Jihad in America: The Virginia Attack

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Sunday, March 15, 2026

 

Yesterday, I addressed Thursday’s jihadist attack in Michigan. Today, I turn to the jihadist attack the same day in Virginia, focusing on the knotty legal issues it raises.

 

At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, a 36-year-old terrorist named Mohamed Bailor Jalloh killed a former Army officer and wounded two cadets in a premeditated attack on U.S. military trainees. Jalloh, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, a country with an overwhelmingly Muslim population, was a naturalized American citizen who himself had attended ODU and served in the Virginia National Guard. More notably, he was at liberty to carry out the attack despite having previously been convicted of a terrorism felony.

 

Situated near the largest U.S. naval base in the world, ODU has close ties to the American armed forces. Many active-duty service members, veterans, and their families attend classes. There are Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs for the Navy, Army, and Air Force. Moreover, ODU offers courses of study, research, and training that are oriented to military systems, defense technology, and maritime engineering.

 

CBS reports that Jalloh walked into a military science class being conducted in Constant Hall, part of ODU’s business college. He asked whether the class was affiliated with the ROTC; informed that it was, he shouted, “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is greater”) and opened fire. He murdered the class’s instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Brandon A. Shah (retired), a native Virginian and ODU alumnus who was providing aspiring military officers the benefit of his experience and life of service to our country — which included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Jalloh also wounded two students. As he fired, he was set upon by other students in the class, one of whom killed him with a knife.

 

What I most want to focus on is the question of why Jalloh was not in federal prison and why he was still in the country.

 

As noted above, Jalloh was convicted of a terrorism felony. He pled guilty in 2016, not long after being honorably discharged from the National Guard. Terrorism is as heinous as criminal conduct gets so it should be extremely rare, to say the least, for someone to live long enough and remain active enough to be prosecuted twice for terrorism crimes.

 

Note, I said “should be.” As things are, two such prosecutions, even more than two, are possible because of the combination of prosecutorial undercharging, judicial under-sentencing, early release from custody, and inadequate post-release supervision in terrorism cases.

 

Jalloh pled guilty in 2016 to the charge of material support to terrorism. That’s a serious crime, but not as serious as conspiring to commit terrorism.

 

Federal law features two material support offenses. Jalloh was charged with the more serious one: providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization (the best known in our law are ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas) under Section 2339b). That offense is punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment, but there is no minimum sentence (i.e., a judge could impose no term of incarceration).

 

The other material support crime, under Section 2339a, is providing such support or resources to some person or group (not necessarily formally designated), knowing that this support is to be used in connection with various crimes commonly associated with terrorism. It is punishable by up to 15 years’ imprisonment (again, no minimum sentence).

 

When Jalloh pled guilty, the Justice Department asked for the maximum sentence of 20 years. Alas, Judge Liam O’Grady, an appointee of President George W. Bush to the federal bench in the Eastern District of Virginia, rebuffed the prosecutors. Besides Jalloh’s six years of military service (2009–15), Judge O’Grady was apparently moved by defense claims that Jalloh was plagued by substance abuse and mental health problems.

 

The federal system abolished parole in 1987, so defendants are supposed to serve substantially all of the term of incarceration meted out (meaning over 80 percent, as opposed to the ridiculous 33 percent or less common in the parole era). Prisoners are still permitted to earn “good time” (up to 54 days a year) if they are reasonably well-behaved in custody, which can reduce the sentence by about 13 percent. (Terrorism convicts are not supposed to be eligible for some additional benefits, such as time off for completing drug treatment programs or the 2018 First Step Act’s anti-recidivism programs.)

 

Jalloh was sentenced in 2017, but he was credited with time served beginning with his May 2016 arrest. Still, it appears he should have been in custody until the end of 2025. For reasons unexplained at this point, he was released on December 23, 2024, about a year early. He was given a five-year term of supervised release (post-sentence administration by the Bureau of Prisons). As the atrocious events of Thursday demonstrate, it’s a very passive form of supervision with no meaningful deterrent effect against terrorists and hardened criminals.

 

I believe the Justice Department often charges defendants with materially supporting terrorism when prosecutors should instead charge them with actually committing or plotting to commit terrorism themselves.

 

The material support statutes do not provide for sentences of life imprisonment or death because they are meant for people who knowing contribute assets — usually money — to terrorist groups. That’s heinous, but it’s not as heinous as scheming to do hands-on mass murder. If the material support a jihadist provides to a terrorist group is himself, that is not merely material support; it is substantive terrorism or conspiracy to commit terrorism.

 

The distinction makes a big difference. For example, a person convicted of conspiracy to commit terrorism that contemplates murder, as most terrorism conspiracies do, can be sentenced to any term of years or life imprisonment (under Section 2332). Ditto a person who conspires to use a weapon of mass destruction (under Section 2332a) or who conspires to commit acts of terrorism that would cause serious bodily injury (under Section 2332b).

 

When Jalloh was apprehended in July 2016, the Justice Department issued a press release describing the evidence against him. It says he met in Nigeria with members of ISIS (referred to as “ISIL” in the Obama era) and had an ISIS contact who brokered an introduction to someone he and his contact believed was a terrorist but who turned out to be an FBI undercover agent conducting a sting operation. This introduction was in furtherance of scheming to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. Jalloh, having been in the armed forces, indicated that he had military training, including in the use of firearms. For purposes of carrying out the attack, he contributed $500 to the cause and ultimately obtained a firearm — the day after which he was arrested.

 

That seems to me like enough to charge someone with conspiracy. To be sure, as a matter of law, one cannot conspire with an undercover government agent. Nevertheless, according to the government, Jalloh met the agent only because he had already connected with ISIS in Africa. Jalloh expressly said in the course of the planning that he wanted to commit a mass-murder attack similar to the 2009 attack on U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood, in which a jihadist shot 13 people to death and wounded another 30. And Jalloh took concrete steps (overt acts) to try to carry out this objective.

 

That’s not just material support; it’s deep involvement in a plot to personally commit mass murder.

 

Still, I can’t fault prosecutors much here. Even if they had brought more serious charges against Jalloh, there is no guarantee that the sympathetic Judge O’Grady would have imposed a more severe sentence.

 

Here is what we can say with confidence: Confronted with a jihadist who’d sought to carry out a repetition of the Fort Hood attack, the government charged him with a 20-year crime rather than crimes befitting a would-be mass murderer; the judge then further discounted his terrorist conduct by slicing nearly in half the available sentence, imposing just 132 months’ imprisonment instead of 240; the federal correction authorities then released Jalloh almost a year early; and because, instead of being incarcerated as he should have been, he was on post-incarceration “supervision,” Jalloh this time was able to carry out a jihadist attack rather than be thwarted while plotting one.

 

Finally, many have asked why Jalloh wasn’t denaturalized when he pled guilty back in 2016. Had he been, then upon his release from the 2016 terrorism conviction, he could have been deported rather than released back onto America’s streets.

 

It’s complicated and, as this is written, we lack some necessary information.

 

For the most part, revocation of naturalized citizen status is limited to situations in which a person procured naturalization by fraud of some kind (e.g., by lying about or withholding material facts about one’s background and qualifications). A criminal prosecution for such fraud must be brought within five years of naturalization (see Section 1425 of the penal law); but even if such a case is charged, the statute does not prescribe automatic denaturalization as a penalty.

 

To accomplish that, the government must file a civil suit. There is no statute of limitations on such an action, but the disqualifying conduct must be in connection with the naturalization process. (See Section 1451 of immigration law.) That is, if a person becomes naturalized and subsequently commits some crime, that is generally not a legal basis to denaturalize.

 

That said, there is a provision in Section 1451 (in conjunction with Section 1424) that says a person’s naturalization can be revoked if, within five years afterward, he joins or becomes affiliated with a subversive organization. This is a vestige of the Cold War, written with membership in communist and anarchist parties or organizations in mind. But its general language captures totalitarian organizations that advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Consequently, there have been denaturalization cases based on affiliation with ISIS and other jihadist organizations.

 

Jalloh was born in Sierra Leone in 1989. So far, I have not been able to find reporting about exactly when he immigrated to the U.S. and when he was naturalized. He enrolled at ODU in 2006 when he was 17 years old; how long he’d been here at that point, I cannot say. The Justice Department’s press release indicates that his affiliation with ISIS, details about which are murky, began on a six-month trip to Africa after he was discharged from the military in 2015.

 

Bottom line: We’d need to know when Jalloh was naturalized. If it was in his youth, years before his embrace of ISIS, there would have been inadequate legal basis to seek his denaturalization. If his naturalization was close in time to his embrace of ISIS as a 26-year-old, there might be a basis to argue that the government should have sought denaturalization when he pled guilty — on the theory that his pledge of loyalty to the U.S. was fraudulent.

 

So we need more facts.

 

Personally, I believe any American convicted of committing, conspiring to commit, or materially supporting terrorism should have his citizenship revoked. In 1967, however, the Supreme Court ruled (in Afroyim v. Rusk) that Congress has no constitutional authority to divest citizenship from a natural-born citizen without that citizen’s consent. A natural-born citizen can be divested only after renouncing U.S. citizenship.

 

For naturalized citizens, such as Jalloh, it’s a different matter. They can be divested involuntarily. They should be; whether they can be shouldn’t hinge on some inference about fraud or allegiance to be drawn regarding the naturalization process itself. Affiliation with terrorists who revile the American constitutional system, wage jihad against our nation, and seek to violently supplant our governing framework with sharia should suffice under any circumstances. But for that, we’d need to change the law.

Enough With Immigration

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” These immortal words from William Blake’s 1790 prose poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” offer a rueful perspective on the turn in Donald Trump’s fortunes in 2026. It appears his administration did “what is more than enough” in implementing its policies related to illegal aliens inside the United States and, in so doing, turned an unalloyed political and policy triumph into a possible defeat.

 

What was “enough” was stemming the tide at the border in 2025. Last year, the net number of illegal crossings into the United States was zero. All in all, according to the Brookings Institution, “net migration to the U.S. was negative in 2025, a sharp reversal from net inflows exceeding three million in 2023 and two million in 2024.” This came about due to better patrolling, increased apprehensions of those attempting to cross and their subsequent return south of the border, and the general sense among those outside of the United States that the effort to enter under this new administration would be a fool’s errand.

 

That change demonstrates just how out of control the border had become during the feckless Biden years, when the administration adopted a triumphally petulant “whatever the Trump people did, we’re going to do the opposite” attitude. It arguably got Trump elected to his second term as a result. Trump promised to put an end to the Biden approach. And he fulfilled that campaign promise.

 

Polls suggested the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the results. And then Trump did “more than enough.”

 

Throughout 2025, even as the work at the border was uncontroversial in the eyes of the public, the decision to use ICE and the Border Patrol to go in active pursuit of illegals inside the United States proved to be a controversial policy. Closing the border was essentially an act of defense. But conducting raids across the United States to capture and deport illegals—some of them criminal actors but others simply people gathered in one place to seek temporary day jobs in parking lots—was more akin to a war of choice. It did not come in response to an immediate existential threat—unless, that is, you are single-mindedly focused on the idea that the presence of illegals among us constitutes a fast-acting social poison that we must flush out of our system without delay.

 

It’s true that Trump promised to conduct “mass deportations” in his second term, but he never offered a clear definition of what that meant or how it would be done. And while 6 in 10 Americans said they were in favor of deportations in 2024, the visible effort to pursue them in 2025 seemed to make Americans queasy. Nate Silver’s poll average calculates that overall public support for Trump on immigration turned negative in June 2025 and has stayed that way since. The news coverage of ICE’s actions in cities, showing masked agents moving aggressively on what appeared to be unthreatening people, surely played a significant role in the shift.

 

Then things took a particularly bad turn for Trump when he made the decision to “surge” forces into Minneapolis in December. This was not a direct reaction to any specific change on the streets there but a naked effort to shine a national light on an important story dating back to 2018: the channeling of public dollars into fraudulent and nonexistent relief organizations run by members of the Somali community in the Twin Cities. The details were so egregious that the state’s sitting governor, 2024 Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, found it necessary to announce he would not run for another term.

 

The Walz humiliation could have been a Dayenu moment—that’s the word Jews sing on Passover that means “it should have been enough.” The Somali fraud scandal was a slow-acting agent that turned suddenly lethal at the end of 2025 when it came to Walz’s career and offered the promise that all kinds of blue-state coziness between leftist politicians and not-for-profit groups might be exposed and more fraud uncovered. The Somali scandal didn’t need ICE. It was going to ice liberals all on its own.

 

That was not good enough for Trump. No, in the Blakean marriage of heaven and hell that is his administration, Trump evidently needed to learn what was more than enough. He surged ICE. He added Border Patrol agents. The city’s (and the country’s) highly organized network of leftist activists was there and ready for it. They instantly redirected the national spotlight away from Walz and Co. and toward the immigration-enforcement officers. They sought to provoke confrontations and they succeeded. Two activist citizens, both personally imprudent but politically more useful than they could ever have known, were killed by ICE and Border Patrol agents during chaotic scrums lasting fewer than 10 seconds. One was minimally defensible, the other in no way defensible. The whole business of the Minneapolis surge became at best tragically unnecessary—a war of choice gone wrong—and at worst either a sign of an armed agency out of control or of a brilliantly manipulated PR campaign that was turning Trump’s greatest strength into a liability.

 

American attitudes on immigration are incredibly confused and incredibly confusing. We believe immigration is a benefit to the country. At the same time, we do not support illegal immigration and say in large numbers that it should be prevented and that illegal aliens should be deported. There’s something irreconcilable there. And matters become even more knotted due to the influence of a radical vanguard led by White House deputy Stephen Miller that opposes all immigration, illegal and legal, and is actively working to eliminate it. The vanguard is also seeking to end birthright citizenship, which has been accepted as a constitutional right since the passage of the 14th Amendment (and which was implicitly seen as such in the nine decades that followed the inception of the United States in 1776).

 

Miller and others define what is “more than enough.” Trump has largely been walking along the path they laid for him. He is showing signs of stepping off because he sees that the American people do not like how it feels to live in a country whose government acts in the way it has. Mere self-preservation suggests it’s time for him to say enough.

 

 

Mexico’s Bold Strike Against Drug Cartels

By Gil Guerra

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

 

Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, popularly known as “El Mencho” and the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), was killed in an operation on Sunday conducted by Mexican security forces. Following the 2016 arrest and eventual extradition to the U.S. of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, El Mencho was the most wanted drug trafficker still operating freely in Mexico, with a $15 million U.S. bounty on his head. His death is being hailed in Washington and Mexico City as a landmark victory in the war against drug cartels.

 

While leaders in both countries have reason to celebrate, they also have reasons to fret. In addition to an ongoing wave of violence and disruption unleashed by CJNG in retaliation for El Mencho’s death, the two pillars of Mexico’s cartel duopoly—CJNG and the rival Sinaloa Cartel—are simultaneously leaderless for the first time in the modern drug war, with no clear historical model for what comes next.

 

Who was El Mencho?

 

Born in 1966 in the avocado country of Michoacán state’s Tierra Caliente, Oseguera dropped out of school after the fifth grade and illegally migrated to California in his teens. His first known brush with the law came in 1986, when he was arrested for possession of stolen property. After being deported from the U.S. following roughly three years in prison for other criminal charges, he took the unusual step of enrolling as a municipal police officer in rural Jalisco state. A TV Azteca assessment later concluded that he was endeavoring to learn the vulnerabilities of Mexican law enforcement from the inside out, knowledge that played a role in his remarkable success in evading capture once he returned to a life of crime.

 

Oseguera married into the González Valencia family, whose 15 siblings had been involved in marijuana and opium trafficking since the 1970s, and built CJNG into one of the most operationally versatile cartels Mexico had seen. The CJNG is known for combining organizational structuring with unfathomable barbarity: A raid on a crematorium in Teuchitlán in March 2025 uncovered a CJNG operation that lured recruits with job ads offering $200 to $600 a week and then put them through 30 days of combat and dismemberment training in a room called “La Carnicería,” or “the Butcher Shop.” Only 30 of 200 recruits are reported to have survived.

 

El Mencho was a central but shadowy presence in the CJNG. Every publicly circulated photograph of him was decades old, and he avoided cultivating the popular legend status of some other cartel figures glorified in narcocorridos, ballads about the exploits of drug smugglers. In past years, rivals scrawled messages claiming he had died of kidney failure; one faction split from CJNG in 2022 on the premise that he was already dead. By the time El Mencho died at the hands of Mexico’s armed forces, CJNG operated across 40 countries and nearly every U.S. state, and through roughly 90 sub-organizations.

 

Tracking a kingpin.

 

Four armed helicopters and two twin-engine planes descended on a ranch near Tapalpa at approximately 7:20 a.m. Sunday, where evidence of El Mencho’s presence had steadily grown recently. U.S. agencies had tracked medical equipment shipments to treat his chronic kidney failure into the Jalisco mountains; the presence of one of his girlfriends helped confirm his safehouse’s exact location.

 

The Mexican army engaged El Mencho’s guards in a firefight that lasted approximately three hours, leaving seven CJNG members, including the kingpin, dead. Two CJNG operatives were arrested, including Audias “El Jardinero” Flores-Silva, the cartel’s most powerful non-family operational leader, who oversaw methamphetamine production, cocaine transport, and weapons procurement. He carried a $5 million bounty from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and was considered a candidate to succeed El Mencho.

 

The army’s account of the operation warrants some scrutiny. Mexican and U.S. security sources have told journalists the decision that Mencho not be taken alive was made beforehand, but one of the biggest questions after El Mencho’s death is why Mexico’s government preferred a dead cartel leader to one who might talk.

 

Charitably, it would be reasonable to assume that the Mexican government determined that keeping him alive would risk a potential CJNG rescue operation or extended reprisals as a way of pressuring the government to release him. In 2020, the Mexican government released El Chapo’s son after determining that the price of keeping him in custody was too high, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum may have been hoping to avoid a similarly embarrassing incident.

 

Viewed more skeptically, the decision could be seen as an attempt to keep El Mencho from revealing dealings and connections between the CJNG and members of Sheinbaum’s political party, Morena.

 

Personal reasons may have also come into play. Omar García Harfuch, the security secretary who oversaw the operation, had reasons to prefer finality: In 2020, CJNG deployed 25 to 28 gunmen to assassinate him on a Mexico City boulevard with .50-caliber Barretts and fragmentation grenades, firing over 400 rounds and wounding him three times. In a show of defiance, García Harfuch tweeted from the hospital. Six years later he got the opportunity to return the favor, with more successful results.

 

Why did Mexico act now?

 

The El Mencho operation was almost certainly the product of a ratcheting pressure campaign from the U.S., which has been intensifying pressure on Mexico to take more aggressive action against cartel figures.

 

The opening salvo came on the first day of the second Trump administration. Executive Order 14157 designated cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

 

These steps were accompanied by a broad institutional reorientation toward fighting drug cartels. The FBI established a Counter Cartel Coordination Center (C4) to integrate its Criminal Investigation and Counterterrorism divisions, while its approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces took on cartel-related responsibilities alongside their traditional caseload. FISA Section 702 surveillance, which Congress had already expanded to cover counternarcotics in April 2024, became fully applicable to designated cartel networks, meaning any information connected to the designated groups qualified as “foreign intelligence,” even beyond their narcotics activities. The National Counterterrorism Center also pivoted, adding more than 35,000 cartel-linked identities to the classified terrorist database and standing up a new Interagency Fusion Cell to feed intelligence directly to law enforcement in the field.

 

On February 1, President Trump signed 25 percent tariffs on most Mexican imports. A phone call between Trump and Sheinbaum resulted in a one-month delay on the tariffs and Mexico’s first security concession, in the form of sending 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to the border. Later that month, Mexican officials transferred 29 cartel figures facing charges in Mexico to U.S. custody in a single day.

 

The dispute between the U.S. and Mexico over the administration’s desire for action and Mexican concerns over sovereignty reached a peak in early May when Sheinbaum confirmed that Trump had offered to have the U.S. military “take a leading role” in fighting cartels on Mexican soil. She publicly responded by saying, “Sovereignty cannot be sold,” and Trump shot back, telling reporters Sheinbaum was “so afraid of the cartels she can’t walk.”

 

Sheinbaum’s defiance masked continued concessions. In August, days after the New York Times reported that Trump had secretly signed a Pentagon directive authorizing the use of military force against cartels, Mexico transferred another 26 people to U.S. custody, including Abigael González Valencia, CJNG’s financial architect and El Mencho’s brother-in-law.

 

The most recent inflection point came on January 3, 2026, when U.S. forces entered Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, who was then arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom on drug charges. Buoyed by the successful capture of Maduro, Trump began raising the matter of American troop deployments in calls with Sheinbaum. Trump’s desire for unilateral American military action in Mexico grew even clearer—in an interview on Fox News five days later, he warned that “we’ve knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by water, and we are going to start now hitting land.”

 

On January 15, the Pentagon launched the Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel in Tucson, Arizona, under Northern Command. The task force fused military intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the DEA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into a single targeting operation modeled on the network-mapping methodology used against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Five days later, Mexico delivered a third mass transfer of 37 suspects, for a cumulative total of 92. On February 15, 19 members of SEAL Team 2 arrived at a Mexican naval facility in Campeche to help train Mexican counter-drug forces.

 

One week later, El Mencho was dead.

 

What does this mean for the cartels?

 

For most of the last decade and a half, Mexico’s drug trade has been dominated by a duopoly. In addition to El Mencho’s CJNG, Mexico’s cartel landscape has also been heavily influenced by the older and more established Sinaloa Cartel, which was built by figures like El Chapo Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

 

Between them, the two organizations controlled the vast majority of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine entering the United States. Their competition was brutal, but the duopoly formed two poles around which alliances, disputes, and territorial arrangements organized themselves.

 

That structure has been shaken by recent law enforcement action targeting the leadership of both cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was hit first—in July 2024, El Chapo’s son Joaquín Guzmán López lured Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada to a meeting before incapacitating him and flying them both to U.S. custody in New Mexico on a private plane. This triggered a destructive internal war, pitting two Sinaloa Cartel factions against each other and leaving almost 2,000 dead and another 2,000 missing. U.S. courts gave El Mayo life without parole and hit him with $15 billion in forfeiture, one of the largest in DOJ history. As a result of El Mayo’s capture and the internal fighting, the Sinaloa Cartel is thought to have lost 30 of its 42 trafficking routes.

 

Only a few weeks before the Tapalpa raid, García Harfuch told reporters: “For many years, Mexico and the United States targeted only one drug trafficker. And what changed? Nothing.”

 

Every prior cartel disruption in modern Mexican history occurred with at least one top-tier organization intact, providing a grim but real anchor of stability. With El Mencho dead, that condition may no longer hold. CJNG’s own succession crisis is acute, but the picture is more complicated than a pending collapse. The retaliation waged by cartel members itself should give pause to anyone predicting a rapid disintegration or fragmentation: Road blockades from the U.S. border to Puebla and Oaxaca, coordinated across at least 15 states within hours, suggest a high degree of centralization and unit loyalty.

 

What comes next?

 

In the best-case scenario, the Mexican government will be able to leverage the unprecedented assistance and focus from the U.S. and permanently shatter the power structures of Mexico’s two largest cartels. In the worst-case scenario, the process of trying to accomplish this may result in a CJNG that is fragmented but not crushed, triggering a new wave of mass violence in Mexico as internal CJNG factions vie for control over the organization and dozens of regional criminal groups consolidate and fight among themselves in an attempt to capitalize on the weakness of the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel. The violence that comes from this fighting will be less viral than the initial CJNG retaliation—and harder to stop.

 

This summer’s World Cup will be the first major test of whether Mexico is capable of imposing a monopoly on violence within its borders. Estadio Akron, located in the same Zapopan municipality where cartel forces killed six National Guard troops on Sunday, is scheduled to host four group-stage matches this summer, including Mexico vs. South Korea on June 18. Soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, will undoubtedly be concerned about whether Jalisco remains a viable location for these matches, and the organization holds unilateral authority to relocate games at its discretion.

 

Before Sunday, CJNG’s monopoly in Jalisco actually simplified things for Mexican security planners, giving them one actor to deal with who was theoretically capable of enforcing a truce and who had economic incentives to keep Jalisco calm during the tournament. That logic died with El Mencho. Instead of needing to negotiate only with the CJNG, Mexican authorities may now face a dozen splinter groups, none of which has an incentive to keep the peace and several of which could be actively fighting each other for control.

 

For the United States, El Mencho’s death is a short-term political gift to the administration. President Trump enters Tuesday’s State of the Union address with a 39 percent approval rating, stinging from a partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown and a Supreme Court ruling that struck down one of his key tariff authorities. The death of El Mencho represents a win for Trump, and he will likely tout it alongside Mexico’s 92 extraditions, the maritime strikes off Venezuela, and declining fentanyl-related deaths.

 

Whether the discipline visible in Sunday’s CJNG retaliation translates into a coherent succession or the spectacular end of a chapter in Mexico’s long drug wars remains an open question. Given their competing domestic priorities, Sheinbaum and Trump may be hoping for different answers.

Another Attack on Federal Law Enforcement

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 20, 2026

 

It began with a call to a 911 dispatcher. Someone had stolen an ambulance from one of the bays at St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center in Meridian, Idaho. Local police believe the suspect weaved the vehicle across the parking lot to pick up a cache of gasoline canisters, which had been pre-staged in a row of bushes. The suspect had assembled a mobile firebomb.

 

It was just after 11 p.m. on Thursday night when the suspect gunned the ambulance directly into the front doors of The Portico, another nearby medical center where the Department of Homeland Security occupied office space. The attacker likely knew that federal law enforcement was utilizing the space he targeted. After all, the “hospital has faced criticism,” U.S. News & World Report’s dispatch read, “for leasing space to the Department of Homeland Security while President Donald Trump’s administration carries out his immigration enforcement crackdown.”

 

The suspect rammed the ambulance directly into the building’s façade, leaving behind a scene of devastation reminiscent of a video game, one local radio station observed — “although this incident was very real, very dangerous, and not ‘fun’ at all.” The vehicle immobilized, the attacker reportedly exited the ambulance and poured accelerant inside and around the ambulance in an attempt to detonate the massive firebomb. But it would not catch. With authorities converging on the attacker, the suspect fled the scene.

 

“This was absolutely an act of violence, and if the suspect had not been interrupted, there is no doubt this building would have been burned, putting the lives of first responders and others at risk,” said Meridian Police Chief Tracy Basterrechea.

 

“There has been a lot of rhetoric surrounding the Department of Homeland Security’s using office space at this location,” he continued, “with comments in some social media such as ‘property damage isn’t violence’ — is absolutely false.”

 

The suspect remains at large, and law enforcement has not established a motive for this attack. But we can hazard some speculation. The target was a controversial DHS facility. The weapon was a vehicle-borne petrol bomb. The chatter that preceded the attack was typified by the absolute conviction that property destruction does not constitute violence — a road-worn feature of both anarchistic and elite left-wing discourse. These are the familiar features associated with left-wing political violence.

 

This attack was not thwarted, and this crime was not victimless. The attacker managed to destroy a building façade and disable an emergency medical vehicle. That the attack could have been far worse does not mitigate the damage already done. It is an attack that fits within a historical pattern of political violence perpetrated by ideologically inspired attackers.

 

We cannot make any definitive determinations yet, but informed observers can posit an educated guess as to the perpetrator’s motives. This attacker wasn’t the first to be moved to violence by them, and he or she will not be the last.

Trump Throws In the Towel on Minneapolis Surge

National Review Online

Sunday, February 15, 2026

 

President Trump sent Tom Homan to Minneapolis to declare victory and go home, and so he has.

 

Trump’s border czar announced the end of the ICE surge that had roiled the city and our national politics. Homan says ICE is getting more cooperation from county jails in handing over incarcerated illegal aliens, and immigration authorities have detained many of the illegal immigrants they had been targeting. It’s not clear how extensive the supposed new cooperation is, but Homan certainly forged a better relationship with state and city officials.

 

The big story here is that semiorganized resistance on the streets, with the support of the elected leadership in Minnesota and Minneapolis, made the aggressive federal enforcement too painful to continue. Usually, in sheer political terms, when mobs are arrayed against law enforcement, law enforcement prevails. In Minneapolis, though, the public considered the DHS operation arbitrary and heavy-handed, and the officers in camouflage lost the image battle to the agitators. Trump, who is attuned to optics and willing to shift gears at a moment’s notice, realized it and stood down.

 

This is a bad precedent, but immigration enforcement doesn’t rise and fall exclusively based on what happens in Minneapolis. Trump began Operation Metro Surge as a headline-chasing reaction to all the attention around the Minneapolis fraud scandal.

 

The level of theft in the Twin Cities has indeed been stunning, but the U.S. attorney’s office there had been prosecuting cases for years, and putting thousands of DHS agents on the streets was not the way to root out fraudulent billing practices.

 

On top of this, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol honcho Gregory Bovino wanted the operation, in accord with Trump’s wishes, to be as visible and muscular as possible to project an image of toughness. The theory was that would send a message to illegal immigrants around the country and convince them to self-deport. The political problem was that a broader audience, not just illegal immigrants, watched what was happening in Minneapolis.

 

Where to go from here? First, Homan, a no-nonsense professional, should be given de facto responsibility for immigration enforcement, which may already have happened. Noem is an incompetent publicity hound who, if she’s going to stay at DHS, should have as little responsibility as possible.

 

There’s been tension in the administration between going after “the worst of the worst” and casting a wider net for immigration arrests. While no illegal immigrant should be immune from detention and deportation, it makes sense to focus resources on targeted arrests of illegal aliens who have committed non-immigration offenses or identity theft against citizens and those who have final orders of removal. There is also a stronger case for removing recent arrivals in order to roll back the Biden-era flood. These priorities should be coupled with much more vigorous worksite enforcement, both raids and the bureaucratic work necessary to squeeze employers who are systematically employing illegal labor. An enforcement regime along these lines would be more politically palatable and effective over time.

 

Ultimately, the battle is not over Minneapolis but whether our immigration laws can be enforced such that the population of illegal immigrants significantly declines.

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.

The System Works, Sort Of

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

“Don’s double defeat” read the headline this morning at Politico, reeking of triumphalism at the president’s expense.

 

I was mortified. To an Eeyore, a strong dose of unexpected optimism has the same effect that garlic has on vampires. My supernatural power to suck the hopefulness out of any political development was momentarily disabled.

 

But only momentarily.

 

The “double defeat” happened in the span of a few hours Tuesday. First came shocking news that our scummy mafioso Justice Department had asked a grand jury to indict six congressional Democrats over the video they cut last fall reminding U.S. service members not to obey unlawful orders. I thought the FBI’s investigation of the six was essentially for show, going through the motions to appease Donald Trump as he screeched about “sedition.”

 

Nope. The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., led by “Judge Jeanine” Pirro, actually tried to prosecute members of Congress for accurately stating military policy. And then, the even more shocking news: The grand jury said no. Pirro’s office failed at the most notoriously easy task in American law, and not for the first time.

 

The second defeat came in an even less likely forum—Congress.

 

Leaning ever further into his role as Renfield to the president’s Dracula, House Speaker Mike Johnson sought to pass a rule that would bar lawmakers (namely, Democrats) from introducing bills aimed at repealing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs. Twice last year Republicans passed similar rules for specified periods of time; Johnson wanted another extension, hoping to spare his conference from having to tackle a fraught issue that might soon be rendered moot by the Supreme Court.

 

The Republican Party: Offloading its civic duty to restrain the president onto others since 2016.

 

Nearly every member of the House GOP went along with this latest attempt to outlaw, er, legislating, but this time “nearly every member” wasn’t enough. Three Republicans—Thomas Massie, Don Bacon, and Kevin Kiley—voted no, as did every Democrat. The rule failed, 214-217.

 

The first floor vote on a Democratic resolution to undo Trump’s tariffs passed the House today, with the support of six Republicans. There’s a fair chance that this resolution or one like it will eventually make it through the Senate, which has already passed several resolutions under simple majority rules to rescind presidential tariffs. That would be an embarrassing rebuke for a president whose party controls both chambers.

 

Our system worked, in other words. Our legislature and our justice system checked Trump’s attempts to abuse his power. It’s a great day for the rule of law, no?

 

Sure, I guess. If you’re a chump optimist who cares more about moral victories than outcomes.

 

Justice?

 

What is the outcome that our corrupt DOJ sought by pursuing the six Democrats in Congress? Sending them to prison?

 

Unlikely. Trump may have fantasized about that because he neither knows nor cares anything about law, but Pirro and Pam Bondi surely understood that this wouldn’t end in victory for their side. There’s no scenario in which an American, let alone an elected lawmaker, does time for exhorting agents of the state to follow laws they’re already duty-bound to follow. Federal judges would have made mincemeat of the Justice Department’s case if a grand jury hadn’t done it for them.

 

The outcome the DOJ hoped for (besides getting the president off its back by pursuing the case) was to scare Trump’s enemies by showing them how far it’s willing to go in abusing its powers to harass them. Not even members of Congress are safe from vindictive prosecution by the president’s consiglieres, you see.

 

And they got that outcome. America is a more frightening place for Trump’s critics today than it was yesterday, notwithstanding the result of the grand jury proceedings.

 

I’m sure Bondi and Pirro would have preferred to obtain indictments against the six Democrats, if only to save face, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. Antagonists of the president are now on notice: If you cross him, whether you escape the ordeal of criminal prosecution will depend on your luck in drawing a grand jury with a higher-than-usual skepticism of government allegations. The DOJ itself won’t refrain from trying to prosecute you out of any quaint ethical sense that it’s improper to do so when it knows it stands zero chance of a conviction.

 

It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if the sources for yesterday’s news stories about the grand jury’s failure to indict were Trump loyalists inside the Justice Department, not Trump opponents. To effectively intimidate the White House’s critics, the fact that indictments had been sought needed to be publicly known. Well, now it is.

 

If that’s a “victory” for the resistance, the resistance is a cheap date.

 

The essential thing to remember today is that, realistically, there’s nothing that can be done to halt the blatant, ongoing corruption of the DOJ. (Well, nothing outside the agency, anyway.) Last week National Review’s Andy McCarthy proposed defunding the department if it made supporting the president a qualification of employment, but shutting down federal law enforcement is unimaginable politically for Democrats. Every crime in the United States that occurred during the shutdown would be blamed on the left, whether it fell under federal jurisdiction or not. The GOP attack ads about “defunding the police” would write themselves.

 

A Democratic-controlled Congress could impeach Bondi next year, I suppose, as there’s no shortage of grounds—dubious investigations of the president’s political enemies, cover-ups shielding federal agents who have killed Americans, preposterously sweeping claims about the executive’s constitutional power to license illegal conduct, etc. (If egregious hypocrisy were a high crime or misdemeanor, she’d be dead to rights on that, too.) But what would be the point? Senate Republicans won’t vote to remove her.

 

Even if they did, the cultural rot at the Justice Department would persist. For all her faults, the attorney general clearly isn’t the cause of her agency’s corruption. Replacing her with Todd Blanche won’t fix anything and might plausibly make it worse.

 

Yesterday reminded us again that the Justice Department is an unethical disgrace to the country and will almost certainly remain so until 2029, if not longer. Some victory for the rule of law.

 

Tariffs.

 

What about the tariff vote in the House? What outcome were Mike Johnson and Republicans seeking there?

 

Obviously, they were hoping to protect the president’s power to impose burdensome tariffs on Americans based on nothing more than his royal whim. Well, good news: He still has that power today and, unless and until the Supreme Court takes it away from him, will continue to have it no matter what legislation Democrats manage to move.

 

That’s because our country is now in the same constitutional upside-down on trade that it’s been in for decades with presidential-ordered military interventions. Instead of seeking lawful authority from Congress before acting, the White House acts first and then dares Congress to strip it of the authority it has asserted to do so. And that’s nearly impossible: Since the president will veto any bill that tries to curtail his power, the House and Senate are forced to try to muster all-but-unattainable supermajorities to override his objection.

 

In a world where Republican cowards in Congress cared more about protecting Americans from tariffs than they cared about protecting themselves from primary challengers, that’s doable. In the world we live in, it is not.

 

So the closest thing to a meaningful “victory” that happened in the House yesterday is that the aforementioned cowards will now have to go on record as to whether they support or oppose various measures to limit Trump’s tariffs. And that ain’t nothing, in fairness, in the same way that the grand jury declining to indict the six Democrats ain’t nothing. The president’s trade policies have cost U.S. states $200 billion and counting, or about $1,000 per American household per one study, and they’re currently rocking a 37-60 approval rating, according to a recent Pew Research survey. Tariffs will be a liability for the GOP in the midterms.

 

But how much more of a liability will they plausibly be for House Republicans just because they now have to vote on whether to repeal them? Midterms are referendums on the president’s agenda: If the average voter hates a policy like tariffs, he or she is apt to punish their local GOP congressman for it regardless of how that person voted in the House on the subject.

 

And that’s especially true, I think, if the president has bear-hugged the policy and stubbornly doubled down at every opportunity about how supposedly great it is.

 

Last night, for instance, right around the time that the House voted to kill Johnson’s rule, a clip circulated on social media of Trump boasting in a new interview that he jacked up his tariff on Switzerland from 30 percent to 39 percent because he didn’t like the tone that an envoy from the Swiss government took with him on the phone. That’s the sort of “national emergency” that supposedly justifies his power to set trade policy unilaterally and the logic that now informs momentous decisions on which the fate of many American businesses depends. “Arrogance” doesn’t scratch the surface of describing his hubris.

 

Nothing that happens in the House going forward will save Republican members from the wrath of voters outraged at knowing their livelihoods have become pawns in a spiteful lunatic’s petty score-settling. But if I’m wrong about that, then last night’s defeat was arguably a good thing for the House GOP long-term: It means some members of Mike Johnson’s conference will have a chance to distance themselves from the president’s unpopular tariffs before November by casting a symbolic vote to repeal them.

 

So how was it some important victory for “the system”?

 

The proper response to the executive commandeering the legislature’s power to set trade policy under a patently ridiculous claim of a trade-deficit “emergency” is impeachment. Instead, we’re destined for a series of votes on repeal bills with no hope of achieving their intended purpose, a sort of congressional kabuki theater of accountability. Hooray for the rule of law.

 

A silver lining.

 

Here’s where I surprise you with a bit of optimism, though. In a way, Tuesday was a meaningful victory for Trump opponents.

 

In court and in Congress, the president’s allies were forced by the perverse cultish dynamics of Republican politics to defend bad, disliked policies that will damage their public support. Corrupt toadies deserve the people’s scorn, and yesterday increased the probability that they’ll receive it: I’d call that an example of our political system working.

 

It’s possible, as I said, that the House’s actions on tariffs going forward either won’t matter to voters or will give some Republicans an opportunity to register their opposition to Trump’s policies before November. But it’s also easy to see how having to take those votes might hurt them (which is why Mike Johnson wanted to avoid it, of course). Some GOPers will vote against repealing the president’s tariffs because they’re worried about a primary challenge, but that vote will haunt them in the general election. Others will vote for repeal to protect their left flank in the general election but at the risk of antagonizing Republican primary voters, especially with an enraged Trump demanding consequences for “disloyalty.”

 

The White House’s obstinacy on sticking with tariffs despite their unpopularity is a strategic disaster. It’s only fair that his apologists in Congress should suffer for it, and now some of them are more likely to. The system works!

 

It will also work, I expect, regarding the attempted indictment of the six congressional Democrats. Polls taken late last year showed Americans siding with the six against the administration’s attempts to punish them for sedition, but I’d bet good money that the margin has since widened as anxiety about lawlessness by federal law enforcement has risen. “Don’t obey illegal orders” sounds a lot more reasonable now that ICE agents have begun shooting American citizens.

 

My sense, which I hope is based on more than wishful thinking, is that the president and his administration lost the benefit of the doubt as to their good intentions from some critical mass of the electorate over the last six weeks. If so, then the sleazy, discrediting shenanigans in which our renegade Justice Department is presently engaged—which are by no means limited to harassing Democratic lawmakers—should affirm newly minted Trump doubters in their skepticism and gradually harden opinion against him further.

 

And needless to say, the failed indictment should add rocket fuel to left-wing turnout in November. Our system has no means to stop a corrupt DOJ from behaving corruptly, but handing control of the House to Democrats this fall will at least guarantee some uncomfortable investigations and revelations next year of how an operation run by the likes of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel conducts business behind closed doors.

 

So the system worked yesterday after all. It didn’t work the way it’s supposed to, by preventing abuses of power altogether, but it created a modicum of accountability by supplying voters with two separate vignettes illustrating why the party that runs Washington is unfit to govern and shouldn’t be trusted with power. There’s virtue in that.