Josh Marshall thinks Minneapolis may be a turning point. Acknowledging the danger of ever thinking such a thing he writes:
But it’s what we saw afterwards and especially today that took things to a new level – top Trump officials including the Vice President and Secretary of Homeland Security saying that what we see in these videos is in fact exactly what we want to see happen: a federal law enforcement officer, in danger of being killed, reacting with deadly force to someone “weaponizing” their vehicle. I don’t think that this kind of predatory up-is-downism is sustainable for a majority of the American people. We know that Donald Trump sees America’s blue cities as a kind of conquered territory. We’re now seeing what that actually means in practice, when the potential violence which has always been coiled up in federal law enforcement is vented on American citizens because of the predatory license granted by Trump’s example and his acolytes. The message is pretty simple. Your cities are a war zone, and any false move, any transient moment of non-compliance or any fidgety moment of misunderstanding can mean your death. Top Trump officials are saying emphatically that this is exactly how it should be and I don’t think that will stand.
[…]
The U.S. has a long tradition of intolerance of unleashing military and paramilitary forces on American civilians. You find it right there in the central role of the Boston Massacre in driving the final crisis of the American Revolution. You see it in the 3rd Amendment and numerous laws which are supposed to keep the U.S. military from being used in domestic law enforcement except under the most extreme circumstances, and now don’t seem to apply anymore.
ICE and CPB aren’t the military of course. But this is too literal a way of looking at the matter. They are being sent into American cities as forces of occupation and they are acting like that. They are very consciously decked out in the costumery of urban warfare and military occupation. We don’t have to stand for this. It’s outside of our traditions. It’s malevolent and predatory. It’s time to say enough. And this may be the turning point.
He says that ICE and CBP should be abolished and he’s right. (Even Bill Kristol says it!) I’d go farther and throw out the whole DHS edifice. It was a bad idea to begin with. The country can deal with immigration without this phony macho paramilitary force running around cos-playing like they’re in a video game.
Maybe this will be the moment the worm begins to turn. There are protests and some people are obviously upset. But I just don’t know if that’s going to be enough. Trump is juggling a lot of shiny objects right now — we have taken over a country and descended on a major American city all in one week and people are being killed in both places. Can we sustain our focus long enough to actually make a difference before he commits the next outrageous act and we all move on? I just don’t know.
Mostly what I’m finding among people in my real life is a general reluctance to engage with any of this. They just do not want to talk about it and resent me for bringing it up. I’m at a point where I’m just communicating here rather than even attempting to discuss current events socially. I mentioned the other night the famous Reverend Niemöller quote (“first they came for…”) and was told that I was being hysterical. I hope they’re right I really do.
The Cesspool of Sin found itself in the news last night when on perhaps three hours’ notice a couple of hundred gathered to protest the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good. “The Briefing with Jen Psaki” ran clips not just from here but from across the U.S. (Local coverage here.)
View on Threads
The right is itching for Donald Trump to swing his tiny Sharpie at anyone who, like Good, refuses to roll over onto their backs and submit like a frightened cocker spaniel.
On their target list is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, for example:
Republican lawmakers are urging President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
This comes after the embattled Democrat threatened to deploy the National Guard in response to the actions of ICE in his state.
Republican Mary Miller called for the president to arrest Tim Walz in a post to X.
Miller’s calls to invoke the act gives Donald Trump the power to arrest suspects obstructing federal law enforcement.
Walz’s threat came as a woman was shot dead by an ICE officer in Minnesota.
One imagines another Trump supporter named Miller is getting all moist in his nether regions over the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. That is, when he and his boss are not fantasizing about bombing Iran.
The Ospreys left Fairford on Wednesday morning and have “gone dark” on flight trackers.Fairford is considered the main air bridge from the US into Europe, and flight data has shown several of the Globemasters moving on to Ramstein in Germany. www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/a…
The woman who flipped me off as she passed last night with her hand shaking with rage likely reflects the mood of authoritarian followers in the Trump cult about now.
Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, et al. have a message for brown-skinned residents of this country: GET OUT!
“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert picked up on the subtle metamessage that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, et al. just sent the rest of us. In the wake of the deadly shooting of Renee Nicole Good, 37, in Minneapolis on Wednesday by an ICE agent, that message is, “OBEY OR DIE! And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey.”
Jimmy Kimmel’s Thursday evening monologue on the Minneapolis shooting, noted frantic efforts by the Trump administration to convince Americans that we did not see what we saw.
There once was a baseline of truth and decency in this country, Kimmel lamented. It doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
I was on the street with that same message about decency in mid-December.
Kimmel’s staff assembled multiple examples of authoritarian propaganda.
“If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion,” warned one talking head, you’ll end up just as dead as Renee Nicole Good.
Michelle Goldberg heard that “giddy sadism” 5 by 5. Homeland Security’s social media posts and recruitment videos telegraph “the creation of a far-reaching police state,” Goldberg writes:
In such a system, the relationship between every citizen and their government is transformed by the constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders. “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.
All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D) of Texas broke down in a committee hearing on Thursday over Good’s killing.
“A child has lost her mom!” Crockett sobbed before composing herself.
She later recalled that she first ran for Congress amidst protests in the wake of the George Floyd lynching (her word) by law enforcement in Minneapolis. She recalled the pro bono work she did with nonprofits then for protesters arrested in Dallas.
Unless there is some kind of justice for the “state-sanctioned execution that we all saw,” Crockett predicted, nonprofits that aid poor people unable to make bail will be kept busy again. Expect another wave of protests across the country.
Crockett at the time did not have the name of shooter. The Minneapolis Star Tribune identified him as Jonathan Ross. Perhaps Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin, will send Ross greetings from the Federal Correctional Institution in Big Spring, Texas.
Under the Trump misadministration, I have little confidence that Ross will join him.
This piece by Ashley Parker in The Atlantic (gift link) called “The Wrath of Stephen Miller” will chill you to the bone. He’s running things. He’s a psychopath. And it truly appears that he’s extremely popular in the White House:
[I]n Trump’s second term, Miller finds himself at the height of his powers—the pulsing human id of a president who is already almost pure id.
Miller has tried to recast the nation’s partisan political disagreements as an existential conflict, a battle pitting “forces of wickedness and evil” against the nation’s noble, virtuous people—a mostly native-born crowd that traces its lineage and legacy “back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello.” He accuses federal judges of “legal insurrection” for ruling against Trump’s policies, describes the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization,” and dismisses the results of even legal immigration programs as “the Somalification of America.” And he has declared an end to the post–World War II order of “international niceties” in favor of a world that rebukes the weak, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” as he put it this week when discussing recent military action against Venezuela.
Along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Miller was the chief force behind Trump’s decision to capture the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. “We are a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, articulating a worldview that started with the fear of immigration but has gradually expanded to a broader national-security and rule-of-law argument. (In this Darwinian vein, Miller also declared that the U.S. military could seize Greenland without a fight, echoing a social-media post that his wife, Katie Miller, had made two days earlier, showing an American flag superimposed on a map of the icy landmass alongside the word: SOON. NATO leaders have nervously affirmed Denmark’s claim to the territory.)
Miller’s official titles—he is also the director of the interagency Homeland Security Council—understate the full sweep of his purview. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and a Miller ally, describes him as Trump’s “prime minister.” Miller has a role in nearly every area about which he cares deeply: immigration and border security, yes, but also national security, foreign policy, trade, military action, and policing. He may draft a flurry of executive orders one day, lead a meeting on lowering domestic beef prices the next, and travel to deliver a fiery speech of his own—think Trump at his angriest and most dystopian, without any of the president’s impish humor—the following week. (Miller declined to comment for this story.)
Early in Trump’s second term, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to treat migrants as part of a foreign invasion, directed Congress to pass $150 billion in new funding for homeland-security enforcement, and captained the administration’s assault on elite universities such as Harvard and Columbia. Late last year, he helped orchestrate Trump’s authorization of military strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, setting the stage for the military operation against Maduro.
The force behind Miller’s directives became clear during Signalgate—in which the Trump administration accidentally included The Atlantic’seditor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on a private Signal chat about a bombing campaign in Yemen. It was Miller—not Trump’s national security adviser, Pentagon chief, or even vice president—who ended the debate and directed the group to move forward with the strikes. Trump has described Miller as sitting “at the top of the totem poll” inside the White House.
He’s a very adept operator who knows how to work the levers of power and has been given a massive portfolio. And they all seem to have immense respect for his abilities.
And then there’s the sociopathy which doesn’t seem to bother any of them. Barbara Wien, a retired women protesting in his neighborhood looked at his wife and did this:
He went crazy:
“You want us to live in fear? We will not live in fear,” Miller said days later, in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. He had gone on the program to discuss the federal response to Kirk’s recent assassination, but although he was focused on “domestic terrorists,” he included doxxing on the list of related offenses. For those familiar with the Millers’ personal lives, it sounded less like he was talking about Kirk’s assassin than about Wien, who’d distributed flyers with his address.
“You will live in exile,” he continued, “because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you have broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
Miller set about drafting a series of executive orders, later signed by Trump, that directed federal law enforcement to refocus counterterrorism efforts on people with “anti-fascist” ideas, such as “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
This fall, Miller also began describing a central divide in the country, pitting “legitimate state power” against what he termed left-wing “street violence.” His definition of the latter was broad. He accused Democratic politicians who called him or Trump “authoritarian” of “inciting violence.” (Never mind that he had repeatedly called the Biden administration “fascist.”) He placed doxxing—what his family faced—on the continuum that leads to violence. (Also never mind that Vice President J. D. Vance encouraged calling out those who celebrated Kirk’s murder, including at their place of employment.)
As Miller announced federal policies aimed at combatting the threat, he was also fighting a private battle against the very enemy he described. In the weeks after Wien made her gesture in front of his wife, the Millers decided that they were no longer safe in their six-bedroom, roughly $3 million Northern Virginia home. They sought out military housing at a nearby base, arguing to friends and allies inside the administration that their safety depended on it.
But the legitimate powers of the state repeatedly declined to fully cooperate with the Millers’ attempt to turn their own situation into a catalyst for the sort of crackdown they claimed was necessary. The FBI was initially hesitant to take a major role in the investigation of Wien, prompting the Millers to demand its involvement, according to a person briefed on their efforts. A Democratic Virginia state prosecutor became concerned about the federal involvement in a search warrant on Wien, and sought to narrow its scope. A federal magistrate judge refused to approve federal search warrants, according to a report by Axios.
Katie Miller, who hosts her own podcast, recently appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show and accused a progressive guest, Cenk Uyger, of attacking her Jewish children by merely having a difference of opinion with her. She then offered a veiled threat to have Uyger’s citizenship revoked. (Uyger is a naturalized citizen; in a text message, he described Katie Miller’s threat as “not an attack on me as much as it’s an attack on America.”) When the investigation against Wien appeared to stall, Miller’s longtime ally Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee chair, announced that he had opened an inquiry into the Democratic prosecutor in Virginia who had sought to narrow the search warrant and raised concerns about federal involvement.
“This is so cool,” Katie Miller said on social media. “Thank you.”
The prosecutor refused to get that warrant. But I doubt the Millers are going to give up.
This is what he has in common with Trump and why they work so well together. They are bonded in their thirst for vengeance.
Read it all. I feel more unnerved by this than anything I’ve seen recently. This man is in charge.
U.S. officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, U.S. officials, including White House aides, have discussed figures ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 per person, said two of the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The idea of directly paying residents of Greenland, an overseas territory of Denmark, offers one explanation of how the U.S. might attempt to “buy” the island of 57,000 people, despite authorities’ insistence in Copenhagen and Nuuk that Greenland is not for sale.
[…]
One of the sources familiar with White House deliberations said the internal discussions regarding lump sum payments were not necessarily new. However, that person said, they had gotten more serious in recent days, and aides were entertaining higher values, with a $100,000-per-person payment – which would result in a total payment of almost $6 billion – a real possibility.
Six billion for Greenland. Reimbursement for any oil companies’ investments in Venezuela and untold billions for the occupation. An extra half trillion for the military, which is already budgeted for a trillion in this year’s budget. Over a hundred seventy billion more for DHS (more than the entire budget for the U.S. Marines corps.) Pretty soon we’ll be talking about real money.
Meanwhile, Trump and his friends and family are swallowing a firehouse full of corrupt money.
I heard the price of eggs is down, though. So it’s all good.
President Trump declared on Wednesday evening that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality,” brushing aside international law and other checks on his ability to use military might to strike, invade or coerce nations around the world.
Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Mr. Trump said, “I do.” But he made clear he would be the arbiter when such constraints applied to the United States.
“It depends what your definition of international law is,” he said.
WTF???
The pussy grabbing, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, classified documents thief, coup plotter, insurrection inciter, swindler in chief says we must depend on his mind and hismorality instead of laws, treaties, institutions. He says, “it’s the only thing that can stop me.” Let’s stop pretending otherwise. We know what we’re dealing with.
I can’t imagine why they haven’t given this sociopath the Nobel Peace Prize yet.
I always thought the term "cosplaying" was overused until ICE/CBP started showing up everywhere. Look at this guy, does he think it's Fallujah? (It's a high school in Minneapolis). www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0…
Minneapolis Public Schools on Wednesday canceled classes district-wide for the remainder of the week “due to safety concerns,” following the killing of a woman Wednesday by an ICE agent. The district said it was acting “out of an abundance of caution.”
The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.
“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” a school official, who spoke to MPR News on condition of anonymity said.
“They don’t care. They’re just animals,” the official added. “I’ve never seen people behave like this.”
They also rousted a bunch of day care centers. Oh, and they murdered a legal observer as she was trying to comply.
It’s going to get worse:
JD Vance: "Democrats have to stop rallying the mob against legitimate law enforcement operations. That means we are gonna get tougher." pic.twitter.com/iZzhkOv5JV
JD Vance: "Ramming an ICE officer with your car — that's what justifies being shot … the reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car and that guy acted in self defense" pic.twitter.com/ojtBPW6MK0
The idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals are gonna go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job he was asked to do is preposterous. The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity.”
Federal officials have absolute immunity? Interesting. I thought it was only the president (and even his is ostensibly not “absolute”) but apparently not. But then maybe he’s just talking about the fact that the president will pardon any of his minions and then punish any state that prosecutes them under their own laws. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works now.
She was asking for it:
JD Vance shamelessly lies: "You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that. I can believe her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it's a tragedy of her own making." pic.twitter.com/aKY4Gl2Qyq
"This was a family that could've been like mine" — Philip Bump breaks down crying on MS NOW when talking about the stuffed animals in Renee Good's car when she was killed pic.twitter.com/t1wm2djw5h
NY TIMES: "Our analysis of bystander footage, filmed from different angles, appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired three shots at close range."#ICE#Minniapolis#Minnesotapic.twitter.com/2D2yQX3f9l
That forensic analysis done by the NY Times sows that the ICE agent who murdered Renee Good was not hit. I know that has seemed obvious to many of us but CNN has been saying that he was. This proves otherwise. They need to correct their coverage.
The man was videoing the event just seconds before he pulled out his gun and started shooting. I you didn’t know better you’d think that he was livestreaming the murder. (He wasn’t — he didn’t have the phone up when he fired.) But what in the hell was this guy doing? Facial recognition? Making one of their music videos for Kristi?
Sadlyu, it doens’t seem that we’re going to find out any time soon since Kristi Noem, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi have refused to allow Minnesota to be involved in the investigation. Golly, I wonder why. Could it be because they’ve already decided what happened? That they want to provoke a violent reaction so they can invoke the insurrection act and start brutalizing and killing protesters? Yes, I’m afraid so.
The exchange was a glimpse into Mr. Trump’s reflexive defense of what has become a sometimes violent federal crackdown on immigration, which in this case claimed the life of an American citizen who was protesting ICE’s presence in Minneapolis.
But on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump stuck to his position even as we pointed out the inconsistencies in his account and the lack of clarity in videos circulating on social media. We asked if, in his mind, firing into a vehicle like that was acceptable.
“She behaved horribly,” Mr. Trump said. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”
We told the president that the early videos circulating online were unclear.
“I’ll play the tape for you
Mr. Trump’s aide Natalie Harp brought a laptop over to the Resolute Desk to show us what he said would be evidence of the woman’s wrongdoing.
Before the video began, Mr. Trump acknowledged the tragic nature of the shooting. “With all of it being said, no, I don’t like that happening,” he said, before pivoting to his common refrain of criticizing illegal immigration.
As a slow-motion surveillance video of the shooting played on the laptop, we told him that this angle did not appear to show that an ICE officer had been run over.
“Well,” Mr. Trump said. “I — the way I look at it … ”
“It’s a terrible scene,” Mr. Trump said at the end of the video. “I think it’s horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.”
But did this fatal shooting mean his ICE operation had gone too far? Mr. Trump sidestepped the question, instead blaming his predecessor’s immigration policies.
They only showed him that one, grainy tape because they didn’t want him out there saying something that could be construed as criticism of the ICE agent. He was surprised to see that it wasn’t true. Of course he reflexively defended than but you can tell that he was surprised. (Ir’s reminiscent of that MS13 tattoo they photoshopped and told him it was real.)
I think it’s pretty clear that this has become one of the problems. Trump is stupid and he’s crazy. But he’s also undisciplined and unconventional and the people around him who have a bigger agenda can’t trust that he won’t go off script. They’re manipulating him. If they were decent people that might even be a good thing. But they’re not.
The MAGA movement is confused. The supposed peace-loving followers of Donald Trump who have spent the last decade disparaging George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden for their “forever wars” are suddenly being confronted with the fact that their leader is bombing, blockading and invading countries all over the world — and they kind of like it. Suddenly, they feel like themselves again.
This shift is entirely predictable. With few exceptions, the American right loves war. Sure, there was the original, isolationist “America First” movement leading up to World War II, which was heavily informed by a little infatuation with a certain fashy, right-wing German chancellor. But in most situations ever since, they have been reliable warhawks.
The right’s detour into a weird sort of pacifism was an uncomfortable fit for a movement based upon belligerence and insults.
The right’s detour into a weird sort of pacifism was an uncomfortable fit for a movement based upon belligerence and insults, made necessary because Trump — a natural warmonger if there ever was one — constructed his entire political philosophy around the idea that whatever previous presidents did, he would have done the opposite. When he entered the presidential race in 2015, the Iraq War was still a live issue and he naturally said that he was against it, a claim that was not true.
But Trump has always issued a disclaimer with those proclamations. “We should have kept the oil,” he has said, insisting the U.S. should seize oil fields wherever it chooses. In that sense, his followers have no need to feel any dissonance over Saturday’s military incursion in Venezuela. In fact, the president told MSNOW’s Joe Scarborough on Tuesday, “the difference between Iraq and this is that Bush didn’t keep the oil. We’re going to keep the oil.”
Despite the administration’s allegations and rationales in recent days about fentanyl and narco-trafficking, taking Venezuela’s oil fields appears to be Trump’s only motivation for his decision to depose President Nicolás Maduro and bring him and his wife to the U.S. for prosecution. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on the other hand, is clearly driven by his long-standing desire to eliminate leftist governments in Latin America and Venezuela as a stepping stone to his white whale: Cuba. Despite reports suggesting he has been given the task of “running” Venezuela, he seems to have little interest in that part of the job, writing off the operation as “law enforcement” and suggesting that the U.S. naval blockade will somehow lead to everyone cooperating with whatever Trump orders them to do.
The GOP establishment has predictably fallen in line, with the only dissent coming from the usual suspects such as former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, all of whom protested the operation.
But nobody seems to be listening to them anymore. The person whose defense of the operation seems to most appeal to the MAGA base is White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who made the case to CNN’s Jake Tapper for straight-up American domination, saying, “we live in a world in which, you can talk about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller, too, believes the armada stationed off the Venezuelan coast will keep the country’s residents in line.
Much of this is explained by the new “Donroe Doctrine,” which holds that the United States has a right to pretty much do anything it chooses in the Western Hemisphere, including annexing countries, taking their resources and otherwise overseeing their affairs as a regional hegemon. MAGA podcaster Matt Walsh put it succinctly: “I totally support turning other countries in our hemisphere into subordinate vassals of the United States. That’s the very definition of an America First foreign policy,” while MAGA influencer Benny Johnson spoke for many Trump true believers when he tweeted, “This is our hemisphere. America will never be a socialist country. And Trump just reminded everyone we run this joint. Master move.”
According to Will Sommer, who covers the right at the Bulwark, this wasn’t the universal response among the MAGA faithful. When white nationalist Nick Fuentes celebrated the operation on Telegram by posting “TAKE THE OIL. THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IS OURS,” many of his groyper followers rejected his opinion. Sommer was surprised at this reaction, since Fuentes is rarely a cheerleader for Trump, and quipped, “Perhaps it should be no surprise that someone who considers Adolf Hitler ‘cool’ would want to engage in aggressive, ultimately self-defeating wars.”
But what of MAGA’s big guns like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon? They have preached the America First philosophy seriously over the years, with both denouncing the Iran strikes last summer. Carlson took the position that the operation may have actually been ordered because Maduro was a real social conservative who is against marriage equality. He doesn’t appear to be joking. Bannon supported the operation, but has expressed reservations about the U.S “running the place.” He said, “The bigger issues here people are concerned about is like President Trump saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to do boots on the ground,’ and last night, ‘We’re going to rebuild the country.’” Bannon has his finger on the MAGA pulse, and he may be right.
The one person who’s been conspicuously absent around the Venezuela mission is JD Vance, and that’s unusual. The vice president is usually right at the center of everything, applauding Trump actions like a trained seal. Since this is Rubio’s baby, perhaps he gracefully took a backseat. But considering his only statement on the matter, it seems more likely that Vance is keeping his cards close to his vest until he can determine if the MAGA voters he’s courting for a potential 2028 run will continue to support this assault. More than anyone else in the administration, Vance has staked his reputation on the America First philosophy, but he’s very adept at shape-shifting, so he will no doubt position himself wherever he believes it will most benefit him.
I would guess that MAGA will be perfectly happy to go along with whatever Trump wants. Most of them probably cheered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s crude comments about Maduro: “He f****d around and found out.”
But Republicans need more than those true believers to win elections, and they should be worried about that. A Reuters poll taken after the attack showed that only 33% of Americans approve of the Venezuela action, and 72% are concerned that the U.S. will get too involved. Even among Republicans, only 60% endorse sending in troops and taking over the oil fields.
The GOP had better hope the Venezuelans are able to set their country right under Donald Trump’s rule in record time, because they don’t have much running room before the November midterms. So far, the “Donroe Doctrine” is a dud with the American people.
