Bitter Coffee

Who knew the house of cards would fall apart after rendition of legal U.S. residents to El Salvador without due process? But there you have it. The coffee tastes bitter today. Here’s hoping the coming days are sweeter.

If immigration reform and rounding up undocumented U.S. residents was the first goal of the administration (and it was), they did a terrible job preparing for it. The present goal apparently is to deport one million people per year, far short of what was said on the campaign trail. They did not adequately ramp up the legal system to accommodate due process for each one of this number of deportees. They seemed shocked that the judiciary system won’t let them load random people on cattle cars and sent them off to foreign lands with gulags without charges or a hearing of any kind. They just assumed the judiciary would go along. This lack of due process appears to be a line in the sand. When it get the the U.S. Supreme Court, the hand-picked justices seem unlikely to accept it. We shall see.

One has to ask how much time to spend thinking about Trump and his minions. I follow the news in a cursory way. I am usually familiar with a story someone raises in conversation. It is best for my personal productivity to spend as little time as possible occupied with figuring out what the administration is doing. I do care, yet it seems pointless to try to make sense of it when there is no conventional sense to be made about much of it. There are two key threads: Russell Vought’s implementation of Project 2025, and the daily changing whims of the president. I am not interested in being a spectator in the coliseum.

To maintain my sanity, I have to stay focused on finishing writing the current book. Once it is put to bed, I can turn my attention to other important things.