REPUBLICAN VOTERS HAVE LIVED IN AN AI-SLOP FANTASYLAND SINCE BEFORE THERE WAS AI

Did you know that Zohran Mamdani is Jeffrey Epstein's son? Alex Jones says he might be, so it must be true.

A major investigation is underway to determine if reports are true that the current New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani
Is the biological son of Jeffrey Epstein? pic.twitter.com/2bd2E7RT7A

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 1, 2026

As a reader noted, the image is AI generated, but the tweet has twenty thousand likes.

This follow-up isn't even AI:

Analyze these faces @grok and tell us the probability they are related pic.twitter.com/IrBX4OPwdp

— USA NEWS 🇺🇸 (@usanewshq) February 2, 2026

I don't see any resemblance there. Do you? Does anyone?

But I don't think this is intended to be carefully scrutinized. It's intended to be wish fulfillment for right-wingers: We hate Mamdani -- who might be the secret son of the most notorious pedophile of all time!

A Hannah Arendt quote, from her last public interview, is often invoked in discussions of Republican mendacity:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

This may be applicable to other authoritarian states, but it's not applicable to 21st-century America. GOP voters -- who are the only citizens Republicans care to persuade -- never reach a point where "nobody believes anything any longer." They continue to believe whatever they're told by Republican propagandists, or at least they're willing to give credebnce to whatever contradicts accepted truth if it reinforces their priors and prejudices. Zohran Mamdani's father isn't really a Columbia professor, but, rather, a demon who walked among us? Sure, that's believable! Or at least it's a satisfying story.

And most Republican lies don't "have to be changed." Consider this one:

Trump: "These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. The Republicans should say, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize voting. We have states that I won that show I didn't win. You're gonna see something in Georgia."

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— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 1:08 PM

Republicans have been telling us for decades that ineligible immigrants routinely vote Democratic in large numbers -- this despite the fact that no one can actually find these unqualified voters, including right-wing think tanks:

A database maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation found "fewer than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than 1 billion lawfully cast ballots."

The Heritage Foundation!

But the culture of lying in right-wing media conditions Republican voters to believe that anything could be true if it contradicts an official narrative they don't like. These voters aren't conditioned to believe that there's no such thing as truth -- they're conditioned to believe that there's no such thing as a truth they'd prefer not to believe.

There are influencers on the right who specialize in creating imaginary worlds where everything that upsets and enrages Republicans is shown to be a lie. These are AI-slop worlds in verbal form, and they existed before there was AI slop. Remember this, from 2018?

Republicans can't get enough of this sort of thing, to this day:

The Melania documentary had a more successful opening weekend than a lot of us expected, but its audience is about what you'd expect demographically:

Audience members were largely white (75%), women (70%), and 55 or over (72%). Dallas, Orlando, Tampa, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta and West Palm Beach were among the top markets over the weekend, according to data from Amazon MGM Studios.

Even if the intended audience doesn't fully believe the Nick Adams tweet, and didn't believe the Jacob Wohl tweet, the tweets nevertheless conjure a world in which no American is really as anti-Trump as "they" want you to believe. The Big Lies that Donald Trump and other Republicans tell us -- that the 2020 vote was phony, that protesters in Minneapolis and elsewhere are in the streets only because George Soros and his son are paying them to protest -- get reinforced.

Hannah Arendt was thinking about societies in which the majority of the populace needed to be manipulated by lies. In America, GOP control of enough states to nearly win the Electoral College and Senate in every electoral cycle means that the Republican Party cares only about persuading its own voters. And those voters live in a fantasy world.

OVERTHINKING THE ETHNICITY OF ALEX PRETTI'S KILLERS

ProPublica has identified the two men who shot Alex Pretti.

The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez....

Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units.

I don't like the framing of Marcy Wheeler's response to this:

Stephen Miller Paid Latino Thugs to Murder Alex Pretti emptywheel.net/2026/02/02/s...

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— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 6:53 AM

Wheeler notes that a number of Miller's goons aren't white. For example:

Alfredo Mancillas Jr. was found in St. Paul last Tuesday, passed out drunk in his illegally-parked car, covered in his own vomit....

The two heavily masked ICE agents who snatched Brad Lander last June are “a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who lives in Brighton Beach” and “an Indo-Guyanese gentleman who lives in South Ozone Park.”

(Lander was the comptroller of New York City and a supporter of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign. He's currently primarying Congressman Dan Goldman from the left.)

What I don't like about Wheeler's framing is that she doesn't seem to believe that these non-white enforcers of Miller's reign of terror have any agency of their own. To Wheeler, only the whites in the Trump regime can be decision-makers. And her belief that Miller feels the need to conceal the ethnic identity of these men seems absurd to me.

There are a lot of reasons Stephen Miller’s goons wear masks. To terrify the communities they invade. To make it harder to shame them. To make it harder to tie them to other crimes they may have committed....

But there is accumulating evidence that a big reason these goons hide their faces is to hide that the white nationalist project Stephen Miller is pursuing — like virtually everything else in America — relies on brown people to do the hard work. Miller can only sustain the myth of white self-reliance by hiding the faces of those who murder white men at his behest in the streets of Blue cities....

They’re trying to hide how much even their deeply racist project is helpless without brown labor.

Wheeler doesn't offer us any of this "accumulating evidence," only a list of non-white offenders.

I think this misunderstands the way right-wingers look at race. Some are pure bigots in the David Duke/Nick Fuentes mold. They hate anyone who isn't white and Christian. And even those who don't fall into this category want to live in an America in which white male heterosexual Christians run pretty much everything.

But the people hoping to build a white ethnostate are always in tension with those on the right who proudly point to everyone of color who seems to have "escaped" from "the liberal plantation." The organizers of Trump's campaign rallies seemed happy to have the candidate speak with "BLACKS FOR TRUMP" signs in the background. Trump embraced Kanye West before West became too toxic. And Republican candidates of color -- Herschel Walker in Georgia, Mark Robinson in North Carolina, Royce White in Minnesota -- have won Republican primaries throughout the Trump era. In the Florida governor's race, Byron Donalds leads all other candidates in Republican primary polling by more than 30 points, and in polling of the Ohio GOP gubernatorial primary, Vivek Ramaswamy's lead is more than 50 points. Most Republicans enjoy pointing to these figures and accusing liberals of being "the real racists."

Wheeler's framing implies that Miller's non-white immigration agents are laboring in a state of pseudo-enslavement, or at least doing the work reluctantly because there's nothing else available. That's belied by what the ProPublica story tells us about one of the agents:

Ochoa, who goes by Jesse, graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American with a degree in criminal justice, according to his ex-wife, Angelica Ochoa. A longtime resident of the Rio Grande Valley, Ochoa had for years dreamed of working for the Border Patrol and finally landed a job there, she said. By the time the couple split in 2021, he had become a gun enthusiast with about 25 rifles, pistols and shotguns, Angelica Ochoa said.

And this doesn't surprise me:

Records show both men are from South Texas.

Recall the results of the 2024 election:

After years of losing the statewide Latino vote by double digits, Republicans set a high-water mark with Donald Trump capturing 55% of the critical voting bloc, besting Vice President Kamala Harris’ 44% share, according to exit polls.

In the traditionally Democratic strongholds along the border, Trump managed a near sweep.

He won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his attention-grabbing 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region. He carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley just eight years after drawing a mere 29% in the region — a feat that included delivering 97% Latino Starr County to Republicans for the first time since 1896. And, though he lost El Paso, one of the border’s most populous counties, he narrowed margins there in ways not seen in decades.

According to Pew, Trump won 28% of the Hispanic vote in 2016, 36% in 2020, and a remarkable 48% in 2024. He won 50% of Hispanic men. Polls show that Trump's support among Hispanics has plunged since the 2024 election, but a quarter of Hispanics still back him.

I don't believe that the Hispanic men who killed Alex Pretti were men of color reluctantly doing jobs for white overlords. I think they shared the mindset that compels white men to become immigration officers. It's patronizing to imply that they didn't want to be to be doing what they're doing. I've watched my fellow Italian-Americans move to the right during my lifetime, and I think it can happen to members of any ethnic group. The Republican coalition is still overwhelmingly white, but it isn't exclusively white. Maybe Stephen Miller wants it to be, but we're not there, even now.

REPUBLICANS WANT TO BE CRUELER TO IMMIGRANTS' CHILDREN THAN I WANT TO BE TO STEPHEN MILLER

A federal judge has ordered the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who were detained last week in Minneapolis by President Trump's immigration goons. At the time of his arrest, Liam Ramos was wearing a bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack.

In The New York Times today, Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia University, notes that Liam Ramos is far from unique:

Children all across the country are being arrested and detained.... From January to October 2025, at least 3,800 children under the age of 18, including 20 infants, were arrested and detained by U.S. immigration authorities. Since March 2025, many hundreds of families with children who are minors have been detained in federal immigration custody, with more than 1,700 children in custody since family detention centers reopened. Many have been detained for long periods of time, some for nearly half a year.

The children at Dilley with whom I’ve worked over the past year range in age from 2 to 16 years old.... A 2-year-old boy was breastfeeding in detention. One 6-year-old boy had leukemia. An 8-year-old girl began wetting the bed. A 14-year-old girl engaged in self-harm. All of these children and their parents were detained despite being eligible for release — ICE has the authority to release these families, who are not flight risks, on parole — and while seeking asylum and other humanitarian protections in the United States. None of these children or their parents had a criminal history anywhere in the world.

What's sickening about this is the gratuitous cruelty:

The family detention facility at Dilley is a hellhole. Children and parents consistently report not having access to sufficient potable water, palatable food (both children and parents have told me they found worms in their meals), adequate medical care or meaningful educational opportunities. Lights are left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep.

And the cruelty has been the point since the first Trump presidency:

... the first Trump administration insisted in 2019 before a federal appeals court that it was “safe and sanitary” to detain immigrant children for days in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights without blankets in cold temperatures.

How does all this advance the administration's stated goal of removing every undocumented immigrant from America? How, for instance, does leaving the lights on 24 hours a day in areas where children are detained advance that goal in a way that allowing a period of darkness wouldn't?

They're doing it because people in the administration, as well as their most devoted voters, relish the suffering of these immigrants, the same way they relish the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They want the people they hate to suffer, and that includes children of immigrants.

I don't know about you, but while I want the people orchestrating this orgy of brutality to be held accountable, I don't fantasize about piling on sadistic punishments for them. I think it would be justice for the president to die in prison, and for long terms to be meted out to Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, and many other Trump officials, as well as the cops who killed Good and Pretti. But this is America, where conservatives are rarely held accountable, so I don't expect any of this. Nevertheless, at the very least, I'd like these people to be lifelong pariahs, as marginalized and widely reviled as David Duke.

Your mileage may vary. You might hope that these people will be brutalized in the future. But even so, you feel that way because they've actually committed unspeakable offenses. Republican voters feel this way about little kids -- kids who've done nothing to them.

The key voting bloc in the coalition that elected our current federal government has a worldview that places right-wing heterosexual Christian men in a dominant position in the culture and believes they should be given carte blanche to dole out extremely harsh punishments to everyone who fails to live up to their standards of behavior, starting with their own children and wives. These are people who believe it's sinful not to subject your children to corporal punishment. These are people who believe empathy for people outside one's own tribe is a grave sin.

I don't think these people represent a majority of America. But for years they've been seen as normative, while the rest of us have been seen as elitist weirdos.

Maybe we're arriving at a point where their extremism is being recognized outside communities of liberals and progressives. Yesterday's election of a Democrat (by approximately 14 points) in a state legislative district in Texas that went for Trump by 17 points in 2024 suggests that maybe times are changing. I hope so. But for now, the dominant ideology in America approves of mistreating children if they're the "wrong" children.

*****

UPDATE: Liam Ramos and his father have been released.

THE RELEASE OF ADDITIONAL EPSTEIN FILES IS JUST ONE MORE BIT OF EFFLUENT IN THE FIREHOSE

More Jeffrey Epstein files were released yesterday. The government has additional documents but says it won't release them, in defiance of the law. Nevertheless, what we saw yesterday hinted at the loathsomeness of many famous people -- Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Howard Lutnick, Steve Tisch ... And then there are the more horrifying claims, such as the allegation that the late Robin Leach, who hosted the TV series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in the 1980s and 1990s, "strangle[d] a young girl to death at a party."

Was this worth it? We're shaming these boldface names, but no one seems to have a plan to hold anyone accountable, up to and including Trump. It's good to put a scarlet letter on these vile people, but that's probably all we're going to get out of this.

As for the timing: In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon told Michael Lewis that the correct Republican strategy for dealing with the media was to "flood the zone with shit." The standard interpretation of this phrase is "flood the zone with lies and half-truths" -- as David Corn wrote last year, "It’s Trump’s version of what’s been called the 'firehose of falsehood' model of propaganda utilized by Russia."

But what we're getting from the Trump White House in 2026 -- and have been getting since he was inaugurated a year ago -- isn't a firehose of falsehood necessarily. The Trumpers just throw everything at us all at once, and we struggle to respond to one outrage as twenty others pop up on our phones. Yesterday I noted that the Trump administration has been arresting journalists who covered a protest at a church in Minnesota, seizing ballots and other electoral records in Georgia, and planning to do to Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, what's recently been done to Minneapolis. Now there's more. It's being reported that Trump wants the arch he intends to build in D.C. to be more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial. He also announced that he wants an Indy-car auto race to take place on the streets of Washington this summer, and he wants a stadium that can hold 100,000 people to be built in front of the White House, in time for a scheduled UFC event scheduled for his birthday. This isn't "shit" as in lies and misinformation -- it's "shit" as in I'm doing this, and you haters will just have to eat shit.

The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell posted this yesterday:

Called it.

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— Sarah Longwell (@sarahlongwell25.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 11:15 AM

I'd say that Trump is throwing so much at us that it's all a distraction from Minneapolis, and the other items I've mentioned are distractions from the newly released Epstein files, and the fact that the administration withheld millions of Epstein pages but exposed many famous people in the newly released files is a distraction from the additional appearances of Trump's name in the newly released files, and reports that the administration is adopting a "new tone" in Minnesota are distractions from the fact that the crackdown hasn't really abated -- the administration continues to claim broad powers to arrest people without judicial warrants, and there's this:

The government is escalating its war, not drawing down.

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— The Editorial Board (@editorialboard.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 8:45 AM

We're all struggling to get purchase on all of this, and that's what the Bannon strategy envisions.

TRUMP WILL GET HIS ABUSE FIX ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

This week, far too many people fell for the notion that President Trump now recognizes the need for self-restraint in Minnesota after the thuggish murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Trump made a few cosmetic changes in the state, but he appears to have responded to the widespread outrage by getting his abuse fix in other ways.

Here's the act of abuse that's leading the news:

The former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested late Thursday night on charges that he violated federal law during a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minn., his lawyer said, in a case rejected last week by a magistrate judge.

Mr. Lemon has said he was simply reporting as a journalist when he entered the Cities Church on Jan. 18 to observe a demonstration against the immigration crackdown in the area.

The protesters interrupted a service at the church, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official serves as a pastor, and chanted “ICE out.” Afterward, the Trump administration sought to charge eight people over the episode, including Mr. Lemon, citing a law that protects people seeking to participate in a service in a house of worship.

But the magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence approved charges against only three of the people, rejecting the evidence against Mr. Lemon and the others as insufficient. The Justice Department then petitioned a federal appeals court to force the judge to issue the additional warrants, only to be denied.

Lemon is well off and has a high-powered D.C.-insider lawyer, Abbe Lowell. It's quite likely that he'll beat the rap. But Lemon isn't the only Black journalist who's been arrested for the crime of covering this protest:

Minnesota based Independent Journalist GEORGIA FORT has been arrested for filming a protest of the church pastor that works as an ICE manager. SPREAD THE WORD! Georgia has been doing outstanding reporting from ground zero!

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— The Letterhack (@theletterhack.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 8:23 AM

Georgia Fort, an independent journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was also arrested by federal agents this morning I was sent this video of agents at her door:

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— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 9:58 AM

On Wednesday, the FBI seized voting records and ballots from the 2020 election in heavily Democratic Fulton Country, Georgia. Yesterday, Trump sued the FBI for $10 billion, accusing the agency of negligence in hiring an employee who went on to leak Trump's tax returns. And there are

media reports that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine told state leaders that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning a 30-day surge in Ohio....

The operation in Ohio is set to begin Feb. 4 after the Trump administration ended Temporary Protective Status about 500,000 Haitian immigrants in the U.S.

If we want to look at these new fronts in Trump's war on common decency as "distractions," please note that he's distracting us from his evil acts in Minnesota with more evil acts.

If it's all meant as a distraction, it's not meant as a distraction intended to make us forget that Trump's thugs have been doing morally reprehensible things in Minnesota. If anything, it's intended to distract us from the fact that Trump didn't crush the Minnesota resistance. Trump doesn't think he did terrible things in Minnesota that alienated most of America -- he thinks he looks weak because he had to make even a superficial retreat. If he's trying to distract us, he's trying to distract us from his failure to be a completely successful thug.

(Or you could argue that he's trying to distract himself from his poor polling and his failure to dominate Minneapolis.)

Regrettably, it will be a struggle to get normie voters to respond to these outrages the way they've responded to two summary executions in Minneapolis, even though the attacks on elections and the First Amendment are deeply alarming. Maybe Trump understands that on a gut level. Maybe he assumes that only journalists -- who are held in low esteem these days -- will be truly outraged at the arrests. Maybe Trump critics in the press will continue to insist that he can't really tamper with the midterms. If so, these will turn out to be successful distractions, whether or not that's what they were meant to be.

SENATE DEMOCRATS SURRENDER THEIR ADVANTAGE

Senate Democrats have preemptively surrendered on Department of Homeland Security funding, David Dayen of The American Propsect reports.

... the Democrats’ list of demands appears to have shrunk after internal deliberations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released the Senate caucus’s set of asks on Wednesday. They included an end to roving patrols and a requirement for proper judicial warrants, limiting enforcement actions to known targets in conjunction with local law enforcement; standards on use of force that match those of the local police; and a “masks off, body cameras on” policy.

The first few items would be good if they could be enforced. "Body cameras on" is useless -- those of us who live in big cities know that cops with body camera requirements routinely say, "Whoops! I forgot to turn my camera on!" when footage is demanded after a controversial incident. We also know that the Republican message machine can persuade nearly everyone in the GOP voter base that they're seeing something other than what video evidence shows.

And the thugs will sidestep "masks off," saying they need to wear face coverings for the cold (in places like Minnesota and Maine now), or wear gas masks because they're deploying tear gas and pepper balls.

And:

Arguably many of these conditions are already part of ICE and CBP standards; the problem is a lack of enforcement. Indeed, a new directive sent to ICE agents late Wednesday night instructed them to avoid talking to community members (“agitators,” to use their word) and to only target immigrants with criminal charges or convictions. That would encompass a good chunk of the Schumer demands.

What's missing from the Democrats' list of demands?

Ideas like requiring cooperation with state and local investigations into ICE and CBP misconduct, returning CBP personnel to the border rather than interior enforcement, preventing enforcement in “sensitive locations” like schools or churches, and ending mass quotas for immigration arrests are not present in the Schumer list. And Schumer also doesn’t touch funding levels, nor does he attempt to claw back the surge funding for ICE that enables operations like those we’re seeing in Minnesota.

Yes, end the quotas! It's a reasonable ask, and Democrats could have made the case that the quotas are the reason Trump's thugs are detaining children, elderly citizens in their underwear, and immigrants who are working and not committing crimes. Also, there are reports that even the agents themselves find the quotas burdensome.) And stay away from schools, churches, and hospitals.

But that's the problem: old-fashioned Democrats feel they need to be strictly passive in the face of public opinion -- or even what they imagine public opinion is. They don't believe they're within their rights to try to change public opinion, even if they have compelling arguments. They finally understand that the public has turned against ICE, but they've internalized the belief that it's still the late twentieth century, and normies -- Chuck Schumer's imaginary Baileys -- believe in "law and order" and keeping law enforcement accountability to the absolute minimum. They can't imagine that they could invoke the arrest of children to stir justifiable outrage. They think only Republicans are allowed to try to steer public opinion -- or even, in this case, nudge it further in the direction it's already going.

There are Democrats who aren't thinking like this.

... the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has released “non-negotiable” policy positions for DHS funding, including suspending ICE/CBP enforcement actions in Minnesota, barring detention of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, protecting sensitive locations, banishing Border Patrol to the border, redirecting Big Beautiful Bill funding of DHS away from mass detention and deportation, and a bunch more.

Even if you're a Schumer Democrat and believe that most of these demands are the more than the Baileys can tolerate, what's wrong with demanding that Trump's Gestapo no longer detain citizens and lawful permanent residents? Or even just citizens? Is it so hard for the Schumer Democrats to imagine that normie voters might react positively to the idea that it makes no sense to detain U.S. citizens in what's supposed to be a crackdown on undocumented immigrants?

But the Schumer Democrats can't wrap their minds around the idea that Democratic messaging should lead to the conclusion They're the extremists. We're the reasonable Americans. And so, once again, they're squandering an opportunity.

NOEM ISN'T PULLING MILLER UNDER THE BUS -- SHE'S USING HIM AS A HUMAN SHIELD

The White House response to public outrage over events in Minnesota is being described in some quarters as a "circular firing squad." Some people don't believe Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will keep her job for much longer, and they believe she's trying to take De Facto President Stephen Miller down with her.

Wow. It’s clear what is happening here, and it is juicy. Kristi Noem knows she’s being thrown under the bus for her slanderous lies about Alex Pretti…and now she’s trying to pull Stephen Miller under the tires with her. These people deserve each other. www.axios.com/2026/01/27/t...

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— TrumpsTaxes (@trumpstaxes.com) January 27, 2026 at 4:58 PM

So will multiple heads roll, or will only Border Patrol's Greg Bovino lose his job? Regrettably, it appears that the latter scenario is more likely.

The New York Times says that Noem seemed to be in President Trump's doghouse, but only for a short time:

Facing an intense and increasingly bipartisan fusillade of criticism over the killing of a protester in Minneapolis and how Ms. Noem and other officials sought to portray the victim as a “domestic terrorist,” Mr. Trump removed the official running the deportation campaign in Minnesota and replaced him with an aide reporting directly to him, effectively cutting Ms. Noem out of the chain of command....

But her time in Mr. Trump’s penalty box was measured in hours. By Monday night, she was in the Oval Office, meeting with Mr. Trump. By Tuesday the president was telling reporters that her job was safe and that the media should focus more on her role in shutting down illegal immigration into the country, not the chaotic scenes coming out of Minnesota in which agents who report to her have twice shot and killed American citizens protesting their presence.

The Axios story cited in the Bluesky post above (free to read here) does say this:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for issuing misleading and incendiary information that claimed immigration agents killed an armed Minnesota protestor Saturday because he wanted to "massacre" them.

But that language was dictated to Noem and her department by the man most responsible for the controversial operation: Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump adviser, four sources tell Axios....

"Everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the president and Stephen," Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.

And why would she say this? Because Miller is apparently untouchable:

The episode illustrates the sheer power of Miller, Trump's close and longest-serving political adviser whose dominion in the White House far exceeds his title.

His influence extends to de facto oversight of Noem, though she's a Cabinet secretary who technically outranks him.

... Miller ... remains one of the president's closest advisers, sources said.

"Stephen Miller is one of President Trump's most trusted and longest-serving aides. The president loves Stephen," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios.

Miller, for his part, declared that the shooting of Alex Pretti -- which he'd previously celebrated -- happened because Customs and Border Protection agents "may not have been following ... protocol." So he's throwing Noem (who oversees CBP) under the bus. She, on the other hand, is using him as a human shield.

Which means, sadly, that neither one is likely to be unemployed anytime soon. The majority of Democrats in the House want to impeach Noem, but that's not enough to make it happen in a Republican-controlled House. Much is being made of Republican discontent with Noem, but in the Senate -- where twenty Republican votes to convict would be needed in the event of an impeachment by the House -- only two Republicans, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and North Carolina's Thom Tillis, have called for Noem's resignation.

It's taken an extraordinary series of events and an unprecedented level of Democratic outrage to get us this far, and it's still not enough. It seems as if it would take twice as much outrage to achieve major personnel changes. There might be more hope for reforms of ICE, however inadequate they might be. But with Trump still at 41% approval and public opinion on ICE abolition still roughly 50-50 (actually 45%-45%, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll), it's hard to imagine Republicans in Congress breaking with the White House in significant numbers to permit a serious turnaround in how the federal government handles immigration.