When I look at the video of Trump, Macron and Zelensky today I see something I hadn’t expected — not just in this quick footage but more generally. (Google it.) The first thing is that Trump looks like the least comfortable guy there. But there’s something more general that I have seen globally, in both senses of the word. Round one, no one knew how to deal with Trump. He always had the element of surprise, just by being the freak that he is. Round two, I get the sense that everyone knows exactly how to deal with him. I think he feels that intuitively, and doesn’t necessarily like it.
I’m not saying this is necessarily “good” or bad for Trump. You could see it as the opposite: everyone now accepts that this is how things work and they’re ready to work with him on that basis. But I don’t think it’s totally that either. It’s a pattern or dimension of this story that I’m going to be thinking more about.
Very interesting update from MAGA-whisperer Marc Caputo at The Bulwark. Following on Trump’s tweet of support, the idea is that Pete Hegseth has bought himself at least time to continue his nomination fight because Trump likes his fight. But the operative theory is twofold, that even though Hegseth doesn’t currently have 50 votes that they can break the GOP senators’ … well, let’s call it their moonwalk confirmation strategy (I’ll explain that later) and that Hegseth is good to have as a punching bag because maybe that will help RFK Jr. and Kash Patel move through more easily. Caputo quotes a Trumper: “Hegseth is a heatshield. Pete can take the heat, and that’s better for everyone else.”
One of the central features of Trumpism is that Trump never wants to deal in pain. Not for people who might vote for him. Or at least, no pain to anyone who might vote for him … that they would blame on him. That’s why, at least in concept, he’s always said he’d never support cuts to Social Security or Medicare. That’s in concept of course. What happens down in the fine print of administrative decisions or omnibus tax bills is another matter. But the position in concept is still important and fairly consistent. But over the last couple weeks things have gone sideways in a pretty big way. And key players in his administration-in-the-making are now proposing massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the Hunter pardon, Pete Hegseth and his mom and the ascendancy of some star House Democrats.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
As President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to implement sweeping policy changes affecting American immigration and immigrants, one of the issues under scrutiny by his allies appears to be birthright citizenship — the declaration in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that anyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents’ nationalities or immigration status.
Some prospective members of Trump’s team, including anti-immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan, have said they intend to stop issuing federal identification documents such as Social Security cards and passports to infants born in the U.S. to undocumented migrant parents, according to The New York Times.
This first step down a path to deny citizenship to some individuals born in the United States reflects a conflict that’s been going on for nearly 200 years: who gets to be an American citizen.
Nonetheless, even in the highly racialized political environment of the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed an expansive view of birthright citizenship. In an 1898 ruling, the court decreed that the U.S.-born children of immigrants were citizens, regardless of their parents’ ancestry.
That decision set the terms for the current controversy, as various Republican leaders, U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, as well as Vice President-elect JD Vance, have claimed that they will possess the power to overturn more than a century of federal constitutional law and policy and deny birthright citizenship.
Citizenship by birth
Dred Scott, around 1857, when he sued seeking freedom from slavery for himself, his wife and their two children. Wikimedia Commons
Most citizens of the U.S. are born, not made. Before the Civil War, the U.S. had generally followed the English practice of granting citizenship to children born in the country.
In 1857, though, the Supreme Court had decided the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, with Chief Justice Roger Taney declaring that people of African descent living in the U.S. – whether free or enslaved, and regardless of where they were born – were not actually U.S. citizens.
After the Civil War, Congress explicitly rejected the Dred Scott decision, first by passing legislation reversing the ruling and then by writing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which specified that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
This broad language intentionally included more than just the people who had been freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War: During legislative debate, members of Congress decided that the amendment should cover the children of other nonwhite groups, such as Chinese immigrants and those identified at the time as “Gypsies.”
This inclusive view of citizenship, however, still had an area judges hadn’t made clear yet – the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” In 1884, the Supreme Court had to interpret those words when deciding the case of a Native American who wanted to be a citizen, had renounced his tribal membership and attempted to register to vote.
The text of the 14th Amendment also became an issue in the late 19th century, when Congress and the Supreme Court were deciding how to handle immigrants from China. An 1882 law had barred Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. from becoming naturalized citizens. A California circuit court, however, ruled in 1884 that those immigrants’ U.S.-born children were citizens.
In 1898, the Supreme Court took up the question in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ultimately ruling that children born in the U.S. were, in the 14th Amendment’s terms, “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, so long as their parents were not serving in some official capacity as representatives of a foreign government and not part of an invading army. Those children were U.S. citizens at birth.
Yet in the Wong Kim Ark ruling, the court did not mention any distinction between the children of legal immigrants and residents and the children of people who were in the United States without appropriate documentation. All people born in the United States were automatically simply citizens.
The long reach of Wong Kim Ark
John Fitisemanu, born in American Samoa, was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking formal U.S. citizenship. John Fitisemanu/Twitter
Since the Wong Kim Ark ruling, birthright citizenship rules haven’t changed much – but they have remained no less contentious. In 1900 and 1904, leaders of several Pacific islands that make up what is now American Samoa signed treaties granting the U.S. full powers and authority to govern them. These agreements, however, did not grant American Samoans citizenship.
A 1952 federal law and State Department policy designates them as “non-citizen nationals,” which means they can freely live and work in the U.S. but cannot vote in state and federal elections.
In 2018, several plaintiffs from American Samoa sued to be recognized as U.S. citizens, covered by the 14th Amendment’s provision that they were born “within” the U.S. and therefore citizens. The district court found for the plaintiffs, but the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, ruling that Congress would have to act to extend citizenship to territorial residents.
A new debate has ignited over whether Congress has the power to alter birthright citizenship, and even over whether the president, either through an executive order or through directing the State Department not to recognize some individuals as citizens, can change the boundaries around who gets to be a citizen. Efforts to alter birthright citizenship are sure to provoke legal challenges.
At least until now, the courts have continued to uphold the centuries-long history of birthright citizenship, dating back to before the Constitution itself and early American court rulings. But if the Trump administration pursues the policies that key figures have discussed, the question seems likely to reach the Supreme Court again, with the fundamental principle hanging in the balance.
Democrats on Capitol Hill are strongly condemning Republicans’ reported interest in making cuts to federal safety net programs in the next Congress, especially ones that low-income families are most reliant on.
“It would be devastating to all the people who rely on these programs — many of them are Trump voters,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) told TPM on her way to a Wednesday floor vote. “There’s even a move to eliminate SNAP completely — which I will oppose — and it’s bad for the children who rely on SNAP but it’s also bad for our farmers. Our (agriculture) sector will suffer significantly if they were to eliminate programs or significantly cut programs like SNAP.”
Does Pete Hegseth continue to twist in the wind or does Trump pull the plug and let Ron DeSantis or whoever the replacement is jump-start their own confirmation efforts over the weekend?
In a normal transition with a reasonable president-elect, a nomination sitting this low in the water with no prospect of being bailed out would have already been scuttled. But of course if we’re positing a normal scenario, Hegseth would never have been nominated in the first place. The skeletons in his closet have skeletons in their closets.
The Senate is gone today, but before it left town for the weekend it got another dose of Hegseth making the rounds. It did not go well enough to matter. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), herself a possible replacement for Hegseth, said on Fox News that she is not ready to vote for Hegseth. Other reporting quoted GOP senators as signaling the nomination is DOA: “It’s on the death watch,” on Republican senator told The Hill. In another sign the writing is on the wall, Trump is not calling senators on Hegseth’s behalf.
The Trump track record makes it clear that Hegseth was going to come out on the other end of any run as defense secretary without his dignity intact. He’s just lost it sooner than most Trump appointees and looks unlikely to have the resume item to show for it.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.
LOL
An associate of former Ambassador Ric Grennel approached conservative social media influencers with offers of five-figure contracts to boost Grennel’s prospects for being named secretary of state, Politico reports: “One such contract, obtained by POLITICO and not previously reported, outlined that the influencer would do so during ‘peak posting times,’ that ‘content must appear genuine,’ and it could not ‘appear as an overt advertisement or promotional message.’” Sen. Marco Rubio (R), not Grennel, got Trump’s nod for secretary of state.
For The Record …
I goofed in yesterday’s Morning Memo by not making it clear that in picking former Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) to be his nominee for IRS commissioner, Donald Trump is promising to fire the current commissioner before the end of his term.
The IRS commissioner’s five-year term, like the FBI director’s 10-year term, is intended to insulate the position from politicization. Trump is running roughshod over those protections and making it worse by naming a partisan to the post.
When A Right-Wing Extremist Sits In The White House
“Based on campaign promises and Trump’s first-term record, analysts foresee a rollback of initiatives aimed at curbing violent extremism, especially among right-wing movements. Among the predictions: a slashing of domestic terrorism resources, White House pressure to investigate what Trump terms “the radical left” and cuts to programs aimed at the prevention of radicalization.”–WaPo
Sign Of The Times
The NYT follows up Politico with more reporting on the internal White House discussions about issuing blanket pardons to protect potential targets of Trump II lawlessness:
Among those whose names have been floated are former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who was vice chair of the bipartisan committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former top infectious disease expert for the government whose advice on Covid-19 made him a target of far-right attacks; Jack Smith, the outgoing special counsel who prosecuted Mr. Trump; and Senator-elect Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who was a lead House prosecutor at Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Oligarch Watch
New federal campaign finance filings reveal the full extent of Elon Musk’s 2024 election-related spending:
It turns out Musk was behind the mysterious pro-Trump super PAC that invoked Ruth Bader Ginsburg and falsely portrayed Trump the late justice as aligned on abortion. Musk’s $20.5 million contribution came on Oct. 24, which meant it did not have to be reported on filings until after the election.
In total, Musk contributed more than $250 million to getting Trump elected, making him probably the largest individual contributor in the 2024 election.
‘A Trans Case Before A Very Not Trans Court’
Chris Geidner: From appellants to lawyers to reporters, trans people centered themselves this week at the Supreme Court
Casey Parks: L.W., a trans teen from Tennessee, has her day at the Supreme Court
Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.
“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.
An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.
Under Public Pressure, Gorsuch Recuses
“Justice Gorsuch’s recusal is particularly significant for two reasons. During his 2017 confirmation to the Supreme Court, his web of ties to Mr. Anschutz attracted attention, raising questions over whether he would step aside in cases involving the billionaire’s business interests. He appeared to leave that door open, despite having systematically sought to recuse himself from such cases as an appeals court judge.”–Charlie Savage
Mass Deportation Watch
“Immigrants without legal status or in mixed-status families are avoiding going out in public, scrambling to apply for asylum and attending legal workshops ahead of Donald Trump’s return to power, fearful they will be swept up in the president-elect’s promised mass-deportation campaign.–WSJ
House GOP Still Covering For Matt Gaetz
Two new developments Thursday on the House Ethics Committee report on recently resigned Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL):
The House Ethics Committee met but did not divulge whether it took another vote on releasing the Gaetz report. Republicans on the evenly divided committee have so far resisted releasing the report.
The Backdrop To Our Current Politics
“After 2023 ended up the warmest year in human history by far, 2024 is almost certain to be even warmer. Now, some scientists say this could indicate fundamental changes are happening to the global climate that are raising temperatures faster than anticipated.”–WaPo
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Kevin Kiley (R-CA) on Thursday officially introduced federal anti-SLAPP legislation, meant to protect journalists and other critics from frivolous lawsuits, particularly of the sort that are expected under the new Trump regime.
It seems all but certain that Pete Hesgeth’s nomination to lead the Pentagon is doomed. Yesterday he was reduced to promising not to drink on the job if he’s confirmed for Defense Secretary. You may not like him, but don’t deny him this: he’s going to have the best story ever when he introduces himself at his first meeting and explains what brought him to AA. It’s probably best to refer to Hegseth on Thursday afternoon as one of the “post-nominated.” Trump is already sounding out Ron DeSantis for the job. But he’s happy to let Hesgeth twist in the wind a bit longer. And in a paradoxical kind of way I appreciate his doing that. This of course will be Trump’s second top-tier nominee to go down in flames, and the third overall.
Has this gone well for Hesgeth? I don’t mean in terms of getting the job. I mean in the general sense of reputation, dignity, etc. I’d say it’s gone … well, pretty badly? Kind of the fate of everyone and everything who locks up with Trump.
DeSantis is much like Marco Rubio, a generally clownish figure, if somewhat more malevolent, but in the overall ballpark of the kinds of people who get these jobs. He’s served in Congress. He’s been governor of the one the country’s most populous states. Given the type of people Trump often hires for these jobs, the country could do so much worse.
So does it matter that Hesgeth goes down the tubes?
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