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Atlantic
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Hype Man of Trump's Mass Deportations
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. 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.'
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Court Comes to the Administration's Rescue, Again
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. A clear pattern has emerged in the extended back-and-forth over the legality of many Trump-administration actions. Donald Trump or a member of his Cabinet takes a certain step—say, firing an official protected from such removal, or destroying a government agency established by Congress, or seeking to ship a group of immigrants off to a country where they may be tortured or killed. Then, a lawsuit is quickly filed seeking to block the administration. A federal district judge grants the plaintiffs' request, typically in an order that prevents Trump from moving forward while that judge weighs the underlying issue. An appeals court backs the district court's decision. So far, so good for the plaintiffs. Then the administration takes the case to the Supreme Court—which hastily upends the lower courts' orders and gives Trump the go-ahead to implement his plan. The Supreme Court exactly followed this script yesterday, when it issued an emergency ruling that could potentially allow Trump to lay off enormous numbers of federal employees. The late-afternoon order paused an injunction issued by a California federal court that had blocked the implementation of an executive order demanding 'a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy.' (The confusing double negative—a ruling stopping a ruling stopping something from happening—is part of the pattern too.) It's not yet clear how far the administration will get in its plans for mass firings before another court steps in and the cycle begins again. The original litigation, meanwhile, may still continue as the district court and the plaintiffs weigh how best to proceed. But the Supreme Court's intervention is a particularly pointed example of the justices' willingness to cut the president a break, even—or, for some of the justices, perhaps especially—if it requires tossing less exalted members of the judiciary under the bus. The case, Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, began as a challenge to the White House's plans to reshape the federal government through a complicated process known as 'reductions in force,' or RIFs—an effort to slash the jobs of potentially hundreds of thousands of government employees. If successful, the RIFs will be a key component of the Trump administration's destruction of the federal government. [Paul Rosenzweig: The inscrutable Supreme Court] A coalition of nonprofits, local governments, and unions representing federal employees filed suit and secured a pair of emergency orders halting the process from federal District Judge Susan Illston, who ruled that the White House's RIF plans 'reach so broadly as to exceed what the President can do without Congress.' The Trump administration ran to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, seeking a temporary pause on Illston's order. The Ninth Circuit declined to issue one. Since May 30, when that court ruled, the orders for RIFs had been halted—until yesterday, when the Supreme Court took the administration up on its request to issue the pause (on the pause) that the Ninth Circuit rejected, thus bringing the original RIF plans back to life, at least for now. The high court does not provide a vote tally for its emergency orders; only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion. Why exactly did a majority of the justices feel that Judge Illston's order should be put on hold? As is so often the case with orders resulting from the Supreme Court's emergency docket, the Court provided little guidance. The scant explanation sketched out in the order, and in Justice Sonia Sotomayor's brief concurrence, hints that the Court is drawing a distinction between the high-level instructions on RIFs provided to government agencies by the White House—whose implementation Illston had blocked, but which the Court suggests were likely lawful—and the plans developed by individual agencies to enact those instructions, which may cross a legal line. In one sense, the Supreme Court's intervention may not be immediately earthshaking, because the lower courts seem to still have the opportunity to weigh the legality of what the RIFs look like in practice. 'This is not the end of this case,' wrote Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. The Court's decision is still troubling, however, for what it says about both the justices' relationship with the lower courts and their relationship with basic facts. As Jackson wrote in dissent, Illston had combed through piles of evidence demonstrating that agencies were already following White House directives to cut their workforces well past the point where they could function as legally required. The majority breezed past this record entirely. In Jackson's view, this was indefensible: 'It is not this Court's role to swoop in and second-guess a lower court's factual findings,' she wrote, condemning 'this Court's demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President's legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.' That enthusiasm has been apparent in case after case over the past two months. The Court has blocked lower-court rulings preventing the administration from implementing its unconstitutional plan to raze birthright citizenship, shipping a group of noncitizens to South Sudan, giving DOGE access to Social Security records, illegally firing officials meant to be protected from presidential removal, stripping immigration protections from large numbers of people from Haiti and Latin America, and barring transgender service members from the military. Crucially, all of these cases arrived at the Supreme Court on the emergency docket, meaning that in none of them did the justices reach a final conclusion about whether Trump had the power to take these actions before they gave him the go-ahead to do so while litigation continued. [Paul Rosenzweig: The Supreme Court's inconsistency is very revealing] What is driving this trend? One reading is that the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority leans further to the right than lower-court judges, and is taking the opportunity to cut some slack to an administration whose approach is in line with the justices' sympathies. However much the Court wants to understand itself as a wise and neutral arbiter, shaking this perception is difficult—particularly given that on the emergency docket, the Court rarely bothers to explain the reasoning behind its actions. But even the Court's political leanings can't fully account for what's going on. Data collected by the political scientist Adam Bonica suggest that Trump has fared poorly in the lower courts in front of judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. The liberal Supreme Court justices, meanwhile, don't always reject the administration as a bloc. (Recall that Jackson was the only public dissent in the RIF case.) Another possibility is that district-court judges, who deal more directly in facts—and less in legal abstractions—have a harder time ignoring the truth of what Trump is actually doing. The Supreme Court, in contrast, appears inclined to take on faith the sanitized, often disingenuous version of events that the administration presents in its legal briefs. Whatever the cause, the overall picture is of a Supreme Court casually undercutting the lower courts. Dissenting to the Court's ruling on birthright citizenship, Jackson warned that 'this Court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts' would lead to 'the degradation of our rule-of-law regime.' The Trump administration, though, seems only too happy to take advantage of the Supreme Court's help. And as far as the White House is concerned, the cost to the rule of law may be a bonus. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Court Comes to the Administration's Rescue, Again
A clear pattern has emerged in the extended back-and-forth over the legality of many Trump-administration actions. Donald Trump or a member of his Cabinet takes a certain step—say, firing an official protected from such removal, or destroying a government agency established by Congress, or seeking to ship a group of immigrants off to a country where they may be tortured or killed. Then, a lawsuit is quickly filed seeking to block the administration. A federal district judge grants the plaintiffs' request, typically in an order that prevents Trump from moving forward while that judge weighs the underlying issue. An appeals court backs the district court's decision. So far, so good for the plaintiffs. Then the administration takes the case to the Supreme Court—which hastily upends the lower courts' orders and gives Trump the go-ahead to implement his plan. The Supreme Court exactly followed this script yesterday, when it issued an emergency ruling that could potentially allow Trump to lay off enormous numbers of federal employees. The late-afternoon order paused an injunction issued by a California federal court that had blocked the implementation of an executive order demanding 'a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy.' (The confusing double negative—a ruling stopping a ruling stopping something from happening—is part of the pattern too.) It's not yet clear how far the administration will get in its plans for mass firings before another court steps in and the cycle begins again. The original litigation, meanwhile, may still continue as the district court and the plaintiffs weigh how best to proceed. But the Supreme Court's intervention is a particularly pointed example of the justices' willingness to cut the president a break, even—or, for some of the justices, perhaps especially—if it requires tossing less exalted members of the judiciary under the bus. The case, Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, began as a challenge to the White House's plans to reshape the federal government through a complicated process known as 'reductions in force,' or RIFs—an effort to slash the jobs of potentially hundreds of thousands of government employees. If successful, the RIFs will be a key component of the Trump administration's destruction of the federal government. Paul Rosenzweig: The inscrutable Supreme Court A coalition of nonprofits, local governments, and unions representing federal employees filed suit and secured a pair of emergency orders halting the process from federal District Judge Susan Illston, who ruled that the White House's RIF plans 'reach so broadly as to exceed what the President can do without Congress.' The Trump administration ran to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, seeking a temporary pause on Illston's order. The Ninth Circuit declined to issue one. Since May 30, when that court ruled, the orders for RIFs had been halted—until yesterday, when the Supreme Court took the administration up on its request to issue the pause (on the pause) that the Ninth Circuit rejected, thus bringing the original RIF plans back to life, at least for now. The high court does not provide a vote tally for its emergency orders; only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion. Why exactly did a majority of the justices feel that Judge Illston's order should be put on hold? As is so often the case with orders resulting from the Supreme Court's emergency docket, the Court provided little guidance. The scant explanation sketched out in the order, and in Justice Sonia Sotomayor's brief concurrence, hints that the Court is drawing a distinction between the high-level instructions on RIFs provided to government agencies by the White House—whose implementation Illston had blocked, but which the Court suggests were likely lawful—and the plans developed by individual agencies to enact those instructions, which may cross a legal line. In one sense, the Supreme Court's intervention may not be immediately earthshaking, because the lower courts seem to still have the opportunity to weigh the legality of what the RIFs look like in practice. 'This is not the end of this case,' wrote Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. The Court's decision is still troubling, however, for what it says about both the justices' relationship with the lower courts and their relationship with basic facts. As Jackson wrote in dissent, Illston had combed through piles of evidence demonstrating that agencies were already following White House directives to cut their workforces well past the point where they could function as legally required. The majority breezed past this record entirely. In Jackson's view, this was indefensible: 'It is not this Court's role to swoop in and second-guess a lower court's factual findings,' she wrote, condemning 'this Court's demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President's legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.' That enthusiasm has been apparent in case after case over the past two months. The Court has blocked lower-court rulings preventing the administration from implementing its unconstitutional plan to raze birthright citizenship, shipping a group of noncitizens to South Sudan, giving DOGE access to Social Security records, illegally firing officials meant to be protected from presidential removal, stripping immigration protections from large numbers of people from Haiti and Latin America, and barring transgender service members from the military. Crucially, all of these cases arrived at the Supreme Court on the emergency docket, meaning that in none of them did the justices reach a final conclusion about whether Trump had the power to take these actions before they gave him the go-ahead to do so while litigation continued. Paul Rosenzweig: The Supreme Court's inconsistency is very revealing What is driving this trend? One reading is that the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority leans further to the right than lower-court judges, and is taking the opportunity to cut some slack to an administration whose approach is in line with the justices' sympathies. However much the Court wants to understand itself as a wise and neutral arbiter, shaking this perception is difficult—particularly given that on the emergency docket, the Court rarely bothers to explain the reasoning behind its actions. But even the Court's political leanings can't fully account for what's going on. Data collected by the political scientist Adam Bonica suggest that Trump has fared poorly in the lower courts in front of judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. The liberal Supreme Court justices, meanwhile, don't always reject the administration as a bloc. (Recall that Jackson was the only public dissent in the RIF case.) Another possibility is that district-court judges, who deal more directly in facts—and less in legal abstractions—have a harder time ignoring the truth of what Trump is actually doing. The Supreme Court, in contrast, appears inclined to take on faith the sanitized, often disingenuous version of events that the administration presents in its legal briefs. Whatever the cause, the overall picture is of a Supreme Court casually undercutting the lower courts. Dissenting to the Court's ruling on birthright citizenship, Jackson warned that 'this Court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts' would lead to 'the degradation of our rule-of-law regime.' The Trump administration, though, seems only too happy to take advantage of the Supreme Court's help. And as far as the White House is concerned, the cost to the rule of law may be a bonus.
Fast Company
08-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
PepsiCo and Wendy's exec Kirk Tanner to become Hershey's next CEO
Longtime food and beverage exec Kirk Tanner was appointed as The Hershey Company's new CEO early on Tuesday. Tanner will be replacing former Hershey's CEO Michele Buck after she announced her retirement early this year, and will be leaving his current position as Wendy's CEO to begin his new role with the chocolate company on August 18, 2025. His business portfolio includes the likes of PepsiCo, where he worked for 31 years and climbed the corporate ladder from sales associate to the tiptop as the soda giant's chief executive officer. During his time with the company it saw steady, slow rising annual revenue. His 5-year stint as chief executive also had its fair share of brand-expansion like the acquisition of Rockstar Energy and Siete Foods, investing in environmental efforts like regenerative potato farming, and controversies like the brand's significant effect on pollution and questionable health-washing. Trading Frostys for chocolate bars After leaving PepsiCo, Tanner spent a little over a year as Wendy's CEO before he decided to amicably part ways with the company. His short time with the signature red pigtailed fast food company was marked by a focus on 'innovation' through the expansion of menu options, including limited-time Frosty flavors, and opening new restaurants, including the 74 new Wendy's that opened during the first quarter of 2025. However, his leave also comes just as investors speculate the company's stock will fall as much as 6% by the end of August, as it has seen steady decreases in shares over the last year. 'It has been a privilege to lead Wendy's, an iconic brand, and I leave with a sense of gratitude for our employees and franchisees who make the Company a truly special place,' Kirk said in a statement. 'The brand is of the highest quality in the quick service restaurant industry, and I believe there is tremendous growth potential ahead for all Wendy's stakeholders.' 'Leading snacking powerhouse ambition' Kirk's return to the 'packaged goods' industry comes as Hershey looks to continue their expansion of non-chocolate snack foods, especially with the potential rising costs of imported cocoa beans due to Trump-administration tariffs. 'Kirk is a proven, high-impact leader in the food and beverage industry with a great combination of customer and consumer passion, commercial acumen and operational scale,' Mary Kay Haben, Hershey's Lead Independent Director and Chair of the CEO Search Committee said. 'With a track record of driving growth in complex global businesses, Kirk brings a focused, results-driven mindset. His deep experience in snacks, beverages, M&A and innovation—combined with public company CEO and board roles—makes him well suited to lead Hershey into the future.'
Atlantic
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Conservative Attack on Empathy
Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that 'the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.' By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they're moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that of their home country. In this line of thought, empathetic approaches to politics favor liberal beliefs. An apparent opposition between thought and feeling has long vexed conservatives, leading the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to famously declare that ' facts don't care about your feelings.' But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days. That a conservative presented with these cases might feel betrayed by their own treacherous empathy makes sense; this degree of human suffering certainly ought to prompt an empathetic response, welcome or not. Even so, it also stands to reason that rather than shifting their opinions when confronted with the realities of their party's positions, some conservatives might instead decide that distressing emotions provoked by such cases must be a kind of mirage or trick. This is both absurd—things that make us feel bad typically do so because they are bad—and spiritually hazardous. Xochitl Gonzalez: What happened to empathy? This is certainly true for Christians, whose faith generally counsels taking others' suffering seriously. That's why the New York Times best seller published late last year by the conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, is so troubling. In her treatise packaging right-wing anti-empathy ideas for Christians, Stuckey, a Fox News veteran who recently spoke at a conference hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, contends that left wingers often manipulate well-meaning believers into adopting sinful argumentative and political positions by exploiting their natural religious tendency to care for others. Charlie Kirk, the Republican activist who runs Turning Point USA, said that Stuckey has demolished 'the No. 1 psychological trick of the left' with her observation that liberals wield empathy against conservatives 'by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts' and then perverting them 'to morally extort us into adopting their position.' Taken at face value, the idea that Christians are sometimes persuaded into un-Christian behavior by strong emotions is fair, and nothing new: Suspicion of human passions is ancient, and a great deal of Christian preaching deals with the subject of subduing them. But Toxic Empathy is not a sermon. It is a political pamphlet advising Christians on how to argue better in political debates—a primer on being better conservatives, not better Christians. Empathy is an ambiguous concept. When it was imported into English from German a little more than a century ago, empathy referred to one's capacity to merge experiences with objects in the world, a definition that current usage bears little resemblance to: The Atlantic reported in 2015 that 'the social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts,' such as 'knowing another's thoughts and feelings,' 'actually feeling as another does,' and 'feeling distress at another's suffering,' a kind of catchall term for having a moral imagination. Stuckey's definition doesn't distinguish among these different elements; she instead frames empathy itself as a specific emotion rather than a psychological capacity for understanding the emotions of others, which makes her usage especially confusing. Whatever it is, empathy isn't something Stuckey wants to reject altogether: Jesus embodied a kind of empathy, and it can be, she says, 'a powerful motivation to love those around you.' Arthur C. Brooks: What's missing from empathy The toxic kind of empathy, she contends, is the kind that makes you double-check your specifically conservative political priors. Some examples: 'If you're really compassionate, you'll welcome the immigrant' and 'If you're really a Christian, you'll fight for social justice.' This argumentative technique, in which Christians are asked to consider their political positions in light of the logic of their own faith, can hardly be described as empathy in any common sense of the term. This linguistic confusion between rational arguments about whether a person's political positions are adequately Christian, on one hand, and arguments that people should reason from emotion, on the other, runs through the entire debate about empathy. What Stuckey seems to be saying is merely that progressive assertions summon certain emotions inside their conservative debate partners—such as pity and compassion—that make them unwilling to defend their premises, regardless of whether said conservatives are actually inhabiting the emotional states of other people. Labeling those emotions as fruits of toxic empathy is a strategy for dealing with them: It resolves the tension between what one feels and what one thinks by dismissing one's feelings as misguided. This approach glibly ignores the possibility that such emotions are in fact the voice of one's conscience, and takes for granted that ignoring one's sympathies for other people is a good Christian habit of mind. In that sense, the toxic-empathy rhetorical framework, built for producing peace of mind for conservative debaters, threatens to render Christians insensitive to moral demands of Christianity that run contrary to conservative preferences. 'Toxic empathy claims the only way to love racial minorities is to advance social justice,' Stuckey writes at one point, 'but 'justice' that shows partiality to the poor or to those perceived as oppressed only leads to societal chaos.' It's true that every person should be judged equally in the administration of the law, but it's also the case that Christianity actually does dictate that the needs of the poor and powerless should be prioritized in society. Far from being a misleading interpretation adduced by bad-faith actors in political debates, it is rather the plain meaning of the Gospels, attested to by thousands of years' worth of Christian saints and thinkers who have declared that God especially loves the poor and the oppressed. That fact remains as radical today as it was when Jesus was preaching, and now, just as then, there are people who can't stand to recognize it.
