It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #1

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

In this new weekly series, the gang get together to speed run the first two weeks of Trump’s second term, his deluge of executive orders, and what they mean on the ground.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. We decided every week we were going to do an episode called Executive Disorders White House Weekly, where we report the news. And today we are going to start that episode. We have the entire full-time team here. We have Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, James Doubt, and I am the voice in your ear, Sophie Lichterman. Yeah, and you should know we'll be making a number of references to a show you haven't watched called The Newsroom. So many references. Just pretend we didn't.

Anyways, let's do the episode now. Go. Yeah, so this episode is also going to be a little bit different because the idea is to cover each week of stuff that's happening vis-a-vis the White House. And it's been two weeks since inauguration day. And we are recording usually on Wednesday so there'll be you know a day or two there that we will record the week after but we have a whole bunch of stuff today because we are covering essentially two weeks. I'll start with some of the transgender executive orders that happened last week. There was an order defining two sexes assigned at

conception which made plenty of biologists scratch their heads. A lot of this is just going to impact the ability to change your gender marker on federal documents for the next four years, you know, passports, and also removing the the X gender marker from federal documents. There's also a new directive that pride flags are not to be flown on federal buildings. Also a separate one I don't think we have included here in the research doc, but how brutalist and modernist architecture is now not allowed to be used on new federal buildings. You have to use Greek or Roman inspired architecture because they project power.

So all of those like Greek avatar statue Twitter accounts have a complete cultural victory now Great. I am going to Agitate to replace the Oregon State Capitol with just a statue of a Roman orgy, you know We don't even need place for the legislators. Just look at the statue and you'll know what to do This actually is like bad, you know, very 1930s, you know. Yeah, famously no other regimes have harkened back to the classical era. Well, and specifically is like, calling like, you know, modern architecture, brutalist architecture as, you know, as like weak or bad or things that get restricted.

Yeah. On a more somber note, part of this two sex that conception thing also means that a whole bunch of trans women are now being sent to immense prisons. And like a lot of this stuff is stuff that we knew was going to happen and it did happen quite immediately. Yeah. And this is this is just the start, I guess we'll throw over to Mia for some more executive action done on the woke gender ideology angle. done on the woke gender ideology angle. Yeah, but by the time we're finished recording this, there might be another anti-trans executive order.

We'll get to that again. But the big ones for right now is that Trump is trying to do a... And this is something we talked about in our last episode about what it's going to look like for trans people, but a federal funding ban for trans health care, which means for youth trans health care, which means any provider that like gets federal funding. And this includes things like taking Medicare and Medicaid, right?

Those hospitals can't do any kind of gender affirming care for youth. Part of what's sort of terrifying, I mean, there's a lot of terrible stuff about this, but they've defined a kid as age 19. Or under the age of 19.. Or under the age of 19. Yeah, under the age of 19. Yeah. Obviously, like that gives, you know, worries for stuff that we've been talking about for years for how they might try to start bumping up the age for these for

these HRT bands. Yep. Yep. This also could be them not really realizing what they're doing to some extent, because this could also just be copying, I believe, in Alabama or in Arkansas ban. And that was like the highest age used in any of these like state health care bans. They could just be copying that over because it is the highest one. And like, I'm not sure how much they've like thought about, you know, their capacity to start like, you know, arbitrarily raising that number.

I mean, part of what I think is happening, and I think this because this was definitely at play in the Alabama ban is this is in addition to being an attack on trans people, part of what I think is happening and I think this because this was definitely at play in the Alabama ban is This is in addition to being an attack on trans people part of a broader Set of messaging towards the parents rights movement. Yeah, which very much does not consider 18 year olds to be adults Totally totally. Yeah And and and on that note one of the things they're trying to do is target states that have like Transanctuary laws by trying to like get parents who had take their kids to save states like charged on kidnapping charges.

And it's worth noting supposedly later today there's going to be one about using the attorney general's office to work with attorney generals in states who prosecute teachers to use gender affirming pronouns as like sexual abusers. And I want to point out like these executive orders specifically, like the second raft of them that I've been talking about, like these are all unbelievably illegal. Right? Yeah. Like these are probably not going to get implemented immediately because there's immediately going to go to the courts. Like the Supreme Court will probably give them some of it.

But like you can't just like declare something a crime and have the attorney general prosecute people for it. Like that specific thing is genuinely so ridiculous that it might not survive this room court. It's nonsense. But things that are nonsense, and this is something you genuinely can do that's very dangerous is he's trying to get this is from her Aaron Reed. He's a trans journalist does pretty good work on this stuff. The federal government has been instructed to not follow W path guidelines or W path is this sort of organization that sets the guidelines for like trans health care. And this, we don't know

what this is going to do, there is a chance that this could endanger private like health care covering it because they follow the government using W path. So that's extremely, extremely bad. But again, and this is going to be a running theme in the next section of this A lot of this is stuff that he should need Congress for and he's just trying to do it Because he thinks that he can and he doesn't give a shit Well, and it's just signaling to the base even if it gets stopped. Yeah, like he's I think yeah

I don't think he cares if Decent chunks of it gets stopped. He tried to do the thing. Yeah, I agree with Robin Yeah, he can now shift the blame to someone else. Look man. I did the executive order Which honestly is what Biden should have done on some stuff, right? Fuck it. Yeah, make the statement, you know, yeah Yeah, so speaking of fuck it. Let's get into this whole this whole freezing the entire federal government thing Um, we're gonna do a more detailed episode about this next week But maybe the most unhinged thing that he's done so far is in the birthright stuff federal government thing. We're gonna do a more detailed episode about this next week, but maybe the most unhinged thing that he's done so far

is in the birthright stuff. He did an executive order that's telling everyone they can't fund DEI. Early this week, the US Office of Personnel Management sent out this memo to everyone, telling them that all grant programs are frozen until they submit a description of like what the grant program is and why it's not DEI. And so like things that were like fucked by this,

right? I have a few of these programs that they were the grants they were shutting down here. The Nicholas and Zachary Burt Memorial carbon monoxide poisoning program. Whoa! The National School Lunch program, Special milk program for children, the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, the DOD's basic and applied scientific research grants. DEI, DEI. Yeah, it's even got a D right in there.

That's right. Yeah, and like one of these, and this is a very serious one, at least for these people holding onto power was the National Guard's military operation and maintenance. Famously low. Which, it's like eight billion dollars of money to the National Guard. Hey, critical support, he got one thing right. The way that you can tell that none of these people, and the thing this is a sign of, is that none of these people have any idea what's going on inside of the state.

They don't understand what it is, they don't understand what it does. And I can prove this for a fact, because one of the programs that they froze was a program that gives money to police to do patrols outside of a nuclear weapons assembly plant. E-O-E-E. They defunded the nuke police. Check the signal loop, gang. I think I got a plan based on that. Right, like- Like check the signal loop gang. I think I got a plan based on that

We're gonna become the first nuclear armed podcasting network So I think people have this conception that like, you know, they're operating according to a plan These are all sort of strategic like strokes and master strokes and like no they're just they're just lashing out, right? They're driven by pure anger and they're trying to do this purge of the government of anything woke or whatever like anything that's like vaguely involves nonwhite people or just like anyone who's not a cis white dude. They're trying to get rid of. Yeah. And this memo was immediately challenged in court because it's also this is also hideously illegal.

The president doesn't control the purse strings. That's like, you know, in the Constitution, it says that Congress controls this. So where we're at now is that the memo has been withdrawn. But there's a there's a bunch of really conflicting information where like Trump spokespeople are saying that they're still going to go through with the executive orders. They're probably going to try to rewrite it. They might make it more targeted against, you know, woke, whatever that means.

Yeah, it may not be as like broad as this as this initial memo, but they're certainly going to try again. But the problem that they have is that there are literally so many of these grants. And the reason they did it this way in the first place was because they just they just they found a list of grants that copied all of them. And they were like, OK, departments, you have to go figure this out, and we're freezing your stuff until you do that. Even Medicaid was frozen for a few hours yesterday.

Yeah. Right. Like, they effectively nuked most of the capacity of the federal government. And it's going to take a lot of effort for them to sort through which of these things they could afford to turn off so that they don't end up, like, turning off the nuke police. Right. Critical support to abolishing the nuclear security team. Yeah. They did what Biden couldn't do.

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All right, we are back. I guess I will turn it over to our immigration and border correspondent, James Dowd. That's me. Yes, please report the news. I'm ready to report the news. I have never been more ready. Okay, this is going to be a long run because there was a raft of executive orders about the border in the... A flurry.

A flurry, yeah. It's the only word we're allowed to use. Okay. A flurry. Okay, we can't use a murder like crows, you know, the collective noun for crows. I mean, this is going to result in a murder. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it will.

So let's start with a couple of the big ones, right? The first one was essentially revoking the right to asylum to anyone, quote, engaged in the invasion across the southern border, end quote. I want to highlight this invasion language, because obviously, like, I'd venture to say I've spent more time at the southern border of the United States than anyone in the executive branch and most people reporting on it too.

The idea of innovation is laughable. I've been at the border twice since Trump was inaugurated. It's extremely quiet. I've never seen things more quiet. The only remarkable thing I saw was a pig, a Vietnamese potbellied pig, which some people have released, which now lives there. But I think it's being rehomed because of some other stuff that we will talk about later. But this invasion language is important because it's used as a justification for some of the things that the executive branch is doing, which

would otherwise seem to be outside of its authority. It's getting the national security and counterterrorism treatment. And anyone who's followed US politics for the last 20 years will understand that that means an effective waiver for all of your constitutional rights. And migrants have always been people who don't have rights. And this is just something that we're now seeing further pushed. So let's go through some of these orders aside from the effective asylum ban. He directed the United States Northern Command to, quote unquote, seal the border. This has resulted in a deployment of about 1600 United States troops.

Most of them are military police or engineers. We've got Marines and we've got army and San Diego sector. It's it's first Marines out of Pendleton. They're the ones that I've seen locally. He has directed various government departments and the attorney general to begin, quote, identifying countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries. This is effectively the travel ban that we saw in the first Trump administration or version of that, right? the first Trump administration or a version of that, right? It's a visa revocation or travel ban for people from certain countries. And we can guess what those countries will be at last time.

They were, they were for the most part majority Muslim countries, right? And we might well see that again. They have attempted to rescind birthright citizenship for children of undocumented families. Right? This is one, if people go back to our, like, what can Trump do for mass deportations podcast that Robert, Sophie and I did sometime in November, I think, you'll get more information there on like, what is and what is not possible than we have time to go into today. But you're seeing a lot of the

things that we talked about there coming into reality now, I guess, specifically the attempt to rescind birthright citizenship relies on the idea that they are not quote unquote under the jurisdiction thereof of the United States, which is how the 14th Amendment is phrased. Generally, it is understood that people who are not considered to be under the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore don't get citizenship when they're born here are the children of diplomats, because they have some diplomatic immunity, right? So they're not necessarily governed by United States laws in all areas. And that is why children of diplomats don't get citizenship even when they're born here. The Trump administration is arguing this applies to children of undocumented

people as well. There are five court cases challenging that already. So they've got an uphill battle in the courts there. He has attempted to restart the migrant protection protocol, MPP, better known as remain in Mexico, right? The migrant protection protocol requires migrants to wait in Mexico, where their immigration cases are processed. In practice, it puts them in a lot of danger, right? Some of them are fleeing Mexico. Others are fleeing group sort of states that can reach them in Mexico.

So it leaves them in an unsafe place. The other thing he did while Trump was still in the inaugural ceremonies, like literally minutes after taking office was canceling CBP-1. CBP-1, there is a lot of misinformation about what CBP-1 is. CBP-1 is an application that allowed migrants to make an appointment and they had to be either in southern border states of Mexico or north of Mexico City. They could then make an appointment to approach a United States port of entry, those are the places where you can enter across the land border

and make their case for their asylum, right? Do their first asylum interview. Like this is like following the law, like this is like the process. Yeah, making a CBP one appointment is quote unquote the right way. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have a legal right to enter between ports of entry and still make an asylum claim, which is what we saw in the outdoor detention situation. Right. But but doing it via CBP one is like the belt embraces correct way to do it. People who had appointments at noon Pacific on the day Trump was inaugurated saw those appointments canceled. They can saw those appointments canceled.

They can't make appointments anymore. CBP one is gone. Those people who've waited an average of nine months in dangerous places have wasted their time. They now don't have a pathway to asylum in this country. If you go back to my episodes on the Dadian gap, you will hear some of those people, right? Those people are now stuck in Mexico without really any legal means to enter the United States and claim asylum.

Trump has directed ICE to increase detention capacity. We spoke about this in our previous podcast. The amount of detention beds they would need to hit the 13 million deportations they talked about is immense. But one of the things they are doing is starting to house people. It's people whose countries won't accept them for deportation, right, which is a thing that has happened.

The United States has begun using military aircrafts for deportations in the last two weeks. I want to stress that this isn't a capacity issue. Biden deported 8,000 people in a month in the September to October of 2021. Trump is aiming to hit 8,000 people in a month in the September to October of 2021. Trump is aiming to hit 5,000. Biden did it all with contractor flights. Trump is doing a lower number and using air force flights.

This is not because he can't get the contractors. It's purely an aesthetic choice. And it's an aesthetic choice, which has ruffled enough feathers in South and Central America that you have Honduras saying that they're going to revoke the US mission to have a military base in Honduras as they mistreat migrants. We had Colombia briefly refusing US military flights with deportees, Mexico doing the same. Briefly entering a trade war with Colombia. Yeah. Which lasted about two hours. The one hour trade war, about the same length as the civil war in Western Yugoslavia. The trade war with Colombia was averted when Colombia sent its own military plane to get

these deputies. Yeah, Colombia caved immediately. Yeah, they will continue to accept US deputies as they have done for a long time. Again, if you listen to my Darien series, you'll hear of some Colombian people being deported. We're now getting into things that are like more, these are orders that we haven't seen realized yet. One of them is he has talked about having the attorney general remove as far as possible federal funding from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, right?

These are normally places where local law enforcement would cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. ICE makes a majority of its detentions from people who are already detained. People who are like arrested by police. Yes, exactly. Yeah, for whatever. Then those police notify ICE and ICE come get them. We've seen a lot more of door to door ice raids in the last two weeks and they've been ramping up even really this week but ever since Trump was inaugurated. We've seen ice attempting to enter people's homes, often they just have a warrant issued by

themselves rather than a judicial warrant so we've seen people refusing to let them into their homes. We've also seen the removal of the quote unquote sensitive places doctrine. Yeah. Sensitive places had previously been understood to be schools, churches and hospitals. Now ICE is conducting quote unquote enforcement operations in those places. Those are actually places that like the sensitive places doctrine have been in place for a long time. This wasn't like a Biden thing. This was a, this had been a long-term thing. So ICE is now, and we've seen immigration actions conducted at a church in Atlanta.

For instance, we've seen, I think there were actually secret service agents who identified themselves as ICE agents at a school in Chicago because a child had posted an anti-Trump video. And then I guess the last thing that we are seeing is this designation of organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations. This is an interesting one. We haven't really seen any action on this yet, but it's one of his executive orders in day one.

In his first administration, he designated Iran's Quds Force as a foreign terrorist organization, and then proceeded to kill that leader. So this FTO designation opens up the possibility of a lot of covert activity. I'm talking CIA and tier one special forces units. It also allows him to bring about economic sanctions on anyone materially supporting these organized crime organizations. In practice, that would encompass huge swaths of the Mexican economy, right? Because there are people in agriculture, people in business who are paying protection or they're being extorted to pay money, right? And so in theory, those people are now materially benefiting a terrorist organization and they could be sanctioned as well. We will have to see how this plays out, I guess. And

there's still the directive was to look into and then name these groups. Well, and this is something that Hegseth has previously been in favor of and he has now been confirmed. Yes, yeah, Hegseth has talked about using special forces in Mexico. Oh yes, and this was Agenda 47 stuff. They've been talking about this for a while. Yeah, yeah, it's also in our Agenda 47 episodes, if you want to go back there.

Direct action raids in Mexico, drone warfare in Mexico. Obviously, doing this without the permission of the Mexican government would be an act of war, right? Like killing foreign nationals without the permission of their government, conducting direct action raids, bombing another country. That is an act of war. The US has had an FID, Foreign Internal Defense Mission, right? Where it trains, advises and assists Mexican law enforcement and military for a long time. The guys who arrested El Chapo,

for instance, were trained, I think, by Marsoc, but this has been happening for a long time. But to go from that to unsanctioned direct action would be a huge, a huge step up. The only really analogous, directly analogous thing I can think of is Clinton with the Plan Colombia, designating FARC as a foreign terrorist organization. But that was very much with the cooperation and support of the Colombian government. We're seeing a much more adversarial relationship between the United States and Mexico right now. The last thing I want to mention is this deployment and spoken about it, but there are about 1600 troops deployed right now. Biden deployed 1500 troops in the summer of 2023. This is not a vastly different number, but they are doing different things. They seem to be chucking razor wire on top of the wall and being photographed

at their two major jobs at the moment. We will see how that plays out. Also with reference to a military, Trump immediately canceled the refugee resettlement program. This left people all over the world stranded, including Afghans, many of whom worked for the United States or family members of US service people. The refugee resettlement program, people don't come to the southern border, they go do all their background things and then fly into the United States, it's a different status to entering a claiming asylum. Those people, many of whom had booked flights, found their flights were cancelled. They're now stranded, lots of them are stranded in Pakistan and

facing immigration enforcement there in the case of the Afghans. So yeah, that is a speed run of all the terrible Trump immigration executive orders. We'll be reporting on this pretty extensively, so you can keep coming back for more. But another thing that we have more of right now is advertisements. Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more.

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I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips. It's about never feeling good enough. I feel like I'm always failing. You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose. We make it this big pie-in-the-sky thing, and then of course we're all frustrated because no one knows how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose. We make it this big pie in the sky thing, and then of course we're all frustrated

because no one knows how to get there. Struggling with tough emotions, we have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too. The ability to approach somebody and make them experience desire for you in minutes or even hours is a rare and rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking.

The Happiness Lab's how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. I have a few other notes I want to add for the woke front that I'm reporting on right now. I think there's been a lot of conflation between you know, like DEI and like what we would consider like affirmative action. DEI refers to like these specific like corporate training policies and diversity initiatives, which is, you know, separate from long standing affirmative action policies, which has been used both in the corporate world and in like the government for decades at this point. And what a whole bunch of this DEI rollback type stuff is essentially doing

is just openly discriminating against people who are not like straight white men. It's like, if you are a straight white man, we cannot hire you because that would mean we are doing DEI. And like this is what a lot of the stuff that we're seeing kind of looks like. There was a mass email to federal agencies about DEI and calls to report DEI policies in their department if they're going by like other names. Right. So that would be stuff like affirmative action. Right. If there's anything that that is about, you know, trying to trying to increase the diversity in your workforce or any quote unquote woke topics, including, you know, trying to increase the diversity in your workforce or any quote-unquote woke topics,

including gender ideology, anything that seems vaguely woke, you're supposed to now report to make sure that gets removed because that's not part of the new federal government. I believe someone from the NSA did leave a tip on that email line reporting DEI masquerading as another name. Similar to this, there was a memo or an email that was leaked to Ken Clippenstein from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which basically said that they're not going to be observing any woke holidays, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Black History Month, Women's History Month, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth, Women's Equality Day, National

Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month, with a small asterisk saying that the pause on observing these will not affect the federal holidays, which would be MLK and Juneteenth. Although, who knows, they might try to even remove some of those as being federal holidays, which would be MLK and Juneteenth. Although who knows, they might try to even remove some of those as being federal holidays. I did wonder that, like, at some point, you're going to lose people when you take away their days off work. That's right. Right. So like, I think they might leave those like actual federal holidays in, but you're not allowed to observe any of these other awareness months or, you know,

Pride Month, Black History Month, like you're not allowed to acknowledge that at all in these federal agencies now, at least for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Support for most of Trump's executive orders does fluctuate. According to a poll from Reuters, the support for closing all DEI offices is actually pretty split. 51% oppose the closing of these offices, according to their poll, 44% are in favor. And it's very segmented, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America, pretty disliked with 70% being in opposition.

Look, the one thing people hate most is changing names. Having the names be changed. Yeah. Nobody likes that. Yeah, yeah. He did Denali as well, right? Yeah. I guess that was changed more recently.

But the Gulf of Mexico has been the Gulf of Mexico for longer than America has existed as a country. The United States, right? I mean, Denali has been Denali for longer than America has existed. It's just... Right, right, right. But there was a period where we called it McKinley.

No one's ever called it the Gulf of America. Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying the Denali thing is right. I'm just saying like that's a much harder sell. Yes, yeah, yeah. You're not going to get much buy-in on that. Yeah. Pardoning J6 protesters, new tariffs or taxes on Canadian goods and ending birthright citizenship are

all around 60-30, 60 opposed, 30% in favor. Trump during his first week did see a record high approval rating that has slowly, I think, gone down. But I don't know, it's hard to gauge the level of like general enthusiasm for his actions right now. And there's, I think, part of the general strategy that we're seeing is there's just so much happening every single day that you can't even keep track of it all, let alone internalize it. He is trying to sign as many of these orders every day so that both

the courts, all of these NGOs, advocacy groups are always working and we're never sure what is real, right? We're never sure what's going to stick around. All of these memos about funding and grants. It's just so exhausting and that's like part of the design is that this just feels like a constant stream of nonsense that we maybe have to deal with, maybe we won't. One of the more odd things is Trump openly embracing manifest destiny language, which I guess isn't actually odd. That actually makes sense. It's just one of those things that it feels very Rubicon-esque.

But he does have this new distinct focus on territorial expansion. During his inaugural address, he praised, quote unquote, our American ancestors for having, quote, won the Wild West. Now, apparently, the call about Greenland to Denmark did not go very well. Denmark did not realize how serious Trump was, and was apparently quite angry during that phone call. And, you know, seemingly upset that Denmark is not going to easily hand over Greenland, he seems to be pivoting more towards retaking Panama.

Yeah. Which is something that he also mentioned in his inaugural address. he seems to be pivoting more towards retaking Panama. Yeah. Which is something that he also mentioned in his inaugural address. Let me tell you, Panamanians, not stoked. I've been receiving communications from Panama where I was in September. They are burning American flags. The quote from the inaugural address is, The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation,

one that increases our wealth and carries our flag into new beautiful horizons and we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars. Wow. Yeah. I don't know. What do you have to say? That's not a good thing. I think that's bad. Like obviously that's, you know, not great, not ideal, you know, invading Panama, not ideal, going to war with Greenland slightly more funny because it's cold. I think specifically he's focused on like why he believes the US has a vested interest in Greenland.

Isn't just picking out a spot on the map. I think this also could be like related to trying to prepare for climate change. Having territory in the Arctic is going to become an increasingly valuable commodity to have. And I think there is a part of this that could be legitimately on that side, because I mean, I don't know, maybe Trump should just get really into Alaska. Well he did deregulate drilling in Alaska. Drill baby drill. I will be up there later this year talking to people in Alaska about drill baby drill. Very excited for that. But I don't know, I think it's also generally not super useful to make huge generalizing statements about what this type of stuff Trump is doing right now and how it will reflect

on his entire presidency. People have been doing this kind of about Trump's flip flopping opinions on TikTok, you know, being very into like, you know, saving TikTok and then then calling it worthless. But then going back to actually making sure that Microsoft buys it or something. And, you know, people are very easy or quick to like jump onto these sorts of things. Trump's flip-flopping tendencies, maybe not sinking every single easy bucket and acting like these would be emblematic of his entire presidency. And like, that's not the case. That does not actually mean that.

Trump just says things. Even though he's going to call TikTok worthless does not mean that he's going to not do that easy layup. We're all aware of how much he just says what is on his mind. Yep. And I think these sorts of things do not necessarily mean that he's going to like plummet to being the most unpopular president ever because he, you know, refuses to use the right messaging around TikTok or something. The other economic situations he might walk us into would be much more affecting to his general popularity.

Yeah. Yeah. He's doing, again, I talk about this a lot, why fascists succeed is that they try. They're constantly reaching for stuff and oftentimes they overreach but nobody pushes back so they get the thing right that's what he's doing here. Do I think that he's willing at this point to commit to a full scale military invasion and armed occupation of Panama a thing that could be a real problem for his presidency right like US troops dying in meaningful numbers

in attacks in a country that we had no fucking beef with before, that could be a real fucking problem for a guy who ran on the things that he ran on. But maybe he gets a bunch of concessions for nothing. It's the same thing with Greenland. You make the push, you try to scare Denmark, you try to scare Greenland,

and you see if they'll accept something, and then you walk away maybe with a coup, and you do it fucking widely enough, you might get something, right? Like that's it. He's always testing his limits. Because that's what they do. I mean, look at Columbia, right?

He immediately went to like 11 on the retaliation scale and effectively received concessions. Yeah. So I think, you know, similar to how, you know, it was annoying in the first, like, resist lib era to take every single crazy statement Trump says seriously or, you know, do this performative outrage over every single thing he does, I think it's also useless to do fast, mimetic reactions that form generalizing statements about, you know, how something that Trump is doing is emblematic

for the rest of his term and how he's like doomed to failure. I think those statements are actually pretty useless. And at the very least are not helpful right now. Let's close by talking about Guantanamo. I guess Robert and James, I'll have you take this. So Trump has signed an executive order saying that they're going to create a facility capable of storing 30,000 migrants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

First, we should probably just talk about how realistic this is. If you ever looked at a topographical map of Guantanamo Bay, it's quite a large, like the, the U S concession in Cuba is a sizable degree of land, but it's not easy land to build things on. Right? Like it is, it's rugged terrain, you would say. So making a camp like this is almost certainly going to be extremely expensive and at least

under kind of the way things currently work, it will probably take a good amount of time to get set up. Like this is not a quick thing. This is not an overnight thing. And one thing I want to remind people of is that they have already have expanded a number of camps and facilities in the U.S. to deal with all the migrants they are taking in.

So this is not the start. If you want to call this, and I think it's fair to call this a plan to start a concentration camp system. That system began early. Yeah. And in fact, it started before Trump took office. A decent chunk of it was anticipating him coming into office.

But this is not the first camp, right? Yeah. And like Biden did significant legwork for detention that is cruel and unusual with his legal defense and his establishment of outdoor detention for migrants since the end of Title 42 in May of 23. And I think like we have to acknowledge that. I know people are very much into that, like don't criticize the Dems right now. Like if they don't change, if taking a fat L in what should have been one of the easiest elections of the century doesn't change them, then nothing will.

And like, we have to acknowledge that we are going to concentration camps quicker. I mean, there were foreign outlets that called the outdoor detention sites in Hacumba concentration camps, right? Because they sure as hell look like one. And they are. This is a big personal frustration to me. I'm seeing a ton of people going online and comparing this to the Nazi concentration camp here after referred to as the KZ system, right?

There's one post I came across on Twitter where a person who I'm not going to name just to not cause a bunch of bullshit for them, time from taking office to opening a mass detention camp. Mussolini, eight years. El Al Gheila and others, Libya. Hitler, 51 days. Dachau, Germany. Trump, nine days.

That's fucking horseshit. Yes, Dachau took longer to establish. Dachau was not the first concentration camp. The concentration camp system in Germany under the Nazis started as soon as the Nazis took power with a series of what were called wild concentration camps. And this was involved a huge number of people, largely political enemies of the regime, members of the opposition party being taken into custody, beaten, tortured, and stored in a series of airsats facilities.

200,000 people were taken into custody under the wild concentration camp system in 1933, the first year that Germans were in power. These are not comparable systems. That does not mean that I don't believe what Trump is doing is a concentration camp. It is a concentration camp made in the model of the American system. This is part of the American history of concentration camps, which goes back something like 200 years, right? I mean, we were one of the first countries to employ concentration camps.

The concentration camp as a concept began with what were called Reconcentrados in Cuba at the behest of a Spanish general fighting an insurgency. There were US officers embedded there, they came back and those tactics were adapted for our wars with Native American tribes on the frontiers and the plains. General Sherman was one of the very first Americans to carry out concentration camps and what we are seeing here is part of America's tradition with concentration camps. It is not part of the German tradition with concentration camps.

You're going to be mistaken about how this is going to proceed and what the dangers are. I do not think the dangers at this point are that we build a death factory capable of incinerating a million people in less than a year. That's not the threat. The threat is huge numbers of people are taken into custody and stored in places that are not safe, that do not have good hygiene, that do not have good food standards.

And a significant number of those people will die or suffer permanent physical injury, but it won't look like Auschwitz. And if that's what people are expecting, they'll be like, well, maybe this isn't that bad. Maybe this isn't a concentration camp after all. So it's important to get things right, both for that reason and because it's also disrespectful to the people who died

during the fucking Holocaust to be like, yeah, Trump's a lot worse than Hitler right now. Like, no, no, stop it. Yeah, like we have, you can trace a line from like Bosque Redondo, right? Where they sent the Navajo people. Right. The Basque Redondo is a great thing to bring out.

Yes. And you can trace a direct line from that to the outdoor detention camps we saw in 2023, where people were forced to remain in one place without food, water or shelter. And people died as a result of that last year, two years ago. And like from there to Guantanamo Bay, it is not a massive leap. And yeah, just being like we don't have Auschwitz, it's just asinine. Like if you can't acknowledge

that America has a long history of doing this, then you really need to examine your own preconceptions before like speaking for others. Yep. All right. Is that this episode for this week, everyone? I think that's the episode. I think we're done.

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