"In the time of Trump, 'Don’t take the bait' is a rule that’s almost as important as 'Do not obey in advance."

 

Following the shooting death of Renee Good and other incidents where agents played fast and loose with the rights of both American citizens and immigrants, ICE seems to be doing everything it can to be an accelerant to the tensions. 

Wednesday evening, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that federal agents were trying to arrest a man from Venezuela who was in the country illegally, when he fled from agents. She said he “began to resist and violently assault the officer,” and was joined by two other men who attacked the agent with a snow shovel and broom handle. McLaughlin said the agent feared for his life and shot the man they’d been trying to arrest in the leg.

There are obviously questions about this scenario, including how an agent ended up alone and whether a reasonable agent would have thought his life was at risk. As The New York Times put it, “The federal government’s narrative could not immediately be verified.” A crowd of about 200 people gathered after the shooting, and according to the police chief, engaged in illegal acts, including throwing fireworks at police. 

After agents from ICE’s sister agency, CBP, showed up in what the Times called a large, military-style vehicle, protesters “swarmed the vehicle and yelled and threw snowballs at agents.” Retreating agents fired tear gas-type canisters, and agents who arrived subsequently sprayed chemical agents against the protestors who moved toward them. A protester lobbed fireworks toward the agents as they left.

Agents could have de-escalated the tension at any point in these developments, but did not. That forces us to ask why—is there a deliberate effort to provoke protestors into acts of violence? We don’t know the answer to that question for certain, but a social media post by the president this morning gave some hint.

Trump threatened to use the “INSURRECTION ACT” due to attacks on “the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job.”

No surprise. We’ve always known he was looking for an excuse to do this. We’ve discussed insurrection act here before. I wrote to you about it back in April, in a piece that also discusses the importance and effectiveness of peaceful protest. 

“Trump might try to take advantage of minor incidents, or even plants who engage in violence, to impose the Insurrection Act and use the military to put a halt to Americans who are out on the streets exercising their First Amendment rights.”

So as difficult as it may become to show restraint, it’s essential that we don’t take Trump’s bait as we protest. If he’s going to impose the Insurrection Act, as he likely will at some point, we don’t want to give him any cover for it. Each of us can help by sharing this message with those around us and making sure they share it forward.

Here’s what you need to know about the Insurrection Act:

Normally, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. It explicitly outlaws using the armed forces to enforce the law within our borders, unless that action is expressly authorized by the Constitution or an act of Congress.

Enter the Insurrection Act, which permits a president to deploy the military in American cities and on our streets in very narrow circumstances involving insurrection, rebellion, or extreme civil unrest. Even in those circumstances, the military can only be used for “emergency needs” towards the goal of reestablishing civilian control as quickly as possible. This is where lawsuits may come in, especially since governors and local leaders are not only not asking for federal intervention, but in the case of Minnesota, explicitly asking the feds to leave.

Typically, the Act is only used at a Governor and/or local officials’ request. The exceptions to that are 60 years ago and come from the heart of the civil rights era, when presidents sent troops to states like Mississippi and Alabama to protect people’s lives and liberty, like college students integrating state universities, not sending troops in to traumatize a civilian population trying to peacefully exercise its First Amendment rights.

But the Act’s language is broad and gives presidents plenty of discretion to, for instance, use the military to arrest American citizens engaged in protest, if a president calls what’s going on an insurrection, rebellion, or civil unrest. 

And in an 1827 case, Martin v. Mott, the Supreme Court ruled that it is up to the president to decide whether the Insurrection Act should be invoked and that the courts may not review his decision. Although more recently, courts have intimated that a president’s assessment needs to pass the smell test, we should still expect to see them give broad deference to his decisions.

There are reports that federal agents are unrepentant following Good’s death at the hands of one of their number. Minnesotan Patty O’Keefe, an American citizen, was arrested and detained by ICE. While they were transporting her, she says one of the agents said to her, “You’ve gotta stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.”

NBC is reporting that in its rush to hire; ICE is deploying new agents to the field without adequate training. An AI program they were using flagged new hires with no law enforcement experience as trained agents and surged them out to offices. 

The article says this was the case with “many” of them. The president directed ICE to hire 10,000 new officers by the end of 2025 and offered new recruits $50,000 signing bonuses using money allocated to the agency by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” DHS says those agents have been identified and are receiving training in the field.

It’s not just Minnesota. Geraldo Lunas Campos died at an ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas, on January 3. The Washington Post reports it has listened to a recording of a call between a staffer in the coroner’s office and Mr. Campos’ daughter, where she is told that pending the results of a toxicology report, “our doctor is believing that we’re going to be listing the manner of death as homicide.” At the time of his death, the agency said, “staff observed him in distress,” but did not offer a cause of death. 

The Post reports that “a fellow detainee says he witnessed … Campos being choked to death by guards.” The El Paso facility is described as “a colossal makeshift tent encampment on the Mexican border.” Not only have the people being housed there reported “substandard conditions and physical abuse,” ICE inspectors found over 60 violations of federal standards for detaining migrants in just 50 days dating back to last September.

In new reporting this week, ProPublica found more than 40 episodes over the past year where immigration agents used life-threatening maneuvers, like the banned chokehold, on immigrants, citizens, and protesters. The reporting notes that the “agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.” ProPublica noted that the incidents they are aware of are not a complete accounting of incidents like this that may have occurred.

This is now about far more than Minnesota. This is about all of us. “Don’t take the bait” doesn’t mean that the threat isn’t serious, because it obviously is. This is about being smart as we head into the midterm elections. 

Nothing has the potential to discourage people from voting like the risk of being pulled out of their car by armed men as they head to their polling places, as ICE did earlier this week to a woman who was on her way to a doctor's appointment. If Trump deploys the military while voting is underway, the damage could be significant. Donald Trump is well aware of that, and we need to be too.

In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Trump had this to say: “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.” He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” 

We’ve moved on from claiming he won an election he lost to saying elections are unnecessary. This is a president unfettered by laws, norms, and even the oath he swore to uphold the Constitution. So let’s be prepared. And don’t take the bait.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse. If you appreciate explanations and analysis like this, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription. Your support makes the newsletter possible.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Appeasement

 

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has presented her gold Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump after meeting him in the White House, nearly a fortnight after he ordered the abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, who received the award last year for her struggle against Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state,” told reporters on Thursday she had made the gesture in recognition of the US president’s “unique commitment [to] our freedom.”

Several hours later, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Machado “presented me with her Nobel peace prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”

What have the peace prize organizers said?  Earlier in the day, they posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot!”

 

"Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires"

 

Something truly awful may be happening to our economy — at least for average Americans — as the result of Trump’s billions in tax breaks for billionaires, looting of our treasury and economy, $38 trillion national debt, and his corrupt embrace and promotion of foreign autocracies and digital currencies. If it happens, it’s going to hurt many of us, all while making Trump’s billionaire buddies massively richer.

I remember the look on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s face when the economy crashed in 2008. The former Goldman Sachs CEO’s hands trembled as he stood at a podium and confessed that the GOP’s banking deregulation had blown up the American financial system and very nearly the global economy.

Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, and their retirements that year, but the barons of Wall Street lost nothing — except a brief moment of embarrassment — and then paid themselves tens of billions in bonuses.

About $430 billion was initially shoveled out the federal door and into the banks in just one month. And, tragically, both Bush and Obama decided that not one top donor executive should go to prison, and not even one major bank was broken up. We coughed up $430 billion to make them whole. And now, it appears, the banksters are at it again.

According to a new report from Lever News, over the past few months the Federal Reserve has quietly extended more than $420 billion in emergency support to Wall Street’s biggest banks in near silence, with minimal scrutiny, and no serious conditions attached. This isn’t an accident: it’s the predictable end point of a system that punishes working people for falling behind and rewards billionaires for their political connections.

As headlines today warn of layoffs spreading through U.S. manufacturing (100,000 job losses since Trump took office) and the Federal Reserve is quietly extending hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency support to Wall Street, it’s worth remembering a sobering but basic rule of history: when economies break, the rich make out like bandits. That’s because recessions are basically shopping sprees for people like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

When Wall Street banks crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater. The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009, it had collapsed to 6,594.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century. Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market. But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later! The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America. The market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, and working people, now out of work, were again selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008! Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day). Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt. Which is why average Americans should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of Republican policy choices that get repeated over and over again — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered in plain sight.

Deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working-class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich. So no, this warning isn’t fringe: it’s historical and empirical. And it’s being quietly confirmed by the behavior of the people like Warren Buffett — now sitting on $314 billion in cash — who know the markets best and are waiting for the crash to cash in.

So, get ready. Reduce your debt as much as possible, nail down your employment and assets, prepare your garden, and get ready to live simply as Trump crashes our economy again just like he did in 2020, and then tries to use that as an excuse to consolidate his power while he and his billionaire buddies again make off like the bandits they are.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They’re Looting the Economy Again”

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"Free speech and independent media are essential"

 

The FBI search of a Washington Post reporter’s home on Jan. 14, 2026, was a rare and intimidating move by an administration focused on repressing criticism and dissent. In its story about the search at Hannah Natanson’s home, at which FBI agents said they were searching for materials related to a federal government contractor, Washington Post reporter Perry Stein wrote that “it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home.”

And Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The New York Times the raid was “intensely concerning,” and could have a chilling effect “on legitimate journalistic activity.”

Free speech and independent media play a vital role in holding governments accountable by informing the public about government wrongdoing. This is precisely why autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin have worked to silence independent media, eliminating checks on their power and extending their rule. In Russia, for example, public ignorance about Putin’s responsibility for military failures in the war on Ukraine has allowed state propaganda to shift blame to senior military officials instead.

While the United States remains institutionally far removed from countries like Russia, the Trump administration has taken troubling early steps toward autocracy by threatening – and in some cases implementing – restrictions on free speech and independent media.

Trump sued the New York Times in 2025 for $15 billion for what he called ‘malicious’ articles; a judge threw out the case. Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Public ignorance, free speech and independent media; ignorance about what public officials do exists in every political system. In democracies, citizens often remain uninformed because learning about politics takes time and effort, while one vote rarely changes an election. American economist Anthony Downs called this “rational ignorance,” and it is made worse by complex laws and bureaucracy that few people fully understand.

As a result, voters often lack the information needed to monitor politicians or hold them accountable, giving officials more room to act in their own interest. Free speech and independent media are essential for breaking this cycle. They allow citizens, journalists and opposition leaders to expose corruption and criticize those in power. Open debate helps people share grievances and organize collective action, from protests to campaigns.

Independent media also act as watchdogs, investigating wrongdoing and raising the political cost of abuse – making it harder for leaders to get away with corruption or incompetence. Public ignorance in autocracies: Autocrats strengthen their grip on power by undermining the institutions meant to keep them in check.

When free speech and independent journalism disappear, citizens are less likely to learn about government corruption or failures. Ignorance becomes the regime’s ally – it keeps people isolated and uninformed. By censoring information, autocrats create an information vacuum that prevents citizens from making informed choices or organizing protests.

This lack of reliable information also allows autocrats to spread propaganda and shape public opinion on major political and social issues.

Most modern autocrats have worked to silence free speech and crush independent media. When Putin came to power, he gradually shut down independent TV networks and censored opposition outlets. Journalists who exposed government corruption or brutality were harassed, prosecuted or even killed. New laws restricted protests and public criticism, while “foreign agent” rules made it nearly impossible for the few remaining independent media to operate.

At the same time, the Kremlin built a vast propaganda machine to shape public opinion. This control over information helped protect the regime during crises. As I noted in a recent article, many Russians were unaware of Putin’s responsibility for military failures in 2022. State media used propaganda to shift blame to the military leadership – preserving Putin’s popularity even as the war faltered.

The threat to independent media in the US: While the United States remains far from an autocracy, the Trump administration has taken steps that echo the behavior of authoritarian regimes. 

Consider the use of lawsuits to intimidate journalists. In Singapore, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, routinely used civil defamation suits to silence reporters who exposed government repression or corruption. These tactics discouraged criticism and encouraged self-censorship.

President Donald Trump has taken a similar approach, seeking US$15 billion from The New York Times for publication of several allegedly “malicious” articles, and $10 billion from The Wall Street Journal. The latter suit concerns a story about a letter Trump reportedly signed in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book.

A court dismissed the lawsuit against The New York Times; that’s likely to happen with the Journal suit as well. But such lawsuits could deter reporting on government misconduct, reporting on the actions and statements of Trump’s political opponents, and the kind of criticism of an administration inherent in opinion journalism such as columns and editorials.

This problem is compounded by the fact that after the Jimmy Kimmel show was suspended following a threat from the Trump-aligned chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the president suggested revoking the broadcast licenses of networks that air negative commentary about him.

Although the show was later reinstated, the episode revealed how the administration could use the autocratic technique of bureaucratic pressure to suppress speech it disagreed with. Combined with efforts to prosecute the president’s perceived enemies through the Justice Department, such actions inevitably encourage media self-censorship and deepen public ignorance.

The threat to free speech: Autocrats often invoke “national security” to pass laws restricting free speech. Russia’s “foreign agents” law, passed in 2012, forced nongovernmental organizations with foreign funding to label themselves as such, becoming a tool for silencing dissenting advocacy groups. Its 2022 revision broadened the definition, letting the Kremlin target anyone who criticized the government.

Similar laws have appeared in Hungary, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Russia also uses vague “terrorist” and “extremist” designations to punish those who protest and dissent, all under the guise of “national security.”

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump administration took steps threatening free speech. It used the pretext of the “violence-inciting radical left” to call for a crackdown on what it designated as “hate speech,” threaten liberal groups, and designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

The latter move is especially troubling, pushing the United States closer to the behavior characteristic of autocratic governments. The vagueness of the designation threatens to suppress free expression and opposition to the Trump administration.

Antifa is not an organization but a “decentralized collection of individual activists,” as scholar Stanislav Vysotsky describes it. The scope of those falling under the antifa label is widened by its identification with broad ideas, described in a national security memorandum issued by the Trump administration in the fall of 2025, like anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity. This gives the government leeway to prosecute an unprecedented number of individuals for their speech.

As scholar Melinda Haas writes, the memorandum “pushes the limits of presidential authority by targeting individuals and groups as potential domestic terrorists based on their beliefs rather than their actions.”

-Konstantin Zhukov, Assistant Professor of Economics, Indiana University, Institute for Humane Studies, from The Conversation

 

"Republicans need to decide whether they want to be complicit in Trump’s descent into depravity. Democrats must force them to make that choice in full view of voters"

Untrained ICE agents ready to use force at the slightest provocation (or none at all) have been brutalizing Americans, with hundreds more undisciplined thugs ready to deploy in Minneapolis and elsewhere. The epidemic of government-initiated violence goes far beyond a few isolated incidents in blue cities.

The Wall Street Journal reported: The Wall Street Journal has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead. 

According to court records and lawyers, only one civilian was armed—with a concealed weapon that was never drawn—and at least five of those shots were U.S. citizens. Several federal officers reported injuries, including bruised ribs, a dislocated finger and a bite wound.

The lack of training and shoot-first ask-no-questions-later mentality have turned our streets into something out of 1930’s fascist Europe. ICE and other federal agents disregard accepted, safe law enforcement practices. 

“The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire,” the Journal reported. Despite decades of research to develop “accepted standards” for conducting traffic stops, ICE agents feel empowered to fire at civilians who tick them off. When tragedy strikes, the Trump regime smears and investigates the victim.

Illinois and Minnesota have had enough. The two states filed lawsuits on Monday against Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the Border Control, and specific officials including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and CPB agent Gregory Bovino; challenging the violent, abusive actions of the immigration agents.

The complaint in page after page meticulously lays out incidents of abusive conduct, violation of First Amendment rights, and lawlessness. The states seek relief based on, among other grounds, the First and Tenth Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act. 

Their demands include halting the surge of agents in their states (which interfere with states’ health, education, and safety powers); barring arrest of those who have not violated immigration law (unless there is probable cause they committed a crime or threaten others); limiting certain biometric data gathering; protecting the feds from, in essence, overtaking local and state policing; allowing ICE to operate in sensitive places (e.g., schools, hospitals) only in limited circumstances; and preventing use of physical force to disperse crowds engaged in First Amendment-protected activity. The states also want to stop agents from pointing firearms at individuals who pose no threat to others and/or masking their identities.

The federal probe is so corrupted that federal prosecutors at Main Justice and in Minnesota federal prosecutors have quit. “At least five senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced their resignations this week, believing that the Trump administration has undermined the work and mission of the section, according to four people familiar with the personnel moves,” the Washington Post reported. 

On Tuesday, another batch of federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned, reportedly over directions to investigate the victim and freeze out state investigators. The whitewash is so blatant and clumsy that no one will believe the results of the phony “investigation.”

Frankly, it is stunning that lawsuits are necessary to bring about such basic restraints that, until now, most federal and state law enforcement officials have widely followed. And given the extent of Trump regime violence and public outrage, it is inconceivable that Democrats would miss the opportunity to use the upcoming the spending deadline to halt unrestricted flow of hundreds of billions to a rogue DHS.

Democrats should rally around proposals such as those from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and from Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Cal.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.) in the House to condition spending on increased oversight of ICE and on requirements that agents have warrants, wear body cameras, do not mask themselves, and stop using force indiscriminately. Democrats can bring the same attention and pressure to bear on Republicans as they did in the healthcare fight: Get on the right side of the issue or face the wrath of voters.

That strategy is entirely doable, if Democrats maintain their nerve. They must remember that the political landscape has changed dramatically since the end of the Oct.-Nov. shutdown: Trump is far weaker than he was even a couple months ago.

Trump’s approval ratings have continued to plummet, and both Houses have rebelled against Trump (with a War Powers Act vote in the Senate, an ACA vote in the House, and on votes to release the Epstein-Trump files in both). 

Even Republicans have begun denouncing him on the malicious prosecution of Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell. (At least two Republicans said they would oppose confirming any Fed nominee until Trump backs off a malicious prosecution of Powell.)

Trump is not the only one with diminishing leverage. Contrary to legacy media punditry, Senate Republicans now face loss of their majority. Even before the latest Powell and ICE debacles, I have argued — based on Democrats’ November sweep, the sinking popularity of “concerned” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Democrats’ recruitment of key candidates (e.g., Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Roy Cooper in North Carolina), and key Republican retirements (e.g., Iowa Sen. Joni “We are all going to die” Ernst) — that Democrats’ chances to win back the majority have been underestimated. On top of the latest Trump blunders, former congresswoman Mary Peltola announced she is running to challenge Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).

No one should doubt that the Senate is in play. Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Alaska are winnable; Iowa and Texas are competitive; and Democrats’ defense of Minnesota, Michigan, and Georgia look far safer. Republicans could very well lose both the House and the Senate, bringing Trump’s reign of chaos, terror, and lawlessness to a screeching halt.

Accordingly, while the country is in an uproar about ICE’s brutal onslaught (and getting hit with enormous healthcare insurance premium hikes), Dems should use the pending funding deadline to turn up the heat on both the ACA extension and ICE restrictions. 

Trump is already in trouble on his unilateral, forever wars, so war powers resolutions on Greenland, Iran, etc. can be dealt with separately. Pro-democracy voters need to keep the pressure on Democrats to press their advantage and to warn Republicans that siding with Trump will result in their wipe-out in November.

Democrats can increase their chances for success if they begin to tie the disastrous results to individual senators. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) could have voted to prevent you from losing healthcare. He refused. Sen. X voted to allow ICE to run wild, killing Americans on the street, so hold her responsible for the deaths that followed. Stressing specific members’ responsibility for Trump’s horrors will both encourage them to join Democrats on the ACA and ICE as well as lay the groundwork for the midterms.

The first two weeks of 2026 have put on display Trump’s crazed desperation. His frenzy to secure his authoritarian rule in the face of plunging popularity suggests he understands that a blue wave midterm will bring his regime to a screeching halt.

Therein lies the danger of an unhinged, vengeful narcissist enabled by sycophants and morally vacuous toadies in Congress, the press, business, and universities. His actions become more outrageous, his lies more outlandish. But in his absurd overreach — going to war against Venezuela, defending the stone-cold killing of an American mom, prosecuting the Fed chairman — he also has demonstrated to anyone outside his cult that the midterms are not just about healthcare and high prices.

Trump has made this about chaos, insanity, war, violence, and simple decency. Republicans need to decide whether they want to be complicit in Trump’s descent into depravity. Democrats must force them to make that choice in full view of voters.

The Contrarian is reader-supported. Thank you for getting us through our first year! To support independent journalism, help with litigation efforts, and keep this opposition movement lively and engaged through 2026, please join the fight as a paid subscriber.

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"Get this lunatic under wraps before he ruins it for everyone"

 

Alright, I’m saying this as an Australian who is absolutely sick to death of watching the world hold its breath every time this blabbering blubbering blithering blustering buffoon opens his grotesque mouth.

You see folks, as far as I can tell, from the outside, this is what it looks like: America has elected a man who talks and behaves like a megalomaniac, and the rest of the planet is supposed to just trust that he won’t completely lose his grip on reality and drag us all into catastrophe.

You want to steal Greenland.

You want Cuba to “make a deal before it’s too late.”

You talk about bombing or invading Mexico.

You kidnap a President and knock off the people's oil in Venezuela.

You joke about annexing Canada like it should be a shopping centre car park you can just claim because you feel like it.

Do you have any idea how insane that sounds to the rest of us?

This isn’t tough talk. This isn’t strategy. This is a deeply unstable old man threatening sovereign nations like he’s flipping over a Monopoly board because he’s losing. This is not normal behaviour. This is not leadership. This is not strength. This is a walking, talking international crisis.

And Americans, this is where it comes back to you. Not just MAGA, not just the people who voted for him, all of you. Because when the President of the United States starts talking about kidnapping leaders, annexing countries, and issuing ultimatums like a mob boss, the rest of the world doesn’t get a vote. We just get the consequences.

You don’t get to shrug and say, “Well I didn’t vote for him.” That might fly at a dinner party, but it doesn’t fly when nuclear powers are watching this circus and recalculating their own red lines. This is your system. Your presidency. Your responsibility.

From the outside, it looks like America lit the fuse and then wandered off while everyone else stands around the bomb wondering who’s going to cut the wire.

And let’s be brutally honest. This man is nearly 80. He’s frail. He’s clearly deteriorating. He is not some long-term visionary playing chess. He’s at the end of his lifespan and acting like nothing matters after him. That is the most dangerous type of leader there is. A man with nothing to lose and an ego that demands constant feeding.

Why should the rest of the world pay for that?

Why should families in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, anywhere, have to worry about war, trade collapse, energy shocks, or global instability because America couldn’t get its own house in order?

This is not about left or right anymore. This is about basic sanity. This is about stopping a psychopath before he does something irreversible. Because once a war starts, once a country gets invaded, once alliances fracture beyond repair, you don’t get a reset button.

So yes, this falls on Americans. You got the world into this mess, and you damn well better roll your sleeves up and get us out of it. Impeach him. Remove him. Contain him. Do whatever your system allows but do it fast.

Because the rest of us just want to live our lives, raise our families, pay our bills, and not wake up one morning to find out World War Three started because an unhinged old man wanted to feel powerful one last time.

This isn’t funny anymore. It isn’t theatrical. It isn’t tolerable. Get this lunatic under wraps before he ruins it for everyone.

"Is this the tipping point for global diplomacy? Find out what’s happening behind the headlines and why it matters to YOU."

-David Attenborough

 

Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns

An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An agent in Massachusetts jabbed his finger and thumb into the neck and arteries of a young father who refused to be separated from his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing.

After George Floyd’s murder by a police officer six years ago in Minneapolis — less than a mile from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good last week — police departments and federal agencies banned chokeholds and other moves that can restrict breathing or blood flow.

But those tactics are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Examples are scattered across social media. ProPublica found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using these life-threatening maneuvers on immigrants, citizens and protesters. The agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.

In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits “unless deadly force is authorized.”

About two dozen videos show officers kneeling on people’s necks or backs or keeping them face down on the ground while already handcuffed. Such tactics are not prohibited outright but are often discouraged, including by federal trainers, in part because using them for a prolonged time risks asphyxiation.

We reviewed footage with a panel of eight former police officers and law enforcement experts. They were appalled. This is what bad policing looks like, they said. And it puts everyone at risk.

“I arrested dozens upon dozens of drug traffickers, human smugglers, child molesters — some of them will resist,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades working at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including in the first Trump administration. “I don’t remember putting anybody in a chokehold. Period.”

“If this was one of my officers, he or she would be facing discipline,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a longtime police chief in Seattle who also served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner under President Barack Obama. “You have these guys running around in fatigues, with masks, with ‘Police’ on their uniform,” but they aren’t acting like professional police.

Over the past week, the conduct of agents has come under intense scrutiny after an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Good, a mother of three. The next day, a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot a man and woman in a hospital parking lot.

Top administration officials rushed to defend the officers. Speaking about the agent who shot Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “This is an experienced officer who followed his training.”

Officials said the same thing to us after we showed them footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds. Federal agents have “followed their training to use the least amount of force necessary,” department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

“Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. Both DHS and the White House lauded the “utmost professionalism” of their agents.

Our compilation of incidents is far from complete. Just as the government does not count how often it detains citizens or smashes through vehicle windows during immigration arrests, it does not publicly track how many times agents have choked civilians or otherwise inhibited their breathing or blood flow. We gathered cases by searching legal filings, social media posts and local press reports in English and Spanish.

Given the lack of any count over time, it’s impossible to know for certain how agents’ current use of the banned and dangerous tactics compares with earlier periods.

But former immigration officials told us they rarely heard of such incidents during their long tenures. They also recalled little pushback when DHS formally banned chokeholds and other tactics in 2023; it was merely codifying the norm.

That norm has now been broken. One of the citizens whom agents put in a chokehold was 16 years old…

Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds on U.S. Citizens — ProPublica