Last week, a new report was published on the Trump administration’s handling of immigration, its signature issue.
Here’s the bottom line: “Trump’s crackdown has escalated the number of immigrants in detention and those with cases tied up in courts, but hasn’t boosted the pace of removals.”
The rate of removals has actually slowed, and not just because fewer people are crossing the border. That’s a bad look for an administration that promised the “largest deportation operation in American history.” So naturally, as the pace flagged, the number of publicity stunts increased—stunts like grabbing international students off the streets over op-eds they wrote, Kristi Noem pretending to personally jail illegal aliens while sporting hair extensions, the White House tweeting ASMR deportation videos, and so on.
The purpose of this theater is more than just deceit. While I think this is happening in other ways, I opened with immigration because it was perhaps the top issue of the November election and, for many Americans, the single most important one of our time. If you can convince people that you’re fully delivering on the biggest thing ever, you can get them to go along with—or at least look away from—other stuff that they might otherwise not support because, after all, they’re getting the biggest thing ever. That’s how this administration operates. It’s why Trump keeps floating his “gold card” that would be marketed at the wealthiest foreign billionaires, which he acknowledged in a joking-but-not-joking way could be exploited by—in his words—“oligarchs”; it’s why the White House wants to reverse a ban on the toxic, endocrine disrupting chemicals that destroy fertility and cause cancer; it’s why a president who ran on liberty and peace is busily building the new surveillance state and increasingly rattling the saber.
Because, although you did not vote for any of the above, at least you’re getting the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
The lie is the most important thing. The lie that we’re being given back our country rather than watching it be looted by a different cast of characters.
Again, this isn’t limited to immigration. You’re also seeing it play out now with the bizarre implementation of tariffs.
To be clear, tariffs can serve as a useful instrument of economic nationalism. The concern is how they are being utilized and what that might mean for the average American—who is right now discovering that any and all questions are forbidden. Indeed, questions are tantamount to treason.

On every issue, the most important thing is the lie, and around this endless lie has emerged a movement completely divorced from or hostile to reality. I spent much of my political writing career as a member of it who got a good look at the inside, and I do not hesitate to call it an enormous con that cannot be salvaged. I hear from others like myself every so often who feel the same way but would never be public about it because they’ve seen the wrath invited by honesty. I can’t blame them.
Others struggle to admit to it out of a sense that they’ve sunk too much into it or that there is no alternative. I understand this position and know people who are trying to do good in whatever ways they can.
The loudest and most reprehensible faction consists of those who know they are lying about what’s happening and insist that Trump cannot fail, only be failed. They lead mobs against critics and engage in the kind of behavior associated with spiteful far-left mutants. They take comfort in petty bigotry as a way of consoling themselves and deluding their followers. The episode that is burned into my mind is when they went after Elon Musk over his support for legal immigration.
Musk denounced them as “unrepentant racists” who should be removed from the Republican Party “root and stem,” and Trump repeatedly sided with Musk over his staunchest supporters, who seemed actively in denial of how the dynamic was unfolding. They were utterly and brutally humiliated, but their response was to declare victory and turn up the vitriol as if it were comfort food for losers who desperately needed to save face. Meanwhile, Musk went on to pick fights with impunity with MAGA populists like Steve Bannon and trade adviser Peter Navarro.
A real movement would find this sort of thing intolerable, but the right that emerged with Trump is not that. It is purely a cult of personality, and as such, it will ignore consistency and conviction until word comes from the top.
In a great twist of irony, this faction also ended up going to war over just how much bigotry, how much insanity is good for political appearances and where it should be aimed. Imagine Costin Alamariu (an aging academic who pretends to be a kind of bodybuilding fascist named “Bronze Age Pervert”) arguing with the followers of Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens over whether the blame for all our problems rests with Jews or women or those who fail to trust the plan. Even Curtis Yarvin, the philosopher king of Thielworld, seems worried about the state of things.
But these people are all part of the same organism that is rotting from the head down and poised to inflict a good deal of suffering on normal people before it is dead and buried. No matter who “wins” this fight, you lose.
The predicament is this: decades of elite hubris and neglect created the conditions that made Trump’s rise inevitable, and though he seemed a kind of populist savior, he was and is not. We’re stuck with a movement dominated by charlatans and sociopaths competing over who gets to be the leading intellectual light of a rolling dumpster fire. What now?
I only paid $5.00 to post a comment regarding the immigration situation under Trump. I work for ICE in a northeastern state. I've been in federal law enforcement for 22 years. I started with the Border Patrol and was a BP agent for five years.
There's never been interior enforcement like we have now. Never. ERO (interior immigration enforcement) the guys who handle processing and deportation are working 24/7. Other agencies are also helping. We are also tasked with finding thousands of unaccompanied minors who crossed under the Biden administration. 100% I can speak to that Axios article the author linked to as false. Under Biden, there were thousands or ten of thousands of encounters at the Border. Say half of those are going to be removed and the rest are let into the interior. Traffic at the border is almost non-existent. All of the removals happening now are interior arrest. Under Biden, ERO was almost a non entity they were so hamstrung. It's night and day. I live this, 100% the idea that ICE was somehow more effective under Biden is incorrect. I am not a MEGA, I am just posting my experience in this field. Ask anyone in law enforcement, as far as immigration, things are 180 from Biden. I don't know anything about Tariffs, I can only speak to immigration and this administration for all their bluster is putting guys on the street and picking up illegal aliens. The author can follow up with me, anytime. No bullshit, I work in this field. Guys who can are retiring from the job because they don't want to be part of this surge!
Your writing/your twitter brought a lot of light to how flawed Trump is. Because of what I was learning from your Twitter feed I grow to dislike Trump and back Desantis. We got Trump instead. I didn’t think he would win the election but he did. And I’m glad he did, despite his flaws I I voted for him. In the words of Ann Coulter "the worst Republicans are still better than the best Democrats" I think that still holds true.
A lot of ppl are blind to his hypocrisy and the level of flip flopping he has done in the last four years and right wing media has played a major role in that.
That being said I believe we have to play the cards we have been dealt. If we say "I am not playing this game” take our chips and leave the table where do we go? and will leaving the game entirely hand over total power to the left? I think that’s what a lot of Dems did in 2016. They couldn’t stomach Clintons hypocrisy so they stayed home. Look what happened with that, it cost them three Supreme Court Justices.
I see your point though. I watched your discussion with Fang and Woodhouse. You brought up some really important points. I didn’t even know that Elon made that comment against Trumps base.
Do you feel a Trump presidency will take us down the same path as a Kamala presidency?