Some poll findings of the last few days. This is from Pew:
G. Elliott Morris has this: note the swing state approvals….
For you poll junkies out there, Morris just dropped his new poll tracking site called 50PlusOne that replicates the old 538 model. FYI.
He’s always rude and he doesn’t listen to briefings so he probably didn’t know about this but still. What an appalling person:
President Donald Trump mocked transgender people in front of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose child identifies as nonbinary, during an Oval Office meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that was intended to focus on trade relations but instead became a showcase of Trump’s familiar culture war politics.
The meeting, held in the presence of reporters, aimed to emphasize renewed cooperation between the two countries, which remain deeply economically intertwined. But as The Independent reported, it “devolved into a political rally disguised as a routine press availability.” Trump repeatedly veered off topic to attack Democrats, the media, and transgender people, boasting that under his leadership, “We have strong borders. We have no men in women’s sports. We’re not going to take your child away and change the sex of your child.”
He went on to claim that Democrats had left America “a dead country” plagued by “men playing in women’s sports and transgender for everybody and windmills all over the place.”
Carney, sitting beside him, did not respond publicly. The contrast was striking: Trump dominated the moment with bluster and provocation, while Carney, having been elected on the promise that he could handle Trump better than his predecessors, remained silent.
Maybe because if he said something it would blow up the relationship between the two countries. Any father in Carney’s position would be hard pressed not to slap Trump across the face:
Carney and his wife, British-Canadian economist Diana Fox Carney, have four children, one of whom identifies as nonbinary. In 2019, The New Haven Register profiled then-Yale student Sasha Carney, who used they/them pronouns and spoke about the relief of being recognized outside the gender binary when the university introduced a nonbinary gender marker.
Trump’s a pig.
What else is there to say? Trump 2.0 has declared war on anyone non-MAGA (CNN):
A remarkable scene unfolded in the White House State Dining Room on Wednesday as the Trump administration convened a group of independent journalists and online commentators to share stories of violence at the hands of Antifa, an anti-fascist movement with no leadership or organization.
President Donald Trump and top officials vowed to use the full weight of the federal government to bring down Antifa – comparing it to major gangs and drug cartels who they’ve attacked with the US military. They said they’d go after Antifa’s finances and designate it an “international” terrorist organization as they moved to dismantle it.
This is like Bush II’s “global war on terror,” or GWOT. No nation. No central command. TERROR is not an organization. Neither is the non-organization known as ANTIFA, short for anti-fascist. Antifa is Trump 2.0’s imaginary monster under the bed. Imaginary except that if they choose, you are in it.
But just as it was not an impediment for Bush II’s international anti-terror marauders, Antifa being a non-organization is no impediment to the second Trump administration. Trump 2.0 is reprising the Bush approach to brand anyone non-MAGA a potential target for summary execution by Hellfire missile fired from a drone. Trump’s attorney general suggested as much.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi compared the movement to the administration’s effort to target cartels.
“Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It’s breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels. We’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa, destroy the entire organization, from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart,” Bondi said.
Mehdi Hasan noticed, “So he is going to drone strike American citizens?”
Sure, just so long as it’s captured on video. Good for ratings.
George Soros owes me so-o-o-o much back pay.
Trump’s use of “insurrectionists” above is no accident, Natasha Lennard argues at The Intercept:
… members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”
Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”
It’s coming. The questions I have now are 1) What can we do to stop it? and 2) What do we do if we can’t?
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
The first time Donald John Trump took the presidential oath of office in January 2017, he swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, etc. As I watched I wondered how the career con man would manage to raise his right hand and place his left on a bible with his fingers crossed behind his back.
I kid. He simply lied in front of the entire planet. And did again in January 2025.
A Facebook post yesterday a from a woman with D.C. connections came to my attention. After a career “dedicated to preserving and strengthening democracy,” she is suspending her account. She recommends escaping social media algorithms to build local community as a means of rebuilding trust.
“It’s also how we figure out ways to govern ourselves going forward.”
I read “going forward” to mean (ominously) that she believes we might have to rebuild from scratch. I’ve been itemizing the ways Donald Trump and the MAGA Party are not making America great, but are working overtime to unmake it to the point that we’ll have to start again from scratch, if that’s even possible.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D) of Connecticut gave a speech this week laying out the Trump 2.0 battle plan for unmaking America. Before we get to that, the constitution Trump swore to protect (twice) is being shot through with holes by him and his Project 2025 lieutenants.
Let’s do a battle damage assessment in their Cold Civil War.
Since retaking office, Trump has usurped the constitutionally assigned powers of the Legislative Branch — specifically, “the power of the purse” — without a whimper from his MAGA allies there. The White House sees itself as a law unto itself and, as we saw this week with AG Pam Bondi, views congressional oversight with contempt.
Trump has treated the Judicial Branch alternately as a legal dodge and gnat he can swat away as it pleases him. He has defied court rulings including the unanimous 2024 NRA v. Vullo ruling. That case confirms that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech.” Yet Trump 2.0 has made threats against media outlets over content he doesn’t like. He has threatened colleges and universities over what they teach. Through paper-thin criminal cases brought against his perceived enemies “as part of his crusade for retribution,” through a flurry of executive orders targeting law firms, and through harassment lawsuits he brought personally against newspapers and media outlets, Trump has made a mockery of the judiciary.
The convicted felon is stealing freedoms guaranteed to you in the Amendments as well. Trump 2.0 is systematically gutting rights guaranteed under the First Amendment (discussed above).
His immigration secret police now snatch immigrants and citizens off American streets without judicial warrants and without probable cause. They systematically violate people’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Once detained, immigrants and citizens alike are denied their due process rights under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Impacted by these unlawful actions are not only undocumented immigrants summarily deported, but also green card and visa holders who find them revoked without notice or court appeal.
Trump’s federalized deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, California alleges, violates state sovereignty guaranteed by the 10th Amendment. Illinois and Oregon also find their 10th Amendment protections in Trump’s sights.
His first day in office, Trump issued an executive order claiming the power (that belongs to Congress and state legislatures) to strike the birthright citizenship clause from the Fourteenth Amendment as if by royal decree. To date, that effort has failed.
But his second administration has stepped up efforts to denaturalize U.S. citizens protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Ohio Capitol Journal reports that “a recent Justice Department memo prioritizes national security cases, it directs the department to ‘maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence’ across 10 broad priority categories.”
The ACLU warns, “Under other administrations, those targeted for denaturalization were often Nazis and other war criminals trying to escape prosecution under assumed identities. Now, the administration is attempting to strip citizenship from individuals based upon old removal orders issued when an applicant did not appear, discrepancies in applications, and allegations of crimes that they had not even been charged with at the time of their naturalization.” A mere accusation of being a gang or cartel member can be enough under Trump 2.0.
Finally, through a lengthy menu of voting-related legislative and administrative gambits, Trump’s MAGA party has eaten away at states’ guarantee of a republican form of government under Article 4.
God knows where they’ll turn next in redacting your constitutional rights.
Murphy this week outlined the plans behind Trump’s authoritarian takeover:
Step 3, you’ll notice, is to illegally deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens.
Step 5 is to rig election rules to concretize his control of government and to destroy your right to a republican form of government under Article 4 of the Constitution.
File away for future use. Twice this month I’ve been approached by youthful Trumpers sealioning me about why I oppose their boy king. Shut them down with this.
Robert Reich has a tighter list concluding with this. “Don’t give Trump what he wants.” Remain peaceful.
(h/t KY & CHS)
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
I’m convinced that there’s an attention economy and virtually nothing matters in politics anymore if nobody hears about it. So you have to become skilled at breaking through the noise, especially the endless cacophony coming from Trump and his minions, in order to make any headway. (I wrote a bit about this earlier.)
Josh Marshall has some excellent insights on this phenomenon in his piece today. Here’s an excerpt:
To the extent the outcome of a political question or fight is pre-determined, politics and news coverage of it ceases to exist. Or if it doesn’t cease to exist, it loses the vast amount of its electricity and impact. We see this most clearly in 2025 public corruption stories. There are countless public corruption stories out there right now. But do they matter? Are you as a reporter going to really dig deep into one and is your editor going to give you a lot of running room when it is an absolute certainty there will never be an investigation by the Trump DOJ? The Tom Homan story is almost the exception that proves the rule. The Feds already basically caught him totally dead to rights. And yes, this case is so totally bonkers that reporters are kind of razzing Trump and AG Pam Bondi and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about it. But even here, reporting is constrained by the iron reality that Homan won’t lose his job, let alone face any legal consequences.
This dimension of politics applies in legislative and DC politics as well. As long as the outcome is foreordained, the gas just drains out of the politics tank. This is why the Epstein story caught hold like wild fire during the summer. It really wasn’t the inherently shocking and provocative nature of the crimes. It was that people could see that it wasn’t clear the White House could control it. Then politics and media coverage, which to a real degree were in a sort of months-long coma, began to flicker to life.
That’s the same issue here. It’s easy to look all-powerful when you are in fact … well, all-powerful. Blue America and all its commentators and consultants and campaign gurus have never been sufficiently attuned to how Trump’s constant performances of power create this aura of invincibility around him which in turn makes him seem uncrossable. The Kimmel fight — despite being about a late-night talk show — began to pierce some of that bubble. The trillion dollars of health care cuts weren’t popular when they passed this summer either. But as long as the outcome was guaranteed, it was never going to get sufficient attention. No one wastes time watching a rigged prize fight. All political contest and all the news coverage that swirls around it are based on uncertainty and the fact that there’s always the new detail to be known. This is a big part of why this fight, regardless of the outcome, was so important. Democrats don’t just seem to be winning this political fight, at least for the moment. They’re bringing actual politics — contests of power and public opinion about which the outcome is unknown — out of its coma. And that makes everything look very different.
That’s what the fighting is for. We don’t know how it will come out and that’s what gets people’s attention and creates engagement. This is always true to some extent but in the Trump era it is everything. So far, the Democrats have made this shutdown have some real suspense and as a result they’ve created the space to have some success as well.
No, you’re not having a nightmare. The Economist explains that weird sight:
On October 6th, in the middle of his most difficult period as president, Javier Milei donned a long leather jacket, strode into a packed arena in Buenos Aires and jumped around like a rock star, belting out Argentine rock classics. The idea was to revitalise his party’s campaign for the midterms on October 26th and to remind his supporters, and perhaps himself, that his presidency was once exciting, even fun.
Lately, running Argentina has been quite a slog. On September 22nd Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, promised that America is ready to “do what is needed” to steady Argentina’s currency. That intervention was prompted by the Argentine central bank being forced to sell over $1bn in two days to prop up the peso. Mr Bessent’s promises stopped the slide, but details are scant and even Republicans are questioning the bail-out. The situation is again fraught.
With every social-media post by Mr Bessent, the peso and Argentine bonds lurch (see chart). By some estimates the Argentine treasury has sold more than $1.7bn over the past five days to support the currency. Mr Milei’s economic team is in Washington, trying to hash out the details of the bail-out and buy some calm. Yet even if they can navigate American politics, the Argentine variety may swamp them. A serious loss in the midterms would all but end Mr Milei’s radical economic reform programme.
Trump really is the bail out king isn’t he? We’re bailing out Scott Bessent’s buds overseas now too:
Judd Legum reported a couple of weeks ago:
Popular Information revealed that the taxpayer-funded bailout had massive economic benefits for hedge fund billionaire Rob Citrone, a personal friend and former colleague of Bessent. Citrone’s fund, Discovery Capital, had bet heavily on Argentina, purchasing Argentine debt and equity in numerous companies closely tied to the country’s overall economy.
Citrone’s investments reflected his belief that Milei’s right-wing economic program, which emphasizes deregulation and sharply reduced government spending, would revitalize the Argentine economy.
That theory began to unravel as growth slowed, unemployment spiked, and Milei’s popularity tanked. This spring, Citrone reportedly urged Bessent to help Milei secure a separate $20 billion package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF funds began to arrive in April, but proved insufficient to turn the Argentine economy around.
Concerns turned into panic after Milei’s party was routed in the Buenos Aires provincial election in early September, fueling fears that Milei would soon lose control of the economic agenda. Investors began dumping the peso and liquidating other Argentine assets, which spelled major trouble for Citrone’s hedge fund.
It’s very weird in Bizarroworld. The merging of show business and politics and extreme ideology was never on my bingo card although as I look back I suppose we should have seen it coming.
It will be such a relief if we really start to see this unravel. A Milei loss would be a good start.
On Tuesday, Johnson was asked by reporter Pablo Manriquez for his thoughts on the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show.
“I didn’t even know who Bad Bunny was, OK,” Johnson said, “but it sounds like a terrible decision in my view.”
Asked to elaborate further, Johnson suggested that Bad Bunny didn’t appeal to a “broader audience” and that he wasn’t a role model to “impressionable children.”
“Well, it sounds like he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience,” Johnson continued. “And I think — you know, there’s so many eyes on the Super Bowl, a lot of young impressionable children, and I think, in my view, you would have Lee Greenwood — or role models — doing that, not somebody like this.”
He actually thinks that Lee Greenwood, a one hit wonder, appeals to a broad audience especially the young people. I mean, Willie Nelson, yes. Dolly Parton, for sure. Lee Greenwood????
They’re so upset about this that they’re talking about putting together a Turning Point alternative to the halftime show featuring …. Creed. I’m not kidding.
Bad Bunny has been the most-streamed artist in the world for multiple years. I can guarantee that anyone younger than 35 knows exactly who he is and most of them couldn’t pick Lee Greenwood out of a line-up. Probably not Creed either.
Someone please explain to me why everyone insists on saying that these throwbacks are the Real Americans and the rest of us are out of step with the culture and need to be reined in. It’s laughable.
Greg Sargent has a good piece today discussing whether Democrats are properly framing this crisis. He says Stephen Miller is deepening the polarization with these theatrical raids and violence and defiance of law and order for a reason: Americans will be forced to take a stand and most of them will embrace authoritarian rule. I agree that’s what he believes. Whether he’s right about that remains to be seen. Greg asks:
Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment? It’s unclear. But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one. They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship—if they are presented with this as a clear choice.
He goes on to describe in detail what Trump and Miller are doing to make this happen and surmises that:
Miller appears to want Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Recently, Miller was asked directly if he’s discussed the idea with Trump, and he evaded the question. It’s likely that Miller, a master manipulator lurking furtively behind the despot’s throne, frequently uses the word “insurrection” about Trump’s opponents to lodge it deep in Trump’s brainstem and make invocation of the Act more likely. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger notes, Miller’s goal is to supplant the rule of law with the “rule of Trump,” a personalist form of rule that answers to Trump the man and no one else.
But there’s another aim as well:
He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively on Trump.
Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles, media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.
Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video depicted the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on Fox News to hail the operation as an enormous triumph.
He describes Pritzker’s muscular response to all this, “depicting it as a lawless action targeting U.S. citizens in order to provoke a response and justify more thuggery later. Pritzker called it “Trump’s invasion,” deliberately using a term Miller uses for immigrants.”
Miller eagerly took the bait
To be clear, the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey finds that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll finds opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37 percent.
But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions at best. In this understanding of politics—and you should read Brian Beutler and Lee Drutman on this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to really take sides.
Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language, he has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.”
In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate Blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly.
On the other hand, Miller thinks there’s a potentially sadistic-leaning silent majority that can be brought into authoritarianism by “flooding the public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.” In other words he’s counting on the public just accepting his framing of the “crisis” and going along with this disproportionate response.
It’s really an extension of Trump’s innate ability to persuade a large portion of the public that up is down and black is white. Miller certainly does not have that skill and Trump seems somewhat impotent in the last month or so, kind of phoning it is. (I think he’s really focused on winning that Nobel Peace prize — lol.) So Miller is using tried and true Nazi-style propaganda techniques by creating “content” to spread around on social media and other right wing outlets. I’m not sure how much that’s penetrating to that low-info crowd though. The polls aren’t showing it anyway. It seems more that they are feeding their own beast which isn’t good but it isn’t particularly persuasive to anyone else.
However, the Pritzker, Newsom approach is having the effect of at least energizing the other side, which is vitally important. Whether any low-info voters are hearing that stuff either is unknown but at least it’s out there as a counter weight.
I think more and more Democrats are seeing the necessity to stop rhetorically pussy-footing around with this. I hope so anyway.
As you can see, Trump called for Gov. J.B. Pritzker to be jailed this morning for failing to protect the ICE agents who are running roughshod over Chicago. Since he said this on the day they are arraigning James Comey on phony charges, I wouldn’t just laugh this off. After Pam Bondi’s execrable performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday and Stephen Miller’s ongoing hysteria. it’s clear that they are going completely off the rails and anything is possible.
The behavior of the DHS agents in Portland and Chicago is grotesque. They are mostly “creating content” for the onanistic pleasure of Miller and the MAGA horde but in the process people are being terrorized, traumatized, hurt and killed. Here’s what’s actually happened in Chicago courtesy of JV Last at The Bulwark:
Here are the ultra-butch, lethal warrior warfighters from Texas, arriving Tuesday afternoon:
We should be exceedingly clear:
There is no crisis in Chicago that requires the National Guard. To the extent that there is civil instability in Chicago it has been caused by Trump’s surge of federal agents into the city and their lawless assault on the citizens of Chicago.
Specificity is required:
September 12: ICE agents shoot and kill Chicago resident Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park. ICE claimed that González was shot after he “seriously injured” an ICE agent. But bodycam footage shows the same agent immediately after the encounter describing his injuries as “nothing major.”
September 30: Some 300 federal agents raid an apartment building in the dead of night. Some rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter positioned over the building. They ransack apartments and detain not only children but several U.S. citizens, including one Rodrick Johnson, who spoke with Block Club Chicago:
Rodrick Johnson, who lives in the building and is a U.S. citizen, said he heard “people dropping on the roof” before FBI agents kicked in his door. He was stuffed inside a van with his neighbors for what felt like several hours until agents told them the building was clear, he said.
“They didn’t tell me why I was being detained,” Johnson said. “They left people’s doors open, firearms, money, whatever, right there in the open.”
October 4: CPB agents shoot an unarmed woman, Marimar Martinez. They claim that she provoked them by ramming their vehicle with her car. Martinez’s lawyer tells the Chicago Sun-Times that there is bodycam footage that shows an agent turning left into Martinez’s vehicle, after which an agent says, “Do something, bitch.” The agent then gets out of the vehicle and shoots Martinez.
October 7: A masked federal agent is caught on camera aiming a weapon at a resident who is reportedly doing nothing more than documenting his activity. This act is reported by Chicago Tribune reporter Laura N. Rodríguez Presa:
There have also been arrests of local officials and candidates for office who were protesting, including Illinois’ ninth congressional district Kat Abughazaleh, who went viral with a video of an Ice agent slamming her to the ground, Daniel Biss, the Evanston mayor, and a city alderman who were aggressively arrested while trying to advocate in a hospital setting. . . .
Reverend David Black of the First Presbyterian church of Chicago, said that he was pelted with about seven or eight “pepper exploding pellets” that hit his head, face, torso, arms and legs, while in a position of prayer. . . .
Local journalists have been detained or attacked by federal agents as well. Over the weekend, Steve Held, Unraveled Press co-founder and reporter, was detained by agents while covering a protest outside of the facility. A Chicago-Sun Times reporter was also tear-gassed and pelted with “rubber projectiles”, according to the outlet.
On Sunday morning, CBS Chicago News reporter Asal Rezaei, was attacked by an Ice agent who shot a pepper ball into her car from about 50ft away and was exposed to chemicals on her face. She said in a social media post that after the incident, she was “puking for two hours”.
In addition to protesters and journalists, legal observers, often delineated in the Chicago-land area by their bright neon green hats that read “legal observer” were also attacked in recent weeks by Ice agents.
Don’t take the word of journalists for it. Here is sworn testimony from a local police chief Thomas Mills in Gov. Pritzker’s lawsuit against the Trump administration:
- According to the sworn statement of the Broadview police chief who witnessed this conduct daily, the “use of chemical agents by federal agents at the ICE facility in Broadview has often been arbitrary and indiscriminate. At times it is used when the crowd is as small as ten people. The deployment of chemical agents is dangerous to the health of both demonstrators and first responders on the scene. In addition, when ICE agents deploy chemical agents, it causes the crowd of protesters to disperse, sometimes running into the road, which is dangerous both for them and for motorists. Broadview police officers have had to attempt to position themselves in a way that directs the crowd to disperse in a safe manner. Over the course of my career in law enforcement, the way in which federal agents have indiscriminately used chemical agents in Broadview is unlike anything I have seen before.”
- According to a sworn statement by the Broadview Police Chief, the next morning, Saturday, September 27, Bovino and several CBP agents came to the Broadview Police station. They told the Broadview Police that the DHS agents would bring a “shitshow” to Broadview that weekend, including that they would be increasing deployment of chemical arms, such as tear gas and pepper spray.
He points out that this is not complicated. The president has ordered federal troops to use extralegal violence against citizens of Chicago and when the people exercised their first amendment right to protest he called up the national guard from a MAGA Confederate state (my words, not his) to invade the state of Illinois. In other words:
He is setting not just the federal government against one of the states, but pitting armed soldiers from one state against the citizens of another.
Please read the rest of his analysis if you can. He correctly lays out all the reasons why this is a very, very dangerous moment and why, should we have the good fortune to survive and defeat Trumpism, legal reforms must be put in place to prevent this from ever happening again.
Greg Sargent and others including Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California recognize that the fight to prevent the U.S. from slipping into dictatorship is not a policy battle. It is a battle for attention in an attention economy.
The president’s pet psychopath, Stephen Miller, is tossing around the word insurrection and its variants almost daily. He means to drill the idea down deep into Donald Trump’s pea brain. Miller means to poke and prod lefties with inflammatory actions by ICE until a predictable, violent, national attention-getting response gives him and his puppet the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and impose martial law.
Pritzker and Newsom “grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship—if they are presented with this as a clear choice.”
To further his goal, Sargent writes, Miller “relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. ” A 21st-century Red scare, only with “radical leftists” hiding in every woodpile.
So far, Miller’s scheme is floundering. The ICE queen’s helicopter-fueled raid of a Chicago apartment building was supposed to generate a propaganda video that would drive Miller’s invasion narrative. Instead, media coverage “depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.” Miller declared victory while Pritzker declared it Trump’s invasion.
Sargent explains:
The rub here is that both these men want this fight. To be clear, the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey finds that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll finds opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37 percent.
But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions at best. In this understanding of politics—and you should read Brian Beutler and Lee Drutman on this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to really take sides.
Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language, he has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.”
In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate Blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly.
Sadly, the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress are not just bringing a knife to a gun fight. They are fighting the last century’s political war with obsolete political weapons. There are exceptions besides Pritzker and Newsom. Sen. Chris Murphy gets it better than most. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does as well, as Lawrence O’Donnell reported Tuesday night. Mockery, as I’ve argued as well, works against small men like Miller and Trump’s clown-car cops. “Laugh at them,” AOC urges. “Make them feel small.”
It is another tool that most Democrats ignore. Laughter is empowering. It is contagious. Autocrats like Trump and his hangers on absolutely hate it. Most of all it is attention-getting in this war. It’s the attention, stupid!
Policy is a yawn in this political moment, no matter how important Democratic legislators believe health care will win them seats in 2026.
Sargent again:
Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.
Low-attention voters (and nonvoters) are the battleground. It’s why most of the signs I’m displaying for thousands of rush hour commuters four or five days a week are not about health care or Gaza or deportations, topics not front of mind for commuters. Trump’s and Miller’s ICEmenschens are attacking your precious freedoms. Take that thought home with you.
Update: Something shareable.
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