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      Trump and DeSantis Push for Mass Deportations, Escalating Hard-Right Immigration Proposals

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      In dueling speeches in California, the two Republican candidates pushed for mass deportations, a position that is as extreme as it may be unfeasible.As a presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has said he would authorize the use of deadly force against people crossing the border, seek to end the practice of birthright citizenship and send the military to strike against drug cartels inside Mexico, a key ally of the United States, even without the permission of its government.Those positions put him on the hard right among the Republicans running for president, many of whom are tapping into deep anger among G.O.P. primary voters over immigration.Now, Mr. DeSantis, who often tries to stoke outrage with his border policies, has unveiled another extreme position: deporting all undocumented immigrants who crossed the border during the Biden administration.“Everyone that has come illegally under Biden” should be sent back, Mr. DeSantis said on Friday in response to a reporter’s question at a campaign event in Long Beach, Calif. “That’s probably six or seven million people right there. It’s going to require a lot of effort. It’s going to require us to lean in.”Though Mr. DeSantis greatly overestimated the number of people who have entered the country illegally since Mr. Biden took office, such mass deportations would require enormous investments in the nation’s immigration enforcement system and could do severe economic harm to key American industries.Conducting so many deportations would require Mr. DeSantis to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, authorize widespread raids into immigrant communities, significantly expand immigration detention space to meet national standards and substantially grow the fleet of airplanes used for deportations. Billions more dollars would need to be spent on bolstering immigration courts to adjudicate cases within months instead of years. Currently, some migrants who have recently arrived in the United States have been given court dates a decade from now because the immigration court backlog is so large.Still, Mr. DeSantis is not alone in his promises to upend the nation’s immigration system.Speaking to a crowd in Anaheim, Calif., former President Donald J. Trump pledged to enact the largest deportation in the country’s history.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesOn Friday, former President Donald J. Trump, who is leading the Florida governor by roughly 40 points in national polls, pledged to enact “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” if re-elected. Mr. Trump was speaking at the same time as Mr. DeSantis, roughly 20 miles away at a convention of Republican activists in Anaheim, Calif.The dueling speeches highlighted how crucial an issue border security has become in the Republican presidential primary. At his campaign event, Mr. DeSantis took the opportunity to criticize Mr. Trump, saying that his rival had failed to “get the job done” on the border during his first term. Though the two men are largely aligned on immigration policy, Mr. DeSantis is making the argument that he would be more effective in carrying out a hard-line vision.“I would note that the former president is campaigning on the same promise he made in ’16 that he didn’t deliver on,” Mr. DeSantis said.With his “six or seven” million figure, Mr. DeSantis was probably referring to the roughly six million people who have been caught crossing the border since 2021. That is about double the number of unauthorized immigrants who actually entered the country under Mr. Biden and are still here.Of those six million, at least 1.6 million have been allowed to stay in the country temporarily and face charges in immigration court. Officials estimate about 1.5 million others have entered the country illegally without being detained.The government estimates about 11 million undocumented people live in the country overall.Mass deportations are not as simple as the Republican contenders make them sound.Many of the people they call illegal immigrants are eligible for legal status in the United States or are already here on a legal status. An example of a legal status is Temporary Protected Status, the humanitarian benefit Mr. Biden just extended to nearly 500,000 Venezuelans who have come to the country since the spring of 2021. People who are in the country and eligible for legal status are entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, said Greg Chen, the senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.The time it would take to remove millions of people is substantial. In the past, the greatest number of deportations has been around 400,000 a year. The year with the highest number in recent history is 2013, during the Obama administration, when there were more than 432,000. During the Trump administration, the year that saw the most deportations was 2019, with more than 359,000.Deporting such a large amount of people poses “logistical, practical and legal challenges,” said Ron Vitiello, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration.Justin Hamel for The New York Times“DeSantis’s statement demonstrates his utter lack of any understanding of immigration enforcement operations,” Mr. Chen said. “At a practical level, deporting that many people would be impossible in even a single term.”Mr. Chen also pointed out the serious economic costs of deporting many of the workers who take on the United States’ most dangerous and low-paying jobs, particularly in agriculture.Immigration laws signed by Mr. DeSantis in Florida this year have already led to worker shortages in the agricultural sector, as well as in construction and hospitality, some employers have said. In addition, undocumented workers play a key role in hurricane cleanup in the state, but many have said they would no longer risk traveling to Florida because of the threat of deportation.There is also a significant diplomatic component to deportations — countries must be willing to take back their citizens, and the United States must have relations with those countries to coordinate those return trips. This stipulation would pose a huge challenge in returning the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have fled to the United States in the past few years. A DeSantis or Trump administration would most likely need to reestablish diplomatic relations with Venezuela and recognize the government of Nicolás Maduro — something Mr. Trump did not do as president — to carry out their plans.“Mass deportations are really, really, really hard to do,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant organization. “The political backlash would be enormous.”Ron Vitiello, a former acting director of ICE during the Trump administration, acknowledged that there were “logistical, practical and legal challenges” to deporting so many people. But he said that immigrants would continue to cross the border illegally if they believed that they would be able to stay long-term.“If the rest of the world believes they’ll never be deported, that is an incentive for lots of people,” Mr. Vitiello said. “You have to end the incentives to change the traffic patterns at the border.”When Republicans tried to enact comprehensive immigration reform under President George W. Bush, the idea of deporting large numbers of undocumented people was not considered realistic or desirable, reflecting how deeply the political mood in the G.O.P. has shifted in the years since.“Mass deportation is not a workable solution,” the Bush administration argued in a 2007 fact sheet, at a time when the population of unauthorized immigrants was even higher than it is today. “Deporting the millions of illegal immigrants who are already in the country would be impractical, harmful to our economy, and potentially devastating to families with deep roots in their communities.”Jonathan Swan More

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      Running San Francisco Made Dianne Feinstein

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      When I was interviewing Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2011 for a book about San Francisco’s tumultuous history from the 1960s to the ’80s, she suddenly began to tear off her microphone and terminate the exchange. My offense? I asked about her decision as mayor of the city to veto a 1982 ordinance that would have extended health insurance benefits to live-in partners of municipal employees, including lesbians and gay men. I managed to coax the irate Ms. Feinstein back into her chair, but she had clearly drawn a line: I’m ready to leave whenever I don’t like the direction this is headed.Ms. Feinstein could be imperious, thin-skinned and intolerant. She was also the leader that San Francisco sorely needed on Nov. 27, 1978, when she was abruptly thrust, at the age of 45, into City Hall’s Room 200 after Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by another colleague, Dan White.“This will not be a rudderless city,” she firmly told the shellshocked public after the murders, even though she was shaken by them. When she met with the hastily assembled press soon after the killings, her skirt was stained with Mr. Milk’s blood.During her nine plus years as the first female mayor of the famously cantankerous metropolis, Ms. Feinstein won the grudging respect of the old boys’ network that had always run City Hall. She managed to steer San Francisco between the liberal, freewheeling future that Mr. Moscone aimed toward — the era of San Francisco values — and its older, more conservative traditions, including its downtown business interests. As mayor, she opposed rent control on vacant housing and some demands from the gay community, like domestic partner legislation. But she also pushed through a tough gun control ordinance, environmental regulations and pro-labor laws and hosted a wedding ceremony of lesbian friends in her backyard.All the while, she kept a strong hand on the rudder, emphasizing law and order and putting more cops on the streets but also drawing the line against police mayhem after the White Night riot and violent police sweep of the gay Castro district after the stunningly lenient verdict for Mr. White.“This city has to be managed,” she said. “If you don’t manage, it falls apart.”The Chinatown activist Rose Pak witnessed Ms. Feinstein’s hands-on approach one day when she was riding with her in the mayoral limousine. Spotting an older man collapsed on the sidewalk, Ms. Feinstein ordered her chauffeur to stop, jumped out, wiped foam from the stricken man’s lips and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him. People later commented that this incident proved she was not a cold fish.“But I didn’t see it that way,” Ms. Pak recalled. “I saw her as a doctor’s daughter and a doctor’s widow, doing the proper clinical thing.”Most important, Ms. Feinstein became a national face of AIDS compassion when President Ronald Reagan was ignoring the growing suffering and conservative activists like Patrick Buchanan were crowing that the disease was nature’s “awful retribution” on gay men. When the gay progressive supervisor Harry Britt, who often clashed with the mayor, brought Ms. Feinstein the city’s first AIDS proposal in 1982, she told him simply, “Fund everything.”Other cities dumped their AIDS patients on San Francisco, including a notorious incident in 1983 when hospital officials in Gainesville, Fla., put a dying man on a plane to the city, miles from his loved ones. San Francisco took care of the sick men, but Ms. Feinstein denounced the practice as “outrageous and inhumane.”“Dianne spent more time visiting AIDS patients in hospitals than I did,” Mr. Britt remembered. “She was a giver. She was a very compassionate person. I don’t want to say ‘queenly,’ because that sounds negative, but she was a good queen.”Led by Ms. Feinstein — and the city’s gay and lesbian activists and frontline medical workers — San Francisco wrapped the sick and dying men in its arms and finally became the city of its eponymous friar, St. Francis, who cared for the needy.San Francisco made Dianne Feinstein, but until the gunfire that exploded at City Hall, she had concluded that her political career as a city supervisor was over. After returning from a challenging trek through the Himalayas that month with her future husband, the investment banker Richard Blum, she recalled, “I was firmly convinced I was not electable as mayor.”Ms. Feinstein was widely perceived as too starchy, a goody-goody, the Margaret Dumont in a wacky city filled with Marx Brothers. She was raised to be a political animal; her paternal uncle Morris Goldman, a clothing manufacturer and Democratic Party wheeler-dealer, took her as a girl to “board of stupidvisors” meetings and pointed out how the flick of a city boss’s cigar could change the vote tally. But later, as a young civic reformer, when she visited a hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury district that had been trashed by a police raid or seedy porn theaters or the down-and-out Tenderloin neighborhood (where she posed as a prostitute in a wig), Ms. Feinstein came off as slightly ridiculous.Newly elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Ms. Feinstein addressed the hard-luck worshipers at Glide Memorial Church, lecturing them about the importance of good hygiene and hard work — and predictably got a tepid response from the congregation. “Dianne,” Glide’s minister, the Rev. Cecil Williams, told her later, “you don’t talk that way to these folks. If they had a place to get cleaned up, most of them would get cleaned up. If they could get a job, they’d get a job.”But Ms. Feinstein — a daughter of privilege, educated at the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and Stanford University — did her political homework. She was ready to lead when history came calling.One day in 1979, when Ms. Feinstein, then the interim mayor, was campaigning for election, she went door to door in the city’s rough and redeveloped Fillmore district. Suddenly she was approached by a man who pointed a silver pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. She froze in fear; the City Hall assassinations happened the year before. Out of the man’s gun shot a butane flame instead of a bullet. She quickly gathered herself and went on campaigning. She won the election, even though The San Francisco Chronicle and key political establishment figures supported her more conservative opponent.“She ran the city with an iron fist,” Mike Hennessey, a progressive who served as San Francisco’s sheriff for 32 years, told me. “Of all the mayors I’ve worked with, she was the best. That’s because she took responsibility for this city. San Francisco is a very hard city to run. It’s very politically fractious. It takes a lot of work to hold it together. And that’s what Feinstein did.”In her three decades in the U.S. Senate, to which she was elected in 1992 (four years after her last term as mayor), Ms. Feinstein turned in a more mixed record. Over the years, she gained wide respect, even across the political aisle, for her hard work and political wisdom. But her success at banning assault weapons was undone, and her legislative record is uneven at best.In 2017, as a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, I warned Ms. Feinstein not to run again the next year for the Senate, writing that she would then be 85 and too old for the rigors of the job. But she didn’t listen — and neither did California’s voters.When I think of Dianne Feinstein, I think of her as San Francisco’s mayor. She may not have been the leader many San Franciscans (including me) wanted, but she was the one we needed.David Talbot is the author of, among other books, “Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.” The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Dianne Feinstein: a life in pictures

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      Dianne Feinstein, left, California assembly speaker Willie Brown, center, and the Rev Cecil Williams of the Glide Memorial Church of San Francisco, hold hands during Dr Martin Luther King Jr march in downtown San Francisco, January 1986

      Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP More

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      Who Will Replace Dianne Feinstein in Her California Senate Seat?

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      The death of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, immediately turns the spotlight to an intense, ongoing three-way battle to replace her, fraught with racial, political and generational tensions over one of the most coveted positions in California and national politics.It also puts new pressure on Gov. Gavin Newsom, who will chose someone to fill her term through the end of 2024. Mr. Newsom, whose profile has risen in national Democratic politics in recent weeks as he has traveled the country on behalf of President Biden’s re-election campaign, had come under fire for announcing he would not pick any of the declared candidates in filling any vacancy, so as not to elevate them and give them an advantage in the Democratic primary race.Mr. Newsom had originally promised to pick a Black woman to fill the position if it opened up, and many Democrats thought he would turn to Representative Barbara Lee, a progressive. But Mr. Newsom said he would pick a caretaker senator instead. “I don’t want to get involved in the primary,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”Ms. Lee denounced Mr. Newsom for that decision, calling it insulting.The other leading Democratic candidates in the primary race for Ms. Feinstein’s seat are Representative Adam Schiff, a high-profile member of the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; Representative Katie Porter, a third-term California member of the House; and Ms. Lee.It remains to be seen if, after Ms. Feinstein’s death, any other candidates will jump into the race. However, Mr. Schiff, Ms. Lee and Ms. Porter are well-known figures in Democratic politics, and have for months been raising money and building support.It is unclear whom Mr. Newsom might pick to fill Ms. Feinstein’s seat for the remainder of her term. The names that have been discussed, since Ms. Feinstein said earlier this year that she would not run again, include Shirley Weber, the California secretary of state; Holly Mitchell, a Los Angeles county supervisor; and Angela Glover Blackwell, a civil rights lawyer in Oakland and the founder of PolicyLink, a research and advocacy nonprofit group.Mr. Newsom had originally made the pledge about a Black woman in response to the fact that there are no Black women serving in the Senate. The last one was Kamala Harris, a California Democrat who left the Senate to become Mr. Biden’s vice president.At that time, in January 2021, Mr. Newsom picked Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state, to replace her. Mr. Padilla became the first Latino from the state to serve in the Senate; he was elected last year to a full term. More

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      ‘Almost a troll of the legacy’: Reagan’s spirit looms over Republican debate

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      Tourists posed for photos beside the presidential seal, peered inside the cockpit, studied the nuclear football and gazed at a desk where a “Ronald Reagan” jacket slung over the chair, page of handwritten notes and jelly bean jar made it appear as if the 40th US president could saunter back at any moment.Air Force One is the star attraction at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. But on Wednesday it is competing for attention with a curving Starship Enterprise-style stage set featuring seven lecterns and microphones for the second Republican presidential primary debate.The Reagan library describes this as “the Super Bowl” of Republican debates, against the dramatic backdrop of the Boeing 707 that flew seven presidents and close to the granite gravesite where Reagan was buried in 2004, looking across a majestic valley towards the Pacific Ocean.“As a new field of Republicans make their case to be the next President, the legacy of Ronald Reagan looms larger than ever,” the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which sustains the library, said in an email statement that will be put to the test at 9pm ET. For there are some who argue that Reagan would no longer recognise a Republican party that now belongs to Donald Trump.“There are no more Reagan Republicans,” said Jason Johnson, a political analyst and professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore. “Having this debate at the Reagan Library is almost a troll of the legacy of actual Republicans in the party because they are no more. The last real Republicans in the party were probably Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. The rest of these people are frauds, clowns and sycophants.”Reagan and Donald Trump are the two best US presidents of the past 40 years, according to Republicans surveyed recently by the Pew Research Center (41% said Reagan, who held the office from 1981 to 1989, did the best job while 37% said Trump did). Neither man will be at the two-hour debate – frontrunner Trump is skipping it again – yet both will help to frame it.Several candidates have been straining to drape themselves in Reagan’s political finery. Former vice-president Mike Pence often talks of how he “joined the Reagan revolution and never looked back”, and took his oath with his hand on the Reagan family Bible. This week Pence received the endorsement of five senior Reagan administration officials who praised his stances on limited government, lower taxes, individual freedom, strong defence and abortion restrictions.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has fondly recalled Reagan’s “optimistic, positive revolution” while also approvingly recalling his decision to fire more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who went on strike in 1981: “He said, you strike, you’re fired.” Scott’s campaign has promoted a quotation from Senator Mike Rounds: “Tim Scott is the closest to Ronald Reagan that you’re going to see.”Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has asserted that it is this generation’s “time for choosing”, a nod to Reagan’s 1964 speech that made him a breakout conservative leader and paved the way for his election as governor of California. In the first debate, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy called himself “the only candidate in this race, young or old, black or white, to bring all of those voters along to deliver a Reagan 1980 revolution”.Even Trump has recently begun referencing Reagan as he seeks to navigate the electorally awkward territory of abortion restrictions after the fall of Roe v Wade, stating that “like President Ronald Reagan before me, I support the three exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother”.The Reagan Library and Museum, unabashedly laudatory with little discussion of the former president’s record on race relations or Aids, leaves no doubt as to his status as a political touchstone. It chronicles his rise from small-town Illinois (“Almost everybody knew one another”) to General Electric to Hollywood, where his role as football player George Gipp in the film Knute Rockne, All American earned him the nickname “the Gipper” – and the myth-making was under way.A bumper sticker that says “Win it for the Gipper” features in a display on the 1980 presidential election, as does a campaign poster with the pre-Trump slogan: “Let’s make America great again.” The Reagan revolution was assured when he beat Jimmy Carter by 10 percentage points in the popular vote and took 44 of the 50 states – unthinkable in today’s polarised politics.Visitors see a replica of Reagan’s Oval Office, a display of first lady Nancy Reagan’s fashion and a paean to the trickle-down economics now rejected by Joe Biden as a failed economic philosophy, accompanied by the celebrated Morning in America campaign ad and a piano version of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA – now familiar as Trump’s walk-on song at rallies.There is a gallery devoted to Reagan’s “peace through strength” approach to the cold war and “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, including a replica of the Berlin Wall and statues of Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Among his quotations: “We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted.”Jonathan Alter, an author of presidential biographies, said: “Unlike Trump, where it’s all about him, where it’s a cult of personality, with Reagan it was heavily ideological. It was all about trying to restore limited government with a strongly anti-communist foreign policy. So it was cut spending, cut taxes, increase defence. That was their agenda and that became the animating idea of the Republican party.”After he left the presidency, Reagan told the Republican national convention: “Whatever else history may say about me … I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts.”There has, many would argue, been a significant shift in tone in the Republican party since then. At last month’s first Republican debate in Milwaukee, Pence insisted: “We’re not looking for a new national identity. The American people are the most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic, hard-working people the world has ever known.”Ramaswamy retorted: “It is not morning in America. We live in a dark moment. And we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold, cultural civil war.”This once unthinkable repudiation of Reagan implied that the 40th president’s “shining city on a hill” has given way to the 45th president’s “American carnage”. Bill Kristol, a founding director of the Defending Democracy Together political group and former Reagan administration official, said: “I talked with someone 10 years ago. He was a prominent person who said, ‘I wonder if the mood of America is changing.’ I said something conventional about Reagan Republicans.”Kristol went on: “He said, ‘I don’t think that stuff would work any more. The country’s getting more and more pessimistic.’ I said, ‘Well, the voters still want to have hope and an upbeat message.’ He said, ‘I’m not so sure about that.’ Trump, in the way he’s a good demagogue, saw that. You wouldn’t be penalised for being down. Quite the opposite.”Perhaps the area in which Reaganism is closest to being nothing more than a museum piece is foreign policy. Trump has embraced the old foe, Russia, and called Vladimir Putin a “genius”. He has dragged the party towards “America first” isolationism and anti-interventionism. Ramaswamy has vowed to cut off financial support to Ukraine in its war against Russia.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said: “Reagan believed we were an example for the rest of the world and charged out to help spread freedom around the rest of the world. The fact that the Republican party has become pro-Putin under Trump – Ronnie just wouldn’t understand it. It goes against everything he believes.”Reagan signed a law granting legal status to nearly 3 million immigrants. Walsh added: “This is very much a-build-a-wall-around-America, keep-everybody-out kind of Republican party. Reagan had a lot of flaws … [but] we were the city on the hill and we welcome all who want to come here.”David Prosperi, an assistant press secretary to Reagan, said: “When Ronald Reagan was running for president he said, ‘I didn’t leave the Democratic party. The Democratic party left me.’ I think today he might just say, ‘This Republican party has left me’.”But there is a school of thought that the former film star Reagan and former TV star Trump have more in common than their devotees would like to admit.Reagan’s critics say he cut taxes for the rich and sowed distrust in government. He spun exaggerated yarns about a “Chicago welfare queen” and a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-bone steak”. In a call with President Richard Nixon he referred to African UN delegates as “monkeys”.Reagan launched his 1980 election campaign with a speech lauding “states’ rights” near the site of the notorious Mississippi Burning murders of three civil rights workers – seen by many as a nod to southern states that resented the federal government enforcing civil rights. Once in office, Reagan opposed affirmative action and busing programmes.Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, said: “While it’s right to be alarmed by the way in which Trump has moved things into an unprecedented realm, we’d be mistaken to believe this is somehow entirely brand new. I know that the ‘never Trump’ crowd in the Republican party have created this kind of fictitious version of Reagan that was wholly different from Trump. But there are elements of this here.”Reagan arguably tapped into the same populist forces that Trump would later fully unleash. Kruse added: “Reagan, before the presidency, ran for governor of California, where he was very much seen as a backlash candidate, the voice of white resentment. As president, it was much more of a dog whistle approach. Trump is loudly screaming what Reagan said softly with a smile.” More

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      ‘We’re not just clowns and jesters’: San Francisco’s first drag laureate on surviving a dangerous time

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      When D’Arcy Drollinger, a veteran of the San Francisco drag community, was named the city’s first drag laureate this year, she quickly realized she was walking right into the eye of a storm.The 54-year-old performer, who said she was initially caught off guard by the nomination, has found herself at the forefront of a long-brewing culture war. With anti-trans legislation spreading across the US and bills banning drag performance being passed in various states, her first few months in the role have been a whirlwind.“It came in at full force, and I was as ready for it as I could be,” said Drollinger, who uses “she” pronouns when in drag and “he” in daily life. “I feel very lucky to be able to be in that spotlight and be an ambassador and a beacon for all of the places that are not like San Francisco – where people don’t have the same kind of enthusiasm and support from not only audiences but city officials.”Drollinger will receive a $55,000 stipend in her 18-month role as the city’s inaugural drag laureate, described in the job listing as someone who will “embody San Francisco’s historic, diverse and inclusive drag culture, elevating the entire community on the national and international stage”. Thus far, her duties have included participating in drag events, throwing out the first pitch at a Giants game, and liaising with politicians on how to preserve LGBTQ+ culture and history.The position has brought official recognition to the art form Drollinger has dedicated her life to – one she says is often dismissed as “frivolous” or just entertainment at a time when it has become more political than ever.“Drag is an art form, but it is also a lens through which you can view all other art forms,” she said. “Drag is everything over the top – it’s larger than life. And when you look at something in a magnifying glass or under a microscope, you see things in very different ways. So I think the power of drag is being able to look at things with a different perspective.”The schedule of a drag laureate can be grueling, said Drollinger, speaking on a video call from her “drag room”, a walk-in closet of sorts filled with wigs, outfits and heels. She now spends almost every day in drag, doing three or more events, speaking with news outlets, and performing. But a few months in, she has finally been able to catch her breath.“It all happened so suddenly, but now that it has had time to sink in, I have more clarity about what I want to do” in the remainder of her 18-month tenure, she said. “With this role being brand new, there isn’t a path – I’ve got to pave it myself. I have to decide what this position could and should be in the future.”And not just for San Francisco. West Hollywood also appointed its first drag laureate in June, and other cities could be next. San Francisco’s decision to appoint a drag laureate came in part as a response to the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ crimes and legislation in recent years, said the mayor, London Breed. “While drag culture is under attack in other parts of the country, in San Francisco we embrace and elevate the amazing drag performers,” she said.The list of such attacks is seemingly endless. Drag story hours, in which drag queens read to children, have been targeted in a number of protests by white supremacists in recent years – including in the Bay Area in 2022. The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ pieces of legislation in the US, including more than a dozen specifically targeting drag performers. Texas successfully passed a ban on drag performing in June, but the law was blocked temporarily before going into effect this week.Drollinger said in this cultural environment, it has “never been more dangerous to be a drag performer”. She feels her role has gone beyond a laureate – typically an artist or a figure simply recognized for significant contributions to a field – to a spokesperson for and a defender of LGBTQ+ rights at a dire crossroads. And that responsibility that can be daunting at times.“The problem is I just want to entertain people – I don’t want to spend all my time fighting,” she said. “But the reality is if more cities appointed drag laureates and recognized what we do – not only politically and economically but for the community on a social level – I think the less power these proposed laws could have.”Drollinger, who was born in San Francisco, said her interest in drag began at age four, when – inspired by Mary Poppins – she asked her mother to buy her a pair of heels and an umbrella. She started drag performances in adulthood in 2004 after she moved to New York City, and opened her own nightclub with friends in 2015, after moving back to San Francisco.That nightclub, called Oasis, has become “much more than a venue”, she said – it is a center for queer community in San Francisco. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she launched Meals on Heels, where performers brought food, cocktails and socially distant lip-synching performances to home-bound customers. She said the drag laureate position provided official recognition to the foundational work she and many before her had done for the city.“The drag community so often are the ones taking care of our community,” she said. “We are not only the clowns and the jesters; we are the political voice. We’re here to entertain, but also to support – and that’s why I think that drag is very important.”Drollinger said to that end, she was looking forward to working with the city on the best ways to preserve and celebrate queer history, and to honor the people who had come before her. San Francisco was the site of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot – a historic act of resistance led by the transgender community that predated the Stonewall riots.She said over her decades-long career, she had never seen drag as politicized as today. In her childhood, she remembers tourists from outside the Bay Area driving to see drag shows in the North Beach area of San Francisco, or men wearing drag on television and in films like Some Like it Hot. Now, she feels the need to hire more security and use metal detectors at her nightclub.“Racism and prejudice has always existed in our culture, but after Trump and others hijacked the Republican party, it has opened the floodgates for people who were already feeling this way to be very vocal about it,” she said. “It’s not about being anti-drag, it’s about being anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-community.”She said she was working hard to make concrete changes – to protest, to speak out, and to develop programs with the city to fight anti-LGBTQ+ hate. But her biggest weapon, she said, was her sparkle.“If we just sit here and watch, we feel helpless,” she said. “We ask ourselves: what can we do? But the truth is, if we can live more authentically every day of our lives, things will change. And by authentic, I mean more fabulous – because that is what we all want. If we can be that free and that fabulous every day, we inspire everybody around us.“People might not realize it, but deep down everybody wants to be the most fabulous they can be in this life – and if everyone is just a little more fabulous, there’s that much less room for anger and hate and hostility and violence. And little by little we can create social change around us. I do believe that is possible.” More

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      in Elections

      Restaurants and Unions Agree to Raise Pay to $20 an Hour in California

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      The deal will avoid a ballot fight over a law passed last year that could have resulted in higher pay and other changes opposed by restaurant companies and franchisees.Labor groups and fast-food companies in California reached an agreement over the weekend that will pave the way for workers in the industry to receive a minimum wage of $20 per hour.The deal, which will result in changes to Assembly Bill 1228, was announced by the Service Employees International Union on Monday, and will mean an increase to the minimum wage for California fast-food workers by April. In exchange, labor groups and their allies in the Legislature will agree to the fast-food industry’s demands to remove a provision from the bill that could have made restaurant companies liable for workplace violations committed by their franchisees.The agreement is contingent on the withdrawal of a referendum proposal by restaurant companies in California that would have challenged the proposed legislation in the 2024 ballot. Businesses, labor groups and others have often used ballot measures in California to block legislation or advance their causes. The proposed legislation would also create a council for overseeing future increases to the minimum wage and enact workplace regulations.“With these important changes, A.B. 1228 clears the path for us to start making much-needed improvements to the policies that affect our workplaces and the lives of more than half a million fast-food workers in our state,” Ingrid Vilorio, a fast-food worker and union member, said in a statement released by the S.E.I.U.Sean Kennedy, executive vice president of public affairs at the National Restaurant Association, said the deal also benefited restaurants. “This agreement protects local restaurant owners from significant threats that would have made it difficult to continue to operate in California,” he said. “It provides a more predictable and stable future for restaurants, workers and consumers.”Last year, the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 257, which would have created a council with the authority to raise the minimum wage to $22 per hour for restaurant workers. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it on Labor Day last year.But the bill met fierce opposition from business interests and restaurant companies, and a petition received enough signatures to put a measure on the November 2024 ballot to stop the law from going into effect.Other business groups in California have successfully used that tactic to change or reverse legislation they opposed.In 2020, ride-sharing and delivery companies like Uber and Instacart campaigned for and received an exemption from a key provision of Assembly Bill 5, which was signed by Mr. Newsom and would have made it much harder for the companies to classify drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.Those companies collected enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot as Proposition 22, which passed in November 2020. More than $200 million was spent on that measure, making it the costliest ballot initiative in the state at the time.And in February, oil companies received enough signatures for a measure that aims to block legislation banning new drilling projects near homes and schools. That initiative will be on the 2024 ballot.In response to calls from advocacy groups who have said the referendum process unfairly benefits wealthy special-interest groups, and in an effort to demystify a system that many Californians say is confusing, Mr. Newsom signed legislation on Sept. 8 that aims to simplify the referendum process. More

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      in US Politics

      Gavin Newsom says Ron DeSantis is ‘fundamentally authoritarian’

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      Ron DeSantis is “fundamentally authoritarian”, but Donald Trump’s quest for “vengeance” poses an even greater threat to democracy, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom said on Sunday.Newsom took aim at the leading two candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination during a hard-hitting and wide-ranging interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, the final episode with its long-time host Chuck Todd.“I worry about democracy,” he said. “I worry about the fetishness for autocracy that we’re seeing not just from Trump, but around the world, and notably across this country.“I’ve made the point about DeSantis that I think he’s functionally authoritarian. I’m worried more, in many respects, about Trumpism, which transcends well beyond his term and time in tenure.”Newsom added: “The vengeance in Donald Trump’s heart right now is more of a threat.”The governor, seen as a rising star in the Democratic party and a likely future presidential candidate, was referring to the former president’s often-voiced promises to gain “revenge” – if he wins back the White House – over political rivals he blames for the multiple criminal indictments against him.If Trump does win the 2024 general election, Newsom said, he would work with his administration for the sake of California residents, as he said he did during the Covid-19 pandemic.“At the end of the day, these are the cards that are dealt. And I want to do the best for the people that I represent, 40 million Americans that happen to live in California,” he told Todd, who is standing down as host of Meet the Press after almost a decade.“Many support him. I’m not going to oppose someone just to oppose them – I don’t come into a relationship with closed fists, but an open hand. I call balls and strikes, and few people were more aggressive at calling balls and strikes against Donald Trump. I called California the most un-Trump state in America, and I hold to that.”Newsom saved his harshest criticism, however, for DeSantis, the rightwing Republican governor of Florida, with whom he has frequently clashed. He disagreed with DeSantis’s strategy of lifting lockdowns and banning mask mandates, and attacked the Florida leader’s “partisanship” – most recently on display when he snubbed Joe Biden’s visit to the state in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia.“I don’t like the partisanship. And I thought it was demonstrably displayed by what I thought was a very weak exercise by governor DeSantis,” Newsom said regarding the Floridian’s snub of the president.Newsom and DeSantis have agreed to a televised debate on Fox TV this fall. An impasse over logistics might soon clear, Newsom said.The California governor said he was fine with the rightwing Fox personality Sean Hannity as moderator, making it effectively a “two-on-one” debate in Newsom’s words. But Newsom said he was still not happy with the proposed venue and sizable public audience.“They wanted thousands of people and [to] make it a performance. I wasn’t interested in that. We were pretty clear on that. [But] we’re getting closer,” he said.Other subjects covered during the interview included who might run as the Democratic party’s candidate in the 2024 presidential election if Biden – who will be 81 on polling day – drops out.Newsom said he doesn’t expect that to happen, but if it does, the candidate will not be him.“Won’t happen,” he replied when Todd asked him if he would ever run against the vice-president, Kamala Harris, a former California senator with whom he said he has “a very good relationship”.“It’s the Biden-Harris administration. Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned about presidents and vice-presidents. We need to move past this notion that he’s not going to run. President Biden is going to run, and [I’m] looking forward to getting him re-elected,” Newsom said.Newsom was also questioned on the future of the veteran California senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, whose recent health issues have led to long absences from the chamber and prompted calls for her to stand down.He refused to be drawn on whether he would appoint a replacement, as he did when elevating Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, to the senate when Harris became Biden’s running mate in 2020.“Her staff is still extraordinarily active and we wish her only the best,” he said, insisting that Feinstein could still represent the state until next year.“Her term expires – she’s not running for re-election. So this time next year we’ll be in a very different place. I don’t want to make another appointment, and I don’t think the people of California want me to make another appointment.“That said, [if] we have to do it, we’ll do it.” More