Pay attention. Trump is trying to convince us that he's a reasonable man so he can soften the plans by Senate Dems to use the budget process to put new restraints on DHS. He's playing dumb: "I didn't know what the people I hired and talk to ten times a day were doing."
He doesn't care about Renee Good and Alex Pretti, other than the PR problem they present. He just wanted the victims to be Black, part of his plan to heighten chaos and give him a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act.
During his first term, Barbara Res, who was the VP of construction at the Trump Organization, said he was an obsessive micromanager, and to remember that when he blamed the people who worked for him. "No one does anything he doesn't want them to do," she said in an interview.
I remind myself of that, because he has a lot of people working to convince us otherwise.
He will not actually change what ICE is doing. He will only tell them to get better at covering it up.
The danger here is that the Senate Democrats, who hold real power in the budget negotiations over ICE, will fall for it. (Charlie Brown, Lucy, football.) This is the time to contact your senators and stiffen their spine.
Lev Parnas, the shady Giuliani associate who worked on Trump's behalf for years, but later broke with him over Ukraine, is sounding the alarm.
I need you to stop for a second and really see what’s happening right in front of our eyes—because once again, Republicans are running the same old playbook: create chaos, pick a scapegoat, launch a distraction campaign, and hope the American people forget who’s actually responsible.
And let me be very clear: it’s not complicated. They want you arguing about Pam Bondi. They want you arguing about Kash Patel. They want you arguing about Kristi Noem. They want you arguing about Stephen Miller. They want you arguing about Pete Hegseth, or whoever the headline is that day.
But I keep telling you: it’s not them. It’s not Pam Bondi. It’s not Kash Patel. It’s not kristi Noem. It’s not Pete Hegseth.
It’s their leader. Donald Trump.
And as long as people keep falling for the distraction, he keeps getting away with it.
And I want to add something here that people still do not understand about Donald Trump, even after all these years.
Donald Trump is a micromanager. He doesn’t “accidentally” end up in these situations.
He doesn’t “find out later.” He doesn’t get “embarrassed” by what his people do.
The New Republic's Greg Sargent says we will know that Trump is changing course if he allows a good-faith investigation into the government’s killing of U.S. citizens to proceed -- "And that isn’t happening anytime soon."
Still, Trump has visibly been caught off guard by what he’s unleashed. He senses that Democrats now have unexpected leverage over him—hence his effort to placate them before they restrict DHS. He sees that the public has turned sharply against him over the occupations and the smearing of the victims—so he instructed press secretary Karoline Leavitt to distance him from Stephen Miller’s description of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” and he now has his aides leaking word of his “pivot” and “de-escalation.”
And Trump surely knows the DOJ cover-up of these killings is creating a wealth of new, sordid revelations for investigative reporters—and, possibly, a Democratic House—to unearth. He now claims to want an “honorable and honest investigation” that he personally will be “watching over.”
There won’t be any such “honorable investigation.” Yet Trump, who is predisposed to smearing the victims himself but displays political canniness at unpredictable moments, clearly sees that the ethnonationalist ideologues around him—Miller and JD Vance, who harbor malice toward allies of immigrants and thus eagerly savaged the dead—are taking this to a politically perilous place.
