The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

As the nation mourned the killing of VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti yesterday at the hands of federal officials in Minneapolis, President Donald J. Trump spent last night at the White House at a black-tie private screening of a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to the film just weeks after executive chair Jeff Bezos dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago following the former president’s reelection and is spending another $35 million to promote the film.

Then, this morning, Trump’s social media account posted a 450-word social media screed complaining about the lawsuit against his addition of a massive ballroom to the White House. Calling the National Trust for Historic Preservation a “Radical Left” organization, the account claimed that the addition “is being done with the design, consent, and approval of the highest levels of the United States Military and Secret Service. The mere bringing of this ridiculous lawsuit has already, unfortunately, exposed this heretofore Top Secret fact. Stoppage of construction, at this late date, when so much has already been ordered and done, would be devastating to the White House, our Country, and all concerned.”

This morning, administration officials doubled down on their insistence that the killing had been justified.

On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino claimed the true victims of yesterday’s shooting were federal agents. He confirmed that the agents who killed Pretti yesterday remain on the streets today, though they have been reassigned elsewhere. FBI director Kash Patel claimed on the Fox News Channel that the fact Pretti was carrying a weapon proved that he was planning trouble, although because he was part of a community-led first-responder network, carrying the weapon for which he had a permit made sense.

But Americans are not buying it. They are coalescing around the idea of the American people versus an out-of-control government. As conservative lawyer George Conway put it: “I just checked—it turns out that Art. II, Sec. 1 of the Constitution of the United States does *not* say ‘The executive Power shall be vested in a bunch of sociopaths who think they can do whatever the f*ck they want and make sh*t up as they go along.’”

Reports out of Minnesota say that in the face of the terror inflicted on it by federal agents, the people there are even more closely linked together in community solidarity. They are patrolling the streets, donating food, delivering groceries, helping with legal services, organizing to look out for each other in a demonstration of community solidarity so foreign to administration figures that Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday suggested that there was something nefarious about how well organized they are as they protect their neighbors.

In Minneapolis today, the Minnesota prison system took the extraordinary step of launching its own website to combat lies from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its first major announcement suggested that Bovino had lied about the Border Patrol operation that was underway when agents killed Alex Pretti. The Minnesota Department of Corrections expressed its condolences to the family and loved ones of Alex Pretti and said that although Bovino claimed that the operation was targeting a man with a significant criminal history, that information was false.

In fact, the individual Bovino identified had never been in custody in Minnesota, and records showed only traffic-related offenses for him. Records did show, though, that he had been in federal immigration custody during Trump’s first administration and had been released.

Chief Brian O’Hara of the Minneapolis Police Department told Margaret Brennan of Face the Nation, “People have had enough. This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone, and now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks…. This is not sustainable. This police department has only 600 police officers. We are stretched incredibly thin. This is taking an enormous toll, trying to manage all of this chaos on top of having to be the police department for a major city. It’s too much.”

The Minnesota National Guard made it clear which side they were on. Wearing neon vests to distinguish themselves from federal agents, they handed out doughnuts, coffee, and hot chocolate to anti-ICE protesters.

The National Basketball Players Association said it could no longer remain silent. “Now more than ever,” it said, “we must defend the right to freedom of speech and stand in solidarity with the people in Minnesota protesting and risking their lives to demand justice. The fraternity of NBA players, like the United States itself, is a community enriched by its global citizens, and we refuse to let the flames of division threaten the civil liberties that are meant to protect us all. The NBPA and its members extend our deepest condolences to the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, just as our thoughts remain focused on the safety and well-being of all members of our community.”

The newest killing has opened up a rift in Republican ranks. Administration officials not allied with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and her cronies are complaining to reporters, including Bill Melugin of the Fox News Channel, that they are frustrated with DHS officials’ statements that Pretti was intending a “massacre” of federal agents in the face of videos that disprove such absurd claims. They have told Melugin such comments are “catastrophic.” “[W]e are losing this war,” sources say, “we are losing the base and the narrative.”

Indeed, at the base level of politics, MAGA supporters who support gun ownership are appalled by statements like that of FBI director Kash Patel, who told the Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have the right to break the law and incite violence.” But Pretti had a license to carry a weapon, and he did not brandish it. President Rob Doar of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center noted that Pretti had the right to carry a gun in that situation and that it shouldn’t be necessary “to choose between exercising your First Amendment rights or your Second Amendment rights.” He expressed concern that “our government and agents of our government are not engaging in good faith with what we’re seeing with our own eyes.”

Lawyer John Mitnick, who served as deputy counsel of the Homeland Security Council from its inception during the George W. Bush administration and then served as general counsel of the United States Department of Homeland Security from 2018 to 2019, when he clashed with Stephen Miller, wrote on social media: “I helped to establish DHS in 2002 and 2003 and later had the homeland security portfolio as a White House Counsel and served as General Counsel of the Department. I am enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty. Impeach and remove Trump—now.”

Aside from a few strong MAGA voices, elected Republicans appeared reluctant to defend the killing. Neither Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) nor House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) commented on it.

Vermont’s Republican governor Phil Scott did, though, leading the way for other Republicans in districts that are sliding away from MAGA. In a statement, he said: “Enough…It’s not acceptable for American citizens to be killed by federal agents for exercising their God-given and constitutional rights to protest their government. At best, these federal immigration operations are a complete failure of coordination of acceptable public safety and law enforcement practices, training, and leadership. At worst, it’s a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans…. The president should pause these operations, de-escalate the situation, and reset the federal government’s focus on truly criminal illegal immigrants. In the absence of presidential action, Congress and the courts must step up to restore constitutionality.”

G. Elliot Morris of Strength in Numbers noted today that even the Republican-leaning Rasmussen polls have shown that 59% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while only 39% approve. In Strength in Numbers today, he reported that “Trump’s 2024 coalition has come undone.” He explained that “[y]oung voters, non-white voters, and low-turnout voters who swung to Trump from 2020 to 2024 have swung back against him in force. In many cases, these groups are even more anti-Trump now than they were ahead of the 2020 election.”

Morris also noted that Trump’s approval rating is not underwater in ten of the states he won in 2024, as I wrote last night. It’s underwater in fifteen.

Today the editorial boards of both Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and his New York Post urged the administration to pause its ICE operations in Minneapolis after the killing of Alex Pretti. The Wall Street Journal’s famously right-wing editorial board warned that “[t]he Trump Administration spin on this simply isn’t believable.” It continued: “Ms. Noem and Mr. Miller aren’t credible spokesmen. Their social-media and cable-TV strategy is to own the libs, rather than to persuade Americans. This is backfiring against Republicans…. Mr. Miller’s mass deportation methods are turning immigration, an issue Mr. Trump owned in 2024, into a political liability for Republicans in 2026. Americans don’t want law enforcement shooting people in the street or arresting five-year-old boys.”

Tonight, the editorial board of the New York Post warned that Trump’s ICE actions in Minneapolis are “backfiring.” “Swing voters…see US citizens dying at federal agents’ hands, and recoil in horror.” It concluded: “Mr. President, the American people didn’t vote for these scenes and you can’t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes.”

Trump’s social media account turned defensive tonight. After repeating Trump’s false claim that he had won election in a historic landslide (in reality, he won less than 50% of the vote), it blamed Democrats for the chaos ICE and CBP agents have caused in Democratic-led cities. It demanded that every Democratic mayor and governor cooperate with the administration to “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Yesterday, after Alex Pretti’s death, the son of a man Pretti had cared for at the VA hospital published a video of Pretti speaking at his father’s deathbed. “Today we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti said. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it. May we never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom. So in this moment, we remember and give thanks for their dedication and selfless service to our nation in the cause of our freedom. In this solemn hour, we [give] them our honor, and our gratitude.”

Asked if Pretti ever brandished his gun, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said Saturday: “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers.”

In 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse, a conservative 17-year-old from the Chicago suburbs, brought an AR-15 to a racial justice protest in Wisconsin, killing two people and injuring another. Liberals said he was looking for trouble, but Rittenhouse, arguing he had acted in self-defense, became a hero to many conservatives and was later acquitted of murder.

In another episode that year, Mark and Patricia McCloskey waved guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, albeit from their front yard. They were celebrated by gun rights backers and invited to speak at the Republican National Convention.

Liberals, including gun-control supporters, in contrast emphasize that Pretti’s legal possession of a weapon in no way reflects on his intentions at the protest, and certainly cannot justify his killing at the hands of federal agents.

The divide underlines how much American politics in the Trump era has departed from a debate over principles — to the extent that it was ever that — and has settled firmly into a battle of us-versus-them, where actions are lauded or vilified depending on who is behind them.

Yesterday President Donald J. Trump blamed Democratic officials for the killing of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minnesota Saturday morning. Since then, administration officials and their supporters seem to be coalescing around the idea that the reason there have been violent clashes in Minneapolis is not the violence of federal agents there, but that city officials aren’t cooperating with federal officials.

As Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote notes, this language comes straight from the Insurrection Act, and indeed, MAGA leader and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that he thinks Trump should invoke that act. Bannon said Pretti “knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.”

On right-wing social media, Bannon echoed the language of a dystopian vision of the world that claims immigrants are invading the United States and those protecting them in Minneapolis are dangerous. He told his supporters: “This is just not Minneapolis—this is an organized, well thought through effort to invade the country.” MAGA adherents are embracing the daft idea that the Minnesota people who have come together to protect their neighbors are an organized, paid insurgency.

But the tide seems to be running against them.

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted that the president is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota. Homan is a White House advisor under scrutiny for allegations that he accepted $50,000 in cash stuffed into a CAVA bag after promising to steer government contracts toward those offering him the money. According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, Homan has been clashing with the extremist faction led by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, her advisor Corey Lewandowski, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller because he thinks their made-for-TV violence is doing long-term damage to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice commented: “If Tom ‘Cava Bag’ Homan is your emergency crisis comms guy, you’re f*cked.”

Trump’s account also posted his version of a phone call with Minnesota governor Tim Walz that would let Trump deescalate the situation there. Despite the fact that, as journalist Laura Bassett notes, the administration has been leading its followers to believe Walz is going to jail, Trump’s account posted:

“Governor Tim Walz called me with a request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I! We have had such tremendous SUCCESS in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place that we have ‘touched’ and, even in Minnesota, Crime is way down, but both Governor Walz and I want to make it better! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

This morning, Republican Chris Madel withdrew from the Minnesota governor’s race, saying “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so…. Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”

“United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong,” Madel said.

He added: “I am above all else a pragmatist. The reality is that the national Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.”

Neil Mehta and Valerie Bauerlein of the Wall Street Journal noted that Preya Samsundar, a Republican strategy consultant, agrees, noting that her own mother, who immigrated legally, has begun to carry her passport with her.

Some Republicans are backing away from the administration over its tactics and violence in Minnesota. Former vice president Mike Pence today called images from there “deeply troubling” and called for a full investigation into Pretti’s killing. By Sunday, Republican senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had all called for investigations.

Today those calls reached deeper into the party, with Republican senators John Curtis of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Todd Young of Indiana also calling for an investigation and “accountability.” This afternoon, Jordain Carney and Adam Wren of Politico reported that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had called a hearing for February 12. He has asked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner Rodney Scott, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow, and ICE acting director Todd Lyons to testify.

One House Republican told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico: “Many of us wonder if the administration has any clue as to how much this will hurt us legislatively and electorally this year.”

As Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo noted today, even MAGA firebrand Texas governor Greg Abbott said on a Dallas talk show that the White House needs to “recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure that they get back to get what they wanted to do to begin with—and that is to remove people from the country.”

And immigration officers themselves are speaking up. This afternoon, Nicholas Nehamas, Hamed Aleaziz, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Alexandra Berzon of the New York Times reported that immigration officers deployed to urban areas are angry at the aggressiveness the Trump administration is employing and at the administration’s sending them into dangerous situations. They say the arrest quotas, long hours, and public anger at them are taking a significant toll on morale. Most of those the journalists interviewed said they were unhappy that administration officials had jumped to blame Pretti for his own killing. One agent said he had “always given the benefit of the doubt to the government in these situations” but no longer believed “any of the statements they put out anymore.”

Throughout the day, there were signs that the administration was preparing to throw Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino under the bus. An unsigned editorial in The Free Press, an outlet closely aligned with the administration, lambasted Noem for pushing lies that the American people can see with their own eyes are untrue. “Perhaps Republican operatives consider the politics of division as a viable strategy for their party to survive the midterm elections,” the editorial said, but it noted that “the administration’s deportation tactics as well as the conduct of federal agents in Minneapolis are driving voters away from the president and his party.”

Then, this afternoon, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reported that Bovino and some of his agents are leaving Minneapolis and returning to the sectors from which they came. Before hitting the road, though, on Friday federal agents took into custody Juan Espinoza Martinez, whom a jury acquitted this week after the Department of Justice accused him of participating in a plot to hire someone to kill Bovino. While CBP appears to be leaving, the operation itself will continue.

Tonight Alvarez and her colleague Michael Williams reported that DHS had suspended Bovino’s access to his official social media accounts.

In response to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s suggestion in a letter on Saturday, shortly after Pretti’s killing, that Governor Tim Walz could “restore the rule of law” in Minnesota by handing over the state’s voter rolls, Walz said: “I think everybody understands what the last request was, totally unrelated to anything on the voter files. This is again…Donald Trump telling everybody that the election was rigged…. I would just give a pro tip to the attorney general. There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.”

This afternoon, Trump turned back to tariffs, saying he is increasing tariff rates on South Korean “Autos, Lumber, Pharma, and all other Reciprocal TARIFFS, from 15% to 25%.”

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted that he “just had a very good telephone conversation with Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis. Lots of progress is being made!”

Frey responded with a statement: “I spoke with President Trump this afternoon and appreciated the conversation. I expressed how much Minneapolis has benefited from our immigrant communities and was clear that my main ask is that Operation Metro Surge needs to end. The president agreed that the present situation cannot continue.

“Some federal agents will begin leaving the area tomorrow, and I will continue pushing for the rest involved in this operation to go.

“Minneapolis will continue to cooperate with state and federal law enforcement on real criminal investigations—but we will not participate in unconstitutional arrests of our neighbors or enforce federal immigration law. Violent criminals should be held accountable based on the crimes they commit, not based on where they are from.

“I will continue working with all levels of government to keep our communities safe, keep crime down, and put Minneapolis residents first.

“I plan to meet with Border Czar Tom Homan tomorrow to further discuss next steps.”

Yesterday President Donald J. Trump blamed Democratic officials for the killing of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minnesota Saturday morning. Since then, administration officials and their supporters seem to be coalescing around the idea that the reason there have been violent clashes in Minneapolis is not the violence of federal agents there, but that city officials aren’t cooperating with federal officials.

As Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote notes, this language comes straight from the Insurrection Act, and indeed, MAGA leader and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that he thinks Trump should invoke that act. Bannon said Pretti “knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.”

On right-wing social media, Bannon echoed the language of a dystopian vision of the world that claims immigrants are invading the United States and those protecting them in Minneapolis are dangerous. He told his supporters: “This is just not Minneapolis—this is an organized, well thought through effort to invade the country.” MAGA adherents are embracing the daft idea that the Minnesota people who have come together to protect their neighbors are an organized, paid insurgency.

But the tide seems to be running against them.

This morning, Trump’s social media account posted that the president is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota. Homan is a White House advisor under scrutiny for allegations that he accepted $50,000 in cash stuffed into a CAVA bag after promising to steer government contracts toward those offering him the money. According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, Homan has been clashing with the extremist faction led by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, her advisor Corey Lewandowski, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller because he thinks their made-for-TV violence is doing long-term damage to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice commented: “if Tom ‘Cava Bag’ Homan is your emergency crisis comms guy, you’re f*cked.”

Trump’s account also posted his version of a phone call with Minnesota governor Tim Walz that would let Trump deescalate the situation there. Despite the fact that, as journalist Laura Bassett notes, the administration has been leading its followers to believe Walz is going to jail, Trump’s account posted:

“Governor Tim Walz called me with a request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I! We have had such tremendous SUCCESS in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place that we have ‘touched’ and, even in Minnesota, Crime is way down, but both Governor Walz and I want to make it better! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

This morning, Republican Chris Madel withdrew from the Minnesota governor’s race, saying “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so…. Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”

“United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong,” Madel said.

He added: “I am above all else a pragmatist. The reality is that the national Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.”

Neil Mehta and Valerie Bauerlein of the Wall Street Journal noted that Preya Samsundar, a Republican strategy consultant, agrees, noting that her own mother, who immigrated legally, has begun to carry her passport with her.

Some Republicans are backing away from the administration over its tactics and violence in Minnesota. Former vice president Mike Pence today called images from there “deeply troubling” and called for a full investigation into Pretti’s killing. By Sunday, Republican senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had all called for investigations.

Today those calls reached deeper into the party, with Republican senators John Curtis of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Todd Young of Indiana also calling for an investigation and “accountability.” This afternoon, Jordain Carney and Adam Wren of Politico reported that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had called a hearing for February 12. He has asked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner Rodney Scott, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow, and ICE acting director Todd Lyons to testify.

One House Republican told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico: “Many of us wonder if the administration has any clue as to how much this will hurt us legislatively and electorally this year.”

As Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo noted today, even MAGA firebrand Texas governor Greg Abbott said on a Dallas talk show that the White House needs to “recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure that they get back to get what they wanted to do to begin with—and that is to remove people from the country.”

And immigration officers themselves are speaking up. This afternoon, Nicholas Nehamas, Hamed Aleaziz, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Alexandra Berzon of the New York Times reported that immigration officers deployed to urban areas are angry at the aggressiveness the Trump administration is employing and at the administration’s sending them into dangerous situations. They say the arrest quotas, long hours, and public anger at them are taking a significant toll on morale. Most of those the journalists interviewed said they were unhappy that administration officials had jumped to blame Pretti for his own killing. One agent said he had “always given the benefit of the doubt to the government in these situations” but no longer believed “any of the statements they put out anymore.”

Throughout the day, there were signs that the administration was preparing to throw Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino under the bus. An unsigned editorial in The Free Press, an outlet closely aligned with the administration, lambasted Noem for pushing lies that the American people can see with their own eyes are untrue. “Perhaps Republican operatives consider the politics of division as a viable strategy for their party to survive the midterm elections,” the editorial said, but it noted that “the administration’s deportation tactics as well as the conduct of federal agents in Minneapolis are driving voters away from the president and his party.”

Then, this afternoon, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reported that Bovino and some of his agents are leaving Minneapolis and returning to the sectors from which they came. Before hitting the road, though, on Friday federal agents took into custody Juan Espinoza Martinez, whom a jury acquitted this week after the Department of Justice accused him of participating in a plot to hire someone to kill Bovino. While CBP appears to be leaving, the operation itself will continue.

Tonight Alvarez and her colleague Michael Williams reported that DHS had suspended Bovino’s access to his official social media accounts.

In response to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s suggestion in a letter on Saturday, shortly after Pretti’s killing, that Governor Tim Walz could “restore the rule of law” in Minnesota by handing over the state’s voter rolls, Walz said: “I think everybody understands what the last request was, totally unrelated to anything on the voter files. This is again…Donald Trump telling everybody that the election was rigged…. I would just give a pro tip to the attorney general. There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.”

This afternoon, Trump turned back to tariffs, saying he is increasing tariff rates on South Korean “Autos, Lumber, Pharma, and all other Reciprocal TARIFFS, from 15% to 25%.”

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted that he “just had a very good telephone conversation with Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis. Lots of progress is being made!”

Frey responded with a statement: “I spoke with President Trump this afternoon and appreciated the conversation. I expressed how much Minneapolis has benefited from our immigrant communities and was clear that my main ask is that Operation Metro Surge needs to end. The president agreed that the present situation cannot continue.

“Some federal agents will begin leaving the area tomorrow, and I will continue pushing for the rest involved in this operation to go.

“Minneapolis will continue to cooperate with state and federal law enforcement on real criminal investigations—but we will not participate in unconstitutional arrests of our neighbors or enforce federal immigration law. Violent criminals should be held accountable based on the crimes they commit, not based on where they are from.

“I will continue working with all levels of government to keep our communities safe, keep crime down, and put Minneapolis residents first.

“I plan to meet with Border Czar Tom Homan tomorrow to further discuss next steps.”

Let’s go through the tragicomedy of the last week or so in geopolitics to ask and answer a question. What happens when the world can’t trust America anymore?

Now, you might say, “It already can’t!” That’s true, perhaps, but not quite in the sense I mean. The hard stuff of trust. So far, the world is sort-of-dancing-at-the-edge of the abyss. It’s bewildered by what’s happened to America, and it’s unsure. Trust it, or not?

Hence, the last week. Here’s what happened. Trump, in a classic spiral of fascist-narcissist obsession, decided to erupt at Europe over Greenland. He threatened a whole new trade war, this time, with the explicit intent to seize a territory.

Europe was double crossed, because it’s spent the last year trying to please and placate Trump. Appease might be too strong a word, but Europe’s leaders, being unaccustomed to the kind of brutality and rage that permeates America these days, sort of nervously bit their fingernails, and hoped that Trump would calm down, if they played along, smiling, reducing tariffs on their end, not retaliating. But of course, Trump is Trump, and more to the point, authoritarians are authoritarians.

So after Trump—LOL—got? Stole? Demanded? A Nobel Peace Prize, and who the hell even knows what to call this ridiculous act, which was swiftly derided by the Nobel Committee itself, he proceeded to blow his top over Greenland in some bizarre combination of teenage temper tantrum by way of 21st century Hitler. But the really funny part is what happened next, in this sort of escalating geopolitical comedy hour. At Davos, Trump proceeded to double cross Europe again.

He declared that a “framework” for a “deal” had been arrived at, which was to include land and mineral rights, and therefore, since he’d won, he was “cancelling” the tariffs. The only problem was that no such deal had remotely been reached, or even discussed. Trump had met with the head of NATO, which isn’t a country, that can cede sovereignty, and politicians who actually led said countries were quick to point all this out.

Meanwhile, markets reacted as if what Trump had said was real. Because of course in the upside-down fantasy world we now live in, who the hell knows? And does anyone even care? Ah, but this is the part where we all should.

So. There’s Trump. Double-crossing America’s oldest friends and allies, not just once or twice, but just over and over again, like the mafia rolling into a bar, before they burn it down. Just lying through his teeth, so he doesn’t look like an idiot and an incompetent. Declaring “deals” have been done, when of course they haven’t.

And there’s the world asking: can we still trust America? Remember, it hasn’t quite arrived at an answer yet. It’s sort of stunned. It can’t quite comprehend this weird authoritarian fascist technofeudal expansionist explosion-implosion, which is like if all of history’s bleakest chapters decided to have diarrhea all at once (sorry, someone needed to say it.)

Now. Meanwhile, there’s Trump, just double-crossing and lying, and lying and double-crossing, over and over and over again. We should all understand given the pattern above what happens next. Trump double crosses everyone again, and the non-deal is angrily said to be not good enough, and bang, here comes another trade war, more expansionism, more insanity, more lunacy, more stupidity, as if we’re not all drowning in it already. But do enough of us understand that? What are a million double crosses even called?

This is Trump’s game. The abuser’s game. The inducement of the act of holding out hope. The “reprieve.” The double cross. The doubling down. This is the pattern. We can all see it by now. Aren’t we all—pardon my Vichy French—weary of it by now?

So what happens when the world finally cottons onto the fact that Trump is history’s high priest of bad faith? That none of this is ever going to work, the negotiations, the deals, the diplomacy, the nice-guy-smiles, the handshakes, all of it? And just concludes, in fact, that America can’t be trusted?

You might say, “of course the world can’t trust America now!,” but that’s not. quite the point. The point is that it wants to.Because of course it has a great deal invested in America. Capital, assets, people, time, energy, history, the list goes on. And so it’s in disbelief, precisely because disbelief is a thing that happens when we first want to believe. But at some point, and it’s coming soon, America will finally lose all credibility.

That means: nobody will bother even attempting to “deal” with Trump, because if all that’s going to happen is that you’ll be double-crossed, and lied to, then lied to, and double-crossed…then who’d bother? And that’s when the fireworks will really begin.

Right now, the world is still making a feeble attempt to deal with Trump in good faith. It’s playing out this sort of spectacle which we all know is a charade. OK, maybe if we just…maybe if we just…try to give this maniac a little bit of what he wants, he’ll go away. But it doesn’t work. It never has. You can’t appease a fascist, what is this, third grade?

But at some point, this fools’ dance will stop. Nobody will want to deal with an America that the world has rightly concluded can’t be trusted. Everybody’s tired of this goddamned game. It’s draining, playing out this three act play over and over again, every day, like we’re trapped in Kafka’s ******* high school notebook, or a 90s B-movie thriller: you threaten me, I placate you, then you double cross me and stab me in the back, hello, this is history’s dumbest and most cliched plot line, too, just ask Caesar. It’s all so tiring and so painful and so stupid the blood is pouring out of my toenails trying to find a new body to inhabit, or maybe just a less idiotic future.

We’re all too tired of it now. So what happens when the world’s like, thanks but no thanks, please, find someone else to star in this dimwits’ play? Then a lot of things happen, and none of them are good. The world just shakes its head and walks away when Trump announces he wants to “make a deal,” which is like the mafia asking if you want them to “invest” in your restaurant. The world walks away, from American business, assets, capital, investment, dollars. It’s not that it doesn’t want them, and whatnot, but…who knows what’s going to happen? If the idea is that you deal in good faith, but you’ll still get double crossed…and you know it…what does that make you?

This is a step beyond “uncertainty.” It’s a very different place. Uncertainty was one of the buzzwords of pundits of the last year. It was sort of accurate, in a tepid way. But this isn’t that anymore. This is certainty. Uncertainty is where the world’s been. Can we trust America? Should we? How much? Maybe 50%? That’s pretty good, right? Sort of mafia-investing-in-the-bar odds, actually, but I digress. Now we’re crossing the threshold into certainty. America can’t be trusted.

It can’t be trusted with money, with capital, with wealth. With ideas, with creativity, with time and energy. It can’t be trusted to be a goddamned responsible member of civilization, and maintain even what semblance of democracy it had, which wasn’t exactly a shining example, what with the endless wars and school shootings and so on, but at least it wasn’t a full on fascism orgasm (sorry number two.)

When the world decides that America can’t be trusted, then the consequences will be severe. The final loss of credibility is what we’re talking about now. What happens when something, someone, loses credibility? You don’t even listen to the threats anymore. You just walk away, and get on with your life. This way lies becoming a pariah state, and all that entails

Now. Would you want to hold stuff that didn’t have much credibility in the world’s eyes? Why would you? How much would it be worth? Credibility is everything, in the end.

Why don’t we invest as much as we probably should as a world in poor countries? It’s not just that they’re poor, it’s that they’re not credible. Their institutions are too weak for them to carry through on their promises, often, as noble as they may be. Their leaders are…a lot like Trump. They’re riven by malfeasance and corruption. And so that lack of credibility exacts a steep, steep price. In the end, it is what keeps so many poor countries poor.

Credibility is…everything. For a currency. For bonds, for stocks, for property. It’s everything for everything. Do you tend to do much business with those you know you can’t trust? Not just wonder if you can. Know you can’t. How about be friends with? Have relationships with?

Maybe you see my point. Let me now make it crystal clear.

We’re reaching a turning point now. Not just the place where the world wonders if it can trust America. But where it knows it can’t.

This will be the principle by which geopolitics will be ordered for probably the rest of our lives. If you doubt me, by the way, you’re probably American, so go ahead and ask a European or Canadian if they’ll trust America again just because it elects someone nicer. They’ll tell you: so what? Now the problem is that you just might do it all over again, at any point, and how do we know you won’t?

America now has a serious credibility problem on its hands. The consequences will be disastrous. For it. Geopolitically, this opens a great deal of room, for nations who wish to emerge now as leaders, like Canada, like Europe, who can serve as credible stewards of global institutions, order, and the future itself.

Big opportunity. They’re already seizing it. America blew it. This kind of credibility doesn’t come back, at least not in the rest of our lifetimes. The world really has changed dramatically now.

For a world, for a civilization, the question is always: who or what can, should, will we believe in? One answer is abstract, about ideals. Another is harder, about promises made and kept, investment, cooperation, prosperity, about who can be trusted to care even for what doesn’t belong to them. Credibility is power, in this way, my friends, the truest kind of all. The rest is just details.

And as America loses its credibility, so too goes everything it has built over decades and centuries.

Department of Homeland Security officers have fired shots during enforcement arrests or at people protesting their operations 16 times since July, and as in the recent shootings in Minneapolis, in each case the Trump administration has publicly declared their actions justified before waiting for investigations to be completed.

Most of the incidents involve officers firing at drivers during enforcement stops in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago where DHS has surged federal immigration officers. At least 10 people have been struck by bullets — including four U.S. citizens. Three people have been killed.

Board of Peace Set to Hand Trump Sweeping Powers Over Gaza

President Trump would have sweeping powers over the future governance of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and the well-being of its people, under a plan drafted by the new international group he leads, laying out how it would operate.

The group, the Board of Peace, met for the first time in Davos, Switzerland, last week, as member states including Azerbaijan and Qatar, signed its founding charter, which calls for securing “enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”
Much about the Board of Peace has so far been unclear, but a draft resolution, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, would allow the chairman, Mr. Trump, to nominate senior officials who will help administer Gaza, and assign responsibilities.

Those officials include a “high representative” for Gaza, tasked with overseeing a Palestinian body administering the enclave, and the commander of an international stabilization force, which is intended to help provide security. Mr. Trump would also have the power to approve resolutions and suspend them in urgent cases.

The resolution is dated Jan. 22 — last Thursday — and has not been signed by Mr. Trump, which would bring it into force, according to three officials who were briefed on the resolution and verified the authenticity of the obtained copy. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, adding that the resolution was currently under discussion.
It was not clear whether the draft was the final text of the resolution.
The document resembles a United Nations Security Council resolution, and appears to be an effort by the Board of Peace to formalize some of its plans for Gaza.

The notion of establishing a Board of Peace for Gaza was first set out in Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan, announced last September, for ending the 2-year war between Israel and Hamas that devastated the Palestinian enclave.
In November, the U.N. Security Council granted the Board of Peace a mandate as part of U.S.-led efforts to sustain the cease-fire in Gaza.
The assumption was that the board would focus solely on Gaza, but the Trump administration said this month that it would address conflicts elsewhere, although the scope of that remains unclear.

Though some countries have enthusiastically joined the new international organization after being invited by Mr. Trump, others, including close U.S. allies like France and Britain, have refused. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said his country would not join because the board excluded the Palestinian Authority and because the body was “outside the framework of the United Nations.”

The murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday morning at the hands of federal agents has put wind in the sails of those trying to rein in the Trump administration at the same time it has sent the administration scrambling to regain its course. Popular outcry over the killing of a beloved ICU nurse for the VA and popular organization over the general violence of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol have unleashed pent up fury over the actions of the Trump administration. The outpouring has reached as far as spaces like a subreddit devoted to videos of people playing cats like bongos, as Drew Harwell and Scott Nover of the Washington Post noted. The anger has been so overwhelming that it has changed the course of national politics.

Pretti’s killing has thrown into doubt the passage of a funding package that includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Seven Democrats in the House voted in favor of the measure, which also includes funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Labor Department, and so on. The bill is one of the twelve appropriations bills that must pass Congress by the end of the month to fund the government. Part of their argument for voting in favor of the bill even with funding for DHS is that the Republicans’ July 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” poured so much money into DHS that it can function until September 30, 2029.

So until Saturday, the measure was expected to have enough Democratic votes to pass through the Senate. The killing changed the equation. On Sunday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) issued a statement saying: “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”

Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY) publicly apologized for his vote for the bill. “I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis,” he posted on social media. “I hear the anger from my constituents, and I take responsibility for that. I have long been critical of ICE’s unlawful behavior and I must do a better job demonstrating that.” He called for Trump to pull federal agents out of Minneapolis.

Senate Democrats want the Republicans to take the DHS funding out of the larger bill and pass it to prevent a government shutdown, but such a change would require unanimous consent in the Senate, and Republicans there are refusing to do it. In the House, the far-right Freedom Caucus has written to Trump to ask that he refuse to “allow Democrats to strip [DHS] funding out to pass other appropriations separately. We cannot support giving Democrats the ability to control the funding of our Department of Homeland Security,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, news about the actions of federal agents is unlikely to garner them more support. People, a widely read popular magazine that has devoted more of its pages to politics lately than in the past, has been publishing stories of those who died in ICE custody last year—at least 32—including Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death in ICE custody in Texas has been ruled a homicide. It told readers about five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, detained by ICE after being used as bait to capture relatives, and of Wael Tarabishi, who died of a rare genetic disease thirty days after his father, Wael’s primary caregiver, was detained by ICE at a routine check-in at an ICE facility in Dallas.

News broke today that federal agents deported a five-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras, a country where she had never been before being sent there with her mother. The agents did not permit either to have access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge. An immigration attorney tried to find them, but ICE agents allegedly told the attorney the mother and child weren’t in their database. The two were being held at a hotel rather than a detention center, a choice some advocates suspect was designed to keep them from being included in such a database.

Today Jeff Winter and Priscilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that ICE agents have been collecting the personal information of protesters in Minneapolis. They reported that officials asked federal agents sent to Minneapolis to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” A form titled “intel collection non-arrests” enabled agents to fill in protesters’ personal information.

This information supports the statement of Trump’s “border czar”—a fancy term for an advisor—Tom Homan on the Fox News Channel earlier this month. “[W]e’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Homan said. “We’re going to put their face on TV. We’re going to let their employers, in their neighborhoods, in their schools, know who these people are.”

Before a Border Patrol agent shot Renee Good, he captured her face and license plate on camera, and in Maine, a protester recorded an agent responding to her question of why he was recording her license plate. “We have a nice little database,” he answered, “and now you are considered a domestic terrorist.”

This information also seems to reflect Trump’s 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7 that suggests anyone objecting to the administration’s policies is a domestic terrorist.

After the Maine incident, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CNN: “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS. We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement. Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.” She reiterated today that there is no DHS database.

Sources told Winter and Alvarez that federal agents had documented details about Pretti before Saturday. About a week before his death, Pretti stopped his car to observe federal agents chasing a family on foot, shouted, and blew a whistle. Five agents tackled him and one leaned on his back, breaking a rib, before they released him. Medical records confirm Pretti was treated for the injury. It is not clear if the agents on Saturday recognized him.

Federal agents are causing trouble on the international stage, too. Today a federal agent tried to force his way into the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis. As Max Bearak of the New York Times notes, international law forbids federal agents from entering a consulate or embassy without permission from the consul or the ambassador. An employee blocked the agent. Videos show an employee saying: “This is the Ecuadorian consulate. You’re not allowed to enter.” The agent responds: “If you touch me, I’ll grab you.” The Associated Press reports that Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs has filed a protest with the U.S. embassy.

This morning, news broke that ICE agents from the Homeland Security Investigations Unit would join other federal agents working at the Olympic Games in Milan, Italy, in February. According to Brian Mann of NPR, Homeland Security officials have worked at past Olympic Games, but this time many Italians objected. The mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, told reporters: “This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips. It is clear they are not welcome in Milan, without a doubt.”

Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani tried to reassure concerned Italians, saying: “It’s not like these are the [ICE] people on the streets of Minneapolis. It’s not like the SS are about to arrive.” Former Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte remained skeptical, calling out ICE for “street violence and killings” in the U.S. As for letting ICE agents into Italy, he said: “We cannot allow this.”

The administration appears to be floundering as it tries to respond to the popular outrage.

While DHS has announced it has taken on the investigations of the killings of both Good and Pretti itself, FBI director Kash Patel yesterday told a right-wing podcaster that the FBI will be investigating the Signal chats of those organized in Minneapolis to observe and record federal agents to see if they have endangered federal agents. Aram Roston of The Guardian reported that podcaster Benny Johnson suggested the chats were “coordinated infrastructure,” adding that he would “like for the feds to take a crack at trying to get rid of this infrastructure the way they approach the mob or cartels or other terrorist networks, right?”

Mark Caputo and Brittany Gibson of Axios reported today that sources in the White House told them the administration knows the situation in Minnesota is a mess and is looking for a way to calm the fury without leaving the state. “We can’t lose Minneapolis because if we do, we lose Chicago and Los Angeles,” one advisor explained. “We’re not going to let the people who lost the presidential election over immigration dictate to us on immigration.”

Marianna Sotomayor of the Washington Post reported today that House Democrats plan to open an investigation into Noem as part of “a push to impeach her.” Such an outcome would be a long shot, but they want to make Republicans take a stand either for or against the administration’s policies, something most Republicans want to avoid. Justin Papp of CNBC reported that the Democrats will impeach Noem if Trump doesn’t fire her. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Democratic leaders said in a statement.

As two Republican senators also called for Noem to resign, her supporters in the White House today tried to deflect blame for the outrageous story that federal agents acted in self-defense when they killed Pretti, for he intended to “massacre” them. Officials told Caputo of Axios that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was behind the White House lies. Through an intermediary, Noem passed to Caputo the statement: “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”

For their part, Miller’s team tried to put the blame on federal agents, including Bovino, claiming the agents had said Pretti had a gun. A source told Caputo that Miller “heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops.” Miller called Pretti “an assassin” on social media. Vice President J.D. Vance reposted the statement, and Noem used the same language in front of the press.

Trump made it clear tonight that the crisis in Minneapolis is not going to make him stop his attacks on either immigrants or Minnesota Democrats. At a speech in Iowa, he called those arrested by federal agents in Minnesota “hardened, vicious, horrible criminals.” He called out Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar—a frequent target of his—saying of her Somali birthplace: “She comes from a country that’s a disaster…. It’s not even a country. It barely has a government. They’re good at one thing—pirates. But they don’t do that anymore because they get the same treatment from us as the drug dealers get: Boom! Boom! Boom!”

Omar appeared tonight at a town hall in Minneapolis and said: “We must abolish ICE for good. And Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.” As she spoke, a man rushed her and sprayed her with liquid from a syringe before security grabbed him and rushed him out as Omar herself advanced toward the man. “I’m ok,” Omar later posted. “I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win. Grateful to my incredible constituents who rallied behind me. Minnesota strong.”

Former president Joe Biden also weighed in on events in Minneapolis today. This morning, he posted on social media: “What has unfolded in Minneapolis this past month betrays our most basic values as Americans. We are not a nation that guns down our citizens in the street. We are not a nation that allows our citizens to be brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights. We are not a nation that tramples the 4th Amendment and tolerates our neighbors being terrorized. The people of Minnesota have stood strong—helping community members in unimaginable circumstances, speaking out against injustice when they see it, and holding our government accountable to the people. Minnesotans have reminded us all what it is to be American, and they have suffered enough at the hands of this Administration. Violence and terror have no place in the United States of America, especially when it’s our own government targeting American citizens.

“No single person can destroy what America stands for and believes in, not even a President, if we—all of America—stand up and speak out. We know who we are. It’s time to show the world. More importantly, it’s time to show ourselves.

“Now, justice requires full, fair, and transparent investigations into the deaths of the two Americans who lost their lives in the city they called home. Jill and I are sending strength to the families and communities who love Alex Pretti and Renee Good as we all mourn their senseless deaths.”

Quote:

This morning, news broke that ICE agents from the Homeland Security Investigations Unit would join other federal agents working at the Olympic Games in Milan, Italy, in February. According to Brian Mann of NPR, Homeland Security officials have worked at past Olympic Games, but this time many Italians objected. The mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, told reporters: “This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips. It is clear they are not welcome in Milan, without a doubt.”

Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani tried to reassure concerned Italians, saying: “It’s not like these are the [ICE] people on the streets of Minneapolis. It’s not like the SS are about to arrive.” Former Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte remained skeptical, calling out ICE for “street violence and killings” in the U.S. As for letting ICE agents into Italy, he said: “We cannot allow this.”

Federal agents continue to rain terror on Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other U.S. cities including Portland and Lewiston, Maine. That violence has made it crystal clear that the goal of attacking immigrants is not simply to create a white nation; it is also to terrorize Americans into accepting the domination of MAGA Republicans.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has delivered the Department of Justice into the service of this project. The Department of Justice is not investigating the killings of Renee Good or Alex Pretti and so evidently intended to cover up information about the shooting of Pretti that a judge ordered its officers not to destroy evidence.

On Monday, four Democrats from the House Committee on the Judiciary wrote to Bondi noting that “[f]ederal agents have now gunned down and killed two American citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—in Minneapolis. Videos taken by bystanders who observed and documented these killings leave little doubt that there is no legal or moral justification for these cold-blooded homicides. Yet, under your leadership, the Department of Justice (DOJ)—an agency created in 1870 at the height of post–Civil War Reconstruction to enforce the civil rights of all Americans—actively obstructed any investigation into these killings, and instead of defending the civil rights of Americans, now appears to be covering up the most egregious civil rights offenses and systematically condoning the lawless killing of Americans by agents of the government.”

The four Democratic representatives—Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, and Lucy McBath of Georgia—noted that Bondi’s refusal to investigate the deaths was unprecedented, and demanded the department provide all documents and information related to the killings by February 2, including those showing who ordered the department to abandon the investigations.

On Monday, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, appointed by President George W. Bush, suggested his patience with ICE had run out. After officials apparently ignored his order to permit a detainee to have a bond hearing or release him, he ordered Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, to appear in court on Friday to explain why he wasn’t in contempt of court. On Tuesday, the government released the detainee.

Today Schiltz canceled the Friday hearing but went on to rake ICE over the coals. He identified “96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases” and commented, “The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated.”

“This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” Schiltz warned that he would haul Lyons or other government officials into court if they kept ignoring court rulings. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” he wrote.

Malcolm Ferguson of The New Republic reported today that because the federal government won’t hold ICE and Border Patrol agents accountable for their actions, elected prosecutors around the country have launched a group called Fight Against Federal Overreach, or FAFO. This acronym is more commonly used to represent the saying: “F*ck Around and Find Out.”

Today Bondi traveled to Minnesota, not to restore the rule of law but apparently to try to reclaim the narrative of the crackdown in Minneapolis for the administration. In a social media post, she said that federal agents had arrested “16 Minnesota rioters for allegedly assaulting federal law enforcement—people who have been resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents. We expect more arrests to come. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: NOTHING will stop President Trump and this Department of Justice from enforcing the law.”

She then posted images of 11 of those arrested. They are facing the camera, while the federal agents standing next to them have their backs to the camera. Journalist Matt Novak commented that the photos make the “rioters,” looking at the camera, appear to be heroes, while the ICE agents look like cowards, afraid to be seen. “Bondi thinks she’s going to win the propaganda war with this sh*t,” Novak wrote, “but it’s never been more clear that they’re losing.”

The department charged the 16 with assaulting immigration agents, but the judge overseeing the court where they were charged said she was “deeply disturbed” that Bondi had posted the photographs. In the United States of America, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The government should not post their images suggesting otherwise. “This conduct is not something that the court condones,” Judge Dulce J. Foster said.

G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers reported yesterday that federal agents’ killing of Good and Pretti has created a backlash that amounts to a tipping point. The number of American adults who approve of Trump’s presidency has dropped to a new low: 39.2%. Support for his immigration policies has also collapsed, dropping 18 points from its highest point to put it at –10 now. On deportation, Morris says, he is at -12.

Morris notes that these averages may overestimate Trump’s support, as when Americans hear the world immigration now, they don’t think of migrants under an overpass in south Texas, but of an “ICE officer killing a woman in her car and calling her a ‘f*cking bitch’” or a “regular guy being shot 10 times in the back after being tackled to the ground and disarmed.” Morris shows that Americans have moved dramatically toward abolishing ICE: 46% of Americans now support abolishing the agency,, while only 43% oppose getting rid of it.

Today, music legend Bruce Springsteen posted a song called “Streets of Minneapolis.” “I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis,” he wrote. “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free.”

As the administration loses control over the national narrative, MAGA domination may well depend on stealing the 2026 and 2028 elections. Hours after federal agents killed Alex Pretti last Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota governor Tim Walz blaming Democrats for the violence and suggesting that to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” the governor must give the Department of Justice access to the state’s voter rolls “to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law.”

Tying aggressive immigration enforcement to access to voter rolls is a different justification for the DOJ’s continuing demands for state voter rolls. According to Eileen O’Connor of the Brennan Center for Justice, since May 2025 the Trump administration has demanded complete voter rolls, including sensitive information, from at least 44 states and the District of Columbia. When most refused, the Department of Justice began in September 2025 to sue for them. So far, it has sued 24 of those jurisdictions.

Abby Vesoulis and Ari Berman of Mother Jones note that Minnesota has the highest turnout rate of any state and is often cited as a model for election security. The journalists also note that right-wing activists have sought voter data for decades as part of their quest to prove that noncitizen voting is a huge problem in the country, an accusation that has been repeatedly debunked.

The federal government has no authority to oversee state elections systems. The 1960 Civil Rights Act Bondi cites as authority says that the attorney general may request records “relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting in such election.” But it specifies that the DOJ must provide “the basis and the purpose” for the request. Until now, Bondi has claimed that the DOJ wants to make sure lists are maintained correctly, but tying state violence to the voter rolls is an ominous sign.

“Here’s the bottom line…they’re not entitled to that data,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “This isn’t leadership. This is blackmail. This is the way organized crime works. They move into your neighborhood, they start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want. This is not how America is supposed to work, and I’m embarrassed that the administration is pushing in this direction.”

Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) executed a search warrant at the elections warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential election. It appears President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists remain determined to convince Americans that the election was stolen through voter fraud despite zero evidence of such a theft, five years in which Trump’s claims have been thoroughly debunked, and the dismissal of dozens of court cases.

On January 2, 2021, Trump tried for an hour to persuade Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump, one more than he needed to steal the state’s electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, the presidential candidate the Georgia people had chosen. When Raffensperger refused, Trump suggested Raffensperger could have committed a crime by refusing to do as Trump demanded.

That story has been in the news again lately, as Trump told the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 21 that “everybody now knows” the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

Former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on January 22. A grand jury indicted Trump on four counts related to that attempt, but Trump’s reelection to the presidency halted the case. Smith reiterated his conviction that there was enough evidence that Trump committed crimes to convict him.

And now, according to journalist Jen Psaki of The Briefing with Jen Psaki, Trump’s administration has seized the physical ballots from the 2020 election, all tabulator tapes, and all ballot images from the original ballot count, breaking the line of custody and contaminating the files. Crucially, they also seized all voter rolls from Fulton County. “This is a seismic event,” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Psaki. “This should have people across the country absolutely shook. This is a huge deal. This is an FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office.... This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections. He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020.” Ossoff warned that Americans must be prepared as Trump tries to take away Americans’ right to choose their elected officials in 2026.

On January 6, 2026, Trump explained to Republican lawmakers: “You gotta win the midterms. Because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”

What is the war on vaccines really about? Just after the New Year, like someone racing to fulfill a resolution, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA alliance at the Department of Health and Human Services released a radically revised federal vaccine schedule, bypassing the usual procedures and abruptly cutting the number of diseases for which shots are recommended from 17 to 11.

The new guidelines certainly look like the frontal assault on vaccine science many Americans have been fearing for a year. But a different way to think about it is this: as another attack on the country’s threadbare social safety net by health libertarians whose strategy for making America healthy again appears straightforwardly to mean letting more of the country’s weak and vulnerable suffer and die.

On a recent episode of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” the new head of the federal vaccine advisory panel, the pediatric cardiologist Kirk Milhoan, said flatly that his goal was to make “individual autonomy,” rather than “public health,” the top priority of the country’s public health apparatus. As part of that mission, he questioned whether we should even be vaccinating for polio.

Kennedy and his acolytes have defended their new set of recommendations as a way of bringing America’s standards in line with those of other wealthy countries. In some narrow sense, their argument is accurate. Many countries maintain policies closer to the old American set than the new one, but generally speaking, they require fewer shots. One country in particular stands out as a natural comparison for the new American standards: Denmark.

But as many public health workers have responded, in considering why the United States and Denmark had taken such different approaches to vaccination policy, you should at least consider the fact that, well, the United States isn’t Denmark. It is much larger and more diverse, with a much more unhealthy population and more severe health disparities, too. Not to mention: The health care systems that attend to the sick in the two countries are very different, as well.

Part of the problem is that the two countries face different disease landscapes: In 2023, per capita rates of chronic hepatitis B, for instance, were more than three times as high in the United States as in Denmark. The hepatitis B vaccine is now recommended by the C.D.C. only for high-risk groups, but that points to another major difference: Because of its patchwork health system, the United States is far less effective in screening for risk than countries in which health care is universal and health surveillance is both more far-reaching and feels less obtrusive.

When people do get sick in other rich countries, it’s generally easy and affordable for them to get care. That isn’t always the case here, where more than 25 million Americans lack health insurance and, partly as a result, many maintain an erratic and distrustful relationship with health care. There are also obvious demographic, behavioral and morbidity differences, which mean that many more Americans are vulnerable to opportunistic infections than their counterparts in Denmark.

And what this implies is rather striking, and rarely discussed by those outside of public health: that among their many purposes and benefits, vaccines have served now for decades as a kind of substitute health safety net in America. They are a way of limiting the downside consequences of all of our country’s notorious shortcomings: its lack of universal or free health care, its imperfect health insurance system, its lack of robust disease surveillance and screening, its declining trust in medical institutions and practitioners, its yawning gaps of economic inequality and equally horrifying disparities in morbidity and mortality.

Elsewhere, these problems might be addressed in other ways, through various forms of redistribution, welfare policy and social spending. In the United States, it seems, the best we’ve been able to do is to protect against some of the health manifestations of those problems with a few shots. Give a pregnant mother an R.S.V. vaccine and you can worry less about whether her child will have easy access to care and treatment for respiratory infections. Give a newborn a hepatitis B shot and it matters much less whether someone in the family is an intravenous drug user who might be carrying the disease. Give a full course of M.M.R. protection and you don’t need to worry quite as much about the way measles is much more punishing for those suffering malnutrition. And if you don’t do any of these things, or you make it harder for others to — well, all those problems start to loom a bit larger.

If America were a healthier, better cared for and solidaristic place, perhaps we could get away with somewhat less aggressive vaccination, trusting that those who really needed the boost of protection could be reliably identified ahead of time and that those who fell sick later could be capably treated. As it is, mass vaccination is not just a disease prophylactic but among the simplest tools we have to limit the damage of America’s many social pathologies and inequalities. And the consequences of rolling back that safety net are likely to be profound.

How profound? Much of the answer depends on how much is actually rolled back, and — for now, at least — it seems likely that large parts of the country will stick closely to the old recommendations, state by state. This is another way in which the MAHA reign has been as much bark as bite: Many states have decoupled their own recommendations from the federal guidelines, and leading health organizations, from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the American Medical Association, are doing the same.

But almost certainly that won’t be the case everywhere, and it is probably least likely in those places that are already falling way behind in most measures of health and well-being. In some Southern states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, life expectancy is more than half a decade shorter than in Northeastern states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.

Look by county and the disparities are even starker, with life expectancy over a decade shorter in large swaths of Appalachia than in the upper Midwest. That’s about the same as the life expectancy gap between Liechtenstein and Bangladesh.

These American disparities are not merely the results of gaps in vaccine coverage. Vaccines are one way we have of addressing the underlying pathologies, social and individual, that give rise to them. Without vaccines, the diseases will be both much more ravaging and far more common. Perhaps more disconcertingly, those now in charge seem basically fine with that.

“What we’re going to have is a real-world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles,” Dr. Milhoan, the head of the vaccine advisory panel, said, sounding somewhat excited about the possibility. “What is the new incidence of hospitalization?” he asked. “What’s the incidence of death?”

As the American people continue to express their fury over the violence of federal agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere, officials from the Trump administration today tried to shift the public narrative to shore up their softening base and silence their opponents.

Late last night, more than two dozen federal agents took independent journalist Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, into custody, charging him with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which criminalizes people who move past peaceful protests to threaten someone or obstruct their access to a reproductive health clinic or “place of religious worship.”

That law has usually been used to prosecute antiabortion activists who block reproductive health clinics. As soon as he took office in 2025, Trump praised dozens of right-wing protesters who had been convicted of violating the FACE Act when they committed acts of violence at women’s healthcare clinics.

Lemon is also charged with conspiring to hurt the exercise of rights, a law originally passed after the Civil War to combat Ku Klux Klan members who were trying to force Black Americans back into a form of quasi-slavery.

Lemon filmed protesters who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday, January 18. Kiera Butler of Mother Jones reports the ultra-conservative white nationalist church has ties to the Trump administration. One of the church pastors, David Easterwood, is an official from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Jarrett Ley and Samuel Oakford of the Washington Post reviewed the video Lemon filmed at the church protest. They wrote that the video shows that Lemon identified himself as a journalist and followed protesters into the church. Inside for about 45 minutes, he interviewed four parishioners and five protesters. Eight of those nine exchanges appeared calm. The video does not show Lemon participating in the chants with which the protesters disrupted the service. A pastor asked Lemon to leave, and seven minutes later he exited the church.

Federal prosecutors tried to charge Lemon, his producer, and six others shortly after the protest, but a magistrate judge refused a warrant for Lemon and his producer, saying prosecutors had not shown evidence that would justify the arrests. The administration then asked a federal judge to overturn the magistrate judge’s decision. When he, too, refused, calling the request “unprecedented,” the administration rushed the case to the Eighth Circuit. It, too, refused.

At that point, it appears the administration went to a federal grand jury to indict Lemon.

Officials also arrested independent journalist Georgia Fort of Minnesota, along with two participants in the protest: Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy.

The arrests of Lemon and Fort are windows into the deep concern of administration officials about how dramatically Americans have turned against ICE and the Trump administration. At its most basic level, the attack on two independent journalists is undoubtedly designed to intimidate other independent news producers from covering the Trump administration, particularly the violence of ICE and Border Patrol agents.

It is a dramatic assault on the First Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the government from curtailing the freedom of the press.

It is also a transparent attempt to change the popular narrative. The killing of two white American citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—by federal agents hammered home to white Americans that they are as much at risk from the authoritarian system Trump is building as are Black Americans and people of color who are not citizens. With that realization—especially when administration officials, including Trump, blamed Pretti’s killing on the fact he carried a gun, although he did not use it—solidarity against the administration has been building, with white Americans often leading the way.

All four of the people arrested in the past 24 hours are Black. This morning, the official social media account of the White House posted a picture of Lemon with the caption: “When life gives you lemons…” and an emoji of chains, evoking the chains of enslavement.

In case this appeal to the MAGA base wasn’t clear enough, Attorney General Pam Bondi took to social media to highlight the religious claim behind this profound attack on the freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment. “Make no mistake,” she said. “Under President Trump’s leadership and this administration, you have the right to worship freely and safely. And if I haven’t been clear already, if you violate that sacred right, we are coming after you.”

The administration is appealing to the MAGA racist and Christian nationalist base by demonstrating that it is willing to violate the Constitution to impose MAGA’s ideology on the nation. But it is also apparently trying to signal to white American citizens that they should think they are safe from an authoritarian administration: its top victims remain Black Americans and people of color.

Lemon will be pleading not guilty. After appearing in court Friday, he told reporters: “I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now…. I will not be silenced. I look forward to my day in court.”

The growing concerns of administration officials that they have lost control of the narrative over ICE and federal authority might have been behind their willingness to drop what they say is the last of the Epstein files they will be releasing. Congress passed a law requiring the full disclosure of those files by December 19, but until today, the Department of Justice had released less than 1% of them. Today Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department is continuing to withhold nearly 3 million pages of documents because they contain child sexual abuse material and the department has an obligation to protect victims’ rights. He said the department is withholding another 200,000 pages because of legal privileges.

“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document review process to ensure transparency to the American people,” Blanche told reporters.

For all the talk of protecting the personal information about Epstein’s victims, the new files released the names and identifying information of a number of survivors, including some who have not previously been associated with the Epstein operation. Twenty Epstein survivors released a statement saying: “This latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files is being sold as transparency, but what it actually does is expose survivors. As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy. This is a betrayal of the very people this process is supposed to serve.”

Journalists are scrutinizing the new material and have already found that billionaire commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who said last year that he and his wife had been so repulsed by Epstein that they cut ties with him around 2005, in fact visited with him in 2012, four years after Epstein’s first conviction of procuring a child for prostitution, and continued to correspond with him until at least 2018.

Other administration figures also show up in the files. First Lady Melania Trump wrote a friendly email to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002. Before she married Trump and when Maxwell was Epstein’s girlfriend, Melania Knauss wrote to compliment Maxwell on a picture of her in a New York Magazine profile of Epstein. Knauss added: “I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in NY. Have a great time!” She signed the email: “Love, Melania.”

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates appears in the files. Elon Musk appears repeatedly in the files with messages suggesting he was a big fan of Epstein’s parties. Trump, too, appears frequently in the files, but a spreadsheet listing accusations against him and other prominent people disappeared shortly after it appeared today.

The lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), wrote to Blanche today formally requesting access to the unredacted Epstein files as soon as possible. Khanna told Jenna Sundel of Newsweek: “The [Department of Justice] said it identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages but is releasing only about 3.5 million after review and redactions. This raises questions as to why the rest are being withheld.”

Today Trump announced plans for a massive automobile race into downtown Washington, “the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.,” in August as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this summer. In an executive order, he called the proposed race a tribute to INDYCAR racing and said the race would “showcase the majesty of our great city as drivers navigate a track around our iconic national monuments in celebration of America’s 250th birthday.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said: “To think, 190 miles an hour down Pennsylvania Avenue—this is going to be wild.”

The attempt to change the narrative around ICE does not appear to have been effective, at least so far. Today the Senate passed the appropriations bills to fund the government in 2026 with funding for the Department of Homeland Security pulled out for longer discussion. Now it heads to the House.

In the Senate, two Republicans joined all the Senate Democrats to vote in favor of an amendment proposed by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to repeal the $75 billion funding increase for ICE that Republicans included in their July 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Sanders proposed using those savings to reverse the cuts to Medicaid that were also in that law. The amendment failed by a vote of 49 to 51, but that it got so many votes shows that senators are feeling the pressure over ICE.

“As we speak, ICE agents are shooting American citizens in cold blood, breaking down doors to arrest people, and sending 5-year-olds to detention centers, all in clear violation of our Constitution,” Sanders said. “Instead of funding Trump’s domestic army, we should instead use that money to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from losing the health care they desperately need by investing in Medicaid.”

Across the nation today, people turned out into the streets in a scheduled nationwide protest. CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz watched the tens of thousands of people protesting in Minneapolis today and said: “I’ve covered many protests…and I have to tell you, I’ve not seen a crowd like this before. I mean, it is eight degrees out here. Eight degrees, it feels like five, it is freezing, but nothing, nothing is stopping these people….”

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Today Trump announced plans for a massive automobile race into downtown Washington, “the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.,” in August as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this summer. In an executive order, he called the proposed race a tribute to INDYCAR racing and said the race would “showcase the majesty of our great city as drivers navigate a track around our iconic national monuments in celebration of America’s 250th birthday.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said: “To think, 190 miles an hour down Pennsylvania Avenue—this is going to be wild.”….”

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