LaGuardia stopped functioning this week. On Sunday night, an Air Canada plane crashed into a fire truck, killing the two pilots and injuring more than 40 passengers. One runway was shut down for days. The mayhem exacerbated the hours-long security lines that had been growing ever since the partial government shutdown axed TSA agents’ pay. The Trump administration responded by sending ICE agents to the airport to… stand around and do nothing. The result was even longer delays for passengers at one of the world’s busiest airports. In the future, historians will look back at our system of air travel the way we look back at medical treatments from the Middle Ages. “People stood in line for hours for this? What did they do if someone got sick—administer leeches?”

It’s kind of amazing that the planes could afford to fly at all, given the price of gas. Consumers are facing high prices at the pump as Trump’s illegal war in Iran rages on.

In a normal country, the president would be held accountable for fixing the things he’s broken. At least by the media. I try to avoid “imagine if Barack Obama did…” comparisons but imagine if Barack Obama launched a war of choice that led to massive spikes in the price of oil while the airports ground to a halt because the TSA wasn’t funded because he was trying to foist unconstitutional thugs on the country.

Of course, the reasons those comparisons are useless is because Obama was a Black man and Trump is a white supremacist, and being an open white supremacist apparently grants you a kind of pass for your drooling incompetence. Indeed, the only thing Trump can deliver on consistently is racism.

Amid all this failure, Trump made the time this week to take another bigoted swipe at Somali-Americans. He said, “In Minnesota, it’s very Somalia-oriented. These people come from a crooked country, disgusting country, one of the worst countries in the world. They come to our country—low IQs—and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.”

Donald Trump’s disgusting racism is the cover for his gross incompetence. The racism is what he uses to convince his supporters to ignore his pathetic job performance.

Current Issue

April 2026 Issue

And it works. Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former. That’s why racism is the only thing that is actually still working in our country.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The Trump administration is launching an investigation into the admissions practices of three top medical schools: Stanford, Ohio State, and UC-San Diego. If there is any place we need more affirmative action, it’s in the medical profession. It is incredibly difficult to find a Black doctor, and incredibly difficult for a Black person to get quality care from a white doctor. I’ve had precisely one white doctor in my entire life who made me feel like I was getting the same care as his white patients. Anyway, like I said, racism is the only thing that is working in this country.
• The International Olympic Committee officially banned transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. The rule will take effect at the 2028 Olympics, which are still slated to be held in Los Angeles. To recap: trans people in sports = bad; major sporting events in fascist countries that violate international law = OK.
• A coalition of 21 states have sued the Trump administration over its new USDA regulations, which could deny funding for SNAP, WIC, school lunch, and other essential programs. The administration has threatened to punish states that promote “DEI” and “gender ideology” or “provide incentives for illegal immigration.” Aside from not really knowing what those terms mean in the context of SNAP benefits, I must also point out that not giving people food because you don’t like a state that celebrates tolerance is just fucking evil. Collectively punishing poor people because a state refuses to subject people to a genital exam before they use the bathroom is beyond wrong.
• New Jersey passed a law banning ICE agents from wearing masks. Umm… that’s good. Holy crap, something good happened this week!
• In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that Internet service providers cannot be held liable for copyright infringement done by its users. The case (which involved music rights holders like Sony suing ISPs) already feels obsolete. I’m no longer worried about kids using Napster to steal a couple of songs; I’m worried about AI stealing every song and then spitting it back out in some kind of unholy cacophony of sound. And this ruling doesn’t help us deal with that problem.

Inspired Takes

• I saw somewhere that tech bro Marc Andreesen proclaimed that he does “zero introspection,” and I thought, “What an incredible thing to admit to the entire world that you are both an idiot and a sociopath.” I didn’t think much beyond that until I read David Futrelle’s deep dive in The Nation on the latest case of tech vulture nihilism.
• This investigation by Oren Ziv and Ariel Caine—published by The Nation in partnership with +972 magazine and Local Call—connects the violent dots between a series of settler attacks on Palestinian villages and a coordinated settler effort to push even deeper into the West Bank and seize more Palestinian land. All with army support.
• The Trump administration’s arguments in the birthright citizenship case—which will be heard by the Supreme Court next week—are based, in part, on the theories of the white supremacist who argued on behalf of the segregationists in Plessy v. Ferguson. Ian Millhiser explains.

Worst Argument of the Week

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a short ruling in a case about police brutality. Predictably, the Republican supermajority sided with the brutal police.

The case, Zorn v. Linton, arose after a peaceful protest at the Vermont statehouse in 2015. Cops went to clear out the protesters, and Shelia Linton claims that, while most of the protesters were ushered out peacefully, she was put in a rear-wristlock (a “pain compliance technique”) by officer Jacob Zorn.

This is where I point out that Linton happens to be Black. Zorn allegedly told Linton she should have “called her legislator” instead of showing up at the protest.

As many know, police officers generally receive qualified immunity for actions taken while on the job. The protection means that cops can generally not be held liable when they violate the law. But there are some exceptions to qualified immunity. One exception is when police officers commit crimes. Another exception is when officers knowingly violate citizens’ constitutional rights.

In this case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Zorn’s qualified immunity claim. It said that Zorn should have known that applying a pain compliance technique to a peaceful and nonviolent protester was a violation of Linton’s constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court disagreed. In an unsigned opinion, the court’s Republicans said that officers have no reasonable way of knowing when inflicting pain is a violation of constitutional rights.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented. She accused the Roberts court of turning qualified immunity into an “absolute shield” for law enforcement.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Qualified immunity is something made up by Supreme Court justices. There is no constitutional language granting law enforcement immunity from the Constitution. States could remove qualified immunity from police officers tomorrow simply by passing legislation.

Police unions would complain, of course. The police have become accustomed to violating the law with impunity. That doesn’t mean we should let them.

What I Wrote

The Supreme Court heard oral argument this week in the mail-in ballots case—the one the Republicans have been pushing to try to block mail-in ballots received after Election Day from being counted. I explained what happened, including the fact that the Republican’s antidemocratic argument doesn’t stop with ballots received after Election Day. Taken to its logical conclusion, it can be used to attack early voting and ballots mailed in before Election Day. It’s… pretty much all bad, friends. 

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Baseball is back! Thursday was Opening Day, and our long winter is at an end. Baseball is my favorite sport. I know that’s weird, because I’m Black and am under the age of 95, but what can I say? I can watch a baseball game while reading a book, and if I happen to doze off, it’s still OK. It’s not a sport; it’s a lifestyle.

And this might be the last season I get it for a while. The lords of baseball—i.e., the owners of the various teams—appear ready to blow up the sport to make themselves a little wealthier.

Baseball is the only major American team sport that operates without a salary cap. There are some “luxury tax” rules and other thresholds meant to punish teams that spend a lot of money, but, fundamentally, owners can spend as much cash on their baseball teams as they want.

You’d think that the kinds of smash-and-grab businessmen who are able to amass the kind of wealth necessary to own a baseball franchise would be fans of, you know, unfettered competition, but they’re not. Instead, most of the owners want a salary cap. And why wouldn’t they? Imposing a salary cap gives the owners fixed, and artificially depressed, labor costs. Most capitalists are more than happy to abandon capitalism if market regulations help them reduce labor costs.

The owners want a salary cap, and to get one, they’re probably going to lock out the players next year—until the powerful baseball player’s union agrees to give the owners a way to artificially depress the wages of baseball players.

As Matt Kreisher explains in The Nation, what’s particularly infuriating about the owner’s position is that many baseball fans will end up taking the side of the greedy owners. For most people, the athletes getting paid multiple millions of dollars to play a game—a child’s game that involves hitting a ball or throwing one—already seem grossly overcompensated. Baseball players make vastly more than teachers or scientists or any number of people whose contributions are more critical to the functioning of society.

But athletes are labor. And what the owners want is to artificially cap the cost of labor, even though baseball owners already enjoy a literal monopoly—aided by a straight-up antitrust exemption—for the sport. Moreover, baseball players must accrue six full years of major-league service time before they’re even allowed to become free agents with the power to sign with the team that offers them the most money. Owners have a monopoly on the sport, a monopoly on the early careers of all its players, and when the players are finally able to participate in what counts as the free market for their labor, the owners want to introduce another artificial ceiling on how much they can make.

Yet fans of teams, especially fans in “small market” cities, support this ownership control and greed. They feel like their teams can’t compete with the big spenders in New York and (especially) Los Angeles without a salary cap.

It’s a terrible argument. The owners in Milwaukee or Cleveland or Pittsburg are not poor. They’re not even broke. They have money to spend on players and compete with the Los Angeles Dodgers or New York Yankees. And if they don’t have the liquid cash available, they can always sell their teams for billions of dollars to somebody who does have enough cash to buy a right fielder.

The problem is that owners of some of the baseball teams don’t want to spend money. They want to use their baseball teams as prestige toys, instead of putting the most competitive team they can on the field to try to win the World Series. The owners want socialism for themselves but rapacious capitalism for everybody else.

They seem to be willing to sacrifice the 2027 season to get it. Players are already being told to save money in preparation for a long lockout.

Baseball fans are fond of saying “maybe next year.” But this year, next year might never come.

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