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The Reviews Are In

Published by digby on January 31, 2026

And they are spectacularly bad

Oh my:

No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

Yikes:

To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet.

Wow:

Melania the book wasn’t an autobiography so much as a highly priced brochure. Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket. It’s a reminder that the richest people in the world are investing in entertainment brands not because they care about art but because the public does, and because all of these vanity projects and capitulations are a way to consolidate their own power and fortune. It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely “because we think customers are going to love it.”) It is also galling—to me at least—that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers.

No good:

I don’t want to blow anyone’s minds here or throw you off your balance when I inform you that the Melania documentary, now in theaters, is terrible.

The truth is, my soul left my body during the very first seconds of the film, when a drone shot over the ocean makes its way over the Mar-a-Lago grounds to Melania’s feet in heels, walking to her car as The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” plays. But my soul didn’t just escape and flee, which it would have been in its every right to do. No, it lingered, glaring at me the entire Melania running time with a mixture of disappointment and anger, like an owner would at their dog after it ate the garbage.”

Oh boy:

“Last night, I left an empty chickpea can on my counter. When I came back 30 minutes later, small, black bugs had swarmed the tin and were crawling over my sink. I would rather relive that moment a hundred times over than have to watch another minute of the movie Melania.”

Yowza:

“Watching Melania get fitted for expensive clothes in gaudy rooms, or talk up how extravagantly staged she demands her balls be – and both happen a lot in Brett Ratner’s unrelentingly boring feature doc debut – only strengthen perceptions of her as a chilly, lifeless socialite wannabe… Melania is not the story of the First Lady of American politics, but the imagining of the first homeland monarch in U.S. history. This is not a film concerned at all with the America of today; it is propaganda that serves the formation of a future non-democracy.”

Man, oh, man:

“Melania” is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called “Day of the Living Tradwife.”

The wingnuts are all cheering the fact that the movie made $8 million on its opening night. However, there are numerous reports that the theatres were empty. I’m going to take a wild guess that somebody created a simple program to buy out theatres. After all, $8 million is chump change to someone with billions.

It just sounds so bad and is so openly a corrupt gesture to appease Trump (as if the wholesale destruction of the Washington Post weren’t enough) that it’s a historic documentary for all the wrong reasons. But it fits Melania perfectly: vapid, boring, elitist, cruel and venal.

De-escalation? Not Bloody Likely

Published by digby on January 31, 2026

MPR News has the whole story:

The resident, a woman, had been observing and recording video of immigration enforcement actions from her car when agents removed her from her car and took her into custody…

The woman, who did not want to be identified because she fears for her safety, is a U.S. citizen and a resident of St. Peter. She told MPR News in an interview that she was out in the community in her car, tracking the movements of federal agents, and recording them on a dash cam.

She shared that video with us. Agents in three vehicles began chasing her and trying to force her to pull over. Eventually they box her in, three agents get out of the car in front of her, with their guns drawn and try to force her out of her vehicle. “Get out of the car! Get out of the car,” the agents scream at her repeatedly, while she calmly responds, “No. I will not get out of the car.”

While she’s alone in the car, the woman can be heard talking with other observers on speaker phone and she tells them to call 911. The agents open the door, which unlocked automatically when she put the gearshift in park, they drag her out and force her to the ground. She said the agents were overly aggressive and physical as they pinned her down and handcuffed her, leaving her with multiple cuts, scrapes and bruises.

The woman’s husband eventually arrives and tries to intervene, and he made a separate recording of the interaction on his phone. He tells the agents not to search her car because they don’t have a warrant and it would be an illegal search. The agents appear dismissive of his constitutional concerns. “I’m not getting into the legality of everything,” One agent responds tersely.

[…]

The woman said the agents put her into one of their vehicles and started driving toward the Twin Cities, presumably to the Whipple Federal Building near MSP Airport, where ICE has an immigration detention facility. About 20 minutes into the drive, when they were near Le Sueur, she says one of the agents got a call, apparently from an ICE supervisor. They turned off Highway 169 at the next exit and drove back toward St. Peter.

The husband told MPR News that after his wife was taken into custody, he called his attorney, and soon after, he got a call from St. Peter Chief of Police Matt Grochow, whom he said he has known for years.

“I was talking to him, kind of venting some of my frustrations,” the man said, adding that he urged the chief to have his officers just be more visible during the federal enforcement actions. “If [local police] were present and they could see you, I promise you their behavior more than likely, or hopefully, would, you know, be appropriate and law abiding.”

The husband says he talked to the chief for a while and “we had a good conversation.” “He asked me, ‘what was your wife’s name’? I told him my wife’s name. He said, ‘was she picked up in a bronco?’ And I said, ‘I’m not sure, but it was an SUV, dark colored. I’d have to look at my video.’ He goes, ‘I think I got her. I’ll call you back’. The husband said a few minutes later, the chief called again, “and said, I got her or I’m bringing her home.”

FYI:

They Could Have Done It Differently

Published by digby on January 31, 2026

But they want all immigrants out, not just the criminals

In the before times:

The ICE officers descended on Compton, targeting immigrants convicted of theft, child abuse and selling drugs. There were no protesters. No whistles alerting targets to the officers’ presence. No face masks. In some cases, residents opened their doors to let the officers inside their homes. One man thanked them for not arresting him in front of his children.

The Los Angeles area operation ended with 162 arrests, including a Mexican national convicted of rape and a Salvadoran national convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said almost 90% of the people arrested had criminal convictions.

It was June 2018, more than a year into Donald Trump’s first term as president. Seven years later, carrying out the same operation in L.A. or other U.S. cities feels almost impossible without drawing angry crowds and requiring multiple officers, at times across federal agencies, to detain a single target.

Why? Because Stephen Miller has created the first steps in a strategy of ethnic cleansing and suppression of dissent:

In the years since Trump’s first term, ICE and the government’s immigration enforcement apparatus expanded raids well beyond those against known criminals or suspected ones. Increasingly, immigrants with no criminal records and even legal residents and U.S. citizens found themselves stopped and sometimes arrested.

The uncertainty over who is being targeted has fueled a growing pattern of community protests and rapid response mobilizations, even when officials say they are targeting convicted felons, reflecting a widening gap between how enforcement is described and how it is experienced. That gap has become most visible on the ground.

Gangs of masked men dressed in military gear are rampaging through the cities and intimidating, harassing, brutalizing, assaulting and killing people under color of law. And that was the plan from the very beginning:

Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, is widely seen in the administration as the mastermind of the president’s immigration policy, relentlessly pushing officials to meet goals that he designates on behalf of the president.

His power is evident in his daily 10 a.m. conference calls, including Saturdays, where he demands updates from agencies and exerts pressure on senior officials who deliver less-than-satisfactory results, according to a source familiar.

The call, which a White House official described as a “policy call to ensure interagency coordination,” includes senior leadership of agencies across the administration who are responsible for various aspects of national security and public safety.

And while the call can cover a host of topics, it largely focuses on Trump’s immigration push, a core part of the president’s second-term agenda.

Miller is militant, according to administration sources, in his belief that he must strictly enforce that push. He has been keenly focused on numbers, including how many immigration arrests are being conducted on a given day and how quickly deportations are happening. Last year, he directed ICE officials to meet daily quotas of 3,000 immigration arrests — an unprecedented number that hasn’t yet been met.

The intense White House pressure is felt downstream among agents and officers conducting immigration enforcement operations, resulting in their casting a wide net as to whom they arrest, including those who do not have criminal records.

All you have to do is read Miller’s posts:

His agenda seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? And he is batshit crazy.

About that antisemitism

Published by digby on January 31, 2026

Calling Mr Kushner, Mr Jared Kushner:

A day before six career federal prosecutors resigned in protest over the Justice Department’s handling of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, lawyers in the office had a conversation with Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol field leader, that left them deeply unsettled.

According to several people with knowledge of the telephone conversation, which took place on Jan. 12, Mr. Bovino made derisive remarks about the faith of the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, Daniel N. Rosen. Mr. Rosen is an Orthodox Jew and observes Shabbat, a period of rest between Friday and Saturday nights that often includes refraining from using electronic devices.

Mr. Bovino, who has been the face of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, used the term “chosen people” in a mocking way, according to the people with knowledge of the call. He also asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Rosen understood that Orthodox Jewish criminals don’t take weekends off, the people said.

Mr. Bovino had requested the meeting with Mr. Rosen to press the Minnesota office to work more aggressively to seek criminal charges against people Mr. Bovino believed were unlawfully impeding the work of his immigration agents.

Remember when Donald Trump and his henchmen blackmailed universities with threats to cut off all funding if they didn’t take action on alleged campus antisemitism? Yeah, I knew that you would.

The only reason they got rid of Bovino is because they needed a fall guy and Trump thought he was too short to be out of central casting. (In reality, Bovino is a perfect Nazi, right down to the fashy haircut and SS Greatcoat.) I have no doubt that Trump and his men loved watching him strut around brutalizing people everywhere he went. If only he were 6’2″…

Last Night In Minneapolis

Published by digby on January 31, 2026

That’s Tom Morello and Bruce Springsteen at the legendary First Ave venue.

Also last night:

For-profit Fascism

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 31, 2026

Are there no forced labor camps?

You may have heard that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is devoting a portion of its outsized persecution budget to create more detentions centers for the persecuted (Bloomberg):

Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.

The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens.

On Jan. 16, the administration paid $102 million for a site near Hagerstown, Maryland, according to a local court filing. A week later, the government paid $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers.

Place your bets. Once built, there will be a sunk-cost argument for keeping these camps open even if Shadow President Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant pogrom flames out. Now let’s see, who else might private contractors make bonuses housing there?

People like this?

Perhaps ICE’s private-sector partners will extract more profit from prisoners by turning ICE detention centers into forced labor camps?

Trump 2.0 and its partners no longer care about public opinion or the optics. They’re working hard to render public opinion irrelevant by November 3.

The Civics War

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 31, 2026

Forget what schools didn’t teach

Events in Minneapolis have unsettled us all. Donald Trump in late September told a gathering his top generals that Democrat-led American cities were dangerous places that they might use as training grounds for a “war from within.” By then his DHS goons had already made examples of Los Angeles and Portland. Chicago was under siege. Charlotte and New Orleans would be next. Trump found out he did not need his professional soldiers after all. His under-trained, over-armed, and amped-up Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement “troops” had been using cutely named “surges” as training exercises since January. They’d honed their brutal skills before descending on Minneapolis and murdering protesters.

Kathleen Parker is as unnerved as you are. She writes, “Never did I imagine that the existential threat to America’s democratic republic would be posed by our own government.” She’d always believed the nation’s commitment to moral principles and the rule of law was baked in (gift link):

But something has happened to the nation. We’re not the same people we were as recently as 2016, when the norm-shattering Donald Trump came to power. He stepped into a role tailor-made for him at a time when the future seemed up for grabs. His vision for the United States has hardened into something unrecognizable while his methods have escalated into lawlessness. 

The chaos is not random, but strategic. “The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol didn’t quite do the trick” for Trump. And so Trump (more likely Shadow President Stephen “Trump’s Brain” Miller) sends chaos agents into cities to justify more crackdowns, and perhaps invocation of the Insurrection Act. He’s gone out of his way this week with an FBI raid on Fulton County, Georgia election records from 2020 to prepare for rendering elections in 2026 and 2028 mockeries of the people exercising their will.

Parker’s colleague, George Will, advised this week that “it is good citizenship to assume that everything ICE says, and everything the administration says in support of its deportation mania, is untrue until proved to be otherwise.” Like DOJ allegations against Trump enemies.

On Thursday night and Friday morning, former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort were arrested by federal agents in connection to their coverage of an anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul.

Into this darkness, a slice of light pierces the gloom. The worm seems to be turning. Most Americans oppose what is happening, while other countries file formal protests and issue travel warnings to citizens considering a U.S. destination. Even some MAGA voters must loathe what they’re seeing. Welcome to the light, friends. America’s partisans, and all of those trapped between, have a common enemy and a unifying mission to stop the madness. It’s time to take a stand.

Perhaps we will. But this is more than a political skirmish now. It’s a civil war in which only one side bears arms. The other struggles to fight with tattered civics schools no longer teaches and the Trump administration no longer regards as a constraint on its will-to-power. Trump 2.0 is using every lever of government it can get its stubby fingers on to eviscerate the republic and render the rule of law meaningless as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Congress once wrote and passed laws the president then signed and the federal government followed. Not anymore:

Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

No new law. No congressional authorization. No “I’m Just a Bill” niceties. Executive fiat. The king’s say-so. The freedoms you took for granted teeter on a knife’s edge.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

It’s been so cold in most of America and we’re chilled to bone by what ICE is doing. So here’s some good cold news for a change:

Scientists expected the opposite, but polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic islands of Svalbard have become fatter and healthier since the early 1990s. Polar bears rely on sea ice, which is declining, as a platform from which to hunt the seals that they rely on for blubber-rich meals. The bears’ fat reserves provide energy and insulation and allow mothers to produce rich milk for cubs. Researchers think that Svalbard bears have adapted to recent ice loss by eating more land-based prey, including reindeer and walruses.

Ok, you deserve some cute cubs:

No Bread, Lots Of Circuses

Published by digby on January 30, 2026

He is Nero.

Picked The Wrong Day To Give Up Distractions

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2026

Like drinking news from a firehose

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice released another 3 million Epstein documents Friday morning. I’m seeing comments (unconfirmed) that they’ve padded the release with some old materials. Whatever. What’s appearing on social media proves why Trump did not want these released:

The files released Friday appear to contain at least 3,200 documents that mention President Trump. The Times is going through the documents and that number could increase.

The White House will claim that a lot of these mentions are hearsay, unauthenticated tips, etc., and some may be. But it’s going to be hard to convince a majority of the public that all these women made up such detailed tales of debauchery and sexual violence out of whole cloth.

View on Threads

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00622303.pdf

Those 3,200-plus references to Trump are perhaps why the administration is filling the air with lots of brightly gleaming chaff today:

Will there be casino gambling like Monte Carlo?

Pay no attention to the Epstein files release!