The New York Times had an excellent article last week on Trump’s plans for immigrants he doesn’t like: concentration camps and mass deportations, all bypassing due process hearings. Because letting presidents lock up whoever they want without hearings or trial worked so well last time. And Trump, let’s remember, kept insisting the Central Park Five were guilty even after the legal system cleared them. Yeah, I trust his judgment … not.
He also intends to eliminate birthright citizenship, never mind that it’s in the Constitution. Will the courts do anything about that when the inevitable civil liberties case reaches them? If they do, what if he just ignores them. As JD Vance has suggested Trump do if the courts try to stop him staffing the government with party loyalists.
While the article is good, there’s a point where the authors (Maggie Haberman, Charlies Savage and Jonathan Swan) write that “there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Mr. Trump is eyeing.” This I have trouble with. We’re talking a massively racist, unconstitutional policy that will undoubtedly hurt a great many innocent people; the chance of innocent people getting deported or interned in a no-hearing system is damn good (and that’s not the only harm). “Breadth and ambition” sounds laudatory — like a description of the space program in the 1960s, the 1930s New Deal or 1950s containment of Soviet expansion (flawed as our anticommunist strategy became in so many ways). Hitler’s final solution, Putin’s dream of restoring Russia’s Soviet-era empire are visions with breadth and ambition but no American paper would describe them that way. This shouldn’t be any different.
As Lawyers, Guns and Money has said repeatedly, the media’s focus on Biden’s age is irrelevant. Quite aside from the facts Trump’s no spring chicken and seems to be losing it faster, Trump and Biden are going to be the candidates if they live to election day. Pundits pining for the two parties to pick differently or urging that perennial fantasy, a third-party win, are dreaming. And slacking off. This is one period when both sides are not the same; you’d think given Trump’s frequent threats to the media, they’d be aware of that. What matters is what Trump plans to do in office; focusing on Biden’s age or finding something so they can “both sides” it (e.g., Trump said Biden stole the election, Biden said Republicans reject democracy, therefore both parties are the same!) is a waste.
Part of the problem is that the political media love a horse race. It’s more entertaining and less demanding or uncomfortable than dealing with Republicans morphing into a fascist party. This may be why, as Jennifer Rubin says, the press are hooked on “Joe Biden’s in trouble.” Sure, last week’s elections were a win for Democrats and decent Americans but the polls, the polls show Trump’s making amazing gains! And Dems are worried about Biden’s campaign because of those polls! Bad news for Biden!
That’s not to say they shouldn’t report problems with Biden’s campaign or cover the race evenhandedly. But when one party is running on a power grab, has the support of anti-Semites and neo-Nazis — well, I don’t think “both sides do it” is the solution.
