From TPM Reader JL …
Read MoreI agree with a lot of your post on disorganized retreat. But I want to come at this from another angle.
For the most benefit practically and politically over the next few months, the concession that is most important imo is giving MN AG full, real time access to all evidence. Not to be crass about it but the public loves a murder trial. Talking about legislative constraints on ICE will put the public to sleep. But the public will have an endless appetite when it comes to pursuing justice for Alex Pretti and putting the man who shot him in the back of the head in jail.
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.