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The White House is gloating about the arrest of journalist Don Lemon, posting a picture of the former CNN correspondent with the message, “When life gives you lemons” and a chains emoji on X Friday morning. Boasting about a Black journalist’s arrest with a chains emoji was certainly a choice, evoking racist imagery. Federal agents arrested Lemon Thursday night along with one other Black journalist, Georgia Fort, and two Black activists, Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy. All of them were connected to the anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis church earlier this month where an ICE agent was serving as pastor. A federal magistrate judge had rejected a criminal complaint against Lemon last week, reportedly enraging Attorney General Pam Bondi.Three of the protest organizers were also arrested last week, with Bondi posting, “Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP” and the White House sharing a doctored image of one of the organizers, civil rights attorney and Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, supposedly crying as she was arrested.Arresting protesters and journalists is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The White House appears to be trying to intimidate anyone who opposes its racist immigration agenda—and even the journalists attempting to document it.

Lindsey Graham is so mad about his phone records being investigated that the South Carolina Republican might shut down the whole dadgum government.On Thursday night, Graham refused to support a bill agreed upon by both Donald Trump and Senate Democrats that would have solidified 95 percent of the year’s funding for federal agencies.The remaining five percent consists of the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security. Following months’ worth of public outcry against the violent actions of ICE, Democrats successfully stripped DHS funding from the larger bill. The new bill allows for a two-week stopgap, giving Democrats time to formulate policy changes before they agree to fund DHS.Graham is refusing to endorse the bill, not because of his love for DHS, but for a much dumber reason: he’s annoyed at a provision that repeals a law allowing senators to get payouts if they had their phone records seized by former special counsel Jack Smith.As one of nine Republican lawmakers who had their records seized while Smith investigated Trump’s role in the Capitol riot, Graham would have been able to sue his own employer and potentially collect millions of dollars in taxpayer money under the provision—an idea he appeared to be very excited about. Now, that provision (which was criticized on both sides of the aisle as essentially legalized bribery) is gone, and Graham is reportedly pissed.Graham will likely cave to his dear leader soon and agree to support the bill. But a government shutdown being caused by one of Trump’s biggest loyalists remains possible—and quite funny to think about.

Doug Burgum had a long resume before Donald Trump tapped him to be the secretary of the interior, but the credential that actually got him the job was apparently his wife, according to the president.“I saw them riding horses in a video. And I said, ‘Who is that?’ I was talking about her, not him,” Trump said Thursday, seated at the Resolute Desk beside the couple. “They explained it, I said, ‘I’m gonna hire him,’ because anybody that has somebody like you to be with, it’s an amazing tribute.”The reference to the video made Burgum’s wife, Kathryn Burgum, turn her face into her husband’s chest. Burgum served for eight years as North Dakota’s governor prior to entering Trump’s presidential cabinet.BREAKING: Trump just claimed that he hired Doug Burgum because he was attracted to his wife. What an awkward moment. "I saw them riding horses in a video. And I said, 'Who is that?' I was talking about her, not him. I said, 'I'm gonna hire her,' because anybody that has… pic.twitter.com/BE7BqEql0T— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) January 29, 2026It’s the second instance in recent weeks in which the president has opined about his colleagues’ wives.At a GOP retreat on January 6, Trump told a collection of Republican lawmakers that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has a “great wife,” recalling Jennifer Scalise’s affection for her husband after he was attacked by a gunman at a congressional baseball game in 2017.“Another one who has a great wife, Jacquie, is Tom Emmer, right,” Trump also said at the time, referring to the House majority whip. “Look at you, you have a great wife.”“She actually liked me at the beginning when we were having little fights,” he continued, recalling that he and Emmer used to regularly disagree. “But Jacquie was saying, ‘I’m telling you, he’s a great guy, he’s good. He’s going to be a great president, blah, blah, blah.’ She was fighting for me and now I love this guy. He’s great. Jacquie’s right about—she was right about both of us, I think, right.”

It was already a pretty weird week, what with Tulsi Gabbard—the official in charge of gathering foreign intelligence—showing up at a Georgia election office for an FBI raid. But then, on Thursday, the president of the United States filed a lawsuit that is an obvious shakedown of the government he runs. Donald Trump, his two older sons, and their business are suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion for allowing a government contractor to gain access to their tax filings (the contractor later leaked the files to the press). It reads like a transparent attempt to steal a few billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he can get away with it.It’s an interesting twist of fate that the Gabbard raid and this lawsuit both dropped in the same week, because they actually go together quite well in the Venn diagram of Trumpian iniquity. Both developments prove a core point about our system that everybody had better learn and be prepared to act on after Trump leaves office (assuming that happy day comes): namely, that Trump has shown that a conscienceless and corrupt person can pollute the system in endless ways because previous generations never anticipated that someone this comprehensively conscienceless and corrupt could win high office. There simply aren’t laws that prohibit much of what he does because it never occurred to anyone that a holder of high public trust would ever even try such stuff.Let’s look first at this IRS suit, beginning with a little historical background. First of all, as The New York Times reported when it got the leaked documents, Trump paid no federal taxes in 10 of 15 years from 2004 to 2019. We don’t know that that was a crime; maybe it was just fancy accountants. But one way or the other, it sure isn’t right.But OK, they got leaked. That’s against the law. Of course, one could argue that the only reason they had to be leaked was that Trump refused to release his tax returns publicly, making him the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon not to do so. Had he complied with that honorable custom—one that requires that people adhere not to a law but to a democratic norm of behavior—there would have been no leak.But fine. They were leaked. That’s illegal. And guess what? The guy who did it is in prison! He started serving a five-year sentence in May 2024. We can debate whether, in breaking that law, Charles Littlejohn in fact performed a public service (historical fact of note: Nixon’s returns also were leaked, and for that crime, no one was ever indicted). But Littlejohn broke a law, and he was convicted. The system, on paper, worked.For normal human beings, that would have been enough. Justice was served. But not for the Trumps. The slightest whiff of an opportunity to scam someone or someones—in this case, the taxpayers he was elected to serve—gets them salivating like hyenas over a springbok carcass. So now we have the unprecedented and frankly insane circumstance of the sitting president of the United States suing the government of the United States, over which he himself presides, trying to use his office to line his pockets. They’ll pick that carcass to the bone if they can.Now you might ask: Shouldn’t there be some kind of law preventing the president of the United States from suing the federal government, at least while he’s in office? I’m not a lawyer, so maybe there is some such law from 1856 or whatever, and someone will discover it. But assuming there’s not, I can tell you why there’s not: It never occurred to people that a president could be so petty and venal as to do something like this! Now let us turn to Gabbard. She has been sidelined for some time, ever since she made the error, fatal in Trumpworld, of saying something true to the factual record—that U.S. intelligence services saw no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said at the time, “I think they were very close to having one.” More recently, she was frozen out of the action on Venezuela.So, needing a way to get back in Dear Leader’s good graces, she boned up on a topic that she knew would demonstrate her value: the “fraudulent” 2020 election. How can she possibly claim jurisdiction over this obviously domestic matter, many have been asking since this week’s raid? Well, she can’t, on real Earth. But on Trump Earth, you might recall that back in 2020, there were some wild conspiracy theories that involved foreign governments and intelligence agencies. Remember “Italygate”? I thought you might not. It never really gained traction among us flat-earthers. But it was a QAnon favorite for a while there, and it held that an Italian aerospace company and an Italian Army general worked with the American Embassy in Rome to use Italian satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Yes, that is what they believed. Then there’s the China angle, which Trump was touting on social media just the other day. In case the Italygate story isn’t ominous enough for you, Trump tossed China into the mix. “China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” he posted. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.” This is the stuff of mad dogs and March hares, to put it mildly. But if you’re Tulsi Gabbard, it’s ample reason to claim that a conspiracy this immense not only allows for the nation’s chief intelligence officer to be involved, it veritably demands it!So now we are about to launch—at the expense of the same taxpayers whose pockets la famiglia Trumpa is trying to pick in the IRS suit—into an investigation into “crimes” that are more than five years old (and thus likely beyond the statute of limitations) and were never committed anyway. But Trump wants people to go to jail, and Gabbard and Pam Bondi—who meanwhile is 41 days late delivering the Epstein files and thus in clear violation of federal law—will move heaven and earth to make sure someone does. (Note: Bondi released more than 3 million Epstein-related documents today, just a couple hours after I wrote this.)Again, we might ask: Why is there no law preventing a president from using his government to pursue such obviously baseless revenge lawsuits? Because no one imagined a president would behave so sleazily. Or they thought that, if one did, surely Congress, regardless of party loyalty, would step up and assert its constitutional authority and make an unequivocal statement about what is right and wrong in a democratic society. Yeah. Right.So this is where we stand, as we begin this second year of the second Trump presidency. Three more years of this. It’s getting harder and harder to see how we survive it, but if we do, Congress is going to have to pass a bunch of laws that were never thought necessary until we elected a gangster as president.

The horrible killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and the resulting national outrage have given congressional Democrats perhaps their best chance so far to rein in President Trump’s misuse of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies. But they are totally squandering this opportunity. They have coalesced around a lackluster list of reforms that fully addresses neither the current situation in Minneapolis nor the broader problem of Trump essentially creating a fascist national police force. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are on the verge of a temporary agreement to provide funding for the Department of Homeland Security and several other federal agencies to prevent a government shutdown. But Senate Democrats say they won’t agree to long-term funding for ICE and the broader DHS unless three core Democratic demands are met: a requirement that ICE agents wear body cameras and proper identification and not masks; a new code of conduct for how agents use force and independent investigations if they are accused of violating those rules; and the end of roving patrols by ICE officers and requirements that they have warrants and work with state and local police. That’s not nearly enough. Body cameras are just not useful. As we’ve seen across the country, as local police officers increasingly wear them, law enforcement agencies are able to put up all kinds of barriers to the release of the footage. It’s not an accident that the police violence Americans see often comes from videos taken by citizens. And there is no evidence that officers behave better because they fear abuse being caught on tape. After all, police killings of civilians are at almost the exact same level as they were in 2014, before the Black Lives Matter movement and the resulting widespread adoption of body cameras. ICE agents wearing body cameras isn’t necessarily bad. But it’s the kind of toothless reform that Republicans and the Trump administration should be offering to calm anger from Pretti’s killing, not one of the core demands from Democrats. “Cameras are only worthwhile if they are consistently used, and if the footage is reliably accessible and used to hold officers to account. Officers can, and frequently do, turn their cameras on late, off early, or not on at all,” the liberal group FWD.us concluded in a recent report. Similarly, while I hate the image of masked agents on American streets, many ICE agents seem quite comfortable showing their faces and making threatening comments to people protesting them. There is no evidence that unmasked ICE agents will be less abusive. In terms of codes of conduct, ICE already has restrictions and guidelines on use of force. So do local police departments. These policies always include exceptions if officers feel threatened or unsafe—and officers always plead self-defense after they kill or injure civilians. Law enforcement officers are rarely prosecuted and almost never convicted. So again, this should have been in the Republicans’ counterproposal, not one of three ideas from Democrats. Trying to end roving ICE patrols is a solid idea that actually gets at the abuses of the last year. ICE agents, instead of targeting specific sites or individuals accused of immigration crimes, seem to be essentially driving around cities looking for Latino-looking people. That proposal should have been joined by a long list of substantive demands. Most immediately, there is no way that Democrats should sign onto DHS funding until Customs and Border Protection and ICE personnel are completely gone from Minneapolis. The killings of Renee Nicole Good and Pretti and the siege of Minneapolis are the immediate cause of this crisis. Trump fully withdrawing forces from the city would be an important acknowledgment that his administration’s policies in the Twin Cities have been autocratic and deadly. The Senate Democrats’ demands are so meager that ICE and CBP could likely remain in Minneapolis even if the party’s conditions are met. Second, Democrats should be doing much more to stop ICE from terrorizing communities and creating a climate of fear for not only illegal immigrants but legal ones too. Banning ICE from enforcement actions at houses of worship, day cares, courts, and hospitals is essential. A proposal from House Democrats to bar ICE from detaining American citizens should have been included in the Senate proposal too. Third, Democrats should use this funding fight to limit Trump from using CBP and ICE as a national police force and, really, a standing army. Democrats should insist that Customs and Border Protection agents, whose job is to defend the border, are never be sent to nonborder areas like Chicago and Minneapolis. After all, it was CBP agents, not ICE, who killed Pretti. As law enforcement journalist Jessica Pishko explained in a recent episode of TNR’s show Right Now, CBP agents are even less trained in policing in urban settings than ICE agents and are more violent toward civilians. And combining CBP personnel with ICE gives the Trump administration the ability to send hundreds or even thousands of law enforcement personnel to a city without involving the National Guard, which usually requires the sign-off of a governor. Finally, as long as ICE and CBP exist and Trump is in office, he will use them in dictatorial ways. So while Democrats can’t abolish these agencies, they can try to shrink them. Democrats must demand substantial cuts to the ICE and CBP budgets, at least 10 percent. The Republican-controlled Congress approved a massive increase to ICE and the broader DHS budget last year. The administration is using that money to go on a hiring spree, offering signing bonuses and loan forgiveness for people who sign up to work for ICE. And since immigration levels are low right now, the odds that these officers will show up in blue cities are high. Democrats need to claw back whatever money from ICE they can. This isn’t an exhaustive list. Groups such as FWD.us and Indivisible are also pushing aggressive proposals. But the point is that the Democrats’ opening bid should have been much bolder.“By starting negotiations without challenging the premise that ICE should be the 13th largest army in the world, by refusing to go after the source of their power—their obscene budgets—congressional Democrats begin ‘negotiations’ in an already right-wing, weakened framework,” says left-leaning writer and podcast host Adam Johnson. “Their unwillingness to meaningfully and substantively rein in the power of Trump’s DHS by seeking to slash their $170 billion-plus budget shows they are unable, or unwilling, to meet the moment.” Trump is in a very weak position right now. His administration has killed two people, in videos seen by people across the country. Americans are outraged at ICE. I doubt Trump and congressional Republicans would go along with most of the changes I proposed. But the Democrats’ starting point should have been eight or 10 serious proposals for real change, both to have a strong place to negotiate from and to inform the public what really needs to happen at ICE. Instead, the GOP is likely to adopt trimmed-down versions of one or two of the Dems’ small-bore ideas, Dems will fold, and there will be little change with ICE or CBP’s actions on the ground. We are seeing the usual Democratic fear and reflexive centrism. Party leaders think talking about affordability is their salvation and crime, and immigration their Kryptonite. There is little evidence for that second view. There is a moral case for forcing major changes to Trump’s immigration policies and increasingly an electoral one too. If a newly hired ICE agent kills someone in Chicago or Denver, a body camera will not keep that person alive and almost certainly won’t ensure that their killer faces any jail time. The Democrats are pushing reforms that they know won’t work because they are doing performative, perfunctory opposition to try to quiet their base, instead of real legislating and fighting to dismantle Trump’s ICE and CBP. It’s a huge whiff on one of the defining issues of this era. The time to end invasions of American cities and monstrous raids was yesterday, not 2029.

A girl was injured after being hit by a car sporting a large Trump flag on Thursday afternoon. The driver of the vehicle then sped away to screams from a crowd of high school students protesting ICE.The incident took place outside Fremont High School in Fremont, Nebraska. In video captured by Veronica Sandoval of News Channel Nebraska, a young man is seen entering a red SUV with a Trump flag mounted on the back. The young man reportedly drove past the protest multiple times before the incident, and student protesters heckled him from the side of his car before he began to drive away once more.One girl in the crowd ran toward the car from the front, seemingly attempting to stop it. The car did not stop but accelerated slightly, striking the girl and throwing her to the ground. The SUV then stopped for a split second before accelerating again, away from the scene.News Channel Nebraska reported that police and paramedics responded to the injury, and that the girl was alert and talking with first responders. She was loaded onto an ambulance and taken to a hospital.It’s the latest in a growing number of protest incidents that have turned violent, with one of the most notable being the shooting and killing of Minnesota poet Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross after Good attempted to drive her car away from him.