An ICE arrest, 2025. ICE
If we still lived in a rational democracy, the masked thugs in Trump’s ill-trained paramilitary force would be in full retreat. If the guy gave a fig about public opinion, he’d have realized by now that it was nuts to invade and terrorize Minneapolis, and that it’s a losing proposition to insist that a U.S. citizen was guilty of getting herself killed when most people could see with their own eyes that she was innocent and murdered.
The verdict is already in. By wide margins in multiple polls (CNN, Quinnipiac, Economist/YouGov, Data for Progress), Americans say the shooting of Renee Good was not justified, that ICE is making the cities less safe, and that it needs to be reined in or even abolished. The public backlash is so fervent, according to a new Associated Press poll, that Trump’s approval rating on immigration has cratered. Trump arguably won in 2024 on the perceived strength of his hardline immigration stance, but now the AP says that only 38 percent of Americans support the way he’s handling the issue. A landslide 61 percent give him thumbs down.
Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokesliar, declared the other day that immigration “remains among his best polling issues,” but sane observers know better. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, says “the Renee Good story has broken through” — at Trump’s expense — “in a way other stories have not.” In focus groups, she talks to “ardent fans of the president,” some of whom now believe that his anti-immigrant aggressiveness has “gone too far.”
Gee, ya think? Perhaps you’ve heard about the Minneapolis couple that made the mistake last Wednesday of driving their SUV down the wrong street — “wrong” only because members of Trump’s sturmabteilung were busy doing their thing. The presence of ICE had drawn protestors; ICE responded with flash-bang grenades and tear gas, ignoring or not noticing that the trapped couple had their six kids in the SUV. It filled with smoke, and three of the kids required hospital treatment - including the youngest, six months old - because they could barely breathe.
Even hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan — one of Trump’s biggest ‘24 boosters, named by the Wall Street Journal as “the country’s most important swing voter” — is repulsed by MAGA’s boots on the ground. Renee Good’s death “just seems like all kinds of wrong to me,” he said in his studio the other day. “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people - many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them. Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”
Gestapo…he said it, not me.
And of course that’s what we’ve come to - thanks to a voting plurality that chose to commit national suicide and usher in a goonocracy. What shocks me today is that anyone can be shocked by what’s happening; as I wrote in December ‘24 (this prediction required minimal brain cells), “Anyone who’s still in denial about what awaits us should be indicted for failure of imagination.”
It’s nice that people en masse have woken up and remembered (perhaps too late) that fear and terror are not core American values, and a case can even be made that Joe Rogan’s epiphany is somewhat analogous to Walter Cronkite’s 1968 on-air announcement that Lyndon Johnson was wrong to wage the Vietnam war. LBJ quickly realized that when he lost Uncle Walter, he was politically doomed. Today, if this were a just world with at least a shred of democratic decency, Trump would heed Rogan and dial back the madness.
But here’s the big problem, as if you didn’t know: Authoritarians don’t care what their peasants think.
One key finding in a new Wall Street Journal poll says it all: “Some 92 percent of people who voted for him in 2024 give him a positive job rating today, including 70 percent who ‘strongly approve.’” As long as his most ardent sycophants continue to march in step, it doesn’t matter a whit to Trump that swing-voting independents hate what he’s doing (a 29 percent approval rating). As long as his MAGA bubble holds firm, he’ll dwell within it, lying to himself and to anyone who’ll listen about Renee Good (“She ran him over”); dismissing all polls as fake and all opposition as “radical left”; and, in the tradition of long-dead mentor Roy Cohn, doubling down instead of easing up.
I know it sounds melodramatic to say that we’re living on a knife’s edge, but reality trumps the natural instinct to ignore and deny. Thanks to the lavish funds supplied by last summer’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the mass recruitment of ICE goons continues apace, and Trump seems to be thirsting for any excuse to send in the military to wage domestic war under the Orwellian guise of imposing peace, while lying with each inhalation of oxygen about Minneapolis and everything else. His lies, and those of his abetters, have already done untold damage to our civic order and bring to mind these words from Hannah Arendt, the 20th century’s premier expert on authoritarianism: “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”
So what can we the people do to salvage what we’ve always loved about this country, what we long took for granted? The only rational option is to push back peacefully in the street, demonstrating that indeed there can still be strength in numbers; to inspire the jelly-legged congressional Democrats to reattach their spines; and to vote massively for renewed checks and balances in the November midterms — braving the inevitable MAGA efforts to obstruct the vote counts and cry foul in the aftermath.
It’s been 10 years of havoc. On election night in 2016, my late wife stayed up til dawn tallying the returns, in the futile hope that Trump’s first win would not stand. That morning she told me, “This is not the country I thought I lived in.” She didn’t live to see his second win. Her father had fled fascism for America in the late 1930s, and to her it was an article of faith that we were the good guys. She would be aghast today, but her feet would be on the street — mindful, as the people of Minneapolis well know, that silence is surrender. The Germans kept their heads down; that we should not abide. We have three centuries of tradition to tap for rebellious inspiration. We owe it not only to ourselves, but to the everyday patriots who’ve passed on.
