Friday News Roundup
Trump’s Declining Support
I advertise my column as an antidote to doomscrolling. Personally, I have found it better for my mental health if I try to process Donald’s Trump negative effect on the country if I do it in a concentrated burst & try to move on for the rest of the week.
I don’t believe in optimism for optimism’s sake if it rings false, but in this case, we have some great news about Trump’s declining support. Pushback against Donald Trump works. And we should keep on pushing. When even a moderate conservative milquetoast like David Brooks is telling us we should have a “a comprehensive national civic uprising,” the time could never be better to resist.
A major bearer of good news is the Pew Research Center, which released some survey results two days ago. The results show the complete across-the-board collapse of Donald Trump’s support in many demographic groups. The only two groups that still give Donald Trump a positive favorability rating are Republicans/Republican leaning voters and those who voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
Donald Trump even has -2 favorability rating with white people, a -11 rating with men, and -12 rating with people who never went to college. One of the biggest declines in approval for Trump has occurred among people who abstained from the 2024 election. Just two months ago, in February, 44% of nonvoters in the presidential election supported Trump, but now Trump’s approval among nonvoters in 2024 has dropped 13 points to only 31%. This rapid increase in nonvoter satisfaction could be a major opportunity for the Democrats, but only if they don’t blow it.
Right Wing Violence Watch
Phoenix Ikner, the registered Republican who perpetrated last week’s shooting at Florida State University that left two people dead, was a member of the pro-Trump organization Turning Point USA. Ikner had also previously attended Tallahassee State College, where he was a member of a nonpartisan discussion group called the Political Roundtable. According to Reid Seybold, the leader of the Roundtable, “…basically our only rule was no Nazis… And he espoused so much White supremacist and far-right rhetoric as well. To the point where we had to exercise that rule.” Ikner would make even white supremacist statements to his classmates like “Rosa Parks was in the wrong.” Ikner’s grandmother publicly blamed Phoenix’s father and his police officer stepmother for turning him into a violent bigot: “They taught him how to hunt, they’re bigoted people, they hated a lot of people.”
At the Foraker Group summit, one of the biggest civic events held in Alaska each year, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski confided her fears of Trumpist violence. Murkowski said, “We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” Murkowski is too reticent to call out Trump by name, but it’s Trump who sponsored the primary campaign against her in 2022.
Trump’s Deportation Gulag Policy
It’s becoming clearer every day that Trump’s deportation policy is based on lies. Trump’s stated justification for his mass deportations comes from a presidential proclamation titled, “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua.” First of all, immigration is not invasion. If you don’t question that premise, you are accepting a white nationalist framing of the immigration issue. More importantly, the proclamation uses the Alien Enemies Act (a law denounced as tyrannical since the Jeffersonian era) to claim that Trump’s immigration policy is a foreign policy matter that cannot be blocked by the courts. In order to back up that claim, Trump makes claims that Tren de Aragua has infiltrated the Venezuelan government, which is now trying to “invade” the U.S. by encouraging members of Tren de Aragua to immigrate here.
Unfortunately for Trump, 17 out of the 18 intelligence agencies in the United States say that Donald Trump is completely wrong in his claims about Venezuela in Tren de Aragua. As Venezuela expert Geoff Ramsey at the foreign policy think tank The Atlantic Council said, “The idea that Maduro is directing Tren de Aragua members and sending criminals to infiltrate the United States is ludicrous.” In fact, in 2023, Venezuela’s leftist dictator Maduro invaded a prison with an army with 11,000 troops in order to take control of the prison away from Tren de Aragua. In this respect, Maduro was actually harsher against gangs than Nayib Bukele, the El Salvadoran dictator running CECOT aka Donald Trump’s immigration gulag.
Here are some other news stories about Trump’s immigration policies that came across my radar screen this week:
According to this story by Zeteo, Columbia University ignored frantic emails for months from student Mohsen Madawi who pleaded with the university for protection from the FBI illegally breaking in to his apartment. Madawi pleaded to have his own on-campus housing in order to be protected from being kidnapped off the street by government agents, but Columbia refused.
What’s more, event though he has an Arabic name, Madawi is a convert to Buddhism. When an anti-Semite came to a pro-Palestine rally, Madawi nonviolently confronted the bigot, when neither Columbia campus security nor pro-Israel groups would do so. As Madawi said, “You don’t represent us because we have Jewish brothers & sisters who stand with us.” Trump claims that his deportations stem from his fight against campus anti-Semitism, but when a pro-Palestine protester actually did act bravely to defend Jewish students, the Trump regime keeps him detained anyway.
Two German women planning a backpacking trip in Hawaii ended up getting full body scans and strip searches, followed by deportation, instead of the spirit of aloha.
Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois is currently pulling state funds from El Salvador, including from its $200 billion state pension fund, in a boycott against Nayib Bukele’s support of Trump’s deportation gulag policy.
If you thought your high school literature or history class was too hard on the people who told the Nazis that Anne Frank was hiding in the attic, have we got an app for you! MAGA influencer Laura Loomer is promoting IceRaid.US, an app that promises people cryptocurrency rewards for snitching on immigrants to ICE. The man behind the app is Jacob Engels, a close associate of both Alex Jones and J6 conspirator Roger Stone. The Southern Poverty Law Center has the receipts on this guy.
ICE agents are now frequently found violating the sanctity of local courtrooms, such as when masked agents stormed a Charlottesville courthouse to arrest an immigrant housepainter paying a fine for drunk driving. It’s absolutely shameful that in Charlottesville of all places that ICE is acting more like a bunch of tiki torch Nazis than public servants upholding the law.
In a less noticed story, attorney general Pamela Bondi’s brother Brad is running to become president of the DC bar association, in an attempt to take over the professional association for MAGA purposes. This is relevant to the immigration issue, because one of the safeguards that prevented Donald Trump’s coup on January 6th from succeeding is that lawyers who lie for Donald Trump face disbarment, which happened to Rudy Giuliani in 2024 for his participation in the plot to overturn the 2020 election. If we don’t have the threat of disbarment or sanctions, which will happen if Brad Bondi neuters the DC bar association, then Trump Administrations lawyers in immigration cases will be able to lie before judges with impunity.