The Trump Administration

Perhaps it was the sight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis using a terrified 5-year-old boy as bait. Perhaps it was the revelation that they voided the Fourth Amendment in a secret memo. Or perhaps it was when the country watched Trump — after a year of bombing Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen — sundown in the middle of his mob-boss routine over Greenland. 

Whenever it was, the Trump administration has ended the age of savvy temporizing and feigned ambiguity. There is no longer a stigma around the use of stark, simple terms, stated loud and plain, like, “These people and their actions are evil.”

We can also say this: Wherever you live in the United States, the Trump administration is going to bring an ethnic cleansing near you, if not directly to you, and they are going to use every term except that one to describe what they are doing. They will not stop until they have ethnically cleansed the United States, and they do not care if you die. The only lesson each new body teaches them is how inconsequential it is to make the next one.

It is natural to want to evade or resist the conclusion that putting a region under a constitutional interdict and then terrorizing, assaulting, kidnapping and potentially disappearing and/or killing any person of color caught up in sweeps made by the secret police is, in fact, ethnic cleansing. But, short of gas chambers and crematoria, it is pretty much exactly the image people conjure if you tell them to close their eyes and imagine an ethnic cleansing. “It’s different when we do it” is already a bad American habit, and it is one that is dangerously easy to keep applying until something tells you to stop.

Like the people in the streets in 2020, those in the streets of Minneapolis are the ones who are making sure you understand that the Department of Homeland Security has finally become the best version of itself, the apex of its predation. 

It is a criminal, fascist profanation of the Constitution and the spirit of this nation, a perfect symptom of the soup of moral and mental diseases that constitute Trump’s mind, his Cabinet’s and all those of the mediocre light-fingered gauleiters they’ve seeded the executive and judiciary with. It, like all of them, must be torn out.

They will not stop until they have ethnically cleansed the United States.

Collectible Nazi figurine Greg Bovino spent Wednesday doing photo ops at gas stations, grinning like the Johnny Cab from “Total Recall” while encircled by his ICE dancers, trying to incite the apocalyptic urban unrest that lies sent him to put a stop to. They and their meme squad of tactical videographers need something they can twist into the war they declared was already happening. Anything, really, to drown out the message that’s come through from the streets of Minneapolis, just like it did last time.

And yet, for some, habit will be enough to deny the evidence of testimony ringing from multiple precincts and voices up and down every demographic. Some will continue to accord equal or greater weight to a single, demented, infantile voice that lied to them as few as 30,000 times in a single presidential term. 

They will mulishly refuse to emerge, at long last, from Beltway chat-show heuristics and instead reject the exhilarating freedom of trusting themselves to bear witness to reality. They will persist even as the ethnic cleansing makes its way to Maine today, and God knows where tomorrow, perhaps stopping to make an encore appearance in Chicago or Los Angeles, mowing the lawn of what’s sprung up since, like the Israeli Defense Force’s former Gaza management strategy. Then out to the counties with the bigger non-white populations, leaving cleaning up the smaller ones for later — or, like the remnants in the cities, to the snitches.

You may be hurt or killed in the act of objecting to this. The Trump administration’s response to its murder of Renee Good has been to insist on its right to murder anyone if it has probable cause, which has been defined down to a simple yes/no about whether the officer in question is anxious, annoyed or feels like you are annoying him or triggering his anxiety in a “terrorist” or “crime” way. At the same time, the percentage of the population that DHS can assume constitutes a threat, criminal or a group of hot-dish terrorists has only increased.

The percentage of the population that the DHS feels it can safely exclude from terrorist or criminal designation is rapidly shrinking. Capital cities and state governments can’t be trusted, and Trump will only grow more convinced that any perceived obstruction constitutes a capital offense for public figures. 

As with anything Trump publicly covets long enough, someone will eventually work toward the Führer to make it happen, but Renee Good is proof that everyone else is already this disposable. Party members who have stomached things so far — the same people who responded to 2020’s road-closing protests for racial justice with support for legalizing vehicular murder — will learn to swallow bigger and bigger body counts.

So why not you? Or, to come at it from a different direction: Why wouldn’t you assume you were disposable already?

They have already told all levels of law enforcement to take the gloves off, and they take care to look the other way when “officers are on scene” and a “shooting transpires” and “it eventuates” that you die. They don’t care if you are detained and some combination of filth, disease, malnourishment, injury, confiscation of your medication or “discipline” makes you die. They don’t care if your insurance rescinds your coverage and you die. They don't care if they eliminate Medicaid and Medicare, and you have to fly home and take care of your mom before she dies. They don’t care if you fly home to see her, and your plane collides with something and you die, and they don’t care if it’s blown apart by the debris from a Nazi’s rocket that was busy exploding over a protected wetland and you die.

They have already told all levels of law enforcement to take the gloves off.

They don’t care if you get measles, mumps or rubella and die. Sometime in early summer of 2020 was the last time they cared that anyone got COVID and died. They resented passing COVID relief, themselves defrauded it with lusty abandon, and come the next pandemic, they will use their own crime as justification for the moral hazard of spending a cent to make sure you don’t die.

They don’t care if you die in Greenland, Venezuela, Mexico or a training exercise, but they’re going to make you watch your secretary of DUI do kettlebell bullshit that looks like something out of a suicide manual for the lumbar spine. They don't care if the inevitable, obvious, utterly destined response to any of their casually cruel and stupidly bellicose actions on the world stage is the reason why you die, and they don’t care about the abject wretched and revolting violation of using your death to make someone else’s kid sign up and die.

They don’t care if you eat green eggs and die or eat listeria ham and die. They don't care if they JDAM your boat and die, and if you’re close enough to whatever they designate a cartel area in the next minority-target-of-opportunity strike in the Americas, they don't care if you have your passport on you for that goat selfie you’re in the middle of when you die.

When you distill all of the now overtly Nazi iconography of this down to its essence, it is all being done, somehow, for the sanctity of white women, who, looking at maternal health care data — you guessed it! They don’t care if they die, either.

Why, then, would any of us matter, standing between them and an ethnic cleansing that represents the culmination of so many unstated, then dog-whistled, then whispered, then bellowed aspirations? We have, after all, waited a decade for someone to make them care. We’ve waited for the FBI and been failed and turned against. We’ve waited for the Supreme Court and have been failed and turned against. We’ve waited for the same from opportunists among his own party and our oligarchy, only to be teased with vindication before being abandoned, failed and usually turned against.

ICE is its own opposition recruitment poster; we have to paste it everywhere.

We’ve waited for the media and been failed and, at every point, either been exploited, championed, blamed or turned against — or some combination, but mostly blamed — depending on whatever most exculpates them from past responsibilities and obviates future ones. 

The purportedly opposition party has used the same Heisenbergian Responsibility principle, including still blaming, with the McGovern-like whiff of psychological eternity, one primary candidate and maybe a dozen podcasters from 2016, whenever they can’t think of a more current scapegoat before going to commercial. We delivered the opposition a mandate to seek justice for what Trump had set in motion, and they pretended that what America craved was the sclerotic status quo ante that brought us here.

Now that we are here, we are the ones coming to save us, and we have to learn from each other. ICE is its own opposition recruitment poster; we have to paste it everywhere. 

Many more of us have to wield the shame already pressing down on the goons, ruining their fully funded shitkicker holiday with the condemnation of communities who can find, if in nothing else, a wholeness in their rejection of fascism, of violence, of being stained with the lies and abuse of faceless oppressors and unaccountable violation. Our oppressors are humiliated by bravery and terrified of being seen. The sooner their crimes surround them, and scorn and shame and rejection pours into their ears — the sooner more voices join — the more of us we can save.

Like all abusers, the Trump administration cannot abide the word “no.” Minneapolis and businesses and activists around the state are saying it again today — not some official body, but the people who make a city, who shape a community, who give it breath and bind it in mutual recognition and in crisis. They are on strike.

The courage they are showing today and have been for days upon days has been heartbreaking and wondrous. Within reach of violent, deadly men — men knowingly armored by immunity and sanctified by a criminal presidency — we have watched the people of Minneapolis run to each other in acts of incredible, vulnerable bravery, to insist that they matter, and that their community matters. Because helping is a reflex, and because that’s what Trump is wasting another unearned fortune in lives and futures and mercenaries to stop.

Minneapolis is rejecting that. It can be frightening to be among the first to say “no,” but it is such an easy word, and such an easy word to say to Donald Trump’s inhumanity. It will be so easy to join them. Each of us only makes it easier for the next.

-Jeb Lund

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