On today’s “To the Contrary” podcast, Chris Cillizza joins me to discuss Donald Trump's economic U-turn with China, the uber-skeevy $400 million jet from Qatar, and the crypto-fueled grift orbiting Trump's inner circle. We also get into Joe Biden’s awkward media tour, the troubling revelations about John Fetterman, and the stunning rise of an American pope as a global counterweight to Trumpism.
We also discussed the question: What was the most important election? The election of Obama in 2008? Trump’s first election in 2016? Or 2024? Here’s Cillizza’s take (with which I agree completely):
In a conversation with Charlie Sykes today — stay tuned for the full podcast on Charlie’s To the Contrary Substack! —he mentioned how he has never been surprised that Donald Trump was, well, Donald Trump. What Charlie said truly shocked him over this past decade was how Republicans and conservatives (and the electorate more broadly) have gone along with Trump as he fundamentally re-shapes the vision of what the GOP (and the country) is and should be.
That got me to thinking about something that I have been wanting to write for a while now that basically goes like this: The 2024 election was far more consequential and revealing about who Americans are and who they want to be than was the 2016 election.
I’m sorry, but the hamster wheel of insanity won’t stop anytime soon. Our daily mission is to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. But I can’t do it without you. To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. There are no ads. No paywalls. No sugar daddies. Just me and the dogs. And your generous support. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled white South Africans…
Subtle it is not.
Having slammed the door to refugees from around the world — including our Afghan allies waiting for asylum — Trump/Musk/Miller have found one group worthy of succor: white South Afrikaaners. Some important reads:
In its first hundred days the second Trump administration has already done a lot to reverse refugee flows into the United States. The administration has;
Over the weekend, however, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was prepared to reverse course and finally admit some refugees. And you’ll never guess which refugees!
The Trump administration is planning to bring the first group of white South Africans it has classified as refugees to the United States on Monday, according to officials briefed on the plans and documents obtained by The New York Times.
Although the president halted virtually all other refugee admissions shortly after he took office in January, his administration hastily put together a program to allow in white South Africans, who he claims have been the victims of racial persecution in their home country….
While the program remains suspended for refugees across the world, such as Congolese families in refugee camps and Rohingya seeking safety, white South Africans were processed much faster than is normal for these cases….
“Farmers are being killed,” Mr. Trump told reporters before leaving for a trip to the Middle East. “They happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me. White farmers are being brutally killed, and the land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
South African police data does not support the narrative of mass murder. From April 2020 to March 2024, 225 people were killed on farms in South Africa, according to the police. But many of the victims — 101 — were current or former workers living on farms, who are mostly Black. Fifty-three of the victims were farmers, who are usually white.
Gosh, this is confusing. I wonder why the Afrikaners were bumped to the front of the queue. Okay, that’s a lie, I know exactly why that’s the case — Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau answered the question.
As Radley Balko pointed out on Bluesky, “This is obviously thinly-veiled racism. But it’s also a bullshit premise. Haitian refugees were thriving in Springfield. Bhutanese, Congolese, other refugees from Africa & Asia have reinvigorated Rust Belt towns and cities.” That the Trump administration acted on Afrikaners while revoking the Temporary Protected Status of Afghans is particularly striking.
So let’s just say it: the Trump administration has accepted Afrikaners because they were white and rejected almost everyone else because they are not white. And by Trump administration’s self-definition of the United States, non-white people do not fit in and should be non-Americans.
What is happening right now with the expedited refugee admission of white South Africans is a betrayal of the entire international refugee system. It is a clear, racist signal to the far-right, here and abroad, that this second Trump term will bend U.S. policy to fit their conspiracies and white grievance narratives.
In February, Trump signed an executive order fast-tracking refugee status for white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, citing "egregious actions" by South Africa's government, a constitutional democracy still reckoning with apartheid's legacy. The order came without credible evidence of persecution. It echoed the "white genocide" conspiracy theory that Trump embraced during his first term after Tucker Carlson amplified it. I know this firsthand. I was in the room, briefing then Vice President Pence with facts to counter the hysteria.
Yesterday, 59 Afrikaner "refugees" arrived in the United States.
Let's pause there. During Trump's first term, one of Stephen Miller's earliest actions was attempting to halt all refugee admissions. While unsuccessful initially, the refugee ceiling was slashed to historic lows—from 18,000 to eventually 12,000—numbers we never even reached as the system collapsed under deliberate sabotage. Genuine refugees were abandoned, allies stranded, and faith-based resettlement partners left unable to operate.
Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs—and by Mr. Trump’s own hand. Witness the agreement Monday morning to scale back his punitive tariffs on China—his second major retreat in less than a week. This is a win for economic reality, and for American prosperity.
Make that a partial win for reality….
So after weeks of market turmoil, the economy is left with higher trade costs and greater uncertainty for business, but at least a step back from Smoot-Hawley 2.0. Investors, businesses and households probably would welcome this outcome, which is considerably better than Mr. Trump’s initial plan.
But a 10% across-the-board tariff is still four times the average U.S. tariff rate before Mr. Trump took office. It keeps the door open to the economically and politically destructive special pleading for tariff breaks for well-connected industries and companies at the expense of everyone else. U.S. companies protected by high tariffs will gradually lose their competitiveness against the rest of the world.
If there’s a silver lining to this turmoil, it is that markets have forced Mr. Trump to back down from his fever dream that high tariff walls will usher in a new “golden age.” The age didn’t last two months, and it was more leaden than golden. White House aide Peter Navarro, the main architect with Mr. Trump of the Liberation Day fiasco, has been repudiated.
Mr. Trump will not want to admit it, but he started a trade war with Adam Smith and lost. He’s not the first President to learn that lesson.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro — one of the right’s uber-influencers — broke bad on Trump’s sleazy Qatari bribe.
Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jazeera, all the rest — that’s not America First! Like, please define America First in a way that says you should take sacks of cash from the Qatari royals who are behind al-Jazeera. It just isn’t America first in any conceivable way,” submitted Shapiro to start.
“So back to the original question: is this good for President Trump? Is it good for his agenda? Is it good for draining the swamp and getting things done? The answer is no, it isn’t. It isn’t. If you want President Trump to succeed, this kind of skeezy stuff needs to stop.”
Skeevy? If only Ben had been warned.
We’ve been here since the beginning, and we tried to warn them. To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Joe Biden “totally fucked us” by leaving it too late to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election, a former top campaign aide to Kamala Harris has told the authors of a new book.
David Plouffe, who was manager of Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign and a senior adviser in his White House, was drafted in to help Harris’s bid for president after the declining Biden withdrew from the race last summer.
Harris’s 107-day sprint against Donald Trump was “a fucking nightmare”, Plouffe is quoted as saying by authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. A copy was obtained by the Guardian.
“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe adds, reflecting on the former US president’s decisions to run for re-election and then to cling on for more than three weeks after a catastrophic debate performance against Trump raised questions about his mental acuity and age. “He totally fucked us.”
Tuesday dogs
Eli checking out the new flora and fauna.
Auggie in a rare contemplative mood. With green ball.
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