Dear Weekend Jolter,
The Trump administration made its second tactical retreat in as many weeks, reining in the immigration-enforcement surge in Minnesota after deciding not to invade Greenland.
It’s a small consolation that President Trump seems to sense his administration’s ventures are coming to embody the original acronymic meaning of SNAFU: “POTUS knew he needed to unf*** it,” an anonymous adviser acknowledged to Axios.
Audrey Fahlberg details this week’s pivot, which included sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, recalling Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, implicitly sidelining Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, reaching out to Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and declining to endorse his lieutenants’ early, inflammatory descriptions of the U.S. citizen killed by Border Patrol last weekend.
The administration’s ability to regain its footing with voters on the president’s core domestic issue hinges on Homan, a hard-nosed but more pragmatic deputy, for the time being. Moving quickly, the border czar announced Thursday they would draw down the ICE/Border Patrol presence in the region once local officials hold up their end and cooperate on enforcement operations in the jails. While saying the administration is not “surrendering” the mission, he acknowledged that agents had gotten away from traditional “targeted” enforcement. Of the new boss, Andy McCarthy writes:
Homan is an experienced, highly competent law enforcement pro. He has his problems, and — in the fashion Trump requires of his people — he is sometimes over-the-top combative with the media and Congress. But he knows the law, and he knows what he’s doing, particularly in comparison with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisers.
Homan is cognizant of both the significant limitations of immigration-enforcement resources (such as agents, detention space, adjudicators — the limitations discussed in my weekend column) and the need for public support of enforcement operations. Consequently, he wanted to prioritize arrests and deportations of serious criminals, which would be a great deal of work in and of itself with the illegal-immigrant population potentially topping 20 million and the notoriety of gang activity in many areas.
Noem, by contrast, wanted a dragnet in which every person illegally in the country was ferreted out and deported. To be fair to Noem, this is what her boss has signaled that he wants, elucidated by the public rhetoric of Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff.
As Andy notes, Homan is well aware of this reality: The president originally opted for Noem’s way and is only shaking things up because of bad optics. It doesn’t mean deportation dragnets are gone for good.
But the polling has gotten progressively worse for Trump. Before last weekend’s shooting, Noah Rothman flagged a New York Times/Siena survey showing that only 26 percent of registered voters thought ICE was taking the “right” approach. A clear majority said ICE was going too far. More recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows approval of the president’s immigration policy dropping to its lowest level this term.
Tragically, both the administration and local Democratic leaders have for weeks been more interested in stoking conflict than resolving tensions, to deadly results. Our editorial suggests a more sensible approach going forward, one that doesn’t involve caving to the demands of those who oppose enforcement of any sort. As Dan McLaughlin writes, Democratic politicians have quite clearly tried to stop ICE from operating in their states, posing a challenge to the legitimacy of federal immigration law. The tactics of protesters at times have crossed the line into harassment, interference, and even violence. Tensions between the president and Mayor Frey continue to flare, though Homan is trying to navigate the situation.
Even if a truce can be sustained in Minnesota, Jeff Blehar predicts that progressives’ maximalist demands will mount, creating a separate set of problems for Democrats, in time. Perhaps Trump waits for the pendulum to swing back. But for now, the president’s own hubris, as Dan writes, has damaged his second term. On immigration, tariffs, and more, the Trump administration emboldened Democrats by overreaching — and governing “as if there was no risk of alienating any of his new coalition.”
Yuval Levin explains it all:
The White House appears to have misread the public’s attitudes toward immigration from the start. Americans do want to see illegal immigration curbed, especially at the border. And the public does appear to have a fair amount of patience for a deportation effort aimed at illegal immigrants who commit other crimes in America. But how this is done has always mattered.
Americans do not generally share the dark, bitter, vindictive hostility toward immigrants and immigration that characterizes the views of some of Trump’s senior aides. And so most voters are not encouraged but alarmed by the thuggish and fascistic tone of much of the administration’s rhetoric on the subject. The militant ICE recruitment ads, the nativist DHS tweets, the mendacious White House press statements, and the callous reactions of senior officials to the killings of protesters in the course of immigration enforcement operations all convey a hunger for confrontation (if not a lust for blood) that is not only grossly unbecoming of the government of a free society but also extremely unappealing as a way of talking to the country.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The Minneapolis editorial, once more, is here: Reeling Minnesota
The political statements about gun rights this past week were a remarkable thing to witness: The Second Amendment Role Reversal
Some good news: Celebrating the Historically Low Murder Rate
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: The Scale of the Iranian Massacre Comes into View
Luther Ray Abel: ICE’s Ice Problem
Charles C. W. Cooke: Gavin Newsom Is Fooling No One
Becket Adams: Canadian Media Outlets Help Whip Up U.S. Invasion Fears
Jianli Yang: With Xi Jinping’s Purge of China’s Most Senior Uniformed Official, War in Taiwan May Be a Step Closer
Audrey Fahlberg: Virginia Prosecutors Poised to Let CEO’s Alleged Murderer Off on Insanity Plea, over Family’s Objections
Haley Strack: Trump Orders Federal Agencies to Take Over Lagging L.A. Wildfire Rebuild
Haley Strack: In ‘Dire’ State of Fiscal Distress, Santa Monica Establishes $3.5 Million Reparations Fund
Seth Cropsey: How the U.S. Navy Can Right the Ship
Payton McNabb: The Supreme Court Must Find the Courage to Defend the Truth on Women’s Sports
Kamden Mulder: Israel Confirms Return of Final Hostage’s Remains from Gaza
James Lynch: Trump’s South Korea Tariff Threat Comes as Seoul Targets U.S. Company with Massive Regulatory Crackdown
Dan McLaughlin: The Annual Census Update Shows a Redder America
Richard Ekins: Britain’s Chagos Deal Can’t Go Forward Without U.S. Consent
Daniel J. Flynn: Bozell at 100
CAPITAL MATTERS
Marc L. Busch, with a word about consistency: Apply Health-Care Tariffs Evenly, or Not at All
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on “another film excluded from this year’s crude, cruel Oscars”: Sorry, Baby Achieves Satire and Self-Awareness
Brian Allen heads to the big city, visiting the first exhibition on Renoir’s drawings since 1921. It’s sketchy: Renoir Drawings Raises a Question: Did Even Renoir Think His Drawings Were Important?
EXCERPTS: THE PERFECT COMPANION FOR WAITING OUT THE ARCTIC WEATHER
Dan McLaughlin explains the significance of the latest census data, combined with redistricting forecasts:
Now that we’re halfway through the 2020s, projections of how these trends could reshape our political map are becoming more reliable, and they may be more dramatic than usual because errors in the pandemic-era 2020 census had hurt red states. The American Redistricting Project updated its forecasts, with Texas and California dominating the shifts, but it estimates a less dramatic gain for Florida and a less dramatic loss for New York than it did in last year’s projection . . .
How bad is this news for Democrats? Let’s break this out by reference to the last few presidential cycles:
- Red states that Donald Trump won by six or more points in 2024, which voted for Trump in 2020 and 2016 and have all-Republican senators and governors: +8 seats.
- Purple-red states that Trump won by two to six points in 2024, all of which have Republican state legislatures: +3 seats. (Of these: Arizona and Georgia voted for Biden in 2020, North Carolina and Arizona have Democratic governors, and Arizona and Georgia each have two Democratic senators.)
- Purple-blue states that Trump won by less than two points in 2024, Biden won in 2020, and that have Democratic governors and one senator from each party: –2 seats.
- A blue state (Minnesota) that Kamala Harris won by less than six points in 2024: –1 seat.
- Deep-blue states that Harris won by six or more points in 2024: –8 seats, with half of the loss in California.
In a future presidential election where the Sun Belt battlegrounds of North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona go red while the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan (plus Minnesota) go blue, there would be a net shift of eleven electoral votes in favor of the Republican ticket compared with the current Electoral College. That would turn a 270–268 Democratic map into a 279–259 Republican map. The House of Representatives would see a similar shift toward red states and toward Sun Belt battlegrounds over Rust Belt battlegrounds.
As I’ve been writing since these trends emerged several years ago, this is likely to have an impact on the intra-GOP battles to succeed Trump. The rustpolitik approach of JD Vance and others of like mind in the Republican Party is premised on the centrality of the Rust Belt to the party’s fortunes. But that era may end after the next census. In the short run, that may be good news for Vance in the 2028 presidential primaries. He’s already well positioned for the nomination based on a simple binary calculation: If Trump’s political fortunes look good in 2028, Vance will be very hard to defeat in a primary, and if Trump is widely unpopular, Vance’s intraparty competitors may prefer to let him run the hard race in 2028 and wait for a more favorable map in 2032, after the Midwestern “blue wall” becomes a blue hedge. If you are Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis or Brian Kemp or Glenn Youngkin or some other Republican with a more Sun Belt and less Rust Belt brand than Vance, you may well look at 2028 and tell Vance, “Take your turn now, I’ll wait.”
Demographics isn’t destiny — at least, not on its own. If Republicans do enough to splinter their current political coalition and alienate enough voters, they will find different ways to lose. But for now, the map promises the hope, or the fear (as the case may be), of a redder future.
Noah Rothman revisits the stifled unrest in Iran and examines the true scope of the horrifying death toll from the regime’s crackdown:
There can be no doubt that the Iranian regime and the thugs in its control brazenly disregarded Donald Trump’s warning of the consequences that would follow the slaughter of anti-establishment protesters. Even when Trump tried to give regime officials an out — claiming that Tehran had declined to go through with the scheduled executions of political dissenters — Iranian prosecutors insisted that the president was wrong. The tempo of repression and brutality, the regime’s officials maintained, would not slacken.
With information flowing out of the Islamic Republic slowing to a crawl after the regime shut down digital and telephonic communications with the outside world, the scale of the massacre the clerisy had engineered was unknowable. But as the regime has gradually loosened those restrictions amid its newfound confidence in its survival, the scope of the carnage is coming into view.
According to details compiled by international Iranian dissident networks, the number of dead Iranian civilians can be measured in the tens of thousands. The ranks of the injured extend well into the hundreds of thousands.
“It is understood that at least 16,500 people have been killed by security forces,” the British broadcaster LBC reported, “however there are fears that accurate figures far surpass this, but are being veiled by Tehran.” Indeed. The opposition-backed news outlet Iran International believes that more than 36,000 were killed at the height of the protests this month. Basing their assessment on “classified documents, field reports, and accounts from medical staff, witnesses, and victims’ families,” including unnamed Iranian regime officials, the activist network accuses the regime of executing a campaign of mass murder — one that culminated in the summary execution of protesters in their hospital beds as they recovered from the injuries meted out by Iran’s security services.
The International Center for Human Rights in Iran believes the number of fatalities is greater still. Based on interviews, field research, and a forensic analysis of the images and videos of the carnage that escaped Iran’s digital lockdown, “at least 43,000 people have so far been killed by agents of the Islamic Republic during the recent protests on the streets of Iran,” the organization reported. In addition, about 35,000 demonstrators were injured amid the crackdown, some permanently. The ICHRI believes almost all the deaths took place over the course of just 48 hours — butchery preceded and made possible by the regime’s internet blackout.
An accurate account of the number of dead may never be known. The regime certainly has an active interest in preserving whatever ambiguity persists. What can be fairly assessed at this point is that Iranian officials perpetrated one of the worst massacres of civilians in modern history. The Western world’s reaction to it has been woefully inadequate.
ICYMI, Payton McNabb, a former high school athlete whose sports dreams were cut short, had an important piece last weekend on the Supreme Court cases about men in women’s sports:
In September 2022, I had been looking forward to my next big step in life — heading off to college on a softball scholarship. But that dream came to an abrupt halt: During a girls’ volleyball game against a rival high school, I sustained traumatic head and neck injuries from being struck by a ball spiked by an opposing-team member, a male who identified as female.
While my sports dreams were gone for good, I knew that I didn’t want any other woman to experience that kind of physical pain and crushing heartbreak. That’s why I decided to stand outside the Supreme Court on January 13 while attorneys presented their oral arguments in two pivotal cases on men in women’s sports.
Both West Virginia and Idaho have signed legislation protecting female athletes from being stripped of medals and placed in vulnerable positions — or, ultimately, in danger — on the field of play or in the locker room. Those cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, are now before the nation’s highest court, and the outcome will determine whether males who identify as women can play in female-only sports.
I was one of the athletes who could have been protected by such a law. When I was injured, I wondered why the adults in the room refused to protect me — and all of my teammates — from the obvious danger of competing against men. I concluded that people who stay on the sidelines of this issue are afraid of speaking out. They are afraid because cancel culture has taken many people from the height of their career to the lowest place in their lives.
Silence, however, is no longer the safe option. You cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while truth is being assaulted. If you cannot recognize basic biology, you have no credibility. You may be “canceled” for telling the truth, but without truth, there’s nothing left worth defending.
According to a study conducted by the United Nations, female athletes have lost 890 medals and counting in 29 different sporting categories because of men who claim to be female. I have met with and know other female athletes who have been stripped of their titles, who have missed out on breaking national and state records, and, worse, who have — like me — been injured because of the far-fetched idea that men can fairly compete against women.
CODA
I’ll throw back to the late ’90s once more to play us out, with an album I’ve long had a soft spot for: Yield. With a couple exceptions, these Pearl Jam songs are polite, rarely insisting on your attention in the way of, say, “Porch.” They win you over, gradually. By the time Yield came out, rock fans knew grunge was fading like thrift-shop flannel anyway.
Thanks for reading. Stay warm, my friends.