The actual Economist editorial is here (paywalled but archived).

Perhaps some leading election deniers are motivated by a psychological defense mechanism, but I think that many realize the strategic benefit. The members of the public who are convinced that Democrats steal elections will vote Republican. They’ll also be more willing to accept a Republican refusing to leave office after losing an election, if things come to that.

It’s unfortunate, but Leland Dudek is doing his job. Some people appear naive about what his job is.

Edit: Perhaps I should explicitly say that I’m not happy with the administration’s agenda, and what I mean is that this guy won’t be punished because he’s doing what he was hired to do. I don’t mean that this is what his job ought to be in some moral sense.

Of course as a resident of NYC I am angry about this. Not only is he a criminal but he’s also selling out the city to Trump. I would enjoy knowing how much he was squirming if the case was dismissed without prejudice like Trump wanted it to be, but I suppose it’s better that Trump has less control over him.

I do see a bit of humor in all this, because he accepted such small bribes.

From Wikipedia:

Adams took over $100,000 in bribes from Turkey in exchange for using his powers to help open the Turkevi Center. These bribes mostly took the form of free and discounted luxury travel benefits. These benefits included free hotel rooms, free meals at high-end restaurants, free entertainment while in Turkey, free and heavily discounted flights, and similarly free and discounted flight class upgrades.

I would understand why he might be tempted to give up his integrity and accept the possibility of being caught if large sums of money (millions at least) were involved, but $100,000 is less than his yearly salary would be in the NYPD and he didn’t even get it in cash! I don’t earn as much as an NYPD captain like him (but enough to be comfortable) and I would experience zero temptation to take such a risk even if I had no moral objection to bribery. If I was the mayor then I would even be offended by the offer - who do they think I am if they expect me to sell myself for so little?

He’s just a petty crook higher up in the world than he knows how to be. Pathetic.

Such public benefits now fall prey to the whims of the president with his pardon of a cryptocurrency company that smacks of political corruption.

So a man who promised to pardon his friends and allies, once elected, pardons his friends and allies. Is that corruption or is it just government policy by this point?

I wonder if that’s actually true, because I think that he is to some extent literally psychotic. What happens when someone who actually has enormous wealth and power still goes through manic phases or experiences something like grandiose delusions? He might really believe that he’s saving the nation and the world, and that this should be obvious to all.

It’s like those movies (I can’t remember which ones but I’m sure I’ve seen some) where the king thinks of himself as good and is genuinely surprised and confused when he learns that the common people feel oppressed by him. Except in this case the king does not (and probably can not) learn a heartwarming moral lesson.

That’s not exactly ICE’s argument. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the judge doesn’t have the authority to order the feds to do that.

Consider a similar but more sympathetic example. The government accidentally releases information which reveals the identity of an American agent working in a foreign country, and that agent is arrested. The agent’s family sues the government, arguing that the judge should order the government to carry out a prisoner exchange. The government says that revealing the agent’s identity was a mistake, but now undoing that mistake would require negotiations with a foreign country and such negotiations are not something that a court can order the government to carry out. The government’s argument in such a case would seem reasonable to me.

My understanding is that Trump’s guys are arguing that the court has no authority to order them to return this guy, not that he can’t be returned. In other words, now that he’s out of the country, his situation is foreign policy rather than American legal proceedings.

It’s what the linked article presents as the likely explanation.

Biden deported more people

Technically true, according to Reuters:

U.S. President Donald Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, previously unpublished U.S. Department of Homeland Security data show, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.

However, this appears to be the case simply because fewer people are currently attempting to enter the USA illegally.

Biden did not do anything about illegal immigration propaganda

Biden’s policy was to let record numbers of people into the country and then do almost nothing for them afterwards. Apparently he was fine with, for example, relying on the City of New York to provide food and shelter to several hundred thousand completely destitute immigrants out of its own local tax budget. I would have respected a major federal-level initiative to help these immigrants. I would have understood turning them away. The federal government did neither - a total failure of leadership.

It’s not a matter of trusting the government. (No one trusts the government.) It’s a matter of trusting Trump’s judgement. Even some people I know who are generally opposed to Trump are happy about the deportations because they believe that “the government” is unable or unwilling to do anything about illegal immigration (which, to be fair, was true during the Biden administration) and that Trump’s expressed desire to stop illegal immigration is genuine.

That isn’t a uniquely Republican attitude. Not many people seem to think that the rule of law is more important than any specific policy.

Is this a “forced out by Trump” resignation, a “forced out by the university” resignation, or a “protest against capitulation” resignation?

Criticism from Democrats is not going to have any effect.

Identify specific acts Trump has taken to harm you that cannot be construed as core executive functions. This will give Roberts the chance to list some conduct that is—and conversely that can never be—a core executive function, to diffuse Trump’s notion that he can get away with murder. Hint: trying to impeach a federal judge is not, and can never be, a core executive function. Lying to American citizens about a foreign invasion is not, and can never be, a core executive function.

I don’t see how the Presidential immunity ruling is relevant to Trump’s current actions. So what if something Trump does is not a core executive function? The idea that Trump could face criminal charges right now, as the sitting President, seems far-fetched. It’s especially far-fetched for these examples, which he doesn’t need immunity for because they’re not crimes.

I don’t see anything anticompetitive in that. Many browsers use Chromium because that’s what users apparently prefer. Look at the history of Firefox’s market share or the market share of the original Edge. Users had those options and rejected them despite the fact that the former had an enormous head start and the latter was bundled with Windows.

Apparently simply being popular is enough to count as a monopoly even when there are multiple other browsers readily available for free? It’s extortion, IMO.

(I know that the case is more complicated than that, with the integration of Chrome and Google Search being an issue, but I think my point still stands.)

How did he have both a student visa and a green card?

I don’t know enough about legal precedents or the housing situation in BC to comment on the merits of the particular policy being litigated, but I feel it’s self-evident that restricting what people can do with their property is, in general, a bad thing. Such restrictions are often necessary to prevent some other, even worse outcome and that may be the case here, but why would you cheer this part of the article in isolation?

I would save the analogy to a fire with the maximum number of alarms for the stuff that will happen later. This one will have just one alarm in retrospect.

If this is what you call a genocide truly beginning, what words would you use to describe a time when people start being killed?