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Rebecca Gordon, A Litany of Horrors in the New Age of Trump

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All I can say is: thank heavens for Bernie Sanders. (If only he had been elected president instead of You Know Who!) Responding to Donald Trump’s recent decision to try to freeze trillions — yes, trillions! — of dollars in federal grants and loans, he said, “If President Trump wants to change our nation’s laws he has the right to ask Congress to change them. He does not have the right to violate the United States Constitution. He is not a king.”

No, indeed he’s not, but it seems that, until Sanders spoke up, no one had told him that and, the second time around in the White House, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today, he feels all too regal and has been acting accordingly. As a climate-change denier of the first order, he’s similarly moved to freeze the Department of Energy’s $50 billion budget, while preparing to cut out of it any funding that might be heading in a climate-friendly direction, part of an effort to halt any climate-positive policies instituted by the Biden administration.

And keep in mind, of course, that those acts, as New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall wrote recently, were just part of “a frenzied week of pardons, executive orders, threatening phone calls, and emergency declarations,” all of which also involved concentrating ever more power in — oh, yes, his hands (or perhaps His hands). And that’s just a start, of course. Where we’re going nobody really knows, not even Donald Trump. (Or do I mean, especially not Donald Trump?) But I can’t help thinking of that classic line attributed to King Louis XV of France: “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”).

Whether that deluge proves to be the Trump-aided overheating of the planet or who knows what else, the future is looking anything but cheery right now, as Rebecca Gordon makes so vividly clear today. Tom

King Donald

Or Facing the Rise of Fascism Like Fools for Freedom

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This past weekend my partner and I got together with a group of friends. We’ve been meeting every six weeks or so since 1982. Originally, this group of lesbians convened to talk about sex: what we were doing, what we wanted to do, what we fantasized about doing. But you know how it is with any relationship. Over time, it can come to embrace so many other things. That’s how it’s been with the group we call “Group” (or sometimes “A Closed Group with No Name”). We’ve seen each other through breakups, new lovers, job changes, housing worries, ailments, the deaths of lovers, caring for aging and dying parents, and now confronting our own age and the nearness of our mortality.

We’ve been together through an earthquake, several wars (Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the "Global War on Terror”), the advent of the Internet, and seven presidents. Now, we’re facing the return of the worst of those seven. The Group's latest meeting took place at the end of the first week of Donald Trump’s new term. So many disturbing things had happened in just seven days and none of us really wanted to talk about any of it.

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Todd Miller, Facing the Deportation Industry

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Yes, Donald Trump is distinctly focused on the border and immigration but, of course, he’s anything but focused on the issue that, more than any other in the years to come, will actually drive immigration. I’m thinking, of course, about climate change. Today, TomDispatch regular and border expert Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, considers a world in which our changing climate — the growing heat — is indeed driving people in Mexico toward the U.S. border.  Of course, if they make it, in a world where Donald Trump has already sent 1,500 more U.S. troops to the Mexican border to join the 2,200 already there — yes, Joe Biden sent troops to the border, too! — and is threatening to dispatch many thousands more, they may be in for a surprise.

After all, thanks to the phenomenon that Donald Trump wants to encourage in a significant fashion through his “drill, baby, drill” policies when it comes to oil and natural gas (not to speak of coal), Phoenix, Arizona, a desert city which is only getting drier and hotter by the year, has already experienced 154 rainless days as it heads for a new record, while this planet comes off yet another record-breaking year of global heat.

With that in mind, let border expert Miller remind you of how this country already put staggering amounts of money into border “security” during the “liberal” presidency of Joe Biden and so many presidents before him while building up a stunning — to use Miller’s term — “border-industrial complex.” Tom

The Mass Deportation Handoff, Biden to Trump

And the Booming Border-Industrial Complex

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It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.

As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.

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Helen Benedict, A New Future for Syrian Refugees?

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Significant parts of the Middle East are now in deepening chaos. In some sense (including Great Britain’s establishment with its Palestinian “mandate” of what became Israel), the Middle East was long one of the major European colonial regions on this planet, whether it was the British in the Persian Gulf, the French in Lebanon and Syria, or somewhat later the Soviet Union (and then Russia) in Iraq and Syria. And much of the region still seems to be in a state of ongoing disintegration in the wake of those colonial moments and the rise of Israel as a military power. Most recently, Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad fled his country for asylum in Moscow as his dictatorship collapsed (and perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Israel promptly moved from the Golan Heights into a neighboring part of Syria and, at least for the time being, took possession of it).

It still remains to be seen what a post-Assad Syria will actually look like, given that 6.7 million Syrians have been internally displaced in these years, while food prices have reportedly surged 800%. At this moment, the country remains in disintegrative chaos and the new Sunni Arab regime there, led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of a former militant extremist group (that did, in the end, break with ISIS and al-Qaeda), has been trying to bring it together.  Still, the collapse of a dictatorship is always a moment of hope and, with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Helen Benedict, author of Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, take you into the world of Syrian exiles and refugees scattered, among other places, across Europe, at a moment when everything is changing in a Middle East in ever greater chaos. Tom

“The Lion Has Fallen!”

The End of Syria’s Brutal Regime Brings Joy and Uncertainty to Refugees

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Six years ago, at the time of the first Trump administration's Muslim ban and its initial round of vicious anti-immigrant policies, I visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos to see how Europe was handling its own immigrants and refugees. Within a day, I met two Syrians, Eyad Awwadawnan and Hasan Majnan, who had fled Bashar al-Assad's brutal dictatorship only to end up in a filthy, overcrowded camp in a country that didn't want them with a future they could not foresee.

That was June 2018 and I've kept in touch with them both ever since. So, when Assad's regime fell on December 8, 2024, ending two generations of perhaps the most murderous dictatorship in the modern world, I contacted Eyad and Hasan to see how they felt.

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