It makes a certain awful sense that Trump’s lackeys would stage the president’s promised mass deportations as a media event. On Sunday, “border czar” Tom Homan invited TV’s Dr. Phil McGraw to “embed” with him on a mission to arrest immigrants in Chicago, viewing the inside of a “command center” and narrating arrests, all streamed as “exclusive” programming on Dr. Phil’s own channel (launched when his long-running CBS show was canceled, after McGraw welcomed the far right and conspiracy theorists to his couch). Immigration and Customs Enforcement have said they lack the manpower and necessary logistics to implement the Laken Riley Act, requiring they arrest every undocumented person accused of low-level theft offenses; if that is true, they certainly lack the resources to arrest, detain, and remove from the U.S. the millions of immigrants that Trump claims will be deported under his watch. But what Homan can do right now is put on a show.

Dr. Phil is here to livestream your arrest is almost too stupid to take seriously. But that may prove to be the defining feature of life under the second Trump administration: For now, to survive and move strategically, we will have to live with the whiplash of having to take the cruelty of men who are not very bright very seriously.

There is no shortage of not very bright guys to point to: from the new head of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth, whose qualifications include running two different veterans’ nonprofits into the ground and showing up to work drunk (along with multiple allegations of sexual misconduct), to Kristi Noem, the admitted puppy-killing governor of South Dakota—not a guy, but now running the agency housing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security.........

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