Andrew Schulz, Government Mouthpiece

Today on Andrew Schulz’s podcast Flagrant, Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy advocated for an end to birthright citizenship.

Akaash Singh: You brought up citizenship, ending birthright citizenship—

Ramaswamy: —for the kids of illegals. That’s what I would favor. That’s what I do favor and have long favored. That’s a whole separate, we could get into legal rabbit  holds—

Singh: No, I just wanted to clarify.

Ramaswamy: If you came into the country—I'm a pretty hard liner that if you're going to come to the country, come legally. period. Don't enter the country—

Alexx Media: What if they're here legally, awaiting their, what's the—

Ramaswamy: Illegally? 

Media: No, no, no. All the cases that are going on—

Ramaswamy: Illegally, though.

Media: But there are some that came, they applied for—

Schulz: You're talking about legal asylum seekers. They went through the borders, they—

Media: Yes. So now they're waiting for their trial and then they have a kid,

Ramaswamy: So I would say, let's just start with the lowest hanging fruit, obvious stuff. A, seal the border. B, stop paying for any sanctuary cities and any kind of government benefit to anybody who enters the country illegally. End government welfare benefits to anybody who's even here on asylum. So end the incentives to be here illegally. Ending birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals, that is one of those incentives. And then at least starting with anybody who has committed a crime. And even, I would go a little further than that. Anybody who entered the country illegally recently. Let's start with that. 

What does recently mean? Last 18 months, last 24 months. You came in the last 18 to 24 months illegally crossing that border, you haven't established roots in this country. I think it's a ridiculous claim to think that in one year or two years you have. If that group of people alone is returned to their country of fortune, if it's just that, that alone would represent the largest mass deportation in American history, by far. 

So very practically, say the largest mass deportation in American history—I don't know that many people who actually find it objectionable to say, if you entered illegally in the last couple years of Biden, you haven't established roots in the country or you committed a crime—we're talking about millions of people. But to say, combine that with sealing the border and ending incentives to enter this country illegally—I think most Americans are actually, if they have the permission to say it, most Americans are in favor of that.

This goes on for some time, until eventually Media asks Ramaswamy to comment on Trump’s rollback of a policy that prohibited ICE from making arrests in schools and churches. After some deflection—Ramaswamy says he wouldn’t trust reports from state-funded media like PBS—he says it’s a good idea: “I don’t think we, as a country, generally like murderers and rapists hiding in schools and churches.” 

Then his hosts ask him about healthcare. 

Lest you think comedy’s left-of-center pundits are offering a suitable alternative to the right’s propaganda, Jon Stewart argued on Monday that Democrats are straining their credibility by calling Trump a fascist. Why? Because everything he’s doing is well within his power. Here’s Stewart on Trump’s firing of 17 inspector generals: 

What? I'm sorry. What? Oh, apparently you can fire them, but you have to give them 30 days notice. Oh, so that's what we're upset about. "No, you can do it, but not in that font! That's Hitler's font!" But this is the cycle we find ourselves in. First law of Trumpodynamics, every action is met with a very not equal overreaction, thus throwing off our ability to know when shit is actually getting real.

And on Trump’s pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists:

Was it shitty? Yes. Should you have let some of those terrible people [go]? No. Is it an abuse of pardon power? I don't fucking know. But that is his constitutional power. Again, for some reason, we have given presidents the power of a king, and then we say, "oh, by the way, with that power, you're not going to get all kingly and shit on us, right?" 

Whether it’s an abuse of pardon power would seem to be the crux of the matter, which makes it noteworthy that Stewart is content to let the question slide. When it comes to Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship, he’s happy to describe it as an authoritarian overreach; or maybe it helps that an actual judge made the judgment for him:

See how easy that was? It was a dictatorship, and then the judge went: [wags his finger]. It's like when you have an electric fence, you never check it, and you're not really sure if it works because you have the good boy. 

[…]

Look, we are facing a deluge of these executive actions, and certainly we must be prepared for those most vulnerable to the consequences of these actions, but the “this is all fascist” argument has become almost a reflex for the left.

“I would say it’s not fascism,” he adds. “Do I not know what fascism is?” 

Perhaps not. Throughout this segment, Stewart demonstrates a strange faith in the ability of democratic institutions to stop Trump—a guy who led a failed insurrection, successfully evaded any legal accountability for it, then returned to power and immediately started stripping the administrative state—from undermining them. His faith relies on cognitive dissonances that I find shocking in their generosity: note how readily he excuses the inspectors general firing on the grounds that all Trump did wrong was skip some technicalities; meanwhile, the temporary restraining order on Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship is enough to reassure Stewart that the left is crying fascism way too early, never mind the fact of the effort itself:

Now, look, I have a lot of fear that as this term goes on, things are going to get a little fascist-y. And we must be vigilant. But part of vigilance is discernment. Republicans control the House, the Senate, the executive and the judiciary, and just about every move that has been made till this point, we have granted them electorally. It's our fault. And the constant drum—[over applause] yeah, it's just our fault—and the constant drumbeat of encroaching fascism will erode the credibility we will need if—hopefully if and not when—it hits. But the truth is that for now, his most objectionable actions have taken place almost entirely within our designed democratic system. 

The night this episode aired, the Trump administration announced its unconstitutional plan to freeze all federal grants. Today, it announced plans to house tens of thousands of migrants on Guantánamo Bay. The secret to great comedy, don’t you know, is timing.