This July 4th, Ignore Trump. Listen to Gerald Ford.
Our past Republican presidents understood that we are proudly a nation of immigrants.
A so-so June jobs report dropped this morning, with the U.S. economy adding 57,000 non-farm jobs last month—about half as many as economists had expected. What’s more, April and May’s job reports were revised down a combined 74,000 jobs. The unemployment rate, however, ticked down from 4.3 percent to 4.2 percent. Basically, bleh.
In other news, Folarin Balogun did nothing wrong and he must be freed to help the U.S. men’s national team destroy Belgium. Can’t Donald Trump, recipient of the FIFA Peace Prize, give us an executive order here or something? What’s the point of a president who runs the government like a mob boss when he won’t come through when it really matters? Happy Thursday.
And no newsletter tomorrow: Happy Fourth of July.
Our Nation, Richly Rewarded
by William Kristol
When we read the Declaration of Independence this July 4th weekend, we’ll surely focus on its second paragraph, with its famous beginning:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
As the philosopher Leo Strauss put it, “[This] passage has been frequently quoted, but, by its weight and its elevation, it is made immune to the degrading effects of the excessive familiarity which breeds contempt and of misuse which breeds disgust.” And so that passage, and the rest of the paragraph that develops its implications, are very much worth dwelling on.
But we might also take a minute to look at what follows that paragraph—the list of the charges against King George III that are “submitted to a candid world” to justify the revolution. Many of them have particular resonance in our current circumstances. One is that:
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither. . . .
The Declaration is in favor of “the naturalization of foreigners” and “their migration hither.” It is pro-immigration.
The Trump administration is not, to say the least, pro-immigration. It’s pro-mass deportation. Its nativists even toy with dreams of “de-naturalization” and “remigration.”
And so it’s fitting that in the run-up to July 4th, the Trump administration has launched a new anti-immigration push. This crackdown doesn’t target criminals or those who are somehow burdens on the nation. It’s about hitting numbers. As the New York Times reports, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “were told that the White House wanted an increase in arrests . . . ICE officials had been told that 2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement.” And so ICE agents have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, arresting people “at check-ins with immigration authorities, during traffic stops and on the street.”
The forcible deportation of peaceful and law-abiding residents who have chosen to come and live here is the July 4th priority of the Trump administration. It makes sense. Mass deportation is key to its policy agenda and vision of America: A walled fortress with gates locked, the drawbridge up, and masked agents scouring our neighborhoods to forcibly expel outsiders—especially those who in some way look or sound different from what “heritage Americans” imagine Americans should look and sound like.
This, sadly, is America at 250.
It was not always so.
Fifty years ago, on the occasion of our bicentennial, President Gerald Ford made it a point to travel on July 5th to Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello to speak at a naturalization ceremony. His remarks are worth quoting at some length:
I am very proud to welcome all of you as fellow citizens of the United States of America. I invite you to join fully in the American adventure and to share our common goal and our common glory. . . . You have given us a birthday present beyond price—yourselves, your faith, your loyalty, and your love. We thank you with full and friendly hearts.
The patriots of 1776 . . . wanted to build in this beautiful land a home for equal freedom and opportunity, a haven of safety and happiness, not for themselves alone, but for all who would come to us through centuries. How well they built is told by millions upon millions who came and are still coming.
Immigrants came from almost everywhere, singly and in waves. . . . Such transfusions of traditions and cultures, as well as of blood, have made America unique among nations and Americans a new kind of people. . . . We offered citizenship to all, and we have been richly rewarded.
Ford celebrated America as a land of immigrants. He didn’t merely respond to nativist attacks. He wasn’t defensive. He made the case for immigration. He argued that we were “richly rewarded” for being a nation of immigrants. And so, addressing the new American citizens, Ford said:
You came as strangers among us and you leave here as citizens, equal in fundamental rights, equal before the law, with an equal share in the promise of the future. . . . We have gained far, far more than we have given to the millions who made America their second homeland.
Thirteen years later, on January 19, 1989, the man whom Ford defeated in 1976 for the Republican nomination for president, Ronald Reagan, gave his last public address as president. In it, he discussed what he saw as “one of the most important sources of America’s greatness”:
We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.
It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. . . . But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American.
This July 4th, I for one will try to put our current administration (at least briefly!) out of mind. I’ll remind myself that we have done better, that we can be better, and that we surely will do better again.
AROUND THE BULWARK
How Trumpism Betrays the Declaration of Independence… Cherry-picking Lincoln, the MAGA New Right tries to rewrite—or discard altogether—the promise of human equality, writes LAURA K. FIELD.
Iowa’s Rob Sand Tries a Different Kind of Populism… Instead of chasing outrage, he’s campaigning on audits, electoral reform, and singing “America the Beautiful,” reports ANDREW EGGER in a guest Opposition.
A Gross and Messy White House… MAGGIE HABERMAN joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to discuss revelations from her new book, and CAMERON KASKY explains which DSA candidates are resonating with voters.
Quick Hits
UKRAINE SUFFERS ON: With Russians souring on his war on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is showing less restraint than ever in how he prosecutes the conflict. Russia hammered Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with ballistic missiles and drones overnight, killing at least 18 people, injuring at least 80 more, and demolishing several apartment buildings. The New York Times has more:
The Russian barrage was the latest in the deadliest spring for Ukraine since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022, as Ukrainian strikes prompt Mr. Putin to respond militarily. Ukraine has been bringing the war home to Russia by using long-range drones and cruise missiles to attack fuel facilities and military installations deep inside Russia and in occupied Crimea.
These attacks have caused widespread fuel shortages and have eroded Mr. Putin’s ability to insulate large parts of his country, including Moscow, the capital, from the war.
The Times also got a remarkable quote from a Kyiv resident who experienced the night of terror:
“We could hear the explosions clearly — it wasn’t far away,” said Olena Rudenkova, a resident of [Kyiv’s Darnytsia] district. What has changed, she said, is not the fear but the response to it. “I don’t think anyone cries anymore, not even the children,” she said. “Everyone becomes as focused and angry as possible.”
We are four years and four months into this war, which Putin envisioned would take only a matter of days. There is little end in sight.
HIS OWN PERSONAL PIGGY BANK: It’s astonishing enough that Donald Trump banked roughly $1.4 billion last year in crypto deals, a state of affairs that obliterates all existing norms about ethics and conflicts of interest. What might be even more astonishing is how much of that money was bilked directly from his most loyal supporters. The Wall Street Journal notes that nearly two thirds of investors in Trump’s memecoin have lost money on their purchases:
Morten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire.
Instead, the value of those tokens tanked. While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project, according to a financial disclosure he filed this week.
“In crypto, people say a game is a game,” the digital-asset entrepreneur said. “He played a better game than I did.”
It has been clear for some time that President Trump’s forays into the crypto world have been lucrative, but the stunning disclosure that those ventures earned him some $1.4 billion last year underscored the different reality the president is living in from many of the investors who have embraced digital assets alongside him.
The president raked in cash by issuing new assets—World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto. Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.
We’d be shocked if there’s another politician alive who could survive a story like this with his career intact. It’s so audacious and such a bad look that no one in the business of trying to court public opinion would even contemplate trying it. And yet we’ll be shocked if people are still talking about this one by next week. Read the whole thing.
DEMOCRACY IS WHEN WE SEIZE POWER: Just how “democratic” are the Democratic Socialists of America? At the Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes about how recent factional fights within the organization, which holds more sway in Democratic party politics than ever, have led the DSA further from actual democratic commitments:
Left-wing factions have realigned the organization in firm opposition to liberal democracy. In 2021, the DSA joined the São Paulo Forum, a communist-led international network—a move that would, one DSA member protested at the time, “support authoritarian governments who systematically violate the basic tenets of democratic socialism.” It proclaimed its solidarity with Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, and with Cuba under that of the Castro brothers. The DSA now locates its vision of the ideal society in the world’s most despotic regimes.
The organization is still called democratic socialists, of course, but the term does not necessarily mean “liberal democracy” as Americans have traditionally defined it. Many socialist thinkers define what they call “true democracy” as a system in which capitalism has been overturned and the proletarian classes have seized political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves “democratic.”
And if you want to get further sense of where on the spectrum DSA stands on certain issues—and just how difficult a sell it might be to voters—check out their foreign policy platform online, specifically the part about immigration:
Allow workers to freely migrate between countries to seek employment without restrictive immigration controls. Demilitarize the border, end all immigrant detention and deportations, immediate amnesty for all immigrants regardless of current immigration status, and provide access to jobs, labor rights, and social services to all immigrants.
Cheap Shots
We need a high ranking Native American to speak out and put Stephen Miller in his place about exactly what being “nativist” is really about. I don’t know who it would be but Count Dracula needs to be put in his place in an embarrassing manner. There’s someone out there that could do this in an awesome manner. I am sooooo sick of that guy’s 💩…
Bill: "This, sadly, is America at 250."
Or maybe this is exactly what a plurality of the electorate wanted.