In keeping with this administration’s habit of unveiling massive new policies on social media, Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem took to X Monday evening to announce that she was “recommending a full travel ban,” barring visitors from “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation” with persons she called “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” These people are “foreign invaders,” Noem said. “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Like many a post on X, it was an astoundingly direct expression of the kind of lofty bullshitting that circulates among white nationalists and neo-Nazis—only now coming out of an official communication channel for a member of the president’s Cabinet and the head of the wealthiest federal agency. “Our forefathers built this nation,” Noem said in the same post, only for immigrants to “slaughter our heroes” and “snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.” 

Noem’s post is part of a desperate scramble by the Trump administration, as it attempts to move on from the inconvenient facts around last week’s shooting in the nation’s capital. Last Wednesday, an Afghan immigrant who worked alongside the CIA in the Afghanistan War, and who had been granted asylum in April, allegedly shot two National Guardsmen as they were patrolling the city, killing one and wounding the other. The accused was also shot, and in a virtual court hearing from his hospital bed on Tuesday, he pleaded “not guilty” to one charge of first degree murder.

The National Guard would not have been on the streets in Washington in the first place had the........

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