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Tuesday, January 27, 2026
A good friend of mine sent me a text Sunday morning:
Hi hi!
Checking in to say what some of us are thinking—
Things are starting to look and feel more than fucked, pardon my French.
What part of history would you relate this to? Or time in history.
Well, that got me thinking, darn her. Her question boils down to, “Is this unlike anything before and, if so, how?” But that begs an important question: what is “this?” What exactly is going on here?
I am not a professional historian, but I like to play one during Trivia Nights. And because I am a patriotic red-blooded American and an optimist by nature, I prefer to think that our country has never been one where state-sponsored violence against its citizens was tolerated.
But of course it has, and such violence has been an integral, if unfortunate, touchstone of our history. At the most macro levels, consider the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement and killing of Africans. Millions of souls were lost, most with either tacit or explicit approval from the government.
When the official policy of our government was to oppose the labor movement, government soldiers and lawmen were used as strikebreakers. On a more positive note, they were also used to enforce school desegregation orders and protect civil and voting rights. And, they’ve been used to quell disturbances, e.g., the Watts Riots in 1965 and the L.A. riots in 1992.
But I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this.
Here’s what seems different about this moment:
I.
The government picked the fight. Put another way, the government’s presence was for provocation, not peacekeeping.[i] Here, the government sent an armed force of over 2,000 poorly-trained or -supervised agents into a community and authorized it to push the envelope of violence and repression. It did it against the wishes of state or local officials.
II.
This is no longer about immigration, if it ever was. Consider the fact that the major focus of ICE, CBP, and DHS now is a state with an estimated 130,000 undocumented immigrants, ignoring much larger immigrant populations in Texas (2.1 million) and Florida (1.6 million). (2023 estimates.) Consider also that those states have loyal, MAGA-fied Republican governors and political infrastructure – which ought to make it even easier for ICE/CPB/DHS to operate effectively in their states.
Yet Stephen Miller and the buffoons at the top of DHS have stopped shrieking about their 3,000 deportations per day quotas and have refocused the mission of the thousands of ICE/CPB/DHS agents towards suppression of civil “unrest” in Minneapolis. In other words, they are now an occupying force, working without the permission of, or in coordination with, state and local law enforcement resources.
III.
They’ve killed two people, and so far without accountability. It has been standard procedure for a generation that when a cop kills a citizen, the DOJ’s Office of Civil Rights opens an investigation: were the victims federally-protected civil rights infringed? But no such investigations have been announced for Renee Nicole Good or Alex Pretti. In fact, the DOJ announced it was investigating Good’s (and her wife’s) connections to domestic terrorism. That landed with a thud, which may explain why Pretti is not being investigated … yet.
(Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti – American martyrs.)
Furthermore, the federal authorities have pointedly excluded state and local investigators from their investigations. There may come a time when the ICE agents involved face legal accountability for their actions, but it’s hard to see a pathway now.
IV.
Donald Trump has created a private paramilitary. It is unaccountable to a supine Congress, which has lavished it with funding. It is dismissive of the courts and the American people. Each “surge” of the ICE/CPB/DHS force – Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Charlotte – has been a failure from an immigration enforcement perspective but a successful proof-of-concept of Trump’s desire to create his own paramilitary force to impose his will upon the American people. But Trump has not reached the final stage …
V.
Trump is hoping an ICE agent will get killed. Remember, the endgame for Trump is not creating a little ICE/CBP/DHS army: it is putting the ACTUAL Army as his disposal as a domestic force. This is his vision of himself as a leader, like Putin or (until recently) Maduro. Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act (he threatens to do so almost weekly) and the trigger will be when a federal agent dies during one of these increasingly violent confrontations.[i]
A year ago, speculation like this would have struck me as unrealistic, if not paranoid. I have few illusions about Donald Trump’s patriotism, intelligence or emotional stability, but I would have thought it impossible he could execute such a complete takeover of the federal government.
I hope that the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti will knock some sense into the American people and their leaders, but who knows?
Trump has dispatched Tom Holman to Minnesota to lend some credibility to the DHS debacle. You know things are bad when Tom Holman is your go-to guy for sensible leadership. When last we heard from him, he was trying to explain that accepting a $50,000 bribe to steer government contracts to an undercover FBI agent was … OK somehow. And then the DOJ dropped the case, and that was that.
Holman’s value here is that he dislikes Kristi Noem and, specifically, the whole cosplay nature of her DHS leadership. Holman thinks our immigration goals are better served by chasing actual bad guys – undocumented aliens with criminal records – rather than using five-year old children as bait to catch their refugee father or mother.
In the meantime, the Cosplayers – Kristi Noem, Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller, and the diminutive made-for-TV villain Greg Bovino – strut and fret their hour upon the stage, soon to be heard no more. Bovino has been exiled from Minnesota, and Noem tops the Polymarket betting charts for first Cabinet officer to be defenestrated.
(Noem, Miller, and Bovino – a Mediocre Rogue’s Gallery if there ever was one.)
Trump’s authoritarian plan to turn the U.S. into his family-controlled empire is serious business, and unserious people like Noem have no place when the going gets rough.
Speaking of cosplayers, watch your backs, Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel.
[i] I suppose one could argue that, say, John Kennedy’s sending the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama was a provocation, but a review of the record shows that it was a final step after a long period of negotiation.
[ii] The Atlantic has a superb article about how the people of Minneapolis have organized a peaceful resistance to the federal invasion – neighborhood watches and school safety patrols, training for nonviolence, video-documents the depredations.
[1] I suppose one could argue that, say, John Kennedy’s sending the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama was a provocation, but a review of the record shows that it was a final step after a long period of negotiation.
Guess I didn’t see the big Trump picture until you pointed out that orange Mussolini probably wants an ice agent or border patrol dead so he can expand his “army”. Chilling
The only comparison to societal discord of this magnitude in my lifetime would be the Vietnam protests. Though no police or national/state guardsmen were killed during that period, six protesters were killed at Jackson State and Kent State, and numerous protesters were injured around the nation. I don’t know whether those protests, over half a century ago, were less widely supported, but they seem to pale in comparison to what is happening today. The use of mobile phone cameras have much to do with the broadcasting of information of today's discord. Nevertheless, in response to your excellent article, I must say that I fear the minimal effect trump’s adjustments to tactics in Minneapolis will have on his broader strategy of building his own Gestapo to ensure his continued enthronement.