Weekly Roundup: The Death of Voting Rights: SCOTUS, Alito, and the Colorblind Myth

Dan Miller: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. Lot to talk about this week. A lot of things going on, ranging from the things that would be comical if they weren't so tragic, to the absurd to the outrageous, all of the above. There's not a chance we can hit everything that came out this week, but we're going to do our best. Ready to get started?

My name is Dan Miller. I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you. I am your host today flying solo. Brad Onishi is not here, so we'll see how this goes. I think we can all survive without Brad for one day, and we'll do what we can to fix the world in the meantime.

I want to start with something that came out just yesterday, something that I think a lot of people haven't had a chance to take a close look at. As people might remember, Trump established a task force by executive order in February 2025 to look at anti-Christian bias in the federal government. Well, that task force has just released its report with its findings. It's a long report, and we'll have more to say about it over time as we have a chance to look at it. But I wanted to offer just a few quick hits on this.

The first is, I think it's worth noting that this report and this task force in general didn't even make a pretense of addressing anti-religious bias. Usually Christian privilege — usually the presumption of Christianity as the normative default religious position of the US — is masked under the language of religious freedom, or anti-religion, or what have you. In this case, it wasn't. It was the anti-Christian bias task force. No pretense, no pretense that we're talking about Americans who might not be Christian, or Americans who are not a particular kind of Christian, and so forth. So the first point to make is just that it highlights that.

But I think the next point related to that is that this is going to feed off of and presuppose what has become the standard conservative conception of so-called religious freedom as they define it. What it really is is a freedom to discriminate against non-Christians on the basis of Christian beliefs — or what somebody says are deeply held Christian beliefs — and to discriminate on the basis of those, even if somebody is acting as a person in business, even if they're in a government position, even if they're a medical provider, and so forth. So throughout every segment of society, the notion that I as an individual, if I have personal religious views, should be able to discriminate against you if you don't share those views, or if you have a lifestyle or make choices that I disagree with — that is their religious freedom. And that's what this report is going to find. What this report is going to find are examples where, I think a preponderance of examples will probably be instances where anti-discrimination policies are pitched as anti-Christian bias.

I also think, all in all, I don't think this report is going to move the needle. I think everybody who understands what the Trump administration is about knows what this report is about. The people who support the Trump administration, they know what this report is about. The people who oppose the Trump administration know what this report is about. I don't think that a pretty narrow portion of Americans who are persuadable are going to be really moved by this. I think this was a report aimed at throwing red meat to the MAGA masses. I'm not even sure how it lands with them at this point — a year later, a year plus later — in the midst of high gas prices, in the midst of an affordability crisis, and so forth. So I don't think that this moves the needle. We'll take a look at it, and we'll let you know, and we'll be talking about this, and I'm sure we'll have people on who will also be talking about it. It's significant. Wanted you to know that I know about it, but it's not something that we have time to get to today. The thing is, it's hundreds of pages long. I'm pretty good, folks, I'm pretty good, but I couldn't get through that by today.

So we're going to dive into some other things. And I want to start with another SCOTUS decision — a disappointing decision. A lot of you will have heard about this. I'm going to walk through some of the background to it. It's another one of these decisions that on the legal side gets a little bit wonky and can be a little bit difficult to understand. I'm going to try to walk all of us non-legal specialists through part of that and highlight some things about it.

So a conservative SCOTUS majority further hollowed out the Voting Rights Act this week — the VRA — and they did this in line with practice that's been well established for them by now, and that I think was widely anticipated. I don't think, frankly and disappointingly, that this decision was surprising, but it still gives us a window into the rationales and the arguments that are put forward about race and racism in particular, that have come to really define the conservative playbook in the US. So we're going to see how that plays out in SCOTUS, and how it plays out beyond.

Here's a little bit of background. As most people know or have some idea of, the Voting Rights Act — the VRA — is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and it sought to enforce voting rights of the 14th and 15th Amendments. It sought to really guarantee those specifically for Black Americans.

And in the most recent case — the case that was just decided — the case was Louisiana v. Callais. Following the 2020 census, Louisiana was assigned six House seats. So you have the census, you count up the population, that determines how many seats you have in the US House. Louisiana was assigned six, and the census also found that about a third of the state of Louisiana's residents are African American. However, the GOP-controlled state legislature approved new congressional district maps that were largely unchanged from before. So 2020, you have the census, you have new information on population distribution and so forth, but they don't change the congressional district maps to reflect this. And what that meant was that despite the fact that a third of the state is Black, five of the districts had non-Black majorities.

So the new maps are challenged in court by Black voters on the grounds that they violated Section Two of the VRA, the Voting Rights Act. So what is Section Two? What Section Two of the VRA does is it prohibits voting practices with a racially discriminatory effect, and it does so irrespective of whether or not that effect is intentional. In particular, it prohibits jurisdictions from drawing electoral districts that dilute the votes of protected minorities.

So Black voters in Louisiana challenged the maps, and they argued that they violated Section Two of the VRA, and they were successful. They took this to court, they succeeded, and in June of 2022 a federal district judge ordered Louisiana to draw a map with two Black-majority districts reflecting the state's population. So again, they get six House seats, a third of the population is Black — this would make two of the six seats African American majority districts. The idea was that it would reflect the diversity in the state.

And following more legal wrangling — there's some ups and downs to this, injunctions and so forth — following more legal wrangling the state legislature produced a new map to be in effect by the 2024 election. But a group of self-styled non-African American voters challenged the new map on the grounds that it was a racial gerrymander. So a new map was drawn arguing that the existing map diluted the Black vote in Louisiana, that it essentially did not reflect the racial makeup of the state, thereby disadvantaging Black voters. So non-Black voters argued that the new map was a racial gerrymander, and this week, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs and argued that the new map is unconstitutional.

So the map with the two Black-majority districts is now unconstitutional. And Samuel Alito, arguing for the majority, stated that it is unconstitutional because it took race into account to draw its lines. Note that it took race into account. The whole point of the new map, the whole point of the suit, was that the existing maps disadvantaged African American voters. So Alito rules that this is unconstitutional because it took race into account, and it follows the logic that any accounting of race is — and I'm quoting him now — discriminatory. Okay. Any accounting of race is discriminatory, so the new maps amount to an act of racial discrimination.

Okay, that's a lot, and it's a lot because several dimensions of right-wing ideology flow into this. I think it also illustrates a logic that has been fully weaponized by the MAGA movement. So I want to back up and really talk about the reasoning that was used here in the VRA, and then expand out from there to think about MAGA.

So the first thing I want to talk about is the Supreme Court's weakening of the VRA. The Supreme Court has not ruled that the Voting Rights Act in whole, or Section Two, is unconstitutional. What they've actually done instead is they've essentially gutted the VRA. They've essentially made it so that it technically still holds but it's essentially a toothless law — a dead letter. And this started more than ten years ago. Okay, so this isn't new. The court has been going after the Voting Rights Act for a long time, in particular led by John Roberts, who has wanted to evacuate the Voting Rights Act of any significant meaning since he was a lawyer in the Ronald Reagan White House.

So over ten years ago, the court ruled in a five-to-four decision — this is at a time when there were five conservative justices and four liberals, it's now six-three — in a five-four decision, they threw out the most powerful part of the Voting Rights Act. And if you follow these things, you will remember this. That section of the Voting Rights Act had required that all or part of fifteen states with a history of voting discrimination — so states mostly in the South, and again this is in 1965, following the period of Jim Crow, segregation and so forth — it had required that those states had to seek federal approval before changing how they hold elections, before changing maps, before changing rules and so forth. They had to get federal clearance. And John Roberts basically vacated this part of the act. His argument was that the requirement used forty-year-old data and didn't account for racial progress, that enough racial progress had been attained that essentially this requirement was out of date and no longer relevant. This was widely recognized at the time as the beginning of the end for the Voting Rights Act.

Folks who remember: there were questions about whether the Voting Rights Act would just be declared unconstitutional, what the conservative majority would do. Instead, they did not address the issue of constitutionality — didn't say it was unconstitutional — but they basically vacated the most significant provisions of the Voting Rights Act. And what this reflected, and why this is significant, is it reflected John Roberts' what we could call his colorblind judicial ideology.

So going back even further, in 2007, another five-four Supreme Court decision — another five-four conservative decision — the court struck down voluntary race-conscious student assignment plans in school districts in Seattle and Louisville. So there was a case about whether or not school districts in Seattle and Louisville in particular could voluntarily use race-conscious student assignments to try to make their schools more accurately reflect the population of the regions that they were in. Roberts wrote for the majority, and this was struck down. And Roberts, at that time writing for the majority, famously wrote this — and this is what he said: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." End quote. Famous statement by John Roberts. A lot of you listening will have heard this before.

In other words, it's the argument that any appeal to racial groups who are discriminated against, in an effort to counter that discrimination, is itself discriminatory because it focuses on race. Let me say that again. Any effort to essentially address racial discrimination and its effects by focusing on the race of the groups who are discriminated against is defined as itself an act of discrimination, because you're using the category of race. In other words, if you appeal to the category of race, that's inherently racist and discriminatory and cannot then be a means of combating racism, discrimination, or its effects.

That reasoning is absolutely perverse. It's absurd, it's unintelligible, it makes no sense. But that has been the reasoning of the conservative majority of the court, and John Roberts articulated it at that time. It has been used by the court in overturning various affirmative action programs and other things. We remember this — the Harvard decision and so forth. That's the logic that has been used: that if you take account of race in decision making, that is a form of discrimination.

So the same logic was applied in the Louisiana case. The new congressional maps were drawn for the purpose of countering the dilution of the Black vote. So they said, you're diluting the Black vote — a third of the population is Black, our congressional districts don't reflect that, so we're going to look at the population and create two Black-majority districts so that our congressional districts reflect the population. So they were drawn for the purpose of countering anti-Black discrimination. They were ruled unconstitutional because they appealed to race — because they looked at the racial makeup of those districts. So the majority essentially ruled — they did rule — that it is unconstitutional to allow, quote, "race to play any part in government decision making." End quote. Race cannot play any role in government decision making.

So they vacated this. Louisiana can go back to its old map.

Okay. What are the takeaways? Why does this matter? That's a lot of wonky stuff — thanks for sticking with me, because I know going through the Voting Rights Act can be work.

Well, the liberal justices in their dissents noted that this effectively neutralizes Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. It further weakens the act. It now becomes almost impossible to demonstrate racial discrimination because you're not allowed to talk about race to do it. So the Voting Rights Act stands, Section Two stands, but it becomes almost impossible to apply in any situation.

And I think more broadly, that logic — that broader logic beyond the VRA, beyond Section Two — it makes it almost impossible to ever demonstrate racial discrimination, precisely because as soon as you point at it and say, that's racial discrimination, they're discriminating on the basis of race, somebody says, "Whoa, race! You're talking about race! Look who's being discriminatory now." It makes it literally impossible to talk about the category of race, because you're not allowed to attack discrimination if you're focusing on race.

And if that sounds convoluted, if it sounds absurd, it's because it is, folks. It is. It's absolutely absurd. This is not a real judicial philosophy. This is just an attempt to unwind workarounds and laws aimed at addressing the effects of racial discrimination in this country. That's the goal. The legal rationale is a post-facto, after-the-fact formulation intended to come up with a justification for the unjustifiable.

Okay, so this has become the right-wing playbook, and it's become that ever since 2007 when the Chief Justice said you should stop talking about race. That telegraphed to everybody on the right at every level — judicial, legislative, executive — it telegraphed to everybody that this is the path forward. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has given us the pathway for challenging efforts to combat racism and discrimination, and that became the playbook.

Okay. Here's why this matters beyond SCOTUS, beyond John Roberts, beyond the Louisiana decision. That colorblind ideology is exactly what we've seen on display in policy after policy during Trump 2.0. All the attacks on DEI — diversity, equity, inclusion — programs, all the attacks on so-called wokeness. All of those things play on this same logic. They apply this same conception of a colorblind approach to race. Any programs aimed to counter discrimination on the basis of race or gender or sexuality become discriminatory by definition.

So you get an expansion: number one, beyond race to issues of gender and sexuality, but also beyond the narrow confines of judicial review and legal challenges and so forth. So anytime somebody says, well, I don't know, half of Americans are women but only about a third of people in these companies are women, maybe we should have programs to try to get more women in the companies — they'll say, "Whoa, you're focusing on gender! We're not supposed to discriminate on the basis of gender, but you're focusing on gender. You're discriminating." Thereby you wipe it out and make it impossible to address the wrong that's in view.

It has become the right-wing playbook, as I say. And so this is how the Trump administration has challenged all of those programs — DEI programs, equal access programs, et cetera — through policy and through legal action. What it allows then is the maintenance of and reinforcement of a straight, white, Christian, patriarchal culture on the grounds that anything else becomes inherently discriminatory. Anytime you point out and say, "Whoa, like, this is really white," — "Hey, you're focusing on race! That's discriminatory." Everybody like, "I don't know, they're all cis straight guys" — "Whoa, you're discriminating! You're making a distinction on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. That's discriminatory." It just maintains a white, Christian, patriarchal society.

So I think the SCOTUS decision, not surprising. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody who read it or recognized how it played out was surprised by this. It is disappointing, but it is a window into very much what is the ideology on the right, and we see it play out every day.

So let's move on. I want to stick with something related. We're talking about constitutional things. What I want to move on to is another right enshrined in the Constitution — in the First Amendment — the right to free speech. Let's stick with talking about MAGA and the way that they interpret fundamental rights. Let's talk about them playing fast and loose with constitutional guarantees. But this time, let's think about free speech.

We all know, on the one hand, that the Trump administration has tried to pitch themselves as the champions of free speech. All the efforts against higher ed are positioned as defenses of free speech, the accolades and defenses of Charlie Kirk, all ostensibly in the name of free speech — even as they prohibited speech about Kirk and so forth. After Trump was elected, JD Vance — people will remember this — he was dispatched to Europe where he sanctimoniously lectured European leaders about free speech and their lack of free speech, and that they didn't care enough about free speech. This is what he said: "Just as the Biden administration sought desperately to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do exactly the opposite." Says the Biden administration wanted to silence people. You speak your mind, the Biden administration is going to come after you, they're going to silence you, they're going to cancel you. The Trump administration, we're going to do just the opposite. That was his claim.

But of course, we have seen over and over and over since then that this only applies to Americans and political views that Trump approves of. Only the right kinds of Americans, only MAGA nation, has a right to free speech in Trump land. And this week, it was highlighted in a couple of different events that occurred, and they're worth talking about.

The first, of course, is the shooting and then the apprehension of the shooter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I'll be clear at the outset here — there's been a lot of discussion of this, and I in no way condone political violence. As with every time there's one of these shootings, there's more work to be done to figure out all of the motives and the background and why security was maybe less extreme than it could have been, and so forth. We're not going to get to talk about all of it, but the Trump administration is using this as an argument for why his big, giant ballroom should be built and so forth.

But at any rate, this is one of the issues where free speech has come in. And specifically, exhibit A about this has to do with Jimmy Kimmel. In a segment that was aired days before the White House Correspondents' Dinner — and many people will have heard about this — he made a joke about Melania Trump. What he said, talking about Melania Trump, is that she had, quote, "the glow of an expectant widow." End quote. So after the shooting, Melania Trump took to X and said that Kimmel should be fired for his, quote, "hateful and violent rhetoric." I'll say it again: he said she had the glow of an expectant widow. She said he should be fired for his hateful and violent rhetoric and that it is intended to divide our country.

Donald Trump then jumped on and called it a "despicable call to violence." It was stated, again, before the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Kimmel has said it was a joke about Trump's age. Well, soon after this, the FCC ordered the Walt Disney Company, who owns ABC, to seek early broadcast license renewals. In other words, companies have to have licenses to broadcast, and they said, "Oh, we know that your renewal is not up, but we're going to require it now. We're going to review it." And this was widely seen by everybody as a retaliatory effort by the Trump administration and FCC chair Brendan Carr to punish Kimmel and ABC. You're going to say these things, you're going to make this perhaps-in-poor-taste joke about Melania Trump and about Donald Trump, we're going to threaten your license.

Now, of course, Brendan Carr has said that this had nothing to do with Kimmel's speech or Kimmel's joke or anything. Kimmel said everybody sees through this. And this is all despite the fact that, number one, there's no evidence that this was a call to violence. Again, Kimmel said it was a joke about Trump's age. He did not say, go out and take out Trump or something like that. It's not clear that it's a call to violence. And number two, virtually all legal experts agree that this was an expression of protected free speech by Kimmel. There's nothing prosecutable or punishable here.

And what this is, once again, is the playbook that we have seen over and over and over again: the weaponization of federal agencies to target Trump's political foes. We know that in this case, he's already gone after Kimmel once. They tried to get ABC to fire Kimmel. They didn't. And so forth. They're having a second bite at that apple, using what happened at the White House Correspondents' Dinner to come after him.

Here's the point: the champions of free speech are not such champions of free speech when it's a criticism of Donald Trump or a joke made at the expense of his wife.

Here's Exhibit B, and for me, this one feels more significant. Former FBI Director James Comey took a photo of seashells on the beach and posted it to social media. He's walking down the beach, and somebody had made a pattern with seashells. He takes a picture and posts it, and it said, "Cool shell formation on my beach walk." End quote.

What was the image? Many of you will have seen it. You can Google it if you want. The image was the letters 8647 spelled out in seashells. He took a picture of this.

Comey has now been indicted on the basis of this photo. He has been indicted by a grand jury in North Carolina where the picture was taken, and he has been indicted on the grounds that it is a threat to Donald Trump — that he took a photo and posted a threat to Donald Trump. 8-6-47: "86" can mean to do away with, to throw out, to get rid of, and 47, of course, Trump is the 47th president. So he has been charged with making a threat against the president, with transmitting a threat, and with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, because he posted it online.

So what are they claiming? The administration and the GOP claim that this amounts to a death threat — the former director of the FBI posting a public death threat against the President of the United States.

Now, if that feels thin, it's because it is. Once again, First Amendment experts agree that these charges will be dead on arrival in courts. Getting an indictment is one thing. Getting a conviction is something very different. Among other things, Comey took the post down when he learned that some would associate the numbers with violence. He said, quote, "It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down." He said he saw it, did not think of it in violent terms, didn't understand that it could be interpreted that way by some. He posted it, and he says that when it was brought to his attention that it could be interpreted that way, he took it down. He also didn't spell out the message — he said that he found it. And additionally, courts have found a pretty high bar for political speech to be taken as a death threat. This image is not going to cross that threshold.

So legal experts have said over and over and over again, this isn't going anywhere. This was not a death threat. No reasonable person could say that it's a death threat. Once Comey realized that some could perhaps find violent intent to the message, he removed it. So what is this? This isn't really about a death threat. It's not really about anything like that.

It is another case of Trump capitalizing on an act of political violence. The GOP and Trump and everybody else — it's a whole other story, completely predictable — everybody on the right is now railing about how it's the violent rhetoric on the left that led to this act of political violence. Again, despite the fact that the President of the United States has used violent and inflammatory rhetoric since before he was president the first time. He does it all the time. He has reveled in the death of others and so forth. We could talk about Pete Hegseth and the way that he talks about anybody the administration doesn't like. We could talk about — and we have talked about — the way that people on the right and in the administration will talk about undocumented immigrants and others. We've talked about these things to no end. And yet, when there's an act of political violence, they come out against the left.

Okay, so what is it? Number one, it's Trump capitalizing on and politicizing an act of violence, and number two, again, weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack a political opponent. Again, they went after Comey once, it didn't go anywhere. So they're ginning up charges to come after him again. And just like the first time, I think the same thing is going to happen — with everything, with Kimmel — this is going to be symbolic and empty. MAGA is going to love it. People who want to stick it to the libs and anybody who doesn't like Trump or who talks about Trump Derangement Syndrome, they will love it. But it's not going to go anywhere. It's going to go nowhere in prosecution.

And this is the pattern that we have seen in the Trump administration by this point: getting indictments or issuing executive orders or doing whatever, but then it always falls apart. It falls apart when it comes time to apply it or defend it or get it through court, which is what they would have to do.

But acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has demonstrated his loyalty once again. He has demonstrated his loyalty to Trump. He obviously is aiming to be the permanent Attorney General, so he'll do whatever Trump wants. But we see this once again — that the administration, when it suits their interests, and certainly when they're talking about conservative Christian nationalists, they are staunch defenders of free speech. They will let everybody know it. They'll send envoys to Europe to lecture everybody else about not defending free speech and so forth. But we know that free speech in the Trump administration has severe limits, and if you don't support Trump, if you don't support his policies, if you have been critical of him, he will come after you. And they will do it on the basis of your speech.

It's also worth noting — I read some things about how the left loves James Comey. We all remember that there probably is no first Trump presidency without James Comey reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton and announcing that he had reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton days before the 2016 election. So if anything, you would think Trump still owes the guy — I don't know what he would send over, a box of cigars, a bottle of scotch. I don't know what James Comey is into. Instead, he targets him again, as he does.

And finally, another topic I want to talk about today is essentially continued efforts by the Trump administration to keep America for white Americans. There are a couple of developments this week that I think highlight those efforts. One of them sounds comical, and one of them I think probably wasn't noticed that widely, but I think they're both significant, and they both continue to show this desire to hold on to what they envision as real America, true America — an America that is white, that is Christian, and so forth.

So here's the first one. The Trump administration announced this week that when foreigners apply for US visas, those visas will be denied if those foreigners do not affirm that they do not fear persecution in their home countries. That's a lot of nots and do-nots in that sentence. So in other words, when somebody fills out a visa form, there's a question that says, "Do you fear persecution in your home country?" And they have to affirm that they do not fear persecution in their home country — that they are not afraid of being persecuted. If they don't affirm that, if they say that they do fear such persecution, their application will be denied.

Now, these are not people who are asking to stay in the US. These are not people who are saying they should be let into the US because they fear persecution in their home countries. These are people seeking visas who have to stipulate on those visas that they do not fear persecution in their home country. Why? Because the administration is afraid that once in the US, they will claim asylum. The administration is afraid that people will enter the US on a valid visa, and then once they are safely in the United States, they will say, "We fear persecution. We're claiming asylum."

The Trump administration wants to limit asylum seekers. They want to stop not just immigration — non-white immigration to this country — but immigration that is both legal or illegal. And so what they're doing, sort of preemptively, is this: on these visas, if somebody says "I don't fear persecution in my home country" and they let them in, if that person then turns around and says "Actually, I do fear persecution," what they're going to do is deny that asylum claim and say you lied, you were fraudulent in what you said, you lied and misrepresented yourself in your visa application, and they're going to deport you. And if you say, "I do fear persecution if I return to my home country," they're just not going to let you in.

Why? They want to stop asylum seekers from entering this country. And I'm just going to remind everybody and keep it in front of them that we heard MAGA nation tell us for years — we heard it in the run-up to the last election, we still hear it from the Trump administration — that they're targeting the worst of the worst. They want to get rid of undocumented immigrants, they want to get rid of people who shouldn't be in the country and are here illegally. Folks, these are people who would be here legally. This is not just about keeping undocumented or so-called illegal immigrants out of the country. It is about making sure that America stays white. These are people who could seek asylum. This is Trump, once again, trying to keep out people from what he has called, quote-unquote, "shit hole countries."

MAGA is not about preserving a nation where the worst of the worst are removed. MAGA nation is about preserving a white America — an America where people of color are not here, where asylum seekers are not here, where undocumented immigrants are not here. And so this is one of the steps that the administration announced this week: to deny visas to people who could potentially claim asylum once they're in the country.

Which brings me to the next one I want to look at, and this is the one that, on its surface, is comical. And it's okay to have a laugh at this. We don't have to feel guilty about that. It's okay to have some levity. We talk about a lot of heavy stuff here on Straight White American Jesus. So a laugh is okay. Brad isn't here to make me laugh today, so if you want to laugh at this, you can.

Right-wing influencer Alyssa Marie posted a suggestion to social media on Monday this week, and the suggestion was to change the name of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. To — is everybody ready for it? — National Immigration and Customs Enforcement. To add one word. Trump liked this idea. Trump was excited. Trump posted "DO IT" — all caps, standard Trump fashion — on Truth Social, next to an image of the post.

Why one word? The shift from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to National Immigration and Customs Enforcement — what's going on? I'll give you folks a few seconds to think about it. It's going to land for some of you. What it would mean is it would change ICE to NICE. From Immigration and Customs Enforcement to National Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE would become NICE. Cannot make this stuff up. Somebody posted it. Trump loved it. Trump said, "DO IT."

Now, is that comical and ridiculous on the surface? Sure. Absolutely absurd and ridiculous, and just the kind of thing that Trump likes to spend his time doing. But I want to go below the surface and think about the significance of this and what it really tells us about this administration, their priorities, and how they understand things.

As ICE loses the national PR war, as it is an agency that is less and less popular, it is viewed more and more as a threat to everyday Americans. It is an agency that has murdered American citizens. It's an agency that has, through deceptive practices, taken children away from their parents. It is an agency that has targeted people in places where they would traditionally have been safe. It is an agency that has used deception to jail people. It is an agency under which record numbers of detainees die in custody. This is what ICE is.

Trump wants to rebrand. He doesn't want to fix anything. He doesn't want to address the problems. He wants to rebrand. Just as he got rid of Kristi Noem and sort of pretended that that was going to fix things, here he says, "Well, let's just change the name from ICE to NICE." He wants to rebrand. There's no concern here for Americans or detainees. There's no effort at reform.

And of course, this is exactly what was going on in Congress, as the Republicans have finally moved forward legislation to fund parts of the government. But this is why there were sticking points about ICE — because the Republican Party and Donald Trump refused any significant reforms of ICE despite these realities. And what's Trump's reaction? Let's just call it NICE. Let's call the agency NICE. It's nice. Who could be opposed to something that's literally nice?

He just shifts the label, hoping to gaslight Americans into forgetting everything that this agency is. And I think what he wants to do by calling it NICE — and there's this image that comes with it of an ICE agent on one knee with their hand on a child, sort of gazing into the future — this effort to continue casting the work of ICE as protection and defense and service. The agency is nice. It's nice.

But I think that that idea shows just how callous the Trump administration is. Again, an agency where people die routinely in custody, where children are taken away from their parents, where American citizens are murdered, where people are deported and left in third-party countries against court orders. People who are in this country legally have been deported. People are stripped of their naturalized citizenship. That's the agency we're talking about. And the idea that the way to fix what's wrong with it is just messaging — just call it NICE — it illustrates the degree to which there is no awareness in the Trump administration or in the GOP about the depth of what this agency is, the depth of how much Americans have come to hate it and fear it and loathe it, or the idea that they can just change the name and make all of that go away.

And I think that calling the agency that does this NICE shows how out of touch they are. I think we can imagine times in the past — in past administrations — where if you had a government agency that was this unpopular, that had misstepped this badly, that had failed in its mission this thoroughly, you would have efforts by the administration at a kind of PR repair campaign. They would be trying to put their best foot forward. They would be trying to show that the agency cares about people. They would have it doing, I don't know, relief work or something like this, to try to rehab its image. None of that. None of that. Let's just change the name. Let's call it NICE.

So as comical as that may be, as silly as that may be on the surface, I think that it continues to tell us and show us something real and disturbing about the Trump administration. Those two things — the refusal of visas to people who won't stipulate that they do not fear persecution in their own country, and this silly proposal to change the name of ICE to NICE — again demonstrate just the fundamental concern the Trump administration has for defending white America.

As I say, that's a lot. There's more that we could talk about. We're going to wind it down, though, because if we keep going about everything that's wrong with America, we'd be here for hours. We could talk more about all of these, and I'll invite you — we always love all of your insights and thoughts and feedback, so please keep those coming.

I do want to get to my reason for hope, though. And here it is. As I'm recording this, it is May 1. It's May Day. It's almost summer, which means on the political calendar, it's almost fall. Things happen in the summer, but you get long congressional recesses, lots of Americans go on vacation and kind of tune things out. There's something of a lull in the political cycle. So once we hit summer, it's almost summer, which means it's almost fall.

Why does that matter? It matters to me, folks, because I am watching the clock. I am watching the countdown — as I know many of you are — to the midterms in 2026. The midterms in the fall. And I am watching the clock, and I am watching the GOP, and I am watching MAGA nation run out of time. They're still mired in Iran. We still have high gas prices, we still have an affordability crisis, we still have disapprovals of ICE and Trump ballrooms and all these other things.

We have been hearing from the GOP for the better part of a year now about how they're going to turn things around. They're going to get the messaging going. They're going to do great things for Americans. They're going to stave off a bloodbath in the midterms. Circle around to the beginning of the new year, and you had the GOP starting to be a little nervous but saying, "Hey, we're going to do this. Tax time is going to come around, we're going to pitch the benefits of the big, beautiful bill and so forth. We're going to pivot to affordability." And we're now in May. Tax season came and went, and it didn't catch on. People did not get the refunds they were promised, and if they did — something I predicted on this show — it didn't feel like it offset everything else. Groceries are expensive, gas is expensive, everything is expensive. So if you got a few extra hundred bucks back in a tax refund, good for you. It all just disappeared into your gas tank or trying to feed your kids. Obamacare numbers are down because healthcare costs are up. Affordability is a thing. And we're now five months later, and there still hasn't been the pivot to affordability that they promised. There still wasn't the swing in public approval.

So folks, I take hope in this, because the more time passes with the GOP incapable of getting out of the mud and trying to motivate themselves and orient themselves toward the midterms, and the more that Donald Trump undertakes policies and practices and international debacles that continue to distract from that, the more the clock ticks down. We're coming into the fourth quarter of the election cycle. And I think disarray for Trump and for MAGA land is something that will help us all in this country. That's my reason for hope.

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