Has Trump Derangement Syndrome Passed?

There is a short-term ICE detention facility in a commercial building on the west side of Glenwood Springs, near the Meadows shopping area. It has been there since 2004.

The Glenwood Springs Planning and Zoning Commission granted the permit in 2003 — to the General Services Administration, the federal government's real estate arm, which leases the space on ICE's behalf. Carbondale had rejected a similar facility earlier that same year.

The permit came with conditions. The federal government made representations about what it would and would not do in that building. One of those conditions was simple enough to check: nobody held longer than twelve hours.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by the city showed that condition has been violated. Between October 2022 and March 2026 there were three separate days when five or more people were held at once. During one wave of enforcement in late May, eight people were held past the twelve-hour limit.

Then the city found something else. Final certificates of occupancy were never issued for suites 110 and 210 — the two suites ICE has occupied since 2004. Twenty-two years in a building the city never signed off on.

In March, Congressman Joe Neguse drove to 100 Midland Avenue to conduct an oversight inspection. Public reporting had identified it as one of nine purported "secret" ICE holding facilities in Colorado. He knocked on the main doors. Nobody came. He called. Nobody answered. A sitting member of Congress stood outside a federal detention facility in his own district and could not get anyone to speak to him.

On April 28 the Planning and Zoning Commission held a public hearing and voted 5-1 to revoke the permit. About a hundred and sixty people showed up — enough to fill the room, the overflow room, and the hallway of City Hall.

The city notified the GSA. It notified ICE. It notified the property owner.

None of the three replied by the appeal deadline.

On July 24, the Glenwood Springs Fire Department responded to an EMS call at 100 Midland Avenue. That call is how the city confirmed the facility was still being used for detention — three months after the permit was revoked.

Yesterday, August 7, the City Council voted 6-1 to sue the landlord. Not ICE. Not the federal government. JG Housing Solutions LLC, a Florida limited liability company that owns the section of the building ICE occupies. The city is suing a private landlord in state court because suing the tenant is not realistically available to it.

City Attorney Karl Hanlon put the ceiling on it plainly: the federal government is not obliged to comply with local codes. The Supremacy Clause has said so since 1789. Any injunction would apply narrowly to the detention operation itself — ICE could keep the space as an office, which the zoning allows. What it could not do is hold people there.

Hold that sequence in your head, because it is the whole piece in miniature.

A local government followed its own process. It found a documented violation. It held a hearing. It voted. It notified every responsible party. It was ignored by all three. It learned the operation had continued because somebody called an ambulance. And its remaining option is to sue a Florida LLC.

That is what it looks like when the machinery stops answering.

Now the national numbers, because the argument people have about this facility is almost always an argument about a number, and almost nobody has the number right.

Ask which president deported the most people and you will get a confident answer from whoever you asked. They will be quoting a real statistic. It will probably be the wrong one for the question.

Here is why. The Department of Homeland Security counts two different things.

A removal is a formal court order expelling someone from inside the country. A return is someone turned away at the border before entering. Both are real. Both get called "deportations." They are not the same event, and the gap between them is where every immigration argument in America goes to die.

Start with removals — the formal ones, the ones that involve a courtroom.

Barack Obama removed more people than any president in American history. Roughly three million over two terms. Immigration advocates called him Deporter-in-Chief, and they were working from the same DHS numbers printed above.

Trump's first term came in around 1.2 million — under half of Obama's — on a platform promising the largest deportation program the country had ever seen.

Now switch metrics and watch the leaderboard rearrange itself.

Counting removals and returns together, Bill Clinton expelled about 12.3 million people, the most of any president. But 11.4 million of that 12.3 million — ninety-three percent — were returns at the border, not court-ordered removals. Under George W. Bush, 8.3 million of 10.3 million total deportations, eighty-one percent, were also returns.

That is the entire trick. A president with a busy border racks up an enormous number and a modest removal count. A president with a quiet border racks up the opposite.

Which brings us to the two most recent terms, where the numbers get actively slippery.

One more comparison, because it is the cleanest apples-to-apples available. Reuters reported that Trump deported roughly 37,660 people in his first month back in office. Biden's last full year averaged about 57,000 removals and returns a month.

The mass deportation program started slower than the administration it replaced.

And then there is the bill.

In 2024 a bipartisan border package would have delivered $19 billion in enforcement resources — agents, detention capacity, immigration judges to work through a court backlog that now stands at 3.7 million pending removal cases.

It failed after Trump opposed it.

Read those two facts together. The court backlog is the single biggest reason a removal takes years instead of months. The bill would have funded judges to shrink it. The politician who campaigns hardest on deportation killed the largest deportation-enforcement bill either party has produced this decade.

That is not a Democratic talking point. It is a vote count and a dollar figure.

Which is worth remembering in Glenwood Springs, where a facility that has never been able to hold anyone longer than twelve hours legally held eight people longer than twelve hours — because there was nowhere to move them and nobody to process them.

A president does not run the economy. Congress writes the budget. The Federal Reserve sets rates. Oil shocks arrive on their own schedule and don't check who won the last election.

Any honest comparison says that before it starts. So here are the rules, and they don't change halfway through.

Terms, not decades. The clock runs inauguration to inauguration. George W. Bush 2001–2009. Obama 2009–2017. Trump's first term 2017–2021. Biden 2021–2025. Trump's second term from 2025, which is partial, and gets labeled partial every time it shows up.

Who controlled Congress is disclosed. Trump and Biden each spent their first two years with their own party holding both chambers. Each lost the House at the midterm. That's stated, not buried.

Budget numbers carry a lag. A president's first fiscal year was budgeted by the guy before him. Where that matters, we say so.

Every figure names its source in the same sentence. Where sources disagree, we print the disagreement instead of quietly picking a winner. You just watched that happen with the deportation numbers, and it happens again below.

Here's that last rule in action, immediately.

The most cited academic work on this question is Alan Blinder and Mark Watson's 2016 paper in the American Economic Review. They found a large partisan gap in growth, and it held up statistically. They also concluded that a good chunk of it comes down to friendlier oil shocks, better productivity, and a calmer world — luck, in other words, more than policy.

That's the authors' own conclusion. It's printed here rather than left for someone else to find and wave around.

One more thing belongs in this section, because leaving it out would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Everything above assumes those institutions are working the way they're supposed to — that Congress writes budgets, that the Fed sets rates on the economics, that the Justice Department follows the law regardless of who runs it. That assumption is the foundation of every comparison in this piece.

It is also, right now, under documented attack. Not alleged. Documented — in court filings, in a Supreme Court opinion, in an award ceremony, and in the words of a justice Trump himself appointed.

That's chapter 7. Read the arithmetic first, then read what's happening to the machinery that produces it.

Blinder and Watson looked at sixteen complete postwar presidential terms. Across those sixty-four years, the economy grew at an average of 3.33 percent a year.

Split it by party and it isn't close.

A gap of 1.79 points sounds like rounding. Over four years it's the difference between an economy that grew about eighteen percent and one that grew about ten.

More recently: per person, real GDP grew 2.5 percent a year under Biden. That's the best of any term since Clinton's second. Under Trump's first term it was 1.3 percent. Both figures come out of BEA national accounts data.

For the term we're in now, CBO projected 2.2 percent growth for 2026 in its February outlook.

Jobs are the cleanest number in American economics. BLS publishes total nonfarm payroll employment every month. The only judgment call is where you start and stop the clock. Start at each inauguration. Stop at the next one. Done.

Two of those bars need their footnotes read out loud, because both parties have lied about them.

George W. Bush. Democrats have claimed eight million jobs were lost under Bush. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact both ran it against BLS and both got the same answer: a net gain of 1.09 million over eight years. The claim is false.

What's true is worse for the tax-cut argument. That gain works out to a 1 percent increase in employment, the weakest of any postwar administration. And the private sector alone lost 653,000 jobs across those eight years. Government hiring is the only reason the headline number is positive at all.

Trump's first term. Minus 2.67 million is real, it's BLS, and it includes the pandemic. Before COVID, job growth ran about 183,000 a month — decent, and slower than Obama's last three years. Anyone quoting the negative number without saying the word "pandemic" is doing to Trump exactly what Harry Reid did to Bush.

Unemployment tells it cleaner, because it's a rate instead of a count.

Where things stand right now: BLS put unemployment at 4.1 percent in July 2026, with payrolls down 23,000 for the month.

Fiscal discipline is the oldest Republican brand promise in American politics.

It's also the category with the least wiggle room, because the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget scores every law and executive action the moment it's enacted, using CBO's own numbers, and shows its work.

Trump approved $8.8 trillion in gross new borrowing over his first term, against $443 billion in deficit reduction. Net: $8.4 trillion. Biden approved $6.6 trillion in deficit-increasing actions against $1.9 trillion in reductions. Net: $4.7 trillion.

Pull the pandemic bills out of both and it's $4.8 trillion against $2.6 trillion.

The ratio survives every honest adjustment you can make to it.

Then there's the number neither party puts on a bumper sticker, and it's the most interesting one in this section. Seventy-seven percent of the debt Trump approved came through bipartisan legislation. For Biden, 71 percent came from unilateral executive action.

Read that twice. It cuts both ways, and it's supposed to.

Republicans didn't run the debt up in the dark. They ran it up with Democratic votes, on the record, in bills that passed both chambers. And the Democratic half of the ledger was mostly done by executive action, which is faster, less accountable, and easier for the next guy to erase.

Neither of those is a good look. Only one of them contradicts a forty-year brand.

Where it's headed, per CBO's February 2026 outlook: debt held by the public climbs from about $31 trillion to $56 trillion by 2036. That's a record 120 percent of GDP. Annual deficits pass $3 trillion. The 2025 reconciliation law adds $4.7 trillion over the window. Tariffs claw back about $3 trillion of it. The fiscal 2026 deficit runs near 5.8 percent of GDP against a stated Treasury target of about 3 percent.

Here's the category that doesn't go the way the rest of this goes. It's printed at full strength, because leaving it out would make everything above it worthless.

Measure the S&P 500 by average annual return from 1926 through 2023 and Democratic presidencies win big — 14.78 percent against 9.32 percent. That's a premium of five and a half points a year.

Measure the same index by median compound annual growth since 1957 and Republicans win — 10.2 percent against 9.4 percent.

Both measurements are legitimate. Averages get dragged up by a handful of enormous years, several of which happened to land under Democratic presidents. Medians throw exactly those years away, which is the point of a median and also its weakness.

Anyone who shows you one of these two charts and not the other is selling something. That includes this newspaper, which is why both are here.

The honest read: the market does fine under both parties. If your retirement account is what you care about, who's in the White House is close to noise.

There's a version of this argument that says Republicans haven't passed anything in fifteen years that helped anybody.

That version is false. Running it would be the one unforced error in an otherwise documented case, so both columns get printed. Republicans first, then Democrats, same standard for each: the law, the year, who led it, and the measured outcome. Not what anybody claimed at a podium. What happened.

The first one on that list is a valley story, and almost nobody here knows it.

A Republican senator from Colorado wrote the biggest public-lands funding bill in half a century. Gardner introduced it in March 2020 with Joe Manchin. It guarantees the Land and Water Conservation Fund its full $900 million every year, permanently, with no appropriation required — a fund authorized at that level since 1964 and funded at less than half of it most years since. It sends up to $1.9 billion a year at a maintenance backlog covering the Forest Service, the Park Service and the BLM. Trails. Campgrounds. Roads. Fire infrastructure.

If you've parked at a Forest Service trailhead in this county in the last five years, you've used it.

Now look at the whole list again, because the pattern is the actual finding.

Gardner needed Manchin. Grassley needed Hakeem Jeffries. Cornyn needed Chris Murphy. Capito needed Manchin. Bush needed a Democratic caucus that had been pushing for AIDS money for a decade.

Every significant Republican legislative win of the last fifteen years required Democratic votes to happen.

And on the Safer Communities Act, 193 House Republicans voted no. Fourteen voted yes. Fifteen Republican senators supported it. The rest of the caucus opposed a bill their own leadership had negotiated.

That's a harder finding than "they've done nothing." Unlike "they've done nothing," it's true.

There's a coda, and it isn't a happy one. PEPFAR — 26 million lives, the best thing the party has ever done — got frozen in 2025 when the second Trump administration paused foreign aid. Only about half its programs had restarted by February. Over the following reporting period, HIV testing, new diagnoses, treatment enrollment and prevention services all fell.

The party didn't just fail to build on its finest work. It interrupted it.

Now the other column, same standard.

Now hold the two lists next to each other, because that comparison is the actual finding of this chapter.

The Republican column is heavy on things that required Democratic votes. The Democratic column is heavy on things passed on party lines and therefore reversible the moment the majority flips — which is exactly what happened to the enhanced ACA subsidies when they were allowed to lapse.

Both parties have real accomplishments. Neither one's accomplishments are safe.

Chapter 1 said a president doesn't run the economy — that the Federal Reserve sets rates on the economics, not on the politics.

That is how it is supposed to work. Here is what is on the record about what's happening to it.

On April 15, 2026, Trump said he would fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell if Powell stayed on past the end of his term. It was not the first threat. He has promised to fire Powell repeatedly. His Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into renovations at the Fed building.

Powell's response was not the language of a career central banker. He called the investigation and the surrounding actions "pretexts" for the real objective: getting the Fed to cut interest rates.

Trump also moved to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook over mortgage-fraud allegations she denies. Cook sued. The Supreme Court let her keep her seat while the case proceeds. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the decision rested on narrow ground, because Trump had failed to give her any process to dispute the allegations against her. Trump and his allies signaled almost immediately that they intended to keep trying.

Then there is the sentence that ends the argument about whether any of this is normal.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh — appointed by Trump — said Trump's position "would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve."

Not a Democrat. Not a columnist. Not this newspaper. A Trump appointee on the Supreme Court, describing what the president was asking the court to let him do.

Republican Senator John Kennedy, who sits on the committee overseeing the Fed, put it plainly: he doesn't think any president has the right to remove the Federal Reserve chairman, and the Fed ought to be independent.

And on May 31, 2026, Powell accepted the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award — for protecting the independence of the central bank. He accepted it by saying he'd only done his job. What the public has every right to expect, he said, is that the Fed decides on its best economic analysis of what benefits the people it serves, without regard to the fortunes of any political party or politician.

Nobody gives a sitting central banker a courage award during a normal presidency.

Why this belongs in a piece about money, and not in a piece about politics: the Fed's rate decisions set the price of a mortgage in Basalt, a construction loan in Carbondale, a truck note in Glenwood. A central bank that cuts rates because a president demanded it rather than because the data called for it is a central bank that produces inflation later. Every economy that has tried it has learned the same lesson the same way.

That is not a partisan claim. It is the reason the institution was made independent in the first place, and it is why a Trump appointee used the word "shatter."

Everything above this line is arithmetic. What follows is a calendar.

Every entry is a dated public act: a televised statement, a released memo, a recorded vote, a government press release, a federal court filing. Nothing below is an accusation of a crime against anyone. Appearing in an investigative file is not a charge, and a number of prominent people named across these documents have not been tied to any wrongdoing.

What this chronology tracks is a series of official promises, and what happened to them.

That last entry is the live one, and it's worth reading closely, because it isn't an opinion column. It's a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

New Mexico's attorney general says that back in 2019, federal prosecutors asked the state to pause its own investigation into Epstein's Zorro Ranch and promised to share what they found when they were done. The state says that never happened. The complaint argues the department's conduct "actively harms victims and undermines the public interest," and quotes a 2021 finding by the Eleventh Circuit that the facts underneath the Epstein case were a "national disgrace."

The filing says the released files contain more than 13,000 references to that ranch and 5,000 to New Mexico.

The Justice Department's answer, on the record: the Transparency Act doesn't require and the protective orders in the Southern District of New York don't permit handing over victim-identifying information wholesale, and New Mexico hasn't offered a lawful basis for doing it. Protecting victim privacy, the department says, remains a top priority.

That defense is printed here in full because it's the department's actual position, and a chronology that leaves out the response is a press release.

The lawsuit landed while Blanche's nomination to be attorney general was sitting in front of the Senate.

One last number, and it is the one that reaches every household in this valley without anybody voting on it.

Last year the average American household paid about $1,100 in tariffs. That figure is from the Budget Lab at Yale, under current law. Over ten years the take is roughly $1.9 trillion. Congress never passed it. It showed up at the register.

It did not land evenly.

This is what a scorecard is for. Not to tell you how to vote — you'll figure that out with or without a chart — but to make the trade visible.

So here's the trade, plainly.

A household in this valley pays about $1,100 a year in tariffs nobody put to a vote. The fund created to compensate people who feel the government treated them unfairly runs to $1.8 billion. The debt approved across the last two full presidential terms pushes federal borrowing to a record share of the economy inside ten years, and every point of that shows up in the rate on a mortgage in Basalt, a construction loan in Carbondale, a truck note in Glenwood.

And the audit that would have settled what the President's own family owed will never be finished.

That's not a syndrome. That's a receipt.

You can read every document in this piece yourself. BLS publishes the jobs numbers every month. CBO publishes its outlook every February. The Justice Department put 3.5 million pages on its own website. New Mexico's complaint sits on a public docket. The one-page order is a hyperlink in a government press release.

None of it requires a diagnosis to read.

What it requires is about an hour, and a willingness to find out that a number you were sure about turns out to be wrong. Two of the numbers in this piece came back the opposite of what we expected when we started. Both are printed above.

That's the whole method. Read the document. Print what it says. Print it especially when it costs you the argument.

The trail funding came from a Republican. The job losses under Trump are real, and so is the pandemic that caused most of them. The market data splits right down the middle.

The debt doesn't split at all.

And a household in Carbondale paid about eleven hundred dollars last year, at the register, for a decision nobody ever put on a ballot.