This afternoon,
President Donald J. Trump posted on social media a video of the theme song of
the Davy Crockett TV series from 1954–1955 starring Fess
Parker. Over the clip, he wrote: “Davy Crockett, obviously a distant relative
of Jasmine Crockett, and a very High IQ Frontiersman, would be proud of the
legacy that he began long ago, and especially Jasmine’s Great Success as a
Politician from the Great State of Texas! President DONALD J. TRUMP” The Walt Disney Studio
designed the Davy Crockett western series for children when Trump was about
nine, an age that put him in the right demographic to have been part of the
Davy Crockett craze that put “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” at the top of the
Hit Parade and spurred the sale of $300 million of Davy Crockett merchandise
as little boys begged their parents for raccoon caps that would make them
look like a western hero. Jasmine Crockett is a
current Democratic U.S. representative from Texas. There is no evidence she
is related to David Crockett, who served as a U.S. representative from
Tennessee from 1827 to 1835 and who died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.
Trump mused about their possible relationship before, in 2025. It feels frighteningly
appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump
right now than the real world of April 2026 does. Davy Crockett was
only one of the many westerns on television in the 1950s and 1960s as those
eager to dismantle the New Deal government championed the idea of the western
hero as the true American. Trump is trying to bring to life a right-wing
political fantasy of the 1950s, and Americans in the present are making clear
they reject it. After World War II,
Republican businessmen, southern racists, and religious traditionalists hated
the government that both Democrats and Republicans had embraced since 1933,
one that leveled the American social and economic playing field by regulating
business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and
protecting civil rights. They insisted that such a system of government
action was socialism or even communism, and contrasted it with their fantasy
of an independent white man on the frontier who wanted nothing of the
government but to be left alone. In 1960 a
ghost-written book released under the name of Arizona senator Barry
Goldwater, who wore a cowboy hat and boasted of his family’s ties to the Old
West although he himself grew up with a live-in maid and a chauffeur,
articulated this right-wing vision. The Conscience of a
Conservative maintained that even if Americans liked the new
government that had stabilized the country since the Great Depression and
World War II, the Constitution’s framers had deliberately written a document
that would prevent “the tyranny of the masses.” In place of a strong
federal government, the book said, power should go back to the states to
restore true freedom to Black Americans, farmers, and workers. Federal action
had given those groups too much power, and they were using it to destroy
liberty and lower the American standard of living. In their hands, the book
said, the U.S. was on its way to becoming a totalitarian state. At the same
time, the government must protect the country with an increasingly strong
military. At an Easter lunch
reception yesterday, Trump echoed this argument precisely. “I said to [Office
of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money
for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare,’” he said.
“That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big
country. We have fifty states, we have all these other people. We’re fighting
wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of
daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They’ll have to
raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a
little bit to them to make up, but we, it’s not possible for us to take care
of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it
on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one
thing, military protection.” Trump is expected to
release his 2027 budget plan tomorrow, in time to use it to shape
Republicans’ argument for the midterm elections in November. Like Trump’s
budget requests for 2026, it calls for an enormous boost to the nation’s
military spending, $1.5 trillion, to be paid for with cuts to domestic
programs. But members of Congress recognized that domestic spending is
popular, and their 2026 appropriations bills kept domestic spending
relatively flat. The popular pressure
to fund domestic programs showed today when House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)
backpedaled on the Senate’s plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) without funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the parent
agency for Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection. Far-right House
Republicans opposed the Senate’s bill, and bowing to them, Johnson called the
Senate’s bill “a joke” and sent House members home until April 13 without
voting on it. Today Johnson said he would bring the bill forward to pass it
with Democratic support and that Republicans would then try to fund ICE and
Customs and Border Protection through a budget reconciliation measure that
does not need Democratic votes. Racism was central to
the rhetoric of cowboy individualism, and the institutionalization of that
racism in the mass deportations and incarcerations of the Department of
Homeland Security under Trump has created a backlash. A poll last week by the
Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that only 35% of Americans
approve of Trump’s handling of immigration while 61% disapprove. An analysis of DHS
records by Ali Winston and Maddy Varner of Wired revealed
today that DHS has used agents from special units accustomed to dealing with
high-risk warrants, armed drug cartels, and manhunts for civilian immigration
sweeps. Agents from Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and its sister unit,
Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR), are part of what the
journalists call “a secretive, tightly knit world” in which their identities
“are typically excluded from official documents and shielded from public
records requests.” The journalists’
analysis shows that these agents are “as a group, the most violent of the
hundreds of federal agents deployed to Chicago.” Following the use-of-force
guidelines rewritten by former leader Gregory Bovino—himself a member of
BORTAC—their use of force there “included punching and kicking protesters,
throwing tear gas, macing civilians, firing pepperballs and 40-mm foam rounds
into crowds, shocking people with tasers, unleashing dogs on deportation
targets, and shooting unarmed civilians, killing at least one of them
[Silverio Villegas González, shot at “close range” as he fled from officers
after a traffic stop]. The county medical
examiner yesterday declared the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a visually
impaired Rohingya refugee from Myanmar whom Border Patrol agents dropped off
in the parking lot of a coffee shop on a frigid February night in Buffalo,
New York, a homicide. Rather than releasing him to his family or lawyer, CBP
officers offered Shah Alam what they called a “courtesy ride.” He was found
dead five days after agents left him at the closed shop. A DHS spokesperson
told Sydney Carruth of MS NOW that the homicide ruling was “another hoax
being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law
enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol.” Those who oppose
government social welfare programs, regulation of business, and so on, have
worked to concentrate power in the president, knowing that Congress will
hesitate to slash programs their voters like. Yesterday Assistant Attorney
General T. Elliot Gaiser, of the Office of Legal Counsel, published an
opinion for the White House that claims the Presidential Records Act, which
requires that presidents keep records of their official business and turn
them over at the end of their term, is unconstitutional. Gaiser clerked for
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. “The PRA is not a
valid exercise of Congress’s Article I authority and unconstitutionally
intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by
Article II. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of
congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and
identifiable legislative purpose,” the memo reads. “For these reasons, the
PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its
dictates.” The fallout from that
concentration of power is showing now in Trump’s disastrous adventure in
Iran, undertaking to attack the country without consultation either with
Congress or with allies. Yesterday evening,
Trump commandeered time from television networks to deliver what officials
billed as a major announcement on the Iran war. But rather than announce
anything new in his first address to the nation about a war that has gone on
now for more than a month, Trump rambled for 19 minutes, reiterating what he
has put in social media posts. He said the war was almost over but also that
military operations were going to intensify, said its purpose was to destroy
Iran’s nuclear capabilities—despite his claim in June 2025 to have
obliterated those capabilities—and said the rise in oil and gas prices would
be only a “short-term increase.” Sounding tired and
speaking in a monotone, Trump reiterated his claim that the U.S. doesn’t need
the oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz and demanded that other
nations who need the oil more force Iran to reopen it. In reality, the U.S.
is tied into international oil markets, and prices not only of oil, but also
of products that use oil to get to market, are already rising. One Republican
strategist from a battleground state texted Lisa Kashinsky and Alec Hernandez
of Politico: “What the hell did he just say?” The strategist
called the speech “nonsense.” As Trump spoke, U.S.
stock futures plummeted, erasing about $550 billion in 25 minutes. Today forty nations,
led by Britain and France, discussed ways in which they could work to reopen
the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited to participate. In the midst of this
crisis, the tension between the Army’s leadership and Defense Secretary Pete
Hegseth blew up today when Hegeseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy
George. The Army chief of staff is the highest-ranking officer in the U.S.
Army, the top military advisor for the Secretary of the Army, overseeing
planning, training, and policy. George was appointed to his position in 2023
and worked closely with former defense secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the
four-star general who preceded Hegseth. Recently, George refused to remove
four officers—two women and two Black men—from a promotion list at Hegseth’s
insistence. A source who spoke to
Jennifer Jacobs, Eleanor Watson, and James LaPorta of CBS News said that
Hegseth “wants someone in the role who will implement President Trump and
Hegseth’s vision for the Army.” Two other Army leaders were also removed:
General David Hodne, leader of the Army’s Transformation and Training
Command, and Major General William Green, head of the Army’s Chaplain Corps.
Hegseth has reworked the Chaplain Corps recently to limit the range of
religious instruction available to military personnel. And finally, Trump
today fired Attorney General Pam Bondi by posting her dismissal on social
media. He was apparently angry that she has not adequately punished his
enemies and that her botched handling of the Epstein files has stoked rather
than calmed the story. For the present, her replacement will be Deputy
Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before joining
the Department of Justice. It was Blanche who met
privately with Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker
Ghislaine Maxwell, last July, as the outcry over the Department of Justice’s
apparent cover-up of the Epstein files grew. After their meeting, Maxwell was
moved from the prison where she was being held in Florida, to a less
restrictive, minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas. |
