Portside

The tariffs, the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the DOGE moves—they’re all fundamentally about the same thing. It's time to shed flawed assumptions about who Trump is and make sense of what he is doing.

Between 1968 and 1973, the two governments concealed the expulsion from the world. If anyone asked, Anglo-American officials decided to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos” were “transient contract workers,” as one bureaucrat explained. A British official called the Chagossians “Tarzans” and “Man Fridays,” in a tellingly racist reference to Robinson Crusoe.