Mar 27, 2025CHRIS PATTEN
US President Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign agenda will bring misery to Americans and non-Americans alike, tarnishing the country’s reputation for years to come. It now falls to American citizens and legislators to defend the democratic values that have long underpinned the country’s global leadership.
People who don’t live in the United States may think they are safe, but as the world’s leading superpower – and once the standard-bearer for the values that underpinned much of the progress of the past 80 years – what happens in America does not stay in America. The collective well-being and security of open societies worldwide have long depended on the wisdom and courage of US presidents, dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even Richard Nixon, for all his faults, left behind meaningful diplomatic achievements, particularly his opening to China.
While no one knows exactly when or how things will unravel, storm clouds are unmistakably gathering in Washington and beyond. A constitutional crisis (or worse) appears to be in the offing as the Trump administration undermines the rule of law – once a cornerstone of American democracy – to target its political opponents and critics.
Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, is Chancellor of the University of Oxford and the author of The Hong Kong Diaries (Allen Lane, 2022).
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Yes, the constitutional crisis will happen soon. They will openly defy the courts and it will be crystal clear then that MAGA has seized power and we will then be in a post-Constitution authoritarian regime. The funny thing is that MAGA could have actually gotten away with a lot of their agenda if Trump was just not so hellbent on crashing the economy with tariffs. In any case, the story of the next four years will be if Americans are able to resist the regime and reclaim our democracy, or if we turn into Turkey or Hungary.
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Something else I never knew, or conveniently forgot long ago. With another Democrat – Harry Truman in charge. …
From Time Magazine, in 2020 – something else I never knew until I looked this morning …
“… 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most egregious acts of exclusion, one that has been almost stricken from historical memory: the decision to prevent Jewish Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish victims of World War II from immigrating to the United States. At war’s end in 1945 Europe, millions of ill-clothed, malnourished, diseased, and disoriented concentration, death, and labor camp survivors, forced laborers and slave laborers, POWs and political prisoners were left to wander the roadways and haunt the town squares and marketplaces in search of food and shelter. American military forces took the lead in rounding them up, transporting them to assembly centers, and then repatriating millions to their former homes in western Europe, Italy, and the Soviet Union. By summer’s end, however, there remained left behind in Germany a million displaced persons (DPs), who were unable or unwilling to return home or, like the Jewish survivors, had no homes to return to. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, largely funded by the United States, was organized to shelter, feed, and provide these last million victims of war with medical care in newly established DP camps. They would remain there for the next three to five years while the victors in war debated what to do with them.
For the Jews who survived the concentration and death camps or in hiding throughout Europe or in the deep recesses of the Soviet Union, as for the eastern Europeans who had been violently ripped from their homes to serve as slave and forced laborers in European, the violence and brutality of war had not been magically erased with the cessation of hostilities.
The Soviet Union and the eastern bloc nations demanded that the last million DPs in Germany, with the exception of Jews, be returned to their former homelands. Those who had committed war crimes or collaborated with the Nazis would be brought to justice; those who had been deported to Germany as forced laborers or POWs would assist in the rebuilding of their shattered nations. The United States disagreed. As Eleanor Roosevelt, an American delegate to the United Nations, declared unequivocally, displaced persons who had committed no crimes had every right to refuse repatriation to their Soviet-dominated homelands.
Over Soviet objections, the United States and its allies organized and funded the International Refugee Organization to resettle those who refused to go home again. While American representatives encouraged the nations of the world to accept, resettle, and put the eastern European DPs to work, Congress refused to even consider allowing them to immigrate to the U.S. The only exception made was for several thousand Nazi collaborators and scientists who were handpicked by government and military officials and clandestinely transported to the United States to use their expertise and knowledge to help fight the Cold War.
For the Jewish survivors, America’s refusal to open its gates was particularly cruel. Barred by the British from immigrating to Palestine and denied resettlement by IRO nations whose governments considered them too damaged, too clannish, too dangerous, and either incapable or unwilling to do the hard work required of them, America remained the Jewish survivors’ best and last hope of escaping quasi-captivity in German DP camps.
For three full years, the U.S. Congress ignored the plight of the Last Million. Only in June of 1948 did Congress pass a bill authorizing the admission of 200,000 DPs, but barring the immigration of the 90% of Jewish survivors who, having spent the war years in the Soviet Union and/or the first months of the postwar period in Poland, were accused of being Communist sympathizers or operatives. No such “security” measures were written into the law to guard against the entry of the thousands of Nazi collaborators and war criminals who had lied their way into the displaced persons camps. The outcry against the discriminatory nature of the first Displaced Persons Act was such that it was amended, two years later, to remove the restrictions on Jewish immigration, but, by this time, after three to five years in camps in Germany, the vast majority of survivors, unwilling to spend a day more in Germany, had immigrated to Israel, illegally before May, 1948 and then legally after Israel declared, and President Truman recognized, its independence.”
Trump is an ass and an idiot … but, when it comes to true refugees and foreign policy, for example the Abraham Accords … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Accords we’ve seen worse, … much worse…
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Trump a problem – sure, for economic migrants and members of foreign gangs. But, at least he isn’t indifferent to wars and true refugees like many past presidents.
FDR “… wisdom … courage … protecting people of the world? …” Hell no! Ever heard of the St. Louis? https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/voyage-of-the-st-louis
Ever heard of Jerry Brown: https://www.discovery.org/a/15471/
Ever heard of Jimmy Carter, and Guantanamo Bay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_refugee_crisis
How about Obama and Cuban refugees? https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/12/509575935/obama-administration-ends-refugee-policy-that-favored-cubans
At least Trump is trying to resolve wars. For example, Trump wasn’t the first guy to suggest a real estate deal as part of foreign policy – so did Herbert Hoover.
From the WSJ just this week:
“… (Hoover was) informed by deep engineering knowledge and a heartfelt humanitarian concern for the plight of persecuted Jews. … (managed) humanitarian relief during World War I, using his prodigious organizational skills to save tens of millions of people from starvation. During that time, he saw the persecution of Jews firsthand, intervening against Polish attempts to block humanitarian relief to Jewish communities.
When Hitler came to power in January 1933, President Hoover agreed to Jewish leaders’ request that he make a joint statement with President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt denouncing Nazi persecution. When Roosevelt declined, Hoover instructed his ambassador to Germany “to exert every influence of our government” on the Nazis to stop mistreating Jews. A few months later, President Roosevelt effectively reversed the order, the beginning of his administration’s years of indifference toward the doomed Jews in Europe.
But Hoover continued to press their cause. He denounced Nazism in a 1938 speech in New York, decrying its suppression of liberty, destruction of civil society and creation of concentration camps. “Its darkest picture,” he declared, was “the heart-breaking persecution of the Jews.” That November, Hoover condemned the violence of Kristallnacht on national radio: “This rise of intolerance today, the suffering being inflicted on an innocent and helpless people, grieve every decent American. . . . It makes us fearful for the whole progress of civilization.”
In 1939 Hoover formally endorsed the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would provide 20,000 visas for Jewish children from Germany. He strongly lobbied the House Immigration Committee to pass the bill—without success. Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s State Department actively delayed and denied visas to Jewish refugees, often failing to fill even the country’s modest refugee quotas.
In 1943 Hoover supported the activist Bergson Group in its efforts to bring attention to the persecution of the Jews. He was the most prominent member of the sponsoring committee for the Bergson Group’s protest pageant, “We Will Never Die,” which publicized the mass murder of Jews in Europe and was seen by hundreds of thousands in the U.S.
That May, Hoover signed a full-page ad in the New York Times denouncing the Bermuda Conference—during which the U.S. and British governments met to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis but formed no concrete plans—as a “cruel mockery.” In July he spoke at an emergency conference called by the Bergson Group to demand real action to rescue European Jews.
At the end of the conference, Hoover gave a national radio address declaring that “no language” was adequate to describe the “agonies” of the Jews, and “to find relief for them is one of the great human problems of today.” … Hoover also criticized the Roosevelt administration for imposing obstacles to humanitarian relief. He had been working for two years, he said, to get food to millions of starving Jews and others in occupied nations, only to be blocked “on the ground that such action would aid the Germans.” As he wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1941, “History will never justify the Government of the United States aiding with the starvation of these millions.”
Hoover closed his address by boldly challenging the morality of Roosevelt’s position that the only way to save the Jews was to win the war, arguing that their plight couldn’t wait for the end of hostilities. “The time has arrived when we should demand that a real solution be found,” he declared. … In 1945 (Hoover) proposed an ambitious plan to invest about $150 million in irrigation in Iraq, which he said would allow the Fertile Crescent to triple its population to levels last enjoyed during the kingdoms of Babylon and Nineveh. The additional 2.8 million acres of arable land, Hoover believed, would be a place for resettled Palestinian and other Arabs to prosper, allowing the Holy Land to be set aside for the Jews. …”
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Appreciate your efforts to show us U.S. policy over many years toward refugees and immigrants. Shows there are situations in our past that mirror those of today. Again, many thanks.
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