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Welcome to Trump’s Remake of Argentina’s Dirty War
• Jan 28, 2026

Welcome to Trump’s Remake of Argentina’s Dirty War

There’s no shortage of footage on the sights in the Twin Cities, where residents have spent these past few weeks in the streets, blocking roads, patrolling their own communities, and protesting against federal immigration agents—especially after the death of Alex Pretti last Saturday. While the Trump administration has seemingly taken a psychic hit and a brief stumble from the blowback of Pretti’s death, it’s worth remembering what it was doing as Minnesotans responded with grief and anger: It didn’t call for de-escalation but rather for Minnesota to give into its demands or face further reprisals.Treat any talk of a “pivot” to come with grave skepticism. One year into the second Trump administration, those in power have shown they not only are comfortable with regular attacks on the public and the ensuing chaos, they are, even now, systemically enabling them. They’ve taken kids and used them as bait to draw out family members. Each new day, footage or images out of Minneapolis show protesters and legal observers brutalized, hit with pepper spray or less than lethal rounds, or tackled by groups of masked agents. And even as the administration shifts out Greg Bovino for Tom Homan in Minnesota, it is ramping up a new large-scale operation in Maine.And none of what has happened in the last month is new or unique to Minneapolis. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and other Department of Homeland Security agents have raided communities, abducted people including American citizens, held detainees in poor conditions—and they’d already shot several people before the new year kicked off. The administration has defended these actions, smearing dissenters as dissidents and domestic terrorists and ramping up its “immigration enforcement” by surging personnel into cities to cow them. But in the last month, the full scope and agenda has become clear. Between the assaults on constitutionally protected rights, the ambient menace projected into peaceful communities, the endless smearing and scapegoating of the victims of state violence, and the brazen way the regime figures haven’t much bothered to downplay their campaign of mayhem, the Trump administration is waging an American version of the years of mass repression and state violence the ruling junta in Argentina carried out during the “Dirty War” of the late 1970s.The Dirty War, like the wider U.S.-backed right-wing campaign in Latin America known as Operation Condor, was an all-out assault, using direct violence, political repression and exclusion, and false narratives to snuff out the specter of leftism and democratic dissent as a whole. The United States has plenty of its own history of internal state violence that has led to what is happening in Minneapolis and elsewhere, but the tactics used today by the administration echo Argentina’s Dirty War. And that campaign offers a lens on how to understand them. For nearly a decade, Argentina’s right-wing rulers ran a campaign of repression that looks a lot like what we’ve seen on the streets of U.S. cities. The state, through the military, police, political machines, and corporate and civilian allies, hunted down anyone seen as opposed to the regime. At least 22,000 were killed or disappeared, with the actual death toll likely much higher. The U.S. has not yet seen—and hopefully will not see—figures like that, but it is seeing similar tactics, all the same: People are being abducted, whisked out of state or out of the country, disappeared before lawyers can fight for their release. The federal government has relied on local police to deal with protesters around the country, counting on cities and states to focus more on keeping the peace rather than stopping the feds. It’s been clear for months that “immigration enforcement” was just a pretext for terrorizing liberal cities and punishing political rivals. In Minneapolis, the administration even discarded any pretense that it was doing targeted enforcement. After the killing of Renee Good, it was widely reported that members of the masked forces in Minneapolis treated her death—now officially ruled a homicide—as a warning to the wider populace—“Didn’t you learn your lesson?” was the refrain that many protesters heard as agents mocked Good’s murder. This defiant defaming of Good happened even as officials claimed that she had attempted to ram ICE agents, which footage showed wasn’t true. After Renee Good was killed, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters that “ICE is doing what ICE is designed to do.” While he couched his comments in the context of immigration enforcement, it wasn’t hard to see the double meaning.The killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse with the VA who had been filming the confrontation between Border Patrol agents and protesters when he stopped to help a woman in evident medical distress, saw the administration leap immediately to pushing extravagant lies. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller immediately accused Pretti of being a would-be “assassin” (in a post shared by the vice president), while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused him of being a domestic terrorist. VA Secretary Doug Collins took more than a day to comment on the death of one of his department’s employees, in a statement that discussed neither the nature of Pretti’s death nor the smears against him by Collins’s fellow Cabinet members.These are claims to justify the violence but, given quickly and half-heartedly, instead accusing local civic resistance of being the underlying cause of these deaths. The shift is clear: The state violence is fine, and the administration is leveraging it as a tool for political power. The Trump administration’s casualness with state violence isn’t new. During the 2024 campaign, the Trump team expressed the view—reiterated by Vance last month—that mass abduction and deportation are the path to a perverse prosperity. For example, it was the skeleton key to resolving housing supply issues, by removing people from the country so others can take over their homes. It’s now using economic violence—seen in the attempt to deny blue states federal food aid or any federal funds—to bring these states to heel. It was a claim of fraud that brought ICE swarming to Minneapolis in recent weeks: the only fraud investigation in living memory that required the pacification of an entire city by masked agents of the state and the murder of two citizens at their hands. There is another, more searing parallel to the Dirty Wars. More than just sadistic punishment, this violent campaign is—for the Trump administration—a naked gambit for self-preservation. By using the full levers of violent power and allowing its shock troops to push the envelope by permitting them to circumvent the law, the Trump White House is trying to tamp down dissent and opposition. A big reason you see up-armored agents mobbing the streets, cameras in hand, is to create content that they believe will help intimidate the populace through constant demonstrations of their unleashed capacity for violence. As in Argentina’s darkest era, this is a holistic campaign of repression. But it might be backfiring in ways the Argentinian junta didn’t experience in its time. The events of the last week seem to have pushed the country past some kind of inflection point. Democratic senators are now actually rallying to stop DHS funding, and may even have the votes to stop it (after seven Democrats in the House voted to help fund this even after Good’s death). But Democrats lag the citizenry: The terror and violence in the Twin Cities has clearly galvanized more people into action. Despite the enormous fear and strain that residents of the Twin Cities have been forced to endure, they are anything but cowed. The Dirty War in Argentina didn’t end quickly. It took years of effort, a considerable amount of outside pressure, and the failure of the junta to quell dissent. Here in the United States, the administration has suffered a blow—though it can’t be counted on to back down anytime soon. Nor should we count on Trump and his fellow travelers to de-escalate the violent campaigns waged by CBP, ICE, and others. Bovino may be out, but the ramping up of similar actions in Maine and continued abductions around the country, including Los Angeles, prove they aren’t backing down. The potential for further harm is high and terrifying. But their open declaration of war seems to have finally hit a barrier they can’t simply sweep past. The only remaining question is whether and when the furious pushback against this dirty war becomes strong enough to finally break their back.

Donald Trump Is Frightened
• Jan 28, 2026

Donald Trump Is Frightened

The media verdict is in: President Trump has “softened” his stance on his paramilitary war on Minneapolis. He struck a “cooperative tone” in a call with Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz. The administration hopes to “shift its strategy” on its ICE raids. Trump is executing a “pivot” and is attempting to “deescalate.”You get the idea: Trump is chastened by the backlash to the ICE murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. So he’s now recalibrating the government’s approach in an effort to appear to dial down the violent social conflict that’s been unleashed.So let’s stipulate some threshold questions: Will any of this change how ICE is actually conducting its operations in American cities that fundamentally do not want ICE’s presence among their populations? Is Trump reversing the underlying reality of these operations—that they have become akin to military occupations of enemy territory within the American nation? Will there be serious governmental efforts to investigate those shootings, mete out accountability for them, and address what went wrong?The answers to those questions sure look like “no,” “no,” and “no.” To wit, The Wall Street Journal reports that some Trump aides have realized that all this has become a “political liability,” so they’re in discussions over “how to continue deportations without clashing with protesters.” They’re also planning new steps to “improve ICE’s image.”Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Trump met with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for two hours amid “concern” about the shootings. But Noem’s job is safe. Trump has replaced the public face of the Minneapolis occupation, removing Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who swaggers around these scenes of occupation like a conquering general, with border czar Tom Homan, who swaggers around on Fox News like a conquering general.Note the problem here. Trump does apparently want to minimize clashes between government security services and protesters. But he doesn’t appear to want those heavily armed government militias to stop doing the things that are causing those clashes in the first place.What’s really going on here is this: Trump is looking to defuse anger among congressional Democrats for purposes that don’t portend a meaningful shift. An administration official gave away the game to Punchbowl News, admitting that these “de-escalatory measures” are about placating Senate Democrats so they don’t seize this moment to demand restrictions on ICE as part of any government funding package.The problem for the White House, Punchbowl reports, is that if Democrats successfully renegotiate new measures, the House might have to pass a new package—the House already passed funding that included money for DHS—and Republicans doubt that’s possible. So the show of de-escalation is about making it easier for Senate Democrats to support appropriations bills that don’t require another vote in the House.If anything, this should stiffen the resolve of Senate Democrats to demand major restrictions on ICE at a minimum. As Bill Kristol notes, Trumpworld is showing weakness—so it’s time to “increase the pressure.” The key point, however, is that all this is about avoiding an outcome where Congress seriously restricts DHS. The goal is to not change the overall approach.This is driven home by a new letter that Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, just sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi. The letter points out that the FBI does not appear to be investigating the shootings of Pretti or Good, as it typically does in such instances. It also notes that the feds obstructed state investigations into both killings.In an interesting move, Raskin demands information documenting who made those decisions and how they were made:DOJ’s coverup of these killings did not occur spontaneously or in isolation. Someone affirmatively ordered FBI agents to drop the civil rights investigation into Agent Ross. Someone affirmatively ordered federal law enforcement to instead investigate Ms. Good’s widow. Someone affirmatively ordered line agents to block state prosecutors from accessing key evidence. Someone is now taking the same actions with regard to the killing of another American citizen.Bondi will throw this letter in the garbage. But it nonetheless opens a window on all the heinous wrongdoing that remains to be exposed about this entire affair. A Democratic-controlled House can use subpoenas to investigate who ordered DOJ to refrain from seriously investigating these government killings and much more.Meanwhile, Raskin is openly inviting whistleblowers inside DOJ and DHS to approach House Democrats and disclose wrongdoing about the cover-up of the shootings and other use-of-force violations going forward.“We are now being far more direct in asking whistleblowers to come forward in providing information that government officials won’t,” Raskin told me. “We are hopeful that people in the Department of Justice and FBI will step forward to bring us information about what’s really going on behind closed doors.”We will really know that Trump is changing course if he allows a good-faith investigation into the government’s killing of U.S. citizens to proceed. And that isn’t happening anytime soon.Still, Trump has visibly been caught off guard by what he’s unleashed. He senses that Democrats now have unexpected leverage over him—hence his effort to placate them before they restrict DHS. He sees that the public has turned sharply against him over the occupations and the smearing of the victims—so he instructed press secretary Karoline Leavitt to distance him from Stephen Miller’s description of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” and he now has his aides leaking word of his “pivot” and “de-escalation.”And Trump surely knows the DOJ cover-up of these killings is creating a wealth of new, sordid revelations for investigative reporters—and, possibly, a Democratic House—to unearth. He now claims to want an “honorable and honest investigation” that he personally will be “watching over.”There won’t be any such “honorable investigation.” Yet Trump, who is predisposed to smearing the victims himself but displays political canniness at unpredictable moments, clearly sees that the ethnonationalist ideologues around him—Miller and JD Vance, who harbor malice toward allies of immigrants and thus eagerly savaged the dead—are taking this to a politically perilous place.As Nicholas Grossman demonstrates at Liberal Currents, these killings have penetrated deep into information spaces that Trump and MAGA typically dominate. And Trumpworld is clearly aware of it. All this has seriously gotten away from Trump, taking on popular momentum that can no longer be channeled and controlled. And let’s be clear: Trump, the self-imagined master manipulator of popular passions, plainly knows this at least as well as anyone else does.

America Is at Its Wits’ End. What We Do Now Matters.
• Jan 28, 2026

America Is at Its Wits’ End. What We Do Now Matters.

MAGA men oil their guns with liberal tears, I know, but I have to admit I’ve been shedding them. Or not tears exactly, but a touch of liberal blood. Maybe that works on their guns too. A few days ago, back when I was forcibly trying to tune out the drumbeat of war in Europe, I suddenly blacked out. When I came to, I was bruised and bleeding from the bridge of my nose. A sketchy medispa offered intravenous hydration, and, settling into a big chair with a needle in my vein, I went right back to scrolling. At Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, declared American hegemony dead: “This is a rupture.” He’s looking for allies to organize a free world without us. Fascism is revving up here, but to the rest of the world, we’re at an ending. It’s curtains for the Pax Americana, and maybe even the dollar.The night before I passed out, my timeline was seized with videos showing young men heading north to confront ICE. The street clashes and wails of imprisoned children are driving Americans, once again, to clash and put themselves in harm’s way, while others bear anxious witness. “Doomscrolling” should no longer be framed as a bad habit, unless you’re sold on denial. In A Chill in the Air, Iris Origo’s Italian war diary (1939–40), she describes her utter dependence, as Mussolini’s Blackshirts thronged her village, on “the confused, discordant voices coming out of a little box” that foretold “inevitable, imminent catastrophe.” The same dread is here. Will there be more bloodshed in occupied cities, economic collapse, war with NATO? Reels and TikTok now bleat like the AM tube radio that kept Origo informed and misinformed in equal measure. “‘It’s Now Happening’—Urgent $38 Trillion U.S. Dollar ‘Collapse’ Warning Issued as Markets Brace for Gold and Bitcoin Price Shocks,” read a recent headline, which I first took for propaganda and spam, until I saw it was Fortune; but is Fortune now propaganda and spam like CBS News? Origo later remembered the truth-lies mix from the radio as the worst noise of the war, more disturbing even than the roar of bomber planes. On the night before I fainted, Minneapolis adrenaline seemed like the only response to the fact that, incontrovertibly, it has happened here. Evidently, the old “the Resistance is cringe” wankers who scoffed at the f-word now concede that the “hysterical pussy hats” were right. Shoulda listened, gentlemen. And who’s hysterical now, ye Chapo graduates with your bear spray and Rambo dreams? Where was that ferocity a decade ago when you couldn’t be bothered to so much as join up with the bow-tied Never Trumpers, let alone knit a damn hat and march with us pussy prophets, back when this might actually have been prevented?But I’m not mad at you, as Renee Good once said. No, no, no. Nearly 60 percent of Americans now consider Trump’s first year a failure—you don’t say—so the majority of the United States is at least thinking clearly again. And there’s more than one way to skin a cat, so it should be OK that our fellow Americans choose variously to fight, flee, freeze, fawn, or even flop. Surely some of those sucking up to brain-broken Trump at Davos (like aviator-wearing French President Emmanuel Macron with that vomitous “my friend” text) are fawning to protect themselves, just as Renee Good was fleeing to protect herself and her wife. No emergency behavior may be a noble choice, and fawning for Trump is of course immoral, but here we are. On the little boxes of 2026, the murder of Alex Pretti, hard on the heels of the murder of Good, has been met with moral stupefaction. Minnesota sure looks like a battlefield. Erin Maye Quade, a state rep in a Minneapolis suburb, describes the scene. “I’ll just see abandoned cars on highways, and neighborhood streets. Sometimes the doors are still open and the car is still running.… You could be in line at Burger King and an ICE officer snatches a random worker on the way into work. You could be at a restaurant, and all of a sudden 14 ICE officers come in and kidnap every single worker.”But in New York, on the sidewalks and in the subway, people seem to be Brits-during-the-Blitz-ing it, keeping passably calm and carrying passably on. When I first heard tales of that famous pose in London in 1940, I pictured it with admiration. Now, a dumb bandage on my nose, I can only guess at the blood pressures of repressed people stoically punching the clock in pinstripes. At night, they were allegedly having lots of sex, but were they fainting too?In the videos from Minneapolis, no one seems to be keeping calm or suppressing anything. Good for them. Various Minnesotans keep telling us they have Viking blood up there and not stiff Brit upper lips. It takes all kinds. Some people genuinely think of themselves as Vikings, some as British stoics, some as Black Panthers. In Philadelphia, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense cases the city while carrying big guns. (“Those who serve in the public, they should be fearful of the public,” their leader said recently.) Until now, maybe, presidents have counted on cultural norms, federalism, inertia, the regal dollar, and general human benevolence to get us to believe we’re all American and throw in with this implausible experiment. As we know, the laws, norms, benevolence, and even inertia and federalism are in flames now. So some of us are going to land on the fainting couch, and supply MAGA with gun oil, while others like Pretti and Good are going to head toward danger. On the other side, a Border Patrolman is going to slip and fall, wham, on the Minnesota ice—and give our side video for days. As a liberal-tears-shedder from the icy north, I felt no pity. Then I trudged back to Union Square to protest ICE.

Trump Advisers Quietly Turn on Stephen Miller as Brutal ICE Poll Hits
• Jan 28, 2026

Trump Advisers Quietly Turn on Stephen Miller as Brutal ICE Poll Hits

After we recorded this episode, we noticed that Axios is reporting that anger is rising at Stephen Miller inside Donald Trump’s inner circle. Some White House officials blame Miller for smearing ICE murder victim Alex Pretti. This comes as reports in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times suggest that other top advisers want ICE to change course in a way that is running afoul of Miller’s designs. That all this is leaking out shows internal dissatisfaction with Miller is growing. Meanwhile, a new YouGov poll finds 55 percent of Americans and 67 percent of independents have very little confidence in ICE. Both reflect large recent spikes. We think all this reflects a deeper Miller-MAGA miscalculation. So we’re talking about all this with The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, who spent time in Minneapolis and wrote a good piece on the outpouring of popular energy there. We discuss what he saw on the ground among ordinary people, why it badly undermines Miller-MAGA ideology, how we know advisers are turning on Miller, and how MAGA poses a far bigger threat to social cohesion than immigrants do. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

LIVE: Minneapolis Erupts, Protests Spread Nationwide After ICE Killing of Alex Pretti
1:24:43
• Jan 28, 2026

LIVE: Minneapolis Erupts, Protests Spread Nationwide After ICE Killing of Alex Pretti

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