Stephen Miller Has a Plan

During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker. LOL Stephen, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry. No one is laughing now. Miller, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security adviser and deputy chief of staff, has returned to the White House stronger and more determined than ever to silence the derision…

Read More...

Was Integration the Wrong Goal?

On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court’s gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare “that in the field of public education…

Read More...

ICE Isn’t Delivering the Mass Deportation Trump Wants

The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest. Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class. One Maryland doctor who treats patients with cancer and chronic pain from worksite injuries told me that many are skipping appointments. “They’re terrified,” he said. That much,…

Read More...

Is DOGE Losing Steam?

President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source. Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in…

Read More...

J. D. Vance Stopped Talking About Eggs

We used to hear a lot about eggs from J. D. Vance. On the campaign trail, he talked about them constantly: how his kids were nuts for them, and how, thanks to the failed policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, omelets were ruined for everyone. “My kids eat a lotta eggs!” he said in Traverse City, Michigan. And in Monroeville, Pennsylvania: “A lotta eggs in my family!” Although other elements of the speech changed here and there, eggs—and their rising price—were always front and center. “The 7-year-old, he’s got…

Read More...

The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up

The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by. Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class…

Read More...