Are you tired of the Trump era yet?

I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.

And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.

To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:

• The assault on international tech industry employees and founders

• The disastrous Iran War

• Trump’s unprecedented corruption

Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.

But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.

Trump kicks the tech industry where it hurts

A couple of days ago, without any warning, Donald Trump’s immigration agency announced a new rule. Foreign workers working in the U.S. on temporary visas, they announced, must now return to their home countries while applying for green cards — a process that can take years.

This rule would effectively kick most of the high-skilled visa workers in America out of the country. America’s typical pipeline of high-skilled immigration is basically “try before you buy” — people come to work on visas, then apply for permanent residency while in the country. This procedure is called Adjustment of Status. Almost all green card holders — except for investors — get their green cards this way:

The new policy would end this practice, thus shutting off the main avenue of high-skilled legal immigration to the United States.

There’s a good chance this new policy won’t stand up in court, since Congress explicitly passed a law specifying conditions under which people can be denied Adjustment of Status, so it may not be legal for Trump to simply issue a blanket ban. There’s also a chance that Trump’s allies in the “tech right” will frantically call his administration and get them to walk back the new policy.

The reason they’ll be trying to get him to walk it back is that if the new ban does go through, it will devastate much of the U.S. tech industry. The AI industry, which Trump promised to promote — and which is the only thing now keeping the U.S. economy afloat in the face of tariffs and the Iran War — depends crucially on researchers born outside the U.S.:

All of the biggest U.S. AI companies, and more than half of the top 50, were founded by immigrants, with India and China contributing the most: