Donald Trump never met a war he wouldn’t pretend he could easily solve, but it seems he’s getting tired of talking about only the current ones. Here he was yesterday rolling back the clock: “I wonder if—you know, the Civil War, it always seemed to me maybe that could’ve been solved without losing 600,000-plus people.” Happy Thursday.

Hold On to Your Butts

by Andrew Egger

It’s never good to see an opponent learn from his mistakes. So here’s some unsettling news: Like the Jurassic Park velociraptors opening the kitchen door, the White House is learning.

That’s one takeaway from the news yesterday, first reported by the Washington Post, that the administration will resume interviews for student visas for foreign students, but with more stringent requirements. All applicants will now be obliged to make their social media accounts public “to be scrutinized for hostility toward the United States.”

It’s a significant drawdown from the maximum-hostility interim posture the White House announced last month, when it canceled the issuance of all new student visas while it developed the policies announced this week. That change, in turn, came on the heels of the administration’s iron-fisted first iteration of the policy, which involved canceling current students’ visas on often flimsy pretexts before sending masked plainclothes officers to bundle them into unmarked vans and whisk them away.

The new policy represents a canny political retreat from such excesses. On the merits, it’s far more defensible. It’s hard to imagine the median voter objecting to the sentiment: We shouldn’t invite in immigrants, on student visas or otherwise, who openly profess hatred of America.

But while the new policy is less nakedly hostile than the former maximalist one, its impact may prove to be much the same. The State Department cable announcing the change, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, requires students’ online presences be screened to “identify applicants who bear hostile attitudes toward our citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles; who advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to U.S. national security; or who perpetrate unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence.” There’s obviously a massive amount of discretion here, and it’s not clear yet how stringently U.S. embassies and consulates, which are responsible for processing and distributing student visas, will apply the new standards.

But what is clear is that these requirements will greatly increase the administrative burden of the student-visa process. “If everyone has to now have their social media scrubbed for derogatory information,” a State official told the Post, “officers do not have that time.” Indeed, Rubio’s cable cautioned consulates that they “should consider overall scheduling volume and the resource demands of appropriate vetting” and should schedule fewer student visa cases as necessary.

The new policy is thus still a clampdown on the issuance of new student visas—and, therefore, foreign students studying in the United States. Instead of outwardly denying them entry, the government is now just tripping them up with endless red tape. And if the red tape isn’t enough, then it could very well be a stray online post—open to interpretation by someone at a consulate who has never talked to that person in real life—that does the trick.

That this change comes at this moment is no coincidence. The first few months of the second Trump administration, with everyone involved hopped up on victory and imagining they possessed a massive popular mandate for whatever they might feel like doing, was one big act-first-and-ask-questions-later power trip. The entire federal government seemed organized around the Fyre Festival philosophy of let’s just do it and be legends, man.

Then came the hangover. As Trump’s popularity came crashing down, we started seeing a new level of policy hesitation and uncertainty: Sometimes they were charging ahead, sometimes they were scurrying back.

This latest student-visa policy reflects a White House that’s starting to get its feet back underneath it. It’s taking fewer wild swings—the kind that can draw unnecessary political blowback (see: DOGE cuts and RIFs, reversed). It’s recognizing that popular support for anything it might try doesn’t extend as far as it might have assumed. In some ways, that could be for the good—a more cautious Trump administration is better than a reckless one. But it also shows you can still do plenty of damage (arguably more) when you get a bit creative about it.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Juneteenth: ‘The Day of Freedom Came.’ Read the first-person accounts of emancipation from BOOKER T. WASHINGTON and others.

• Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Making Us More Vulnerable to Domestic Terrorism… Law enforcement can only do so much at once, writes WILL SELBER.

• Donald Trump’s Non-Protection Racket… He’s leaving his former national security officials unshielded against Iran’s assassins. That he’s not protecting his fellow Americans demonstrates that he fails to understand what patriotism is, argues WILL SALETAN.

• Can Trump TACO His TACO? On The Next Level,