Day after day we’re seeing more signs of Donald Trump’s slipping grip not only on public opinion, but at the margins of the GOP itself. But I thought it was a good time to remind ourselves that Donald Trump isn’t the only problem. Yes, there’s the GOP, which could easily dispatch him at any point if he didn’t have an iron hold over the party. There’s the 30%-40% of voters who are solidly in the MAGA camp. Without them, Trump’s nothing. I don’t mean either of those. I’m talking about the global authoritarian movement, which includes and is even perhaps led by Trump. But it exists quite apart from him and has roots in some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and governments around the world.

One issue we’ve discussed again and again during the Trump years is the purported belief as a form of performative aggression. It’s something essential to the Trumpian/MAGA world. You believe things that are, in factual terms, obviously absurd. But they’re also convenient. They create permission structures for all sorts of things they already want to do. To an important degree the absurdity of the professed belief is part of the attraction, especially since aggression is so deeply embedded in the professed belief. This issue comes up in a less extreme, though still similar, way in the various ways Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration try to justify ICE’s behavior.

Let’s start with masking.

We know their basic argument. There are legions of anti-ICE activists. If ICE agents don’t obscure their faces, they risk being “doxxed.” Set aside whether this is a justification for masking. This doesn’t seem crazy on its face. Demanding legal accountability for ICE agents is near the top of all anti-ICE activism. And the more radical activists can be quite aggressive in their tactics. So could this have happened? Of course. But what journalist Philip Bump was able to determine is that “doxxing,” the notional rationale for ICE masking has in fact never happened. Not once. It’s important to note what definition we’re using here. As Bump puts it, “At no point in time has an officer been seen conducting his work, identified and subsequently attacked. While there have been threats issued against agents and incidents of off-duty harassment, there are no known incidents in which an officer was assaulted while off-duty because he was identified as a federal agent.”

A few days ago Donald Trump said he’s deciding to “nationalize” American elections. He then made the comically insane claim that he won the fairly, though not totally, blue state of Minnesota three times. (Reality: 2016: -1, 2020: -7; 2024: -4). What precisely Trump means by this isn’t totally clear and in fact is totally not the point. It’s a bit like asking what the front man from a third-rate punk band means when he dives into a mosh pit for a crowd surfing adventure. It’s just not a linear thing. Not at all. To the extent we can connect it to anything, it is that same central thread as everything else beginning early last fall: Trump is getting less and less popular and, as he does, he is lashing out constantly, both from a desire to hold on to a dominant position in the attention economy and to exert some level of control over his adversaries’ fear. Both at home and abroad he is leaning into prerogative and other powers which are untrammeled as a kind of compensating salve for his loss of popularity and power.

I’ve seen a lot of people respond to this with a mix of fear, anger and most of all outrage. That is the wrong response. And by that I mean it’s the wrong public response. Obviously, you should respond on your own with whatever you actually feel. But the posture we assume and the words we use in the public square aren’t the same thing.

I think I can say with little fear of contradiction that I know as much as anyone else in modern American journalism about the absolute, no-excuses necessity of operating in the black. In some ways, I know more because with big corporate operations there are lots of creative ways by which you can either hide from the public or hide from yourself that you’re operating at a loss or failing as a business. At least for a while, you can convince yourself that everything is great. You’re not losing money. You’re investing in growth. You’re focusing on quality. For this reason I’ve always seen news organization layoffs at least somewhat differently from many others who believe deeply in journalism. All the merit and great stories and hard work just melts into the background when you face the absolute necessity of making payroll. It’s a brutal taskmaster.

That’s not what’s happening at The Washington Post, and not simply because, of course, Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.

Last Friday, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by a GOP campaign consultant named Brad Todd. He says he’s the one who coined that phrase about taking Trump “literally but not seriously.” The big argument of the piece I think actually makes no sense or represents a kind of denial. But there are building blocks to it that capture key insights about immigration policy in the United States. The gist of Todd’s argument is that Trump’s immigration agenda was a big political winner in 2024 and has actually been very successful in practice — dramatically reducing the number of entries via the southern border. The problem is that it’s being overshadowed and the support for it is being wrecked by Trump sending ICE on these wilding sprees into blue cities.

My view is a bit different. I don’t know if Todd is in denial or willfully obtuse or maybe less than fully leveling with readers. But I don’t think this is actually what’s happening. Nobody foisted Stephen Miller or the whole “mass deportation” policy on Trump. Other than perhaps the concept of tariffs it’s the most organic and natural thing to him. It’s more accurate to say that the energy of MAGA is all about mass deportation and perhaps even more than mass deportation the assaultive cleansing of American society, of both those who are “illegal” and/or brown, but also white people whom through various forms of sexual license, gayness, uppity womenhood and non-traditionalism, are collectively standing in the way of Making America Great Again. “Closing the border” or “securing the border” is just the packaging the gets you electorally to 50%. Because that’s something quite a lot of Americans for a variety of reasons want to do. In other words, wilding sprees aren’t inadvertently driving down support for Trump immigration policies. The actual MAGA policy is “mass deportation” and ICE wilding sprees and it’s unpopular. The border rhetoric is popular but that’s neither here nor there.

Both the calendar and the events in Minneapolis have brought the midterm elections suddenly into focus. We had a special election in Texas in which Democrat Taylor Rehmet scored a double-digit victory in a state senate election in a district Donald Trump won by 17 points just last year. This also comes as polls, which for much of 2025 were more tepid for Democrats than many hoped, have moved more clearly into wave territory. The upshot of all these data points is that Democrats, unsurprisingly, are prepped for a strong midterm showing … as long as the votes are fairly counted. Or to put it a different way, if Donald Trump is looking to avoid losing the House in November and possibly the Senate, him getting more popular or running a super good midterm campaign probably isn’t a viable course of action.

We know about Donald Trump and elections. We had a preview of it in 2020. And now we’re in Trump II where the president has already gone a long way to building a highly politicized domestic paramilitary force which is under his direct personality authority. Many people have rightly been worried for months about the president using ICE to harass voters or create a climate of fear in key cities on election day. Remember that right after the killing of Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to the governor of Minnesota offering to withdraw ICE from Minneapolis if the state would essentially surrender its sovereign governing authority. Along with surrendering public assistance rolls and abolishing sanctuary policies, Bondi demanded access to the state’s voting rolls to free Minneapolis from ICE occupation. So the nexus beyond violence and occupation and the state’s sovereign authority to administer elections no longer has to be imagined. It’s right there.

With a hearing on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship now on the calendar, I want to return to a basic point we’ve discussed several times over the last year. Given our experience living mostly in “normal” times, many of us are used to the idea that the law evolves over time. When judges create new case law, the law evolves and changes. And we accept that it has “changed” — in a certain meaning of the word — even when we may not agree with the change. But with so many other things that have changed slowly since 2016 and then rapidly from early 2025, these are outdated ideas, outdated understandings of how the world and the law works.

Birthright citizenship is a key example of this.

Birthright citizenship is clearly, explicitly and incontestably written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the country’s fundamental law and more than 150 years of American history have been lived on that basis. There’s a reason why no one has doubted this over all those years even if many have opposed it.

Masks have become the central symbol of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement wilding sprees across America in 2025. They are emblems of a secret police. Their gaiters and balaclavas convey menace. But their central justification is the idea that the agents themselves are endangered by their work, that their identities must be kept secret because they are endangered by the very public they menace while at least notionally working to serve and protect. The general argument is that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents risk being “doxxed,” being identified and having their private information and home addresses made public. But the word has been the subject to an absurd expansion. Earlier this week I heard an anecdote about a group of ICE agents who were eating at a Minneapolis restaurant. A right-wing account said the agents were then “doxxed,” which in this case meant that activists saw them and sent out word to other activists who then started protesting outside the restaurant.

It’s remarkable how accepted this purported need for anonymity has become. Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has become increasingly outspoken about ICE and called for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to lose her job. But he still thinks ICE agents should remain masked because of this fear of “doxxing.” A bunch of the country seems to have forgotten that even the most abusive of metropolitan departments require their officers to show their faces and wear name tags as a matter of course.

In this post I want to dig more into that rationale: that the people who are entrusted with the power to wield legitimate violence to serve the public need special protection, special rights to privacy and anonymity in order to do so. What is implicit in this claim is that ICE needs to do its work in a highly abusive manner, or perhaps even that its work is to be as abusive as possible. Why else do they need to be more anonymous than your average beat cop? If they’re going to get a lot of people mad, it just follows that they need some additional protection from the consequences of generating that kind of anger.

Needless to say this argument treads a pretty slippery slope.

Big public and political fights often have the dynamics of military confrontations. The ongoing backlash and outcry over the ICE murder of Alex Pretti is one such example. Over the first days of this week, the Trump White House lost its footing on the whole issue of ICE wilding sprees in Blue cities. As we discussed yesterday, they’re trying to manage what amounts to a live-action rebranding, telling the public they’re getting things back into line without, if possible, changing anything. But the White House’s public line on ICE and its Blue state wilding sprees has been so categorical and over-the-top it’s a really tough pivot. It’s hard to get your footing when you’re rapidly going from “ICE is our warrior force against immigrant-befouled hellholes run by domestic terrorists” to “we need a real investigation and ICE probably shouldn’t be murdering this many people.”

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.