MAGA authoritarianism takes square aim at Minnesota
As the Trump administration unleashes repressive mayhem in Minneapolis-St. Paul, crippling biases and blind spots keep the Democrats and major media from conveying the full story to the public
Events in Minnesota over the last few weeks confirm the depths of the U.S.’s escalating political crisis, as an authoritarian president aims to break our democracy and persecute the tens of million of Americans who voted against returning him to power. At the behest of Donald Trump, some 3,000 federal agents are presently marauding through Minneapolis-St. Paul, abusing not only the Somali immigrant community against which the administration has incited so much hatred, but committing a vast array of civil rights abuses against broad swaths of the population. These affronts include but are not limited to: targeting individuals based on their skin color or accent; conducting unsanctioned door-to-door searches; tear-gassing and assaulting witnesses to their brutality; kidnapping citizens; and, most horrifically, murdering 36-year-old Renee Nicole Good for the apparent “crime” of disrespecting an ICE agent.
At each step of the way, members of the Trump administration — from the president on down — have attempted to shape public perception of events via mendacious and inflammatory rhetoric. According to them, thousands of ordinary Minnesotans are in fact secret terrorists and insurrectionists, engaged in unspeakable violence against federal agents. In doing so, they compound the reality of the federal assault with a second, propaganda offensive aimed not primarily at the citizens of Minnesota, but rather intended to deceive the American people as to the plain fact of federal tyranny. Most prominent on this score have been the continuous efforts to paint the murder of Renee Good as justified, with the president, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and other administration officials claiming — against clear evidence we can all see from multiple videos — that Good ran over and seriously harmed the ICE agent.
All of this drove Governor Tim Walz to address the people of Minnesota last week, and to make the jaw-dropping observation that “this long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey echoed Walz’s staggering appraisal, stating that the city has been “invaded, under siege,” and that “I never thought in a million years that we would be invaded by our own federal government.”
In response to Walz’s and Frey’s comments about ICE, the Trump administration chose to escalate its assault further, announcing that it was investigating both elected officials for impeding law enforcement efforts — an attempt not only to criminalize political opposition to the Trump regime, but also to provide cover for further violence against Minnesota residents, while conveying that opposing the illicit actions of the Trump regime is to make oneself an enemy of the U.S. government.
Taken together, all of this adds up to a political emergency that is no less real for the failure of so many in the media and in the Democratic opposition to acknowledge it as such.
It’s not just administration propaganda that is preventing most Americans and our larger political and cultural institutions from recognizing and adequately reacting to what’s been unfolding in Minnesota: the imposition of illicit, authoritarian repression on ordinary Americans and immigrants alike. Two broad additional reasons immediately come to mind. First, the Democrats’ avoidance of direct confrontation with the Trump administration has meant we’ve seen only scattershot truth-telling by the party’s elected officials, feeding false perceptions that what’s happening in Minnesota isn’t as staggering as it is: after all, if the president is intent on abusing the residents of an American city, wouldn’t Democrats be up in arms over such a clear wrong? When the political opposition doesn’t raise a hue and cry, ordinary Americans are left to wonder if they’re somehow misinterpreting wild events, while the media lacks a framework of partisan conflict that would help drive coverage. And more generally, much of the media (and the Democratic Party) remain possessed by notions of American exceptionalism, which insists that our democracy is unbreakably sound, and that the varieties of authoritarianism that have arisen in other countries simply can’t happen here — leading many to ignore, downplay, or mischaracterize what’s happening before their very eyes.
But there are also several more specific reasons why our political system and media environment continue to distort perceptions of the reality of what’s happening in Minneapolis-St. Paul:
First, there is a continued misapprehension that ICE’s actions in Minnesota are mainly aimed at immigration enforcement. But with its indiscriminate questioning and arrests of people based on skin color and accents, i.e. racial profiling; its aggression towards American citizens exercising constitutionally-protected rights in monitoring ICE and peacefully attempting to warn immigrants of its presence; its murder of Good and the administration’s subsequent decision to escalate deployments to Minnesota; and the announced intention to prosecute high-ranking Democrats in the state on fake charges, we can see that immigration enforcement has become an excuse to harass, harm, and oppress American citizens, as well as to assault the Democratic opposition. In fact, the use of immigration enforcement to provoke confrontations that might allow the Trump administration to deploy troops to Democratic-governed cities has been a key story of the last year; we have seen similar efforts in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon. In an excellent piece of reportage and analysis, the New York Times’s Lydia Polgreen captures the Trump administration’s intention in Minneapolis-St. Paul well: “It is an occupation designed to punish and terrorize anyone who dares defy this incursion and, by extension, Trump’s power to wield limitless force against any enemy he wishes,” with the federal forces meant to “stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.”
Second, the chronic lawlessness and violence of Department of Homeland Security agencies like CBP and ICE should disabuse us of thinking of these agencies as neutral government actors impartially carrying out their officially-stated missions — yet a remaining patina of legitimacy is badly warping coverage of what’s happening in Minnesota. Rather, they should better be viewed as paramilitary organizations directed towards violent enforcement of the president’s political ends. Until this happens, news coverage and political commentary will be trapped in a misleading narrative about what we’re seeing.
Third, and related to the point above, the administration’s actions in Minneapolis and elsewhere are infused with a white supremacist ideology that too many elites, particularly in the Democratic Party, are afraid to clearly and unambiguously name. This is apparent both in the targeting of darker-skinned Latino, Asian, and African immigrants, but also in the casualness with which federal agents sweep non-white Americans into their dragnets. It is also well worth noting that the administration initially sought to justify its deployments as a response to extensive social services fraud involving Somali immigrants, and that the Trump administration has for months now used explicitly racist and inciting language to hound and isolate this community, including Somali-American citizens. Unfortunately, the reluctance to name this central aspect of our reality only helps to obscure what is actually happening in Minnesota, by feeding the notion that this is really just a neutral anti-immigrant effort, and is only incidentally targeting brown-skinned people (including, quite significantly, American citizens). And as I’ve written previously, the war on immigrants is ultimately indistinguishable from a war on non-white America; the actions of ICE and CBP show how this functions at a practical, tangible level. Refusing to recognize the white supremacism at play is effectively to turn a blind eye to the anti-American horror of what we’re seeing in Minneapolis and other cities.
Fourth, there has been a failure to recognize that what’s happening in Minneapolis doesn’t simply involve state violence against individuals, or political attacks against Democrats, but constitutes a direct assault on our free society. For if there is any right that most of us would agree is basic to such a society, it’s the right to walk down any American street without fear of government harassment or worse. ICE brutalization of Americans isn’t just an attack on individual rights: it’s an attack on the very fabric of our collective existence, which in the very first instance requires each person’s ability to move about freely as one lives one’s life, and to associate with others as they choose. I think some of the insufficient response to what we’re seeing in Minnesota flows from a failure to yet process the full, unacceptable implications of what ICE is inflicting on Minneapolis-St. Paul and the ability of Americans to simply live their lives.
Finally, there continues to be a consensus among major media and many Democrats that a) most Americans are strongly opposed to immigration and immigrants, and b) that this is a source of unassailable strength for Donald Trump. This bad assumption that the public will generally support any actions Trump takes — so long as they can be fit under the general heading of “immigration” — has played a particularly pernicious role in justifying lazy reporting on the part of much of the major media, and political cowardice on the part of many Democrats. As long as opposition politicians and major media insist on crediting Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda as democratically legitimized, though, it will undermine news coverage as well as political responses to its anti-democratic, anti-American nature.
So how might these distortions loosen their grip over our collective political imagination and the biases of news organizations? The good news is that we may already be seeing a shift both in coverage and in Democratic responses to events in Minneapolis — and so to the larger authoritarian wave of repression being conducted under cover of immigration enforcement.
Most prominently, there are the determined actions by thousands of Minneapolis-St. Paul residents to slow ICE’s round-up of immigrants and document its abuse of residents. As this momentous resistance continues, it may well draw increased coverage even from news organizations initially reluctant to convey the seriousness of what’s transpiring in Minnesota. Contrary to Trump administration efforts to label them “domestic terrorists” or “insurrectionists,” not only are their efforts overwhelmingly non-violent, they are very likely reducing incidences of ICE-inflicted violence. The adherence to principles of non-violence will likely only grow more striking as ICE continues to apply police-state tactics in the Twin Cities.
Second, as Jamelle Bouie wrote last week, the Trump administration is essentially stuck in a single gear for its war on blue America — it only seems able to double-down on repression in the face of mass resistance, leading in turn to still further unpopularity as Americans grow increasingly revolted by such obvious authoritarianism. The aftermath of the Renee Good killing was an object lesson in this tendency, as the administration immediately absolved the ICE agent of wrongdoing, labeled Good a terrorist, and deployed even more federal agents to Minneapolis. I would also note that the escalating disjunction between the reality of the administration’s motives and actions, one the one hand, and its self-justifying propaganda, on the other, is simply not sustainable. In particular, the lies the administration has told about the Good killing — to the point that we can arguably say that the president and his allies are engaged in covering up a murder — are demolished by video evidence of the shooting that Americans can watch and judge for themselves. We should not underestimate how destructive this may end up being to the Trump administration’s already-deteriorating credibility on “immigration.”
Related to the point above, we also should not underestimate the clear demarcation between right and wrong on display in the conflict between freedom-loving citizens and federal agents who treat an American city like occupied foreign territory. It is rare in politics that you have an opportunity to take such clear and devastating shots at your opponents, yet this is what the Trump administration has opened itself up to. Minneapolis Mayor Frey said on CNN recently that “you don’t have militarized troops deployed to a city … because a city happened to vote for the opposite party. That’s maybe what happens in other countries. But it doesn’t happen here. Here this is America and we’ve gotta be standing up for these American values.” The more Americans witness the sheer tyranny of what’s happening in Minneapolis, the more Trump’s popularity will fall, particularly as citizens begin to grasp that immigration enforcement has become a fig leaf for MAGA authoritarianism and oppression of U.S. citizens.
And as Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall writes, it’s deeply significant that Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego — who represents a purple state and has relatively hard-line views on immigration — said last week that, “I think ICE needs to be totally torn down [. . .] People want immigration enforcement that goes after criminals, not the goon squad that has come from Stephen Miller and Trump.” Gallego is certainly aware of the shifting of public sentiment against Trump’s immigration regime, with such sentiment itself being driven by the clear-cut displays of evil we are all able to plainly see.
And as Gallego’s comments suggest, it also seems likely that the shift in public opinion against immigration and ICE abuses will eventually penetrate both media coverage and the skulls of even the most cautious politicians. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found 41% support for Donald Trump’s immigration policies, down from 50% almost a year ago; another recent poll from AP-NORC showed 38% approval on immigration enforcement, down from 49% last spring. Opposition to ICE is also notable: a Quinnipiac poll released last week found that only 40% of voters approved of the agency, with 57% disapproving, while an Economist/YouGov survey also out last week found 46% support for abolishing ICE and 43% opposed. These are not numbers that scream dominance on immigration for Trump. As the illusion of public support for immigration erodes, politicians and reporters may be more willing to question basic premises of Trump’s immigration support, such as the idea that it’s somehow separate from a drive to disempower non-white Americans as well as immigrants, and as they connect the decline in public approval to the brutalization of both citizens and immigrants alike.
Finally, the cartoonish levels of racism and villainy displayed by ICE agents help make tangible the dark force of white supremacism that is driving the war not just on immigrants, but on non-white Americans as well. With ICE lowering its entry standards to basically zero, and aiming recruitment efforts at right-wing men of a white nationalist and violent bent, we could say that DHS is where white supremacism goes to become instantiated into real-world mayhem. Mediocre and racist men are issued weapons and granted impunity like a latter-day government-sponsored KKK, and unleashed into a dual mission of ethnically cleansing the United States while also kicking the butts of the pansy-ass, unarmed liberals who get in their way. It should be uncontroversial to say that those with white nationalist sympathies, let alone membership in organizations with such values, should be banned from law enforcement roles, given that such beliefs are inimical both to a belief in civil rights and American democracy. Yet we are now seeing such beliefs encouraged in Trump’s private army. You could hardly ask for a better real-world example of both white supremacism and its fundamental moral vacuity, and of why the crushing of white power ideology and its proponents must be central to the democratic America we build on the ashes of Trumpism.