Summary
The Trump administration plans to revoke temporary legal status for 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s war, fast-tracking them for deportation.
The move is part of a broader effort to strip protections from 1.8 million migrants admitted under Biden’s humanitarian parole programs.
Trump’s policies also target 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Legal challenges are mounting, as affected individuals face uncertain futures. Advocates warn that even U.S. allies, such as Afghans who assisted the military, are now at risk of detention and deportation.
Yeah, his first time around there were people who kept his worst ideas from being realized and drove away the worst of his associates. This time around those people are gone and he is surrounded by those associates and even worse people like Musk.
I remember stories from Trump’s first term about how his handlers had to babysit him and do things like hide his rough drafts of orders planning to go to war (he’d calm down and forget about them by the next day). It reminds me of the (hopefully apocryphal) story of how Nixon had to be lead to bed when he got roaring drunk and started threatening to nuke North Korea.
The staffers also preserved the documents he (illegally) shredded as a matter of habit, so scholars will hopefully be able to piece together what was going on in that hot mess someday.
None of those handlers are there this term. Trump spent the four years since his first term campaigning and gathering a crew of sycophantic parasites to do his bidding, and we have no view into what’s going on behind closed doors. The “checks and balances” every American was taught about as a child seem to be doing nothing, with him flagrantly ignoring them without reprisal.
I hope the US gets out of this as an intact democracy and without alienating every single ally in existence. People here don’t seem to realize how bad an antagonistic America would be - they have the military and logistics to take on half the world without nukes, and Trump has been very open (almost giddy) about his willingness to use those.
And a civil war would be worse since the government is wholly controlled by what most
wouldshould consider the bad guys and the military is trained to follow the chain of command, and Trump is openly purging top officials and replacing them with loyalists.Ugh, sorry for the rant. The last decade has been exhausting.
It’s about 50/50 whether the US will be able to maintain any semblance of democracy.
The alliances are effectively dead already. Dropping military support to a country during an active war is a huge no-no. No one will ever trust the US ever again. It doesn’t matter if there’s a Democrat president in 2029, no one can trust the American people to not vote in a betrayer like Trump again. The first time Trump was president, it was like “they didn’t know who they were voting for.” Just a bump in the road of democracy. This time, Americans knew what they were voting for.
And we talk to Americans on the internet, we know that Americans don’t respect their allies. The soldiers of allied countries that sacrificed everything in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn’t even register with most Americans. There is too little sense of honour in the American population. Americans only care about money now, and that’s not a motivation that can be trusted by anyone.
Sorry, but Americans are too untrustworthy for meaningful alliances to be possible.