Trump Changes His Mind
Plus: War Department, government ownership stake in Intel, National Guard members become cleaning crews, and more...
A president who changes his mind: "It's very insulting to say students can't come here," said President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House yesterday. "I like that their students come here. I like that other countries' students come here."
"And you know what would happen if they didn't?" asked Trump. "Our college system would go to hell very quickly." Full video below.
NOW - Trump says he's allowing 600,00 Chinese students into the U.S. because "it's very insulting to say students can't come here… I like that their students come here. I like that other country's students come here." pic.twitter.com/wzCshB7tQQ
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) August 26, 2025
It's a little hilarious for Trump to say it's insulting to deny students the ability to come here when that's exactly what he did a few months ago. Besides, it might be a little too late for this change of heart; visa applications for international students are predicted to be down by 30 percent to 40 percent this fall, down from the roughly one million international students in the country about a year ago (with almost 300,000 of those students coming from China) in part due to the tightened vetting mandated by this administration. Chinese students have been targeted in particular as national security threats. Either we're worried about espionage or we're not; it's just not clear where Trump actually stands on this one.
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"The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has long warned that foreign adversaries and competitors take advantage of easy access to American higher education to, among other things, steal technical information and products, exploit expensive research and development to advance their own ambitions, and spread false information for political or other reasons. Our adversaries, including the People's Republic of China, try to take advantage of American higher education by exploiting the student visa program for improper purposes and by using visiting students to collect information at elite universities in the United States," he said via proclamation in June.
"In my judgment, it presents an unacceptable risk to our Nation's security for an academic institution to refuse to provide sufficient information, when asked, about known instances of misconduct and criminality committed by its foreign students," the proclamation continued. "This principle is one reason why…regulations require foreign students to obey Federal and State criminal laws and require universities to keep records about foreign students' studies in the United States—including records relating to criminal activity by foreign students and resulting disciplinary proceedings—and furnish them to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on request."
To strain a bit, it's possible that the underlying concerns have in fact been addressed: Trump made a lot of noise about how American universities welcoming foreign students should be seen as a privilege, not a right, and it's possible he just wanted acquiescence on that front and a shift in university administrators' attitudes and cooperation with DHS. Or it's possible he just changed his mind or was never that committed to the initial viewpoint. Depending on your perspective, Trump's ability to quickly change his mind is either a feature or a bug. But for proponents of brain drain, the decision to let 600,000 new Chinese students in is undoubtedly a good thing.
Scenes from New York:
Funny but unimportant: Zohran Mamdani is bad at lifting weights.
Actually important: Mamdani embarks on things without considering his own limits.
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) August 25, 2025
QUICK HITS
- More on this from this week's Just Asking Questions:
Note: He's not arguing that inventions made with public funds should be in the public domain, so anyone can make or build on them. He's saying he wants the government to get a cut of their monopolies. https://t.co/vlMkYNK70r
— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) August 26, 2025
- "So, Intel has raised some money from the US government, in exchange for equity, and discovered that previous money sent to them by the government should have been reciprocated with equity all along," writes Byrne Hobart at The Diff. "It's actually an incredibly tempting approach to couple corporate subsidies with equity ownership. If the government is making a company better-off, it seems only fair to give the government a stake in the upside, perhaps at a valuation that still makes it an obviously good deal for the company. The problem is that the long-term incentive is for the company to arrange itself around needing constant infusions of capital. The more Intel raises this way, the more attractive further subsidies are, since they help bail out the previous investment. If the government is going to take an equity stake in a previously-private company, but not take it over completely, the only structure that aligns incentives correctly is for them to be straitjacketed into only making the investment one time, and committing to sell it down in the future."
- Women want one thing: To watch the financial collapse of Rent the Runway and take advantage of designer clearance sales whenever bankruptcy is declared. "Rent the Runway Inc. will hand over a controlling stake in the company as part of a plan to cut debt and grow, after residual effects of the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the firm to the brink of bankruptcy," reports Bloomberg. "The deal, with lender Aranda Principal Strategies and other partners, will wipe more than $240 million of debt from Rent the Runway's balance sheet, according to a statement. The company, which allows subscribers to rent clothing for the office and events, will have several more years to repay $120 million in remaining borrowings."
- Calling the Department of Defense the "War Department" (as the president intends to do) strikes me as a lot more honest. I appreciate bluntness and don't understand the hand-wringing.
- Food for thought from Katherine Dee: "The latest suite of 'think of the children' [age-verification and phone-banning] policies create the infrastructure for much broader censorship. The problem isn't the phone bans themselves—it's how they're being used as part of a larger authoritarian project that most people can't see coming."
- Cleaning up the city!
National Guard members activated for DC federal takeover seen picking-up trash https://t.co/jFGM8awBIr pic.twitter.com/nfBuEuyJgZ
— Allison Papson (@AllisonPapson) August 26, 2025
- Evil:
Something I learned from this chapter:
Qian Xinzhong, China's family planning chief, received the inaugural UN Population Award in 1983 for his work on the one child policy. https://t.co/idQLZMXnHx
— Santi Ruiz (@rSanti97) August 27, 2025