No More Mister Nice Blog

David French says we're living in a "dual state."

... we’ve slowly but surely created the mechanisms of what the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel called “the dual state.”

Last March, Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago law professor, wrote a prescient (and deeply disturbing) piece for The Atlantic that revived Fraenkel’s analysis for this new American age....

The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”

“The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.”

It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”

French says that Minneapolis still functions mostly as a normative state -- but if you cross paths with ICE, as Renee Good did, you can be a victim of the prerogative state.

I think it's appropriate to apply this framework to American life now -- and it's why I wrote a post yesterday warning that our electoral system could be at risk, despite the reassurances of many commentators, including French himself. In the New York Times roundtable I quoted yesterday, Jamelle Bouie, David French, and Michelle Cottle argued that the Trump administration's court losses on various issues ought to reassure us that elections will go forward as planned in November.

Bouie: ... I feel like it’s necessary to say that there’s a lot of fear-mongering and scaremongering about what the president can do with regards to the midterms and —

Cottle: Well, he just got shot down by the courts, right?

Bouie: Right.

Cottle: He was arguing that he needed to deprive states of federal funding if they didn’t follow his rules for how they run their elections. And the courts are like: No, bro, step back.

Bouie: He’s demanding voter rolls. And the courts are saying, no, none of this is your business. So for Trump to try to cancel an election in Virginia, for example, like Abigail Spanberger would have to be like, OK, sure.

Cottle: Yeah, that’s going to happen.

Bouie: How is Donald Trump going to stop Gavin Newsom? How is he going to stop Kathy Hochul? You have to think in practical terms. And I understand the temptation to latch on to worst-case scenarios and fantasies. It makes a lot of sense in the moment. But you have to temper that stuff with thinking, how does the practical operation of government actually work?

French: ... there’s another factor that I don’t think people have appreciated quite enough, and that is the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Illinois here in the last few weeks, where it upheld an order blocking the National Guard deployment under this particular statute that Trump was trying to use. That if he was permitted to use it, at his discretion, at his will, we don’t have very many ICE officers, but we’ve got hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Guard.

... I think that the Trump v. Illinois case was very, very important because it’s really cut off from him this ability to deploy the Guard at his whim.

What they all seem to be saying is that elections absolutely won't take place in the prerogative state, where Trump can do whatever the hell he wants. They'll take place in the normative state, where laws still apply.

But then French says:

Now there’s still the Insurrection Act hovering out there. That’s a whole different can of worms. But I do think that there’s great hope.

Yup, and today we're reading this:

The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, defense officials told The Washington Post late Saturday, after President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest there....

The Army placed the units on prepare-to-deploy orders in case violence in Minnesota escalates, officials said, characterizing the move as “prudent planning.” It is not clear whether any of them will be sent to the state, the officials said....

This is the problem: aspects of American life move out of the prerogative state and then move right back into it. Trump can't deploy National Guard troops, but he can deploy ICE, and he could deploy active-duty soldiers. He accepts some court rulings and looks for ways around others. We don't know which state we're in from one moment to the next.

It's possible that Trump will allow elections to proceed more or less as they usually do in November except in Minnesota, because he's so obsessed with the state. Remember, Democrats are trying to win back the Senate, and the Senate seat of retiring senator Tina Smith will be up for grabs. Also, Tim Walz has bowed out of the governor's race, and it appears that the state's other senator, Amy Klobuchar, wants to run for governor.

If he chose to, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota and stage troops at polling places -- but only in heavily Democratic Minneapolis and St. Paul. Could he prevent residents of the Twin Cities from voting and possibly throw the gubernatorial election to a Republican candidate (maybe even, God help us, Mike Lindell)? Could he throw the Senate race to a Republican? Even if Democrats turn out to vote in the Twin Cities, could he have ballots impounded and declare that victorious Democrats won by fraud?

We just don't know when we're going to be in the prerogative state and when we aren't. As a New Yorker, I assumed we'd be where Minneapolis is now as soon as Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor. It hasn't happened -- yet.

America is a dual state, but it's not a static dual state. It's never clear when you're going to find yourself in the lawless part of Trump's America.

Jamelle Bouie wants us all to know that President Trump can't mess with the midterms. Here's what he says in a New York Times roundtable with David French and Michelle Cottle:

... there’s been a lot of chatter on the internet about the president canceling elections. And since we’re talking about the midterms, I feel obligated to say that that’s not a thing. I know the response is going to be: look, he does everything else he wants. But the more accurate response is that there are a lot of ways in which he’s been stopped or blocked. And in a very practical sense, states run elections. States run federal elections — not the president.

The president has no role in federal elections. The president has no role in certifying federal elections. The president has no role in seating members of Congress. When it comes to the conduct and results of federal elections — at least for legislative elections — the president is just a guy. He’s just a guy watching on CNN like the rest of us.

And yes, he has ICE. He has his own little private army. ICE on paper has 22,000 people. Looking at Minnesota right now, in Minneapolis, they’ve committed more than 10 percent of their on-paper agents to try to pacify the 46th largest city in the country, 45th, 46th. And they can’t do it. Obstinate, middle-aged Midwesterners have essentially stopped ICE from operating in Minneapolis in a meaningful way.

I feel like it’s necessary to say that there’s a lot of fear-mongering and scaremongering about what the president can do with regards to the midterms....

But you don't have to believe that Trump "does everything else he wants" to worry about the midterms. You can acknowledge the ways that the system has rebuffed him and still recognize that if he wants to prevent a Democratic takeover of the House and possibly the Senate, he might have ways to thwart the the will of the voters.

But don't even bother arguing this at Bluesky -- or, presumably, any other forum where liberals and progressives congregate. You'll be called an idiot and accused of "obeying in advance," even though you're the one warning that that Trojan horse might have soldiers in it. You'll be told that you're trying to make everyone who opposes Trump feel hopeless, even if what you're really doing is urging everyone to be ready for a bigger fight.

I find much of what Bouie says persuasive. I don't think Trump can shut down elections nationwide at the point of a gun because he doesn't have enough troops to do that. He might do it in Minnesota, because he's clearly decided to single that state out for a special level of abuse. But I don't think he can do it everywhere.

But it's pointless to argue that the law and the Constitution give Trump no official role to play in the midterms. If he declares that the entire process is rotten, we don't know how Republican states will respond. They held the line on behalf of democracy in 2020, and they might do it again, expressing pride in their ability to conduct fair elections. But they might scapegoat Democratic House districts as corrupt if Trump makes clear that he insists on nothing less than that. We don't know.

There are currently 42 Democrats in the House who were elected from states that voted for Trump three times. Not all of those states have unified Republican control, but most do, among them Texas, Florida, and Ohio (25 of the 42 are from these three states, although the numbers are likely to change, especially in Texas because of redistricting).

If Trump demands that Democrats from these states not be certified as winners, what will the states do? Maybe they'll rebuff him. Maybe Democratic court cases will be as successful as they were in 2020.

Or maybe not.

Bouie argues that the system itself acts as a failsafe mechanism.

when the current term of the 119th congress ends on january 2 (or 3, i forget) 227, mike johnson ceases to be speaker of the house bsky.app/profile/gran...

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) January 15, 2026 at 11:36 AM

here's what happens after house elections, which are conducted by each state and locality: the state certifies the winner the winners go to washington they convene a new house they choose a speaker notice who isn't involved here? the president or the current speaker or the senate.

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) January 15, 2026 at 11:47 AM

But that's how the system is supposed to work: the members-elect are supposed to choose a speaker on January 3 (it took them a couple of extra days to get that done in 2025) and the speaker is supposed to swear in winners as certified by the states. But what if we're really through the looking glass and the speaker votes of Democratic winners aren't counted? Why couldn't that happen if Trump insists that it needs to happen? Why should we feel 100% certain that Trumpists can't subvert regular order in this case?

I'm not sure even this deeply corrupt Supreme Court would rubber-stamp all this. The Supremes want to continue flying under the radar, rigging the game, but only in ways that are too abstruse for normies to understand.

And, frankly, I'm not sure Trump will fight this fight. I think he might be caught flatfooted by the election results. He had opportunities in 2025 to declare elections fraudulent and he didn't do it -- I'm not sure why. In 2025, it was probably because his party's control of Congress was never threatened. But he might not even try to rig the process -- sending troops to polling places, for instance -- because he genuinely doesn't think he's unpopular.

So, yes, the midterms might proceed in a fair and democratic way. Trump might be lying to himself about his own popularity or might realize that the people who control our decentralized election system won't rig it for him.

Or 2026 might not be 2020, and the center might not hold. Preserving democracy might require more of a fight this time.

The War on Minnesota wasn't supposed to be about misogyny, but what Michelle Goldberg describes sounds a lot like mission creep:

If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.

This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen — who had to leave the United States in 2024 after the Department of Justice accused her of working for a Russian propaganda operation, but was allowed back in by the Trump administration — wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”

... ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.

Remember, the point of all this was supposed to be rounding up and expelling immigrants. Then the right-wing propaganda machine decided to link the immigrant roundup to fraud in Minnesota -- white-collar crimes that weren't committed by the random blue-collar workers the administration has been seizing off the streets in Minneapolis and other cities. Fraud is best fought by people in offices poring over spreadsheets. It was being fought that way, long before Donald Trump returned to the White House -- the FBI began its investigations in May 2021, a few months after Joe Biden became president.

But Republicans in Washington, at Fox News, and elsewhere in the GOP propaganda community decided that demonizing Somalis in Minnesota -- many of whom are citizens -- was the best way to generate hate content for the GOP base. And then, after an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis, the right switched gears again and decided that white female activists are the real enemy.

No wonder the public, which began 2025 broadly supporting Trump's immigration crackdown, has turned against the administration on this issue.


Republicans hate so many people that they can't keep their focus on enemies they share with normal people. It's completely understandable that normal voters want a crackdown on murderers, rapists, and drug dealers who are here illegally. It's completely understandable that they want a crackdown on fraudsters.

But Republicans don't just hate immigrants who engage in criminal conduct. They hate the ones who bust their humps at difficult jobs for low pay. They hate immigrants here on student visas who don't have the conservatively correct views on Israel and Gaza. And they're so blinded by hate that they indiscriminately shipped immigrants to a foreign torture prison on the basis of innocuous tattoos they misidentified as gang signs.

And now, the same people who brought you the end of Roe v. Wade, then boosted the careers of influencers who argue that career women are history's greatest monsters and maybe only men should be allowed to vote, have decided that normie women who've been radicalized by Trump's immigrant crackdown are the real enemy.

Fox News' Will Cain: “There's a weird kind of smugness... in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority”

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— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 2:54 PM

Republicans are usually good at message discipline, and they're still good at one form of it: agreeing on the same narrative and banding together to push that narrative through every media channel possible. But discipline also means avoiding messages that exceed what the public is willing to hear. Republicans can't seem to do that anymore. They can't keep their hatreds in check, and because they live in a right-wing bubble, they think the country agrees with them.

On Renee Good's murder, it's not working, as CNN's Aaron Blake has noted:

The [latest] CNN poll shows 56% of US adults said the ICE agent’s use of force was “inappropriate,” compared to just 26% who said it was “appropriate.”

Similarly, Quinnipiac University and Yahoo News-YouGov polls released Tuesday tested whether people thought the shooting was “justified.” The former showed registered voters said it was “not justified” by 53%-35%, while the latter showed Americans said it wasn’t justified 52%-27%.

So three polls, all with margins of between 18 and 30 points against ICE. That’s a pretty decisive verdict in public opinion.

... it’s worth emphasizing that the Trump administration didn’t just say the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, was justified in shooting Good.

It went quite a bit further, immediately casting Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism” and saying she intentionally targeted the ICE agent with her car.

It’s looking pretty clear that that is out of step with the public’s interpretation of events.

The Yahoo-YouGov poll shows just 24% of Americans said Good was committing domestic terrorism. Only 52% of Republicans agreed with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on that.

Normal Americans don't hate Renee Good. Republicans are bizarre, hateful freaks who do. They've lost normal America with this. It was all supposed to be about legitimate targets for law enforcement. But Republicans can't control their hatred.

This New York Times story is typical of the mainstream media's coverage of public opinion:

One State, Two Very Different Views of Minneapolis

Pull up a stool at Ye Olde Pickle Factory and listen to a story about America’s urban-rural divide.

The regulars file into Ye Olde Pickle Factory in Nisswa, Minn., before 10 a.m. most days, taking their seats at the bar....

Nisswa is a town of about 2,000 people in the Brainerd Lakes Area, a popular summer vacation destination about 150 miles north of Minneapolis. Most of the regulars on hand this morning say they prefer not to go the city anymore. Not since the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and the city erupted.

Now, Minneapolis is in the news again. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman, Renee Good, during an immigration operation last week, and demonstrators are back on the streets.

What did the regulars make of it?

Ms. Good’s death was tragic, they said. Horrific.

But they also said that she had asked for trouble.

“You obey the law officer,” a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, “and question it later.”

This is the divide, in a single sentence. In Minneapolis, protesters saw an innocent woman killed by a federal agent and took to the streets. At “the Pickle,” the regulars saw a woman who should have complied.

But that isn't "the divide." America isn't divided into two roughly equal segments, half rural and half urban, half Trumpist and half anti-Trumpist.

America consists of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. It's not true that everyone outside big liberal cities is a rock-ribbed rural Republican. On ICE right now, Republicans are overwhelmingly on President Trump's side, as you'd expect, and Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to what Trump is doing, also as you'd expect. But independents are largely siding with Democrats, tipping overall public opinion against Trump.

Recently, when YouGov asked, "Do you think the ICE agent was justified or not justified in the amount of force he used in shooting the woman in Minneapolis?," 88% of Democrats said no and 61% of Republicans said yes. But the numbers among independents were 20% yes, 58% no. Overall, 53% of survey respondents said the shooting wasn't justified; 28% said it was.

YouGov also found that 53% of respondents think the shooter should face criminal charges. Democrats agree 90% to 4%; Republicans disagree, 14% to 63%. But independents largely side with Democrats, 54% to 23%.

We frequently see this split. In Quinnipiac's latest poll, 88% of Republicans and 3% of Democrats approve of how Trump is doing his job. But independents strongly disapprove -- 33% approve, 59% don't. Trump's overall approval rating is 40%, with 54% disapproving. Republicans are the outliers.

More than two-thirds of Republicans think the Trump administration should be running Venezuela, and approve of the U.S. taking over Venezuelan oil sales. But overall, poll respondents oppose the U.S. takeover 57% to 35%, and oppose a takeover of the oil sales 55% to 38%.

There are times when Republicans and independents agree on many issues and Democrats are the outliers, but this is not one of those times. The public is wary of both parties right now -- as John Guida notes in a Times interview with Kristen Soltis Anderson, who conducts most of the paper's focus groups, and Nate Silver, Gallup now finds that 45% of Americans identify as independents -- the highest percentage of self-described independents Gallup has ever recorded. "Young people in particular reject both parties," Guida notes. However, "if you count independents who lean toward a party, it is 47 percent Democratic and 42 percent Republican." Anderson says:

Republicans got a brief reprieve when Democrats ran a very, very old Joe Biden during a very, very tough economy for young people, and that combined with some backlash to overzealous progressivism among Gen Z got overstated into Republicans having won over a new generation. Behold how short-lived it was! Only 21 percent of millennials and 17 percent of Gen Z identifying as Republicans is bad, bad news for the G.O.P. over the long haul.

And Silver adds:

You also have a phenomenon where the Democratic brand is very unpopular, especially among younger voters who don’t have any institutional loyalty to it. So young liberals often identify as “independent” when you first ask them, but are independents who “lean Democratic” if a pollster pushes them to pick one of the two parties.

And yet Anderson's most recent Times focus group features eleven Trump fans -- who, you will be astonished to learn, think Trump is doing an awesome job as president.

The Times feeds us pro-Trump focus groups with the implication that this is how "the other half" thinks. But it's not the other half. It's a minority of the population -- and for now, independents and Democrats add up to an anti-Trump majority.

The Bulwark tells us that a new center-left think tank is begging Democrats not to say "Abolish ICE":

DEMOCRATS RISK FALLING into a “trap” of Donald Trump’s making if they revive calls for the abolition of ICE, warns an upstart Democratic think tank in a new memo that reads, in part, as an emotional plea to others in the party.

The memo, put together by Searchlight Institute and released on Wednesday, draws a direct comparison between the anger felt by voters following last week’s shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in the same city in 2020. The calls to “defund the police” in the wake of that tragedy, the group writes, may have felt righteous in the moment. But it constituted bad policy when adopted literally, and handed a massive cudgel to Republicans electorally. The same, writes Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior policy fellow at Searchlight, is true of “Abolish ICE” now.

“‘Abolish ICE’ is not some proxy for more humane immigration enforcement, or to change ICE’s culture to adhere to due process, or to impose accountability on rogue officers. Itʼs advocating for an extreme,” the memo reads. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE.” Instead, the memo encourages Democrats to adopt an alternative approach toward ICE, one it calls “Reform and Retrain.”

I need to make a few points here. First, it's hilarious that the Searchlight Institute -- a group headed by Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and formed with advice from Seth London, a venture capitalist and (in Politico's words) "adviser to major Democratic donors," is an "upstart" think tank.

Second, I'd like to remind Searchlight that Democrats won the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder. Joe Biden became the first (and still only) American presidential candidate to win more than 80 million votes. If "Defund the police" was such a damaging slogan, why wasn't it damaging in real time?

And the public doesn't think abolishing ICE is extreme. According to YouGov polling, 46% of U.S. strongly or somewhat support abolishing ICE, while 43% strongly or somewhat oppose abolition.

But the centrist think tanks are obsessed with ths now. Here's a Fox News story about another centrist think tank, Third Way:

Center-left think tank Third Way advised the Democratic Party to avoid calls to "Abolish ICE" in favor of immigration reform in a new memo released on Tuesday....

While Third Way agreed with the Democratic Party that the Trump administration's immigration policies were "defined by excess, escalation, and lawlessness," the group cautioned against pushing for a complete elimination of all immigration enforcement.

"The impulse is emotional," the memo read. "The slogan is simple. But politically, it is lethal. Every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement — while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want. This piece argues for a harder and smarter approach: abolish abuses, not ICE."

Is this bad messaging? Would "abolish abuses, not ICE" be better messaging? And while maybe it would be politically risky to advocate abolition without replacement, what's the difference between saying "abolish abuses, not ICE" and saying "ICE should be burned to the ground and replaced with an entirely new agency"?

But that's not the point I'm here to make. What I really want to say is that if Searchlight and Third Way care about the electoral propsects of the Democratic Party, they should shut the fuck up about this.

Is saying "Abolish ICE" bad for Democrats' future electoral prospects? Under these conditions, I suspect not. But I could be wrong! However, I'm not wrong to point out that it hurts the Democratic Party electorally every time a centrist think tank races off to the press saying, "Look how radically left-wing the Democrats are! No wonder they can't win elections! They're out of step with the American public!"

On ICE in January 2026, angry Democrats don't appear to be out of step with the American public. But when the press reports that Democrats are out of step, that reinforces a narrative that is very harmful to Democrats. Yet centrist think tanks spread these harmful messages as often as they possibly can. Why, you'd almost imagine that they want to hurt Democrats' electoral prospects. You'd almost imagine that they want Democrats to lose elections.

There's a Munchausen-by-proxy quality to the centrist think tanks' incessant attacks on Democrats. The think tanks harm the health of the party, then proclaim that they're the cure for the party's ailments.

We need to call them on this. We can disagree with their advice, but we also need to point out that they're harming the image of the party they claim they want to save. And they seem to be doing it repeatedly and deliberately.

Usurprisingly, a GOP member of Congress has decided to suck up to Trump by backing his imperialist quest for Greenland:

A Republican congressman from Florida introduced a bill Monday to annex Greenland and make it the 51st U.S. state as President Trump threatens to seize the autonomous Danish territory....

Rep. Randy Fine said his new legislation would authorize Mr. Trump "to take whatever steps necessary to annex or acquire Greenland." ...

"Greenland is not a distant outpost we can afford to ignore -- it is a vital national security asset," Fine said in a statement.

That's from CBS News. Axios also reported on this, referring to Fine as "a staunch Trump loyalist from Florida."

This is how the most radical Republicans stay under the radar. They're described this way even if they're extreme -- and Fine is very extreme. Meanwhile, the media continues to portray the mostly very moderate Democratic Party as in thrall to dangerous radicals, and a large percentage of the public believes that.

How extreme is Randy Fine? This is from a New Republic story published last summer, shortly after Fine won a special lection to replace UN ambassador Mike Waltz in Congress:

Last week, ABC News reported that 15 people in Gaza had died from starvation within just 24 hours, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Fine responded to the report by wishing for more death and then claiming that it was all a hoax anyway.

“Release the hostages. Until then, starve away,” Fine wrote on X. The post continued, “(This is all a lie anyway. It amazes me that the media continues to regurgitate Muslim terror propaganda.)” The same day, Fine was appointed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

This was too much even for the American Jewish Committee, which condemned the remarks. Fine was unfazed.

He also supports murdering pro-Palestinian protestors.

In another post Sunday, Fine revealed that the only thing he really supports is murder, pushing for a bill that would allow drivers to run over pro-Palestinian protesters blocking bridges and roads with impunity.

“The Thump Thump Act will allow Americans to run over these Muslim Terrorists,” he wrote. “They don’t try this in Florida because of the bill I helped pass in the Legislature to allow them to be run over. It’s time to take it national. Thump thump.”

“To be clear, the Thump Thump Act will also allow you to run over BLM, Antifa, illegal immigrants, and anyone else who intentionally blocks roads! Thump thump!” he wrote in a separate post.

Fine has said this about Palestinians on Twitter:

There are demons that live on Earth.

They deserve no state.

They only deserve death.

My first bill in Congress will be to recognize Gaza and Judea and Samaria as part of the State of Israel and to call for the expulsion of these monsters from Israel.

Last spring, he implied that Gaza should be nuked, then doubled down:

“In World War Two, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis,” Fine had said on May 22. “We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.” Fine did not qualify his statement at the time.

Today, he said: “People claiming I said Israel should nuke Gaza are idiots. But remember, they may be from Gaza, and in Gaza, 50 percent of people are married to their cousins, so obviously they do have a lot of people who aren’t very smart.”

When he was still a state legislator and running for Congress, he proposed a bill banning the display of "political" flags at government buildings:

Sen. Randy Fine filed legislation (SB 100) taking aim at what a media release calls “fictional country flags like ‘Palestine,’ pro-violence ‘Black Lives Matter’ flags, woke and pro-grooming ideological flags, and the flags of any political candidates in government buildings.”

If the bill seems familiar, it’s because Fine carried it in the House last year. Now, he’s running it back in the Senate.

“Supporters of Muslim terror, child mutilators, and groomers have no right to taxpayer sponsorship of their repugnant messages,” said Fine....

“As I prepare to leave the Senate, I look forward to ensuring the only official place in a government building that you will find their flags is in a garbage can.”

More recently, he's called for New York mayor Zohran Mamdani to be denaturalized and deported.

Zohran Mamdani must be deported immediately.

The only thing I want to see him running for is his gate at JFK for his deportation flight back to Uganda. pic.twitter.com/tfRrtqmtrh

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) November 3, 2025

The people who endlessly denounce what they describe as Democratic "wokeness" don't talk about people like Randy Fine. He's barely known to much of America. Our political culture doesn't acknowledge the GOP's radicalism problem, or acts as if the radicalism is limited to the White House. And so much of America continues to believe that the country has two political parties, one that's radical and one that's Republican.

Republican fascism is on the march, so, naturally, it's time for The New York Times to publish yet another profile of Democrat-bashing, self-mythologizing rural congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. This is the fourth major piece about Gluesenkamp Perez to appear in the Times in less than two years, following a Magazine profile in July 2024, an Annie Karni interview immediately after the 2024 election, and a podcast appearance with Ezra Klein last May. As I noted at the time, even Klein was at times put off by Perez, specifically by her contempt for liberal protestors who were decrying human rights abuses by the Trump administration.

(Her point was that liberals should be focused on issues critical to rural Americans and not get worked up about immigrants being shipped off to an El Salvadoran torture prison without due process. By contrast, she had nothing but nice things to say about Trump supporters who fixated on Hunter Biden.)

The current piece is a typical liberal-media love song to rural Volk, written by ... um, a Vanity Fair writer names James Pogue who somehow thinks he's become one of the Volk because he writes about them and drives his own big-ass truck. Here's the photo Pogue uses on the splash page of his website:


Come and take it, liberal man!

Gluesenkamp Perez is best known as a champion of "right to repair," which she and Pogue present as, somehow, the central economic and cultural issue of our time, one that separates ordinary icky liberals from, you know, normal people.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.

To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

For the past half-century, the promise of affordable mass consumption has been the central justification for a host of changes that reshaped America as we know it, driving inequality, disrupting life in whole regions and contributing to a pervasive feeling that we’ve been reduced to “hapless consumers,” as Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez put it to me, describing what she calls the “high cost of cheap goods.”

To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.

This reckoning has been central to the MAGA movement. The Trump administration’s mass deportations and tariffs are the twin pillars of an attempt to create an economic system governed not by gross domestic product data and consumer spending, but by conservative values and nationalist geostrategic ends. Kids don’t “need 37 dolls,” Mr. Trump has said. They should have “three dolls or four.”

Democrats have avoided a reckoning of their own. Their party remains defined by faith in the power of data and expert knowledge, and this has made it difficult for Democrats to really understand criticisms of a system that has brought many Americans a vast bounty of easily measured material wealth. It’s hard to entertain criticisms of the liberal technocratic order when you’re trying to defend it against a populist insurrection.

There's so much bullshit here it's hard to know where to start. First, does Pogue seriously believe that capitalism as we know it -- even cheap-goods capitalism -- would collapse if consumers are allowed to repair their own washer-dryers? The fat cats would lick their wounds and make money the billion other ways they're allowed to.

And does Pogue seriously believe that President Trump's "37 dolls" remark was seen by MAGA voters as a statement of shared values? Does Pogue literally not understand that MAGA simply pretended that Trump didn't say that, because it's unthinkable that Daddy would be so mean to his children?

But the group libel here is that Democrats -- meaning, presumably, rank-and-file Democrats as well as Democrats in D.C. -- want the uglier aspects of 21st-century capitalism because we're all invested in elitism. Writers like Pogue believe that every Democrat is a froufrou elitist. They're as oblivious to ordinary Democrats -- let's take as an example the late Renee Good, who we know never attended a cocktail party with Jamie Dimon -- as they think we are to rural Americans. Yes, ordinary Democrats sometimes vote for corporatist Democratic candidates, but always against unabashedly corporatist Republicans, because the Democrats are better on other issues and at least hint at support for programs that limit capitalism's cruelty.

Do rank-and-file Democrats want capitalists to lock everyone's consumer products? Of course not. No one wants that except the bastards who profit from it.

WASHINGTON D.C. (July 8, 2025) – According to a new national poll, more than 83% of Americans support the REPAIR Act (H.R 1566, S. 1379), which would create a national vehicle right-to-repair law, ensuring consumers’ right to choose how and where they fix their vehicles; 77% support the SMART Act, which would amend patent laws to give consumers more vehicle repair choices....

According to the poll conducted by The Tarrance Group, and commissioned by the CAR Coalition, support for vehicle right to repair is strongly bipartisan, with 84% of Republicans and 82% of Democrats supporting the REPAIR Act....

Other key findings from the survey:

* 98% of respondents said it is important to them to be able to choose where they get their car repaired.
* 89% said car owners should be able to access their own vehicle data.
* 86% of Trump voters and 83% of Harris voters support the REPAIR Act.
* 78% said independent repair shops should have access to vehicle data for repairs.
* 72% said automakers should be barred from restricting data access.

And as it turns out, five states have passed electronics right to repair legislation. Want to guess which ones? New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado -- all blue states.

Gluesenkamp Perez's central idea is massively popular -- but she needs us to believe that she's a pariah in her party for backing it, because being a Democrat-basher is central to her brand. It might get her reelected again. But it's a lie.

I got into a brief argument with Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel) this morning. In a post she published on Friday, she accused The New York Times of sanewashing President Trump's words about Greenland in his big Times interview. She quoted the Times:

“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland — three times the size of Texas but with a population of less than 60,000. He seemed to dismiss the value of having Greenland under the control of a close NATO ally.

When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

The conversation made clear that in Mr. Trump’s view, sovereignty and national borders are less important than the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West.

In her post, Wheeler was right about this:

... after Trump describes contemplating blowing up the alliance that has been the centerpiece of American national security since World War II out of a psychological need to own other people and other countries, nothing more, the NYT describes it to be a comment about Trump’s imagination that he is “the protector of the West.”

You’re both fucking insane! Donald Trump, for contemplating making the US and Europe less safe because of his own psychological inadequacies that drive him to covet big empty spaces on a map, and the NYT for describing it as the exact opposite of what it is, not Donald Trump needing to tend to Donald Trump’s increasing fragile psyche, but instead as something that protects the West rather than destroys the very concept of it.

But I disagree with what she posted on Bluesky this morning:

This is a 25th Amendment confession, contrary to what NYT would have you believe. www.emptywheel.net/2026/01/09/a...

[image or embed]

— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 7:51 AM

In response to her, I raised my usual objection to invocations of the 25th Amendment: that attempting to use Section 4 of the amendment to remove a president from office ultimately requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress to remove, a hurdle we couldn't even jump in one house of Congress when Trump was impeached in 2020 and 2021. We would need significant Republican support in order to remove Trump using either of these methods, and we'll never get it.

Wheeler, however, believes that invoking the 25th could put real pressure on Republicans:

It is ALSO a political tool. It is VERY useful to say to Republicans, "The President has confessed he is nuts, why won't you 25th him to preserve NATO?" Because this is something they know is wrong and this assigns them agency, which they love to disavow.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 8:48 AM

I don't buy this at all. I know we're told that many Republicans secretly hate Trump and regard him as mentally unfit. I know that many of them believe in the old global insitutions. But they don't believe in the old global institutions enough to stick their necks out and challenge the head of their party, a man 95% of their voters worship. They don't want to be political pariahs and they don't want their families living with constant death threats from the MAGA faithful.

But maybe there's public opinion value in saying that Trump is mentally unwell. It really might be time to play the "nuts" card.

After all, here's a set of headlines just now:

* Donald Trump 'orders army chiefs to draw up plan to invade Greenland': US President emboldened by success of Maduro capture operation

* Trump Is Briefed on Options for Striking Iran as Protests Continue

* U.S. Launches Major Strikes on Islamic State Targets in Syria

* Trump threatens Cuba: Negotiate "BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE"

That's one day! And that's while the administration is also engaging in a shooting war with domestic political opponents. Trump isn't a strong leader asserting American might -- he's a guy who walks into a bar, orders a beer, smashes off the lower half of the bottle, and challenges everyone in the bar to a fight. He's deranged. He's dangerous.

Critics of the president need to denounce specific policies and acts in a thoughtful, measured way, but maybe it's time for even the more thoughtful critics to tell the likes of Jake Tapper and Kristen Welker that it looks as if the president is out of his goddamn mind -- not with a specific removal process in mind, because Republicans will act as roadblocks to any such process, but in order to shift the ground so a greater and greater number of Americans are asking, "Is the president out of his goddamn mind?"

This is Tim Walz's successful "weird" talking point, but ratcheted up a few notches, because, well, the president isn't just weird right now, he's unhinged. His aides -- Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller -- also seem as if they're crushing and snorting whatever it is that's making the president this way. They think a policy of unchecked aggression toward everyone who looks at them funny will keep America safe, and that's a very, very dangerous belief, the kind of thing you believe when you pose a clear and present danger to others.

Trump will continue to be this way until his job approval rating slips well below the 42% where it's been parked for the past couple of months.


Calling him a threat to NATO -- even an emotionally needy threat -- won't move the needle. But if ordinarily sober-sounding Democrats start asking whether he's a deranged lunatic? Maybe that could make a difference, especially when his actions are offering so much supporting evidence.

I keep thinking about a short piece that just appeared in The Wall Street Jornal under the headline "America Watches One Shooting and Comes to Two Different Conclusions" (free to read here).

The headline is misleading: the story is based on a series of person-in-the-street interviews, but they're not just about the murder of Renee Good, and the interviewees' responses don't show the public sorting itself neatly into two ideological camps.

Most of the interviewees are Trump supporters, and they're not entirely at ease with everything the administration has done this year.

To Lori Lutz, a Trump voter in Fort Wayne, Ind., the killing was the consequence of presidential overreach....

Lutz, 56, a former retail pharmacy manager, said she wanted Trump to remove undocumented immigrants who she said were taking factory jobs in her state. But when she saw the video of the Minneapolis shooting, she thought, “Here we are overreaching again. It was an abuse of power...This storm trooper house-by-house stuff—everyone is scared about it.”

And there's this man:

Good’s shooting “was like two days ago, and Venezuela was like two days before that,” said Anthonny Gutierrez, 23, a Trump voter near Sacramento, referring to the capture of Venezuela’s now-former leader by U.S. forces. “We don’t know what’s going to come tomorrow.” ...

Gutierrez said the Minneapolis shooting looked to him as if it was a case of “force that shouldn’t have been used” and that Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement has been too sweeping.

“I do agree with them getting the people that deserve it, who may have criminal records and aren’t cooperating with the law,” said Gutierrez, who works for a roofing company and is of Mexican heritage. “But if people aren’t doing bad to the country or they’re working and doing nothing wrong—those people should have a chance to stay, maybe.”

And this woman:

Michelle Adkisson-Redwine, a three-time Trump voter in Richmond, Ind., said she is largely happy with Trump’s performance in his second term. But the 36-year-old accounting firm owner is conflicted about some aspects of his policies, including the mass deportation effort.

“I’m OK with it, but I’m not OK with it,” she said. While some news coverage of ICE enforcement is overblown, she said, federal agents at times are “overstepping their boundaries.” Her mixed feelings extend to those ICE is arresting. She supports the removal of anyone who commits crimes, but doesn’t think the U.S. should deport someone brought illegally to the country decades ago as a child.

Adkisson-Redwine said she is withholding judgment about Wednesday’s fatal shooting. The video she saw of the encounter left her with more questions than answers: “Why was that person there? Why was ICE there? Like, why were they in that street? What was her intention? Did it require the use of deadly force? I don’t know.”

As for Trump’s muscular exercise of executive power, she said she likes that he is getting things done. But she questions moves such as the military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“I don’t like us going into other countries at all, even if they have a dictator and we make the dictator go away. I mean, why aren’t we doing it in North Korea? Then why aren’t we doing it in Russia? Why are we not doing it in China?” she said. Whatever the motivation, she added, “we have to take care of our citizens first.”

If any of these people are sincerely troubled, I don't know who speaks for them, or who could. I'm not here to play Ezra Klein and say that the Democratic Party needs right-centrists who'll advocate a kinder, gentler Trumpism -- but I wonder what the country would be like if there were room for someone who reflected that point of view. Would it be a bridge away from smashmouth Republicanism for people who can't quite bring themselves to align with even moderate Democrats?

I've occasionally had the thought that America doesn't need a third party -- it needs a third party and a fourth party. It could use two new parties, each of which would be to the left of one of the current major parties. (Establishment voices would say that the current Democratic Party is too left-leaning and might benefit from a right-leaning sister party, but that's nonsense.) The moderate Republican party might address the low-level anxiety about Trump and remind his softer supporters that America's government doesn't have to be arbitrary, terrifying, and brutal, and it isn't supposed to be that way.

But this couldn't happen -- even squeamish members of the current GOP would never leave, because it's safer to be inside the tent supporting trump's reign of terror than it would be proposing a more thoughtful approach to conservatism. And, of course, the way the current GOP runs is extremely effective. The reason the GOP incessantly focuses on demonization and culture wars is that it ensures a reliable vote for the party -- and that keeps the party in position to decrease taxes and regulations on rich donors. The plutocrats perhaps didn't realize that "culture war" would eventually mean "tanks in the streets in multiple cities" -- but it's still working for the them at a tax and regulatory level, so they're cool with it.

I don't know how my four-party system would work in practice, but I'm taken by the idea that no party would ever win an absoulte majority in Congress again, so negotations would be necessary before every congressional session just to put leaders in place, just as in actually civilized countries with parliamentary systems. It would be especially good if the existence of four parties led to the creation of even more parties. That would break the "duopoly."

Of course, ideally, I'd rather have a progressive government, and a Fox/Trump GOP weakened and brought low by general societal revulsion. But I know how unlikely that is to happen. It might have been possible once, but Democrats have allowed the GOP to demonize them so thoroughly over the past several decades that I think it will be a struggle for them to regain a truly dominant position in American politics.

I expect Democrats to eke out wins in 2026 and possibly 2028, but I don't see a shift away from this permanent culture war. Maybe it could happen in a country where the smashmouth/culture-war party represented only a quarter or a third of America. But it still represents the people quoted in this article, even if they;re squeamish about it.

Yesterday, Asawin Suebsaeng posted this:

the government is telling you not even unarmed nice white lady moms surrounded by stuffed animals are off limits, and I’m sorry but: that is an extremely terrifying.

— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 2:32 PM

And Michelle Goldberg wrote this (emphasis added):

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 [white] mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption.

There's a fairly widespread belief that Trumpism is racism and it's no more complicated than that. According to this view, Trumpism is a backlash specifically against Barack Obama: America elected a Black president and Republicans (or white America) went crazy.

But the right has always hated white liberals, white leftists, and white countercultures. The right hated anti-war protesters and hippie longhairs in the 1960s and early 1970s. The right has always hated feminist whites and LGBTQ whites. When Boomer counterculturalists entered the political mainstream, the right treated Bill and Hillary Clinton as history's greatest monsters, at least when they held power or seemed to be on the verge of returning to power.

The right hated John Kerry and tried to destroy his good name. They hated (and still hate) Nancy Pelosi and cheered when her husband was beaten with a hammer. They hated Joe Biden. They hate Tim Walz right now.

Some of this hatred, obviously, is deeply linked to racism. Bill Clinton was a politician from what was briefly seen as the New South, a region where the dust had supposedly settled on desgregation and a political coalition could be built combining people of color and liberal and moderate whites. Tim Walz is hated for continuing to insist that Somalis are humans.

But we shouldn't underestimate how much hatred is in GOP base voters' hearts. They also hate LGBTQ people (trans people most of all), and they also hate Walz because his state's bill mandating the availability of menstrual products in school bathrooms is deliberately non-specific about the gender of those bathrooms. Some menstruating people don't identify as women. Walz accepts that, so the right mocks him as "Tampon Tim."

Tampon Tim is hands down the best political nickname ever. It’s so… savagely effective. In one word tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about Tim Walz’s dangerous radicalism. He put tampons in men’s bathrooms! He’ll trans kids. He took away parental rights. He’s woke & creepy.

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) August 7, 2024

The Republican base is as racist as you imagine. But the racism of the right is part of a larger belief system in which people with certain attributes -- white, right-wing, heterosexual, Christian, anti-feminist, pro-gun, and pro-fossil fuel -- are seen as better than everyone else in the world and deserving of a homeland in which no other people exist, or at least none have power, including mere voting power.

I don't think many of the anti-ICE protesters expected to be immune to ICE violence -- less susceptible, clearly, but certainly vulnerable. These people hate everyone who disagrees with them to at least some extent. Their core hatred might be racial, but they have plenty of rage to go around.

A phalanx of heavily armed immigration goons approached Renee Good's vehicle yesterday in Minneapolis, then one of them fatally shot her as she tried to drive away. Two narratives of the incident emerged: one in which Good's worst offense was to disobey law enforcement -- not a death-penalty crime, and one that, according to ICE's own policies, doesn't justify shooting into a moving vehicle -- although there have been nine such shootings since September -- and one in which Good weaponized the vehicle and attempted to do bodily harm to ICE officers. It should be obvious from the video evidence which narrative is accurate and which is a series of falsehoods put forth by in support of a president who's a known pathological liar, in the interests of preserving not only his dominance but that of his party, which routinely distorts the facts in order to maintain a grasp on power:

On the one hand multiple videos from various angles and multiple eyewitnesses, on the other hand self-interested statements from Administration officials, who’s to say where the truth lies.

— Missing The Point (@missingthept.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 6:41 AM

And yet the media keeps struggling to present this as anything other than a "they-said/they-said" story. Here's AP:

While President Donald Trump’s administration described the killing of a 37-year-old mother as an act of self-defense amid his latest immigration crackdown, Minneapolis officials have disputed that narrative.

CNN:

State and local officials disputed claims that the shooting was done in self-defense. Multiple videos of the shooting reviewed by CNN show nuance.

To its credit, The New York Times has posted a video story titled "Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis."

An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire.

It's a solid, thorough analysis, and it unambiguously concludes that Good wasn't trying to ram an ICE agent. But prior to that, the paper treated the administration's claims as potentially credible:

Federal immigration officials said that an ICE agent shot and killed Ms. Good in self-defense. They said her vehicle was driving toward the agent and she had refused to cooperate when ordered to stop.

That explanation was sharply dismissed by many people in Minneapolis, a liberal-leaning city where suspicion of Mr. Trump and his immigration crackdown is fierce.

Yeah, the locals said the administration was lying, though keep in mind that they're a bunch of liberal malcontents.

What's frustrating about this is that the administration isn't just offering a "nuanced" reading of the video evidence -- it's attempting to build up a level of outrage against the victim and her supporters using a narrative that's glaringly at odds with the facts, but consistent with right-wing conspiracy theories.

This started early, with Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin insisting on Twitter that "rioters" were "blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle."

The narrative advanced by President Trump on Truth Social was wildly at odds with reality:

I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.

I know we've all just decided that Gramps tells a few stretchers now and again and that's no reason to conclude that everything his administration says is self-serving culture-war disinformation. But the "professional agitator" slander (with "paid by George Soros" left unstated) has been echoed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem:

Noem: "People need to stop using their vehicles as weapons ... it's clear that it's being coordinated. People are being trained"

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 7, 2026 at 6:34 PM

We know that these people lie brazenly. We know that Trump told 30,573 lies in a first term that was restrained by comparison with this one. So why start from the premise that the administration is, or even might be, speaking in good faith, and should be assumed to be doing so until proven otherwise? Why aren't their words under a cloud of suspicion at all times?

This isn't unique to Trump. Republicans and the right have been lying shamelessly for decades, all for partisan advantage, yet the media persists in assuming that they make every argument in good faith. Really? After Saddam's WMDs and "We don't torture" and the besmirching of John Kerry, after ACORN and the Ground Zero mosque, after birtherism, after decades of lies about "voter fraud" going back to at least the Bush administration, and on and on into Trump's election trutherism and January 6, and now the lies about January 6.... When will the media wake up to the fact that these people lie as a first recourse, because it works?

At Bad Faith Times on Monday, Denny Carter published an essay on the Venezuela invasion called "They Did It for the Content."

I think I know why the regime committed a variety of international crimes in kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and his wife over the weekend.

They did it for the online engagement: For the excitement, for the videos of American aircraft bombing Caracas (and killing 80-some civilians) and the pictures of a blindfolded Maduro being frog-walked out of a government plane in New York and the president presiding over the capture from his make-believe bunker in Mar-a-lago, haggard and tieless and working hard for the average American Joe, who wanted nothing more than for the American government to abduct a head of state from a country he could not identify on a map. It’s why Hegseth and Miller and others in the Mar-a-lago bunker were closely monitoring the X platform during the illegal operation.

They are posters at heart, and they are addicted to the thrill of their content going viral. I say this as someone who understands the sensation. And this – yes, this – was little more than content creation dressed up as serious foreign policy.

At The Atlantic last night, Charlie Warzel made a similar assertion:

It is no secret that the Trump administration is social media–addled. Over the past year, most of the government’s major online accounts—especially on X—have become megaphones for cruel and racist shitposting, not unlike what one might see from a garden-variety troll on 4chan. These accounts have shared deportation ASMR; an AI-generated, Studio Ghiblified version of a real photo of a crying woman being arrested by ICE; a post comparing immigrants to the alien vermin in the Halo video-game series; and Nazi-coded “Defend the fatherland” memes. And who could forget the AI-slop video of Trump in a fighter jet dropping what appeared to be human feces on protesters in Times Square. These official government communications are a key part of how the Trump administration does its job. It is governance through content creation.

Carter sees this as a sign that the Trump administration is less authoritarian than it could be:

The same people who wanted to create content of Maduro’s kidnapping have also created content of the president’s secret police kicking in the doors of their opponents, National Guard troops marching into opposition strongholds for entirely invented reasons, and immigrants dressed in chains shuffling their way to a plane that would take them to a faraway concentration camp. This sort of online content satiates the burning fascist need for the pain and torment of their enemies, both real and perceived....

Almost none of it is real though. In a true authoritarian onslaught, National Guard troops would have stormed into Democrat-run cities and committed acts of unspeakable violence against anyone who dared to protest. They would have arrested and killed every opposition leader in those states and they would have done it quickly and without pretense. Their cameras would certainly not be on for any of this....

In a true authoritarian onslaught, the regime's thugs would not have even entertained the idea of standing before a judge, explaining their attacks on immigrant communities and coming up with faulty legal justifications for their ethnic cleansing campaign. They would have simply arrested or killed the judge, as leading American monarchist and JD Vance adviser Curtis Yarvin has advocated, and carried on with their ethnic cleansing business.

Instead, Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino took glamour shots of himself dressed as an SS officer outside a Chicago courthouse. Because, you see, content is king. Content is the whole point. It always has been.

And Warzel thinks all the content creation is ... nihilistic.

By the time I saw the news of the raid, a photo Trump had posted showing a blindfolded Maduro in a Nike sweatsuit had already become a meme. Just a few minutes later, that meme had mixed with a dozen others....

The result is essentially insane and postliterate. But it is also pretty much legible for those steeped in online culture. It is coherent incoherence, everything reacting to everything else, all at once. The same thing happened after [Charlie] Kirk was shot. The memes, commentary, and speculation became a culture unto itself, a loop of ironic posting, information warring, and commentary on commentary—all before his shooter was identified or Kirk was even pronounced dead. This process is nihilistic....

But that's not what happened after Charlie Kirk was shot. America didn't just enter a multiverse in which your remix of Kirk memes competed with everyone else's for likes. Many people lost their jobs because they engaged in constitutionally protected (and factually accurate) speech about Kirk that our Republican overlords didn't like, as the vice president of the United States led calls for a purge:

In the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death, Vice President JD Vance urged people to call the bosses of those who celebrated the assassination. “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said.

Carter is right: the Trump administration could have gone fascist much more rapidly and brutally, and hasn't hit all the benchmarks yet. But I'm reminded of domestic abusers who prefer gaslighting and coercion to physical violence: they are trying to create an information sphere in which their worldview seems like the only sensible path, and all contrary views must be rejected. Fox has been building a closed information system like this for years, and now the siloing of social media sites plus the paywalling of old-fashioned news means that millions of people never have to encounter a fact that runs counter to their worldview on the way to the memes.

I spend time at Reddit's Forwards from Grandma, which posts right-wing memes and cartoons. In this environment, it's assumed that Democrats are actually pro-Maduro:


Content like this is what your right-wing grandparents on Facebook regard as their "newsfeed" -- and the administration wants to be the top content creator, in ways that substitute image and spectacle for facts.

In America in 2026, this is the news -- memes plus podcasts plus short-form videos. The content the Trumpers are creating is meant to be part of this stream. Warzel writes:

These days, one doesn’t experience the news on these platforms before seeing the memes and reactions—the reaction and the news are, in essence, one thing now.

Right -- so shaping the message in the most viral way is everything, regardless of the facts.

This should be an easy one for Democrats:

President Donald Trump said he believes the U.S. oil industry could get expanded operations in Venezuela "up and running" in fewer than 18 months.

"I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money," Trump told NBC News in an interview Monday.

"A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent, and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue," he said.

When Trump says the oil companies will "get reimbursed by us," he means your tax dollars subsidizing their oil drilling.

The entire Democratic Party should (but probably won't) unite around a simple message: not one dime in subsidies.

Yeah, I know that Democrats are trying to win a Senate race in Texas. So the message there could be that we thought the Republicans believed in domestic energy production. Or is Venezuela now the 51st state?

Trump knows absolutlely nothing about this subject except what he learns from Fox News, which tells him that more oil is better than less oil because oil is manly and all non-fossil fuels are effeminate. But the people who are actually in the oil business approach the question of Venezuela based on actual knowledge of the country, its oil, and the global market:

... industry sources tell CNN that American oil executives are unlikely to dive headfirst into Venezuela for multiple reasons: The situation on the ground remains very uncertain, Venezuela’s oil industry is in shambles and Caracas has a history of seizing US oil assets.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that oil prices are too low today to justify spending the gobs of money – possibly tens of billions of dollars – that would be required to revive Venezuela’s decaying oil industry.

“The appetite for jumping into Venezuela right now is pretty low. We have no idea what the government there will look like,” one well-placed industry source told CNN on Monday. “The president’s desire is different than the industry’s. And the White House would have known that if they had communicated with the industry prior to the operation on Saturday.”

... Just to keep Venezuela’s oil production flat at 1.1 million barrels per day – roughly equal to what North Dakota currently produces – would require about $53 billion of investment over the next 15 years, according to estimates published Monday by consulting firm Rystad Energy.

However, to return Venezuela to its glory days of 3 million barrels per day from the late 1990s, total oil and gas capital spending would need to reach a staggering $183 billion through 2040, according to Rystad’s analysis.

That huge figure reflects not only Venezuela’s aging infrastructure but the fact that most of its oil is considered “heavy,” a blend of crude that is harder and more expensive to refine and process than the lighter oil found in the Permian Basin of West Texas.

Democrats shouldn't worry about appearing "anti-business" -- much of the country holds the oil and gas industry in fairly low regard. (According to a Gallup survey conducted last summer, 35% of Americans have a positive view of the industry, and 49% have a negative view. Dallas went off the air a long time ago.)

I'm naive to iamgine that Democrats will go on offense now, but a guy can dream, can't he?

We know that Americans didn't want military action against Venezuela before it happened:

A September YouGov poll found just 16% support for a “U.S. invasion of Venezuela,” with 62% opposed. And this is a pretty stable result: By mid-December, Quinnipiac found 63% of registered voters opposed “U.S. military action inside Venezuela,” with only 25% in support....

Data for Progress found in December that 60% of likely voters opposed “sending American troops into Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power,” versus 33% in favor. September YouGov polling on using military force “to overthrow Maduro” found 53% opposed and just 18% in support, with the rest unsure....

CBS News ... found Americans opposed to military action in Venezuela by a 40-point [70%-30%] margin....

But Americans usually rally around the flag after the military acts. That happened when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, for instance. It's not happening now.


YouGov says that Americans oppose this invasion by a 41%-34% margin.

And The Washington Post, in a poll conducted by text, finds similar results:


It's not surprising that Americans have tended to rally around the flag, at least at first, for our major military incursions -- Afghanistan, the first and second Iraq wars. But in the past, Americans have rallied around the flag (and the president) for "quickie" invasions as well. They did in 1983:

President Reagan's handling of the invasion of Grenada appears to have produced wide-ranging political benefits for him, a new Washington Post-ABC News opinion poll indicates.

The poll, released Tuesday night, shows that Reagan has edged ahead of the two leading Democratic candidates in trial heats for the 1984 election for the first time since April....

Seventy-one percent in the survey said they approve of the invasion of Grenada, with only 22 percent saying they disapprove.

And the "quickie" war that's the most obvious precedent for this one was also popular in real time, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1989:

Americans strongly support the massive U.S. invasion of Panama and agree with President Bush that “it’s been worth it” despite the loss of American lives, The Times Poll found Thursday.

... on the second day of the invasion by more than 20,000 U.S. Marines, paratroopers, infantrymen, sailors and airmen, American citizens interviewed by The Times Poll were supporting the attack by a ratio of more than 5 to 1, with 77% approving and only 15% disapproving. In fact, 56% approved “strongly.”

I'd like to believe that this military action is far more unpopular because Americans despise Donald Trump, and because it's in blatant defiance of the rule of law. But I don't think that's the explanation. I think Americans have become so cynical about war after Iraq and Afghanistan -- and after other shocks to the system, like COVID and the 2008 financial crisis -- that rallying around the flag seems unimaginable now, at least when Americans can't see a pressing need to act.

Most Republicans are thrilled, despite all their past rhetoric about not getting America entangled in foreign conflicts: 60% of Republicans support this military action, according to YouGov, with 16% opposed; in the Washington Post poll, 74% of Republicans approve and only 10% disapprove. Chuck Schumer is an idiot:

Schumer: "Republicans must -- if there was ever a time, they must step up to the plate. This is the time. And if they don't, they're gonna feel the heat from their constituents."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 5, 2026 at 9:35 AM

Republican voters don't care about the War Powers Act. They just want their guy to win, and they think he's winning now. (Though I'm surprised that GOP support isn't in the 80s or 90s.)

The rest of us are disillusioned. If Trump and his henchmen think they'll distract us from the economy and Epstein by invading a series of countries, that not going to work at all.