Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens slammed President Donald Trump's expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in a conversation with Frank Bruni published on Thursday.
This follows a rising tide of nationwide outrage at the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in her car after an altercation with an ICE agent in Minneapolis. The administration has closed ranks around the officer, making clear there are no plans for any sort of investigation or accountability, and protests are escalating.
"I’m as law-and-order as it gets," said Stephens. "But what’s happening in Minneapolis seems more like a foreign invasion than law enforcement, with more ICE agents in the city than police. And what I saw in that video was neither law nor order. It was the brute abuse of power. The penalty for civil disobedience used to be a citation, maybe even a night in jail. Now it’s a bullet."
"And the complete, relentless savaging of your reputation," Bruni then chimed in. "Trump and his cabal are pretending that Good deserved this. They’re not just spinning what happened. They’re going to extraordinary lengths to vilify her, to demonize her, ludicrously casting her as some clandestinely funded terrorist. This is what they do, whether they’re rewriting the history of Jan. 6, 2021, or investigating political opponents or justifying the use of military force: They weave gaudy, nasty fictions in the service of utter domination. Where and how, Bret, does that end?"
"Left unchecked? It ends in a police state," wrote Stephens.
However, he added one more point of optimism: "I think our system of checks and balances will continue to function, and — try as they might — wannabe authoritarians like Vance and Noem will ultimately remain wannabes. Our democracy isn’t like the Weimar Republic, fragile and shallow, ripe for overthrowing. Historically we’ve survived a lot worse. We’ll survive this, too."