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.”