The ICEmen were presumably looking for undocumented immigrants. Retes’s driver’s license, which he says the ICEmen never asked to see, identifies him as “Veteran Army.” His license plate includes “DV”: disabled veteran. While ICE’s warriors were trying and ultimately succeeding in smashing his driver’s-side window (the better to pepper spray him), they apparently did not notice his rear window’s “Iraq Combat Veteran” sticker.
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In today’s hiring binge, ICE recruiting ads ask: “Which way, American man?” Testosterone is the not-very-sub subtext. Recruits will “defend the homeland,” “recapture our national identity,” stymie an “invasion,” halt “cultural decline” and even save “civilization.”
Something uncivilized is indeed happening. What jobs, if any, are recruits leaving for the glory of donning battle gear and masks (hiding what from whom?) and roaming U.S. communities, throwing their weight around and throwing unarmed people to the ground?
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How many appalling incidents are occurring during today’s tsunami of sometimes lawless “law enforcement”? ICE might not know and, if it does, might not speak truthfully.
Dan McLaughlin ponders Trump’s assertion that an ad featuring Ronald Reagan expressing support for free trade is “fake” – a Trump assertion that, appallingly, seems to be endorsed by the Reagan Foundation. Two slices (first link added):
As you can see from major excerpts from Reagan’s fairly short speech, his free-trade principles were strongly grounded in both economic theory and practical economic history.
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Much of the Trump trade posture, however, is explicitly protectionist, rejecting Reagan’s entire framework of seeking an end goal of free trade, or it’s based on the anti-free-trade assumption that trade deficits in manufactured goods are somehow proof of an absence of fair trade. So you can see why Trump, even aside from his general dislike of a foreign government running TV ads targeting American voters, would be hypersensitive to this message. In fact, Trump was harshly critical of Reagan’s stance at the time for being too soft on Japan: He spent nearly $100,000 in September 1987 running a full-page ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe arguing that Japan was ripping us off by not shouldering the costs of its own defense, a theme similar to what he says today.
Listen also to this November 20th, 1982, radio address by Reagan:
The White House notes that Reagan defended imposing tariffs on Japanese semiconductors during his April 25, 1987, radio address. But listen to the whole thing, and the 40th president clearly explains why this was an isolated move to address a particular problem — not the kind of broad-based tariffs Trump now embraces.
Perhaps the most disappointing element of this episode is that the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute released a statement that said the ad “misrepresents” Reagan’s speech with “selective” edits. While the clips are edited and excerpted, the message is the same: Trade barriers hurt American workers and consumers.
Reagan’s legacy as a free-trader should be a point of pride for the organization charged with keeping his flame burning. Jason Kenney, the Conservative defense minister under former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, called out the Reagan Foundation’s “gormless leadership.” He has a point.
Doug Irwin weighs in with this tweet:
OMG so ridiculous . . .Reagan vetoed several protectionist bills passed by Democrats in Congress 🤡
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is correct:
President Trump also bears some responsibility. Many of his policies, such as extending the 2017 tax reform and deregulation, should be disinflationary as they encourage more supply. But his tariffs are contributing to higher prices in many goods.
Jeff Jacoby decries the notion of putting a sitting president’s image on a U.S. coin. A slice:
In the private sector, such relentless self-promotion could be dismissed as simply the vanity of a vulgarian. In the public sector, it is something more corrosive: the personalization of government authority.
A president who cannot distinguish between personal renown and constitutional responsibility has ample opportunity to turn symbols of national unity into props for self-worship. When the state itself becomes a billboard for the executive’s name and public institutions are turned into extensions of a single man’s vanity, government of the people grows hollow and citizenship is replaced with veneration.
The birth of the American republic was a repudiation of the idea that a nation and its ruler were one and the same. From the beginning, the United States resisted the Old World norm of chiseling a sovereign’s likeness into its money. Elsewhere, kings and Caesars might mint coins bearing their own image, but currency in America was engraved with eagles and allegories of liberty. The message was deliberate: The nation’s identity was not embodied in its incumbent leaders, but in its permanent ideals.
