The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”

Did it ever occur to him that if these agents didn't behave like Gestapo goons, treated people with respect, and acted in accordance with the U.S. Constitution they might not provoke this level of resistance?

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — the Senate’s only Black Republican — wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

Late last night, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted a video full of debunked claims about the 2020 presidential election that included an image of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama with their heads attached to the bodies of apes.

Predictably, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt derided the “fake outrage” over the image, but as Tim Grieve of NOTUS explained, when Republican senators Tim Scott of South Carolina, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi called out the racism behind the post, the president deleted the video and a White House official said that a “staffer erroneously made the post,” as if somehow a staffer could post random racist videos from the president’s account in the middle of the night. As soon as they could blame the post on a staffer, Republicans rushed to condemn the post’s racism.

Later tonight on Air Force One, Trump said that he had posted it himself. When a reporter asked if he would apologize, he said, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”

While the post exhibited both the president’s vile racism and his failing impulse control, it also seems to have been an attempt to use racism to break the growing coalition against him. As when they arrested Black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort as well as Black protesters at a church while leaving white protesters free, Trump and his allies are hammering on racial fault lines. As with the ape trope, the White House went so far as to digitally alter a photograph of church protester and civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who appeared to be quite composed during her arrest, to make her look blacker and as if she is sobbing in terror.

“They couldn’t break me,” Armstrong told Nil Köksal of Canadian news interview show As it Happens. “And so they altered an image showing me broken.” “I thought, am I that much of a threat to the world’s greatest superpower?”

The answer is that the growing coalition of Americans from all walks of life standing against MAGA and defending American democracy is the United States of America at its best, and that coalition is absolutely a threat to the cabal trying to seize the assets of the nation for itself. And American history from Bacon’s Rebellion in the late 1600s forward has established a blueprint for breaking democratic coalitions that threaten those in power along racial lines.

Trump’s doubling down on racism reflects Americans’ growing disillusionment with him and his administration.

Bad news about federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol continues. In emails, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who was removed from his oversight of Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis after agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, said he did not report to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol’s parent agency. Bovino told a courtroom, under oath, that his boss was Secretary Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the department in which Customs and Border Protection is housed.

But in an email, Bovino wrote that when acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told Bovino that he, Lyons, was in charge of the surge into Chicago, Bovino disagreed. “Mr. Lyons said he was in charge, and I corrected him saying I reported to Corey Lewandowski. Mr. Lyons seemed intent that CBP conduct targeted operations for at least two weeks before transitioning to full scale immigration enforcement. I declined his suggestion. We ended the conversation shortly thereafter.” Lewandowski is a special government employee who advises Noem and has a history of favoring political theater to project dominance. He has no experience in law enforcement.

A court transcript from Tuesday, February 3, posted online by Minneapolis lawyer Dan Suitor shows that the administration’s sweeps of immigrant communities have stretched the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the breaking point. As Chris Geidner of LawDork explained, U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell dug into why individuals he had ordered released from detention were not being released. “Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect,” he said, “it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it.” The DOJ, DHS, and ICE “wield extraordinary power,” he said, “and that power has to exist within constitutional limits.”

The government had an obligation to make sure that each arrest it made in its dramatic sweeps complies with the Constitution and with court orders for the release of those wrongly imprisoned, he said. “[W]hat you cannot do is to detain first and then sort out lawful authority later.” One of the government’s lawyers responded that the administration’s surge into Minnesota has “outpaced the system’s capacity to ensure that the Constitution is being complied with.” “Detain first, find authority later, this is exactly their strategy, and we’ve seen this from all of our cases where there’s no warrant, there’s no probable cause.” Authorities simply take people “for how they look or for where they are.”

A Marist poll released yesterday shows that 65% of Americans think that ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws.

Even those who are not focused on that issue have increasing concerns about the Trump administration’s policies.

Measles is back in the United States with the biggest outbreak the U.S. has seen in decades. Now news has broken that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to have lied in his Senate confirmation hearings when he said that a trip he took to Samoa in 2019 had “nothing to do with vaccines.”

The Guardian and the Associated Press obtained emails from U.S. Embassy and United Nations staff saying that Kennedy was indeed visiting Samoa to spread his skepticism of vaccines. One email read: “The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view).” After his visit, antivaccine activists gained ground, and vaccination rates dropped. A subsequent measles outbreak sickened thousands of people and killed 83, most of whom were children under the age of five.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told The Guardian: “Lying to Congress about his role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America. He and his allies will be held responsible.”

The sprawling web being exposed by the Epstein files has ensnared not just Trump, but other members of his administration as well. Tonight, Daniel Ruetenik and Graham Kates of CBS News reported that U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was in business with the convicted sex offender as recently as 2014. Lutnick previously claimed he had cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after touring his New York mansion, saying, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

Mike Stunson of Forbes reported today that the U.S. lost 108,435 jobs in January in the biggest cuts since January 2009 during the Great Recession. Despite Trump’s insistence that he would bring back masculine jobs like manufacturing, in 2025 the U.S. lost about 68,000 manufacturing jobs.

On Tuesday, February 3, a bipartisan group of 27 former Agriculture Department officials and leaders from farm and commodity groups wrote to the leaders of the agriculture committees of both chambers with a dire warning about “the damage that is being done to American farmers.”

Linda Qiu of the New York Times highlighted the letter, which noted that “just a few years ago,” farm export surpluses and farm incomes were at record highs. This year, “[f]armer bankruptcies have doubled, barely half of all farms will be profitable this year, and the U.S. is running a historic agriculture trade deficit.” The authors blamed this crisis on the fact that “the current Administration’s actions, along with Congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag[ricultural] research and staffing.”

They warned of “a widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities.” They noted that administration cuts to healthcare will add to the decimation of rural communities, wiping out a way of life. Rural voters tend to be an important part of Trump’s base.

Apparently concerned that even racism won’t help keep Republicans in office, Trump is trying to rig the system.

Yesterday the Office of Personnel Management issued a final rule to strip civil service protections from about 50,000 federal employees, enabling the administration to replace nonpartisan civil servants hired for their skills with loyalists. Trump tried to do this at the end of his first term, but his successor, President Joe Biden, reversed the plan immediately upon taking office. The United States has had a nonpartisan civil service since 1883. When the government proposed the reintroduction of the political system the U.S. had before then, 94% of 40,000 public comments opposed the change. Only 5% supported it.

The Republicans are also trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. Only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have “enhanced” driver’s licenses that would meet the requirement. In all other states, voters would need either a passport or a birth certificate.

Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.

Trump is also trying to guarantee that Americans will remember him differently than they perceive him now. Last fall he withheld money for the $16 billion Gateway tunnel under the Hudson River, connecting New York and New Jersey. This major infrastructure project is important to the entire region. Jonathan Karl of ABC followed up on a story broken by Punchbowl News yesterday, explaining today that Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) last month that he would release the appropriated money if Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station in New York City and Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., after him.

Schumer refused, after which Trump’s social media account accused Schumer of “holding up” the project.

But House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), at least, appears to think the American people have moved too far from Trump for him to recover their loyalty. Now, rather than dividing Americans, Trump’s outrageous behavior is uniting Americans against him. Jeffries leaned into that anger in his own video responding to Trump’s vile image of the Obamas.

“This disgusting video, posted by the so-called president, was done intentionally. F*ck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior. This guy is an unhinged bottom feeder. President Obama and Michelle Obama are brilliant, caring, and patriotic Americans. They represent the best of this country. It’s time for John Thune, Mike Johnson, and Republicans to denounce this serial fraudster, who’s sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue pretending to be the president of the United States.”

A federal judge on Friday ruled that the U.S. Department of Energy violated federal law when it formed a secretive group of researchers to produce a report downplaying the effects of climate change.

The “Climate Working Group” was composed of five scientists hand-picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright shortly after the White House dismissed more than 400 scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment. The group’s July report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” breaks from broad scientific consensus and questions the severity of global warming.

But Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the group failed to meet the requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a 1972 law governing federal advisory groups that requires for public meetings, open records and other acts of transparency. Records released under the judge’s orders indicate that the group met in secret at least 18 times.

“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” Young wrote in his 4-page decision.

The Energy Department had argued that the Climate Working Group was not subject to those requirements because it was “assembled to exchange facts or information with a Federal official.” It also argued that the claims were moot because the group was disbanded shortly after the lawsuit was filed.

The judge disagreed, noting that the group provided policy advice and recommendations to the Department of Energy. The five members of the group are John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer, scientists and researchers who question prevailing climate science and policy.

Among its conclusions, the July report from the group maintains that carbon dioxide-induced global warming “might be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and that “aggressive mitigation policies” — such as those designed to curb the use of fossil fuels — “could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”

The report was widely condemned, including by more than 85 U.S. scientists and experts who published a withering 459-page document denouncing it as biased, error-ridden and unfit for guiding policy. The lawsuit was brought by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national group of about 250 scientists and experts.

“The court confirmed today that the process for this sham report, which was conducted in secret by five known climate contrarians, violated the law,” Gretchen Goldman, president and chief executive of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “The public deserves transparent climate policy decisions rooted in the best available science advice from credible experts.”

In a statement provided to The Times, the Energy Department said it was pleased that the judge had denied a request that would have prevented the agency from using the report or keeping it online.

“The activists behind this case have long misrepresented not just the actual state of climate science, but also the so-called scientific consensus,” said department spokesman Ben Dietderich. “They have likewise sought to silence scientists who have merely pointed out — as the Climate Working Group did in its report — that climate science is far from settled.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also leaned on the report in its controversial proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, a landmark 2009 determination affirming that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment. The endangerment finding forms the foundation of much of U.S. climate policy.

Erin Murphy, senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, said in light of Friday’s decision that the EPA “must immediately withdraw its fundamentally unlawful and forever tainted proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, which would impose high costs on the American people who are already experiencing the impacts of pollution-fueled fires, flooding, higher insurance costs, and rising energy costs.”

The lawsuit named the Environmental Protection Agency as a defendant. However, the judge on Friday dismissed the EPA from the suit, writing that he had found “no persuasive evidence” that the agency violated the advisory committee law.

Yesterday two right-wing circuit judges signed off on the Trump administration’s new mass detention policy: the extraordinary assertion that vast numbers of noncitizens throughout the country can be arrested and held in detention centers without the right to release until they are deported.

As Steve Vladeck explained in December in One First, this new policy dramatically expanded the number of immigrants suddenly subject to arrest and long-term detention. U.S. judges overwhelmingly rejected the new policy; Vladeck quoted Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who reported that in more than 700 cases, at least 225 judges appointed by all modern presidents—including 23 appointed by Trump—have ruled that the new policy likely violates both the law and the right to due process.

But the administration handpicked a right-wing circuit to rule on the policy, and last night, as Vladeck explained today in One First, Judge Edith Jones and Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit okayed the Trump administration’s new rule denying detained immigrants the right to release on bond. That includes, as Vladeck wrote, “millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety.” It is likely the plaintiffs will appeal the decision.

This policy has dramatically increased detention of immigrants. Before it, the U.S. held about 40,000 people on any given day. Now, according to Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley of NBC News, the United States is currently holding more than 70,000 immigrants in 224 facilities across the nation, 104 more facilities than it had before Trump took office. Those detainees include children.

Private prison companies under contract with the U.S. government operate these detention facilities, including the $1.2 billion Camp East Montana located at Fort Bliss Army base in Texas, where a medical examiner recently ruled the death of detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide. The cause of the January death of Victor Manuel Díaz there remains unclear, although officials claim it was “presumed suicide.” A third man, Francisco Gaspar Andrés, died in December after being transported from the camp to an El Paso hospital for treatment for a serious medical condition.

On January 20, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that ICE stopped paying third-party providers for medical care for detainees on October 3, 2025, and that it would not start even to process claims again until at least April 30, 2026. It told medical providers to “hold all claims submissions” until then. A source in the administration told Legum that some medical providers are now denying detainees medical care.

From 2002 to 2023, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helped to make sure detainees had medical care if an ICE facility couldn’t provide it, with ICE paying the VA for the coverage. But in 2023, Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville lied that President Joe Biden was “robbing veterans to pay off illegals,” and on September 30, 2025, a small right-wing nonprofit sued to get documents from the Trump administration about the VA’s role in detainee care. On October 3, Legum discovered, “the VA ‘abruptly and instantly terminated’ its agreement with ICE,” leaving it with no way to provide prescribed medication or access off-site care.

According to Legum, ICE said it could not provide “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, [and] chemotherapy.” ICE officials described the loss of care as an “absolute emergency” that needed an immediate solution to “prevent any further medical complications or loss of life.” But it did not get solved.

Douglas MacMillan, Samuel Oakford, N. Kirkpatrick, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that according to ICE’s own oversight unit, Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, Texas, has violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention. The contract for the $1.24 billion project was awarded to a small business that operates out of a residential address and has, as Lyndon German of VPM News reported, “little to no publicly available record of managing immigration facilities.”

Last April, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told attendees: “We need to get better at treating this like a business.” He called for a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” In the Republicans’ July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—which they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—they put $45 billion into additional funding for ICE detention.

In November and December, NBC News and Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration was considering “mega centers” for detaining people. Fola Akinnibi, Sophie Alexander, Alicia A. Caldwell, and Rachel Adams-Heard of Bloomberg reported that in November, ICE issued a $29.9 million contract—just below the threshold of $30 million that would require open bidding—to KpbServices LLC for “due diligence services and concept design for processing centers and mega centers throughout the United States.”

In December, Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that the administration was working to put in place a national detention system that would book newly arrested detainees into processing sites before sending them to one of seven warehouses that would hold 5,000 to 10,000 people each. MacMillan and O’Connell reported that “sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.” From there, people would be deported.

“These will not be warehouses—they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” a DHS spokesperson wrote to Angela Kocherga and Dianne Solis of KERA News in Texas. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”

Strickler and Ainsley reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has already secured at least three facilities. It paid $87.4 million for one outside Philadelphia and $37 million for another outside San Antonio, a warehouse of nearly 640,000 square feet. ICE bought a building the size of seven football fields in Surprise, Arizona, outside Phoenix, for $70 million.

But there is increasing criticism of the new warehouses as Americans mobilize against the violence and abuse of ICE and Border Patrol.

Officials from Surprise answered concerns about the federal facility with a statement saying: “The City was not aware that there were efforts underway to purchase the building, was not notified of the transaction by any of the parties involved and has not been contacted by DHS or any federal agency about the intended use of the building. It’s important to note, Federal projects are not subject to local regulations, such as zoning.”

On Tuesday, February 3, more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise City Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:

“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’

“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”

For its part, NBC has denied editing the crowd audio, although it is difficult to resolve why the boos so audible in the stadium and on other broadcasts were absent for US viewers. But in a broader sense, it is becoming harder, not easier, to curate reality when the rest of the world is holding up its own camera angles.

“Well, I mean he is in a foreign country, in all fairness. But, uh, he doesn’t get booed in this country.”

Mine, baby, mine.

Mine, baby, mine.

"Don't say 'coal, say 'Beautiful, Clean Coal' " Donald Trump

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) stood up in front of the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, at a gathering to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The senator waved a piece of paper and later recalled telling the audience: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” He said he didn’t have time to share the names of all those individuals, but he assured the audience that the Democratic administration of President Harry S. Truman was refusing to investigate “traitors in the government.”

Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was busy trying to hammer together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Marshall Plan to provide aid to European countries rebuilding after World War II, later said McCarthy’s Wheeling speech was a good representation of the senator’s work. It was “the rambling, ill-prepared result of his slovenly, lazy, and undisciplined habits.”

McCarthy was an undistinguished junior senator running for reelection and needed an issue. With his dramatic statement, he found it in attacks on the postwar rules-based international order those like Acheson were trying to build. The staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune, whose editor hated the idea of using American resources to help foreign governments, trumpeted the story and threw its weight behind the idea that Democrats were trying to destroy the United States.

The next day, McCarthy pledged to share the names of “57 card-carrying Communists” in the State Department with Acheson, so long as the secretary would let Congress investigate the loyalty records of the people in his department. Then McCarthy telegraphed Truman, charging him with protecting communists in government. The Chicago Tribune put the accusations on the front page, and McCarthy’s office sent out copies of his missive. “Failure on your part will label the Democratic party as being the bedfellow of international Communism,” McCarthy wrote.

McCarthy’s critics pointed out that he never produced any evidence of his wild claims, but their outrage gained far less attention than the claims themselves. He yelled, he made crazy accusations, he leaked fragments of truth that misrepresented reality, he hectored and badgered. He perfected the art of grabbing headlines and then staying ahead of the fact-checkers. By the time reporters called out his lies, they were already old news, and the fact checking got buried deep in the papers. The front page would have McCarthy’s newest accusation.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, when communist North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, invaded South Korea, stoked anticommunism, and McCarthy’s warning that there was a secret plot among Democrats to make America communist gained traction. He spoke widely across the country that summer, and in the midterm elections in fall 1950, every candidate he endorsed won. Using his lies to gain power, McCarthy rampaged across the next years, ruining lives through lies and innuendo.

McCarthy’s star fell abruptly in May 1954, when Americans watched him lie and berate witnesses in televised hearings. But in that same month, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, opened up a different avenue for far-right extremists to argue that Democrats were undermining American society by trying to usher in communism. Reaching back to the racist tropes of Reconstruction, they claimed that federal protection of Black equality before the law was socialism because enforcing civil rights required government personnel who could be paid only through taxes. Those calling for equality before the law were, in this formulation, redistributing money from taxes levied on hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black people.

The idea that a secret group was undermining America to make it socialist continued into the 1980s, when films like Red Dawn—in 1984 the bloodiest movie ever made—told the story of a group of everyday Americans fighting communists who were taking over their town with the collaboration of the government. In the film, the Wolverines, an embattled group of high school football players in Colorado, fight off a communist invasion of Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. The mayor and his son cooperate with the communists, making the heroic Wolverines the underdogs fighting both world communism and their own government.

The idea that everyday Americans had to fight their government to protect the nation so inspired a group of young men that in 2003, when leaders in the George W. Bush administration decided to search for Saddam Hussein, they named the effort Operation Red Dawn. The soldiers began by looking in two sites they dubbed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2.

With the U.S. economy so obviously weighted toward the wealthy in the past decades, garnering power by warning that Democrats are trying to usher in socialism has been a hard sell. But that idea has evolved among far-right thinkers to underpin another conspiracy theory that fits snugly in the space previously occupied by the idea that Black and Brown Americans and their allies are destroying the country through socialism.

The Great Replacement theory says that elites—often a code word for Jews—are deliberately replacing white European populations with nonwhite immigrants using mass migration and white birth rates that are lower than those of migrants. Those indebted peoples will, the theory goes, keep the elites in power in exchange for social welfare programs.

Like the conspiracy theory about socialism, the Great Replacement theory has roots in the nation’s past. In 1916, lawyer Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” which had settled England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, for “[e]fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.”

Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant, describing the book as “my bible.”

A 1973 French dystopian novel anticipated the modern Great Replacement theory by showing immigrants from third-world countries destroying European society, but observers tend to date the emergence of this theory from the 2011 publication of Le Grand Remplacement, or The Great Replacement, by Renaud Camus, a French writer who claims that Muslims in France are destroying French culture and civilization. The theory has become influential among the far right in Europe and Canada. But it moves in a straight line from the Republican insistence that Black voters and their allies would destroy the U.S. with socialism.

Trump nodded to the Great Replacement theory in his 2016 run for the presidency, saying when he announced his candidacy in 2015 that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

On August 11, 2017, the influence of the Great Replacement theory on Americans burst into public awareness when racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to “Unite the Right.” They chanted “you will not replace us,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil.” In addition to that Nazi slogan, they gave Nazi salutes and carried Nazi insignia.

Rather than denouncing them, President Trump refused to condemn them, telling a reporter that there were “very fine people, on both sides.” That statement marked Trump’s open embrace of the far right that backed the Great Replacement theory, snaking it into public discourse through lies like the claims that former president Joe Biden had created “open borders” and that countries were sending “migrant criminals” to the U.S., and by repeating terms like “illegal monster,” “killers,” “gang members,” “poisoning our country,” “taking your jobs,” and a dead giveaway: “the largest invasion in the history of our country.”

At the urging of then-candidate Trump in January 2024, Republicans refused to pass a bipartisan immigration reform measure hammered out by Senate negotiators over months. The bill appropriated $20.3 billion for border security, increased the number of immigration judges to end case backlogs, sped up asylum processes, and closed the border during high-traffic periods. It did not include a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children, the so-called Dreamers, making the measure skew toward Republican demands rather than Democratic priorities.

Nonetheless, Trump urged his supporters to kill it, and they did, teeing up a campaign in which he and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, emulated Senator Joe McCarthy as they hammered on immigration fears, lying about open borders and migrant crime, claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over and was terrorizing Aurora, Colorado, and insisting—falsely—that Haitian immigrants were eating white neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

While many Trump voters appeared to cling to the belief that a Trump administration would deport only “criminal” immigrants, which they thought meant those who had committed violent crimes, Trump’s team appeared to embrace the Great Replacement theory that defined all non-white Americans as a threat to the nation. Now, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others, they are making the idea of purging Brown and Black people from the United States central to federal policy both at home and abroad.

In September, Trump told European nations at the United Nations General Assembly that “the unmitigated immigration disaster” is “destroying your heritage.” “If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail,” Trump told them. “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. I can tell you, I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” he said.

McCarthy’s supporters in the 1950s claimed that his lies were necessary for keeping Republicans in power: the ends justified the means. Neither journalists nor politicians could figure out how to counter McCarthy’s tactics. It was the American people who finally destroyed his career, turning against him when they realized he was hurting decent people and lying to them to gain power.

Suddenly reporters ignored him, the Senate “condemned” him, and he died only two and a half years later, likely from complications relating to alcoholism. Wisconsin voters elected Democrat William Proxmire to replace him. Proxmire told voters that McCarthy was “a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America.”

Remarkable, remarkable, especially when you consider his views.

Last night’s thirteen-minute Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bad Bunny had more watchers than any other halftime show in history: an estimated 135 million watched live, while millions more have streamed it since. Rapper, singer, and record producer Bad Bunny, whose given name is ​​Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is from Puerto Rico, and rocketed to prominence with the release of his first hit single on January 25, 2016. On February 1, 2026, just a week before the halftime show, Bad Bunny made history by being the first artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys for an album recorded in Spanish.

Right-wing critics complained about the NFL’s invitation for Bad Bunny to do the halftime show, saying he was “not an American artist.”

In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism.

In the 1880s, large companies in various industries gobbled up their competitors to create giant “trusts” that monopolized their sector of the economy. The most powerful trust in the United States was the Sugar Trust, officially known as the American Sugar Refining Company, which by 1895 controlled about 95% of the U.S. sugar market. Thanks to pressure from the Sugar Trust, in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which ended sugar tariffs and tried to increase domestic production by offering a bounty on domestic sugar.

This privileged domestic producers, and in 1893, sugar growers in Hawaii staged a coup to overthrow the Hawaiian queen and asked Congress to admit the islands as an American state. President Benjamin Harrison, a friend and confidant of tariff namesake William McKinley, cheerfully backed annexation, but before the treaty could be approved, an 1894 law reinstated the duties on sugar and ended the bounties. Voters elected President Grover Cleveland later that year, and with Hawaiians furiously protesting against the machinations of an American business ring, Cleveland insisted on an investigation, and Hawaiian statehood stalled.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, the Senate still did not have enough votes to admit Hawaii, so Congress annexed it by a joint resolution and McKinley, now president, signed the measure. As the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly put it in a cartoon with a little boy dressed in the symbols of the American flag eating candy, America was swallowing “sugar plums.”

The acquisition of the territory of Hawaii had begun the question of annexing islands. Then the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands including Guam, all of which either were sugar producers or had the potential to become sugar producers.

Since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, adopted under the Articles of Confederation that made up the basis of the nation’s law before the Constitution, the U.S. had rejected colonies and had instead established a system for incorporating new territories into the country on terms of equality to older states. But in the era of Jim Crow, annexing the newly acquired islands under the terms established a century before presented a political problem for lawmakers. Although sugar growers wanted the islands to be domestic land for purposes of tariffs, most Americans did not want to include the Black and Brown inhabitants of those lands in the United States on terms of equality to white people.

Congress’s 1898 resolution of war against Spain in Cuba had contained the Teller Amendment, which required the U.S. government to support Cuban political independence once the war was over and Spanish troops gone, providing a quick answer to American political annexation of Cuba (although it left room for economic domination). But there was no such amendment for the rest of the islands the U.S. acquired in 1899.

A fiercely pro-business Supreme Court provided a solution for Puerto Rico in what became known as the Insular Cases. In May 1901, in Downes v. Bidwell, the court concluded of the newly acquired island that although “in an international sense [Puerto Rico] was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island had not been incorporated into the United States.” This new concept of “unincorporated territories” that were “foreign…in a domestic sense” allowed the U.S. government to legislate over the new lands without having to treat them like other parts of the Union, while also preventing the inclusion of their people in the U.S. body politic.

Two months after the court’s decision, on July 25, McKinley issued a proclamation removing tariff duties for products from Puerto Rico, and the sugar industry boomed.

But what did this system mean for the people in Puerto Rico? In 1902, a pregnant twenty- year-old Puerto Rican woman named Isabel González arrived in New York City to join her fiancé, but the immigration commissioner turned her away on the grounds that she was an “alien” who would require public support. González sued.

When her case reached the Supreme Court, it concluded in the 1904 Gonzalez v. Williams case that González was not an alien, and indeed that she should not have been denied entry to the United States. The justices went on to create a new category of personhood for the island’s inhabitants. They were not aliens, but they were not citizens either. Instead, they were “noncitizen nationals.” As such, they had some constitutional protections but not all. They could travel to the American mainland without being considered immigrants, but they had no voting rights in the U.S.

U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans was established in the 1917 Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act, also known as the Jones-Shafroth Act.

Today, Puerto Rico is a self-governing commonwealth of about 3.2 million people. Puerto Ricans do not pay federal taxes or vote in presidential elections, although a resident commissioner serves in Congress and can sit on committees and debate, but not vote on legislation. Puerto Ricans do pay U.S. Social Security taxes and receive certain federal benefits.

Last night, Bad Bunny highlighted Puerto Rican history, beginning with the workers at the heart of colonial sugar production and moving through to those same cane workers hanging from electric poles in an evocation of the recent blackouts in the country’s inadequate electric grid, poorly addressed by the U.S. government after Hurricane Maria wiped out the system in 2017. He carried the flag of the island from before the U.S. takeover—an independence flag banned from 1948 to 1957— its light blue triangle picked up in various fabrics throughout the performance.

He ended by shouting “God Bless America” in English, echoing the United States mantra in an answer to right-wing critics. And then he rejected the idea animating the current U.S. administration’s deportation of Black and Brown people with the claim they are not Americans and their culture will undermine American culture.

After saying “God Bless America, Bad Bunny listed in Spanish: “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Antilles, United States—not Estados Unidos—Canada, and Puerto Rico.”

“Together,” the football he carried said, “we are America.”