Nothing Reciprocal About It

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Every big story needs a human face, and Donald Trump’s immigration policy has gotten one in the person of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, the Salvadoran native who had been living in the US for about fourteen years until he was—by the administration’s own admission—illegally sent to the “Terrorist Confinement Center” in Tecoluca, El Salvador.

Ábrego García’s case has dominated the week’s news cycle, especially since the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had to “facilitate” his return to the US. Largely lost in the shuffle, though, was what, exactly, had prompted his rendition in the first place.

If you wanted to know the answer to that, you needed to search out journalists outside the mainstream. Take this piece by Roger Parloff, published Tuesday at Lawfare. Parloff meticulously recounts each step of Ábrego García’s journey through the legal system, finding that the main allegation against him—that he was a member of a violent gang—was based on “double hearsay” evidence provided by a Maryland cop: “So the uncross-examined detective’s accusation came from an unidentified informant who was also, perforce, uncross-examined—a second layer of hearsay.” And for those who like their information in an easy-to-digest layout, they can turn to this graphic that was updated around the same time, by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

And what about that officer who made the gang allegations? The New Republic’s Greg Sargent dug up the very salient information that he was suspended just weeks after he arrested Ábrego García for an unrelated crime: his superiors found that he’d given confidential information about an unrelated, ongoing case to a sex worker, for whom he was also a client. The cop was indicted and eventually pleaded guilty.

One morning last summer, a Dartmouth frat bros’ group chat was lighting up. They’d spent the past night performing a bizarre hazing ritual—fueled by beer, wine, weed, and nitrous oxide. But one of their group hadn’t come back, and the location finder on their phones showed that Won Jang, a twenty-year-old sophomore, was somewhere near the bank of the Connecticut River. Authorities found his body sixty-five feet from shore, and tests would show his blood alcohol at 0.167 percent—more than twice the legal limit if he’d been caught behind the wheel. 

In Boston magazine this month, Susan Zalkind tells the horrifying story of Jang’s death, but also puts it in the context of a college where Greek life and booze grease the social passageways that can lead to lucrative careers after graduation. And she doesn’t shy from showing how college administrators have too often responded with apathetic diffidence.

Ron DeSantis has served as Florida’s governor since early 2019, and when his second term expires, he won’t be able to run again because of the state’s term limits. But Floridians might still see a DeSantis on the ballot next year, as the governor has made clear that his telegenic wife, Casey DeSantis, would be a strong candidate: “She would do better than me,” he said recently. “Like, there’s no question about that.”

With that kind of attention comes scrutiny, something the Miami Herald’s and Tampa Bay Times’ statehouse bureau has been willing to provide. With a steady, weeklong drumbeat of five stories in seven days, Lawrence Mower and Alexandra Glorioso delved into murky dealings at a Casey DeSantis project, the Hope Florida Foundation. Ostensibly, her organization’s mission is to wean Floridians off welfare and into productive jobs and lives. But the group was also the lucky recipient last fall of $10 million that state officials quietly channeled from a settlement with a healthcare company. That money would soon find its way to dark-money organizations that funded opposition to a marijuana legalization referendum in Florida. 

As the legislature, which no longer bows to DeSantis, increased its scrutiny, Hope Florida’s chairman responded with an age-old admission: “Mistakes were made.” 

The next day, the group’s executive director quit.

• “A separate round of reciprocal tariffs on 57 countries will follow.” (New York Times)
• “The Trump administration announced a 90-day pause on all reciprocal tariffs.” (Yahoo Finance)
• “Trump and his top trade officials have suggested reciprocal tariff exemptions announced Saturday would be partially or completely reversed.” (CNBC) 
• “Smartphones and computers are now spared from Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.” (NPR)

Those italics are mine, but they should be in the original text, accompanied by quote marks or a sarcasm or shoulder-shrug emoji. There is nothing “reciprocal” about Trump’s tariff scheme, and if he and his ministers want to keep using the word, it doesn’t mean journalists have to dutifully mimic him (any more than, say, they need to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as something else altogether). 

To take an example from Julian Sanchez’s excellent recent Substack post, the European Union imposes tariffs that average from around 1 to 5 percent, yet Trump wants to impose a “reciprocal” tariff of 20 percent upon their goods. “The term ‘reciprocal’ tariffs is effectively a lie and a piece of propaganda,” he writes. “Every time a publication lazily uses that phrase ‘reciprocal tariffs,’ they are helping rationalize it to their readers—and misleading them in the process.” Or as media critic Dan Froomkin put it recently, “you would have no idea just how insane these so-called ‘reciprocal’ tariffs are” by reading such stenographic accounts.

Editor’s Note: This article has been amended to clarify the European Union’s tariff rates.

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