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16 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Administration Wants Military Women to Know Their Place
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be on a mission to erase women from the top ranks of the U.S. armed forces. Last week, they took another step along this path by removing the first female head of the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland. The Naval Academy was founded in 1845, but didn't admit its first class of women until 1976. The head of the school is known as the superintendent, and Annapolis would not get its first female admiral in that position until 2024. Now the first woman to serve as the 'supe' has been reassigned and replaced by a man, and for the first time in the academy's history, the role went to a Marine. Last week, the Navy removed Vice Admiral Yvette Davids from her post and replaced her with Lieutenant General Michael Borgschulte. (Maybe Hegseth thinks Marines are more lethal, to use his favorite Pentagon worship word.) Davids has been sent to the Pentagon, where she will be a deputy chief of naval operations, a senior—but relatively invisible—position. No reason was given for reassigning Davids. Superintendents typically serve for three to five years, but Davids was pulled from the job after 18 months. (A short tenure can be a sign of some sort of problem; for what it's worth, the secretary of the Navy, John Phelan—who has never served in the Navy and has no background in national-defense issues—offered rote praise when announcing her de facto firing as the supe.) Trump and Hegseth have been on a firing spree throughout the military, especially when it comes to removing women from senior positions. This past winter, Hegseth fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female Coast Guard commandant; and Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, who was serving as the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, all within weeks of one another. I taught for many years at the U.S. Naval War College, where I worked under its first female president, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. In 2023, she became the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee—and then she was fired in April, apparently in part because of a presentation she gave on Women's Equality Day 10 years ago. At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military's top jobs. They are not likely to be replaced by other women: Of the three dozen four-star officers on active duty in the U.S. armed forces, none is female, and none of the administration's pending appointments for senior jobs even at the three-star level is a woman. Some observers might see a pattern here. Discerning this pattern does not exactly require Columbo-level sleuthing. Hegseth's antipathy toward women in the armed forces was well documented back in 2024 by none other than Hegseth himself. In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth decried what he believed was 'social engineering' by the American left: 'While the American people had always rejected the radical-feminist so-called 'Equal Rights Amendment,' Team Obama could fast-track their social engineering through the military's top-down chain of command.' (This is probably why Hegseth also fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C. Q. Brown, who is a Black man; Brown was let go for ostensibly being too interested in promoting diversity in the armed forces.) Not that the secretary hates women, you should understand. Some of his best friends … well, as he put it in his book last year: 'It's not that individual women can't be courageous, ambitious, and honorable. I know many phenomenal female soldiers. The problem is that the Left needs every woman to be as successful as every man, so they've redefined success in a counterproductive way.' I'm sure that the more than 225,000 American women who serve their country in uniform are relieved to know that they, too, can be courageous, and all that other great stuff. But Hegseth seems to be implying that many women in today's military might have had their fitness reports massaged 'in a counterproductive way' to meet some sort of 'woke' quota. And that, you see, is why the U.S. military's most-senior female officers had to be removed: They were clearly part of some affirmative-action scheme. Thank you for your service, ladies, but let's remember that the Pentagon's E-Ring is for the men. Oddly, Hegseth has no problem with 'social engineering' as long as it's engineering something closer to 1955 than 2025. Indeed, he writes, the military 'has always been about social engineering—forging young men (mostly) with skills, discipline, pride, and a brotherhood.' One might think that the goal is also to instill respect for one's comrades, regardless of gender, and to defend the country and honor the Constitution, but Hegseth is more worried about what he fears is the distracting influence of women in the military. 'Men and women are different,' he writes, 'with men being more aggressive.' (I read this in Cliff Clavin's voice: 'Yes, Diane … hold on to your hat, too, because the very letters DNA are an acronym for the words Dames are Not Aggressive.') Hegseth goes on: 'Men act differently toward women than they do other men. Men like women and are distracted by women. They also want to impress, and protect, women.' In other words, after forging these neo-Spartans with some of the finest training from the most powerful military the world has ever known, Americans still must worry that these carbon-steel warriors, ready to do battle with any number of global menaces, might have their 'lethality' sabotaged by the fluttering eyelashes and shapely gams of their sisters in arms. I was teaching senior officers, male and female, from all branches of the armed forces when Hegseth was still in high school. His view of women in the U.S. military would be beneath serious comment were he not, through the malpractice of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, the sitting secretary of defense. Instead of defending the nation—or keeping track of the security of his own communications —he is trying to make the American military inhospitable to half of the nation's population. As Nora Bensahel, a scholar of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, told me, the firing of Davids and other women 'is deliberately sending a chilling message to the women who are already serving in uniform, and to girls who may be thinking about doing so, that they are not welcome—even though the military would not be able to meet its recruiting numbers without those very same women.' Today is my late mother's birthday. She enlisted in the Air Force and served during the Korean War. She came from a poor family, and had to leave the military when her father was dying. But she was deeply proud of her service in America's armed forces; I remember watching her march in uniform in hometown parades. She would be heartbroken—and furious—to know that more than a half century after her service, the message to the women of the United States from the current commander in chief and his secretary of defense amounts to a sexist warning: Feel free to join the military and serve your country—but know your place. What Trump's feud with Jerome Powell is really about Trump's social-media habit is getting weirder. The hype man of Trump's mass deportations Today's News House Speaker Mike Johnson blocked a potential floor vote on the release of additional files in the Jeffrey Epstein case until at least September. The Trump administration released more than 240,000 pages of long-sealed FBI files on Martin Luther King Jr. last night, prompting warnings from his family about the potential misuse of surveillance records to distort his legacy. President Donald Trump met with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the White House and agreed to a trade deal that imposes a 19 percent tariff on goods from the Philippines. Evening Read Chasing le Carré in Corfu By Honor Jones Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I've seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her handbag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead. I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there's nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small city, on a small island in Greece. From my hotel room I can see the green edge of the cricket pitch where, in John le Carré's A Perfect Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in slow, limping circles. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Watch. Stephanie Bai asked The Atlantic 's writers and editors to name the rare movies that are actually better than the books they're based on, and their picks might surprise you. Play our daily crossword. P.S. I hope that readers of the Daily won't mind a personal reminiscence. My mother used to tell me, when I was a boy in the 1960s, that if any other kid used the old insult 'Your mother wears Army boots,' I should always correct them: ' Air Force boots.' Here's a picture of my mother, barely an adult, in her uniform. She joined alongside her sister, and both of them went to basic training in Texas—at that time, the farthest from home my mother had ever been. She later was assigned to do office work at an Air Force base in Massachusetts. Like other poor kids from rough backgrounds, she found order and a home, however briefly, in the military, and was proud of her service 'til the end of her life. — Tom When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Democracy Upside Down
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Last month, President Donald Trump's administration scrapped a long-standing Texas law that provided access to financial aid for 'Dreamers'—undocumented immigrants, brought into this country as children, who grew up here, graduated from local high schools, and are committed to becoming permanent residents. The administration's allies tried and failed to persuade the state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, to repeal the law, which has had nearly a quarter century of bipartisan support. So the administration made an end run around Texas's democratic process: The Department of Justice hatched a plan with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to kill the law, filing a joint motion that asked a federal court to declare the Texas Dream Act unconstitutional. A judge approved the motion the very same day. The whole process took just six hours. Whatever one's views are on Dreamer policy, the fact is that this maneuver went against the will of the people of Texas. The organization I lead, Democracy Forward, has, along with several other groups, filed a motion to defend the law. Texans deserve to have the constitutionality of their Dream Act judged in court, not killed off via a collaboration between the president and the state attorney general. And even more alarming than the Trump administration's dismantling of this law is that it's part of a broader effort to short-circuit democracy at the state level. State-level democracy is essential to America's federalist system. During another time in U.S. history when a majority of the Supreme Court was imposing barriers to the public's ability to self-govern, Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously observed, 'It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.' Later, Justice William Brennan argued that states have the 'power to impose higher standards' under state law 'than is required under the Federal Constitution.' Throughout America's long history, state-level innovations have pushed the country forward: Some states abolished slavery long before the Civil War, granted women the right to vote before the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted, and legalized marriage equality years before the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Of course, states have not always been on the side of human freedom and progress. Appeals to 'states' rights' have served as rallying cries for enslavers, segregationists, and others seeking to deny the rights of people and communities since the nation's founding. 'No state,' the Fourteenth Amendment proclaimed after the Civil War, shall 'deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' When America's system of government works as it should, the federal government steps in to prevent states from undermining human freedom. [David Frum: The courts won't save democracy from Trump] That's what America saw in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to implement a Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools; the governor, an avowed segregationist, had refused to comply. President John F. Kennedy similarly federalized the Alabama National Guard to carry out desegregation orders at the University of Alabama, again over the objection of a pro-segregation governor. Now the president and his political appointees, not a state's governor, are ignoring federal-court orders. In April, a federal court found that the government had exhibited 'a willful disregard for its Order' that planes carrying migrants who had been denied basic due process be turned around until the court could hear the migrants' case. (Democracy Forward and the ACLU represent the migrants in that matter.) Two months later, in early June, Trump federalized the California National Guard and deployed active-duty Marines to Los Angeles without the approval of Governor Gavin Newsom, who argued that local law enforcement was fully capable of managing anti-ICE protests. Trump's move was a federal flex that made a mockery of state sovereignty and democracy, and created more chaos than it solved. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said that what she saw in a local park 'looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation.' To justify its actions in California, the administration invoked Eisenhower's 1957 move to enforce federal-court orders on civil rights. Yet Trump's actions aim for the opposite of Eisenhower's. Instead of using federal power to protect people's rights, Trump is misusing federal power to undermine them. That is democracy upside down. Similarly, when Maine insisted that it would defend transgender athletes' participation on women's college-sports teams, the president brazenly interfered. Maine was following the law as it argued was set forth in Title IX and the state's Human Rights Act, but Trump sought to force a new interpretation of the federal law through executive actions, including a February order. That month, Trump pronounced, 'We are the federal law,' at which point the administration began a process to cut off funding to Maine's public-school meal programs as punishment—funds appropriated by Congress to help children in need. 'See you in court,' Maine Governor Janet Mills told the president. She did, and Maine won. The administration has also attempted to usurp the power that the Constitution provides both Congress and the states. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution mandates that only states and Congress can make or alter the 'times, places, and manner' of holding federal elections. Ignoring that, Trump, in an executive order, has sought to impose federal time, place, and manner requirements that create barriers to the ballot box. Much of this executive order has been blocked by two federal courts in response to litigation filed by 19 states, among other parties. One federal judge found that the requirements Trump is seeking to impose would create time-consuming burdens on states and could chill voter participation— 'the antithesis of Congress's purpose in enacting' federal election laws. (The Trump administration is also pressuring Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts in the middle of the decade, outside the normal cycle, to skew the midterm elections.) [Adam Serwer: Trump is wearing America down] The Trump administration has called lawsuits filed against its actions 'frivolous' and 'vexatious.' But as with so many of Trump's attacks, this is really a confession. The Texas ploy is just one of many ways the administration is undercutting the checks and balances in the U.S. constitutional system. The administration has eviscerated agencies and programs created by Congress, attacked judges and the legal profession as a whole, and attempted to stifle a free and open press through intimidation tactics. It's all in keeping with a theme: To empower one man, you need to disempower everyone else, everywhere else—including in states where laws are counter to the president's political agenda. What's happening in Texas, California, Maine, and other states goes beyond normal political disagreements or turf spats. This isn't the typical tug-of-war of federalism. The Trump administration is undermining foundational democratic principles and turning what are supposed to be 'laboratories of democracy' into laboratories of repression—something that should have no place in a nation founded on the promise of human freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
a day ago
- Climate
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All Praise Shade
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There's no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat's imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn arrives and temperatures relent, heat leaves no discernable trace. The Earth is getting hotter. In many places on the planet, summer is already two to three weeks longer than in the 1950s. By the end of the century, the warm season in the United States could last six months, and extreme temperatures could force us to spend much of it indoors. Supercharged heat waves will settle over cities for weeks at a time and cause many people to die. Others will suffer heart attacks, kidney disease, and brain damage. What we now call winter will be a brief, two-month interregnum that feels more like spring. Reducing society's consumption of fossil fuels is necessary for preventing worse-yet climate change. But even if every single power source becomes a renewable one and we stop emitting carbon, the planet's surface won't start cooling. The temperature will continue to rise for a few years before gradually leveling off. It will take 'many, many centuries,' NASA estimates, to end the global-greenhouse effect. It is a sobering truth that cutting emissions isn't enough. We also need to figure out how to live on a new Earth. What if the key to that life is older than civilization itself? We need to manage heat to live. And we have an effective and democratic way of doing it: shade. [Read: Shade will make or break American cities] Shade makes long waits for the bus more comfortable. Shade helps keep farmworkers safe when they harvest fruits and vegetables under an unforgiving sun. And shade cools urban environments, improving residents' chance of surviving blazing summers. 'We all know that cities are cooler when we have shade, but we're not really planning for it,' V. Kelly Turner, an urban-planning and geography professor at UCLA, said on CNN. 'In the future, that's something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about: What does shade infrastructure look like?' Turner believes that shade could be America's next long-term investment in public health. What safe drinking water and clean air were to the 20th century, shade could be to the climate-changed 21st. Scientific models bear her out. If we can get emissions under control and put the planet on a path to moderate warming, then by 2050, getting out of the sun could be the difference between unsafe heat and a livable environment. One obvious way the planet can get more shade is more trees. We evolved in forests, and some of our oldest myths and stories unfold under their canopies. Hippocrates taught medicine under a plane tree, and Ovid found bittersweet beauty in a laurel's leaves. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna slept under a miraculous poplar whose shadow never moved, and Buddha found enlightenment by meditating under a ficus tree. Christian and Muslim heavens alike are cooled by trees' perpetual shade. Tree shade is where public space was born and civic identities are forged. In hot climates, people naturally prefer to confer, conduct commerce, and gossip out of the sun's permanent glare. They spend far more time in shady parks or temple courtyards than in sunny ones. They linger and relax, and that engenders more interactions, and possibly even stimulates social cohesion. It's true in arid cities, humid regions, and even temperate zones with short summers. People want to be in shade. They muse longer, pray more peacefully, and find strength to walk farther. [Read: How climate change is killing cities] Perhaps because we've become so adept at cooling inside spaces with air conditioning, we've forgotten the importance of cooling outside spaces, too. There is no technology that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that dissipate heat. It's hard to feel that effect under one or two of them, but get enough trees together and an urban summer can be as fresh as a rural spring, a feat with major implications for energy use and public health. Where tree-planting isn't viable, cities must invest in other types of public infrastructure that cast shade. Throughout Los Angeles, on streets that are too cramped and paved over to support green canopies, the preferred protections aren't arboreal but artificial, such as the pop-up tents of taqueros and the cheerful rainbow umbrellas of fruit vendors. In Phoenix, a desert city that struggles to nourish an urban forest, common tools include sidewalk screens, frilly metal filters, and soaring photovoltaic canopies. These interventions are more effective than many might expect. Ariane Middel, an Arizona State University urban-climate researcher who runs the school's Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab, surveyed students and staff as they strolled through the shadows that solar panels cast on a Tempe campus thoroughfare. More than any change in ambient temperature, humidity, or wind, the mere presence of shade was the only significant predictor of outdoor comfort. Shade's effectiveness is a function of physics. It depends on the material properties of the sun-blocking objects that cast it—how they reflect, absorb, and transmit different wavelengths of energy in sunlight. It depends on the intensity of that light and the extent of the shade thrown. (A telephone pole that casts a perfect shadow on your body does nothing to stop the solar heating of the surfaces around you.) And it depends on the biology of the person who receives it. Middel has come as close as anyone to adding up all these factors. She praises humble umbrellas and plastic sails, because their shade feels like taking 30 degrees off the afternoon sun, which is about as good as shade cast by a tree. Ultimately, she finds that a city itself can offer the most relief in the shadows of arcaded sidewalks and looming skyscrapers. The Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunts growth, a belief that presaged a modern fixation on the healthiness of sunlight. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, doctors and public-health advocates feared that darkness itself caused the poor health of urban slum-dwellers. It was a vector of disease, where contagions bred and spread, and the murkiness also encouraged licentiousness and other urban vices. Some literally believed sunlight was the best disinfectant. Solar codes were written into urban plans, and new materials and technologies allowed architects to design brighter buildings flooded with natural light. [Read: America's climate boomtowns are waiting] Now we're beginning to see how a solar fetish may be maladaptive. In New York, a recent summer saw a throng of neighborhood activists protest the construction of a 16-story office tower, with signs to Save Our Light. They did this while huddling in the shadow of another building. As intense heat bears down, we have to see shade as a basic human right. We have forgotten that shade is a natural resource. We don't grasp its importance, and we don't appreciate its promise for a better future. Loggers and farmers cut down forests, forcing animals to flee and land to turn fallow. Engineers ignore time-honored methods of keeping out heat, locking us into mechanical cooling systems that fail during blackouts. And urban planners denude shady parks and pave neighborhoods with heat-sucking roads, only to drive us mad with the infernal conditions. But shade is a path to a better future—if we just learn to value it again, and design for it in the places we live. This article was adapted from Sam Bloch's new book, Shade: The Promise Of A Forgotten Natural Resource. Article originally published at The Atlantic Solve the daily Crossword
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a day ago
- Politics
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The Hype Man of Trump's Mass Deportations
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In the upper ranks of the Border Patrol, 20 officials have the title of sector chief. Gregory Bovino is the only one holding a gun in his social-media profile photo. Most of the others conform to a pretty standard formula: wearing a crisp green uniform in front of Old Glory and the black-and-green Border Patrol flag. Bovino's photo is more like a movie poster, or an AI-generated image of a comic-book character. He stands wearing a bulletproof vest against a black background, holding a tricked-out M4 rifle with a scope in his hands. He isn't holding the weapon so much as cradling it affectionately, like a cellist getting ready to play. Bovino's jaw is stiff, and his gaze is distant. Several Customs and Border Protection veterans with whom I spoke—who value the quiet strength of professional modesty—think the photo is ridiculous. And yet, the performative qualities that have made Bovino a sometimes-mocked figure within CBP are the same ones that have landed him a starring role in the promotion of President Donald Trump's deportation campaign. Bovino, whose formal title is chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector, has been put in charge of the administration's immigration crackdown on the streets of Los Angeles, more than 200 miles from his office, which sits near the border. While much of the local anger has been directed at ICE, it's actually Bovino who's been calling the shots. The guys in camouflage, masks, and military gear running around Southern California car washes and Home Depot parking lots aren't Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, but Border Patrol tactical teams trained to hunt drug smugglers in remote mountains and deserts. When horse-mounted Border Patrol agents rode through MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles with camera crews in tow on July 7, Mayor Karen Bass came rushing to the scene and pleaded with Bovino to call them off. No arrests were made, but the sight of heavily armed federal agents advancing in formation through palm trees and soccer fields was jarring to a city on edge after weeks of raids and protests. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the Los Angeles City Council president, told reporters that if Bovino wanted to make Border Patrol promotional videos, he should 'apply for a film permit like everybody else' and 'stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody.' 'Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon,' Bovino fired back on Fox. On Friday, he released a video—set to the song 'DNA' by the rapper Kendrick Lamar, who is from L.A.—showing National Guard troops and mounted agents parading through the park with an armory of weapons and black masks covering their faces. 'People ask for it, we make it happen,' Bovino posted to his government account on X, sounding more like a hype man than a lawman. [Joshua Braver: When the military comes to American soil] At a time when Trump-administration officials have done little to conceal their frustration with ICE leaders, demoting several over the past few months for missing the White House's ambitious arrest quotas, Bovino's assignment in California has been viewed by some at ICE as a slight against the agency. Current and former CBP officials told me it was more an indication that the White House wants field generals who will press the president's deportation goals as aggressively as possible. During the Biden administration, Border Patrol agents were often overwhelmed and exhausted as record numbers of migrants crossed into the United States. Unlawful entries fell sharply during Joe Biden's last year in office, but they have plunged in recent months to levels not seen since the 1960s as a result of Trump's all-out push to seal the border. That has left the Border Patrol's roughly 19,000 agents with far less work and a lot more time. ICE, under relentless White House pressure to ramp up arrests and deportations, is now the agency that needs help. Bovino, a 29-year veteran of the Border Patrol, seemed to anticipate the opportunity well before Trump took office. Two weeks before Inauguration Day, he sent dozens of El Centro Border Patrol agents five hours north to Kern County, California, near Bakersfield. Over the course of several days, agents in plainclothes made arrests at gas stations and stopped vehicles along the highway. The surprise tactics sent a wave of fear through the farms of California's Central Valley, and though Bovino said his agents had targeted criminals, only one of the 78 people they arrested had a criminal conviction, according to records obtained by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters. The ACLU and other advocacy groups sued the government in February and won an injunction barring the Border Patrol from racially profiling suspects, and a federal district court found that Bovino's teams likely violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. (Earlier this month, another federal judge ordered the government to stop racially profiling suspects in Los Angeles.) Bovino had launched the Kern County expedition, which he called 'Operation Return to Sender,' without getting clearance from superiors in Washington, according to CBP officials I spoke with who weren't authorized to speak to reporters. The raids far from the border were not the kind of operation Biden officials would have endorsed. But those officials were already on their way out, and the Trump team coming in was thrilled with Bovino's audition. The Department of Homeland Security did not approve my request to interview Bovino. I sent a list of more than a dozen questions to DHS and CBP, asking about his record in the Border Patrol and why he's been elevated to his current role. 'Because he's a badass' was all that the DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote back. What Bovino is doing in Los Angeles is a pilot of sorts. It showcases the potential for a broader Border Patrol role in U.S. cities and communities, especially those that have adopted 'sanctuary' policies restricting local police cooperation with ICE. By law, the Border Patrol's ability to conduct warrantless searches is limited to within 100 miles of the nation's international boundaries. But that includes maritime borders, and roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, including the country's largest metropolitan areas, fits within those boundaries. ICE has only about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers nationwide, and though the president's tax-and-immigration bill includes funds to hire thousands more, recruiting, hiring, and training them will likely take at least a year. The Border Patrol has idle agents who are ready to go now. Border Patrol agents generally have less experience than their ICE counterparts with the procedural elements of civil immigration enforcement in urban environments. Video clips went viral last month showing a masked Border Patrol team pummeling Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and the father of three U.S. Marines, as the agents arrested him outside an IHOP in Santa Ana. Viewers were shocked, but the tactics used were not out of line with the way agents often handle migrants who try to run or resist arrest near the border. (The Department of Homeland Security justified the use of force and claimed that Barranco had tried to 'mow' them with his trimming tool.) The difference this time was that the arrest occurred on the streets of a U.S. city, not out in the desert with no one watching. [Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.] During the past five and a half years in El Centro, which covers southeastern California's Imperial Valley, Bovino has repeatedly insisted that he oversees the 'premier sector' of the Border Patrol. It's a facetious claim. El Centro is not considered a top-tier CBP assignment like El Paso or San Diego, where there's a lot more smuggling activity. 'It's the type of sector where someone would usually be chief for a couple years and then move on to a larger sector,' one former DHS official told me. Bovino's long tenure in El Centro without a promotion points to a lack of confidence from senior CBP leaders, the official and three former CBP officials said. DHS declined to respond. Border Patrol chiefs have always enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy from Washington regarding day-to-day operations, but they aren't supposed to make partisan statements in uniform or criticize elected officials in the states where they work. During Biden's term, Bovino was the chief who created the most consternation among CBP officials at headquarters because of his outspoken conservative views and social-media enthusiasm, current and former DHS and CBP officials told me. 'He has done things that Border Patrol leadership has had to spend time cleaning up, such as posting information that was law-enforcement-sensitive on social media, which can hamper broader law-enforcement operations,' said the former DHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal disciplinary actions. But the contentious relationship Bovino had with his superiors during those years has only bolstered his standing among Trump-aligned border hawks. As El Centro chief, Bovino became the lead auteur of a new style of highly produced videos for CBP. During the first Trump administration, the Border Patrol launched its own public-relations operation—the Strategic Communications division, or StratComm—to give rank-and-file agents a bigger role in touting their work, improving the agency's reputation and boosting recruitment. Many of the videos emphasized Border Patrol humanitarian efforts and rescues of distressed migrants in remote areas, or the benevolent serve-and-protect image of agents and officials attending parades and community events. Bovino has taken StratComm messaging in a different direction. In September 2020, soon after he took command in El Centro, his social-media team released 'The Gotaway,' a fictionalized video showing a migrant sneaking into the United States and murdering the first person he encounters. The video caused an uproar, and the Border Patrol temporarily took it down, as lawmakers demanded to know why agents were spending time making movies. (One former CBP official told me El Centro benefited from the talents of two agents who had taken filmmaking courses before signing up for the Border Patrol). Bovino has had legal problems as well. In 2022, a federal judge in Louisiana rejected DHS's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed by two Black Border Patrol employees who claimed discrimination when Bovino became sector chief in New Orleans. The two were finalists for the second-ranking position in New Orleans in April 2018 when Bovino abruptly canceled the job listing and used a transfer process to hire his close friend, a white Border Patrol official. The court found an email from the friend that compared Bovino to a Confederate general and the New Orleans office to a unit of Black Union soldiers. 'Oh jeez. DELETE!!!!' Bovino replied. The exchange raised 'concerns of racial animus' in the hiring process, the judge wrote. DHS settled the case. In 2023, Bovino landed at the center of a partisan fight in Congress when Biden officials blocked him from testifying during a Republican-led investigation of the administration's border policies. Top Republicans sent a letter to CBP claiming Bovino had been silenced and retaliated against when he was temporarily reassigned to a desk job in Washington. Rodney Scott, the current commissioner of CBP and the former Border Patrol chief, was one of Bovino's most ardent defenders. Bovino returned to El Centro, his social-media enthusiasm undiminished. He published holiday-themed videos, including hokey parodies of Home Alone and A Christmas Story. The old serve-and-protect messaging was out in favor of guns, ATVs, and tactical teams kicking ass to heavy metal and thumping bass tracks. More recently, the messaging has turned messianic. A CPB video circulated this month by the Department of Homeland Security embodies a new synthesis of high-paced action with Christian-nationalist themes. The video, 'Bible Verse,' opens with a monologue by the actor Shia LaBeouf, lifted from the World War II movie Fury, in which a soldier prepares his comrades to fight the Nazis with a stirring passage from the Book of Isaiah about answering the call of God. The song 'God's Gonna Cut You Down' plays to stylized, washed-out footage of Border Patrol tactical agents zooming around in helicopters and speedboats. The video has nearly 3 million views on X, and as a work of pure propaganda, it's the most engrossing CBP video I've ever seen. But former DHS and CBP officials I shared it with recoiled at the underlying message that Border Patrol agents are delivering holy vengeance. The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which performed the song in the video, sent a cease-and-desist warning to the Department of Homeland Security. 'It's obvious that you don't respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution,' the band wrote, adding: 'Oh, and go f… yourselves.' I have gotten to know at least a dozen Border Patrol sector chiefs during the decade I've spent reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. The chiefs are police commanders, but they are also politicians. They tend to value the same skills required of any good leader: smooth public speaking, personal decorum, equanimity under pressure. They are not especially impressed by guns or social-media posting, and they dislike anything that elevates individual flash over institutional traditions. Much of the job of the Border Patrol is mundane and uneventful; it consists of sitting alone in a truck and watching 'the line' for hours on end in case anyone or anything potentially threatening comes across. There are periodic moments of action, especially when smuggling activity increases, but fewer now that the border is so locked down. [Adam Serwer: The deportation show] Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top border-policy official during the Biden administration, told me that Democrats have at times been too reluctant to let the Border Patrol trumpet its work stopping actual threats and capturing dangerous criminals. The stressful, tedious work agents perform while processing record numbers of asylum seekers is not meant to be their primary job, Nuñez-Neto said. "The Border Patrol's job should focus on detecting and preventing the entry of people who may present a threat to our security, not serving as the entry point for the asylum system,' he said. 'We should have an organized, safe, and orderly process for people who want to claim asylum that doesn't involve distracting the people who work between ports of entry from doing their core mission.' The Trump administration's social-media messaging has become extreme and dehumanizing, Nuñez-Neto said, but he understands Bovino's push to make the job look exciting and heroic. The former DHS official I spoke with told me he is concerned that Bovino's hard-charging approach will ultimately hurt recruitment, even if it's popular among the most gung-ho agents. 'They're going to end up with a growing recruitment challenge, because the people that they will be attracting are not actually the people that they will need to do the unglamorous work,' the former official told me. 'And most law-enforcement work is unglamorous work.' Bovino, now with a bigger stage, has continued making the work look as glamorous as possible as he and his team move from Los Angeles to other parts of California. He released another video Thursday, this one set to Kanye West's 'Power' and showing his agents rolling into Sacramento and chasing people through a Home Depot parking lot. 'There is no such thing as a sanctuary state,' Bovino says to the camera, his thumbs tucked in his belt in the style of an Old West sheriff. Tear-gas canisters dangle from his vest like hand grenades. 'This is how and why we secure the homeland,' Bovino says. 'For Ma and Pa America: We've got your backs.' Article originally published at The Atlantic Solve the daily Crossword
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Politics
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Presidential Pettiness
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Presidents are, like the rest of us, flawed human beings. Many of them had volcanic tempers: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Joe Biden, among others, reportedly could sling Anglo-Saxonisms with gusto. In public, most of them managed to convey an image of geniality. (Nixon might be the exception there, but he embraced being an uptight square and his admirers found it endearing.) But all of them, regardless of their personality, had at least some notion about government, some sense of what they wanted to accomplish in the most powerful office in the world. Donald Trump exhibits no such guiding belief. From his first day as a candidate, Trump has appeared animated by anger, fear, and, most of all, pettiness, a small-minded vengefulness that takes the place of actual policy making. It taints the air in the executive branch like a forgotten bag of trash in a warm house on a summer day—even when you can't see it, you know it's there. Trump's first run for office was itself a kind of petty tantrum. Trump had always wanted to run for president, a wish he expressed as far back as the 1980s. But Trump's journey from pro-abortion-rights New York oligarch to anti-abortion Republican populist picked up speed after President Barack Obama humiliated him at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Trump denies that Obama's jibes moved him to run, but he jumped into the open GOP field once Obama's two terms were coming to an end, and to this day, he remains obsessed with the first and only Black president—to the point that he misspoke on at least one occasion and said that he defeated Obama, not Hillary Clinton, to win his first term. Trump's second term has been a cavalcade of pettiness; his lieutenants have internalized the president's culture of purges, retribution, and loyalty checks. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's insistence, for example, on renaming U.S. military bases after Confederate leaders has led to clumsy explanations about how the bases are now named for men who had names that are exactly like the 19th-century traitors'. This kind of explanation is the sort of thing that high-school teachers get from teenage smart alecks who think they're being clever in class. My colleague Shane Harris recently reported an appalling story about how former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sponsored a rescue dog to become a working animal at the CIA. He named the dog Susan, after his late wife, an animal lover who volunteered at a local shelter. Clapper was looking forward to attending Susan's graduation ceremony at a CIA facility—but the agency, taking what it believed to be Trump's lead, barred him from even setting foot on CIA property. (Trump despises Clapper, and blames him for what Trump calls 'the Russia hoax,' among other slights against the president.) As Shane wrote: 'The upshot is that an octogenarian Air Force retiree who spent half a century in his nation's service was not allowed to attend a party for a dog he essentially donated to the government and named after his dead wife.' Meanwhile, those still in government are being harassed and driven out of public service because of who they know—or even what they might be thinking. Over at the FBI, as I wrote earlier this month, Director Kash Patel is reportedly strapping people to polygraph machines to find out whether anyone is saying bad things about him. Michael Feinberg, a senior FBI counterintelligence agent, was told that he could accept a demotion or resign because of his friendship with Peter Strzok, an agent fired years ago who has long been an object of Trump's wrath. Now Trump wants to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell because Powell refuses to lower interest rates and make Trump's economy look better than it is. (Inflation and joblessness are both rising.) Trump can't summarily fire Powell, but the president is taking the Fed chair's opposition so personally that he is already ginning up a baseless accusation that Powell is somehow guilty of malfeasance on a building project, on the theory that it might be the kind of misconduct that would allow Trump to remove him. Even on matters of grave international importance, Trump governs by emotion rather than any coherent sense of policy. A few weeks ago, the president seemed to change course on the war in Ukraine. He said he would allow arms shipments to continue, and promised last week to have advanced systems such as Patriot missile batteries sent to Ukraine. Trump's own Defense Department was caught flat-footed after repeatedly putting a stop to those shipments. (After all, Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance seemed to be on Vladimir Putin's side after they engaged in an unseemly—and yes, petty— ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House this past winter.) But Putin had finally done something worse than murdering thousands of Ukrainian civilians and kidnapping Ukrainian children: He had made Donald Trump look like a chump. Putin refused to help Trump fulfill an unwise campaign promise by acceding to a cease-fire. Instead, the Russian president has unleashed some of the most violent attacks of the war, a raised middle finger to the White House and its chief occupant. You can do a lot of bad things around Trump. You can ignore court orders. You can deport people without due process. You can let Ukrainian rivers fill with the blood of innocent people. But when you make Trump look weak or stupid, you've gone too far. Trump's promises on Ukraine might amount to very little. Emotional reactions pass quickly, and Trump's attention span is measured in milliseconds; he flip-flops on everything from trade to friendships. So far, some shipments to Ukraine have resumed, but Trump has also offered Putin a respite of 50 days to come to the table—which would be just about the number of days left of good weather for military operations. ('Fifty days' could also be just another version of the way Trump uses 'two weeks' to punt issues that he doesn't want to deal with further downstream.) Now Trump's attention seems to be on strong-arming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians football and baseball teams into reclaiming their old names, the Redskins and the Indians. It's possible that Trump is responding to some hidden groundswell of nostalgia. He's also not the first president to get fired up about Washington's home team: Obama was clearly interested in getting rid of the Redskins name, and undoing anything Obama did is something of a Trumpian rule. More likely, however, Trump is focusing on this small issue in the hopes of picking a racist scab that will occupy the attention of his base—because much of that base right now is deeply angry about a supposed cover-up relating to Trump's former friend and the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. Yet again, when trying to throw red meat to the faithful, Trump picked something small and silly. Trump rules by appeals to grievances—rather than focusing on substantive national problems—because at least some of the MAGA movement revels in that kind of cruelty. This culture-warring behavior helped get him elected, and Trump's voters have been willing to join him on these capricious roller-coaster rides for the first six months of his second term. But roller coasters don't have actual destinations, and sooner or later, even the most dedicated riders will want to get off. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News The Pentagon is starting to pull out 700 Marines who were sent to Los Angeles last month, as President Donald Trump's military deployment to the city winds down. A federal judge appeared to be leaning in favor of Harvard University during today's hearing over Harvard's lawsuit claiming that the Trump administration moved to cut its federal research funding to the university for political reasons. The Justice Department confirmed to Fox News that it has received a criminal referral from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who alleges that Obama administration officials 'manufactured and politicized intelligence' about Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Dispatches Evening Read Should You Sunscreen Your Cat? By Katherine J. Wu For all of the eons that animal life has existed on Earth, the sun has been there too. And for all of those eons, animal life has had only one solution for intense exposure to the sun: evolution. Some creatures have thick, dark skin that's resistant to UV harm; others sprout fur, scales, or feathers that block the sun's rays. Many fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds may produce a compound that protects their cells against the sun's damaging effects. Hippos, weirdly, ooze a reddish, mucus-y liquid from their pores that absorbs light before it can destroy their skin. And plenty of creatures have evolved behaviors that take advantage of their environment—rolling around in dirt or mud, simply retreating into the shade. But certain modern animals have sun problems that natural selection can't easily solve. More From The Atlantic Read. Tyler Austin Harper recommends eight books that break down what's really going on with America's universities. Watch. In 2020, David Sims shared 25 feel-good movies perfect for rewatching—whether you need a laugh, a dose of nostalgia, or just an escape from everyday stress.
