Opinion
This was a multi-billion dollar disaster — and Trump is set to do it again
Get ready. Something truly awful may be happening to our economy — at least for average Americans — as the result of Trump’s billions in tax breaks for billionaires, looting of our treasury and economy, $38 trillion national debt, and his corrupt embrace and promotion of foreign autocracies and digital currencies.
If it happens, it’s going to hurt many of us, all while making Trump’s billionaire buddies massively richer.
I remember the look on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s face when the economy crashed in 2008. The former Goldman Sachs CEO’s hands trembled as he stood at a podium and confessed that the GOP’s banking deregulation had blown up the American financial system and very nearly the global economy.
Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, and their retirements that year, but the barons of Wall Street lost nothing — except a brief moment of embarrassment — and then paid themselves tens of billions in bonuses.
About $430 billion was initially shoveled out the federal door and into the banks in just one month. And, tragically, both Bush and Obama decided that not one top donor executive should go to prison, and not even one major bank was broken up.
We coughed up $430 billion to make them whole. And now, it appears, the banksters are at it again.
According to a new report from Lever News, over the past few months the Federal Reserve has quietly extended more than $420 billion in emergency support to Wall Street’s biggest banks in near-silence, with minimal scrutiny, and no serious conditions attached.
This isn’t an accident: it’s the predictable end point of a system that punishes working people for falling behind and rewards billionaires for their political connections.
As headlines today warn of layoffs spreading through U.S. manufacturing (100,000 job losses since Trump took office) and the Federal Reserve is quietly extending hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency support to Wall Street, it’s worth remembering a sobering but basic rule of history: when economies break, the rich make out like bandits.
That’s because recessions are basically shopping sprees for people like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.
When Wall Street banks crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21 percent. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.
The stock market plummeted by over 50 percent in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On Oct. 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.
While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.
Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.
But the morbidly rich were doing great.
Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.
As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.
Then they did it again 10 years later!
The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.
The market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, and working people, now out of work, were again selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.
March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!
Fewer than three months later, on June 4, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.
And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).
Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27 percent in that one year alone.
American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.
Which is why average Americans should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of Republican policy choices that get repeated over and over again — 10 of the last 11 recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered in plain sight.
Deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.
So no, this warning isn’t fringe: it’s historical and empirical. And it’s being quietly confirmed by the behavior of the people like Warren Buffett — now sitting on $314 billion in cash — who know the markets best and are waiting for the crash to cash in.
So get ready. Reduce your debt as much as possible, nail down your employment and assets, prepare your garden, and get ready to live simply as Trump crashes our economy again just like he did in 2020, and then tries to use that as an excuse to consolidate his power while he and his billionaire buddies again make off like the bandits they are.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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Never mind 'let them eat broccoli': this key sign shows Trump's economy is on the brink
I spent more than two decades in public relations, including stints as media relations director for four of the largest retailers in the United States. One thing you learn is how to read the tea leaves. When corporate planners tell you that prices are going down across the board, that means the economy is about to sour.
There is nothing — nothing — worse for retailers than a pricing war. Price cuts aren’t generosity for customers. They’re all about survival for the brand.
So when I watched Good Morning America talk about how fast-food chains are locked in a $4 value-meal war, my stomach dropped. And it wasn’t because I was hungry. Those meals were $5 not that long ago, in a former pricing war. A dollar shaved off at that level isn’t innovation, it’s desperation.
The $4 meal surely means an economic downturn is imminent.
The very same day, Trump’s agriculture secretary, Brook Rollins, decided to go to war with a $3 meal of her own.
Speaking to NewsNation, Rollins proudly explained that her department has run more than 1,000 “simulations” and concluded that Americans can be fed for about $3 a meal.
As she put it — and yes, this is a direct quote — “It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, you know, a corn tortilla and one other thing. So there is a way to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money.”
Coincidentally or not, on top of the government’s new inverted food pyramid sits that enviable one piece of broccoli.
At this rate, fast-food chains may need to do their own “simulations” to come up with a $3 meal. After all, how do you undercut a single floret? Funny, yes, but it’s no joke.
Because this didn’t start with broccoli. Back in May, Donald Trump told Americans they could cut costs by buying five pencils instead of 250 and three dolls instead of 30. People laughed, rightly, because it sounded unhinged and woefully out of touch. But it wasn’t a joke. It was a preview.
We’ve gone from five pencils and three dolls to one piece of broccoli. The numbers are shrinking because the economy is shrinking, and it’s about to get much worse than anyone in this administration is willing to admit.
Trump’s whacked-out tariffs are going to hit consumers hard and soon. That alone will jack up prices on a staggering range of products, including broccoli, dolls, pencils, and just about everything else that crosses a border. But that’s only one part of the squeeze.
Health-care costs are completely out of control, thanks in large part to GOP members of Congress who refused to act on Obamacare tax credits. So Americans are doing something truly dangerous. They are dropping their health insurance, or clinging to it while slashing spending elsewhere — cuts far more serious than toys or school supplies.
Meanwhile, members of Congress enjoy salad bars in House and Senate cafeterias, with overflowing quantities of broccoli. I know this because I love more than one piece of broccoli, and I worked there too.
Grocery prices, as we learned on Friday, are hovering near their 2022 peak, the spike that followed post-COVID shocks. Trump promised to lower grocery prices. Instead, he decided a $300 million White House ballroom was the priority, presumably so wealthy donors can dine on the finer things in life — like broccoli mousseline.
At the same time, Trump is on a “I’m king of the world” tour, trying to hoard oil from Venezuela and minerals from Greenland, rather than addressing soaring rent, clothing costs, car and housing prices, or basic household essentials.
And then there’s the “Big Beautiful Bill” tax cuts, which ensure Trump’s cronies at Mar-a-Lago won’t be eating broccoli at all. Broccoli is far too bourgeois. It also gets stuck in your teeth. They’ll be bathing in red, white, and blue caviar for America’s 250th birthday, while the rest of us pass a single tortilla round the table.
America is getting by by the seat of its pants. The fast-food price wars should terrify anyone paying attention. They are a harbinger. And if history holds, they signal a grinding halt followed by real suffering.
That’s why we’re down to one piece of broccoli.
The next numbers won’t just be smaller — they’ll be negative. As Americans sink deeper into debt and the economy slides, these jokes will transition into something far darker.
Food insecurity is a persistent and growing problem across the United States. There were 47.9 million people in food-insecure households in 2024. The numbers are especially high among Black and Latino families, single mothers, and people living in the South in both urban and rural areas. There are approximately 340 million people in the U.S., so you can do the math.
Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura went viral this week when he said the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” The reason his video was shared far and wide is because so many Americans agree with him. In developing nations, nearly 300 million people face acute hunger. If Ventura is right, things will get far, far worse here. All fueled by authoritarianism.
If we’re heading toward a country where the military occupies our streets, abject poverty and hunger will be part of that picture. That’s the way it always goes. No exceptions.
People had fun with Trump’s pencils and dolls. They laughed at Rollins’s piece of broccoli. It won’t be funny six months from now, when the bottom drops out and the slide accelerates, and five pencils, three dolls and one piece of broccoli become unaffordable.
The Agriculture Department says it’s running “simulations.” That should worry all of us. Because if one piece of broccoli is today’s answer, I don’t want to know what the meal looks like six months from now.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
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This red state is sounding a warning we all need to heed
“Winter? What winter?” asked the email from an old friend and life-long Montanan.
Indeed, right now it’s still in the 50s here in Helena, in mid-January. At night, the temperatures are not even making it down to freezing, often remaining in the 40s. New high temperature records are being set across the state every week.
“Winter? What winter?” is a dang good question.
Now maybe those who are new in-migrants to Montana — and there are many — this may seem like “really nice weather.” And it is — for spring, not winter in Montana.
But for those of us who have lived here for all or most of our lives, seeing new high temperature records being set every week as the mountain ranges remain brown except for their summits, something like seasonal dislocation is occurring. And it is not comforting because we know what’s coming — and it isn’t going to be pretty.
The meteorologists say the Sno-Tel sites measuring snow depth at elevation are showing wide variation in accumulation — some say it’s good, some say they’re way low. As an email from another old friend this week reported: “Snowmobilers say there’s good snow at 9,000 feet in the Tobacco Root Mountains.” 9,000 feet?! That particular range tops out at 10,000 feet, so we basically have 1,000 feet of actual snowpack and then, well, it’s back to brown all the way down to the valleys below.
Bob Dylan famously sang “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — and indeed, you don’t need a meteorologist to know there’s no snow in our mountains, you can trust your own eyes on that by just looking around.
What this proves — undeniably and more evident every day — is that the environmentalists were right. The predictions of the consequences of overloading the atmosphere with human-caused pollutants are now coming home to roost. Those predictions have been on-going for many decades, and for many decades they have been largely ignored, distorted, and contested by, of course, those with a profit motive in continuing “business as usual” in the fossil fuel industries.
Now, that position has been wholeheartedly adopted by a science-deficient president and the kow-towing toadies larding his administration. Despite his proclamations that climate change is a “hoax,” the reality is staring us in the face here in Montana — and no amount of propaganda is going to bring down the temperature or produce the snowpack necessary to sustain Montanans through the ever hotter and drier summers.
Tragically, not only has the fossil fuel industry been unleashed by removing what few regulatory sidebars once existed, the administration has adopted an absolutely insane policy of massive deforestation of what remains of our national forests.
While billions are being spent on quixotic quests to engineer huge machines to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, those forests and their green trees achieve that job by not only removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but safely sequestering it in the soil. And they do it for free — if we simply let them live.
Unfortunately, Montana’s governor is equally misdirected by trying to log as much of our state forests as possible, even kicking up the supposed “sustainable yield” by millions of board feet every year when there’s no guarantee that they will regrow in the changing climatic conditions.
The environmentalists were right and remain right, and many continue the struggle to try to save something for generations yet to come. The weather? Nice for April, not January, in Montana — where the old hands, who know better, are asking, “Winter? What Winter?”
- George Ochenski is Montana's longest-running columnist and a longtime environmental activist, concerned with keeping Montana's natural beauty clean and safe. He writes from Helena and appears in the Daily Montanan weekly.
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These familiar steps show how Trump is walking us into autocracy
By Konstantin Zhukov, Assistant Professor of Economics, Indiana University; Institute for Humane Studies.
The FBI search of a Washington Post reporter’s home on Jan. 14, 2026, was a rare and intimidating move by an administration focused on repressing criticism and dissent.
In his story about the search at Hannah Natanson’s home, at which FBI agents said they were searching for materials related to a federal government contractor, Post reporter Perry Stein wrote that “it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home.”
And Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told the New York Times the raid was “intensely concerning,” and could have a chilling effect “on legitimate journalistic activity.”
Free speech and independent media play a vital role in holding governments accountable by informing the public about government wrongdoing.
This is precisely why autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin have worked to silence independent media, eliminating checks on their power and extending their rule. In Russia, for example, public ignorance about Putin’s responsibility for military failures in the war on Ukraine has allowed state propaganda to shift blame to senior military officials instead.
While the United States remains institutionally far removed from countries like Russia, the Trump administration has taken troubling early steps toward autocracy by threatening — and in some cases implementing — restrictions on free speech and independent media.
Public ignorance, free speech and independent media
Ignorance about what public officials do exists in every political system.
In democracies, citizens often remain uninformed because learning about politics takes time and effort, while one vote rarely changes an election. American economist Anthony Downs called this “rational ignorance,” and it is made worse by complex laws and bureaucracy that few people fully understand.
As a result, voters often lack the information needed to monitor politicians or hold them accountable, giving officials more room to act in their own interest.
Free speech and independent media are essential for breaking this cycle. They allow citizens, journalists and opposition leaders to expose corruption and criticize those in power.
Open debate helps people share grievances and organize collective action, from protests to campaigns.
Independent media also act as watchdogs, investigating wrongdoing and raising the political cost of abuse – making it harder for leaders to get away with corruption or incompetence.
Public ignorance in autocracies
Autocrats strengthen their grip on power by undermining the institutions meant to keep them in check.
When free speech and independent journalism disappear, citizens are less likely to learn about government corruption or failures. Ignorance becomes the regime’s ally — it keeps people isolated and uninformed. By censoring information, autocrats create an information vacuum that prevents citizens from making informed choices or organizing protests.
This lack of reliable information also allows autocrats to spread propaganda and shape public opinion on major political and social issues.
Most modern autocrats have worked to silence free speech and crush independent media. When Putin came to power, he gradually shut down independent TV networks and censored opposition outlets. Journalists who exposed government corruption or brutality were harassed, prosecuted or even killed. New laws restricted protests and public criticism, while “foreign agent” rules made it nearly impossible for the few remaining independent media to operate.
At the same time, the Kremlin built a vast propaganda machine to shape public opinion. This control over information helped protect the regime during crises. As I noted in a recent article, many Russians were unaware of Putin’s responsibility for military failures in 2022. State media used propaganda to shift blame to the military leadership — preserving Putin’s popularity even as the war faltered.
Threat to independent media in the US
While the United States remains far from an autocracy, the Trump administration has taken steps that echo the behavior of authoritarian regimes.
Consider the use of lawsuits to intimidate journalists. In Singapore, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, routinely used civil defamation suits to silence reporters who exposed government repression or corruption. These tactics discouraged criticism and encouraged self-censorship.
President Donald Trump has taken a similar approach, seeking US$15 billion from the New York Times for publication of several allegedly “malicious” articles, and $10 billion from the Wall Street Journal. The latter suit concerns a story about a letter Trump reportedly signed in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book.
A court dismissed the lawsuit against the Times; that’s likely to happen with the Journal suit as well. But such lawsuits could deter reporting on government misconduct, reporting on the actions and statements of Trump’s political opponents, and the kind of criticism of an administration inherent in opinion journalism such as columns and editorials.
This problem is compounded by the fact that after ABC's Jimmy Kimmel was suspended following a threat from the Trump-aligned chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the president suggested revoking the broadcast licenses of networks that air negative commentary about him.
Although Kimmel was later reinstated, the episode revealed how the administration could use the autocratic technique of bureaucratic pressure to suppress speech it disagreed with. Combined with efforts to prosecute the president’s perceived enemies through the Justice Department, such actions inevitably encourage media self-censorship and deepen public ignorance.
Threat to free speech
Autocrats often invoke “national security” to pass laws restricting free speech. Russia’s “foreign agents” law, passed in 2012, forced nongovernmental organizations with foreign funding to label themselves as such, becoming a tool for silencing dissenting advocacy groups. Its 2022 revision broadened the definition, letting the Kremlin target anyone who criticized the government.
Similar laws have appeared in Hungary, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Russia also uses vague “terrorist” and “extremist” designations to punish those who protest and dissent, all under the guise of “national security.”
After Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump administration took steps threatening free speech. It used the pretext of the “violence-inciting radical left” to call for a crackdown on what it designated as “hate speech,” threaten liberal groups, and designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.
The latter move is especially troubling, pushing the United States closer to the behavior characteristic of autocratic governments. The vagueness of the designation threatens to suppress free expression and opposition to the Trump administration.
Antifa is not an organization but a “decentralized collection of individual activists,” as scholar Stanislav Vysotsky describes it. The scope of those falling under the antifa label is widened by its identification with broad ideas, described in a national security memorandum issued by the Trump administration in the fall of 2025, like anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity. This gives the government leeway to prosecute an unprecedented number of individuals for their speech.
As scholar Melinda Haas writes, the memorandum “pushes the limits of presidential authority by targeting individuals and groups as potential domestic terrorists based on their beliefs rather than their actions.”
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These signs show Trump's maddest threat yet might be blocked … amid the blizzard of crazy
Seizing Greenland? Seriously? This is where we’re at? It seemed like some bizarro Dr. Strangelove fantasy. And yet what was once dismissed as preposterous has exploded into a genuine diplomatic emergency.
It was the capper to another surreal week in Trump’s America, one that would have left George Orwell muttering, “Told ya.”
There is no sane reason for Trump to want to “own” Greenland, but plenty of insane ones. When asked why acquiring it by force was important to him, his response to the New York Times was, “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” As if that answer made even the thinnest shred of sense.
For our president, a glacier-strewn Arctic island is simply a plaything to possess, even if it would result in blowing up our NATO alliance and releasing utter turmoil throughout Europe.
We’ve all long known that wherever Trump goes, chaos follows. It’s his brand. Everything he touches, dies. That didn’t matter so much when he was just another pathetic rich old man screaming into the ether from his Mar-a-Lago balcony. But since he assumed the presidency a second time, every move he makes has great national and international bearing. This is highly unfortunate.
Just think about all of the turmoil and madness that was being juggled over the past week alone:
- That wild Greenland fantasy. Who cares if it would perhaps irreparably disrupt the world order? Little Donnie wants it, even as his sycophantic aides try to dissuade him. Their boss is drunk on the power of being the self-proclaimed “hunter and not the hunted,” permitting him whatever he wants — consequences be damned.
- Having kidnapped the Venezuelan president and declared himself “acting president,” Trump vowed to steal the nation’s oil while installing a puppet proxy. No one evidently bothered to tell him that refining the oil was more expensive than it was worth. But oh well.
- Threatening to attack Iran for attacking its own protesting citizens while at the same time attacking U.S. citizens for … protesting. “Only we can do that to our people!” Trump might as well have declared. The hypocrisy is stunning.
- Deciding the best strategy for tamping down anger was to restrict any “investigation” into Jonathan Ross’s murder of Renee Nicole Good to a federal cover-up, excluding city officials while opting to probe the dead woman’s motives.
- While pictures of citizens in Minneapolis being pulled out of their houses and cars and otherwise assaulted and terrorized played all over the media, Trump doubled down, insisting lack of respect for law enforcement was the real problem.
- Classy as ever, the president flipped off and mouthed “F--- you!” twice to an auto worker at a Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, after the worker yelled, “Pedophile protector!” as Trump walked through. The White House defended the president’s response as “appropriate and unambiguous” … while complaining about Minneapolis protesters “putting their middle finger, proudly so, at the camera.” Seriously.
- On Thursday, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to restore order in Minnesota — seemingly a precursor to cancelling November’s midterms.
- Trump told Reuters there was no need for the midterms. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted he was joking. If so, this was about as amusing as an oncologist telling a patient, “You have cancer. Just kidding!”
Meanwhile, there is the looming catastrophe of doubled or tripled healthcare premiums for millions of Americans, while others on Medicaid are booted off coverage entirely.
Oh yeah, and there’s also a little thing called the Epstein files. As of the middle of January, less than 1 percent of the Epstein files mandated for release by Dec. 19 via an act of Congress have seen the light of day — less than 13,000 of an estimated document total exceeding two million.
Here’s the thing: Trump and his minions love to pile on the pandemonium. It’s not a side effect of his authoritarian rule, but the point. It isn’t just about keeping the water perpetually on boil, to hold the Epstein files forever on the backburner. It’s also about keeping the opposition off-balance.
We can never zero in on a single issue with Trump, because bedlam predominates. No one thing can be successfully addressed because the target itself is both always moving and always enmeshed in a blizzard of targets. Trump counts on everyone being shellshocked — continuously bewildered.
But something else has also been at play since Trump took office a year ago Tuesday. Since there are no effective checks on his power, given the Supreme Court’s acquiescence to his administration’s every whim, he can do whatever he wants – and has.
Cabinet members are similarly powerful and brazen. They always seem shocked by pushback, reacting with rage and astonishment. We’re seeing this in Minneapolis. People including the president and vice president declare that up is down, black is white, and cold is hot, and no one can effectively challenge them.
Equally frightening, the masked ICE monsters breaking laws and smashing heads have been imbued with something resembling complete immunity.
The only thing giving me hope is that Republicans in the Senate are, as of late this week, vowing to stop Trump from seizing Greenland — a sovereign territory part of a sovereign nation, Denmark — by force. That any Republican would oppose their king on any issue for any reason strikes me as a minor miracle. Until they cave, that is.
It would certainly help matters to take at least one Trump-created crisis off the table, leaving us with only a dozen or so others. Though I also fear that if he backs off Greenland, part of the deal might be changing its name to Trumpland.
I’m not kidding.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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How ICE recruitment propaganda targets the worst of the worst
Before Renee Nicole Good’s body was cold, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and JD Vance grabbed the national spotlight to defame her (terrorist mows down federal agents!) while defending the goon who murdered her.
The masked ICE agent who shot Good at close range held his cellphone in one hand while firing his gun with the other, showing more interest in spectacle than fear. His video will be added to the Department of Homeland Security library of recordings to generate bloodlust among the type of recruits ICE seeks: Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, pardoned J-6ers, and basement-dwelling incels craving skin on skin action of any kind.
Under Noem’s guidance, and on the American taxpayers’ considerable dime, DHS records high-resolution, highly-edited, "cinematic" style videos of their own brutality for recruitment propaganda. Like the midnight raid of a Chicago apartment building when DHS filmed a Black Hawk helicopter swooping in to terrify sleeping people with flash-bang grenades, most violence is staged, performative horror.
With the Supreme Court temporarily blocking Trump’s deployment of military forces into U.S. cities, ICE is stepping up, morphing into Trump’s Praetorian guard. A look at DHS’ recruitment materials makes clear that ICE isn’t targeting intelligent, law-respecting recruits, but a rabid ethnic cleansing force to serve Steve Miller’s white nationalist agenda.
Emotional appeals to racists
In ICE’s August recruitment push, DHS posted on X, “Which way, American man?” with signs on a deserted road pointing Uncle Sam to “Cultural Decline” and other destinations.
“Which way, American man” is a call for white nationalism, and was the title of William Gayley Simpson’s 1978 white nationalist, neo-Nazi book.
An online review shows DHS similarly misusing American iconography to recruit new agents, manipulating emotions with depictions of a fictitious, ‘happier’ time in America by turning homey Norman Rockwell-style graphics into sinister appeals for violence.
In September, DHS started using Rockwell’s images on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, starting with the 1946 Working on the Statue of Liberty. The image appears with ICE slogans, “Protect Your Homeland. Defend Your Culture,” and adds a racist dog whistle by Calvin Coolidge — “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America” — along with a URL where people can sign up with ICE.
Rockwell’s family has asked federal agencies to stop using his work because DHS has “become infamous in recent months for its increasingly brutal and often illegal enforcement methods.” In early November, Rockwell’s family wrote an op-ed in USA Today complaining that the Trump messages behind the posts run so contrary to the artist’s personal beliefs that he would be “devastated” to see his art “marshaled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”
Us vs. them propaganda
ICE.gov features job postings in which a Civil War era Uncle Sam points and intones, “America needs you. America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.” Then, in smaller print, “You do not need an undergraduate degree.”
ICE’s YouTube site features video after video of Fox News “interviews” — propaganda — alongside professionally filmed fast-action shorts. One video, “Veterans Day Message,” is an interview with acting Director Todd Lyons conflating ICE agents with the military. Spliced with war-time footage, it shows fast action war scenes, paratroopers dropping from planes, armed troops descending from helicopters, and a war-gaming situation room.
Another, “Florida 287(g) with Collier County Sheriff Rambosk,” is accompanied by video game music and features an “Alligator Alcatraz” sign above swampland complete with live alligators waiting for prey.
Another, “Break the law. We regulate” appeals to directly to thugs. It opens showing six masked ICE officers pulling a man out of his car and shoving him to the ground, then segues to other arrests as a narrator says, “Regulators. We regulate the stealing of his property. We damn good too. But you can’t be any geek off the street. You gotta be good with the steal, you know what I mean, to earn your keep.”
Another features an Ohio sheriff in a ten gallon cowboy hat bragging about how many illegal aliens are in his jail, proclaiming, “Thank God that we have an administration, that we have ICE and President Trump actually doing what people want.”
This racist, political propaganda, illegally funded with federal tax dollars, obviously targets low-intellect applicants.
Minnesota fights back
Immediately after Good’s murder, the Trump regime doubled down, and sent 1000 more ICE agents into Minnesota, on top of an already unwanted 2,100 DHS and Border Patrol agents.
Trump officials know that increased ICE forces, now expanding without legal authority into traffic stops, elevate the threat to civilians. Since increased violence and civic unrest will hasten the day Trump declares martial law, escalation appears to be the goal.
St. Paul, Minneapolis, and the state of Minnesota are fighting back. On Monday, they filed suit, alleging that thousands of armed and masked DHS agents have stormed the Twin Cities to conduct militarized raids and carry out dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional stops and arrests in sensitive public places, including schools and hospitals — all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.
This operation is driven by nothing more than the Trump administration’s desire to punish political opponents and score partisan points — at the direct expense of Plaintiffs’ residents. Defendants’ actions appear designed to provoke community outrage, sow fear, and inflict emotional distress, and they are interfering with the ability of state and local officials to protect and care for their residents….
Minnesota notes that state and city governments are bearing the costs of ICE’s civil rights violations. Government brutality, broad-scale and publicly excused by Trump’s spokespeople, “recklessly endangers the public safety, health, and welfare of all Minnesotans. Additionally, Defendants’ agents’ inflammatory and unlawful policing tactics provoke the protests the federal government seeks to suppress…”
Kristi Noem’s DHS podium is inscribed with “One of ours, all of yours,” the Nazi philosophy of collective punishment. By lore or fact, when one SS officer was killed in a Czech Village, the Nazis killed every resident of that village in retribution. Wildly disproportionate, lawless, ignorant, and brutal, the slogan complements ICE recruitment materials perfectly, and draws a map of where Trump’s ICE is heading.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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These legal loopholes could let Trump use troops against protesters
By Jennifer Selin, Associate Professor of Law, Arizona State University.
As protesters and federal law enforcement clashed in Minneapolis on Jan. 14, 2026, in the wake of a second shooting of a civilian by federal agents, President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send troops to Minnesota in response to protests.
This is not the first time Trump has suggested invoking the act.
Is Trump’s warning just bluster? Does the president have the authority to send the military into American cities?
The answer to this question involves a web of legal provisions that help define the president’s constitutional roles as commander in chief and chief executive of the country and that try to balance presidential power with the power of state leaders.
‘Protect states in times of violence’
Tracing back to the Magna Carta, the British charter of liberty signed in 1215, there is a longstanding tradition against military involvement in civilian affairs.
However, the U.S. Constitution guarantees that the national government will protect the states in times of violence and permits Congress to enact laws that enable the military to aid in carrying out the law.
Almost immediately after the Constitution’s enactment in 1787, Congress passed a law that allowed the president to use the military to respond to a series of citizen rebellions.
Troops serving as what’s called “posse comitatus,” which translates roughly to “attendants with the capacity to act,” could be called to suppress insurrections and help carry out federal laws.
Following the Civil War, the national government used troops in this capacity to aid in Reconstruction efforts, particularly in states that had been part of the Confederacy.
The use of troops in this manner may even have influenced the outcome of the 1876 presidential election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. That happened when, in return for agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South, Democrats informally agreed to the election of Hayes when the disputed election was thrown to a congressional commission.
Two years later, Hayes signed into law the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the use of the military in civilian matters.
The Posse Comitatus Act has not changed much since that time. The law prohibits the use of the military in civilian matters but, over time, Congress has passed at least 26 exemptions to the act that allow the president to send troops into states.
The exemptions range from providing military personnel to protect national parks to helping states in carrying out state quarantine and health laws.
Insurrection Act
One of these exemptions is the Insurrection Act, which governs certain circumstances when the president can use the military. Signed by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, Congress passed the law in order to help fight citizen rebellions against federal taxes.
Over time, the law has evolved to allow the use of troops in other circumstances. For example, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson used the Insurrection Act in the 1950s and 1960s to send the military to enforce court desegregation orders and to protect civil rights marchers.
It was last invoked by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, when he ordered 4,500 troops to Los Angeles after rioting erupted in response to the acquittal of police officers charged with beating Rodney King.
The Insurrection Act says that the president may use the armed forces to subdue an insurrection or rebellion and take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress violence.
But before doing so, he must issue a proclamation ordering insurgents to disperse and return to their homes.
While state governors and legislatures also have the legal authority to ask the president to use troops in this manner, the states have preferred to rely on a combination of local law enforcement and the National Guard, which is under state command, not federal.
Not only does this strategy enable governors to maintain authority over their states, but it also keeps things more straightforward legally and politically.
In December 2025, the Supreme Court refused to let President Trump deploy the National Guard in response to protests against ICE in Illinois. Yet in a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanagh noted, “As I read it, the Court’s opinion does not address the President’s authority under the Insurrection Act.”
Authority uncertain
Reliance on the Insurrection Act raises a host of legal, political and practical questions about who is in charge when the military sends troops into a state.
For example, despite the fact that the act was invoked in response to the Rodney King riots, the military actually was not used as directed. The Joint Task Force Commander in control of the mission appears to have been confused regarding how the Insurrection Act worked alongside the provisions of the Posse Comitatus Act. He issued an order prohibiting troops from directly supporting law enforcement and that led to numerous denials of requests for assistance.
Questions about the federal government’s authority in the wake of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana raised similar concerns.
The administration of President George W. Bush determined that it had authority under the Insurrection Act to send federal troops to the area, despite the fact that Louisiana’s governor was opposed to military assistance.
For political reasons, President Bush did not end up deploying troops but, in 2006, Congress amended the law to address concerns that the military was unable to provide effective assistance to states in emergency situations.
The amendment was later repealed when all 50 state governors raised objections to what they perceived as a grant of unilateral power to the president.
These examples suggest a real difficulty balancing governmental responses to domestic crises. States need the flexibility and authority to respond as they see fit to the needs of their citizens.
But the federal government can and often does serve as a supplemental resource. As the events of the past week illustrate, striking an effective balance is rarely a straightforward thing.
This story is an update to a story originally published on June 2, 2020.
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Media, take note: this is how you hold Trump to account over Epstein
For three seconds on the floor of a Ford Motor Co. plant in Dearborn, a solitary autoworker did what the political establishment has largely failed to do for three months: remind the country exactly who its president is.
As Michigan Advance reported, when Donald Trump walked through the facility Tuesday, a worker in a now-viral video shouted that Trump was a “pedophile protector,” a reference to the president’s long-running ties to Jeffrey Epstein and the still-unresolved question of why the full Epstein files have not been released.
Trump’s response wasn’t denial, reflection or restraint. He flipped off that Ford employee, since identified as 40-year-old TJ Sabula, a line worker and member of UAW Local 600.
That moment — crude, unpresidential and unmistakable — cut through weeks of both-sides noise and strategic silence. In one exchange, the country saw the same man it has seen for nearly a decade: thin-skinned, angry at accountability, and hostile to anyone who challenges him, especially working people.
And then Sabula was suspended.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), whose district includes many Ford workers, confirmed what Ford itself would not say publicly: Sabula was suspended immediately after the incident.
Tlaib didn’t mince words about what that decision said.
She expressed shock that Ford would punish a worker for stating something “factually true,” while saying nothing about a president who responded by flipping off one of their own employees.
“He’s the president of the United States and he did that,” Tlaib told me in a phone interview Tuesday night. “But they say nothing, and they punish him for speaking up … for survivors.”
That’s the part that should linger. This wasn’t just a heckle. Sabula’s comment went to the heart of a question that refuses to go away: why Trump’s Department of Justice has failed to follow the law and fully release the Epstein files, and why so many powerful people seem determined to let the issue fade.
Tlaib made that connection explicit, noting that the Epstein matter has slipped from headlines even as survivors and advocates continue asking when they’ll get justice.
There certainly has been a lot to be distracted by, whether it’s the killing of an unarmed mother of three in Minneapolis, a military incursion into Venezuela to depose its leader or threats to invade a staunch NATO ally’s territory.
But Sabula wasn’t distracted.
That’s what makes this moment so damning. For months, Republicans have tiptoed around Epstein, issuing vague statements about “process” and “transparency,” while refusing to say plainly what millions of Americans already believe: that Trump’s DOJ is obstructing accountability, and that the failure to release the files protects powerful men, not survivors.
Instead, it took an autoworker, with no press staff, pollsters or protective bubble, to say it out loud, at personal cost.
In doing so, Sabula exposed more than Trump’s ingrained cruelty. He exposed Ford’s priorities.
As Tlaib pointed out, Ford planned the visit, brought Trump onto the factory floor and failed to give workers a heads-up. They placed employees in a volatile situation with a deeply divisive president and then acted shocked when someone exercised their First Amendment rights.
Ford could have hosted Trump at headquarters. They could have limited his access. They could have coordinated with the UAW, which Tlaib noted has historically been involved in presidential visits but notably was not part of this one.
Instead, they made a choice, and then punished the worker who bore the consequences.
That choice sends a message. As Tlaib put it, it tells workers that standing up for sexual assault survivors is a firable offense, while accommodating power is corporate policy. It suggests a company more concerned with pleasing a president than protecting the people who build its cars.
It also reveals how normalized Trump’s behavior has become. A president flipping off a factory worker should be a national scandal. Instead, the fallout landed almost entirely on the person without power.
This is why those three seconds mattered.
They cut through the noise and reminded us that Trump, as well as his administration, still treats accountability as a personal insult. But it also means that institutions — from the DOJ to Fortune 500 companies — still bend to protect him.
Tlaib hopes the public will protect Sabula, noting the real risks he now faces for speaking out. She’s right.
We shouldn’t let a factory worker carry alone what should be a collective demand: release the Epstein files, follow the law, and stop punishing truth-tellers to appease an angry president.
For three seconds, America was reminded who Donald Trump is.
And it took a union member and working stiff to do it.
- Jon King is the Michigan Advance’s editor-in-chief, having previously served as the outlet's senior reporter, covering education, elections and LGBTQ+ issues. King has been a journalist for more than 35 years and is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association who has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.
- Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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Here's what ICE is really doing in Minneapolis — and it's not enforcing the law
This week, Mayor Jacob Frey basically took a Fox “News” host down, pointing out that Trump’s own federal prosecutors just quit their jobs rather than investigate and prosecute Renee Nicole Good’s wife for “domestic terrorism.”
Which raises the question: what is ICE really doing in Minneapolis?
Well over a decade ago, the very Anglo daughter of a friend of mine fell in love with a Hispanic fellow who owned a Mexican restaurant he’d started in her little northern midwestern town. They got married, she got pregnant, and everybody in the family was delighted. Until the feds visited the restaurant and discovered her new husband wasn’t a US citizen and had no legal permission to be here in the country.
This was during the Obama administration. The feds were unfailingly polite. They told him he had a certain amount of time to get his affairs in order but within that period of time he must leave the country, return to Mexico, and apply for asylum or a visa from there. Those were the rules.
Nobody showed up to kick in the front door of their home. Nobody from the government was wearing a mask. No swearing, no threats, no guns, no tear gas, no pepper spray, no hitting his car with theirs or beating either of them to the ground. They merely told him he had to leave and served him with the appropriate paperwork, just like they do in most other democratic countries.
At that time, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had been a guest on my radio/TV show every Friday for about a decade, and we got his office involved, trying to intervene in their case, but the feds were emphatic: he wasn’t here legally and he had to leave. So, after a short time to organize their things and finances, the two of them got on a commercial plane and flew to Mexico, where they both live to this day.
We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since the 1920s in America, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:
Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Barack Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.
By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.
In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.
As you can see, today’s ICE violence is not primarily about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.
Similarly, never before have we had immigration agents “investigating fraud” as a bullshit premise for terrorizing an entire community. The way they convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of criminal felony fraud wasn’t with guys with masks and guns; it was a small army of accountants pouring through his financial records.
Never before in modern history have we had a president and vice president characterize an ethnic community in such terms as “eating your dogs and cats,” as “criminals,” as “garbage,” as an “other.”
Never before — other than the Klan in the post-Reconstruction era — have we had agents of the state deputized and authorized to use deadly force who conceal their identities and then ran amok to terrorize entire American cities.
That last point is the key to understanding what’s going on. ICE isn’t in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or any other Blue city to merely enforce our immigration laws. We already know how to do that, as we’ve been doing it successfully for 101 years and never before needed violent masked thugs to make it happen.
No, these people are in these cities for a singular purpose: to spread terror. This is Trump’s own personal Schutzstaffel (SS), a police force answerable only to him who’s principal job is to terrify communities and crush dissent.
Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller have all made it clear that they believe the key to running our country isn’t via the approval of the populace, “the consent of the governed,” but, rather, is to have and use raw, naked power. Violence. Tear gas, tasers, and pepper bullets. The threat of death or imprisonment.
Back in October, Miller said Trump has “plenary authority,” meaning “authority without restrictions.” Ultimate power. Final power. The only real power in the country, at the end of the day.
A few weeks ago, he doubled down, telling CNN's Jake Tapper:
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
John Adams referred to us a “a nation of laws, not men.” The Supreme Court building has “Equal Justice Under Law” carved into its front by the Roosevelt administration in October of 1935. Our founding documents refer to America as a nation where our politicians and police “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
That’s the opposite of what’s happening right now in Minneapolis.
When demagogues and wannabe autocrats set out to seize absolute power in a nation — the way we’ve seen it done, for example, in Russia — they don’t start by rolling tanks down the street or throwing dissidents or writers like me in prison. That comes much later.
Instead, they start by telling the people who they need to fear.
For Putin, it was the Chechens. For Orbán, it was Syrian refugees. For Joe McCarthy, it was communists and socialists. And for Trump, et al, it’s brown and Black people, particularly if they were born in another country.
Once the populace is sufficiently terrified of the “other,” they’ll accept increasing levels of repression in the name of stemming the danger to themselves and their families. Armed agents of the state begin to show up in public places to “enforce law and order,” but their real goal is to terrify people into submission.
This is why Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are refusing to investigate Renee Good’s murder and instead demanding their federal prosecutors go after her grieving wife. They want not only ICE thugs but everybody in America who may think of challenging them to know that smashing windows, dragging people out of their cars, kicking in their doors, beating them to the ground, and even killing them — all without any legal basis, without a single warrant — are what we can all expect to happen to us if we defy their power.
If ICE’s real mission was to find people in the country without authorization, they wouldn’t be going about it this way; they’d go after undocumented people the way my friend’s daughter’s husband was cornered and deported. Firmly, but politely. With paperwork instead of guns.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious to Americans that when Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) two months ago, this is what they had in mind. That Memorandum orders the federal police agencies to go after anybody who presents the following “indicia” of potential domestic terrorism:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
ICE is here to remind us of the awesome power Trump and his lickspittles have to enforce that. Question or, as with Renee Good, taunt a masked ICE thug and it’s clear you’re expressing “extremism.” Your penalty will be violence visited upon you, even death, and when you’re dead, they’ll next come after your family.
This is pure Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Xi, and every other tinpot dictator across the planet and throughout history.
It’s why ICE shot a young man in the face, blinding him for the rest of his life, in Santa Ana this week and the feds are refusing to give any information — including the name of the thug who shot 21-year-old Kaden Rummler — to the Santa Ana city or California state police.
It’s why goons in Minneapolis dragged a disabled woman driving to her doctor’s appointment out of her car and assaulted her.
It’s why they deploy tear gas and fire “less lethal” weapons at the slightest provocation.
Yesterday afternoon, doubling down on untouchable state power that lives well above the rule of law, DHS posted the following tweet from Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Stephen Miller:
“REMINDER. ‘To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.’ @StephenM” (emphasis added)
That message — which is filled with naked lies — is very, very simple: “We have the power. We will use that power. And there’s nothing ‘the little people’ or anybody else can do to stop us. In fact, if you try to stop us, we’ll use that power against you, next.”
Trump is now openly threatening the state of Minnesota with the Insurrection Act, a law that allows a president to deploy the full force of the entire US military directly against the American people.
After a night of confrontations sparked by violent ICE raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to warn that if state and local officials don’t crush protests against his masked federal agents, he will step in with force.
This isn’t bluster or rhetoric. It’s a direct threat to use wartime powers inside the United States to override local government, suppress dissent, and place raw federal violence above the rule of law, something he appears to want so badly he can taste it.
That kind of threat doesn’t belong in a democracy, and it tells us exactly what this administration believes power is for.
This is nothing more or less than state-sponsored terror. And it’s damn well high time that it stop.
- Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
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Sorry, JD: here's why your masked ICE goons don't have the immunity you claim
The Trump administration is trying to take the world back not just to the Dark Ages, when people were tortured to death for their beliefs, but to the Stone Age when neanderthals with the heaviest clubs held most power. Neanderthals commandeered rare earth minerals fecund hunting grounds from weaker neighbors because they could. But when they came up against more organized, ordered, and civilized Homo Sapiens, they became extinct.
Trump advisor and Neanderthal genetic marker Stephen Miller is on record lusting for the good old days when women were dragged by their hair into the cave. He told CNN during an interview that, “We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
He wishes. Shamefully unfamiliar with exalted human histories that produced the Magna Carta, the League of Nations, or the United Nations pact designed to prevent the next Hitler and World War III, Miller added in a later talk that “President Trump’s authority will not be questioned.”
Miller is damaged goods, a lip-snarling, Nazi-adjacent creep born into privilege. When he ran for office in high school, his stump speech claimed the right of all privileged students to litter, to trash the place, because paid staff would clean it up. That was 25 years ago, but people never really change, and Miller is now trying to help Trump re-arrange the world order.
Immunity for ICE agents?
Renee Nicole Good was murdered when one ICE agent shouted for her to “get out of the f------ car,” while another told her to move her car, which she tried to do.
Instead of investigating Good’s murderer, Jonathan Ross, for carrying a gun with PTSD, Trump’s DOJ opened an investigation into Renee Good’s wife — her political contributions, texts and social media posts, her life. MAGA videos of the murder (“Mouthy Dykes get what they Had Coming”) show Good’s wife failing to genuflect or cower in fear, instead suggesting the angry agent go get himself some lunch.
Seconds later, Ross shot Renee three times in the head as she was trying to move her car, then called her a “fucking bitch.” When Trump launched the DOJ investigation this week, six DOJ career officials, including prosecutors, quit in protest.
After Good’s murder, JD Vance engaged in a PR blitz to empower other rogue ICE agents, declaring that they have absolute immunity for murdering people.
Vance and his masked goons need some basic education on the law:
- ICE agents are not immune from prosecution for murder or any other crime.
- There is no statute of limitations for murder.
- Presidents can only pardon for federal crimes, not state crimes, the most serious of which is murder.
Qualified immunity — the theory
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine created by the U.S. Supreme Court that protects immigration officers from civil liability, but not when they knowingly violate the law. Most importantly, it does not protect federal agents from prosecution under criminal laws.
In 2001, the Supreme Court set out a two-step analysis for qualified immunity:
- Whether “the officer’s conduct violated a constitutional right.”
- “Whether the right was clearly established” when he acted.
In Good’s case, the constitutional right not to be shot in the face while trying to move one’s car is clear and established.
In less clear cases, what constitutes excessive force turns on policy, practice and the facts of the case. As explained last week, deadly force cannot be used by law enforcement officers in most circumstances. The DOJ deadly force policy, similar to the DHS policy on deadly force, states that deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect, and that firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless a person is threatening the officer with deadly force by means other than the vehicle, and no other means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.
In Renee Good’s case, a car slowly rolling away does not pose imminent danger to anyone. Ross didn’t move out of the way, and even continued filming with his cellphone in one hand while he shot Good with the gun in the other. If he’d really “feared for his” life he’d have dropped the damned phone. Calling her a “fucking bitch” immediately after also suggests anger, rather than fear, was the motivator.
There is no statute of limitations on murder, and presidents cannot void state prosecutions
For most crimes, a limited window of time exists in which to charge and pursue a conviction, known as a statute of limitations. The driving theory is that witnesses lose fresh recollections about what happened with the passage of time, and that people — criminals, victims, and witnesses — need to get on with their lives at some point.
Statutes of limitation for state crimes vary across state lines, but in general, serious crimes have shorter limitations, and moderate crimes have medium limits (3-7 years for felonies like assault/burglary). For heinous or very serious crimes like murder, terrorism, or serious sexual offenses, most states have no statute of limitations, which allows prosecution at any time.
Complexity arises in the context of prosecuting federal officials for state crimes. A constitutional principle known as the Supremacy Clause holds that states should not be able to undermine federal policy by using targeted criminal prosecutions. Trump, Vance and Miller are trying to use the Supremacy Clause to give all federal ICE agents a get out of jail card, likely inspired by the Supreme Court ruling that Trump has immunity from prosecution for official acts.
But Trump and Co. are clearly mistaken. Even Trump’s own immunity ruling remains unsettled. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent opined that, under the majority’s grant of immunity, Trump could order Seal Team Six to assassinate his rivals with impunity, but Samuel Alito and John Roberts pushed back, suggesting that assessment was wrong.
ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot Renee Good three times, should, and likely will, be tried for murder. If he is not, ICE will become Trump’s paramilitary force, moving us a giant backward towards Trump/Vance/Miller’s Neanderthalic rule by club, and Good’s murder will surely become precedent for more murders to follow.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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This Trump nightmare becomes more realistic with each passing day
I have a recurring nightmare, a nightmare that becomes more realistic with each passing day. It goes like this:
It is November 2026. Here in Georgia and elsewhere, the midterm polls have been looking bad for Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, but the ballots have finally been cast and are being counted. Tensions are high.
That’s when President Trump sends the National Guard or ICE agents to Fulton County, DeKalb County and other blue-trending areas, claiming massive fraud, seizing voting machines and voiding the election.
If it sounds too crazy to be plausible, I’d like to think so too.
But let me ask:
Is that scenario more crazy than what happened five years ago, when Trump summoned thousands of supporters to charge the Capitol, also in an effort to overturn an election? Is it more crazy than trying to seize Greenland by force? Is it more crazy than what is happening in Minnesota? Are we moving away from chaos, or hurtling at it?
And it’s clearly on Trump’s mind as well.
Last month, in a meeting with House Republicans, he expressed disbelief that Democrats might triumph in the midterms, suggesting it’s only because of fraud.
“How do we have to even run against these people?” he said. “I won’t say ‘cancel the election, they should cancel the election,’ because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
And in a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump was reminded that in 2020 he had explored using the National Guard to seize ballot boxes in states where he had alleged fraud.
“Well, I should have,” Trump said.
Trump went on to tell the Times that he balked at using the National Guard in 2020 not because he lacked the authority, but because he didn’t think the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to pull it off. He had already tried to pressure the Department of Justice to seize state voting machines, but Attorney General William Barr had refused. Through Rudy Giuliani, Trump then reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to seize machines, but DHS officials also told him that they had no authority to do so.
Somehow, I think Trump’s request would get a very different response this time from the likes of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem.
Indeed, when asked by Times reporters whether he would consider such a step in 2026, Trump changed the subject.
In those previous requests to seize election equipment, Trump had reportedly focused his attention on a specific but unknown state, a state “that had used machines built by Dominion Voting Systems, where his lawyers believed there had been fraud.”
Georgia uses Dominion voting machines. Dominion was acquired by Missouri-based Liberty Vote in 2025.
In recent social media posts, Trump has continued to rail against voting machines, voting by mail, counting votes beyond midnight of Election Day and the use of QR codes, all of which are standard features of Georgia elections. He has even issued executive orders that claim to abolish such standard features of election operation. In his mind, apparently, that makes it illegal.
According to the Constitution, of course, states are empowered to run their own elections, but the Constitution as it is written on paper is often not the Constitution as recognized by Trump.
“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote recently on his social media platform. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
And what does the president of the United States tell them, “for the good of our country?”
He tells them:
“THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON’T HAVE EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!”
So no, while I do not think it likely, I also do not believe it unthinkable that Trump might claim fraud and dispatch heavily armed, armored, masked federal agents to interrupt vote-counting here in Georgia, and in other swing states as well. Unthinkable things are happening every day.
- Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press.
- Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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Trump's Gestapo can be defanged
ICE and Border Patrol agents must be reined in. I’ll tell you how in a moment.
Since Renee Nicole Good’s death, clashes between ICE and the residents of Minneapolis have escalated. On Wednesday night, an ICE agent shot and wounded someone who, ICE claimed, was fleeing arrest. (Sure, just like Good supposedly was trying to run them over when she turned her car away from them and said, moments before an agent fired three bullets into her chest and arm, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”)
I’ve always loved Minneapolis. Its people have midwestern common sense. They also have a deep sense of fairness and justice.
On Wednesday, Trump threatened that if Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota didn’t stop the protesters, whom he referred to as “insurrectionists,” he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT … and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”
Let’s be clear. The problem is not the protesters. It’s the armed thugs who are shooting and murdering them. (Trump seems capable of seeing a similar dynamic playing out in Iran and vows to protect the protesters there, but not in America.)
A friend who knows a lot more than I do about America’s armed forces recently wrote:
“There are four kinds of people who join the armed forces: those from a traditional military family, true patriots who want to serve their country, those with no other prospects who need a job, and psychotics who just want to kill people.
“The armed services do a pretty decent job of screening out the fourth group, but that group is now the prime recruitment pool for ICE. Racists, haters, gun nuts, and cage fighting fans who want to shoot anyone the least bit different from them. They are becoming America’s Gestapo. That is no exaggeration. We’re slipping into Nazi Germany.”
He’s exactly right.
ICE is reportedly investing $100 million in what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed.
It has lowered its recruitment standards to meet the deportation targets set by Stephen Miller (Trump’s deputy chief of staff for promoting bigotry and nativism), thereby increasing the numbers of untrained and dangerous agents on the streets.
ICE’s recruitment is aimed at gun and military enthusiasts and people who listen to right-wing radio, have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear, live near military bases, and attend NASCAR races.
It’s seeking recruits who are willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”
If I had my way, ICE would be abolished and Border Patrol agents sent back to the border. But this isn’t going to happen under Trump and his Republican lapdogs in Congress. Too many Democrats are almost as spineless when it comes abolishing ICE.
But Congress can still take action to rein in ICE. At the very least, it must disarm ICE.
The Trump regime is allowing ICE officers to use lethal force in self-defense. But we’ve seen how readily ICE and Border Patrol agents claim self-defense when they’re shooting our compatriots.
How do we disarm ICE?
Congress is now considering the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding runs out at the end of January.
Please demand — call your members of Congress and tell them in no uncertain terms — that the DHS spending bill prohibit ICE and Border Patrol agents from carrying guns and that it unambiguously declare that agents do not have absolute immunity under the law if they harm civilians.
Do this as soon as you can.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee (and an old friend), said Tuesday that she’s seeking to put limits on ICE in the DHS spending bill. “I am looking for policy riders in the Homeland Security bill to [be] able to rein in ICE.”
House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said Wednesday that Democrats will oppose the bill unless Republicans agree to new rules governing ICE officers: “ICE cannot conduct itself as if it’s above the law.”
There is no reason for ICE agents to be armed. If they are shot at — and there’s no record of this ever actually happening — they could readily summon state or local police to protect their safety.
ICE was designed to be mainly an investigative agency, not a militarized arm of the presidency. ICE agents are not adequately trained to use deadly force.
In addition, ICE agents prowling our streets in unmarked cars, wearing masks, clad in body armor and carrying long guns, are a clear provocation to violence — both by them and by otherwise law-abiding residents of our towns and cities who feel they must stop their brutality.
Trump, Vance, and Miller want to provoke violent confrontations so they can justify even more oppression — including invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow Trump to call in the regular military.
“I’d be allowed to do that,” Trump said in October, referring to the act, “and the courts wouldn’t get involved, nobody would get involved, and I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted.”
Please: tell your members of Congress not to vote for the DHS spending bill unless it stipulates that ICE be disarmed.
Also tell them that the bill must restrict ICE and Border Patrol’s ability to conduct dragnet arrest operations and target people based on their race, language or accent. And the bill must clarify that ICE agents are liable under civil and criminal law if they harm civilians.
The Trump regime is telling agents they have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits if they kill or maim or otherwise hurt civilians. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” JD Vance said of the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good. “He was doing his job.”
DHS went so far as to post a clip of Miller saying, “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”
Rubbish. There’s no such absolute immunity under the law. Regardless of what the FBI concludes, I hope and expect the state of Minnesota will open a criminal investigation of the agent who murdered Renee Good and, on the basis of the evidence uncovered, prosecute him for murder under state law.
It would be useful for Congress to make it crystal clear in the DHS spending bill now under consideration that ICE agents do not enjoy absolute legal immunity.
Please call your representative and senators today and tell them not to vote for the DHS spending bill unless it (1) disarms ICE agents, (2) prevents them from targeting people based on their race, language, or accent, and (3) stipulates that agents who harm civilians are liable under criminal and civil laws.
To reach your representative or senator, call the U.S. Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Tell them the state and city where you live. They will connect you to any member’s office.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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