The ICEman Cometh?
Welcome to America's first national police force. Trump is its Commander
July 11–13, 2025
By Marc Cooper
In our short but magnificent summer here in the PNW, I keep making short two- or three-day runs to the local majestic forests and mountains to keep my head clear. It’s breathtaking but it doesn’t work. The idle time in the idylls only leaves my mind wide open to the shocking news happening, hourly, across the nation.
I’m back now in Vancouver (Washington) once again trying to make sense of the crazed turbulence roiling those of us not asleep and it ain’t easy. Gotta say right off the bat that a lot of the political confusion around us is intentional. It’s a deliberate strategy by Trump, borrowed from Putin, to keep people so confused that they get bored by politics and tune out. If they were ever tuned in. They become allergic to facts because they cannot separate them from lies.
The more out of touch with the news, the better for any authoritarian. Veteran Democratic consultant Dan Pfeiffer argues this week, with data, that the less news one searches for and consumes, the more likely they have voted for or support Trump.
These are so-called “passive news consumers”—those who do not actively seek out news but who become objects of it. Trump was indeed elected by the 38% of the electorate that is less engaged. Says Pfeiffer:
The people we need to reach to win back the House and Senate are the 38% of midterm voters who don’t actively seek out the news. These folks have very different media diets than you and I. Social media is where most of them get their news.
Only 17% consider CNN to be a major source of news. Only 8% say that about national newspapers. I love complaining about the New York Times’s headlines as much as the next person, but this data makes clear that the voters we need to persuade are paying no attention to the Times. The big battles over their headlines and story choices are mostly an insular conversation among people whose vote was never in doubt.
I plead guilty to sometimes engaging in what is, in the end, this ineffective chitter-chatter among a small circle of friends. National TV news is little different. People popped their cookies when Joy Reid was cut from MSNBC (Thank Jesus!) or when some other anchor gets cut or moved. Or when a NYTimes column offends the Speech Police or the hallowed Hierarchy of Oppression. News flash! Most MSNBC show audiences rarely reach more than a million or so viewers (who also mostly all agree with each other), while FOX gets double that with the same sort of True Believer audience — this, out of a population of 350 million.
Yet, how many center-left and left substacks are obsessed with “proving” daily that the MSM is a corporate-controlled and tamed puppy? A waste of time, politically. Y’know what? We know that already. And the voters who count don’t even watch or read what we are bitching about.
Yet, it’s important that this targeted 38% get credible information because the more they obtain, the saner the electorate. How do we do that? One thing we do is build a progressive mediasphere and that does not include PBS and NPR who will do just fine with Mobil underwriting. Nor does that mean giving money to your local piddly-dink listener-supported radio stations that exist primarily to flatter the incompetent hosts rather than speak in understandable and CREDIBLE terms understood by that 38%.
Right now, today, we stand at an historical crossroads. I see only two probable scenarios ahead of us. The Trump administration continues to fall apart, the Democrats win the House next year and MAYBE the Senate, as Trump limps to the finish line as a very lame duck and any random Democrat crushes the execrable J.D. Vance in 2028, returning the country to a modicum of civility. Or…we continue to slide into a presidential dictatorship and a repressive police state with no end in sight. Oh yeah, a third possibility. Jesus returns and we live in perpetual harmony and love. All three are equally possible.
Discounting that third option, we ask ourselves (without the help of a couple of hundred fired weather experts) exactly which way is the wind blowing six months into this crackpot regime? Is there forward and mounting momentum toward an anti-Trump opposition that will block his worst plans? Or are we just continuously sliding toward authoritarian dictatorship?
My learned answer is both are true, simultaneously. It’s an existential race against time. But the forces of dictatorship are ahead by a couple of lengths…or laps.
First, about some forward motion. The protest next week on July 17 will be the biggest to date. It will draw millions to the streets. And that is good. But what will happen the day after?
Indivisible is organizing a One Million Strong Rising campaign at the end of July to train people on “non-cooperation” and community organizing. Can’t hurt for sure.
I have to say that while I am for it, I’m a bit skeptical about how effective this will be over three nights online. And what does non-cooperation mean? Boycotts? Please. I’d rather see the time invested in organizing local organizing committees who organize face to face and I daresay at this juncture I would find non-violent civil disobedience and a no-business-as-usual lesson plan more to the point. And while I am stalwart adherent to bottom up politics, I also support honest inspirational leaders who guide and motivate. Don’t ask me who? It has to be someone whose name we don’t know yet but who becomes a mobilizing moral beacon in a country that seems to no longer have a moral code. An MLK, a Lech Walesa, a Lula. Certainly not a Schumer.
On this subject I suggest you read as little as the Wikipedia version of the Armenian Revolution of 2018 as an example counter to petitions and hopes about a midterm that might not even happen. In brief, a career establishment politician named Nikol Pashinyan who was a fierce reformer and anti-corruption fighter for more than a decade alternated between being elected to parliament, having his newspaper shuttered, serving time as a political prisoner and going into hiding who determined in 2017 he would not tolerate the-then corrupt Prime Minister from serving an illegal third term, (sound familiar?). Though he never got more than 8% in any national election vote, he formed a tiny political party called Way Out, joined up with a few other micro parties and in 2018 announced he would lead a non-violent march of 120 miles to the capital of Yerevan. He started out with a handful of followers that kept growing along his two-week march. By the time the Prime Minister had been sworn in for his third term, some 200,000 people joined Nikol in a sit-in in front of the government palace and the Prime Minister resigned, breaking the back of the corrupt oligarchical omnipotent ruling bureaucracy left over from the immediate post-Soviet era.
I was there to witness it and it was a moment of national jubilation when Nikol was elected and sworn in. The country changed overnight. A deep gloom had been lifted and while Armenia is no paradise today it’s a lot more democratic, free and prosperous than before and Pashinyan continues as elected prime minister while young people can now at least imagine a future.
This story haunts me when I think of the opposition to Trump. Simply put, we have no electoral mechanisms to remove him from office until 2029 and only God and Stephen Miller know what shape we will be in after another 3 1/2 years of Trump. Armenia has a parliamentary system and regime change can take place with one simple vote. What are our options here?
Those who dishonestly ask you to fund support for the No Kings Act forget to tell you they are about 20 Senate votes short and maybe only two or three in sight. Same deal with pipe dreams about the 25th amendment unless you believe the cronies and kooks in the Trump cabinet are going to join the DSA. And on that subject the coming election of a Democratic Socialist as mayor of New York is good news but it ain’t Kansas as the 42nd Street T-shirts say. And Kansas is a much bigger problem than Manhattan.
There are the midterms, probably, maybe. Trump, however, has shown he can rule with NO Congress as he rules by decree with a compliant Supreme Court.
More importantly, sooner than I imagined, he is starting to politicize and deploy the U.S. Army, Marines and a thuggish ICE corps as America’s first ever national police force. If Trump succeeds in establishing a dictatorship, his initial siege of Los Angeles, which continues as I write, will go down in history as his own Enabling Act with the support of the Reichstag Congress, and the Supreme Court.
Yes, the outrageous tax and medical cuts in BBB are cruel and evil. Trump, I suggest, doesn’t give two wanks about either issue, I think many of us have incorrectly second-guessed his real motivation which I declare to be POWER and POWER alone.
He is dead set on normalizing the presence of ICE brutes throughout America because nothing says power better than total military control. This is the issue, the issue of freedom, the issue of resisting a police state, the militarization of our cities, the invasion of schools and parks by armored vehicles and troops on horseback carrying no badges but rather locked and loaded weapons of war that we need to block with our bodies if necessary.
The upward transfer of money via unequal taxes, and the cuts in medical care are going to take a couple of years to be felt. And when they do hit, Trump will blame someone else, like the Congress of the devil. As Pfeiffer says in the article linked above, for too many people their political affiliation is of ten more important that their religion and have no inclination to change, no matter what,
When it comes to a police state there is only one commander-in-chief. Donald J. Trump. The massive budget allocated to ICE by the BBB is four times its current funding and it is set to recruit 10,000 more new agents, as soon as that many overweight and undereducated rejects and failed applicants from other law enforcement agencies can be herded up. A baseball stadium costs about $1.5 Billion. Alligator Alcatraz is costing about 1/2 billion. ICE’s new construction budget is $45 billion. About enough for 30-50 more camps.
I don’t want to overstate this but this is also a fact. With ICE agents now becoming the largest law enforcement force in the country, with its budget now as big as the French military including its nukes and aircraft carriers, America is being radically transformed. Make no mistake, the emergence of this force radically reduces the power of even large states and gives it to the Federal Government. That’s an act as consequential as the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which set the stage for the Civil War.
Sit through these 3 minutes of video about the recent military invasion of L.A.’s MacArthur Park. After Mayor Bass demanded the troops and cops leave, the rock-headed commander of the operation looked straight into the camera and said “we don’t work for Mayor Bass… we are federal. We’re gonna be here and you better get used to us. It’s going to be normal.”
Are we getting used to it? I hope not.
Far be it from me to tell you what to do. There are no quick and easy solutions to fighting a dictatorship. If you ignore the threat at this juncture and do nothing about it, you qualify as a Good German and assume a piece of the responsibility for the ongoing ruination of America. And if you think that an enlarged national ICE force, who are far less accountable to the courts than ordinary police, are going to limit their activities to snatching the worst of the worst Mexican gardeners, roofers and abuelitas, you are supremely naive and please pass that joint over to me.. When somebody hands you a nine-pound sledgehammer, not to speak of tanks and troop carriers, you are gonna use them. These goons are attached to the Customs and Border Patrol who love to seize contraband and drugs. They LOVE drug seizures. It’s what the used to do before besieging car washes. It might be far out today but not a year from now that these masked goons will be going after your Vuitton knock-off next time you go to an abandoned car wash even if it holds your U.S. passport. Contraband!
P.S. In a couple of recent posts I have referred to ICE agents as the dregs of law enforcement, I stand by that assertion. Look at the videos and see what percentage of them are too fat to be employed as cops. There’s reasons why LAPD recruits start at $88,000 a year and top out at near $200,000 while ICE salaries start at $29,000 and top out at $62,000. Different standards, folks, different training and those will probably be lowered now to find 10,000 more appropriate sub-par brutes. ++
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