By Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
A thought on developments in Minnesota and nationwide. In
the wake of the Minneapolis shooting, and particularly in the wake of the
perceived — and real — climbdown of federal authorities in the city, the far
left is now rising like a rabble to not only claim victory but push boldly
forward. The rhetoric is loud and growing louder: Trump must somehow be
compelled to formally restrict his own powers! ICE or DHS must be abolished!
Rise, leftist Lilliputians, and tie President Gulliver down while he’s still dazed!
And this, incidentally, is why sending Greg Bovino home
to retire and bringing in Tom Homan was the strongest possible countermove the
Trump administration could have made: not only because Homan is a professional
but because progressives who misinterpret the politics of the moment will wipe
away their situational advantage by massively misjudging the mood of the
American people.
That sort of miscalculation is precisely what you’re
seeing from the left’s most hotheaded progressives right now, as they
immediately return to hair-on-fire “Abolish ICE” and anti-deportation rhetoric
as they deem themselves to be “winning the argument” in public opinion. I’m not
referring merely to the Bluesky rants of anonymous nobodies like
“FrightenedKaren981” or “Jamelle Bouie,” I’m talking about actual politicians
here.
Some of them can safely be ignored although not
altogether dismissed. Elliot Forhan, candidate for attorney general in Ohio, promised
Democratic primary voters “I am going to kill Donald Trump” — clarifying that
he intends to charge and convict him of an offense that carries the potential
for the death penalty. (How he plans to do this in Ohio is anyone’s guess;
Forhan is a long-shot candidate, a former state representative who lost
his primary after threatening
a Democratic colleague so forcefully that she had to take out a civil
protective order against him.)
But Larry Krasner is the district attorney of
Philadelphia and wields real power (never against street criminals, that is).
And when he stood at an “Abolish ICE” rally, he promised
to any and all ICE or CBP agents he deems guilty of crimes, “If we have to hunt
you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find you, we will
find your identities, we will achieve justice.” This sort of rhetoric — of
equating ICE to Nazi war criminals — is currently hugely popular among
progressives and just as suicidal for the Democratic Party to be associated
with in the long run.
Politicians like Krasner are appealing to the deep-set
instincts of the Democratic Party’s leftist base. But the problem is that the
base is not the general electorate. The base can and will, however, have an
enormous say in the positions Democratic politicians are forced to take in
order to remain viable (or to break out of the pack) in a primary, and as
Kamala Harris will be the first to tell you, this can have irrevocable
consequences down the road. Recall that, in 2019, Harris was an empty vessel of
no specific convictions; when she grabbed every crazy and freshly baked item
from the à la carte progressive policy buffet and tried to swallow them all at
once, it was done purely because that’s where the Democratic electorate was in
2019. (Tellingly, she didn’t make it to 2020.)
It is here that I must tip my cap to the wonderfully
witty center-left writer Jeff Maurer, whose Substack piece from this morning tracks very much with my thoughts.
He very aptly laid out his views of the differences between where Trump (or,
perhaps more accurately, Stephen Miller) is on immigration, where America
currently is, where the left thinks America currently is, and where the
insane progressives who actually run the show in the Democratic Party are demanding
that America go. In sum, Americans don’t want to see violence in the streets
and don’t want people shot — but they also want deportations to continue.
Progressives who immediately call for an end to them (or,
even worse, for the defunding of ICE and the persecution of its officers) are
only fragging their own team politically. Maybe they think they are moving the
Overton window by getting their maximalist demands out there and forcing
politicians to echo them. More likely, outside of reliably blue states, they
are dooming those politicians. (The chart that Maurer crafted to illustrate
this point is too succinct and funny to summarize: click instead.)
Meanwhile, a government shutdown looms. Bet you forgot,
huh? (That’s alright, almost nobody saw the last one coming or cared that it
dragged on for so long — except perhaps Virginia voters.) Senator Richard
Blumenthal (Conn.) spoke for the Democrats — emboldened by the shifting
winds of public opinion — by making specific demands:
In my view, the most important
demand we’re making is for judicial warrants that curb and constrain these ICE
mass draconian dragnet sweeps, and also body cameras and identification that
are common sense along with a right of action when harm is done to individuals.
These kinds of commonsense reforms can’t be opposed on the merits. Republicans
are trying to jam us politically, but the American people want reforms and
restraints because they’re watching an out of control agency on the streets of
America. They could come after them kicking in doors, smashing through living
rooms, arresting and detaining people without any judicial warrant.
You’ll get even more rhetoric like this and see national
Democrats pressured to say things that will soon come back to haunt them.
(Expect a shutdown, by the way — and expect it to move Trump’s numbers just as
much as the last shutdown, which is to say not at all.) I am certain that a
number of my readers feel sore about the Trump administration’s rhetorical
swerve after the Alex Pretti shooting, but I am far more sanguine — first, for
the simple reason that it had to happen anyway, and, second, because
this will now allow the left to make equally disastrous mistakes. The
rhetorical sloppiness and political overconfidence we have seen from opponents
of immigration enforcement will only increase.
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