Sunday, January 11, 2026
Saturday, January 10, 2026
The Mad King’s Madness Deepens
Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.
And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection. So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.
What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Timesreports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”
The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed . . . .
And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where, on Wednesday, an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.
Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.
A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.
But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.
So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful -- so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.
And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending . . .
It’s a near certainty that Trump’s assertion that he arrived at an immediate 50% increase in the military budget after “long and difficult negotiations” is yet another lie. There’s been no indication whatsoever that a massive increase in defense spending was on anyone’s agenda before he suddenly posted about it on Truth Social.
So what was that about? Given the timing, it’s clear that Trump’s announcement was yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement, as well as an attempt to grab the headlines away from Good’s killing. But what’s also important to realize from Trump’s announcement is that he is now clearly conflating the size of the US military with his ego. Evidently the sugar rush of Maduro’s capture has left him wanting more and more military validation, particularly as his poll numbers tank.
So here’s a warning to the US military: if you continue to indulge the sick fantasies of this man, he will drag this country into more and deeper international morasses to feed his need for glory. Do what Admiral Alvin Holsey, an honorable man, did – stand down and refuse an illegal order. Here’s a warning to the Republicans: if you continue to allow this man to perpetrate war against his own people with impunity through the actions of ICE, you will be remembered as cowards and hypocrites. Here’s a warning to all his other enablers: if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in history as traitors to this country.
And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Friday, January 09, 2026
ICE Sent a Message to Us All in Minneapolis
Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, when he’s sent armed, masked ICE agents into cities, locals have tried to resist by organizing neighborhood watches, both to warn people that agents are coming and to document the arrests they make. Minneapolis, where this week ICE launched what its acting director called the “largest immigration operation ever,” was no different.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”
Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”
The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”
In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”
It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.
Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.
Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill a flood of hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”
Homeland Security’s social media feed is an unending stream of demented propaganda and bellicose Christian nationalism. . . . . . They are telegraphing the creation of a far-reaching police state.
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.
Be very, very afraid.
Thursday, January 08, 2026
ICE Thugs Have Killed a U.S. Citizen
When a federal immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis today, the details were fresh but the story was familiar. Once again, a law-enforcement officer had fired into a moving vehicle, even though experts on use of force, and many agencies’ rules, prohibit or discourage the practice as dangerous and ineffective.
The facts of the Minneapolis shooting are still emerging, but bystander videos and eyewitness accounts provide some sense of what happened. Federal agents are in Minnesota as part of an enforcement push as the Trump administration focuses on welfare fraud among Somali immigrants in the state. Video shows bystanders watching (and heckling) federal agents. A truck with flashing lights pulls up; the driver and a second agent jump out and rapidly approach a burgundy SUV blocking the road, and the driver appears to tell a woman to get out of her car. The SUV reverses briefly, then starts to move forward. A third officer then fires several shots. The car veers away before crashing.
According to a witness who spoke to The Minnesota Star Tribune, a doctor at the scene attempted to help the woman who was shot, but was kept away by federal agents. When an ambulance finally arrived, it was blocked from reaching her by law-enforcement vehicles, and paramedics had to reach her on foot. The woman has died.
An initial statement by Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, appeared to be false in most of its key details, including claiming that “violent rioters” were at the scene and alleging that the driver had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” The available footage suggests that the driver may instead have been trying to flee. Many DHS claims about incidents between civilians and agents have been misleading or plainly false, and the Trump administration has sought spurious charges against anti-ICE protesters.
Residents and local officials reacted with outrage. . . . . Firing at a car like this is problematic as a matter of both law and practice. Under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, police aren’t permitted to open fire on someone who is fleeing unless that person presents a serious danger to the officer or others. Justice Byron White wrote that “it is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes,” but “it is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape.” (The driver in question here was not clearly under arrest, much less a felony suspect.)
Shooting into moving cars is often a bad idea, though, even when it might be legally justified. Officers who fear they are in danger often miss their target—sometimes harmlessly, sometimes striking bystanders or other officers. “If you actually hit the driver and are successful, now you’ve got an unguided missile,” Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police use of force, told me in 2021. “It’s just as likely if you shoot someone that a foot’s going to go on the gas as on the brake.” In this case, photos suggested that the SUV struck another car after its driver was shot.
Experts also point to poor training as a common reason for these shootings. Though the identity and experience of the officer who opened fire today are not yet known, it should be one area of focus. As ICE and other border agencies scramble to add staff and to reach huge deportation quotas set by the White House, they have lowered standards and shortened training in the hopes of getting agents on the streets sooner—but untrained officers are more likely to make mistakes.
Tense relationships between state and local governments and the federal government will complicate the investigation into this shooting . . . .Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, today accused DHS of “propaganda” and promised “accountability and justice.” Officers who kill civilians are seldom charged with crimes, and when charges are brought, officers are often acquitted, but Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has shown a willingness to prosecute officers for violence, including securing the convictions of four Minneapolis police officers in the murder of George Floyd. A successful prosecution here might be even trickier.
In some ways, I barely recognize this country any longer.
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