Donald Trump and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan must stop failed quota numbers used by ICE in their illegal dragnet

Let me get this? So, children are captured and detained by ICE because the evil operations must reach deportation quotas❓  OMG❗💢

Deportation quotas are a 2026, version of Vietnam body counts
In Vietnam, soldiers were rewarded based on body counts. ICE deportation quotas are a chilling reminder of that policy.

Echo essay published in the MinnPost in Minneapolis Community Voices by Ralph Brauer. 

Officials and the mainstream press debating our immigration crisis are ignoring the elephant in the room: the policy of setting deportation quotas. To a historian, this policy ominously recalls the infamous Vietnam body count.

The flawed brainchild of then U.S.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the body count supposedly measured the success of combat operations by tracking the number of enemy soldiers killed in each encounter. 

When troops realized they were being graded on how many corpses they could amass, this macabre idea quickly ran off the rails. Seymour Hersh discovered “there were three-day passes for the men who achieved high body counts; sometimes whole units would be rewarded.” As Hersh showed with stomach-churning detail, it did not matter whose body was counted or how they died.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The administration has dictated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deport 1 million people by the end of the year. If we divide this number among the states it yields an average of 20,000 per year, per state.

The Migration Policy Institute calculates Minnesota has 100,000 undocumented immigrants. Complicating this, 41% of families have children under 18 eligible for birthright citizenship. Three-quarters of the work-eligible undocumented are employed, with 20% in manufacturing, 11% in construction, and 10% in health care. Imagine the impact on communities if they lose these workers. It is estimated that the Minneapolis occupation has cost some businesses 50-80% of their revenue because ICE causes workers to stay home and drives away customers. We don’t yet know what it has cost the state economy.

ICE has also provided questionable information about how many arrests are truly the “worst of the worst” or the fate of those who disappeared into its American gulag. Last November, the conservative Cato Institute estimated 73% of ICE detainees have no prior criminal conviction. The Homeland Security website says, “70% of all ICE arrests are of criminal illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the United States.” These widely divergent numbers suggest ICE body counts are as reliable as those from the Vietnam War.

Unreliable information poses another problem. Hersh discovered Vietnam War troops received “no meaningful instruction in the Geneva conventions or in the proper treatment of prisoners of war during training in Hawaii or in South Vietnam.” Much like the Army struggled to train the flood of Vietnam draftees, ICE scrambled to rush agents into the field, causing cutbacks in training.

That training is complicated by the lack of clarity about objectives and tactics to achieve them, which is at the root of problems with the Vietnam and ICE body counts. As the war dragged on, the question grew about how the enemy could muster increasing resistance when it supposedly lost so many soldiers. (Evil❗) Stephen Miller’s command that ICE deport a million people by the end of this year seems to be pulled from President Donald Trump’s hat and raises additional questions.

Does the administration want to remove only violent criminals or any non-citizens❓Do we deport a taxpaying business owner with a family for a decade-old speeding ticket❓ What about asylum seekers or those currently filing for admission❓ What information is used to make those arrests❓

Answering such questions demands spelling out clear rules of engagement that parallel those of other law enforcement agencies. ICE defenders constantly turn the debate toward deporting violent criminals who are here illegally. These zealots seem unconcerned if this is done in accordance with the rule of law and our values. Maybe we should ask them: “If local police behaved like ICE, would you tolerate it❓”

What if police forced citizens to carry their papers to the grocery store like ICE❓ What if police dragged a 50-year-old naturalized American from the wrong house into the snow wearing only boxer shorts like ICE thugs? What if police ignored court orders like ICE❓ What if police wore masks and said they did not need warrants like ICE❓ This may be OK in some fascist dictatorship, but not in a nation that fought a revolution against unreasonable searches and seizures.

To ensure ICE follows the rules, the country must insist on clear rules of engagement and verification that all violations are investigated and punished. This includes deliberately ignoring court orders and disregarding suspects’ constitutional rights. As Seymour Hersh would remind us, body counts can lead to atrocities like My Lai. Too many have already been shot by ICE. How many more will we lose before the country acts❓

Ralph Brauer, a retired historian who lives in Northfield, Minnesota, is the author of the recent book “The Age of Discontent.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must prevent any money allocated for purchase or invasion of Greenland

Editorial published in The New York Times: 

The World Will Remember Trump’s Greenland Outburst💢

The free world exhaled on Wednesday when Donald Trump retreated from his administration’s threat to invade Greenland. 

But, that relief, however, masks the damage that Donald Trump has done to America this week. Donald Trump’s apologists once dismissed his bullying of Greenland as an attempt at humor. Instead, it has been something far darker. His immoral threats against a loyal NATO ally have escalated a crisis in U.S.-European relations, weakened one of history’s most successful alliances and hurt American interests in tangible ways.

NATO is an important force for global stability and for the democratic values that our nation champions. It has made the world safer, more prosperous and better able to work together for a common purpose. The alliance amplifies American military might, deterring Russia and adversaries around the world through the original promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all. NATO also serves nonmilitary purposes, helping present a unified front that limits the rising technological and economic influence of China and its autocratic allies.

Mr. Trump is undermining these interests with his push to take control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, despite vociferous resistance from Denmark and Greenlanders themselves. He is attacking the shared values to which democracies have aspired for decades: the rule of law, recognition of national sovereignty and respect for self-determination. 

Donald Trump is causing what Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada this week called “a rupture, not a transition” in the world order.

In normal times, the president deserves great deference in the exercise of foreign affairs, but that deference is never absolute, especially not when the president has shown himself unbound by legal and ethical constraints. When the president endangers the country or breaks its laws, other branches of government have a responsibility to intervene. Donald Trump’s repeated moves to undercut our most valuable alliance require other Americans to reaffirm our commitment to our international partners. The Republicans who control Congress cannot sit on their hands as they have done so many times in the past year. Many of them know the value of NATO. Congress should pass a bill that bars spending on any military action against Greenland or Western Europe. It should also hold up all of Mr. Trump’s nominees to national security positions until he commits to halting his attacks on the alliance.




The Supreme Court has a role to play as well. Mr. Trump’s attempt to use tariffs to coerce allies, including in the fight over Greenland, is unconstitutional. He has justified using them by declaring a national emergency on false pretenses. We are encouraged that most justices expressed skepticism of his use of tariffs during oral arguments in November. We are disappointed that the justices are about to embark on a midwinter break that will last until late February, apparently without acting on the case. They should issue an expedited ruling, given the policy’s illegality and the damage it is causing.

Donald Trump has always been an undisciplined and unprincipled politician, but the shambolic and sometimes illegal nature of his foreign policy moves of the past few weeks has been unusually harmful.

After months of blowing up boats in the Caribbean, without giving the victims any chance to defend themselves, he ordered a military operation to capture Venezuela’s dictator — and has since allowed the dictator’s corrupt deputies to continue ruling the country. Mr. Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up against their brutal government, saying “help is on the way,” and abandoned the protesters to a crackdown that reportedly killed thousands of them and imprisoned thousands more. 

And his confrontation with NATO crossed a new line: threatening the territory of a longtime ally. The notion that the United States might invade Greenland would sound like satire under any other modern-day president.

Yet, it fits with Donald Trump’s escalating and caustic attacks against NATO. During the 2016, presidential campaign, he called the alliance obsolete. In his first term, he reportedly considered withdrawing from it. During the 2024, campaign, he said he would encourage Russian leaders to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies if the allies did not increase their military spending. The threat was chilling to Russia’s Baltic neighbors, like Latvia and Estonia, given Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of civilians in Ukraine.

As is often the case, Donald Trump has blended a reasonable policy critique with blatant falsehoods and extreme behavior. In this instance, the reasonable critique is that most European countries have long spent too little on their defense, relying on the United States to protect them. President Barack Obama understandably complained in 2016 that they were behaving as “free riders.” Donald Trump deserves some credit for pressuring Europe to increase military spending, in both his first and second terms.  Nevertheless, that success does not give him credibility or any valid reason to threaten invasion or annexation to promote American interests.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans motivate exodus of Americans looking to move to Canada

Dear Editor echo letter published in The CAP Times, newsin Wisconsin. (*Check below to read a Facebook post from Canadian journalist Alex-felix Tremblay) 

I have a cousin, a citizen of the United States, who recently moved to Canada. She and her partner will be there for three years, the maximum visa time Canada will allow them. They were hoping for a bit longer before returning. My cousin said they departed because of Donald Trump and his ilk's attitude toward LGBTQ and DEI.

My cousin is in her mid-60s, born and raised in Wisconsin, as were her parents and grandparents.

My cousin and her partner will have to return to the United States before Trump leaves office. And they are nervous about whether that will even happen. Their hope is America will at least normalize to some degree upon their return, perhaps at least to the point just before Trump descended the escalator. But they aren't waiting with bated breath because there currently is no shortage of replacements for the Trump army of hate.

I don't have specific statistics for the LGBTQ community of people who want to emigrate like my cousin. But, I am more than comfortable saying they are very far from alone. 

And, besides my being deeply embarrassed as a fellow American, I am at a loss as to what to do about the deeply embedded cancer of evil Trumpism that has invaded our country.

From Bill Walters in Fitchburg, Wisconsin

*Hello, I'm a journalist with Radio-Canada in Quebec, Canada, and I'm looking for American citizens with Canadian ancestry who are in the process of immigrating to Canada. The new Canadian law seems more permissive. Please inbox me site here.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end the ICE Gestapo "Army of Occupation" terrorizing all Americans

Echo opinion letters published in The New York Times:

#ICEOut❗

A Backlash Against ICE’s ‘Army of Occupation’

The move by the Trump administration to remove the Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino from the anti-immigrant operation in Minnesota and replace him with Tom Homan, the Donald Trump border czar, feels like a way to take Bovino out of the line of fire and divert attention from the real issue.

The real issue is how Donald Trump is using an agency to enforce a draconian and violent program directed at nonwhite immigrants and their American citizen supporters. The program violates laws and the Constitution in multiple ways, and has resulted in the killing of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Whatever ICE was set up to do, it has become an army of occupation directed at Democratic cities. Violating laws violently for political purposes seems like the essence of domestic terrorism. In this case, it is directed by the Donald Trump administration with the apparent support of the Republican Party.

At this point, ICE should be defunded and disbanded. Congress (including leadership by Maine's Senator Susan Collins)  should act in an adult manner to hold accountable those who killed Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti, and violated the rights of many more.

A new agency must be designed from the ground up for the stated purposes of immigration enforcement, one that operates according to the Constitution, the law and not the whim of a self-proclaimed dictator.

From Simon Cohen in Queens, New York

The New York Times editorial board rightly emphasizes that Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, and Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, “are lying in defiance of obvious truths.” 

Just because Bovino is removed from the anti-immigrant operation in Minnesota doesn’t change that.

Last week, in a speech to the British Parliament commemorating the coming 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, the U.S. House speaker, Mike Johnson, quoting the British writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton, said that “every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.” One of those things, he noted, is the “indispensable relationship between freedom and virtue.”

Truth is the precondition for accountability. It is also virtuous, making it indispensable to our freedom as Americans. Our democracy will decay if we forget this.

It is therefore incumbent upon Johnson and his congressional colleagues to investigate the killings of Mr. Alex Pretti and Ms. Renee Good to establish the truth. His duty as House speaker — and as a member of our “high civilization” — demands it.

From T. Michael Spencer in Washington

To the Editor: Yes, the Trump administration is lying to our faces. This editorial encapsulates our current national situation.

I am a lifelong resident of Minnesota, 86 years of age. Our state is known as a liberal state and mostly votes Democratic. That apparently does not sit well with the current administration.

We are besieged by federal government forces flooding our streets, terrorizing our residents, scaring our kids. They have brutally and unjustly killed two citizens here since they arrived.

Where is this going❓ When will it end❓ Who is safe now❓

😡😞😟

From Judith Koll Healey in  Minneapolis

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end the campaign against the 2026 elections! ICE OUT NOW !!

This is not a drill❗

It’s only February, and the November elections are already in peril.

Echo opinion by David French in The New York Times. 

When I think back to the days and weeks before January 6, 2021, one thing that’s clear is that many of us suffered from a failure of imagination. We knew President Trump’s lies and conspiracy mongering were dangerous, but it’s hard to think of a single person who predicted that a MAGA mob would storm the Capitol.

Very few people anticipated the sheer scale and scope of the effort to overturn the election or that an incredible 147 Republicans would vote not to certify Joe Biden’s clear and unambiguous presidential victory. We did not realize that they would go along with something that plainly corrupt and dangerous.

We must not make that mistake again.

And so I’m going to do something a little bit unusual. I’m going to ask you to imagine alongside me. But this is a different kind of imagination. It’s based on real events — things that are already occurring right in front of our eyes.

So here we go.

It’s Friday, October 30, 2026, and Donald Trump's approval rating is low, abysmally low. He hasn’t been able to reverse the gradual decline that began after his inauguration.

At the end of January his aggregate approval rating was 41.4 percent, and his disapproval rating was 55.7 percent. In June his approval dropped below 40 percent, and it hasn’t come back up.

Meanwhile, Democrats are leading the generic ballot by a wide margin, and Democratic voters are far more enthusiastic about going to the polls than Republicans. In a normal midterm election, this would mean that Democrats would easily take control of the House of Representatives. They could even win the Senate.

But this is not a normal election year.

Now, in October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, (aka the Evil ICE Gestapo) which rapidly expanded throughout the year, is running large-scale operations in Democratic-controlled cities. Hundreds if not thousands more American citizens were caught in the dragnet. So have thousands of lawful residents.

Citizens, lawful residents and undocumented immigrants alike have been shackled and transported to brutal detention facilities in Texas and Florida.

Despite repeated court orders holding that federal officials cannot stop, much less detain, anyone purely on the basis of perceived ethnicity, the stops are still happening on a daily basis in cities across the United States.

Not only has the administration defied hundreds of court orders, it also refuses to discipline rogue officers. A complex web of federal immunities and privileges further insulates these officers from both private lawsuits and state prosecutions.

As a result, nonwhite citizens are reluctant to go anywhere near ICE, and rumors of ICE conducting operations near polling stations spread like wildfire. Thousands upon thousands of citizens choose to stay home rather than risk arrest to vote.

During early voting, reports of citizens discovering they’re no longer on the voting rolls have multiplied. Most of them have Latin-, African- or Asian-sounding names. The voters named Smith or Jones have had no problems. But if you’re a Gonzalez or a Diallo, then you’ve been purged.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. raided several election offices in blue cities in swing states. Lawmakers in red states have moved to take over election administration in certain blue cities, citing the president’s raids and indictments as justification.

At the same time, his base has continued to radicalize. Democratic protests against the ICE deployments are viewed, in these quarters, as proof that Democrats want undocumented immigrants to vote — that they can’t win without them.

Donald Trump himself stokes their anxiety and their anger. His social media feeds are full of the wildest accusations, constantly repeating even the most specious conspiracy theories about the 2016, and 2020, elections. He keeps up his calls to arrest former President Barack Obama. He also calls for the arrest of Democratic governors and lawmakers.

He tells his base, the people who trust him more than any news source, that the Democratic Party is a criminal enterprise and that its members will destroy the country if they win the midterms.

Right-wing media is full of mug shots of heavily tattooed, scowling criminals that ICE has allegedly yanked from the streets. The banner on the television underneath their mug shots reads “Democrat voters.”

Donald Trump’s raids and indictments prove to them that they were right all along: The 2020, election was corrupt.🤥💢😱❗

And when federal judges issue injunctions requiring federal law enforcement to stay away from polling places, that’s all the proof they need to raise the alarm.

“This election is rigged!” they shout. And they’re right. Just not in the way they think.

The horrifying thing about our current moment is that not a single aspect of the scenario above is far-fetched. In fact, some of it is already happening.

Not only did the F.B.I. raid a Georgia election center last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present. She’s a cabinet-level official responsible for coordinating the activities of American intelligence agencies, yet there she was, in Fulton County, Georgia.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Gabbard has turned much of her attention to investigating the 2020, election, an election that withstood dozens of legal challenges. According to The Journal, she’s investigating possible foreign interference.

The search warrant itself contains a claim that there is probable cause to believe that there is property, data or information at the Fulton County election office that is “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.”

In the days after the search, two Republican-appointed members of the state election board said that it was “on the radar as an avenue we could take” to seize control of elections in Fulton County. Ninety percent of Atlanta lies within the county.

Federal agents are seizing American citizens. There is an enormous amount of evidence that they are racially profiling their suspects and mistreating their detainees.

Even if federal agents don’t show up at polling places (the presence of armed federal agents at the polls is prohibited by federal criminal law), they raise the risk of travel even for American citizens who might look Hispanic by blanketing majority-Hispanic parts of a given city.

But criminal law is no impediment to Trump. He’ll just pardon the violent men and women who break federal law to keep him in power.

And if federal courts enjoin ICE activities, would anyone trust Trump to comply? As the Republican-appointed chief judge for the Federal District Court of Minnesota wrote last week, “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026, than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

Pam Bondi, the attorney general, sent Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota a letter promising to “bring an end to the chaos” in his state if he agreed to a list of demands, including granting Justice Department officials access to its voter rolls.

After the F.B.I. raided the Fulton County, Georgia election center, Trump demanded Obama’s arrest on social media and threatened the prosecution of election workers. He claimed, among other things, that Italian military satellites had hacked the 2020, election and that Obama had “conspired with foreign powers, not one, not two, not three, but four times to overthrow the United States government in 2016.” (OMG file under "you cannot make this 💩shit up❗" 

The Italian satellite theory is a jolting reminder that Trump will demand that his core supporters believe almost anything he says, no matter how wild or delusional.

As Jonathan Karl reported for ABC News, this theory “was brought to the White House by a woman who went by several aliases, including ‘The Heiress,’ and was known at the Pentagon for her claimed ties to Somali pirates.”

Rather than discarding the theory as obvious nonsense from an unreliable narrator, Karl says that “then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows directed both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense to look into the matter.”

Informed readers will know that this column is woefully incomplete. I can’t possibly compile all of Trump’s threats against American elections into a single column. Entire books have been written describing his plot to disrupt the 2020, election.

But one thing is quite clear: He is more dangerous now than he was then. His party controls the House and the Senate. In 2020, Democrats controlled the House.

Trump has filled his administration with cronies and true believers, and his attorney general is one of his chief enforcers. In 2020 Bill Barr, who was then the attorney general, resigned rather than continue to pursue Trump’s stolen election claims.

This time around, by contrast, Ed Martin, a Justice Department official, posted a picture of himself standing next to Sidney Powell, one of the chief legal architects of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In 2023 she pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties. The president pardoned her in November.

And what was Martin’s message? “Good morning, America. How are ya’?”

During his first term, the Trump administration largely complied with federal court orders. In his second term, his administration is defying the courts at a frequency that boggles the mind. So even if Trump-appointed judges and justices repeat their courageous performance from 2020 and block any effort by the president to overturn the next election, it’s an open question whether the Trump administration will care.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about the law. He commands an obedient Congress and is supported by a radicalized base of tens of millions of people who believe his lies, represents a threat to the next election. I fear that millions of citizens are still too complacent. They aren’t aware of the peril we face.

And as you take note of each of the incidents I mentioned, you may realize that Trump can unlawfully influence an election without explicitly rigging the count. By deterring his enemies from coming to the polls, he can engineer the outcomes he seeks.

In a future column, I’ll try to describe what can be done to stop him — aside from simply hoping and praying that his lawlessness has limits other than his own morality — but a nation won’t rouse itself if it doesn’t hear the alarm.

So consider this to be something like a fire drill. It’s an alarm, one of thousands that should be ringing across the country. MAGA’s acts of aggression are already intimidating. Trump isn’t just trying to “stop the steal” again; another kind of theft might (probably is) already be underway.

Donald Trump and his maga Republican cabinet live in a culture of lies

Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself New York Times opinion by Ezra

Last February, a year ago, I wrote an essay about the Trump administration’s strategy of “muzzle velocity.” Muzzle velocity, in its literal sense, describes the ferocious speed of a bullet at the moment it exits the front end of a gun. The term came from an interview that Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, gave in 2019. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” Bannon said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Trump world has an affection for analogies that🤢 glorify the combination of violence and speed. 

After Trump’s second Inaugural Address, Taylor Budowich, then one of the White House’s deputy chiefs of staff, tweeted, “Now, comes SHOCK AND AWE.” “Shock and awe” refers to the bombing campaign that launched America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was an awesome demonstration of initial force that belied a catastrophic absence of information, planning and wisdom. It was the belief that an immediate show of dominance would lead to a society’s submission rather than its revolt. Both Bannon and Budowich’s metaphors have proved more grimly apt than they intended.


The strategy of the Trump administration over the last year has been to move so fast, to do so much, that the opposition could never find its footing. This was Bannon’s insight, and it was real: Attention is limited. The media, the opposition, the electorate — they can only focus on so much. Overwhelm their capacity for attention and you overwhelm their capacity to think, organize and oppose.

But what you are doing to the opposition you are also doing to yourself. “It is a strategy that forces you into overreach,” I wrote last year. “To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself.” And that is what happened. Clearly, the Trump administration is overwhelmed — by its own violence, its own cruelty, its own lies, its own chaos.

There is nothing unusual about a presidency being overwhelmed by crises. What is unusual about the Trump administration is that it has created those crises itself. The Trump administration chose to create a regime of ever-shifting tariffs; it chose to threaten to take Greenland through force or through tariffs; it chose to investigate its political enemies, leading up to its effort to intimidate Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve; it chose to alienate our closest allies, encouraging both Canada and Britain to seek closer ties with China; it chose to stage quasi-invasions of blue cities, setting the scene for the horrifying killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And that’s just a partial accounting of the disasters and diminishments of the last few weeks and months.
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Muzzle velocity was built on the idea that the Trump administration had reserves of attention and focus that the rest of us did not. The reality is just the opposite. The White House has demands on its attention and focus that the rest of us do not. We are not responsible for managing or controlling everything from the labor market to A.I. policy to immigration enforcement and vaccine approvals. We will not be blamed for a measles outbreak or a recession. But the president will.

That is why most White Houses pay such close attention to policy processes and chain of command: These are all ways of filtering the torrent of information and decisions in order to conserve the focus and attention of the president and his top aides. Well-managed White Houses — and personally disciplined presidents — are ruthless in their pursuit of prioritization. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Vanity Fair in 2012. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

But this White House — and this president — have treated freneticism as a virtue and discipline as a vice. Instead of seeking to limit the number of crises and conflicts that they need to remain on top of, members of the Trump administration, from their first day, sought to multiply them. They spent their initial months in office ripping the wiring out of the federal government, including gutting internal teams, like the National Security Council, that are meant to help process information on behalf of the president. They have treated caution and restraint as an admission of weakness.

In January Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff who, in practice, acts as Trump’s prime minister, delivered a message to ICE agents: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony,” he said. That message was part of a broader effort to change the culture at ICE and the Border Patrol, Caitlin Dickerson, a journalist at The Atlantic who covers immigration, told me:

I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a potentially violent and dangerous one. 

Usually, the (reasonable) concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun, because they worried about potential repercussions. And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting. His fear when he was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldn’t use his gun in a moment when he needed to.

And now it’s almost as if the opposite fear is true. We’ve seen in ICE people losing their jobs, high-level officials losing their jobs because they’re not delivering enough deportations, they’re not being aggressive enough. I think Miller is just underscoring that argument that you’re not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive and, in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.

It is hard not to see a straight line from that change in culture to the tragic killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis.

Every organization comes to resemble its leader. Trump himself is easily distracted, desirous of flattery rather than counsel, impressed by crude displays of dominance and violence and obsessed with social media and cable news — and so too is his White House. The sycophancy among Trump’s aides is so crude as to be indistinguishable from mockery. 

(Evil Nazi) Stephen Miller, speaking to a New York magazine reporter about Trump’s health, said, “The headline of your story should be ‘The Superhuman President.’” When Miller says this, does he realize he is making his boss look ridiculous❓ Does he intend it❓

But it’s not just (evil Nazi) Miller. Trump’s cabinet meetings take the form of totalitarian kitsch. Here is Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrapping up remarks in December:  (My personal observation about Donald Trump's farcical cabinet meetings is to call them seances.) If you were to ask me what I’m grateful for, whether it’s a Thanksgiving, it’s a Christmas, a Hanukkah, a New Year’s, anytime of year the fact that this president, after four years serving in office, he could have just left it in the rearview mirror and went on to really enjoy retirement, but he is willing to take a bullet for all of you tuning in at home, because he believes in his flag, our freedom, our liberties and to save the greatest country in the history of the world. So I’m grateful this holiday season for you, Mr. President. 🤢

The joke of Trump’s cabinet meetings is that no one is joking. These meetings are not just a performance; they are a culture. Trump’s favor is won through demonstrations of loyalty rather than competence. The president wants parades, not process, and that is what he gets.

The irony of Trump’s second term is that he was much better served by the advisers in his first term, who understood that part of their job was to protect him — and the rest of us — from his worst impulses. In 2020, when Trump reportedly responded to the George Floyd protesters by asking the military to “just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something,” his advisers weren’t protecting only us when they refused. They were also protecting him.

Trump’s second White House was built to ensure that no one would ever tell Trump no again. He wanted a culture of lies and sycophancy, and he got one. “I hear stories from my predecessors,” Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, told Vanity Fair in December, “about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or cost lives. I don’t have that.”

Trump’s aides flatter him and lie to us. They indulge his constant distraction and so they too are constantly distracted. They are dominated by him and so they seek to dominate us. What they believe to be their strengths are their weaknesses. You can see it in their metaphors. The shock and awe bombing campaign was the prelude to catastrophe, not to victory. And so it is here.

This is a presidency that is, by any measure, failing. Trump is unpopular; his brutality and his tariffs have turned immigration and affordability, once among of his strongest issues, into liabilities. Trump’s opposition is increasingly united and mobilized; Democrats are besting Republicans in elections all across the country and disciplined, brave, beautiful protest movements have emerged in the cities ICE has sought to occupy. I cannot do better here than to quote Adam Serwer’s dispatch from Minnesota:


Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

We are watching an administration that is not only retreating in key areas — dropping its demand for all of Greenland, sending Greg Bovino back to Border Patrol’s El Centro region, meekly backing off its trade war with China — but finding itself cornered by its own cruelty and lies. Miller’s slander of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” could not stand even the barest contact with the video of Pretti trying to protect a nearby woman or the quiet heroism of his daily life.

Trump appears to be trying to course correct, but he has neither the discipline nor the personnel to truly change his presidency’s direction. This administration is a reflection of who the president is and what he wants. This White House is not beset by crises. This White House is the crisis.

Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must protect America's foriegn alliances: claims to take over Greenland are stupid

“Trump Mocks Leaders Who Seek to Curb His Greenland Ambitions as Weak” (news article, January 21):

Echo opinion letters published in The New York Times:

As tensions rise between the United States and Europe, Donald Trump has not done anything to cool things down but instead derided Europe as weak ahead of his meeting with European leaders in Davos, Switzerland. Donald Trump has gone too far.

For years the U.S. has been able to build strength through its alliances, but Donald Trump has turned this idea on its head. 

Obviously and unbelievably, it has come to a point where Donald Trump is willing to bully allies and make threats in order to obtain Greenland, an island that few Americans care about and that would not improve the security of the country, whatsoever. (IOW "stupid")

Donald Trump has made a dangerous assumption that the U.S. on its own would be able to stand strong on the global stage, particularly against two superpowers: Russia and China. If the Donald Trump really wants to pay off the national debt (a financial impossibility) and improve the economy, losing allies is not the way to go about it ❗ Perhaps it is time for Trump to learn the meaning of the word “cooperation.”  From Maxwell Mercado in  Collegedale, Tennessee

To the Editor:  This is not a test. Donald Trump’s increasingly flagrant and bellicose threats to violate Greenland’s sovereignty represent an existential threat. There is no telling what will befall us if the United States shatters the NATO alliance and cements its abrupt shift from leader of the free world to global pariah.

Congress and all Americans: If you oppose this perilous path, now is the time to speak. 

 (Maine Writer post script:  #WhereIsSenatorSusanCollins ❓)

From Emily L. Cooke in Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are now enabling the cover up of two ICE murders after shooting two American citizens

Congress must intervene following shooting of  Alex Jeffrey Pretti, R.N., an ICU nurse who was shot and killed by ICE agents on January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis. On January 7, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good. 

Echo editorial published by The Virginian-Pilot, in Norfolk, VA.

Although several witnesses who saw these two murders also have video taken at the incident, the fact is the Trump administration is preventing the Minneapolis law enforcement to investigate the killings. 

Federal ICE agents fatally shot another American in Minneapolis on Saturday: 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minnesota VA hospital. Pretti was observing immigration operations and stepped in when an agent threw a woman to the ground. He was tackled by several U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, who repeatedly struck him before they fired as many as 10 shots, killing him.

Mr. Pretti’s killing follows the shooting death of Renee Good, a poet, wife, mother and Old Dominion University graduate, on January 7. Ms. Good was given conflicting orders by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — who told her to move her car and to stop and exit her vehicle — before she was fatally shot attempting to move her car as ordered.

Bystanders filmed both incidents as they unfolded, providing the public with unvarnished evidence of what transpired from multiple angles. But, after both, Trump administration officials have insisted that agents acted properly and halted efforts to conduct thorough, transparent investigations.

To adopt the administration’s line of defense requires one to ignore their eyes and ears — to dismiss clear and overwhelming evidence of federal agents using excessive force against people who are not a threat to them.

It also requires believing that those killed were “domestic terrorists,” as administration officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have alleged, rather than Americans standing up for their neighbors, exercising their constitutional rights and opposing the increasingly brutal and arbitrary immigration campaign directed by Donald Trump.

Americans have long recognized the value of immigration enforcement, and would probably still support the administration’s efforts to remove dangerous criminals from our streets had this campaign adhered to that goal. But it has not. It has become a quasi NAZI Gestapo style operation targeting Americans. 

Instead the nation has witnessed federal agents act in increasingly unrestrained and dangerous ways — brutalizing suspects, acting aggressively toward protesters, entering homes without warrants, arresting and even killing American citizens — and public support has plummeted. Americans by growing margins want officials to stop the lawlessness — and to do so now❗

The reaction to Pretti’s shooting suggests they will not.

On Saturday January 24, 2026,  Pretti was helping to direct traffic around federal operations when agents initiated a dispute with two observers by aggressively pushing them to the ground. When Pretti intervened, he was swarmed by seven agents who tackled and beat him in the street.

He was a legal, permitted gun owner and video of the scene shows an agent disarmed him as he was restrained. Then, unarmed and no threat to the agents, the ICU nurse who devoted his life to helping the nation’s veterans was shot multiple times and died.

Noem then followed the same playbook as after the Good shooting: smearing the victim as a radical, claiming without evidence that he was intent on shooting agents, and attempting to create the false belief that peaceful protesters are a threat to law and order.

In fact, the greater danger is federal agents violating constitutional rights, laying siege to an American city and putting the public at risk. Anger is growing, as is support for abolishing ICE and building a new immigration enforcement system from the ground up.

Not that this is all about immigration, as the Trump administration admitted over the weekend. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday saying the White House would withdraw ICE and CBP forces if given access to the state’s voter rolls, among other requirements.

Americans cannot accept a federal government that threatens a state with further brutality for its refusal to submit to the president’s demands for voting information. They cannot stand idle as ICE and CBP routinely ignore rights guaranteed by the Constitution. They must not allow those who kill people in the street without cause to go unpunished by the justice system.

Congress repeatedly refused to exert its power to act as a check on the executive branch, but the time for dithering is over. Federal agents killed another American on Saturday January 24, two innocent American citizens in just one month. How many more will it take before lawmakers do their duty❓

Maine Writer post script- #WhereIsSenatorSusanCollins ❓👀

Donald Trump and maga Republicans claim support from Evangelicals but ignore the urgency of extending empathy to others

MAGA’s War on Empathy  This crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement. 

"Democrats need a big tent that welcomes people of faith into our coalition, even if we don’t agree on every issue. Don’t forget, liberal Christianity has a long and storied history. Progressive people of faith have led virtually every major social movement. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in Selma. That’s a spirit we should work to reclaim," Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Publsihed in The Atlanic by Hillary Rodham Clinton

When I first saw the video of the brutal killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, I immediately thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan. 

Federal agents shot Pretti after he tried to help a woman they had thrown to the ground and pepper-sprayed. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and help those in need. “Do this and you will live,” he says. Not in Donald Trump’s America.

Americans have now seen with their own eyes the cost of Donald Trump’s abuse of power and disregard for the Constitution. 

Videos of the killing of Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents have exposed the lies of Trump-administration officials who were quick to smear the victims as “domestic terrorists.” 

Even Americans who have grown habituated to Trump’s excesses have been shaken by these killings and the reflexively cruel and dishonest response from the administration.

This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school❓

That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.

“The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.

The glorification of cruelty and rejection of compassion don’t just shape the Trump administration’s policies. Those values are also at the core of Trump’s own character and worldview. And they have become a rallying cry for a cadre of hard-right “Christian influencers” who are waging a war on empathy.

Their twisted campaign validates Trump’s personal immorality and his administration’s cruelty. It marginalizes mainstream religious leaders who espouse traditional values that conflict with Trump’s behavior and agenda. And it threatens to pave the way for an extreme vision of Christian nationalism that seeks to replace democracy with theocracy in America.

The rejection of bedrock Christian values such as dignity, mercy, and compassion did not start with the crisis in Minnesota. The tone was set right at the beginning of this second Trump presidency. The day after taking the oath of office last January, Trump attended a prayer service at the National Cathedral.

 

In fact, the Episcopal bishop of Washington,

Mariann Edgar Budde, directed part of her sermon at the new president: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” She spoke of children of immigrant families afraid that their parents would be taken away, refugees fleeing persecution, and young LGBTQ Americans who feared for their lives. It was an honest plea, suffused with the kind of love and generosity toward neighbors and strangers that Jesus taught.

Bishop Budde was immediately vilified. One Republican congressman said she “should be added to the deportation list.” The pastor and influencer Ben Garrett warned his followers, “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.”  (Ben Garrett is evil💢❗)

The right-wing Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey called the sermon “toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.” Toxic empathy❗ ❓What an oxymoron. I don’t know if the phrase reflects moral blindness or moral bankruptcy, but either way it’s appalling.

This is certainly not what I was taught in Sunday school, not what my reading of the Bible teaches me, and not what I believe Jesus preached in his short time on Earth. 

Yes, I went to Sunday school. In fact, my mother taught Sunday school at our Methodist church in Park Ridge, Illinois. As an adult, I occasionally taught at our church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Some people—such as the Republican congressman who once called me the Antichrist—might find this surprising. (When I confronted him, he mumbled something about not having meant it. Trump later appointed him to his Cabinet.)

I’ve never been one to wear my faith on my sleeve, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important to me. Quite the opposite: My faith has sustained me, informed me, saved me, chided me, and challenged me. I don’t know who I would be or where I would have ended up without it. So I am not a disinterested observer here. I believe that Christians like me—and people of faith more generally—have a responsibility to stand up to the extremists who use religion to divide our society and undermine our democracy.

No less a religious authority than the late Pope Francis called out the Trump administration’s war on empathy. After Vice President (Hillbilly❗) Vance - a convert to Roman Catholicism- argued that Christians should be stingy with their love, prioritizing those close to us over strangers, he offered a rebuke. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” the pope noted, before urging everyone to read up on the Good Samaritan.

The contrast between traditional Christian morality and Trumpian amorality was particularly stark at the memorial service for the slain MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, in September. Kirk’s widow, Erika, publicly forgave her husband’s killer. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love.”

It reminded me of the families of the victims of the Mother Emanuel Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2015, nine Black worshippers were murdered at an evening Bible study by a young white man trying to start a race war. In court a few days later, one by one, grieving parents and siblings stood up and told the shooter, “I forgive you.”

Instead of being inspired by Erika Kirk’s grace, though, Trump rejected it. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them,” he declared. He would not forgive his enemies. “I am sorry, Erika,” he said. So much for “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute you.”

With leadership like this, it’s no wonder that one survey found a quarter of Republicans and nearly 40 percent of Christian nationalists now agree that “empathy is a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.” MAGA rejects the teachings of Jesus to “love thy neighbor” and care for “the last, the least, and the lost.” It recognizes only a zero-sum war of all against all. The world may look gilded from the patio at Mar-a-Lago, but the MAGA view is fundamentally fearful and impoverished. MAGA sees a world of vengeance, scorn, and humiliation, and cannot imagine generosity or solidarity.

The whole exercise is suffused with barely disguised misogyny. The extremist pastor Joe Rigney wrote a book called Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. Rigney is an ally of the influential Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, who thinks giving women the right to vote was a mistake and advocates turning the United States into a theocracy. (Would it shock you to know that Pete Hegseth is a big fan of Wilson’s❓)

Rigney declared that Bishop Budde’s plea for mercy was “a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness.”  Manipulation by wily women is a sexist trope as old as Adam and Eve, but this is an ugly new twist. Instead of women tempting men with vice, now the great fear is that women will tempt men with virtue.

Christian nationalism—the belief that God has called certain Christians to exercise dominion over every aspect of American life, with no separation between Church and state—is ascendant in Trump’s Washington. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, displays a historic flag outside his office on Capitol Hill that in recent years has been embraced by Christian nationalists. The same flag was carried by insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, and flown by Justice Samuel Alito’s wife at the couple’s vacation home.

The National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical organization for mainline churches in the country, has warned about the dangers of Christian nationalism. “In this quest for political power, Christian humility is lost, as is the message of God’s love for all humanity,” the council said in a 2021, statement. “Where the Bible has at its core the story of a people committed to welcoming aliens and strangers because they themselves were aliens and strangers, and to defending the oppressed because they themselves were once oppressed, the Christian nationalist narrative rejects the stranger and judges the oppressed as deserving of their oppression.”

This is exactly the kind of mainstream Christian view that enrages Allie Beth Stuckey. The author of Toxic Empathy, who styles herself a voice for Christian women, has more than a million followers on social media. In between lifestyle pitter-patter and her demonization of IVF treatments, she warns women not to listen to their soft hearts. This commissar of MAGA morality targets other evangelicals whose empathy, she warns, has left them open to manipulation. 

Maybe they recognize the humanity of an undocumented immigrant family and decide that mass deportation has gone too far. 

Or they make space in their heart for a young rape survivor forced to carry a pregnancy to term and start questioning the wisdom and morality of total abortion bans. It’s all toxic to Stuckey.

The don’t-love-thy-neighbor Christians have powerful allies in the war on empathy. Silicon Valley techno-authoritarians and social Darwinists argue that empathy is weakness and “suicidal” for civilization because it gets in the way of ruthless ambition and efficiency. That’s pretty rich for the crew that’s busy building artificial-intelligence systems they freely admit might obliterate humanity one day. But these are the same billionaires who dismiss critics and liberals as “NPCs,” or non-player characters, a video-game term for nonhumans. Once you see people that way, why would you care about understanding or helping them❓😢

They may be convinced that they’re the smartest guys in the room, but they’re dead wrong about this. Empathy won’t destroy civilization; indeed, it just might save it. We can debate policies. We can debate theology. But if we give up on empathy, we give up on any real chance of coming together to solve our problems. Empathy does not overwhelm our critical thinking or blind us to moral clarity. It opens our eyes to moral complexity. It’s not a sign of weakness; it’s a source of strength.

This might be lost on tycoons who have a huge financial interest in leaving the rest of us behind on their way to Mars, but one might hope Christians would know better. You don’t need to look too far back to find examples of those who do. I disagreed with President George W. Bush about many things, but I respected his sincere belief in a more “compassionate conservatism.” There was no greater proof of this commitment than the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a mission of mercy that helped save an estimated 26 million lives. It was a public-health miracle. Many of the program’s most ardent champions were evangelical Christians inspired by Jesus’s teachings to heal the sick and feed the hungry.

But, tragically, that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from slashing PEPFAR and other lifesaving assistance to people in need around the world. Experts predict that 14 million people could die by 2030 as a result—including millions of children.

Some earlier leaders of the religious right were also cruel and demagogic. When I was coming up in politics, we had huckster televangelists instead of social-media snake-oil salesmen, but the game was the same: exploit religion to profiteer and push an extreme political agenda. In the 1980s, right-wing firebrands such as Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant claimed that the AIDS epidemic was a plague sent by God to punish gay people. There was no shortage of rhetoric that I would call dehumanizing or un-Christian. These reactionary religious forces led a decades-long campaign against women’s rights and gay rights that helped turn the Republican Party against democracy itself. The rise of unabashed Christian nationalists is their legacy.

It has pained me to see my own United Methodist Church split by deep disagreements over gay rights. Many conservative American congregations seceded and joined with traditionalist congregations in Africa and elsewhere to form a separate, less inclusive Church. 

Other denominations have faced similar struggles. All of this has left room for upstarts such as Douglas Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a growing network of more than 150 Christian-nationalist congregations.

Another factor is Trump himself. No one mistakes him for a devout Christian,or a person of faith or morality. But his corruption isn’t just a personal matter—it taints everything he touches, including his Christian supporters. The conventional wisdom is that Trump says out loud what many others think privately, that his blunt bigotry gives permission for people to throw off the shackles of political correctness and woke piety. That may be partly true. Trump does bring out the worst in people. But it’s more than that. He makes people worse. Cruelty and ugliness are infectious. When they become the norm, we all suffer.

But what we’re seeing today feels different—and more dangerous. The question of who deserves empathy, and the rights and respect that flow from our shared humanity, has always been highly contested in our politics. But until now, no major American political
movement has ever seriously suggested that empathy and compassion themselves are suspect.

The decline of mainstream Christian voices in recent decades left a vacuum that the most extreme ideologues and provocateurs eagerly filled. The Catholic Church and the old mainline Protestant denominations have been weakened by destabilizing scandals and schisms, and have seen declining attendance. With the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian hitting record lows, the National Council of Churches expects that as many as 100,000 churches across the country will close in the coming years, mostly mainstream Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran congregations.

Consider the contrast between Trump and President Reagan, two presidents beloved by the religious right.

President Reagan offered a vision of an optimistic, sunny, welcoming America. He called it a shining city on a hill. His policies often failed to match his rhetoric, but the stories we tell ourselves matter. They shape our national narrative and shared moral framework. By contrast, Trump’s story is dark and angry, filled with “American carnage” in the streets. It makes sense that his political movement—and its version of Christianity—would be dark and angry, too.

President Reagan cultivated a distinctly American mythos: the aw-shucks cowboy working his ranch and standing up to tyranny. Trump, especially in this second term, has styled himself as a gold-plated Caesar, the farthest thing from an American ideal. Instead of the decency of Washington we get the decadence of Caligula; rather than the humility of Lincoln, the cruelty of Nero. You’d think good Christians would see the irony of throwing their lot in with a wannabe Roman emperor, but the whole point of a cult of personality is to leave you blind and afraid.

Finally, I am convinced that the uniquely pernicious dynamics of social media have put all of these trends on steroids.

Our addiction to algorithms has made society more lonely, anxious, and mean. Platforms like TikTok and Elon Musk’s X reward extremism and marginalize moderation. They promote negativity and smother positivity. Empathy doesn’t drive engagement, so it’s not valuable.

In the 1980s, I was impressed by Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argued that television was corroding American society and democracy. He bemoaned how religion and politics had been reduced to shallow entertainment as a distracted public lost the ability to think clearly and debate rationally.

Today I find Postman’s warnings eerily prescient. He argued that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Now that social media—and short-form, algorithmic video in particular—has taken over the world, it’s crucial that we understand how this medium is shaping our culture. It’s no coincidence that TikTok has given such a boost to far-right politics. It’s not just the hidden hand of the Chinese Communist Party, or the group of Trump supporters who recently bought the app’s American shell, although that’s also alarming. It’s that the medium is designed to boost vitriol and knee-jerk reactions rather than thoughtful dialogue. It provides fertile ground for misinformation and is inhospitable to serious journalism or debate.

Cultural critics have begun warning that we are at risk of becoming a “post-literate” society. They point to declining reading and math scores across the Western world in the years since the smartphone was introduced. The fear is that with fewer people reading books and newspapers, we’ll lose the ability to process complex ideas and arguments, become more susceptible to propaganda, and, to paraphrase Postman, scroll our way to oblivion.

There’s good reason to believe that a post-literate society will also be a post-moral society. We already have Christian influencers saying empathy is a sin. We have a president who is allergic to civic virtue. Americans spend countless hours on social media and are lonelier, angrier, and more distrustful than at any time I can remember.

What can we do❓ A good place to start is to follow the example of courageous faith leaders standing up to the Trump administration’s abuses. 

On January 23, about 100 clergy were arrested after protesting deportation flights at the Minneapolis airport. They prayed and sang hymns in the brutal cold until police took them away. Many more have fanned out across the city to support protesters and help immigrant families in need.

In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released an unusual special message condemning “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “the vilification of immigrants.” It is rare for America’s bishops to speak with one voice like this—the last time was in 2013—but they said, “We feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”

I hope grassroots faith leaders across the country who are appalled by what they see from an immoral administration and an extremist political right also find their voice. It is understandable that some stay silent out of fear. Influencers like Stuckey are zealously policing any deviation from the party line. But speaking truth to power has been part of the Christian tradition since the very beginning. The Christian community—and the country—would be stronger and healthier if we heard these voices.

We also need to contest this ground politically. If MAGA Republicans are going to give up on traditional virtues such as compassion and community, Democrats have an opportunity to fill that gap. The violent overreach in Minnesota may provide an opening to engage new audiences looking for alternatives. Many evangelical Christians who have long voted Republican are turned off by Trump’s venality and cruelty. Even some Republican leaders are starting to question the administration’s berserk immigration crackdown.

Democrats need a big tent that welcomes people of faith into our coalition, even if we don’t agree on every issue. Don’t forget, liberal Christianity has a long and storied history. Progressive people of faith have led virtually every major social movement. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in Selma. That’s a spirit we should work to reclaim.

Indeed, welcoming is not enough. Democrats should actively reach out to people of faith and try to win their trust and their votes. That dozens of liberal clergy have already signed up to run for office in the 2026 midterms is an encouraging sign. This doesn’t mean Democrats should abandon our commitments to freedom, justice, and equality for all, or fight any less hard for what we believe in. We should listen with an open heart and an open mind, and be unafraid to talk about our values.

I know empathy isn’t easy. But neither is Christianity. When Jesus called on us to turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute us, it was supposed to be hard. We fail more than we succeed—we’re human—but the discipline is to keep trying.

It’s especially challenging to feel empathetic for people with whom we disagree passionately. I certainly struggle with this. You may remember that I once described half of Trump supporters as “the basket of deplorables.” I was talking about people drawn to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia—you name it. “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable,” I said. I still believe intolerance and hatred are deplorable. Slandering a peaceful protester and cheering his murder is deplorable. Terrorizing children because their parents are undocumented is deplorable. But as a Christian, I also aspire to see the goodness in everyone and believe that everyone has a chance at redemption, no matter how remote.

When I see brutality like we’ve all witnessed in Minnesota, I ask myself: Can I really find empathy for people who insist on dehumanizing others? I’m not sure, to be honest. I’m still working on it. I believe our hearts are big enough to hold two truths at once. We can see the humanity in even the worst of our fellow human beings and still fiercely resist tyranny and repression. We can stand firm without mirroring the cruelty of our opponents. These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption. To be strong, we need more empathy, not less.