Trump's lazily reckless enforcement optics are a consistent problem

© 2025 Peter Free

 

12 June 2025

 

 

Is being a recklessly lazy . . .

 

. . . and grandstanding autocrat societally worse, than being a precisely focused and problem-solving one?

 

Probably.

 

 

For example — LA's I.C.E. riots

 

Below is the rationally defensible anti-Trump opening that President Trump has left his supposedly 'left'-leaning critics:

 

 

In practice, these workplace [immigration] raids are dystopian.

 

Here's how The Wall Street Journal summarizes what's happening:

 

"Federal agents make warrantless arrests. Masked agents take people into custody without identifying themselves. Plainclothes agents in at least a dozen cities have arrested migrants who showed up to their court hearings.

 

"And across the U.S., people suspected of being in the country illegally are disappearing into the federal detention system without notice to families or lawyers, according to attorneys, witnesses and officials."

 

Under normal circumstances, most Americans would rightly reject the notion that masked and unidentified federal agents should have the power to engage in this sort of behavior, particularly when the immigration cops' targets are trying to earn a living and responsibly showing up for court hearings on their legal status.

 

Isn't that exactly what someone concerned about the rule of law should want to see?

 

"The basic framework of Trump's interior enforcement is that it is whimsical and arbitrary," writes David Bier, director of immigration studies for the Cato Institute, in a column for the Los Angeles Times.

 

Distinctions can be lost and context collapses in the face of a crisis, which is perhaps why the Trump administration has moved so swiftly to escalate the chaos in Los Angeles.

 

Americans should ask themselves whether the men and women working at their local nail salon or scrubbing pots in the backroom of their favorite restaurant realistically constitute a threat to public order.

 

It is one thing for the administration to target criminals and gang members who have done actual harm to people and property.

 

These workplace raids are not just a new front in the Trump administration's war on immigration. They are a different policy altogether. . . . One that is focused on maximizing immigration-related chaos, rather than reducing it . . . .

 

© 2025 Eric Boehm, The Trump Administration Is Escalating an Immigration Crisis It Promised To Resolve, Reason (11 June 2025)

 

 

Arguably so

 

For Trump, we can conclude, fascistic showmanship is the performance point. Not merit-worthy problem-solving.

 

This is another of the many ways that the President's self-aggrandizing integrity-vacuity trips him (and us) up.

 

 

A president more concerned . . .

 

. . . with harmonizing political optics with reasonability was what our disintegrating country actually needs.

 

Instead, we got another dementedly grandstanding bomb-thrower.

 

Like the first of this most recent 2-person presidential string of literally brain-dead leaders— here, meaning 2020's Dead Brain Biden — Americans voluntarily voted for 2024's second go-round with the equally competence-challenged Donald Trump.

 

Trump. Whose life record clearly and accurately labeled him as being happy with creating random destruction. Almost always for no rationally good reason, other than demonstrating his self-adulating narcissism's power to control world and national happenings.

 

In view of:

 

 

(a) both these presidents' long and widely publicized previous personal and professional records

 

and

 

(b) the votes they nevertheless gathered, during their elections into office . . .

 

 

. . . we can deduce that a guarantee of peaceful and materially satisfying existence is not what the US public actually wants.

 

Is this self-destructive national character trait both symptom and proof of a culturally malignant cancer?

 

Or is it simply an indicator of how easily the Grand American Oligarchy controls its characteristically anti-rational sheep?

 

Either way, the 1776-1789 American Experiment has failed its Founders' hopes.

 

Meaning that the mechanisms, which their Experiment incorporated into its political structure, do not work as intended.

 

Certainly not this far in time and vastly exploded population and 'diversity' size.

 

This is not a surprise. Yet is, nevertheless, a sorrow for the Founders' proposed system of representative-fulfilled democracy.

 

 

The moral? — The supposedly 'developed' world's future . . .

 

. . . is autocracy:

 

 

In China, an autocracy predominantly grounded upon improving its public's material well-being.

 

In Russian, upon preserving traditional 'conservative' Russia's cultural identity.

 

And in the United States and Western Europe, exclusively upon satisfying the Global Fat Cat Class's all-consuming greed.

 

 

Thus, the sheepiest — most fleeced and blood-sucked — of national publics will reside among the ashes of our intellectually and morally crumbled, parasite-controlled, Western Civilization.

 

This is not an 'awesome' future.

 

To use that tellingly vacuous US colloquialism.