THE DEATH OF RENEE GOOD AND THE MEDIA'S DECADES-LONG OBLIVIOUSNESS PROBLEM

A phalanx of heavily armed immigration goons approached Renee Good's vehicle yesterday in Minneapolis, then one of them fatally shot her as she tried to drive away. Two narratives of the incident emerged: one in which Good's worst offense was to disobey law enforcement -- not a death-penalty crime, and one that, according to ICE's own policies, doesn't justify shooting into a moving vehicle -- although there have been nine such shootings since September -- and one in which Good weaponized the vehicle and attempted to do bodily harm to ICE officers. It should be obvious from the video evidence which narrative is accurate and which is a series of falsehoods put forth by in support of a president who's a known pathological liar, in the interests of preserving not only his dominance but that of his party, which routinely distorts the facts in order to maintain a grasp on power:

On the one hand multiple videos from various angles and multiple eyewitnesses, on the other hand self-interested statements from Administration officials, who’s to say where the truth lies.

— Missing The Point (@missingthept.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 6:41 AM

And yet the media keeps struggling to present this as anything other than a "they-said/they-said" story. Here's AP:

While President Donald Trump’s administration described the killing of a 37-year-old mother as an act of self-defense amid his latest immigration crackdown, Minneapolis officials have disputed that narrative.

CNN:

State and local officials disputed claims that the shooting was done in self-defense. Multiple videos of the shooting reviewed by CNN show nuance.

To its credit, The New York Times has posted a video story titled "Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis."

An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire.

It's a solid, thorough analysis, and it unambiguously concludes that Good wasn't trying to ram an ICE agent. But prior to that, the paper treated the administration's claims as potentially credible:

Federal immigration officials said that an ICE agent shot and killed Ms. Good in self-defense. They said her vehicle was driving toward the agent and she had refused to cooperate when ordered to stop.

That explanation was sharply dismissed by many people in Minneapolis, a liberal-leaning city where suspicion of Mr. Trump and his immigration crackdown is fierce.

Yeah, the locals said the administration was lying, though keep in mind that they're a bunch of liberal malcontents.

What's frustrating about this is that the administration isn't just offering a "nuanced" reading of the video evidence -- it's attempting to build up a level of outrage against the victim and her supporters using a narrative that's glaringly at odds with the facts, but consistent with right-wing conspiracy theories.

This started early, with Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin insisting on Twitter that "rioters" were "blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle."

The narrative advanced by President Trump on Truth Social was wildly at odds with reality:

I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.

I know we've all just decided that Gramps tells a few stretchers now and again and that's no reason to conclude that everything his administration says is self-serving culture-war disinformation. But the "professional agitator" slander (with "paid by George Soros" left unstated) has been echoed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem:

Noem: "People need to stop using their vehicles as weapons ... it's clear that it's being coordinated. People are being trained"

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 7, 2026 at 6:34 PM

We know that these people lie brazenly. We know that Trump told 30,573 lies in a first term that was restrained by comparison with this one. So why start from the premise that the administration is, or even might be, speaking in good faith, and should be assumed to be doing so until proven otherwise? Why aren't their words under a cloud of suspicion at all times?

This isn't unique to Trump. Republicans and the right have been lying shamelessly for decades, all for partisan advantage, yet the media persists in assuming that they make every argument in good faith. Really? After Saddam's WMDs and "We don't torture" and the besmirching of John Kerry, after ACORN and the Ground Zero mosque, after birtherism, after decades of lies about "voter fraud" going back to at least the Bush administration, and on and on into Trump's election trutherism and January 6, and now the lies about January 6.... When will the media wake up to the fact that these people lie as a first recourse, because it works?

TRUMPERS AREN'T JUST DOING AUTHORITARIANISM FOR THE LIKES

At Bad Faith Times on Monday, Denny Carter published an essay on the Venezuela invasion called "They Did It for the Content."

I think I know why the regime committed a variety of international crimes in kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and his wife over the weekend.

They did it for the online engagement: For the excitement, for the videos of American aircraft bombing Caracas (and killing 80-some civilians) and the pictures of a blindfolded Maduro being frog-walked out of a government plane in New York and the president presiding over the capture from his make-believe bunker in Mar-a-lago, haggard and tieless and working hard for the average American Joe, who wanted nothing more than for the American government to abduct a head of state from a country he could not identify on a map. It’s why Hegseth and Miller and others in the Mar-a-lago bunker were closely monitoring the X platform during the illegal operation.

They are posters at heart, and they are addicted to the thrill of their content going viral. I say this as someone who understands the sensation. And this – yes, this – was little more than content creation dressed up as serious foreign policy.

At The Atlantic last night, Charlie Warzel made a similar assertion:

It is no secret that the Trump administration is social media–addled. Over the past year, most of the government’s major online accounts—especially on X—have become megaphones for cruel and racist shitposting, not unlike what one might see from a garden-variety troll on 4chan. These accounts have shared deportation ASMR; an AI-generated, Studio Ghiblified version of a real photo of a crying woman being arrested by ICE; a post comparing immigrants to the alien vermin in the Halo video-game series; and Nazi-coded “Defend the fatherland” memes. And who could forget the AI-slop video of Trump in a fighter jet dropping what appeared to be human feces on protesters in Times Square. These official government communications are a key part of how the Trump administration does its job. It is governance through content creation.

Carter sees this as a sign that the Trump administration is less authoritarian than it could be:

The same people who wanted to create content of Maduro’s kidnapping have also created content of the president’s secret police kicking in the doors of their opponents, National Guard troops marching into opposition strongholds for entirely invented reasons, and immigrants dressed in chains shuffling their way to a plane that would take them to a faraway concentration camp. This sort of online content satiates the burning fascist need for the pain and torment of their enemies, both real and perceived....

Almost none of it is real though. In a true authoritarian onslaught, National Guard troops would have stormed into Democrat-run cities and committed acts of unspeakable violence against anyone who dared to protest. They would have arrested and killed every opposition leader in those states and they would have done it quickly and without pretense. Their cameras would certainly not be on for any of this....

In a true authoritarian onslaught, the regime's thugs would not have even entertained the idea of standing before a judge, explaining their attacks on immigrant communities and coming up with faulty legal justifications for their ethnic cleansing campaign. They would have simply arrested or killed the judge, as leading American monarchist and JD Vance adviser Curtis Yarvin has advocated, and carried on with their ethnic cleansing business.

Instead, Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino took glamour shots of himself dressed as an SS officer outside a Chicago courthouse. Because, you see, content is king. Content is the whole point. It always has been.

And Warzel thinks all the content creation is ... nihilistic.

By the time I saw the news of the raid, a photo Trump had posted showing a blindfolded Maduro in a Nike sweatsuit had already become a meme. Just a few minutes later, that meme had mixed with a dozen others....

The result is essentially insane and postliterate. But it is also pretty much legible for those steeped in online culture. It is coherent incoherence, everything reacting to everything else, all at once. The same thing happened after [Charlie] Kirk was shot. The memes, commentary, and speculation became a culture unto itself, a loop of ironic posting, information warring, and commentary on commentary—all before his shooter was identified or Kirk was even pronounced dead. This process is nihilistic....

But that's not what happened after Charlie Kirk was shot. America didn't just enter a multiverse in which your remix of Kirk memes competed with everyone else's for likes. Many people lost their jobs because they engaged in constitutionally protected (and factually accurate) speech about Kirk that our Republican overlords didn't like, as the vice president of the United States led calls for a purge:

In the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death, Vice President JD Vance urged people to call the bosses of those who celebrated the assassination. “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said.

Carter is right: the Trump administration could have gone fascist much more rapidly and brutally, and hasn't hit all the benchmarks yet. But I'm reminded of domestic abusers who prefer gaslighting and coercion to physical violence: they are trying to create an information sphere in which their worldview seems like the only sensible path, and all contrary views must be rejected. Fox has been building a closed information system like this for years, and now the siloing of social media sites plus the paywalling of old-fashioned news means that millions of people never have to encounter a fact that runs counter to their worldview on the way to the memes.

I spend time at Reddit's Forwards from Grandma, which posts right-wing memes and cartoons. In this environment, it's assumed that Democrats are actually pro-Maduro:

Content like this is what your right-wing grandparents on Facebook regard as their "newsfeed" -- and the administration wants to be the top content creator, in ways that substitute image and spectacle for facts.

In America in 2026, this is the news -- memes plus podcasts plus short-form videos. The content the Trumpers are creating is meant to be part of this stream. Warzel writes:

These days, one doesn’t experience the news on these platforms before seeing the memes and reactions—the reaction and the news are, in essence, one thing now.

Right -- so shaping the message in the most viral way is everything, regardless of the facts.

NOT ONE DIME IN VENEZUELAN OIL SUBSIDIES

This should be an easy one for Democrats:

President Donald Trump said he believes the U.S. oil industry could get expanded operations in Venezuela "up and running" in fewer than 18 months.

"I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money," Trump told NBC News in an interview Monday.

"A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent, and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue," he said.

When Trump says the oil companies will "get reimbursed by us," he means your tax dollars subsidizing their oil drilling.

The entire Democratic Party should (but probably won't) unite around a simple message: not one dime in subsidies.

Yeah, I know that Democrats are trying to win a Senate race in Texas. So the message there could be that we thought the Republicans believed in domestic energy production. Or is Venezuela now the 51st state?

Trump knows absolutlely nothing about this subject except what he learns from Fox News, which tells him that more oil is better than less oil because oil is manly and all non-fossil fuels are effeminate. But the people who are actually in the oil business approach the question of Venezuela based on actual knowledge of the country, its oil, and the global market:

... industry sources tell CNN that American oil executives are unlikely to dive headfirst into Venezuela for multiple reasons: The situation on the ground remains very uncertain, Venezuela’s oil industry is in shambles and Caracas has a history of seizing US oil assets.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that oil prices are too low today to justify spending the gobs of money – possibly tens of billions of dollars – that would be required to revive Venezuela’s decaying oil industry.

“The appetite for jumping into Venezuela right now is pretty low. We have no idea what the government there will look like,” one well-placed industry source told CNN on Monday. “The president’s desire is different than the industry’s. And the White House would have known that if they had communicated with the industry prior to the operation on Saturday.”

... Just to keep Venezuela’s oil production flat at 1.1 million barrels per day – roughly equal to what North Dakota currently produces – would require about $53 billion of investment over the next 15 years, according to estimates published Monday by consulting firm Rystad Energy.

However, to return Venezuela to its glory days of 3 million barrels per day from the late 1990s, total oil and gas capital spending would need to reach a staggering $183 billion through 2040, according to Rystad’s analysis.

That huge figure reflects not only Venezuela’s aging infrastructure but the fact that most of its oil is considered “heavy,” a blend of crude that is harder and more expensive to refine and process than the lighter oil found in the Permian Basin of West Texas.

Democrats shouldn't worry about appearing "anti-business" -- much of the country holds the oil and gas industry in fairly low regard. (According to a Gallup survey conducted last summer, 35% of Americans have a positive view of the industry, and 49% have a negative view. Dallas went off the air a long time ago.)

I'm naive to iamgine that Democrats will go on offense now, but a guy can dream, can't he?

AMERICANS AREN'T RALLYING AROUND THE FLAG

We know that Americans didn't want military action against Venezuela before it happened:

A September YouGov poll found just 16% support for a “U.S. invasion of Venezuela,” with 62% opposed. And this is a pretty stable result: By mid-December, Quinnipiac found 63% of registered voters opposed “U.S. military action inside Venezuela,” with only 25% in support....

Data for Progress found in December that 60% of likely voters opposed “sending American troops into Venezuela to remove President Maduro from power,” versus 33% in favor. September YouGov polling on using military force “to overthrow Maduro” found 53% opposed and just 18% in support, with the rest unsure....

CBS News ... found Americans opposed to military action in Venezuela by a 40-point [70%-30%] margin....

But Americans usually rally around the flag after the military acts. That happened when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, for instance. It's not happening now.

YouGov says that Americans oppose this invasion by a 41%-34% margin.

And The Washington Post, in a poll conducted by text, finds similar results:

It's not surprising that Americans have tended to rally around the flag, at least at first, for our major military incursions -- Afghanistan, the first and second Iraq wars. But in the past, Americans have rallied around the flag (and the president) for "quickie" invasions as well. They did in 1983:

President Reagan's handling of the invasion of Grenada appears to have produced wide-ranging political benefits for him, a new Washington Post-ABC News opinion poll indicates.

The poll, released Tuesday night, shows that Reagan has edged ahead of the two leading Democratic candidates in trial heats for the 1984 election for the first time since April....

Seventy-one percent in the survey said they approve of the invasion of Grenada, with only 22 percent saying they disapprove.

And the "quickie" war that's the most obvious precedent for this one was also popular in real time, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1989:

Americans strongly support the massive U.S. invasion of Panama and agree with President Bush that “it’s been worth it” despite the loss of American lives, The Times Poll found Thursday.

... on the second day of the invasion by more than 20,000 U.S. Marines, paratroopers, infantrymen, sailors and airmen, American citizens interviewed by The Times Poll were supporting the attack by a ratio of more than 5 to 1, with 77% approving and only 15% disapproving. In fact, 56% approved “strongly.”

I'd like to believe that this military action is far more unpopular because Americans despise Donald Trump, and because it's in blatant defiance of the rule of law. But I don't think that's the explanation. I think Americans have become so cynical about war after Iraq and Afghanistan -- and after other shocks to the system, like COVID and the 2008 financial crisis -- that rallying around the flag seems unimaginable now, at least when Americans can't see a pressing need to act.

Most Republicans are thrilled, despite all their past rhetoric about not getting America entangled in foreign conflicts: 60% of Republicans support this military action, according to YouGov, with 16% opposed; in the Washington Post poll, 74% of Republicans approve and only 10% disapprove. Chuck Schumer is an idiot:

Schumer: "Republicans must -- if there was ever a time, they must step up to the plate. This is the time. And if they don't, they're gonna feel the heat from their constituents."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 5, 2026 at 9:35 AM

Republican voters don't care about the War Powers Act. They just want their guy to win, and they think he's winning now. (Though I'm surprised that GOP support isn't in the 80s or 90s.)

The rest of us are disillusioned. If Trump and his henchmen think they'll distract us from the economy and Epstein by invading a series of countries, that not going to work at all.

SO I GUESS MADURO ISN'T AS SCARY A SUPERVILLAIN AS KHALID SHAIKH MUHAMMED, ACCORDING TO REPUBLICANS

Nicolas Maduro was captured and flown to New York so he can stand trial in America. Really?

I'm puzzled because President Trump doesn't merely refer to Maduro as a drug dealer. He calls Maduro a terrorist. He says that Venezuelan gangsters in America are Maduro's allies and are vicious. Here's what he said in his news conference yesterday:

It's, uh, it's both horrible and breathtaking that something like this could've been allowed to take place. For many years after his term as president of Venezuela expired, Maduro remained in power and waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States of America, threatening not only our people, but the stability of the entire region.

And you all saw it. In addition to trafficking gigantic amounts of illegal drugs that inflicted untold suffering and human destruction all over the country, all over, in particular, the United States, Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang, Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide.

And he did indeed. They were in Colorado. They took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they called police. They were brutal.

This is a distortion of the truth -- experts don't believe Maduro is working with TdA, and the Aurora police have said there's no evidence the gang took over an aprtment complex. But according to Trump, it's safe to try Maduro in America. Trump isn't arguing that it's too dangerous, and neither are his allies.

That's a huge contrast to Barack Obama's first term, when Obama and his first attorney general, Eric Holder, wanted to try Khalid Shaikh Muhammed and other 9/11 terror plotters in a civilian court. Republicans flipped out and non-Republicans joined them.

A rally near the federal court building in Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, was held on December 5, 2010, at which the decision to transfer the case to a civilian court was severely criticized. It was organized, in part, by Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot Charles Burlingame, who was killed when Al Qaeda hijackers crashed the plane he had been flying into the Pentagon. Burlingame is one of the three founders of Keep America Safe, a political-advocacy group.

Burlingame would later be controversial for tweets that called Obama and Trayvon Martin "drug addicts" and attacked all Muslims:

In a 2014 Twitter post, Burlingame wrote "When are citizens going to rise up and demand the govt acknowledge that Islam is a transnational threat."

In a 2014 interview on Fox News, Burlingame was asked by the host whether she was a Islamophobe according to accusations from critics. Burlingame responded by saying "I am hard pressed to deny it. There's no such thing as an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims when we know that virtually 80% of terrorist attacks are committed by radical muslims who are motivated by what they deem to be an imperative from their sacred religious texts."

Another co-founder was Liz Cheney. The group wasn't shy about portraying itself as nakedly partisan:

Liz Cheney's new group, Keep America Safe, is gearing up to run a series of targeted radio and Web ads hitting the president in the home districts of vulnerable Democratic congressmen, said Michael Goldfarb, a political strategist for the group.

The ads, according to Goldfarb will "drill down" on Guantánamo, highlighting the terrorist background of especially dangerous detainees and suggesting that Obama's policies might result in the accused terrorists being let loose and allowed to walk free in the member of Congress' district.

The theme of the new ad campaign is going to be "Do you really want this guy in the neighborhood?" said Goldfarb....

... Keep America Safe leaders, including Liz Cheney and Goldfarb's Weekly Standard boss, William Kristol, are convinced the issue has political traction. The group plans to morph the radio campaign in about six months into higher-profile television ads that will be deisgned keep the issue front and center during [2010's] congressional races.

Democrats fell in line:

In a letter to president Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested that holding a trial in New York was dangerous. "New York City has been a high-priority target since at least the first World Trade Center bombing", she wrote. "The trial of the most significant terrorist in custody would add to the threat."

As, in 2011, did the mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, who was an independent at the time and probably wanted a Republican elected president the following year. That was the final straw:

The White House ordered the Justice Department Thursday night to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The dramatic turnabout came hours after Mayor Bloomberg said he would "prefer that they did it elsewhere" and then spoke to Attorney General Eric Holder.

"It would be an inconvenience at the least, and probably that's too mild a word for people that live in the neighborhood and businesses in the neighborhood," Bloomberg told reporters.

"There are places that would be less expensive for the taxpayers and less disruptive for New York City."

The trial would have been expensive:

Estimates put the cost of a multiyear terror trial in lower Manhattan at about $200 million a year....

The federal government has said they would reimburse the city for the costs, most of which cover overtime for increased security, but they won't reimburse business owners for lost revenue during the chaos, said Steven Spinola, president of the heavyweight business group Real Estate Board of New York.

"Is the federal government going to give the city $1 billion plus the cost of propping up businesses? I don't think so," Spinola said.

But as James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News wrote at the time:

It's worth noting here that the hundreds, if not thousands, of extra federal prosecutors, defense lawyers, cops, U.S. Marshals, FBI agents and international news media who will prosecute, defend, protect or cover the biggest terror trial in history will be spending millions in hotels, eateries, bars and shops. You might even argue they'll surely more than offset any losses from the added inconveniences.

But Muslim terrorists in downtown Manhattan was the other part of the message, as if Muslim terrorists were scary supervillains who, if allowed to escape, could not be stopped. Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote in 2009:

... not all dangerous men are the same. It's hard to picture militia members, the Crips, Bloods, or what have you doing something as extreme as, say, crashing a plane into the prison to faciliate an escape and/or provide martyrdom to their brethren.

But Trump says Maduro's alleged gang allies are extremely brutal. They cut people's fingers off! (This apparently happened in America once.)

When Obama was president, we were told that trying a violent terrorist on U.S. soil was unthinkable (Mohammed's case was moved back into the military system, and he still hasn't been tried), even though, in 1996, Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh," one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, was tried and convicted in Lower Manhattan without incident. Then it became unthinkable. Now I guess it's thinkable again.

DONALD J. BUSH

Donald Trump's second presidency is starting to look like the fourth Bush term.

George H.W. Bush invaded Panama, captured its president (who'd been accused of drug crimes), brought him back to America to stand trial ... and then got us into another war a year or so later, against Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Bush's son invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, failed to find Osama bin Laden, gave up on that mission, and started a war of choice in Iraq. I suspect that the attack on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolas Maduro won't be Donald J. Bush's final war.

I'm not sure why Trump is more bellicose now than he was in his first term. I think he ran in 2016 with a determination to destroy the apparent front-runner, Jeb Bush; he tapped into his resentments of the Bush family and stressed his opposition to the Iraq War, though he didn't oppose the war during the run-up or in its early days. During the 2016 campaign, I think advisors helped shape Trump's half-thought-out instincts into an ideology -- opposition to the Iraq War meant he was anti-"globalist" and "America First." He liked that, ran with it, and started believing it.

This time around, advisors persuaded him that wanting to be a hemispheric hegemon is "America First," or maybe "Americas First." Ignoramus that he is, he's running with that now, and appears to believe it.

Although he obviously isn't limiting his bellicosity to our hemisphere:

I’m thinking this morning about all the people I spoke to last year who were absolutely convinced, and tried to convince me, that Trump would be antiwar compared to Biden and Harris. In the past week alone he has attacked Nigeria and then Venezuela and also threatened to attack Iran (again).

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 8:18 AM

He might be thinking, If they won't give me a Nobel Peace Prize, fuck 'em -- I'll be a warmonger.

And, obviously, there are natural resources to be plundered in Venezuela -- not just oil but rare earths. Since World War II, Americans have mostly believed the predominant narrative about U.S. wars -- that we always fight them to right moral wrongs -- but Trump is an unabashed believer in plunder. Even when he claimed to be against war, he regularly said that America should take the oil whenever it scores a victory in a resource-rich area.

In some ways, Trump is being Trumpian (or Milleresque, as in Stephen), rather than Bushlike. Here's a tweet from Senator Mike Lee (the original is here):

👀 First out of the gate to get a justification for what Trump ordered in Venezuela. Sen. Mike Lee after a call w/Marco Rubio... "This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack."

[image or embed]

— Pam Spaulding (@pamspaulding.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 6:18 AM

We attacked Venezuela and are justifying the attack by saying our troops were attacked? That's how the administration talks about ICE. ICE goons go into a city aggressively, are met with resistance, then claim they can arrest protesters for responding to the troops' aggression, as if the targets of U.S. force are the aggressors and the troops are passive victims.

I don't think this will give Trump a boost in the polls, or at the ballot box. Poppy Bush's attack on Panama in December 1989 and January 1990 briefly raised his Gallup job approval rating from 71% to 80%, but it quickly dropped and was at 68% by March. (It's anoshing now to see how high Bush's approval rating was in the first two years of his president when he wasn't fighting a war, but he was the last president who managed that level of bipartisan support.) Bush's party lost seats in the 1990 midterms, and Democrats wound up with a 267-167 House majority and a 56-44 Senate majority. (This was, of course, before the 1994 midterms that put Newt Gingrich's GOP in charge of Congress.)

I'm not sure Trump will get even a week or two of better polling. Bush at least tried to persuade Americans to support his first war. The prime-time speech in which he waved a bag of crack cocaine he said had been purchased in Washington's Lafayette Park took place in September 1989, a couple of months before the Panama invasion. Trump has been bombing suspected drug boats, but he hasn't really been talking about drugs or addiction.

And after the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles, Americans are vastly more skeptical about U.S. wars than they were in the late 1980s. I assume the people who like this attack will mostly be people who already liked Trump. The rest of us won't notice any improvement in our day-to-day lives, and will judge Trump accordingly.

But we'd better get used to this. After all of Trump's talk about "heaven" in 2025, and his recent Wall Street Journal interview about his health, I assume he's afraid of death (though that doesn't mean he's actually dying) and is trying to go out with a bang -- he wants to die knowing he was the most consequential person on earth, if not the most consequential person of all time. Hence the renaming and building and redecorating. He's trying to preen and bomb his way to a legacy. I hope we survive this.

IMAGINE THERE ARE NO FOREIGNERS -- IT'S EASY IF YOU TRY

America's neo-Nazi Department of Homeland Security posted this on December 31. I wondered where the number ("100 Million Deportations") came from.

At first I assumed that DHS was taking a Trumpist approach to statistics. A few months ago, Pew reported that 51.9 million immigrants live in the United States. The vast majority are here legally.

As of 2023, 46% of immigrants were naturalized U.S. citizens. Nearly a quarter (23%) were lawful permanent residents, often referred to as “green card holders,” and another 4% were lawful temporary residents who were permitted to stay in the U.S. for a limited period of time, usually for work or study. The remaining immigrants in the U.S. fell into the “unauthorized” category and constituted 27% of all U.S. immigrants.

"Take the real number, approximately double it, and make it round because round numbers sound better" is a standard Donald Trump approach to statistics. Pew says 14 million immigrants are here unlawfully. Most other estimates range from approximately 11 million to approximately 13 million. Trump and his surrogates regularly say that the number is higher, and suggest that every immigrant here without authorization arrived during Joe Biden's presidency, even though we know that many have been here for decades. In October, during an Air Force One news conference, Trump said:

Well, when people come into our country illegally, especially in terms of speed, the very bad ones, murderers, because we've had murderers came in through the Biden administration. We have very tight borders now, but we had open borders....

It was really a terrible mistake that was made. When you think of it, so much of our time -- our time is spent on that subject and it's a big subject because it's probably 20 or 25 million people, the real number. And of the 25 million people, it's -- you know, millions of people should not be here now.

At a campaign stop in 2024, J.D. Vance said:

"Kamala Harris let in 25 million illegal aliens ... the 25 million people who are here in this country illegally."

Marco Rubio said in 2024, "We’re talking upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million."

So did DHS apply Trumpian logic to the total number of immigrants? Did it approximately double 51.9 million to arrive at 100 million?

Or does 100 million refer to the total number of non-white people in America? Statistia says that there are approximately 342 million people in America, and 254 million are white. That leaves 100 million, more or less.

But I think the 100 million figure is an incorrect reference to non-citizens -- including all immigrants (not just the ones from "the third world") and tourists.

Here's an AP fact check from August:

After the Trump administration announced Thursday that it is reviewing the valid visas of more than 55 million people, social media users began using this figure to inflate the number of noncitizens living in the U.S. by tens of millions.

Posts claimed that these 55 million visa holders, plus about 25 million or more people living in the country illegally, means that nearly a quarter to a third of the people living in the U.S. are not American citizens.

We've established that the number of immigrants living here illegally is well under 25 million. And there aren't 55 million visa holders living here.

The 55 million visas, which includes tourist visas, is not representative of U.S. residents, as not everyone with a visa resides in the U.S. ...

“The 55 million figure is the total number of visa-holders worldwide, not people who are currently in the United States,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

But the numbers made right-wing social media users' heads explode.

Still, many social media users overstated the number of noncitizens living in the U.S., pointing to these figures.

“55 million on visas, tens of millions of illegals—close to 100 million are foreign aliens,” reads one X post. “Almost 1/3 of the entire country are foreigners. Completely insane if you really think about it. America has no reason or obligation to tolerate this. If America doesn’t deport the tens of millions it needs to, it will cease to exist as a nation.”

That tweet is here. Other tweets -- here, here, here -- claim the fraction is a quarter.

55 Million on VISAs
30-40 Million Illegals

Almost 1/4 of Americas population is not American!

How many are on welfare??

— Idaho Conservatives 🇺🇸 (@NorthIdahoRight) August 21, 2025

But if you (incorrectly) assume that all 55 million visa holders are living here, add the (exaggerated) 25 million figure for immigrants here without authorization, and round up, you're getting close to 100 million.

I think that's the message here: We don't want any foreigners living here illegally. We don't want any foreigners living here legally. We don't want any foreigners visiting.

Which makes one of the community notes that have been appended to the DHS tweet rather curious.

The art -- which might make you think of California, big cars, and the early Beach Boys -- was done by a Japanese artist who, Wikipedia tells us, is "known for his cover designs of city pop albums in the 1980s." City pop is a Japanese music subgenre that never migrated to America, presumably because it's heavily influenced by American music (soft rock, funk, disco, R&B), as interpreted by Japanese musicians.

So this image is an immigrant, a work of visual globalism by an artist associated with musical globalism -- appropriated without permission in the service of an extreme anti-globalist message. Hey, steal an American's artwork next time, you idiots!