Schur is a professor at the University of California – Berkeley, Pepperdine University and the University of Southern California, where he teaches courses in politics, communications and leadership.
Late last year, I wrote about the growing pressure on the Biden administration from Democratic elected officials to do more to address the growing influx of undocumented migrants into the country. These Democrats warned both of the real-world impact of the large numbers of arrivals in their cities and states and of the political consequences of continued inaction. They began to put heavy pressure on the White House, demanding more aggressive border security measures than their party has historically supported.
Last month, Joe Biden joined them. Not only did Biden embrace the most far-reaching border and deportation measures offered to date, but he also ratcheted up his language to unprecedented levels, pledging to “shut down” the southern border and calling for “the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country.”
“It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed,” he said. “And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
At the same time that Biden worked to find common ground with Republicans, the progressives in his own party became increasingly enraged as they watched a president who they had helped elect four years ago now embrace the type of immigration package that no previous Democrat had ever been willing to touch. The substantive policy concessions that the White House had offered were highly upsetting to them, but listening to Biden use such highly charged language was even worse.
But Biden clearly feels like he has no other choice. Since linking immigration-related issues to legislation regarding U.S. support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, the president has been forced to accept onerous GOP border proposals to keep his international aid package alive. Meanwhile, the worsening crisis at the border has increased pressure on him to do something to defuse immigration as a political weapon for his opponents to use against him.
Over the last several months, Biden has gradually moved further and further toward traditionally conservative policy solutions, and further and further away from his party's — and his own — history on this issue. Each time the president shifted rightward, Republicans asked for more. GOP leaders are now hinting that there is no immigration policy that they will find acceptable — no matter how restrictive — and would rather wait for the possibility of a Donald Trump victory that would allow them to pass an even more hard-line measure. As the president began to see the growing likelihood that no compromise would be possible and that he would likely face the voters this fall without a significant immigration-related achievement in hand, he decided that stronger rhetorical weaponry would be his next best alternative.
But if this is the type of language that Biden is using in January, imagine what he is going to sound like by October, especially if the race ends up being as closely fought as expected. He has long since abandoned any of the reforms that have been used in the past to balance out stricter border security. There are no guest worker programs of the type that business leaders want, let alone any of the previous proposals for broader legalization and citizenship opportunities for new arrivals. This has been a one-sided discussion from the beginning, and, like any effective negotiators, Republicans keep asking for more.
Biden cannot win this election on immigration. His best possible outcome is to mitigate the damage and turn the conversation to abortion rights and other issues that work in his favor. But Americans are now telling pollsters that immigration is the policy debate of greatest import to them, and with neither a legislative compromise nor a real-world border solution in the offing, Biden does not have much to offer.
The president and his allies are now working to convince voters that it is the Republicans who are the obstacles to a more secure border, arguing that the GOP would rather have a talking point that can damage Biden on the campaign trail than a substantive solution that could actually stem the migrant flow. Those types of inside baseball messages about political strategy are usually harder to sell. But it might be Biden’s best shot.
This article was originally published in AllSides. Ready the original version here.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.