“This is the face that we show the world.” —Shriekback, “Clear Trails” (1983)

Signal-gate — or whatever you call it — is a profound embarrassment. The first question is obvious: why on Earth were top officials in the Trump administration discussing an impending military action on a commercial app? The second: how did The Atlantic Monthly editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, long hostile to everything Donald Trump stands for, get included in the chat?

Naturally Goldberg reported it when he realized it wasn’t a hoax, eventually publishing the entire exchange. This was the opportunity of the year to expose people he disliked instinctively to public ridicule! What did anyone think he was going to do?

The most likely culprit is Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security advisor, who initially insinuated Goldberg might have hacked his way into the chat somehow, which is nonsense. Goldberg wouldn’t have known about it. Then it became an accident. Taken as a whole, this security breach makes all involved look like mental lightweights. And hypocrites if they ever again bring up Hillary Clinton’s emails. This plays right into the hands of those saying that Trump’s cabinet appointees (starting with Waltz and Pete Hegseth) aren’t qualified for their jobs.

These, though, are only two of the questions racing through my mind these uncertain days.

Whatever Happened to: America First!

The military operation itself: why is the Trump administration targeting a people, the Houthis of Yemen, who have not threatened us and are no threat to us? Yes, they’ve caused some local problems — apparently in retaliation for Israel’s breaching the cease-fire in Gaza. But does America have an obligation to intervene?

What happened to “America first!”?

During the chat only J.D. Vance had enough sense to try to raise doubt about the wisdom of the venture. Hegseth immediately shut him down.

Naturally, following Goldberg’s exposé, an investigation ensued. Hegseth fell apart, denying that the chat contained specific attack plans which under normal circumstances would be classified information. The plans were right there in The Atlantic Monthly’s reprint and now in countless other places online. (Here. Judge for yourself.)

Tulsi Gabbard also crumbled under interrogation, creating doubt that she even knows what should be classified, much less whether that should have been. She deferred to Hegseth. People are asking: Trump placed this woman is charge of the intelligence community?

Hegseth and Co. can’t blame leftists for this screw up. Sleepy Joe didn’t do it. Obama didn’t do it. They did it themselves. It’s called p***ing in your own mess kit.

A friend of mine, disillusioned with his vote last November, now speaks of Trump as having turned into “George W. Bush with a red hat!”

Bush, we recall (even if we don’t want to), directed the attack on Iraq back in 2003. Iraq had not threatened the U.S. and posed no threat to the U.S.: an official narrative of the time notwithstanding, which was that Saddam had WMDs.

As with most official narratives, it was a lie. No WMDs were found.

I argued in multiple venues (articles, forums) that attacking Iraq was a bad idea, not in our best interests. I was called, among other things, a “Saddam lover.”

As I predicted, the Iraq War destabilized the region. ISIS emerged from that. Lesson: it’s easy for a superpower to take out a government like Saddam’s — especially as Iraq had been subject to bombing campaigns going back to the Gulf War of the early 1990s launched by the first George Bush.

It’s much harder to put something stable in its place.

Especially a “liberal democracy” among a people with no heritage or traditions that would enable them to grasp the concept liberal democracy. Iraqis and other Middle Easterners were expected to fall in line anyway.

American Exceptionalism, you know, making the world safe for the “rules-based liberal order.”

These were among the discredited narratives that eventually felled Establishment Republicans and made room for Trump’s rise. He offered an alternative to a foreign policy he rightly decried during his first campaign as a “complete and total disaster.”

Back to the present. The Houthis are supported by Iran. Trump bears a special hatred for Iran, shared with elements in the Deep State he also decries. Iran has also not threatened the U.S. (It has, of course, threatened Israel a time or two. I’ll come to this in Part 2.)

The issue, of course, is Iran developing a nuclear weapon. But U.S. foreign policy is pushing the country in that direction.

The unexpected warmongering of this administration, just over two months in, now looking an awful lot like the “complete and total disaster” Trump once criticized, and its reckless discussion of the matter of the Houthis on an insecure app with a list of names carelessly including a figure known to be hostile to Trump, are not the only things that should leave us alarmed.

Here are a few more items I did not vote for, and that for the life of me can’t figure out how they exemplify “America First!” or Making America Great Again.

Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal: An American Superstate?

Annexing Canada and making it the 51^st state. At first I thought Trump was joking, but now I’m not so sure. In what parallel universe would this be a good idea? For starters, Canada’s populations are more left-leaning than in the U.S. This aside, there’s no indication they would be at all sympathetic to being forced into an American superstate under the heel of the Asylum on the Potomac.

Now to be sure, Young Global Leader Justin Trudeau turned the place into a soft dictatorship. Mark Carney (technocrat, former central banker, Trilateral Commission member) won’t be better. But annexation into the U.S. is not a solution. How would that Make America Great Again?

Taking Greenland from Denmark. Another awful idea. Copenhagen has indicated in no uncertain terms that Greenland is not for sale and it’s non-negotiable. Greenlanders don’t want to be brought under the U.S. thumb any more than Canadians. They’ve been protesting in front of the U.S. Embassy in Nuuk, Greenland’s capitol. J.D. Vance and wife had to cut their recent visit short. He wasn’t welcome there and he knew it.

What’s up with this? The place is resources-rich, especially in minerals useful to Big Tech. I don’t know about Trump, but His Muskiness and other technocrats might therefore want Greenland for their very own. This raises the issue who is really running the Trump 2.0 administration. Is it Trump, or the unelected mega-billionaire who has been backing him, and whom Trump turned loose with DOGE?

Frankly, I don’t trust Musk. He invented and patented a device capable of being implanted in our brains and creating a “whole brain interface” between humans and computers. That was one of his earlier companies, Neuralink, about which (interestingly!) we hear very little today.

No one in his right mind thinks Musk gave Trump all that money without expecting something in return. And since we mentioned Vance, his primary mentor is Peter Thiel, another Big Tech billionaire technocrat. Has anyone noticed: this administration is full of, and surrounded by, technocrats who most likely have no sincere interest in Making America Great Again.

Taking back the Panama Canal. It might have been a mistake to give it away in the late ‘70s, but a move to seize the Panama Canal back, however accomplished, would reinforce the sense many Latin Americans have that the U.S. is the biggest bully on the playground. When my wife and I visited Panama back in 2016, a few Panamanians confided this to me once they understood that I did not support what “my” government had done: especially the deadly invasion of 1989 also led by the first George Bush, after which we were lied to about the Panamanian death toll (it was not a “mere” 400 but more like 4,000!).

Would taking back the Panama Canal by force Make America Great Again?

I don’t think so!

And speaking of Latin Americans….  As far as I’m concerned, Trump did the right thing with his decision to get members of the violent Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua out of the country, and the way his decision has been fought by left-leaning jurists such as James Boasberg (an Obama appointee) tells us all we need to know about them.

But again, the way this was carried out was sloppy. It appears that not every Venezuelan on that plane was in the gang. They were judged as such because they wore tattoos. Tattoos are ubiquitous these days. They probably aren’t a good guide to anything.

Besides, was it determined that every deported Venezuelan was in the U.S. illegally? There was no case-by-case investigation, so how can anyone know? There appear to have been people sent to the El Salvadorian prison who weren’t even Venezuelan! This.

Broadening this discussion:

Violating the First Amendment Rights of Mahmoud Khalil and Other Detainees in the U.S. Legally….

Disappearing noncitizens with green cards and student visas. This arguably overlaps with the next category of concern, so I’ll deal with them both at once. The battle for free speech on college and university campuses is not over, it has merely shifted to new territory!

Mahmoud Khalil was a graduate student at Columbia University and a leading critic of the Israeli war in Gaza (where the official number of Palestinians killed now exceeds 50,000) who had led protests. He was in the U.S. legally, with both a green card and a student visa. Both were revoked without due process, as he was forcibly taken from his apartment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and sent to a holding facility in Louisiana, leaving behind his American wife who is 8-months pregnant with their first child.

I don’t know if Khalil is a nice guy. I never met him, obviously. I also don’t know if he defended Hamas as he’s been accused of doing. As of this writing he’s not been charged with a crime. If he broke the law, he needs to pay the consequences which could include deportation.

But we’ve not been told what law he is supposed to have broken. Unless, of course, it is now illegal for a foreign student to criticize Israel or Zionism — that these are thought crimes identical with harassing or intimidating Jewish students in the wake of Israel’s brutal retaliation following Hamas’s attack of October 7, 2023. This seems implied by Trump’s having signed an executive order in January on “antisemitism” on college and university campuses; interestingly, this order reiterates an earlier one he issued back in 2019.

(Note: some of those protesting Israel’s actions have been Jewish students, marching alongside Palestinians and Americans. This gives lie to the claim that the protests aimed to “intimidate Jewish students.”)

Does the First Amendment cover noncitizens who are legally on U.S. soil? I wasn’t sure, so I consulted my friendly neighborhood AI. Here’s what my friendly neighborhood AI told me:

Yes, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution generally protects the free speech rights of all individuals on U.S. soil, not just U.S. citizens. The amendment states, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” and this protection applies to anyone within the jurisdiction of the United States, including non-citizens2.

For example, a non-citizen like Mahmoud Khalil would have the right to express criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza without fear of government censorship or punishment, as long as his speech does not fall into exceptions such as incitement to violence or true threats. This principle has been upheld in various legal interpretations and court rulings.

[Sources: www.freedomforum.org,  www.law.cornell.edu.]

In other words, if Khalil wasn’t trying to incite violence, he was protected by the First Amendment, which the Trump administration and ICE are openly violating. Even if he defended Hamas his speech was protected by the First Amendment!

Worth reiterating: if we don’t defend the free speech rights of those whose speech we find abhorrent, then we aren’t honoring free speech in any principled fashion. I’ve criticized wokesters on these pages, and elsewhere online. I’ve never argued that they should be jailed for their opinions.

The U.S. federal government, under Trump 2.0, is clearly equating support for Palestinians against Israeli strikes in Gaza with support for Hamas, and therefore criminal support for a terrorist group.

Writers across the political spectrum are invoking “antisemitism” just as wokesters invoked “racism” to thwart criticisms of affirmative action.

I’m surprised no conservatives (that I know of) see the exact parallel here!

Khalil is just one of a growing number of green card and visa holders — all in the U.S. legally — who have had this happen to them.

There’s also Yunseo Chung, also a Columbia University student who also participated in (did not lead) pro-Palestinian protests. Chung came with her parents to the U.S. from South Korea when she was 7. Now she is threatened with being deported to a country she probably barely remembers.

Then, more recently, there’s the widely publicized case of Rumeysa Ozturk, Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, in the U.S. on a valid F-1 visa, taken off the street by ICE agents near her home last Tuesday following her publication of an op-ed that criticized what she called the genocide in Gaza and called for Tufts to divest from Israel.

I see no clearer violation of the First Amendment than this: she’s being punished for something she wrote in a student newspaper!

What DHS put out, offering no evidence: Ozturk was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.”

The unnamed DHS spokesperson added that “a visa is a privilege, not a right…”

As of last Wednesday, her attorney could not reach her and did not even know where she was being held.

Due process?

Iranian national Alirez Doroudi, studying engineering at the University of Alabama, was arrested and detained by ICE agents and also taken to Louisiana. He, too, hasn’t been charged with a crime.

But maybe it’s now illegal to be an Iranian in the U.S. (He’d applied for an EB-2 visa, a pathway to a green card for immigrants with, or further pursing, advanced degrees.)

Others being detained are not Palestinian, do not appear to have anything to do with the war in Gaza, are not Venezuelan or Iranian, and since again there are no accusations of criminal activity,  what offense they’ve committed—   Your guess is as good as mine!

German graduate student Fabian Schmidt, age 34, was detained trying to enter the country from the Netherlands at Boston’s Logan Field. He simply disappeared for several days. He alleges he was placed in a bright room with just a mat and denied medication he is on for anxiety and depression until he collapsed. He’s just one of at least three German nationals to have this happen, prompting the German government to issue a travel advisory to its citizens about traveling to the U.S.

Sweden, Finland, and others European nations have issued similar advisories.

My list here of mostly foreign students or others clearly in the U.S. legally or trying to enter legally barely even scratches the surface.

Is this the face we want to show the world?