The Chief Concerns Americans Have and Should Have About Their Lawless President
There's a strong case against invoking the Insurrection Act
On Foreign Policy
War crimes have been committed in the unauthorized bombing of boats near the coast of Venezuela. Initially claiming his concern with its government was about its participation in illegal drug trades to the US, that drew skepticism and scorn because of his pardon of the former president of Honduras - convicted of doing exactly that, to a far more extensive degree. Conviction required extensive evidence which has been completely lacking in his Venezuela bombings.
As well, he pardoned the Founder of Silk Road, serving two life sentences for facilitating major drug and weapons trades on the black market. There is no rational consistency in his anti-drug policies.
Based on the latest reports about US military ships headed to Middle East waters near Iran, it appears in approximately a week, there’ll be a considerable force poised around Iran. If it’s correct that Iran’s government has killed more than 2,000 protesters, of course, world governments have a shared interest in stopping such brutalities. Yet, with the US president using his current approach of going it alone, without allies or Congressional authorization, there’s plenty of reasons for marked concern.
Iran has the 8th largest active military in the world, twice the size of Iraq’s. With a population near 96 million, it would be the largest country by population that the US has ever fought. And our history of military actions in Middle East countries is fraught with gross errors in military and cost estimates, with multiple examples of wars lasting far longer than initial guesses and with quite a few examples of deadly blowback events.
Then there’s his Bully-or-Buy approach to his wishlist of taking over Greenland. There simply is no strategic value militarily to do that. There’s only the suspicion that he plans to open it up for raw materials extraction. And with his record to date, that’s likely to include either direct personal profit (via kickbacks?) or via contributions to Super PACs that he controls or gains benefits from.
I don’t think military action is imminent against Greenland due to the priority that he’s expressed to deal with Iran. As well, with the NATO exercises currently occurring in Greenland, it’s doubtful he or anyone could handle both countries simultaneously.
One of the two greater concerns of the American public is the domestic economic policies he’s pursued.
Cost of living inflation of essentials like food, housing and home energy costs is uppermost in the minds of at least half of US adults. His use of tariffs has worsened that. The price of eggs has dropped since last March and gasoline has done its usual seasonal decline, but now appears to be starting its usual seasonal rise to mid-May, where it will fluctuate slightly into September, just before early midterm voting begins. So there’s nothing there to suggest any economic relief to be hopeful about.
Predictably, after decimating farmers - especially soybean farmers - he’ll likely plunder the US treasury to offer them financial bailouts to cover his mistakes.
And even wealthy investors are displaying concern with his efforts to prosecute his own appointed Federal Reserve chair. With or without that prosecution, the chair’s term ends next Spring. Will he replace him with a yes man so he can control Fed policy to benefit his popularity while fresh economic reports get viewed with increased suspicion that the numbers are being faked? There is no clear answer, but clearly increasing skepticism is the new normal with his economic policies to date.
In addition to the already obscene wealth disparity in the US, his tax cuts will widen that further, the healthcare cuts will likely leave at least 20 million Americans without affordable healthcare, he’s weakening environmental regulations, decimating alternate energy policies and weakening worker safety regs all of which point to the value of a campaign finance system that rewards the biggest donors and flips the bird to everyone else.
The other greatest concern causing plenty of worry is of course, his rogue immigration policies. ICE was created 23 years ago and along with Border Patrol, has been mostly successful at stemming the tide of undocumented immigrants crossing our Southern border. Despite the fears that have been provoked by several violent crimes committed by immigrants during the 45 year sharp rise that began during Reagan’s first term.
In the past 15 years there have been unusual years of extra incoming waves caused by covid, the end of covid lockdowns, extreme poverty and increases in cartel terrorism in 3 countries. Biden weathered two difficult economic inflation years (2022-2023) and in 2023 a big immigration upsurge year but with policy adjustments tamed both in 2024. Our economy outperformed every other developed country in its recovery from the covid downturn, but that success was undermined by Biden’s verbal declines in public appearances near the end of the 2024 primary season.
And Trump has done worse with the economy. It appears to many that Stephen Miller is running immigration policy and quite possibly some combination of Miller, Hegseth and Rubio may be running foreign policy. There’s plenty of examples that Trump is experiencing health declines based on his word drifts, his topic wanderings, his incomplete sentences, his on-camera slumbers and his occasional shuffle wanderings. He’s been getting occasional cognitive testing more often than elderly people acting normally get.
Just a few days ago with his staff and Cabinet arrayed around the giant table, mid talk, Marco Rubio slipped him a note. It’s not uncommon to see someone do that quietly as a reminder of something. Trump picked it up and before digesting its content, blurted it out word for word. Then he wandered off to the window behind him to gaze at the site of his planned ballroom. While he mumbled, Vance and Rubio - who were flanking him at the table, exchanged mutual grins that seemed like two grandsons giggling at Grandpa’s senior moment faux pas.
My instincts may be off but I’m getting the impression that Trump’s staff and main aides are creating policies and selling them to Trump, and they regularly feed him snippets of news reports, conspiracy theories, memes he’ll like and basically they micromanage what he sees in media to influence his perceptions so he’ll be more amenable to their policy prescriptions.
And their worst prescription is the way they’re directing ICE. Their agents used to do well without all the drama, without staged events like rappelling from a helicopter, without arresting people while leaving their vehicles in the middle of streets. This past week, they left a dog in one car. In another car, the engine was running, the tranny wasn’t in ‘Park’ and it rolled down the street unoccupied.
(Cartoon by former pastor David Hayward)
Nobody needs reminding of the murder of Renee Good. ICE has tackled and cuffed special needs people unable to grasp why. They’ve grabbed mothers at school bus stops so their kids will get off the bus wondering where their parents are and why. They grab and deport people who’ve followed all the rules in pursuit of a visa, residency or refugee status, taking them during their scheduled court appearances.
Unlike his campaign promises to go after the worst of the worst, more than two out of three deportees have no criminal records. Some have been part of local communities for 20 or more years, without a crime, paying taxes and offering good services to communities and customers.
Citizens are being detained without being served warrants and denied access to their families, lawyers and phone calls. One US student who booked a flight to visit her parents was just released after being wrongfully held for 20 days. And wrongfully means illegally. They’ve also been detaining Native American Indians. Really.
Why ???!!!??
After numerous reports of serious problems at several detention facilities (overcrowding, lack of food and water, lack of medical care, assaults and sexual assaults, etc.) members of Congress and state legislatures began visiting some facilities but now the Dept of Homeland Security is denying those visits, prompting concerns that they’re hiding increasingly terrible conditions.
And this administration has built an international gulag system that stretches from the Western hemisphere to Africa, sending immigrants to prisons where they don’t know the language, the laws or customs.
Why?
The DHS is using at least two programs that gather data from all phones in a defined area, that grant them the power to make audio recordings of you without your knowledge if you are in that area. It’s essentially a warrantless search of US citizens not suspected of committing any crime. Citizens are not required by law to open doors or windows when law enforcers demand it, are not required to show ID on demand and don’t have to follow the orders of law enforcement. They aren’t permitted to directly interfere with law enforcement during arrests, but blowing whistles, talking to or yelling at officers and agents has never been defined by courts as interference. Professionals in the field are trained to deal with excessive noise of that nature.
With cities like Minneapolis and St Paul being under siege by federal forces 3 and 4 times larger than their own city and county police officers, businesses are being shuttered, some people are skipping work, schools get locked down, medical appointments are being missed, and many families are homebound while neighbors deliver food and essential supplies. Not only are undocumented immigrants holing up like that, but legal immigrants and US citizens who are brown-skinned are doing this to avoid their families being broken apart by temporary detentions hat have been okayed by the Supreme Court.
Yet with every peaceful protest comes increasing White House and DHS threats. State officials and citizens have two growing fears:
1) that ICE is trying to provoke violent responses and if citizens oblige, Trump will declare martial law, send National Guard and US military troops into multiple cities and cancel the midterm elections. And…
2) that he and his staff will continue to define members of the press as stupid and as traitors, define peaceful protesters as domestic terrorists (or part of their fake antifa organization) and begin arresting and jailing more of each.
These fears are consistent with many historical power grabs by dictators and fascists. Yesterday (and not for the first time) the president said he might invoke the Insurrection Act ‘as many other presidents have done’ in his words. But what convinced those other presidents to invoke it?
In the past 127 years the Insurrection Act has been invoked by nine presidents 15 times. It was also thought that Herbert Hoover invoked it against the Bonus Army in 1932 but historians found it hadn’t been invoked and that General Douglas MacArthur had cleared out the Bonus Army camps, at times without presidential authorization.
A closer look at why the Act was previously used reveals that five were directly provoked as a counter to racists in the Civil Rights era (1957-1968) with another six caused by Black citizens’ riots that occurred due to the violence they’d endured for years from local police forces and white supremacist domestic terrorist organizations like the KKK.
Two uses of the Act occurred to quell mineworker riots caused by the same detective agency used by mineowners that attacked unionized mineworkers on strike in Colorado and West Virginia. Another use came due to looting and lawlessness in the wake of a natural disaster. And one was in response to a prison uprising with 1400 prisoners taking hostages.
So racism, including police brutality and citizen brutality, caused 11 of the 15 uses of the Act and 2 more were violent attacks directed by anti-union mineowners. The response to the prison uprising has relevance to today’s situation as it was triggered by the announcement that Cuban immigrants with serious criminal histories were going to be deported back to Cuba. 1400 Cuban immigrants in that Atlanta prison rioted in response. Stephen Miller has cited the Mariel boatlift of 1980 that saw an estimated 125,000 Cubans and Haitians come to the US as an example of the immigrant crimes it exposed the country to. One in eight were estimated to be criminals then. Crime rates by current immigrants are far far fewer than that.
And notably, in 2024, Minnesota was the 16th safest state in the country for homicides and violent assaults. The federal forces being directed at Minnesota has arisen from racism and political retribution. Representative Ilhan Omar has been a steady critic of Trump and he’s since called all Somalis ‘garbage people’ including the approximately 107,000 legal Somali-American citizens living in Minnesota. Trump officials highlight the ongoing prosecution of less than 100 of those Somali-Americans for fraudulently obtaining government grants in the past 5 years, even though Minnesota officials have been successfully gaining convictions without any federal assistance.
And the Trump officials conveniently leave out the fact that the fraud conspirators were led by a white American in their daily effort to demonize 107,000 for the actions of less than one one-thousandth of that legal immigrant population.
Observers of the crime situation, the undocumented immigrant situation and the active protest situation in Minnesota find no reasonable cause to invoke the Insurrection Act as there is no insurrection occurring there. Racism provoked by ICE agents and GOP politicians is what’s occurring while people innocent of any violence are being targeted by the Trump administration.
And there’s a long history of law enforcement violence causing the invocation of the Insurrection Act (especially in Detroit), along with violence by racist white supremacist groups. Repeated claims that protesters are attacking ICE vehicles with their cars have repeatedly been disproven by video evidence. No ICE agent has ever been killed in action in the 24 years of its existence.
It’s the propaganda of racial hate that the Trump administration is spreading as it tries to escalate the confrontations with protesters to justify its desired march to martial law. Any people who remain behind, in denial of the hatred at the core of the practices now being employed by ICE are not paying attention to what the residents of cities facing these assaults are describing. Or they simply don’t care. They’re fine with the torture of immigrants, okay with the harassment and detentions of Americans of color and couldn’t care less whether women are permitted fewer rights than men have.
The misogyny is especially evident in the fact that only 1% of the Epstein files have been released despite Congressional laws and court orders. The deadline to reveal them all was four weeks ago and the foreign policy adventurism is always the easiest way to divert attention from Trump’s own record of assaulting women. Meanwhile, Epstein’s chief partner gets moved to a cushier prison and gets a puppy.
Over 1,000 victims await justice. It’s a safe bet that ICE isn’t going to help those ‘fucking bitches’, nor is the White House with its transparent victim blaming. And war kept Netanyahu’s criminal trial largely stalled for four years, just as the trials of Donald Trump were stalled by a network of bumbling attorneys because billionaires can afford to do that. And unenforceable Supreme Court ethics policies mean billionaires can seemingly buy their legal opinions too, also protecting the lawless president with their radical immunity bestowal.
The majority of Americans disapprove of ICE’s actions, don’t approve of the hostile acquisition of Greenland, don’t hate people of color or homosexuals. and by at least a 9 point margin, don’t support Trump’s poor decisions. Most view pedophiles as the lowest of the low for their crimes against innocent children. And most want to know if Trump was an integral part of the most scandalous pedophile ring in US history.
Former Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump begged her not to support the Epstein file reveal legislation, saying “It would hurt my friends.”
Hanging with and protecting pedophiles isn’t what anyone should want in a president. Or a municipal animal control guy. If that’s what you want from a public servant, I’m pretty sure we can never be friends.
I enclose a couple charts of past invocations of the Insurrection Act. Please excuse my awkward red notations in them.
We don’t need a racist misogynist invoking any Act except the act of resigning. Make that clear to your elected representatives, okay?