Trump appointees insist they have a “mandate” to drive undocumented immigrants out of the U.S. and prevent new immigrants from coming in, and are launching a massive increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and detention facilities to do so. But a poll released Friday shows that only 35% of American adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove.
The poll shows a record 79% of adults saying immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. Only 30% of American adults say immigration should be reduced.
The poll shows that 85% of American adults want laws to allow “immigrants, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Seventy-eight percent of American adults want the law to allow “immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Only 38% want the government to deport “all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country.”
The poll shows Americans eager to fix a problem that stems from a bipartisan 1965 law that reworked America's immigration laws.
In 1924, during a period of opposition to immigration that fueled the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Congress had passed the nation's first comprehensive immigration law. That law, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, limited immigration according to quotas assigned to each country. Those quotas were heavily weighted toward western Europe, virtually prohibiting immigration from Asia and Africa and dramatically curtailing it from southern Europe.
The Johnson-Reed Act simply taxed workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico, because from the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it. Laborers in particular came from Mexico to work for the huge American agribusinesses that dominate the agricultural sector, especially after 1907 when the Japanese workers who had been taking over those jobs were unofficially kept out of the country by the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Later, during World War I, the government encouraged immigration to help increase production.
The Depression, when the bottom fell out of the economy, coupled with the Dust Bowl, when the bottom fell out of the western plains, made destitute white Americans turn on Mexican migrants (as well as on their poor white neighbors, as John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath). The government rounded up Mexicans and shipped them back over the border.
World War II created another shortage of laborers, and to regularize the system of migrant labor, the U.S. government in 1942 started a guest worker policy called the Bracero Program that ultimately brought more than 4 million Mexican workers to the U.S. The program was supposed to guarantee that migrant workers were well treated and adequately paid and housed. But it didn’t work out that way. Employers hired illegal as well as legal workers and treated them poorly. American workers complained about competition.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower returned about a million illegal workers in 1954 under "Operation Wetback," only to have officials readmit most of them as braceros. Under pressure both from labor and from reformers who recognized that the system was exploitative at the same time that mechanization began replacing workers, President John F. Kennedy initiated the process that ended the Bracero Program in 1964. In 1965 the government tried to replace migrant labor with American high school students, but the “A-TEAM” project—“Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower”—failed.
The end of the Bracero program coincided with congressional reworking of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. In the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, Congress wanted to end the racial quota system of immigration and replace it with one that did not so obviously discriminate against Asia and Africa. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, or the Hart-Celler Act. It opened immigration to all nations, setting a general cap on total immigration levels.
But southern congressmen, appalled at the idea of Black immigration, introduced a provision that privileged family migration, arguing that “family unification” should be the nation's top priority. They expected that old-stock immigrants from western Europe would use the provision to bring over their relatives, which would keep the effect of the 1924 law without the statute. But their provision had the opposite effect. It was new immigrants who wanted to bring their families, not old ones. So immigration began to skew heavily toward Asia and Latin America.
At the same time, Hart-Celler put a cap on immigrants from Mexico just as the guest worker program ended. The cap was low: 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually at that point, and American agribusiness depended on migrant labor. Workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal.
In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem of border security between the U.S. and Mexico by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the United States and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of guarding and militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.
Since 1986, U.S. politicians have refused to deal with this disconnect, which grew in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work, largely in the American Southeast. But by 2007, as Mexico’s economy stabilized and after U.S. border enforcement tightened significantly under President Bill Clinton, more Mexican immigrants were leaving the U.S. than coming.
Between 2007 and 2017, the U.S. saw a net loss of about 2 million Mexican immigrants. In 2017 about 5 million undocumented Mexicans lived in the United States; most of them—83%—were long-term residents, here more than ten years. Only 8% had lived in the U.S. for less than five years. Increasingly, undocumented immigrants were people from around the world who overstayed legal visas, making up more than 40% of the country's undocumented population by 2024.
In 2013 the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform measure by a bipartisan vote of 68 to 32. The measure provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and increased border security. It also proposed to increase visas for immigrant workers. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the measure would reduce the federal deficit by $197 billion over 10 years and $700 billion over 20 years.
The measure had passed the Senate by a wide margin and was popular with the public. It was expected to pass the House. But then–House speaker John Boehner (R-OH) refused to bring the measure up before the chamber, saying it did not have the support of a majority of Republicans.
About that time, undocumented migration across the southern border was changing. By 2014, people were arriving at the U.S. border from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where violence that approached warfare—much of it caused by gangs whose members had been socialized into gang culture in the U.S.—and economic stress from that violence created refugees. These migrants were not coming over the border for economic opportunity; they were refugees applying for asylum—a legal process in the United States.
Before the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans highlighted the new migrants at the southern border, although immigration numbers remained relatively stable. They also highlighted the death from the Ebola virus of a Liberian visitor to the U.S. and the infection of two of his nurses. They attacked the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama for downplaying the danger of the disease to the U.S. public and suggested foreigners should be kept out of the U.S. (In fact, the only Americans who contracted the virus in the U.S. were the two nurses who treated the Liberian visitor.)
Despite his own history of using undocumented workers at his properties, Trump followed this practice of using immigration against the Democratic administration for political points, launching his presidential campaign in 2015 by claiming Mexico was sending “people that have lots of problems…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He promised mass deportation and to build a wall across the southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
In fact, Trump’s administration deported significantly fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama’s had, at least in part because Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama focused on deporting those who had been convicted of crimes, a much easier deportation process than that for immigrants without convictions. But it was still legal to apply for asylum in the U.S., a fact MAGA Republicans opposed as they embraced the “Great Replacement” theory: the idea that immigration destroys a nation’s culture and identity.
The covid pandemic enabled the Trump administration in March 2020 to close the border and turn back asylum seekers under an emergency health authority known as Title 42, which can be invoked to keep out illness. Title 42 overrode the right to request asylum. But it also took away the legal consequences for trying to cross the border illegally, meaning migrants tried repeatedly, driving up the numbers of border encounters between U.S. agents and migrants and increasing the number of successful attempts from about 10,000–15,000 per month to a peak of more than 85,000.
Title 42 was still in effect in January 2021, when President Joe Biden took office. Immediately, Biden sent an immigration bill to Congress to modernize and fund immigration processes, including border enforcement and immigration courts—which had backlogs of more than 1.6 million people whose cases took an average of five years to get decided—and provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
His request got nowhere as MAGA Republicans demanded the continuation of Title 42 as a
general immigration measure to keep out migrants and accused Biden of wanting “open borders.” But Title 42 is an emergency public health authority, and when the administration declared the covid emergency over in May 2023, the rule no longer applied.
In the meantime, migrants had surged to the border, driven from their home countries or countries to which they had previously moved by the slow economic recoveries of those countries after the worst of the pandemic. The booming U.S. economy pulled them north. To move desperately needed migrants into the U.S. workforce, Biden extended temporary protected status to about 472,000 Venezuelans who were in the U.S. before July 31, 2023. The Biden administration also expanded temporary humanitarian admissions for people from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua.
Then, in October 2023, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) injected the idea of an immigration bill back into the political discussion when he tried to stop the passage of a national security measure that would provide aid to Ukraine. He said the House would not consider the Senate’s measure unless it contained a border security package. Eager to pass a measure to aid Ukraine, the Senate took him at his word, and a bipartisan group of senators spent the next several months hammering out an immigration bill that was similar to Title 42.
The Senate passed the measure with a bipartisan vote, but under pressure from Trump, who wanted to preserve the issue of immigration for his 2024 campaign, Johnson declared it “dead on arrival” when it reached the House in February 2024. “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill,” Trump posted about the measure.
And then Trump hammered hard on the demonization of immigrants. He lied that Aurora, Colorado, was a “war zone” that had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs—Aurora’s Republican mayor and police chief said this wasn’t true—and that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” A Gallup poll released Friday shows the MAGA attacks on immigration worked: in 2024, 55% of American adults wanted fewer immigrants in the country.
Trump was reelected in part because of his promise to strengthen border security, but now his administration is using attacks on immigrants to impose a police state. As Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng reported Saturday in Rolling Stone, the administration is fighting to impose its will on wrongly-deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it rendered to a terrorist prison in El Salvador, because if they are forced to back down, “it could set a precedent that opens the floodgates to other legal challenges” to Trump’s other executive power grabs.
“The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything,” a close Trump advisor told the reporters. “That is why you gotta stand your ground on everything against the left, including on the [Abrego Garcia] situation.”
But it appears the American people simply want to fix a sixty-year-old mistake in the nation’s immigration laws.
When President Trump signed his marquee domestic policy bill this month, the central tenets of his domestic agenda — slashing taxes and cutting deeply into social safety net programs — became law.
So did a behemoth number of other narrowly targeted, little-noticed measures — some that might have seemed random — that hitched a ride on the legislation, several tucked in at the last minute.
There are tax breaks for the rum industry in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Alaska whalers and metallurgical coal; $300 million to help pay for protecting Mar-a-Lago and Mr. Trump’s other homes; lease increases for two major Washington-area airports; $150 million to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States; and $10 billion for space exploration missions to the moon.
Republicans even crammed in the major elements of a stalled farm bill, with provisions that benefit big and wealthy farmers, especially those in the South.
Clocking in at nearly 900 pages, the size of the bill ballooned in part because of these unrelated measures, turning it into the type of legislation often derided on Capitol Hill as a “Christmas tree,” because it becomes adorned with ornaments, often parochial add-ons, meant to win over enough lawmakers to pass.
[...]
Here are some of the unrelated goodies that made it into the bill.
The Tax Breaks
For people hoping to invest in the construction of a spaceport, there’s good news: interest earned on bonds used to finance them will now be tax-free. That change, which aligns spaceport financing with that of regular airports, was one of several industry-specific tweaks that Republicans made in the law.
Oil and gas drillers, for example, won a break from the corporate alternative minimum tax, which curbs companies’ ability to pay little or no federal income tax. Oil companies will now be able to write off more drilling costs and pay less even under the minimum tax, which Democrats created in 2022.
And investors in early start-ups will be able to cash in even more of their stock without paying any taxes. What was once a $10 million tax exemption for start-up founders and investors is now worth $15 million, with a tax discount available for investments in more companies and after a shorter period of time.
The governments of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands will see more money coming in the door from a change in the way rum exported from the islands is taxed on the mainland. Excise taxes collected on that rum have long been refunded back to the islands; the new law permanently increases the size of the refunds. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana — where sugar cane, the basis for rum, is a major agricultural product — had championed the issue.
There are other tax cuts that, while not hidden, could ultimately amount to strange giveaways. Children born starting this year, and through 2028, will receive $1,000 in a new, tax-advantaged “Trump account.” Congress could ultimately renew the $1,000 payments before they expire, but if it doesn’t, a group of Americans who happened to be born during Mr. Trump’s second term will enjoy a unique, government-funded head start on their life savings.
Parochial Giveaways
Ms. Murkowski may have come away with the biggest pot of benefits narrowly targeted to her state. Alaska-specific provisions include the tax deduction for fisheries’ business meals, a new tax exemption to fishermen from villages in western Alaska and a measure that would allow certain Alaskan whaling captains to deduct more of their expenses.
She also won a carve-out exempting Alaska from a new cost-sharing requirement that would force states for the first time to pick up the costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program if they report a certain error rate.
In the Senate, Republican leaders included a measure that would revive and significantly expand a law for compensating victims of government-caused nuclear contamination who developed cancer and other serious illnesses. That was a measure long championed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who for weeks before the bill’s passage had said he was hesitant to support the legislation because of the impact it would have on Medicaid. He ultimately voted for it despite deriding the Medicaid cuts as “bad”; he has already introduced legislation to reverse them.
The expansion of the law meant that for the first time residents in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alaska — sites where workers processed uranium for the nation’s nuclear program — who were exposed to nuclear contamination will be eligible for benefits.
G.O.P. senators also specifically targeted the airport authority that operates the Washington area’s two major airports, Dulles and Ronald Reagan National, inserting a provision that would force the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority to pay the federal government twice as much as it currently does to lease the land the airports are on.
And even though the airport authority just signed a lease agreement through 2100, the legislation would override that, forcing the authority to renegotiate the lease every decade.
Trump’s Pet Projects
Lawmakers allocated $150 million to the Interior Department to “help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States,” a yearlong string of festivities Mr. Trump kicked off this month at a rally in Des Moines. Mr. Trump has suggested he will host a U.F.C. fight on the grounds of the White House to mark the occasion.
The bill also includes $40 million for the creation of the “National Garden of American Heroes,” a sculpture garden Mr. Trump first ordered established in 2021, in response to the removal of Confederate statues after the George Floyd protests for racial justice. At the time, Mr. Trump called it a “reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values and entire way of life” through “the tragic toppling of monuments to our founding generation and the giants of our past.”
He specified that the garden should include a variety of statues depicting iconic Americans in history, politics, the arts and exploration, including Alfred Hitchcock, Milton Friedman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Shirley Temple, Helen Keller, Antonin Scalia and Elvis.
The measure also includes more than $250 million for the restoration of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Trump has effectively taken over since he was sworn in for his second term. He has described the center, which opened in 1971, as in “tremendous disrepair,” and has called for a major renovation.
Stalled Bills Getting a Second Lease on Life
Republicans also stuffed in a number of measures that normally would be considered as stand-alone legislation, but had become stalled for various reasons. By including them in a reconciliation bill — a designation that is supposed to be reserved for packages that reduce the federal deficit — they avoided any messy debate or the risk of a filibuster on major bills.
One such measure was the farm bill, which provides a safety net for both farmers and low-income Americans struggling to feed themselves and their families. Lawmakers in Congress have been deadlocked for months over reauthorizing the sprawling farm bill, stuck in a dispute over how to pay for it. So Republicans folded some of its major elements into their tax cut bill.
They included several changes to the way federal farm aid is distributed, significantly increasing subsidies especially for large and profitable farms as well as farmers in Southern states. The bill eliminated a cap restricting farmers with incomes of $900,000 or more from receiving certain federal subsidies. And it raised federal subsidies for the largest producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, peanuts and rice, and allowed producers to claim subsidies for more acres of land.
Led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the chairman of the commerce and science committee, Republicans also provided NASA with $10 billion in funding, adding money for programs meant to land humans on the moon and for the International Space Station. The Trump administration’s budget had proposed to cut NASA’s budget by almost 25 percent, and suggested retiring a specific rocket that the bill provides new funding for.
The bill also provided more money to help cover the cost of protecting Mr. Trump and his family. Lawmakers set aside $300 million to reimburse state and local law enforcement agencies for the “extraordinary law enforcement personnel costs” of protection of “nongovernmental” residences, a provision that appeared aimed at covering the security costs associated with Mr. Trump’s stays at his clubs in Florida, Virginia and New Jersey.
The bill also provided $1.2 billion for the Secret Service, money that lawmakers said they were moved to include after Mr. Trump survived two assassination attempts last year.
After years of covering Donald J. Trump, I am used to seeing stories that would have sunk any other president simply fade away as he hammers on to some new unprecedented action that dominates the news. So I am surprised by what appears to be the staying power of the recent Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
That Trump is panicked by the threat of the release of material concerning convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein seems very clear. After the backlash against the Department of Justice’s decision not to release any more information and to reiterate that Epstein died by suicide, Trump tried first to downplay Epstein’s importance and convince people to move on. When that blew up, he posted a long screed on social media last Saturday saying the files were written by Democrats and other supposed enemies of his.
This morning, Trump posted another long message on social media blaming “Radical Left Democrats” for creating the story of the Epstein files. “Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” he wrote, and then he turned on his own supporters for demanding the administration release the files. “[M]y PAST supporters have bought into this ’bullsh*t,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years. I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore! Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Tellingly, Trump compared “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to “the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam itself, a totally fake and made up story used in order to hide Crooked Hillary Clinton’s big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election.” But of course, the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives and Russian interference in the 2016 election were not a hoax: they were well established both by Special Counsel Robert Mueller—a Republican—and by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ever since his campaign’s ties to Russia first came to light, Trump has hammered on the idea that the investigation was a hoax, not just to distance himself from potentially illegal behavior but also because if he could get his followers to reject the truth and accept his lies about what had happened, they would be psychologically committed to him. Although thirty-four people and three companies were indicted or pleaded guilty in the attack on the 2016 election or its cover-up, Trump loyalists believed Trump was a victim of a “deep state” run by Democrats.
Trump had successfully marketed his own narrative over the truth, and his supporters would continue to believe him rather than those calling him out. From then on, whenever in danger of being called out, he harked back to “Russia, Russia, Russia” and “the Russian hoax” to rally supporters to him.
Once again, he is reaching back to “Russia, Russia, Russia” to reinforce his ability to control the narrative. But this time it does not appear to be working.
As Jay Kuo outlined in The Status Kuo today, Trump owes his 2024 victory to QAnon followers, who believe a cabal of Democratic lawmakers, rich elites, and Hollywood film stars are sex trafficking—and even eating—children. PRRI, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that researches religion, culture, and politics, estimated that in 2024, about 19% of Americans believed in QAnon. CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten noted yesterday that QAnon supporters preferred Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 by 61 points.
More broadly, Enten noted that Trump’s political career has depended on conspiracy theorists, from his 2016 support from those who believed Trump’s “birther” charges that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, to his 2024 primary support from those who believed President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election legitimately.
Those supporters followed Trump because they believed he was leading a secret charge against those child sex traffickers. Now that his administration says it will not release any more information about Epstein’s files, they appear to feel betrayed.
Trump seems to be in full panic mode over the idea that information from the Epstein investigation might come to light. He and Epstein were friends, frequently photographed together in the years of Epstein’s operation. After turning on his former supporters on social media, Trump continued his attacks in an Oval Office meeting today, reiterating his claims that the Epstein files were written by Democrats.
But then he continued to attack his own supporters, saying that “stupid Republicans,” “foolish Republicans,” and “stupid people” had fallen for the Democrats’ Epstein hoax and were demanding the release of the files.
Billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s sidekick in the White House before the two fell out, has been hammering on the issue to his 222 million followers on his social media platform X. “He should just release the files and point out which part is the hoax,” Musk wrote.
Trump’s political success has stemmed in large part from his projection of dominance, and perhaps part of supporters’ willingness to cut ties to him comes from his recent behavior, which projects confusion. On Saturday, at the FIFA Club World Cup trophy ceremony, Trump seemed to miss the signal that he should leave the stage as the winning team celebrated, and had to be maneuvered behind the players.
Yesterday he fell asleep on stage at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit. At the same event, Trump told what CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called “an especially odd imaginary tale,” claiming that his uncle, a MIT professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. Trump recounted a conversation with his uncle about Kaczynski, but in fact Kaczynski didn’t go to MIT, and Trump’s uncle John died more than a decade before Kaczynski became famous, so Trump and his uncle could not have identified him as the Unabomber. Today, Trump called chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell a “terrible Fed chair” and added: “I was surprised he was appointed.”
Trump was the president who appointed him.
Finally, today Trump’s Department of Justice fired longtime employee Maurene Comey, who had prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. To bring things full circle, Maurene Comey is the daughter of James Comey, the Republican former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whom Trump fired for refusing to drop the FBI investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.
In the last European elections, for example, almost one in three votes cast by young voters went to micro-parties...
German far right’s strategy for seizing power: Foment US-style polarization
Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has a simple plan for gaining power: use the far left as a foil and deepen the country’s partisan divisions.
It’s a strategy that appears to be inspired by Donald Trump’s electorally successful approach in the United States.
“Our goal is to create a situation in which the political divide no longer runs between the AfD and the other political currents, but rather one in which a bourgeois-conservative camp and a radicalizing left-wing camp face each other, comparable to the situation in the U.S.,” reads an internal party paper, seen by POLITICO. The aim, according to the strategy, is to create a “duel between two irreconcilably opposed camps.”
The AfD is now the largest opposition party in parliament following a best-ever, second-place finish in a national election in February. But despite its growing popularity, the party remains far from the levers of real national power because other parliamentary blocs, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives, refuse to govern in coalition with it, upholding a postwar Brandmauer, or firewall, against the far right.
The AfD’s most urgent political objective is finding a way to knock down the firewall by shedding its taboo status and convincing conservatives and other voters that AfD politicians should no longer be blocked from entering the halls of power because they are seen as too extreme.
The AfD tasked senior lawmaker Beatrix von Storch with developing a strategy for breaking the firewall and charting a path to entering government in coalition with German conservatives.
It’s no surprise that she’d seek inspiration from the U.S. AfD politicians applauded U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s depiction of the firewall, in a speech in Munich earlier this year, as anti-democratic and a way of “running in fear” of voters.
Von Storch has maintained contacts to allies of the Trump administration. She and her husband attended U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration and have met with Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally and leading figure in the MAGA movement.
Storch’s strategy appears to take a page out of the book of Trump, who often depicts center-left opponents as “radical left lunatics.”
Needing the far left as a foil
For the AfD, the clearest political foil is the Left, a far-left party that surged in popularity among young voters ahead of February’s national election. AfD leaders see that party’s rise as weakening center-left parties, including the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governs in coalition with Merz’s conservatives. The far-left’s strength will force center-left parties to pivot further left, goes the thinking, making centrist alliances across the political spectrum more difficult.
“The separation from the radical left, which holds positions that are unacceptable to the majority of Germans, makes it easier for the AfD to position itself as a bourgeois-conservative force,” reads the strategy paper. “The AfD and the Left form the two ideological poles of the social debate. As the antithesis to the ideological and woke left, the AfD can sharpen its bourgeois profile.”
Germany’s firewall blocking far-right parties from power has been far stronger than in other European countries on account of the country’s Nazi past. But the AfD’s rise has increasingly tested the firewall — and cracks have emerged, particularly in local government across eastern Germany, where centrists have cooperated with the party. Merz’s move last January to accept AfD support for passing tough migration legislation led to fears the firewall was about to fall, unleashing a fierce debate that struck at the core of the country’s postwar identity.
Afd’s strategy appears to follow Trump, who often depicts center-left opponents as “radical left lunatics.” | Ralf Hirschberger/AFP via Getty Images
Though the firewall remained intact — albeit damaged — the AfD wants to make it increasingly tough on Merz and other conservatives to maintain it. The AfD “will launch proposals and initiatives that will meet with a high level of approval” of center-right voters, especially those disappointed with Merz’s coalition with the SPD, according to the strategy paper.
The aim, at first, is not necessarily to win all those voters, but to make the firewall increasingly unpopular among them. This, in turn, would force conservative leaders to drop their opposition to governing in coalition with the AfD.
At the same time, the AfD strategy paper says the party will try to win new support within some of the voting blocs where it is weakest, including among women, older voters, academics and people living in cities.
“These groups are not homogeneous and cannot be addressed uniformly,” reads the paper. In order to “win them over to the AfD, we need a socio-demographic microanalysis of these groups. We need to identify subgroups to which we can build a bridge.”
Trump's shift to blaming the left for the Epstein mess is his best chance to turn the page, and I think it might work, for the most part, the more the media and the online left chip away at it.
Now we know why President Donald J. Trump earlier this week began saying nonsensically that Democrats he dislikes wrote the Epstein files. Apparently, Trump was trying to get out in front of the story Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo broke last night in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Trump contributed what the newspaper called a “bawdy” letter to a leather-bound album compiled by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
The journalists say the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
The lines of text represent an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein:
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.
“Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
“Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
“Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
“Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
“Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
“Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
“Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Florida police began investigating Epstein in 2005 after allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. They identified five victims and 17 witnesses, but ultimately the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, negotiated a plea deal with Epstein in 2008, by which Epstein pleaded guilty only to state charges, including soliciting a minor, and avoided federal charges. Trump appointed Acosta to be the secretary of labor in his first administration; Acosta resigned in 2019 after new reporting by the Miami Herald accused Epstein of abusing about 80 girls and women and showed how Acosta had shut down an FBI investigation into Epstein’s actions.
In July 2019, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman charged Epstein with sex trafficking of minors as young as 14. The indictment charged Epstein with sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of underage girls who engaged in sex acts for money at Epstein’s properties in New York and Florida. Arrested in New Jersey in July, Epstein died in his Manhattan prison cell in August.
In 2020, Epstein’s associate Maxwell was indicted on charges of assisting, facilitating, and contributing to Epstein’s abuse of minor girls, not only in New York and Florida, but also at his residences in New Mexico and London, “helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to Maxwell and Epstein to be under the age of 18.” Epstein also owned a private 72-acre island off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, rumored to be another site of sex trafficking. In 2021 a jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor and transporting a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
When the FBI raided Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan in 2019, they seized piles of evidence, including stacks of compact disks bearing the labels “Young [Name] + [Name],” suggesting he had kept video evidence of men sexually assaulting underage girls.
Within hours of the discovery of Epstein’s body in his prison cell in 2019, Trump was retweeting a conspiracy theory alleging that former president Bill Clinton was involved in his death. Trump and his loyalists pushed the idea that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood actors, an accusation that dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was secretly leading the fight against such a cabal. Trump fed the idea that if reelected, he would release the information he claimed was being withheld as part of a coverup.
In fact, the politician most closely associated with Epstein was Trump himself. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
And yet Trump supporters overlooked Trump’s long friendship with Epstein until billionaire Elon Musk resurrected the story that Trump might be implicated in the records of the Epstein investigation. On June 5, in the midst of a fight with Trump, Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
On July 7, the Department of Justice announced that Epstein did not maintain a “client list,” that he died by suicide, and that it would not be releasing any more information about the investigation into his activities, although it released a video from outside Epstein’s prison cell the night he died to show that no one had entered the cell, claiming it was “raw” footage. MAGA exploded, and Trump’s attempt to downplay the Epstein files made things worse. Then he turned on his supporters, calling them “stupid” and “foolish” and saying he didn’t want their support while also insisting that Democrats had written the files.
And then Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired reported that two minutes and fifty-three seconds were missing from the “raw” video.
On Wednesday night, far-right influencer Nick Fuentes responded to Trump: “F*ck you. You suck. You are fat, you are a joke, you are stupid, you are not funny, you are not as smart as you think you are.” “[W]e are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history,” he added. “And the liberals were right. The MAGA supporters were had. They were.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, has been working for the past three years to trace Epstein’s finances, and yesterday, Matthew Goldstein of the New York Times reported his staff’s discovery that four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in financial transactions, but only after Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Wyden renewed the demand for more financial information about Epstein he had called upon the administration to release in March.
Yesterday, Trump announced on social media: “Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”
But the grand jury testimony was a small part of the information from the investigation, and as legal analyst Barb McQuade notes, this demand was “a meaningless trick” anyway, because courts prohibit public disclosure of such information. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance clarifies in Civil Discourse that while it is possible in rare circumstances to publish grand jury testimony, the process will be slow and difficult.
Bondi promptly assured Trump she was ready to do as he asked, but Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that the actual document asked the court to unseal the transcripts “subject to appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information,” a provision that has the potential to protect Trump if his name was discussed.
The story of the birthday message has thrown gasoline on this fire. The Wall Street Journal reporters said that when they contacted Trump about the story, he denied writing the letter or drawing the picture and threatened to sue them. Then, hours later, Trump told reporters that Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had made up the story, although neither was in office when the FBI investigated Epstein. Trump was. Oliver Darcy of Status News reported that Trump personally called the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal to try to stop her from publishing the story.
After the story dropped, Trump posted that the letter was “FAKE.” “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”
Reporters had a field day today rebutting his claim with accounts of all the times Trump auctioned off his doodles for charities, with photos of the sketches. “The drawings, many of which appear to be done with a thick, black-marker and prominently feature his signature,” wrote Tyler Pager of the New York Times, “are not dissimilar to how The Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein.” (nyt - no paywall)
In a letter to FBI director Kash Patel today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that his office had received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured the FBI to put 1,000 personnel to work in 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein records. Durbin said his office had received information that the personnel were instructed “to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
Patel pushed the idea that the Epstein files were being covered up during the Biden administration, only to change his tune once he took charge of the FBI. Durbin asked him to answer a series of questions about the information the FBI holds and how the administration is handling that information, like, for example, how the “raw” footage was modified.
This afternoon, with a complaint that misrepresents the Wall Street Journal story and reads like a Trump press release, Trump sued for defamation Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., its parent company News Corp, owner Rupert Murdoch, chief executive Robert Thomson, and the two reporters who broke the story, asking for $10 billion in damages. A Dow Jones spokesperson responded: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
The Epstein story is about more than the sex trafficking of girls. It is also about rich and privileged people evading accountability for breaking the law. MAGA likely jumped on the story for both of these reasons when they thought a coverup was protecting Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites.
But the story is also about a group of elite people who think they are better than the rest of us and have the right to dominate anyone that is not part of their group, particularly people of color, Black Americans, and women, no matter what the law says.
Journalist Fareed Zakaria called out that worldview today in a Washington Post story noting that for all their performative cruelty, Trump’s ICE raids have led to far fewer deportations than took place under Obama, and barely more than under Biden. ICE does not coordinate with local law enforcement, follow rules, or work with legal processing—all of which are necessary for an efficient process. The plan appears to be simply to create a spectacle that demonstrates power and dominance.
The latest step from the Justice Department in the case of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, woman killed during a botched police raid in 2020, reinforces that message. In 2024 a federal jury convicted former police officer Brett Hankison of depriving Taylor of her civil rights when he fired several shots into her home through a covered window and glass door. While his bullets were not the ones that killed Taylor, a jury decided that his blind firing constituted excessive force.
On Wednesday, assistant attorney general for the civil rights unit in the Department of Justice Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, asked a federal judge to sentence Hankison to a single day in jail, time he has already served.
Civil rights lawyer and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Sherrilyn Ifill wrote: “They mean to be as insulting to Black people, as dismissive of our lives, as [resistant] to our status as full citizens in this country as they can be.”
This has been his usual practice and in this case it's particularly stupid, as will be easily shown in the initial discovery process.
