Neal Pollack

On Monday morning, the nation awoke to learn that 100 "Wanted"-style posters now line the driveway to the White House, featuring faces of people the Trump administration has deported and the crimes they’d committed. A perpetual shriek, warning about the rise of fascism, arose from the online cosmos, as people began posting, again, “This is how it starts.” I saw more than one person compare the display to a medieval king posting heads on spikes around a moat, or Nazi propaganda magazine spreads about dangerous “Juden.” Perhaps. Or maybe it was just oppositional troll-bait. This is how the Trump White House operates. It’s government by meme, and it can be very effective.

In the latest episode of “As the Trump Turns,” Elon Musk and Secretary Treasury Scott Bessent, two incredibly powerful billionaires, got into a White House screaming match over who gets to be the acting commissioner of the IRS. According to Axios, Bessent accused Musk of going behind his back to get Trump to appoint Musk’s favored candidate. Musk “clapped back,” calling Bessent a “Soros agent,” and accusing him of running a “failed hedge fund.” “Fuck you!” Bessent screamed. “Say it louder!” shouted Musk. There were no reports of anyone ripping down drapes or tossing a champagne glass in anyone else’s face. But this is how Donald Trump runs his White House.

The Trump administration has been tossing around the idea of a $5,000 “baby bonus” to help encourage young marrieds to have kids. Elon Musk’s Genghis Khan-like IVF efforts aside, the national birthrate is in decline, leading to bureaucratic fears of a population collapse. If this bonus were to happen, it would give fresh meaning to the term “stimulus.” But there will never be a Trumpian baby boom.   You hear all kinds of excuses for our procreative decline: rampant pornography, sex robots, institutionally encouraged gender dysphoria, microplastics in the water. But the major reason that American people aren’t having kids? They’re too expensive. The baby bonus floated this week is supposed to address that, but there’s one problem: it’s not nearly enough.

As the Trump administration continues its systematic effort to dismantle and humiliate every institution of liberal America, National Public Radio has issued its man-the-torpedoes command. In the equivalent of a red alert going off on the bridge in Star Trek, according to a New York Times report, NPR has ordered its local affiliates to contact their congressional representatives and beg for their professional lives. “Recission,” or revoking of already-allocated funding, is coming soon. “Engage your board members,” the memo goes, “Community Advisory Board, station volunteers, major supporters, community partners, business leaders, and emergency officials who work with your station and ask them to communicate to Congress your opposition to recission.

Last Friday the White House launched, without warning (which is how they like to do things), what is essentially a truth and reconciliation inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. While this somewhat vanished into the fog of President Trump’s ongoing battles against the post-Cold War liberal order, it’s still a significant political event.  Dial your browser to covid.gov, and it takes you to a White House splash page, with the words LAB LEAK in all caps, and “The True Origins of COVID-19” below to the right. The letters “Covid-19” are in cursive, as though a baseball player had signed it as an autograph.

Luigi Mangione has yet another day in court. A fresh collection of glamorous perp walk photos will emerge. Sexy orange-jumpsuit clad come-hither glances are forthcoming. This will surely appeal to his many fans – his stans – who’ve been dying to get a fresh look at their alleged murderous dreamboat. Luigi’s re-emergence comes at the end of an extraordinary week where the American left embraced a rogue’s gallery of villains so ridiculous that they almost seem fictional. You have Mangione, accused of shooting a healthcare CEO in cold blood; Mahmoud Khalil, who faces deportation for his role in Columbia's radical protests; and the latest entry into the sinister sweepstakes, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

A federal immigration judge ruled on Friday that the government could deport Mahmoud Khalil, not a student, but a “Columbia University graduate.” Judge Jamee Comans, a former Mississippi police officer and a Biden appointee in 2023, said that Khalil’s political activities posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” for the United States, which is claiming that Khalil is undermining “US policy to fight anti-Semitism.”  Khalil supporters talk about him like he’s Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, Dr. King writing letters from Birmingham jail or Oscar Wilde staring wistfully at the moon from his cell in Reading Gaol. But anyone looking to ding the Trump administration on its deportation policy could find a better example of injustice.

As soon as reports began appearing from last Saturday’s massive “Hands Off” protests in the United States, the usual right-wing canards began to pop up as well: doctored photos, overstated crowds and, most stereotypically, professional paid protesters. Tweet after tweet showed the usual Craigslist ad, offering $200 for anyone who’d be willing to stand around with a placard for a couple of hours. No one would argue that there’s a professional protest infrastructure in the United States, and that if you followed the money trail, you could trace a lot of the funding back to the kinds of NGOs that the government is trying to defund and shut down. The sinister invisible hand of the Soros family is dipping in there somewhere.

Since Liberation Day, my feed has been full of panicked, apocalyptic screeching, even more than usual. It hasn’t been useful. No, Janet, President Trump is not “trying to kill us all.” Instead, I’ve been seeking out intelligent, thoughtful analyses of our new Tariff Age, particularly from people who think that this is an actual good idea. There aren’t a ton of these people, but there are some. Pro-tariff voices that I’ve encountered include: journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon, who shocked the world when she came out as a “MAGA lefty” and is riding that identity toward a glorious future. Another is a Twitter account called “Insurrection Barbie,” which I take with an enormous salt lick.

On March 24, 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya co-published an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Is The Coronavirus As Deadly As They Say?” He argued that Covid lockdowns and quarantines had no grounding in scientific fact. That was a rare opinion in those isolated days. Anyone who spoke out against lockdowns, mask mandates, booster shots for toddlers, school closures, business shutdowns and any number of other injustices large and small that stemmed from Covid panic feels vindication today, as Bhattacharya, a sensible, mild-mannered scientist whom former National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins publicly smeared as a “fringe epidemiologist” is about, barring some sort of confirmation calamity, to take Collins’s job.