Institutional Serial Killer

 According to Richardson's research, ICE is responsible for killing 10 people on the streets of America. In ICE run detention centers - outside of the public eye - another 21 people have died this year.

The tactical decision to throw the outright Nazi, Greg Bovino, out the door has reduced the rhetorical temperature and some of the more egregious public displays of force in American cities. This has not meant a change in culture within Trump's Brown Shirts. They can't help but feel that they are immune to public accountability, as the killers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are still shielded from the consequences of their actions.

The killing yesterday of Juan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine is a sadly typical extrajudicial killing for ICE. They targeted the wrong person based on appearance - a Kavanaugh Stop - and then got trigger happy. Guerrero was shot in the head in front of his 3 year old daughter. Guerrero is legally able to work in the US, but for the Nazis like Stephen Miller, it is not his legal status but his skin color that makes him a target. His crime was not crossing a line on a map without paperwork, but being brown skinned.

It is worth noting that this happened in Maine. Susan Collins will not have the luxury of facing a rapist with a Nazi tattoo. Maine Democrats will select a replacement soon, but Collins will have to go before the voters of Maine and explain her support for an organization that has killed 31 people in about six months. 

According to the Gestapo's own statistics, there have been 9 killings (including manslaughter) by undocumented aliens so far this year. From 2023-25, the number ranged from 23 to 29. That means ICE is responsible for more deaths than the so-called "dangerous aliens" that they have purportedly mobilized against. At this pace, they will extinguish the lives of about 60 human beings, which is an par with the worst surge of violence committed by undocumented people during the crisis of 2021-2.

ICE is often compared to a criminal gang, but I also think they are like an institutional serial killer. They operate across geographic distance to dilute their crimes, they prey on a certain ethnic group, they escape accountability for far too long.

We are governed by psychopaths. 

The Lies That Bind

 Martin Longman looks at the tactical bind that the GOP is in this November. The basic issue is this: MAGA is centered in "low information" voters. These are people who do not think in especially ideological terms, but rather respond to various cues about the world in a less systematic way. Trump, in this telling, is simply one of dozens of global leaders who have risen to power because the "system" sucks and they want someone to upset the apple cart. It's broadly populist in its contempt for governing expertise and compromise, because they just want to burn the whole thing down.

Trump is currently burning the whole thing down.

Turns out, though, that burning the whole thing down is actually really damaging to a lot things that MAGA likes. Additionally, MAGA is now invested in the arsonist. They simply don't vote in the same numbers in special elections certainly, but also the midterms. Democrats did surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms, despite Biden's low approval ratings, because Trump's GOP really are only TRUMP'S GOP. Without him on the ballot, Republicans could suffer in the turnout war.

The problem - as Longman and others have identified - is that Trump is incredibly unpopular. What's more, he's really unpopular on the issues that people care the most about. Then you add in him saying shit like he doesn't care about the economy or the midterms (his way of preemptively deflecting the stench of coming defeat) and why would anyone come out and vote for the GOP. 

Susie Wiles is talking about a convention in August or September to rally the MAGA faithful. The problem is that he's becoming increasingly toxic. If you are the Democrats, you WANT to run against Trump, against gas prices, against corruption. By all means, re-center Trump in the popular imagination. Democratic partisans are going to crawl through broken glass and lemon juice to vote this November. Blacks are pissed at the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Hispanics are pissed at the wanton cruelty of ICE. Suburbanites are repelled by the corruption and incompetence. The idea that they can rally these infrequent voters who often back Trump seems false on the face of it.

Unless they are hardcore MAGA, they wanted the price of stuff to come down. Inflation is not only had right now, but it looks to get worse over the course of the next six months. Oil prices won't come down for a year or more even if the war ended tomorrow. Fertilizer prices are going to create chaos on the Farm Belt and the grocery store.

Wiles may feel like her only avenue is to "let Trump be Trump" but that seems foolish.

Misconduct

 The Online Famous Popehat (Ken White) has a thread where he discusses the rank misconduct in the case against people opposing ICE in Chicago. There's a no-zero chance this actually leads to disbarring some of the lawyers. It sure sounds like this needs to start happening to DOJ lawyers, because the worst thing we can have right now is a  bunch of DOJ lawyers that aren't afraid of losing their law licenses. Same goes for doctors giving professional cover for RFK's assault on public health. Every lever of civil society needs to be pulled to help push back against this shitshow. 

The Stall

 Krugman looks at the somewhat contradictory jobs numbers. Basically, job growth is slow but unemployment is low. How can that be? Well, it's because we are throttling off immigration. We are likely at or approaching negative net migration - more people leaving the country than entering.

The developed world is seeing a similar problem of a graying, shrinking demographic. We live longer and have fewer children, so whether it's Japan or Germany or the US, the replacement rate is a struggle to achieve. The US has avoided this problem by growing its population through both legal and illegal immigration. That has kept the workforce expanding. Illegal immigration helps the most, in some ways, because undocumented workers actually pay into Social Security, but they don't withdraw from it.

Trumpists will cover this looming problem up by claiming ridiculous projections for productivity and overall economic growth. Something, something AI. There is - as with all Republican policies - an extraordinary amount of wishcasting. 

What worries me is that we are headed for a reckoning on the national debt. Trump has added something like a quarter of all of America's debt. In this, he is just a bog standard Republican, albeit more so than most. America has been able to carry a huge debt for a number of structural reasons, and Trump is destroying most of them, including international goodwill towards the dollar. If the economy falls into a recession caused by economic instability from his whacko policies, a bursting AI bubble and the energy crisis his war has created, America could go from a stalled job market to a collapsing one. 

Democrats are always having to clean up Republican messes. If we dip into a recession, we might have to do so with a politicized Federal Reserve and a budget situation from hell. Trump will want to give away massive checks with his name on them. Democrats - who in this scenario easily win the House and likely the Senate - will have to put strict conditions on the money, and they are usually averse to participating in the immiseration of Americans.

The Iran War isn't over. The oil is not flowing, and even if it was it would take months to get back to normal. The labor market has stalled. The economy is sustained only by an AI bubble that is dependent on cheap energy, which we no longer have. 

If the crash is going to come, it needs to come soon, so we can take Republicans out of the equation in Congress and begin the slow process of repairing the structural damage of this awful man and his legions. 

No Kings

 I am off to - I think - the third protest I've ever been to. The second one was No Kings this fall. I am not a protest guy, I am not a crowds guy, but this shit is so fucked up and bullshit that it's prompting me to overcome my previous scruples.

Meanwhile, CPAC was sparsely attended and riven by factions. Factionalism is rare on the right, but common within revolutionary movements, which sums up the basic friction between Trumpism and institutional conservatism.

The House Republicans have rejected the bill to reopen DHS except for ICE. Senate Republicans caved because the TSA situation was getting out of hand and perhaps some of them secretly wanted to rein ICE in a bit, too. The House catering to Trump's diktats over not funding TSA means that it could not be any clearer who is behind the chaos in America's airports.

We will see how many people take to the streets to protest Trump's corruption, war mongering, incompetence and authoritarianism. I'm guessing that the numbers will be large (providing people can afford gas to get there). If it's as big as the fall protests - or even larger - then I think it's pretty clear where the energy rests going into the midterms. I think the key to a Blue Tsunami is a combination of extremely motivated anti-Trump voters and dispirited Trump voters who stay home. 

So if you can go today, go.

Democrats Win One

 Republicans have caved on the TSA standalone funding. I saw someone online predictably say that this was less a Democratic win than a Republican loss, because Democrats can never win. Bullshit. Democrats laid out a clear line, they held to it and Trump, then Senate Republicans caved. That's a clear "W."

This doesn't really stop the depredation of ICE, but it does begin the process of isolating ICE's budget within the debate over DHS.

Vibes v Policy

 In his mailbag, Yglesias goes off on the idea that Democrats need to moderate their policy positions in order to win the Senate seats in places like Iowa, Texas, Florida or Alaska. This is because Yglesias is locked into the idea that voters select candidates based on ideology and, especially, policy.

Coincidentally, Morris comes out today with just the opposite conclusion - based not on his priors but on a poll he ran. I'll let him summarize his findings:

In our February poll, we asked voters whether each of 10 adjectives describes the Democratic and Republican parties. Each person was asked to rank how well each word — such as “extreme”, “elitist”, “tough”, and “weak” — described both parties on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating the word described the party very well.

The Republican Party’s defining traits in voters’ minds are extreme (60% agree), elitist (57%), tough, (56%) and cruel (51%). The percentage of Americans agreeing with descriptions of positive traits is comparatively smaller: just 41% say the party is competent, 41% say principled, and only 31% — less than a third — say the GOP can be considered empathetic.

The average American sees Democrats in a much different light. The top descriptors of the party are empathetic (54%) and principled (49%). Comparatively few people think of it as “tough” (31%), and nearly half the country calls the Democrats weak (48%) and ineffective (47%). Democrats’ competence rating is 46% — five points higher than the GOP’s — but it’s the weakness and ineffectiveness labels that dominate voters’ impressions and national discourse about the party.

This manifests, I think, in two ways.

The first is the fact that Democrats have for a while now been associated with more feminine values and have run two female candidates for president. Trump won both of those elections, despite the fact that I would rank Hillary Clinton's mental and emotional toughness leagues higher than Trump's. Still, I remain convinced that Trump would not have beaten Joe Biden in 2016 for instance. Or really any male Democrat. Trump benefits from gendered perceptions of "toughness", even though he's the whiniest, most petulant person to hold the office.

The second is that there is an entire online discourse about Democrats not being tough. The algorithm probably boosts this, but Democrats are always "caving" or "losing" in ways that are both real and imaginary. The fall shutdown, for instance, was a "loss", in that Dems weren't able to save health insurance. They DID however amplify the issue of healthcare affordability, which is now a very favorable issue for Dems. Is that a loss or a win? 

The reason why Gavin Newsom or even JB Pritzker is popular is because they fight back. The reason Schumer isn't, is because he does appear to have the same fight in him. 

Right now there is a partial DHS shutdown over ICE. Democrats are "fighting" but the reality of shutdowns is that they rarely work to extort policy concessions. In fact, they got rolled when the Big Beautiful Bill basically funded ICE and DHS in perpetuity. Will they be able to win some concession? Maybe. Possibly. What they are asking for is popular. The structural levers that they have are not strong enough, though, to force through what they want to do.

This, to me, is a massive example of the role of gender on our politics. I think it Maureen Dowd or someone like her who talked about Democrats being the Mommy Party and Republicans being the Daddy Party. Crude, but if you look at the polling, there's some real accuracy there.

Look at the performative masculinity of Pete Hegseth or RFK posting their workout videos or Kash Patel chugging beers with the US Men's Hockey team. Hell, look at the grotesque "Mar A Lago Face" phenomenon whereby women butcher their faces with plastic surgery to reinforce gender stereotypes.

Morris' conclusion is that Democrats don't need to moderate on certain issues, so much as they need to "get tough" with the understanding that there is no magic dial that you can turn to make voters see you as tougher.  My cynical take is that means someone like Graham Platner is a better bet to win in November's Maine Senate race than Janet Mills. I think Mills makes the better Senator, and she is frankly "New England Tough" but Platner has a gravelly voice and voters are kinda stupid.

When we talk about "toughness" we are talking about vibes, not policy. Yglesias may sit there in his DC townhouse and parse white papers, but voters don't. Hispanic and Black men didn't shift to Trump because they believed he wouldn't tax their tips or even that he would save America from trans athletes. They did it because he's a "tough business man" who will lift them up from the precarious edges of poverty.

Will It Work?

 Democratic leadership has settled on a set of demands for funding DHS. It is simultaneously ambitious and insufficient in many ways. Personally, I would ban Border Patrol from being anywhere that isn't the border. That will both reduce the gun-slinging cowboy dynamic within cities but also deny DHS a LOT of their foot soldiers.

Still, what Democrats have landed on is pretty popular with the public at large. The most popular reforms are making ICE/BP wear body cameras; independent investigations of ICE shootings; requiring a judicial warrant to enter homes; allowing people to video ICE; banning racial profiling; ban ICE from entering schools and churches; focusing efforts on deporting criminals, not just anyone who looks Brown.

This is where the upside-down nature of American politics in 2026 comes into play. The requested reforms are popular. They really aren't THAT controversial - or wouldn't have been before Trump came on the scene. Yeah, you should have a warrant to enter someone's home. Yeah, we shouldn't have a masked secret police dressed in paramilitary costumes yanking people off the street. 

However, there can be no distance between Republicans and Trump. You cannot defy Dear Leader. Even if Democrats are able to pass these reform bills, there's little chance Trump will actually sign them. Shutting down the government - even just part of the government - has rarely worked to extract concessions from the majority.

Of course, if and when it doesn't work, we will be told it is because Democrats are feckless and won't fight for things. Even as FEMA and TSA close and things get dicey, and Democrats will once again face the fact that closing the government hurts people, they will be expected to cave, because no one expects Republicans to care about people beyond their base. Even though the reforms are very popular, Republicans will simply double down on cruelty in the service of Trump and his hateful legions. 

Simplest Demand

 Democrats are going to try and reform ICE in the coming weeks, as they have a two week CR on DHS funding to try and hammer out some guardrails for the increasingly lawless agency.

Some of these suggestions are well and good, but I think one thing they HAVE to demand is that Border Patrol returns to the border. 

The "Border" is arguably the one issue that Trump still has positive approval ratings, as crossings have indeed decreased. Still, Alex Pretti was shot by two BP agents, not "ICE" agents. We have largely conflated the two for ease, but Border Patrol is really where the worst, trigger happy assholes reside. Long time ICE agents don't want to ride with them, because they are the ones most likely to pull their service weapon. They are routinely arrested for various violent crimes like spousal abuse.

The quickest way to both de-escalate what's happening in places like Minneapolis and deprive the purges of needed manpower is to deny Border Patrol from operating more than 15 miles from the actual border.

There's Something Happening Here

 Yesterday, there was a special election in a Texas state Senate race. Trump carried the district by 17 points in 2024. Yesterday, the Democrat won by 14 points, a 31 point swing. Democrat Taylor Rehmet spent almost no money compared to his well-funded and Trump-endorsed opponent and still won a landslide. Rehmet is an Air Force veteran and union leader and the sort of male-coded candidate that I personally think will overperform, due to vibes about Democrats being too female, too minority centered. 

Fox News actually does respectable polling, and they have Democrats winning the generic ballot by 6 points, the highest they've ever recorded. As Morris notes, generic ballot polling doesn't tell us what will happen this November, but the party that doesn't control the White House usually picks up about 6 points between January polling and November voting. They start this cycle in the strongest position that they have ever been in. 

Republicans are doubling down, in many ways, on the racism of their immigration policies. Even Americans who might support tighter border controls are not thrilled with the images coming from Minnesota. Trump (or Miller) thinks that they can just change the optics by firing Bovino and his Nazi wardrobe, but that's actually not the imagery that has people enraged. It's five year old Liam Conejo Ramos being arrested for the crime of being brown. 

Meanwhile, with Republicans falling further and further underwater, the slow leak of Epstein files show that that story isn't going away either. As I wrote on Friday, Trump's policies are even less popular than he is himself. Oddly, with Democrats it's usually the opposite. Democratic policies are generally pretty popular - healthcare, taxing the rich, actual infrastructure spending, better education - but Dem pols usually poll worse. Once Trump's personality cult has to assimilate the fact that he really is a pedophile and rapist - if they even can assimilate that information - then the bottom truly does fall out. 

The prevailing fear many of us have right now as we look at the political dynamic is that Trump will throw everything at the wall to try and subvert the midterms in nine months. As of now, he has been largely confined to more or less "legal" attempts like gerrymandering mid-decade. As America rejects him, he will grow more and more dangerous, Stephen Miller will get more and more fevered in his assault on the Constitution. 

However, last night's election results could mean that they won't be able to pull it off.