The Dictatorship
Trump embraced Australia’s harshest immigration policies. But there’s one key difference.
Barely a week into his first term as president in 2017, Donald Trump found inspiration in an unlikely moment: a combative phone call he held with one of America’s closest allies. In his first-ever conversation as president with Australia’s then-prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, Trump berated the Aussie leader over a deal struck with the Obama administration for the U.S. to resettle refugees who had tried to start lives Down Under but were now being held by the Australians in detention centers in Papua New Guinea and the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru.
Trump has finally implemented some of the most draconian aspects of the controversial Australian immigration system.
When Trump asked Turnbull why Australia was refusing to accept the refugees, the prime minister explained it was due to the country’s efforts to thwart people-smuggling by blacklisting anyone who had tried to make the deadly journey via boat — the policy version of being cruel to be kind. “That is a good idea. We should do that too,” Trump responded, per a transcript of the call that later leaked to The Washington Post. “You are worse than I am.”
Some eight years later, and with a firmer grip on power than ever before, Trump has indeed finally implemented some of the most draconian aspects of the controversial Australian immigration system that seemingly preoccupied his thinking for much of his first term.
Like the Aussies, he’s embraced a policy of indefinite offshore detentionsending migrants to El Salvador and Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. He, too, has sanctioned the construction of inhumane holding centers with torturous conditions in sweltering locations. And his policies have drawn concern and condemnation from advocacy groups and international organizations — just like Australia’s.
But there is one clear difference. For all the cruelty and suffering inherent in the Australian system (and there has been much), successive governments of varying political stripes have generally sought to shield Australian citizens from its harsh reality, barring most media and criminalizing whistleblowers. Officials also rarely like to discuss the conditions in these camps, even as they proclaim their success in dramatically reducing the number of migrant boat arrivals.
Out of sight, out of mind — or so the thinking appears to be about a system that still enjoys some voter supportyet is also something of a quiet national shame.
In Trump’s America, though, the system’s cruelty is on full, gleeful display. It is not only advertised, but heralded. Here, it’s no longer just about deterrence for a select foreign audience, as the Australians have long insisted; it’s now also about entertainment for a domestic one.
Trump’s administration and allies have openly promoted and reveled in the harsh treatment he has meted out as part of his immigration crackdown.
The garbage fire that is the White House X account routinely shares memes mocking those being detained or deported, with trolling posts that riff on ASMR videos or Hayao Miyazaki movies. Other administration social media posts about immigration arrests — described as “fun videos” by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt — have been set to the music of Vanilla Ice and Kanye West.
Republican lawmakers and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have traveled to the Salvadoran megaprison housing deported immigrants to pose for photos with a thumbs-up or, in Noem’s case, with her hair perfectly curled and sporting a $50,000 Rolex watch. The Republican Party of Florida is selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandisefor goodness’ sake. When Trump toured that makeshift detention facility in the Everglades earlier this month (accompanied by a media entourage, of course), he openly joked about the dangerous location of the site. The Guardian dubbed his visit “calculated celebration of the dystopian.”
If Team Trump’s sadistic public posturing on immigration enforcement is proving to be bad politics, who exactly is it for?
The U.S. is not the only country that has drawn inspiration from Australia’s system (which was itself modeled on the American detention of Haitian asylum-seekers in Guantanamo Bay in the 1980s and ’90s). The United Kingdom began trying to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda in 2022 — a Conservative Party policy later killed off by Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
But the U.S. is the only country to take such manifest delight in its horrors.
Polling shows the Trump administration’s draconian immigration crackdown is turning off most voters. The percentage of Americans who believe Trump has gone too far with his efforts to deport undocumented people has risen 10 points since February, to 55%, per the latest CNN polling. Some 58% of people also disapprove of the way his administration is using detention facilities, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll, which found a slight majority of Americans now also disapprove of Trump’s deportation program in its entirety.
Perhaps Trump’s zeal is starting to make waves Down Under, too. With Australians holding some of the most negative views about Trump among any of the world’s voters, a survey commissioned by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre ahead of the country’s May election showed many voters supporting a more compassionate treatment of asylum-seekers and fewer voters in favor of offshore processing than a decade ago.
So if Team Trump’s sadistic public posturing on immigration enforcement is proving to be bad politics, who exactly is it for? Well, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Millerfor one, who has long seemed to bask in despising immigrantsand is now the chief architect of the deportation program.
But it’s also for the hardcore MAGA faithful who have been primed by Trump’s movement to rejoice in the suffering of perceived foes, be it liberal tearslaid-off bureaucrats or undocumented migrants.
For anyone with a shred of humanity, though, the administration’s repackaging of immigration enforcement and human suffering as entertainment is not just a spectacle; it’s a horror show.
David Mack
David Mack is an Australian-born journalist and writer who has lived in the United States since 2014. Previously an employee of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and BuzzFeed News, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Slate.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say their interim deal to end the war with Iran will deliver a financial windfall to American farmers.
But the Iranians deny it. And in the absence of more details, sanctions experts are flummoxed over exactly how billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets would make their way to the American heartland from the escrow accounts where they’ve been locked for years by U.S. sanctions.
A tentative agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, and allow Iran to start selling its oil freely again during a 60-day period when the two countries will continue negotiating key issues. The memorandum of understanding also promised to unfreeze Iranian assets.
Trump’s deal has come under fire for failing to address the reasons the president cited for going to war with Iran on Feb. 28, including curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile program and its support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Lashing back at critics Tuesday on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said U.S. farmers would get a payday: The U.S. Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.’’
Vance, who spoke about the proposal after high-level talks in Switzerland, and Trump say that any frozen funds and assets held outside of Iran will be used to buy U.S. crops.
But the Iranians deny that’s part of the deal. A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said any agricultural purchases would be based on “prices and quality,’’ not terms dictated by Washington.
“It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
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Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, rejected Vance’s contention that the U.S. and Qatar would dictate how Iran uses unfrozen funds. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
A U.S. official dismissed the contradiction, asserting that Iranian leaders were speaking to their domestic audience. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said Iran was unlikely to abandon its other trade partners on food.
Iran’s major suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Argentina, he said. Trump’s demand to buy from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors.”
Under previous sanctions, the U.S. has required that money foreign countries spend on imports from Iran — such as South Korean purchases of oil and Iraqi purchases of Iranian electricity — be locked in escrow accounts and typically released only if the Treasury approves and if the proceeds go toward “non-sanctionable’’ items such as food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals and petroleum products through Aug. 21. It did not mention any escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who coordinated efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Iran in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it’s unclear what the new U.S.-Iran agreement actually means for releasing restricted Iranian assets.
Could the U.S. require that the assets be used to buy American farm products?
“Well, we can try!’’ Nephew, who helped design Iran sanctions in the Obama and Biden administrations, said by email. “All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
Banks do not have to comply, he said. If they refuse, the U.S. could sanction them as well.
But it’s rare for the U.S. to conduct itself that way, he added, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
___
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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