David Frum

of finding some way forward from the preferential programs of the past, it is absolutely indispensable that such an administration show itself in every respect to be animated by ideals of equal treatment, racial fairness, justice for all.

When the president is acting like some kind of internet troll, some kind of Klansman with access to a AI machine,

He discredits everything that his administration is doing that looks like something that another administration might also do.

He ratifies every allegation of every critic of that administration, of every critic of the Supreme Court, of every critic of anyone who has ever held up for equal treatment under law by saying, you know what?

The president is obviously motivated by racial animus.

He's overseeing this.

These acts of racial profiling by a paramilitary force that is masked and poorly trained and poorly led and that is sending people into, that is apprehending people because they don't like the way their accent sounds, they don't like the look of their face, and sending them to prisons where they're held without due process for weeks and months, that is sending children under the age of 10 to similar kinds of camps.

In every way that this administration tries to prove that it is indeed motivated by the worst, ugliest,

most primitive kinds of prejudice.

And then it asks Americans to trust it as it dismantles outdated correctives to the prejudices of the past.

This isn't sustainable either.

If you are going to attain equal justice, you have to do it by treating people equally.

I believe that.

I think the Supreme Court, its decisions on these matters have been broadly correct.

I think it's going in the right direction.

And I think that the critiques of past diversity programs, maybe they were not as powerful at the beginning as they are at the end, but by the 2020s, they remain very powerful.

And there are 93 million people to whom all of this has to seem oppressive, unfair, and none of their concern.

But if we're going to get from here to there, we can't be poisoned by the kind of

Talk that comes off the president's social media page and comes from the lips of the people around him The people lead the government must be seen to be just for anyone to believe in the justice of what they do And this is one case of so many where even the parts of the trump administration's agenda that Some people might like that even I might like are disqualified and discredited by the trump administration's own actions and by the president's own personality it's

So tragic.