Eating the Pieces

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, February 12, 2026

 

I’ve been trying for days to find something interesting to say about what’s happening with the Gordie Howe International Bridge. It shouldn’t be hard. The story has everything—corruption, intrigue, three different governments clashing, one comically large and fragile ego at the center of it all.

 

It’s objectively interesting … except to readers of this newsletter, who’ll find the themes familiar to the point of tedium.

 

In brief, the president is mad at Canada for deciding that it would rather do business with China than lick his boots. So on Monday he announced his opposition to the bridge, a joint endeavor between Canada and Michigan to ease congestion in cross-border commerce that’s been in the works for years thanks to, er, the first Trump administration. No more, though: “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given” Canada, the president angrily declared.

 

(We haven’t given the Canadians anything for the bridge, incidentally. They paid for it.)

 

The next day the New York Times revealed that Trump’s post came hours after Matthew Moroun dialed up Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Who’s Matthew Moroun, you ask? Why, he’s the owner of the Ambassador Bridge that for decades has provided the only conduit between Michigan and Canada for commercial trucking. That bridge’s local monopoly on tolls is threatened by the Gordie Howe Bridge so Moroun dialed up the president to ask for a favor, it appears. And of course he got one.

 

This barely qualifies as news in 2026.

 

Everything about the episode is par for the course for Trump 2.0. The rent-seeking by rich cronies. The president’s imperiousness in abusing state power to settle his petty grudges. The economic illiteracy in believing that America gets “absolutely NOTHING,” as he claimed in his statement, from an infrastructure project that will facilitate trade. And of course the usual basketful of lies and nonsense to support his position, punctuated by this head-scratching all-timer: “The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”

 

What is there to say about this at Boiling Frogs that hasn’t been said a hundred times before?

 

The closest I’ve come to finding a point about it that’s worth drilling down on is this: Messing with the Gordie Howe Bridge is remarkably stupid strategically as a political matter.

 

We’re nine months out from a national election. Michigan, famously, is a closely run swing state. Nearly every major office there will be on the ballot this fall—governor, a Senate seat, 13 House seats. And Trump has somehow decided that this is the moment to lob a grenade at the state’s economy, knowing full well that Republican candidates there will have little choice but to take his side.

 

It’s insane. It reminds me of a notorious quote from his first term, when BuzzFeed asked an unidentified former White House official what the president’s strategy was in pardoning sleazy sycophants who’d been convicted of federal crimes. There’s no strategy, the official replied.

 

Trump’s supporters like to believe that he’s playing three-dimensional chess, he continued, but “more often than not he's just eating the pieces."

 

Trying to tank the Gordie Howe Bridge is another case of Trump eating the pieces. As was his immigration crackdown on Minneapolis, which we learned this morning is finally coming to an end.

 

Backlash.

 

On February 4 the Department of Homeland Security announced that more than 4,000 illegal immigrants had been arrested so far under “Operation Metro Surge” since it began in Minnesota on November 29.

 

That’s slightly north of 60 people per day. Not all were violent criminals, surely; probably very few were, in fact, given the national trendlines. Not all who were detained have been deported either. “Arrested” doesn’t mean “removed.”

 

Sixty arrests a day—for an operation that eventually involved 3,000 immigration agents. That’s one arrest daily on average per every 50 officers deployed.

 

Another way to look at it: The total number of arrests in Operation Metro Surge over the course of two months represents barely more than one day’s worth of the national target that Stephen Miller has been pressuring ICE to hit since last year.

 

What did the White House get in return for that measly number? Nothing more or less, I think, than the near-total destruction of its credibility on immigration outside of the core Republican base. And even parts of the core seem a little shaky lately.

 

The president’s job approval today in the RealClearPolitics average is 42.1 percent, a new low for his second term. Four of the last nine polls tracked by RCP have him below 40 percent, a floor he seldom crashed through in polling over the past year until recently. Yesterday an NBC News survey found his approval on “border security and immigration,” traditionally his strongest issue, at 40-60. When respondents were asked whom they trusted to provide the most accurate information about immigration arrests and related civil unrest in Minnesota, just 9 percent said “the federal government.”

 

I wonder why.

 

The Associated Press piled on with a new poll this morning that captured how poisonous Operation Metro Surge has become. Sixty-two percent believe the deployment of federal immigration agents into U.S. cities has gone too far, and 60 percent hold an unfavorable view of ICE. That tracks with the NBC News data, which found no less than three-quarters of Americans want the agency to be reformed or abolished entirely.

 

Last month, after an ICE officer killed Renee Good but before Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, I warned that the crackdown in Minneapolis was discrediting immigration enforcement. Now here we are. Dissatisfaction with the president is so high that he’s begun to get the short end of the stick in polling on whether his term so far has been worse than—deep breath—Joe Biden’s.

 

Four thousand arrests, not all of which will end in deportation, at the cost of crushing one of the GOP’s most consequential policy advantages over the left. The U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis—which was overseeing the prosecution of suspects in the big Somali fraud scandal—has also been wrecked in the process. How does that grab you as a return on a political investment?

 

That’s what eating the pieces looks like.

 

Beyond strategy.

 

Here’s a question that citizens in a democracy don’t often need to consider: How many policies has the president championed over the past 13 months that he had a reasonable expectation would be popular?

 

Securing the border is an obvious one. So are the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, although the bill writ large is not so popular. Beyond that, though?

 

Disruptive, overweening immigration dragnets aren’t popular, as we’ve just seen. Tariffs, Trump’s signature economic policy, aren’t either. Strong-arming nations like Venezuela with military muscle? Not popular. The big Greenland acquisition? Not popular. Racing away from NATO? Also not popular.

 

His Caesarist passion projects, like knocking down part of the White House to build a ballroom and renaming the Kennedy Center after himself? The less said, the better.

 

In every case, he’s eating the pieces instead of playing the sort of political chess that might plausibly improve his party’s chances in a difficult electoral environment. Which might be defensible if he were burning political capital to achieve some important policy goal, like Democrats did in 2010 when they successfully enacted Obamacare at the cost of obliteration in that fall’s midterms.

 

But Trump usually doesn’t get anything meaningful for the political hits he takes. His tariffs are likely to be nuked by the Supreme Court. Nations like Canada and Denmark that he’s tried to muscle are standing firm and forming new alliances. Immigration crackdowns like Operation Metro Surge have done little to shrink the enormous population of illegal immigrants in the U.S. As bad as 2010 was for the left—the GOP picked up 63 House seats, six Senate seats, and flipped 20 state legislative chambers—imagine how much more dismal it would have been if Obamacare had also collapsed in Congress before passage. That’s the trajectory the GOP appears to be on.

 

There are two possible explanations for why the president keeps eating the pieces. One is that he can’t resist trying to bully opponents even when he has reason to know that doing so will backfire.

 

Practically every unpopular policy I named earlier has come packaged with off-putting insults aimed at its target and heavy-handed threats to make that target suffer for refusing to give Trump what he wants. That matters. One high-level European official recently told Politico that the president’s domineering approach has caused a “violent” change of heart among his colleagues about the U.S. government while another complained of the “lack of respect for Europe” that the administration routinely, and gratuitously, communicates.

 

The Gordie Howe Bridge episode came after a year of Trump foolishly taunting Canada about making it the 51^st state, and the crackdown in Minneapolis involved two separate attempts by the administration to smear Americans shot to death by federal agents as domestic terrorists. The boorishness with which America’s leader conducts business ends up alienating everyone outside his own churlish base, hardening the resistance of opponents whose pride he’s offended and alienating voters who might have been receptive to his ends but don’t want to associate themselves with the means. Not so strategic.

 

He can’t help it, though. The ethics of postliberalism plus his own domineering nature mean intimidation and compulsion will always be his One Neat Trick on policy. He didn’t set immigration agents loose on Minneapolis as part of some master strategic plan to boost the GOP’s popularity before the midterms, he did it because authoritarians don’t know how else to solve problems. He cares about public opinion, sure, but you know how it goes with snakes.

 

The second explanation is simpler: The president does not actually care about public opinion. Maybe he used to, but he’s now chest-deep in an autocratic reverie in which he gets to do whatever he wants and Americans will just have to deal with it until January 2029. He wanted a big fascist pageant in Minnesota carried out by his secret police force and that’s what he got. It’s a fantasy, a folie à deux that he and Stephen Miller are sharing in the West Wing.

 

Political strategy has nothing to do with it.

 

Under this theory, he might not even understand that his policies are unpopular. (Remember, there are people around him whose entire job is to deliver good news.) When you hear him boast in an interview about how great his numbers supposedly are or how much voters love his economy, it’s tempting to think that he’s trying to gaslight viewers. More likely, though, is that he’s gaslit himself and is earnestly convinced that Americans love tariffs, never mind what the fake-news polls say. He’ll continue to carry out his agenda because the people are begging for more.

 

It’s hard to reconcile this explanation with his decision to withdraw from Minneapolis, admittedly. Maybe his Republican allies in Congress, who are more in touch with reality, prevailed upon him to do them a favor by ending it. Or maybe the polling on ICE is so heinous that not even the president’s unreality bubble could withstand being punctured by it.

 

Whichever explanation you favor, strategy isn’t what’s driving his decisions.

 

The next fiasco.

 

That tees us up nicely for the immense strategic fiasco to come this fall, when Trump sends ICE into Democratic strongholds in hopes of frightening nonwhite voters into staying away from the polls on Election Day.

 

A shocking number of Americans (including me) already expects it. According to a poll taken earlier this month by Data for Progress, 64 percent agreed when asked if they believe the president “will attempt to deploy immigration enforcement agents to prevent participation in the 2026 midterms.” Don’t accuse them/us of Trump Derangement Syndrome: Steve Bannon, who knew in advance how Trump would react to losing in 2020, promised the MAGA faithful recently that ICE will “surround the polls” in November to prevent another election from being stolen.

 

Under either theory of Trump’s behavior that I’ve offered, it’s a fait accompli. The president will deploy ICE because there’s no way an authoritarian knows how to solve a problem like a looming midterm wipeout other than with intimidation and threats. Or the president will deploy ICE because it pleases him to imagine voters who are hostile to him having to run a terrifying gauntlet past masked goons who might detain them if they try to cast a ballot.

 

He might even persuade himself that Americans like the idea of armed federal agents trying to scare citizens out of voting.

 

In reality, the deployment would be an unholy political debacle for him and the GOP.

 

To begin with, I doubt it would deter many from turning out. The opposite, more likely—Latinos might take offense at the White House’s blatantly sinister attempt to keep them from exercising their rights and show up in numbers to signal their defiance. And if they do, we can guess which party most will be voting for.

 

Having ICE out in force will also complicate the sore-loser right’s sacred obligation to screech about cheating afterward. If Democrats win a majority of the House or Senate with immigration officers watching the polls, what will be left of the GOP’s inevitable claim that that victory was due to illegal immigrants voting unlawfully en masse? If anything, deploying ICE would hand the left a pretext to scream “fraud” in case Republicans end up overperforming on Election Day. We would have won, they’ll say, if not for Trump resorting to Putinist tactics to keep our voters from turning out.

 

But the stupidest part of ordering a big national ICE operation on Election Day is that it would double as a campaign commercial for Democrats, bought and paid for by our Republican president and playing out in front of Americans moments before they vote. The agency is wildly politically radioactive, per the polling I noted earlier; I can’t imagine a surer way to motivate the average joe to vote against the GOP than by reminding them in a starkly vivid way that a Republican win means two more years of a despised, lawless paramilitary force operating unchecked in America.

 

Well, I suppose handing voters a receipt as they enter their polling precinct showing them how much they’ve paid in tariffs over the last year (hint: a lot!) might be slightly surer. But apart from that, a show of force by ICE around the election is the closest thing I can think of to Trump waving a red cape before a bull that’s already preparing to charge.

 

Even a novice chess player wouldn’t make a strategic mistake that egregious. It would be less a matter of eating the pieces than eating the whole board—but it’s going to happen, with near-total certainty. Bon appétit, Mr. President.