Policy / March 27, 2026
In this week Elijah v. UNITED STATESour justice correspondent explores Trump’s astonishing incompetence. Plus: baseball is back, for now.
People wait in long security lines at LaGuardia Airport on March 25, 2026.
(Spencer Platt/Getty Images) LaGuardia stopped operating this week. Sunday evening, an Air Canada plane crashed into a fire truck, killing both pilots and injuring more than 40 passengers. A track was closed for several days. The chaos exacerbated hours-long security lines that had grown since the partial government shutdown wiped out TSA agents’ salaries. The Trump administration responded by sending ICE agents to the airport to… stand by and do nothing. The result was even longer delays for passengers at one of the world’s busiest airports. In the future, historians will examine our air transportation system in the same way we examine medical treatments from the Middle Ages. “People lined up for hours for this? What did they do if someone got sick: administer leeches?”
It’s pretty amazing that planes can afford to fly, given the price of gasoline. Consumers face high prices at the pump as Trump’s illegal war in Iran rages.
In a normal country, the president would be held responsible for fixing things he broke. At least by the media. I try to avoid the “imagine if Barack Obama did…” comparisons but imagine if Barack Obama launched a war of choice that led to massive oil price hikes while airports ground to a halt because the TSA was unfunded because he was trying to force unconstitutional thugs into the country.
Of course, the reason these comparisons are unnecessary is because Obama was a black man and Trump is a white supremacist, and being an open white supremacist apparently grants you some kind of free pass for your salivating incompetence. Indeed, the only thing Trump can do consistently is racism.
Amid all these failures, Trump took the time this week to deliver another sectarian blow to Somali-Americans. He said”In Minnesota, it’s very Somali-oriented. These people come from a crooked country, a disgusting country, one of the worst countries in the world. They come to our country – with low IQs – and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.”
The disgusting racism of Donald Trump is the cover for his serious incompetence. Racism is what he uses to convince his supporters to ignore his pitiful job performance.
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And it works. Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he is objectively good at leading a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former. This is why racism is the only thing that still works in our country.
The bully and the ugly
The Trump administration is launch an investigation in the admissions practices of three major medical schools: Stanford, Ohio State and UC-San Diego. If there’s a place we need more positive discrimination is 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 have had precisely one white doctor in my entire life who made me feel like I was receiving the same care as his white patients. Anyway, like I said, racism is the only thing that works in this country. The International Olympic Committee officially banned transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports. The rule will take effect at the 2028 Olympics, which are still scheduled 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 having continued the Trump administration over its new USDA regulations, which could deny funding to SNAP, WIC, school lunchand other essential programs. The administration has threatened to punish states that promote “DEI” and “gender ideology” or “provide incentives for illegal immigration.” Besides not really knowing what these terms mean in the context of SNAP benefits, I also have to point out that not giving people food because you don’t like a state that celebrates tolerance is just plain fucking wrong. Collectively punishing the poor because a state refuses to subject people to a genital exam before going to the toilet is completely unacceptable. New Jersey Passes Law Banning ICE Agents to wear masks. Um… that’s good. Holy shit, something good happened this week! In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court governed that Internet service providers cannot be held responsible for copyright infringement committed by their users. The case (which involved music rights holders like Sony suing ISPs) already seems stale. I no longer worry about kids using Napster to steal a few songs; I worry that the AI will steal every song and then spit it out in some sort of ungodly cacophony of sound. And this decision does not help us solve this problem. Inspired Takes
I saw somewhere that technician Marc Andreesen proclaimed that he does “zero introspection” and I thought, “What an incredible thing to admit to the world that you are both an idiot and a sociopath.” I didn’t think much about this until I read David Futrelle’s book 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 magazines And Local call— connects the violent dots between a series of settler attacks on Palestinian villages and a coordinated effort by settlers to move deeper into the West Bank and seize more Palestinian land. All with the support of the army. The Trump administration’s arguments in the birthright case — which will be heard by the Supreme Court next week — rely in part on the theories of the white supremacist who championed the interests of segregationists in 2017. Plessy v. Ferguson. Ian Millhiser explains. The worst argument of the week
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On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a brief ruling in a case of police brutality. Predictably, the vast Republican majority sided with the heavy-handed police.
The case, Zorn v. Lintonarose 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 removed peacefully, she was placed in a rear cuff (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 to the protest.
As many know, police officers generally enjoy partial immunity for actions taken in the line of duty. This protection means that police officers generally cannot be held responsible when they break the law. But there are some exceptions to qualified immunity. An exception is when police officers commit crimes. Another exception involves cases where officers knowingly violate the constitutional rights of citizens.
In that case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied Zorn’s request for conditional immunity. He said Zorn should have known that applying a pain submission technique to a peaceful, non-violent protester was a violation of Linton’s constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court disagreed. In an unsigned opinion, the Court’s Republicans said officers had no reasonable way of knowing whether inflicting pain was 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 invented by Supreme Court justices. There is no constitutional provision granting law enforcement immunity under the Constitution. States could tomorrow lift qualified immunity for police officers simply by passing legislation.
The police unions would obviously file a complaint. The police have made a habit of violating the law with impunity. This doesn’t mean we should let them do it.
What I wrote
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in the mail-in ballot case, one that Republicans have pushed to try to stop mail-in ballots received after Election Day from being counted. I explained what happenedincluding the fact that the Republican’s anti-democratic argument doesn’t stop with ballots received after Election Day. Taken to its logical conclusion, it can be used to attack early voting and mailed ballots Before Election day. It’s… pretty much all bad, my friends.
In news unrelated to the current chaos
Baseball is back! Thursday was opening day and our long winter is coming to an end. Baseball is my favorite sport. I know it’s weird, because I’m black and under 95, but what can I say? I can watch a baseball game while I read a book, and even if I sometimes fall asleep, it doesn’t matter. 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, that is to say the owners of the various teams, seem ready to explode this sport to enrich themselves a little.
Baseball is the only major American team sport that operates without a salary cap. There are “luxury tax” rules and other thresholds meant to punish teams that spend a lot of money, but basically owners can spend as much money as they want on their baseball teams.
You’d think that the types of 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 that’s not the case. Instead, most owners want a salary cap. And why not? Imposing a salary cap gives owners fixed, artificially depressed labor costs. Most capitalis They are more than happy to abandon capitalism if market regulations help them reduce labor costs.
Owners want a salary cap, and to get it, they’ll likely lock out players next year until the powerful baseball players’ union agrees to give owners a way to artificially lower baseball players’ salaries.
Like Matt Kreisher explained in The Nationwhat’s particularly infuriating about the owner’s position is that many baseball fans will end up siding with the greedy owners. To most people, athletes who are paid several million dollars to play a game – a child’s game that involves hitting or throwing a ball – already seem grossly overcompensated. Baseball players earn far more than teachers, scientists, or anyone else whose contribution is more essential to the functioning of society.
But the athletes are work. And what the owners want is to artificially cap labor costs, even though baseball owners already enjoy a veritable monopoly – aided by a simple antitrust exemption – for the sport. Additionally, baseball players must accumulate six full years of major league service before even being allowed becoming free agents with the power to sign with the team that offers them the most money. The owners have a monopoly on the sport, a monopoly on the early careers of all its players, and when players are finally able to participate in what counts as a free market for their labor, the owners will want to introduce another artificial cap on what they can earn.
Yet the teams’ fans, particularly those in “small market” cities, support this ownership. control and greed. They feel like their teams can’t compete with big spenders New York and (especially) Los Angeles without salary cap space.
This is a terrible argument. Owners in Milwaukee, Cleveland or Pittsburgh are not. poor. They are not even broken. They have money to spend on players and compete with the Los Angeles Dodgers or New York Yankees. And if they don’t have cash, they can always sell their teams for billions of dollars to someone who has enough cash to buy a right fielder.
The problem is that the owners of some 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 possible on the field to try to win the World Series. The owners want socialism for themselves but rapacious capitalism for everyone else.
They seem willing to sacrifice the 2027 season to get it. Players are already being told to save money in anticipation of a long lockout.
Baseball fans like to say “maybe next year.” But this year, next year might never come.
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Elie Mystal Elie Mystal is The Nationjustice correspondent and columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: New York Times bestseller Let me respond: A Guide to the Constitution for Black Men And Bad Laws: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining Americaboth published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie c. US » here.
