The Cost of Silence

The Dispatch Editors

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

As we end the first month of 2026, the governing spirit of the United States is not populism; it is neither right-wing nor left-wing ideology, and it is most certainly not the political order spelled out in the Constitution. It is chaos.

 

The Trump administration has had an extraordinary few weeks, dragging the American people along for the ride. Federal agents have, as of this writing, shot dead two American citizens—within weeks of each other, in the same city—while clad in masks and military gear and carrying out a campaign of paramilitary-style immigration enforcement that appears far more interested in theatrics than deportations. In both cases, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has rushed to label these shooting victims—and by extension other ordinary Americans protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics—“terrorists.” In recent days, we’ve seen high-ranking administration officials try to retroactively justify the agents’ actions by advancing arguments that infringe upon Americans’ First and Second Amendment rights.

 

Elsewhere in the world, NATO countries dispatched troops to Greenland in response to fears—far from unreasonable—that the United States was weighing an act of war against Denmark as part of a campaign of old-fashioned imperial expansion. The Canadian prime minister announced the end of his country’s longstanding partnership with the United States—“we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”—and has taken steps to strengthen ties with China. India and the European Union, both harmed by U.S. tariffs, announced the “mother of all” trade deals as a defensive measure against the United States and China, now regarded in Delhi and Brussels as twin predators.

 

Gold and silver prices are regularly hitting record highs, and the financing costs of the U.S. government’s ever-expanding national debt are continuing to rise. The United States has now entered its sixth consecutive year of persistently high inflation, and while pandemic-related economic forces and excessive federal spending first signed into law by his Democratic predecessor can account for much of that, President Donald Trump’s stubborn clinging to misguided tariff policies is not helping matters. Neither is his administration’s transparently pretextual criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as part of the president’s efforts to bully the Fed into lowering interest rates in the runup to the midterms.

 

One of the ironies repeated throughout world political history is that autocrats rarely bring the order they are elected—or installed—to deliver, even the servile kind that can be imposed through state terror. No, more reliably, autocrats bring disorder. The disorder under which Americans are now suffering, the ramifications of which have only just begun to be realized, is what inevitably happens when an American president disregards the rule of law, insisting that he is limited only by his own sense of morality—a sense of morality that in this case does not quite seem to exist.

 

The president’s defenders—the true believers and those who, for some reason, feel obliged to play the role—will point out that the worst possible version of the events outlined above has generally failed to materialize. Canada remains a sovereign nation despite continued musings to the contrary; the administration is shaking up leadership and rethinking enforcement tactics in Minneapolis; the United States military has not been ordered to invade Greenland, and the associated tariff threats on European allies have been called off; Jerome Powell is still a free man. Indeed, Trump’s brinksmanship has been mocked with the acronym TACO: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

 

But this brinksmanship is not cost-free, as the families of Renée Good and Alex Pretti can attest. Canada’s turn away from the United States and toward whatever opportunities present themselves—including a closer relationship with China—could very well be permanent. American leadership of NATO remains on paper, but it is a de facto dead letter, and the alliance itself may soon be, too. Countries such as Ukraine that once trusted the United States no longer believe Washington to be a credible friend; enemies such as Iran and Russia may still fear the United States but have learned that it is not always a credible enemy. American leadership of a market-oriented international economic order has been forfeited and may never be recovered. Far-flung allies such as Taiwan are starting to understand that if anything is going to save them from oppression, it is not going to be American fidelity—nuclear weapons might be a better bet.

 

***

 

We are aware that Dispatch readers have read and heard us repeat these points a thousand times in articles and on podcasts, and we are equally aware that a Dispatch editorial, while rare, is not going to be the “J’accuse!” that forces the powers that be to rethink where they are and what has brought them there. But we will repeat ourselves nonetheless: Donald Trump is uniquely unqualified for the office of the presidency, himself a man with no sense of integrity or administrative acumen, and one who is lazy, vain, ignorant, and vulnerable to flattery—all of which make him easy to manipulate for figures such as Stephen Miller, whose ethnonationalist obsessions and sophomoric Nietzschean posturing have dominated the administration’s agenda for months and who is emblematic of the types of advisers with whom the president has surrounded himself this second go-round.

 

But Trump is far from the only one at fault for the mess in which we find ourselves.

 

There is, of course, the Biden administration—and former President Joe Biden himself—whose own incompetence, disregard for the rule of law, and dishonesty with the American people did irreparable damage to the country and paved the way for Trump’s return to power. And when the history of our time is written, congressional leaders—particularly Republican congressional leaders—will be remembered as more important, and much more culpable, than it seems at this moment. Describing their careers as inaction would be too charitable; they have been enablers not only of the particular crimes of the Trump administration but of the more general aggrandizement of the presidency and the subordination of the entire legislative branch—the branch created by Article I of our Constitution to make laws and exercise oversight of federal agencies. They are, in a very real sense, in gross violation of their oaths of office, and so too are the representatives and senators of both parties who have contributed over the years to the reduction of Congress to its current miserable state. It was inevitable that the void left by Congress’ abandonment of its constitutional duties would be filled by the energies—and fantasies, and fundamental incompetence—of a man once accurately described by J.D. Vance as plainly unfit for the office to which he has twice been elected by the American people.

 

There are other aggravating factors as well, including the emergence of a digital culture that has degraded political journalism from an important check on those in power into clickbait fan service and conspiracy theory nonsense. Our two main political parties, which have been supplanted as financial actors by small-dollar donors driven by social media outrage, no longer serve their traditional function as gatekeepers, enforcers of standards, or negotiators of broad consensus and compromise. Vital institutions and activist groups—on both the right and the left—have fallen prey to audience capture and now serve purely partisan interests rather than the missions upon which they were founded. We must ultimately note, however, that while Trump did try to steal the 2020 election, he did not steal the 2024 election—he was put into the position he holds by the votes of the American people.

 

The catalog of the administration’s wrongdoings is so substantial as to feel endless—not impossible to keep track of, but not many people are in a position to dedicate their lives to the project. American citizens illegally detained by ICE agents. The gross corruption on the part of the president and his circle. Launching a war on Venezuela without congressional authorization, after carrying out a likely illegal campaign of extrajudicial massacres at sea. Refusing for months to enforce the law banning TikTok. The pace of outrages and abuses is part of the White House’s strategy—you’ll have forgotten about Trump’s promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day in office by the time you’ve journeyed through Minneapolis and Caracas and Tehran and Nuuk.

 

Here we will take the unusual step of directly addressing Sen. John Thune, the majority leader in the Senate, who, we believe, understands the difference between merely being the Senate majority leader and acting like the Senate majority leader. Whatever his admirable personal qualities, Thune has thus far failed to perform the role he is supposed to play in our constitutional order. If Trump is to be constrained—and the need only grows more dire by the day—it is Congress that will constrain him. Senate Republicans, having a majority that is at the moment expected to survive the midterms, have a special role to play in that. And Thune, as their leader, has an opportunity to begin charting the long path toward the kind of politics and governance that so many elected Republicans privately wish for when the cameras are off.

 

And so we ask Sen. Thune: If you cannot act in the face of this—all this—why do you choose to remain in the Senate at all? Now 250 years into this great experiment in self-government, we firmly believe there is still a much greater appetite for sanity, civility, and decency in this country than social media and cable news would indicate. But even if we’re wrong, we return to The Dispatch’s founding document: “Failure in a good cause is better than triumph in a bad one.”

 

Dante put his cowards and opportunists—those who refused to take a stand in life—in the vestibule of his inferno: It isn’t Hell proper, but you can see the rest of the underworld from there. The cowards and opportunists in the United States in 2026 stand at a precipice, too, and have brought our country to the verge of something awful and unspeakable. We got here one step at a time—let us hope that we remember the way back.

The Casualties of Political Theater

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

In the weeks leading up to the shooting of Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis, observers might have assumed that the loudest supporters and opponents of Donald Trump’s deportation regime were at odds. On matters of principle, perhaps, they were and remain in conflict. But when it came to their respective tactics, these two factions were not working at cross-purposes.

 

The second Trump administration took office operating under the (correct) assumption that Joe Biden’s rhetorical openness to the flight of immigrants north to the U.S. border contributed to the American immigration crisis as much as did his permissive policies. They resolved to execute a campaign of “shock and awe” in response, not only to deport unlawful migrants but to deter their would-be imitators from making the trip.

 

To that end, administration principals such as Stephen Miller implemented daily deportation quotas (to the tune of 3,000), zeroed in on deportation targets with additional criminal complaints as well as workers in sectors like hospitality and farm labor (until Trump put a stop to that), and executed “turn and burn” raids in America’s major metropolitan areas — high-profile shows of force that emphasized the show over the force.

 

These activities, the administration understood, were likely to catalyze a hyperactive response from their left-wing opponents — not that the Trump administration feared that prospect. A conflict with the left’s activist class would reinforce a contrast between Republican and Democratic governance, from which Trump and his allies benefited immensely in 2024.

 

The administration therefore deployed National Guard troops to American metros to subdue the “domestic terrorists” that had put those cities “under siege.” The president declared “war” on the nation’s urban centers. His subordinates castigated the “left-wing radicals,” “illegal criminals,” and “rioters” who stood athwart the execution of federal law. As House GOP press secretary Mike Marinella put it, “Democrats will always side with chaos, rioters, open borders and foreign criminals.” The Washington Post couldn’t help but observe that “Republicans see a midterm opportunity in the unrest.”

 

So, too, did Democrats and activists. Wired reporter Dell Cameron observed that “protest policing in major US cities increasingly took on the character of spectacle” last year, although he somehow missed the dramatic productions put on by demonstrators, agitators, and anti-law-enforcement vigilantes. Honestly, it’s been hard to miss. The often (literally) costumed and always provocative displays of defiance of law enforcement mask an even more irresponsible activist enterprise dedicated to placing well-meaning objectors between armed law enforcement officers and their apprehension targets. The activists blow whistles to disorient law enforcement. They antagonize and provoke with no apparent awareness that their actions could have dire consequences. And they’re egged on by the Democratic political class.

 

Before the consequences of his actions imposed some sobriety on him, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz casually described the White House’s law enforcement prerogatives as acts of “organized brutality against the people of Minnesota.” He invoked the Civil War, accused America’s public servants of acting as “Donald Trump’s modern-day gestapo,” and advised his citizens to continue to confront federal immigration officers and all but deputized them in a campaign to “bank evidence for future prosecution.” Oregon Governor Tina Kotek denounced the application of lethal force by federal agents who face an imminent threat to their lives. “They are hurting people, and they are destroying day by day what we hold dear,” she said of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Dozens of Democrats spared no concern for propriety when they boosted one activist teacher’s claim that federal law enforcement was abducting children and using them as “bait.” As Minnesota Senator Tina Smith contended, ICE tactics “can only be described as pure evil.”

 

All this high-strung rhetoric is designed to inflame passions. The whole point of the exercise is to goad their side’s most committed activists into subordinating their better judgment to the demands of a moral panic. The conflict these appeals to emotion is supposed to inspire has come to be seen as an instrument of political utility.

 

To some extent, they have it right. The images that flow from political combat in the streets serve everyone’s political purpose. To the left, they harken back to an age when the powerful and the police colluded to bludgeon youthful idealists into compliance — a time when the activist set vaguely recalls that the left were the good guys. For the right and law enforcement’s supporters, lawless rabble in the streets represents everything they oppose. That riotous collection of malcontents has designs on them as much as they do the police. Law enforcement is the last line of defense. Therefore they deserve our support, as does the administration that has their backs.

 

These calculations make some elementary sense, even if they would make a casualty of civic courtesy in the process. It was likely foreordained, however, that national comity would not be the only casualty of this profoundly irresponsible pageant. All actors in this drama now seem to be reluctantly and belatedly coming to their senses, but that is likely a temporary reprieve. The show must go on.

Never Fight Alone

By William H. McRaven

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

In 2006, I helped establish the NATO Special Operations Forces Command in Mons, Belgium. It included commandos from more than 19 nations. Over the course of the next two years, we trained and exercised together, drank together, and spent family time together. In doing so, we learned that our common values were much more important than our national differences. We also developed a bond that only men preparing for combat can appreciate.

 

By 2008, I was back fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, I was blessed to have the British Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS) serving alongside my Rangers, SEALs, and Delta Force operators. The Brits took on one of the toughest missions in our counterterrorism fight: the suicide-bomber network operating in Baghdad. Their work unquestionably saved the lives of American soldiers and our allies. And they paid a high price for standing alongside us. In 2005, British special military units lost 10 personnel when one of their C-130s was shot down outside the city. We mourned their loss as if they were our own.

 

In Afghanistan, NATO special-operations soldiers fought with tremendous courage and unwavering loyalty to their American counterparts. That commitment did not come without a cost, either. I stood on the tarmac in Bagram and Kandahar many times paying my final respects to soldiers from the U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, and Germany. Never have I seen such an outpouring of respect and admiration for their contribution to the fight. I also mourned the loss of the first Romanian soldier to have died in combat since World War II—just one of the 27 who fell in Afghanistan.

 

Many other nations contributed to the NATO mission and lost young men and women because we asked them for their help. We asked them for their help, and most didn’t hesitate. They understood the value of our alliance. They understood the power of being united in a common cause. They believed in NATO and they believed in the United States.

 

Anyone who would denigrate the service of our NATO allies clearly never spent a day in uniform. These NATO soldiers were as courageous, as heroic, as patriotic, and as loyal as any soldier I ever served with. I, for one, am forever grateful for their service and their sacrifice.

 

Winston Churchill once said that “there is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” If we continue to show disdain for our allies, if we fail to appreciate their contribution to our national security and greater global stability, we may find ourselves fighting alone someday. And trust me, war is never a contest you want to fight alone.

Worse Than Lying

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

The killing of Alex Pretti was unjust and unjustified. While protesting—aka, “observing” or “interfering with”—deportation operations, the VA hospital ICU nurse came to the aid of two protesters, one of whom had been slammed to the ground by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent. With a phone in one hand, Pretti used the other hand, in vain, to protect his eyes while being pepper-sprayed. Knocked to the ground, Pretti was repeatedly smashed in the face with the spray can, pummeled by multiple agents, disarmed of his holstered legal firearm, and then shot nine or 10 times.

 

Note the sequence. He was disarmed, and then he was shot.

 

That’s why the killing is undeniably unjust and unjustified. Unjust because Pretti didn’t deserve to die: Even if he’d been fully “obstructing” federal agents, death is not a just price for that. But he wasn’t obstructing an agent from deporting an illegal immigrant. He was obstructing an agent from further assaulting a woman in the street.

 

The killing was unjustified because a gang of agents didn’t need to shoot Pretti after they disarmed him. If you want to argue that merely bringing a gun to any protest justifies being shot by law enforcement, even after being disarmed, you’re going to sound as politically dumb, hypocritical, or authoritarian as a whole bunch of administration officials and GOP defenders undeniably did over the weekend.

 

I keep using that word—“undeniable.” Sadly, it really doesn’t mean what it used to mean. “Undeniable” means something that is so obviously and clearly true that no one can refute or dispute it. With this administration, truth ain’t got nothing to do with anything.  

 

In the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s killing, members of the Trump administration took to TV and social media to describe Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.” Gregory Bovino, the CBP commander on the ground in Minneapolis, said “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” (Bovino has since been removed from his post.) Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed the same talking points. Pretti’s motive, she claimed,  was “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement” because he was a “domestic terrorist.” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller asserted that Pretti was an “assassin” who tried to “murder federal agents.”

 

The administration is making all of this up. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are lying. They just don’t care what the truth is.

 

In his seminal book On Bulls— (the actual title isn’t censored), philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt argues that lying implies a certain respect for, and knowledge of, the truth. “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bulls— requires no such conviction.” What this administration does is worse than lying because they don’t care whether something is true or false, only whether it will be believed.

 

The Trump White House is a bulls— distribution hub, that connects via tubes, canals, and sluices across the media landscape. Like some vast Rube Goldberg contraption, the guy on the giant hamster wheel powering the whole thing is a president who spent his life saying whatever he needed to say at any given moment to make a deal, get out of trouble, whatever. Raised on “the power of positive thinking” and the Prosperity Gospel, Donald J. Trump has always believed he could conjure the reality he wants through sheer will and a relentless repetition of what he wants people to believe. He makes claims about what “they” are “saying” and recounts tales about what people have told him, some of which are surely made up while others are probably true but insincerely told, given that everyone knows the president believes all flattery he hears.

 

Trump sprayed bovine excrement throughout his first term, too. But he also had staff with hazmat suits and containment and cleanup gear at the ready.

 

Now, in his second term, everyone grabs a hose—but that’s not water in those tanks. Terminally online and obsessed with cable news narratives, this administration is full of people who have learned at the (kissed) feet of the master. The truth and lies are just different kinds of tools for the job that matters: constructing a narrative the president wants to hear, mostly about himself or for his benefit. That’s why the administration’s Sunday show spinners are so bad at the job. The mission isn’t primarily to reassure, never mind to inform, the public, but to reassure the president that the public is being properly told how great the president is. Because they know he’s watching.

 

Trump is reportedly “reviewing” the policies that left Pretti dead in the street. That’s good. But Trump’s motive isn’t to prevent more needless deaths, just the needless deaths that don’t make him look good.

It Wasn’t Democrats Who Persuaded Trump to Change Course

By Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

The statements from congressional Republicans after Saturday’s shooting of Alex Pretti were relatively mild. Lawmakers said that they were “deeply troubled” or “disturbed” by the second killing of an American citizen by federal immigration officers this month; most called for an investigation into Pretti’s death. But the statements kept coming, one after another, all through the weekend and into yesterday.

 

The reactions from across the GOP sent an unmistakable message in their volume, if not in their rhetoric, to Donald Trump: Enough. The defining characteristics of the Republican-controlled Congress during the president’s second term have been silence and acquiescence. That so many in his party felt compelled to speak up after Pretti’s killing was a sign that Republicans had finally lost patience with federal agents occupying a major American city—a deportation operation that has soured the public on one of Trump’s signature policies and sunk the GOP’s standing at the outset of a crucial midterm-election year.

 

Republican committee chairs in both the House and the Senate summoned top administration officials to public hearings—a rarity in the past year. From the right, the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights advocates criticized comments from senior law-enforcement officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, that blamed Pretti for carrying a firearm and said that people should not bring guns to public demonstrations. (Videos showed that officers disarmed Pretti before they fatally shot him.) Few Republican leaders rushed to defend the unnamed agent who’d killed Pretti, nor did they echo the rhetoric of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who referred to Pretti, an ICU nurse, as a “would-be assassin.” In at least one case, the lack of comment from a top Republican was significant: House Speaker Mike Johnson—ordinarily quick to pick up talking points from the president and his top aides—has said nothing about the shooting.

 

The harshest Republican condemnation came from one of the party’s candidates for governor of Minnesota, Chris Madel, who yesterday declared that he was quitting the race in part because of the federal deployment. “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” Madel said in his video announcement, “nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”

 

Watching all of this unfold was Trump, who already did not like what he saw. For the president, it was a rare winter weekend when he wasn’t in Palm Beach or at the golf course. He never left the White House. And he was glued to news coverage that showed little besides another horrific shooting in Minnesota. Videos of Pretti’s killing were inescapable on TV and social media, and the story broke through to nonpolitical media—drawing reactions from the likes of Charles Barkley and Bill Simmons—in ways that the fatal shooting of Renee Good on January 7 did not.

 

Read: Lethal force on a frozen street

 

Trump’s first move was to defend the federal officers carrying out the immigration operations in the moments before the deadly clash. He reposted a Department of Homeland Security–supplied photo of the gun Pretti had been carrying, before again making claims about fraud in Minnesota’s immigrant communities. But he otherwise remained publicly silent as more videos of the shooting cast doubt on the administration’s statements about what had happened.

 

Trump began asking aides and outside advisers if it had been an “okay” shooting, trying to figure out whether the agents had made the right decision to fire, a White House official and two allies close to the West Wing told us. His top aides, among them Miller—including in a post that was amplified by Vice President Vance—immediately blamed Pretti for instigating violence (as the administration blamed Good after her death) and suggested, without evidence, that Pretti had been a “domestic terrorist.”

 

But this time, fewer Republicans joined the chorus. And as the weekend wore on, more GOP lawmakers and conservative media voices began to call for an investigation into the shooting and to question the administration’s assertion that an armed Pretti had violently resisted agents. Senator John Curtis of Utah called out Noem by name, saying that he disagreed with her “premature” response to the shooting.

 

Trump grew concerned at the response, the White House official and one outside ally told us. He again on Sunday demanded more cooperation from local officials and blamed Democratic lawmakers for violence in Minnesota—but he noticeably did not defend the officers who’d shot Pretti, in either his posts or in a brief interview with The Wall Street Journal. The president, who has long enjoyed near-total fealty from Republicans, took note of the lawmakers calling for a probe or quietly suggesting that federal officials roll back operations in the Twin Cities. (He was glad that the lawmakers did not blame him personally for the administration’s response, one of the allies told us.)

 

Trump was particularly bothered by the NRA's strong reply to an assistant U.S. attorney in California appointed by the administration who said that if a person approaches law enforcement with a gun, there is a “high likelihood” that officers will be “legally justified in shooting you.” Trump has long prided himself on the support he receives from those he calls “my Second Amendment people,” and he has often been deferential to the gun lobby despite its waning influence.

 

When something becomes too controversial for Trump’s liking—or when the blowback becomes too fierce—he has in many cases a way to declare some sort of victory, even a far-fetched one, and then move on (as he did with Greenland last week). Aides wondered whether he was trying to do the same with Minneapolis. Yesterday, Trump appointed his designated “border czar,” Tom Homan, to head the federal operation in Minnesota. Although most Democrats are deeply skeptical of Homan, he has not been involved in the Twin Cities operations and has been more consistently careful with his language than Miller or Noem. (After Good’s killing, Homan said that he would reserve judgment on the matter until an investigation had concluded.) Trump later claimed, after a phone call, that he and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are largely aligned in their goals for the federal operation—and even offered some faint praise for the governor, who is under investigation by the Department of Justice for allegedly impeding the operation of immigration agents.

 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said yesterday that if local officials increased their cooperation with the federal government, Border Patrol agents would “no longer be needed to support ICE on the ground in Minnesota.” The administration decided to pull some federal agents out of Minnesota, aides said, but did not suggest a sweeping overhaul to the mission in the state or to Trump’s broader immigration agenda.

 

Trump’s unease, along with pushback from Republicans, grew by the hour and forced a major change: As The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff first reported, the administration yesterday ousted Gregory Bovino from his role as the Border Patrol’s “commander at large” and removed him from Minnesota, where he had become the public face of the federal operation. Many in Trump’s orbit saw Bovino as an easy scapegoat; he’d claimed, without evidence, that Pretti had planned to attack federal agents. (His choice of coat and interactions with Minnesotans in social-media posts had also generated an uproar.) Despite this, a senior administration official insisted that Bovino’s transfer had been in the works before the announcement of Homan’s new role. Not all of Trump’s allies were happy with the change in Minneapolis. “You can’t sugarcoat this,” the Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his podcast. “It wasn’t just a blink. It was a crater.”

 

Last night, the president met for two hours in the Oval Office with Noem and one of her top advisers, the former Trump-campaign chief Corey Lewandowski, but the senior official made clear to us that no additional leadership changes are imminent. Leavitt, in her briefing, also said that Trump continues to have confidence in Noem. For the moment, she remains at her job.

Criticize Trump, but Don’t Erase the Holocaust to Do So

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

American political rhetoric often abounds with ill-advised allusions to Nazi Germany. Fascism is forever descending on America, etc., etc. Donald Trump’s tenure in Oval Office has been marked by a conspicuous flowering of efforts to metaphorically couple his policies with those preferred, if not pursued, by Adolf Hitler. The last 72 hours have, however, given way to an especially toxic bloom of such analogies.

 

For example, aerial images of deportation targets temporarily housed at a Texas detention facility ahead of their hearings and removal orders led many to compare the facility to a Nazi “concentration camp.” And this sort of talk is not exclusive among the excitable activists for whom hyperbole is currency in their competition for attention. “We grew up reading the story of Anne Frank,” the impossibly irresponsible Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said over the weekend. “Somebody is gonna write one regarding Minnesota.”

 

The anxious sort are equally casual in declaring the agents of federal law enforcement an “American Gestapo.” If they’re not functionally equivalent to the brownshirts, those officers of the law are accused of subordinating their allegiance to the Constitution and acting as “a private military for Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.” When this is all over, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last advised, “We will need an American Nuremberg.”

 

This is, if not Holocaust denial, at least a minimization of the unique crimes attributable solely to the Nazi regime.

 

The concentration camps were not populated by lawful detainees awaiting their day in court. There were no judges to whom they might appeal, no defense attorneys to argue their plight, and their fate was not deportation but liquidation. The Gestapo, like all of Hitler’s agents, swore their loyalty to the man. They were exempted from the oversight of the regime’s thoroughly compromised courts, and they had a mandate to terrorize and intimidate the population. Finally, even a cursory familiarity with the crimes litigated in excruciating detail at Nuremberg should preclude any comparison between a lawfully elected American presidential administration and the Nazi regime, which (by 1934, at least, contrary to popular mythology) was an illegitimate and unconstitutional junta.

 

As I wrote earlier today, these rhetorical flourishes are designed to shock and radicalize. It is an ill-fated political project that seems so dependent on appeals to emotion and the discouragement of reason and prudence. But perhaps the time for thinking is over.

Thin ICE

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

In the span of 12 hours yesterday, the president yanked control of immigration operations in Minneapolis away from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, chatted productively with Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Minneapolis’ Democratic mayor about improving cooperation, and sent boorish Border Patrol goblin Greg Bovino into early retirement.

 

To all appearances, Donald Trump … de-escalated. It was shocking and unsurprising, a familiar paradox with this administration.

 

As a matter of conventional politics, de-escalation was a no-brainer. Something had to give in Minneapolis because the public backlash to ICE’s tactics, driven by two U.S. citizens being shot dead on camera, has turned Trump’s best issue into an albatross. A recent Associated Press poll placed his approval rating on immigration (38-61) lower than his overall job approval. Another survey found nearly 2 in 3 independents now view ICE unfavorably, while a separate New York Times poll saw 61 percent say that the agency’s tactics have gone too far. The White House’s own internal numbers reportedly indicate that 58 percent of undecided voters believe the president is “too focused” on deporting illegal immigrants.

 

All four surveys were conducted before Alex Pretti was killed Saturday. The internal poll was conducted before Renee Good was killed earlier this month. Imagine what the next round of data will look like.

 

Even friendly voices have begun nudging the president to shake things up. Yesterday Sean Hannity told his radio audience that raiding Home Depot to round up nonviolent illegals is a bad look. (If you think that’s out of character, remember how Hannity reacted to Mitt Romney getting trounced by Hispanics in the 2012 election.) A handful of congressional Republicans have lobbied Trump to dial things down as well, although the cowardly majority are following their usual M.O. of lying low and hoping for the best. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who’d gone to bat previously for the president and his immigration goon squad, felt moved to issue a statement this morning calling for Noem’s head to roll.

 

And perhaps it will. Trump met with her for two hours Tuesday evening after spending the last several weeks hearing from allies about cutting her loose. Stay tuned.

 

He was shedding popular support over his approach in Minneapolis, so, reasonably enough, he’s changing that approach. That’s how things are supposed to work in America. Given the incentives created by conventional democratic politics, there’s nothing the least bit surprising about it.

 

But given the incentives created by unconventional anti-democratic Trumpist politics? It’s arguably the most shocking development of his second term, and there have been a lot of shocking developments in his second term.

 

Why did the right’s ultimate “fighter” retreat?

 

The ‘Flight 93’ crackdown.

 

A glib answer to that question might be, “Why wouldn’t he retreat? Trump doesn’t care about the substance of most of his policies. Certainly, he doesn’t care as much as he cares about being popular.”

 

Sure, but this isn’t any ol’ policy, like abortion or Obamacare subsidies. This is immigration, the bête noire of right-wing nationalism. And while the president isn’t above wobbling on aspects of that issue either, the dynamic in Minneapolis seemed lab-designed to bring out his worst escalatory impulses. Locals turning out en masse in a Democratic city to harass ICE agents wasn’t merely an “immigration” issue, it was a basic test of wills to see whether an authoritarian strongman would allow popular resistance to deter him from ridding the country of undesirables.

 

I assumed Trump would consider it his highest priority to pass that test, by any means necessary. I think his fans did too.

 

Shortly before yesterday’s climbdown, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York framed the stakes of the standoff as nothing less than a gut check on whether America has “the resolve” to deport illegal immigrants. Manly man podcaster Matt Walsh went further, as he tends to do: “Any resolution to the Minnesota situation that does not include mass arrests of the leftist agitators and mass deportations of the illegals will be a total failure for the Trump Administration and only guarantee more and worse chaos in the future.” For MAGA, immigration had become a secondary issue in Minneapolis; the main issue was whether the Trump White House understood “what time it is” and was willing to act accordingly.

 

That’s why the fact that Minnesota has a smaller percentage of illegal immigrants than America as a whole, and a far smaller percentage than states like Texas and Florida, hasn’t bothered the right throughout this ordeal. This operation isn’t about finding and detaining the maximum number of illegals. It’s about asserting postliberal dominance over a liberal stronghold.

 

All right-wing defenses of ICE rest on the fallacy that immigration law simply cannot be enforced effectively unless the agency behaves precisely as brutally and lawlessly as it believes it needs to (i.e., as it wants to). Baked into that fallacy is the belief that the sort of citywide leftist backlash we’ve seen in Minneapolis would have happened no matter how ICE behaved even though no such mega-backlashes occurred during Trump’s far less brutal first term. The protesters, not the tactics, must be to blame for the crisis—and so the protesters, not the tactics, must be made to yield.

 

All of this is downstream of the right’s poisonous conviction that modern America faces an existential struggle so dire that conventional constitutional liberalism is unequal to the task of solving it. Only ruthless norm-breaking stands a chance. Michael Anton’s loathsome 2016 essay about the “Flight 93” election is the ur-text for that form of fascist catastrophism; 10 years later, virtually every problem that Trump and his movement face is reflexively transformed into an “emergency” that conveniently requires the White House and its goons to enjoy total impunity in how they respond to it.

 

That’s what I assumed Minneapolis would be—the “Flight 93” crackdown, the proving ground for postliberals to show how far they must and will go to rid America of foreigners and of citizens who believe there are moral limits to how order should be kept. I also assumed Trump was game for it: Remember, the last time he faced major protests, he was allegedly prepared to shoot protesters. The sane people around him at the time who stopped him are long gone now.

 

But here he is, de-escalating anyway.

 

De-escalation is surprising in another way. From the start, the president and his henchmen have treated his victory in 2024 as a comprehensive mandate to do anything they like. Polls routinely show that most Americans dislike his tariffs, for instance, yet Trump is always quick to justify them by noting that he campaigned on the issue. We “signed up” for the tariffs when we reelected him, you see. By the same token, we might reason, Americans “signed up” for a quasi-military occupation of Democratic cities by masked goons in the name of immigration enforcement. (A Fox News guest said so explicitly a few days ago.) Nothing was more predictable than that he’d behave ruthlessly in a second term toward illegals and their leftist defenders, and America gave him a second term anyway. Why shouldn’t he carry out that “mandate” in Minneapolis?

 

To put it another way, if it’s true that Americans elected fascists in 2024 to enforce borders because liberals were unwilling to do so, by what logic should fascists refrain from acting like fascists in doing the job voters hired them to do? Yet Trump does now seem more inclined to refrain from it in Minnesota going forward. Huh.

 

Beyond all of that, de-escalation is wildly out of character for an administration that abhors contrition in principle. Trump 2.0 has a “no scalps policy,” Steve Bannon told Semafor last year, by which he meant that it would rather keep unfit officials in positions of influence than validate the opposition’s criticism of those officials by firing them. Usually, in fact, the more spiteful a Trump deputy is toward the left, the safer he is from being dumped. That alone probably explains why Pete Hegseth still has a job.

 

Yet here we are, suddenly watching the president serve up Bovino’s scalp on a silver platter and maybe preparing to serve Noem’s next. Apart from Stephen Miller, no one in the administration has been more antagonistic toward critics of the administration’s immigration policies than those two have. If being a malevolent authoritarian troll no longer guarantees job security, no one in the administration is safe. Watch your back, Pete!

 

All things considered, it’s deeply strange under these circumstances that Trump would retreat. But maybe he took a hard look at how things are about to play out in Congress and concluded, to borrow a phrase, that he didn’t have the cards.

 

The ICE shutdown.

 

Tell me if this sounds familiar. A government shutdown is imminent, Democrats appear gung ho to pull the trigger, and there’s every reason to believe the public will side with them decisively in the standoff that follows.

 

That was the same situation Trump and Republicans faced last fall. Chuck Schumer and his caucus wanted to draw the public’s attention to the fact that federal subsidies for Obamacare consumers were about to expire and gambled that shutting down the government to protest it would do that. It did: Voters ended up blaming Republicans for the crisis and Democratic candidates, running on “affordability,” cleaned up in November’s elections. The president was so shaken by that result that he acknowledged publicly that the shutdown had hurt his party.

 

Now he’s staring at a sequel. Except this time voters are already angry about the issue that Democrats are zeroing in on and already favor Democrats’ position on that issue lopsidedly.

 

Before Alex Pretti was killed on Saturday, Senate Democrats were poised to grudgingly support a package of six agency funding bills that were recently approved by the House. One of those agencies is DHS. Schumer’s members didn’t want to rubber-stamp more money for Homeland Security in this political climate, but they also didn’t want to cause another shutdown so soon after the last, so they prepared to bite the bullet—until Pretti was shot, which made the prospect of supporting the DHS bill as-is unthinkable.

 

Democrats now won’t let any new money for the agency through until Republicans agree to include certain as-yet-unspecified reforms to how DHS enforces immigration law. That means the entire package will be filibustered, triggering a shutdown this weekend.

 

“Can’t the Senate split the DHS bill off from the other five, pass those five, and then have a mini-shutdown over DHS funding?” you might ask. It can, but the House would need to re-pass that five-bill package, and it’s not scheduled to be back in session until next week, after the shutdown would begin. And that’s the easy part: According to Punchbowl News, a new DHS bill written to incorporate Democratic reforms to ICE will be the heaviest of lifts in the House.

 

Here’s the concern gripping the top levels of the Trump administration—the House simply can’t pass another DHS funding bill under any circumstances.

 

Even if Trump were to cut a deal with Democrats that can get through the Senate, House Republicans believe they can’t round up 218 votes to pass a rule to get it on the House floor. Or alternatively, find 290 lawmakers willing to pass it under suspension of the rules. Republicans just don’t believe there’s a coalition in the House that can pass another DHS bill.

 

That’s why Trump has been focused on “de-escalatory measures,” as one administration official told us, a first step toward placating Democrats.

 

Imagine how all of this might have played out if the White House had stuck with the status quo in Minneapolis. The government would have shut down, and most voters would have backed Democrats’ demand for ICE reforms. Then, even if the White House capitulated and made a deal with Schumer, a critical mass of House Republicans might have blocked the Trump-approved compromise bill for fear of seeming “soft” on immigration to hardline primary voters back home. The GOP could have ended up being blamed by the public twice over, first for the carnage ICE had unleashed and was continuing to unleash and then again for obstructing reforms to limit that carnage.

 

Meanwhile, as the standoff played out, Republicans would be running the risk of new carnage landing in the news that would turn the public further against them.

 

Immigration, already a bleeding wound for the president and his party, was (and still is) poised to create a hemorrhage as the midterms approach. And so yesterday’s de-escalation looks like Trump’s attempt at triage: By handing Democrats Bovino’s scalp and handing Noem's duties in Minneapolis to Tom Homan, he’s offering them DHS “reforms” preemptively in hopes that they’ll change their minds and help pass the six-bill Senate funding package after all, sparing House Republicans from a political nightmare.

 

They won’t, of course. Given how flamboyantly the White House has torched its own credibility in smearing Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats can’t accept any cross-my-heart promises from Trump and ICE that they’ll behave more professionally going forward. Schumer will need to insist that certain reforms be given the force of law—no more masks for agents, body cameras worn at all times, higher recruiting and training standards for new hires, state police being looped in on investigations into the use of force, an end to home invasions without a judicial warrant. (I thought the Fourth Amendment had already taken care of that, but I’ve always been a bad lawyer.)

 

Even if Democrats are destined to play hardball, though, the fact that Trump has now taken a conciliatory posture in Minneapolis might help Republicans in the messaging war over the shutdown to come. “We were already retreating and Democrats insisted on defunding the government anyway,” the White House will say. “Shouldn’t they, not we, be blamed for this standoff?”

 

It might help. It can’t hurt.

 

The next crackdown.

 

Just as I’m skeptical that the White House has truly lost its appetite for Greenland, I’m skeptical that it’s done with staging heavy-handed immigration enforcement pageants in blue cities.

 

Authoritarian chuds like Walsh will insist that it try again. Many MAGA loyalists will dutifully applaud if the president withdraws entirely from Minneapolis, pronouncing “mission accomplished” because that’s the sort of “emperor’s new clothes” prostration this movement requires, but retreat will stick in the craw of hardcore postliberals. Every time leftists come out to protest in numbers henceforth, the worst elements of the right will insist that this wouldn’t be happening if the president had handled the demonstrations in Minnesota Tehran-style.

 

And it will stick in Trump’s craw that his own supporters are needling him for being weak. He resents the “TACO” thing, remember; it’ll bug him even more when it has to do not with tariffs but with his basic authoritarian fortitude in imposing order on “the enemy.”

 

So he’ll try something like Minneapolis again—especially if, God forbid, someone kills an immigration officer. That’s the sort of political posture in which the president might at last feel comfortable invoking the Insurrection Act, as he threatened to do a few weeks ago. It’s hard to get the public excited to crush demonstrations when the cops who are confronting those demonstrators are committing the worst violence. If and when that changes, public attitudes will change too.

 

Frankly, we may have reached the point where the president can’t effectively restrain ICE even if, for political reasons, he wants to. He and Stephen Miller built a force that’s behaving in Minneapolis exactly the way it was designed to behave, in service to a “deport ’em all” agenda that Trump ran and won on. Now that it’s been remade in Miller’s image, the culture of the agency points remorselessly toward further abuse: Officers are reportedly rewarded for the number of arrests they make, not the number of arrestees who are ultimately deported, which incentivizes them to go on conducting the sort of disruptive, haphazard, antagonistic mega-dragnets that have so roiled Minnesotans.

 

To change that culture the White House would need to overhaul ICE from top to bottom, which would amount to repudiating the ethos of postliberalism: Actually, maximum ruthlessness isn’t the secret ingredient for better government. It will not happen. Not willingly, anyway.

 

So maybe the president should regard the coming shutdown less as a crisis and more as an opportunity. If he’s worried about spending his last three years in power having to put out fires started by ICE, he should yield to Schumer’s demands for statutory reforms to bring the agency to heel. “I didn’t want to do it,” the president could tell his fans afterward, “but I had to in order to make sure funding for our wonderful Homeland Security officers continues.” You know him, always looking out for the best interests of others.

How the U.S. Navy Can Right the Ship

By Seth Cropsey

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

The capture of Nicolás Maduro — and the accompanying admirable demonstration of advanced U.S. military proficiency — stand in contrast to President Trump’s delayed action against Iran: With major U.S. naval forces committed elsewhere, U.S. options are constrained. Yet just as the Navy needs more ships, not fewer, the service plans to retire the USS Nimitz. The 50-year-old carrier’s final deployment included stints in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East, providing the U.S. with flexibility and deterrence credibility against Iran during its war with Israel this summer.

 

Pulling a key warship from the fleet just as the U.S. needs even more combat power indicates that the Navy is already losing a war of attrition — not against an enemy, but against its own bureaucracy. The Navy offered no explanation for why USS Nimitz — like the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise — could not have remained in service for one year past its scheduled date of retirement. Righting the ship demands not only the significantly larger defense budget Trump has floated, but a serious cultural change in the service that puts combat readiness back at its core.

 

The recent termination of the Constellation-class frigate, in a decades-long cycle of failed designs and shifting requirements, is a blunder that immediately preceded the USS Nimitz’s untimely inactivation. An abundance of operational, acquisition, and leadership mistakes further underscores the point. In the past year, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman strike group lost two aircraft overboard and collided with a merchant vessel. Insufficient training, manning, and communications were responsible, according to the official investigation, the same causes that were identified in the 2017 collisions of two U.S. destroyers with merchant ships in Asian waters.

 

These operational debacles mirror the needlessly convoluted process of designing and building ships. The Navy’s late November cancellation of its Constellation-class frigate is but one of several expensive, delayed, and finally aborted combatant-ship construction programs. More importantly, the mistakes indicate a crisis within the service most critical to deter and defeat China in Asia’s waters. If the Trump administration is serious about deterrence, the Navy requires a shot in the arm, starting with both a prolonged shipbuilding budget boost and a real strategy.

 

China’s combat fleet currently exceeds the United States’ by 83 ships: 370 People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) vessels to 287 for the U.S. Navy. The PLAN possesses a coherent, clear strategy. It combines thousands of long-range missiles, land-based naval aviation, surface combatants and submarines, dual-purpose merchant and fishing ships, cyberwarfare, and satellite reconnaissance to keep U.S. naval forces out of a thousand-mile bubble extending from China’s coast. Beyond that range, the U.S. struggles to launch operations in the Western Pacific. American naval planners recognized this as far back as the 2010s, when the Navy released its Air-Sea Battle operational concept. But there is little evidence that they have any idea how to surmount today’s challenge.

 

Last year, President Trump proposed the creation of a White House shipbuilding office and said that the U.S. must again make ships “very fast and very soon.” Nearly a year into his second administration, the U.S. has made little progress toward this goal. Although the administration’s requested increase of seven surface ships and submarines, alongside a dozen needed support vessels, is a positive step, most of these will not be completed for years. China built 30 surface combatants, of which half were large ships — including cruisers, destroyers, and an aircraft carrier — in 2023 alone.

 

While the U.S. Navy has embraced the idea of fielding a large fleet of small crewed and uncrewed ships to frustrate an enemy’s targeting, the service gives off mixed signals about resourcing and executing this strategy. It is phasing out the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a design conceived in the late 1990s, because its combatant abilities are insufficient, while its costs and delays are excessive.

 

Therefore, the Navy still wanted a smaller warship. It initiated another program, the FFG(X), in 2017, deciding on the European-designed FREMM-class hull in 2020. Redesignated the Constellation-class frigate program, costs and delays owing wholly to the Navy’s changing requirements during the ship’s construction upended the program. Navy Secretary John Phelan announced in late November that the Navy would terminate the program after building two ships of the 25 initially planned. Hence the Constellation blunder replaced the LCS blunder, leaving the Navy no closer to a fleet of agile surface combatants.

 

Adding to the confusion is the idea of a very large cruiser — or “battleship,” as Trump terms it — with far greater displacement than the replacement for current cruisers, which, because of their age, are expensive to maintain. This concept has operational merit: A large warship of some 30,000-plus tons can carry more weapons, including hypersonic missiles, and operate with smaller warships to target Chinese vessels from afar. But the concept ignores industrial realities. The Navy has only a handful of yards that could build such warships, all of which are booked with carriers, large amphibious ships, and other major combatants. Building a new yard would take years at best. Designing a new combatant of this size and sophistication will take no less than six years before construction can begin.

 

Putting aside industrial constraints, it is entirely unclear what a mixture of many small and several very large naval combatants might look like operationally. The Chief of Naval Operations’ staff for force development (N7) has been studying the question — very quietly. It is as silent as the Navy’s civilian and uniformed leaders about strategy and the mix of vessels to execute it.

 

The Pentagon has sought to address cost overruns, delays, and bureaucratic non-accountability by creating new positions that, for example, place accountability for building submarines in the hands of a single executive — a reasonable idea, except for the fact that responsibility already rests in the persons of the Navy secretary and the chief of naval operations. Would a two-star flag officer or civilian equivalent thus negate or oppose the authority of current military service leadership? This is a prescription for bewilderment, not accountability.

 

But it points to the larger problem, and it is particularly acute for the Navy because of its uncertain primacy in a conflict with China, which geography dictates must be chiefly naval. The U.S. Navy is invisible to the country it defends today. It has no clear strategy. It cannot explain what it is doing. Its secretary and undersecretary have been at odds with each other. There is no articulated connection between what the Navy wants to buy and how its purchases will defeat potential foes. A hard course correction is needed.

 

The Navy must articulate a maritime strategy that is an integral part of the United States’ national security strategy, and the resulting document must guide the composition of the nation’s fleet. Congress should insist on delivery of the strategy before the end of 2026. Sailors should leave their staff jobs and desk exercises to return to training at sea and in the air. Further, no changes should be made to ships under construction unless the secretary of the Navy approves them. Untangling the nest of overlapping authorities that superintend the processes between a ship’s conception and its commissioning with the appointment of a two-star officer will exacerbate, not solve, problems. The Navy must retake control of its procurement, including executive line authority and accountability, and the ability to counter bureaucratic impediments.

 

Finally, the next National Defense Authorization Act must include a major shot in the arm for shipbuilding. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Navy would need around $40 billion per year to resource its 2025 shipbuilding plan. Unless the Navy decides on a radically smaller fleet, this will be necessary for any naval recovery.

 

The Navy is this maritime nation’s sine qua non for preventing crises on the Eurasian landmass from reaching our hemisphere. The massive volume of our exports and imports that transit international waters is protected by the Navy. Protecting our economy and security is impossible without a strong, global U.S. naval force. The dysfunction into which the U.S. Navy has fallen since the Cold War’s end must be reversed.

Technical Error on Tuesday, Janaury 27th

C.A.A. with an apology that a technical error kept yesterday's articles from being published. The error has now been remedied and the articles are now online. 

Tread on Me

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, January 26, 2026

 

A tricky assignment today. I need to write about the latest fatal shooting of an American citizen in Minneapolis by immigration agents—except that I already wrote about it the day before it happened.

 

We’ll come back to that.

 

Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old registered nurse who worked at a local VA hospital. Like many people in his city, he was out in the streets Saturday in subzero temperatures protesting the administration's heavy-handed crackdown on immigrants and recording agents on his smartphone. His death at the hands of those agents would be captured on video recorded by others, the second time this month that immigration officers have killed a local in full view of cameras.

 

Pretti had the misfortune to be standing near a protester when she was shoved to the ground by an officer and possessed with the virtuous impulse to try to help her up as Border Patrol agents closed in. He was pepper-sprayed at least twice for his trouble, then dragged down to the asphalt as officers tried to force him into a prone position. Amid the struggle, one agent in a gray jacket noticed that he had a pistol holstered on his belt and grabbed it to disarm him.

 

A second or so later, a different agent began shooting into Pretti’s back. When it was over, no fewer than 10 shots had been fired, according to the New York Times. An edited version of an image of the victim on his knees and facing away from his masked killer as the latter aims, point-blank, is destined for infamy as a symbol of this era.

 

The most plausible explanation I’ve seen of what happened is as follows. One of the officers yelled “gun” to alert the others to Pretti’s holstered pistol; as an agent in a gray jacket removed the pistol from the scene, it may have misfired. (The weapon, a Sig Sauer P320, has enough of a reputation for doing so that the manufacturer created a webpage to address the subject.) The the agent (or agents) who fired might have heard the word “gun,” then heard the misfire, and panicked in the mistaken belief that Pretti himself had a weapon in hand and was firing at the agents.

 

All available footage indicates that the victim never touched his gun before or during the confrontation. The chief of the Minneapolis police department confirmed afterward that he was licensed to carry. After the shooting, our war-crimes-aficionado defense secretary weighed in glibly on the gruesome incident by posting three rules for avoiding ICE: Don’t be here illegally, don’t attack ICE officers, and obey federal and state laws. But Pretti followed all three—and wound up dead anyway.

 

There are a few points to be made here, some familiar and others not.

 

Impunity, not credibility.

 

My Friday newsletter was about the administration’s willingness to lie even in cases where the truth is well established and supported with extensive visual evidence. From smearing Renee Good as a domestic terrorist to distorting a photo of a protester to make it look like she was weeping during her arrest, its deceit seems designed not so much to mislead Americans as to signal its own sense of impunity in behaving sadistically toward its enemies.

 

“We will do what we like, and you will have no choice but to tolerate it” is how I described the White House’s ethos in that column. It’s dispensing with any pretense of credibility in order to show that it no longer feels bound by traditional political norms, even involving acts of lethal state violence—and that there’s nothing we, its humble subjects, can do to stop it.

 

About 16 hours after that newsletter was published, Border Patrol agents shot Alex Pretti dead and the administration instantly began telling obvious, grotesque lies about him. When I said earlier that I wrote about the shooting the day before it happened, that’s what I meant.

 

“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its first statement on the shooting. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino repeated that smear in a press conference. So did DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who spoke after 5 p.m. on the East Coast on Saturday, when footage of Pretti’s death taken from multiple angles was widely available. Everyone knew the administration was lying, and it lied anyway.

 

Ever eager to escalate, Stephen Miller went as far as to dub the victim a “domestic terrorist” who had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Why Pretti never unholstered his weapon or tried to ambush the agents given his supposedly homicidal tendencies is unclear.

 

As in the Good case, the administration’s sense of impunity also extended to a cover-up on the agents’ behalf. More than 48 hours later, we still don’t know the name of Pretti’s shooter or the other officers involved. According to Bovino, they were quickly whisked out of state and, by extension, out of reach of Minnesota law enforcement. When local and later state cops arrived on scene to investigate Pretti’s death, they were “blocked” by federal agents—despite having obtained a search warrant.

 

Even the attire the agents were wearing broadcast a sense of impunity. I’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s worse that they were dressed in jeans and hoodies, like a gang, than it would have been if they were done up à la Bovino in fascist quasi-military chic. Both are ominous in different ways—brown shirts versus black shirts, essentially—but the irregularity of immigration officers’ current “uniforms” does seem to mirror the irregularity of their tactics. Combined with their masks, the observer is made to understand that while they’re technically agents of the state, they aren’t accountable to the same rules that other government officers are, even in their manner of dress. Proceed at your own risk.

 

At this point, only the most vampiric postliberal or pitiful partisan sucker will continue to believe anything this administration says, especially when it involves violence perpetrated by its own personnel. There is no doubt—zero—that the White House would have aggressively hidden the truth about Pretti’s death if bystanders hadn’t captured it. Just as there’s also no doubt that, despite the president’s claim that his team is “reviewing” the incident, none of the agents involved will serve time in prison. To punish them would mean that Trump’s left-wing critics were correct about his immigration tactics; the MAGA right would sooner see would sooner see many more Americans brutalized by ICE than admit that.

 

Who started it?

 

Pretti’s death is harder for Republicans to spin than Renee Good’s was. A motivated partisan and/or cop apologist could watch the video of Good attempting to drive away from ICE agents and pretend that she intended for a split second to mow down one of them in her car. The officer shot her in self-defense, you see.

 

At no point did Pretti behave aggressively with the Border Patrol, though, and so in his case blaming the victim is more difficult. Instead, the argument I saw repeatedly on social media this weekend imputed collective blame: Minnesota Democrats from Gov. Tim Walz on down incited locals to harass immigration officials, which naturally placed officers there on edge, which in turn led them to assume the worst about Good’s and Pretti’s intentions. If the left hadn’t been so insistent on confrontation, these tragedies never would have happened. They started it!

 

It’s nonsense on stilts.

 

By any measure, Trump and his henchmen instigated the situation in Minneapolis. They targeted the city not because it has a rampant problem with illegal immigration but because they wanted to stage a big, muscular culture-war pageant at the expense of local Somalis, to draw attention to the fraud scandal in which some are involved. (Most of that Somali population is here legally, by the way.) To prove that they meant business, they sent a preposterously huge number of immigration agents to conduct a crackdown, maximizing the operation’s visibility and its disruption to the city.

 

And instead of prioritizing the arrest of violent criminals, which everyone supports, they carried out the Miller-Noem strategy of detaining as many suspected illegals as possible, including ones who are welcome in the community. They rolled into Minneapolis less as a law enforcement agency and more as an occupying army, with Bovino as commanding general. And occupying armies tend to have a distinctly different mindset about the neighborhoods they patrol than police officers who live in those neighborhoods, with predictable results.

 

To make matters worse, the administration has done everything possible to show Minnesotans that it doesn’t expect its immigration officers to behave professionally and won’t punish them if they don’t. It lowered hiring standards for ICE, slashed training times, and tailored its recruitment strategy to appeal to chuds whom it knew would revel in the chance to abuse undesirables. “We haphazardly scaled up a poorly trained police force to storm into neighborhoods that voted against the president, where we antagonize the local population until someone resists arrest, and then we kill them” is how writer Derek Thompson summarized the White House’s M.O.

 

According to the Associated Press, when a crowd gathered at the scene of Pretti’s death and began shouting at the officers, one agent mocked them by replying, “Boo hoo.” We’re supposed to be surprised that Minneapolis residents are suspicious of this renegade goon squad and eager to jeer at them to leave their city?

 

To too many Republicans, the mere fact that immigration officers carry the imprimatur of law enforcement grants them a talismanic benefit of the doubt. Alex Pretti made Border Patrol agents uncomfortable by filming them—entirely legally—and distracted them from their duties, and so it doesn’t matter that they, not he, escalated the situation in every respect. He bears moral responsibility for his own death because he was passively antagonistic to men in badges, sound justification for lethal force in the postliberal mind if ever there was one.

 

The right believes, correctly, that immigration law should be enforced and also believes, incorrectly, that enforcement can and should occur only in the brutal, provocative manner in which it’s currently occurring. The fact that millions of illegal immigrants were deported under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, yes, the first Trump administration without the sort of backlash we’re seeing in Minneapolis evidently provides no insight into whether the tactics favored by the current White House are perhaps the reason for that backlash.

 

Trump the moderate?

 

You know we’re in a dark place culturally when Donald Trump sounds more circumspect about Alex Pretti’s death than his own deputies and many of his core voters.

 

It’s an old gripe among conservatives that liberals are forever declaring the current leader of the GOP to be the worst person ever, only to develop strange new respect for him after he makes way for a new GOP leader and that person is declared the worst person ever. (Left unsaid among the gripes is whether liberals might have a point about the right’s character gradually degrading.) I swear that I’ll never write a column about how much I miss the president after he’s gone, but I do feel obliged to note that Trump seems more chastened by Pretti’s shooting than some of the people around him.

 

His first post on the matter was predictable, blaming Democrats for inciting antagonism against agents, but the president was reportedly “frustrated” by operations in Minneapolis even before the shooting occurred because he feared the bad press was muddling his immigration message. (He’s right.) On Sunday, after Pretti was killed, Trump was asked twice by the Wall Street Journal whether the officer responsible had done the right thing and twice Trump refused to say yes. Unless I missed it, he hasn’t joined the Noem-Bovino-Miller parade in smearing Pretti as an assassin either.

 

On Monday morning, the president announced that border czar Tom Homan is taking over operations in Minnesota and will report directly to him. That had a whiff of de-escalation about it: Homan famously dislikes Noem and opposes her preference for mass deportation, preferring to prioritize criminals instead. If he’s taking over in the city, ICE and Customs and Border Protection might soon have a lighter footprint and an approach more targeted at the actual bad guys.

 

Then, a few hours ago, news broke that Bovino will be leaving Minnesota imminently. The whiff has become a distinct aroma.

 

I won’t insult your intelligence by speculating that the president felt terribly about Pretti’s death, but I can absolutely believe that he feels terribly about his numbers on immigration going down the toilet. It’s strange to think that a guy with his own cult who will never again stand for election would panic upon learning that the public doesn’t support his masked gang, but maybe it’s a legacy matter for him. Immigration is supposed to be his bread-and-butter, the thing that won him the last election. Being suddenly despised for it may have rattled him.

 

Although, Trump being Trump, it’s probably a product of pure narcissism. The president has always cared to an unhealthy degree about “numbers,” and he knows which way his numbers are moving as public patience for ICE’s tactics wears thin.

 

Either way, his henchmen and supporters aren’t burdened by the same psychological pressure to be liked—not by the general public, anyway. Noem, Bovino, and Miller felt free to smear Alex Pretti ghoulishly because their constituency is MAGA, and they knew MAGA would appreciate it. Ditto for Rep. Randy Fine, who celebrated the shooting by announcing, “An armed seditionist attacked federal law enforcement today as they were rounding up foreign invaders in Minneapolis. The insurrectionist was put down. Well done.” There was a lot in that vein from the populist faithful on social media.

 

Some postliberal “influencers” responded to the shooting by calling on followers to show unthinking support for immigration agents irrespective of the morality of their conduct, continuing the Trumpist tradition dating back to the Access Hollywood episode of demanding the highest loyalty to excuse the most disgusting conduct. Others one-upped them by calling on Trump to get tough, invoke the Insurrection Act, and “crush these terrorist riots” in Minneapolis. What good is having a fascist as president, after all, if he won’t deliver an Iran-style bloodbath when circumstances warrant?

 

I’m not prepared for an America where Donald Trump is a voice of comparative moderation among the feral right, but then I wasn’t prepared for a world where Marjorie Taylor Greene is a voice of moderation either. Yet here we are.

 

It was all a lie.

 

We’ve all gotten used to “conservatives” betraying every principle they ever claimed to hold, but even I was surprised by how many Republicans this weekend tried to blame Pretti for his own death by zeroing in on the fact that he was … carrying a loaded gun.

 

Why I was surprised, I don’t know. I suppose the fact that gun rights are such a sacred part of populist right-wing culture, not merely political ideology, led me to assume that GOPers would steer clear of faulting the victim for lawfully having a weapon on him. If nothing else, hypocrisy should have warned them away from making an issue of it: Trump fans have been bringing guns with them to protests for years.

 

But no. The director of the FBI confidently assured Fox News on Saturday that, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple.” Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about: You absolutely can do that if you’re licensed to carry, and any Republican in America would have wet his pants if a Biden administration official had argued otherwise.

 

Amazingly, Kash Patel wasn’t the only Justice Department employee who has concluded that the Second Amendment no longer applies in the presence of the Border Patrol. “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli observed. No, there isn’t—unless you’re brandishing that gun, in which case the police might reasonably fear that you’re about to shoot.

 

But carrying a gun in a holster? That wasn’t an offense warranting summary execution until now.

 

Many other right-wingers on social media joined the huffing and puffing about Pretti’s pistol, leading Toronto Sun columnist Bruce Arthur to this observation: “I almost appreciate how Trump has exposed how vacant every single high profile conservative belief was: free speech, states’ rights, letting the market decide, NATO, right to bear arms, democracy, all of it. It’s been an empty, malicious political project for decades and decades.”

 

Is he wrong?

 

The modern American right is so hollow and ridiculous a political movement that its most notorious conspiracy theorist, a figure who’s screeched about government tyranny for decades, was reduced on Saturday to defending the shooting of a helpless, unarmed man at close range by masked federal goons. It reminded me of how the rioters with the most sinister designs at the January 6 insurrection were the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia formed to defend the constitutional order from federal encroachment. When a fascist right-wing president undertook to destroy that order by staging a coup, those supposed “anti-government” heroes eagerly volunteered as muscle.

 

To borrow a phrase from former GOP consultant Stuart Stevens, the conservative movement was all a lie. Not for everyone, of course—The Dispatch wouldn’t exist otherwise—but for a great many right-wingers the principles of conservatism were plainly not much more than window dressing for the friends/enemies distinction that actually drives their politics. They favored small government not because they cared about liberty in principle but because they believed liberals were more disposed to use federal power aggressively, and therefore shrinking government would benefit the right on balance. Once Trump came along and showed that Republicans could abuse federal power too, up to and including creating a masked secret police force tasked with purging undesirables, that calculus went out the window.

 

It turns out that the key words in the famous slogan on the Gadsden flag weren’t the first two but the last two. Don’t tread on me—but on you, or on a guy with a smartphone who got in the goon squad’s way? That’s a different matter.

 

There wasn’t much left of conservatism when Alex Pretti was shot, but watching “patriots” rush to justify lethal force by the government against a citizen for carrying a lawful weapon finished off whichever part was still twitching. It wasn’t always an “empty, malicious political project” but it sure is now. Good riddance.