Dem
47
GOP
53
Politicians can get away with an awful lot, especially these days. However, one thing that is tough to overcome is if some sort of bad behavior is captured on tape. If people can hear it for themselves, it's rather harder to make the problem go away. Even worse than that is if the bad behavior is captured on video. As it turns out, people trust their own eyes, quite a bit.
We make this observation because the Trump administration has a couple of video problems right now, both of them related to the scapegoating of those who are foreign-born. The first of those involves DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who seems to have some of the worst political instincts ever seen from a politician of (nominally) national stature. Yes, she managed to twice get herself elected as governor of South Dakota, but maybe securing the leadership of a state with 900,000 or so people is not quite the same crucible of fire as running for, say, U.S. Senator from New York.
Anyhow, despite the fact that the Trump administration has yet to offer any proof that the people deported to El Salvador were actually gang members, and despite the fact that the administration's actions have already been deemed to be in violation of the law by James Boasberg, Noem and Donald Trump are still trying to squeeze this for all it's worth. And so, she traveled to El Salvador with a press contingent, so that she could be filmed railing against immigrants with the deported, and now imprisoned, Venezuelans in the background of the shot:
She posted the video, filmed on an iPhone, to her eX-Twitter account within a few minutes of it being recorded. Clearly, she was eagerly awaiting a pat on the head from the Dear Leader.
We fully understand that the point here is to look "strong." But just like the dog-shooting story, it actually makes Noem look cruel and inhuman. Again, there has yet to be any proof that these men are guilty of anything (and there has now been reporting that the main "evidence" of their guilt was... that they have tattoos). And even if they are guilty of a crime, or many crimes, cramming them into a small space, with shaved heads, and then using them as a backdrop is really icky. Especially since they were clearly posed by the jailers, as The Bulwark's Jonathan Last points out.
And not only is it icky, it's potentially illegal. The Trump administration has a bad habit of using one interpretation of events when it suits their needs, and then switching to a radically different one as necessary. For example, the Signal messages were alternately "classified" and "not classified" depending on what particular characterization was most useful at the time. Similarly, the forced deportations of these men were justified on the basis that they were "making war" on the United States, and so the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is in effect. Well, if so, the Geneva Conventions forbid the use of prisoners of war as props for political messaging (or for any other purpose).
Moving along, the other video is the one that might really catch fire. The next 48 hours or so will tell the tale. The administration continues to target graduate students who are Muslim, based on increasingly spurious claims that they somehow have something to do with Palestine or Hamas. Yesterday, for example, the feds arrested Iranian national Alireza Doroudi, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Exactly what he did to cause this is unknown, as the government has refused to comment since "disappearing" him to... Louisiana... maybe? Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the visas of 300 other grad students have been revoked.
So, what exactly is this video we keep talking about? Well, it actually involves yet another grad student, a hijab-wearing Turkish woman named Rumeysa Ozturk, who is enrolled at Tufts University in Boston. The Trump administration has done us all the kindness of at least semi-explaining itself in this case, saying that Ozturk is guilty of "glorifying and supporting terrorists" and that she has shown support for Hamas.
Exactly what that means, however, is not clear. It's not too hard to discover that she was one of four authors on a pro-Palestine op-ed that ran in the Tufts Daily last year. However, and this is coming from someone who worked for a college newspaper for well over a decade, it's actually pretty mild by college-paper opinion-page standards. And even if it wasn't mild, free speech is not a crime. We've had a few messages from readers who say, First Amendment or not, they're not too sad that the Trump administration is targeting the most outspoken pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protesters. Those who feel this way should remember that these things always start with the easiest targets, and then move on from there.
As chance would have it, when Ozturk was arrested while walking down a Boston street, she happened to be within the field of someone's home security cameras. And so, the whole incident was caught on camera:
It's pretty scary stuff. She was minding her own business, and then was suddenly surrounded by half a dozen men in dark clothing and hoodies. As far as she knew, she was about to be raped or kidnapped (if the latter thought crossed her mind, she wasn't exactly wrong). In a matter of seconds, she's cuffed, and shoved into a car, with her next stop being Louisiana, where her lawyers have been unable to make contact with her.
A major point of these grad-student arrests, besides scoring points with the base, is to silence dissent. Someone in the Trump administration is clever enough to know that large-scale campus protests were absolutely lethal for more than one president, most obviously Lyndon B. Johnson, but also Joe Biden/Kamala Harris. And the scheme has been pretty successful, at least in the short term. Students and faculty who might be tempted to protest, particularly to protest what's going on in Gaza, are largely scared stiff, for fear that they'll be the next person to end up in a Louisiana gulag.
But suppression of free speech is not usually an effective long-term play. Eventually, as anger intensifies, and as it spreads to more people, things tend to pop, like a cork in a champagne bottle. And the video of Ozturk is bad enough that it has led to mass outrage and mass protests in Boston, both on campus and off. That's 2,000 people in the former case, and 1,000 in the latter, who were roused to action less than 24 hours after Ozturk was arrested and the video was made public.
We believe that while the Trump administration may win the early battles, they are going to lose the war. Eventually, the universities and the law firms and the news outlets are going to realize that this is a "Join or Die" situation, and that accommodating Trump just encourages more and more predations by him and his administration. These days, we regularly think of India, circa 1946. The people of India were kept under the thumb of the British for a long time. But when tens of millions of those people finally decided that they had bloody well had enough, even the mighty British empire was powerless to maintain its grip. (Z)