Trump Has Reason to Rage—But Needs to Stay Calm and Get Even Rather than Mad ~VDH

Trump must concentrate on the disaster of the Biden administration and reiterate nonstop the agendas of 2025 that will save us from tottering on the brink.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Donald Trump gave one of his best and most conciliatory speeches of his political career after his win in the recent Iowa primaries—that might explain why the media would not cover it. Later, to answer an ad hoc ambush reporter’s question whether he would hold grudges, he emphatically said he did not.

Yet after his win in New Hampshire, Trump went ballistic at Nikki Haley’s earlier charges that he, rather than Joe Biden, was cognitively challenged, past his prime, and a perennial loser of popular votes.

In response, Trump shed his short-lived Iowa temperance. He went wholehog after Haley’s dress and her affectations and trashed her character. He tweeted that she was a “birdbrain,” and on and on.

For six years, observers have noted the disconnect between Trump’s stellar record of governance, his occasional sense of humor and even self-criticism—and his ad hominem venom that often turns off the 3-7 percent of the electorate in the suburbs who otherwise might vote for him.

Reasonable calls to tone it down by pundits, aides, and friends do not work with Trump, and perhaps for several understandable reasons.

One, Trump is reactive in his “they started it, I finish it” mode. His theory of deterrence is to be disproportionate in retort to eliminate future preemptive attacks. Almost all of Trump’s crudeness was in disproportionate response, sometimes even to minor offenses.

In such a world of Trump deterrence, if you do not relish a crude Trump, then don’t first talk about cutting off his head, blowing him up, stabbing him, shooting him, or lighting him on fire, or don’t spread lies like “Russian collusion,” “laptop disinformation,” or that the influence-selling Biden consortium was innocent of shaking down foreign interests for millions of dollars that were routed into the clan’s coffers.

To put it another way, remember how Barack Obama went ballistic over the yarns, often fueled by Trump himself, that he was born in Kenya (a mythos he himself fueled by allowing his book to be plugged as the work of a Kenyan-born, exotic-named author, e.g., “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”).

But what would a prickly Obama have done had right-wing prosecutors, mirror images of a Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, or Jack Smith, indicted him over his garnering and intentionally not reporting the names of major contributors in 2008 (rather than the federal election commission taking five years to fine Obama $375,000 for what was essentially campaign fraud).

What would Obama have said or done had a federal prosecutor indicted him for bribery, extortion, or tax fraud over the illegal Tony Rezko lot deal? What would have been his reaction to his “wingman.” Eric Holder’s, being jailed for his refusal to obey a congressional subpoena (such a transgression may well earn both Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro jail sentences).

Trump was pilloried for the Russian collusion farce. But the reality was that the 2015-17 Russian collusion conspiracy farce was discussed and greenlighted in the West Wing by a lame-duck but knowledgeable Obama, who unleashed his FBI, CIA, and DOJ to do whatever, legal or not, it took to stop Donald Trump.

Currently, Donald Trump was just fined $83.3 by a left-wing New York jury presided over by a left-wing judge in a suit filed by a left-wing writer who was funded by a left-wing Silicon Valley billionaire—all possible because a left-wing state legislator had recently lifted the statute of limitations on allegations of sexual assault to allow three-decade-old charges like E. Jean Carroll’s to be refiled.

So Trump blew up and charged out of the courtroom, lost his cool in the courtroom, and hurt any slight chance he had to escape such an outrageous and politicized fine.
But again, note the surreal nature of the suit. Carrol cannot remember even the year in which she and Trump, she claims, ended up in a department store dressing room.
She was mistaken about the dress she wore on the day of the assault.
Long after the alleged assault, she praised Trump’s Apprentice as her favorite TV show.

She created an app game called Damn Love, described as: “You’re shown two people who are madly in love. Your object is to break them up. Shown a pair of options, you choose the ones more likely to stir up shit, given each person’s personality and proclivities, and the quicker you can make them split, the more you increase your evilness and rise through the ranks.

Carroll’s narrative about being sexually assaulted in a department store dressing room is eerily almost the identical narrative of a 2012 “Law & Order: SVU” episode that focused on an alleged sexual assault in the lingerie dressing room of the very same Bergdorf Goodman department store. Coincidence or inspiration?

And thus, to refute all the above, Trump was criminalized as a defamer and fined $83 million.

Under such rules of evidence and damages, what would Joe Biden have had to pay when his former senatorial aide, Tara Reade, accused him of a sexual assault, only to be widely defamed by legions of Biden’s left-wing flacks?

So much of Trump’s rage is an understandable reaction to the sustained, unhinged venom of the media and left.

Two, Trump’s base, unlike his other supporters, does not differentiate between Trump’s solid governance and his volatile character. They see what he does and says not as antithetical but complementary. Trump, in the base’s view, gets things done precisely because he displays open, unfiltered contempt for the swamp, the bipartisan political class, the globalists, and the media.

His 24/7 bellicosity, MAGA diehards feel, ensures he will always be hated by the media and establishment—and thus not compromised even if he wished to be. In other words, for MAGA, whom a president is despised by is more important than by whom he is liked. For the base, the role of a mercurial and disruptive Clinton Eastwood gunslinger is preferable to that of a jolly Roy Rodgers crooner.

Three, Trump is seen as the MAGA rabid pit bull, who, from time to time, is to be unleashed and pointed in the proper direction. For those who were smeared collectively and nonstop by Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or a late John McCain variously as clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, racists, sexists, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, chumps, dregs, semi-fascists, hobbits, bizarros, and crazies—and as smelly and toothless by the media—Trump is their payback.

Has a Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, or Adam Schiff ever apologized to the nation for daily lying to the American people that the Biden family was never compromised by or profited from Hunter Biden’s skullduggery, that Christopher Steele’s dossier was authentic, that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow, or that COVID sprung from a bat or pangolin?

So for the Trump voter, those nightly, serial lies had more deleterious consequences for the nation than a leaked Trump private conversation in which he supposedly said Haiti was a “sh-thole” country.

All of the above may explain, though not defend, what appears to the bicoastal elite and even many Trump supporters as irrational, if not self-destructive, behavior.

However, why Trump does what he does still does not address the central question of 2024—what is now in Trump’s own self-interest—and the country’s?

Before answering that question, most would object that it does not matter. Trump cannot help himself even if he tried, as if Heraclitus was right that a man’s nature is his fate (ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων, often loosely translated as “character is destiny”).

Yet there are reasons to suggest that Trump, in fact, could scale back the ad hominem invective.

One, in the past, he has been magnanimous and certainly did not go after enemies or subvert the levers of government in the manner of the Obama administration that weaponized the DOJ and had West Wing meetings, where the Steele dossier and Hillary Clinton’s subterfuge were openly condoned, if not abetted.

Two, the 2024 election is different from both 2016 and 2020. There is no longer a COVID ruse to change voting laws or conduct a surrogate campaign.

Instead, the left is open now about its intentions to put Biden on ice in his basement, outsource the campaign to handlers and the media, count on billions from big tech and finance to ensure 70 percent of swing state balloting is not on Election Day, and blast Trump as a January 6 insurrectionary and murderer of women in need of abortions.

They will seek to keep him off the ballot in dozens of states and coordinate four prosecutions to jail him during the campaign season. The near billion dollars infused into the election to alter voting laws in 2020 will be seen as child’s play in 2024.

More importantly, the country is imploding in 2024 in a way it was not in 2020, when there was still a border, deterrence abroad, coherent energy policies, deterrent police, and a semblance of the rule of law.

Now there is simply no margin of error.

To be elected, Trump will have to win the popular vote by at least 4-5 percent. What’s more, the error/rejection rate on mail-in/early balloting in most states will be a fraction of what it had been pre-COVID. 2020 taught us that the more purple states are flooded with massive non-election ballots under 2020 altered ballot rules, the more the normal rejection percent of unsubstantiated or illegal ballots declines.

Trump has an enormous responsibility in 2024 to stay calm, reach out, and get even rather than mad.

Why? For millions, he is now seen as the last and only obstacle to what more than half of America believes is the sustained, left-wing attempt to turn the nation into something unrecognizable—an imploding country of open borders, with two million illegal entries per year, racial separatism and tribal chauvinism, the end of deterrence abroad, soaring crime and homelessness, $35 trillion in debt with $2 trillion annual deficits, wars on natural gas and oil, and warping of the administrative state and the law to punish enemies and reward friends.

In sum, Trump should ignore Haley and his old vulture critics in the media and on the left as much as he can.

He must concentrate on the disaster of the Biden administration and reiterate nonstop the agendas of 2025 that will save us from tottering on the brink. That forbearance demands that he speak and campaign in the only way that can win the election: unite the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the MAGA base, independents, disaffected Democrats, minorities, and even Never Trumpers into an eleventh-hour coalition to stop the revolution in our midst before it consumes us all.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- January 30

 

Denationizing the United States

posted by Gary Gindler at American Thinker 

The Rio Grande border conflict is not an isolated incident. It is part of the World Economic Forum program of "denationization" of the United States.

In the same way that a “state” is a form of self-organization of human society, a “nation” can also be treated as a form of self-organization. These terms are different in nuance, and Russian conservative philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev was the first to devise a formula to discern between them a century ago. His analysis proceeds from the application of the eschatological way of thinking. Berdyaev stated that humans are mortal; therefore, a state or government, as an example of human creation, is also mortal. “Nation” emerged when our ancestors realized the need to self-organize along transcendental lines rather than administrative ones.

The newly created self-organized form was intended to achieve what was radically unachievable -- immortality. Unlike all other animals, humans have always sought to transcend ordinary biological existence. Our predecessors figured that life is a process while death is an event and focused on life.

Berdyaev wrote in 1923 that “[t]he manner of life of a nation is not to be defined nor explained, be it by race, nor by language, nor by religion, nor by territory, nor by state sovereignty, although all these signs more or less are extant for the national manner of life. And most correct are those who define the nation as a oneness of historical destiny. The awareness of this unity is also what comprises the national consciousness.”  

Finally, “[t]he nation is not merely the generation alive today, nor is it the sum of all the generations. A nation is not a mere composite accumulation; it is something primordial, an eternally alive subject within the historical process, it is there live and dwell all the past generations, no less so than the contemporary generations. Nation possesses an ontological core. The national manner of life conquers time. The spirit of the nation forestalls the devouring of the past by the present and the future. The nation is always striving towards imperishability, toward a victory over death, it cannot allow the exclusive triumph of the future over the past.”

A country is created when its boundaries are drawn and its administration is set up. A nation is created when a communication link is up and running, connecting the past, present, and future.

Compare Berdyaev’s proposition with Edmund Burke, who, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” described society as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Berdyaev’s nationalism concept casts the issue of mass illegal immigration in a very unusual light. Illegal aliens directly threaten the immortality facet of social self-organization because they alter and disturb -- sometimes beyond repair -- the communication mechanism connecting past, present, and future generations.

Berdyaev’s theological argument is one of those rare contributions of divine inspiration to the field of realpolitik. The illustrated proposal clearly distinguishes between two items. The first is objective, material, measurable, and mortal -- a country, its citizens, and its government. The second one is subjective, immeasurable, and immortal -- a nation.

As a corollary, the terms “National Conservatism,” “National Socialism,” or “National Bolshevism” have no meaning as they attempt to unite ununitable mortal and immortal terms. However, as we know, these contradictory terms exist; therefore, we must use them with a strong reasoning that they can be applied only to a particular historical period and place. That also applies to another commonly reputable term: “nation-state.” The term “Christian Nationalism” is also an oxymoron as it unites ununitable items -- relationship with God and relationship with time.

The modern leftists are fighting so fiercely for the “rights of immigrants,” not because the fate of illegal aliens worries them in any way. It is because globalists anticipate illegal immigrants as the main “engine of the revolution,” which must bring about socialist transformations and catapult the globalists to power. Consequently, the greater the number of “engines” in a country, the happier the elite of the globalist party will be. So, naturally, they call (irrationally and contrary to common sense) for opening the United States borders, dissolving the Border Patrol, and granting the right to vote to non-citizens.

In essence, the World Economic Forum coterie runs the program of denationization of the United States. The position of globalists on this issue is ultra-uncompromising because, for them, illegal immigration is not a legal issue but a political and close to existential one.

Following globalists, this is not a matter of violating the country’s sovereign rights but a matter of political survival. In the opinion of globalists, illegal immigration encapsulates precisely that army of mere mortals stupefied by the propaganda of the masses. These mere mortals will be required to stand on the barricades to gain political power over every area of the planet.

Basically, the globalists’ idea might be expressed as follows: “If our citizens do not vote for us, we will import hordes that will.” The Texas National Guard on the banks of the Rio Grande protects not only the state and not only the country. They secure the immortality of the American nation.

WEF Totalitarians Seek to Euthanize the West

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

Totalitarianism is the warm bath in which civilization slits its wrists.  It envelops the people with petty rules, strange dogmas, immoral duties, and forced sacrifices.  It warms its victims with intoxicating promises of the government’s false love.  It leaves the citizen naked — stripped first of his free will, then the thoughts in his head, and finally anything he once called his own.  It slowly dispossesses each person of his personhood, until the population withers into frail, colorless facsimiles of the bleak, omnipresent State.  Without the courage to act, the desire to think, the wisdom to pray, or the conscience to object, human purpose disappears.  Society is exsanguinated of its vitality, creativity, spirituality, and mirth — until it slips beneath the water and stops breathing.

This was the story of Lenin’s Soviet Union and the imprisoned nations trapped behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain.  It was the story of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.  It has been the story of Kim’s North Korea, Castro’s Cuba, Chávez’s Venezuela, and the ayatollahs’ Iran.  For over a century, humanity has endured one form of barbarous totalitarianism after the next.  It slithers into unsuspecting countries — often hiding behind the mask of democratic elections.  It misrepresents itself as just one political party of many before announcing itself as the only party for all.  It seeks to eliminate opponents in stages: first it proselytizes, then it intimidates, and finally it murders.  With a couple hundred million victims over the last century alone, it is a governing philosophy that specializes in mass executions, dank prison cells, killing fields, and concentration camps.  Totalitarianism infiltrates society with lies and builds nothing but the machinery of death.

With the Earth still wet from so much blood, Western governments now seek to turn the twenty-first century into the twentieth century’s even bloodier reflection.  It is humbling to realize that we humans repeat so many mistakes through the course of history.  It is infuriating, however, to watch today’s political leaders push humanity down the exact same paths that led to such monstrous tragedies in the recent past.  When will the lesson be learned that censorship of opposing points of view leads to irreparable social division?  When will governments grasp that coercion only intensifies the human desire to be free?  When will courts realize that two-tiered justice and political persecution ensure the rule of law’s demise?  How many more lives must be lost before those who exercise power understand that tyranny always leads to terror?

Totalitarian control over each citizen’s life was the driving force behind the outbreak of WWII and the prolonged isolation of closed societies surviving under the blanket of communism during the Cold War.  Germans uniquely possess the social memories of both totalitarian perpetrator and victim — first driving the Nazi ideology across the European continent and then suffering through a half-century of bifurcation and Soviet oppression in the East.  They experienced the temporary euphoria of trading their individual lives for the greater glory of the German State and the torturous agony of submitting to an occupying force that required absolute obedience.  If any nation of people should have learned the harsh repercussions of totalitarianism, it is Germany.  

Instead, today’s German leaders seek to ban opposition political parties and silence dissent.  They micromanage economic activity under the dangerous propaganda campaign of “climate change.”  They disrupt social cohesion and cultural unity by opening Germany’s borders to illegal aliens from unassimilable civilizations.  They use the horrors of their own past to slander political protesters as “fascists.”  Nearly a century ago, German Nazis rose to power by dehumanizing much of Europe.  Now their ideological descendants dehumanize those who oppose growing German totalitarianism by ironically branding them as Nazis.  And in this strange milieu of historical contradiction, the German Klaus Schwab has built the World Economic Forum as an engine for making oppressive government universal.  Even after the devastation of WWII and the Iron Curtain, it seems Western leaders still have no “vaccine” for the totalitarian disease.

It is a strange sight to see Western nations send their parliamentary leaders, foreign ministers, military generals, and prominent business executives to Schwab’s WEF powwows, where they may organize how best to dominate and manipulate their respective national populations without even the pretense of a democratic mandate or constitutional legitimacy.  This time around, totalitarianism returns to the West not on the heels of invasion and annexation but rather with light bacchanal celebrations in the crisp air of the Swiss Alps.  It seems that the only thing aspiring Western tyrants learned from the twentieth century’s carnage is that would-be totalitarians should not waste resources fighting one another when their common enemy has always been the people.  During the age of monarchies and empires, the easiest way to conquer foreign lands was to purchase their nobles.  That is what the World Economic Forum and its cabal of globalist conquerors do today.

Perhaps the most pungent indicator that Western totalitarianism has returned with a vengeance is the World Economic Forum’s Orwellian insistence that its members are working to combat “threats to our democracy.”  Financial and political oligarchs pretending to protect the people’s will is indistinguishable from a fox entrusted to guard the henhouse: the vulnerable always end up dead.

There is nothing “democratic” about labeling dissent as “disinformation.”  There is nothing “democratic” about conspiring with tech companies to censor public debate as “hate speech.”  There is nothing “democratic” about imposing top-down “climate change” regulations that do nothing other than strip private property rights and centralize economic control.  There is nothing “democratic” about mandating what farmers may grow, what meats may be eaten, what people may own, what words can be said, or what experimental “vaccines” are required to work.  There is nothing “democratic” about using central banks’ manipulation of digital monies to control the public’s behavior.  The World Economic Forum is a totalitarian machine that undermines the democratic will of all Western peoples and an existential threat to human rights.  As one astute commenter sardonically advised: “I say we nuke the WEF from orbit.  It’s the only way to be sure.”  It is certainly true that neither global war nor the proliferation of Iron Curtain police states around the world sufficed to eradicate tyrannical fantasies in the minds of brutal men or bury the miseries of totalitarianism for good.

Fundamentally, the WEF’s totalitarians misunderstand history.  They believe that easily manipulated people are governed by lies when, in fact, people are desperate for authentic truth.  WEF-ers such as Bill Gates, Al Gore, and John Kerry think so little of ordinary people that they terrorize them with scientifically fraudulent warnings of a looming “climate change” apocalypse built around the preposterous notion that poor and middle-class communities can be saved only if they hand over their private property, live in tiny cubicle apartments in fifteen-minute cities, abandon any fondness for personal freedom, and subsist on a diet of bugs.

The fear-inducing power of such malevolent lies does not tend to last.  It is why Central and Eastern Europeans rebelled against Soviet communism and collapsed the Iron Curtain.  It is why the Chinese Communist Party is so desperate to legitimize its totalitarianism with the pretext that it divinely operates under a “Mandate of Heaven.”  It is why the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” confronted Justin Trudeau’s tyranny.  It is why Dutch, Polish, German, Romanian, Irish, and French farmers are fighting back against insane “green” policies today.

Because Klaus Schwab’s evil club has effectively disenfranchised the people, there is now a growing popular revolt throughout the West that could easily combust into an anti-Establishment “Reign of Terror.”  The WEF desires the West’s suicide.  Let us band together and choose life instead.

Emmanuel Macron Flies to Sweden as Farmer Protests Rage Around Paris

 

STOCKHOLM (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron was welcomed Tuesday with pomp and ceremony at the start of a two-day state visit to Sweden during which he will meet Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and the Scandinavian country’s monarch, King Carl XVI Gustaf.

Macron and his wife, Brigitte, were greeted by the king in the inner courtyard of the downtown Stockholm royal castle that is the official residence of the Swedish royals. There, Macron and Carl Gustaf reviewed members of the Grenadier Guards that had lined up.

Macron noted that it had been too long since a French president visited Sweden — the last time was in 2000, when Jacques Chirac traveled to the Scandinavian country.

“My visit is therefore first and foremost to renew our friendship, our partnership in the European Union, and as Sweden prepares to join NATO, our alliance,” Macron said.

Later Tuesday, Macron is to discuss the future of European security at a military academy in Stockholm, together with Kristersson and the king. Russia’s war on Ukraine and Sweden’s NATO application are likely to be on the table.  

After more than a year of delays, Turkey earlier this month completed its ratification of Sweden’s bid to join NATO, meaning Hungary is now the last member of the military alliance not to have given its approval. All NATO countries must agree before a new member can join the alliance.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Sweden and neighboring Finland abandoned their traditional positions of military nonalignment to seek protection under NATO’s security umbrella. Finland joined the alliance last year.

On Wednesday, Macron and his wife are to travel to Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, in southern Sweden, where they will visit a European multidisciplinary research facility under construction and visit a company to discuss green technologies.

At home, Macron’s government faces angry farmers who have camped out around Paris. They demand better pay, fewer constraints and lower costs. On Monday, they encircled Paris with traffic-snarling barricades, using hundreds of tractors and hay bales to block highways leading to the capital.

The French president initially was to travel to Sweden in late October, but the visit was postponed due to the Gaza war that began with Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7  

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/01/30/emmanuel-macron-flies-to-sweden-as-farmer-protests-rage-around-paris/  

Dr Ben Carson Responds to Suggestion He Is Possible VP Selection

My instincts and preferences aside, here’s Dr. Ben Carson being asked directly about the possibility of him being President Trump’s running mate.

Janet Yellen Throws Biden Under the Bus With Astounding Comment Destroying His Claims About Inflation

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

So many people have been crushed under the bootheel of "Bidenomics" and Bidenflation for so long. It's one of the main reasons Joe Biden's numbers are in the basement in terms of approval, particularly when it comes to the economy. 

First, the Biden team denied the reality of the crushing inflation, calling it "transitory." Then they claimed it wasn't Joe Biden's fault, despite his excessive spending. They blamed it on Russia and greedy corporations, among others.

Now Biden has been saying prices are coming down and claiming credit, even though prices are still up more than when he came in. In his latest remarks in South Carolina, he also blamed the greedy corporations for Bidenflation. 

That's the shtick he's been rolling out at campaign events now. The problem, of course, the American people know how his words don't match up with how much more is still going out of their pockets each month for things like food and other essentials. 

Biden is trying to sell us on this fiction of how much he's doing to change what he broke, and no one believes him because he doesn't even understand the problem. Or he does and he just wants to spin us. 

But now, Treasury Janet Yellen just threw him under the bus with what she had to say about inflation. She was being interviewed by ABC when she was asked how she would convince people that prices might not go back to what they were before the pandemic. This is an astounding statement, especially in light of what Biden keeps saying now. 

"Well, I think most Americans know that prices are not likely to fall," Yellen said. "It's not the Fed's objective to try to  push the level of prices back to where they were." 

Oh. 

So sorry, just accept we broke everything. 

What is it that Biden is saying to us then? What is it that the Fed is trying to do with higher interest rates that are now also a problem? Do these folks check with each other with the statements that they keep shoveling out? Do any of them know anything? Or do they just keep talking and talking, hoping we won't notice the problems? 

The Republicans should run this on a loop during the general election, contrasting it with what Biden said, and driving home why no one should be voting for Biden, for this and so many other reasons. They have no idea what they are saying or doing. Why would anyone vote for these people who don't seem to get anything right? 

Why on Earth Would Republicans Make an Immigration Deal With This President?

posted by Guy Benson at TownhallVIP 

Reports indicate that a forthcoming bipartisan border deal in the Senate may be dead on arrival -- perhaps in its chamber of origin, and almost certainly in the narrowly-GOP-controlled House of Representatives.  The specifics of the bill itself, chiefly negotiated by Oklahoma Republican James Lankford and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, are not yet public.  Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin reported these alleged elements within the emerging deal over the weekend.  Take these bullet points with a grain of salt, as we still don't know exactly what would be finalized in the proposed legislation.  For what it's worth, some sources of mine are pushing back on certain pieces of the account as lacking some context. 

The Melugin-relayed summary:

BREAKING: Senate border deal details, per source familiar I just had a call with.

- Mandatory detention of all single adults.

- Mandatory “shut down” of border once average daily migrant encounters hits 5,000. Importantly, this 5,000 number includes 1,400 CBP One app…

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) January 27, 2024

- Mandatory detention of all single adults.

- Mandatory “shut down” of border once average daily migrant encounters hits 5,000. Importantly, this 5,000 number includes 1,400 CBP One app entries at ports of entry per day, and roughly 3,600 illegal crossings per day.

- How is that enforced? Once the 5,000 threshold is hit, a new authority is codified into law that requires Border Patrol to immediately remove illegal immigrants they catch without processing. They would not get to request asylum, they would immediately be removed. This includes removals back to Mexico, and deportations to home countries. This would be a *massive* change from current policy, which is that once an illegal immigrant reaches US soil, they must be processed via Title 8 and allowed to claim asylum. Under this new authority – they are not processed, and they are mandatorily immediately removed once the “shut down” threshold is reached.

- This “shut down” also takes effect is there are 8,500 migrant encounters in a single day

- The “shut down” would not lift the next day. It wouldn’t lift until daily encounters are reduced to under 75% of the 5,000 threshold for at least two weeks. This means the “shut down” authority would not lift until two weeks of an average of less than 3,750 migrant encounters per day.

- Some family units will be released with ATD (Alternatives to Detention, ankle monitors etc).- New removal authority to immediately remove all migrants who do not have valid asylum claims, which will be determined within 6 months rather than the years long process we have right now.

- Any migrant caught trying to cross twice during “shut down” phase would be banned from entering US for one year.

- US will need agreement with Mexico for MX to take back non Mexican illegal immigrants. This hasn't been ironed out yet.

- President Biden approves of the deal and is ready to sign it as is, right now, and implement the new authority it would give him.

Before we go any further, a few points: First, let's wait and see what the finalized version looks like. Second, I respect Sen. Lankford, and I think some of the performative purging and shaming of him is counter-productive. Third, I understand why well-meaning conservatives, operating in good faith, might argue that working to mitigate the crisis is preferable to letting the chaos and dysfunction continue to play out for another year. I also understand that because additional US assistance to Ukraine and Israel have been linked to the border battle by Republicans, urgent foreign policy priorities are now tied into these negotiations. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, giving voice to this perspective, scolded recalciatrant conservatives late last week:

Public frustration over border failures is coming to a boil, and Mr. Trump is hoping to ride this back into the White House. Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson is down to a hairline majority in the House, and he lives under daily threat of defenestration by members of his own party. Some House Republicans are demanding nothing less than their own preferred border bill, known as H.R. 2. That measure commanded no Democratic support in the House, and it won’t miraculously win over the Democrats needed to clear the Senate. Yet giving up on a border security bill would be a self-inflicted GOP wound. President Biden would claim, with cause, that Republicans want border chaos as an election issue rather than solving the problem. Voter anger may over time move from Mr. Biden to the GOP, and the public will have a point. Cynical is the only word that fits Republicans panning a border deal whose details aren’t even known. The GOP would also abandon the best chance in years to fix asylum law and the parole loophole that Mr. Biden has exploited. Mr. Trump while President in 2018 complained that such dysfunctions precluded him from fully restoring order to the border...Mr. Trump may imagine he can strike his own border deal if he wins, but that’s highly unlikely. Democrats are willing to discuss asylum and parole changes now because President Biden and Democrats are suffering in the polls from the ugly scenes on television. If Mr. Trump returns to Washington, the left will revert to its factory settings of opposing all Trump priorities. Especially if Mr. Trump sabotages a bipartisan deal now.

Theoretically, I might agree with any number of these points, but I think these arguments are missing the larger challenge: While some Republicans are engaged in this process out of a sense of duty to governance and a desire to improve the disaster zone that is the southern border, they are in talks with opponents who have been bad-faith operators on immigration and border issues for years. Democrats reflexively opposed everything Donald Trump did (or tried to do), even if it was successful. When Biden came in, he immediately terminated Trump orders and eliminated policies that had dramatically improved the border problem. Biden does not need any 'bipartisan deal' from Congress, as he claims, to simply reverse course on these devastating unilateral actions he's taken that uprooted what was working well.  He has steadfastly refused to do so for years, even as the situation deteriorated terribly -- resulting in record-shattering illegal immigrant encounters, got-aways, and deaths.  

Until and unless Biden takes these available executive actions and drastically curtails the crisis using the authority he has right now, why should Republicans help bail him out politically with a "bipartisan" plan that represents, at best, a partial fix?  More important than handing Biden the gift of deeply undeserved political cover, why should they trust this administration to faithfully execute any new enforcement mechanism, given their outrageous and shameless disregard for the rule of law in this realm over the past three years?  This crew has presided over up to 10 million illegal crossings since January of 2021.  They are pro-illegal immigration.  Conservatives do not trust the Biden administration on this front because the Biden administration has thoroughly and ostentatiously shown themselves to be unworthy of trust.  This is the key objection being advanced by Sen. Mike Lee:

Also, inherent in the description furnished by Melugin's sources is an apparent acknowledgment that the border can be 'shut down' with aggressive enforcement.  Why only trigger this desperately-needed action after some seemingly-arbitrary number of thousands of illegal immigrants cross the border first?  If they're admitting they can basically seal the border and quickly expel illegal entrants once they flip a proverbial switch, after certain conditions are met, they're admitting they could execute these enforcement maneuvers if they really wanted to.  After the dangerous national disgrace we've seen playing out since 2021, why would any sane path forward include the continued arrival of thousands of illegal entries every day?  Recall that Barack Obama's DHS chief said even 1,000 border crossings per day rises to a 'crisis' level what would overwhelm the system.  Republicans should not accept anything about the new, catastrophic Biden-era brline -- especially because Biden could undo his terrible decisions that created that new, catastrophic brline overnight.  He's choosing not to.  Rewarding him for that choice, and preemptively worrying about Democrats' continuation of their bad faith and derelict behavior on this issue if Republicans win the next election, would reinforce terrible incentives. 

For years, I was an immigration moderate, supporting enhanced enforcement in exchange for some combination of a DREAM Act, or even a path to legal status for some number of illegal immigrants living inside the United States.  The appalling border crisis of the Biden years has somewhat radicalized me.  I'm now opposed to anything that goes beyond an immediate restoration of sovereignty, operational control, and robust enforcement.  Perhaps I'll regain my appetite for other compromises and changes down the line, but not until the federal government first demonstrates a sustained, competent commitment to stopping the current flood of illegal immigration.  I have zero faith that the Biden administration has any desire to do that because they have actively done the opposite throughout their entire time in power.  We shall see what these ongoing talks actually produce, but as we await that official policy reveal, count me as extremely skeptical. Texas is in a dramatic stand-off with the administration, and it's not because the feds are doing the job they're supposed to be doing.  Quite the opposite, as Border Patrol is essentially admitting, as its union sides with the state over their federal bosses. And House Republicans are moving to impeach the Homeland Security Secretary for a reason -- and it's not his scrupulous, faithful adherence to immigration laws already passed by Congress.  I'll leave you with this, which strikes me as broadly correct:

Stopping the invasion at our border is a matter of will. It doesn’t require a so-called deal that codifies into law illegal entries in excess of 1.8 million per year and provides incentives for future illegal immigration. pic.twitter.com/ClQToc7nVi

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) January 27, 2024