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Brad and Dan discuss the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump's recent tariffs and draconian deportation policies. They tie these events to broader themes of Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, and Trump's governing style.
The episode covers Trump's unpredictable tariff policies, the economic repercussions, and the administration's harsh immigration practices, including erasing the social security numbers of migrants and canceling student visas.
Dan & Brad touch on the theological implications, the reaction from right-wing pundits, and the disturbing vision of a dystopian governance model inspired by business efficiencies, culminating in a critique of the Trump administration's approach to ruling without governing.
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This week, Donald Trump sent the world into chaos through his rollercoaster of tariffs.
His administration also continued to pursue a draconian deportation policy, canceling student visas without notice, erasing the social security numbers of migrants, and continuing To refuse to bring back migrants from El Salvador who were deported based on administrative errors.
Today we tie in the tariffs and the deportations to theological aspects of Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, and Trump's general maxim of ruling without governing.
I'm Brad Onishi and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
I'm Brad Onishi and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Friday, joined as always by my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Good to be with you, Brad, as always.
You too.
We recorded a special episode yesterday.
And so I think today, you know, A, it's nice to see you again this week, but B, you're feeling tired of like, hey, I just did this and now we're doing it again.
But special episode is coming next week and if you're a subscriber, you're going to get to hear one of the most bizarre stories I've ever told on this pod.
It does include...
Deep personal embarrassment.
So you will get both the absurdity and the humiliation of Brad that you've come to know and love.
So we did half an hour on empathy and Al Mohler.
So there's one more installment of the empathy stuff.
And so even if you're not a subscriber, that'll be available for free.
But you will want to subscribe so you can hear Dan's answers to AMA questions and also...
The absurdity of my life after evangelicalism and trying to date people and act like I'm normal and just totally know what I'm doing.
So, anyway.
Dan, your midlife renaissance continues real quick.
We're going to live, laugh, and love.
I call this section now Live, Laugh, and Love.
That's what we do for like two minutes at the start.
You're going to get a new tattoo?
You don't have to tell us about it, but is that right?
I am.
I'm looking into it.
I had a meeting with one artist a couple days ago and somebody else today, and then I'll probably make a decision.
I haven't gotten a new tattoo in a really long time, so I've been thinking about it for a while.
You're on fire.
Earrings, tattoos, dodgeball, metal concerts.
Everybody needs a tattoo of Brad Onishi's face over their heart, and that's what it's...
That's really not what it's going to be.
I hope not, because for so many reasons.
It would be weird for a lot of reasons.
I think you would think that's weird.
I'm pretty sure my partner would think that's weird.
I hope she'd think that's weird.
Maybe not.
And probably, I don't know, your partner might think that's weird too.
Well, I would just feel sorry that your life had amounted to that and just would want something more for you.
You could do the old school, like the heart with your name on it, like an arrow through it kind of thing, the Cupid heart.
No, I don't think that's necessary either.
All right, y'all.
I jump into all of the things related to tariffs, as everyone has been paying attention to this week.
There's some angles there that I think are interesting in terms of the American right fracturing over this and obviously the stupidity and roller coaster that the president has taken the world on.
We'll then jump into just a whole bevy of things related to migration and immigration, but we'll start that with the Supreme Court decision or at least a ruling last night that came down about that on the surface.
We're going to get to a couple of...
Things surrounding the pro-natalist movement and its moment here in the United States right now.
Let's start with Tarifstan.
Just a complete rollercoaster and yeah, I don't even know what to call it.
I'll leave it to you.
Take us through some basic things of what happened and then let's jump in and see if we can make any sense of it.
So I've learned more about economics.
I think the technical term for this is rolling dumpster fire.
I'm pretty sure that's what economists, you know.
No. So, like, just recap.
People know a lot of this, but last week, Trump announced, you know, 10% tariff on all imports and so-called reciprocal tariffs on other countries.
We talked about why it wasn't reciprocal and how they generated this number.
The point is, like, I don't know, 70-something other countries, big tariffs and so forth.
It was unclear all week what the end game was here, right?
On one hand, you had Trump surrogates saying this is not a strategy, a negotiation strategy.
This is just trying to remake the global economic system.
But you had other people talking about countries calling Trump to try to make a deal and get the tariffs rolled back and so forth.
Trump boasted that countries were, quote, kissing his ass.
It's a nice presidential quote from Trump.
He had that thing where people were like, oh, please, please, sir, don't do this.
He was presenting countries as groveling, which is what Trump likes.
As I say, advisors went and told us all it wasn't a negotiating strategy, but then he would talk about countries doing this and so forth.
Markets tanked, as people know.
Worst downturn in years.
No concern from the Trump administration for regular people, right?
Like people's retirement savings are taking a beating, college savings, savings plans taking a beating.
And, you know, there was all this stuff about Trump at Mar-a-Lago playing golf and, you know, being sort of tone deaf to all of this and so forth.
Countries enacting reciprocal tariffs or retaliatory tariffs and so forth.
So all of this, and then, on Wednesday, two days ago from when we're recording this, so who knows what happens by the time this goes up in a few hours, right?
Trump apparently caved.
And I'm going to say caved, and we can talk about that.
He put a 90-day pause for every country but China, and that's its own thing.
Just after posting that people should BE COOL, all caps, right?
That people should be cool.
And there had been some signs of Trump being, I think, Disconcerted by people freaking out by this.
He talked about people panicking.
He kept saying, be cool.
He talked about how China responded poorly by putting counter tariffs on and all this sort of stuff.
But he put a 90-day pause on all these except for China, which...
He raised tariffs to 125%, and China has now raised tariffs on U.S. goods to 125% to match that.
Also, apparently, Canada and Mexico, where he had already leveled 25% tariffs, but they weren't subject to the 10% tariffs, now apparently are subject to the 10% tariffs, and they weren't before.
So, good unified strategy by Trump.
And one of the things that came out is there was a good article in The Atlantic by David Graham.
Who made the point that I'm making.
He basically said, you know, on one hand, this could seem surprising, but Trump always folds.
That's what Trump does.
We've talked about this with Putin.
We've talked about this with Ukraine.
We talk about Trump, you know, talking a good game.
And then if things aren't going his way, he just folds and says that somehow it was a victory or he just comes around to the position of his opposition or his opponents.
And then says that they reached a deal or whatever.
Bill Ackman, right, is a Democratic kind of activist investor posted on X. It was textbook art of the deal, but it's not clear that Trump actually won any concessions from anybody.
If Team Trump wants to say he was doing 3D chess and he got exactly what he wanted, nobody's clear on what that was because there's nothing sort of concrete in this.
More likely he did this because the domestic cost he was paying.
As you said, the GOP was...
I think he legitimately somehow did not expect that other countries were going to respond as if they don't know how Trump works by now and the EU and others and so forth.
Anyway, he did all of this stuff.
It does fit his pattern of wanting to be unpredictable.
It is, however, on any measure counterproductive if one of the aims, and I think that this is one of the aims, the thinking heads, so far as they count as that, who are advising him, I think this is their aim, to try to get manufacturing back to the U.S., to try to fix, you know, budget surplus, or excuse me,
trade surpluses, deficit balances, and all that sort of stuff.
It's not going to do that.
No company is going to spend the billions of dollars to relocate manufacturing here unless they know that that's actually going to happen.
And now, of course, there's nothing but uncertainty and so forth.
So all of that.
That's what happened.
Here's the but.
Here's the part that people are talking about, obviously, and thinking about, is that Wednesday, Trump posted, this is a great time to buy.
All caps again, right?
Obviously, because the markets are tanking.
They're down more than they have been for like half a decade or whatever it was.
And he says it's a great time to buy.
And less than four hours later, he pauses the tariffs.
And what happens?
The Dow closed up over 3,000 points higher.
Now, things have leveled off some since then.
And there's a lot of discussion about the long-term effects of this.
But the point is that on top of everything else, there are now accusations of deliberate market manipulation or maybe insider trading, right?
That when Trump says, now's a great time to buy, it's like, wink, wink, all of you after this sell-off, go in and buy now because stocks are about to take off.
And or talking to his buddies and his friends ahead of time to say, you know, hey, now's a good time to buy.
Here's some stocks you might look at and so forth.
The White House says he was only projecting calm.
Ethicists and lawyers say it was a violation of certainly ethics, perhaps of laws and so forth.
So that's one line of this discussion.
I think my personal take is, I don't think it was a grand strategy for market manipulation.
I think he panicked and caved before they went fully into effect.
But he did send out that tweet.
And whether we view that as kind of a last minute, hey, some people can still make some money off of this.
I can still do a good thing.
Or whether being Trump, he was just...
You know, talking and people were listening and he gave away the game without meaning to, I don't know.
But I think he did manipulate markets with the way this went out.
I don't think that was the initial strategy, but I think that's where we wound up.
So that's the nuts and bolts of it.
Interested in sort of your thoughts.
As far as I know, I should say this, Al Mohler has not been as, you know, vocal on this as he has been on immigration.
So for anybody who listens to the bonus episode, they'll know what we're talking about in a few days.
So I think there's a couple of things.
And I think that those of you who are people who pay attention to the news, you listen to podcasts, you read books, a lot of you are in our discord.
You're up on the fact that the bond market is really the measure that I think scared not only the Trump admins, but the folks in Congress, the economists and anyone who's paying attention.
You know, the bond is you buy a bond and.
You're giving the government money.
And the government's like, hey, I'll give you the money back in 10 years with interest.
And if people stop buying bonds, whether that's here in the US or abroad, you have a situation where funding the government becomes very to do and the economy is going to go down quickly because it's a reflection of a deep lack of confidence in the viability of the American government and the cash flow.
And so that was the thing that all of the kinds of folks who are, you know, invested in these things and experts on these things we're talking about.
So that's number one.
I think number two, I want to come back to a maxim that I've held since Trump's inauguration, which is they don't want to govern, they want to rule.
And I think what Trump sees in the tariff wielding, the sword that he has, That is labeled tariff is a chance for him basically to rule.
He can threaten other countries.
You say to him, well, we're doing this.
And he's like, well, how about 125%?
How about 150%?
He can do whatever he wants there.
That's number one.
He did seem very proud of his market manipulation.
I want to play a video for you all of him standing in the oval telling some F1 drivers.
About how Charles Schwab and a couple of others made hundreds and billions of dollars based on them buying the dip and taking the advice that this is a good time to buy.
This is Charles Schwab.
It's not just a company.
It's actually an individual.
He made $4.5 billion today and he made $900 million.
He's in financials.
As you say, Dan, was that a grand strategy?
I don't think so.
But was that Trump being very proud that he has the power to manipulate the market to the point that he can look at the billionaires, the ultra wealthy who never allowed him into high Manhattan society and say, I'm the one who creates your wealth.
Kiss my ass.
He loves that.
I mean, on the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump will consider exempting some U.S. companies from tariffs.
And this is something that Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut and others have been harping on forever, which is tariffs domestically are a way for him to wield power over companies in the U.S. to say, kiss my ass and I'll give you a tariff exemption.
Apple, Microsoft, Meta, whoever you are, if you kiss the ring.
I take the tariff off your goods.
That is market manipulation.
And it's also the antagonistic.
And let me just introduce one thing here, Dan, and that is the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo are leading a lawsuit.
That's what I was just about to bring up, yep.
Okay, you do it.
Well, I was just going to say that the Koch brothers have filed...
So we talked about this before, I think others have talked about this, that Congress is the one that's authorized to level tariffs.
So Trump has invoked this kind of emergency powers kind of discourse to say that that's what this is.
It's a national emergency because of trade imbalances and so forth.
And we talked about, and lots of people have talked about this, like that lots of people question this, but nobody's been ready to kind of pull the trigger in trying to challenge it in court because they're afraid of Trump's retaliation and so forth.
And none other than the Koch-affiliated groups, K-O-C-H, Koch, right?
Koch brothers.
...has now filed this lawsuit on those grounds.
And it shows, you mentioned the fracturing of the kind of right around this.
That's your big business, free market, deregulation wing of the Republican Party that had been the driver of Republican Party economics for decades.
Coming out against this on precisely those grounds.
And so I think that that's really significant.
And the reason I was going to bring it up is it also goes to your point of governing versus ruling, right?
It's beginning to catch up.
You've got members of Congress questioning this.
Why? It doesn't poll well.
Americans are not loving this at all.
And you've got people who are actually going to have to go up for re-election who are like, we need to actually be able to govern and convince people that we did things and things like this.
You have the business community that wants to make money and that's what governing is for them.
So you've started to see the limits.
of the just you know wielding power and speaking things into being and you know and so forth and signing executive orders to the Oh, this had real consequences.
And like, what do we do with that?
And, you know, treasury bonds are sliding and all of this stuff.
That's when you get into governance.
And what does Trump do?
He just kind of folds up his table and puts it away, tries to exercise it against individual companies, but to bring it back.
Now that's being challenged.
Just a lot of pieces of this that are highlighting exactly what you're talking about.
I think what Trump wants out of this and beginning to run into headwinds because you can only do it for so long.
But if you think about how Putin controls the Russian economy, it is the least Reagan, conservative, libertarian thing you can think of.
Whether it's William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, the conservative idea of free markets, small government, and Christian identity.
Dan, it's completely been obliterated.
I tried all summer, all fall to tell people, J.D. Vance.
...is such a different figure than Mike Pence, because Mike Pence is that Reaganite Republican who's like, yeah, Christianity all the way, but also low taxes, free trade, no tariffs, NAFTA.
And Vance and now Trump are showing you they want a government that manipulates the market.
The government controls the markets.
The government controls everything.
And they're going to fire the administrators and the experts to make sure they can.
Now, what happened in MAGA world, especially with, like, Christian nationalists, was they are trying to get their head around it and justify all this.
So I turned into Charlie Kirk, and he's, like, doing that thing you hate, Dan, where it's like, when you ask Charlie Kirk, like, about gender, he's like, what?
It's one or the other.
What is a woman?
What is a man?
He does this whole either-or shtick.
Right? How about abortion, Charlie Kirk?
Nope. Abortion is murder.
And then you're like, hey, bro, like, what about these tariffs?
And he's like, guys.
This is really complicated stuff.
It's very nuanced.
But the bond market?
Let me explain the bond market.
Now I gotta explain, and Scott Besson said this, and then the tariff over here.
Guys, it's a lot.
It's a lot of details, right?
It's a thing you hate, Dan, where when they need to justify something, they all of a sudden are interested in nuance.
One of the best, though, came through our Discord, and somebody sent it to me.
Benny Johnson, who is Christian Nationalist's very popular podcaster.
Part of that group that was found to have been backed by Russian money.
He said this this week.
Will it lead to recession?
Talking about the tariffs.
I don't know.
I'll leave that for people with much higher IQs.
I went to community college.
But what I like is that Scott Besant is on a warpath to create a wall around our home.
Scott Besant is out there to reinforce against someone like Soros doing that to American dollar and the American economy.
So, like, you don't want American dollars to be valuable.
You don't want...
Anyway, I'm not even going to get into it.
But here's the thing that we've got to get to.
Yes, there will be pain.
Yes, you'll have to exercise some demons.
These are the kind of things that happen when you have demonic possession, which is what the country has right now.
So he goes right to the thing, spiritual warfare, demonic possession.
And it shows you the ways that the spiritual warfare motifs and the demonic kind of Endless battles that are now so pervasive in American Christianity are shortcuts.
It's a shortcut.
Oh, there's going to be pain and economic difficulty.
You know what that is, right?
When you exercise demons, that's a process and it kind of hurts a little bit.
Last comment, and I'm curious in what you think about this, Dan, is not only is Trump completely abandoned any notion of libertarian small government capitalism, like this is the Furthest thing from capitalism, when the government controls the market.
This is Maoism.
What do I mean?
Well, MAGA spent the week, Jesse Waters and everybody on Fox News, all of the right-wing pundits spent the week saying, bringing the manufacturing home is going to make America more manly.
And whether it's Caroline Leavitt, the press secretary, or anyone else from Trump's orbit, they're like, Manufacturing.
You're going to enjoy working in a factory.
You want these manly jobs, right?
Doing these things.
You're going to enjoy.
I mean, there was a guy that was like, yeah, the American man has lost his way.
He needs to go back to working with his hands and making things.
This is going to renew the nation.
This is the government.
If you boil this down, this is Trump saying, I control the market.
And I'm leveling tariffs and economic policy such that we are isolated from the rest of the world.
And I'm basically going to create a situation of like the great head start where we're going to like just force manufacturing in whatever way we can across the country.
And people are going to lose so much money.
The shelves are going to be so empty.
The jobs are going to disappear so fast.
American wealth will...
Evaporate in a matter of months.
So you're going to have to go work in the factories that are in essence an outworking of the states collapsing every other opportunity you might have.
All the hatred for communism?
This seems a lot more like Mao than it does Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, or anyone else.
I don't know.
Maybe I sound crazy.
No, I don't think it does.
I've got some thoughts on a few things that you said, but we'll pick up on that, that, you know, as it happens, right,
Yes. For Trump,
it's not state-sponsored, it's Trump-sponsored.
It's all about the person of Trump.
But if you have the whole unified executive theory that all of MAGA World has, Trump is the state, and that's what he's trying to do.
So I think you're right.
I mean, that's the model.
I think one of the realities it's run into is that Trump doesn't actually know anything about economics.
This is one of the mistakes, and I know that there are really, really smart business people out there and so on, but...
Business people and CEOs are not the same thing as economists, right?
Like you have to know a lot about economics to be a successful CEO, especially if you run a real business, not like Trump's like household business that's big, but like a business that, you know, has investors and things like that.
You know, boards of directors, all of that stuff.
Economists said, among other things.
The point that a few of us non-economists, you know, just made sense to us.
You know, it's like he's announcing the tariffs.
You feel like raising your hand in the back room.
Excuse me, Professor Trump.
I like how that's the word.
Dr. Donald, if you raise giant tariffs on other countries, won't they just do it back?
Like, isn't that something they might do?
Oh, sorry, Professor Trump.
Didn't the EU form so it could be a big enough economic block that it could, you know, have some economic weight?
Isn't it going to matter if they, like...
Level tariffs against us.
China, second largest economy.
Isn't it going to be a thing?
And by the way, if you want a state-run kind of capitalist machine, there's your model.
They're better at it than we are.
And that's what you're trying to go to.
Every economist said things like that.
I think Trump, honest to God, did not think that that was going to happen.
Or somehow didn't anticipate that the markets were going to just start falling the way that they did or whatever.
All the economists would say they would.
So Trump wants that.
He has that vision.
I think that same vision you're describing.
But he doesn't actually know enough to be able to do it.
And it's a question within a system like ours and outside of a really long time if it can be done the way that they want to do it because you've got to unravel everything.
Whatever. Bigger question.
I'll leave it to the economists and others.
We'll see how this goes.
But I think that that's a real thing.
Another piece of this, to go back to some of that discourse, I'm thinking about the Charlie Kirk thing where like all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's lots of nuance.
The parallel for me, and I bring this up a lot on It's in the Code.
People have heard me bitch about this before.
It's the thing where, like, whenever you're talking to some high-control religion person or Uncle Ron or whomever, and you bring something up, they're like, well, you know, God's ways aren't our ways.
Our ways are not to question.
God far exceeds.
You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You didn't say that about same-sex marriage.
You didn't say that about, like, the transgender kid down the street.
You don't seem to think that about abortion.
But, like, over here, I've said for...
I've said since I wasn't evangelical, it's one of the reasons I'm not anymore, that that was always the theological code for we don't know what the hell to say here.
We can't find Bible verses that seem to agree with this.
We're just doing this because the politics are good and work for us and we really can't justify it.
So we'll cling to ineffability.
God is ineffable.
God can't be known.
And you're like, you've made your whole damn career, your entire religion, about knowing God and claiming to speak with the authority of God, and all of a sudden God can't be known?
It's that same logic.
Just shifted into a slightly different register here.
So, when it comes to all the culture war stuff, yeah, we're absolutely, we know, we know, we know, when it comes to immigration and closed borders, we know that God's really angry about brown people coming into this country.
We know this.
When it comes to tariffs and a clear reversal by Trump, oh, it's complicated.
Who are we?
I don't know.
We can't do it.
It's a tough question.
To anybody out there, whenever you hear the people who Speak with the authoritative voice on everything all the time, and then all of a sudden they start telling you that it's too complicated, or it's something humans can't understand.
It's all part of the same structure of control, whether it's in a political register or a religious register, which of course, in our country at present, have largely collapsed together.
So that's what I think when I hear that kind of Charlie Kirk response.
Well, my juices are flowing now because we're really doing the theology now.
So you talk about that on It's in the Code.
If y'all have heard me on Mondays, what I've talked about with the empathy stuff is that Joe Rigney can't find New Testament passages to justify not having empathy.
So he always goes to Numbers and Leviticus.
And it's these passages where God is like, if someone tries to get you to...
Like Yahweh is telling the Israelites in these passages, if...
One of your family members tried to get you to worship false gods, kill them.
And Joe Rigney's like, look, empathy's not always the right answer.
And you're like, that's the one you're going to?
It's not a let him who's never sinned cast the first stone.
No, never.
It's not like any of the super empathetic Jesus stuff.
We can't have the Jesus stuff because it's way too empathetic.
So yeah, we'll go to the holiness codes and things.
But the point you're making is, I think we should emphasize something here.
about the authoritarian and Christian nationalist entanglement of the responses to Trump is if your leadership conceives of themselves, if the men, and they're always men, conceive of themselves as an extension of God,
then they're going to not only appeal to ineffability with God when they need it and black and white morality when they need that, they're also going to...imbue certain leaders with the same ineffability that they've given God.
And you're like, Brad, what the hell does that mean?
And what that means is a lot of MAGA worlds spent the week saying, like Kayleigh McEnany, the former White House press secretary, was like, Trump, the great dealmaker, is making deals.
I trust him.
And people on the panel are like, Kayleigh, what do you mean?
What are the deals?
She's like, the great dealmaker?
Making deals.
He's a maker of deals.
He's great.
And therefore, he's making great deals.
And you're like, Kaylee, I don't know if that makes sense.
But what was she doing there, Dan?
She was saying there's no sense to what he's doing.
What he's doing has no coherency.
But Trump's ways aren't our ways.
Just like God's ways aren't our ways.
Like, when they need Trump to be the ineffable divine figure, they do.
When they need him to be the black and white authoritarian, it's this or that, they do.
When your model is that somebody's an extension of God, they're always going to carry with them the authoritarian streaks of that God, but also get the benefit of that ineffability.
If your model, as it is in other religions, mainline traditions and other religious traditions, is that a leader of the community might be somebody who is doing their best to discern God's will or discern.
The meaning of a sacred text, despite its complexity and despite its sometimes contradiction or whatever may be, you have a different style of leadership that says, I'm not the one speaking for God.
I'm the one trying to lead us as close to God as I can, despite the fact that I'm a human being.
So I just think that's all...
I don't know if what I'm saying in response to you is making sense to you.
No, I think it is.
To that point about a different model of trying to discern, I think that's also...
I feel like I sometimes need to spend time talking about...
One of the things I responded to in the bonus episode that people will get to hear if they're subscribers is somebody was asking what not high-control religion might look like.
What are some of the marks of that?
You know, and one way, and I was talking about this with students the other day, they said, like, what are other understandings of the Bible?
I said, there are traditions that affirm the Bible, that use it, appeal to it, they find it as a source of wisdom, but they would also say that what you have in the Bible is this record of different communities in their own ways, all trying to discern what they think God is, how they relate to God, and whatever.
And then we look at some of those efforts at discernment, we're like, yeah, I don't think so.
Guys, I'm sorry, but I don't think that that worked.
That's intelligible in your context, but I don't think that's where we are anymore.
So it's even being part of this tradition of ongoing discernment and ongoing fallibility.
So that being religious doesn't have to mean infallibility, but it also means it's not going to move in that authoritarian direction.
So there are other ways.
Of being that.
And you could map that onto politics, right?
Where a politician could actually say things like, yeah, whew, that was a mistake.
I didn't think that was going to happen that fast or whatever.
But we know the politicians don't like to do that.
But I think to your other point about ineffability, I'm reminded there's a novel.
It's older now, but there was the series.
Was it Amazon that did the series?
Good Omens, right?
So it's Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett.
And I read that book a lot of times, and I actually taught it in religion and pop culture a couple times, but there's this part in there where it's all wrapped up on, like, end-time stuff, and if anybody remembers the film, like, the original film, The Omen, or the remake, or whatever, but there are these parts in there where it doesn't make sense,
and they run into this stuff where, like, you know, but, like, why would God want this to happen?
He's like, oh, that's the ineffability bit, remember?
They're like, oh, yes, ineffability, like...
It's just sort of, like, punching at this notion that whenever something just doesn't make sense, they just say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's ineffability.
And then you're like, oh, yeah, got it.
And I'm not saying, like, I spent the early part of my career studying Christian mysticism.
Like, I have spent hundreds of hours reading people who think God is ineffable.
I think what you and I are upset about is, like, when you use ineffability as a way out, it's like the fantasy writer who's like, well, I don't know what to do with the plot.
So I'm just going to invent the fact that this character can fly!
Ah, good!
Okay, we did it!
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, what it is is what you can't put together, in my view, is ineffability and authoritarianism or this kind of assurance.
If you want to say God is ineffable and exceeds humility, awesome, but it means you need to show some humility.
It means you as a Christian tradition, as a congregation, whatever, need to be able to say, you know what?
We've always thought these things about, I don't know, sex or gender or whatever.
Maybe we need to rethink that.
Maybe we've been wrong.
Or maybe, who knows?
Maybe that's what we used to need and now we don't.
Or whatever.
It's that consistency.
Because if you're going to say and mean that God somehow transcends us in a way where we just are not capable of fully comprehending that, then that's cool.
But that's going to lead to an intellectual, and I think in practice, exercises of humility, exercises of compassion, things like that.
And so it's when you try to put the authoritarianism of a tradition that says, we know everything that the Bible says, and the Bible has no mistakes, and it all says one thing, and we're the authorized interpreters of it.
But then as you say, pull the ripcord occasionally and be like, oh yeah, we killed this character off in season three, but it turns out he's really been living in like, you know...
This secret place for years and now he's back.
That kind of move, that's when it's ridiculous.
Yeah, this has gotten really theological really quick, which I'm enjoying and it's awesome.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about everything related to the deportation cases and what's happening there.
Be right back.
All right, y'all.
Let's go through what happened.
Today is Friday.
Let's go through what happened last night, and that will lead into a very large discussion of things happening all over the country related to student visas, to ICE, to a lot of things.
Supreme Court had a case, Nome, as in Christy Nome, cosplay Christian nationalist Barbie, versus Abrego Garcia.
And as Ian Millhiser says at Vox, The details of this case are shocking even for a Trump administration.
In mid-March, the government deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
He's detained in the notorious prison that we've been talking about and everyone else has been covering and trying to get details on for the last month and a half.
In 2019, an immigration judge issued an order Forbidding the government from sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador because he faced a clear probability of future persecution.
Nonetheless, that is what the Trump administration did.
Why did they do that, Dan?
They did that because of an administrative error.
Even Trump's own lawyers admit that.
He had not committed a crime.
He was not a threat.
Not a gang member.
Administrative error.
The George ordered the federal government to, quote, facilitate and effectuate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States by Monday, April 7th.
And yet he is still in El Salvador.
Now, the Supreme Court punched back at Trump last night because he didn't listen.
The Supreme Court concludes that the lower court's order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.
So the...
Emphasis here is on facilitate.
The Supreme Court agrees with the lower court's order that the government needs to facilitate, facilitate Abrego Garcia being released from custody in El Salvador.
But it adds, the intended scope of the term effectuate in the district court's order is, however, unclear.
In other words, Dan, they need to facilitate it, but...
The court may not have the power or authority to demand that they effectuate it, meaning they need to facilitate that happening, but not actually make it happen, as in go get him from the prison and fly him back to the United States.
That has caught a lot of people by their attention, because on first glance, the Supreme Court's opinion seems to be a punchback at Trump.
On the other hand, if you look closely, this is not good news that you sent somebody to an El Salvadoran prison that is understood to be a labor camp because of an administrative error.
And you are saying we don't need to go get him and we're not going to do anything about it.
That's cruelty.
That's barbarism.
That's disgusting.
Kristi Noem says that the detainees in the El Salvador prison should be there for the rest of their lives.
Even though, zooming out from this case, that there's a lot of, in many of these cases, it's hard to find evidence for why they're there in terms of their gang relation, in terms of their crimes, in terms of anything.
This comes in the week, Dan, of something that I think should be truly chilling to everybody.
This is In the New Republic.
It's by Hafiz Rashid.
If Donald Trump's mass deportations weren't already dystopian enough, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, says he wants to make them look like Amazon Prime.
Todd Lyons made the remarks at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, saying that he envisions lines of trucks arresting and detaining immigrants, much like the retail website delivers orders across the U.S. We need to get better at treating this like a business.
Like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.
I can continue on that, Dan.
There's more here to introduce.
I'll stop there.
Do you want to respond to that?
Like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.
So we've said for years, right, that this whole notion that lots of people have, lots of regular people, the Uncle Rons of the world, but certainly lots of politicians.
That a government should be run like a business.
And that a CEO makes a good government leader and so forth.
And again, we've said for years that it's a bad analogy.
You don't want a country that's run like a business.
And I feel like what's happened since January is you get this literally dystopian vision of, see, here's why it sucks when you run a government like a business.
You have Elon Musk.
Basically doing the kind of startup, you know, come in and buy the Silicon Valley startup and fire everybody kind of model, but with the government.
We've seen what that looks like.
We've seen what happens when you have the, just react like, you know, send a bunch of people to a foreign country so they can be in a foreign prison so they don't have any due process and we're not required to give it to them and anything else.
We just go in the name of efficiency and movement and all this kind of stuff.
We've seen what that goes like.
And then somebody comes out and says something that, again, if you were like, I don't know, if you were accusing them of this, if you said what they want is like a reverse Amazon Prime full of trucks, like, you know, going around and just picking people up and taking them to a place, they'd be like,
oh, come on, that's ridiculous.
That's overstatement.
That's so overblown.
It's so crass that you would suggest that this is their model.
Until the dude says the part out loud.
And invokes this business model of convenience and mass transit and mass delivery and so forth as a model for actual policies about actual real human beings around an actual issue that is highly complex and nuanced.
And there are lots and lots of people who are not Americans who are in the United States for lots of reasons, under lots of conditions, some with some status, some with other status.
The point is it's complicated.
And to boil it all down to this, what we have seen since January is this dystopian vision of, yeah, all of you for decades were like, you need to run the country like a business.
They are.
And this is what we see, and this is what it looks like.
It is exactly what people have said that they wanted for decades.
Fortunately, there are some parts of the country that are beginning to wake up to the fact that that actually sucks.
But it's just mainstream Republican political ideology at this point.
It's the working out of the logic.
I think that's what you're saying.
This is the working out of that logic.
If you think life is transaction, if you think life is commodities, if you think life is buying and selling, then you can get to a place where you see other human beings as things to be bought and sold or things to be understood as part of a factory service.
Or it's just about transport.
We're just moving them from here to here.
There's no morality to it.
There's no compassion to it.
Dare I say, Brad, there's no empathy in it.
No, it's just they're just commodities to be moved.
That's all the value that they have.
They are something that we don't want here, so we will move it to there.
And it's one of the most literally dehumanizing things that I think I've ever experienced or seen.
But there's business involved because El Salvador gets money.
You have so many private security companies.
And Tom Homan says it in the same...
Setting where Todd Lyons is saying Amazon Prime but for human beings.
Tom Homan, the border czar, is like, yeah, outsource everything else.
Let the cuffing and the arresting and the detaining.
We'll do that.
We're ICE.
But we'll outsource everything else to contractors.
He's basically saying there's business.
You know what there was business into?
The Middle Passage.
There was business in that.
That was business.
We've got a long history, America does, of moving bodies and commodifying them and treating them that way and just moving them from one place to another.
Middle Passage or Japanese American internment or any number of things where we just ship bodies around Native American relocation.
We can talk about it.
It's a long history and it's a sordid history and it's one that we're just repeating now again in this new guise.
So if you read about Japanese incarceration, and I know you hear about Japanese incarceration more on this show than others, just because one of the hosts happens to be me.
Japanese incarceration was definitely born of racism, just as this is born of racism, and this is born of xenophobia.
Japanese incarceration was born of that.
There are all the signs that say no Japs, white men only, etc., etc., etc.
But I live in the Bay Area, in San Jose.
If you go half an hour south of here, there is one of the most productive farming regions in the entire United States, right?
This is the part of the country that produces so much fruit and vegetables and other things.
And if you go back to the time right before Japanese incarceration, there are so many Japanese American farmers there who are doing really well.
And there are a lot of white people.
White farmers lobbying the government to not let them buy land, own land, etc., because they're a competition.
And part of what is happening with Amazon Prime but for human beings is ridiculously grotesque racism and xenophobia, and part of it is business, just like it's always been, whether the Middle Passage, whether it's been Japanese incarceration,
and so on.
Before we run out of time, Dan, let me introduce a couple of more things.
El Paso Times, Jeff Abbott.
The Trump administration is seeking new ways of forcing migrants who entered the United States during the administration of Joe Biden to self-deport.
The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is seeking to cancel their social security numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants to cut them off from essential services.
If you don't have a social security number, it's hard to do things.
It would...
Cut off migrants who entered the country legally from accessing financial services, including banking, applying for credit, and accessing government services.
And it would basically make them dead in the country.
They would be persona non grata, stripping the citizenship of non-citizens.
And he joked this week that he would like to send American citizens to El Salvador.
And Karen, leave it.
Press secretary said, oh, he was joking.
He was joking.
He was joking.
It's always a joke.
It's always hiding behind that facade of it was said in jest.
We've said it before.
I'll just say it one more time.
You may not be a relative of a Venezuelan migrant, but they want to denaturalize people.
People who've been told that they are American citizens.
They want to say, no, you're not.
They want to take away the social security numbers of people who came here legally, were given a social security number, and can do all the things that you can do with a social security number, which is everything from banking to government stuff to getting a mortgage,
whatever it may be.
They want to continually erode who is safe and who is considered part of this country.
That is what they're doing.
One more instance, Dan, and I'll stop and throw it to you.
There are people with student visas having their visas revoked with no notice all over the country.
This is coming out of Delaware.
They've been reducing non-citizen enrollment in American schools by canceling visas without any advance warning to those students.
These are PhD candidates in physics.
In Washington, these are molecular biology master's students.
In Denver, these are people who are here studying at what are supposed to be the best universities in the world in the United States.
According to studies, international students account for 6% of the country's higher education population, and they contribute more than $50 billion to the U.S. economy.
As you know, Dan, you and I remember from our UK days, international scholars usually pay full tuition and they subsidize many domestic students.
But this is not a situation where people are waking up to a letter in the mail.
It's a situation where they're waking up to their university saying, hey, we checked our database and you're no longer in it because you no longer have a visa and you should go home in three days.
Now, There are lawsuits popping up everywhere.
There's lawsuits popping up all over the country.
There's one coming from California, close to where I live.
There are people standing up to this.
But this is absolutely, completely cruel.
It is a self-inflicted wound.
It is born out of racism and xenophobia, but it is also born straight out of the authoritarian's playbook.
To me, this is right from Hungary and Orban.
If you destroy the universities, you can destroy so much of the dynamism of democracy, of multiculturalism, of pluralism, and the people who represent the non-homogeneous ethonational state that you want to create.
And so that's what's there.
I want to bring in a quote from Hannah Arendt, but thoughts about the visas, about...
The social security numbers, any of those things.
Again, just some sort of disparate thoughts that come together and kind of flow in this direction.
One is, again, talking about the difference between this and the traditional GOP.
Traditional GOP has always positioned itself as being about economic growth at all costs.
The xenophobia trumps, pardon the pun, economic growth.
All of these policies that are being enacted are bad.
For economic growth.
So don't let Uncle Ron or anybody else tell you if they want to start harping on deregulation and economic growth.
You're like, ask him about all this stuff that is going to do away with that.
Ask him about, you know, other things like, you know, the number of people coming to visit the U.S. plummeting and all these other things and the estimates of what that the loss of that tourism revenue is going to be.
And like just sort of you could look at like a bunch of different directions with this, the tariffs, all of it.
Just like don't let them tell you that economic growth is what they're really about at this point.
Of white Christian America.
That's what this is about.
So there's that piece of it.
The other one is, you know, to pick up on just how Orwellian and dystopian this is, ICE had a social media post this week talking about stopping illegal ideas.
...from entering the United States.
And they deleted that post.
But that's chilling.
You've had the stories of people coming in and their phones are taken.
They're going through social media posts and texts and personal communication to see if there's anything quote-unquote anti-Semitic.
I put that in quotes because anti-Semitism is real.
This means pro-Palestine.
But anything that's pro-Palestinian or whatever or anti-Trump or whatever it is is considered anti-Semitic.
Statements in opposition to the Trump administration have kept people out of the country.
And once again, somebody at ICE on social media decided to say the quiet part out loud and say, we're going to prevent illegal ideas from entering.
Folks, there's no such thing as illegal ideas.
That's like not a thing that exists in this country.
It is something that exists in 1984 in the Orwellian book, right?
There it's illegal to think certain things and they're going to reprogram you until you don't.
That's the vision here, right?
Not just keeping the wrong people out, not just removing people we don't want, but keeping the wrong ideas out, keeping the ideas from coming in, which, as you say, to tie it back into universities, guess where a lot of ideas get kicked around?
Guess where a lot of ideas come from?
Guess where a lot of ideas that challenge the status quo take shape?
In universities, which is why they're a primary target.
So just so many themes flowing together around this issue.
Let me bring in something I bookmarked in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.
No single element in this general intellectual climate in post-war Europe was new.
Bakunin had already confessed, I do not want to be I, I want to be we.
There's a sense that Arendt talks about of people sacrificing their self-interest.
Oh, Trump's doing the tariffs.
It's going to hurt me.
Yeah, but I trust him.
I want to be part of the movement.
So I give my devotion to MAGA Nation.
And that means that I want to be a we who trusts Trump and the terrorists, but also is celebrating people being sent to an El Salvadoran labor camp by an administrative error.
But there's another quote here, Dan, that I think actually sums up a lot of what we've talked about today.
What proved so attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy.
Terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred.
A kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded, enforcing the recognition
of one's existence on the normal strata of society.
I think.
I think.
The idea, Dan, of terrorism as a philosophy to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred.
The celebration of cruelty, the idea of deportation as a spectacle, the cuffing and binding of people in hoods and posting that on social media as a kind of deportation porn, that is a political philosophy of resentment,
hatred, that is bound up in...
A kind of terrorism.
And that's what I think we're seeing here.
In addition to Trump wanting to rule and reward only the oligarchs and let everybody else eat cake and not much else.
Any last thoughts?
We got to go to reasons for hope.
Give us your reason for hope as well.
So I think that one thought that I think maybe dovetails with Arendt's thoughts and what you're saying here.
But people ask this sometimes, like, why, how do...
People don't like to admit that they made mistakes.
Right? We all know people in our lives who will go to like, maybe it's us sometimes, right?
We've probably all been there too, where we go to extremes to try to deny just having made a mistake, having made a bad decision.
So people elect somebody to office, you get the whole, I want to trust him, I want to be a part of this movement, I want to belong to this.
And then when there are things that in the abstract, if somebody said, would you support this?
Would you think that this is a good way to treat people?
Would you think this is a good, they would be like, no, of course not.
But now it's their guy.
It's the person they voted for.
It's the movement they want to be a part of.
And that basic, fairly trivial, it seems, psychological thing that people don't like to admit that they were wrong gets people to fall into line behind things that they would have found abhorrent if it wasn't somebody that they had chosen to put in office,
if it wasn't somebody that they were friends with, if it wasn't a family member.
And that is how movements shape the people who enable them.
It's not just the people who join the movement.
The movement reshapes its own members, and that's how they metastasize and turn into things like the contemporary MAGA movement.
It's a chance to be part of a we.
It's a chance to be part of something that goes beyond the hum and drum of cotidian life, which I get, that desire.
But to do it in the forms of cruelty we're seeing is, to me, Unacceptable.
My reason for hope is the protests that happened last Saturday.
Five million people protested.
I talked to relatives who are in deep red parts of the country who went out and saw 500 of their neighbors.
More people than was ever present at any of the Tea Party stuff.
The Democratic Party is not going to be the vehicle for Trump resistance.
It's the people.
And if the Democratic Party can welcome them...
And somehow, how is it it's good?
But this is beyond the Democratic Party right now, and it's beyond the normal understanding of who is a political activist, and we need more of it.
And I just want to say, do not shame people for jumping in.
People might be new to this, they may not be experienced, they might be cringe.
Shaming them is not going to do anybody good.
That's not going to help them keep coming, keep volunteering, keep activating.
So don't do that.
So my reason for hope, I think, ties in with that.
One is that Trump being Trump, it's starting to come into view.
We talked about this with the election.
There were certain people who were never going to vote for Trump no matter what.
And there was a large section of the population who was always going to vote for Trump no matter what.
And what decided the election were those people who could be persuaded.
And a lot of them were on economic grounds, right?
That, you know, groceries are expensive.
I'm going to make them less expensive.
I'm going to bring down inflation.
This is not happening.
There's lots of polling data that show that Trump is not popular.
And I think that that...
I don't want the country to have to go through Trump to realize this, but I do think that for lots of Americans, they are beginning to realize that this is not what they signed on for.
This is not what was promised.
That this isn't what it looked like.
And to your point, those are some of those people who are beginning to explore these other avenues, and that's why sometimes they don't fit in.
And I'm with you.
Don't shame them.
Walk them in, because the more people that are drawn to that, that is a sign of hope.
The more people recognize that, wow, all the terrible shit that people said Trump was going to do, he's doing it all.
He's delivering all the promises.
That's a problem, and I take some hope in the growing realization about that.
All right, y'all.
We'll be back next week with great stuff on Monday.
I have a great interview about Girls Gone Bible coming Wednesday.
It's in the code Friday.
The Weekly Roundup and our bonus episode will drop and it's pretty great.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for your support.
If you're a subscriber, we couldn't do this without you.
We appreciate all of you listening and we hope that you are finding hope in these times and that you have a wonderful week.
