Six months in, the war in Iran is suddenly hot again. The U.S. military said Sunday it had bombarded Iranian troops on Larak Island who were trying to launch mines into the Strait of Hormuz, killing several people. Iran responded by firing at bases hosting U.S. personnel in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Oil prices rose on the news, although they remain below their wartime peak this spring. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that senior military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that large-scale attacks on Iran are becoming “unsustainable.” Happy Monday.
Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein for MAGA Mondays today at 10:00 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.
(Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Jim Swift, Rick Lee James, Shutterstock)
by Jim Swift
Springfield, Ohio
When I was last inside Greater Grace Temple in late July, faith leaders from Springfield’s G92 coalition—a faith-based association dedicated to protecting the city’s Haitian community—were praying that ICE, which had not yet established a presence in the city, would treat its Haitian residents humanely.
Perhaps God heard their prayers. But ICE certainly did not. In the month between that visit and my return last week, the agency has arrested thirty-four Haitians, including two pastors. Organizers believe one has already been deported. Pastor Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church describes the city as “under siege.”
The first time I visited Greater Grace, the church was mostly empty, save the reporters and clergy. On Friday, the entire church was humming with activity. While other churches and businesses around town were emptying because people were afraid to leave home, Greater Grace had become an activism factory, the headquarters of a five-day regional mobilization, with each room serving a different purpose.
In one room, volunteers used Google Translate to write letters in Haitian Creole to detainees and packed boxes of food for local families. The pantry and donation space doubled as a check-in area for volunteers.
Another room served as an impromptu phone bank. Volunteers raised money for the Haitian Support Center and called Gov. Mike DeWine and Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno (all Republicans), urging them to act. Elsewhere, organizers prepared transportation and assignments for volunteers. A group behind me planned Sunday’s finale, “Unshackle Springfield,” a potluck and public faith witness at City Hall Plaza.
All the volunteers were sustained by food catered by Keket Bongou Caribbean Restaurant. Ruby said it had taken in only $24 the previous week as Haitian customers stayed home. The folks at Greater Grace Temple, in addition to buying hundreds of dollars worth of food, also had a donation box replete with $20 bills.
One organizer said a volunteer from the other side of Cleveland had told her he got up at 4 a.m. to make the trip. Some are coming for multi-day trips to work and bear witness.
This is what Trump is doing to our towns and cities. In the name of cracking down on immigration, he has ripped our social fabric apart. And it is small acts of decent human beings—people who don’t want to live in a society in which the state terrorizes families, schools, and churches—that is keeping it together.
The media crowded into a small, stuffy prayer room at the side of the church. Ruby opened with a story: While this mobilization was being organized, he was in Canada helping a Haitian family he knew relocate there. Returning to Haiti was not an option. Before coming to America, their children had survived kidnapping attempts, and the family’s car had been shot at as they fled. Canada was available only because they had an immediate relative there.
Ruby has been working pretty much non-stop, and a small documentary crew now follows him during what will surely be a defining chapter of his life.
A few weeks earlier, Ruby had accompanied a parishioner to an appointment at the ICE office in Blue Ash, outside Cincinnati. As they walked inside, the man told Ruby what had happened to his brother in Haiti.
“He leaned over and said, ‘My brother was just kidnapped in Haiti,’” Ruby recalled.
“And I said, ‘What happened to him?’ And he said, ‘They burned him.’” Ruby initially misunderstood. “I said, ‘Is he okay?’” he continued.
“And he said, ‘No, they burned him alive.’” Ruby paused before adding: “That’s happening in Haiti.”
When ICE summons Springfield Haitians to Blue Ash, it presents them with a choice: deportation, or an ankle monitor.
The Haitians being fitted with monitors are not fugitives hiding from the government. They are showing up when the government tells them to.
“They are not hiding,” said Vilès Dorsainvil of the Haitian Support Center. “They know where they live. They know where they work.” If immigrants are summoned before a judge, he said, they appear. “You ask them to go for ICE checking, they do that. And they arrest them.”
Dorsainvil said seven Haitians had reported for ICE check-ins last Thursday. One was a woman who had given birth twenty days earlier and lost the baby. “She came to the office. She could not even walk,” he said. “But they put the shackle on her.”
She also described a man on North Limestone Street who had received notice of a court appearance in Dayton but was afraid even to leave his home to retrieve the letter from his mailbox. “Everything is still going on,” Dorsainvil said. “How do you want the person to go for his biometric if you know that they cannot go on the streets?”
“She came to the office. She could not even walk. But they put a shackle on her.”
At one point, Ruby turned toward Dorsainvil, holding up a yellow legal pad to hide his mouth like an NFL offensive coordinator with a play sheet. Dorsainvil is himself a TPS holder with a pending asylum case. By speaking publicly and helping others navigate ICE, he was putting himself at risk. Ruby was seemingly asking permission to speak about his friend in this way:
“Vilès is one of the bravest people I’ve ever seen,” Ruby said. He recalled sitting in a meeting with Dorsainvil and ICE officials who, according to Ruby, told him: “Even though you have asylum pending, we will pick you up, and we will put you in jail and leave you there.” Ruby appealed to the clergy surrounding them: “We need to protect this man.”
(Jim Swift/The Bulwark)
For the black clergy gathered at Greater Grace Temple, the ankle monitors carried a historical meaning that could not be separated from their function. Rev. Adam Banks, a descendant of enslaved people, called them “technologically advanced ankle and wrist shackles that are still as heavy as they were for my ancestors.”
The devices, Banks argued, belong to a longer history of “anti-black containment,” restricting movement, separating families, and treating people “as problems to be patrolled instead of partners deserving protection.”
Denise Williams of the Springfield NAACP supplied the mobilization’s refrain: “Unshackle Springfield.”
“I’m scared. My skin is dark,” Williams said. She described Haitian families staying inside, turning off their lights, and closing their blinds. “They are not criminals,” she said. “What is the reason for shackles? Humiliation.”
Leaving Greater Grace Temple, I drove through the parts of Springfield where Haitians live, work, eat, and worship. At Keket Bongou Caribbean Restaurant, the door was closed. But taped to it was a handwritten sign for would-be customers in Haitian Creole: “Even if you see the door closed, we are open.”
by William Kristol
One imagines the members of Donald Trump’s cabinet at bedtime, satisfied by what they’ve accomplished that day at the office in the way of illegality and mendacity and cruelty, approaching their vanity dressers to echo the Evil Queen from Snow White: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?”
What they mean, of course, is “Who is the fairest to Donald Trump?”
Who knows? They don’t. Their Dear Leader likes to keep them guessing. It’s pleasant to imagine them jolting awake in a cold sweat from nightmares in which their Leader has turned on them for some instance of insufficiently supine loyalty.
In any case, it’s hard for us sane types to know who’s the fairest of them all to Trump. But a question we can try to answer is, Who’s the worst of them all for America?
Sam Stein and Tim Miller rose to this challenge on Friday’s Bulwark Daily podcast.
Sam’s list of the worst five in Trump’s cabinet was reasonable:
Pete Hegseth.
RFK Jr.
Markwayne Mullin.
Sean Duffy.
Todd Blanche.
As was Tim’s slightly different ranking:
Marco Rubio.
Hegseth.
Blanche.
Howard Lutnick.
RFK Jr.
You should watch their amusing and instructive discussion.
Several of you have asked me to referee their debate. OK. I’m sad to report that neither of my estimable colleagues has gotten it quite right. The correct ranking is:
Hegseth.
Mullin.
Blanche.
RFK Jr.
Rubio.
It’s a parlor game. But it reminds of just how deplorable and dangerous are the individuals running our federal government. And it’s useful to recall, in light of the forthcoming midterm elections, that all hold their positions because they were confirmed by a Republican senate.
And it’s also worth pointing out that at this time in Trump’s first term, the counterparts of my Top Five were Jim Mattis, Kirstjen Nielsen, Jeff Sessions, Alex Azar, and Mike Pompeo. A mixed bag, surely. But still a world of difference from what we have now. Mattis wasn’t dedicated to politicizing the military and waging unconstitutional wars. Nielsen wasn’t willing to go all-in on masked agents brutally carrying out a mass deportation. Sessions still thought some rules and norms should be observed at the Department of Justice. Azar didn’t spread wild misinformation about vaccines or seek to destroy our medical research infrastructure. Pompeo still tried to uphold a U.S.-led international order.
Trump’s second term is something else. It’s not just that he’s older and crazier and more megalomaniacal. Look at the people now controlling the most powerful government departments. Would any of them stand up to Trump even in the face of truly destructive commands? Would any of them tell the truth rather than lie for Trump? Would any of them balk at any illegality they were ordered to perform? Would any of them fail to go along with election subversion in 2028?
The dangers of Trump’s second term far exceed those of his first.
And it’s not a fairy tale with a guaranteed happy ending.
FEDS TO THE LEFT OF ME, POSTERS TO THE RIGHT: Last week, our Will Sommer reported on the strange case of the woman known online as “Data Republican”: Elon Musk fangirl, Twitter troll/conspiracist, and—it suddenly came to light—Defense Department employee. Many were astonished to learn that such a prominent “independent” pro-Trump and pro-Hegseth voice was actually on the Trump administration’s payroll—and, as Will noted, she was only the tip of the iceberg.
Yesterday, the Washington Post tracked down a few more of X’s greatest Pentagon employees, including retired Cols. Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson. All three are reliable administration boosters to their large online audiences; none had disclosed they were ongoing recipients of government cheese.
The revelations were embarrassing for the posters, and they were embarrassing for Hegseth, who thinks he’s presidential material but still apparently feels the need to buy fake friends on X. But the funniest spectacle was seeing the way the broad MAGA ecosystem reacted with a shrug. This is a group of people that sees a Deep State conspiracy under every rock and bush and for whom “fed” is a grave insult. But here were actual, honest-to-God feds in their midst—and it turned out they barely even cared.
MILO GETS THE BOOT: Speaking of influencers: It’s both astonishing and unnerving how much both the MAGA media ecosystem and the federal government now run on the court-politics rules of Louis XIV. One of the clearest examples came this weekend, when Trump cheerleader turned critic Milo Yiannopoulos was deported to the United Kingdom.
Yiannopoulos’s detention and deportation seem to have gone by the book: He overstayed a visa, missed an immigration hearing, and was given a deportation order by a judge. But the messaging around his deportation strongly resembled the purging of a dissident. Trump whisperer Laura Loomer, whose tweets and conversations with Trump have spurred prior purges of government employees and other official actions, took boastful credit for putting ICE on Yiannopoulos’s trail after the two of them feuded. And the Department of Homeland Security paraded Yiannopoulos’s mugshot online, writing that he “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”
VACATION REMINDED ME I NEED A VACATION: How utterly pointless and irrelevant has Congress become in its period of late-Trump decadence? The House gavels back in today for the first time in five weeks. But if Speaker Mike Johnson gets his way, they’ll quickly pass one spending package to avoid a shutdown and charge back into recess as fast as possible. Politico reports:
Johnson is hoping to tick the lone essential item off the chamber’s to-do list in lawmakers’ first days back: sending a shutdown-averting spending bill to President Donald Trump’s desk. Otherwise, the Capitol Hill agenda is devoid of must-pass legislation until later in the year.
Meanwhile, the thin GOP majority has had trouble opening the House floor for debate on any number of legislative priorities, and many Republicans lawmakers are simply eager to get back home ahead of the November midterms rather than endure more headaches in Washington.
Together that has fueled open speculation among members and aides that House leaders will call it quits until mid-November much sooner than the currently scheduled Oct. 1 exit date.
