“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on! It’s been a week of WTF moments.
Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?
President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.
We know someone who can sum this up nicely. This is how Hillary put it this morning.
Trump didn’t just pardon his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He’s now set them up for payments through a slush fund he created to reward his allies—out of your tax dollars. You could not make this up.
Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStackthis morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.
On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press,“There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”
There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.
Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup? There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.
Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”
Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.
In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.
“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.
“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”
My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.
Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.
He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.
He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.
He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.
He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.
He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.
He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.
Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.
With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.
But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.
The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.
Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.
An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.
The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.
There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”
Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”
It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country. It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.
1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.
This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”
On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”
Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.
Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.
The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.
The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”
The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.
At least three immigrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties at the San Antonio Immigration Court. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12.www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a…
Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?
The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.
Please use the link to read the details. The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.
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“The Eighth Amendment prohibits ‘cruel and unusual punishments,’ which the real Supreme Court has interpreted to forbid torture. Of course, the Trump administration does as it pleases.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The first text message I woke up to today put a lot into perspective. “ICE on S Claiborne in Holly Grove! Please relay… 3 HOURS AGO.” It was way uptown, so all I could do was just put the word out and hope. I have a copy of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in my desk drawer, which I had left on top after trying to tame the contents of my drawers.
Which among us these days would “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor?” It’s times like these that I remember the 6 in my family who did, and 7 if you count the stepfather of one of my grandfathers, George Washington. Then there is the rest of the family who fought in all the wars to keep us free and ensure that all men and women were free and had the right to vote.
It’s been interesting to share the awful experience of having your city invaded by your own country. It’s given me a chance to reconnect with high school friends in L.A. and Minneapolis. I know many people here who daily mutually pledge to these causes down here in New Orleans, and we didn’t become a part of the scene until the Louisiana Purchase.
It’s time to stand up for what we’re supposed to stand for.
This Op-Ed in the New York Timescaught my eye immediately after I tucked my pamphlet back in its rightful drawer. Lydia Polgreen, an Opinion Columnist, asked the same question that I had earlier and answered it succinctly. “This Week Has Revealed 3 Types of Americans.” I know where I stand, do you?
In Minnesota, I saw scenes that reminded me of the chaos and violence in civil wars I’ve covered in other countries. Heavily armed agents have rampaged through the streets, assaulting, tear-gassing and arbitrarily detaining people. They have fired on civilians at close range, killing two of them.
If this is a war, it is one-sided: The forces Trump has unleashed face not military opponents to their authority but ordinary people equipped with cellphones and whistles. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has activated the National Guard under his command, it’s true. But so far, they have been deployed to do little more than deliver coffee, hot cocoa and doughnuts to Minnesotans who have taken to the streets. There hasn’t been the kind of state and federal standoff that would constitute a classic civil war, though Walz has worried such a confrontation could soon be in the offing.
Yet the clash in Minneapolis has revealed a cleavage over the meaning of citizenship and constitutional rights perhaps as profound as the one that split the nation in 1861. The fight, now as it was then, is over that simple question: What kind of America are we?
There were the bystanders and accommodationists. On the day federal officers gunned down Alex Pretti, a nurse who cared for critically ill veterans, they were on full display. Dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns, some of the country’s richest men and women streamed into the White House for a special private screening of a hagiographic documentary about Melania Trump, the first lady.
Along with the chief executives of Apple and Amazon — the latter company had paid the first lady’s production company $40 million for the rights to the film — grandees and celebrities filled out the guest list. Beneath a glittering chandelier, gloved waiters served popcorn in glossy, black-and-white commemorative buckets. As if to underscore the transformation of the people’s house into a Trumpian Versailles, guests were sent home with French cookies emblazoned with the first lady’s name.
Then there were the aggressors. Not content to be largely silent supplicants, these Americans actively supported what had happened. Top administration figures like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem rushed to paint Pretti as a domestic terrorist bent on slaughtering officers of the law. Never mind that he was a former boy scout and choir boy with no criminal record, his legally owned gun safely holstered. Perhaps most odiously, the conservative media personality Megyn Kelly declared that Pretti had only himself to blame for his death.
But arrayed against these powerful figures were the resisters, embodied by the two Americans gunned down in Minneapolis this month: Renee Good, a poet and a mother who had just dropped her son off at school, shot through the head by an ICE agent whom, it was baselessly claimed, she sought to run down with her car; and Pretti, who bravely placed himself between federal agents and a woman they shoved to the ground, paying for this valor with his life.
You may read more stories about these resisters at the gift link. And then, there are the journalists covering the story. This is from CNN. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were taken into custody after a Minnesota church protest. My great-granddaddy was a Methodist Circuit rider back in Kansas and back in the day, and a fierce abolitionist. People are just oozing traditional American values here, while the Trump Regime just ignores all those years of fighting, standing, dying, and making history. Remember the Presbyterian minister in Chicago? They certainly didn’t care about his right to peacefully protest. What about the rights of journalists to report a story?
Two independent journalists, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, have been arrested in connection with a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Lemon and Fort were live-streaming as dozens of anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters rushed into Cities Church on January 18, interrupting a church service and leading to tense confrontations.
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday announced said four people total had been arrested “in connection with the coordinated attack” at the church.
The other two individuals Bondi named were Trahern Jeen Crew and Jamael Lydell Lundy.
Court records related to the arrests were not immediately available. Lemon, a former CNN anchor who now hosts his own show on YouTube and other platforms, is expected to appear in federal court in Los Angeles on Friday.
Lemon was in L.A. to cover the Grammy Awards and was arrested after 11 p.m. local time in a hotel lobby in Beverly Hills.
“Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” Lemon’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement Friday morning. “The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.”
“Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case,” Lowell added. “This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand. Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.”
Lemon has repeatedly said he was present at the demonstration as a journalist, not as an activist. In a video of the episode that he posted to YouTube, Lemon said, “I’m just here photographing, I’m not part of the group… I’m a journalist.”
Fort made the same points in a Facebook Live stream when federal agents arrived at her home early Friday morning.
“This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media,” Fort said before she surrendered to agents.
“We are supposed to have our constitutional right of the freedom to film, to be a member of the press,” she said. “I don’t feel like I have my First Amendment right as a member of the press because now federal agents are at my door arresting me for filming the church protest a few weeks ago.”
We are burying our neighbors. Keith Porter Jr. Renee Good. Alex Pretti. Thirty-two more in custody last year alone.Six killed so far this year. They were not statistics. They were us. They were America. The killing MUST stop. Stop funding the killers. #ICEoffOurStreets
Our fat Orange Caligula and his cronies sure want him to be king. I just don’t understand how anyone who knows our history could possibly find these events anything but outrageous breaches of our Constitutional democracy. But catch this Trump hatement today. This is reported by NBC News‘ Pillar Melendez. “Trump calls Alex Pretti an ‘insurrectionist’ and ‘agitator’ after new video of ICU nurse emerges. The president’s rebuke of the slain ICU nurse came after a video emerged of a confrontation between Pretti and federal agents days before he was fatally shot in Minneapolis.” The orange idiot has to be the center of attention, no matter how Bond villain evil he sounds.
Donald Trump on Friday called Alex Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist,” marking an increase in the intensity of his rhetoric toward the ICU nurse fatally shot by federal agents after the president recently said he wanted to “de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that Pretti’s “stock has gone way down with the just released video of him screaming and spitting in the face of a very calm and under control ICE Officer, and then crazily kicking in a new and very expensive government vehicle, so hard and violent, in fact, that the taillight broke off in pieces.’
NBC News previously reported on the video, shared online this week, that appeared to show Pretti in an altercation with agents just days before he was fatally shot. In the video taken on Jan. 13, Pretti is seen yelling at federal immigration agents and kicking the back of a vehicle used by agents, breaking a taillight. It is not clear what happened before the interaction.
“It was quite a display of abuse and anger, for all to see, crazed and out of control. The ICE Officer was calm and cool, not an easy thing to be under those circumstances! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump said in the Friday post.
The Department of Justice has opened a federal civil rights probe into Pretti’s death, Deputy AG Todd Blanche said in a Friday press conference. He added that he does not know where Pretti’s phone is or the gun that he had on him before his death.
“We’re looking at everything that would shed light on what happened that day and in the days and weeks leading up to what happened,” Blanche said.
David Rothkopf, writing for The Daily Beast, has this characterization of Trump and his hatred of Free Speech. “There Can Be No More Doubt. Trump Wants to Kill Free Speech. JEFFERSON WEEPS. Don Lemon is the most high-profile reporter being targeted. Trump wants to target all of us.”
Donald Trump is seeking to execute the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the same way that his thugs gunned down Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good.
The arrest of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for doing their jobs as journalists and covering a public protest at a church in Minneapolis is a violent assault on freedom of the press in the United States of America, one of the most egregious we have ever seen from a U.S. government.
Not one but two judges rejected prior efforts by the—misnamed—U.S. Department of Justice to indict Lemon and Fort for their presence at the church protest. But undaunted, Attorney General Pam Bondi proceeded to personally direct the arrest of Lemon in Los Angeles late on Thursday night, thus reminding us that she more than any other member of the Trump cabinet deserves to be impeached—no small distinction in a group that includes deserving candidates for being fired and convicted by the Senate like Kristi Noem, RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth.
Lemon’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, wrote in a statement, “Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable” and he characterized the arrest as an “unprecedented attack” on a free press.
If anything, Lowell understates the dangers associated with Lemon’s arrest. Seeking to prosecute him represents not one but three separate attacks on freedoms so fundamental that were among the first guaranteed by our Constitution.
The latest Trump-appointed Fed Chair is like a read-it-and-weep announcement. I’m wondering what this will do to financial markets worldwide. This is from CNBC. “Trump nominates Kevin Warsh for Federal Reserve chair to succeed Jerome Powell.” Jeff Cox has the lede.
The decision culminates a process that officially began last summer but started much earlier than that, with Trump launching a fusillade of criticism against the Powell-led Fed almost since Powell took the job in 2018.
“I have known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best,” Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the selection.
The pick of Warsh, 55, likely won’t ripple markets because of his past Fed experience and Wall Street’s view that he wouldn’t always do Trump’s bidding.
“He has the respect and credibility of the financial markets,” said David Bahnsen, chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“There was no person who was going to get this job who wasn’t going to be cutting rates in the short term. However, I believe longer term he will be a credible candidate,” added Bahnsen.
Stock market futures nevertheless were slightly negative Friday morning, though off their lows since Warsh’s appointment became clear.
Warsh now faces Senate confirmation. If approved, he will take over the position in May, when Powell’s term expires. Warsh will fill the Board of Governors position currently held by Governor Stephen Miran, whose term expires Saturday. Miran can continue to serve until a replacement is named.
(Sigh). And now, the movie with the worst buzz ever!!! This is from Mother Jones. “Those Brutal ‘Melania’ Documentary Reviews Have Vanished from Letterboxd. Meanwhile, the First Lady used a Fox News appearance calling for ‘unity’ to shill the film.” I don’t think at my advanced age I’m going to start getting into porn, frankly.
Yesterday I published a storyabout what was quickly becoming a surprising site of capital R Resistance: the Letterboxd review page for the $75 million documentary film, Melania.
Comments were profane, fun, silly, unprintable. I included some of my favorites. The point I was making was this: Even before the movie’s release this Friday, it has become a lightning rod for anger, not least because Melania Trump’s oligarchic private premiere gala at the White House came the same day Alex Pretti was shot dead in the streets of Minneapolis amid her husband’s disastrous siege of the city. A real let-them-eat-cake moment.
But as my colleague Arianna Coghill went to promote the story today on our social media channels, she discovered the reviews have been wiped from the site entirely.
Sad.
So I sent an email to the Letterboxd press team asking why. What terms were violated? When did that happen? Even though the reviews appeared before the official release of the film, how is Letterboxd to know reviewers hadn’t seen the film itself?
They haven’t gotten back to me, and I’ll share their response when they do.
Update, Tuesday, January 27, 5:45 p.m.: Letterboxd just got back to me (they are based in New Zealand), attributing the erasure to an innocuous, automated back-end update:
This was an automatic update, caused by a previously incorrect premiere date. Letterboxd pulls through film data from TMDB, a user editable database for movies. The official premiere date was corrected on TMDB, automatically updated on the film’s main page on Letterboxd, thus preventing all reviews from appearing on the film page until its premiere. This happens from time to time on film pages through the automated sync, with no manual intervention required from the Letterboxd team.
So there you have it. Friday’s official release of the Amazon-MGM doc will provide would-be reviewers a fresh opportunity to contribute to Letterboxd’s thriving message boards.
Mo. Basuony at Filmogaz has this headline: “melania movie opens after Kennedy Center premiere as reviews turn combative.”
The melania movie reached theaters Friday, Jan. 30, 2026, after a Washington, D.C. premiere that blended red-carpet spectacle with unusually loud online blowback. The project — marketed as both a film and a companion series — has become a test case for how politics, celebrity, and platform-scale promotion can reshape a documentary rollout in real time.
The release centers on Melania Trump and the final weeks leading up to her return to the White House, with Brett Ratner directing and Melania serving as a producer with significant creative input. The premiere drew a mixed roster of political figures and pop culture guests, including Nicki Minaj, while early reactions focused less on what’s on screen and more on money, optics, and the film’s unusually aggressive marketing push.
Thursday night’s invite-only event took place at the Kennedy Center, though invitations and branding around the premiere used the phrase “Trump-Kennedy Center,” prompting immediate debate over naming and institutional politics. The red-carpet photos and guest lists quickly became part of the story, not just a prelude to the story.
Nicki Minaj’s appearance added to the swirl: her presence at a politically charged premiere turned the event into a crossover moment that traveled far beyond film pages and into fandom and campaign-world timelines. The result was a premiere that functioned as a media event first and a film debut second.
The money and the rollout plan
The financial contours are now inseparable from public perception. The film’s backing has been described as a rights/licensing deal near $40 million plus a marketing push widely pegged around $35 million, often summarized as a $75 million total outlay — a figure the filmmakers and team have pushed back on in parts, arguing the production scope is larger than a typical standalone documentary.
So, it’s just a usual day of grifting and pummeling Constitutional law. And how’s your day going?
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“Déjà vu all over again and again and again…” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I had a difficult time sleeping last night and had to rely on all the furry creatures in the house to help. The furnace just couldn’t handle it. Very old houses in Tropical Zones are not cut out for weather in the 20-degree Fahrenheit range. It’s noon, 36, and lots of sun. I’m always thankful to my sister and daughters for sending their ski coats and thick sweaters my way when this happens. We missed the snow, unlike last year, but I still had to do the usual New Orleans thing of wrapping the outdoor faucets and leaving a few indoor faucets dripping overnight. Fortunately, no pipe breakages!
And of course, the cold, dark hand of winter isn’t the only systemic blast over us. The headlines are still about the nightmare in Minnesota, where ICE is pulling out all the stops. Even the Wall Street Journal and the NRA have had it with them. The NRA’s rationale was explored in USA Today. “Gun rights groups slam feds’ comments after Minneapolis shooting. “I don’t know of any peaceful protesters that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.”
Several prominent Second Amendment rights groups have blasted federal officials for suggesting it’s dangerous – and possibly an indication of mal intent – for lawful gun owners to protest while in possession of their legally obtained firearms.
The controversy came after a Border Patrol agent on Jan. 24 shot and killed Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and registered Veterans Affairs nurse, in Minneapolis. Federal officials said Pretti had a gun and intended to “kill law enforcement.” But videos and a witness account in federal court show Pretti holding a phone, not brandishing a firearm.
Hours after the fatal shooting, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli in Southern California took to X and said, “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!” Other members of the Trump administration argued that peaceful protesters don’t show up with guns.
Several prominent gun rights groups took issue with Essayli’s statement, including the National Rifle Association.
“This sentiment from the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California is dangerous and wrong,” the NRA said on X. “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
Gun Owners for America said in a statement that its leaders “condemn the untoward comments” by Essayli.
Here’s the Wall Street Journal take. “Videos Contradict U.S. Account of Minneapolis Shooting by Federal Agents. See how immigration officers escalated a fatal confrontation Saturday..” Trump’s regime has morphed beyond the reaches of what used to be Republican Conservatism, and a lot of them now can finally smell the fascism.
Federal agents claimed Alex Pretti, 37, forced their hand, alleging he “violently resisted” disarmament until the officers fired “defensive shots.”
Bystander footage appears to tell a different story. A frame-by-frame review by The Wall Street Journal shows a federal officer pulling a handgun away from Pretti. Less than a second later, an agent fires several rounds. Pretti died at the scene.
“Where is the gun?” agents shouted in the chaotic aftermath.
Pretti, an intensive-care nurse, had been on a Minneapolis street Saturday morning and was filming Border Patrol agents. Videos appear to show what happened next.
Since the fatal shooting of Renee Good, the friction between Minneapolis residents and the federal agents patrolling their streets has intensified.
Massive anti-ICE protests have mobilized thousands, while a more granular resistance has taken hold in the city’s neighborhoods through ICE monitoring groups.
On Nicollet Avenue around 9 a.m. local time on Saturday, locals blew warning whistles and filmed masked federal agents walking through Minneapolis’s Whittier neighborhood.
Bystander footage shows Pretti standing in the street where he appears to film with his cellphone while other people approach the agents.
Seconds later, Pretti approaches the group, shouting, “Hey!” and continuing to film.
As Pretti and the two other civilians walk away, one of the agents follows them.
That agent then shoved someone who appeared to be with Pretti.
Pretti immediately puts himself between the fallen person and the officer, who appears to spray a nonlethal chemical agent on all three of them.
As a struggle ensues, agents pull Pretti from the others; at least five masked DHS agents surround him and force him to the ground.
Bystander footage shows one agent drawing his firearm and pointing it at Pretti.
Around the same time, a different video verified by the Journal shows Pretti pinned to the ground and agents appear to discover a firearm on him.
In a statement, DHS said, “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted.”
Less than a second later, one of the agents fires his weapon toward Pretti—the first of at least 10 shots within 5 seconds.
Each of these statements is followed by camera footage of the event. It’s pretty clear that the story told by Noem and other ICE representatives does not reflect the truth of the situation. After the Congress failed to defund ICE, there was widespread uproar from various quarters. AXIOS has the general overview of what’s going on in Congress right now. Will the Senate defund ICE? “DHS and ICE are under siege by Congress like never before.” Andrew Sollender has the lede.
The Department of Homeland Security is coming under unprecedented scrutiny from Congress in the wake of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, with Democratic attacks more strident and Republican defenses more muted than ever before.
Why it matters: The growing tension could result in a government shutdown, politically charged hearings and even an impeachment vote.
More and more Democrats are signing onto Rep. Robin Kelly’s (D-Ill.) articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, with Kelly’s office telling Axios they expect a surge in co-sponsors in the coming day.
And Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, has asked the heads of ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to testify to his panel.
Driving the news: While many Republican leaders and loyal Trump allies leapt to DHS’ defense in the wake of the shooting, a noticeably large group of GOP lawmakers offered more equivocal statements than in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting weeks earlier.
The office of Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), a staunch conservative and Trump ally, said in a statement: “Leaders at every level must lower the temperature, enforce the law, and protect public safety. In the days ahead, we will work to ensure a full and transparent review of events.”
“Law enforcement should conduct an objective investigation and get the facts. We defend people’s free speech and right to protest,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) in a statement to Axios, though he added that it is “not right to interfere or obstruct law enforcement in their official actions.”
Zoom in: The responses of Rep. Michelle Fischbach (R-Minn.) to two different shootings in her home state offer a revealing picture of how the GOP’s tone has shifted since the start of the year.
After Renee Good was killed on Jan. 7, Fischbach called the incident a “targeted assault on ICE agents” in a post on X, writing, “I stand with the officer who acted in self-defense to save lives.”
On Sunday, she wrote after Pretti was killed: “I am deeply saddened by the tragic loss of life in Minneapolis and fully support the ongoing investigation into this incident.”
NBC has this report on the Democrats who seemed in disarray about the situation last week. “Senate Democrats plot strategy as DHS standoff deepens heading into shutdown week. Two sources who were on a Democratic caucus strategy call Sunday said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the group the message must be to “restrain, reform and restrict ICE.” This is reported by Sahil Kapur and Frank Thorp V.
Senate Democrats held a conference call Sunday to discuss their strategy after they made it clear they will block a Department of Homeland Security funding bill if it does not include changes to impose conditions on immigration enforcement operations.
The Senate is heading into a critical week with a Friday deadline to fund the government or face a partial shutdown.
The package doesn’t have the 60 votes it needs. Without them, much of the federal government could shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
Two sources on the call told NBC News that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told the caucus the message had to be to “restrain, reform and restrict ICE.”
According to one of the sources, Schumer told them that the vote won’t come until Thursday and that he discussed the Democratic caucus’ unity in opposition to funding DHS without reforms. He said the five other funding bills apart from the DHS measure are acceptable.
“Basically DHS is the problem and needs to be stripped out,” the source summed up Schumer as saying.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., pushed the caucus to come up with a demand for DHS reforms, two sources with knowledge of his comments said.
Republicans could limit the scope of a shutdown by voting on the non-DHS measures separately and passing them.
Ongoing concern about the health of the rotter in the White House continues to be a topic of discussion. This is from The Hill. “Trump on closing his eyes during Cabinet meetings: ‘Boring as hell’.” This is reported by Ashleigh Fields.
President Trump said he’s closed his eyes during Cabinet meetings because they are “boring as hell” but noted this isn’t a reflection of his health.
“It’s boring as hell; I’m going around a room, and I’ve got 28 guys — the last one was three and a half hours. I have to sit back and listen, and I move my hand so that people will know I’m listening,” Trump told New York magazine.
“I’m hearing every word, and I can’t wait to get out,” he added.
In recent months, speculation about the president’s ability to deal with chronic venous insufficiency and lead the country by past staffers, political strategists and the public has mounted.
But those in Trump’s orbit defended Trump’s behavior and noted his innate ability to notice details both small and large in a split second.
“The guy is too healthy. He’s too active,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told New York magazine, detailing one time when Trump surprised him with a set of medallion samples after noticing some were missing from chandeliers inside the State Department.
Rubio said when the White House leader closes his eyes, it’s a “listening mechanism” that tunes speakers in rather than drowning them out.
Amid support from one of his top Cabinet officials, the president says he regrets taking an MRI scan and heeding the advice of his medical professionals at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center this fall, as it caused more questions about the state of his health.
At least one of Trump’s unqualified buffoons is out of office. NBC News reports that “Lindsey Halligan is no longer employed by the Justice Department after departure from Virginia U.S. attorney’s office. Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience, stepped down from her post in the Eastern District of Virginia after a judge found she was “masquerading” as U.S. attorney.” How many hundreds or thousands of them are left?
Donald Trump loyalist Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance attorney who brought two unsuccessful cases against two of the president’s perceived enemies, is no longer a Justice Department employee, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Halligan, who lacked any prior prosecutorial experience, stepped down last week from her proclaimed role as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, a position a judge found she unlawfully held. It was not entirely clear last week whether Halligan would assume a new role at the Justice Department, as Alina Habba did after after federal appeals court judges upheld her disqualification as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey in December.
But two sources familiar with the matter said Halligan is no longer a Justice Department employee. It is unclear whether she has a new job outside of the Justice Department.
A federal judge ruled last week that Halligan had to stop “masquerading” as the Eastern District’s top federal prosecutor.
It’s easy to portray these folks as a run away circus show, but the problem is that every decision they make impacts the lives of millions of Americans and folks around the world. They all need to be sent to one jolly prison to rot.
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“Jack Smith returns to Washington to testify publicly in front of Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Yesterday, the entire news cycle was dedicated to the testimony of former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who prosecuted the rotter in the White House for his election interference scheme. Many of the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee were far from up to the task of diminishing Smith’s appearance and the merits of the case. At one point, Democratic Ranking Member Jamie Raskin and Republican Darrel Issa got into a shouting match.
PBS had this headline yesterday, along with a tick-tock of the day’s events. It was a strange thing to see that Republicans were part of what was a look at Trump’s Election crimes, which appeared to be less daunting to them than dealing with the Epstein Files. Anyone paying attention surely took the event and the testimony as yet another way Trump defies our Constitutionally defined form of government.
Jack Smith is set to testify in a House Judiciary hearing Thursday. It’s an opportunity for the career prosecutor to offer his inside perspective on the investigations into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The president was indicted in two federal cases, but both were scuttled once it was clear that Trump would return to the Oval Office, due to DOJ policy that prevents prosecution of a sitting president.
One of the things we learned is that the manner in which the case was dismissed lets a future Congress and DOJ go after him again. This was yesterday’s New York Times’ conclusion. “In Testimony, Jack Smith Defends Decision to Prosecute Trump. The former special prosecutor argued a case he was never allowed to in court: that President Trump “engaged in criminal activity” that undermined democracy.” The leded is shared by
By Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer.
But the hearing also provided Mr. Smith with what was likely to be his best opportunity to challenge, in an official forum, Mr. Trump’s justification for ordering the Justice Department to pursue his enemies: that he was persecuted for his politics, not prosecuted for his alleged misdeeds.
“Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, that it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to exploit the violence,” Mr. Smith said, sitting alone at the witness table with a water bottle, legal pad and white ballpoint pen.
He appeared wan and tired, speaking so softly at times his voice did not register with voice transcription apps. Before sitting at the witness table, Mr. Smith greeted four law enforcement officers who were attacked by the pro-Trump mob at the Capitol — Michael Fanone, Daniel Hodges, Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn.
Republicans repeatedly accused Mr. Smith of participating in a Democratic conspiracy to destroy Mr. Trump by investigating his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as his handling of classified documents after he left office.
Mr. Smith and his team interfered in the “democratic process by seeking to muzzle a candidate for a high office,” Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in his opening statement, quoting from an editorial in The Washington Post.
But Republican lawmakers offered no new evidence to support that claim, and spent much of their time rehashing political arguments and grilling Mr. Smith about his decision to seek a court order for metadata about phone calls Mr. Trump and his allies made to nine Republican lawmakers as they sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
This may seem like more rehashing of old news, but remember, Trump is angling to interfere with the 2026 midterms. It’s a good refresher as to the criminal lengths he will go to retain power. The news today still reflects the regime’s abuse of constitutional rights. ICE is still in the headlines. The abuse is on full display in Minneapolis. This analysis of the last Constitutional Crisis nightmare can be found on Joy Vance’s SubStack, Civil Discourse. “Breaking the Fourth Amendment.”
Last night, we learned from a report in the Associated Press that ICE, contrary to longstanding Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, is taking the position that it can enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant. Instead, they believe that an administrative warrant suffices. An administrative warrant is a form signed by an “authorized immigration official,” which means an executive branch employee who can be fired if they displease the president. It’s not difficult to see the problem here.
The Fourth Amendment provides that: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” It’s the reason your home can’t be searched by the police without a search warrant that has been supported with probable cause to believe that evidence or fruits of a crime will be found there.
ICE seems to be arguing that if they think a non-citizen for whom there is a final order of deportation is in a house, they can blow right past the Fourth Amendment, take the doors off the house if they aren’t admitted voluntarily, and go right in. But the Fourth Amendment doesn’t change just because ICE says so.
The Supreme Court has made it clear that a search warrant must be signed by a “judicial officer” or a “magistrate.” Their signature on the warrant says that they have reviewed the evidence that the agents believe constitutes probable cause to justify a search, and they agree that it is sufficient to breach the wall otherwise established by the Fourth Amendment and allow law enforcement into a private home (or car, or private areas of a business, etc.). The idea is that a detached, neutral judge—not someone involved in investigating a case or “on the same side” as law enforcement—should evaluate the evidence before a search warrant or an arrest warrant is issued.
As the Supreme Court explained in Johnson v. U.S., in 1948: “The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.”
This report by The Washington Post shows how utterly evil, cruel, and lawless the agency has become. “ICE detains four children from Minnesota school district, including 5-year-old. Columbia Heights Public Schools district officials accused ICE officers of using the 5-year-old “as bait.” A 10-year-old and her mother were also detained.” Andrew Jeong provides the report.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota have detained at least four children from the same school district this month, including a 5-year-old boy, school officials in a Minneapolis suburb said Wednesday.
The events have inflamed tensions between residents and ICE officers,sparked by the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renée Good by an ICE officer this month. The Trump administration has sought to justify the presence of ICE personnel by saying that the officers are detaining immigrants convicted of violent crimes.
“Why detain a 5-year-old?” Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of the Columbia Heights Public Schools district, located just north of Minneapolis, said at a news conference. “You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”
Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, whom the Department of Homeland Security identified as Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias in an emailed statement, were detained in their driveway Tuesday afternoon, just as they were returning from the child’s school, according to a news release from Columbia Heights Public Schools.
The father fled on foot when ICE officers approached him, DHS said. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” it added.
After detaining the father, ICE officers then asked Liam to knock on the door to see if any other people were inside the home, “using a 5-year-old as bait,” according to the school district.
Another adult living in the home, who was outside at the time, “begged the agents” to leave the child with them, the school district said. ICE agents refused.
Liam’s middle-school-age brother returned home 20 minutes later to find that his younger brother and father had been taken away.
Liam and his father are now in San Antonio in the custody of Homeland Security authorities, the family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, said in an email. They are not U.S. citizens but “have been following the legal process perfectly, from presenting themselves at the border to applying for asylum and waiting for the process to go through,” he said.
The Substack Strength in Numbersof G. Elliott Morris has this true and frightening headline. “The consent of the governed has been withdrawn. One year into his second term, Trump has suffered the largest approval collapse of any modern president (except the one who resigned in disgrace). He is underwater on every major policy area.” He’s so underwater that the numbers are worse than during the worst of the COVID pandemic.
One year ago this week, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. He entered office with a net approval rating of +5 in the FiftyPlusOne.news approval rating aggregate. Despite a tumultuous first term — which ended with the president posting his worst-ever numbers after the January 6 insurrection — voters, it seemed, were willing to give him another shot.
They are no longer willing to give him that chance. Trump sits at an -16 net job approval on average today, down from +5 on his first day in office. His 21-point drop is the worst first-year performance, in the eyes of public opinion, of any president’s first term going back to at least 1948. If you compare the last year to other second-term presidencies, Trump’s is still the worst first-year performance of any president in the modern polling, with one exception: Richard Nixon (who was consumed by Watergate and other national crises at this point in his term).
Either way, Trump is in historically bad company.
As The New York Timesreported this week, Trump’s support among key groups he persuaded to vote for him in 2024 — notably, young, Black, and Latino voters — has now sunk below levels measured in the run-up to the 2020 election (which Trump lost to Joe Biden by 4.5 points in the national popular vote)
Let’s hope that turns into some momentum to get rid of Republicans in Congress. As noted before, the Trump Regime, plus many Republican Congress Critters, are truly afraid of what’s coming for them. Don Moynihan has this to say at his Substack. “Can We Still Govern? Past the breaking point. The violent occupation of an American city is more than a warning.”
We use words like “police state.” Then we see it happen. To watch is not the same as to experience it, of course. Of being afraid to leave your house. Or having a classmate, co-worker, or family member disappear. But the images make it more real. It removes any illusion that it could not happen here. It is happening here. We see it happening here, if we are willing to look.
In recent weeks, the paramilitary occupation of the Twin Cities has moved us past some invisible breaking points. About how we expect our government to treat us. And about what might be done about the government agencies that fail those expectations.
Lets step back: the primary purpose of this occupation is the selective use of government power to establish federal dominance over blue states or cities that President Trump dislikes. Thats it. Trump thinks Minnesota is the enemy, and so he unleashed an armed and masked paramilitary upon its people. There is no serious case that this is about the number of immigrants, or some level of violent crime not seen elsewhere. It is about the Department of Homeland Security, in the form of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Patrol, developing their skills as the President’s stormtroopers. It is about making an example of a community.
To make matters worse, Congress did not defund ICE thanks to a handful of turncoat Democrats. This is from Newsweek. “Seven Democrats Just Voted to Approve ICE Funding: Full List.” This news is reported by Gabe Whisnant.
Seven House Democrats broke with much of their party to vote in favor of funding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), helping advance a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending measure in committee despite strong opposition from progressives.
The votes came during a markup of the DHS appropriations bill, with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky casting the lone Republican vote against the funding, which passed 220-207 and will fund ICE as well as FEMA through September 30.
“Right now we are about to take a vote and that vote is on DHS and whether or not we will give more funding to ICE. Right now I am willing to shut it down. I am going to do what it takes instead of just kind of being a go-along to get-along lawmaker,” Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, told Newsweek ahead of the vote.
The seven Democratic representatives who voted yes to approve ICE funding were:
Tom Suozzi (New York)
Henry Cuellar (Texas)
Don Davis (North Carolina)
Laura Gillen (New York)
Jared Golden (Maine)
Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)
Marie Glusenkamp Perez (Washington)
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
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“The hypocrisy of this Trumplican administration continues to reach unfathomable levels. If you’re not paying attention, shame on you. If you’re paying attention but ignoring it, shame on you. Violent protest is what they are provoking. Contest the alternative so-called facts everywhere you can, woke is what they fear! Elon hasn’t funded a vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus, yet.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
My home and I have been going through a major streak of Danshari (断捨離)at the beginning and end of the year. It sure feels good to throw junk out and get down to the basic, simple life, but wow, is it time-consuming and brutally exhausting after living in a house for 25 years and letting things accumulate. My house is quite small, and still, stuff piles up. Time to toss out all the things that you don’t need, don’t want, and that really create a burden on your way of life and take up needless time.
This is how I feel about the Trump administration. We never needed them; the health effects of having their garbage pile up are devastating and exhausting. Time to toss them all out.
Having gone through a period of ICE Raids and watching other American cities suffer in similar ways, I have to admit that what’s going on in Minneapolis right now is beyond the pale. It’s like they used the rest of us to beef up their levels of assaulting normalcy, morality, and decency. Time to remove the real refuse and live a simpler, more productive life.
This first suggested read is from the AP. “Federal immigration agents filmed dragging a woman from her car in Minneapolis.” This is not the American Dream. It’s an American Nightmare.
A U.S. citizen on her way to a medical appointment in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and detained by immigration officers, according to a statement released by the woman on Thursday, after a video of her arrest drew millions of views on social media.
Aliya Rahman said she was brought to a detention center where she was denied medical care and lost consciousness. The Department of Homeland Security said she was an agitator who was obstructing ICE agents conducting arrests in the area.
Rahman said that she was on her way to a routine appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center when she encountered federal immigration agents at an intersection. Video appears to show federal immigration agents shouting commands over a cacophony of whistles, car horns and screams from protesters.
In the video, one masked agent smashes Rahman’s passenger side window while others cut her seatbelt and drag her out of the car through the driver’s side door. Numerous guards then carried her by her arms and legs towards an ICE vehicle.
damn — CNN put together a video of Kristi Noem claiming ICE officers are "highly trained and skilled" and "gifted" alongside to a clip of them beating someone nearly to death in Minneapolis
Philip Bump, writing at MS NOW, has the Op-Ed up. “Trump could be close to unleashing the state violence he’s always wanted. President Trump suggested on Thursday that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act. He’s wanted to do that for years.” He’s doing this while trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which still blows my mind. He’s also after protestors while telling Iraq we will attack them if they attack peaceful protestors. Go figure. You may remember that Bump was noticeably crying during the reporting on the death of Renee Good, imagining her small child and the backseat filled with stuffed animals.
On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump suggested — not for the first time — that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing him to deploy active-duty soldiers to combat protesters. The president’s musing about the Insurrection Act should not be understood as a reaction to what’s happening right now. It should instead be understood as the next link in a chain of events that Trump set in motion back in his first administration — and dramatically accelerated in his second.
Trump seems to have lingering regrets about not doing some of the things he wanted to do back in 2020, when protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spawned unrest across the country and outside the White House.
When Trump was hurried to the bunker at the executive mansion one evening, it projected weakness. Members of his administration pushed back against his ambitions to unleash more forceful responses — such as deploying soldiers against protesters. This frustrated the president, contributing to his removal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Trump returned to Washington last year even angrier at the establishment and his opponents, but now he’s well-versed in the levers of power and understands how flimsy the barriers to that power can be. Since early in his second term, he’s seemed eager to show that this time around, he won’t waste any time in using an iron fist against dissent. And he’s staffed his Cabinet with people who aren’t likely to object.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his allies insisted that immigration laws needed to be tightened and that people living in the country illegally needed to be removed. They often insisted that they would prioritize criminal immigrants, people who — Trump said — were known to law enforcement and could be rolled up quickly.
Once inaugurated, however, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security initiated sweeping dragnets, first in Los Angeles, then in Chicago and now in Minneapolis. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (which includes Border Patrol), were given free rein to aggressively detain immigrants — and anyone who stood in their way.
Speaking to reporters in May, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, warned Democratic leaders in blue states that they could expect to see federal agents in their cities.
“If we can’t arrest a bad guy in the jail … you’re gonna force him in the community to find him,” Homan told reporters last week. “If we can’t find him in the community, we’re gonna find him at the worksite. So we’re going to flood the zone, and sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don’t want.”
Comply or we’ll blanket your streets, Homan warned. And they did.
Notice that Homan framed the threat as being about criminals: If cities wouldn’t hand over criminals who were in custody, ICE would “flood the zone” everywhere else. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin repeated this framing in an interview on Fox News this week centered on the current operation in Minnesota.
“If [Gov.] Tim Walz and [Minneapolis] Mayor [Jacob] Frey would let us in their jails, we wouldn’t have to be there at all,” McLaughlin said. “Currently, there are 680 criminal illegal aliens [in the city] … people who, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you would never want these people to be on your streets or your neighbors. That’s the people who we are targeting.”
McLaughlin’s assertion is also untrue outside of the context of Minneapolis. Data released by DHS shows that more detainees in ICE custody have no criminal records than have criminal convictions or pending charges. A new report from the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group, summarizes the shift since Trump returned to office: “The result of … changes in arrest practice has been a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day.”
Those numbers alone give the lie to the idea that ICE is simply doing what it has always done. It isn’t. It’s doing something broader and more aggressive than what it has done in the past — at the direction of DHS leaders and with Trump’s approval.
The unjustified and indefensible killing of an innocent woman, Renee Good, by U.S. government agents; the lack of any recognition or acknowledgement by those agents or their superiors that what they did was wrong; the intensification of the government’s reign of terror in the streets of our cities and towns; the unabashed defense of brutality by the administration in power, and their wholesale lying about it . . . it’s horrifying.
But the less dramatic stories emerging from our reign of terror are also horrifying.
At around 3 p.m. Wednesday, four Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up for lunch at a small, family-owned Mexican restaurant, El Tapatio, in Willmar, Minnesota. They took a booth and apparently enjoyed their meal—though staff at the restaurant appeared “frightened,” according to a witness who spoke to the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
When the restaurant closed that evening at 8:30 p.m., ICE agents followed departing workers and detained three of them.
The agents presumably had a good laugh about this. Perhaps they relished their meal even more because the staff that served them was frightened. Humiliation of their victims, a kind of relish in their fear and misery, a kind of—let’s call it what it is—sadism has become a dominant part of the culture of ICE.
It does not, thankfully, appear to be dominant in the culture of the country. At least not yet. A Quinnipiac poll shows only 40 percent of Americans approve of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws, while 57 percent disapprove. In a CNN survey, 51 percent of Americans say they believe ICE is making cities less safe, while only 31 percent say ICE is making cities safer.
Those numbers in support of ICE are higher than they should be in a healthy and humane society. But still, in today’s polarized politics, a 17–20 percent margin is substantial. If only Democrats could win the national vote this fall by that amount!
White House border czar Tom Homan admits the administration has a problem. Not with the policy, of course. It’s just, Homan said yesterday, that ICE needs “to be better at messaging at what we’re doing.” Still, it’s good to see Homan on the defensive.
The question is whether the Democratic party is going to go on the offensive.
Yesterday Minnesota Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar put out a statement: “Our local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders all agree: The best way to restore order and safety in Minnesota is for ICE to leave our streets. This Administration is escalating rather than de-escalating and it needs to stop.”
ICE of course could care less about local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders, who can do little to stop ICE’s terror. But ICE is an agency of the federal government. It operates under authorities granted and defined by Congress. It uses funds appropriated by Congress.
So if ICE needs to stop what it is doing, it’s Democrats in Congress who need to try to do their best to stop it. Which does not mean offering a couple of pro forma amendments that will lose. It does not mean failing to excoriate Republican senators, by name, for refusing to stand up to their dear leaders. It does not mean going on to approve government funding as usual.
You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?
They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.
Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.
They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”
The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”
As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.
While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.
In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like [the agents are] talking to us.”
This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”
My friends in Minneapolis are experiencing the same kind of trauma that every city that has experienced an ICE invasion, but on a much larger scale. I wake up to read what is going on in their neighborhoods and their city, and I know the feel of those intense emotions. It freaks me out all over again.
This is the latest news on their latest reign of terror. It’s from the AP. “ICE says a Cuban immigrant died in a suicide attempt. A witness says guards pinned and choked him.
A Cuban immigrant died in a Texas immigration detention facility earlier this month during an altercation with guards, and the local medical examiner has indicated that his death will likely be classified as a homicide.
The federal government has provided a differing account surrounding the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, saying the detainee was attempting suicide and staff tried to save him.
A witness told The Associated Press that Lunas Campos died after he was handcuffed, tackled by guards and placed in a chokehold until he lost consciousness. The immigrant’s family was told by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday that a preliminary autopsy report said the death was a homicide resulting from asphyxia from chest and neck compression, according to a recording of the call reviewed by the AP.
The death and conflicting accounts have intensified scrutiny into the conditions of immigration jails at a time when the government has been rounding up immigrants in large numbers around the country and detaining them at facilities like the one in El Paso where Lunas Campos died.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is legally required to issue public notification of detainee deaths. Last week, it said Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old father of four and registered sex offender, had died at Camp East Montana, but made no mention of him being involved in an altercation with staff immediately before his death.
This is exactly why the framers of the Constitution and the signers of the Declaration were obsessed with Due Process. Everyone should have access to a trial, to lawyers, to a judge, to a jury of peers, and to laws that protect everyone from unjust prosecution and punishment. This is at the absolute core of our American Way of Life and system of Government.
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There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.
My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.
Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.
There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”
This Op-Ed in the New York Times caught my eye immediately after I tucked my pamphlet back in its rightful drawer. Lydia Polgreen, an Opinion Columnist, asked the same question that I had earlier and answered it succinctly. “This Week Has Revealed 3 Types of Americans.” I know where I stand, do you?
You may read more stories about these resisters at the gift link. And then, there are the journalists covering the story. This is from CNN. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were taken into custody after a Minnesota church protest. My great-granddaddy was a Methodist Circuit rider back in Kansas and back in the day, and a fierce abolitionist. People are just oozing traditional American values here, while the Trump Regime just ignores all those years of fighting, standing, dying, and making history. Remember the Presbyterian minister in Chicago? They certainly didn’t care about his right to peacefully protest. What about the rights of journalists to report a story?
David Rothkopf, writing for The Daily Beast, has this characterization of Trump and his hatred of Free Speech. “There Can Be No More Doubt. Trump Wants to Kill Free Speech. JEFFERSON WEEPS. Don Lemon is the most high-profile reporter being targeted. Trump wants to target all of us.”
The latest Trump-appointed Fed Chair is like a read-it-and-weep announcement. I’m wondering what this will do to financial markets worldwide. This is from CNBC. “Trump nominates Kevin Warsh for Federal Reserve chair to succeed Jerome Powell.” Jeff Cox has the lede.
(Sigh). And now, the movie with the worst buzz ever!!! This is from Mother Jones. “Those Brutal ‘Melania’ Documentary Reviews Have Vanished from Letterboxd. Meanwhile, the First Lady used a Fox News appearance calling for ‘unity’ to shill the film.” I don’t think at my advanced age I’m going to start getting into porn, frankly.
Mo. Basuony at Filmogaz has this headline: “melania movie opens after Kennedy Center premiere as reviews turn combative.”
Each of these statements is followed by camera footage of the event. It’s pretty clear that the story told by Noem and other ICE representatives does not reflect the truth of the situation. After the Congress failed to defund ICE, there was widespread uproar from various quarters. AXIOS has the general overview of what’s going on in Congress right now. Will the Senate defund ICE? “DHS and ICE are under siege by Congress like never before.” Andrew Sollender has the lede.
NBC has this report on the Democrats who seemed in disarray about the situation last week. “Senate Democrats plot strategy as DHS standoff deepens heading into shutdown week. Two sources who were on a Democratic caucus strategy call Sunday said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the group the message must be to “restrain, reform and restrict ICE.” This is reported by Sahil Kapur and Frank Thorp V.
Ongoing concern about the health of the rotter in the White House continues to be a topic of discussion. This is from The Hill. “Trump on closing his eyes during Cabinet meetings: ‘Boring as hell’.” This is reported by Ashleigh Fields.
At least one of Trump’s unqualified buffoons is out of office. NBC News reports that “Lindsey Halligan is no longer employed by the Justice Department after departure from Virginia U.S. attorney’s office. Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience, stepped down from her post in the Eastern District of Virginia after a judge found she was “masquerading” as U.S. attorney.” How many hundreds or thousands of them are left?
One of the things we learned is that the manner in which the case was dismissed lets a future Congress and DOJ go after him again. This was yesterday’s New York Times’ conclusion. “In Testimony, Jack Smith Defends Decision to Prosecute Trump. The former special prosecutor argued a case he was never allowed to in court: that President Trump “engaged in criminal activity” that undermined democracy.” The leded is shared by
This may seem like more rehashing of old news, but remember, Trump is angling to interfere with the 2026 midterms. It’s a good refresher as to the criminal lengths he will go to retain power. The news today still reflects the regime’s abuse of constitutional rights. ICE is still in the headlines. The abuse is on full display in Minneapolis. This analysis of the last Constitutional Crisis nightmare can be found on Joy Vance’s SubStack, Civil Discourse. “Breaking the Fourth Amendment.”
This report by The Washington Post shows how utterly evil, cruel, and lawless the agency has become. “ICE detains four children from Minnesota school district, including 5-year-old. Columbia Heights Public Schools district officials accused ICE officers of using the 5-year-old “as bait.” A 10-year-old and her mother were also detained.” Andrew Jeong provides the report.
The Substack Strength in Numbers of G. Elliott Morris has this true and frightening headline. “The consent of the governed has been withdrawn. One year into his second term, Trump has suffered the largest approval collapse of any modern president (except the one who resigned in disgrace). He is underwater on every major policy area.” He’s so underwater that the numbers are worse than during the worst of the COVID pandemic.
Let’s hope that turns into some momentum to get rid of Republicans in Congress. As noted before, the Trump Regime, plus many Republican Congress Critters, are truly afraid of what’s coming for them. Don Moynihan has this to say at his Substack. “Can We Still Govern? Past the breaking point. The violent occupation of an American city is more than a warning.”
To make matters worse, Congress did not defund ICE thanks to a handful of turncoat Democrats. This is from Newsweek. “Seven Democrats Just Voted to Approve ICE Funding: Full List.” This news is reported by Gabe Whisnant.
Philip Bump, writing at MS NOW, has the Op-Ed up. “Trump could be close to unleashing the state violence he’s always wanted. President Trump suggested on Thursday that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act. He’s wanted to do that for years.” He’s doing this while trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which still blows my mind. He’s also after protestors while telling Iraq we will attack them if they attack peaceful protestors. Go figure. You may remember that Bump was noticeably crying during the reporting on the death of Renee Good, imagining her small child and the backseat filled with stuffed animals.
Trumpian narratives are never backed by fact. They represent pure propaganda since these talking points are never true. Here’s a take from the Never Trumper Republican folks at The Bulwark. Yes, I’m quoting my strange bedfellow Bill Kristol again. “Fighting ICE’s Reign of Terror.”
Heather Cox Richardson’s latest offering on Substack, “Letters from an American,” is bone-chilling.
My friends in Minneapolis are experiencing the same kind of trauma that every city that has experienced an ICE invasion, but on a much larger scale. I wake up to read what is going on in their neighborhoods and their city, and I know the feel of those intense emotions. It freaks me out all over again.
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