The Guardian's Exclusive On The Signal Chat

The Guardian ran an "exclusive" yesterday that had nothing new on a two week old story but continued to get everything wrong:

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

. . . According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

The Guardian story then repeats Waltz's initial explanation that Goldberg’s number had somehow been “sucked” into his phone and seems to use the complex chain of contact updates outlined above to lend support to the story.

The problem is that the Guardian's version -- which appears to have been planted by Waltz allies within the White House -- simply doesn't fly. For starters, it implies that Signal is just a text messaging app:

Waltz also appears to have also engendered some sympathy from inside Trump’s orbit over the group chat because the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.

Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said. As a temporary solution, the Trump White House told officials to use Signal as they had done during the transition instead of regular text-message chains.

But there are other text messaging apps, inclulding WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, and Viber. The important thing about Signal is that it has a strong commercial-level security feature. According to techradar,

What sets Signal apart is its robust privacy features: it’s regarded as the benchmark for secure mobile communications. Which makes Signalgate all the more ironic, even though it has little to do with the app's technical security.

All messaages are encrypted on the sender's phone, transmitted over the web in encrypted form, and decrypted on the receiver's phone. But in order for the text to be decrypted, the app must be on the on the receiver's phone. As I noted a week ago, Signal would have had to be installed on Goldberg's phone, which would have involved:

• Downloading Signal to the phone and running the install program
• Registering a phone number and waiting for a verification code
• Entering the verification code and finishing the onboarding process
• Editing a user profile and notifying a chat admin of it.

There is no way this could have happened just by "including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number" into a text message mistakenly sent to Waltz by Brian Hughes. Goldberg, someone on Goldberg's staff, or possibly someone on Waltz's staff, would have had to have access to Goldberg's phone, installed Signal on it, registered the phone with Signal, verified it, and then created or edited a Signal user profile for Goldberg, notifying Waltz, or someone on Waltz's staff, that this was Goldberg's profile.

Then Waltz, or someone on Waltz's staff, would have had to add Goldberg's profile, knowing it was Goldberg, to the Houthi chat. There is no way around this -- after all, this is strong commercial-level security. At least two people had to be involved, likely more than two, and there are presumably audit trails of every action. This is, for instance, the level of security banks use in things like wire transfers.

The Guardian story indicates there was some sort of internal forensiuc investigtion at the White House. The Guardian's use of the term "forensic" suggests the investigation involved auditors qualified to investigate fraud. It's hard to imagine the technical details of how Signal is installed and a phone is registered and a specific user profile added to the chat on Signal itself weren't part of that forensic investigation.

It's also hard for anyone not to conclude that someone on Waltz's staff was fully aware of what was done and for what purpose, namely, to damage the Trump administration's image by leaking information to a hostile journalist. I'm inclined to believe just one point in the Guaridan story:

Trump briefly considered firing Waltz over the episode, more angered by the fact that Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic – a magazine he despises – than the fact that the military operation discussion took place on an unclassified system such as Signal.

But Trump decided against firing him in large part because he did not want the Atlantic and the news media more broadly to have the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term.

Trump isn't stupid. Right now, he's keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. The Guardian story seems to come from Waltz and Waltz allies:

When Trump left the White House on Thursday, he was joined aboard Marine One by his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, his personnel chief, Sergio Gor, and Waltz, which aides took as a show of support for the embattled national security adviser.

Trump has learned important things about Waltz and Waltz's staff from this episode. Waltz, I think, is the stupid one here.

Let's Take Another Look At Trump, DEI, and the Ivies

Just this morning I saw yet another threat to an Ivy over anti-Semitism and DEI:

The Trump administration is poised to block $510 million in federal grants and contracts for Brown University over the school's response to antisemitism on campus, the New York Times reported.

Following the report, Brown Provost Frank Doyle said in an email that the school couldn't substantiate the information but was aware of "troubling rumors" about federal action against its funding. The potential freeze follows similar moves by the US government against Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, Brown's Ivy League peers.

As I noted yesterday, Alan Dershowitz never believed that the Ivies ever dropped Jewish quotas, they just disguised them throughout the postwar period as geographical "diversity" admissions preferences -- if you were applying to Harvard from someplace like Kansas or Montana, you got a few extra points, not least because you probably weren't Jewish. The Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel wdnt into much more detail in his 2005 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Karabel's main point is that the admissions process at elite schools is almost infinitely subdivided. As one reviewer put it,

By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard's admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover, another for the eight Rocky Mountain states.) Information from interviews, references, and student essays was then used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not between dockets, so there was no way for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to shut out the graduates of Andover and Exeter.

Karabel uses the term "baskets" more often than "dockets", but his point is the same. More important, there are baskets where neither academic ability nor athletic prowess nor character makes much difference -- some baskets are reserved for legacies, others for children of major donors, others for children of politicians and celebrities. A very good example is Hunter Biden: by the time he applied to Georgetown and Yale Law, he was the son of a US senator; that outweighed any other consideration on his record, even though his subsequent career manifested his utter lack of promise objectively viewed.

We might still ask why Hunter didn't apply to Harvard -- the answer is that there are some legacies, some children of celebrities, politicians, or major donors, that even an Ivy can't justify. Harvard couldn't justify admitting John-John Kennedy, a lifelong underachiever, even though he was a legacy, a celebrity, and scion of a wealthy family, but he did get into Brown, arguably the least selective and least prestigious of the Ivies.

The question is how big the various baskets are relative to the others. We can grant -- even the Ivies will grant, however reluctantly, that they exist. The question is what percentage of an incoming first-year class is made up of applicants who were weighted for reasons other than academic promise or even athletic ability. The answer to this is a closely held secret, and to some extent, it's irrelevant, since the competition among applicants is within the baskets, not overall. But the point is that DEI is nothing more than a slight rejiggering of the basket system.

If DEI applicants are a new basket, that means one or more baskets are proportionally smaller -- and my bet is that the basket that loses most will be the one that gives preference to the competitive Northeastern public school, SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. The baskets that lose the least will be the legacies, prep schools, major donors, and children of politicians and celebrities baskets -- and now the DEI.

And this brings me to one of the formative events of my life -- I got into an Ivy, via a public school, Northeastern suburb, SATS-grades-and-extracurriculars basket. I'd taken German, Latin, extracurricular Greek, and other AP courses, and all my SATs were in the high 700s, with one perfect 800 in Latin. I just assumed that all my classmates would have similar qualifications. But once I arrived on campus, I found no such thing. A fair number had developed severe alcoholism by the time they turned 18. Others just didn't seem very smart. Still others had acquired experience with drugs in prep school, something that in the mid 1960s hadn't reached the public schools.

I'd read and admired Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt in junior higb school. Why did so many of my classmates remind me of George F Babbitt? And I was always trying to figure out why so many had the same surname as the names of campus buildings -- Steve Throckmorton. Why is that the same as Throckmorton Hall?

As I've noted here now and then, I went to the dean of freshmen and told him I thought somehow there'd been a major mistake. I was in the wrong place. The dean had something of a wry reacton, looked at my file, and more or less assured me that I was an intelligent young man indeed, stick it out. He was probably right that, ill-placed as I was, there was probably nowhere else for me to go, and that's probably still the case. Hillsdale College is good as far as it goes, but I'm not all that impressed with the online courses I've taken there. It's still your basic liberal arts school.

There's a fairly broad strain of opinion that says if Trump is overturning the system of tariffs, he's out to change more than just tariffs. If he's out to stop uncontrolled migration, he's out to reform more than just migration. If he's out to stop DEI and campus anti-Semitism, he's out to change more than just DEI and anti-Semitism. I certainly hope an unintended consequence of this particular program could be a more basic academic reform, maybe a scrapping of the whole basket admissions system.

They Miss The Point

Ingrid Jacques at USA Today:

Money talks.

That’s the message coming loud and clear from the country’s universities, as they respond to demands from the Trump administration to strip “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts and antisemitism from their campuses.

College administrators who might otherwise have rolled their eyes at such demands are paying attention now that their federal funding – provided by taxpayers – is on the line.

But it isn't just DEI:

The Trump administration has suspended several dozen federally funded research grants to Princeton University as part of its investigation into campus anti-Semitism, according to a Princeton University email published by the Daily Princetonian student newspaper.

The email, dated April 1 and sent to the campus community by university President Christopher Eisgruber, said the university received the notification from the funding agencies, including the Departments of Energy, Defense, and NASA.

. . . Eisgruber’s email said more information would be released following conversations with affected faculty, researchers, and grant managers.

Princeton is among the 60 elite higher education institutions currently under federal investigation for the harassment of Jewish students following Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Elsewhere,

The Trump Administration has officially put Harvard University on notice that it must change its policies on everything from wearing masks to admissions, or it will lose federal financial support.

Unlike the administration action cutting off Columbia University from about $400 million without options for adjusting policies, the government letter to Harvard this week gives Harvard the choice to adhere to government demands without an immediate cutoff, reported The Hill.

The Trump administration began the process of reviewing colleges and universities and taxpayer-provided financial support less than two weeks after President Donald Trump was inaugurated to serve a second term. Trump's Executive Order on Jan. 29 zeroed in on incidents of campus protests and specifically mentioned "Measures to Combat Campus Anti-Semitism."

. . . On March 31, the administration posted that it had opened a direct policy and funding review of Harvard.

This week's communication from the administration to Harvard does not specify the length of time Harvard is allowed to implement and begin enforcing the required policy changes.

Nor is it just elite universities:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and two other nonprofit organizations have come under fire for allegedly implementing scholarship and career advancement programs that discriminate against white Americans, potentially violating federal law and jeopardizing their tax-exempt status.

The American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) reported three organizations, the Gates Foundation, the Lagrant Foundation, and the Creative Capital Foundation, in letters to the IRS, claiming the nonprofits have “intentionally” discriminated against white people.

These cases of discrimination, AAER says, constitute “sufficient grounds” for the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt statuses of these three organizations.

. . . The Gates Foundation, AAER says, is “intentionally discriminating against white students by excluding them from the tuition assistance and specialized support that it provides to students of every other race or ethnicity.” The foundation’s Gates Scholarship states that the program is a “highly selective, last dollar scholarship for outstanding, minority high school students” before listing acceptable racial and ethnic backgrounds in its eligibility requirements.

A 2022 video advertising the Gates Scholarship reaffirms that only “low-income, minority students” are eligible. The program is only open to students who are “African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, or Native American.”

The complaints about both elite universities and charitable foundations actually put equal stress on both DEI and anti-Semitism, and even before the age of DEI, Alan Dershowitz in his 1991 Chutzpah pointed out that selective universities stressed "diversity" in their admissions policies by, for example, favoring applicants from outside the Northeast, which had the effect of excluding Jewish applicants from the Northeastern cities and suburbs. DEI simply continued the same policy under a slightly different guise.

But even that, it seems to me, isn't the whole story. In Thursday's post, I returned to Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich, where he discussed both charitable foundations and university endowments as byproducts of the income tax, which was made constitutional in the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution:

The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution allows Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states on the basis of population. It was passed by Congress in 1909 in response to the 1895 Supreme Court case of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by the requisite number of states on February 3, 1913, and effectively overruled the Supreme Court's ruling in Pollock.

. . . For several years after Pollock, Congress did not attempt to implement another income tax, largely due to concerns that the Supreme Court would strike down any attempt to levy an income tax. In 1909, during the debate over the Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act, Congress proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the states. Though conservative Republican leaders had initially expected that the amendment would not be ratified, a coalition of Democrats, progressive Republicans, and other groups ensured that the necessary number of states ratified the amendment. Shortly after the amendment was ratified, Congress imposed a federal income tax with the Revenue Act of 1913.

As Lundberg points out, although charitable foundations existed before 1913, both they and university endowments became effective ways to conceal and shelter stock ownership after the advent of the income tax. Wealthy families could donate corporate shares to the non-profits and universities while continuing control over those stocks via their membership on the non-profit and university boards, which followed because of those same major donations. In effect, this was the plutocratic response to the progressive policy innovation, and as part of the package, it incorporated other plutocratic predilections like anti-Semitism.

As I've been noting, a feature of the Trump paradigm reset is removal of multiple legs of the stools on which particular problems sit. He approached the migration problem both by closing the border and canceling funding to the NGOs that enabled the migration. He's approaching the dual problem of DEI and anti-Semitism, of which elite universities are and have been bastions, by threatening the federal part of their funding. It looks as if a further step will be to threaten federal funds to charitable foundations on the same basis.

Another factor in the Republican agenda will be to tax elite university endowments:

Washington insiders believe it is very likely that a significant increase in the tax rate on university endowment income will be enacted this year. They cite the need for additional tax revenue to offset the Trump tax cut agenda and the antipathy of many Republicans to what has been happening on campuses for the last two years. They also focus on the fact that then-Senator JD Vance introduced a bill in the last Congress imposing a 35 percent tax on endowment income.

Existing law imposes a 1.4 percent tax on endowment income of private universities that have endowments of $500,000 or more per student. The type of tax that might be considered in the current Congress is exemplified by a bill, H.R.446, the Endowment Tax Fairness Act, introduced by Congressman Nehls (R-TX), which raises the current 1.4 percent tax rate to 21 percent. The 21 percent is the same as the tax rate imposed on corporate income. Another bill, H.R. 1128, introduced by Congressman Lawler (R-TX), increases the rate to 10 percent, but it also greatly increases the number of schools covered by including private colleges and universities that have endowments of $200,000 or more per student.

But yet another leg of the stool on which university endowments sit is the income tax itself. Trump's long-term agenda, which is likely to outlive both him and his presidency, is either to reduce or completely eliminate the income tax. This will simply remove a major reason for the existence of university endowments and charitable foundations at all. Many people don't seem to understand the breadth of Trump's agenda, just part of which will be to reduce the prestige of the universities and, as just one result, to mark the value of a university education to market.

The Laura Loomer Firings

More has trickled out about the National Security Council firings yesterday following the Signal flap, along witn a couple of new firings just this morning:

President Donald Trump fired Air Force General Timothy Haugh, the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and head of U.S. Cyber Command.

General Haugh, a Biden holdover who assumed leadership of both agencies in 2024, has been relieved of his duties effective immediately, the New York Post reported.

General Haugh, who succeeded Gen. Paul Nakasone nearly a year ago, was informed by the White House that his tenure had concluded. His civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, was also relieved of her duties.

. . . Notably, this follows a meeting between President Trump and conservative activist Laura Loomer, who has been vocal about the need for personnel who are steadfastly loyal to the President’s agenda.

The Gateway Pundit reported on Thursday that during Loomer’s meeting with Trump, Loomer asked Trump to fire several National Security Council staff members, including his principal deputy national security adviser, Alex Wong.

The AP added some new context to that meeting:

People speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters say Loomer met with Trump, Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Sergio Gor, director of the Presidential Personnel Office and presented “research findings.”

When reached for comment, Loomer referred The Associated Press to an X post shared earlier on Thursday, saying she was not going to divulge any details about her Oval Office meeting with Trump “out of respect” for the president.

Apparently this is not the same meeting that was reported in a Politico story I linked here on Sunday:

On Wednesday evening [March 26] — following a brutal day of headlines surrounding the now-infamous Signal chat — Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles and top personnel official Sergio Gor gently offered President Donald Trump some advice in a private meeting.

So this meeting was a different one, Laura Loomer was there, and the personnel matters went beyond NSC staff. One outcome of this April 2 meeting was released yesterday:

President Donald Trump has dramatically fired several members of his National Security Council team.

. . . The dismissals come after National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added The Atlantic magazine's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat where top administration officials were discussing an attack on the Houthis in Yemen.

However, The New York Times reported Thursday morning that far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office on Wednesday and pressed for National Security Council (NSC) firings.

. . . Loomer came to the White House armed with research that purportedly showed some NSC staffers were not loyal enough to the president's agenda.

This was apparently a follow-on to the March 26 meeting with Trump, Vance, Waltz, Wiles, and Gor. The story continues,

'NSC doesn't comment on personnel matters,' was the official line from NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes.

But CNN reported Thursday that the individuals fired were Brian Walsh, Thomas Boodry and David Feith.

The network said that the firings were directly the result of Trump's meeting with Loomer, who Trump's top Congressional ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, had tried to get banished from MAGA months ago.

Loomer, however, has maintained a position in Trump's orbit.

CNN added another name to the three mentioned by the Daily Mail:

The four officials fired include Brian Walsh, a director for intelligence and a former top staffer for now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee; Thomas Boodry, a senior director for legislative affairs who previously served as Waltz’s legislative director in Congress; David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security who served in the State Department during Trump’s first administration; and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations.

CNN also adds other names to the April 2 meeting, which had more members than the March 26 meeting:

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff who was among the advisers who worked to control Loomer’s access to Trump during the campaign, was present for the Wednesday meeting, sources familiar with the meeting said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was seen greeting Loomer before she left the White House campus, was in the meeting for part of it. Communications Director Steven Cheung and Vice President JD Vance also attended, sources said.

. . . It was unclear when the Loomer meeting was placed on the schedule, but one aide said the presence of Wiles and Gor underscored that it was a sanctioned meeting. Gor, who is seen as one of the president’s most loyal aides, has been among the advisers who has been fielding complaints from MAGA world about Waltz.

. . . Christopher Rufo, an activist, published internal logs that showed staffers allegedly exchanging explicit messages in National Security Agency chat rooms; Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard within days announced that she had fired people over the revelations.

I'm less concerned about the possible security exposure from Signal than many of the politicians -- the communications are encrypted using a hard-to-decode algorithm, and only the phones of designated group members can decrypt them. According to Politico,

NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes noted that Signal is allowed on government devices and that some agencies automatically install it on employees’ phones. He also stressed that officials have used the app in both the Biden and Trump administrations.

“It is one of the approved methods of communicating but is not the primary or even secondary, it is one of a host of approved methods for unclassified material with the understanding that a user must preserve the record,” Hughes said. “Any claim of use for classified information is 100 percent untrue.”

The complaints about the Houthi chat were essentially that the members were discussing "sensitive" information, but that term is meaningless in a security context, and the assertion from the participants that they in fact did not discuss "classified" information -- and indeed warned each other not to discuss it -- appears to be correct. But I'm more concerned about whether the group chat -- which in the business world would be more accurately characterized as a meeting -- was necessary at all. That's the rub. The CNN link says,

National security adviser Mike Waltz’s team regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work on issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, Middle East policy, Africa and Europe, according to four people who have been personally added to Signal chats.

Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of sensitive information being discussed.

Again, "sensitive" in a security context is a meaningless designation, unlike "secret", for example. We could substitute another word, "balderdash", with perhaps better effect:

Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of balderdash being discussed.

And this sounds more like what in the business world we would call a meeting. These people were in dozens of meetings in which balderdash was discussed. And they were fired. Fancy that.

CNN and the AP have the vapors over far-right conspiracy theoriest Laura Loomer was urging Trump to fire NSC members. But my point last weekend was that you didn't need DOGE to investigate the Houthi Signal chat. Laura Loomer was enough.

Trump Is Resetting The Paradigm

The thing that struck me about Trump's moves on the migration crisis was that they simply removed at least two legs of the stool that held the whole situation up -- he closed the border by eliminating the policy of paroling anyone who wanted to come in, and he ended the funding to the dozen or so faith-based NGOs that ran the migrant programs, both the ones that settled groups into small cities and towns in the interior and the ones that ran the camps at the border.

That transformed the whole situation within weeks. At the same time, he's working to knock legs off the stool that's held up the Ivy League and other prestige universities.

The Trump administration’s drive to clean up woke elite universities continues, with Princeton and the big tuna, Harvard, both under the microscope.

Princeton reportedly faces a pause on some $210 million in federal funds as the Department of Education investigates it for allowing antisemitism to fester unchecked, concealed as pro-Palestinian protests.

Harvard has even bigger financial woes possibly in train, with the feds probing some $8.7 billion in grants and $255 million in contracts with the world’s richest university and premier destination for whiny rich kids, Jew-hating keffiyeh thugs and the rest of the ugly left-wing panoply.

These are some of the marquee moves in the Trump admin’s 60-school probe.

But the drive against the Ivies and other well-endowed universities is just part of another agenda, which appears to be elimination of the income tax. Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rich and the Super-Rich understood that the advent of the income tax in 1913 underlies the whole current structure of university and other charitable endowments:

Prior to 1913 at least, the problem of taxes could not have influenced Rockefeller in his philanthropies because business and wealth were subject then only to piddling local taxes. Nor can it be held that the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation was a direct reflex to the advent of federal taxes in 1913 because the Foundation had long been planned, at least since 1905. The community of Big Business, it is true, was opposed to the new taxes and Rockefeller's chief attorney, Joseph H. Choate, had been the lawyer who in 1893 convinced the Supreme Court that income taxes were unconstitutional; it was therefore necessary to amend the Constitution to enact income taxes. However, even though the advent of federal taxes did not influence the idea of the Foundation, it was gradually noticed by others that there were distinct tax advantages in making philanthropic allocations. This fact is now part of standard tax doctrine, set down in many tax treatises. Gifts to philanthropic funds pay no taxes, the income on such funds pay no taxes, and there is no inheritance tax on such funds. Furthermore, stocks placed in such endowments carry corporate voting power--a nice point. It should be recalled here that it is power really, rather than money or property, that we are concerned with.

So what does Trump intend?

President Donald Trump has stated multiple times that he wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with tariffs. Such a decision would be one of the most significant changes to the tax code in decades, and it could help Americans save a lot of money.

Eliminating the income tax is a death knell for university endowments and charitable foundations as we know them. But the paradigm shift goes beyond that; Trump's tariff agenda is generally recognized as applying to issues beyond just income taxes and trade deficits. According to the BBC,

President Trump's critique of the post-1945 international order dates back decades. Nearly 40 years ago he took out full-page advertisements in three US newspapers to criticise the United States' commitment to the defence of the world's democracies.

"For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States," he wrote in 1987. "Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

"The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won't help."

It's a position he has repeated since his second inauguration.

According to The Guardian,

Overarching all of this, say experts, is a US president who is not only prepared to approve annexation elsewhere but has an imperialist outlook, which has led some, including Ivo Daalder, the former US ambassador to Nato, to declare that with “Trump in office, the rules-based order is no more”.

As analysts have noted, Trump’s policy on both trade tariffs and territorial acquisition harks back to the 19th century – the era of president William McKinley, who presided over the acquisition of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

So far, it looks as though Trump has been able to move so quickly with a comprehensive strategy that his opponents have been able to attempt only minor individual points of resistance. Judge Boasberg tries to return deported Venezuelans to the US, when Trump's overall policies have already stopped mass migrations and begun to reduce the numbers of illegals -- something disputes over the legal rights of a few dozen gangsters won't affect. Vandalzing Teslas here and there will be an equally feckless gesture. Cory Booker's marathon speech on the Senate floor will be of equally nil effect.

This will be very, very difficult to stop, in some measure because Trump's opponents don't have his imagination. His solutions immediately knock legs away from stools that simply can't be replaced.

More On The Key, Conflicted Role Of Faith Based NGOs In The Migration Crisis

A couple of other recent developments supplement the Musk-Gracias Green Bay, WI remarks on immigration at the border. Breitbart News quotes the San Diego Union Tribune:

[T]he county’s two major migrant sheltering agencies gave notice that they will be laying off employees by the end of next month.

Catholic Charities in San Diego will let go of 73 employees at its two shelters, one in San Diego County and the other in Imperial County. Jewish Family Service will do the same with about 115 employees at its San Diego Rapid Response Network migrant shelter — once hailed as a national model for welcoming a large number of people.

According to NBC 7 San Diego,

Rep. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, announced an additional $43,675,626 in Shelter and Services Program funding Wednesday [November 27, 2024] for non-governmental organizations providing support to migrants awaiting their immigration court proceedings.

The Catholic Charities Diocese of San Diego received $21,598,261 and Jewish Family Service of San Diego received $22,077,365 in SSP funding to assist newly arrived migrants. This funding -- which goes toward necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, medical care and transportation -- is in addition to the over $39 million in SSP funding announced in April.

. . . In April [2024], the county of San Diego and the Catholic Diocese of San Diego County were both awarded $19,592,554.

These piecemeal reports suggest that the two faith-based NGOs, which appear to operate the principal migrant shelters on the San Diego section of the border, were between them receiving something approaching $100 million in federal funding in 2024. Breitbart News commented,

[M]igrant crossings have plummeted since Trump took office and allowed the U.S. Border Patrol to do its job, while restoring the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers awaiting court dates.

According to the UK Daily Mail, the Trump border policies have simply eliminated the market for migrant shelters at the border:

California's formerly overrun border with Mexico is now virtually empty just months after Donald Trump's election, images show.

Aid workers have begun packing up after weeks without seeing any migrants, SF Gate reports.

'To say there has been a dramatic change would be an understatement,' Jeffrey Stalnaker, acting chief patrol agent of the San Diego sector, said.

Not long ago, the stretch along southern California was dealing with a record number crossings.

December 2024 saw a record 301,981 people caught crossing the border illegally.

The number of migrants caught crossing illegally stayed well above 200,000-a-month for much of Biden's time in office. He insisted there was nothing he could do.

But during Trump's first month in office the number of illegal migrants intercepted plunged to just 11,709 people, making a mockery of Biden's claims that his hands were tied.

Not long ago, the stretch along southern California was dealing with a record number crossings.

December 2024 saw a record 301,981 people caught crossing the border illegally.

The number of migrants caught crossing illegally stayed well above 200,000-a-month for much of Biden's time in office. He insisted there was nothing he could do.

But during Trump's first month in office the number of illegal migrants intercepted plunged to just 11,709 people, making a mockery of Biden's claims that his hands were tied.

. . . Stalnaker told SF Gate the addition of concertina wire has drastically reduced the number of illegal entries, which has seen arrests plummet by 70 percent so far this fiscal year compared to last.

Whether the NGOs have been laying off staff due to the Trump administration's funding cuts or due to the drastic decrease in border crossings is a chicken-or-the-egg question. The San Diego NGOs were getting dollops of grants in the tens of millions to run the migrant centers, when the problem they were meant to address has now suddently disappeared -- but let's keep in mind that the benefits and other assistance they provided were part of the policies that had been attracting the migrants in the first place. In other words, they were facilitating the problem they were somehow supposed to fix.

I see two conflicts for all the fiath-based NGOs that provide migrant services at the border. The first is that they were tacitly relying on traffickers to bring them their clientele. For instance, they complain that cuts in their funding leave them unable to serve the numbers who turn up at their doors:

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says the administration, by withholding millions even for reimbursements of costs incurred before the sudden cut-off of funding, violates various laws as well as the constitutional provision giving the power of the purse to Congress, which already approved the funding.

The conference's Migration and Refugee Services has sent layoff notices to 50 workers, more than half its staff, with additional cuts expected in local Catholic Charities offices that partner with the national office, the lawsuit said.

But the services Catholic Charities had been performing at the San Diego border assumed a steady supply of migrants delivered by traffickers. Their hands aren't clean. In addition, there's another conflict Catholic Charities has with Catholic doctrine, specifically Catechism 2241:

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.

The faith-based NGOs, among which Catholic Charities is prominent, are reported by DOGE to assist the migrants in obtaining social security numbers at the border, with the understanding that they can be used for various kinds of benefit and voter fraud as outlined in yesterday's post. They are tacitly encouraging, or at least enabling, the migrants to violate US laws. Beyond that, as Antonio Gracias pointed out in Green Bay,

ICE told us that kids are being trafficked back and forth across the border to complete families to make this easier. This is a human tragedy.

The unaccompoanied children numbered in the hundreds of thousands in recent years. Some must be passing through Catholic Charities camps, and it's hard to think Catholic Charities staff is not aware of the situatuion and even knows who these children are, having seen them more than once. Are they doing anything to stop this? Beyond that, as Gracias continues,

And how many of these people died on the way up here that didn’t make it in? What happened to them? We created a system here that created [an incentive] for people to come and be taken advantage of by these traffickers.

Let's keep in mind, the more migrants who were encouraged to show up, the more money Catholic Charities and the other faith-based NGOs got. They didn't have any incentive to limit their number. The only thing that limits them is the likelihood that they will be turned away at the border or deported if they enter illegally, and the threat of deportation is already encouraging them to leave:

If migrants are deported by the United States government, they are separated from their families and detained in crowded jails, sometimes for many weeks. Once legally deported, migrants cannot visit for 10 years or longer, even when their relatives remain in the United States. They also lose possessions and easy access to their bank accounts.

Haitians “are self-deporting right now because they don’t want the worst thing … because [the government] does send them back to Haiti immediately,” Jeff Lamour, an American businessman in Albertville, Alabama, told Breitbart News on Friday.

. . . South of the border, northbound migrants are also turning back homewards. “It is true that people are going different directions,” Caleb Vitello, a senior official in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, told the Council on Foreign Relations. For example, the northward foot and boat traffic in the dangerous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama has dropped “because people aren’t risking that walk or that dangerous journey through there,” he said.

The migrants’ exit is bad news for business groups who want more imported customers, workers, and renters to increase their profits and stock values.

It's also bad news for the faith-based NGOs that provide the business groups with imported customers, workers, and renters and work closely with them. What's remarkable is the perceptiveness and efficiemcy with which the Trump administration has simply knocked the legs off the whole economic stool that drove migration. They cut demand by closing the border and beginning deportations for those who'd gotten in. They cut supply by turning off the funmding spigot to the NGOs that throve off the problem. In a mattrer of months, the immigrant camps have been shutting down.

"It Was A massive, Large Scale Program To Import As Many Illegals As Possible"

Bits and pieces keep coming out about the Biden mass immigration program. Over the weekend, Musk and one of his DOGE associates, Antonio Gracias, outlined a new piece of the overall picture at a rally in Green Bay, WI. This is a less-than-ideal forum -- I certainly hope Musk and DOGE are working on an organized, authoritative written report of their findings. Up to now, most of the insights we've been seeing have been over programs that bypassed the border by recruiting "refugees" in their home countries and flying them in via the CHNV and TPS programs, which I'll update in tomorrow's post.

The Musk-Gracias presentation in Green Bay focused on the border itself. There doesn't seem to be a single, complete transcript; the best I've found is from Beege Welborn at Red State, but annoyingly typical of Salem Media writers, she doesn't provide a link to the full transcript if it exists, and frankly, I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who goes by Beege. I doubt if this is on her birth certificate. (Reminds me of a junior higfh school classmate who went by "Dubby". She became a doctor, I doubt if she still uses that name.)

Anyhow, Gracias's remarks are highly informative:

GRACIAS: "In 2021, 270,000 non-citizens got social security numbers. In 2024, 2.1M non-citizens got social security numbers. We went in to find fraud and found this by accident.

. . . If I hadn't seen this myself, I'm not sure I believed it. I went through it myself and mapped it. And Elon is right. This is true. The defaults in the system from social security to all of the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, MAX PAY for these people and minimum collection.

We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example. We've gone through on every benefit program we went through, we found groups from this particular group of people, this 5.5 million people in those benefit programs.

And then what was really, really disturbing us was why we're asking ourselves why. So we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records and we found people here registered to vote in this population. Yes.

Who did vote? We found some by sampling that ACTUALLY DID VOTE.

We have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation Service. Yeah. Already, already. That is already happening right now. The truly disturbing thing though, I just want you to know this, a truly disturbing thing to me, and the darkest thing about this, to me, the voter fraud is terrible.”

This piece at Real Clear Politics has later passages from Gracias's transcript with more specific information on how the illegals are processed through the system:

I talked to Border Patrol myself. Elon was there too. I went to Laredo and Brownsville; Elon went to Eagle Pass. You walk up to a Border Patrol officer and tell them you want to come in. They have a couple of choices: they could charge you with a misdemeanor or felony under [8 U.S.C. §] 1325, or they can make it an administrative offense, like a parking ticket basically. They were told to do that -- to make it an administrative offense under the last administration.

Then you walk across the border. They do what’s called a "release on your own recognizance" and give you an NTA, a notice to appear, to appear at a judge. The wait times on judges are like, average, six years. Look at Grok, you’ll see it on immigration judges. There’s only 700 of them; this is 5.5 million people, okay?

So what happens then? Once you’re in the country and you’ve got asylum through one of these pathways—and we’ve mapped the whole thing out—you can apply for a work document. You file a 765; it’s the work form. You get this form called the 766—that’s the authorization—and then the Social Security Administration automatically sends you your Social Security number in the mail. No interview, no ID.

Musk then summed up the main point:

So it’s really if you create a massive financial incentive for people to come to the United States illegally, then that’s what they will do. It would be strange—it would be odd if that didn’t happen.

So the really the thing that actually has the Democrats losing their mind, by far, the real reason for these attacks and sort of the burning of the cars and everything is that we’re going to turn off the payments to illegals.

Because I mean, because that’s not the deal. It’s simply not right. And look at that thing with the Roosevelt Hotel and like the luxury hotels in New York where the Federal Emergency Management Agency funds were being used to house illegals in luxury hotels in New York that the average American can’t afford. And they were given a welcome package and ten thousand dollars debit cards and everything else. Like, it’s super real.

I mean, it’s like a—I think it’s the biggest voter fraud thing in history by far. And moreover, if left unchecked, it would have succeeded.

Pieces of the whole program and its objectives are gradually coming out in almost a stream of consciousness. First, we heard about the Haitians, then the Venezuelans and the Tren de Aragua, and we've heard in little bits about how these programs were facilitated by nine- and ten-figure grants to faith-based NGOs, whicn designated "sponsors" to find the unvetted immigrants housing, training, Engliah classes, jobs, and cars, which somehow turned into highly profitable schemes for slumlords and sweatshop employers.

But this was just the part of the overall program that bypassed the border. Now we're starting to learn what actually happens at the border itself. And we've already seen that the same NGOs were facilitating that humanitarian crisis on the border:

The American Red Cross and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have come under fire from some Republicans who allege they are helping migrants cross the southern border into the U.S.

Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, wrote on social media that NGOs "are FACILITATING illegal immigration to the U.S., like the International Committee Red Cross, providing maps and information about traveling to the southern border."

In another post on X, formerly Twitter, Roy said the International Committee of the Red Cross was "not even hiding it—its website has U.S.-bound migration maps for 2023 in DIFFERENT LANGUAGES!"

And the NGOs were working with the human traffickers who brought the migrants to the border. They wouldn't have been there for the NGOs without them. Gracias points this out:

Because what you don’t understand, people don’t know, Americans need to know, that’s why I’m here, is that human traffickers made thirteen to fifteen billion dollars off of this. Okay? That’s the money that’s going around the world, moving people around the world to our borders because of these incentives. How does it work? What happens?

If you’re in Africa and you’re in South America, you’ve got to walk up through Mexico and through here South America. Who do you pay? You pay the narcos. You pay the traffickers.

And we found, we were told by ICE, it’s between twenty thousand dollars and five hundred dollars depending on they pick you up to walk across all those countries and get all the way up to the border. Where does that money go? It goes to the cartels. It goes to human traffickers.

The Biden policies, which funded the NGOs that ran the migrant camps at the border, provided benefits to the migrants and facilitated their entry, created a demand for the traffickers' services, with which the faith-based NGOs were complicit. The traffickers provided them with the migrants that were the reason for their lucrative government funding.

In tomorrow's post, I'll have more to say about the faith-based NGO activities at the border and the efficiency with which the Trump administration has knocked the legs off that stool.