The Dictatorship
This JD Vance post revealed his honest opinion of the megabill — and America
The megabill President Donald Trump just signed is remarkably unpopular. Even Fox News admits that according to polls, “Americans are far from thrilled with the measure.” On Monday, Vice President JD Vance took to social media to put some steel in GOP spines. “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” he wrote. The bill “fixes this problem….Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
Vance has a point, sort of: The legislation will enormously increase the resources the government will devote to rounding up and incarcerating immigrants, providing tens of billions of dollars for nothing less than a redefinition of American identity. Those provisions are at least as important as the tax giveaways to the wealthy or the brutal cuts to Medicaidwhich will take health insurance from as many as 16 million people. Vance has done as much as anyone in the administration to create the philosophical justification for this rejection of not just centuries of history, but America’s very ideals.
The vice president offered a preview of this approach during the 2024 campaign.
This legislation will pour over $150 billion into border and immigration enforcement. It will triple the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It will allot tens of billions of dollars for detention facilities, and tens of billions more to complete Trump’s border wall. If you think those masked-up ICE agents rolling into Home Depot parking lots are a bunch of unprofessional goons, just wait until the agency hires thousands of new personnel. And if they aren’t in your community now, they may be soon.
Meanwhile, Justice Department leadership has directed its attorneys to focus on “denaturalization,” taking away citizenship from naturalized citizens when they are convicted of crimes (there are around 24 million naturalized citizens). Though the DOJ is starting this effort with convicted criminals, this administration’s ambitions are always larger; when asked if the president wants New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani denaturalized and deported because of a song he sang when he was younger, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said“It’s something that should be investigated.”
The president, after threatening to arrest Mamdani, said“A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally” (false) and “we’re going to look at everything.”
An immigration, incarceration and deportation apparatus many times its current size, executed by an administration eager to expel as many people as possible, is the recipe for a police state — and it’s just what Vance was hoping for.
The vice president offered a preview of this approach during the 2024 campaign. He amplified the despicable lies about Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio, claims he all but admitted were false, but were politically useful. He also said that though he knew those Haitians were in the U.S. legally — they had temporary protected status (TPS) — he would still refer to them as “illegal aliens” anyway. The Trump administration is now trying to revoke TPS for all Haitian immigrants, subjecting them to deportation.
In Vance’s convention speech and other appearances, he tried to clothe his anti-immigrant argument in terms less vulgar — but just as dangerous. In accepting the GOP nomination for vice president, he rejected a central foundation of the American ethos: that our identity is not a function of race or religion or lineage; instead, anyone can become a part of if they believe in and commit themselves to our founding ideals. This is what is supposed to have made America different from the moment of its founding.
Anyone with a grasp of history can hear the echoes of odious nationalisms from the past.
But Vance disagrees. “America is not just an idea,” he told the convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” To emphasize the point that if you aren’t part of that “shared history” then you can’t be truly American, Vance described the cemetery where five generations of his family are buried. “Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland,” he said.
It was an assertion he had made beforeand anyone with a grasp of history can hear the echoes of odious nationalisms from the past. It may have been expressed most vividly in the “blood and soil” slogan used by the Nazis (and American neo-Nazis today) insisting that only those with the right lineage and ties to the land (especially rural land) were true citizens of the nation.
You can see it expressed in Trump’s attempt to undo the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment says that if you’re born here, you’re an American. Nope, say Trump and Vance — we’ll decide if we think you’re American enough, based on who your parents are, whether we like your political beliefs, which god you pray to, and so forth. Membership in this national community is provisional and can be revoked.
But Vance is wrong. Part of the American creed is that we don’t care where anyone’s ancestors are buried. Vance’s debased version of patriotism says that we’re just a tribe like any other: insular, fearful and hateful, believing in nothing more morally ambitious. It’s small and ugly — and, dare I say, un-American.
ByDavid Rohde
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says there is “no reason” to doubt a new report by five European nations that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed in a Russian government prison with poison found in Latin American dart frogs.
A fatal toxin not found naturally in Russia — epibatidine — was “conclusively” discovered in samples of Navalny’s body by a joint investigation conducted by Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden, according to a joint statement by the nations on Saturday.
The toxin is only known to exist in poison dart frogs in Central and South America. One species, the phantasmal poison frog, contains a chemical that is 200 times more potent than morphine.
“It’s a troubling report,” Rubio told reporters at a news conference during a visit to Slovakia on Sunday. “We don’t have any reason to question it.”
It was not clear why the United States did not participate in the investigation of Navalny’s death. But the finding comes amid rising support in the Senate for a bill that would impose sweeping new sanctions against the government of Vladimir Putin, which has been opposed by the Trump administration.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted on the closing day of the Munich Security Conference, where Rubio received a standing ovationthat 84 out of 100 senators have signed on to co-sponsor the bill authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
“I don’t understand the reluctance to go after Vladimir Putin and what Russia is doing in Ukraine,” Shaheen told a group of reporters. “The failure by the United States to act has extended this war.”
Russian officials have repeatedly denied playing any role in the death of Navalny two years ago in a government-run penal colony in the Arctic. They called the new European report “a Western propaganda hoax,” according to Russia’s state news agency.
The report comes as U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kusher, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, are expected to meet with both Russian and Iranian officials on Tuesday in Geneva. The goal of the Russia talks is to reach a peace settlement in Ukraine by a June deadline the administration has set. (Witkoff and Kushner are also set to join a second round of nuclear talks with Iranian officials in Geneva on the same day.)
Critics of Trump, who promised to end the war days after returning to office, say Russia has not been seriously negotiating and is simply playing for time so it can gain ground on the battlefield. Democrats have also expressed concerns over reports that Witkoff has been negotiating business deals during peace talks with Kirill Dmitriev, a former Wall Street banker who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Dmitriev pitched $12 trillion in bilateral economic agreements with the U.S. It is unclear how such large deals could be achieved. The $12 trillion figure is about four times the size of Russia’s 2025 gross domestic product.
A European diplomat whose country has negotiated with Russia in the past told MS NOW that Moscow has repeatedly made such investment offers. But the business entities end up being largely Russian controlled. “They lure you in,” said the diplomat, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Shaheen expressed skepticism as well.
“I’m concerned about all things Russian in this administration,” Shaheen said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But I’m beginning to become one with respect to Putin and President Trump.”
David Rohde
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
A glove with DNA found near 84-year-old missing Nancy Guthrie’s home appears to match those worn by a masked person caught on surveillance footage, the FBI said Sunday.
“The FBI received preliminary results yesterday on 2/14 and are awaiting further testing,” the bureau said in a statement. “This process typically takes 24 hours from when the FBI receives DNA.”
The FBI said investigators collected “approximately 16 gloves in various areas near” Guthrie’s house in Tucson, Arizonawhere she was last seen on Jan. 31. Most of those gloves were “searchers’s gloves that they discarded in various areas when they searched the vicinity” but the glove with the “DNA profile recovered is different and appears to match the gloves of the subject in the surveillance video,” the FBI said.
“What we have is a lead here. The glove retrieved would need to have the victim’s DNA or some other forensic material to tie it to the home,” a law-enforcement source familiar with the investigation cautioned. “It must be connected to the home and victim. That would make the glove actual evidence, at this point it’s a lead. A good lead.”
The FBI said said the glove was found in a field approximately two miles from Guthrie’s house. The glove resembles the one on the hand of a person who was captured on porch camera video footage at the home of NBC “Today Show” host Savannah Guthrie’s mother the night she went missing.
The agency said it is awaiting quality control and official confirmation before putting the individual’s profile into the bureau’s national database, which could take up to 24 hours.
The FBI has described the man captured in photographs and on video as approximately 5’9”-5’10” with an average build. In addition to gloves, he was also seen wearing a ski mask and a black, 25-liter “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack. The agency on Thursday increased its reward for any information leading to an arrest and conviction of anyone involved in Guthrie’s disappearance to $100,000.
Guthrie was reported missing by her family on Feb. 1. Sheriff’s deputies also found blood on the front porch that was later confirmed to belong to the network host’s mother. Guthrie’s children, including Savannah, have posted several videos pleading for their mother’s release, agreeing to pay any ransom demanded and asking for help from the public.
Alex Tabet, Marc Santia and Ken Dilanian contributed to this report.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Acton Sunday slammed what he called Donald Trump’s “Epstein administration” for not fulfilling its legal obligation to release all government documents related to the late convicted sex offender.
Massie cited a Justice Department letter sent to Congress on Saturday defending its redactions made to the newly released final batch of Epstein documents. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” show, the GOP congressman noted the DOJ letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, cited “deliberative-process privilege” as a reason for withholding certain records.
“The privileges that applied to the withheld records were deliberative-process privilege, work-product privilege, and attorney-client privilege.,” the Feb. 14 DOJ letter said. The letter listed the names of more than 300 people, many of whom had no direct dealings with Epstein and have long been dead, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Ronald Reagan.
Other names include President Donald Trump, former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick — who was grilled before Congress last week over his association with Epstein — Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. None of the people listed have been accused of criminal wrongdoing with regard to Epstein’s actions.
Rep. Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who co-authored the Epstein bill, also criticized the DOJ letter regarding its redactions.
“The DOJ is once again purposefully muddying the waters on who was a predator and who was mentioned in an email,” Khanna said on X. “To have Janis Joplin, who died when Epstein was 17, in the same list as Larry Nassar, who went to prison for the sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and child pornography, with no clarification of how either was mentioned in the files is absurd.” (The Justice Department announced in December that a letter released in a tranche of Epstein files purportedly from Epstein to Nassar, the convicted Olympic gymnastics coach, was a fake.)
Massie objected to the DOJ’s claim of privilege in withholding certain Epstein documents because, he said, the Justice Department “must release internal memos and notes and emails” related to investigative and prosecutorial decisions regarding the Epstein matter.
“It’s important they follow that because then we could find out why they didn’t prosecute Leslie Wexner,” he told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. A legal representative for Wexner said in a statement that the assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Epstein investigation “stated at the time that Mr. Wexner was neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect” and that “Mr. Wexner cooperated fully by providing background information on Epstein and was never contacted again.”
Massie accused the Justice Department of taking down documents before members of Congress were able to review them in their unredacted forms. “We want to be able to look at all these files,” he said. Lawmakers have also been subject to apparent surveillance while reviewing Epstein documents in a private room at the Justice Department.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, echoed calls for answers about who was involved in the trafficking of girls and women besides convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
“We have questions for President Trump, and I think the broader issue here is why wasn’t this investigated when these accusations and these stories actually were heard by the FBI years ago?” Garcia said in a Sunday interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” show. “Where was the investigation? Where was the DOJ? And this, by the way, is an issue not just in Republican administrations, but also ones led by Democrats. We have to get answers.”
The Justice Department, in its letter to the Republican chairmen and ranking Democrats of House and Senate Judiciary Committees, said no records were withheld or redacted “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
Several of those listed have faced backlashincluding ex-prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was stripped of his royal titlesevicted from Windsor Castle and faces a potential investigation in the U.K.
The DOJ said the lengthy list of high-profile names included in its letter includes “all government officials and politically exposed persons.” But the letter does not differentiate between people mentioned in news stories who likely had little or no connection to Epstein and those who were shown to have communicated with Epstein, Maxwell and other associates.
Massie, who is facing a primary opponent endorsed by Trump, said the president is “still with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration and they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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