What Donald Trump is doing in Minneapolis is what he had his armed mob do at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, only on a much larger scale.
At his inflammatory “Stop the Steal” rally five years ago, Trump exhorted an armed mob to “fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore.” He has given the same marching orders to the paramilitary thugs he’s set loose on anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant, and any American citizen standing up for them.
Does this violent, ragtag militia even deserve to be called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as if it were actually a functioning agency of the government?
Just as the false patriots on Jan. 6 set upon and injured more than 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police in Trump’s last-ditch attempt to overturn the 2020 election (as we heard again in testimony by Jack Smith), his ICE militia obviously has orders to shoot first and not ask questions later.
Indeed, one wonders how many of them are veterans of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election? Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested answers to that question in a letter sent to both Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. (Looking at Raskin’s letter, one also wonders how much cognitive dissonance was required to address Bondi and Noem as “The Honorable.”)
The purposeful incitement of violence by heavily armed and masked ICE and U.S. Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis follows similar scenes in Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte, New Orleans and other cities where Americans have had the nerve to elect Democrats to leadership. Like a cheap mobster trying to enforce his rule over the mean streets, Trump utilizes threats of violence to make people living in blue states think twice about crossing him again.
Any reasonable person would say that ICE agents are the terrorists, and are executing protesters to prove they can — and to prove it can happen to you, if you are so foolish as to exercise your First Amendment rights.
After the executions of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse for the V.A., members of the Trump administration immediately blamed the victims, calling them domestic terrorists. What any reasonable person would say at this point is that ICE agents are the terrorists, and are executing protesters to prove that they can — and to prove it can happen to you, if you are so foolish as to exercise your First Amendment rights to protest. Once again, local and state authorities are being kept away from investigating these apparent crimes.
Trump has done all he can to block data coming out about his weakening economy; likewise, he will block any real investigation into his personal militia’s executions of U.S. citizens.
As Greg Sargent of The New Republic notes, Trump and his team of white supremacists believe that a silent majority of Americans are anti-immigrant, but they appear to have miscalculated:
But the surprise of the moment has been the extraordinary solidarity that ordinary Americans have shown with immigrants and against Trump-Miller-Vance’s parade of ethnonationalist horrors. Miller is using state-sponsored violence and terror to try to break up that alliance. A big reason Trumpworld is unapologetic about Good — Vance responded by exaggerating the immunity of ICE officers, and Miller kept describing protesters as insurrectionists, meaning it’s open season on them — is to warn Americans showing solidarity with immigrants that they do so at their personal peril.
Now Trump and his shamelessly ever-lying minions want us to believe that it’s in America’s the best interest to bring that level of chaos and straight-up direct threats to the countries considered the closest U.S. allies and most trusted trading partners since World War II.
Call it Jan. 6, writ even larger.
As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, put it in a remarkably direct speech at Davos, the U.S.-led world order is a thing of the past; it has been ruptured. If you have not, you should listen to his speech.
Trump hated what Carney spelled out at Davos, ranting about Canada “not being grateful” and threatening to apply a 100% tariff on Canadian goods, so you know it was a reasonable and intelligent speech.
When Trump exhorted the Jan. 6 crowd he paid to come to Washington “to fight like hell,” he was thinking only of himself, not the country. As reported by the New York Times, in the first year of his second term, Trump has utilized the presidency to amass at least $1.4 billion for himself and his family.
That alone should end his presidency but won’t, because Republicans in Congress care more for their do-nothing jobs than they do the country.
Because America re-elected a malignant narcissist who perpetuates malign idiocies multiple times each day, we are no longer considered a reliable trading partner or a trustworthy member of the Western alliance. Trump has handed the future to China, India and the reorganizing powers of Europe.
MAGA folks, if you think that any of this will make things easier on your pocketbook, think again. Beyond the immediate economic effects of having the world rebuild trade relations without the U.S., Trump has condemned our children and grandchildren to live in a country with all the growth potential of Hungary or Russia.
Some time ago, I predicted that Trump would ruin the economy, but I never imagined it would be this crazy. Oh, wait, I actually did:
He appears ready to follow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for replacing expert civil servants with a legion of loyalist lackeys, ditching climate science, imprisoning or expelling immigrants who are crucial to the economy, cutting taxes further and reducing Social Security and Medicaid benefits, forcing a misogynistic theocracy on a nation founded on the separation of church and state, and turning our back on historical allies around the world. Oh and, first and foremost, getting revenge on all of Trump’s enemies.
I’ve written this far too many times, but I’ll write it again: If Trump isn’t working directly for Vladimir Putin, he might as well be. As many others have pointed out, for nearly 80 years, the U.S. benefited greatly from its leadership of the NATO coalition. That’s over now, and no one could be more pleased than the autocrat Donald looks up to the most.
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While understand the theories about late-stage capitalism, I reject the notion that we are doomed to come to chaos in the end. With strong, articulate and empathetic leaders like Carney and among America’s historic allies, we can see and understand the benefits of a democratic governance that does its best — however imperfectly — to represent all the people, versus a brutal, authoritarian governance in service to the few.
As The Atlantic’s Jonathan Rauch writes, even those who have (somehow) hesitated to call this fascism should see this upsurge of state violence as just one part of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the American democratic republic. What he got away with on Jan. 6 turned out to be just a trial run.
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from Kirk Swearingen
