A Complicated Week in America
A small note about what counted this past week.
As previously noted the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World spent a long weekend in Lake Annecy, France as part of the Fletcher School’s annual Talloires Symposium. Talloires is a very relaxing place. I mean, this is what the sunset looked like on Friday evening from the mountains:
And this is what sunrise looked like on Sunday from lake Annecy:
Let me stipulate at the outset that such a setting might have put me in a more optimistic frame of mind than usual. But after a long weekend of conversations, ruminations, and reflections about the state of the United States, I confess that I am feeling better about the state of America than I did a week ago.
It is worth explaining why, because there were already an awful lot of reasons to be down on the state of the United States. And over the past week:
The Trump administration ratcheted up his deployment of troops to Los Angeles;
A sitting senator who identified himself as such was manhandled by DHS and FBI agents;
Trump delivered a rabidly partisan speech in front of uniformed soldiers who were hand-picked to attend based on their political affiliation;
Political violence in the United States notched a few more fatalities;
Dueling assemblages of Americans converged over the weekend.1
And yet, on the whole, I would conclude that the forces of illiberalism seem weaker than they did a week ago.
Why? Well, for one thing, as predicted, Trump chickened out on his maximalist immigration position. The New York Times reported on how businesses pressured Trump to scale back his restrictionist ambitions:
On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.
Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target work sites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Farmers rely on immigrants to work long hours, Ms. Rollins said. She told the president that farm groups had been warning her that their employees would stop showing up to work out of fear, potentially crippling the agricultural industry.
She wasn’t the first person to try to get this message through to the president, nor was it the first time she had spoken to him about it. But the president was persuaded….
Some influential Trump donors who learned about the post began reaching out to people in the White House, urging Mr. Trump to include the restaurant sector in any directive to spare undocumented workers from enforcement.
Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Ms. Rollins. Many of Mr. Trump’s top aides, particularly Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, have urged a hard-line approach, targeting all immigrants without legal status to fulfill the president’s promise of the biggest deportation campaign in American history.
The New Republic’s Greg Sargent notes that Trump’s TACO behavior on deportation reveals his political vulnerability on the issue pundits like to say is his strongest:
Trump plainly grasps that his deportations are now perceived—accurately—as needlessly targeting good people who are contributing vitally to our economy and society, and not primarily the violent “criminal migrant” class that Trump and Stephen Miller keep insisting they’re removing….
To get voters to support mass removals, Trump and Miller have relentlessly smeared targeted migrants as uniformly dangerous criminals. But polls show that majorities oppose removing undocumented longtime residents, people with jobs, and those who don’t have a criminal record.
The public is even souring on deportations more broadly. And as NBC’s Natasha Korecki reports, headlines about deported families and other deeply sympathetic cases are growing more common. If this weren’t becoming a major political problem, vulnerable Republicans would not have to distance themselves from all of it.
The Trump administration might try to re-raise their bellicosity in the hopes of fomenting more political violence, thereby justifying even more mobilization of the federal government’s coercive apparatus. There are reports suggesting that very gambit. But I am also sure the conventional wisdom that Trump would benefit from his actions in Los Angeles have proven to be badly off. His overall polling numbers have trended downward since he escalated Los Angeles. His specific polling on this issue has been bad from the outset and has been getting worse over the past week.2
Meanwhile, the Saturday contrast between the “No Kings” protests and Trump’s Army parade in Washington, DC also demonstrate that Trump’s efforts to turn the United States into an illiberal state are foundering. Relying on crowdsourcing data, G. Elliott Morris reveals that the protests garnered a healthy turnout — which has been emblematic of Trump’s second term:
As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday….
According to the [Crowd Counting Consortium], there have been over 15,000 political protests since Donald Trump’s second inauguration this January. Over the same period in 2017, during Trump’s first term, there were barely over 5,000. protests….
With our preliminary counting, the turnout at yesterday’s No Kings Day events nationwide rivals, and may exceed, turnout for the 2017 Women’s March. The 2017 Women’s March drew between 3.3 and 5.6 million people, depending on the estimate, making it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. Our early numbers suggest No Kings Day may be in that range.
Total turnout in the No Kings Day protests is likely to fall short of the famous 3.5% population threshold for forcing action via mass protest. But the cool thing about that work is that the scholars find that smaller mobilizations of 1-1.5% of the population still have a 40-60% chance of accomplishing their goals.
Both the number of protests and their massive size are warnings for the Trump administration, which has routinely trampled the limits of public opinion during the president’s second term. On immigration, deportations, Medicaid/social spending, and democracy, the president has pushed policy much farther right than sanctioned by the U.S. public. The mobilized resistance across the country on Saturday is a real-world sign of backlash to his unpopular agenda.
In theory, Trump’s military parade in DC was never terribly popular with Americans. In practice, the parade seemed… let’s say “politically underwhelming.”
Actually, credit is due here to the U.S. Army, which seemed to finesse Trump’s demands for a parade while retaining its integrity. The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott explains:
The Army’s 250th birthday parade was not the grand military spectacle that many anticipated, and for that Americans can breathe a momentary, measured sigh of relief.
It was a family-friendly conclusion to a celebratory day, with events on the Mall and fireworks at the end. What had been billed as an overwhelming display of military might turned out to be a linear history lesson, from the early days of revolution to the age of robotic dogs and flying drones. A narrator made sense of it all over loudspeakers and for those watching the live stream on television, with a script that rarely strayed from the Army’s disciplined sense of itself as a lethal fighting machine in the service of democracy and the Constitution….
The soldiers who paraded past the presidential reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue walked with a loose-limbed gait, disciplined but not robotic, with individual soldiers integrated into the collective without losing their identity. Those riding by on tanks, trucks and other combat vehicles waved and smiled, engaging with an enthusiastic crowd. The announcer often sounded as if he were narrating a fashion show for machines rather than a military parade.
Max Boot expressed similar sentiments: “This was not a menacing, goose-stepping parade a la Moscow or Pyongyang. It was America’s army on display, and I appreciated how many of the GIs were women or ethnic minorities — a reminder of the limits of Hegseth’s anti-DEI purges in a force that truly represents the entire country.”
Why highlight the contrast between the protests and the parade? In my travels abroad as of late, I have often been asked whether anything will stop Donald Trump, whether that “anything” will include the American people engaging in social mobilization, and whether the midterm elections will even still happen. The tone of these questions suggests that international observers believe that the United States is becoming ever more Trumpified.
Despite the deployment of troops and the manhandling of sitting senators, the events of the past week falsify that despairing belief. Sure, a lot of Americans are copacetic with Donald Trump’s vision of America. A lot more Americans are opposed, however — and they are starting to organize.
That should be the most important takeaway from this past week.
Oh, right, Israel and Iran also went to war. I am going to punt the Middle East conflict to a later column, as it is too big and too unrelated to shoehorn here.
Even the polls showing stronger support for Trump aren’t exactly robust in their findings.
Class prevailed over crass 😎
The summary is sharp, the analysis precise and swift — as if global unrest is already on the move: arrests, protests, assassinations, and new wars igniting.
Your writing is clearly resonating with more and more readers. I look forward to your upcoming work.