The MAGA Insurrection Writ Large
Trump takes his Revenge and Retribution Tour global
What Donald Trump is doing in Minneapolis is what he had his armed mob did to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, writ large.
At his inflammatory “Stop the Steal” rally then, Trump’s exhortations to what he knew was an armed mob (he had the metal detectors turned off, saying, “They’re not here to hurt me”) to “fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore,” are obviously the same marching orders given to the paramilitary thugs he has set loose on anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant and any American citizen standing up for them.
Does this violent, ragtag militia even deserve to be called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as if they are part of an actual, functioning agency of the government?
Just as the false patriots on January 6 set upon and injured more than 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police in Trump’s last-ditch attempt in his months-long conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election (as we heard again in testimony by Jack Smith), Trump’s militia obviously has orders to shoot first and not ask questions later.
Indeed, one wonders how many of them are veterans of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election? Congressman Jaimie Raskin (D-MD), a ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested answers to that question in a letter sent to both Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. (Looking at his letter to them, one also wonders how cognitively dissonant it was for him to address each of them as “The Honorable.”)
The purposeful inciting of violence by heavily armed and masked ICE and U.S. Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis follows similar scenes in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte, New Orleans, and other cities where Americans have had the nerve to elect Democrats to leadership. Like a cheap mobster trying to enforce his rule over the mean streets, Trump utilizes threats of violence to make people living in Blue States think twice about crossing him again in the voting booth.
After the executions of Renée Good, 37, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, also 37, an intensive care nurse for the Veterans Administration, members of the Trump administration immediately blamed the victims, calling them domestic terrorists. But what any reasonable person would say at this point is that the ICE agents are the terrorists and are executing protesters to prove that they can — and to prove it can happen to you, if you are so foolish as to exercise your First Amendment rights to protest. Once again, local and state authorities are being kept from the investigation.
Trump has done all he can to block data coming out about his weakening economy; likewise, he will block any real investigation into his personal militia’s executions of citizens.
As Greg Sargent of The New Republic notes, Trump and his team of fascist white supremacists believe that a silent majority of Americans are anti-immigrant, but that appears not to be working at all:
But the surprise of the moment has been the extraordinary solidarity that ordinary Americans have shown with immigrants and against Trump-Miller-Vance’s parade of ethnonationalist horrors. Miller is using state-sponsored violence and terror to try to break up that alliance. A big reason Trumpworld is unapologetic about Good — Vance responded by exaggerating the immunity of ICE officers, and Miller kept describing protesters as insurrectionists, meaning it’s open season on them — is to warn Americans showing solidarity with immigrants that they do so at their personal peril.
Now, Trump and his shamelessly ever-lying minions want us to believe that it’s in the best interest of the United States to bring that level of chaos and straight-up direct threats to the countries we have considered our close allies and trusted trading partners since World War II.
Call it January 6, writ even larger.
As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, put it in a remarkably direct speech at Davos, Switzerland, the U.S.-led world order is a thing of the past; it has been ruptured. If you have not, you should listen to his speech.
Trump hated what Carney spelled out at Davos (ranting about Canada “not being grateful” and threatening to apply a 100% tariff on Canadian goods), so you know it was a reasonable and intelligent speech.
When close to the end of his exhausting monologue to the crowd he paid to come to Washington on January 6, Trump exhorted, “We have to fight like hell, or we won’t have a country anymore,” Trump was thinking of himself, not the country. As reported by the New York Times, in the first year of his second term, Trump has utilized the presidency to amass at least $1.4 billion for himself and his family.
That alone should end his presidency, but, incredibly, it won’t, because Republicans in Congress care more for their do-nothing jobs than they do the country.
Trump has handed the future to China and a quickly reorganizing NATO.
Because we re-elected a malignant narcissist who perpetuates malign idiocies multiple times each day, we are no longer considered to be a charitable country, a reliable trading partner, or a trustworthy member of the Western alliance. Trump has handed the future to China and a quickly reorganizing NATO.
MAGA folks, if you think that any of this will make things easier on your pocketbook, think again. Beyond the immediate economic effects of having the world reorganize trade without the United States, Trump has condemned our children and grandchildren to live in a country with all the growth potential of Hungary’s or Russia’s economy.
A while back, I predicted that Trump would ruin the economy, but I never imagined it would be this crazy. Oh, wait, I did:
He appears ready to follow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for replacing expert civil servants with a legion of loyalist lackeys, ditching climate science, imprisoning or expelling immigrants who are crucial to the economy, cutting taxes further and reducing Social Security and Medicaid benefits, forcing a misogynistic theocracy on a nation founded on the separation of church and state, and turning our back on historical allies around the world. Oh and, first and foremost, getting revenge on all of Trump’s enemies.
I’ve written this far too many times, but I’ll write it again: If Trump isn’t working directly for Vladimir Putin, he might as well be. As many others have pointed out, for nearly 80 years, the United States benefited greatly from its leadership of the NATO coalition. That’s over now, and no one could be more pleased than the autocrat Donald looks up to the most.
And I understand the theories of late-stage capitalism, but I reject the notion that we are doomed to come to chaos in the end. With strong, articulate, and empathic leaders like Mark Carney and much of the leadership amongst our historical allies, citizens can better understand the vast benefits of a democratic governance that does its best — however imperfectly — to represent all the people, versus a brutal, authoritarian governance that is in service to the few.
The MAGA insurrection writ large? Add in the shuttering of USAID, which has already led to the deaths of more than 700,000 people (including half a million children), and we can, conservatively, call it Trump’s insurrection against humanity.
As The Atlantic’s Jonathan Rauch writes, even those who have (somehow) hesitated to call this fascism should see this state violence as only part of the Trump-branded authoritarian takeover of the American democratic republic. What he got away with on January 6 turned out to be just a trial run.
I used to think Donald was willing to burn America to the ground to keep what he did with Jeffrey Epstein secret, but I was obviously underestimating his panic.
