Piper French on Trump's Department of Justice
The first preview from our latest issue
Our fifteenth issue, coinciding with the five-year anniversary of The Drift’s founding, is also our first opportunity to grapple with the new Trump administration and all the transformation and devastation it has unleashed in its opening months. Our usual essays section, featuring a small number of pieces with lengthy gestation periods, seemed incapable of speaking to the bewilderingly vast range of developments that we’re trying to wrap our heads around right now.
Instead, we’ve enlisted an all-star roster of past Drift contributors to produce a special Dispatches section — a collection of shorter salvos each addressing a separate facet of our present political conundrum. We’ll be rolling out these interventions online in the coming weeks before the publication of the full issue (which is also equipped with an expanded selection of fiction and poetry, plus a series of interviews). First up: Piper French analyzes how the Trump administration has smoothed over the contradictions at the heart of the Department of Justice by refashioning it into an institution that exclusively does bad things.
Read her full Dispatch online today.
Unified Vision and Total Purpose | Trump’s New Department of Justice
PIPER FRENCH
A typically deranged February DOJ memo designating immigration enforcement as the department’s new priority begins with a little rhetorical flourish: “The Department of Justice is the only federal agency with a name that includes a moral imperative.” By now, we have all become so inured to the Trump administration’s talent for stripping meaning from words that this line almost doesn’t faze; it’d be corny to call it Orwellian. Though perhaps outrage at the manipulation of language feels impossible to summon because this is hardly the first time that the department’s title has seemed like a misnomer — or at the very least an oversimplification.
The Drift’s first poetry reading is on Tuesday! Join us at Karma in the East Village to hear our poetry editor Zoë Hitzig in conversation with three brilliant poets.
The thing that never fails to amaze me in the midst of this ongoing train wreck is how many people in every political spectrum and income level can be so surprised that all this is happening-it's not like Trump & Co. snuck in the back door when no one was looking; if you find a flaming paper bag on your doorstep that smells like dog poop, you should have more sense than to bring it in and serve it for dinner... (Could've had barbecue with Kamela, but why would anyone want that!?)