Donald Trump has a myriad of guises, none of them admirable: He is a preening narcissist with no end of self-congratulatory thoughts; a multiple-times failed businessman with six bankruptcies on his record; a sexual predator who declared his prowess to a journalist and was even accused of brutal sexual aggression against his first wife; a felon convicted by a New York jury on multiple counts of falsifying business records; an ex-president who illegitimately absconded with highly classified records to his seaside retreat in Palm Beach after losing the 2020 election; and he’s been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States as well as conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in connection with his overall plan to prevent the transfer of power to Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who had clearly won the 2020 election. He is also demonstrably incapable of systematic, organized, rational thought. Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote Trump’s book The Art of the Deal, has said that he found it impossible to conduct a systematic interview with Trump because the man could not focus on a single train of thought for more than a few minutes. Schwartz has shouldered his portion of the blame (shared, I think, with Trump’s infamous TV show The Apprentice) for creating the misleading image—still accepted by many—of Trump as a rational thinker. The tariff issue, on which The Donald still refuses to acknowledge that tariffs are paid by the receiver of foreign goods rather than the sender, is one example of the actual operation of his befuddled mind.
But all that is not my main concern at this moment. My principal concern right now is the midterm elections, and whether our system of democracy will continue to prevail or be seriously compromised or even snuffed out completely by Trump. I didn’t mention above my conviction that Trump is, above all, a destroyer, and his goal, consciously or unconsciously, is to destroy every good aspect of the American project, top to bottom, in every field of endeavor and accomplishment. But I also didn’t mention what I consider his saving grace, though that might not be the right term for it. I refer to the all-important fact that he is, I believe, quintessentially a coward, with a host of fears that run very deep and haunt him. He can be brutal, but only when it is easy and safe to be brutal—when he thinks the field before him is wide open to such behavior.
But it is noteworthy that he will not stand up to the likes of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, and particularly Putin, the more brazenly cutthroat of the two. Imagine a president of the United States on the verge of sending potentially nation-saving missiles to Ukraine and then being talked out of it by Putin in a telephone call! Trump can attack small, defenseless boats in the Caribbean supposedly transporting drugs, and kill their occupants, and he can kidnap the president of the small and virtually defenseless nation of Venezuela with little consequence. Iran is a vastly larger country but no match for conventional armed forces, though Trump may have stumbled into a trap there that will prove difficult to untangle himself from.
My thesis, therefore, is this: Trump is a bloated, pretentious, cowardly bully, and like all bullies he can be made to stand down, and as a matter of fact has already been forced to stand down—in Minneapolis, to be exact, through the actions of its citizenry, as Bruce Springsteen has immortalized them in song. Let me review some of the events that took place in freezing wintry weather there over a period of two months and two weeks, from December 1, 2025, to February 12, 2026, a total of 73 days in succession. Operation Metro Surge was launched in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area on December 1, targeting the substantial Somali community there (Trump has a special Trumpian grudge against Somalis for some reason). On December 4, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced the arrest of 12 people during the crackdown. On December 9, federal agents used pepper spray to push through a crowd of protesters who were using whistles to alert the vulnerable to ICE’s presence. On December 30, ICE launched a new surge of agents into Minnesota, and on January 7, 2026, Renee Good was fatally shot in her car by an ICE agent. On January 23, a statewide economic blackout summoned residents to withhold labor and consumption by staying home from work and school; tens of thousands participated in demonstrations despite the severe winter weather, while hundreds of businesses closed in solidarity.
The next day, January 24, Alex Pretti was shot by two Customs and Border Protection officers. This became a rallying event and fed protests and demands for an independent investigation of the incident. On January 30, tens of thousands of protesters across all 50 states took part in a “national day of action” and called for a “national shutdown” in response to ICE and CBP activities in Minnesota. Then, on February 4, border czar Tom Homan announced that ICE would withdraw 700 of its 3,000 agents from Minnesota. Finally, on February 12, 2026, Homan followed up by announcing the end of ICE’s Minnesota operation.
Thirty-seven days later, on March 21, I saw a banner headline in The Wall Street Journal proclaiming “Trump Seeks To Alter Narrative On ICE” and indicating he had acknowledged that some mass deportation policies went too far. Apparently, a coalition of chief of staff Susie Wiles, then-incoming head of the Department of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and Homan persuaded Trump that a more tempered approach in this matter was called for. This turnabout—or “cave”—has positive implications for the emerging battle over the midterm elections, which Trump is sworn to subvert.
