Kristi Noem's plan to put down opposition
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump just handed Dems a weapon that will finish him
After what happened in Minneapolis last weekend, the American people are angry, afraid, and feel powerless to stop a president and a Department of Homeland Security drunk on power and violence. They are crying out for someone — anyone — to show a way forward, to counter this administration and defend a fragile democracy.
This is the moment Democrats must step forward together.
Poll after poll shows Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in deep trouble. Voters are furious about affordability, exhausted by chaos, alarmed by the open lawlessness defining this administration.
Democrats have rightly centered accountability, calling out a GOP Congress that sits idle while Trump tramples the Constitution, the rule of law, and basic human decency.
The second fatal shooting of an innocent, law-abiding American by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis sickened anyone with a functioning conscience. This was not an accident. It was the predictable result of an unrestrained DHS operating a paramilitary force, emboldened by Trump and protected by Republican silence.
Republicans, according to reporting, are afraid to confront Trump over ICE’s brutality. In the absence of Republican courage, Democrats must act.
They have real leverage.
Last week, the House passed a funding package that included more than $64 billion for DHS, which oversees ICE and Customs and Border Protection. It passed despite Democratic demands for guardrails to rein in ICE’s violent, lawless behavior and the rogue leadership of DHS Secretary Kristin Noem.
That DHS funding was bundled with several other appropriations bills needed to keep the government funded through the end of the fiscal year.
In normal times, such a package would sail through Congress. These are not normal times. Any faith that business could proceed as usual has been shattered by the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot in broad daylight by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.
The bill now sits in the Senate, where Democrats have the power to stop it.
Senate Democrats vowed not to provide the votes needed to advance DHS funding unless the department is fundamentally reined in. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called what happened in Minnesota “appalling and unacceptable,” and called the bill “woefully inadequate” to curb ICE abuses.
That stance upends what House negotiators — read Republicans — thought was a near-done deal. Because DHS funding is tied to five other spending bills, removing it would require renegotiation and new House approval, unlikely before funding expires at the end of the week.
The result is a very real threat of a partial government shutdown if Democrats hold firm and Republicans refuse to separate DHS from the broader package.
This is why the stakes are so high, and why Democrats must stay united until they get real action on behalf of the American people.
They have been here before. Last year, Democrats forced a shutdown over expiring Obamacare tax credits. They showed unity, then accepted a familiar Republican “promise” that the issue would be taken up later.
It wasn’t, of course. Why would anyone in their right mind take Republicans in Congress at their word? The credits expired. Premiums spiked. Millions lost coverage. Democrats sent a message, but messages don’t pay bills. Outcomes do, and the outcome was failure because Democrats caved.
Now the test is far more dire.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries condemned the killing of Pretti, calling Trump and DHS “completely and totally out of control.” He labeled the killing of a VA nurse a “horrific, preventable tragedy” and demanded an independent investigation free from DHS interference.
But words are not enough. If the Senate blocks DHS funding and the bill returns to the House, Jeffries must keep his caucus united to stop it.
This is not the moment for half-measures or false promises of reform later. Or to trust Republicans to do the right thing. Senate Democrats must refuse to fund DHS — fully, publicly, to the end.
Not for symbolism. Not for a press release. Not in exchange for another empty Republican assurance.
This is a defining test for Schumer. The New York senator built his career battling in the trenches. Yet that fighter feels absent now, replaced by a leader strong on floor speeches but weak against Trump’s, and the GOP’s, relentless bad faith.
Schumer has a chance to remind the country who he once was. He can hold his caucus together, vote down DHS funding, and force a reckoning over the brutality and illegality that has now claimed American lives.
Public opinion is already there. Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans are horrified by what is happening in Minneapolis. There are not two legitimate sides to this story. Americans can see the truth for themselves. There is only one.
Trump’s response has been escalation. He sent border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis, a move roughly equivalent to sending a Tsavo lion into a chicken coop. Homan, like his boss, offers intimidation instead of accountability.
Democrats must be visible. They must go to Minnesota, stand where Americans were killed, and make clear they are willing to confront this administration head-on. They must stay united and refuse to be conned yet again by Republicans.
This is not politics as usual. It is about protecting American lives.
The country is watching. If Democrats fail, this will not stop in Minnesota. These tactics will spread to blue cities and blue states, putting more American lives at risk.
This really is a matter of life and death.
Democrats must either prove they are willing to fight, or once again signal that they will blink. If they break now, the consequences will be measured in blood, making polls and headlines meaningless.
- 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 chilling Trump message led to murder
Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even Whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.
But that’s not their real message.
Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.
One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.
“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”
His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:
“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
In other words: “Obey or die!”
It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.
This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.
Noem and Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.
Their real message — and Trump’s, Stephen Miller’s, and JD Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:
“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”
And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.
Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington, D.C., perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.
Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.
Billionaires are buying fancy homes around D.C. so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.
And the message under it all is:
“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”
Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.
— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.
Their message: “Obey or die!”
— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.
Their message: “Obey or die!”
— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.
Their message: “Obey or die.”
— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.
He didn’t obey, so he had to die.
These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Vladimir Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Viktor Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Recip Tayyep Erdoğan does in Turkey, and Abdel Fattah El-Sisi does in Egypt, among others.
This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook, as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”
It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.
They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”
And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.
The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.
Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.
When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.
That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.
Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.
We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.
Trump himself has already been found guilty of fraud multiple times, exposed for stealing money from a children’s cancer charity, and found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. His lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.
Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.
Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.
These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.
History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.
Soon, everybody is silent.
Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”
And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.
- 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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This brutal invasion would horrify our nation's founders
The Twin Cities metropolitan area is under occupation by armed federal agents. According to the Census Reporter, there are roughly 3.7 million people living in the metro area and there may already be 3,000 militarized federal agents occupying our city. An additional 1,500 active duty troops from the army’s 11th Airborne Division are on standby, ready for deployment to Minnesota.
Let’s put that in perspective. During the last year of his first term, President Donald Trump negotiated a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, which at the time was a nation of 39 million people, to be completed in early 2021. In 2019, there were between 12,000 and 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. At the start of the Biden administration, there were only 2,500 U.S. soldiers remaining there.
I say this because the Trump administration has decided to send more armed federal agents to the Twin Cities than Joe Biden inherited in Afghanistan. That’s too many armed federal agents under any circumstances.
Two U.S. citizens have already been killed who would be alive today absent the occupation. Many U.S. citizens have been detained and physically abused, and many more such instances have been endured by legally authorized immigrants.
We are about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Founders of the United States were intensely suspicious of standing armies in peace time. If they were British citizens, the colonists asked, why were the Red Coats stationed in Boston? They included, among their reasons for dissolving their ties to King George, the following:
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, future President James Madison made the following observation:
“A standing military force, with an overgrown executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
It was clear to the nation’s Founders that federal forces were meant to fight foreign enemies and defend the United States from other nations. Among their first actions after the end of the Revolutionary War was to disband the Continental Army. Federal forces were never meant to occupy American cities and rural areas.
Some might suggest that the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States constitute a foreign invasion. Hogwash. The undocumented here come from many nations and arrived for as many reasons. It was not and is not an organized foreign invasion.
U.S. federal forces are meant to protect us from foreign threats, not to occupy the streets and farms of America in unmarked cars and wearing masks and picking up people without judicial warrants based on how they look, or speak, or what neighborhood they live in, or how they get to work, or where they work.
What is happening in Minnesota is un-American. It would make the Founders wonder what has become of their project. After 250 years, we now resemble the British more than we do the Patriots, except the Red Coats had the courage to show their faces.
- Jeff Kolnick is a retired professor of history. He is a founder of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy and he served his faculty union as a negotiator and local president.
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Here's how ICE executions can end Trump's reign
Today we mourn the death-by-execution of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. I use the term execution intentionally because they were murdered intentionally by Trump’s goons. (I’ve seen the videos; I’m sure you have as well.)
At times like this, Gandhi used to say, “The truth is revealing itself.”
To show our grief and solidarity, you might want to wear a black armband this week and light a candle in your window this evening and for the remainder of the week.
But there is much more to do than mourn. As the labor leader Joe Hill asked in 1915 just before he was executed: “Don’t mourn … Organize.” The best way to honor the memories of Alex Pretti and Renee Good is to take action against the forces that executed both of them.
Obviously, your energies are needed in organizing your congressional district and your state for the midterm elections, and getting out the vote. (I’ll be back in coming months with detailed suggestions for how.)
But the midterms are nine and a half months away. In the meantime, Donald Trump and his thugs can do a great deal of damage if not stopped. What can you do now?
A few action items occur to me:
- Tell your U.S. senators to vote NO on the Department of Homeland Security spending bill they’ll be considering this week — unless ICE is disarmed and prohibited from using racial or ethnic profiling and its agents are explicitly liable to criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits. At the very least, DHS’s funding should be slashed. If DHS is shut down after Jan. 30 because no spending bill has been enacted, so be it. (The congressional switchboard is: (202) 224-3121.)
- If you’re represented by Republicans, call them and demand they rein in ICE. They need to hear from you. Some Republicans are beginning to come around. (Remember: They now have a margin of only three votes in the House.)
- Urge your state attorneys general to join with other state AGs and to investigate ICE, the Border Patrol, and their leadership (Noem, Miller, Trump), with a view toward possible criminal prosecution. Trump cannot pardon them or protect them from state-level prosecutions. (You can locate the office of your state attorney general through the National Association of Attorneys General website or the USAGov directory. Most offices have official websites with online complaint forms, phone numbers, and mailing addresses for submitting consumer inquiries, complaints, or reports.)
- If ICE is coming to your city or is already there, call on your mayor and your state police to protect those protesting ICE.
- Circulate a pledge in your community to oppose ICE if and when it arrives there. Aim for signatures from 10 percent of the adults residing there.
- If you are a member of your local Indivisible group (or if you’re not a member, join one; or if there’s none in your community, start one), suggest a general strike. What might this entail? I can imagine three elements: (1) no one goes to work (call in sick), (2) no one buys anything (stock up beforehand), and (3) no one uses social media (except Substack). In coordination with other Indivisible groups and other resistance groups across America, decide what date and for how long. (Then let me know!)
- Isolate the United States economically, even more than Trump is doing. If you live in an EU country, urge your government to activate the Anti-Coercion Instrument. The Trump regime represents a clear and present danger to the world, including the sovereignty of European nations. The Anti-Coercion Instrument in the EU would allow the sanctioning of Trump regime officials, freezing of assets of corporations benefiting from the theft of Venezuelan oil, and expulsion of U.S. forces from European bases.
- Allow the U.S. dollar to fall. Under the Trump regime — which is actively trying to take over the Fed, America’s central bank, and is dissolving ties with the rest of the free world — the dollar is becoming a highly risky currency. It’s already falling. Allow it to fall further. If you work in a large global corporation, urge your top executives to do the firm’s international transactions in currencies other than dollars. If you are in a large financial institution, urge traders to dump dollars.
Clearly, this is an incomplete list of the peaceful “good trouble” we could make. If other actions occur to you, please share them with the rest of us in the comments.
Friends, have courage. Be strong. Hug your loved ones. Remember Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Please do not succumb to fear or despair. We will be victorious.
- 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/. His 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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Trump's insanity is hiding the one thing that will finish him
Americans spent last week cringing over President Donald Trump's behavior, both at home and abroad in Davos, Switzerland, especially as the wanna-be king asserted he will take Greenland one way or another, even admitting that his personal desire to obtain it played a bigger role in his decision than national security.
But while one must absolutely hold Trump accountable for his never-ending insane bullying on the world stage, everyone best entertain the strong possibility that it is less Trump flailing away as a man experiencing cognitive decline than being crazy like the proverbial fox. It sure appears that Trump is willing to look like a self-absorbed maniac on the world stage, so long as his inanity blocks Americans' focus on the potentially-explosive revelations in the Epstein files.
No scandal has hit Trump harder, none posing a greater risk, than what might explode from those FBI files against a man who places his personal interests over everything else, in every context. It all forces us to lay much of the blame or explanation of Trump's dangerous Greenland talk as merely a convenient distraction, buying Trump valuable time, even at the expense of further trashing the country's reputation with neighbors and former allies.
Almost as an aside, but very related to Esptein, it's worth noting that Trump has never sounded more like a brute than when asserting an American right to take Greenland. He asserts all American rights or interests in Greenland as wrapped up in military dominance and wealth. As a nearly untouchable, powerful man nonetheless hearing the word "No," from both Greenland and Denmark, Trump responds with little more than a version of, "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way."
It is almost impossible to not see how the same discussion might have occurred with a woman who continues to say, "No."
In Davos, Trump's behavior forced experts to question his sanity at levels over and above the torrid past. He stumbled, using "Iceland," instead of "Greenland" at least three times, while ripping Canadian leadership and the EU's defense of Denmark, while rambling about his grievances.
Trump even admitted he felt little need to act peacefully because he believed that he had been "overlooked" for the Nobel Prize — behavior no different than a 13-year-old failing to get what he wants and responding with over-the-top rebellious behavior.
He isn't doing this in a vacuum.
Congress notes that it has received a mere one percent of the Epstein documents — a near-stupefying fact, forcing everyone to wonder what can possibly be in those files, material so damaging that career officials like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have put their own legal fates on the line by withholding materials the law clearly mandates be released.
There is a tendency to get lost amidst Trump's history of attacking clear truth — attempting to overturn an election, reversing the January 6 narrative, etc — such that we cannot even see the Epstein matter at its most basic level, in its shocking corruption and criminality.
Simply consider that we have a president who may be implicated as at least knowing of and perhaps participating in the biggest, most notorious child sex-trafficking ring in American history, and that the same president is personally interfering in the investigation, to protect himself and his friends as assailants.
Clear out all we know about Trump and lay the above out as a purely objective matter. It would be extremely tough to name anything more damning, more deserving of bipartisan questions regarding impeachment, than interfering with an investigation of powerful people engaging in child rape. Yet he's doing all he can to cover the investigation up, even calling victims "Democrats."
Commentators have long noted that Trump will do nearly anything to "wag the dog," to fog over Epstein headlines. We noted that he might declare martial law or invoke the Insurrection Act, even cancel elections, anything to distract. We all knew it was coming. Nonetheless, it's hard to see it play out in real time.
So while it is critical to hold Trump accountable for his insane behavior on the world stage, it is also critical to never forget that he has proved willing to do nearly everything necessary to generate outrage that doesn't flow from Epstein.
The Department of Justice has released a tiny fraction of its files, even sitting under the sword of Damocles that Congress put in place, forcing everyone to ask, Why?
Only one answer makes sense. Hold that fact and it becomes obvious why Trump is willing to make a joke of himself on the world stage, or invade Venezuela, or investigate Fed Chair Jerome Powell, occupy Minnesota, even to state that the Insurrection Act makes everything "easier," implying he simply wants to "rule."
It all appears planned. It is also working.
Everything is on the table — Greenland, insurrection, tariffs, Cuba, everything — so long as those files stay under the table. We should never forget and never stop pushing. Ultimately, Epstein may explain all.
- Jason Miciak is a past associate editor of Occupy Democrats, an author, and an American attorney. He can be reached at jasonmiciak@gmail.com, and on Twitter @JasonMiciak, or Bluesky @jasonmiciak.bsky.social
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One key contrast between Alex Pretti and Kristi Noem explains this terrible moment
Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. He took care of our nation’s veterans, people who served, suffered, and came home needing help. It’s hard to imagine something more noble.
Nurses are helpers. When something is wrong, they move toward it. That instinct, that humanity, is likely what compelled Pretti to act when he saw a woman dragged to the ground by federal agents in Minneapolis.
From the videos, it is painfully clear he was not charging officers with a weapon. He was not there to commit violence. He was filming. He was doing what decent people do when they see injustice unfolding. In 2026, cellphone cameras carry the weight of a judge’s gavel.
And for wielding his phone, he was killed.
Pretti was a healer. A caregiver. A man whose father said he “cared deeply about people.” He had recently lost his dog, one he loved deeply. It was a quiet grief. Anyone who has lost a pet understands that ache, the absence, the tenderness, the love that lingers. Pets are the purest expression of love.
And that detail matters.
Because it stands in stark contrast to the people now lying — atrociously and unforgivably — about his death.
Donald Trump is the first U.S. president in more than a century to have no pets in the White House. To him, “dog” is a slur for enemies. To him, we, the American people, are “dogs.”
His Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, once bragged about shooting her dog, an act she tried to spin as proof of toughness. In reality, it revealed plain cruelty.
Noem now defends the killing of an innocent American who loved his dog, loved people, and devoted his life to caring for others. Vanity is her only loyalty. Violence is her vice. She appears to savor these moments: another dead citizen, another camera, another chance to posture as “tough.”
To her, dogs are expendable. So are people.
The contrast between Alex Pretti's compassion and Kristi Noem’s savagery tells you everything you need to know about what kind of “strength” this country is being taught to admire.
Within minutes of Pretti’s killing, the lies began spilling out, from Trump, Noem, and their executor-in-chief, Greg Bovino. A coordinated smear campaign followed, delivered with conspiratorial confidence and vindictive venom. Pretti was labeled a “domestic terrorist.” A threat. Just as Renée Nicole Good was before him.
Pretti’s father called the lies “sickening … reprehensible and disgusting.” He was right.
The videos do not lie. They show ICE agents treating Pretti the way Noem treated her dog: kill first, lie about it later. A performance of “toughness” meant to terrify us all into silence.
Pretti did not approach officers with a gun. He was holding a phone, filming ICE agents as they tackled a woman. If he “brandished” a weapon, it was invisible, because all that appears in the footage is a phone. While “subduing” him, agents removed a lawfully owned firearm from his waistband. That should have been the end of it.
It wasn’t.
Pretti legally owned a gun. So do millions of Americans, a fact usually celebrated loudly by the very same political figures now pretending it’s disqualifying. The Second Amendment, it seems, only applies to the right kind of people. When federal agents break the law, those rights disappear.
Renée Good was a writer, a poet, and a mother. Alex Pretti was a nurse who cared for veterans. They were not terrorists. They were citizens.
If this administration wants to talk about domestic terrorism, there are names it could use. Stewart Rhodes. Enrique Tarrio. But they walk free, because Trump set them free. They are alive. Innocent people are not.
What’s happening in Minneapolis is something else entirely. It’s suffocating. It’s mind-numbing. It’s authoritarian. At a press conference overflowing with lies, Bovino appeared dressed like an SS officer, a deliberate, threatening message.
Trump, Noem, and Bovino have perfected the inversion of truth: goodness framed as danger, brutality as “law enforcement.” Their campaign of fear is not confined to Minneapolis. When they come to your city, how will you respond?
Masked ICE agents rampaging through neighborhoods like an occupying force. Dragging citizens from their homes. Smashing car windows. Kidnapping people who dare question them. Pepper-spraying families. Using five-year-old children to lure parents into the open.
These are not mistakes. They are a pattern. And the killings are the inevitable result.
It would be easy — understandable, even — to respond with nothing but rage. To harden into the very cruelty embodied by those causing this destruction. You can feel that temptation everywhere.
But surrendering to hate is exactly what they want.
Because even now, goodness still exists, and it matters. It lives in the people who raise their phones to document abuse. In neighbors who surround ICE agents not with weapons, but with witnesses. In the refusal to accept lies as truth, no matter how often they are repeated.
Trump is trying to replace America’s inherent goodness with fear. Some days, fear feels overwhelming.
But hate has only one antidote: an abundance of good. And yes, the anger, the hate, the rage is all too consuming. It boils the blood, and we have to manifest that anger somehow into something that inevitably wins.
Every time this administration kills an innocent American, we lose a piece of goodness. And if we lose all of it, we lose everything. There is nothing good about Trump, Noem, Bovino, or an ICE force operating without accountability, conscience, and with only masks.
But there is something good in Minnesota, the North Star State where their north star is goodness itself.
The people have shown goodness in grief, in protest, in solidarity, and in care for one another. There are horrifying lessons coming out of Minneapolis. But there are hopeful ones, too.
Goodness surrounded mom and artist Renée Nicole Good when she died. It surrounded Alex Pretti, a nurse, a helper, a man who loved his dog, when he was killed for trying to help someone.
We can be angry. We should be angry. We have to be angry. We can protest. We must protest. And we can be there for each other.
But we can’t lose our goodness. If we do, the diabolic will win. And we cannot let that happen. We just can’t.
- 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 city knows all too well how low Trump will go — and he's about to go yet lower
During the 2024 election, JD Vance and Donald Trump told disgusting, racist lies about Haitians in Springfield and made the southwest Ohio city a national target of hate and extremism.
Pathetic loser neo-Nazis stalked the streets, disrupted community meetings, and protested in front of City Hall. Charity leaders were harassed. Schools closed after being subjected to repeated bomb threats. Business and city leaders were threatened with violence and death.
After telling the racist lies that sparked this hateful chaos in a city of his own constituents, then-Sen. Vance admitted that he would “create stories” to get attention, which is how a child operates.
Now he’s Vice President of the United States.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine tried to be the adult in the room.
He took to the New York Times to shoot down the lies and support the actual community — as opposed to the hate-filled fantasy portrayed by the amoral sociopaths in the right-wing media echo-chamber.
DeWine was born in Springfield.
DeWine and his wife Fran also have deep connections to Haiti, founding a school there named after their late daughter, who they tragically lost in a car accident in 1993.
Amid gang violence in 2024, the Becky DeWine School had to close down.
That current, brutal spat of gang violence stems out of a history of genocide, colonization and slavery, revolution, extortion and impoverishment, and subsequent dictatorship, instability, and violence.
I know the story of one Haitian refugee who escaped the violence there and has been in the U.S. for years under protected status.
Working multiple jobs and living modestly to save as much as possible, she had a home built for herself back in Haiti to eventually move back.
She furnished it and everything, getting it ready: a new couch, a new fridge, a comfy bed.
About two months ago, gangs broke into the home, robbed everything from it, and left it in ruins.
She now has no home to return to, just a pile of rubble.
“Self-deport,” they say: self-deport to violence and disaster.
“Illegal,” they say, as they strip them of their legal status.
During Trump’s first term, he tried to end Temporary Protected Status for refugees from Haiti in 2018 and referred to Haiti and African nations as “s---hole” countries. Courts blocked him.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has now once again set a date to end protected status for Haitian refugees in the U.S., on Feb. 3.
A lawsuit against the order is before an appellate court of federal judges, but no decision has yet been given. A ruling is expected Feb. 2.
Springfield is on edge.
The helpers at the local level are doing everything they can. They’re exhausted. They’re scared.
It’s an absolute disgrace that America has sunk so low. The community has done everything they can.
Now it’s time for Ohio’s elected leaders to do everything they can to help: Make phone calls, back-channel, use whatever influence possible to do everything possible to keep Ohio safe and peaceful.
Springfield, Ohio does not need a vengeance tour of appalling, illegal, unconstitutional, propaganda porn for right-wing internet losers from a sadistic regime.
DeWine has been public about the economic storm that would hit Springfield if the city that has spent years successfully expanding and adjusting to this hard-working, faithful community is suddenly upended by the mass deportation of 10,000 residents.
Factories will be hobbled, jobs will go unfilled, local businesses will close down, city and county revenues will plummet, churches will once again have empty pews, and neighborhoods that had been revitalized will fall again into shambles.
Meanwhile, all those horrific scenes playing out in Minnesota will come to this small Ohio town.
Open abuse of police powers violating the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Violence, hatred, chaos. A maelstrom of madness, based on the lawless whims and childish fantasies of under-trained, under-vetted, unaccountable goon squads.
This the doing of “public leaders” who are mental, intellectual, and emotional toddlers — broken people breaking the world.
They’re too weak and stupid, short-sighted and malicious to have any positive vision for humanity, so they spew forth darkness, resentment, paranoia, division, and hate.
In stark display of their sickness of soul, they delight in the pain and hurt they torment upon others.
They reject the light of truth, compassion, mercy, restraint, benevolence, tolerance, and love. They insult God.
It’s well past time for all adults remaining among Ohio’s so-called leaders to stand up to these children.
It’s time to protect the law — actual, constitutional law. It’s time to protect order. It’s time to protect Ohio’s peace. It’s time for a shred of decency.
- Ohio Capital Journal Editor-in-Chief and Opinion Columnist David DeWitt has been covering government, politics, and policy in Ohio since 2007, including education, health care, crime and the courts, poverty, state and local government, business, labor, energy, the environment, and social issues. He has worked for the National Journal, The New York Observer, and The Athens NEWS. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and is a board member of the E.W. Scripps Society of Alumni and Friends. Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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Bully Trump just got battered
As I wrote this column, Donald Trump was speaking at the Davos Economic Summit. This event rightly has often been derided for pandering to elites and corporations while shallowly nodding to concerns about the environment, civil rights and economic inequality as the billionaires and world leaders fly in on their private jets.
But this year it was at the center of the fear and chaos over Trump’s war on NATO and Europe, his demand for a Nobel Peace Prize, and his desire to seize Greenland.
In his rambling speech, lying about his so-called accomplishments, Trump appeared to rule out using military force to take Greenland (after implying for days that he would seize it, as he put it, “the hard way” if he needed to do so). But, Trump said, he wants “immediate negotiations” to acquire Greenland because it is “undefended.” He’s made repeated false claims that it is being circled by Russian and Chinese ships.
Was this another Trump TACO? Possibly. But don’t think he won’t threaten World War III again, nor demand the Nobel Peace Prize again in return for not waging war as he continues to grab for Greenland. We’ve come to know the tired performance in which Trump demands the world’s attention, the media complies, and international relations are damaged.
Greenland, of course, is, always has been, and — barring any change in circumstances — always will be “defended” because it is part of NATO. That means the U.S. is defending it, along with the rest of the alliance. So everything that’s happened in the past few days around this issue is pure idiocy, and all about Trump’s ego and his desire to own land which I’m sure he’d like to rename “Trumpland.”
But that’s what we have come to expect from the debilitating dictator who is waging war on his own country, sending thousands of violent goons to terrorize Minneapolis while continuing to dodge the Epstein files.
The world, for its part, is moving on. The speech at Davos by Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney was a powerful synthesis of this. There is a new world order, he said, as the U.S. not only cannot be relied upon for stability; it can’t be trusted in any agreements and will at any time lash out with punishing tariffs or threats of domination.
This new order will be a painful adjustment for the world and, in particular, those considered long-time allies of the U.S. But the people most hurt will be Americans, seeing Trump rip up trade agreements as the rest of the world makes new alliances. The very people who voted for Trump, hoping he was going to make life more affordable, will be more miserable than ever.
As Ryan Cooper reported at the American Prospect, Trump, in repealing the government investments in green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act, has already doomed the American car industry with his war on electric vehicles:
Now, thanks to that betrayal, plus Trump’s lunatic trade and foreign policy in general, the American auto industry is bleeding out.
Consider Canada, which has historically been one of the biggest markets for American cars, being quite similar culturally, already heavily integrated into the U.S. auto industry (along with Mexico), and also one of the few places that will buy our big stupid trucks.
America’s share of the Canadian auto market has been tumbling, down from about half in the previous decade to just 36 percent, because of Trump’s deranged trade war and threats of annexation, which has sparked a massive nationalist backlash and a mounting customer boycott of anything American.
And that brings me back to Carney’s speech. He urged world leaders not to continue to yearn for a past order whose presentation was pretty fictional anyway:
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem-solving — are under threat. As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable.
A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
Carney urged the “middle powers” of the world to unite — economically, militarily, and geopolitically — to become a force that can stand up to the great powers. It’s ambitious, but it’s the only thing that they can do, he said. As the European Union leaders described new trade deals with India, Brazil, China, and other countries, Carney also touted new trade agreements:
We’ve agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.
In the past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.
The U.S. is pulling itself away while many of its spurned friends are making new alliances. As Carney noted, this is about survival and the inability to count on the U.S.:
The question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality — we must.
The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.
Now, Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, has termed value-based realism.
Or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights.
And then this line:
Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
In the first Trump administration there was an idea that Trump was an aberration. The hope was that he or someone like him would never return. The U.S. would go back to the order of the last century, and, even with all its flaws — including the U.S. and other great powers continually exempting themselves from the rules — it would all work out. But now there’s the realization that it’s done. And Carney sees it as a moment of opportunity and even liberation.
We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine co-operation.
The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home and to act together.
That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.
With that, Carney laid it out for the business and political leaders of the world, receiving a standing ovation.
Trump today ranted and lied at Davos, and he will continue to do so whenever he speaks. But he is making himself and the U.S. more and more irrelevant, as much of the world has no choice but to move on and find safety by joining together and making new friends.
In forcing that, Trump is making America weaker by the day. Can we bring the country back? That will depend on the 2026 elections — and all of us working hard to stop the GOP from enabling him — as well as on the 2028 elections. And, though it perhaps can be done, whoever becomes president will have an enormous task in gaining the trust of the world once again.
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Trump's psychotic meltdown exposed something terrifying — but not about him
Last Sunday night, Donald Trump sent a deranged letter on White House stationery to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. It shocked the world more than any of his antics of the past decade.
In it, Trump unleashed a madman’s rant at Gahr, an innocent bystander, declaring that “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace” as a consequence of having been denied a Nobel Peace Prize. And there was this:
“The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”
By Monday morning, as the National Security Council forwarded it to European ambassadors, global stock markets began to crater. The long-term damage to U.S. international relationships — and world peace — remains uncertain, at best.
The core of the communique is a jaw-dropping admission of bad motives and illegal intentions:
Dear Jonas — Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.
With that, Donald Trump unleashed an international crisis as grave as any in our lifetimes. The U.S. has stared down powerful enemies before.
This is the first time it has stared down its friends.
With NATO nations angrily dug in to defend Greenland from illegal American aggression — and sending troops on the ground there — this borders on a declaration of war with our own allies. Too many numbed Americans will feel no choice to shrug this off as Trump being Trump because it’s too painful for them to process.
The long-term consequences of this act of madness must not be trivialized as just more noise. The damage done to America’s image and reputation throughout the globe cannot be walked back at the next White House press briefing.
But this trauma is significant at home for a more alarming reason. It’s an ominous signal that the president’s mental fitness is unraveling.
Donald Trump is mad.
There’s no analogy to Richard Nixon here: Trump’s irrational behavior — citing personal grievance as grounds for war — is seriously closer to the precedent of the Roman Emperor Caligula, who ordered his soldiers to "attack the ocean" by stabbing the waves and collecting seashells as "spoils of war."
America has moved into 25th Amendment territory with this one. If Trump’s unhinged betrayal of America doesn’t fit the phrase “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” it’s hard to imagine what would.
That said, it is impossible to visualize a serious discussion about the 25th Amendment happening anytime soon. Look no further than those North Korean-style Cabinet meetings at which members ritually prostrate themselves before Trump.
These people orbit Trump like planets around the sun — they’re not about to move against him. Any serious pushback from Republicans in Congress is equally implausible.
But this is one crisis that must not be reduced to partisanship. It won’t be helpful if those on the left frame this as a validation of what we’ve been saying about Trump all along. Or if we plot it on a timeline of American imperialism. So what?
The safe space of normalization is the enemy here. The presumed comfort of knowing we’ve come through worse is useless for anyone not old enough to have been around for the Civil War.
And it’s not enough to note that Trump is a psychotic timebomb. It is critical to understand he is an evolving psychotic timebomb.
Mental illness isn’t static. The escalation between first-term Trump and second-term Trump has nothing to do with human guardrails reining him in or not. It’s about his demons tightening their grip.
Against all odds and across all political lines, Americans need to recognize the progression of what is happening to this man and thus, our nation. Trump’s symptoms of mental distress have grown more pronounced by the day.
They are metastasizing.
If Americans can’t see that — and act upon it — maybe we’re the ones unfit to discharge our powers and duties.
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Vanquishing Trump means smashing this enemy first
I have previously said liberals should face the fact that the Democrats can’t do it alone. The viability of democracy requires some Republican buy-in. I said, “liberals have to work more to create conditions in which the Republicans choose to behave.”
About those conditions.
I didn’t mean taking a phony middle position on something like immigration to appear moderate compared to a blood-and-soil Republican. I have said before and will say again: accepting lies as if they are true is not centrism. It’s just another form of deceit. There’s no reward in it, because most voters can tell it’s fake.
What I had in mind was something Professor Matt Seyhold of Elmira College told me in my recent interview with him. We must expand the tent of freedom to beat “totalitarian kleptocracy,” he told me. To do that, we must include “a whole lot of dumba-----.”
Those are the conditions liberals should work to create.
How do we bring in the “dumba----”?
First, Professor Seybold said, by recognizing that nonvoters decided the election. About 90 million eligible voters stayed home on Election Day. He and his colleagues call that “couch.”
“Couch cannot be defeated on a Tuesday in November every couple of years unless couch is being defeated on the regular.”
And how do we do that?
Make community – “take a night course at a local college, join community theater, volunteer at soup kitchen, start a book club.”
“If more people are making community, that’s bad for any politics which depends on feelings of isolation, fear and powerlessness,” Professor Seybold told me. “A precondition to political empowerment is simply feeling seen and heard.”
He went on:
“If you want better electoral outcomes, but you don’t want to try to ‘convert Trump voters,’ just make community. My greatest hope for the 2020s has nothing to do with Donald Trump. My hope is that we all win a lot more days against couch. If that happens, our politics will start looking a lot more sane.”
Seybold is a professor of American literature. He’s also a Mark Twain scholar and the host of a Twain-inspired podcast called The American Vandal.
In the first part of our two-part conversation, Professor Seybold explained at length what he meant by “dumba----.” He meant Americans who just don’t know any better as well as Americans who do know better but can’t or won’t do anything about it.
In this second part, he focuses on a solution to each.
Your comment [about dumba----] speaks to the problem of hope. At least my problem. America saw Trump, didn't like him, threw him out. Then we put him back in. And the dumba---- were central to that. Why should I put my faith in them?
By Mark Twain’s definition, hope is precisely what “the facts refuse,” and it is the only remedy to suicidal depression - from which he himself suffered - in the face of the “incurable disease” of our mortality.
For my part, I will simply argue the dumba----- didn’t put Trump back in office nearly so much as the kleptocrats did.
And, so long as our system of free and fair elections holds, the project of making fewer dumba---- and defeating kleptocracy will be the same project. Intelligence is just access to information, the existence of expertise, and the time and wellbeing necessary to avail oneself of each.
So, if we turn our attention to supporting education, healthcare, journalism and libraries, the project of undumbing is underway.
It has been said that Trump's abuse of power — what I think of as the ongoing insurrection — is radicalizing people. It's snapping them out of their ignorance, complacency, apathy. Do you agree? If so, what can liberals do to take advantage of it?
Let’s forgo “taking advantage.” There’s that intrinsic criminality in the language of US party politics again.
I just saw a poll this morning in which the percentage of people in favor of “abolishing ICE,” which was a pretty fringe position under Joe Biden, is now higher than Trump’s approval rating.
If there are people being “radicalized,” we don’t have to worry about motivating them. They don’t need nudging. Being “radical,” whether you see that as a positive or negative, is not compatible with inaction. Your moral urgency compels you.
Hopefully, there are a rather large number of people who, though they will never be radicals, are being broken of their complacency by the events of the past year.
My friend, Anna Kornbluh, is fond of saying, “Donald Trump didn’t win the 2024 election. Couch did.”
Eighty-six million eligible voters decided the difference for them wasn’t great enough to get to the polls. That’s 9 million more than voted for Trump.
Couch cannot be defeated on a Tuesday in November every couple of years unless couch is being defeated on the regular.
If more people are touching grass, if more people are making community, that’s bad for any politics which depends on feelings of isolation, fear and powerlessness.
Getting people to rallies, phone-banks, marches, and explicitly political gatherings is great, but honestly, if they take a night course at the local college, join community theater, volunteer at soup kitchen, start a book club, I think that’s almost as good.
A precondition to political empowerment is simply feeling seen and heard. If you want better electoral outcomes, but you don’t want to try to “convert Trump voters,” just make community.
My greatest hope for the 2020s has nothing to do with Donald Trump. My hope is that we all win a lot more days against couch. If that happens, our politics will start looking a lot more sane.
The phrase "new deal" appears to have come from Twain. Liberals think they know what it means. What did Twain mean? What does his meaning of the word say to our moment?
I’ll just give people some context and they can interpret it for themselves.
FDR got “The New Deal” from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The Yankee arrives in feudal Britain, and this is what he says after getting his lay of the land:
Here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the 994 to express dissatisfaction with the system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become stockholder in a corporation where 994 of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of directors and took all the dividends. It seems to me that what the 994 dupes needed was a new deal.
I wish I had said “dupes” instead of “dumba----.”
Twain’s still a helluva lot better at this than me.
We are living in a kind of dark ages in which fear, ignorance and superstition are encouraged by those in power. What can a regular person do? What do you tell your students?
I don’t talk about contemporary partisan politics barely at all. And not because of the recent witch-hunting of professors either. I never have. But two things have changed about my philosophy of instruction in recent years.
One, I teach as much history as I possibly can, supported by as much primary source documentation as I can, if possible getting students to lay hands on those primary sources, and to think about the media environments of previous eras in comparison to their own.
Two, I try to give students (and myself, frankly) a break from the surveillance. No phones. No laptops. Paper and ink. Chalk and slate. Human voices and human ears. Make community first.
Don’t take it for granted.
Learning will follow.
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This glorious freedom is poisoning Trump
Following the murder of Renee Nicole Good, Donald Trump doubled down and sent more ill-trained, masked, and lethally armed occupying forces into Minneapolis. It’s a safe bet that his efforts to ratchet up community outrage and violence will succeed sooner or later, if not in Minneapolis then somewhere else controlled by Democrats.
While it’s clear that Trump is doing everything he can to bolster and hasten his invocation of the Insurrection Act, for online gamblers betting on predictable and stupid Trump moves, it’s just a question of when it will happen.
Astute betters might predict that Trump’s declaration under the Insurrection Act is still five or six months away, closer to November, the better to cancel the midterms. But Jeffrey Epstein could return to dominate headlines any day, and Trump will indulge his compulsion to out-noise him. Also, judging from his non-stop blunders in other areas (looking at you Greenland, tariffs, and the flop in Davos), Trump will likely stumble into another strategic error by invoking the act early, while there’s still time for SCOTUS to smack it down on First Amendment grounds.
In the meantime, Trump officials are sharpening attacks against peaceful protesters, treating the First Amendment like inconvenient fiction.
Targeting Don Lemon, hiding federal policy
When former CNN news anchor Don Lemon filmed a marathon seven-hour protest at a Minneapolis church last week, Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s Assistant Attorney General, publicly threatened him: “You (Lemon) are on notice! A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws! Nor does the First Amendment protect your pseudo journalism of disrupting a prayer service.”
Never mind that Lemon did not select the location, organize, or even participate in the protest — it’s apparently now illegal for journalists to breathe the same air as the protesters.
On cue, other Trump officials piled on, declaring the protest an “act of hatred against Christians.” Karoline Leavitt, her signature cross blazing, announced, “President Trump will not tolerate the intimidation and harassment of Christians in their sacred places of worship. The Department of Justice has just launched a full investigation into the despicable (Don Lemon) incident that took place earlier today at a church in Minnesota.”
Leavitt’s cross must be burning a charred replica on her throat. She forgot to mention that Trump reversed the policy that prohibited ICE from attacking people at places of worship in January 2025, after that policy had been in effect for 13 years.
Since then, Trump’s green shirts have arrested, brutalized, and tackled people in churches all across America. Although most ICE attacks go unnoticed by the media, ICE attacks on or near church grounds to date include a raid on Iglesia Fuente de Vida church in the Atlanta suburbs; a raid on United Methodist church property in Charlotte; raids at Our Lady of Lourdes in San Bernadino; throughout Puerto Rico during Sunday services; on numerous church grounds throughout California (Inland Empire, Downey Memorial Christian Church, Montclair, Highland and St. Adelaide); and in Washington, D.C., where the Evangelical Lutheran Church joined the Quakers in a suit to block ICE raids in places of worship.
On a better day, the hypocrisy would be laughable. Not only is ICE attacking people in their “sacred place of worship” under Trump’s own official policy, but the location isn’t what makes it un-Christian. Dragging people out of their beds with flash-bang grenades, tackling senior citizens to the pavement, and pulling handicapped people out of their cars are only Christian acts in Lucifer’s bible.
Full out assault against the First Amendment
The DOJ’s response to Don Lemon was a warning shot to all journalists: Reporting ICE brutality will cost you.
Dhillon said: “Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long, long time.”
Perhaps Dhillon skipped Constitutional Law, or doesn’t understand the difference between interrupting church services, which may not be protected by the First Amendment, and protesting outside a church, which is. Ratified and in effect since 1791, the First Amendment is older and wiser than MAGA (low bar), and will still be standing long after Trump is horizontal and feeding worms. Putting protestors and journalists “away for a long, long time,” is straight out of Putin’s playbook, and is not going to happen here without the Civil War Trump so desperately craves.
Multiple cases pitting freedom of speech against Trump’s “executive authority” ICE brutality are pending in the lower courts, and ICE is going to lose bigly. A recent smackdown from a Reagan-appointed judge is instructive while we wait.
'Failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution'
Last week, during a hearing over student speech on college campuses, US district judge William Young called Trump an “authoritarian,” and accused the administration of “an unconstitutional conspiracy” against the First Amendment. On Jan. 22, he issued a ruling that Trump officials had, under the law, “objectively chilled protected speech.”
Young found that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”
“The big problem in this case is that the Cabinet secretaries, and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” Young said.
Describing the case as one of “the most important” of his career, Young asked: “How did this happen? How could our own government, the highest officials in our government, seek to so infringe on the rights of people lawfully here in the United States? It’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”
Here’s to American judges never toeing the line for a fascist, to journalists never pulling their punches, and to the glorious and everlasting freedom to call Trump what he is: an idiot.
- 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 was murder. It is time to rise against Trump
I don’t have all the details yet but it appears that Trump’s goons have murdered another American in Minneapolis.
This is the third shooting involving federal agents in the city this month, including the murder of Renee Good, 37, on Jan. 7.
The person who was killed was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old man, an American citizen who lived in Minneapolis.
At least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. The video appears to show a group of masked agents mobbing someone, pushing him to the ground, then shooting him multiple times, even as he lies motionless.
The Department of Homeland Security says he threatened agents with a gun, but footage shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him.
The people of Minneapolis, who braved sub-zero weather yesterday to protest Trump’s army of occupation, are not deterred.
Dozens of protesters at the site of today’s murder blew whistles and demanded that police arrest the federal agents. As rapid response networks immediately sent text messages about the killing to various neighborhood and immigrant network Signal chats, other protesters made their way to the scene.
Trump’s goons used tear gas and flash bangs against the crowd. As protesters began running away, ICE agents pursued them.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called the incident “sickening” and said Trump “must end this operation,” adding that “Minnesota has had it.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he saw a video of the shooting.
“How many more residents, how many more Americans, need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” he asked, adding that “a great American city is being invaded by its own federal government.”
There are now 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, a city whose own police force numbers 600.
I expect Trump will use today’s protests to invoke the Insurrection Act, and send active military troops there.
But almost everyone in America is now aware of the brutality of Trump’s goons.
It’s becoming harder for Americans to tell themselves that Trump is only going after “hard-core criminals.” Or even “illegal immigrants.” Or even Latinos. Or Black people. Or communists or “radical left extremists.”
He’s coming after all of us.
He’s coming after all of us who oppose his tyranny and brutality. All of us who defy his dictatorship. All of us who challenge his out-of-control, murderous goons.
All across America, we must rise up against this oppression as peacefully but as definitively as we possibly can.
- 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/. His 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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