In just the first month of this year, President Trump’s forces have abducted a foreign leader and fatally shot two U.S. citizens protesting the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown. Laws are being bent, twisted and broken so frequently and so egregiously that it’s hard to keep up.
Everywhere we’re seeing signs that ICE, the White House and its virtual army of influencers, agitators and generalized degenerates are losing control of the public narrative surrounding the murder of VA ICU nurse and activist Alex Pretti. These things don’t come in one coherent motion. You see it more in a kind of fragmentation, a general loss of a coherent and aggressive message. Individual players and factions start groping for their own climb down and then often at one sudden point run rapidly for the hills. The White House and ICE have over the last 48 hours simultaneously been claiming that Pretti was there for a mass shooting of ICE agents, so thank god they killed him, and, also, that Pretti’s death is a terrible tragedy and it’s all Governor Tim Walz’s fault because Minneapolis is a sanctuary city. Those two messages don’t really hold together.
Things accelerated from there. Just today, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the White House needs to “recalibrate,” which presumably means not murdering so many civilians or at least not doing it on camera. A Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, Chris Madel, who is currently representing Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot Renée Good to death, dropped his candidacy, blaming ICE, and even left the Republican Party. The president himself seems to be moving to declaim any ownership of Pretti’s murder by sending Tom Homan to Minneapolis as his man who “has not been involved in that area” (i.e., isn’t the one who is doing all the killing) to get the situation under control and “report directly to me.” These moments of breakdown in the White House’s feral and, to date, overwhelmingly united propaganda campaign were matched by dozens of other MAGA influencers and other members of the GOP who could not quite manage to keep yelling that Pretti’s killing was anything other than murder.
Opposition to garrisoning soldiers in civilian towns was a cornerstone of the American Revolution as well as an essential element of the American civic tradition. The Boston Massacre was a key accelerating event in the build-up to the American Revolution. The 3rd Amendment bans the quartering of soldier in homes except under specific and limited circumstances. I’ve written a number of times about how when it comes to this part of the American civic tradition we’re much too literal today about what constitutes an army or soldiers. Let me say a bit more about that.
Today we tend to think of two groups who wield legitimate violence on behalf of the state: police and soldiers. Police deal with citizens and law and order, while soldiers go to war. But policing organizations and other civilian paramilitaries are a very modern invention. They go back around two centuries and most of their history goes back less than 150 years. Those include metropolitan police departments as well as organizations like the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and various others.
There is another point I want to note about what has happened over the last 48 hours. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is a pretty forward-leaning lawmaker. But on a show this morning he said something very clear: “We cannot fund a Department of Homeland Security that is murdering American citizens.” That’s clear, succinct and accurate. Those are the stakes. DHS is being used as a domestic terror force to deprive American citizens of their liberties. Yes, they’re killing American citizens. But that’s with the goal of terrorizing the larger population and depriving it of its liberties.
Pam Bondi sent the state a letter offering to withdraw ICE agents if the state will turn over welfare rolls, voter rolls and end sanctuary policies. So the administration will withdraw its marauding gangs in exchange for state leaders surrendering citizens’ right to local self-government.
I’m going to post TPM Reader DS’s note and follow up on the concept of “escalation dominance” and who exactly has the upper hand in Trump’s war on blue cities. I said in my earlier post that the White House thinks it has escalation dominance, the stronger hand at every stage of escalation. I think they’re wrong. The simple explanation is that they think this is a battle of force. It’s not. It’s ultimately a battle over public opinion. And it’s one they’re already losing. Escalating the contest of force will make them lose harder.
The concept of escalation dominance comes out of Cold War deterrence and strategic theory. DS shares some more thoughts on that. But one of the key things about these concepts, which emerged in the 1950s, is that they’re highly theoretical, in both senses of the word. The real world isn’t as linear or as predictable as you expect. There are various ways that weakness can be turned into strength. And, as DS notes, the point of escalation dominance is to keep the weaker party from escalating at all. It’s supposed to be a framework of deterrence for the stronger power.
Again we have an ICE killing in which the Department of Homeland Security gets a story out first which, on its face, appears to describe an armed civilian in the process of committing a massacre of federal law enforcement officers. A tragedy is prevented only by fast-thinking federal officers, this account claims, who shoot and kill the assailant before he can do any harm.
As now happens 100% of the time, these early DHS narratives are willfully absurd and don’t survive contact with abundant video evidence emerging from the scene. My best current understanding is that the dead man, Alex Pretti, 37, was legally carrying a licensed firearm and was at the scene in some sort of observer status or perhaps there to place himself between ICE agents and those they were trying to assault or arrest. Video evidence seems to clearly show that Pretti never brandished his firearm and actually used clear non-confrontation signals in his engagement with ICE agents. What’s more, video evidence appears to show that ICE agents had already confiscated Pretti’s firearm in a scuffle before shooting him multiple times.
In response to this latest ICE killing, a TPM Reader contacted me this afternoon and said that he thought Stephen Miller’s true goal was to have the U.S. military enforcing martial law in U.S. cities. Why else would they continue to escalate ICE’s tactics in the face of growing public outcry and the majority of Americans opposing ICE’s behavior?
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Kate and Josh discuss the self-destruction of Trump’s America on the world stage and Bill Cassidy’s comeuppance.
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