Trump’s War on Three Fronts: Blue Cities, the Middle East, and Stochastic Terrorism

The assassinations and near-assassinations in Minnesota are symbolic of what true believers will attempt.

It was a bad weekend for President Donald Trump; his military parade didn’t draw the kind of support he’d dreamed of, millions of people in over 2000 locations in all 50 states turned out for No Kings Day, and the Middle East war was bumping his name off the lead news stories on legacy media.

The Borowitz Report’s snarky take was:

• The “crowd” that did show up could best be described using Stormy Daniels’s nickname for the birthday boy.

• Tiny.

Not only was the enthusiasm lacking at the DC parade, Fox News got busted for adding a cheering soundtrack to their coverage.

Clearly humiliated by the dismal response to his vanity parade and the overwhelming response by the American people to the No Kings events, Trump has posted a rambling, bitter TruthSocial message promising to wield ICE with even more violent, illegal overreach than he already has.

The Truth Social post was way too cohesive and lacking in all-caps threats to have been written by Trump. You don’t have to be a fly on the wall in the Oval Office to assume that head hatemonger Stephen Miller was up for the ghost writing task.

One of the words used in Trump/Miller’s screed deserves some extra attention; REMIGRATION is a new word for rants attributed to the President. It’s a term popular with hard right European parties used to indicate a desire to expel ALL immigrants, including those with citizenship.

Trump’s declaring war on specific areas based entirely on their voter registration, which is a form of speech and protected political choice. It’s “vote Republican or I will punish you.”

Media accounts published over the weekend indicate the State Department is looking to extend their travel ban by an additional 36 countries who will have to prove compliance with new rules applied to them individually within 60 days.

The countries are:

Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

They all have one thing in common: non-white populations. Read that list and think about Stephen Miller’s intentions.

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While proclaiming that he could enable peace between Israel and Iran, there were disturbing indications pointing to US involvement in the conflict. Planes from the UK and US are actively intercepting drones aimed at Israel. The US President had enough influence on the Israeli attack to exercise a veto over targeting Iran’s Supreme leader.

Despite throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Iran, the Israelis have not successfully neutralized the half-mile deep facility that enriches uranium at Natanz, though attacks at all three known nuclear oriented facilities have killed a number of Irani military officers and scientists.

Their choices at this point are a large invasion-scale operation backing up commandos or the US dropping a bunker-buster bomb capable of delivering destruction through the solid rock surrounding the facility.

Airplane tracking nerds have reported a large movement (32) of fuel tanker planes headed east over the Atlantic. Maybe this has something to do with the Haifa refinery burning down after being struck by Irani missiles, cutting off a prime source of fuel for Israeli fighter jets. Or maybe not.

There is a trilateral training exercise (Atlantic Trident 25) scheduled to operate out of Finland in the coming week, but the sheer number of aircraft aloft has these amateurs openly speculating about US middle east intervention. These tankers are strategic force multipliers, enabling long-range ops for bombers, fighters, and intelligence assets.

Fox News reports that a “US official” has confirmed the USS Nimitz carrier strike group is heading to the Middle East earlier than planned.

Stay tuned on this one. The Middle East War has bumped much of the Trump administration’s propaganda efforts off the front pages of many newspapers and an intervention will allow the President to claim more credit than he has already admitted.

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Last but not least, after weeks of right wing fulminations about organizers of the No Kings protests being a reincarnation of Antifa, attacks on protesters were actually few in number, considering the numbers of people and protests. Salt Lake city saw one bystander killed as ‘security personnel’ returned fire on an armed individual’s attack. Culpepper, Virginia demonstrators were injured when an individual drove into the crowd. And, to be sure, there were other stochastic attacks. Noah Berlatsky has a decent rundown at Public Notice.

The fact is that the overwhelming numbers of No Kings (and Pride in some areas) events were nothing more than citizens peacefully protesting the nation’s headlong dive toward authoritarianism.

ICE bullies certainly won’t stop snatching people off the street, and Republican officials generally won’t stop winking at violence directed toward those who they consider to be opponents. Donald Trump will continue acting in his self interest over the country’s, and the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the planet will continue being considered by the Senate.

Also, the claims of 12 million people participating in protests are bullshit. People who know how to count are saying 4 to 6 million people attended No Kings and related events. Those are great numbers, and organizers should be proud of the hard work it took to send a unified message.

But it ain’t over ‘till it’s over. It took more than three decades of effort by the far right to be coming close to taking over and dismantling the government. There will need to be more protests, lawsuits, and people standing up to be heard before this tide is turned. And it ain't going to be easy.

You might be surprised to hear that some of the hard work is underway. The Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, has been tracking protests every day since January 1, 2017. They say the number of political protests to date in Trump’s second term are roughly three times greater than at the same time in his first term. Of course, Trump had a game plan (Project 2025) for this time around and knew better than to include sane people in his administration.

The assassinations and near-assassinations in Minnesota are symbolic of what true believers will attempt. They are an example of how right wing propagandists will seize on events to drum up fury aimed at non-MAGA people. Kudos to the Minnesota Star Tribune for making the effort to refute those lies. And the deaths involved will have real world political consequences beyond the fear they spread.

The Minnesota state House of Representatives was split 67-67 between the parties before Representative Hortman was killed. Now the Republican Party will have a one seat majority. The Democratic Farm Labor Party, which functions as the Democratic Party in the state, had a one seat majority in the Senate before Senator Hoffman was shot and seriously wounded. Until he recovers, the state Senate will be split evenly between the two parties.

Here’s Paul Krugman’s closing today::

• This isn’t the end of the assault on American democracy. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. But it may well be the end of the beginning. Trump spent his first 6 months in office trying to steamroller over all opposition, creating the impression that resistance is futile. Clearly, he hasn’t succeeded. On the contrary, resistance is stiffening, and those who preemptively capitulated seem to be paying a higher price than those who showed some backbone.

• Although the tide may be turning, MAGA isn’t simply going to roll over and slink away. On the contrary, the administration’s power grabs will become even more aggressive and desperate, with growing efforts to intimidate, prosecute and even physically harm political opponents, as well as widespread efforts to suppress dissent with force.

• Nonetheless, despite the difficult times ahead, America has just passed an important test. May freedom ring.

‘Can’t erase us’: Drag queens march in Hillcrest for trans rights, capping protest weekend by Madeline Nguyen at Times of San Diego

• Following on the heels of Saturday’s massive No Kings Day protest downtown, the annual San Diego Drag March for Trans Rights brought drag queens and San Diegans together to rally support for the city’s transgender community for the third year in a row.

• This time, organizers say the colorful moment of celebration was a much-needed bright spot in a dark year for the city’s transgender community.

• “Our world is so full of people who are trying to erase us, people who are trying to say that we don’t count, people who are trying to say that we are not worthy, that all we can do is fall back on the joy and happiness that we create,” said Sister Amanda Reckinwith, a local drag queen who hosted the march. “We create this through the rainbow of our diversity.”

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ICE’s War on Home by Anahid Nersessian at The London Review of Books

• Trump may spin spine-tingling tales of ‘bad hombres’, but videos of recent ICE raids tell a different story. The mother of a newborn is handcuffed and shoved, head down, into an unmarked vehicle, her family screaming, the neighbours filming, her baby cradled against a weeping woman’s shoulder. A young boy wails as his father is thrown into the back of a van. Children whose parents have been taken into custody sob on the floor of a school gym, not knowing if they will ever see their families again. The raids have not been on drug dens or sex-trafficking rings. They have been on restaurants and schools, hospitals and court houses. ICE’s war is not simply at home, but on home.

• The protests that broke out last weekend in Los Angeles are at once an autonomous phenomenon and a continuation of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the student-led campaign against the war on Gaza. They have been met with no longer shocking displays of state violence, including the arrival of the National Guard and seven hundred marines. Protesters have been gassed, shot in the head with ‘less lethal’ munitions, beaten, trampled with horses, hit by cars and taken into custody.

• The LAPD, like many police departments in the US, trains with soldiers from the Israel Defence Forces, and you can see, in their response to the protesters, the same libidinal thrust of disproportionate force that’s turned against children throwing rocks at tanks in the West Bank. In LA, protesters have dug up stones from the landscaped medians that run down the middle of the larger boulevards and hurled them at ICE’s unmarked cars, or else dropped them from highway overpasses onto LAPD vans.

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The National Weather Service issues Alaska’s first ever heat advisory by Mark Thiessen at The Associated Press

• People can open their windows to allow cooler air in during early morning hours — if wildfires aren’t burning in blaze-prone state. But if it’s smoky and the windows have to remain shut, buildings can heat up very rapidly.

• “Last year was the third year in a row in Fairbanks with more than a hundred hours of visibility-reducing smoke, the first time we’ve ever had three consecutive years over a hundred hours,” he said.

• There’s only been two summers in Fairbanks in the 21st century with no hours of smoke that reduced visibility, a situation he said was commonplace from the 1950s to the 1970s.