TRUMP RENEWS L.A.-BASED REALITY SERIES, ANNOUNCES TWO SPINOFFS

The big news story this morning is the arrest of the Minnesota shooter, Vance Boelter, but the news with the greatest impact is a policy adjustment announced last night at Truth Social. AP reports:

President Donald Trump on Sunday directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, a move that comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”

He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”

Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.

The AP story implies that the announcement was a defiant response to Saturday's demonstrations. That might be true -- if Trump has a core principle, it's one he learned from his great mentor, Roy Cohn: When you're attacked, never apologize and always go on offense. In response to the demonstrations, and to polls showing his support on immigration slipping, he's doubling down.

He also wants to be perceived as not retreating after his recent announcement that he's pausing ICE raids on farms, hotels, and restaurants, which upset some of his richest backers.

The press is focusing more on the policy shift and less on the Truth Social post itself. I believe that America is in trouble because the voters for the country's dominant political party respond well to this kind of presidential rhetoric:

Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People.

Republicans run America because they've persuaded tens of millions of Americans that Democrats are history's greatest monsters. When Trump refers to "Radical Democrat Politicians," he's talking about all Democrats -- they're all radicals, as far as he and his voters are concerned. You may not see Democratic politicians engaged in "violence, harassment, and even threats" against ICE agents "every day," but Trump's voters (and Trump himself) think they have. They're sure they see it every day on Fox News.

In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.

Referring to this passage, Axios says that Trump "echoed baseless claims he made during the 2024 presidential election" -- but they're not just claims he made in 2024. Obviously he said the same things in 2020, but he also made similar claims after the 2016 election, when he insisted that he would have won California, a state he lost in a landslide, if it weren't for illegal votes. And it's not just Trump -- a large percentage of the Republican Party regularly accuses Democrats of cheating on elections, something that's been true at least since President George W. Bush fired U.S. attorneys two decades ago because they wouldn't pursue cases involving nonexistent Democratic election fraud.

Trump continues:

These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!

Here we have the core belief of the Republican Party: Democrats deliberately weaken America because they hate America. The GOP has been saying this since the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The party's media spokespeople -- on talk radio a generation ago, on Fox News and podcasts now -- say it every day as if it's established fact. This decades-long demonization of one of our major political parties has corroded democracy in America. It's a much greater crisis than, say, Democratic attempts to downplay President Biden's age-related impairment, or the fact that some progressives use the word "Latinx," but there's no Jake Tapper out there decrying this as a major threat to the Republic, even though it's the greatest threat to the Republic, and the reason at least 45% of Americans think the Trump/GOP dictatorship is perfectly acceptable.

You might see Trump's sudden change of subject -- what the hell do trans people have to do with immigration? -- as a sign of mental impairment, but it just means that his brain is wired like the brains of millions of other Fox viewers. A generation ago, the digression might have been about "Sharia law" or the subject of some other Fox-driven panic. Now it's trans people.

Trump writes:

I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day.

If you don't agree with Republicans on this issue, you're not a real American. You shouldn't be allowed to vote. You shouldn't have citizenship. As Republicans say:

Real Americans are enjoying the footage from L.A. the way normal people enjoy a horror movie: they're watching what terrifies them most -- people who disagree with them politically -- and there seems to be violence and chaos (even if they never process the fact that it's confined to a few blocks of a large, sprawling city, and even if they don't grasp that the tear gas smoke they see is coming from the cops, not the protesters). Then, after this series of delicious scares, their hero arrives to kill the monsters.

In their America, it's great TV. No wonder Trump is renewing Police State: L.A. and announcing two new spinoffs, Police State: Chicago and Police State: New York.