Trump Announces Former ICE Director Tom Homan to Serve as ‘Border Czar’: What to Know

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Oscars

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I never got rid of it completely.

Beyond books, some public libraries offer everything from musical instruments to seeds for patrons to check out. | Ho Ming Law/Getty Images Vox reader Alexia Cherry asks: I work at a public library and I think a lot of the talk about libraries is generally uninformed about what librarians actually do. So many people that I interact with are shocked that you need to have a master’s degree to be considered a professional, and many people don’t know about the wide variety of library jobs available. People do indeed seem to find librarians oddly mysterious! In August, Western Illinois University laid off its entire librarian faculty and at the same time insisted the university would still have “adequate coverage in the library.” The school seemed to be operating under the belief that librarians are only warm bodies who exist to check books in and out, and that they only have master’s degrees in order to artificially jack their wages up. Anyone, this line of thinking goes, could keep a library running without much work. They just need to know how to scan a barcode.  But then, libraries are undervalued in general, perhaps because they are such radical institutions. The truism is that if you tried to invent the public library today, the right would never let you get away with it — giving so many things to the public for free, and subsidizing them all with taxes, imagine. How many other spaces do we have left where a person can go and spend hours on end and still not be expected to buy anything?  Perhaps on a subconscious level, we tend to undervalue libraries culturally in order to keep them from reaching their full potential. If we pretend that they’re bizarre federally subsidized bookstores, we don’t need to think about how they’re enormous warehouses full of knowledge available to anyone who walks in, staffed by professionals highly trained in sorting, extracting, and preserving that knowledge. What do librarians actually do? Let’s take a brief look at what libraries need and how librarians provide those needs.  All libraries, from the public to the academic to the corporate, need to be cataloged in order for anyone to know what books are in them, where each kind of book is, and what those books are useful for. In the library sciences, cataloging is its own highly esoteric specialty, closer to coding than anything else, and it requires careful technical training. Catalogers describe each notable aspect of a book, then classify each aspect so it’s searchable. To do it, you have to learn not just multiple classification systems, but also get training in how to describe a book you may have not read, what parts of it are most important, and which categories will supersede others depending on the library you’re classifying for. A cataloger must make judgment calls on whether to code in spoilers (do you classify a spy novel as “double agent” even if that’s the big twist at the end?) and how far down you should keep subdividing. Cataloging is such a rigorous and precise form of information processing that it’s one of a librarian’s most lucrative skill sets in the information era. Some librarians, after grad school, go off to work in corporate archives, where they catalog and preserve information about the company’s history for internal usage. (Not a particularly glamorous job, but the private sector tends to pay better than the public.) Fresh library school graduates can use the same skill set to process papers at historical archives, but there they’ll also need to know how to handle fragile antique documents without damaging them, and potentially how to repair books at the end of their lifespans. All libraries also need acquisition specialists, who are the ones facing heavy scrutiny in our book-banning era. The acquisitions department is responsible for deciding where the holes in a library’s collection are and how to fill them. They make the call as to whether it’s a good idea to bring in a book full of errors — say, a book on creationism — if patrons are requesting it, or whether it’s worth it to keep around a book on a controversial subject — say, teen sex ed — if patrons are protesting against it. Most libraries need research specialists who can help patrons figure out how to access what they’re trying to look up. If you’re trying to flesh out your family tree, a research librarian can usually tell you what newspaper archives to consult, and get you access to those archives free of charge. If you’re trying to write an academic paper, a research librarian can walk you through the process of which databases best serve your specialty and how to navigate them. How are public libraries different? Public libraries require all these specialties, too, and more. Most public libraries have a mandate to serve the communities in which they exist, and so they offer more resources than many people are probably aware exist.  Public libraries in places with a large immigrant population will frequently offer free ESL and citizenship classes. Many libraries help connect patrons to social workers, food banks, public health, and legal resources. Many others will let patrons check out things like cooking equipment, musical instruments, board games, and even seeds.  Because public librarians are one of the only third spaces left that don’t charge money, librarians find themselves working as de facto social workers for unhoused people — in addition to the literal social worker that many libraries now have on staff. Many libraries train their staff in using Narcan to revive people overdosing on opiates. Some offer hygiene kits and clean clothes for unhoused people. All of that is despite the low salaries public librarians can expect. The average salary at the New York Public Library system is just around $52,000 per year, under the $69,000 estimated to be the cost of living in New York.  A library is both a vast, complex technology designed to preserve and organize information and a physical space that exists in order to serve its community in whatever ways it can. The people who work there have to go through enormous amounts of training in order to do both — even if their labor is often invisible to those of us who enjoy its fruits.

The Donald Trump who campaigned in 2024 would not have won in 2016. It’s not just that his rhetoric is more serrated now than it was then; it’s that he has a record of illicit behavior today that he didn’t have then.Trump wasn’t a felon eight years ago; he is now. He wasn’t an adjudicated sexual abuser then; he is now. He hadn’t yet encouraged civic violence to overturn an election or encouraged a mob to hang his vice president. He hadn’t yet called people who stormed the Capitol “great patriots” or closed his campaign talking about the penis size of Arnold Palmer. He hadn’t extorted an ally to dig up dirt on his political opponent or been labeled a “fascist to the core” by his former top military adviser.But America is different now than it was at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump isn’t only winning politically; he is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores. More than any other person in the country, Trump—who won more than 75 million votes—can purport to embody the American ethic. He’s right to have claimed a mandate on the night of his victory; he has one, at least for now. He can also count on his supporters to excuse anything he does in the future, just as they have excused everything he has done in the past.It’s little surprise, then, that many critics of Trump are weary and despondent. On Sunday, my wife and I spoke with a woman whose ex-husband abused her; as we talked, she broke into tears, wounded and stunned that Americans had voted for a man who was himself a well-known abuser. The day before, I had received a text from a friend who works as a family therapist. She had spent the past few evenings, she wrote, “with female victims of sexual abuse by powerful and wealthy men. Hearing their heartbreak and re-traumatizing because we just elected a president who bragged about assaulting women because he can, and then found guilty by a jury of his peers for doing just that. And then they see their family and neighbors celebrate a victory.”The preliminary data show that Trump won the support of about 80 percent of white evangelicals. “How can I ever walk into an evangelical church again?” one person who has long been a part of the evangelical world asked me a few days ago.[McKay Coppins: Triumph of the cynics]I’ve heard from friends who feel as though their life’s work is shattering before their eyes. Others who have been critical of Trump are considering leaving the public arena. They are asking themselves why they should continue to speak out against Trump’s moral transgressions for the next four years when it didn’t make any difference the past four (or eight) years. It’s not worth the hassle, they’ve concluded: the unrelenting attacks, the death threats, or the significant financial costs.So much of MAGA world thrives on conflict, on feeling aggrieved, on seeking vengeance. Most of the rest of us do not. Why continue to fight against what he stands for? If Trump is the man Americans chose to be their president, if his values and his conduct are ones they’re willing to tolerate or even embrace, so be it.And even those who resolve to stay in the public arena will be tempted to mute themselves when Trump acts maliciously. We tried that for years, they’ll tell themselves, and it was like shooting BBs against a brick wall. It’s time to do something else.I understand that impulse. For those who have borne the brunt of hate, withdrawing from the fight and moving on to other things is an understandable choice. For everything there is a season. Yet I cannot help but fear, too, that Trump will ultimately win by wearing down his opposition, as his brutal ethic slowly becomes normalized.So how should those who oppose Trump, especially those of us who have been fierce critics of Trump—and I was among the earliest and the most relentless—think about this moment?First, we must remind ourselves of the importance of truth telling, of bearing moral witness, of calling out lies. Countless people, famous and unknown, have told the truth in circumstances far more arduous and dangerous than ours. One of them is the Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “To stand up for truth is nothing,” he wrote. “For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The simple step a courageous individual must take is to decline to take part in the lie, he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” A word of truth can sustain others by encouraging them, by reminding them that they’re not alone and that honor is always better than dishonor.Second, we need to guard our souls. The challenge for Trump critics is to call Trump out when he acts cruelly and unjustly without becoming embittered, cynical, or fatalistic ourselves. People will need time to process what it means that Americans elected a man of borderless corruption and sociopathic tendencies. But we shouldn’t add to the ranks of those who seem purposeless without an enemy to target, without a culture war to fight. We should acknowledge when Trump does the right thing, or when he rises above his past. And even if he doesn’t, unsparing and warranted condemnation of Trump and MAGA world shouldn’t descend into hate. There’s quite enough of that already.In his book Civility, the Yale professor Stephen L. Carter wrote, “The true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not in his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people—many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power—but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent.”Third, the Democratic Party, which for the time being is the only alternative to the Trump-led, authoritarian-leaning GOP, needs to learn from its loss. The intraparty recriminations among Democrats, stunned at the results of the election, are ferocious. My view aligns with that of my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch, who told me that “this election mainly reaffirms voters’ anti-incumbent sentiment—not only in the U.S. but also abroad (Japan/Germany). In 2020, Biden and the Democrats were the vehicle to punish the incumbent party; in 2016 and again in 2024, Trump and the Republicans were the vehicle. Wash, rinse, repeat.” But that doesn’t mean that a party defeated in two of the previous three presidential elections by Trump, one of the most unpopular and broadly reviled figures to ever win the presidency, doesn’t have to make significant changes.There is precedent—in the Democratic Party, which suffered titanic defeats in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and in the British Labour Party, which was decimated in the 1980s and the early ’90s. In both cases, the parties engaged in the hard work of ideological renovation and produced candidates, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who put in place a new intellectual framework that connected their parties to a public they had alienated. They confronted old attitudes, changed the way their parties thought, and found ways to signal that change to the public. Both won dominant victories. The situation today is, of course, different from the one Clinton and Blair faced; the point is that the Democratic Party has to be open to change, willing to reject the most radical voices within its coalition, and able to find ways to better connect to non-elites. The will to change needs to precede an agenda of change.Fourth, Trump critics need to keep this moment in context. The former and future president is sui generis; he is, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham put it, “a unique threat to constitutional government.” He is also bent on revenge. But America has survived horrific moments, such as the Civil War, and endured periods of horrific injustice, including the eras of slavery, Redemption, and segregation. The American story is an uneven one.I anticipate that Trump’s victory will inflict consequential harm on our country, and some of it may be irreparable. But it’s also possible that the concerns I have had about Trump, which were realized in his first term, don’t come to pass in his second term. And even if they do, America will emerge significantly weakened but not broken. Low moments need not be permanent moments.[Rogé Karma: The two Donald Trumps]The Trump era will eventually end. Opportunities will arise, including unexpected ones, and maybe even a few favorable inflection points. It’s important to have infrastructure and ideas in place when they do. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me, “We have to think about America’s challenges and opportunities in ways that reach beyond that point. Engagement in public life and public policy has to be about those challenges and opportunities, about the country we love, more than any particular politician, good or bad.” It's important, too, that we draw boundaries where we can. We shouldn’t ignore Trump, but neither should we obsess over him. We must do what we can to keep him from invading sacred spaces. Intense feelings about politics in general, and Trump in particular, have divided families and split churches. We need to find ways to heal divisions without giving up on what the theologian Thomas Merton described as cutting through “great tangled knots of lies.” It’s a difficult balance to achieve.Fifth, all of us need to cultivate hope, rightly understood. The great Czech playwright (and later president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel, in Disturbing the Peace, wrote that hope isn’t detached from circumstances, but neither is it prisoner to circumstances. The kind of hope he had in mind is experienced “above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a dimension of soul, he said, “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, according to Havel; it is “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope properly understood keeps us above water; it urges us to do good works, even in hard times.In June 1966, Robert F. Kennedy undertook a five-day trip to South Africa during the worst years of apartheid. In the course of his trip, he delivered one of his most memorable speeches, at the University of Cape Town.During his address, he spoke about the need to “recognize the full human equality of all of our people—before God, before the law, and in the councils of government.” He acknowledged the “wide and tragic gaps” between great ideals and reality, including in America, with our ideals constantly recalling us to our duties. Speaking to young people in particular, he warned about “the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.” Kennedy urged people to have the moral courage to enter the conflict, to fight for their ideals. And using words that would later be engraved on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery, he said this: Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. No figure of Kennedy’s stature had ever visited South Africa to make the case against institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. The trip had an electric effect, especially on Black South Africans, giving them hope that they were not alone, that the outside world knew and cared about their struggle for equality. “He made us feel, more than ever, that it was worthwhile, despite our great difficulties, for us to fight for the things we believed in,” one Black journalist wrote of Kennedy; “that justice, freedom and equality for all men are things we should strive for so that our children should have a better life.”Pressure from both within and outside South Africa eventually resulted in the end of apartheid. In 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned at Robben Island during Kennedy’s visit because of his anti-apartheid efforts, was elected the first Black president of South Africa.There is a timelessness to what Kennedy said in Cape Town three generations ago. Striking out against injustice is always right; it always matters. That was true in South Africa in the 1960s. It is true in America today.

Two grandsons saw a metal bar fall on this letter writer’s head. One grandson laughed and neither asked if their grandparent was okay.