U.S. citizens.
Quick Hits
SCORN FOR THE LAW: Three months in, JD Vance is settling into his role as the smart-talk-for-morons messenger of White House policy. Last night, he weighed in on the administration’s approach to due process for deported migrants:
“To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: What process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors,” Vance tweeted. “Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year? If the answer is no, they’ve given their game away. . . . They want to accomplish through fake legal process what they failed to accomplish politically: The ratification of Biden’s illegal immigrant invasion.”
Got that, citizen? Following the law with respect to deportations would be onerous and slow things down! Best just to sit quietly and not worry so much about “fake legal process.”
THE WORLD’S WEALTHIEST CREEP: Elon Musk’s personal fixer, Jared Birchall, had a warning for Ashley St. Clair, the 26-year-old mother of one of Musk’s fourteen known children. When one of Musk’s kids’ mothers goes “the legal route,” Birchall told her in December, “that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise.”
That’s one of about a million wild details reported in a Wall Street Journal feature that dropped last night: “The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers.” Four grafs in, our jaws were on the floor. By the end, we were going from room to room trying to figure out where we’d left our jaws at all.
Here’s just a sampling:
“In Musk’s dark view of the world, civilization is under threat because of a declining population. He is driven to correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence . . . Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion.” . . . During St. Clair’s pregnancy, Musk suggested that they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. ‘To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,’ he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by the Wall Street Journal, ‘we will need to use surrogates.’”
“Musk has used his wealth to buy the silence of some women who have his kids. . . . If the mothers push back or seek outside counsel, Musk’s advisers, including Birchall, have threatened financial retribution. . . . Birchall described Musk’s expectations to St. Clair: ‘Privacy and confidentiality is the top of the list in every aspect of his life, every aspect, and his entire world is set up to be, like, a meritocracy.’ Benefits flow, he said, when ‘people do good work.’”
“While Musk posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X about right-wing politics or his companies, among other things on his mind, he often interacts with lesser-known users. He replies to them and sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages.”
“Birchall was involved in acquiring the property for a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences. . . . [Neuralink executive Shivon] Zilis lives in the gated community with their children, and Musk comes and goes. Musk also attempted to get Grimes to move to the compound, but she refused. Similarly, he tried to get St. Clair to spend some time in Austin ‘with our kid legion,’ according to a text he sent her.”
“When Birchall told St. Clair that other mothers signed similar secrecy agreements, she observed that they didn’t seem happy. Zilis, Birchall said, ‘goes in and out of finding contentment’ but Grimes wasn’t ‘ever going to find true happiness.’”
We give up. You’d better just go read the whole thing. Isn’t it nice to have such normal, well-adjusted people running the world?
Cheap Shots
Note on DOGE reductions: Competitive area notices went out for dept of interior employees yesterday, which agency heads are required to do 90 days prior to initiating a RIF (30/60 days with OPM waiver, which I assume they will have). That means the hunger games will begin 1-2 months from now for interior employees.
Also, commerce dept just refired all their probationary employees, and so we'll likely see all of those people refired by agency heads rather than OPM/DOGE in the coming weeks across all of government. These aren't just newly-hired people on their first 2 years. These are also people who have served in government for a long time and took a promotion and are in their first 2 years of that new position. Even in the case of newly-hired people, some of those positions are critical. An example: I just wrapped up my PACT Act screening (burn pits and other exposures from my service) with a toxins exposure specialist with about 20 years of medical training. She is within her first 2 years of work with the VA and is under the umbrella of probationary, and the VA only has a total of 4 of these specialists. It is very difficult to find talented people like this to work in government.
We are pulling pins out of the airplane that is government mid-flight, and we won't realize that we fucked up until the government faces a national crisis and is undermanned and won't be able to respond to said crisis to the full extent of its capabilities.
The Trump plan to isolate America from everyone but other authoritarian regimes is heartbreaking. 80 years of American leadership in the world flushed down the toilet. How is this not Putin's plan?