Politics
Opinion: Trump's focus on retribution distracts from the nation's real domestic enemies
It is no secret why President Trump forced out FBI Director Christopher Wray, his first-term pick to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer: Soon after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Wray told Congress that the Capitol siege was an act of “domestic terrorism.” And for the next four years, he oversaw the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history to bring the perpetrators to justice — including their instigator and cheerleader, Trump.
Even before Jan. 6, Wray repeatedly warned Congress that the problem of “domestic violent extremists” — DVEs, in bureau parlance — rivals or exceeds that of international terrorism. The threat “has been metastasizing across the country,” Wray testified in 2021, and “it’s not going away anytime soon.”
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Trump, by his Day 1 blanket clemency for the Jan. 6 “DVEs,” has helped make sure of that. We’re all less safe as a consequence.
The president will have an ally in excusing right-wing extremism if the Republican-run Senate confirms the president’s choice to succeed Wray: provocateur Kash Patel, spreader of anti-FBI conspiracy theories and apologist for the Jan. 6 rioters. Patel’s confirmation hearing is set for Thursday.
For weeks Trump’s Republican allies have argued that his picks for national security posts in his Cabinet — Patel as well as Pete Hegseth, confirmed Friday for Pentagon chief, and Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence — should have been hustled to confirmation in the wake of the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans and a suicide truck explosion outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas.
Here’s the irony of that argument: Those reminders of the ongoing threat of domestic extremism only underscore why all three Cabinet picks are unfit to be security stewards. They not only lack experience for the jobs Trump wants to entrust them with, they have a record of undermining the essential institutions they would head.
Patel has warred against the FBI for years. Hegseth, aside from his history of alleged sexual assault, falling-down drunkenness and mismanagement, defended accused and convicted war criminals as a Fox News talking head and helped persuade Trump, in his first term, to grant them clemency. Gabbard, who would be in charge of all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, has opposed their past findings about Russia’s Vladimir Putin and since-deposed Syrian strongman Bashar Assad, echoing those murderous dictators’ talking points instead.
But all three Cabinet choices have the one qualification Trump cares about: loyalty to him.
That alone makes Patel, especially, a danger to America’s security. His zeal for attacking Trump’s political enemies would follow him into the FBI director’s office. Among those targets are former President Biden; former Biden, Obama and even Trump administration officials; prosecutors involved in the federal cases against Trump, now dropped, for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and for making off with top secrets, and the witnesses in those cases.
Of course, Trump’s enemies aren’t America’s enemies. They’re not the ones whom Wray as well as numerous other security experts have warned about. Trump and Patel’s fixation on retribution would necessarily distract the bureau from the real threats, domestic and foreign, that endanger the nation.
And now Trump has exacerbated the danger by setting hundreds of Jan. 6 extremists free.
The now-pardoned QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley, quickly exulted on X, in all capital letters, that he was “gonna buy some [expletive] guns!!!”
Fortunately, Daniel Ball, jailed but not tried yet for allegedly assaulting officers and using an explosive on Jan. 6, wasn’t released despite the pardon because of a separate federal gun charge: He has been indicted on a charge of possessing a firearm despite past felony convictions (domestic battery by strangulation and resisting police with violence). Nice guy — and not alone among those pardoned and set free in having a criminal record.
The immediate threat, of course, is less to the American public than to the freed attackers’ families, friends and associates whom they blame for their legal travails.
Jackson Reffitt, who turned in his father, Guy Reffitt, after Jan. 6 and testified during his dad’s trial that Guy threatened to kill him and his sister if they did so, has moved and purchased two guns for protection. “I can’t imagine being safe right now,” the son lamented to MSNBC. “It goes far beyond my dad…. I get death threats by the minute now. ”
The younger Reffitt added that his dad, “an amazing father” before he came under Trump’s influence and became a leader of the anti-government Three Percenters, has been “further radicalized in prison.”
Tasha Adams, the ex-wife of Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes, free after Trump commuted his 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, and Rhodes’ oldest son, Dakota Adams, say that they fear for their lives at the hands of the man who, according to Tasha’s sworn statement, abused them for years. “He is somebody that had a kill list — always,” Tasha Adams told an interviewer last fall, fretting at the prospect of Trump freeing Rhodes. “And obviously, now I’m on this list and so are some of my kids, I’m sure.”
Rhodes, fresh out of prison, told reporters he hoped that Patel “cleans house” at the FBI. “I feel vindicated and validated,” he said — just as Jackson Reffitt predicted Rhodes and the others would.
Trump likes to claim, falsely, that other countries empty their jails to send criminals to America. Turns out he’s the one who’s sprung violent convicts on the land.
@jackiekcalmes
Politics
Will Mexico accept military flights of deportees? President Sheinbaum deflects on sensitive issue
MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum hedged Tuesday on whether Mexico would accept U.S. military flights carrying deportees under the Trump administration’s mass-expulsion plans
“Until now, this hasn’t taken place,” Sheinbaum responded at her morning news conference when asked several times whether her nation would consent to Pentagon aircraft returning deported citizens. She declined to elaborate.
The White House has begun using military aircraft to transport deportees, including two Pentagon flights that flew more than 150 people to Guatemala last week.
The use of the military — including the deployment of active-duty troops to the United States’ southwest border — is a cornerstone of Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda. But it bumps up against Mexican sensitivities — heightened by a long history of U.S invasions and incursions — against military encroachment by its northern neighbor.
It is not clear whether Pentagon air assets would be deployed to transport deportees to Mexico. Media reports last week that Mexico refused a U.S. military flight that would have brought deportees have not been publicly confirmed by either country.
The military-transport issue has raised alarms throughout Latin America since a weekend diplomatic crisis in which an enraged President Trump moved to impose tariffs and other penalties on Colombia — a longtime U.S. ally — after President Gustavo Petro denied landing permission for two Pentagon aircraft carrying deportees.
After negotiations, the White House withdrew the threatened sanctions and Colombia said it had received assurances of the “dignified conditions” Petro had demanded. Petro said on social media that he had never refused to accept deportees but would not agree to their being returned handcuffed and on military aircraft.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents knock on the door of a Chicago home on Sunday as part of mass deportations.
(Christopher Dilts / Getty Images)
The Brazilian government also denounced “degrading treatment” of its citizens after some deportees walked off a nonmilitary U.S. plane on Saturday in the northern city of Manaus in handcuffs and leg shackles.
The idea of giant C-17s flying over Mexican airspace and unloading deportees at Mexican airports is a potentially incendiary prospect in a country with a long memory of U.S. invasions; the nation lost much of its territory in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.
Though Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico for more than a century, Mexican youth are schooled in Mexico’s “heroic” resistance to past U.S. actions.
Many in Mexico are already unnerved at previous Trump threats to deploy the U.S. military against drug traffickers. His executive order to designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations is viewed by many as a prelude to direct military intervention.
Already casting a shadow on binational relations are Trump’s threats to impose tariffs of 25% on Mexican imports if the country does not do more to stop U.S.-bound undocumented immigrants and the smuggling of fentanyl. Trump has indicated he would decide by Saturday on the tariffs — which could devastate a fragile economy heavily dependent on cross-border trade.
Sheinbaum is under pressure to bend to Trump’s demands in order to safeguard the economy, but she must also take care not to alienate citizens sensitive to perceived slights against Mexico’s sovereignty.
Protesters gather for a rally and march to Trump Tower in Chicago, with dozens of groups calling on the Trump administration to reconsider its policies on immigration and Gaza.
( Jacek Boczarski / Getty Images)
“President Sheinbaum is in a tight spot,” said Tony Payan, who heads the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “The optics of military planes flying deportees back to Mexico would not be good for her nationalist base. But she may not have a choice other than to accept it.”
Mexican citizens are by far the largest nationality among the estimated more than 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally. In recent years, Washington has removed about 200,000 deportees annually to Mexico, mostly via the southwestern land border — but including some ferried by nonmilitary aircraft to the Mexican interior. The number of deportees returned to Mexico is widely expected to increase under Trump’s directives.
Sheinbaum has already agreed to accept Trump’s reinstatement of the controversial Remain in Mexico policy, which forces asylum-seekers arriving at the border — including Central Americans and other non-Mexicans — to wait in Mexico for adjudication of their cases in U.S. immigration courts. She has said Mexico would seek financial aid from Washington to reimburse the costs of repatriating third-country nationals to their homelands.
Mexico received four deportation flights last week— on nonmilitary aircraft — but has yet to see a significant uptick in returned deportees, officials say.
But Mexican authorities are erecting large-scale new shelters along the country’s northern border with the United States and making other preparations to house and otherwise assist repatriated citizens and third-country nationals sent to Mexico.
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.
In his first week in office, President Trump tried to browbeat governments across the world into ending the flow of drugs into America, accepting planes full of deported migrants, halting wars and ceding territory to the United States.
For all of them, he deployed a common threat: Countries that did not meet his demands would face stiff tariffs on products they send to American consumers.
Mr. Trump has long wielded tariffs as a weapon to resolve trade concerns. But the president is now frequently using them to make gains on issues that have little to do with trade.
It is a strategy rarely seen from other presidents, and never at this frequency. While Mr. Trump threatened governments like Mexico’s with tariffs over immigration issues in his first term, he now appears to be making such threats almost daily, including on Sunday, when he said Colombia would face tariffs after its government turned back planes carrying deported immigrants.
“The willingness rhetorically to throw the kitchen sink and use the whole tool kit is trying to send the message to other countries beyond Colombia that they should comply and find ways to address these border concerns,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products on Feb. 1 unless those countries did more to stop the flows of drugs and migrants into the United States. Previously, he threatened to punish Denmark with tariffs if its government would not cede Greenland to the United States and to impose levies on Russia if it would not end its war in Ukraine.
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he would impose 25 percent tariffs on Colombia and raise them to 50 percent in one week. Within a few hours, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, said he would hit back with his own tariffs. But by Sunday night, the White House had released a statement saying that Mr. Petro had agreed to all of its terms, and that Mr. Trump would hold the threat of tariffs and sanctions “in reserve.”
That quick resolution may only further embolden Mr. Trump’s use of tariffs to extract concessions that have nothing to do with typical trade relations.
Speaking to House Republicans in Florida on Monday, Mr. Trump referenced his threat that countries like Colombia, Mexico and Canada reduce the flow of migrants into the United States or face tariffs.
“They’re going to take them back fast and if they don’t they’ll pay a very high economic price,” he said.
Ted Murphy, a lawyer at Sidley Austin who handles trade-related issues, said the tariffs would have been a significant blow to industries that rely on imports from Colombia, but that the implications of the threat were much broader.
“Tariffs could be used in response to almost anything,” he said.
Even having a free-trade agreement with the United States is no guarantee of safety: Colombia signed such a deal with the United States in 2011, while Mr. Trump himself signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2020.
Mr. Trump is also not limiting himself to the trade-related laws he relied on to impose tariffs in his first term, Mr. Murphy said. For Colombia and for other nations, Mr. Trump has appeared willing to deploy a legal statute — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA — that gives presidents broad powers to impose trade and sanctions measures if they declare a national emergency.
Mr. Murphy said the bar for Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency appeared to be “not very high.”
Governments in Mexico, Canada, Europe, China and elsewhere have prepared lists of retaliatory tariffs they can apply to American products if Mr. Trump decides to follow through with his own levies. But foreign officials seem well aware of the economic damage that cross-border tariffs would cause, and have tried to defuse the tensions to avoid a damaging trade war.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said Monday that Europe needed to unite as the Trump administration threatens to usher in an era of policy changes, including tariffs.
“As the United States shifts to a more transactional approach, Europe needs to close ranks,” Ms. Kallas said, speaking in a news conference after a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels.
“Europe is an economic heavyweight and geopolitical partner,” she added.
Presidential use of trade-related measures for matters unrelated to trade isn’t without precedent. Douglas A. Irwin, an economic historian at Dartmouth College, pointed out that President Richard Nixon conditioned the return of Okinawa to Japan on its agreeing to limit the amount of textiles it sent into the United States. President Gerald Ford signed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked granting the Soviet Union “most favored nation” trading status — and lower tariff rates — to it allowing Jews to emigrate.
Still, Mr. Irwin called Mr. Trump’s approach “unusual.”
“Trump is very overt and transactional in his approach,” he said.
In recent decades, presidents have been less willing to wield tariffs or other measures that would restrict trade, in part out of deference to the World Trade Organization. W.T.O. members, including the United States, have agreed to certain rules around when and how they impose tariffs on other countries within the organization.
The W.T.O. carves out exceptions for its members to act on issues of national security, and governments have used that exception more liberally in recent years when imposing tariffs or limiting certain kinds of trade.
Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Cornell University, said that many administrations, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s, had used national security considerations “as a veil to implement tariffs and other protectionist measures without running afoul of W.T.O. rules.”
Although no U.S. president has wielded the threat of tariffs as Mr. Trump has, they have pressured other countries with other types of economic measures, like sanctions or embargoes. And in recent decades, U.S. presidents have been more willing to use trade as a carrot, rather than a stick, holding out the prospect of free trade deals and other preferential trade treatment for governments that support the country politically.
If Mr. Trump indeed goes through with his tariffs, it remains to be seen if U.S. courts ultimately decide to curtail them.
Peter Harrell, who served as White House senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, noted on social media that IEEPA had never before been used to impose the types of tariffs that Mr. Trump threatened on Colombia, Canada and Mexico. (Mr. Nixon did use a precursor statute, the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, to briefly impose a 10 percent universal tariff in 1971 to address the trade balance, unemployment and inflation.)
Mr. Harrell suggested that such an expansive interpretation of the law could face legal challenges. He said that he was “skeptical” that courts would allow Mr. Trump to use the legal statute to impose a broad global tariff, but more targeted tariffs, like those on Colombia, would be “a much closer and more interesting test case.”
Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from London.
Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., and more than a dozen other House Republicans are pushing a proposal to ban the provision of chemical abortion drugs.
The congressman reintroduced the proposal that he previously put forward in 2023, according to a press release, which provides a link to the text of the 2023 version.
“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, whoever prescribes, dispenses, distributes, or sells, any drug, medication, or chemical for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion on any woman, shall be imprisoned for not more than 25 years, fined under this title, or both,” the text reads.
MANY WOMEN ‘UNPREPARED’ FOR INTENSITY OF PAIN FROM CHEMICAL ABORTION, STUDY FINDS
Rep. Andy Ogles at event about The Ending Chemical Abortion Act in Capitol Hill of Washington D.C., on Sept. 28, 2023 (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The ban would not apply to the provision “of any contraceptive agent administered before conception or before pregnancy can be confirmed through conventional testing,” or to “treatment of a miscarriage,” or to situations “where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death.”
The proposal also stipulates that a woman who receives a chemical abortion may not be prosecuted criminally.
ABORTION SURVIVORS SLAM DEMS FOR BLOCKING ‘BORN-ALIVE’ ABORTION BILL: ‘WE ARE NOT TREATED AS HUMAN BEINGS’
“Chemical abortions not only end a human life but pose a serious risk to the lives of the mothers,” Ogles noted, according to both the 2023 and 2025 press releases about the proposal.
“I’m taking a stand against the irresponsibility of the Democrats and working to protect women and girls across America. I’m taking a stand for life because, born or unborn, every single person is uniquely and wonderfully made. It’s not merely a political issue; it’s a moral duty to uphold the sanctity of life. I am committed to safeguarding the innocent and voiceless in our society,” he noted.
Cosponsors include Republican Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois, Trent Kelly of Mississippi, Mike Bost of Illinois, Ben Cline of Virginia, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Rick Allen of Georgia, Randy Weber of Texas, Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Elijah Crane of Arizona, Mark Green of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Doug LaMalfa of California, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Barry Moore of Alabama, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, and Mike Ezell of Mississippi.
LAWMAKER UNVEILS CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO GIVE TRUMP THIRD TERM
Left: Rep.-elect Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, is seen after the freshman class photo on the East Front of the Capitol on Nov. 14, 2018; Center: Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., is seen outside the U.S. Capitol during House votes on Friday, April 12, 2022; Right: Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., arrives to a Republican caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol Building on Sept. 13, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Left: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call; Center: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Right: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Ogles recently proposed a Constitutional amendment that would alter presidential term limits in a manner that would allow President Donald Trump to seek a third term in office.
The proposal reads, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
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