Under the pretext of targeting foreigners abroad, Section 702 has become a vehicle for unconstitutional, warrantless backdoor searches of Americans' private communications. The FBI conducts up to 3.4 million illegal backdoor queries in a single year.
But if you view the year through the lens of the president's powers, all of that action comes to seem more circumscribed. By neglecting some of the most significant formal and informal tools at his disposal, Trump has largely failed to advance durable policy change, at least on domestic matters. He has dominated a lot of news cycles, but at the expense of shaping the future-for good or ill.
"There's no doubt that America's adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. If this were a war, that would be one of the worst wars. I believe they killed over the last five or six years, per year, 200-to-300,000 people. You hear about a 100,000, which is a lot of people, but the number is much higher than that. That's been proven."
If there's one belief that unites Americans across the political spectrum, it's that other countries are the reason we can't have nice things. "We sent $250 billion to Ukraine," the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on X in January. "And yet we can't get water to fight fires in California." In 2023, Assemblyman (and now New York City Mayor-Elect) Zohran Mamdani told an audience at a Democratic Socialists of America conference that
My critique is not being focused on America First, but I largely blame that on our Congress because I serve in the House. I also blame those who are advising him in the White House. You know, keeping him on nonstop tours around the world and nonstop meetings with foreign countries' leaders is not America First. It's just not. I think domestic policy should be the most important issue that the president and the Republican-controlled House and Senate are working on.
But my serious point is to say that hustle why isn't it applying to some of these major domestic issues? I'm thrilled with what he's doing abroad, but whether it's the debt, whether it's it's health care longterm, whether it's dealing with 10 million people here longterm, like, why can't we address that now while he has the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House?
House Republicans voted narrowly to pass a domestic policy package that, among other provisions, includes a last-minute measure prohibiting federal funding for necessary health care for transgender individuals.
