Almost 70% of Republicans are all in on the administration”s crackdown. I guess that’s no surprise. But Indies are not. This is an ongoing problem for the Republicans. Even the fact that 15-20% of Republicans don’t support this should be of concern as well.
Speaking to The New York Times (gift link) on Wednesday, Mr. Trump echoed grievances amplified by Vice President JD Vance and other top officials who in recent weeks have urged white men to file federal complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
When asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Mr. Trump said he believed “a lot of people were very badly treated.”
“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” he said, an apparent reference to affirmative action in college admissions. “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”
I think that says it all don’t you? Little Richie Rich’s daddy paid someone to take his SATs and he barely made it through, but it’s the young Black or female students, who’d never even been considered because they weren’t white males, who screwed over the white men. Ok.
I think this is worth thinking about too:
President Trump said during an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, even though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order effectively.
The remarks by Mr. Trump in the interview last week harked back to one of the most perilous moments from his first term in office, when he was urged by some advisers to order his national security agencies to take control of machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to find evidence that they had been hacked to rig the election against him.
The statement also came as he has continued his attacks on digital voting machines, saying that he wants to “lead a movement” to get rid of them altogether in advance of this year’s midterm elections.
That link to the NY Times above has the whole transcript and tape of the interview and you should click over when you have the time. He is really on a roll. I’ll be writing more about this over the next few days. It’s a doozy.
Maybe Dana White for president of Greenland? Kid Rock for Canadian Viceroy? Why not?
It’s trolling, of course, but I think it’s a mistake not to acknowledge how much the Trump base is loving this stuff and has very quickly recalibrated their definition of “America First” to mean world domination. I know that sounds hyperbolic but it’s real. I think we can probably count on most Republicans to go along with whatever he does. They always do.
Ryan Goodman, co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, unearthed a report on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s violent culture from 13 years ago. CBP commissioned it and then tried to bury it:
The 2013 report found a deeply concerning pattern of conduct:
“It is suspected that in many vehicle shooting cases, the subject driver was attempting to flee from the agents who intentionally put themselves into the exit path of the vehicle, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force.”
The independent review was conducted for CBP by a nonprofit organization, Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), which works closely with law enforcement agencies. The review covered cases from January 2010 to October 2012. As a mechanism to avoid misconduct in future, the PERF report recommended:
“Training and tactics should focus on avoiding positions that put agents in the path of a vehicle and getting out of the way of moving vehicles.”
That recommendation is relevant not only in consideration of the Renee Good killing but also in reflection of the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reporting on other potentially illegal uses of deadly force by ICE agents against people in vehicles in recent months.
Back in 2013, CBP initially rejected PERF’s major recommendations for policy change on the use of deadly force. CBP also tried to keep the report secret, even from Congress. As the LA Times reported in 2014:
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which had commissioned the review, has tried to prevent the scathing 21-page report from coming to light.
House and Senate oversight committees requested copies last fall but received only a summary that omitted the most controversial findings — that some border agents stood in front of moving vehicles as a pretext to open fire and that agents could have moved away from rock throwers instead of shooting at them.” (emphasis added)
The report which later became public is linked here.
After the LA Times obtained the full report and CBP’s 23-page internal response, the agency shifted course. Eight days after the LA Times report, Border Patrol Chief Michael J. Fisher issued the following Directive “effective immediately”:
In accordance with CBP’s current Use of Force policy, agents shall not discharge their firearms at a moving vehicle unless the agent has a reasonable belief, based on the totality of the circumstances that deadly force is being used against an agent or another person present; such deadly force may include a moving vehicle aimed at agents or others present, but would not include a moving vehicle merely fleeing from agents. Further, agents should not place themselves in the path of a moving vehicle or use their body to block a vehicle’s path.
On May 22, 2014, the ACLU sued the CBP for release of the PERF report under the Freedom of Information Act. Again it was just eight days later that CBP then released the PERF report (though not the agency’s internal response) and made its revised handbook on the use of force public.
But has CBP made its handbook mandatory reading for the belligerent, masked thugs it’s hiring, arming, handing badges, and sending to snatch people off the streets, out of their cars, the ones turning this country into a totalitarian dystopia?
(Aside: Look at how haphazardly any gaggle of CBP agents are “uniformed.” IN any group they may be variously branded FEDERAL AGENT, ERO, CBP, HSI, ICE, or simply POLICE. It is as if CBP fits out its agents with uniforms and tactical gear randomly pulled out of bins for maximum public confusion.)
Goodman provides a list of CBP policies on the use of deadly force against vehicles going back to 2010 at Just Security. He adds, “It gives you a sense of changes made over time and the current policies in place when ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good.”
From 2023:
C. Use of Safe Tactics
1. DHS LEOs should seek to employ tactics and techniques that effectively bring an incident under control while promoting the safety of LEOs and the public,and that minimize the risk of unintended injury or serious property damage. DHS LEOs should also avoid intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.
Do their policies also include not drawing and aiming weapons at unarmed bystanders and angrily threatening to shoot them?
Does training include discussion of the Fourth Amendment, the one that insures the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” except upon issuance of a warrant by a local or federal judge?
Apparently not. If CBP studied its own use-of-force guidelines, it was for loopholes.
The warrant agents display here does not look like a judicial warrant. This home invasion is not a legal police action.
Great. Victims may file an administrative tort claim with CBP “for property damage or loss, or personal injury, or death resulting from the negligent or wrongful acts or omissions of an employee of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).” Good luck with that. Especially if you’re dead.
Or you might file a civil rights complaint with the Department of Homeland Security. Good luck with that too. (See American Grotesquerie for legislative long-shots in the pipeline.)
“So, this all seems horrible,” as Bruce Banner said in The Avengers (2012). He was talking about an invasion from space, not a home invasion. Whatever.
Anand Giridharadas wants to add some glass-half-full to the discussion. This chaos is not the beginning of something, he argues, but the bitter end of the backlash:
We must understand that what we’ve been living through is backlash. Backlash. It’s not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history. Then we might remember — just to pat ourselves on the back for a second — that what we are actually endeavoring to do right now is to become a kind of society that has seldom, if ever, existed in history. Which is become a majority-minority, democratic superpower.
[…]
And what we have to do is get smarter than those powerful people. Get more organized than them, and understand that there is a different story to tell those who mistakenly went to the Mall and the 12 percent of Americans who actually supported that terrorist attack, and everybody else — a story to tell them about something great we are trying to do. We will actually create a country that’s better for every single person. But we have to be willing to tell that story forcefully. We have to be willing to fight those people tooth and nail, and we have to fight to win.
We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.
Until then, we fight.
It is not against the law to “disrespect” law enforcement. Trump certainly believes this when it comes to his precious “January 6th hostages” who beat the shit out of the cops who showed the professional restraint that his ICE goons aren’t required to have.
Vox spoke with David Hausman, a UC Berkeley School of Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project, a database of individual-level immigration enforcement cases about the changes in ICE procedures under the Trump regime.
He assured me that none of what we’re seeing in Minneapolis is normal — and that these kinds of operations are about more than just immigration.
How does domestic immigration enforcement now compare to how it used to work before Trump?
Before this current administration and going back to at least the first Obama administration, ICE was really an agency that didn’t conduct many arrests. The vast majority of arrests that ICE used to conduct were really transfers of custody from a state or local authority to the federal government. And as a result, ICE arrests out in the community were very, very rare. I think it’s fair to say that ICE didn’t have that much arrest capacity, and that’s part of the reason that, now that it’s under so much pressure to create arrests, it’s going about it so indiscriminately.
How did it evolve in the Trump administration?
I think the difference between the first and second Trump administrations in ICE arrests is the sense that this administration is just not acting subject to constraints. An additional difference is that Congress recently allocated a huge amount of money for building additional detention centers, which gives ICE more capacity to imprison people after arrests now. And then one last difference is that arrests at the border are very low now, whereas they were relatively high, especially towards the end of the first Trump administration. And that also means there’s more detention capacity for people who’ve been arrested inside the United States.
I think the easiest way to see the lack of constraint is the obvious one: We just see ICE and CBP randomly arresting people, often openly, or almost openly, on the basis of race. The scale of that phenomenon is new with this administration.
It’s to fulfill the Trump administration’s mass deportation promises, right?
That’s right. ICE is under tremendous pressure from the administration to increase arrest numbers. And there just aren’t enough people who are noncitizens in jails and prisons for them to meet those numbers, which is related to the more general point that there just aren’t that many noncitizens who’ve been convicted of crimes. And that’s why, under the new administration, such a small proportion of people they’re arresting have any criminal convictions.
What effect does that have on neighborhoods, on people’s perceptions of ICE and their communities? What is this doing to our understanding of public spaces if ICE is suddenly monitoring those spaces?
Anecdotally, we’re hearing about people being afraid to go out, afraid to do normal things. There’s research from the Obama era actually showing that the intensity of immigration enforcement back then had all sorts of bad effects in communities, including unemployment and health outcomes. So there’s every reason to think that those effects would be even larger now.
It’s important to recognize that a lot of what’s happening is not about immigration. We can see that most directly in the many arrests of citizens or people with lawful immigration status in these raids. But having masked men roving the street, seemingly randomly arresting people, obviously has implications well beyond immigration.
Border Patrol is used to manhandling immigrants at he border and nobody has ever really cared about it. Recall that they were putting barbed wire in the Rio Grande and letting people die of thirst in the desert for years. But neither CPB or ICE have any training or experience dealing with protesters, traffic stops or any kind of law enforcement in neighborhoods and streets of America. Neither have they ever been granted anonymity by being allowed to wear masks and intimidate anyone who confronts them or given “absolute immunity” (largely due to the president promising to pardon them for anything they do.) They are particularly confrontational toward those who are filming them.
This is causing scenes that I don’t think anyone has seen in this country since the days of Bull Connor turning the fire hoses on protesters during the civil rights movement.
Those are all from just the last few days in Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, Trump is promising to bomb Iran for brutalizing its protesters.
What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is not civil disobedience. It isn’t even protest. It’s just crime.
The word “civil” in civil disobedience refers to the fact that the protester is allowing themselves to be arrested in order to emphasize just how important their cause is to them. It is also generally done in a context that threatens minimal harm to police and bystanders.
Today, across the country, but especially in bastions of democratic socialism like Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle, we see something entirely different: bands of people following, harassing, doxxing and sometimes engaging in direct assault against ICE agents.
What these ICE Watch groups across the country, of which Good was reportedly a trained member, do is entirely different. They are trying to impede federal agents from carrying out democratically enacted laws, not sending a message, and importantly, they are trying to evade capture.
Sorry, that is crime, not protest.
Further, we need to ask ourselves, quite seriously, if groups of people training and then executing missions that put law enforcement and the public in harm’s way may, in fact, be criminal conspiracies.
If one’s job is to be a neighborhood lookout for a street drug dealing operation, that is a crime. It’s not entirely clear why doing the same thing to protect illegal immigrants, including many of whom are vicious criminals, isn’t a similar activity.
According to a recent poll, only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that number leaps to an astounding 61%.
Maybe they are listening to too many true crime podcasts, but we have to ask ourselves, how on Earth did this become acceptable behavior in our society?
The short answer is that for most of this century, our law enforcement agencies and courts have just let it happen. They have decided that some criminal activity is just fine so long as your cause is just.
Yeah:
Then they came for the wine moms ….
One might think that the brutalizing and killing of white women would be a bridge too far even for the bloodthirsty, racist MAGA cult but I’m afraid not. Sure, they love a trad wife, a Mar-a-lago Botox babe or a hard-core wingnut female scrapper. But consider what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene when she dared to cross Trump. He actually called for an investigation into her.
Obviously, they’re misogynists (many of them outright incels) who resent women who dare to defy them just as much as they resent people of color and immigrants of all stripes. It’s just that they used to generally keep their violence against them behind closed doors. The masks and the costumes and the get-out-of-jail-free card dispensed by the president of the United States have given them permission to let it all hang out.
Paul Krugman delivered a comprehensive look at the U.S. economy at year’s end that’s worth paying for his Substack to get. (Actually, it’s always good.) He makes several points and answers many questions we might have but this is an overview. It’s not good:
How is the U.S. economy doing?
Early every month the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data on the state of the job market the previous month. The Employment Situation report is based on two surveys: a survey of employers and a survey of households. The employer survey produces, among other things, estimates of total employment. The household survey produces, among other things, estimates of unemployment.
While these data are noisy on a monthly basis, last Friday’s final job report for the year smooths out the noise and gives us an assessment of U.S. job performance over 2025 as a whole. And it definitely wasn’t great. As the chart at the top of this post shows, job growth in 2025 was clearly weak. In fact, the year of the Covid pandemic aside, it was the weakest in a decade.
This is not a hot economy. Indeed, by multiple measures it’s notably worse than the economy Trump inherited from Biden.
And it may be even colder than reported. BLS employment numbers are often significantly revised when more comprehensive information comes in. Cognizant of that fact, Federal Reserve officials believe that recent BLS employment numbers may have been overstating job growth by as much as 60,000 a month. If that’s true,employment may have been flat for 2025 as a whole.
If the US is not gaining jobs, is it at least adding good jobs while shedding bad jobs? A Thursday night Trump Truth Social post appears to make this claim.
That Truth Social post represented an extraordinary breach of the rules for handling BLS reports. These reports, publicly issued at 8:30 AM on a Friday, are provided to the White House the previous night — but only on the strict condition that the information is to be kept confidential, with officials refraining from comment until half an hour after the public release. This rule is intended to prevent insider trading. Yet Trump’s Thursday post included job numbers that were under the disclosure embargo. So the post was illegal and would probably have led to jail time if a staffer had done it.
Trump’s intention was clearly to spin the report. He wanted to claim that weak employment growth in 2025 was partly a result of layoffs by DOGE, in which supposedly unproductive jobs were eliminated. However, it’s likely that Trump didn’t realize that this claim doesn’t make any sense — 2025 was a very weak year even if one only counts private-sector jobs:
Similarly, Trump administration officials have suggested other definitions of what constitute “real” jobs in order to spin the weak employment numbers. For example, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has dismissed strong employment growth under Biden by saying that it was overwhelmingly government jobs or jobs in “government-adjacent” sectors like health care and education. But if your position is that government or government-adjacent jobs don’t count as “real jobs,” then 2025 looks even worse: All net job creation took place in health care and social services, with employment in the rest of the economy declining:
I could go on. Joey Politano notes that 2025 was marked by a decline in blue-collar jobs, aka “manly” jobs — basically jobs that might possibly require upper-body strength. There is simply no plausible way to slice and dice the data to make the 2025 job creation numbers look good.
That said, weak job growth didn’t lead to a huge rise in unemployment. The BLS defines unemployment as the number of people who are actively seeking work but don’t currently have a job — a number that is estimated using its monthly survey of households. The unemployment rate rose during 2025, but only from 4.1 to 4.4 percent. This was a significant rise, but not enough to trigger the widely used Sahm rule indicator (originally devised by Claudia Sahm, who I interviewed early in 2025), which generally signals that a recession has begun.
Why didn’t unemployment rise by more? As I will discuss later, Trump administration policies have reduced the demand for labor. These policies are probably the main reason job growth has declined so much. But the combination of a crackdown on new immigration and deportation of people already in the United States has simultaneously reduced the supply of labor, and thereby reduced “breakeven employment growth,” the number of jobs the economy needs to create each month to keep unemployment from rising. In effect, without the crackdown on immigration and deportations, it’s likely that the unemployment rate would have risen substantially.
It’s important to understand that I am not saying that anti-immigrant policies have been good for native-born workers. They suffered rising unemployment over the course of 2025. I’m just trying to explain the mechanics here — how very weak job growth in the Trump economy is consistent with only a moderate rise in unemployment.
He points out that while there haven’t been mass layoffs, people are rightly freaked out about the job market because there just hasn’t been much hiring. And “because it’s hard to find a job, long-term unemployment — the number of people who have been unemployed for 15 weeks or more — has risen much more than total unemployment.”
Why aren’t things better than they are?
Trump’s grandiose claims about what his policies would achieve never made sense. But Trump’s tariffs did offer some industries a lot of protection against foreign competition. Why didn’t manufacturing employment expand, at least somewhat? And why has hiring plunged, leading to a very bad job market?
A large part of the answer to the first question is that international trade in the 21st century works very differently from the way trade worked in the 1890s, when William McKinley imposed the tariffs Trump admires. At the end of the 19th century nations basically traded final goods that were sold to consumers. In 1890 America basically exported agricultural products while importing manufactured goods, end of story. But modern trade is dominated by “value chains” in which most imports are inputs into the production of other goods.
Given this reality, Trump’s tariffs actually made U.S. manufacturing less competitive against foreign products, because the tariffs raised the cost of imported inputs. In the end, the loss of competitiveness due to the higher cost of imported inputs more than offset the benefits of protection from import competition that the tariffs provided.
And even as manufacturing has suffered from higher costs, U.S. farmers — who are highly dependent on export markets — have been severely hurt by foreign retaliation.
It’s also the uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic decision making and the unknown consequences of this AI boom.
He concludes:
Trumponomics 2025 is a story of how Trump worsened the economy that he inherited from Biden through big promises and policy choices that failed to understand how the economy actually works. The uncertainty created by Trump’s constantly changing tariff policy during 2025 appears likely to continue, as he delivers a stream of unworkable, half-baked ideas. While the stock market may be doing well, the rest of America isn’t. And it may very well get worse before it gets better.
Read the whole thing if you can for the details and charts that fill out this story.
And then there’s this latest looney move:
That’s right, the DOJ has opened a criminal investigations into the chairman of the federal reserve:
Are the starry eyed AI-addled markets just going to accept this one? I guess we’ll see.
If Donald Trump were really a Russian agent, would he be doing anything differently? Or so goes the speculation. One might also ask that if he really were trying to wreck the U.S. economy, would he be doing anything differently? Like the way his anti-immigration policies are lowering “the annual rate of economic growth by almost one-third.”
Or by pretextually threatening Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with a criminal indictment to gain his compliance with Trump’s whims. Powell until now has reserved criticism of Trump’s strongarm efforts to dictate how the Fed sets interest rates. If nobody knows how to goose U.S. economic growth like Trump (see above), then the toddler must also be the nation’s foremost expert on managing interest rates.
Powell is finally speaking out. He’s calling Trump’s threatened criminal indictment what it is:
This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role; the Fed through testimony and other public disclosures made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.
This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.
And how is the economy (as seen in the markets) responding this morning?
Gold leaps to record high, dollar drops as US prosecutors target Fed’s Powell
‘Sell America’ returns to Wall Street after Trump ups the ante against Jerome Powell and the Fed:
Investors took one look at the Trump administration’s criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and they decided to resuscitate the “Sell America” trade, selling off US stocks, bonds and the dollar.
Stock futures traded lower Monday morning. Dow futures were down 350 points, or 0.7%. S&P 500 futures fell 0.6%. Futures tied to the Nasdaq were 0.9% lower.
The US dollar weakened against other major currencies. The dollar index, which tracks the dollar’s strength against six major currencies, was down 0.4% – a sharp move for the greenback.
Treasuries fell somewhat, too. The benchmark 10-year yield, which trades in opposite direction to prices, rose to just under 4.2%, near a one-month high. Bond yields’ move higher suggests the Trump administration’s action against the Fed could backfire, and rates may not start sinking as the president has demanded.
Nobody knows economics like Trump.
Topkapi (1964), the classic caper film, stars the late Melina Mercouri. By chance last night, I came across and watched it again on TCM. After its run, the host made a point of mentioning how the late Greek actress, after the Greek military junta in 1967 stripped her citizenship, issued a classic comeback.
Briefly, via Wikipedia:
The Greek junta or Regime of the Colonels[a] was a right-wing military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. On 21 April 1967, a group of colonels overthrew a caretaker government a month before scheduled elections which Georgios Papandreou‘s Centre Union was favoured to win.
The dictatorship was characterised by policies such as anti-communism, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents. It was ruled by Georgios Papadopoulos from 1967 to 1973, but an attempt to renew popular support in a 1973 referendum on the monarchy and gradual democratisation by Papadopoulos was ended by another coup by the hardliner Dimitrios Ioannidis. Ioannidis ruled until it fell on 24 July 1974 under the pressure of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, leading to the Metapolitefsi (“regime change”; Greek: Μεταπολίτευση) to democracy and the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic.
Mercouri was performing in New York at the time. She condemned Brig. Gen. Stylianos Pattakos, one of the junta’s principals, and began an international effort to help bring down the dictatorship. The junta stripped Mercouri’s Greek citizenship, revoked her passport, and confiscated her property. (Her citizenship was restored after the junta fell. She was elected to Parliament in 1977. She was appointed Minister of Culture in 1981.)
Mercouri responded, ”I was born a Greek and I’ll die a Greek. Pattakos was born a fascist and he’ll die a fascist.”
Americanized, there’s a quote for our time.
View on Threads
* A veteran friend notes that it’s not the generals you have to worry about. It’s the colonels.
They’ve declared war on Minnesota:
The Trump administration announced that it would suspend funding of food stamps and other hunger relief programs in Minnesota just as a federal judge blocked a similar effort to freeze funding for social services amid allegations of widespread fraud in the state.
Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, posted a letter addressed to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota saying that she would suspend payment of $129 million in federal funding from the Agriculture Department, citing unfolding investigations of fraud in Minnesota’s social safety net, which have involved members of the Somali-American community.
In the letter, which included Trump-style insults to Mr. Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, Ms. Rollins said the state government would need to provide “payment justifications” in the next 30 days for funding of services like food stamps to be restarted. It is unclear what that means, and the Agriculture Department did not immediately respond to a question on what information it was requesting.
It’s very interesting that they’ve decided to make Minnesota the example. It’s not as big a state as California or Illinois so that makes it easier. And certainly the Republicans want to take down Tim Walz.
But really it’s just about race. Many states have large immigrant communities but they want to focus on blue states (which means Ohio, for instance, isn’t really on the menu.) To hit the real MAGA sweet spot they needed a Democratic state with a large Black immigrant, Muslim community and Minnesota perfectly fits the bill. Add in the fact that the George Floyd murder, which sparked the BLM protests that the right wing is still whining about, and you have a perfect target.
That the first killing is a blond, lesbian “wine mom” makes it just:
It hits every mark.