My remarks at last night's Trump 2.0 debate
Thanks to anyone reading this who may have come out last night for my debate on the first four months of the Trump 2.0 Administration. Attendance was surprisingly robust! I met a few longtime Substack readers/followers, so that was nice.
Here was the official motion, to be debated in formal “Oxford” style:
Does Trump’s “America First” agenda advance the prosperity, national security, and civil liberties of the American people?
The full debate can be viewed here. What follows are the opening remarks I wrote out before the debate. I didn’t recite them verbatim or anything, but they formed the general structure of my argument. Let me know what you think; any feedback on the debate itself also welcome.
Let me first stipulate that I am hardly afflicted with “TDS,” also known as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but I do likewise try to inoculate myself from its lesser-known variant, “Trump Devotion Syndrome.” Which can be a tricky balance to strike. I was one of the very few people with any media-adjacency who from the outset challenged the so-called “Russiagate” narrative that dominated Trump’s first term; as a refresher, this was the view that Trump had sinisterly colluded with Russia, and was controlled by Vladimir Putin. I’ve also been a skeptic of many other Trump-related histrionics, from the two impeachments, to the overwrought screeching about January 6, and so forth. I was reliably informed that my Tweets and Articles were regularly read in the White House — not to mention that on several occasions I’ve had the glorious honor of being retweeted by Trump himself. I closely covered all four of the Trump prosecutions while he was out of office, and found all four highly spurious for different reasons, often perniciously so.
I should also acknowledge that I’d probably be inclined to take the opposing side of this motion whatever administration was in power, such is the nature of my incorrigible “contrarian” disposition.
Which is all just to say, please don’t take this argument as a byproduct of reflexive anti-Trump animosities, which I know can be annoyingly common. And also please don’t construe any aspect of this argument as any sort of implicit endorsement of the prior administration, or of Democrats in general, who have their own work cut out for them to explain why it is that their party’s previous standard-bearer was beset by catastrophic cognitive decrepitude.
I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t start by reviewing the first major foreign policy pronouncement of the Second Trump Administration, which came in early February when Trump, standing alongside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that the US would “take over” Gaza and expel the remaining Palestinians. At the time, this was widely dismissed as a “joke,” or a classic Trump “negotiating” ploy. I was personally chastised by a Republican congresswoman for taking Trump much too literally on the matter. And yet in the ensuing months, the statement has become all too serious. The Israeli government has now integrated Trump’s position into their own war planning, with Netanyahu having proclaimed that Israel is now resolved to, quote, “carry out the Trump plan.” If you think the US facilitating some half-baked mass expulsion scheme will enhance anyone in this room’s “security,” you may want to take a moment to familiarize yourself with the concept of “blowback,” which US support for Israel has already been a longstanding source of over the last many decades. Unfortunately, “blowback” has a very well-documented tendency to culminate in violent reprisals.
In his much ballyhooed trip this month to the Gulf State monarchies, whoever wrote Trump’s speech cleverly had him decry “interventionalism” and “nation-building,” much to the excitement of the online chattering class. But on that very same trip, Trump again repeated his plan for turning Gaza, a besieged and worn-torn territory in the heart of the Middle East, into some sort of US military protectorate. Few seemed to notice any contradiction at all. Perhaps the idea is that we’ll eventually be “greeted as liberators,” and Gaz-a-Lago will be hailed throughout the Arab World as a beacon of American freedom and friendship.
All the while, Trump continues to back Israel militarily, politically, and diplomatically as it wages what the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert recently described as a “war of annihilation.” This after Trump systematically undermined the very ceasefire arrangement he and his emissaries were heralded for brokering when he first came to office in January. The Administration then eased whatever meager restrictions the Biden operation had placed on arms supplies to Israel, and as such are now directly enabling the current annihilation offensive, which has no obvious end in sight. Hundreds of people are extinguished by the day, with US munitions, as Netanyahu declares his objective to totally demolish and “conquer” Gaza, in accordance with Trump’s plan.
It’s a dark irony that this all comes after Trump, rather cynically but with characteristic political savvy, went to Muslim-heavy areas of Michigan during the presidential campaign last year and promised to bring “peace” to the conflict — but as usual, he provided few specific details. Perhaps it’s true that “peace” could eventually flourish once the entire territory is fully obliterated, but that’s probably not quite what the voters of Dearborn, Michigan, who voted for Trump in 2024 by a solid plurality, had in mind. It’s still an enduring mystery that Trump’s grand ambitions to annex some combination of Gaza, Greenland, Canada, and Panama were not revealed until *after* the election. If expanding American imperium is so obviously in the national interest, why hide it from the voters when it counts?
Then on Ukraine, Trump of course incessantly repeated that he would end the war in 24 hours, and even end the war as president-elect, while again providing precious few specifics — except for the implied exhortation that everyone must have faith-based confidence in his supernatural negotiating abilities. Now, he’s been reduced to clarifying that the pledge was always meant to be sarcastic or figurative. Just in the past few days, Trump has exploded with rage against Putin, calling him “absolutely CRAZY,” and issuing vague yet ominous threats of further escalation after Russia launched its largest aerial bombardment of the entire war on May 24.
Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the Senate and confirmed that the Biden Administration policy of arms-provision to Ukraine is completely unchanged under Trump, and not a single Biden-era sanction against Russia has been lifted.
If I had told you before the election last year that by May 2025, the Trump policy on arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia would be essentially identical to Biden’s, would you have been surprised? Or how about that Trump would intensify US economic and political entanglements with Ukraine by executing what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as a “minerals deal” — giving the US ownership of Ukrainian natural resources in exchange for future “military aid”?
I’d wager both Trump supporters AND opponents would have been quite surprised by these developments. Which is both an indictment of an un-discerning media, and of myopic partisans who will always find a way to believe whatever they want to believe.
You shouldn’t have been surprised if you followed the actual policy record of the first Trump administration — still touted by Trump and Republicans for having been extremely “tough” on Russia — and rationally discerned what policy outlook was likely for a second Trump administration.
Where I will happily credit Trump is in resuming basic diplomatic contacts with Russia, which had been effectively shuttered for several years under Biden, in a huge historical aberration for the US-Russian relationship dating back to even the most fraught days of the Soviet Union. But it’s still a rather low bar to clear, and if the brass-tacks policy is still essentially the same, the result is still the status quo with some cosmetic adjustments.
Negotiations with Iran are underway, but the administration has gradually adopted the position, favored by Republican hardliners and Israeli officials, that Iran must completely dismantle its nuclear enrichment program, which anyone who’s followed the issue for the past 15 or 20 years knows is a complete nonstarter. This raises the prospect that the negotiations could simply be pretextual, allowing for the Administration to at some point insist, “Hey, at least we tried to negotiate first!” before either bombing Iran themselves, or outsourcing the task to Israel with ancillary US support. Maybe it’s all a pump-fake, and a deal will in fact be brokered that allows Iran to continue enrichment, but this would make it all the more strange that Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear deal during his first term, on the ground that it intolerably permitted enrichment.
As far as civil liberties go, the likes of RFK Jr. and his podcaster clique melodramatically proclaimed during the campaign last year that if we were to have any hope of restoring “free speech” in America, we must vote to restore Republican executive power. Then they got in power and proceeded to initiate a sweeping, whole-of-government crackdown on disfavored political speech, namely speech deemed “anti-Semitic” — meaning excessively critical of Israel.
I just have to read out this quote from RFK Jr., promulgated in his capacity as Secretary of Health and Human Services, because it’s still almost too amazing to believe it actually exists:
“Anti-Semitism — like racism,” RFK rhapsodized, “is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues… In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.”
Pursuant to this imperative, the Administration commenced sending threat letters to universities demanding that they adopt radically expanded “hate speech” codes that prohibit certain criticisms of Israel. Thereby stifling and penalizing the speech of native-born Americans — even as some of the most aggressive measures taken have been against Green Card holders deemed to pose, quote, a “threat to US foreign policy,” most notoriously by writing mild op-eds in a student newspaper. If you’re willing to take a blowtorch to the First Amendment in order to deport a maximum number of undesirable foreigners who came 100% legally, at least have the decency not to parade around as a diehard defender of Free Speech.
As to immigration more broadly — in a pluralistic society where there was a clear popular clamor for more restrictionist immigration policy, it’s reasonable to defer to popular will on the matter. Wanting to more stringently control immigration inflows of course need not make anyone a “racist” or xenophobe. But execution of this popular desire also need not have resulted in the establishment of a Penal Colony in El Salvador, or the introduction of a legal framework whose disregard for core Constitutional protections is reminiscent of the worst excesses of the War on Terror. Nor need it have been conjoined to this goofy obsession with combating “anti-Semitism,” which seems to be one of the very few policy objectives that unites all factions of the current Administration. To wage this crusade, they are invoking extremely punitive interpretations of the very same Civil Rights Law which they would have otherwise rebuked for ushering in the era of “DEI.” While the prior “DEI” regime might be out the door, its muscular Republican manifestation has come right back in. A top Trump DOJ official, Leo Terrell, proclaimed that the federal law enforcement apparatus is being marshaled to “eradicate anti-Semitism in this country” — a mirror image of the prior “woke” conviction that every claimed social malady, like Racism or Transphobia, can and should be stamped out with the power of the state.
Ross Douthat, a conservative and generally fair-minded New York Times columnist, who is seen as credible enough by the Administration that JD Vance engages in regular colloquies with him, recently told Vance directly that, quote, “There are elements of what you might call a kind of War on Terror mentality… that you’re taking vis-à-vis the cartels or people associated with the cartels, or people allegedly associated with gangs and cartels, that seems to me similar to the approach taken to anyone associated with Islamic terrorism and so on in the aftermath of September 11th.” Despite Vance’s unending mission to intellectualize every Trump action in terms of some high-minded principle of Nationalist Conservatism or whatever, he couldn’t muster much in the way of a coherent response.
Indeed, a recent assessment from the CATO Institute — admittedly an immigration-friendly libertarian think tank — found that at least 50 of the Venezuelans who’ve been imprisoned in the newly established El Salvador penal colony, quote, “came to the US legally, and never violated immigration law.” No one is saying, or at least I’m not saying, that the Administration must be forbidden from carrying out a more restrictive immigration policy. My qualm is with invoking the archaic “Alien Enemies Act,” for the first time since World War II, to invent vast new categories of persons to be designated as “terrorists,” and then using that as justification to abridge basic Constitutional protections. This corrodes the integrity of the whole Constitutional Order, just as eerily similar actions did during the Bush/Cheney Administration. It’s more than ironic that the same cadre of people who last fall used the likes of Dick and Liz Cheney as a convenient political punching bag now turn around and accuse anyone who raises concerns about civil liberties infringements of being “Terrorist Defenders.”
To quote Antonin Scalia, “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.” Nowadays, Scalia would presumably be condemned as a RINO establishment squish hell-bent on sabotaging MAGA, which is amusingly the accusation increasingly hurled at all three of Trump’s own Supreme Court nominees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, for having ruled that the administration must abide by a modicum of due process.
I would argue that “prosperity” is inherently entwined with upholding core civil liberties, and is also entwined with the government’s conduct abroad. But in the particular domain of economic policy, allow me to share a brief anecdote. Recently I asked someone in the administration what they take to be the objective of the current Tariff policy, and the answer was “depends on who you ask” — meaning this official could hardly himself identify a coherent objective, and was instead consigned to reading the tea-leaves from the Man at the Top, just like the rest of us; analyzing every Truth Social post with talmudic intensity, sifting through the irregular capitalization for clues as to what they should even be doing.
So if there could be said to be any organizing principle for the Tariff policy, it would again be to place dogmatic faith in the world-historic negotiating prowess of one individual. Shortly after “Liberation Day” in April, Trump reported with great satisfaction that so many countries were already calling him up and “kissing his ass” for tariff relief. Commerce Secretary Howard Luntick implored: “Let Donald Trump run the global economy... you gotta trust Donald Trump.” In reply I will just quote Rand Paul, the Republican Senator from Kentucky: “The tariffs are simply imposed by presidential fiat, by proclamation. Government by one person, who assumes all power by asserting a so-called emergency, is the antithesis of constitutional government.” So even if you are open to some measure of protectionist economic policy, as I have generally been, that this openness should require unthinking allegiance to the daily whims and contradictory impulses of a single Supreme Leader seems increasingly dubious.
In his 2024 campaign announcement speech, Trump vowed that if given a second term he would “dismantle the deep state.” Now, predictably, he is touting Trillion Dollar military budgets and a new boondoggle “missile defense” program that makes every “Deep State” operative tremble with glee. He marketed himself as the “candidate of peace,” which is usually what Americans want to hear — and then undermined his own “ceasefire” arrangement to fuel the annihilation rampage of an Israeli government controlled by messianic fanatics. He strode into office signing an executive order to “Restore Free Speech,” and proceeded to spearhead a relentless campaign to punish disfavored political speech. He railed against influence-peddling and corruption — and now you can buy a Trump “memecoin” for presidential access. The list goes on.
It’s true that when Trump first won in 2016, he did so by overthrowing the two reigning American political dynasties, Bush and Clinton, and also overturning much conventional wisdom that had for too long prevailed. This did present a historically unique opportunity to inaugurate what you might call a “new prosperity,” unshackled from outmoded conventions. The reality, let’s say, has been slightly more complicated.
I always read Michael to get a cold dose of reality. Almost makes me cry, but at least the disappointment don't hurt so much.
My view of the Trump 2.0 administration from my perch in Mexico City is that it's Biden 2.0 with some red meat for the MAGA diehards.