Yesterday I discussed how in a flash, over roughly 24 hours, the Trump administration began to lose control of the public narrative about ICE and its wilding missions in Minneapolis. The public has been turning against ICE for months. This isn’t new. What we see now is the fragmentation of the pro-ICE wilding chorus. These propaganda choruses are like schools of fish. They are marvelously united and function in a way that no fish has any interest in straying from the school. They flit this way and that but always in unison. When they begin to fragment, that coherence breaks apart very rapidly as the incentive for each fish to stay in line diminishes.
I want to recommend a new article in The Atlantic, one by Adam Serwer, the kind of article only Adam can write. The gist is that ICE and MAGA are losing in Minneapolis in large part because the citizens of the city are performing — really embodying — a resistance of mutual protection. MAGA (and its paramilitary wing, ICE) presents itself as a movement of social solidarity, camaraderie and valor based on ethnic and ideological purity. But it’s the citizens of Minneapolis who are embodying those values. Good and Pretti lost their lives acting as observers, spotters, place-your-body-in-the-breach defenders of people they didn’t know. They showed bravery and selflessness and concern for their neighbors, the kind of intense communalism MAGA posits as commonplace in a lost golden age that can be regained with a purifying violence.
Meanwhile ICE has been characterized by workaday spasms of meaningless violence, aggressive lying packaged as a virtue. You look at these videos and you see a man interceding to help a defenseless woman. He wields a tool of transparency — an iPhone recording a video — and is first tackled and then murdered by a group of heavily armed men. This afternoon I saw one of the House’s most Trump-fluffing members of Congress, Glenn Grothman (R-QI), say, “Right now the video looks pretty damning … the Department of Homeland Security is going to have to do a better job of educating their people to make sure this sort of murder doesn’t result.” Minneapolis is a spectacle and tableau of virtue crushed by coarse and erratic vices. No wonder ICE and the White House are losing control of the situation.
A certain duality is a unique feature of Donald Trump as a political actor and civic warlord. His most basic instincts and ambitions are rooted in a predatory aggression against outsiders and anyone who doesn’t bend to his will. And yet he also knows what plays and doesn’t play on TV. He knows instinctively what’s hot and what isn’t. So now he comes in, cans his Himmler-y mass deportation martinet Greg Bovino, lets word circulate that almost the whole of the DHS crew may, possibly, be fired and puts in the Himmler-y martinet’s place the totally (barely) different and (not) fair minded Border Czar Tom Homan. And Homan is presumably going to try to manage some kind of ethnic cleansy moonwalking in which everything seems different without anything changing at all. As David Kurtz put it in today’s Morning Memo, it’s just a slight rebranding and a new lead character. But the spectacle of punitive raids and terrorizing communities in blue cities is the essence of second term-Trumpism. As Serwer wrote in the first term, the cruelty is the point. It’s the feature and not any kind of bug. So it’s not clear that kinder, gentler ICE wilding sprees in Minneapolis or Chicago or any other blue city is really possible.
Just as I was writing this I saw a news report that the Kristi Noem or one of her administration allies appears to have leaked that her right-out-of-the-gate fusillade of lies about Alex Pretti trying to assassinate ICE agents was actually dictated by none other than Stephen Miller. Of course Miller is the driver behind all of this and behind Miller of course is Donald Trump himself. Noem all but saying on the record that everything she did was for and at the behest of “the president and Stephen.” No one wants to get caught holding this bag. So the previously unbreakable united front of Trumpism is falling out into its individual parts. Noem doesn’t want to go down alone for what she did for Trump and Miller. And who can blame her?
It’s up to the citizens on the ground in Minneapolis and opposition elected officials across the country to chase MAGA and ICE as they are in retreat, making the simple point that the best way to stop murdering innocent American citizens who are defending their rights is to stop killing them. The best way to tamp down the terror is to stop terrorizing civilian communities. There’s simply no such thing as a kinder, gentler ICE. More investigations, more testimony, more demands for tearing down ICE and building a better, non-criminal agency in its place, more making every member of Congress who supported these travesties to answer for it every day until November.
The changes the White House has made over the last 24 hours are purely nominal. They are swapping out Bovino for the higher up who has been Trump’s loyal Great Replacement toady for years. But nominal doesn’t mean meaningless. They show the White House saw the current situation was untenable. They couldn’t keep people in line.
One unfortunate fact for the White House is that Pretti’s murder came just as the White House was trying to strong-arm Congress into passing the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. The new plan, reported overnight at Politico and other outlets, is to accept the mounting Republican criticism of ICE and the Minneapolis surge while holding the iron discipline on the budget vote intact. That’s just not how it works. You can’t reposition on Minneapolis while demanding total fealty on the one vote or public action Members of Congress can take to register an actual opinion on what’s happening.
What happens next is up to oppositionists around the country and in the key blue cities. They will determine whether this is a a bump in the road or the turning point.