A Blog about the Pillars of Belief: Politics, Culture, Stories
Today in Mueller Music Hour, Maurice Ravel’s Bolero interprets the period from February 16, 2018, when 16 Russian nationals were indicted for running troll farms and using social media to spread divisions in the United States during the 2016 election, and April 9, when NYC prosecutors marched into Michael Cohens office drums and horns blaring.
On Tuesday the Trump Administration announced they will divert $12 billion in emergency aid to farmers hurt by retaliatory tariffs.
The Trump Administration made a truce on their trade war with allies by meeting with the president of the EU at the White House. They are going to stop tariffs and resume the same talks of a trade pact that were underway during the Obama Administration.
Here is a list of prominent Republicans who slammed the plan on the same day.
Tuesday night Cohen released an audio recording of a phone call with Trump about paying off McDougal. Cohen’s lawyer said Cohen is “on a new path — it’s a reset button to tell the truth and to let the chips fall where they may.”
After threatening to impeach Rosenstein, conservative House members pulled back on their threat to force the entire House to vote. Only 11 GOP congressmen supported the measure.
Despite the fact that Trump tweeted this week that Russia would interfere in the 2018 elections to help democrats, the first evidence of actual Russian interference surfaced: they were trying to hack Claire McCaskill’s emails.
There was some bad polling for Tump, especially in swing states he won or nearly won. Jamelle Bouy attempts to state the obvious: that Trump is unpopular and the GOP is in real political danger. He captures the essence of the times: the fact that few believed he would win in 2016 is keeping many from accepting the reality of his unpopularity in 2018.
Here is a good 538 analysis of the polls through the lens of the child separation policy: Trump’s poll numbers remained relatively steady during the weeks when the policy was heavy in the news.
Child Separation Policy
Of the 2,551 separated children: 879 have been reunited; 917 not eligible for reunification; 130 parents waived reunification; 463 parents have already been deported.
Thursday was the court imposed deadline for the government to reunite all children ages 5-17 who were separated form their parents at the border. The government numbers were: 1442 children have been reunited; 771 have not; 378 have been released but not all with their parents; 431 children have parents who have already left the US; 900 parents who will be reunited have already received deportation orders.
By Friday 1820 children were either reunited or placed with relatives; 650 were still ineligible, 431 because the parents have already been deported. Judge Sabraw said the next step is to reunite those families.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.3%
On Sunday before the Putin summit, Trump made some statements to the media: that Obama was to blame for the Crimea invasion; that he had not thought about extraditing the 12 Russian GRU agents responsible for election hacking; that Europe was one of our “foes.”
On Monday in Helsinki Trump and Putin met without advisors present for 130 minutes. This was followed by a lunch meeting with advisors then a press conference. Nothing concrete was announced on any particular issue or joint project. But Trump did say he saw no reason to disbelieve Putin’s denials over 2016 election interference over the word of Dan Coates and other members of his intelligence community. Trump reiterated his message from earlier tweets that the US-Russia relation was so poor because American has been foolish, and because of the Mueller probe. He described Putin’s offers to have Russian’s partner with Mueller’s investigators as “incredible” and “generous.” For his part, Putin admitted that he had wanted Trump to win the 2016 election; he also pointedly declined to say that he did not have compromising material on Trump.
There was immediate fallout. More than one commentator describe trump’s pro-Putin and moral equivalent comments as “the foreign policy equivalent of Charlottesville.”
By Monday afternoon, many Republican officials including Ryan and McConnel and Burr made blanket statements that said the opposite of Trump’s message: that our intelligence community assessment is correct; that Russian is not and cannot be our friend. Only a few like McCain and Sasse criticized Trump directly.
I am going to list some quotes from people who express shock about Trump’s press conference statements. Each seem to be striving to express simply and plainly what they feel are extraordinary and disturbing statements.
Gingrich tweeted: “It is the most serious mistake of his presidency and must be corrected — immediately.”
McCain: “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”
Jeff Flake: “I never thought I would see the day when our American President would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression. This is shameful.”
David Ignatious quotes former national security adviser Tom Donilon: “The president of the United States was standing next to a foreign adversary rejecting the judgment of his own intelligence and law enforcement services. We’ve never had anything like this in American history.”
The pundits gave their takes.
David Frum: “The reasons for Trump’s striking behavior—whether he was bribed or blackmailed or something else—remain to be ascertained. That he has publicly refused to defend his country’s independent electoral process—and did so jointly with the foreign dictator who perverted that process—is video-recorded fact.”
David Ignatious points out connections between three key events: the Trump-Putin Summit; the Mueller indictment of 12 GRU officers and the Storzk hearing. 1) the indictment is a warning to Putin that US intelligence has infiltrated the GRU operations and may know much more about its operations and agents; 2) Same message to Trump about what Mueller may have on the collusion question; 3) As Strzok put it in his statement to a House committee Thursday: “In the summer of 2016, I was one of a handful of people who knew the details of Russian election interference and its possible connections with members of the Trump campaign.”
Yglesias: “Having offered earlier in the week scathing, specific indictments of the European Union’s immigration policy, of the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 election, of the United Kingdom’s efforts to negotiate a “soft” version of Brexit, and of Germany’s energy infrastructure policies, Trump had no specific criticisms of Vladimir Putin’s domestic or international policies.”
Rich Lowery: “Trump has a strange ability to abstract himself from his own administration that he often comments on as if he’s a pundit with no responsibility for it. In Helsinki, he talked about the United States the same way, as an entity he stands apart from and critiques accordingly.”
Putin gave an interview with Chris Wallace, perhaps because he assumed FOX News would treat Trump the way his state media treats him. It did not go well. Here is a summary of Chris Wallace’s grilling of Putin, in which Putin did not ingratiate himself with his interviewer or the FOX News audience.
On Tuesday, back in the White House, Trump tried to walk back his Helsinki statements. He said that he believed his intelligence community reports and that he misspoke–saying would instead of wouldn’t–when he said at the press conference that he could not think of any reason Russia would have interfered in the 2016 election.
On Wednesday, when asked if Russia was trying to interfere in the 2018 election Trump said “no.” Sara Sanders later said he was responding to a different question. Then he gave an interview to CBS where he claimed he was more forceful with Putin over the election interference and that he accepts the conclusions of the intelligence community.
The New York Times summarizes the times Trump has been briefed on intelligence about Russia election interference going back before his inauguration, including proof that Putin personally ordered the interference. Despite having been shown this proof, Trump has consistently denied or downplayed the conclusions.
Frum thinks the events of this week inspired someone in the intelligence community to leak some of these new revelations to the Time: “The reporters on that story—David Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg—are two of the most seasoned and reputable national-security journalists in the United States. They would not have taken the decision to reveal such sensitive sources-and-methods information lightly; perhaps not unless a responsible person assured them the revelation would no longer put lives at risk. And that, in turn, raises the possibility that the sources that produced the January 2017 certainty have already been compromised, closed, or worse.”
By the end of the week it remained a mystery what Trump and Putin talked about or agreed to. While the Russian officials were saying that they had reached certain agreements, “officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military, scrambling since Monday to determine what Trump may have agreed to on national security issues in Helsinki, had little to no information Wednesday.”
Late on Friday, two developments. It was revealed that one of the pieces of evidence seized in the Cohen raid was a short recording between Trump and Cohen about the McDougal payment and the National Enquirer “catch and kill” strategy. This could suggest legal trouble not just for Trump but for the publisher AMI.
And a FOIA application resulted in the publication of heavily redacted FISA warrant for Cater Page. What little we can read seriously undercut Nunes’s justification for attacking the FBI.
Child Separation Policy
This week the government notified the courts that 365 children have been reunited with their parents. 908 are deemed ineligible to be reunited. The other 716 who are eligible have been given final deportation orders, which means they could be deported immediately after being reunited.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.70%
I’m not ready (yet) to speculate about Picard’s job title and when and why Troi should phone in. We’ll have over a year to do that. All I know is that I have been drifting off to sleep each night this week thinking about what old man Picard is up to these days. He’s sitting in his library at Chateau Picard sipping a glass of wine, looking up from his book every once in a while to watch the stars twinkling over his vineyard. He gives a thought to the stars he has visited, before turning back to whatever he is reading.
For those of us who don’t read the novels, Picard has been stuck in time. For me, not a big fan of the movies, that means my head canon stops at the poker table in All Good Things. There is not much life beyond that in my imagination. So this new series is a rare treat. It brings a beloved character back to life and pushes his story forward.
It’s also a rare opportunity in the history of the franchise: to have a main character depicted in the prime of his life, and then many years later, have the character developed and expanded upon closer to the end of his life. Kirk aged and evolved over the 6 TOS films, but he met his death pretty soon after that. He was past his prime but no old man (parallels to Kirk’s full arc and Picard’s will also need to be discussed, and hopefully the CBS writers will avoid the pitfalls of Kirk’s end). We saw Spock in his later, final years, but mainly in a guest staring role.
So I’ve been thinking about Picard the man, the kind of life he will be looking back on in this new series:
One of the many things Star Trek fans like to debate is the preferred setting and time period (and parallel dimension) writers should use to tell stories within the Star Trek universe. While some fans love stories set in the gap years between installments we have already consumed, others would prefer the franchise leap into the future.
At the Vulture Festival in May, the now former Star Trek: Discovery co-showrunner Gretchen J. Berg said they “inherited the timeline” from the DSC’s creator and short-lived showrunner Bryan Fuller, but that she “loved the box” they were put in. She talked about how writers thrive when they are forced to operate within “boundaries and restrictions,” and how “overwhelming” it would have been to have to find a place for their show somewhere in the “entire universe” of Trek lore.
By stating that they “inherited the timeline” Berg is able to sidestep any debate about why the show is set ten years before the Original Series or whether that was a good idea. It is simply the reality of the show she was hired to write for. But it is clear that she appreciated Fuller’s choice of setting because, as a writer, it significantly reduced the amount of white space on the Blank Page CBS handed her.
As nature abhors a vacuum, writers abhor the Blank Page. Especially TV writers. There are too many disparate demands and studio “notes” dictating what their writing must accomplish, not to mention the relentless pressure of production and filming deadlines. The task of creating a new TV show–from concept, to production design, to characters (and casting), to filmable scripts–must be overwhelming in ways that fans of the show cannot appreciate.
Berg is not alone. Throughout the 52-year history of the franchise, many other Trek writers were similarly grateful that they did not have to reinvent their corner of the Trek universe from whole cloth. At every juncture, from the 1970s to the 2010s, Trek writers could have chosen any premise and any time period for their new Star Trek. What did they chose, and what do their choices tell us is likely to happen the next time Trek writers and producers are faced with the Blank Page.
Sample Size: Leaps vs. Gap Years
Let’s look at the numbers and define some terms. After TOS, the franchise has had 18 installments that reached either the development stage or filming stage. For our purposes, let’s define an installment as any time a studio gave writers and producers the green light to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and create a new Star Trek property for film or television.
The time period settings of these installments fall into three categories. The most common is a Continuation, when the series takes place soon after or simultaneous with a previous installment. Then there is the Gap Year, when a series is set somewhere in Trek’s past. The least common installment is the Leap, when the series takes place far in the future relative to previous installments.
Of the nine installments that were filmed and distributed–the six TV series and three film series–five were set in time periods that were Continuations of a prior installment. TAS presumably takes place during Kirk and crew’s original five-year mission, and the TOS Film Series beings some short number years after that. DS9 begins during TNG’s 6th season. The TNG Film Series and VOY begin within a year of TNG’s 7th season, when DS9 was in its 3rd season, and all three installments run concurrently with frequent character crossovers, visits to the same settings, and dual use of props and sets.
Three of the nine installments were set in Trek’s Gap Years. ENT takes place a century before Kirk’s five-year mission; the Bad Robot series begins during Kirk and Spock’s childhood; DSC takes place a decade before the five-year mission.
That leaves TNG, which takes place about 80 years after TOS, as the only Trek installment that represents a Leap into the franchise’s future. Therefore, when Trek writers were faced with the choice between the Blank Page and a familiar frame, they chose the familiar 89% of the time.
Choosing a Familiar Frame
Starting within a familiar frame exerts a powerful pull on the creative process, especially in sci-fi where the possibilities for every aspect of the show are limitless. When there are no limits, there are only infinite decisions the creators need to make. Decisions take time, energy and money to resolve. In TV and film, each decision faces the brutal math of production costs. Consider the benefits of some of Trek’s familiar frames.
When Michael Piller and Rick Berman set out to create DS9, they did not start with a Blank Page. Their premise of a space station at a stable wormhole between Bajor and Cardassia had already been developed and established over a handful of classic TNG episodes. Four of the seven lead characters had strong TNG ties: O’Brien had been on the 1701-D since TNG’s first episode; Kira was written as Ro Laren for much of DS9’s pre-production; Quark was a Ferengi, which was one of TNG’s original contributions to Trek’s pantheon of aliens; Sisko’s (and Jake’s) backstory was intricately tied to Picard. Similarly, VOY borrowed half of its premise–the Maquis crew–from storylines that had been developed on TNG and DS9.
Trek’s Gap Years are rife with opportunities for a familiar frame. Even before they wrote one script, the ENT writers knew from the start what a bulk of their stories would be: early interactions with the Klingons and Vulcans; the beginning of that TOS/TNG mode of exploration and familiar technology; the founding of the Federation.
All of these pre-existing plot threads and character elements offered the writers jumping off points and opportunities for creative synergy that would not be available to them if they had to dream up every element–new aliens, new locations, and new characters–from scratch.
Production design is another powerful motivator for showrunners to avoid the Blank Page. DS9’s alien station sets had to be designed from scratch, but their basic features and technology did not require radical rethinking of what we saw on TNG (holosuites instead of holodecks; ops instead of a bridge, etc). The Starfleet ships and tech on DS9 and VOY could be virtually identical to what the props department had in storage. All the ENT production designers had to do was smashkit the TOS Enterprise with circa 2000 nuclear subs and the International Space Station. With the Bad Robot movies and DSC, all there was to do was take TOS and TOS-Film era designs and update them with contemporary flourishes.
Premise, setting, production design are all things that must be sweated out before the first scripts can be written. Choosing a familiar frame that is a Continuation or set in a Gap Year makes the process less daunting and, since millions of dollars are on the line, much less stressful for the showrunners.
The Undeveloped Treks
We see the same trend if we expand our sample size to Trek installments that achieved some development but never reached the production or filming phase. There are nine of these scattered throughout the franchise’s history. All but the last two listed below are archived as “undeveloped” on Memory Alpha:
Four of these are Continuations. Planet of the Titans was to be the first motion picture with the TOS crew; Phase II was to be a TV series with most of the TOS crew, set on a refit Enterprise a few years after the first five-year mission; the 1990’s IMAX project would have focused on O’Brien and likely been set in the TNG/DS9 timeframe; the new Picard series will continue Picard’s story 20 years after his last appearance in Nemesis.
Another three were set in Gap Years. The Starfleet Academy concept was Harve Bennett’s idea for a second film series, and would have been set during the TOS crew’s Academy days. After the TNG Film Series concluded in 2002, The Beginning was Erik Jenderson’s idea to launch a third film series, set a century prior to TOS during the Earth-Romulan War. Finally, while we do not know much about Nick Meyer’s trilogy series for CBS All Access, we know it is set in a Gap Year because a significant aspect of the premise has been previously depicted in the at least one of the Trek film series.
Only two of the undeveloped installments represent Leaps. Final Frontier was an animated series set 149 years after the last TNG outing Star Trek: Nemesis (NEM). Federation was to be a live action series set in the year 3000, 621 years after NEM.
That means only two live-action Trek installments have ever been conceived. What conclusions can we draw from this fact?
Setting TNG 80 years after TOS was a natural choice. Roddenberry and Berman wanted TNG to have the same premise as the original show but to also stand apart and succeed on its own. In the early years of TNG they were allergic to TOS callbacks. McCoy’s cameo in the pilot is the exception that proves the rule: his old man makeup made clear to fans that TNG was so far in the future that there would be no crossovers with familiar characters, and even if there were they would be virtually unrecognizable from the characters we knew and loved.
This Leap was also a no-brainer from a production design point of view. Twenty years had passed since TOS was designed, and now Roddenberry had more advanced technology and more budget to play with than he could have dreamed of in the 60s. So the 1701-D became bigger and sleeker; the trifecta of Starfleet tech–phasers, communicators and tricorders–became smaller and more user friendly. Everything was recognizable within the Trek aesthetic TOS had established, but all of it was updated in a believable way.
Fast forward to 2006. With Star Trek: Federation, the writers wanted to explore themes around what happens when an advanced society succumbs to decadence. In their premise, the Federation has become complacent and corrupt; member worlds are breaking off and other species like the Ferengi are on the rise. According to one of the head writers, Geoffrey Thorne: “Utopia has occurred and everything has stagnated’ [….] I pictured a Federation that had hit its plateau and stayed there for three hundred years.” A new Enterprise is commissioned “to return the Federation to its goal of going boldly.” Setting their Trek show in the year 3000 just 6 years after Y2K, the writers were making clear that their declining Federation was an allegory for the United States.
Perhaps it was the writers’ commitment to these themes that made them less afraid of the Blank Page than other Trek writers. According to Memory Alpha, “Thorne’s series pitch document was twenty-five pages in length, detailing the era of the show, the eight primary characters, and outlines of the first four episodes [and] the Enterprise‘s new technology.”
It is reasonable for fans who long for post-Nemesis Trek to look to these two examples–TNG and Federation–and protest, “What’s so hard? These writers figured out how to do it, why can’t others?” This is a fair point. Just because most Trek writers choose not to Leap does not mean it is impossible. But the fact remains: most Trek writers stick with the familiar.
Trump’s political power is still a mysterious force to many, and so it gets inflated in the partisan imagination. Liberals think it’s horrifying that half the country loves Trump and will follow him wherever he leads (only 26% strongly approve of the job Trump is doing). Trump supporters think it’s too bad that half the country hates him (only 41% strongly disapprove of Trump), but they probably do not think too much about his unpopularity and the reasons for it.
Because the laws of political gravity did not seem to apply to Trump in 2016, there is a tendency to reject the voices that say they will apply to him in 2018. The presidential job approval number is a measure of political gravity, and by now we can draw some conclusions. I wanted to understand and quantify why Trump’s approval declines when it does. If you are a Trump critic, consuming a news and internet diet where everything Trump does gets dialed to 100 on the Rage’o’Meter, it’s useful to know what presidential actions and issues actually register disapproval among the broader public. If you are a Trump supporter, it’s good to know what doesn’t work politically so your preferred candidates can shape a strategy that will continue to win arguments and elections.
What follows is how I measured and quantified the periods of Trump’s presidency where he lost public support for the job he is doing.
| Week 54 | 40.20% | 1.40% | |
| Week 55 | 40.80% | 0.60% | |
| Week 56 | 41.40% | 0.60% | |
| Week 57 | 40.00% | -1.40% | |
| Week 58 | 40.40% | 0.40% | |
| Week 59 | 40.70% | 0.30% | |
| Week 60 | 40.20% | -0.50% | -1.20% |
The question to ask is what happened in the country between weeks 56 and 60 that accounts for the decline? But before we get to that, we have to ask another question: how bad is a 1.20% drop?
| Approval Decline: | Rank: | Approval Range: | Rank: |
| 0.70-1.39% | 1 | 43.0-44.80% | 1 |
| 1.40-2.09% | 2 | 41.30-42.99% | 2 |
| 2.10-2.79% | 3 | 39.55-41.29% | 3 |
| 2.80-3.49% | 4 | 37.80-39.54% | 4 |
| 3.50-4.20% | 5 | 36.0-37.79% | 5 |
Lowest Approval: 36.90%
Key Events:
Lowest Approval: 41.60%
Key Events:
On Monday night, Trump nominated Bret Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
This despite the fact that McConnell had quietly urged the White House against picking him because his extensive paper trail may make confirmation more difficult.
At the NATO summit Trump attacked NATO and Germany in particular; he also suggested that NATO countries should increase their contribution from 2% to 4%.
Trump went from the NATO summit to visit England. He gave an interview in the Sun tabloid where he criticized May for her handling of Brexit, that he told her how to handle it but that she did not follow his advice. This after Boris Johnson resigned on Monday over disagreements about a “soft” Brexit policy May is perusing.
Child Separation
As of July 12, Department of Homeland Security says they have 103 children under five who have been separated; 57 have been reunited; 46 have not been reunited; 12 cannot be reunited because the adults have already been deported; 1 cannot be reunited because the parent cannot be found.
Russia Investigation
The White House ordered the FBI to release classified information about the informant the FBI used to contact members of the Trump campaign, Stefan Halper, to all members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Many intelligence officials including Wray and Coates opposed the expansion of access.
On Thursday Peter Strozk testified before the House Intelligence Committee. He gave a robust defense of FBI protocols and integrity, and explained in detail how and why it would have been impossible for his or anyone’s personal political views to shape the Clinton or Trump-Russia investigations: “At every step, at every investigative decision, there were multiple layers of people above me, assistant director, deputy director, director of the F.B.I., and multiple layers of people below me, section chiefs, unit chiefs and analysts, all of whom were involved in all of these decisions. They would not tolerate any improper behavior in me any more than I would tolerate it in them.” The hearing devolved into a circus when several members of the conservative caucus over-reached in their attacks.
On Friday morning Rosenstein announced the next set of indictments in the Mueller investigation. It names 12 Russian GRU officers responsible for stealing Democratic documents through hacking. Read the indictment here. In contains vast amounts of forensic detail, which Mark Warner said was mostly new information to him and the Senate intelligence committee. This suggests that the Mueller investigation is the only one with the capabilities to provide a complete summary of what happened in 2016.
This was seen as a major step forward in the investigation, one that brings the walls in closer around Trump. By making the legal case that a major theft happened, it sets up the potential next round of incidents of Americans citizens (and Trump campaign officials) who used those stollen goods.
Jonathan Chait writes another one of these Trump-Russia recaps wherein he connects certain dots to remind us that there may be a much wider conspiracy here, dating back to the late 1980s. The most vivid detail is the reminder of the pinging off a server between Trump Tower and Russian Alpha bank, which was reported on during the summer of 2016. Will it turn out to be verifiable collusion? Only time–and Mueller–will tell.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42%
Trump rescinded seven guidelines for how colleges should apply affirmative action in college applications. These do not have the force of law but are a statement of the official views of the government.
The Washington Post published an analysis of immigration visas that allow people abroad to move permanently to the United States with the intention of obtaining citizenship: -“The number of people receiving visas to move permanently to the United States is on pace to drop 12 percent in President Trump’s first two years in office” -Visas from Muslim-Majority countires have decreased 29% -Family migration applicants are “facing arbitrary questions that are really difficult for them to answer, and then they’re getting denials for things that attorneys have never seen before,-Refugee arricals set to fall 75% from 2016 levels.
The New York Times declared: “A trade war between the world’s two largest economies officially began on Friday morning as the Trump administration followed through with its threat to impose tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese products, a significant escalation of a fight that could hurt companies and consumers in both the United States and China.”
Scott Pruitt resigned after mounting evidence of corrupt practices.
On Saturday Pompeo met with officials in North Korea to advance the negotiations that began with Trump’s summit. It did not go well. He was seeking a declared list of weapons and nuclear sites, and a timetable for denuclearization. Kim did not meet with him, and the official statement afterward accused him of “gangster-like” demands.
Family Separation
On Friday the Trump Administration asked for more time to reunite immigrant families before the judges deadline. The judge did not give an extension but “he gave the government until Saturday evening to come up with a list naming all 101 of the youngest children, along with an explanation of why it would be impossible to promptly restore them to a parent”
Russia Investigation
Trump’s lawyers are placing greater preconditions to a Mueller interview, namely: “that he has evidence that Mr. Trump committed a crime and that his testimony is essential to completing the investigation.”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.2%
The Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban from mostly Muslim countries. It was a 5-4 decision with all of the conservatives siding with Trump. John Roberts wrote that the presidency has vast powers to control immigration, and that a president’s words on the subject could not be used to affect a legal decision that would bind future presidents, meaning Trump’s anti-Muslim statements could not invalidate the travel ban.
On page 29 of the opinion Roberts quotes several presidents who made statements about religious tolerance, especially toward Muslims. Roberts then writes: “Yet in cannot be denied that the Federal Government and the Presidents who have carried its laws into effect–from the Nation’s earliest days–performed unevenly in living up to those inspiring words.”
Justice Kennedy announced his retirement on Wednesday. Within hours people from the left and the right were predicting that the new court will overturn Roe v. Wade.
Child-Separation
As of this week the Department of Health and Human Services is holding 2,047 separated children, six fewer than last week.
The Justice System wheeled into action on Tuesday: “A federal judge in California issued a nationwide injunction late Tuesday temporarily stopping the Trump administration from separating children from their parents at the border and ordered that all families already separated be reunited within 30 days.”
Customs and Border Protection announced that they would end zero-tolerance policy for adults with children, meaning they will be released pending their hearing. Officials say this is only temporary.
Here is Vox’s Dara Lind on how the travel ban became normalized. The first two versions of the ban were struck down in lower courts, and only the third version was upheld: “The current version is as close to court-proof as a policy signed by the man who once called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” could possibly get. While that means it’s likely to stay in place, it also represents a victory for the ban’s opponents. The courts (perhaps inspired by the resistance in the streets) forced the administration to keep its ambitions within the scope of what was legally permissible, and the administration complied. The system worked.”
Children as young as three years old are having to go without their parents into their own asylum/deportation hearings.
Sessions is drafting a regulation that will make it much harder to request asylum.
In what may a sign of things to come, Harley-Davidson says it is moving some jobs and production oversees to avoid Trump’s tariffs.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.80%
The dam of news reporting on what is going on on the Mexico boarder seemed to break on Sunday. The New York Times provides its first timeline of the family separation policy, with context from the Bush and Obama administrations. John Kelly floated the idea in March 2017 but it was dropped as too controversial. Under him the Department of Homeland Security “quietly tested the approach last summer in certain ares of Texas.”
Laura Bush wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post attaching the policy in strong terms: “These images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.”
There was also audio recordings of children crying in detention centers.
Trump and his Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielson both made public comments on Monday to defend the family separation program. Congress is beginning to make noises about doing something.
Sessions said on Monday: “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”
By Wednesday, with political pressure mounting, Trump tried to reverse course. Trump signed an Executive Order that he claimed would end family separation at the boarder. What it really means is that families will be detained together, which is against the law after 20 days due to the Flores ruling. No telling what will happen at that point. Also, the order does nothing to reunite the 2000+ families already separated.
While there seems to be indications that families were no longer being separated, the question turned to how families already separated would be reunited.
While all of this was going down, there was much illuminating reporting on exactly what is happening on the boarder. We had the chance to learn this week about the history of the previous Central American immigration surge in 2014. Faced with this problem, and the fear that a larger surge would follow, the Obama administration tried to detain families together, which ran afoul of the Flores ruling. Trump is now facing a much smaller surge, but it is more than last summer, which was historically low.
Here is a good summary of facts about illegal crossings:
Some journalists (black ones, mostly) pointed out that race is a major factor in the family separation policy. Perry Bacon Jr. at 538 pointing out that 14% of Americans are now foreign born, which is a historical high: “According to Gallup, most Republicans want the number of immigrants to go down, while Democrats are both less concerned about immigration overall and increasingly opposed to reducing the number of immigrants.”
And Jamelle Bouie retweeted his article from February 6, 2017, which reads like reverse science-fiction, since is so clearly perceives what Trump is doing in June of 2018 with an article titled “Government by White Nationalism is Upon Us” written a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration.
Stephen Miller gets a lot of attention in these race-related articles, probably because he is most honest about what he believes. He said to the New York Times that the family separation policy was good politics for Trump: “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border. And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border.”
In non-boarder news, It was reported that Commerce Secretary Wilber Ross used insider knowledge to short stock, which may be a legal issue for him down the road.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%