Possible Travel Bans Coming
Plus: The Trump administration's American dream revisionism, 50 theses on DOGE, what people get wrong about extreme MAGA, and more...
Trump 2.0 looks mighty different from Trump 1.0 but there are a few crucial areas of overlap. His penchant for tariffs is one of those things, as covered yesterday. His fixation on projecting strength at the border is another. But now it's looking like President Donald Trump will also be reviving another first-term relic that threw people into chaos and instability and ignited some of the earliest #resistance actions: travel bans.
"A draft recommendation circulating inside the executive branch proposes a 'red' list of countries whose citizens Mr. Trump could bar from entering the United States," several White House officials tell The New York Times. That red list will most resemble the first-term travel ban list, possibly including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. It's likely the list will be released within the next two weeks.
Afghans who have been traveling outside the country, who are on valid visas, have been urged to come back immediately lest they get shut out of the country, reports Reuters. And the tens of thousands of Afghans cleared for refugee resettlement or Special Immigrant Visas because of their roles in aiding the U.S. military during the war (as well as their legitimate fears of Taliban retribution for their roles), believe their status to be jeopardized.
The draft recommendation also lists an "orange" group of countries, where visa access may be restricted, possibly limited only to people traveling for business (not tourism), and shortened. Applicants from those countries might also be required to have in-person interviews, all in an effort to weed out poorer and more desperate people from coming and overstaying their visas.
"In one of the many executive orders he issued on Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump ordered the State Department to start identifying countries 'for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries,'" reports the Times.
Bessent is confused: "Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said yesterday during a speech to the Economic Club of New York. "The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security. For too long, the designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this."
Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today in NYC: "Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream"
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 6, 2025
I'm not sure what Bessent thinks upward mobility means if not being able to more easily afford things that make people's lives better, full of less labor and exertion, to be able to springboard oneself into a higher level of material comfort than before, and to not be bound by the class or circumstances into which one was born. It's easy to decry "cheap goods" and conjure up images of random stupid crap purchased on Amazon—a materialism that seems hollow and unnecessary. But "cheap goods" means washing machines and dishwashers that free us from the drudgery of household chores; it means "the infinite supply of everyday items," all the toothbrushes and nail clippers and pens and tennis balls and coffee mugs that keep our households running; it means cars and iPhones for people to be able to travel and communicate and stay connected more seamlessly than ever before. It's the lack of "cheap goods"—lumber, steel, aluminum parts, and nails—that has driven our housing prices up to such an untenable degree (among other things).
Access to cheap goods is very much the essence of the American dream; it should never be taken for granted that we live in a time of extraordinary material abundance, that our problems involve overnourishment, not undernourishment; how much work new technologies like artificial intelligence save us (and what will happen to people whose jobs get replaced); spiritual crises and atomization and fertility-rate woes that stem from people having so much freedom over how to live their lives. You could make the case that our material abundance has brought new problems, but it's not clear to me that the cheap goods are really the issue here, or that our new problems would be solved if the cheap goods were done away with. This is sort of just what happens when you move up the hierarchy of needs, when a society becomes more sophisticated and complex.
We live in an era of too much—too much noise, too many resources, too many things to which we're asked to give our attention—not an era of too little, for almost the first time in human history. Joseph Schumpeter was right; now all the factory girls have gotten their stockings and we're facing big questions of what to do next. Bessent appears to be selling short this modern miracle in service of promoting tariffs which will, in fact, make the American dream harder to achieve.
"Wall Street's done great, Wall Street can continue doing well. But this administration is about Main Street," Bessent said later in his speech. No, it's not. The policies this administration is pursuing will greatly harm the poorest Americans, and all for what?
Scenes from New York: Curious what other people have noticed. My lower Manhattan parish was absolutely packed for the 6:30 p.m. service.
A question for Catholic X followers: At my local parish in Princeton, there was an enormous turn out of people to receive ashes for Ash Wednesday (despite a soaking rainstorm). I've never seen anything like it. What was the turnout at your parish? Is something happening?
— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) March 6, 2025
QUICK HITS
- Possibly the worst example of malicious compliance I've seen yet: "The Air Force briefly removed new recruit training courses that included videos of the Tuskegee Airmen soon after Trump's [diversity, equity, and inclusion] order," reports the Associated Press.
- A follow-up to something I noted earlier in the week: Apparently, no offensive cyber operations directed at Russia have been halted, and no such order was given.
TO BE CLEAR: @SecDef has neither canceled nor delayed any cyber operations directed against malicious Russian targets and there has been no stand-down order whatsoever from that priority. https://t.co/OxGK0aQXN1
— DOD Rapid Response (@DODResponse) March 4, 2025
- "DOGE in its Elon [Musk] iteration is much more focused on two metrics: number of federal employees and dollars saved," writes Statecraft's Santi Ruiz (who also happens to be one of my good friends), stapling his 50 theses to the digital door. "I have been told that given the political pressures on it, DOGE is focusing staffers on projects that have a figure associated with them, either headcount or dollar spend. Those are brute metrics that are quite vulnerable to Goodhart's law: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' I do think there's plenty of wasteful spending in the federal government, and one of the upsides of DOGE is clearly the potential of creating a federal culture that is more aware of how it spends taxpayer dollars (more on this shortly)."
- "This may surprise some people who think that Trump is super callous, but these guys are really disturbed by seeing bodies in the streets," says Vanity Fair writer James Pogue on the latest Just Asking Questions. "There's something you can't really understand about MAGA, like the hardcore of MAGA, without understanding that. They feel the viscerality and reality of death and war in a way that a lot of neoliberal technocrats often don't." I really think that this Pogue episode, and the Matt Taibbi episode before it, are representative of what we're trying to do with this show: Eschew easy/boring mainstream media narratives and actually ask tough questions to people who are deeply sourced, have insider knowledge, and are dissatisfied with the typical simplistic explanations.
