President Trump built his 2024 re-election bid, in large part, on ending the border crisis and reversing mass migration. On the first front, external enforcement, he has unquestionably succeeded, as even Democrats grudgingly admit. Yet his broader efforts to reduce illegal and legal immigration have encountered resistance, often in unexpected places. Some of the fiercest opposition has emerged in areas of policy not obviously connected to immigration, while some of the most successful has come from within his own coalition.

This owes to the paradox of mass migration: as the share of foreign-born newcomers swells, voters become more determined to shrink it, while governments become less able to do so. Reversing mass migration, in other words, is hard. Really hard. Because migration entrenches itself and remakes recipient societies in indelible ways.

Public opinion in the late Biden years reflected the mounting frustration. In early 2024, Americans cited uncontrolled immigration as their no. 1 or no. 2 priority for three consecutive months — the first time they’d done so for multiple consecutive months in Gallup’s monthly trend assessment. Later that year, in June, Gallup found that 55% of Americans wanted immigration decreased, the highest share in more than two decades.

Trump took such polling as his new mandate. Immediately upon taking office, the president handed down sweeping executive orders to shut down the border, boost interior arrests of illegal and criminal immigrants, and (less concertedly) restrict legal immigration. 

Nearly two years later, the results show Trump partially delivered on that mandate. Illegal crossings at the southern border have dropped by more than 90%, while legal immigration has slowed considerably. Fewer visas are being issued, and immigration processing has slowed considerably, with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services completing 74% fewer naturalizations in July 2026 than at the same point a year earlier. 

But nowhere has Trump’s agenda been more aggressive, or more controversial, than in interior deportations. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, estimates that interior deportations surged to roughly 120,000 in 2025, up about 150% from the 47,732 immigrants Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed from inside the homeland during Biden’s final full fiscal year.

These results have been obtained despite serious opposition from Democrats in Congress and Democratic-controlled states and cities, where many of the administration’s most intensive ICE operations have taken place. The administration’s aggressive interior enforcement tactics in particular have triggered intense media scrutiny and street-level backlash, contributing to public concerns over how arrests and deportations are being carried out. 

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Why Texas is at war with Islam

By Alicia Nieves

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that around 60% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Yet disapproval of Trump’s enforcement tactics doesn’t appear to translate into broader opposition to his effort to curb immigration. The same annual Gallup survey that tracks Americans’ immigration preferences found earlier this year that a whopping two-thirds of Americans favor either maintaining today’s much lower levels of immigration or reducing it further. Americans may be uncomfortable with some of Trump’s hard-line tactics, but they appear to quietly favor the result.

By the standards of Western politics, Trump’s achievement — partially translating voters’ long-standing demand for lower immigration levels into actually lower inflows — is something close to a miracle. Across Europe, voters have for decades demanded less immigration, and elected governments promising to deliver it, only to watch as more and more newcomers flooded the system, squeezing workers’ bargaining power, straining social services, and contributing to social incohesion.

Spain’s case is instructive. In 2024, a national poll commissioned by the El País newspaper found that a clear majority of Spaniards believed the country already had too many immigrants. Yet mass migration persisted and in early 2026, the government launched an extraordinary regularization program initially estimated to convert roughly half a million illegal migrants into legal residents. By the time applications closed in June, nearly 1.2 million people had applied. 

Then there was Brexit and its aftermath — perhaps the clearest example of the betrayal of voters’ desire for lower immigration levels. In 2016, a majority of British voters took the extraordinary step of rejecting the political and economic order that had governed their country for decades. Regaining control over immigration was at the center of the Leave campaign. 

Yet even exiting the European Union, it turned out, wasn’t enough. The Tory governments ostensibly charged with overseeing the implementation of Brexit did the opposite. The annual number of people immigrating to Britain surged to 1.3 million in 2023, up from 589,000 in 2016. 

The truth is that since the current era of mass migration began more than a decade ago, no other major Western country has yet managed to reverse the trend and sustain substantially lower levels of immigration despite widespread public demand to do so. Trump’s partial success in sustaining substantially lower immigration for nearly two years remains, for now, an anomaly in the Western world. And even that effort is partial, tentative, and vulnerable, as we will see.

The reason is straightforward. Immigration at sufficient scale doesn’t merely add people to a country. Over time, institutions and industries adapt themselves to their presence. Businesses — especially in sectors like hospitality, food, construction, and personal services — become dependent on migrants’ cheap labor. In parallel with this, government agencies and nonprofit contractors build programs around migrants, which these days generally means poorer populations from the Global South. 

Those dependencies eventually create political pressure of their own, as employers, service providers, and local governments push national elected officials to protect the economic arrangements that have developed around migration. Immigration restriction therefore comes to mean more than stopping a flow of people. It means disrupting interests that have grown dependent on that flow.

Trump’s second term offers revealing examples of how this works. His immigration agenda has faced the resistance one expects from Democrats, including mass protests and federal lawsuits. Yet the greatest obstacles to his efforts to restrict immigration have not come from efforts to protect migrants themselves. Instead, they have come from federal elected officials in both parties seeking to protect the industries, labor markets, and government programs that have grown dependent on their presence.

Consider the 2025 government shutdown. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained plenty for Democrats to oppose on immigration, including tens of billions of dollars in new funding for ICE and the administration’s enforcement agenda. Yet when Democrats chose to force their most consequential confrontation with Trump, immigration enforcement wasn’t at the center of it. Health care was. Democrats blocked government funding for six weeks in what became the longest shutdown in American history, demanding that Republicans abandon the health-care provisions of the bill and preserve enhanced Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) subsidies that were scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

Here the paradox begins to reveal itself. The Biden-era immigration surge had become intertwined with the enormous expansion of government health subsidies. The CBO estimated that by 2024, the Biden surge had added roughly 600,000 migrant recipients of heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, private health insurance through ObamaCare. That was on top of another 300,000 foreign nationals receiving full Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits. 

The CBO projected that the insurance-premium tax credits for the surge population would add $66 billion to the federal deficit over the following decade, while Medicaid and CHIP spending would increase by another $40 billion. Much of that government spending ultimately became revenue for private health-care companies. ObamaCare subsidies pay premiums for plans sold by private insurers, while much of Medicaid coverage is administered by private firms. As migration increased the number of people eligible for subsidized coverage — aided by the Biden administration’s expansive use of parole and other humanitarian statuses that moved migrants into categories eligible for welfare benefits — it also expanded the market for the companies paid to insure them.

Here Trump’s immigration restriction efforts encountered an indirect kind of resistance. The fight wasn’t directly over migrants themselves, but over the flow of federal funding to private markets that had expanded alongside the growth of the migrant population. By the time Trump sought to unwind the enhanced subsidies, only four years after their creation, insurers had already adapted to the enormous market they created. Cutting them meant removing millions of subsidized customers and billions in revenue — a disruption significant enough that Democrats were willing to sustain the longest government shutdown in American history to prevent it.

In blue cities, meanwhile, mass migration — legal and illegal — functions like a permanent jobs bill for various groups, including public-school teachers amid otherwise declining enrollment; lawyers and other laptop workers in the NGO sector facing AI and automation; Left activists looking for a streetfighting cause to compete with the pleasures of Netflix and legal weed; and public functionaries struggling to justify their salaries amid out-migration from blue cities to suburbs and exurbs, and from blue states to red. 

Put another way, as UnHerd’s Michael Lind has argued, mass migration provides a subset of the urban professional classes with a reason to maintain and expand the government agencies and NGOs that keep them employed.

Which brings us to the Right. Republicans’ resistance to portions of Trump’s immigration crackdown reveals the same paradox from the other direction. Where Democrats faced pressure from industries that had come to serve migrants as federally subsidized consumers and program enrollees, Republicans faced it from industries that had come to depend on them as cheap labor.

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Serfdom, Republican-style

By Michael Lind

When workplace enforcement raids increased in 2025, Big Ag — one of America’s most forceful cheap-labor lobbies — warned Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that farmers and ranchers risked losing workers. Rollins took their concerns to Trump, who briefly directed immigration authorities to pull back enforcement at farms, hotels, and restaurants. 

More recently, even as it has removed temporary protected status for Haitians and others, Team Trump held off terminating protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, apparently following intense pressure from the construction industry. In both cases, Trump found himself caught between the populist voters who elected him to enforce immigration law and Republican-aligned industries that had spent years building their businesses around the wage arbitrage made possible by inviting what Marx called a “reserve army of labor.”

The Trump administration and some congressional Republicans, moreover, have moved to expand guest-worker presence in migrant-heavy industries, most notably agriculture. A subset of the GOP, in other words, is prepared to tolerate high migrant flows in some regions, so long as the newcomers are tied to specific employers, can’t organize or vote, and continue to do jobs “Americans won’t do” (which is just cheap-labor-lobby speak for: jobs Americans won’t do at poverty wages).

The upshot is mixed. Trump’s first two years have demonstrated that it is possible to end the age of mass migration. They also show the extraordinary political effort required to do it — and the multidirectional resistance. His most difficult battles have not always been with the liberal opposition, but with businesses, government programs, and other institutions that spent years adapting themselves to high immigration and now have an interest in its continuation.

Understanding this paradox matters as Western societies are at a breaking point after years of governments failing to respond to the growing demands of their people. A politics focused narrowly on reducing immigration numbers misses much of what sustains mass migration once it has taken hold. The more important target may be the sectors that have come to depend on migration. Industries, nonprofit agencies, and other institutions often play a quieter but more influential role in frustrating the changes voters demand. Reducing mass migration therefore requires more than changing immigration law. It also requires voters to elect governments willing to confront the domestic interests that have grown up around it, forcing them to adjust to lower levels of immigration.

There is a cost to waiting. If these interests grow powerful enough to completely prevent governments from translating public demands into policy, the consequences will extend beyond immigration itself to the very legitimacy of representative government.

In Marx’s view, this magnificent achievement involved one or two misfortunes: mass poverty, grotesque inequalities, blighted lives and grinding exploitation. It also brought with it perpetual wars between competing capitalist states, the extermination of colonial peoples, and a rapacious social order in which more or less everything from love to art to sport was subject to the profit motive. Yet Marx didn’t allow his fury at these atrocities to dim his admiration of the class that gave birth to Balzac and Dickens, Mozart and Mendelssohn, Rembrandt and Turner. “Bourgeois” for him was never simply a swear word. Instead, he held in tension a positive and negative judgment of that class, in what was known as a dialectical approach in the days when radical young men wore sideburns and denim suits. He especially appreciated their insolent upfrontness. The feudal order had concealed its brutality behind church, monarch and lord of the manor, but with capitalism it was out in the open. “All that is solid melts into air,” he remarks in the Manifesto, “all that is holy is profaned, and humanity is at last compelled to face with sober senses its real conditions of life.”

The middle classes worship fact rather than fancy, use rather than ornament, the material as against the ideal. They tell it like it is, instead of spinning utopian dreams or fantasizes of King Arthur. The dominant literary form was now not epic or romance but the realist novel, tales of ordinary men and women rather than of gods and demons. Religion was still an active force, but more for the sake of social cohesion than love of God. The Victorians feared that morality would collapse without the Almighty, and the collapse of morality might bring with it political disaffection. What Walter Bagehot called the “ceremonial” aspect of British society, with its quaint cults and esoteric rituals, still flourished, but truth and reality were increasingly a matter of land, cash and property. What mattered was what you could touch and taste, buy and sell.

In commending the middle class’s lack of hypocrisy, Marx is perhaps a touch too charitable. If the Victorians were crassly materialist, they were also remarkably high-minded. Fantasizes of King Arthur did indeed continue to be spun, not least by the man whose poetry was Queen Victoria’s bedside reading, Alfred Tennyson. In civilized circles, money was still as unmentionable as excrement, and Freud was to detect some fascinating relations between the two. This coyness lingers on: even today, the British speak of appointing someone to an academic post, while the Americans talk of hiring. Despite this, the gap between materialism and idealism has always been starker in the States than it is in Britain. Brits are more likely than Texans to be embarrassed by the high-toned rhetoric of Our Brave Men and Women in Uniform or This Wonderful Nation of Ours. Hyperbole like this borders on the impolite in the UK, where it’s customary to play yourself down, not wear your heart on your sleeve and not lavish praise on your own children.

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ICE theatrics are getting real

By Malcolm Kyeyune

The Americans, however, have invented an ingenious way of reconciling their spiritual high-mindedness with their love of money. This is to turn the pursuit of profit into an enterprise every bit as spiritual as Buddhism. America has a dream — but it’s a dream of power, prosperity and infinite self-expansion, not of community or humility or selfless devotion. It’s an idealism of the will, not of the soul, and only one can play at a time. This is why it’s not entirely true to see Donald Trump as having abandoned the usual lofty American talk of God’s Own Nation and other such blasphemies for a coarser, grosser, in-your-face discourse. There’s no denying that he’s coarse and gross, but one needs to remember that in the Land of the Free, making an enormous amount of money is itself a kind of spiritual project. Idealism is built into everyday life, not a spirit that soars above it. The Puritans who founded the United States believed that worldly success might be a sign of God’s favor, so that the material and the ideal were linked from the outset.

They’re also linked in the sense that the millionaire is a kind of magician. He can change the world with a stroke of the pen or a word on the phone. Money is a brute fact, but one which can make the most extravagant fantasy become real. Fantasists like Trump can’t stand the recalcitrance of the world and want it to be instantly pliable to their touch. Most of us have to adapt our desires to reality, whereas autocrats can do the opposite. No doubt it all goes back to the breast. The infant feels hungry and out pops a nipple. It’s not the smartest way of preparing for adult life, even if it keeps you alive.

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Does Trump read Shakespeare?

By Terry Eagleton

There’s something to be said for the idea that Trump has stripped some of the veils of rhetoric from a brute reality. He doesn’t say much about God, freedom and democracy, which US Presidents are supposed to do. He was once photographed holding a Bible and looked as uneasy as if he was cradling a rattlesnake. Instead, he talks about oil, rare minerals, grabbing other people’s territories and flogging off their resources. 19th-century imperialism felt the need for some vacuous moral platitudes in order to explain why they were killing and enslaving so many people. The White Man’s Burden was one such cliché, as was the notion of bringing the fruits of civilization to the barbarians. Today, the fruits of the barbarians are being brought to the civilized, as with Trump’s weird desire to own a bunch of polar bears in Greenland. It’s like threatening a nuclear war if you can’t have Wales. Yet he quite often dispenses with the usual deceitful rationalizations for such behavior. His is the language of realpolitik, not of the preacher.

It may be that American imperialism is a roundabout way of teaching geography to the younger generation. Americans are notoriously bad at knowing whether, say, Vienna is to the north or south of New Zealand, or what the capital of Scotland is, and invading other countries involves having to look at maps to make sure you raze the right place to the ground. A lot of American citizens know exactly where Vietnam is, which was one of the few benefits of their visit to the place some decades ago. There might, however, be rather less painful ways of obtaining this kind of knowledge. Globes, for example.

Governing classes have long known that power works most effectively when it’s intangible. The ideologies which shape us most profoundly aren’t sets of doctrines. They form the invisible color of daily life, the taken-for-granted values built into our behavior. The state is wary of smashing up political demonstrations, not so much because it has tender feelings for the demonstrators but because power which becomes too conspicuous tends to lose its credibility. It much prefers to work deviously, obliquely, without having to reveal its steel hand. To do so preserves the illusion of its neutrality, a view of the state questioned by a renowned thinker who believed that its purpose was to protect private property (no, not Marx: Cicero). Trump, however, is doing just the opposite in Minneapolis and elsewhere. He takes a positive delight in parading his power, turning it into theater and spectacle, using ICE officers as an extension of his monstrous ego. It’s a gross violation of the bourgeois playbook.

It didn’t take two deaths in Minneapolis to alert the world to the excessive violence of the United States. It’s the only English-speaking country which uses the word “aggressive” positively. Freud argued that what’s wrong with the superego isn’t that it punishes us, but that it punishes us well beyond our culpability. It lays obligations on us which it knows we can’t fulfill, then fills us full of guilt because we can’t live up to its insanely unreasonable demands. In short, it’s not only punitive but malicious, sadistic and vindictive. And all this is betrayed by the pointless surplus of violence it wreaks upon our heads.

Such a surplus has long been evident in the United States, fueled by its Puritan heritage. Ten police cars with their sirens screaming close in on a single septuagenarian shoplifter. Six or seven ICE officers pile themselves on top of a single protestor. This isn’t just because every cop in town likes to grab a piece of the action when his radio starts to crackle. It’s also the result of a Puritan fear of chaos and a paranoid insistence upon order. Allow one individual to get out of hand and before you know where you are (a key phrase in this style of argument) millions of them will be running wild searching for toddlers to eat. Power of this kind is irrational, which is why it provokes those it oppresses into rebellion in order to oppress them even further. This is what is unfolding in Minneapolis.

Puritans like clean distinctions and neat antitheses. Their minds are intolerably tidy. America is the land of the good guys versus the bad guys. All police officers are heroes and all Somalis are scum. No previous President, however, would have used those latter words. He would have tarted them up in fancy moral phraseology. With Trump, however, what you see is for the most part what you get, which sounds like honesty but is in fact callousness. We seem to be moving into a post-ideological era — not ideology in the sense of convictions, but in the sense of actions and beliefs which try to mask their ugliness in exalted speech. The cop who killed George Floyd didn’t even try to look as though his life was under threat. Americans are sometimes admired for telling it like it is, unlike us two-faced Brits. What the admirers forget is that how it is can be pretty revolting.

The SIG P320 is a source of endless controversy in gun circles. From shooting ranges to online forums, wherever gun guys gather, there are strong opinions on this pistol. If you aren’t a gun guy, you might mistake the dispute as a matter of brand loyalty: think Ford versus Chevy, Pepsi versus Coke. And the SIG debate is that, in part, but it’s also far more than that. 

The issues go a lot deeper, and the backstory reveals something about gun culture in America, and how it’s crossing the political divide from red to blue.

But to get something out of the way upfront, to save my fellow gun nuts a bunch of scrolling through this essay so they can figure out where I stand on The Issue: I’m a die-hard SIG guy with a small yet primo collection of raced-out DA/SA pistols to prove it. But I don’t touch the P320, nor do I recommend it to anyone.

There are exactly two things a loaded firearm absolutely must do with 100% reliability. First, it must go bang every time the shooter intends for it to do so. Second, it must never go bang when the shooter does not intend for it to do so. There is zero room for error in either of these two requirements, which, incidentally, is the reason why electronically authorized “smart guns” — which identify the user before permitting the gun to fire — have never taken off in the market and probably never will.

The Beretta M9 that the US Army issued to troops up until 2017 as a standard sidearm struggles to meet requirement No. 1, for example. For starters, the M9 had basic mechanical problems, at least initially. A 1988 Government Accountability Office report detailed significant quality and safety shortcomings: namely, slide failures and frame cracks. But the M9 and guns like it also have what we might think of as a user-interface problem that can prevent them from going off even when the gun is working exactly as designed. I’m speaking of the challenge posed by the presence of a manual safety mechanism.

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South Minneapolis has had enough

By Ryan Zickgraf

Even a perfectly functioning pistol can fail to fire when a shooter intends for it to do so, if that shooter has forgotten to flick off the safety before pulling the trigger. This safety issue is well-known for all guns that have manual safeties. When I took my concealed-carry class, the two veteran Austin Police Department detectives who taught it spent time scaring us with stories of dead cops whose corpses were found with their trigger fingers swollen from desperately squeezing a trigger that was never going to fire, because they “missed the throw” of the safety lever in the stress of a shootout.

The instructors told us these horror stories to stress the importance of training yourself to the point that your body reflexively flicks the safety off when bringing the gun up; you shouldn’t even have to think about it. But what about those of us who just don’t have time to ingrain the safety flick so deeply into our muscle memory that our thumb will automatically do it, without fail, under life-or-death levels of stress? What about new recruits?

Training is one way to address this issue. Another is to simply remove the safety, which is essentially what striker-fired pistols like the Glock and the Smith & Wesson M&P ultimately did. (The Glock does have a tiny little safety built into the trigger, so that when you pull the trigger you’re pulling the safety, but it’s basically like not having a safety. Note also that you can get versions of these pistols with a manual safety, but this isn’t a popular option and is typically only selected in situations where a department still requires the safety.)

Striker-fired pistols became popular over the past few decades with police and special forces because they nail our requirement No 1: every time the trigger is pulled, these light, partially plastic handguns go bang. They may not have the ergonomics and heft of a nice Colt 1911. But these “plastic-fantastic” shooting appliances have proved to be extraordinarily reliable. And most important, they’re dead-easy to use under pressure, because you don’t have the added step of manually disengaging the safety before engaging the target.

Which brings us back to Pretti’s handgun. In January 2017, the US Army announced that the SIG P320 had won the bid to become the branch’s next standard-issue service pistol. This announcement brought the Army into the striker-fired era, and was a huge victory for SIG Sauer over rival firms like Beretta and Glock.

The P320 is more than just a striker-fired pistol. It’s a modular weapon system — a “platform” that lets buyers mix and match the parts so that the same gun can be configured in more than one size and capacity.

This concept of a gun as a “weapon system” or “platform” was pioneered by the AR-15, which an executive at high-end AR maker Daniel Defense once told me is like “Legos for grownups”. In recent years, Glock has also evolved in a similar direction, with an ecosystem of aftermarket parts so extensive that it’s possible to build a complete “Glock” out of entirely non-Glock parts from other manufacturers.

The P320 fully embraced this hacker ethos and incorporated it into its design. From the point of view of federal firearms law, the “gun” is legally whatever part of the firearm has the serial number on it. In the case of the P320, the serial number is engraved on a small metal frame that houses the trigger and the core mechanical parts — all of which can be swapped out, or the frame itself can be moved around into different-sized grips and matched with slides and barrels of different lengths.

So when you buy a P320, you’re essentially buying a fully assembled gun kit that’s designed to be disassembled and reassembled in a variety of configurations for applications like concealed carry, home defense, or military use.

As with its striker-fired cousins from other makers, there was little question that the P320 would go bang every time the shooter pulled the trigger. But about two years after the gun’s 2014 debut in the civilian market, rumors began cropping up of troubling incidents: to wit, a number of users claimed that their P320 had fired a round without the trigger being touched. By the time the gun won the Army contract, the uncommanded-discharge allegations were widely known, but not necessarily widely believed, in the gun community.

YouTube videos began circulating, as the “bro scientists” went to work proving or disproving the reports of uncommanded discharges rolling in from firearm classes, police departments, and gun stores.

The specific allegation is that if the gun is dropped — or even bumped or jostled just right — the internal mechanism that holds the spring-loaded firing pin striker will disengage and the gun will go off, even though the trigger hasn’t been touched. Accusations of such flaws have plagued other striker-fired pistols on and off through the years, including the Glock. But with the P320, there is such a great quantity of smoke that it seems pretty reasonable to many to assume there’s a fire, too.

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Minneapolis is becoming a dual state

By Leighton Woodhouse

If the uncommanded-discharge reports were true and indicative of some sort of design flaw, then this would be bad. Very bad. It would be bad for SIG, obviously, but also bad for the legions of shooters who had rushed out to buy a modern, modular handgun billed as a garage tinkerer’s dream.

To decide if the P320 has a real problem, you can spend hours watching YouTube videos and forming your own opinion. I’ll just say that for me, as for many other gun enthusiasts and SIG partisans, the mere fact of the controversy is enough to keep us away from the P320. There are many other great handguns out there, and even SIG has a solid alternative in the P365 family of striker-fired pistols. (I own and shoot one of these.)

Why does this controversy matter within the broader debate over the Pretti shooting? First, as I said above, the P320 is absolutely going to bang if a finger or anything else gets inside the trigger guard and applies the required few pounds of pressure to the trigger. As you can probably guess, these kinds of negligent discharges resulting from improper gun handling happen all the time with striker-fired guns. They happen when someone is reholstering the weapon and a piece of clothing gets caught in the trigger guard. And they can certainly happen when someone is amped up in a high-pressure situation and has grabbed the weapon — either his own or someone else’s — and unthinkingly placed his finger on the switch.

If Pretti’s gun went off at any point — and there’s an ongoing dispute over whether it did — then it was most likely because the officer holding it accidentally pulled the trigger.

The second, more disturbing, and admittedly far more remote possibility is that this was an uncommanded discharge. That is, the ICE officer who removed the SIG from Pretti bumped the gun in such a way that it went off at exactly the wrong moment, causing confusion among his comrades, and costing the protester his life.

Whatever the truth, the discharge — whether it did or didn’t happen, or what role the peculiarities of the P320 ultimately played — should be part of a careful probe of what took place. That is, if we ever get such a probe. What’s most surreal for me, as a longtime shooter and on-and-off gun-industry reporter, is the fact that this very Republican-coded “gun-guy” controversy has now bled over into the blue side of my feed.

We now have the spectacle of a Left-wing concealed carrier sucked into the long-running SIG P320 controversy, and whose right to carry that gun at that protest is being defended by both the arch-gun-restrictionist lawmaker Gabby Giffords and the National Rifle Association. What a time to be alive.

Having done nothing illegal, Yana is bewildered, but also confident that it’s a mistake that will be sorted out by the courts. With each passing day that assumption becomes more far-fetched. She’s informed that she’s a dangerous drug dealer, because the chemical she has sold legally for a decade has suddenly been deemed a narcotic, even though it isn’t one. She’s transferred from the police station to prison. Days become weeks. With every failed bail hearing, her sentence is extended. She serves seven months, until she is at last found innocent and released.

Behind her arrest were the machinations of bureaucrats. The head of the Russian security agency tasked with drug control was attempting to shake down the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. A tranche of formerly legal chemicals had been re-listed as narcotics. Veterinarians were being imprisoned for having prescribed ketamine to cats. The point was to terrorize the industries into submission to the gangster state.

Those same bureaucratic designs lurked behind her exoneration, too. The head of the agency that had targeted Yana coveted the job of the director of Russia’s premier spy agency, the FSB. The two administrators despised each other. So when the FSB chief heard Yana’s story, he engineered her very public release and exoneration to embarrass his rival.

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Will MAGA survive its civil war?

By Leighton Woodhouse

This is a signature trait of Russian authoritarianism: laws exist as weapons to be wielded by politicians, bureaucrats and oligarchs in their conspiracies against one another. Ordinary Russians are routinely ensnared in these power games, their lives turned inside out for reasons they could never imagine. One day you’re living a normal life, following the rules, keeping your head down, making a living. The next moment you’re a high-value target of the state.

Earlier this month, after the shooting of Renee Good, American columnist David French suggested that the United States under President Donald Trump is being transformed into a similar regime. He relies on a different analogy — Nazi Germany — but the pattern is the same. Borrowing a concept from a Jewish refugee and lawyer, Ernst Fraenkel, French describes what is emerging in America today as a “dual state”. The dual state is made up of the “normative state”, which is the sovereign system of law and order we’re all taught to believe in, and the “prerogative state”, which is the parallel system of hazy and ephemeral laws and procedures that is entirely subordinate to the arbitrary will of those in power.

One might presume that tyranny depends upon the displacement of the former by the latter, but, in fact, it works best when the two systems operate in tandem. Under a dual state, most of the population carry out their lives within the ordinary framework of the normative state system. They know they can sustain a more or less normal existence if they keep their disagreements with the government largely to themselves — and don’t, like Yana, have a stroke of terribly bad luck. Things aren’t perfect but they don’t feel dystopian either. Should they step over an invisible line, however, they will find themselves in a topsy-turvy world in which the familiar old rules become twisted, amorphous and incomprehensible.

As French pointed out in his piece: “You can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide. But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state.”

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South Minneapolis has had enough

By Ryan Zickgraf

Since French wrote, the intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis, and that faint line between the two states has become much clearer. Pretti, like Good, was acting well within what were, just a few weeks ago, his rights. But, then, suddenly, he found himself face-to-face with the prerogative state.

His death is shocking, but the conditions have been ripe for weeks for such an incident to occur — again. In Minneapolis, ICE routinely pulls over American citizens who dare to follow them in their cars, film their activities, and blow whistles to alert neighbors of their presence. On an episode of the New York Times Daily podcast last week, an activist described having followed an ICE vehicle for about 40 seconds before the agents stopped the car, got out, surrounded her, pepper sprayed her vehicle’s ventilation system, smashed her front windows, pulled her and another activist out, handcuffed and arrested them, only to release them later with no charges. The activists are operating in a world straddling the two sides of the dual state. What are the rules now? Are you safe if you’re not blocking traffic? From what distance can you follow ICE? Is it OK to film from across the street, where you’re clearly not impeding? Is there even a policy to discern at all, or is it whatever the agent in front of you decides it is at a given moment?

If you’re an American citizen and you keep your nose out of ICE’s business, you can keep living a normal life in Minneapolis — albeit deprived of some of your former political freedoms. But not always. You might get questioned at the bus stop. You might have your door kicked in and be pulled out into the cold in your underwear. The van that takes your kids to school might get pulled over. You might choose to keep your kids at home, just in case.

A few weeks ago, it was pretty clear what counted as constitutionally protected activity. Documenting law enforcement actions fell squarely within that category. Now it’s contested terrain that could plausibly lead to your death. Until this month, if you were a US citizen in Minneapolis, it wouldn’t have crossed your mind to carry your passport with you to the grocery store. Today, it’s unclear whether agents are now allowed to stop you randomly and demand your papers. Minneapolis now exists in a purgatory in which neither regular people nor federal agents know what they are and are not allowed to do. But the agents have badges as well as guns. By default, they get to decide what the rules are at any given moment.

The new rules are inscrutable, because they’re dictated not by statutes or facts on the ground, but by the whims of sycophantic office holders competing for Trump’s ever-shifting favor. Like Yana’s imprisonment and release in Putin’s Russia, it’s all a show for others. One of the audiences is you: you and your neighbors need to be adequately intimidated in preparation for the day when the White House turns its attention to your state or city. The other audience is the President, who rewards those who humiliate his enemies in ways he can watch on TV.

So you have to just keep licking your finger and sticking it in the air, to see which way the breezes are blowing. You don’t quite know what you are and are not allowed to do anymore in protest of your government. You can only guess at what you’re still allowed to say. Or you can play it safe, and say nothing at all.

This was Sammee’s first real action as a protester since moving to Minneapolis from Duluth a few years ago. “I just cannot in good conscience just sit home and do nothing while these people are terrorising my neighbours, my community,” she told me. On Monday, her first day picketing ICE’s local headquarters, she came unprepared and got pepper-sprayed in the face at this exact spot with only sunglasses to protect her eyes, and soon felt the pain of chemical burns on her skin. She returned the following day clad in a rainbow-striped ski suit and bright orange goggles placed over her silver-rimmed glasses for protection.

She’s tougher than she looks because of a roller derby hobby, a sport that trains you to stay upright when momentum is working against you. So when ICE agents failed to knock her down, more piled in, throwing her down into the filthy snow piled along the curb. As she lay there, they yelled at her to get back up, even as they continued to shove her back down like grade-school tormentors. The moment she rose to her feet, she received a dose of harsh pepper spray to the face that got partially deflected by her anti-ICE sign. 

“Do it again!” she responded in a fearless taunt. The agent who sprayed her looked nervously at his colleagues for guidance on how to respond. “If you look in their eyes, a lot of them look fucking scared,” Sammee told me. “I think they’re just genuinely afraid of the crowd, even though they’re the ones being violent toward us.”

She expected to be handcuffed and detained inside the federal building, but ICE instead escorted two of her fellow picketers past the gates and into detention; they’d likely be released back onto the street in a matter of hours. Minutes later, Sammee and her fellow protesters returned to screaming obscenities at unmarked black trucks full of masked ICE agents, who sometimes cursed at them, in turn. 

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Most interactions between protesters and federal agents in Minneapolis play out this way. By and large, they aren’t a matter of life and death. They’re more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon pitting an outmatched-but-fearless provocateur and a mean-but-incompetent bully. But since another white female activist who sought to observe or impede agents, Renee Good, was shot and killed by agents last week in a similar scenario, there’s an ominous cloud of danger hovering over these encounters. Yet Sammee managed to keep an unwavering smile on her face while recounting the story about how she just been assaulted by ICE.

But for how long? These days, the happy-go-lucky Midwestern demeanour that defines this place seems like the exception rather than the rule. What’s clear in my time touring the southern part of the city is that the weight of five years of stressful events, including the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, a targeted deployment of ICE and border agents to Minneapolis, has taken an enormous psychic toll. 

Federal officials have billed it as the largest deportation operation ever undertaken in America, and have characterised last week’s deadly encounter with Good as a self-defence shooting, a version contested by local leaders and eyewitnesses and many Minnesotans who’ve watched the video of the incident.

Residents I spoke with also insist that Trump is employing ICE to sow chaos here to provoke a violent reaction and footage dramatic enough to justify escalation. One longtime local described it bluntly after showing me a video taken by his neighbor of ICE agents throwing gas and flashbang grenades on his block from out their car windows: “They’re trying to provoke people into confrontation,” he said. “They want the bad stuff to happen so they can send in more people, call it a civil war.” For his part, Trump has encouraged political protesting in Iran — “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he posted on Truth Social — but demonises it in Minneapolis, dismissing it as “unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing.”

Collectively, Minneapolis is pissed and scared. But most of all, the city’s tired in a world-weary way. Even the signs hung on houses or held in protesters’ hands reflect this attitude. The gentle virtue signaling of “In This House” signs of the early 2020s are gone, replaced by blunt or angry ones reading simply “Fuck Ice,” “Ice Out Now,” or “No Trespassing.” What this city really needs right now is a cigarette or a drink, preferably both.

This feeling is most pronounced in south Minneapolis’s leafy Powderhorn neighbourhood. The street where Good was killed by ICE and the intersection where George Floyd died sit at the heart of a cluster of largely residential blocks a few miles south of downtown that took shape in the early 20th century as a streetcar suburb of single-family homes, duplexes, and low-rise apartments. It’s home to institutions like the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

Over the decades, this area evolved into one of the city’s most economically and racially diverse neighbourhoods, drawing middle-class artists, working families, and immigrants, while anchoring a vibrant local culture around Powderhorn Park. But it’s not a place historically accustomed to being the center of the universe. “Minnesotans generally like things quiet — shut up, get to work, get things done. It’s a very German Lutheran mindset,” said John Davis, a resident who embraced that low-key lifestyle when he moved here from New York City three decades ago.

Yet, Powderhorn is now a living-history museum of the current decade. Walking here as an outsider feels like an act of dark tourism, a term that describes sightseeing of destinations known for death, disaster, horror, or misery. Within a few square miles, you can trace nearly every pressure point of the 2020s. Five years ago, the neighbourhood became globally recognisable, almost overnight, when George Floyd’s killing at 38th and Chicago transformed an ordinary intersection into a hub of protesting and riots, and a pilgrimage site. Streets were closed, helicopters circled, and fires burned close enough that people kept hoses ready, just in case. Residents adjusted as best they could. Some embraced the transformation, but others merely tolerated it or were disgusted by it. “I was so distraught about (the Floyd protests),” said an elderly woman who asked not to be identified. “We shopped at places where people were stealing TVs and burning buildings, and we said this is not what Minnesotans do!”

Then came the long tail. The pandemic dragged on. Schools went remote, then hybrid, then back again. Teachers went on strike for multiple weeks in 2022. Businesses closed or limped along. In October 2025, a gunman shot through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church during Mass, killing two children, ages 8 and 10, and injuring 17 other people, including 14 children. The neighbourhood began to resemble something like normalcy when the ground shifted and Trump announced on Jan. 6 that he’d deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents to the area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

Residents here — immigrants and activists, along with everyone else — have been under the constant threat of low levels of violence, random catch-and-release-style kidnapping, tear gassing, and other forms of lawlessness from federal law enforcement for more than a week. You can walk down Powderhorn sidewalks and sometimes spot what looks like blood marking the ice, but is actually leftover reddish-hued chemicals from non-lethal weapons discharged by ICE. 

Federal officers are also sending agents into the parking lots of churches and schools; they’re marching into Targets to detain people. It often feels improvisational, reactive, and thin-skinned. Locals here were already on edge, but the slaying of Good has escalated those nervous feelings into a kind of existential dread. “Y’all, they’re shooting white ladies in the face in the street! What’s going to happen next?” exclaimed a black pastor to his flock at an evangelical church. Some churches, schools, restaurants, and other institutions have spent the last week closed or partially closed, and others are alerting their patrons or members when federal agents are nearby.

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Peter Vircks, a professional saxophonist, described Powderhorn as an open wound that cannot heal. “Everyone’s feeling like they’re in limbo, waiting for the next thing to happen,” he said. For Vircks, that next thing happened on January 9 after the killing of Good. He was walking his dog on 28th Street, where his teenage son goes to Roosevelt High, when he stumbled upon the aftermath of an incident in which armed US Customs and Border Patrol officers entered school property during dismissal, roughed up people (including students), handcuffed two staff members, and fired pepper spray and pepper balls on bystanders. 

“It’s really beyond the pale,” Vircks told me. “It’s not a suburban campus. It’s a neighborhood. Grandmothers and grandkids.” Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, a Roosevelt graduate, agrees. He arrived at the school shortly after Vircks to condemn ICE. “We’re a third-world country now,” he told a Fox News affiliate. “You want to know why? Because in third-world countries, they have the military doing their police work in the cities.”

Vircks’s son was not involved in the Roosevelt clash with ICE and hasn’t talked much about it — or about anything, really. “My wife is convinced he’s angry at adults for screwing up his world. Between riots, the strikes, murders, a kid can’t do anything about it — he can’t even vote.” Vircks is an adult and a voter, but even he feels exhausted and helpless in the new status quo. He has trouble sleeping because of the bright stadium lights illuminating the park across the street from his house since last week, and the constant din of helicopters hovering overhead. During the George Floyd protests, he was worried about his property, to the point of regularly dumping water on his woodpile to keep rioters from setting it ablaze. But the ICE invasion feels different because there is no end in sight, he says, and no authorities to appeal to.

“They say to email or call your representatives. But that seems like screaming into the void. You try to live your everyday life, pay your mortgage, and then you add this on top of it?” he said. Today, for his job as a professional musician, he’s supposed to write an upbeat pop song. But how?

Not everyone I encounter is as open as Vircks or as chipper as Sammee. Multiple Minnesotans tell me they aren’t talking to anyone, much less the media. Can you blame them? This city has already served as a battleground once this decade — symbolic and literal — and understands how quickly local tragedy can be nationalised, flattened into content, and weaponised by people who don’t have to live with the consequences. When this season finally passes, the deeper question will linger: how much cumulative strain can a neighbourhood absorb before something essential gives way? Not a riot or a revolution, but a collapse of the quiet civic trust that binds communities together.

Minneapolis will certainly endure the winter of ICE, but the deeper, more permanent damage may not be seen until the season’s deep freeze melts away and spring arrives.

The New York Times defined “Dark Woke” last year as “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing.” In the Gray Lady’s telling, it “requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” Examples range from Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare to Jasmine Crockett’s alliterative insults (“Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision?”). GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to “subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite ‘when they go low, we go high’ posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again.” 

These aren’t mutually exclusive definitions. Dark Woke is a meme with amorphous contours. Sometimes, it’s merely rhetorical; other times, it offers serious strategies to challenge MAGA with a dose of its own post-liberal medicine. Either way, it’s rooted in the same demand posed by grassroots Democrats to the party establishment: throw some punches, or we’ll primary you into oblivion.

Since Good’s demise on the icy streets of Minnesota, videos of enraged anti-ICE protesters are proliferating on social media. In one clip posted by the Fox News reporter Matt Finn, an ICE agent goes up to two shiny SUVs blocking traffic, warning the women in them not to “make a bad decision.” The women, both of whom appear to be Millennials, aren’t intimidated. “I think I’m making exactly the right decision,” one says. When the officer signs off with, “Thank you, have a good day,” she replies with a grin: “I hope you have a terrible day.” In another viral clip, a gaggle of whistling women surround a reporter; one gleefully taunts him as another screams, “Nazi!” 

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Or there’s the TikTok video circulating on X, in which a blue-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired woman who describes herself as a 42-year-old single mother and “relationship anarchist” slips sexily into her Carhartt overalls while spelling out a “dating-profile request” for a man whom she can “call, right now, and say, ‘Hey, get in the passenger seat and let’s go fuck some shit up.’” 

These street soldiers aren’t the antifa types torching cars or the rioters looting stores. They are, like Good, Millennial moms in the Midwest. They’re people from normal quarters of American life who are spending time during the workday putting their bodies and vehicles on the line to protect illegal migrants, some with serious criminal records, from deportation. And they see ICE as a neo-Gestapo that calls for more than rhetorical condemnation.

The Washington Post this week wrote about the growing activist coalition: “As the Trump administration deploys thousands of federal immigration officers and agents around the nation, a loose-knit but increasingly organized network of activists is tracking their whereabouts and documenting arrests.” With whistles and messaging apps, these ICE “watchers” or “verifiers” are often trained by nonprofit groups, according to the Post article, which adds that they are “dispatched to spot arrests, record interactions, and, where possible, get contact information for family members of those arrested.”

This partly explains why Dark Woke is growing amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Tracking ICE supplies a sense of agency and community at a time when people feel powerless and atomized. It is also a clue as to why there are so many upscale white women in the ranks of the Dark Woke army. 

Last fall, the GOP pollster Alex Tarascio “asked likely voters if they agreed that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement, even if it breaks the law,” as he put it in an X post. “Overall, just 24% of Americans agreed. But among white women, 18 to 44, who identify as liberal? The number shoots up to 61%.” Half that number, only 30%, disagreed. Among all liberals, the number was nearly 20 points lower, at 42%. And among all likely voters, the number dropped to less than a quarter of the population.  

Why are white liberal women especially eager for battle? People like Good are motivated by a sincere commitment to social justice, to be sure. Good was so moved by the prospect of ICE deportations in Minneapolis that she joined a midday protest after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.

However, there is also no shortage of research in recent years showing that young women on the Left struggle more with mental health than do other cohorts. In 2024, Times columnist Thomas Edsall dug into studies on the “happiness gap,” noting “one of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the Left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.”

In 2025, a study published by Zach Goldberg at the Right-of-center Manhattan Institute found that “females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.” 

Research from the Institute for Family Studies has likewise found that “when we control for education, race, age, and income, …  liberal women ages 18 to 40 are over three times as likely to report frequent feelings of loneliness compared to their conservative peers.”  

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Renee Good, of course, was married and — at least in the tragic record of her final minutes — cheerful in demeanor. Unhappiness and lapsed agency may or may not explain her personal decision. However, it’s fair to speculate that rational disapproval of Trump is not the only explanation for why more and more young progressive women are training as “ICE watchers” and joining physical protests. Tellingly, the Institute for Family Studies found that “a large part of [the] loneliness gap comes from different rates of marriage and church attendance. … Adding controls for marriage and church attendance, ideology becomes less important, with marriage being the strongest predictor of feeling less lonely.”

Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good. 

Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity.

The fans of wrestling want to get “worked”; they want to believe the spectacle is real, even though they all know that it is not. The way to get the fans to open up their wallets is to get them sucked into the fictional world of performances and rivalries, and so the companies and actors try very hard to make it all stick.

In contrast, a “shoot” is when the wrestling performance goes far enough that something actually crosses over into reality. As a wrestler, it is possible to “work” yourself into a “shoot”; to have the act you’re playing go so far as to take on a life of its own, outside of your control. A fan could begin stalking you, or could even attack you for things you did to the babyface in the ring; a fake rivalry could turn into a real one.

Today, a very similar dynamic has sunk its fangs into American society itself, and the consequences are becoming increasingly deadly. When Trump began his second term in office, he came in promising a far-reaching revolution in the basic assumptions that underlined American politics. In area after area, the status quo was to be overturned: industries would be onshored rather than offshored, US allies and enemies alike would be brought to heel by tariffs, and the results of decades of mass immigration would be upended through a titanic deportation effort. Having promised his voters the moon, Trump and his administration have struggled to actually deliver. Reindustrialization has turned out to be a bust, for US manufacturing employment is actually contracting. The trade war against China is de facto already over, resulting in only limited changes to the status quo but still causing huge damage to American farmers.

Centrally, the new project of mass deportations has also struggled to get off the ground. While the number of deportations are high in historical terms, they fall massively short of the goal of one million deportations per year that Trump set for his administration. The White House has found it tougher than expected to change the reality of slow enforcement, limited resources and the often glacial pace of legal proceedings. To make matters worse, there are a number of contradictions baked into the idea of massively expanded deportation efforts, and these contradictions don’t have a neat solution.

From the very start of his second term, the various parts of Trump’s coalition have been at loggerheads with each other about the direction and goal of the administration’s immigration policy. 2025 began with a bitter conflict between the “tech bro” wing and the broader Republican base over the need for, and scope of, the H1B visa program, a conflict in which Trump actually sided with the tech bros. On top of that, Trump has consistently wavered on the question of going after employers, even going so far as talking about extending some form of amnesty for illegals working on farms: an idea that the now-late Charlie Kirk warned could break the MAGA coalition. Like Saint Augustine, who supposedly cried “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”, the Trump administration is caught between wanting to make good on its promises to ordinary voters, and the basic economic and political reality of having very wealthy donors who don’t actually care about any of that. This contradiction is nothing new in American politics — in fact, it’s been the status quo for the GOP stretching back decades. The GOP has long been the party of voters who are sick of illegal immigration and the employers who want more of it and in fact rely on it to maintain their profit margins. Historically, this awkward marriage has generally produced a politics that is heavy on the rhetoric and very light on the actual follow-through. Trump has not actually managed to transcend this fundamental contradiction; what he has done is come up with a very novel way in which to handle it.

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If you can’t meet the goals you set out for yourself when it comes to actual mass deportation numbers, and your political coalition includes business interests who risk losing serious money if they can no longer access cheap, illegal labor, then what can you do? Well, you can turn it all into wrestling. ICE agents — who tended to keep a low profile and work mostly in plainclothes — now ride around in the open, heavily armed and wearing masks, with massive WWE-style media blitzes announcing their arrival. Until recently, ICE generally took some pains to avoid announcing their presence, particularly in blue states where they were known to be unpopular. But all that has been replaced with heavily promoted and hyped-up ICE “campaigns” in blue areas; campaigns that invariably lead to protests, clashes with governors and mayors, and recalcitrance from local law enforcement. All of this of course makes the process of actually finding and deporting illegal immigrants much slower and more dangerous than it would otherwise be. But that isn’t really the point: just like in wrestling, the administration is in the middle of a “work”; building a story and a hyperreality that their “fans” can make themselves part of.

On one level, the administration is truly pushing the envelope: Trump talks regularly about sending in the uniformed military to police Democrat cities, either to solve crime or to simply arrest all the dumb liberals who have supposedly ruined places like Chicago or Los Angeles. But when you actually dig into the details, these plans and suggestions for military deployments are almost entirely hot air, often involving dozens of soldiers for cities of hundreds of thousands. When deployments do happen, like in Washington, D.C., they go on only for a short while before they are quietly rolled up. Just like in wrestling, what matters is the storyline: actions like these are calculated based on what will move the media cycle and on what sounds impressive to the base. As with wrestling, the point isn’t actually to be real; the point is to feel real.

To millions of Americans, what is happening right now is starting to feel very real indeed. Republicans cheer as masked officers finally take off the kid gloves and roughhouse their political enemies. Democrats increasingly feel that the country is becoming lawless, and that the talk about having marines and Army soldiers use their cities as “training grounds” for future military conflict might just be real after all. And even if the actual mass deportations are fake, even if Trump ends up deporting fewer people than Barack Obama or Joe Biden, even if the plans to send in the military to “clean up Chicago” fall apart under even the faintest scrutiny, it doesn’t actually matter. The rocks and snowballs being thrown by protesters right now are real; the tear gas and the batons and the bullets are real. Slowly, surely, the work is morphing into a shoot.

On 7 January, the city of Minneapolis saw a “shoot” happen in the most tragic and literal sense of that word. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother with no previous criminal record, was fatally shot in her car after being stopped by ICE agents. There is a great deal of footage available of the scene and the shooting itself, taken from multiple angles; the reader is thus free to make up his or her own mind about the incident. Yet whatever conclusion you draw about the details, the reality is that the details actually do not matter. They do not matter in the slightest, because before the body of Renee Good had even cooled, Donald Trump had already taken to social media to denounce her as someone who had “viciously” attempted to kill ICE agents. The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, minced no words either, going so far as to essentially declare Good a domestic terrorist.

This kind of rhetoric is fantastically irresponsible, but it’s also not surprising. Rather than compelling people to tone down their rhetoric and back away from the brink, Good’s death immediately became another part of the hyperreality; in death she was transformed into another stereotypical, villainous heel for the crowd to boo and jeer. Pundits on Fox News immediately began talking about how this now-dead woman had written her pronouns — she/her — on her social media profiles, and that she apparently was in a lesbian relationship of some kind. At the same time, angry crowds in Minneapolis began pelting retreating ICE agents with jeers and snowballs, as videos of Good’s crumpled body spread like wildfire. One half of America had a new babyface, the other part got a new heel. Republicans could cheer that another dangerous and potentially terroristic liberal got what she deserved; Democrats received further evidence that the fascists in jackboots really were coming to kill them all.

America is busy weaving a great and terrible fantasy; one where the country is slowly inching toward civil war. Trump is talking about defeating the “enemy from within”, Steve Bannon is warning that Republicans will go to jail if Democrats win the midterms. Social media is increasingly filled with shrill talk about how the other side is dangerous and cannot be reasoned with, and polling indicates that a very large number of Americans are now worried about the risk of democratic decline and even civil war itself. People have already died as a result of this fantasy; even worse, their deaths rapidly become the fuel the fantasy needs to keep growing stronger and more believable. As the story grows in urgency, it is drawing in more and more people, making future confrontations and further deaths all the more likely. Neither side in this conflict has anything even remotely resembling clean hands. Before Renee Nicole Good, there was Ashli Babbitt. Before Donald Trump dismissed his own countrymen as seditious radicals and terrorists, Joe Biden and his party did much the same thing.

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Increasingly, this kind of wrestling-like dynamic seems to be applied everywhere. The now almost entirely abandoned trade war between America and the rest of the world, going even further than the trade war with China, was one great big spectacle from start to finish. Massive, business-destroying hikes to tariff rates got announced through late-night social media posts. Trade delegations of important allies like Japan, upon visiting the White House to try to work out new trade policies, found themselves part of what turned out to be mere photoshoots: the Americans were neither prepared for nor particularly interested in actually settling on the details of some new agreement. In his various feuds with countries like Canada and Denmark, Trump has strayed far beyond geopolitical norms; but the feuds are reminiscent of Trump’s own history inside the wrestling world. Indeed, Trump has the rare honor of being the only president in American history to have been inducted into World Wrestling Entertainment’s coveted hall of fame, engaging in fan-favorite feuds such as the “Battle of the Billionaires” match between him and WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, the outcome of which led to Trump shaving McMahon’s head inside the ring.

But acting out the fake wrestling version of an incipient civil war is fantastically dangerous. The level of dehumanization, cruelty and bloodthirstiness one now sees on social media is already reaching a boiling point. Without some kind of reconciliation — which there appears to be zero interest in — more people will die, and the fantasy will slowly begin to turn into reality. America already has all the prerequisites for dangerous levels of social unrest and internal violence. The national debt is exploding, internal dissatisfaction with the state of the economy keeps rising, and the growing AI bubble is looking increasingly unstable. On top of that, it is engaged in multiple simmering conflicts over the world: trying to strong-arm Venezuela, guard against China, counter Russia and Iran, while also antagonizing all of Europe and threatening to annex Greenland from Denmark, a Nato ally. It has few friends and a growing list of enemies, forcing an increasingly overstretched and under-resourced military to try to be everywhere all at once. Historically speaking, the combination of social and economic crisis at home, and overstretch and wars abroad, is a dangerous one.

Moreover, America’s recent spate of high-profile assassinations should put to bed any lingering delusions — popular in the Joe Biden era — that a domestic conflict would be neat, easy, and containable. The US military, for all that’s impressive about it, cannot actually do much against the kind of internal violence that would be relevant here. Even Donald Trump himself, a man one of the most expensive security details in the world, was an inch away from losing his life to an assassin’s bullet only recently. If a concerted outbreak of political violence happens, very few people will be safe.

But that outbreak of concerted mass violence has not yet arrived in America. All talk of dealing with “the enemy within”, of sending in the troops to clean out Chicago, of calling in the National Guard to defend against Trump’s fascism, of “communists” or “fascists” about to take over the country and kill your friends and family: it’s all just fake. It is made up, it is a story. Yet people have already begun killing each other over that story, and as things stand nobody seems inclined to stop. As the late wrestling legend, Hulk Hogan, would have put it: sometimes, when you work a work, you work yourself into a shoot.

To that piece of wrestling wisdom, we could perhaps somberly add: if the work you’re working is about how dangerous enemies of the republic lurk around the corner, and how every political enemy is a domestic terrorist, a bloodthirsty communist, or goose-stepping fascist, it’s usually only a matter of time before the shooting starts.

Let’s look at some of his top hits. There was the video that used the song “Ice Ice Baby” over clips of 72 ICE arrests at a “nightclub run by the cartel”, in Charleston in June. There was an AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style animated image of a Dominican woman being arrested. A real photo of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a fentanyl dealer, weeping in a parking lot was posted on social media after her arrest in March for re-entering the US (ICE first removed her in 2020); the picture went viral, then salt was troweled into the wound when the official White House X account posted the Ghiblified update. “You’re sociopaths and you belong in prison,” read the top comment. Kaelan Dorr, a neckbeard on the comms team, said: “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

Then, in August, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account upped the ante. Uncle Sam, scratching his head, hesitates at a crossroads signposted with the phrases “cultural decline”, “homeland”, “service”, “invasion” and “opportunity”. In his hand, a broken section: “law and order.” The caption read: “Which way, American man?” For those uninitiated in the lore of ultraconservative “poasters” — by which I mean most of the public — the meme referenced another, “Which way, Western man?”, which in turn referenced a book of the same name by the white supremacist William Gayley Simpson. Published in 1978, the 1,000-page tome condemned a supposed Jewish ploy to destroy the West with the malicious forces of feminism and multiculturalism. Simpson’s solution was Hitler’s — violence against and expulsion of Jews, “Enemy No. 1”. When asked by NPR whether the post was directly referring to the book, a core text of American extremism, a DHS spokeswoman called Tricia McLaughlin said “calling everything you dislike Nazi propaganda is tiresome”.

The White House’s ragebait strategy is a luxuriant expression of power, a single protracted snort against hand-wringing critics of border enforcement. The message is this: not only can no one stop us deporting people, but they can no longer shame us for laughing about it. The civilized somberness of the Left’s immigration conversation, in which the rights of and compassion for entrants are so often prioritized over those of citizens as a matter of moral superiority, has been torpedoed by the admission that we, the elected American government, no longer care if you think we’re mean.

Criticism only sweetens the iconoclasm: in July, the White House’s X account earned the opprobrium of the cultural landmark that is Jess Glynne — a British singer whose two popular songs are best known for featuring in ads — for using her song “Hold My Hand” over a video of ICE deportations with the slogan “Nothing beats a Jet 2 holiday”. Glynne felt “sick”, she said, adding that her music was “about love, unity and spreading positivity — never about division or hate”. Lib, owned. Olivia Rodrigo found herself in a similar bind last month, and responded by calling the DHS “racist” and “hateful”. Then this month, the White House poked a new bear in the form of the Gen Z songstress Sabrina Carpenter, who criticized ICE’s “inhumane agenda” when they used her song “Juno” in a deportation video. On Friday, more like an infuriating little brother than an official government social media account, the White House doubled down — editing a clip from Carpenter’s appearance on Saturday Night Live to make her appear to call a Hispanic comedian “illegal”.

Offense is the point. So are the inevitable newspaper quotes from the immigration lobby: Angelica Salas, head of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, complained that “the memes are mean”. They “create a terrorizing environment for our people”, she added. “We don’t deserve this.” But as anyone who’s ever known a school bully will recall, appealing to their kindness means you’ve lost the argument. The Trump administration has the liberals hanging by their ankles in a bathroom stall, hair tickling the toilet bowl. To have them beg for mercy is the aim.

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It is difficult to imagine any other American administration, or the government of any other country, being quite so brazen. We are in an era of extreme, swaggering Trumpian confidence where the only constraint on enforcement seems to be time itself. Sensitivity, as well as practical concerns like funding, now seem very remote. Compare this with Britain’s Labour government, whose lurch to the right on immigration under the unexpectedly competent home secretary Shabana Mahmood comes not from the conviction of this Fabian Cabinet but under the pressure of public resentment. As the DHS urges Americans to “remember your homeland’s heritage” above a painting of a young couple cradling an infant in a prairie schooner, the British government struggles to get deportation flights even to take off. Trump’s National Security Strategy, released last week, warns that mass migration and declining birth rates present Europe with “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure”. The document was meant to invigorate like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent, but short of a Reform election sweep it is hard to imagine mainstream parties in Britain using such grand language. Conversely, the edgelordism of Right-wing meme culture has already found a footing on British X, where grotesque racialized Wojaks abound. If Reform cribbed from the White House’s meme machine, it would find fertile ground in the UK.

This administration’s philosophy of migration is so potent because it combines supreme earnestness with total insincerity. Irony has allowed official government agencies to say the unsayable under the cloak of plausible deniability. This has been the method since the beginning of this term when, in February, the White House posted a video titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight” featuring audio of clinking chains and boots trudging up tinny airplane steps. Amid the din of horror from X’s normies was the real prize: the approval of the terminally online edgelords — the Fuentes loyalists, the remote nihilists — areas of the alt-Right Trump must be keen to shore up. One posted a picture of Patrick Bateman in a Maga hat savoring music on his headphones; another wrote: “Gonna play this on a loop tonight when I go to sleep.”

“The average Democrat politician doesn’t understand why this makes us all feel good, hence why they’ll keep losing,” wrote a third. This last commenter was entirely right: these posts are about feeling good, feeling so confident in the morality and effectiveness of your policy that you go online to brag about it. These posts will be remembered by future generations as a victory lap from a corner of the West surrounded by broken and unconfident allies, governments — including Britain’s own — pathologically apologetic about having to involve themselves in the dirty work of enforcing borders. Taking paint-stripper to the veneer of politesse surrounding immigration policy does make many voters feel good: much of middle America is enjoying being a spectator in Trump’s theater of cruelty, delighted that for once they “got what they voted for” — one of the resounding phrases of this second term. These memes may be undignified, “mean”, tasteless — but that is the point. The Boomer mainstream has been quietly initiated in the language of the terminally online, supping on the in-jokes and relishing its risky allusions. The era of “being kind”, it seems, is well and truly over. In its stead arrives something stranger, crawling out the gutter of 2010s forum culture — an unprecedented irreverence that no longer cares what the grown-ups think.

Eventually, this surging tide of gentrification engulfed Gabriela. Two months ago, she had to move from Condesa to another flat, about five kilometers away across the capital’s massive urban sprawl. “They told me they would not renew my lease because the owner wanted to tear down the building. I imagine they are going to build a new building — and if they follow the other buildings on the street, they will build luxury apartments or Airbnbs to be used by foreigners.”

Gabriela, who has studied in the United States, understands why many Americans might want to flee their car-oriented and often-costly cities. But she admits to anger at seeing so many gringos — often working remotely from their new homes — take over her native district. “Mexico prides itself on being very welcoming but it’s impossible to compete with American salaries,” she says. “Of course it is fantastic when you can live a much more affordable life. But when I was a kid, the only foreigners who came to Mexico City were people interested in our culture since it was deemed the most dangerous and polluted city in the world. Now so many of them come here, but they are not interested in our country.”

Such complaints are far from unusual — and laced with cruel irony at a time when Mexicans north of the border are being hunted down, detained and deported. Visiting Mexico City early last year, I was amazed to hear so many American accents in its most prosperous enclaves. Friends told me there was growing fury over an “invasion” that exploded after the pandemic, when the nation had comparatively loose restrictions. Anti-gringo graffiti and stickers began appearing. Then came three demonstrations over the summer in Condesa, culminating with protesters attacking boutiques, cars, coffee shops and taco restaurants aimed at tourists. Some chanted “Fuera Gringo!” (Gringos Out!); others held signs saying things like “Gentrification is colonization!” and “Learn Spanish, dog”.

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum — who is facing fresh demonstrations over corruption following the murder of a popular mayor — quickly condemned the display of xenophobia. And Mexico City is far from the only place to face protests over rapid gentrification that pitches rich against poor, local against newcomer, localism against a globalization. There have been similar complaints in other tourist hotspots where short-term lets inflame such issues. Last month, for instance, I was investigating this issue in Lisbon, where the typical price for a home has surged to 21 times median household income — making it the least affordable European capital for local people.

The shift in Mexico City’s image can be traced to 2016, when The New York Times unexpectedly labeled it the world’s best place to visit. The first substantial wave of gringos  — a word which in Mexico refers specifically to Americans — arrived in central areas like Condesa, Polanco and Roma the following year. A pair of natural disasters inflamed the influx. First, in 2017, the city was struck by an earthquake, leaving homes damaged. Many local families moved out and house prices fell. Then numbers soared during the pandemic — and gentrification started to ripple into adjacent districts.

In Condesa, perhaps one in five homes are now an Airbnb or other tourist house. And while there is limited data on numbers of foreign residents — many use tourist visas — last year 56% more temporary-residency permits were issued to Americans in Mexico City than five years earlier (though foreigners make up a tiny minority of Mexico City’s 9.2 million people). All this in a city that saw the lowest rate of new house-building of any Mexican state over the last decade, notwithstanding its Left-wing leadership.

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These are familiar concerns in many cities: an influx of foreigners seeking fun, freedom and fewer financial shackles, before becoming a focal point for generational fury over housing inadequacies and political ineptitude. Yet while the new arrivals have put pressure on costs — property prices have risen eightfold in under two decades in prosperous Polanco — the tensions are also cultural. It was no coincidence that the initial protest took place on 4 July: US Independence Day. Behind the volley of demands for rent controls, or effective regulation of short-term lets, locals are angry over the arrogance of many Americans in their city. “When I was in Condesa, the people who lived there spoke Spanish,” says Vanessa Gonzales, 49, a hairdresser driven out last year after her salon’s landlord demanded a near-tripling of rent. “Now it’s all English, English, English. We’re Mexican but you go to the restaurants and menus are in English.”

When Gonzales first opened a salon near her home in Condesa 15 years ago, almost all her clients lived in the district; now barely one in 10 remain. And, as she explains, many Mexicans “do not love American people” for economic, religious or historical reasons — a feeling intensified when strutting newcomers refuse to respect their culture. Fernando, a taco seller working with his two nieces, tells me that gringos complained about the smell of his food, the umbrellas over his stall and even how he clogs up the street. “They’re not even from here,” he says, “and they complain that this commerce should not be here.”

There are even more brazen examples too. A young American model sparked outrage last year after posting on Instagram that people should stop giving money to traditional street musicians playing automated organs since they were “polluting with their noise.” Another American in Condesa — a long-term resident married to a Mexican man and running an Airbnb in their home — tells me she was horrified to hear a group of “vile” young Americans discuss their cocaine use recently while standing in the queue at her local bakery. “This was so incredibly offensive in a country that has been ravaged by drug violence,” she says. “Although most guests at our Airbnb have been very pleasant, it sums up the arrogance of some of the people coming here.”

This seems to be the key issue — along with corrosive suspicions that rich foreigners get favorable treatment in their city. One podcast featured someone who spoke about trying to make a booking at a popular restaurant in Spanish and being told there was no room: only to get an English-speaking friend to call back and be told there was an available table. There are even scandalous claims that some restaurants have toned down the heat in their salsas.

True or false, there is a unique edge to this Mexican outrage at gentrification, since it comes at a time when the White House has dispatched controversial federal enforcement units to find and deport undocumented migrants. “Whenever I open YouTube I get this fucking Pam Bondi ad where she says don’t come to the United States illegally because we will catch you,” says Sebastian Rojas, a musician who was born in Condesa, but who moved after being “strangled” by high rents. “At the same time you see all these gringos living like kings and enjoying the beauty of the best parts of our city.”

Emilio Guerrero Alexander, a filmmaker, makes a similar point in response to claims that Americans are entitled to gentrify his city when millions of Mexicans go to the US. “This is not a two-way street,” he says. “Some people are unlucky to have been born in areas where there is lots of criminal activity and murders so they go north to escape this misery. They just want safety and a better life for their families. But the Americans coming to Mexico City are people who realized — mostly during the pandemic — they will be richer here and buy more with their dollars… They are coming to have fun and don’t even try to get into our culture. Some do — but sadly it is just a minority.”

Even some Americans tell me they supported the protests against them. “It makes sense that people are upset,” says Shaynn, a charity worker who has lived in the city for four years. “I do my best to be conscious about where I spend my money, the kind of housing I live in, how I pay or hire people — but my being here definitely has a negative impact, which is something I grapple with. Anyone earning in a foreign currency, especially dollars, and spending in pesos negatively impacts on people living here by increasing prices.”

Such ambiguities are also apparent among Mexicans. In one luxury spa, for instance, a therapist tells me she supported the protests despite feeling hypocritical. “We have to treat them like special guests because they come with money, so it feels like I am betraying my own culture,” she says. “And I hate seeing gringos coming to the city and paying huge amounts of rent when we can’t afford to live in these most beautiful parts because they have raised the costs so much.”

This woman also has relatives living north of the border. “It feels a bit icky,” she admits. “My family has friends who aren’t citizens in the US and they are being profiled the whole time. Our government sees all these Americans as bringing money into our country, but I do feel some resentment when I hear these people saying how much they love Mexico City, how they love having such fun here and how it’s so cheap. It feels like we are being colonized.”

This word is heavily loaded in a nation colonized by Spain for centuries, and then invaded by the US in 1846 and 1916 — and the fact that it kept cropping up in my conversations underlines the depth of disquiet about gentrification in the Mexican metropolis. “I support the protests since it feels like we have been colonized again, predominantly by Americans,” says Armando, 25, working in a Roma boutique selling $130 hoodies.

Not that everyone agrees. Eduardo Garcia, 64, a writer and podcaster, argues that though the demonstrations reflect genuine grievances over high rents and the conversion of buildings into short-term lets, they got out of hand and damaged the nation’s image. “The protests left a bad impression,” he tells me. “A lot of small businesses, a lot of the waiters such as those here, benefit from the high number of foreigners coming to the city. If foreigners think twice about coming to Mexico and feel unwanted, they could hurt these people.”

Protests against over-tourism in places such as Spain suggest they do not deter arrivals and have little long-term impact, but can lead to small behavioral changes, such as switching to hotels. Yet studies indicate the capital has seen hefty price rises in its swankier parts, with a single room in Condesa or Roma Norte now costing $1,000 or more — higher than average monthly wages. One report, published last year by the National Academy of Sciences, revealed average house prices quadrupled over two decades before 2022, while the country’s per capita income declined relative to inflation. “Gentrification in Mexico City,” the authors concluded, “is impacting housing accessibility and displacing its residents.”

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Given international trends, some suspect these shifts are an inevitable consequence of our globalized economy. Garcia, who is married to an American, says his country was cut off from the rest of the planet when he was growing up, with its low trade, poor-quality domestic consumer products and tourism limited to beach resorts. “Now Mexico is competing with the world, producing better products, and is attractive to foreigners,” he continues. “I saw these changes and like these changes. I believe in the strength of Mexican culture — and there is nothing to be afraid of foreigners coming into your country and changing it a little bit.”

His stance is supported by the economist José Alberto Lara-Pulido, head of the center for sustainability at Ibero American University. “Gentrification is tough,” he says. “It has a relationship with xenophobia because a lot of people from the US came to the richest areas of Mexico City, prices of houses have risen and local people are being pushed away. There is fear of real-estate speculation. But for me, it is just the market working and a big city should welcome people from all over the world.” Foreign business owners defend themselves too, claiming they create jobs, pay decent wages and assist local suppliers. “The frustration is valid but misdirected,” says Fahra Bellak, a 40 year old from Edinburgh who runs a thriving bagel shop in Roma Norte. “Farmers tell me they come into the city and make four times as much as in rural areas, which helps sustain their farms. We buy our eggs from an organic farmer — when we started it was seven trays a week, now it’s more than 60, so he says I’ve helped him grow his farm. Our coffee guy says the same.”

Regardless, the authorities are responding. Following the protests, Mayor Clara Brugada proposed a 14-point plan to regulate rent prices, protect residents, and build affordable social housing. Critics, however, point out that existing rules to limit occupancy of short-term lets to a maximum of six months a year are rarely enforced, while Sheinbaum, during her own tenure as mayor, has faced accusations of fueling the boom — after signing a 2022 deal with Airbnb to lure digital nomads and tourists.

Lara-Pulido argues that Mexico’s real problem is not gentrification but rampant inequality in a land where about half the population work in the informal sector; where inflation has long been high; where the economy is dominated by a handful of huge corporations; and where it is hard to start or close a business. “There are much bigger issues with our economy,” he stresses. “A lot of young people cannot afford houses with these rising prices but the solution is not regulating prices or controlling Airbnbs but the creation of a more prosperous economy.”

In Mexico, as in so many places, these issues are divisive. A self-proclaimed “social warrior” since his student days 50 years ago, veteran housing activist Enrique Gonzales labels the anti-gentrification protests as a publicity stunt, used to divert attention from other important issues such as inadequate security, healthcare and infrastructure. “Mexico has a long history of hospitality and welcoming people from other societies,” he says. But, like many others, Gonzales is ambivalent about the tide of American arrivals given events north of the border. “The gringos here are happy, they feel safe, but the Mexicans in the US are all scared, hiding in the shadows.”

Earlier this year, his daughter Emma, 39, had to leave her home in Texas after two decades amid the immigration crackdown, leaving behind her 12-year-old daughter. She hopes to return soon after obtaining US citizenship. Yet to her father’s shock, Emma tells me she likes Trump for his straight-talking style — even as she supported the anti-American protests in Mexico. “These people, the gringos, are taking something that does not belong to them,” she says. “This is why there is war in the world. It’s not because they are American but because they are pushing up prices and changing the economy. It is already very hard for people like me and they are making life harder.”

Both the Gonzales and their beguiling city ultimately show how the arguments over globalization, housing, migration, populism and tourism that strain our own societies are being echoed across so much of the planet. “Our culture is changing, our way of life is changing,” adds Enrique. He is right, of course — but the big challenge of our era, one that even divides this family, is over the best solution.

The crash was intentional. The maneuver, known as a Precision Immobilization Technique, is regarded as reckless, dangerous and not particularly effective — including by the Chicago Police Department, which severely limits the practice. But this is no longer their town. Donald Trump has vowed to bring order to the city he now describes as a “death trap” — and has called upon the federal officers of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agencies to make it safe again. Welcome to Chicago under Operation Midway Blitz.

Following the incident in the Southeast Side, a largely Latino neighborhood, a crowd gathered to protest. More federal agents were sent in to calm the situation, which they did by firing tear gas. Chaos ensued. Among those gassed were 13 members of the Chicago Police Department. The front page of the Chicago Sun-Times the next day depicted a federal officer pointing his weapon at a young man who had his hands raised.

Through the smoke and the havoc, it is possible to see the chaos as a win for both sides. For the MAGA Right, the protests are yet more evidence of the Soros-funded malignant forces Trump is trying to subvert. For the Left, here is a city united in a resounding rebuke of the President, the Resistance reborn.

That may help fundraising, and television ratings, but what about ordinary people who have bills to pay and families to feed? The truth, as I see it from reporting on Chicago over the last several years, is that Operation Midway Blitz will change nothing — no matter how aggressive its tactics. Instead, it will only exacerbate our existing divides, making solutions impossible. This is true of every major political issue. Vehemence trumps compromise. Vitriol trumps civility. We are all now living in Chicago.

***

Trump is right in his identifying of a chronic disorder that has plagued American cities since the Covid pandemic. Among big cities, Chicago has the highest per capita murder rate, far above that of a New York City supposedly backsliding into the bad old days. And the number of carjackings has soared in the last decade. But in trying to conflate illegal immigration, violent crime and general urban disorder, Trump has ensured that none of those issues will be resolved. This is the same intersectionality beloved by the Left, only applied to a different set of concerns.

The surge in National Guard troops and immigration officers in Chicago is the same approach the administration took in Washington, DC. There, violent crime dropped by 22%, and a long stretch of August, which can be a turbulent month, went by without a single murder. But this is an unsustainable trend: federal resources in Chicago were not directed toward the largely impoverished, majority-black neighborhoods — Garfield Park, Washington Park, Englewood — where responsible interventions like a gun interdiction task force might make a significant difference.

Similarly, in Chicago, Trump’s zealous lawmen are unsure of what they want to do and where they want to do it: “They’re so afraid to go where the crime is,” an iron worker named Caroline tells me. “They’re picking up the fucking guys trying to make a living at Home Depot. They’re pulling busboys out of fucking restaurants.” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino has thrust himself with rather disconcerting eagerness into the fray, apparently throwing a can of tear gas during one recent encounter with protesters. He now has to report to court daily, as if on parole.

As has been the case in Los Angeles, Washington and Portland, few believe Trump’s forays into Chicago will make much of a difference. But in an age in which politics is entirely performative, perhaps the performance of toughness is all that is required. Bovino may win an Emmy, when all of this is through.

The same, too, could be said about the performance of defiance. The protests by Chicagoans against this invasion of their city have been forceful and impassioned. Yet they will also change little in a lasting sense. American policy — whether it comes to immigration, crime, poverty, or just about anything else — will remain in a state of pervasive constipation. Maybe that explains the growing number of Americans (about a third of those recently surveyed in a recent poll from NPR, PBS News and Marist) who say violence is an acceptable laxative.

***

Outside the ICE processing facility in Broadview, a shabby Chicago ‘burb, I watch protests ebb and flow. Activists have set up a tent nearby. Tracy, a white, middle-aged protester, is all for securing borders. She is not especially political, she tells me, but she can’t square what she is seeing now in Chicago with what she thought Trump had promised.

“If ICE was actually doing what they said they were going to do, which is go after criminals, drug cartel people, I think that would be great,” she says. “But they’re really targeting people of color. They’re targeting brown people, and they’re targeting people that don’t look like they come from here.”

A poster flutters in the wind, bearing the name of a Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer who had allegedly aided in immigrant detention. An American flag also flutters. A pro-Trump counter-protester named Ben had driven to Chicago from Arkansas. He is holding a sign that says: “GOD BLESS ICE.” Some people honk in approval as they drove past. “I want them to know that America supports them and that we are not all crazy liberals,” Ben tells me. “We are not all these democratic socialists.”

At this point, events take a nasty turn. An activist runs up to Ben. A woman in a dinosaur costume has claimed that Ben put his hands on her. Did he put his hands on the woman in the dinosaur costume? Ben denies it. The activists bristle.

Another man, loud and irate, raises the name of Charlie Kirk, recounting the macabre details of the assassination and seeming to suggest that Ben deserves the same fate.

“Guess where he’s at now,” the irate man says ominously.

Ben does not miss a beat. “Heaven,” he replies.

Just as things seem like they could escalate, several state troopers step in. The ICE detention facility stands in the distance, a hulking symbol of whatever you want it to mean: fascism, law and order, something else altogether. The protester in the dinosaur costume remains near the fence, alone.

***

MAGA-friendly commentators have used videos of confrontations between ICE agents and local activists to depict Chicago as a war zone in desperate need of even more forceful intervention. Anti-Trump outlets have shown Chicago rising up in unison to offer the White House a resounding rebuke.

The truth is less satisfying. Chicago seems to be largely indifferent, as is much of the rest of the country — not just to the immigration raids but to, well, pretty much anything short of a nuclear strike. While there are a few stirrings of vigor in America — New York, for example, seems about to elect a socialist mayor — a strange passivity appears to have settled over much of the land.

Trump has used this moment to his advantage, while his opponents, motivated as they may be, have not found a way to attract the voters whom they lost in 2024. Having given up a huge share of the black and Hispanic vote, Democrats could now be losing the educated, city-dwelling whites who are their lifeblood.

“We’re completely fucked,” confessed an actor named Seth who was having a drink at Hemingway’s Bistro in Oak Park, a much nicer suburb than Broadview where no one would dare put an ICE facility. He voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, but was furious that the Democrats could do no better than her or the enfeebled incumbent. He would go to the large anti-Trump protest organized for the upcoming weekend (which would turn out to be huge, as it would be in many cities), but he was not sure if the protest would do any good. Apathy could set in. Maybe it has already. If it does, MAGA will doubtlessly benefit.

***

People are surprised to learn that there is a Trump Tower in Chicago. Perhaps they shouldn’t be. It is a graceless building on the Chicago River whose defining quality is that it is tall, and that its proprietor’s name can be seen from many blocks away. But the President seems to have an uncanny understanding of the unspoken grievances that motivate people to vote. His immigration raids have been needlessly provocative and disruptive, but they give off the sense that something is being done.

In 2016, Chicago resoundingly repudiated Trump. That year, he earned only 12.4% of the vote. But by 2024, that share had jumped to 22%. To understand why his support almost doubled here, you need only look at how the city has handled immigration over the past few generations — and how MAGA has learned to exploit those failures.

In 1985, Chicago became a sanctuary city — with a policy of not asking people about their immigration status or cooperating with federal immigration agencies. The current Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker, supports the policy. “We’re not going to help federal officials just drag them away,” he said of undocumented immigrants earlier this year.

Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, feels the same. Three years ago, after the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, decided to bus Mexican migrants across to liberal cities such as Chicago — presumably to show big city mayors what Texas had been experiencing for years — Johnson seemed initially upbeat about the development. “We are going to do everything we can to make this home for you,” he told a group of migrants who were sleeping in a Chicago police station. Johnson further argued that these convoys did not constitute “a crisis” — even though the migrants had nowhere to live and no means to make a living and had not asked to be sent to Chicago.

The fact that Abbott was moving people like political pawns did not seem to feature in Johnson’s thinking. Overall, some 40,000 migrants ended up in Chicago, the vast majority of them desperate families wanting a better life. Many of the migrants Abbott met in the police station had fled deteriorating political and economic conditions in Venezuela. However, the visible presence of these new incomers — and evident lack of solutions — only reinforced the sense that Chicago’s leaders had lost control of the city they were supposed to lead. These highly unpopular progressives have proved easy foils for the MAGA Right.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, migrant women sat with their children on many corners in the downtown Chicago district known as the Loop, with desultory boxes of candy for sale on the pavement before them. Some of the women coddled infants. Sometimes, toys were scattered on the ground. They looked helpless and you, passing by, were helpless in your own way. The nature of the modern American city is such that the comfortable are too comfortable, and the afflicted too afflicted, for things to ever really change.

At a City Hall hearing in the summer of 2023, I watched a man in a baseball cap with the motto “Power Pussy Peace” berate legislators for what he saw as their hypocrisy. “On every corner there’s an undocumented immigrant,” he told the members of the subcommittee on fire and police, who surely knew as much. “Single mother, with two to three kids, with a box of candy, all downtown.”

The man in the Power Pussy Peace hat pointed out that the migrants were generally not harassed by the cops. This also bothered him. “If this would be us,” he said, referring to black people, “all our kids would have been taken, they would’ve been arrested, they would be going through family court.” The migrants got a free pass. He couldn’t understand why.

Undergirding all this is the resentment of downwardly mobile whites who reasonably expected to enjoy the same lifestyle as their parents — only to see job security, affordable home ownership and a pension vanish. When Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, in what most serious people thought was a joke, he appealed to them directly in his speech from the lobby of the original Trump Tower, in Manhattan: “The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

***

It is not too hard to find Chicago residents who feel the same way about their own city — and perhaps understandably so, given the Texan migrant-bussing “experiment”. One local poll from 2024 found Chicago residents less favorable towards immigration than the general US public. Where only about a third of the general US population wanted to see “immigration reduced”, half of Chicagoans did.

But immigrants — including the 257,000 undocumented immigrants living in and around Chicago — know that Trump Tower cannot function without them. Nor could just about any of the city’s services or businesses. And while they are scared, they are also indignant.

I meet Esmeraldo at an ice-cream shop in the North Austin neighborhood, close to where there have been ugly confrontations between ICE and immigrants. Tables are packed, but nobody is eating ice cream. They are here for a WhistleMania event, making kits that included whistles which could be used to issue an alert when immigration officials were approaching.

Esmeraldo is a student at DePaul University and a native of the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of the city. Her parents are undocumented. “I’m doing this event for them,” she tells me. “They are fearful. They can’t go outside to work.”

Migrants helped power the great American urbanization that started to take place around the turn of the millennium. They are, to use a pandemic phrase, essential workers in the truest sense. Without their contribution, the American economy could sputter. The signs are already there, at least here in Chicago. When I checked in at my hotel, a makeshift notice had been pasted up in the lobby: “Due to a staffing shortage, Housekeeping service will be limited,” that sign partly said. Enjoy your stay.

There are signs everywhere, and not just pasted angrily on the streets. Some restaurants have started posting notices on their doors prohibiting immigration officers from entering without a judicial warrant. Meanwhile, inside federal buildings, there are signs addressed to “illegal aliens” printed in both English and Spanish advising them to self-deport. “Self-deportation is safe,” these say. “Leave on your own terms by picking your departure flight.” If you leave it up to Trump, is the unspoken implication, you might end up in Uganda.

***

On a miserable afternoon, in a windowless room with a blue wire carpet, I witness Chicago’s administrative machine in action. A young judge named Craig Defoe is here at the courthouse to hear 19 immigration cases. There are three rows of hard wooden benches. A baby cries, grows silent, then cries again.

While the cinematic scenes of ICE encounters shared on social media make it seem like deportations are happening all the time, in the courthouse, deferral remains the order of the day. The cases I hear center on the question of whether a person, or people, deserves to stay in the United States, after having entered the country without doing all of the paperwork and waiting their turn.

These people had crossed jungles and deserts. They had forded rivers and sat in locked vans like cargo, not knowing where they were headed. This was brave, but it was also illegal, because other people had filled out their paperwork and waited. My family, for example, waited for a decade, though on the whole, emigrating from the Soviet Union was a lot easier than emigrating from Latin America.

Now a judge in his 30s would decide their fate. Defoe seems bored and morose, but he frequently surprises me with his shows of empathy. The third case that afternoon is of a Cuban woman who had entered illegally from Mexico. She was apprehended, sent back to Mexico, then crossed back again. Defoe and her attorney spar through a complicated exchange full of acronyms that no ordinary human being could be expected to understand. The upshot seems to be that there were several things the Cuban woman could have done to make her status here more secure, only she had failed to take those steps and was now at risk of deportation.

“That was not smart,” Defoe says. I imagine that he is going to let this woman really have it, ordering her sent back to Cuba at once. Instead, he simply schedules another hearing.

It is more or less the same with a Nicaraguan couple who had been delinquent with their paperwork. Their lawyer tries to explain that they could not file the necessary papers because the husband had been in prison. “The excuses don’t sound very compelling to me,” Defoe says. He grants the couple a month to file whatever had not been filed before.

The sixth case is an East Asian couple and it involves a protracted debate about whether they need a Korean or a Mandarin translator. Finally, Defoe sets a new hearing date for the couple: 27 June, 2028.

By then, we will be in the midst of electing a new president. Perhaps, by that time, artificial intelligence will have divined an answer to our immigration morass. But it seems more likely that things will remain as they are.

I certainly see little enthusiasm for Trump’s heavy-handed approach here. The afternoon is, to the people who actually work in the tangled guts of the immigration system, just one more performance in a country that has come to treat politics as entertainment. After it was done, there would be a new show — and another after that.

***

When I emerge from the courthouse, the rain has stopped but the weather is still raw. I go to Wicker Park, home to the Chicago Bath House, one of the last true Eastern European steam rooms in Chicago. Once, every city in the Northeast and Midwest had many steam rooms, because that is where Russians and Poles and Hungarians and Jews bathed and socialized. But then the Russians and Poles became Americans, and the steam rooms closed. The Eastern Europeans moved to the suburbs, where they bought houses with lawns and voted for Republicans.

Inside, I slip easily back into my native language of Russian with both patrons and staff. Everyone else here is speaking Russian, too, or another Slavic language. This would earn no dirty looks, no questions about legal status. Nobody here is worried about having to sit in Defoe’s courtroom anytime soon, or having to sit in a communal cell in the Broadview processing facility. Ensconced in an underground steam room, we are safe. No tear gas here, just purifying steam, salty snacks and beer.

By the time I leave, day has gone and darkness has fallen over Chicago. What fresh provocations and foul surprises will tomorrow bring? America is exhausted, and its exhaustion is especially evident in this city. Last year, Democrats asked voters to save democracy and the oceans and Obamacare. They may have simply misjudged our collective stamina, the reach of our moral imagination. People mostly just want to save themselves. In the zero-sum contest that is American life, you can’t fault them for that.

This weekend, the city that bears George Washington’s name will witness something different. On Saturday, Donald Trump will oversee a large military parade through the streets of DC, commemorating both the 250th birthday of the US Army and the 79th of Trump himself. The spectacle isn’t entirely unprecedented — the end of the Gulf War also saw an ostentatious military parade through the streets of the US capital. Yet, as the comparison with the 18th century implies, it is not exactly central to the American tradition either.

No wonder, then, that the parade, with its thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks and aircraft, is causing a noticeable sense of unease in America — not least because it is unclear exactly what it is meant to celebrate. If there is anything central to the self-conception of the military, after all, it is that it is different and better compared to the rest of the world, an institution that stands above and apart from the rest of society. Large military parades to celebrate the birthday of the Dear Leader are fairly common elsewhere, but never in the land of the free. Now, though, those old republican certainties are slipping away, implying a military that’s less the guardian of liberty and more the tool of a coercive state. Dovetailed by Trump’s actions elsewhere, notably around deploying the National Guard in California, and the United States suddenly feels very far from Washington’s ideal.

It’s easy to attack Trump’s parade on practical grounds. After all, it comes at a moment where America’s finances are a mess, and the military itself is declining. The Navy recently announced that it is scaling back plans to purchase new ships, cutting its shipbuilding budget for the coming years by nearly half. The hope is that Congress will find supplementary money somewhere to make up for these cuts, but it’s a signal that things are still going in the wrong direction, and that the US is in fact losing readiness in the Pacific theater rather than gaining it. All that obviously makes Saturday’s $45 million festivities hard to justify, especially when DC isn’t built to handle the massively heavy M1 Abrams tank, potentially damaging the city’s roads.

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In truth, though, the real impact here is theoretical. As George Washington so vividly showed, America has always prided itself on its soldier-citizen ethos, where service inside the military was a civic duty that transcended party or faction. In this, the US modeled itself on Rome. The Roman Republic, just like its American successor, was proud of keeping the generals out of politics. In the Roman case, that ethos was slowly undermined from within, as the growth of the city’s nascent empire caused the military to shift in both size and social makeup. The Marian reforms, meant to make the Roman army more effective, also had the effect of making military service a career for a certain social strata of Roman society rather than a civic duty for every citizen. Thus transformed, the military quickly became just another tool to be used by ambitious politicians like Caesar, who used legions personally loyal to him to overthrow the Republic.

The risk of following down the same route occupied the minds of America’s Founding Fathers, and they had a healthy distrust of standing armies as a result. Well, America’s military has now undergone the exact same transformation that Rome’s military once did: starting as a small, ad hoc citizen-soldier militia, then growing in size to deal with larger and larger battles, only to become a permanent institution staffed by career soldiers with very little understanding of the vicissitudes of civilian life.

Thus, rather than being a simple celebration of America’s vaunted military, the parade being planned for this weekend is a source of some cultural unease. That the Founding Fathers themselves wouldn’t have liked it all that much is probably a foregone conclusion, but the fact that it coincides with the President’s own birthday further blurs the line between the Republic and the leader at the top of it. It’s ominous, too, that the anti-Trump protests being planned to coincide with his parade are now billing themselves not as being against wars, or against the US military, but against the coming of any American kings.

Here, too, there is a resemblance between Rome and America. Rome, in its early days, saw a rejection of kings as one of its most foundational aspects; to be a true Roman was to be a member of a republic, not merely a member of an ethnic tribe on the Italian peninsula. The same sort of identification has been equally important to Americans: to be an American monarchist is a contradiction in terms, in a way that an Italian or Serbian monarchist wouldn’t be. As Republican senator Rand Paul recently put it: “We were always different than the images you saw from the Soviet Union or North Korea. We were proud not to be that.” Now, though, as political polarization increases, and Americans lose trust in their own institutions, these once obvious differences seem to be vanishing.

None of this is helped by the military’s actions elsewhere. That’s especially true in California, where anti-ICE riots have led the President to nationalize parts of the state’s National Guard, taking away control from Governor Gavin Newsom. Even more strikingly, the White House also announced that it would both deploy thousands of Guardsmen to the streets of Los Angeles, to be joined by active duty Marines.

To say that this is controversial would be a massive understatement. It’s long been accepted convention that the National Guard shouldn’t be deployed over the heads of sitting governors. The last time this happened was roughly 60 years ago, at the height of America’s desegregation crisis, when President Eisenhower used the military to enforce school integration. And even then, civil rights represented a truly monumental political crisis. That’s in stark contrast to the unrest in LA — which doesn’t appear serious even compared to the George Floyd protests. No wonder Newsom has taken to the airwaves, essentially saying that the constitutional order of America is being broken by Trump’s arbitrary use of America’s military, and suggesting that the country is now devolving into tyranny.

These are heated words, to be sure, but they do get at something real. There is, after all, something quite strange about the way in which these troops are being used. Quite aside from the lack of historical precedents, the actual riot in the City of Angels doesn’t seem to be especially severe. After being theatrically mobilized, California’s guardsmen are now sitting about doing nothing: the Pentagon couldn’t handle the paperwork needed to actually pay them. The 500 Marines, for their part, were called up in equally dramatic fashion. But then they failed to even appear in LA, pending several days of extra training. In a sense, that’s unsurprising. Marines are combat troops, unsuited for domestic policing. Yet, rather than sending out a detachment of military police, Trump instead went with the bruisers.

Just like in Rome, then, what were once America’s citizen-soldiers are now increasingly becoming mere pawns for grubby power plays. And if Trump’s antics have sparked a political storm, with other Democratic governors signing an open letter in support of Newsom, what’s to say Trump won’t employ similar tactics elsewhere? With the anti-ICE protests spreading to New York and other cities, and Texas already calling up its own National Guard to deal with its own protests, using troops to settle domestic law enforcement issues is about to become the new norm.

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That matters — if nothing else for the Army’s own character. One of the strongest political traditions inside America is the very clear line between the military and partisan politics. That line is clearly being blurred by these deployments, and they’re not the only example. In a recent visit to Fort Bragg, for instance, Trump gave a speech to an audience of soldiers where he managed to whip up audible boos against Governor Newsom. At first, this might have appeared as a completely organic show of support, a sign that the troops were so exhausted of liberal politicians that they were willing to break decorum.

But as journalists reported later, the entire event was in fact a stage-managed ploy. Internal memos from inside the 82nd Airborne show that Trump’s audience was screened in advance. People who, for whatever reason, didn’t agree with his policies were told to talk to their unit commander, and request to excuse themselves from participating. Fat soldiers were apparently also banned from participating, presumably because they didn’t look photogenic enough. In ordinary times, a soldier cheering or booing a politician for any reason would be harshly punished: the Pentagon has long-standing rules against that sort of thing. The fact that indiscipline was not only indulged by encouraged is therefore remarkable, particularly given Trump was accompanied to Fort Bragg by a vendor hawking MAGA merchandise to the assembled troops.

Unsurprisingly, that in and of itself broke many internal Pentagon rules aimed at preventing open displays of partisanship. But once again, the real shift is in mindset. To anyone unfamiliar with the US military, soldiers cheering, jeering, and booing a politically partisan speech might not seem like a big deal. But the US military, and especially its officer class, was — until recently anyway — sincerely proud of its detachment from politics and its dedication to civil service without fear or favor.

To be fair, Trump isn’t the first president to try to entangle the US military in partisan political fights. Joe Biden did so too, delivering a fiery speech in late September 2022, attacking Donald Trump as a budding authoritarian while flanked by two Marines in dress uniform. But those Marines, at least, were mercifully silent, while Republican criticisms of Biden’s actions were scathing. Today, less than three years on, Trump himself is now envisioning a role for America’s servicemen that goes far beyond what Biden ever dreamed of. Combined with Saturday’s parade, one thing is clear: America’s traditional relationship with its own military is slowly crumbling. What that means for the future of Washington’s republic is anything but good.