The Trump Administration Is Addicted to Violence

Border security czar and future truth and reconciliation commission defendant Tom Homan has spent the past week saber-rattling about his foot soldiers’ impending invasion of New York City. He told Fox News that he has reviewed “operational plans” to send ICE into the city to carry out a threat he made to New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Homan had vowed to send in the jackboots should Hochul sign legislation barring local law enforcement from cooperating with Homan’s goons. She did sign that legislation.

It is flatly inappropriate for the federal government to threaten a state with violence in an effort to influence that state’s legislative process. It should be unconstitutional for the Trump administration to send its paramilitary to a state because it disagrees with that state’s laws. That is the kind of stuff that could spark a civil war and will spark civil unrest.

And New York is about to host the World Cup Finals—the largest international sporting event on Earth—at the end of the month. Immigrant rights groups have actually issued travel warnings to people planning to visit New York for the game.

Why is this happening now? One reason: The Trump administration wants violence. Violence that could help Trump politically. Trump is incredibly unpopular. He has thrust the country into an unpopular war. He looks weak and, frankly, laughable, on the world stage. His border thug could be just saber-rattling, but waging violence against Black and brown immigrants during the world’s greatest sporting event is likely a good way to rile his gross and evil base supporters to his side.

Think of it this way: Homan wants to invade a city full of immigrants who will resist him, so the pictures on television are of ICE cracking the skulls of minorities instead of killing white people like Renée Good and Alex Pretti. He wants New York’s popular, socialist, Muslim mayor to be the face of the resistance to Trump’s gestapo forces.

Homan is also willing, and perhaps eager, to put ICE agents in danger. He’s willing to use them as bait. If ICE’s violence sparks counterviolence, the administration might try to install martial law.

Whether or not it works depends, sadly, yet as always, on white folks. ICE will commit violence. New York will resist. When ICE kills people here, it might not be a “perfect” victim—a white mom or a white nurse—in the views of white media. It might be a Latino mom or a Black nurse.

If Trump sends his goons in, it’s going to get ugly.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Former New York City comptroller and current congressional candidate Brad Lander has been cleared of obstruction charges stemming from his attempt to inspect one of the federal concentration camps being used to store immigrants. Lander is a real one, and I expect him to be on the front lines resisting any coming invasion.
• MAGA prosecutors in Virginia are refusing to enforce Virginia’s new assault weapons ban.
• Apparently, the Seventh Circuit thinks it’s OK to execute people in secret. It’s upheld an Indiana ban that prevents journalists from chronicling the state’s executions.
• A court appeared inclined to reject the Trump administration’s latest argument for pushing through his ballroom. For those who have lost the thread of this story, the administration has taken to arguing that courts can’t stop the ballroom from being built—or even stop the destruction of the Statue of Liberty—should Trump wish it.
• While we’re talking about Trump’s attempts to deface our national monuments, a court ordered that his stupid name be taken off the Kennedy Center.

Inspired Takes

• I was traveling last week, so I didn’t get to flag Joan Walsh’s must-read piece in The Nation about Graham Platner and the wholesale adoption of white-male identity politics. I agree with the piece in full. That said, now that Platner has won the primary, I would hold my nose and vote for him over Susan Collins. She was one of the critical votes to put alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court for life, so… she’s worse. But, man, I am happy I don’t live in Maine.
• Amy Littlefield has a really thoughtful piece in The Nation about Turning Points USA’s annual leadership conference for conservative women, a weekend-long confab where they wrestled with supporting a party that clearly hates them. The women mostly don’t seem to understand that the party hates them and instead seem to internalize the hate. I’m not surprised, though: Conservative women are willing to accept the sexism in order to participate in the racism.

Worst Argument of the Week

The Trump administration has intensified its crusade against transgender people by issuing a proposed regulation—blandly titled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance”—that imposes a blanket ban on federal funding for “gender ideology.” Erin Reed, whose essential Erin in the Morning Substack monitors trans news and legislation, calls the regulation straight-up “fascism.” She explains: “If finalized, the rule would reach every hospital, university, school district, state government, nonprofit, and homeless shelter that receives federal funding, effectively requiring much of American institutional life to discriminate against transgender people as a condition of receiving federal money.”

I cannot overstate how sweeping this regulation could be. An incalculable number of programs and institutions rely on federal funding. All of those places would be blocked from supporting transgender individuals.

And the term “gender ideology” is so broad that it could mean almost anything. In addition to preventing hospitals from providing gender-affirming care, it could ban universities from having unisex bathrooms, bar schools from referring to students according to their gender identity, and prohibit homeless shelters from providing space to trans people trying to escape untenable situations.

This policy comes on the heels of the Department of Justice’s recent effort to force hospitals to turn over the identities and other personal information of transgender young people who’d received gender-affirming care. That request is so overbroad that a federal judge has referred DOJ lawyers for disciplinary action because the lawyers seemingly lied about the scope of the request.

In addition to the administration’s machinations, we’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to bring the hammer down on trans student athletes in a high-profile case it will decide within the next two weeks.

The attacks against the trans community are coming from every side. We are witnessing an attempt by the federal government to deny that an entire class of people exists. I know the consulting class of the Democratic Party has decided that trans rights are a losing issue, but people who consider themselves decent cannot ignore what is happening here.

Trans people exist and have a right to continue to exist.

What I Wrote

I wrote about Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and sock puppet who has been nominated for attorney general. Will Blanche be the worst AG in Trump’s history? Possibly, but at this point “the worst” is a distinction without a difference.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

New York City feels like the center of the universe this week. I mean, as a New Yorker, I know New York City is the center of the universe, and I’m always glad when the rest of the world acknowledges it. But between the New York Knicks magical NBA Finals run, the upcoming World Cup, and the impending ICE invasion, the summer is off to a wild start in the Big Apple.

On Monday, Trump showed up to Game 3 of the Knicks series because he is a drooling narcissist who cannot allow the nation to be distracted from his antics for even a second. He sat next to the Knicks billionaire failson owner James Dolan. They showed his face on the jumbotron during the national anthem, and Trump was booed so lustily by the crowd you’d think he was from Philly. Later, he was caught literally sleeping during the game.

Watching it all, I started thinking about ancient Rome. I thought about how the Roman emperors would come to the Colosseum to watch the various games being held in their honor, and I thought about how booing the emperor at those games was one of the only ways to track what we would now call their “approval rating.” I thought about how the ancient sources (who can’t always be trusted) always point retroactively to one of these public booings as a precursor to the civil unrest or regime change that the sources knew were about to happen.

I can only hope that one day we look back to Trump getting booed in his hometown, at “the world’s most famous arena,” in the country’s most populous city, as a prelude to the end of the Trump era.

But for that to happen, in the coming weeks, New Yorkers are going to have to be prepared to do more than boo.

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