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Earlier this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—possibly the most prominent figure on Israel’s extreme right—canceled a visit to New York amid legal pressure, in a rare moment of accountability for a regime that generally operates with near impunity where the United States is concerned.  Ben-Gvir, who is best known for attempting to build […]

As the president demonstrates his utter insanity, 13 Democrats vote to help him suppress the vote.

According to President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, you may be a member of a criminal conspiracy if you have done any of the following: worn black to a demonstration, given face masks to protesters, joined a book club, distributed a zine. Recently, federal prosecutors have cited these actions as evidence that activists protesting Trump’s deportation […]

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.A Republican operative just offered something remarkable to Politico about how the party is thinking about the midterm elections right now. The operative said this: “We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out.” This quote seems to capture something bigger. There really is a sense that things are spinning out of Trump’s control. The Iran war debacle is deepening. A bizarre new outburst from Trump suggests he’s delusional about what this really means. The polls also show Trump continuing to crater on the economy. And as Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg pointed out on his Hopium Chronicles Substack, that GOP operative’s dismay is in sync with polls we’re seeing in the Senate races, including in places that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.But we still think there’s a long way to go, and a lot of things can go wrong. So we’re talking to Simon Rosenberg about how Democrats can close this deal, and whether all that GOP pessimism is really that justified. Simon, thanks for coming on.Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always a pleasure.Sargent: Good to see you, Simon. So Politico’s report is really striking. One GOP operative says they’re preparing for the bottom to fall out. That operative also says that Senate races are in play in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio, and even that House districts that Trump carried by double digits are firmly in play. Simon, I’m just not ready to get that optimistic. If all those places are really in play—and again, this is coming from a Republican—then it really is on the verge of falling apart for Trump. Are you there yet or not? And why?Rosenberg: No, I think we have a shot here. I mean, it’s a year of opportunity for us. How well we seize it is really going to be in part up to us. They’ve created a situation where he’s already fallen very far, much further than where he was in 2018 at this point. The national climate is plus seven or so, or above, for us, which means that the House should flip. We have polls showing Sherrod Brown up—independent polls showing Sherrod Brown up in Ohio, and Mary Peltola up in Alaska, and Josh Turek up in Iowa. I mean, these are states that Trump won by more than ten points.Sargent: A lot of this has to do with the war. A second Republican close to the White House tells Politico that all this is driven by Trump’s refusal to accept that he’s lost in Iran. This Republican calls this “a classic escalation trap.” I’m a little torn over this. On the one hand, it’s not that hard to imagine him pulling out of the war in September and declaring victory, though he’d probably have to accept a fair amount of humiliation to do that, and he might not be willing to. And yet on the other, you hear things like this from Donald Trump.Donald Trump (voiceover): A poll just came out. Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war. That just came out loud and clear in a poll. Nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Do you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? You think it’s good?Sargent: Simon, that’s really something. The new Washington Post poll finds 29 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the situation in Iran, with an extraordinary 69 percent disapproving. The contrast between him saying the war is popular and Republicans admitting the bottom is falling out over it is really something, isn’t it?Rosenberg: Yeah, look, he can’t accept—he has said repeatedly there are no limits on his power. And what he’s finding is that there are, and he can’t accept that. He can’t accept that the war may be the biggest mistake by an American president in all of American history. And he has no way out, because he already declared—remember, Greg, he already surrendered and declared victory once. And that didn’t work, because Iran wasn’t playing ball with the perception that he was actually the victor. And they started asserting themselves in the Strait of Hormuz, which was an unacceptable situation for the United States and his regional partners. And so he’s now had to go back in and do what he did before, which didn’t work, which is bomb them, which was ineffective. And so he’s in a very bad place. And the resumption of the war itself has driven up energy prices, and it’s going to reignite inflation. Interest rates are going up, the bond yields have gone up.Sargent: One Republican operative told Politico about the war, “Nobody can really defend it.” The Post poll, by the way, says only 28 percent say the war was worth fighting, 68 percent say it wasn’t, and only 31 percent say what the U.S. is doing right now will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, while 66 percent are not confident of that. Simon, if I’m reading that correctly, huge majorities are rejecting every single argument he’s making about this. I don’t know if we’ve seen such a dramatic repudiation of a president in modern times, have we?Rosenberg: Well, and you could make the case that there’s similar data on the tariffs. So here’s Trump—prices are going back up, his standing is in the toilet, the Senate is in play now. And his tariffs are expiring. His temporary tariffs, his global tariffs, are expiring on Friday. And instead of letting them expire and saying, listen, I think it’s the right thing for the economy and the American people that I lower prices, he’s desperately slapping all sorts of new creative tariffs on the economies of the world, purposefully raising prices. He jacked up Brazil to 25 percent. He jacked up Canada to 50 percent. So he’s now raising prices on purpose in a time when all these other prices are going up. And I think for the Republicans, you have to be tearing your hair out. It’s like, dude, let the tariffs expire. Let’s claim that we’ve lowered prices for people going into the election. But he can’t do it, right? Because he can’t admit defeat. He can’t backtrack on anything. He can’t course-correct. What happens when he gets challenged is that he just doubles down and escalates, and he’s doing it on the tariffs.Sargent: I want to underscore the importance of this, because I think it’s really lost on a lot of people. The tariffs are going to come back in a big way as we get closer to the midterms. And the tariffs are like the sleeper issue that really debilitated this president very badly in the first place. That’s what really started the inflationary stuff. And that’s when Donald Trump’s approval rating really started to unravel, particularly on the economy, over the tariffs. And so now for him to be out there, number one, saying the Iran war is popular when it’s polling at like 28 percent, and then number two, escalating the tariffs again heading into the elections after Republicans just took this tremendous political hit over that—I think, with those two things, you see a president who is utterly disconnected from any concern over what happens to his party.Rosenberg: Well, let’s add a third thing that’s going to erode their position before the election, which is that both the private plans and the public health care plans—people are going to start getting notices of the premium increases. And what we’re seeing in the data is that even private plans are going to see significant cost increases, and that 50 percent of businesses have said in surveys that they’re going to pass those cost increases on to workers in their companies. And so this is all going to happen in October, right before the election—that tens and tens of millions of people are going to be formally notified that their premiums are going to increase because of Donald Trump and the Republicans, right before the election.And then finally, you could add a fourth, which is we’re starting to get data that people are being pushed off of SNAP at a much higher rate than was anticipated. And so you’ve now got potentially tens of millions of people falling into greater food insecurity than was anticipated. And so all of these trend lines together add up to this basic reality, which is that Donald Trump and the Republicans have purposefully done extraordinary harm to the American people and to the United States itself in order to enrich themselves and their friends. And it is an extraordinary betrayal of the American people. People have figured it out. And every argument he makes—this is the point you made that I think is really important—he can’t get to a majority on anything that he’s doing any longer. He’s so distant from the electorate. And what it means for us is that we’ve got a shot, we’ve got a chance to have a really meaningful election where we really degrade MAGA’s power all across the country, which is why we’ve got to be working as hard as we can heading into November.Sargent: Simon, let me add yet another thing that I think is going to be working against them, which is that the ICE killings just started up.Rosenberg: Yeah. Sorry, how did we forget that? Number five, let’s add number five to the list.Sargent: Right, right. Seriously—I mean, ICE just killed two people, one in Texas, one in Maine, where there’s a very competitive Senate race. We have a piece up at newrepublic.com on the Senate race in Maine and how it’s going to be impacted by the ICE killing. Check that out, folks. But so there you’ve got yet another area where Trump is absolutely disconnected from the impact this is having on Republicans. This is a really bad issue for Republicans. You had mentioned that Trump can’t get to a majority on any issue. That now includes immigration, and the ICE killings are getting worse again.Rosenberg: Yeah. And I would just say to that—I mean, Tom Homan has been, for whatever reason, very vocal, very visible the last couple of days. And the guy is really a barbarian, right? I mean, the stuff he’s saying is so fundamentally illiberal and inhumane. He’s doing this, you know, like, hey, people wouldn’t get killed in the streets if they would follow law enforcement—meaning that he’s sort of sanctioning extrajudicial killing of Americans on our soil. And it’s just—it is shocking how Nazi-like and fascistic the language is when they get challenged. When they are feeling weak, they revert back to this kind of psychotic language about people, this inhumanity, this disrespect and contempt they have for everyday people, which is sort of the core of their politics.And so I agree with you, Greg. Adding to what you just said about Maine—there’s almost no state in the country that gets punished more by Canadian tariffs than Maine. And so Susan Collins not only had this ICE killing last week, she’s now got to contend with Trump’s whimsical, punitive—for whatever reason, he got up and decided to punish Canada again, because it’s his battered wife, right? He’s now putting Susan Collins into another terrible position. And so, yeah, look, it is extraordinary. What I wrote in my piece today is that usually when a president or a political leader in a democracy is in a position like Trump is, they’re trying to do everything they can to do things that help people and to make themselves popular again. And he’s doing the opposite. And it’s part of the reason that the Republicans realize that they’re attached to a crazy man.If you think about what’s happened in the Senate, Donald Trump hasn’t been helping the Senate Republicans. His major contribution to their reelection campaigns was to defeat two of them, as opposed to get them elected. So they don’t feel that he actually cares. I mean, he cares because he wants to protect himself from the hearings and everything else, but he’s not acting as if that is actually a priority for him, in partnering with the House and Senate Republicans to do things. Think about the housing bill, Greg, right? I’m sure you’ve covered this extensively. He denied them the ability to do this big public event showing that they did something to lower prices in the United States. He killed that event and buried that bill. And it ended up passing, but without his signature. And so they are aware that he’s acting impulsively, irrationally. They can’t trust him to lead their party into the midterms. And that’s why you get these kind of comments from Politico today.Sargent: OK, this is where it gets harder, though. I still don’t think we’re there yet. I’m not prepared to believe House districts that Trump won by double digits are really in play, with the generic ballot matchup still stuck at around four or five points. Democrats are up four or five, depending on which set of averages you use. Democrats aren’t doing well enough. And it just seems like a bunch of these Senate races are on a knife’s edge, and many could go the wrong way at once. If you look at the Times polling, The New York Times polling of Senate races, which I trust—I really think The New York Times is probably the gold standard poll right now—they had Texas tied, but they had Democrats a hair behind in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio. That’s not going to get you there. Am I wrong to look at it this way?Rosenberg: No, no. I think, first of all, everything’s within margin of error, right, in these polls. And yes, we have a long—we have three and a half—people start voting in two months, but we’ve got three and a half months till election day. Anything can happen. In 2014, for example, we were even in every battleground state on Labor Day, and we ended up losing most of those races.There are two things you have to keep in mind, though, Greg. One is that when you’re the party out of power in an election like this—it’s almost always the case, there’s no rules in politics, right, but there’s things that we know—that things break away from the incumbent party at the end. That’s part of what happened to us in 2024. That’s the likely scenario. The likely scenario is that things get better for us as we get closer to election day. The second thing is that our candidates have a lot of money that they’re going to be able to spend, much more. The Republicans have more money in the aggregate, but our candidates have more money, which is where you would rather have the advantage. And I think the fundraising has been important.And then the third thing I would say is that I’m hopeful that Democrats release some kind of modest agenda that says that if you vote for us, we’re going to do these three or four things that will give people more of a reason to vote for us, and not just vote against Trump. It’s what we did in 2006. We had this “six for ‘06,” we called it, in the big midterm win that we had in ‘06. I think that, in terms of what you’re thinking about, Greg—which is, how do we continue to improve our standing—I think that putting out a simple national agenda, you know, we want to roll back the tariffs, we want to increase the funding of the ACA, whatever it is—I’m ecumenical about what it is, right? But we need something to point to, to give people a reason to vote for us, which I think can, again, marginally improve our position, which is already a very strong position in the election.Sargent: I just feel like party leaders seem a tiny bit complacent. They don’t seem to feel like they’ve really got to make a big argument against Trump. They don’t seem to be willing to go out and do what you’re rightly advising them to do, which is to be extremely clear about what a Democratic Congress means.Rosenberg: Yeah, I don’t think this is that hard. I think that you and I could sit here and craft a three- or four- or five-point agenda that would be very consistent with where polling is and what people want, that shows that we are going to fight for them. Because look, what we know from polling—we know from the exit polls, we know from tons of polling that’s been done over the last year and a half—that people believe that Democrats’ hearts are in the right place, that we want to do the right thing, that we’re on their side. What they question is whether or not we’re tough enough to be able to deliver for them once we’re in power.Sargent: Rightly so.Rosenberg: Right, but this is very consistent through the polling. So we have to show them that we’re tough enough to deliver for them in power—in part by being more pointed, by fighting with Trump more directly and being aggressive in the contest. And I think that whether we’re coasting or whether we’re taking stuff for granted—I don’t think our candidates are. And I just want to, I guess this is perhaps my final point today—we have unbelievably good candidates all across the country. I have interviewed virtually every House and Senate candidate running this cycle in the last few months. And I’ve been doing this for 34 years, and I have been in every cycle for 34 years. Our candidates are really good. They seem confident. They feel like they’re connecting to their voters. They are raising lots of money. They’re feeling the affirmation from people on the ground. This is really important—when you have confident candidates, it’s because they feel like their message is connecting back home.And so the other thing I’ll just say, if I can say this last thing, Greg—and I just want to put this out there as food for thought. There have been a lot of theories about how we need to win again, kicking around out there. And I can tell you one thing that we saw in the New York Times polling, and that I have seen in my own interviews with these candidates, is that character and virtue really matter this cycle. People understand that the Trump guys are bad guys, and that they’re corrupt, and that Trump is morally deficient. And it’s weighing down the entire Republican brand around character and virtue issues. And in the New York Times polling, when they asked what was the most important reason you were voting for one of the Democratic Senate candidates, the number one issue wasn’t inflation or health care, it was character. And so we have a huge advantage around character this cycle that is also becoming a central reason why we’re winning. And the truth is, we have candidates of great character, who are virtuous people, admirable people. And people are responding to that. And my God, what a thing—that if we could take anything away from this election, that there’s still an ability to sell virtue and character as part of, in the Epstein era, right? It’s a good sign of where we’re not only going in this election, but our ability to create accountability and to restore democracy after this election, too.Sargent: I really hope Democrats listen to what you’re saying about the agenda, though, because I think we’re still not there. The flip side, though, is that Republicans are saying pretty clearly, to Politico and other places, that the whole thing is falling apart for Donald Trump. Simon Rosenberg, good to have you on. Again, I hope Dems listen to you.Rosenberg: It happens from time to time, Greg.

For violinist Michael Barenboim, Germany’s memory culture has become a tool for upholding complicity in Israel's crimes and rendering Palestinians invisible. The post ‘In Germany, Jews who reject Zionism are seen as not really Jewish’ appeared first on +972 Magazine.

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed? Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons. The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”Santa Clara was used, for example, to justify the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a sort of Citizens United precursor in which corporations were granted the right to spend unlimited funds on ballot initiatives. The dissenter in that case, weirdly, was the future conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Rehnquist wasn’t ordinarily a guy to lose sleep over excessive corporate power. But in this instance he worried the majority opinion would expand political rights for labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP. Rehnquist wrote:A State grants to a business corporation the blessings of potentially perpetual life and limited liability to enhance its efficiency as an economic entity. It might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere…. [T]he States might reasonably fear that the corporation would use its economic power to obtain further benefits beyond those already bestowed. In any event, Rehnquist’s fears were borne out—not by labor unions or liberal nonprofits, but by American businesses.One reason the Supreme Court justices in Santa Clara County took it on faith that corporations were people may have been that judges and regulators were starting to regard corporations as potential criminals under the legal doctrine of respondeat superior (“let the master answer”). The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 leveled criminal penalties against corporations, and so did the Elkins Act of 1903, which added criminal penalties to the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. (This is your periodic reminder that the federal administrative state was created not by Woodrow Wilson, as the Roberts court would have you believe, but by railroads behaving badly.) In 1909, the Supreme Court upheld the notion that corporations were people for the purposes of criminal prosecution in New York Central & Hudson River Railroad v. United States. Since you can’t throw a corporation in jail, it’s fair to ask what the point was in subjecting corporations to criminal prosecution. In civil trials, judges can levy fines and order corporations to change their behavior, just as they can in criminal cases. But in the early twentieth century, civil law wasn’t sufficient because little civil liability then existed for corporations; most legal bases for suing corporations were established during the New Deal and after. The practical reason criminal prosecutions persist is that it remains easier, at least in certain cases, to bring misbehaving corporations to justice through criminal law. Also, criminal prosecutions inflict greater reputational damage on corporate scofflaws. Starting in 2000, though—the same year, ironically, that the Justice Department put out a memo to encourage criminal prosecution of corporations—such prosecutions began a steep decline at the federal level, dropping from 304 to 99 by 2022, according to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Public Citizen. That might not be so bad if federal civil litigation took up the slack, but it didn’t. Lawsuits filed by the federal government declined during the same period. The falloff in prosecuting corporations is, of course, accelerating right now under President Donald Trump.You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million. Something else of interest happened in January. BitMEX created a swap listing tied to the $TRUMP memecoin. Two months later, Trump pardoned the co-founders and the company. The pardon didn’t appear in time to spare the co-founders from paying $30 million, but it was just in time for BitMEX itself to avoid paying the $100 million fine, since the deadline was later that week. Before Trump, pardons and commutations did not spare recipients from having to fork over unpaid penalties. (Once a fine is paid, it’s non-recoverable unless Congress appropriates the money.)I think probably the fight against corporate personhood is lost. Rather than grieve, fellow liberals, let’s demand corporations be taxed as people. The top marginal tax rate for Homo sapiens is 37 percent. The flat corporate tax rate is 21 percent. To properly respect corporations’ innate dignity as human beings, let’s tax both up to 37 percent (and then raise the top rate for both to 70 percent, as it was before Ronald Reagan). Capital gains are kind of corporate too, aren’t they? The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. Raise that to 37 percent as well, and later to 70 percent. To do otherwise would treat you and me differently from corporations, and since 1886, that has violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection under the law. People are corporations, my friend.

Not long after a federal agent killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine last week, Senator Susan Collins rushed to declare that she’d privately talked to Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Collins credited herself for getting Mullin to end the vehicle stops by agents that have spawned many killings on the streets of U.S. cities, including the deaths of American citizens.Only hours later, Trump abruptly reversed Mullin’s decision, decreeing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s reviled tactics will continue. “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump raged. The stops resumed, undercutting Collins’s effort to project deep concern about the killing.The incident neatly captures how Trump, through his handling of this horrific ICE shooting, is inadvertently screwing over Collins and complicating her path to reelection. The shooting is a real problem for Collins: It highlights her votes to fund Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces and her feckless refusal to rein in his worst abuses of power. It localizes a national issue and could viscerally mobilize Maine voters against her. And it allows Democrats to try to seize the offensive on turf that has historically favored Republicans.“Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, told me. “This is front and center now in our communities. And we are going to hold her accountable in November.”Can Democrats turn the ICE shooting into a serious liability for Collins and shift the broader moral debate over immigration their way? It should be very doable. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was gunned down after agents boxed in his vehicle outside his home in Biddeford, and his three-year-old daughter was seen crying after the incident. He has been widely described as a devoted father and hard worker who was in this country legally.Nor was Durán Guerrero the intended target of the enforcement operation to begin with. And the agent who pulled the trigger, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as mentally ill, violent, dangerous, and a domestic abuser. This horror raises profoundly grave questions about how ICE is recruiting, now that Trump and Stephen Miller are staffing up their deportation army at breakneck speed and unshackling it to carry out violent ethnic purges on a mass scale. It’s here that Collins deserves severe censure and should be politically vulnerable.Democrats, for instance, plan to make an issue out of a little-noticed vote by Collins not long before the shooting. In early June, Collins opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress. The amendment was defeated on party lines amid passage of $70 billion in new ICE funding, which Collins voted for even though it utterly lacked guardrails against future abuses.These votes could now create bigger problems for Collins. As it turns out, the ICE agents involved in the killing of Durán Guerrero were not wearing body cameras. Collins is now insisting that she secured certain protections against ICE this year, such as $20 million for expanded bodycam use and other minor safeguards. But if ICE’s latest shootings confirm anything—agents also recently killed a 52-year-old immigrant father in Texas—it’s that such half measures are entirely useless in holding back the monster that Trump and Miller have unleashed.Collins’s reelection depends in part on perceptions of her willingness to take on Trump, including on immigration. But her approach has accomplished nothing. ICE agents have dragged their feet in using bodycams despite money being appropriated for it, and Trump’s ICE forces have shot around two dozen people, killing six. If anything, ICE has now been supercharged by the $70 billion Collins voted for. Her little safeguards will prove as constraining as an old picket fence in the face of a megaflood.So Democrats can argue that only lawmakers who are prepared to fully deploy congressional power to grind ICE’s killing machine to a halt deserve office. “Collins is accountable for getting us here,” Murphy-Anderson of the Maine Democratic Party told me. “She has stood with Trump and ICE at every single juncture.”Obviously it will still be very hard to defeat Collins. The race is super-close: A new poll finds Collins’s almost-certain challenger, Troy Jackson, leading her by 49 percent to 46 percent, a statistical tie. She’s a resilient politician with deep ties to her state. Some pundits still argue that ICE matters to the Democratic base far more than to swing voters—and that Democrats must tread carefully on the issue. It’s at least possible this will prove correct.But there’s reason to doubt this in Maine. A recent New York Times poll found that only 42 percent of Maine likely voters approve of Trump on immigration, while 56 percent disapprove. Among independents, those numbers are a stunning 39–61. So vowing to rein in ICE may well appeal to many in the middle. What’s more, highly engaged voters will likely dominate in the midterms, and the outcome will partly turn on which side is more energized. Democrats in the state say the ICE killing has ratcheted up the energy big-time among both Democratic voters and older women, who play an outsize role in Maine elections. As Murphy-Anderson put it, this is “viscerally” playing “across broad segments of our electorate.”Then there’s how Jackson, the Democratic challenger, will handle the issue. A former social conservative who has adopted progressive populist views over the years, he declared of the ICE killing: “This rogue agency must be abolished.” It does remain to be seen how that will play among moderate voters. But it’s a key tell that Collins is at least trying to appear concerned about voter anger at ICE: The energy is plainly on the anti-ICE side. What will probably matter most is which candidate speaks to voters’ revulsion over these killings with more force and emotion, and which can offer a clear path out of this madness while promising to restore the rule of law. Collins can’t do this persuasively. Jackson can.Ultimately, Collins’s biggest problem on this front may be the true nature of the Trump-Miller project. Ask yourself this: Why did Trump suddenly restart the vehicle stops that Collins had just boasted of stopping? The answer is obvious. Trump and Miller want immigrants and their allies to receive their message loud and clear: They have no real intention of dialing ICE down even when—especially when—it results in horrific killings like this one. ICE recruitment relies heavily on explicit white nationalist messaging that is quite openly enraptured with purging and purifying the nation via unchecked paramilitary aggression. Trump and Miller want all this to be fully understood by Americans as exactly what it is: a violent ethnic cleansing project that you should perpetually fear and loathe as an inevitable fact of life under the brutality of Trumpian rule.Collins is proceeding as if Trump is capable of acting conventionally—as if he’ll willingly moderate to help vulnerable Republicans in bluer areas, or treat mass removals as a mere law enforcement operation that’s subject, as is typical, to reform when it results in violent, terrifying excess. But the violence and the terror are the point. Broadcasting that ugly fact far and wide matters a whole lot more to Trump than Collins’s political survival does. And in the end, there’s always this: She just voted to fund a whole lot more of it.