Another American citizen has been murdered in the streets of Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration enforcement agent. This victim, a 37-year-old ICU nurse named Alex Pretti, was killed on January 24 while tending to the injuries of a woman agents had pushed to the ground. The previous victim, Renee Good, was a 37-year-old mother of three who was executed in her car on January 7.

In both of these cases, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed the agents were acting in self-defense. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem immediately issued a statement accusing Good of “domestic terrorism.” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller denounced Pretti as “a would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.” These statements, released before any investigation took place, seem intended to halt any investigation at all and make the “official” story the only one that counts.

But anyone who’s watched the videos of these killings knows that neither of them were in self-defense. Good’s car was pointing away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross when he put three bullets in her. Her last words were, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Pretti was lawfully carrying a holstered gun, but he was unarmed and down on the ground when a Customs and Border Protection agent emptied a magazine into him.

The executions of Good and Pretti are only the tip of the iceberg. In Minnesota alone, ICE’s reign of terror has included blinding a young man with a nonlethal round, shooting teargas into a car filled with children, and abducting children as young as 5 years old. Videos of these incidents and countless others, filmed daily by ordinary Americans around the country, show the unforgivable violence that President Donald Trump, ICE, and Border Patrol are unleashing on the American people.

The Evolution of ICE, From Bad to Worse to Gestapo

Formed in 2003 by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, ICE is a relic of the War on Terror, founded when there was widespread fear of al-Qaeda entering the country through the Mexican border. Its purview is fairly broad, covering more than 400 statutes related to immigration, trade, and customs.

The agency’s evolution into a paramilitary organization, deployed in high numbers on American streets, is new to President Trump. His second administration quickly began a mass recruiting campaign for ICE, offering generous salaries and high sign-on bonuses and appealing specifically to white nationalists. Then Trump green-lit the agency’s escalating use of violence and intensified its presence in American communities, all while Congress increased its budget astronomically.

Now the agency acts as an invading and occupying force, loyal solely to Trump and not to the law, the Constitution, or any state or local governing bodies. Its actions have put it in conflict not only with American citizens but with local law enforcement and, in some states, even the National Guard. Some of ICE’s violent, unconstitutional, and immoral tactics include:

• A racially targeted, Gestapo-style “show me your paperwork” approach to enforcement. Rather than using investigative police work to go after the “worst of the worst,” as Trump once pledged, ICE agents simply stop whoever they think looks like they might not have been born here. They are raiding job sites, restaurants, public areas, schools, and even impersonating police and going door-to-door, apparently trying to meet Miller’s 3,000-deportations-a-day quota. At least 170 US citizens have been swept up in raids like these, some of them violently assaulted and detained for days.
• Arresting people in the midst of immigration hearings. Republicans often say they don’t mind immigrants as long as they do it the “right way.” But ICE has stalked immigration courts to capture people doing just that, deporting them right in the middle of trying to get their paperwork sorted.
• Detaining and disappearing people into concentration camp-like detention centers. The most notorious facility currently used by ICE is CECOT in El Salvador, a supermax gulag with brutally inhuman conditions and a chilling reputation for torture. But in America, conditions may be no better. Amnesty International condemned Florida’s secretive Alligator Alcatraz as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.” Detention facilities are refusing to provide medical care. Detainees sometimes disappear entirely, leaving their lawyers and family members unable to reach them or find out if they’re alive. In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody that we know of.
• Compiling a mass surveillance database and labeling Americans domestic terrorists. ICE partners with Palantir, a nefarious tech and AI company co-founded by billionaire Trump-ally Peter Thiel, to not only track immigrants but also to keep records on Americans who oppose them. This effort is closely tied to NSPM-7, a presidential memo that effectively sets the table for Trump to declare any political or ideological opponent an enemy of the state. One ICE agent told a woman recording him in Maine, “We have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist.”
• Killing Americans in broad daylight. The executions of Good and Pretti were not mistakes or accidents brought about by poor training. They were immediately backed up by the administration as good and proper responses, with Vice President JD Vance even declaring the agents have “absolute immunity.” ICE agents have since invoked these incidents to threaten Americans, with one saying, “Have y’all not learned from the past couple days?... Is this how you want to die?” This is terrorism, plain and simple—violence and intimidation to achieve their authoritarian political goals.

For a MAGA true believer, all this is forgivable because, in their minds, anyone without the right paperwork is a criminal, anyone who protects them is also a criminal, and any violence the state uses against criminals is justified. In reality, undocumented immigrants commit violent and drug-related crimes at a much lower rate than the native-born population, and simply being here without the proper authorization is codified as a civil offense, not a crime.

Not all of these abuses are brand new. Immigration activists have long blasted ICE and US immigration policy, especially under former President Barack Obama. But the scale, violence, regularity of abuse, and lack of accountability have turned the situation into a five-alarm fire. ICE is acting well outside its statutory duties, committing crimes and terrorizing communities to carry out its mission as handed down by Trump, Noem, Miller, and other MAGA extremists.

Skating on Thin Ice With the American People

If there is a silver lining in any of this, it's that people are fed up with it. Residents in Minneapolis have turned out en masse to protest ICE. They are protecting one another through constant filming, as well as blowing whistles to alert neighbors to the presence of ICE agents. On January 23, tens of thousands of Minnesotans marched down the streets in the state’s biggest general strike in 100 years. They shuttered businesses and halted labor with the understanding that the best way to combat the system is to hit it in the only spot it truly feels pain: its pockets.

Most elected officials aren’t yet close to representing the energy and anger of the people. Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) still speak of reforming ICE rather than abolishing it. But there have been increasing calls for things like the impeachment of Kristi Noem, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has deployed the National Guard to, hopefully, protect his state’s residents.

In the battle for hearts and minds, at least, MAGA is losing. Even on Fox News, they are struggling to uphold the narrative. In an interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, far-right pundit Maria Bartiromo was incredulous that Alex Pretti posed a threat and said: “There is outrage across the country… Someone is dead at the hands of border patrol.” At this point, only the most diehard MAGA faithful seem to be buying the administration’s talking points.

Essential immigration and customs functions can be reallocated to other agencies, but there is no need for storm troopers to go door-to-door demanding to see people’s papers under threat of violence. It is rank Nazism.

While these recent excesses might give the Trump administration a black eye in the public view, it’s only part of a larger struggle being waged. This violence and chaos is not an accidental byproduct. The administration doesn’t care about casualties, and they aren’t interested in making nice. It’s about seeing how far they can go, how much power they can grab, and then defying the American people to do something about it.

Recall who we’re dealing with here. Stephen Miller is widely believed to be in charge of the administration’s law enforcement and border policy. He’s the most brazenly fascistic senior member of the administration and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has an “affinity for white nationalism.” Meanwhile Greg Bovino, the commander of US Border Patrol and the only field agent who goes out unmasked, essentially cosplays as an SS agent.

Amid the chaos in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a mafioso-style letter to Gov. Walz telling him that all he had to do to “bring back law and order to Minnesota” was hand over his state’s voter data in exchange for ICE withdrawal. This alone shows that their goals go far beyond immigration reform or enforcement. They’re interested in a complete takeover, which requires that they muddle election integrity and identify and track enemies of the regime. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said of Bondi’s letter: “This is blackmail. This is the way organized crime works. They move into your neighborhood, they start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want.” So far, it hasn’t worked.

In the Declaration of Independence, the founders wrote that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Through their actions and violent abuses, ICE have lost that and then some. Americans are right and justified in their filming, protest, and even obstruction of ICE. Now we need to go further.

At the political level, sorting all this out means removing ICE from streets, eliminating their overly broad national security powers, canceling their partnerships with big tech, prosecuting the Trump administration officials responsible for these abuses, and throwing out of office the Democrats who funded it. In plain language, we need to abolish ICE. Essential immigration and customs functions can be reallocated to other agencies, but there is no need for storm troopers to go door-to-door demanding to see people’s papers under threat of violence. It is rank Nazism.

Once that’s done, we need to take a much broader look at our use of state violence. It’s no coincidence that the killing of two white people is causing cracks in the dam. This is the way we’ve been treating less fortunate people for decades, from the militarized police killings of Black Americans to the genocide we funded in Gaza. As a nation we remained largely indifferent to those atrocities. Wake-up calls are always welcome, but America can’t go back to sleep if and when this stage of the violence is contained.

The lesson is that the worst our government does can be done to any of us at any time, and we all need to work to curtail it. Minnesotans are showing us the way with their fearless solidarity and general strike. Trump’s campaign against blue states and his occupation of Minneapolis look like the early stages of a civil war. It needs to be stopped now, and the perpetrators held to account before their power has the chance to grow an iota.

On Sunday afternoon, CNN anchor Jake Tapper was interviewing US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hours after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti. Suddenly, CNN cut away to live coverage of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference. Noem declared that Pretti had “attacked our officers” while “brandishing” a handgun and planned “to kill law enforcement.” When a reporter tried to ask a question about her claim, she interrupted to say, “That is no claim. It is the facts.” When another reporter noted that the White House had just called Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” Noem forcefully agreed.

By this time, bystanders’ videos of the shooting were appearing online and on news outlets. When Tapper resumed his interview with Ocasio-Cortez, the representative said that Noem and the Trump administration were “asking the American people to not believe their eyes… to instead hand over your belief into anything that they say. I’m not asking the American people to believe me, or her, but to believe themselves.”

Any journalist who’s been paying attention knows that Noem’s boss, President Donald Trump, often doesn’t tell the truth. Trump launched his political career by asserting without evidence that America’s first Black president wasn’t born in the United States, which would have meant Barack Obama was in power illegally. After losing the 2020 election, Trump said he had no plans to leave office because, he insisted, he had actually won. Trump repeats that lie to this day, along with his claim that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol to keep him in power was a day of “peace” and “love.”

But in spinning their latest web of lies, Trump and his aides didn’t reckon with the ingenuity and courage of Minnesotans who witnessed Border Control officers shooting Pretti—and Renee Good before him—and recorded the encounters on their cell phones. Without that evidence, the government’s version of the facts would have had the upper hand in shaping the public narrative. With that evidence, however, it’s obvious that “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked,” as Pretti’s “heartbroken but also very angry parents” wrote in a statement the next day. “He had his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down.” Likewise, bystander videos of Renee Good’s shooting show that she was turning her vehicle away from ICE agent Jonathan Ross when he fired three deadly shots through her windows.

Whether they know it or not, the bystanders who recorded these videos are citizen journalists. They are ordinary people, not trained in conventional journalism, and they were bearing witness to events of utmost importance to their community and country. And they were doing so under dangerous conditions, as was also exemplified by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who on May 25, 2020, bravely kept her cell phone focused on police officer Derek Chauvin throughout the nine minutes and 29 seconds that Chauvin’s knee was choking the life out of George Floyd.

The events of recent days have shown that citizen journalists, though not a substitute for professionals, can be an invaluable complement. Without their presence at the scene and steadiness under pressure, the public and the rest of the media would be ignorant of a pivotal aspect of the story unfolding in Minneapolis. We’d be hearing only the government’s version of the truth, which, given the Trump administration’s history of flagrant falsehoods, deserves extreme skepticism. Absent these videos, it is all but inconceivable that the editorial boards at three of America’s most influential newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—would be stating that the administration’s narrative defies belief or that the administration itself would be trying to walk back its initial slanders of Pretti.

All parts of the modern information system, from legacy newsrooms to social media influencers, can now present a fuller account of what is happening in Minnesota and let viewers and readers draw their own conclusions. And we can explore urgent questions raised by these videos, such as: How many more people might ICE agents have killed when no cameras were recording? Working in tandem at this critical moment for American democracy, citizen and professional journalists can fulfill the essential mission the nation’s founders envisioned for a free press: to inform the people and hold power to account.

After a year of gutting the United States government, deploying armed jackboots to American cities, and bombing at least seven countries, the Trump administration kicked off 2026 by invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In the wake of that assault, President Donald Trump doubled down on his abandonment of the isolationist positions he once supposedly held, threatening military action against Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico. He then vowed that the US would come to “own” Greenland either “the easy way” or “the hard way.”

In truth, American imperialism defines much of this country’s history, but the latest escalation comes at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have also been deployed around the nation to grab immigrants off the streets and whisk them to detention centers. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to preach the jingoistic gospel of stopping the arrival of new refugees and migrants, while blasting European governments over migration—even as he vows to launch military campaigns that will undoubtedly result in further mass displacements and fleeing people crossing borders in search of safety.

Destabilizing countries the world over and then attacking the people who flee those wars is, of course, nothing new. From the September 11 attacks in 2001 until September 2020, this country’s war on terror, according to one study, displaced an estimated 37 million people in eight countries. And that figure doesn’t even include several million displaced during smaller conflicts the US participated in from Chad to Tunisia, Mali to Saudi Arabia. Nor does it include the number of people displaced by Israel’s five wars since 2008 in and around the Gaza Strip; its land theft in the occupied West Bank; or its frequent airstrikes in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran, all made possible thanks to Washington’s financial and military support.

When it comes to Washington demonizing the people displaced by its weapons, just ask the Palestinians. Millions of them live strewn across the map of the Middle East and beyond thanks to Israel’s ongoing military occupation and the American tax dollars that have enabled it.

“Eight Lives, Gone Just Like That”

In March 2015, I sat in the back of a taxi bound for Saida, a Lebanese coastal city a little less than an hour south of Beirut. The taxi hummed down the highway, the sea blurring through the windows to our right, and then swerved inland. Saida is more than 30 miles north of the country’s boundary with Israel and some 50 miles west of the border with Syria, but even that deep inside Lebanon, a de facto border appeared in the front windshield. The driver made a series of turns, braked, and inched toward a military checkpoint outside Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp.

Lebanese soldiers appeared on either side of the vehicle. Their job was to decide who could—and could not—enter the camp. After reading over our documents and ensuring that we had the proper military permission to enter the camp, the soldiers motioned the driver to move forward. We eased in amid a sprawl of ramshackle homes, many built atop one another. It was a dusty, humid day, but people clogged the streets. Children punted a soccer ball back and forth in the road. Motorbikes trembled over potholes. Men stood around in knots, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, and some walked by with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.

Along with an American photographer and a Lebanese reporter, I had gone to Ain al-Hilweh, the largest of Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian camps, to speak to people who had been doubly displaced by the war in neighboring Syria. As that civil war tore through the country—a war that drew interventions from the US, Great Britain, France, Israel, Russia, Iran, and several other places—Palestinian refugees from Syria found themselves fleeing to Lebanon. The population of Ain al-Hilweh alone had swelled by tens of thousands.

"For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”

Of the Palestinians we met that day, the only ones who had ever set foot in their ancestral homeland were those who had been born before—and lived through—the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation. What we’d soon learn, however, was that a term like double displacement failed to capture the extent to which borders had governed every aspect of their lives in permanent and repeated exile.

In a corner store with barren shelves, we found Afaf Dashe sitting in a small chair near the counter. At 70 years old, she had survived the Nakba—Arabic for catastrophe, the term Palestinians use to describe the ethnic cleansing of their country since 1948—as a three-year-old girl when her family fled to Syria. She had grown up in a suburb of Damascus, married, and raised children. When civil war started to rip through Syria in 2011, she and her family gritted it out through four years of barrel bombs, airstrikes, and shelling before they finally escaped.

While Ain al-Hilweh offered some respite, it offered neither true safety nor stability. In Lebanon, decades of state repression, lethal Israeli interventions, and failed Palestinian rebellions had left such refugees particularly vulnerable. Rather than setting down new roots in that dismal camp, Afaf explained, three of her daughters, along with five of her grandchildren, had decided to risk taking the long, often deadly journey to Europe. After crossing from Syria to Lebanon, they parted with Afaf and continued on by sea to Libya. They then paid smugglers to board a boat bound for Italy. As Afaf reached that point in her story, tears gathered in her eyes and she paused, for a long moment staring into the distance, seemingly at nothing, before turning back to us. The boat carrying her family, she said, had capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. “Eight lives, gone just like that. For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”

More than once in her life, it occurred to me, wars had pushed her, her children, and her grandchildren across borders and, in a distinctly embattled world, borders decided where she and her loved ones could possibly move, where they could live, and where they could die. I thought about the US passport in my pocket, the relative ease with which I had crossed borders throughout my adult life, and the American tax dollars that helped doom Afaf to a life of permanent exile. She would be the first person I met who had lost loved ones simply looking to cross a border to find safety, but by no means the last.

Violent Borders

For tens of millions of people, borders are not merely places where the risk of violence is present. Borders are, by definition, violent. Borders are not merely crossed. Borders must be survived and endured. Borders are not only walls and razor wire. Borders are guards and police, surveillance cameras and drones, batons and bullets. For those tens of millions of people, borders don’t stop where one country ends and the next begins; they stalk and haunt across endless miles and years. Borders are both crime scenes and crimes, with nationalism the motive.

For people forced to flee, the violence doesn’t stop once they escape countries being bombed or economically strangled. The journey itself offers its own slate of dangers. The International Migration Organization has recorded more than 33,200 instances of refugees and migrants dying or going missing in the Mediterranean Sea alone since 2014. Between 1994 and 2024, rights groups estimate that more than 80,000 people died in the deserts or rivers on and around the US-Mexico border.

Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe.

Throughout the last decade, I’ve traveled along the European refugee trail, stopping off in countries across the Balkans and Central and Western Europe, while also reporting from American communities along the heavily militarized US-Mexico border. Wherever I’ve gone, the displaced have horror stories to tell—of people drowned at sea, of migrants shot along borders, and others who simply disappeared along “the refugee trail.” At a shelter in Belgrade, Serbia, Afghans who had fled the fallout of the US war in their country and walked the endless land route from Turkey spoke of the Bulgarian border police who had detained, threatened, or beaten them along the way. On the Serbian border with Hungary, Moroccans and Algerians told me of policemen who beat their feet with batons to deter them from ever trying to cross the border again. In Greece, young men from Sudan and Somalia—their countries no strangers to US intervention—described the tear gas and rubber bullets they faced on the country’s northern border with Macedonia. In Turkey, Syrians told me about the dogs that Bulgarian border police sicced on them. In Arizona, people recalled walking for so long in the Mexican desert that the soles of their shoes tore apart.

Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe. From the time Donald Trump first entered the Oval Office in January 2017, far-right and ultranationalist parties around Europe have also gained ground in ways that would once have been unimaginable—and where the far-right has yet to take power, center-left and liberal parties have often swung hard to the right on their immigration and border enforcement policies.

In one breath, even Democratic Party officials in the United States, still singing praises of liberal democracy, are also promising to crack down on immigration and strengthen border enforcement in a desperate bid to appear tougher in the age of Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom, the center-left Labour Party ousted the Conservatives in 2024, only to put into practice anti-immigrant policies that align with those even further to the right, like Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party. In Greece, even after the violent neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party was banned, following years of anti-immigrant violence, the nominally center-right New Democracy Party adopted and repackaged its rhetoric in slightly modified form, while placing a former fascist in charge of its migration ministry. From the United States to Europe, immigration is ever less often discussed as a humanitarian issue and ever more often described in terms of an “invasion,” functionally recasting desperate civilians as armed soldiers.

Politically, the invasion story is more easily digestible than the grim actual stories of displaced people. Unsurprisingly, it has found ever larger audiences. And consider that a grim irony, since so many of the people crossing into the US and Europe, even before they faced deadly journeys at sea and militarized borders, were driven from their countries at least in part due to American and European involvement in mass violence and policies designed to foster economic collapse in their homelands.

Such invasion stories about immigrants are, of course, anything but new, after centuries in which a nationalistic desire for hard borders has undergirded so many claims that war and violence are necessary. In 1908, a decade before she herself was deported from the United States, the Lithuanian-American anarchist Emma Goldman pointed to the violence at the heart of such nationalism during a speech in San Francisco. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” she told her audience. “Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.”

Hope in the Pushback

In the decade since I started covering migration and borders, I have also witnessed what resistance to the anti-immigrant far-right might look like. In Greece, activists and volunteers, anarchists, socialists, and everyday people worked together to do what they could to offer an alternative to the grim realities displaced people were experiencing. On Greek islands like Lesbos, humanitarians gathered by the shore to help the displaced disembark from boats. Others headed out to sea to rescue people from sinking vessels. In Athens, anarchists and other leftists occupied abandoned buildings, refashioning them into squats that displaced immigrants could inhabit without the overcrowding and decrepit living conditions of the official camps. In Germany, everyday people opened their homes to newly arrived refugees. In Austin, Texas, the congregants of a church told me about how they had taken in asylum-seekers facing deportation.

And today, Americans in cities from Chicago to Los Angeles have rallied to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Ever since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, ever more protesters have taken to the streets in growing numbers to voice their opposition to state-sanctioned murder and the Trump administration’s drive to carry out mass deportations fueled more by cruelty than any concern for the country’s safety. As the president deepens federal deployments and threatens to use the military against what he calls the “invasion from within,” those demonstrators undoubtedly understand that their own fates are wrapped up with those of immigrants and refugees. Squats, humanitarian aid, and mass protests may not stop the cruel wheels of the anti-immigrant political machine, but they do offer glimmers of hope at a time when hope is in short supply.

You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet.

In the early months of 2026, that hope may be needed more than ever, in part because all too many Americans and Europeans continue to empower politicians who recycle the tired argument that, if there were fewer immigrants, life in their countries would be more prosperous and peaceful. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump bluntly assured Americans that immigrants were invaders who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” During the first year of his second term, his administration snatched international students off the streets, separated families, and shipped immigrants off to foreign prisons. Meanwhile, he continued to repeatedly tell Americans that they were being “invaded,” a story that comes with a painful body count, while courting what inevitably loiters behind nationalism and nativism: fear.

In her novel White Teeth, Zadie Smith put all of that in perspective this way: “But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance.”

Last year, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimated that more than 122 million people across the world had been displaced as a result of war, violence, or persecution, a number that marked a decade-long high and was also the 10th consecutive year that the total number of people displaced across the globe had increased. Worse yet, war and military campaigns are still driving people from their homes globally.

Sooner than later, such wars and other disasters will result in yet more people seeking safety in Europe and the United States. When that happens, there is little doubt that far-right leaders, hoping to offload the blame for their own failures, will once again stand in front of us and claim that state violence is necessary to protect our country from an “invasion.” Then, you’ll have to make a choice: You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet. That choice will determine just how much hope there is for a world where desperate people escaping disasters they had no hand in creating don’t have to consider crossing a manmade line a matter of negotiating their very survival.

nited States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol began “Operation Metro Surge” targeting the Twin Cities nearly two months ago. Since then, they have taken the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti while terrorizing Minnesota’s immigrant communities.

The massive deployment of immigration officers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul has been met with an incredible response from the community. Neighbors have come together to develop complex rapid response networks to track ICE and notify vulnerable people, keep immigrant families fed and protected with strong mutual aid networks, and make their opposition to what amounts to a full-scale federal invasion clearly visible.

This past Friday, unions, faith leaders, and community organizations organized a day of mass protest and economic disruption, punctuated by a rally and demonstration in well below sub-zero temperatures attended by tens of thousands.

What’s next for organized resistance in the Twin Cities? To get a picture of the situation on the ground, Inequality.org checked in with experienced labor organizer and activist Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis.

Chris Mills Rodrigo: What has your experience been like on the ground in Minneapolis over the last two months?

Kieran Knutson: It’s unlike anything I’ve ever lived through before. There are 3,000 ICE agents in the Twin Cities metro area, just by comparison the Minneapolis Police Department is between 800 and 900 cops.

You see them frequently and they’re constantly active, whether that be abduction raids, missions where they have the name of someone they’re trying to grab specifically, or just straight up racial profiling while ripping people out of gas stations or as they’re picking up their kids from daycare.

And confrontations with ICE have been intense. They’re deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades. Brutalizing people. It’s hard to describe, it really just strikes me as a fascist paramilitary force, a force of occupation.

CMR: How has that presence affected the community you live in?

KK: One the one hand, huge numbers of Latino workers in particular are just locking down. People stopped going out altogether. Imagine being stuck inside, not being able to go to the bar, go see friends, run errands, none of that stuff. I think there’s this level of terrorism that even if you don’t ever run into ICE you do fear it.

On the positive side, in the neighborhood that my wife and I live in, for example, there are 700 people in the rapid response network. And my understanding is that there are eight or so similar neighborhood networks across the Twin Cities — that means there’s thousands of people participating in this movement. Tons of people here are outraged, the whole society hates ICE here and that’s heartening.

CMR: What has labor’s role been in community response?

KK: The first thing to say is that the immigrant portions of the working class are an incredibly important part of the working class in the Twin Cities and have really strengthened it to be much more pro-union and more militant. Some unions are heavily immigrant, so what’s been going on can’t help but affect them. Our local is less so, but we do have this spirit of an injury to one is an injury to all that we’ve cultivated over the years.

We see this as an extremely important fight, and labor unions have been involved in the scaling up of rapid response networks and planning actions like the big day of action last Friday.

CMR: Can you tell me more about how labor was involved in organizing that?

KK: The idea for it came out of the labor movement. There have been talks for some time about how unions have to be more serious about being able to do strikes, and political strikes in particular. There’s this problem in U.S. labor law where almost every collective bargaining agreement has a strike clause. And while this action was not able to avoid that, what it did do was create a situation where tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of workers were absent from work, almost like a mass sick out.

The unions built the coalition which includes a lot of faith groups and community organizations, ones that represent the Somali community, the Latino community, Native American groups.

Also, since the George Floyd uprising, there have been some significant labor struggles in the Twin Cities area — teachers here went on strike, nurses have done strikes. I think that’s given people more confidence. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the experience, and the networks, that came out of the uprising in the response to ICE today.

We really wanted to push to make this action a mass one, so we included no school and no shopping so that it could become a society-wide effort. There was a huge amount of support from small businesses, I think 700 ended up closing.

CMR: What was the intended message of the action?

KK: Some union organizers pointed out that early on in his term, when Trump was listing cities that he was going to send ICE to, San Francisco was on the list. Trump backed off though, saying that tech executives had called him to explain that deployment wasn’t necessary. So some of the thinking was, there are all these CEOs and billionaires with corporate headquarters here in Minnesota that have been silent about this reign of terror in our communities, we should start squeezing them into speaking up.

And it kind of worked — on Sunday a letter came out from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce with over 60 big CEOs signing on. That showed the business class is willing to say something to the Trump regime about the chaos it’s causing.

CMR: The day after this incredible show of solidarity, ICE officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a union member. What’s the next escalation for labor?

KK: On Monday, the first day back at work after the action, coworkers that I talked to all felt very excited about Friday. They saw the national coverage, how big the march was despite -20º weather, how celebrities got behind it. And then, to them, Saturday felt like retaliation.

Some people are calling for staying on strike, or a real strike. Our membership hasn’t had a chance to discuss next steps yet, but speaking with other labor activists what makes sense to me is to organize a substantial assembly of rapid response groups, unions, activists, and community organizations to hash out what’s next.

CMR: What makes ICE and the occupation of the Twin Cities a labor issue?

KK: It’s an attack on oppressed sections of the working class, some of the poorest paid sections of the working class, and sections of the working class that have the least rights.

I think the administration is also aimed at the Twin Cities because of the George Floyd uprising, a sense of disciplining the population that had been a big part of that. I think that unions which want to be fighters for the working class have to be a part of this fight. This army that’s being constructed could just as easily be unleashed against workers who are organizing or on strike, or on social movements.

This is a dangerous, dangerous force that has to be defeated. To leave this force intact would mean a constant danger for all of us.

By Ralph Nader January 30, 2026 “How’s the Democratic Party’s ground game in Pennsylvania?” I asked a friend several weeks before the 2024 presidential election. He replied optimistically that there were far more door knockers this year than in 2022. It turned out these door knockers were just urging a vote for the Democrats without…

Ever since Trump rode down the escalator in 2016 attacking immigrants as drug smugglers and rapists, immigration has been his signature issue, often putting the Democrats on the defensive.

During his first term, however, his cruel policies of separating families at the border and his BS about Mexico paying for the wall contributed to his defeat in 2020. But the Biden administration had no answer for the flood of immigrants who then crossed the border, which Trump used as a cudgel during the 2024 campaign. Once again the issue was Trump’s and in his second term he’s decided to play hardball by, in effect, totally shutting down the border and deporting record numbers of immigrants.

And it was working. While his handling of the economy tanked his poll numbers, immigration enforcement remained strong, until Minneapolis.

There, he overplayed his hand and did not stick to his argument to deport undocumented felons. Instead, he allowed the psychotic Steven Miller to round up undocumented immigrants, non-felons and felons alike, with even some darker-skinned citizens (literally) tossed into the ICE detention centers.

Not only is this a cruel and inhumane policy, but it’s also not what the American people, including the white working-class, want.

For different reasons Trump and the Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that nearly two-thirds of the American people support “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and committed no felony crimes.”

Trump doesn’t give a damn about these hard-working immigrants. He’s quite happy to support the MAGA “replacement theory” that calls for the protection of a white America from people of color. For Democrats, a pathway to citizenship is too hot to handle, making them look as if they support “illegals,” even if these undocumented immigrants are not felons. They fear Trump’s cudgel and ignore what the American people want.

According to our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 63 percent support the “granting legal status” statement and only 37 percent oppose it.

In urban areas in these four states the support is massive:

• Democrats: 91 percent
• Independents: 73 percent
• Republicans: 47 percent

Looking at urban and non-urban areas combined, 36 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 supported this path to citizenship. And 81 percent of Hispanic voters supported it.

We also have 2020 data on the support of the white working class throughout the country, which shows that 62 percent supported this same exact “granting legal status” statement, up from 32 percent in 2010.

It’s as if Trump and the Democrats are stuck in 2010 and don’t realize that the working-class has great sympathy for hard working undocumented immigrants, especially in urban areas where day-day contact is greatest. That’s where nearly everyone comes into contact with immigrants who do so much of the hard labor that makes our economy function. Just 20 metro areas account for 60 percent of all undocumented immigrants.

It is politically explosive to send thousands of ICE and border agents into urban areas to randomly round up undocumented workers. Unless you are trying to foment an urban rebellion so you can send in troops to crush it in the name of law and order and cancel the midterms.

What about the dangerous felons?

The Trump administration has deported each month approximately 1,100 undocumented immigrants with prior violent convictions, according the New York Times. I have no doubt that many Americans support their deportation if it is done in a reasonable way. But at the same time Miller’s shock troops have deported 2,100 immigrants with no criminal records per month. Per month!

That’s what happens when thousands of heavily armed mask-wearing troops invade an urban area, stopping people on the street and raiding houses of worship, businesses, and hospitals without court-approved search warrants. That’s not how you catch felons, that’s how you round up undocumented non-felons. That’s how you get away with stopping people based solely on their skin tone, not on any investigative information about criminal activity. And it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s not OK with much of the American people, something Trump slowly is realizing.

Will the Democrats Come to the Defense of Undocumented Workers?

You couldn’t ask for a better political moment given that Miller’s goons have killed two protesters in the last two weeks. This would be the perfect time to demand that ICE be prohibited from conducting any and all random stops throughout the country, and refrain from arresting any undocumented immigrants who have not committed a felony crime. And this is the time to call for a clear path to citizenship for hard working, non-felonious, undocumented workers.

Undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness...

But there’s little indication that the Democratic Party is willing to go there. The political calculous is obvious: let Trump overplay his hand and hope the anger against him crests into a massive blue wave flooding the midterms. Why risk supporting a path to citizenship, which only will be thrown back at the Democrats declaring they are weak-kneed on immigration? Stopping Trump, the thinking goes, is more important than grandstanding about paths to citizenship given that the Democrats don’t have the votes to deliver. And besides, undocumented workers can’t vote, angry protestors can and will.

But here are two problems with this strategy. The first is that Trump will adjust the ICE invasions between now and November. He has to realize that rounding up felons requires a different, less visible approach that refrains from random searches and street brawls in urban areas. It should be obvious to Trump that Miller’s masked goons will cost the Republicans the midterms if the shock troops continue to roam the streets. White House border czar Tom Homans already is in Minneapolis saying that the shock troops will stand down, in some way, soon.

The second problem is that undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness, something that working people of all shades can connect with.

The anti-ICE protestors are leading the charge with the backing of a few state and local Democrats. But nationally the Democrats seem more comfortable talking about Epstein than protecting terrorized immigrants.

The Democrats may not have the nerve, but Dan Osborn, a working-class independent in Nebraska running for the U.S. Senate sure does. Here’s how he put it:

I believe that undocumented workers, there should be a clear path for them to become documented or become legal status.

We need some meaningful immigration reform. These people are our friends. They’re our neighbors. A lot of them have been here 30 years or more, and I think it’s time they get into Social Security already. There’s 80,000 open jobs in Nebraska that we can’t fill, that we can certainly use immigrant labor for.

Did that kill his chances in his 2024 race? He lost by six points but ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris and he’s running again in 2026. He deserves our support.

And, as Bruce Springsteen sings in his a song he wrote last weekend, so do the people who are protecting “the stranger in our midst.”

Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Democratic Rep. John Larson of Connecticut is an irreplaceable leader in the fight to expand Social Security. As the top Democrat on the Social Security subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, he combines deep policy expertise with passionate advocacy for Social Security’s 67 million beneficiaries and its 185 million contributors.

Rep. Larson’s signature legislation, the Social Security 2100 Act, would increase Social Security’s modest benefits for everyone. It also includes additional targeted increases for the most vulnerable. And it is paid for by requiring millionaires and billionaires, who currently stop paying into Social Security after their first $184,500 in income, to finally pay their fair share.

Not surprisingly, billionaires hate the Social Security 2100 Act—and the man who wrote it. That’s why they are backing Rep. Larson’s primary challenger, corporate lawyer Luke Bronin. Hidden behind shadowy outside groups, they plan to pour enormous sums into the race.

These billionaires know that the clock is ticking. The Social Security 2100 Act has support from nearly 90% of House Democrats. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has pledged that if Democrats take back the House this November, they will hold a vote on the bill—setting the stage for it to become law the next time there is a Democratic trifecta.

Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand the fear felt by millions of Americans who don’t know how secure our Social Security is, with billionaires like Elon Musk buying political power to try to demolish the system brick by brick.

Thanks to Rep. Larson’s leadership, we are closer than ever to expanding Social Security. It’s no accident that the Social Security 2100 Act has such widespread support among the entire Democratic caucus, including both progressives and moderates. Rep. Larson made that happen by appealing to his colleagues in person at every opportunity—the type of work many members of Congress leave to their staff.

Rep. Larson is legendary for his tenacity. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was first elected to Congress, she was shunned by Democratic leadership and many of her Democratic colleagues. Not Rep. Larson. He immediately went to her office and asked for her support for the 2100 Act. In fact, I was called by her staffer, who asked me who the guy patiently waiting in her office with a folder for her explaining Social Security expansion was.

Rep. Larson works this tirelessly to educate every member of the caucus about Social Security expansion. AOC signed on—and recorded a video with Rep. Larson about their mutual support for Social Security.

Wall Street and its billionaires know that their best shot at stopping Social Security expansion is to take out Rep. Larson. That’s why they are uniting behind Bronin.

Rep. Larson grew up in a public housing project. He went to state university and then worked as a history teacher. In contrast, Bronin went to a fancy prep school and Yale University. He then worked in corporate law and focused on opportunistically climbing the political ladder.

Bronin was elected mayor of Hartford in 2015, on a pledge to serve out his full term. Bronin broke that pledge to unsuccessfully run for governor of Connecticut two years later. At the time, the Connecticut Mirror reported that “even admirers of Bronin, most of whom declined to be quoted by name, said he risked being seen as an opportunist, someone more interested in advancement than completing a difficult job.”

That’s exactly what Wall Street is looking for, and has found in Luke Bronin—someone who wants power for its own sake, and is happy to carry out its preferred agenda. Wall Street wants to deprive Social Security of its greatest champion in the US House, and Bronin is its weapon of choice.

Tellingly, Bronin attacks Rep. Larson for fighting too hard for Social Security. I think that is because Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand what life is like for the 154,216 residents of Connecticut’s First Congressional district and the 67 million Americans around the country who rely on Social Security to live their lives independently and with dignity.

Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand the fear felt by millions of Americans who don’t know how secure our Social Security is, with billionaires like Elon Musk buying political power to try to demolish the system brick by brick. President Donald Trump and Musk have closed offices, broken the phones, and most destructively fired thousands of workers needed to keep the system functioning. Larson has been fighting against that destruction and shined a spotlight on it. Social Security is in the greatest danger in its 90 year history, and it is because of Wall Street and its billionaires.

More than ever, we need Rep. Larson leading the fight to protect and expand Social Security.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Democrats covered up Biden’s physical and mental decline. As Trump gets caught sleeping through a cabinet meeting and rambling incoherently, some are asking: are Republicans covering up for their own octogenarian president?

• Will the world’s richest man let The Washington Post die? Fewer reporters are being sent to the Olympics and the Super Bowl. Foreign correspondents are holding off on trips to conflict zones. And editors are being encouraged to experiment with new forms of storytelling. Big layoffs are coming to the newsroom and the business sides of the paper, with sports, local and international taking most the pain. Video journalists, as well as politics and national security are expected to become more central.

• Democrats and the White House agreed to fund ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks while they negotiate restrictions on an immigration crackdown. Demands: banning ICE goons from masks and requiring them to wear body cameras and ID, an end to random immigration sweeps, judicial warrants for stop and searches and the same use-of-force standards as real cops. How much will Dems cave? Will Lindsey Graham hold things up? Did you hear about the “National Shutdown” today?

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The post Is Trump Bidening Out? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

One year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos got front-row seats at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The images of CEOs enjoying better seats than congressional leaders foreshadowed exactly how much access and influence Big Tech would wield in the Trump White House.

Since entering office, Trump has repeatedly signaled deference to a small group of powerful technology executives, aided by advisors like AI czar David Sacks who have spent their careers profiting from the industry. With Trump’s blessing, companies like NVIDIA are now poised to profit from sales of advanced chips to China, America’s foremost strategic competitor. That choice exposes a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the administration’s AI policy: prioritizing short-term corporate gains over long-term public interests.

In December, Trump signed an executive order threatening states for enacting AI safety laws without offering a credible federal framework to replace them. It was yet another misuse of executive power—and an industry giveaway disguised as a competitiveness strategy. By threatening states for acting while offering no federal safeguards in return, the order attempts to clear the field for companies that have spent years lobbying against meaningful accountability.

While Republicans move to shield companies from accountability and block reasonable state action without offering meaningful protections, Democrats can articulate a smarter approach.

Supporters argue that preemption is necessary to help the United States compete with China. But if that’s true, why is the president offering the Chinese Communist Party access to superior American technology and a clear path to win the AI race?

That contradiction hasn’t gone unnoticed, even inside Trump’s own coalition. Indeed, most Americans continue to express deep concern about Trump’s growing alignment with Silicon Valley.

Still, Trump has only doubled down, pushing a vision of global “tech dominance” with little regard for the real-world consequences of unprecedented AI investment. Even Republicans who were once vocal critics of Big Tech are now taking money from Meta and other companies to accelerate AI on industry-friendly terms.

For Democrats, this should be a moment of clarity—and a moment to lead. While many lawmakers have raised legitimate concerns about AI’s risks, the party’s response has too often leaned on commissions, task forces, and studies when the public is asking for clear rules and accountability.

Democrats must ask themselves: if Big Tech is already working overtime to block meaningful safeguards, why not meet the moment by standing clearly on the side of consumers, parents, and workers? Voters are asking for real leadership, but all they are seeing is a familiar pattern: billion-dollar companies consolidating power, writing the rules, and dodging accountability, leaving children, workers, and democratic institutions to deal with the consequences.

The 2024 election underscored a deeper challenge for Democrats than economic uncertainty or flawed candidates. Many voters struggled to see a coherent vision for the future under Democratic leadership. That vacuum has allowed Republicans to posture as pro-consumer and pro-family while quietly shielding powerful companies from accountability.

The debate over AI offers Democrats a chance to do better. While Republicans move to shield companies from accountability and block reasonable state action without offering meaningful protections, Democrats can articulate a smarter approach: clear expectations for safety; real liability when technology causes harm; serious preparation for economic disruption; and responsible planning for AI’s massive energy demands.

AI is no longer an abstract idea; its impacts are already being felt. But without clear rules, it risks reshaping our economy, labor markets, and democratic institutions in ways that undermine security, opportunity, and trust. When elected leaders prioritize the agendas of their corporate executives over the long-term public interest, trust erodes—not just in institutions, but in innovation itself.

That erosion of trust is already visible. Workers worry about job displacement, recent graduates struggle to enter a rapidly-changing workforce, and parents fear how algorithmic manipulation and AI-generated deepfakes will shape their children’s reality. These concerns aren’t partisan. This shared national anxiety goes to the heart of the American experiment.

If Democrats want to regain trust ahead of the 2026 elections, they need to show they are willing to take on Big Tech with the urgency that everyday Americans are demanding. That means recognizing that AI isn’t just another talking point, and pursuing strong, enforceable standards now—so its extraordinary potential strengthens the middle class, improves our children’s future, and reinforces democratic institutions rather than undermining them.

The history of American power is, in many ways, the history of reinventing rules—or designing new ones—to fit US strategic interests.

This may sound harsh, but it is a necessary realization, particularly in light of US President Donald Trump’s latest political invention: the so-called Board of Peace.

Some have hastily concluded that Trump’s newest political gambit—recently unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos—is a uniquely Trumpian endeavor, detached from earlier US foreign policy doctrines. They are mistaken, misled largely by Trump’s self-centered political style and his constant, though unfounded, claims that he has ended wars, resolved global conflicts, and made the world a safer place.

At the Davos launch, Trump reinforced this carefully crafted illusion, boasting of America’s supposed historic leadership in bringing peace; praising alleged unprecedented diplomatic breakthroughs; and presenting the Board of Peace as a neutral, benevolent mechanism capable of stabilizing the world’s most volatile regions.

What is truly extraordinary is that even in its phase of decline, the United States continues to be permitted to experiment with the futures of entire peoples and regions.

Yet a less prejudiced reading of history allows us to see Trump’s political design—whether in Gaza or beyond—not as an aberration, but as part of a familiar pattern. US foreign policymakers repeatedly seek to reclaim ownership over global affairs; sideline international consensus; and impose political frameworks that they alone define, manage, and ultimately control.

The Board of Peace—a by-invitation-only political club controlled entirely by Trump himself—is increasingly taking shape as a new geopolitical reality in which the United States imposes itself as the self-appointed caretaker of global affairs, beginning with genocide-devastated Gaza, and explicitly positioning itself as an alternative to the United Nations. While Trump has not stated this outright, his open contempt for international law and his relentless drive to redesign the post-World War II world order are clear indicators of his true intentions.

The irony is staggering. A body ostensibly meant to guide Gaza through reconstruction after Israel’s devastating genocide does not include Palestinians—let alone Gazans themselves. Even more damning is the fact that the genocide it claims to address was politically backed, militarily financed, and diplomatically shielded by successive US administrations, first under Joe Biden and later under Trump.

It requires no particular insight to conclude that Trump’s Board of Peace is not concerned with peace, nor genuinely with Gaza. So what, then, is this initiative really about?

This initiative is not about reconstruction or justice, but about exploiting Gaza’s suffering to impose a new US-led world order, first in the Middle East and eventually beyond.

Gaza—a besieged territory of just 365 square kilometers—does not require a new political structure populated by dozens of world leaders, each reportedly paying a billion-dollar membership fee. Gaza needs reconstruction, its people must be granted their basic rights, and Israel’s crimes must be met with accountability. The mechanisms to achieve this already exist: the United Nations; international law; longstanding humanitarian institutions; and above all the Palestinians themselves, whose agency, resilience, and determination to survive Israel’s onslaught have become legendary.

The Board of Peace discards all of this in favor of a hollow, improvised structure tailored to satisfy Trump’s volatile ego and advance US-Israeli political and geopolitical interests. In effect, it drags Palestine back a century, to an era when Western powers unilaterally determined its fate—guided by racist assumptions about Palestinians and the Middle East, assumptions that laid the groundwork for the region’s enduring catastrophes.

Yet the central question remains: Is this truly a uniquely Trumpian initiative?

No, it is not. While it is ingeniously tailored to feed Trump’s inflated sense of grandeur, it remains a familiar American tactic, particularly during moments of profound crisis. This strategy is persuasively outlined in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which argues that political and economic elites exploit collective trauma—wars, natural disasters, and social breakdown—to impose radical policies that would otherwise face public resistance.

Trump’s Board of Peace fits squarely within this framework, using the devastation of Gaza not as a call for justice or accountability, but as an opportunity to reshape political realities in ways that entrench US dominance and sideline international norms.

This is hardly unprecedented. The pattern can be traced back to the US-envisioned United Nations, established in 1945 as a replacement for the League of Nations. Its principal architect, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was determined that the new institution would secure the structural dominance of the United States, most notably through the Security Council and the veto system, ensuring Washington’s decisive influence over global affairs.

When the UN later failed to fully acquiesce to US interests—most notably when it refused to grant the George W. Bush administration legal authorization to invade Iraq—the organization was labeled “irrelevant”. Bush, then, led his own so-called “coalition of the willing,” a war of aggression that devastated Iraq and destabilized the entire region, consequences that persist to this day.

A similar maneuver unfolded in Palestine with the invention of the so-called Quartet on the Middle East in 2002, a US-dominated framework. From its inception, the Quartet systematically sidelined Palestinian agency, insulated Israel from accountability, and relegated international law to a secondary—and often expendable—consideration.

The method remains consistent: When existing international mechanisms fail to serve US political objectives, new structures are invented; old ones are bypassed; and power is reasserted under the guise of peace, reform, or stability.

Judging by this historical record, it is reasonable to conclude that the Board of Peace will eventually become yet another defunct body. Before reaching that predictable end, however, it risks further derailing the already fragile prospects for a just peace in Palestine and obstructing any meaningful effort to hold Israeli war criminals accountable.

What is truly extraordinary is that even in its phase of decline, the United States continues to be permitted to experiment with the futures of entire peoples and regions. Yet it is never too late for those committed to restoring the centrality of international law—not only in Palestine, but globally—to challenge such reckless and self-serving political engineering.

Palestine, the Middle East, and the world deserve better.

On 5 February 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START—the last remaining arms-control pact between the United States and Russia—is set to expire. Moscow offered to Washington to voluntarily extend it for a year, but US President Donald Trump recently shrugged it off and told the New York Times, "If it expires, it expires.” POTUS has also recently been in the headlines for saying that he doesn’t believe he is required to follow any laws except his own morality, accountable to no one.

I often think about the pre-election live-streamed conversation between Trump and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is now in charge of orbital dominance for the US Space Force over planet Earth. When Trump expressed fear of nuclear disasters like Fukushima, Musk responded by defending nuclear energy, despite the fact that a country that has the ability to create and maintain nuclear-power facilities is technically capable of creating nuclear weapons, and despite the fact that we still do not have the technology to remediate (detoxify) nuclear waste.

Musk went even further, minimizing the danger of nuclear weapons themselves. During the conversation which took place on August 11, 2025 (just three days after the 80th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki), at an hour and 17 minutes Musk said: “It’s like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re like full cities again. So it’s really not something that, you know, it’s not as scary as people think, basically. But let’s see.”

No. We do not ever want to see nuclear weapons used again. The basis of any valid moral system means doing everything you can to minimize the harm you cause to others, and making amends for the harm you do cause. Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy entire cities.

A new arms race would not make anyone safer—but it would make weapons manufacturers wealthier.

Those who survive the initial blast endure slow, excruciating deaths from radiation sickness, burns, cancers, and generational genetic damage—as did so many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is nothing “not as scary as people think” about this.

Recently, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at SpaceX announced that Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence software GROK, from Musk’s private corporation xAI, will be integrated into Pentagon networks. Hegseth said:

I demand and we demand that we arm our war fighters with overwhelming and lethal technology right now… This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed, to ensure that we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future. In short, we will win this race.

The only race being fueled in the planet’s current polycrisis is the race to extinction, where there are only losers. The current push by the Department of War to accelerate AI-driven warfare alongside the development of new nuclear weapons eerily echoes the War Room scenes in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, where General “Buck” Turgidson treats mass murder and nuclear holocaust as a logistics problem and a branding opportunity. Reality is stranger than fiction when today’s enthusiasm for automation, speed, and “dominance” mimics satire like in Kubrick’s dark comedy. When machines shorten decision time and leaders prioritize advantage over restraint, the system begins to outrun moral judgment.

It was only a few presidencies ago in 1985 when the USA under former President Ronald Reagan reached a joint agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The dialogue implied that neither side would seek military superiority, with the intention to lower the risk of catastrophic conflict and to advance arms-control negotiations.

From survivors of nuclear tests on American soil—like New Mexico, Nevada, and San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point Shipyard—to communities across the Pacific, from the Marshall Islands to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are innocent victims who experienced the horror of nuclear weapons. Their testimonies exist. Their pain is documented. Their warnings are clear.

As Mrs. Yoko Ota, a Japanese writer who put down this description shortly after the Bomb destroyed Hiroshima, recalled:

On the roads I saw thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children fleeing the hell of Hiroshima. All of them, without exception, were covered with terrible wounds. Their eyebrows were completely burned off. On their faces and hands the skin was burned too and hung in strips. If many of them held their two arms stretched toward the sky, it was purely to try and calm the pain. These unfortunate creatures had their whole bodies swollen up, like drowned men who have been a long time in the water. Their eyelids were swollen so that their eyes were completely shut, while the skin all around was bright red. They were all blind… Most of them were naked to the waist… girls completely naked, women without a hair on their heads, an old woman with both arms dislocated, walking along with them hanging by her sides, the flesh, burnt as if on a grill, came away from the bones; blood was flowing abundantly and a yellow liquid like fat mingled with it…There wasn’t a single person who wasn’t wounded. A woman was lying on the ground, her head split open horizontally. The whole inside of her head was red, like a watermelon. In spite of this horrible wound the woman was still alive and crawled along the ground, leaving behind her a long red streak…

Survivors of nuclear weapons deserve to be listened to—not dismissed, not minimized, and not disregarded.

Nuclear weapons should never have been created, yet we live with their existence. If the New START treaty lapses, there will be no legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. A new arms race would not make anyone safer—but it would make weapons manufacturers wealthier. According to The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), “The private sector earned at least $42.5 billion from their nuclear weapons contracts in 2024 alone.”

Companies positioned to profit include defense contractors and tech-military hybrids, many of which already benefit from massive government contracts. Elon Musk’s companies, particularly SpaceX, stand to gain further through expanded “orbital infrastructure” and defense systems. Trump’s proposal for an impossible “Golden Dome” missile defense system would funnel billions more into contractors like SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman—all while creating the illusion of safety rather than actual security—and leaving the working class impoverished and degraded. “Food, not bombs,” has been a persistent slogan among people who demonstrate for peace.

Letting New START expire would end more than a treaty—it would end the last remaining restraint on nuclear escalation. Secretary of War Hegseth announced that the US military will “learn from failure” as a strategy—so wouldn’t it be efficient strategy to learn from the failures of dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and take the opportunity now to renew New START?

Contact your senators in writing or call your representatives at the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121, and urge them to support extending the New START Treaty before it expires on February 5, 2026. Without it, there will be no legal limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals, triggering a costly and dangerous arms race. We need immediate diplomacy to preserve New START, as nuclear arms control is a present and urgent challenge.

Often times, the followers in a political party are far ahead of where their leadership is. This is indeed the case regarding the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill talk about reforming ICE and making changes in how ICE operates, rank and file Democrats have concluded that ICE must be abolished.

In polling conducted by YouGov on January, just under two-thirds of Democrats (62%) strongly support abolishing ICE while 14% somewhat support abolishing ICE. The bottom line here is that more than three-quarters of Democratic voters (76%) support doing away with ICE.

The only accurate way to describe Democratic support for abolishing ICE is that it is the overwhelmingly mainstream Democratic position. If a Democrat on Capitol Hill endorses anything less than the elimination of ICE, the media and advocacy groups need to point out that they are in the fringe of the party.

A Democratic member of Congress may argue that in order to win they need not only Democratic votes, but Independents as well. There is good news here for ICE opponents. Independent voters, though certainly not as supportive of abolishing ICE as Democrats, do support abolishing ICE. According to the YouGov polling, just over 1 in 3 (35%) of Independent voters strongly support abolishing ICE, while 12% of Independents somewhat support abolishing ICE. The bottom line here is that a 47% plurality of Independent voters support abolishing ICE.

I would hope that Democrats on Capitol Hill would take substantial political comfort in deciding to vote to eliminate ICE.

Successful politics is always about adding people to your coalition. The polling data from YouGov clearly shows that it is easy to build a strong coalition with Democratic and Independent voters to support abolishing ICE. I would suggest that anyone who tells you otherwise is either disingenuous or can not do the simple arithmetic.

Democratic support for abolishing ICE is so great that almost any Democratic member of Congress who fails to support the abolition of ICE could easily face a primary challenge. The dividing lines are that clear.

I would hope that Democrats on Capitol Hill would take substantial political comfort in deciding to vote to eliminate ICE. Abolishing ICE is strongly supported by the majority of Democrats. To any Democrat thinking of compromising on the abolition of ICE, I would ask if you are not going to support something that has the support of 76% of your party, are you really a Democrat?

It is impossible to imagine that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America ever envisioned that we would disintegrate to the point that we would fully embrace the militarization of American cities under civilian rule to the extent that we have built up ICE into a huge paramilitary terrorist force.Oh, well. It was a good run while it lasted.

The post The United States of America 1776-2026 appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The nation has been convulsed by the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Millions now see with sickening clarity a lawless assault by federal officers on an American city and its people. As The Wall Street Journal editorialized, it is a “moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency.”

The videos were followed by a fusillade of lies from senior government officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” White House aide Stephen Miller called Pretti an “assassin” who tried to “murder federal agents.” Border official Gregory Bovino declared, “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” The instant impulse by these high officials was to bully and smear.

Another outrageous statement by a cabinet official has not gotten enough attention.

On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz linking the violence in Minneapolis to a demand that the state give the Justice Department complete access to the state’s sensitive voter rolls, among other things. There’s no explicit quid pro quo offered—but anyone familiar with Grade B gangster movies won’t miss the implication. Certainly that’s how state officials have read it. Let that sink in: Federal agents have killed innocent civilians in cold blood. And the response of the attorney general of the United States is to use it as leverage to illegally access voter data. That is an unambiguous abuse of power.

That sense of crisis, consciously instigated, can create opportunities to undermine the election and sow doubt and division.

As my colleague Wendy Weiser has written, “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon provided Bondi with the only legal and responsible answer (a simple “no”), describing her offer as “an apparent ransom.”

Make no mistake: The federal government has no authorization to demand confidential voter information from the states. In our constitutional system, states are responsible for maintaining and protecting voter rolls. Indeed, various state and federal laws limit how much data the federal government can collect.

But that hasn’t stopped it from trying. Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded access to the voter records of 44 states and Washington, DC, and it has sued more than 20 states for not complying. Two courts have already ruled on the side of the states.

Why would the administration want to hoover up this data? It would give election deniers new ammunition to push false claims of voting by people who are not US citizens. It would help the federal government pressure states into reckless voter purges, which would kick eligible citizens off the rolls just as November rolls around.

Plainly, it’s all part of a broader strategy to meddle with our elections. Last weekend, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Republicans are looking into yet another version of the unpopular SAVE Act—the bill that would require American citizens to produce a birth certificate, passport, or similar document to register to vote. At least 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents, according to our research. The bill narrowly passed the House but stalled in the Senate last year after massive public pushback.

Bondi’s letter is a gross escalation of this effort—an explicit abuse of this moment to coerce Minnesota to step into line.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) worries that this escalation is by design. Over the weekend, he warned that the “Trump administration is creating this mayhem, particularly in cities in swing states, in order to take control of the election.”

When Donald Trump took office the first time in 2017, he talked of “American carnage.” Shooting of bystanders, squads of masked armed men, terrorized immigrants, clouds of tear gas, vague claims of conspiracy, and more—all bring that “carnage” to life. That sense of crisis, consciously instigated, can create opportunities to undermine the election and sow doubt and division.

To be clear (and I get asked this a lot): Donald Trump cannot cancel the midterms. Presidents have no power to do that.

But this armed assault on a major American city, coupled with a thuggish offer implying that the bully boys might be pulled back if state officials will betray their voters, shows the damage that can be done nonetheless.

The dignified and angry public response from around the country to the latest killing suggests maybe something has snapped. It would not be the first time in our history that government violence kindled an even more powerful reaction.

It’s not only the safety and sanity of people in Minnesota that’s at stake. As we are reminded once again, our democracy is on the line.

More Americans now support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, than keeping it.

A January 13, 2026 Economist/YouGov poll found that 46% want to eliminate ICE, compared to 43% who support preserving it. It’s a trend that’s been growing since ICE agents have been running rampant in US cities during Donald Trump’s second term.

A majority of Americans in 2024 backed strict immigration enforcement, so this surge in anti-ICE sentiment likely stems from the agency’s draconian crackdown on immigrants, protesters, citizens, and even children. Most recently, federal agents shot and killed an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti in Minneapolis when he came to the defense of other protesters.

Pretti was only the latest casualty. On New Year’s eve, a Black man named Keith Porter was killed in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of an off-duty ICE officer with a documented history of abusing children and being racist and homophobic.

Imagine living in a nation where, instead of pouring our collective resources into hurting and killing our fellow human beings, we pay to house, feed, clothe, educate, and care for one another.

A week later in Minneapolis, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed a white woman named Renee Good in an incident that galvanized the nation.

During the same crackdown, ICE agents dragged an elderly Hmong American man into the street in his underwear in frigid temperatures after invading his home and terrorizing his family. Other agents tear-gassed a family of eight trying to get home from their son’s sporting event, causing their infant child to lose consciousness.

These are just the documented incidents involving US citizens. Meanwhile, immigrant children as young as 5 years old are being targeted and detained, and dozens of noncitizens have died in ICE custody.

Senators who believe in compassion and human rights have a unique opportunity to pull back the agency’s powers by refusing to back an appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives. That bill, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, “would renew ICE’s excessive budget, with no strings attached, adding to the over $170 billion in taxpayer funds already allocated for immigration enforcement in July 2025.”

Although seven House Democrats voted for the bill alongside Republicans, a majority of Democrats voted against it and there are even rumblings within the party to support the idea of eliminating the agency altogether. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) recently introduced legislation to that effect.

Abolishing ICE is not only good for human rights in the nation—it would also free up funding for such critical needs as healthcare. “My position has always been clear that ICE funding should be cut,” explained Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) after Good was shot, adding: “the cuts to your healthcare are what’s paying for this.”

She’s right. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” deeply slashed Medicaid funding and allowed subsidies that lowered healthcare costs for Affordable Care Act plans to expire at the same time it hiked ICE funding to historic levels.

ICE funding comes out of the pockets of all working Americans—who are currently, absurdly, funding an agency with striking similarities to Hitler’s Brown Shirts. This comes at a time of continued economic insecurity for a majority of Americans.

For a microcosm of what it would look like to reverse the equation, look at New York City. In just a few weeks the city’s popular new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who has clearly stated his desire to abolish ICE, has taken actionable steps toward affordable housing, universal childcare, and other bread-and-butter issues.

Imagine living in a nation where, instead of pouring our collective resources into hurting and killing our fellow human beings, we pay to house, feed, clothe, educate, and care for one another.

The Senate now faces such a choice. It was only after Pretti was killed that Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) signaled his party would take a stand and block the vote.

This can and should be the first step toward eliminating ICE altogether.

Having reached a certain age and long been fascinated by obituaries, I sometimes think about both Donald Trump’s and my own. At 79, he’s just slightly less than two years younger than me, though of course I wasn’t the 45th president of the United States or the 47th one either. And eight chaotic years (or more?) as president (assuming he makes it that far) guarantee him a monster (and I do indeed use that word advisedly) set of obituaries when he dies, whereas almost a quarter-century at TomDispatch guarantees me nothing at all.

And I wouldn’t argue with that for a second. After all, Donald Trump has been (and continues to be) a truly one-of-a-kind president of the United States — though the word “kind” (as opposed to “king”) doesn’t actually apply to him, does it? Think of him, in fact, as the mad hatter of American presidents. If you remember, that Alice in Wonderland character was accused of “murdering the time.” And that, in its own strange fashion, seems like quite a reasonable description of at least one of the crimes of President Donald Trump.

The man who believes that climate change is a “green new scam” has tried, among other things, to shut down every major East Coast offshore wind power project in sight (though judges, including one he appointed to the bench, have so far denied him that right). Meanwhile, he’s been working to ensure that coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, remains a major source of American energy. He and his crew aren’t even letting major coal-burning power plants whose days are all too literally past close.

Phew, that paragraph left me out of breath — so much for my wind power! — and I didn’t even get everything in. After all, he’s also had the urge to pull every last barrel of oil out of Venezuela (even if, once upon a time, he did all too accurately call that country’s petroleum the “worst oil probably anywhere in the world” and “garbage”). And in the process, he is indeed engaged in murdering time — at least, the time we humans have left to live reasonably decent lives on this planet, which is, it seems, no longer truly ours but, at least for now, significantly his.

At 79, he gives old age new meaning. He’s the anything-goes president on a planet going down, down, down. The only thing, it seems, that doesn’t go down (not yet, at least) is Donald J. Trump.

In some sense, you might say that Donald Trump is hard at work trying to ensure not only that he’ll get a major obituary on his death, but that humanity will, too. In that sense, give him credit. He’s trying to put us all in the paper and give us all the experience he’s had of being “the news.”

And I wonder if someday, if not your obituary and mine, perhaps those of our children or grandchildren will start out something like this: “He/she died in his/her home in the midst of a blinding heat wave/a devastating storm/a historically unprecedented flood [or you name it] on a planet still growing hotter and more uncomfortable by the decade, if not the year.”

The U.S. Is an Increasingly Violent Petro State

When it comes to obituaries, don’t think it’s just the climate that’s the problem. We are living in a distinctly mad world of the living (and the dead). And OMG, it’s increasingly apparent that, on a planet where wars are still proliferating from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan (and the burning of fossil fuels to fight them is already adding significantly to the devastation of the planet), things are unlikely to get better any time soon. As the Costs of War project reminds us: “The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of oil — and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.”

And just to take one grim example, “my” president wants to take our tax dollars and apply them even more strikingly — in fact, in a blindingly record fashion — to the Pentagon budget, the thing that, once upon a time, was called, however inaccurately, the “defense budget.” It’s already at somewhere close to a trillion dollars a year and, give him credit, he only wants to raise it by another half-trillion dollars to $1.5 trillion.

And no, that is not a typo! Believe me, there’s no misprint there! That’s what he thinks he needs to do to create a “dream military,” which (at least in his mind) would undoubtedly ensure that Greenland will become the 51st state, Canada the 52nd, Cuba the 53rd, and Colombia the 54th. The 55th, then, could well be China. (Or so he might dream anyway. Or perhaps the phrase should be: so he might nightmare anyway.) And don’t fret. That increase in the military budget is only likely to mean a $6 trillion increase in our taxes over the next decade (or roughly $45,000 per family).

Oh, wait, this is already the nation with by far the largest military budget on Earth that, over all the endless decades since it emerged globally victorious from World War II, couldn’t win a single significant war — not in Korea, nor in Vietnam, nor Afghanistan, nor Iraq, nor even, possibly, in the weeks to come on the streets of Minneapolis. Nowhere. And count on this, another half-trillion dollars a year will ensure only one thing: that the United States won’t win yet more wars ever more extravagantly, whether in Greenland or somewhere else entirely, while never learning even the most obvious lessons from such a grim reality.

And no, for some reason, Donald Trump has never actually used the word “nightmare” either in relation to himself or his presidency, though he certainly did accuse the Democrats of being the party of “the socialist nightmare.” Nor did he use it in his recent interview with the New York Times when he was asked about whether there were any limits whatsoever on his own global power. Instead, he responded this way: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

So now, you can breathe a giant sigh of relief, right? Who could possibly worry about his mind? If Donald Trump’s “morality” is the only thing that stands between us and him doing more or less anything he wants, however destructively, on this planet of ours, then what could possibly go wrong?

And speaking of nightmares (or even obituaries), oil is Donald Trump’s dream liquid — and oil is hell. In the long run on this already overheating planet of ours, oil means war, not on this country’s potential enemies, or even Donald Trump’s, but on all of us. (And the U.S. is indeed an increasingly violent petro state, as Mark Hertsgaard has recently reminded us at the Nation magazine.)

The very decision to elect Trump to the presidency, not once, but twice, should be considered the popular equivalent of preparing an obituary not just for him but for this country, this planet, all of us. And it might read something like this. Or rather, let me just start it for you, since I know that you won’t have the slightest problem filling in the rest:

“Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, died yesterday. Born in New York City on June 14, 1946, he would come to be known for many things from the TV show The Apprentice to pussy-grabbing. (“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”) And that admission, which came just before his first presidential election contest against Hillary Clinton, didn’t do the trick. He still won, which certainly tells you something about the United States (if, that is, we were writing an obituary not of a president but of a country).

But perhaps his presidency was most significant not for grabbing this country’s pussy, but for murdering time. He was America’s first green-new-scam president, the “drill, baby, drill” candidate who proved all too ready to devastate not just a few women, or a pile of American voters, but the planet itself. Hey, if you happen to want to close down wind farms, but keep coal plants open, you know just the man to vote for (yet again).”

The Anything-Goes President

We don’t know yet what our future holds. Donald Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow and kiss this planet and the rest of us goodbye. But if he lasts the next three years, having already figured out how to largely ignore Congress — really, who needs Congress to blow up ships in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, or invade Venezuela, or take Greenland? — and do whatever the hell he wants to do, the Constitution be damned, there’s always the distinct possibility that he’ll deal with the 22nd Amendment, which prevents any president from having a third term in office, in a similar fashion. When it comes to running for president yet again, he’s already said: “I would love to do it.” And perhaps the key line in any future obituary of Donald Trump could prove to be that he broke new ground by becoming the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win (or do I mean seize?) a third term in office and so become the first true American autocrat.

There’s no question, he’s the man, and if he can’t do it, nobody can. And believe me, if he succeeds, he won’t be forgotten, not on a planet he’s lent such a hand to sending down, down, down. In some fashion, you might say, he’s put a tariff on all of us when it comes to life on Earth and that’s no small… well, I hesitate to say it… accomplishment.

If only we could put a tariff on him — call it the autocrat tariff — and make him pay us for the suffering he’s caused and will undoubtedly continue to cause. I mean, when you think about his “accomplishments,” it’s no small thing the second time around to have left Congress largely in the lurch and done whatever pleased him most, with only his “own morality” to stop him.

At 79, he gives old age new meaning. He’s the anything-goes president on a planet going down, down, down. The only thing, it seems, that doesn’t go down (not yet, at least) is Donald J. Trump.

Having reached this point, I now wonder if my task in this piece shouldn’t have been writing obituaries for Donald Trump and me but writing one for humanity and Planet Earth (at least as we’ve known it all these millennia). In some sense, here’s the extraordinary thing: in November 2024, a near majority of American voters, 49.8% of us, to be exact, voted yet again for him as president. Anybody can understand and even excuse making a mistake once in this strange world of ours. But twice? Really? When it comes not just to a president of the United States but to the very fate of this planet?

I have a feeling that, if Trump makes it to a third term, he — not Congress — would have to change the preamble to the Constitution of these (dis)United States of America to read this way:

“I, the Only Person Who Matters in the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Autocracy, establish Injustice, ensure domestic and global Chaos, provide for a common offensiveness, promote the general Poorfare, and secure the Blessings of Autocrcacy to myself and my Posterity (if they even make it), do ordain and establish this Constitution for the (Dis)United States of America and a world going to hell in a handbasket.”

And having done that, I suspect that we would then have to start preparing an obituary (which might be headlined “Murdering Time in the Age of Donald Trump”) for this planet of ours, at least as we humans have known it all these endless centuries.

The United States is on a very dark path under President Donald Trump, argues political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. Democratic rules and norms have virtually collapsed, and cruelty is the name of the game. Trump has used the military and federal law enforcement to build a paramilitary force that carries out pogroms against immigrant communities, assaults the constitutional rights of citizens and even murders people if they protest against its Nazi-like tactics. Under Trump, the US is acting at home in the same lawless manner that it acts abroad. How to fight Trump’s fascism is the million-dollar question.

Alexandra Boutri: I want to start by asking you to elaborate a bit on the concept of “imperial proto-fascism” that you referred to in the last interview we did together. I don’t think I have encountered this term before.

C. J. Polychroniou: It’s really a pretty basic and straightforward term. It seeks to capture the type of political order that is unfolding in the United States under Trump 2.0. The United States is and has been an imperialist power at least since the late 1890’s, although imperialism has changed its pattern over time and surely since the time of the writings of Hobson, Lenin, Luxembourg, and Hilferding. Yet, in a very surreal way, the Trump administration is reviving the Monroe Doctrine and seeks to take over foreign territories through whatever means necessary while making a mockery of international law. Whether you want to call it “Old Imperialism” or “New Imperialism” is a rather academic matter. The point is that the Trump administration envisions a new role for the US in today’s word in which might is right. No tricks or deception about pursuing US interests in the name of democracy, human rights, and freedom, which has been the rhetorical approach to US foreign policy by all previous administrations since the end of the Second World War. There is no point talking about international niceties because as Trump’s Waffen-SS chief Stephen Miller recently put it, “the iron laws of the world” are strength, force, and power.

On the domestic front, you have the emergence of a regime that relies on the same tactics that it uses on the international arena. Cruelty and brute force are its main traits. Under Trump, the US is acting at home in the same lawless manner that it acts abroad. But Americans are rebelling against Trump’s imperial proto-fascist political order, so interesting times do lie ahead.

Alexandra Boutri: The Trump administration has brazenly lied in order to justify the deaths of the two people in Minneapolis. What sort of government people can justify the murders of their own citizens?

C. J. Polychroniou: Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by Trump’s own fascist paramilitary squad. The mission of ICE is to capture undocumented immigrants and instill fear across communities. In shooting and killing two harmless protesters, ICE thugs did not violate any protocol. They followed the protocol. When pressed about ICE’s tactics and the murder of Alex Pretti, Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller turned against each other. But they are both complicit in Trump’s lawless police state actions. They work for a criminal government and are carrying out its leader's orders. Miller is in fact the architect of Trump’s inhumane anti-immigration policies.

The current administration in Washington DC does not pretend to be a national government looking after the interests and the well-being of all Americans. So let’s put aside political niceties. It is an administration of hateful, racist, ruthless thugs who have embarked on an open war against democracy and the rule of law, against the “other,” and against human decency. It is fascism with US characteristics.

Alexandra Boutri: It appears that Trump has switched tactics and is now trying to turn attention back to the economy. Will it work?

C. J. Polychroniou: It depends on what he decides to do with his inhumane immigration crackdown. I don’t see anti-ICE protests going away as long as the paramilitary squad's barbaric tactics continue unabated. Most Americans are clearly fed up with Trump and his policies. He has nothing to point to that would make the public feel good about his administration. He had made life much less affordable in just one year. He has added trillions to the debt and the US dollar is collapsing. Only those supporting Trump like sheep, either because they are wearing blinders or because they have vested interests in him being in office, like the tech oligarchs, can find something positive with his administration. But he has three more years left in the White House and there is no doubt that his wrecking ball will keep swinging. And Trump will continue with his distraction tactics during damaging stories for his administration. And that includes embarking on new military adventures abroad, more bombings and killings, and even pursuing regime change.

Alexandra Boutri: How do people push back against Trump’s imperial proto-fascist order?

C. J. Polychroniou: The anti-ICE protests are very important because they signify resistance against one of the administration’s cruelest and most dangerous policies. The US is indeed on a very dangerous trajectory under Trump. The situation is so critical and overwhelming that only a united front, I believe, could defeat Trump’s imperial proto-fascist order. In this context, what is needed is full-fledged resistance against the Trump regime and all its collaborators, especially including its corporate collaborators. A united front against fascism is an alliance of working-class organizations with all progressive forces whether they are reformist or even attached to liberal institutionalism. And I am not necessarily referring to the united front strategy of Leon Trotsky against Hitlerism. The united-front formulation predates Trotsky, and it was a united front strategy in France that defeated the far right in the legislative elections of 2024. The primary goal here is to resist and ultimately defeat Trump’s plan for an imperial proto-fascist order. Nationwide general strikes which are a very powerful tool against unpopular and repressive regimes, but are exceptionally rare in the US, have a much better chance of happening if there is a movement of mass resistance based on a united-front formulation. Hopefully, with each passing day, more and more people will come to recognize Trump’s government for what it really is, an abomination, and realize that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train,” as Howard Zinn aptly put it.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Trump intensified his threats against Iran suggesting he could soon attack “with speed and violence.” He and Europe want: an end to enrichment of uranium and disposal of current stockpiles, limits on the range and number of ballistic missiles, and an end to support for proxy groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Will Trump and/or Israel attack? How? When?

• Trump and Schumer are trying to avoid a partial government shutdown of Homeland Security this Saturday. Democrats want reforms to ICE—what would they look like? Also from Minnesota: Alex Pretti confronted ICE 11 days earlier, Trump vs. guns, Klobuchar running for governor.

• A Dutch court ruled that the Netherlands violated the human rights of residents of Bonaire by failing to protect them from the effects of climate change.

• After Trump demanded Minnesota voter records, FBI raids Fulton County, Georgia voter records. This has never happened before.

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As President Donald Trump’s second term unfolds, the contradictions at the heart of his “America First” agenda are increasingly apparent. What began as a populist revolt against elite globalism appears to have morphed into policies that alienate the very rural and small-town constituencies that backed him in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

These rust-belt and rural counties were drawn to his promises of economic revival, border security, and non-interventionism. Yet, emerging signs of fracture in this MAGA base suggest a potential backlash in the upcoming midterms.

The administration’s domestic policies, coupled with aggressive foreign postures, are accelerating disillusionment among Trump’s core supporters.

Domestically, Trump’s intensified immigration enforcement has backfired. Ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were sold as fulfilling pledges of mass deportations targeting “criminals”. But these operations have swept up undocumented workers essential to rural economies. Small family farms and businesses in states including California, Idaho, and Pennsylvania are reliant on immigrant labor for harvesting crops, dairy operations, and meatpacking. They now face acute shortages.

Trump, meanwhile, is perceived as profiting personally. His properties and branding deals benefit from economic nationalism, even as family farms teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.

Agricultural employment dropped by 155,000 workers between March and July 2025, reversing prior growth trends. Farmers in Ventura County, California, for example, denounced raids that targeted routes frequented by agricultural workers. Fields lie unharvested signalling financial ruin for some operations. Family-run farms struggle to find replacements. Low wages and grueling conditions simply fail to attract American-born laborers.

This labor crisis exacerbates a broader sense of betrayal. Rural voters supported Trump for his anti-elite rhetoric, expecting protection for their livelihoods. Instead, the administration’s actions have hollowed out local workforces without viable alternatives.

The H-2A visa program, meant to provide temporary foreign workers, has been streamlined—but remains insufficient amid ongoing raids, which deter even legal migrants. These disruptions ripple through small-town economies, where agriculture underpins community stability. Democrats, sensing opportunity, are investing in rural outreach, emphasizing economic populism to woo disillusioned voters who feel abandoned by Trump’s enforcement zeal.

Compounding these woes are the ongoing tariff disruptions. Trump touts his tariffs as tools to “make America great,” but in fact they have driven up costs for the same rural groups. Between January and September 2025, tariffs on imports from China, Canada, Mexico, and others have surged, collecting US$125 billion. However, the figure may be even higher according to experts.

But while the administration claims these taxes punish foreign adversaries, the burden falls squarely on American importers and consumers. Small businesses, which account for around 30% of imports, faced an average of US$151,000 in extra costs from April to September 2025, translating to $25,000 monthly hikes. Farmers, already squeezed by low grain prices, pay more for necessities, such as fertilizers (hit by 44% effective tariffs on Indian imports) and machinery parts.

Midwest producers of soybeans, corn, and pork—key US exports—suffer doubly from retaliatory tariffs abroad, which reduce demand and depress revenues. In Tennessee and Pennsylvania, builders report 2.5% rises in material costs, while food prices climb due to duties on beef, tomatoes, and coffee.

Trump, meanwhile, is perceived as profiting personally. His properties and branding deals benefit from economic nationalism, even as family farms teeter on the verge of bankruptcy. This disparity fuels resentment. Polls show Trump’s approval slipping in swing counties, with economic anxiety eroding the loyalty that once overlooked his character flaws.

Foreign Policy Compounds Domestic Fractures

These domestic fractures are mirrored in foreign policy, where Trump’s interventionism starkly contradicts his campaign pledge of “America First” restraint. Having promised no new wars, he has instead pursued aggressive postures that many Republicans view as unnecessary. The most emblematic is his renewed bid to acquire Greenland, apparently by negotiation or force, which has swiftly followed the US raid on Venezuela in the first week of January, accompanied by threats against other Latin American countries including Cuba and Colombia.

The US president has justified demands for control over the Arctic island—citing threats from Russia and China—as a strategic necessity. But NATO allies such as Denmark—of which Greenland is a constituent part—have rebuked it as an potentially alliance-shattering move. Congressional Republicans, including Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), have broken ranks, warning that force would obliterate NATO and tarnish US influence.

Such dissent highlights broader paradoxes. Trump’s populist realism prioritizes tough rhetoric for domestic consumption but yields aggressive, even reckless actions abroad. His administration is effectively dismantling post-1945 institutions while embracing 19th-century spheres-of-influence and outright colonialist thinking, including invoking an updated version of the 1823 Monroe doctrine.

The fractures signal that Trump’s “America First” policies may ultimately leave its rural and rust belt champions behind.

Rural voters, weary of endless wars, supported his non-interventionist promises. Now they see echoes of past entanglements in Trump’s suggestion that the US could intervene in Iran. This cognitive dissonance is accelerating disillusionment with his presidency.

These self-inflicted but inherent contradictions are hastening a pivotal reckoning for Trumpism. In many counties that have thrice backed him—and especially in swing counties—economic hardship and policy betrayals erode the cultural ties binding rural America to the Republican party. Democrats, through programs such as the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, are betting on this “betrayal” narrative, spotlighting farmers’ plights to flip seats in November 2026.

Polls show Latinos and independents souring on Trump, with the US president’s base turnout potentially waning as the midterm elections approach in November. If Republicans suffer larger-than-expected losses in those elections, it could mark the decline of Trumpism’s grip by exposing its elite-serving underbelly beneath populist veneer.

Yet, without a compelling alternative vision, Democrats risk squandering this opening. For now, the fractures signal that Trump’s “America First” policies may ultimately leave its rural and rust belt champions behind. Whether Trumpism proves resilient or begins a long decline may well be decided not in Washington and Mar-a-Lago, but in the county seats and small towns that once formed its unbreakable base.

Any resistance needs to celebrate its victories, and the weekend’s retreat by the administration is a big one: Should the forces of decency ever regain the upper hand in DC, we need a monument to the people of Minneapolis on the National Mall, and busts of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the Capitol.

And it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I'm paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)

I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cell phone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.

As we were reminded Tuesday morning, when Drew Warshaw, a candidate for New York state comptroller with a long record of building clean energy in the private sector, released a true bombshell report. In it he called for the state to divest its vast pension funds from fossil fuels—and provided the data to show that the failure of the incumbent to do that over the last two decades had cost taxpayers $15 billion in foregone returns. Billion with a b. That’s $750 for every woman, man, and child in the Empire State, all because the longstanding (as in, way too long) state treasurer, Thomas DiNapoli, has ignored the counsel of one expert after another and kept the state invested in Big Oil. (Oh, and since cowardice often consorts with incompetence, another report also finds that DiNapoli has cost the state more than $50 billion by underperforming index funds and giving huge contracts to various advisers.

Always remember, most of the nation’s economy is in places that voted against Trump. It’s a weapon that needs to be used.

A bit of backstory here. Fifteen years ago, some of us launched a fossil fuel divestment campaign. At the beginning the argument was mostly moral: It was wrong to try and make a profit off the end of the world, and if we could convince institutions to sell that stock it would tarnish Big Fossil’s social license.

But it didn’t take long for another argument to emerge. The pension funds, college endowments, and others who joined the movement reported that they were making money as a result, and for a very simple reason: Anything that they put the money into was generating better returns than coal, gas, and oil. And that in turn was for an even simpler reason: Fossil fuel is a faltering industry, because an alternative—the trinity of sun, wind, and batteries—now produces the same product, just cleaner and cheaper. That’s why 95% of new generating capacity around the world last year came from renewables; fossil fuel only has a good year any more if something goes very wrong (the invasion of Ukraine, say).

Anyway, this became the largest anti-corporate effort of its kind in history, with funds representing $41 trillion in investments joining in. Its had powerful effects—when Peabody Coal filed for bankruptcy, for instance, its legal documents listed divestment as a reason. But it also protected the fiscal integrity of the funds that did the right thing—they had more money to pay pensions, provide scholarships, or whatever else. That’s why pension funds in states and entire countries joined in.

Which brings us back to New York. Advocates have put in tens of thousands of person hours explaining to DiNapoli that he should join pension funds in dozens of other places in divesting from fossil fuels, and he has dragged his feet at every turn, with half-measures, occasional strongly-worded letters, and the rest: He is the Chuck Schumer of finance. As Warshaw’s report puts it:

When an investment, and in this case a whole sector of investments, fails to perform over a long period of time and show no realistic signs of turning around, investment managers need to act. Each market cycle over the last two decades has left in its wake less value for fossil fuel companies and less value for fossil fuel investors. This value erosion and strong headwind threats are at the heart of the divestment argument. Why continue to invest in an industry that is now only 2.8% of the market with no plausible strategy to turn things around and a corporate culture that simply that denies the problem even exists? Investment managers need to focus their time on maximizing risk-adjusted returns, not engaging in politically-driven wishful thinking for an industry in permanent decline.

DiNapoli is not alone in his cowardice, of course. For a brief moment—when they were scared by the emergence of Greta’s worldwide movement before the pandemic—lots of financial leaders said they were going to take steps to address climate change. BlackRock, for instance, the biggest investor in the world, which has the power should it choose to use it, to make vast change fast. (BlackRock’s wealth is roughly twice the continent of Africa’s). Here’s what Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said in 2020:

Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. Last September, when millions of people took to the streets to demand action on climate change, many of them emphasized the significant and lasting impact that it will have on economic growth and prosperity–a risk that markets to date have been slower to reflect. But awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.

The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations–including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk–is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.

Will cities, for example, be able to afford their infrastructure needs as climate risk reshapes the market for municipal bonds? What will happen to the 30-year mortgage–a key building block of finance–if lenders can’t estimate the impact of climate risk over such a long timeline, and if there is no viable market for flood or fire insurance in impacted areas? What happens to inflation, and in turn interest rates, if the cost of food climbs from drought and flooding? How can we model economic growth if emerging markets see their productivity decline due to extreme heat and other climate impacts?

Investors are increasingly reckoning with these questions and recognizing that climate risk is investment risk.

But then what happened? Big Oil pushed back, in the form of red state treasurers promising to pull their money from BlackRock. Suddenly Fink turned tail and ran. By now he’s part of President Donald Trump’s inner circle. As Pilita Clark explained in that radical journal the Financial Times over the weekend, DiNapoli and Fink’s failure of courage is endemic across too much of the American elite landscape:

This failure is not due to a shortage of scientific understanding or technological breakthroughs. It is because we lack the political changes needed to put financial systems and economies on to paths that avoid burning fossil fuels. Achieving those changes is inordinately difficult.

Public support from large businesses is important. Ultimately, staying quiet at a time like this is self-defeating. It undermines the global institutions needed to address a growing global climate problem that poses serious financial threats.

David Gelles, in the Times, has another sad account of this collective failure of nerve on Wall Street, and it’s well worth reading. As he writes:

Republican legislatures around the country introduced more than 100 bills to penalize financial companies that supported ESG practices. Republican state treasurers around the country began pulling money out.

This is the company DiNapoli keeps, and the people he apparently listens to—again, he’s a lot more like Chuck Schumer than he should be. So it’s very good news that insurgent candidate Warshaw is talking about bringing New York State’s financial might to bear—in part because it amplifies the message being sent by Mark Levine, new comptroller of the city of New York. Levine’s predecessor Brad Lander, who already led the divestment from fossil fuel companies, late in his tenure called for the city to ditch BlackRock, and Levine seems to be interested in following through.

Together, the pension funds of New York City and New York state control far more resources than the funds of the various red states combined. If they manage to put effective pressure on the oil industry and the finance industry, it will have enormous impact—it will aid enormously in the climate fight and it will undercut Trump. And it will encourage other blue state leaders to do likewise: Always remember, most of the nation’s economy is in places that voted against Trump. It’s a weapon that needs to be used.

And New York can do so without putting anyone’s pension at risk—under the Empire State’s laws, the comptroller has to pay pensions in full no matter what happens to his investment portfolio, so there’s no danger Warshaw will do anything except save taxpayers large sums of money. (And Warshaw is not alone; the other Dem in the primary, Raj Goyle, has called for divestment too, though not with the same depth of analysis). This is a no-brainer, except if you’re stuck in your ways.

I helped found an organization devoted to elder action on behalf of climate and democracy; obviously I don’t think age disqualifies one from office. But DiNapoli is 71 and he represents the greatest danger of long tenure in office: a stultification of ideas, an inability to see new facts, a stubborn attachment to old ideas. It’s time for him, finally, to get out of the way, or to be voted out.

The climate fight, even in this country, is very far from over. The basic premise of that battle—that we must move swiftly away from the moral and financial sinkhole of Big Oil—is still clear and powerful.