Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a message for a hypothetical little girl worried that she won’t have more than two dolls because of Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policy.

“I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents,” Bessent said, during an appearance on Fox News Tuesday night. “That you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents, which, working-class Americans had abandoned that idea.”

“Your family will own a home, you will be able to advance. You will have a good education, you will have economic freedom,” Bessent continued.

“Confident” is an interesting choice of words for Bessent, after consumer confidence sank a whopping 7.9 points in April, to its lowest level since May 2020.

The beleaguered Bessent has been desperate to rebrand Trump’s isolationist America First economic policy as a Buddhist-like maxim on desire as the root of all suffering. In March, Bessent claimed that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” In fact, being able to afford to live is a huge part of the American dream, and abundant consumer conveniences have become baked into our national identity.

But Bessent and Trump are insistent that they’re playing the long game—a little pinch in the present to make way for an expansive future they haven’t deigned to actually progress toward yet.

Small consumer grievances may illustrate the present-day realities of Trump’s tariffs, but they should not be used by the administration to obscure the larger picture. If we’re really going to play with hypotheticals, then we should imagine how a little girl’s “economic freedom” might be hurt by the collapse of her family’s soybean farm. Maybe then she can get a job in one of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s factories, and then her children can work there, and her children’s children. By then, maybe they’ll have dolls to play with.

The Trump administration is planning to use a military plane to deport immigrants to Libya in a cruel, arbitrary escalation of its mass deportation campaign. The deportations could happen as soon as Wednesday, and the nationality of the immigrants remains unclear. 

The situation in Libya is so unstable that the State Department dissuades its citizens from traveling there “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded land mines, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict.” 

The detention centers where these migrants would be held are even worse. A 2021 Amnesty International investigation found “horrific violations” in the prisons there, calling them a total “hellscape.” The organization’s Middle East deputy director, Diana Eltahaway, noted that prisoners are “immediately funnelled into arbitrary detention and systematically subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labour and other exploitation with total impunity.… The entire network of Libyan migration detention centres is rotten to its core and must be dismantled.”

This comes months after the administration pulled a similar move by sending Venezuelan immigrants to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador—an extrajudicial  move that is still being debated by the court.

The president’s Make Alcatraz Great Again pitch just got more fuel from one of his subordinates.

Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested Tuesday that alleged international drug traffickers, “if convicted,” should stay in American prisons—“maybe Alcatraz,” she added with a smile.

Other Republicans have similarly scrambled to make Trump’s bizarre Sunday evening order to “rebuild, and reopen Alcatraz” sound like a bright idea. Senator Eric Schmitt vaunted the plan as “very smart,” and Senator Markwayne Mullin endorsed it on X, while Representative Mary E. Miller got to work itemizing the most important Alcatraz inductees: “The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci,” she wrote, referring to the pandemic-era director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In reality, there is practically zero possibility that the famed prison would reopen to house more prisoners. Alcatraz—which operated for just 29 years—was shut down in 1963, in part due to how expensive it was to operate. Data from the federal Bureau of Prisons shows that housing inmates at Alcatraz was three times more expensive than at other jails thanks to the fact that it was located on a remote island, requiring all of its resources, such as water, food, and fuel, to be shipped from the mainland.

“An estimated $3-5 million was needed just for restoration and maintenance work to keep the prison open. That figure did not include daily operating costs,” according to the Bureau of Prisons.

John Martini, an expert on Alcatraz history who previously served as an Alcatraz park ranger, told the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday that the building is “totally inoperable” and has no running water or sewage.

“It was falling apart and needed huge amounts of reconstruction, and that would have only brought it up to 1963 code,” Martini told the paper, noting that the building would need to be torn down and completely rebuilt to house prisoners again. “It was always an extremely expensive place to run.”

Meanwhile, the tourism centering around the former island prison rakes in $60 million in annual revenue, hosting 1.6 million annual visitors,........

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