YES, UNDER PRESIDENT VANCE, AMERICA REALLY MIGHT MAKE BEING TRANS ILLEGAL FOR ADULTS

On Monday, I wrote a post questioning whether we can maintain a united front against the Republican Party in 2028. I wrote the following about Gavin Newsom, a flawed politician who really might be the Democratic presidential nominee that year:

I don't intend to vote for Newsom in the primaries. I understand why people don't like his stance on trans rights and other issues....

Yes, I could imagine Newsom signing legislation that banned trans youth from competing in school sports nationwide, just as Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But Gavin Newsom won't support a complete ban on transitioning. I think a Republican 48th president might do that. I think we could live to see the criminalization of trans people under continued Republican rule. We won't see that even with a bad Democratic president.

Well, here you go: Yesterday, Erin Reed, a trans journalist, reported this:

On Tuesday, the president of the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, appeared on the influential far-right PBD podcast to discuss gender-affirming care.... the conversation turned towards what the Heritage Foundation was working on when it comes to the future of transgender people. It was during this shift that Roberts darkly announced that his solution to being transgender was simple: "You outlaw it," and that the organization was working to ban gender-affirming care at all ages....

... when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

If you know what happened to abortion rights in the decades after Roe v. Wade, you can see where this is going. Maybe receiving trans medical care as an adult won't be made illegal in the next Republican presidency. But that's what the right wants to do, and they won't stop fighting until they get what they want, unless we stop them.

No Democrat wants this. Soon, the overwhelming majority of Republicans will demand this.

But we don't just need to vote for Democrats, even bad or disappointing Democrats, to prevent this and other erosions of rights and decency. We need to push back on anti-trans messaging from the right and the left-center.

This week, the influential left-centrist online magazine The Argument published results of a poll on trans issues under the headline "The Trans Rights Backlash Is Real." The Argument's pollster, Lakshya Jain, cites numbers like this:

... 52% of voters now support legislation requiring trans people to use bathrooms corresponding with their biological sex, while just 33% oppose such a bill.

This is a sharp and dramatic change from the way things stood at the beginning of the Trump era, when Americans consistently rejected the concept of bathroom restrictions for trans people. In a Pew Research Center poll from September 2016, 51% of Americans said that trans people should be allowed to use public restrooms of the gender they identify as. Months later, the Public Religion Research Institute released a similar finding showing 53% of Americans were opposed to laws that would require trans people to use bathrooms corresponding to their birth sex.

Both Jain and The Argument's editor, Jerusalem Demsas, say they're not recommending that liberals beat a full retreat on trans issues. They note that nearly two thirds of respondents in their poll "want to ban discrimination against transgender people in hiring and housing. Not a single subgroup–including Trump 2024 voters—opposes such legislation."

So they call for a partial retreat, defending what the public supports and not defending what the public opposes. Demsas writes:

If you care about building durable protections, you have to build them in the world as it actually exists, not the world you wish you could rhetorically enforce into being.

But as G. Elliott Morris said in a different context last fall:

Public opinion is not static.... It changes over time and it’s unpredictable what it will be in the future. You don’t want to base all of your political strategy over what the polls say today, because there’s no election today. The election is going to be a year and a half from now. Or I guess, in our case, a year and two months from now. You want to base all of your political calculus on what you think opinion will be a year and two months from now. Or also maybe on your values, beliefs.

(Emphasis added.)

Morris was discussing immigration -- another issue on which Democrats were urged to meekly accept the right-wing backlash and meet the public where they were:

In March, a lot of this backlash I was referencing against Democrats talking about immigration, especially [Kilmar] Abrego Garcia, was predicated on this idea that Trump was doing well in his immigration net approval. So don’t talk about that. You don’t want to raise this issue of immigration because he does well on it. The counter argument was like, look, you’re never going to change how people feel about the president if you don’t engage with him.

if you don’t fight him on this. And as soon as we saw Democratic representatives and senators start fighting him on Abrego Garcia, on deportations in general, especially after the events in LA in, gosh, June, I believe, you saw his immigration numbers fall.

And then the Trump administration started the War on Minneapolis. Here's what's happened to Trump's approval on immigration:

So I'll argue in favor of supporting a candidate who's bad on trans issues if that candidate wins the primaries -- but we also need to try pushing publc opinion back to where it was before the massive right-wing (and centrist) anti-trans campaign began. Demsas writes that "the path to civil rights has never run through making disagreement illegal" -- as if we live in a world where "the woke mob" is silencing anti-trans voices -- but there's a lot of ground between this imagined "You must comply" pro-trans regime and complete acquiescence whenever polling on an aspect of trans rights become more than 50% anti-.

We need to emphasize the humanity of trans people, and counter the right's stereotyping of them as sick, violent monsters. The alternative in an America in which they'll soon literally be illegal. And maybe we could even push Gavin Newsom a bit further to the left in the process.

RANDY FINE MIGHT BE THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

People who should know better believe that the Republican Party might moderate after Donald Trump leaves office, but here's a story about a Republican who's been in Congress for less than a year and is already an emerging superstar hatemonger:

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., prompted calls for his resignation from Democrats and a major Islamic civil rights group after suggesting in a social media post that he'd choose dogs over Muslims.

"If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one," Fine posted to the social media platform X on Sunday.

Shortly afterward, he added a photo of a post from Nerdeen Kiswani, the co-founder of the pro-Palestinian group "Within Our Lifetime," in which she called dogs "unclean" and said that "NYC is coming to Islam." Kiswani later told NBC News in an email she made the comment satirically.

Fine wrote in the follow-up post, "For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani," referring to Zohran Mamdani, New York City's new mayor.

Here's a little background: On January 25, New York City had its biggest snowstorm in five years. Parts of the city received nearly 15 inches of snow. Temperatures were well below freezing for a week after the storm, and only briefly cracked 32F for another week. So the snow has lingered, which is unusual here. It's finally begun to melt in the past few days.

There's an unpleasant amount of scattered trash and dog poop on top of the snow piles. This isn't pleasant, but I've lived here nearly fifty years -- it always happens here when snow lingers for a while. The New York Post -- which hates our new mayor and wants to blame him for this -- has fixated on this problem. Here's a story the Post ran on February 11 (cover your eyes if you're sensitive to the sight of dog waste):

The next day, Kiswani posted these tweets:

Congressman Fine knows how to ring the Pavlovian bell that makes right-wing rageoholics drool: He not only attacked Kiswani, he linked her to Mayor Mamdani:

For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani. pic.twitter.com/zcIs4tVyly

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 15, 2026

(Kiswani, in fact, has been critical of Mamdani since he was inaugurated.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in:

This is genuinely one of the most disgusting statements I have ever seen issued by an American official.

It should not stop shocking us that the Republican Party openly embraces this. Fine should be censured & stripped of committees. To ignore this is to accept and normalize it. https://t.co/OPHd5jtM2b

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2026

Fine took her on as well:

Rep. Randy Fine: "People should know Democrats like AOC are saying 'we are going to get rid of your dogs.' Americans need to keep that in mind when they go and vote in November."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 17, 2026 at 8:09 AM

Fine hits every pleasure center in GOP rageoholics' brains:

Look, here's my view: It's not enough for Democrats to think anyone who wants to come here illegally should be able to do that. They also think they should be able to get whatever free stuff they want. Now they're demanding that we change our values and how we live as Americans.

My post was in response to a major Muslim leader saying dogs should be forbidden from New York City because to some Muslims it bothers them. Well, if they're going to make us choose between our dogs and them going home, the choice is easy, and people should know Democrats like AOC are saying, "We are going to get rid of your dogs."

You mean this AOC?

(That's Deco, AOC's French bulldog.)

Apart from the bigotry and the Democrat-bashing, this plays on GOP voters' misunderstanding of how diverse communities work. Kiswani wasn't really saying dogs should be banned in the city, but even if that had been her point, and even if she were a top Mamdani adviser, it wouldn't matter. New York is a very dog-friendly city. We wouldn't tolerate a ban on dogs -- some of were angry in 1978 when a law went into effect requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets. But we can tolerate unpopular opinions -- we don't expect everyone to think the same way, just as we don't expect everyone to have the same set of religious beliefs or the same dietary habits or the same dress code. We know some of our neighbors eat halal (or kosher), but we know they don't expect us to. Do some Muslims or some Jews (or the Amish men who come up from Pennsylvania to sell produce) dress according to their customs? Fine, but there's no pressure on us to do the same.

I think many Republican voters can't understand this. The places they live are monocultures. They'd like to impose their monocultural values on the rest of America. They assume that our Muslim mayor wants to impose what they consider a bad monoculture on us, but he doesn't, and we wouldn't allow him to (and wouldn't have elected him if we thought that's what he wanted).

Fine, meanwhile, seems like a rising GOP star. He's Jewish and wears a yarmulke, which might limit his stardom, but he's a hardcore hater:

... he privately wrote “Go blow yourself up!” to a Florida Muslim after they challenged his social media posts, calling on an Islamophobic trope that Muslims are prone to violence or suicide bombings.

In December 2023, as Palestinians awaited much-needed humanitarian aid, Fine mocked them, posting on his X account, “Stop the trucks. Let them eat rockets. There are plenty of those. #BombsAway.”

... In November 2024, Fine warned Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that they should “consider leaving before [he] gets there,” followed by “#BombsAway,” an open threat against two Muslim members of Congress....

In May 2025, Fine suggested on national television that the United States should use nuclear weapons against Gaza, invoking the atomic bombings of Japan as a model for dealing with Palestinians. When asked to explain this genocidal rhetoric, he doubled down with a racist and dehumanizing response, claiming that half of Gaza’s population is “married to their cousins” and has “mental defects,” and that “you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”

I could see him winning the Senate seat of the aging Rick Scott in 2030. I could see him running for president and being a credible candidate in the GOP primaries. And if he doesn't have a successful career in electoral politics, I expect to see him topping the podcast charts someday. He's a star on the rise.

HERE'S WHY I'M A 2028 ELECTION DOOMER

If we have free elections in November, I expect Democrats to do well. I think they'll retake the House fairly easily and might retake the Senate.

But I'm pessimistic about 2028. President Trump and his party might or might not succeed in rigging the 2028 election, but even if that contest is fair, I question whether Democrats (and the independents whose votes they'll need to win) will be able to unite around a candidate.

It's possible that the party's 2028 nominee will be a progressive -- maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Under those circumstances, I expect plutocrats who sometimes fund Democrats -- Bill Ackman, Mike Bloomberg -- to spend millions trying to elect the Republican candidate (almost certainly J.D. Vance, who has a massive lead in early polling, with Marco Rubio as his running mate). I also think America won't elect a woman, especially a young, slight woman. Many normies appear to believe that the president needs to be physically intimidating. (How can she stand up to China?)

But it's more likely that someone a bit more mainstream will be the nominee. Gavin Newsom seems to be making his presence felt more than any other contender -- and that's leading to a lefty backlash:

Progressive Twitch streamer Hasan Piker ... said he would be unlikely to back Newsom in a hypothetical matchup against Vice President JD Vance in the 2028 race during an interview on the I’ve Had It podcast with Jennifer Welch....

“At that point it doesn’t even matter,” he said. “My policy on this is the same as my refusal to endorse Kamala Harris. The reason why I did not endorse Kamala Harris is she did things that were not only unproductive but also unconscionable. I still stand on that. I still talk about it all the time because people constantly bring it up.”

That makes sense to quite a few online influencers.

On this subject, I'm with Will Stancil, who responds to another influencer here:

The reason people are concerned about lefties saying “I won’t vote for a moderate Dem” isn’t because they want Newsom. It’s because lefties keep not voting for moderate Dems! I think all the scolding about it being years til the primary would hit a little harder if WE DIDN’T JUST GO THROUGH THIS

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— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 16, 2026 at 1:24 AM

I don't intend to vote for Newsom in the primaries. I understand why people don't like his stance on trans rights and other issues. I'm appalled that he cozies up to the likes of Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk.

But he's not a fascist. J.D. Vance is a fascist. Marco Rubio, as he just made clear in his "Vance Lite" speech to the Munich Security Conference, is a fascist. (Today Rubio traveled to Hungary to meet with Viktor Orban and told him, "Your success is our success.") All the other candidates who show up in the first tier in 2028 polling for the Republicans -- Donald Trump Jr. (who won't run), Ron DeSantis, Robert Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson -- are authoritarians. They are candidates who will make common cause with Vladimir Putin, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the Heritage Foundation. It will not be possible to nudge them to the left if elected, any more than it's possible to nudge Trump to the left. They don't like democracy. They don't believe in compromise or power-sharing with their political opponents.

And on the issue that Newsom critics always raise first: Yes, I could imagine Newsom signing legislation that banned trans youth from competing in school sports nationwide, just as Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But Gavin Newsom won't support a complete ban on transitioning. I think a Republican 48th president might do that. I think we could live to see the criminalization of trans people under continued Republican rule. We won't see that even with a bad Democratic president.

And on every other issue, Vance or another Republican president woiuld be immeasurably worse than any Democrat. What's maddening to me is that the Republicans in my lifetime who were elected president when the left abandoned the Democratic Party are some of the worst and cruelest presidents of all time: Richard Nixon in 1968, George W. Bush in 2000, Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024.

That list makes me despair, because the left used to reject Democrats only when they'd been in power for a couple of terms. Nixon and Dubya were elected after eight years of Democratic rule. So was Trump in 2016.

But our national memory of Trump's awfulness faded after a mere four years in 2024. And now we have progressives who want to argue that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans while a Republican is subjecting us to the worst and most authoritarian presidency of all time. It's not even amnesia anymore.

I get it. Fighting the powerful is hard. The left scores very few victories against right-wing extremism or the plutocracy. So, perhaps on an unconscious level, leftists think: We can't hurt the right-wing power structure, but we can beat a Democrat. That's an attainable goal. That's a power progressives actually have: the power to hurt the Democratic Party. So they wield it in order to feel they can make something happen.

I know a lot of you don't think Vance can win the general election, or even win the nomination. On the latter, here's my reply:

You all keep telling me that Vance is too boring to win the 2028 nomination, but I'm going to keep telling you that the GOP base can see what a hate-filled asshole he is every day. The base *loves* that. He's not leading in the primary polls just because of name recognition.

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 2:15 PM

And in the general, I'm sticking with what I said earlier this month:

... mainstream outlets may very well portray J.D. Vance ... as a thoughtful, soft-spoken Republican who wants to move the GOP away from its worst instincts....

We'll get insipid, soft-focus profiles of Vance, and he'll be portrayed as a turn of the page after Trump -- more so than loudmouths like Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee.

And I know that the online left is a small sliver of the overall electorate -- but I also know that swing states are often won by small margins.

Do we need better Democrats? Sure. Should we reject the Democrats if they let us down in many ways? Not when the alternative is a 48th president who's the U.S. equivalent of Orban or Farage. And that really will be our choice.

IT WOULD BE GOOD TO KNOW JUST HOW BATSHIT CRAZY TRUMP'S ELECTION CONSPIRATORIALISM IS

Kristi Noem said something alarming on Friday:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said President Donald Trump’s administration is working hard to “make sure we have the right people voting” heading into the 2026 midterms.

Noem made the comment during a press conference in Arizona on Friday....

The secretary said elections are one of the “critical infrastructure responsibilities” that fall on her and the DHS.

Noem's department has limited electoral responsibilities. DHS is tasked with "protect[ing] the security and resilience of our nation’s election infrastructure from both cybersecurity and physical security threats," but it has no role to play whatsoever in combatting election fraud. I didn't make that up -- that's according to a fact sheet on DHS's own website, which is marked as "archived" but was most recently updated in February of last year, after Donald Trump was sworn in as president again.

Noem said this:

Kristi Noem: "When it gets to Election Day, we've been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 14, 2026 at 9:51 AM

And elections is another one of those critical infrastructure responsibilities that I have as well. And I would say that many people believe that it may be one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust, is reliable, and that when it gets to Election Day, that we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country through the days that we have, knowing that people can trust it.

It's obvious that if you were to ask Noem what she means by "have the right people voting," she'd say she merely wants to ensure that everyone who is voting is a U.S. citizen who's properly registered to vote. She'd say "the right leaders" are candidates chosen through a clean electoral process. She'd swear on a stack of Bibles that she doesn't want to take the vote away from any legitimate voter.

But we also know she's articulating a near-universal belief in the Republican Party: that every Democratic electoral victory -- or at least every Democratic victory in a competitive race -- is the result of fraud, that if only legitimate voters are voting, only Republicans will win. Whether Noem herself actually believes this is probably irrelevant -- she and her party have been selling this lie for decades, and she knows that millions of GOP voters believe it, and will support voter suppression measures based on this belief.

We never hear this belief openly articulated by Republicans in top positions (apart from President Trump) because the mainstream press doesn't really understand how conspiratorial the thinking of the average GOP voter is on this subject. Remember, these are the same reporters who told us during the Barack Obama presidency that GOP voters didn't really believe Obama was born in Kenya. Here's a sneering Dave Weigel post published by Slate exactly fifteen years ago:

The non-partisan-but-usually-hired-by-Democrats firm Public Policy Polling is out with more data on what Republicans -- well, 400 "Republican primary voters nationwide" -- think about Barack Obama's citizenship. They have their doubts!

A 51% majority of national GOP primary voters erroneously think President Obama was not born in the U.S. 28% know that he was.

Another way of putting this is slightly more than one in four Republicans believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Does that mean that 72 percent of Republicans think Obama should be disqualified from the presidency? No. It suggests that birtherism has become another screen for extreme partisanship.

Republican voters don't really believe this nonsense! It's just a tribal shibboleth! But they did believe it -- and now they believe Trump won the 2020 election. They also believe that President Joe Biden let in 25 million undocumented immigrants (he didn't) so they could vote for Democrats upon arrival (House Speaker Mike Johnson in 2024: "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.")

I want to hear some specifics from the Conspiratorialist in Chief. I think it would be a service to America if a journalist would ask the president this question:

Mr. President, you've often expressed doubts about the 2020 election. According to official records, Joe Biden won more than 81 million votes in that election. How many of those 81 million votes do you believe were legitimate?

I think it would be valuable to know just how batshit crazy Trump's beliefs are on this subject. I imagine he'd say that a majority of Biden's votes were fraudulent. He might say that Biden only won a few hundred or a few thousand legitimate votes.

Of course, I'm imagining how this would play in a country that still had a capacity to respond to delusional right-wing extremism with shock, outrage, and a determination to re-establish a reality-based government. I realize that we don't live in that kind of country.

But -- after Noem and other officials confirmed that they agreed with Trump's absurdly low estimate of Biden's legitimate vote (which would happen), and after polls showed that the majority of Republican voters also agreed with that estimate (which they would), maybe our political culture would understand just how extreme and out of touch with reality America's dominant political party is.

There are other areas where myth replaces fact for Republicans. I think Republican voters (and some in the middle) continue to support the Trump administration's immigration agenda because they believe nearly every undocumented immigrant in America is a violent felon. A journalist should ask Trump to estimate the percentage of immigrants he believes are violent felons. I'm sure he'd provide a very high number, probably something like 99% -- as would most Republican voters.

The degree to which Republicans have succumbed to disinformation in the Fox News era is something we need to confront. But I don't think that reckoning will ever happen.

JANET MILLS WILL DIE ON THE HILL OF SCHUMERISM

A few days ago, G. Elliott Morris wrote about the Democratic Establishment's fondness for liberal-bashing left-centrism:

After every Democratic loss, the same argument returns: the party needs to move to the center, or it will die. The post-2024 version has been especially loud, with elites in politics and the press uncritically adopting the theory that Democrats lost the last election because of progressive policy positions.

... in many Democrats’ eyes, [Bill] Clinton is the model Democrats should follow today. By publicly rebuking the left (Clinton’s “Sister Souljah Moment”), moving to the right on entitlements, and holding the line with southern whites, the usual explanation goes, Clinton broke 12 years of national Republican rule ushered in a new era for the New Democrats.

But, Morris tells us, this belief is at odds with the data:

According to the American National Election Studies (a quadrennial academic survey of the American public) voters perceived Bill Clinton as more liberal than Michael Dukakis, and also rated Clinton as less favorable.

... The Sister Souljah narrative assumes voters rewarded Clinton for tacking right — but political scientists have found voters didn’t even perceive Clinton as particularly moderate.

Morris writes, "I see Democrats endlessly relitigating an ideological debate that the electorate isn’t having," by which he means this:

Instead of poring over troves of polling data and statements of issue positions, voters mostly react to national conditions and (only the most significant) moments in campaigns. The data does not support the case that Clinton won in 1992 because he ran to the center. But it does show a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who lost faith in the Republican Party to handle the economy.

The 1992 election took place before Morris was born, but I remember it, and he's right: normal people didn't see Clinton as a center-left candidate -- they saw him as the first major-party candidate to have emerged from the 1960s counterculture, a pot-smoking hippie horndog...

... who had cleaned himself up and now seemed, at least to those who warmed up to him, like a smart, articulate, vigorous man in early middle age who might be able to extricate America from Poppy Bush's stagnation.

In the 1992 campaign, Clinton expressed support for the death penalty (and, as a sitting governor, carried it out), and chastised Sister Souljah, the rapper and activist, for saying, "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" -- but unlike today's anti-progressive Democrats (Rahm Emanuel, John Fetterman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and others), he didn't spend the campaign flamboyantly drawing attention to his disagreements with the left.

*****

In Maine, it appears that Governor Janet Mills, Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate for the Senate seat currently occupied by Susan Collins, is trying to draw attention to the fact that she's AWOL in the fight against the White House immigration war. Drop Site News reports:

On January 24, the morning that federal agents murdered VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, more than 500 Mainers packed into the former St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church ... for the state’s first large-scale ICE protest, an “ICE THEM OUT” rally. That week, masked federal agents launched “Operation Catch of the Day,” a mass deportation campaign aimed at the nearly 6,000 Somalis who live in Maine....

The Lewiston event featured many of the state’s prominent Democratic politicians.

Speakers included [Senate candidate Graham] Platner, as well as gubernatorial candidates Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Hannah Pingree, and Angus King III; Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline and Portland Mayor Mark Dion, the leaders of Maine’s two largest cities; and Rep. Chellie Pingree.

Gov. Mills was notably absent.

There's more:

The day ICE launched its Maine operation, Mills was caught jetting off to California. Dinner invitations obtained by Axios reveal Mills planned to attend a trio of big-money Senate fundraisers in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley on Wednesday, and the East Bay on Thursday. The Wednesday invitation described an “intimate dinner” in San Francisco’s financial district....

On January 30, six days after Mills was a no-show at the Lewiston rally, a city-wide service worker strike took place in Portland, Maine’s largest city. Almost 200 businesses shut their doors to protest ICE. Thousands of people marched through the city....

At this event, one of the largest protests in Portland’s history, Mills was again absent. That evening, Mills was photographed dining at Scales, an upscale seafood restaurant in Portland’s gentrified Old Port District. The pictures from Mills dinner have now been viewed millions of times across platforms.

Mills is so conspicuously absent from the fight that Adam Jentleson -- the president of the Searchlight Institute, a center-left think tank that has begged Democrats not to say "Abolish ICE" -- has criticized her cowardice:

What the hell? She’s the governor, total failure of leadership. https://t.co/fwjqsbLBd5

— Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson) January 24, 2026

She could show up and call for ICE reform rather than its abolition, as Jentleson recommends. But she's making a great show of being out of the picture altogether.

This is probably what Chuck Schumer thinks she should be doing. It's the conspicuous-rush-to-the-center strategy that G. Elliott Morris tells us isn't really effective.

There hasn't been much polling of this race, but a couple of surveys conducted late last year suggest that Graham Platner, Mills's key opponent in the primary, would do slightly better against Susan Collins than Mills would. Platner is campaigning as a leftist.

Dismantling ICE is the moderate position.

Unmask these thugs, arrest them, and make them answer for these horrors.

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) January 7, 2026

We'll see whether the Mills/Schumer approach is the right one. I think Mills -- a septuagenarian like Schumer (and Clinton) -- simply doesn't understand the moment.

ONCE AGAIN, REPUBLICANS ARE THE ODDBALLS

There's a lot of news today and I've been struggling in vain to find a Big Idea that ties current stories together, so I'll abandon that effort and just respond to these results from the recent AP-NORC poll by restating a simple fact:

Once again we get the same results we've gotten over and over again in other recent polls: at least two-thirds of independents agree with nearly every Democrat on major issues -- and a majority of Republicans are on the other side.

I'll keep saying it: Democrats are the normal people in America. Republicans are the out-of-touch, beyond-the-pale extremists. A majority of them think it's fine for America to take Greenland by force or coercion. Large majorities of them think Trump's arbitrary and onerous tariffs are just fine, and think ICE and the Border Patrol are doing a terrific job in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

They are not normal Americans. People who are dissatisfied with Donald Trump's presidency are normal Americans. Our political culture needs to wake up to this fact.

I'm not a real journalist, but maybe some people who really are journalists -- independent or otherwise -- need to conduct some safaris to the heartland to find the many Americans who aren't upscale, overeducated city-dwelling white liberals but who loathe Donald Trump anyway. They're there. They're everywhere. There are millions of them, and they're invisible.

Even a shellacking of the Republicans in the midterms might not get the point across -- pundits will say the vote was merely "thermostatic," or they'll fixate on winnable races Democrats lost. Even when Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, he was seen as the candidate who represented the zeitgeist, much more so than when Joe Biden won the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history four years later, and despite the fact that Biden's popular-vote margin was three times greater than Trump's in 2024. (Even Hillary Clinton's popular-vote win in her 2016 Electoral College loss was greater than Trump's popular-vote win eight years later.)

Democrats represent the zeitgeist now. It's time for the political world to acknowledge that.

IN EL PASO, TRUMP'S COWBOYS WANT TO CREATE AN AIRBORNE MINNEAPOLIS

In my post yesterday, I was obviously wrong to speculate that a war with Mexico was about to start. I say this even though it's clear that President Trump desperately wants to invade Mexico, as he said in two separate Fox interviews last week. One was with Sean Hannity:

President Donald Trump suggested in a new interview that the U.S. military could launch land strikes on drug cartels in Mexico.

“We’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water. And we are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview aired Thursday night.

“The cartels are running Mexico, it’s very sad to watch and see what’s happened to that country,” Trump said.

The other was with Larry Kudlow:

Speaking in an interview with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, Trump said his administration initially focused on disrupting drug shipments at sea, claiming those efforts reduced drug flows by roughly one-third. He said the strategy is now shifting to land-based operations to prevent traffickers from adapting by rerouting shipments.

“Now we’re going to start on land,” Trump said, arguing that hitting trafficking networks on land would stop smugglers from simply moving operations back to boats.

I'm sure you know by now that air traffic was shut down in and around El Paso after a U.S. anti-drone laser was fired at a target that turned out to be a party balloon. CBS News (which still seems to be functioning as a legitimate news organization) reports that tests of anti-drone technology have been underway for months, and the Department of Defense/War has insisted that the tech doesn't endanger commercial air traffic:

The Pentagon had undertaken extensive planning on the use of military technology near Fort Bliss, a military base that abuts the El Paso International Airport, to practice taking down drones.

Two sources identified the technology as a high-energy laser.

But the folks at the Pentagon had to act like cowboys:

Meetings were scheduled over safety impacts, but Pentagon officials wanted to test the technology sooner....

The airlines were under the impression that the airspace closure was put into place out of an abundance of caution because the FAA could not predict where U.S. government drones might be flying. The drones have been operating outside of their normal flight paths. The airlines were also aware of the apparent impasse between the FAA and Pentagon officials over the issue because the Pentagon has been using Fort Bliss for anti-cartel drone operations without sharing information with the FAA, the sources said

An aviation industry official told POLITICO that the restriction was put in place because the Defense Department has been using drones & testing some counter-drone techn in the airspace, which neighbors Mexico, without sharing critical safety info on such operations w/ the FAA https://t.co/kvHdiuby2b

— Oriana Pawlyk (@Oriana0214) February 11, 2026

But it wasn't the military that deployed the weapon that endangered commercial air traffic, as The New York Times tells us:

The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.

To me this feels a little like Minneapolis: Wannabe macho men in the Trump administration are choosing to act in ways that recklessly threaten public safety, while refusing to coordinate their actions with other parties that have a stake in the matter. And, of course, the macho men include immigration agents.

To some extent, this is part of the Trump/GOP War on Democrats, as Forbes notes:

Local officials, primarily Democrats, criticized the abrupt closure, and said local officials were not given proper warning. “I want to be very clear: this never should have happened,” El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson said in a statement on social media. “You cannot restrict airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, hospitals, and community leadership. That failure to communicate is unacceptable.” Johnson said emergency flights were grounded during the closure, forcing medical flights to reroute to Las Cruces, New Mexico, a city about 45 miles northwest of El Paso. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., also said he would demand answers from the FAA about “why the airspace was closed in the first place without notifying appropriate officials.”

The Pentagon and CBP kept the FAA out of the loop and then the FAA kept local officials out of the loop. The notion that we'll fight over some issues but work together on others is antiquated and passé. It's a war of all against all now. I'm sure that'll make America great.