Please accept my congratulations if, on the election of Trump, you sold all your stock and invested the proceeds in certificates of deposit yielding an interest rate of, say, 4.25%. Hell, congratulations if you deposited the proceeds in a mattress. Markets are said to abhor uncertainty and, along this line, someone recently observed that Trump's next move might be to impose a 50% tariff on all imported goods, but only for 45 minutes. Then, after 45 minutes . . . something else.
There is a possibility that Trump will be sunk by a Trump slump, but what would sink him immediately, were it not for the national malaise that elected him, is the vanishing of a pro-Palestinian student protester. The Times's columnist Michelle Goldberg summarizes the case here. Money quote:
But the fact that it was easy to see this ideological crackdown coming shouldn't obscure how serious Khalil's detention is. If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump's inauguration.
That Goldberg's conclusion is apt may be seen in the way the phrase "ideological crackdown" seems to have been tapped out on her keyboard in the manner of a mere prepositional phrase. When the First Amendment was operative, we didn't have "ideological crackdowns" in the United States. No one has said Khalil committed a crime. The Department of Homeland Security says he "led activities aligned to Hamas." Take note of that weaselly formulation. What does it even mean? Only that the detainee opposes the policies of the Israeli government. So does Hamas, therefore this Columbia grad student is a terrorist. That's the logic. I mean "logic."
Officials who crow about being "free speech absolutists" are rounding up for deportation people whose expressed views they don't like. You could not say they're trying to hide anything. Trump, on his Truth Social account:
This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.
The first amendment has a Formerly Respected Opinion about Who and What is Un-American.
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