When Will Democrats Decide to Join the Resistance?

Lately I’ve been wondering what it might be like for the residents of the embattled Twin Cities to receive one of those trademark email solicitations from the Democratic Party. You know the ones: The sender is Chuck Schumer, the subject line reads “THIS IS THE END,” and the body of the email explains how the gyre is widening and the falcon can’t hear the falconer and it’s up to you to send $5 to hold back the blood-dimmed tide. These are annoying during whatever times we might have once considered to be “normal.” With federal agents wilding on the streets and kidnapping children, to hear our problems reframed as something that we can fix by handing the nearest Democrat the change in our couch cushions is anger-inducing.

I’ve heard and read enough accounts from Minneapolitans to know that they’re feeling little connection to Beltway lawmakers, and that by and large they feel abandoned by most Democrats in Washington. This can only go on so long before something breaks: Ordinary people are showing remarkable valor protecting their communities from a corrupt and violent federal presence, egged on by a senescent and (allegedly) incontinent president and his ghoulish hangers-on. Democrats have the power to recognize this effort to protect democracy, provide it with material support and media cover, and thus knit up the fabric between themselves and these brave Americans. 

Let us acknowledge that the answer will not come with a legislative fix. Senate Democrats held the funding of several executive branch agencies hostage over demands to reform the Department of Homeland Security, precipitating a partial government shutdown, but earlier this week a deal was struck to fully fund those other agencies while only keeping the lights on at DHS for another two weeks as lawmakers negotiate reforms.

One Democratic lawmaker to whom Axios granted the veil of anonymity suggested that Democrats expect the base to “get upset” but believes the discontent will wash away because “then you’re going to have the real fight in two weeks.” Whether or not that period ends with any meaningful change in the status quo remains to be seen. Much of what Democrats seek would merely require various federal agents to obey rules and regulations that they’re already supposed to follow as a matter of agency directive—though enshrining these policies as laws would be a step in the right direction.  

That said, there’s still the thorny matter of enforcing any new constraints that are imposed on ICE and Border Patrol. I hope I’m wrong about this, but by the time all is said and done, I don’t expect much in the way of material change where the president’s paramilitaries are concerned. At best, perhaps, people will see the faces of the thugs who are beating them—though not always, if Schumer has his way. 

I think people, by and large, can accept that when it comes to enacting policies, Democrats have little room to maneuver given their minority power. Moreover, the revival of arguments over the party’s unwillingness to use what leverage it has out of fear that closing the government on a long-term basis will lead to larger downside liabilities is, by now, parlor-room talk. Looking toward the future, Democrats must pivot to combat an even greater danger, which Senator Chris Murphy articulated on the podcast of TNR’s Greg Sargent: “I think if people don’t see us fighting on something as existential as whether we condone the federal government murdering our own citizens, then there will be a mass withdrawal from politics altogether.”

Murphy continues:

I do think this is a critical moment. The whole country is seized by what they have seen—the statistics suggest that 80 to 90 percent of Americans have seen these videos—and they desperately want somebody to stand up for the rule of law. So, yes, if we do not make a fight right now, I think it could result in just a massive withdrawal of participation in our civic life. 

And that is how democracies die. Democracies die not often simply by force—it would be totalitarian—but by citizens deciding that there’s no one that is willing to stand up and save them.

Democrats, stymied as they are on Capitol Hill, have a freer hand to act in other venues—to undertake the necessary work of standing up for the people and proving that they are all on the same team. They must fight on these remaining fronts with an eye toward forging a greater connection with the broader civil resistance, providing it with rhetorical and material support. There are a number of ways in which Democrats can interact with those fighting to protect their families and neighbors from Trump’s predations that aren’t subject to a presidential veto.

First and foremost, Democrats should play the leading role in waging a campaign for the truth. In the past two weeks, the media has been suckered into front-running for the Trump administration, presenting a favorable narrative that spins a gauzy story: Forces are being drawn down, and the temperature is being lowered in Minneapolis. None of this is true: Minneapolitans are still living with the same brutal fear they were experiencing before Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino was sent packing. People with legal citizenship are being abducted from the streets of the Twin Cities and sent to Texas, where they are released and abandoned without the means to get home. Democrats are uniquely positioned to echo and amplify the voices on the ground that are simply saying that the Trump administration is lying; that its abuses are escalating.  

Democrats should ignore calls to keep their distance from the people who are impacted by Trump’s mayhem. That doesn’t mean we need every septuagenarian lawmaker in front of Border Patrol truncheons outside Minneapolis’s Seventh Street Entry, but being present and visible in any way makes a big difference. New York congressional candidate Brad Lander trekked to Minneapolis to help locals protect their neighbors in the same way he’s helped those in his home state. Joaquin Castro and Ilhan Omar made personal intercessions to return the abducted Liam Conejo Ramos home. Castro personally made the trip home with the 5-year-old; his efforts garnered a ton of well-deserved positive attention from the media. 

Democrats have able-bodied staff, connections to important and influential people, and a bully pulpit. All of these resources can be mobilized to help embattled citizens survive Trump’s onslaught, whether it’s getting more media attention on the daily abrogations of our constitutional rights, helping organizers on the ground with logistical support, or kickstarting fundraising efforts to help the mutual aid organizations central to the fight. They can also bring these efforts home to their own districts: As TNR contributors Ana Marie Cox and Sarah Jaffe separately reported, Minneapolitans were well positioned to offer a stern resistance to ICE because they’d prepared for it in advance. Knowing that the president views any Democratic district as a potential venue for ICE violence, lawmakers should get their own communities prepared for the worst by building the necessary resilience now. 

This is, of course, a midterm campaign season, and there’s no better way to reconnect with those suffering under Trump’s bootheel than to make the solemn promise to hold him and his cronies accountable; impeach them, remove them, forever discredit them, block their paths to power indefinitely. And look, if you’re a one-note Democratic lawmaker who feels like the only thing you can freely talk about is affordability, you too can suck it up and play a role: ICE violence is currently one of the primary drivers of the affordability crisis. 

Recently, Indivisible’s Ezra Levin said something interesting about the kind of email missives I made fun of at the top of the piece. Today’s “political system,” Levin wrote, “largely treats people like small-dollar ATMs that vote every two years. Everybody gets deluged with emails asking for money. It feeds cynicism and burnout. Rarely do you get a ‘help me organize our community’ email.” To Levin’s reckoning, it may not be the case that Democrats are asking too much, it’s that they are asking for “too little.”  

People under tremendous pressure and mortal fear have spontaneously spun up a vibrant civil resistance that puts the lie to so many of the assumptions upon which Trumpism was built. The democracy movement already has leaders. It would be to the benefit of all if Democrats find new and novel ways to join them.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

One of the consequences of covering American politics is that it forces you to have frequent close encounters with some of the dumbest people alive and their terrible ideas. Cutting taxes on wealthy people will eventually enrich the middle class. Invading and occupying Iraq will spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Michael Bloomberg should be president. The list goes on. Anyway, here’s the latest, greatest hit from the terminally stupid: We can fix ICE by retraining them.

The idea that a right-wing goon squad can somehow be reformed through the magic of Powerpoint presentations is squarely rooted in the fear among the Beltway-brained that proposing to abolish this rogue agency is going to cost Democrats a winnable election. I’m not sure where these fears find their foundation given that when “Abolish ICE” was in vogue, Democrats did great: They won in 2018 and 2020 and surprisingly overperformed in 2022. Then they got to 2024 and lost, not long after they took a rightward turn on immigration in an attempt to prove that they could be tougher on migrants than Trump was, as if his main failing was that his draconian immigration policies weren’t dressed up in enough management consultant–speak.

The Searchlight Institute, the Beltway consultant class’s latest rebrand of gelatinous centrism, recently released a sternly worded memo tsk-tsking everyone who believes that it was a mistake to resurrect the Stasi and turn it loose to terrorize liberal cities. “Let’s be clear that advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue,” the memo bleated. “Instead, Democrats should embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.”

This is all written at a significant remove from what’s actually happening in places like Minneapolis or even Washington, D.C.—and it’s no mean feat to be out of touch with a community of which you’re ostensibly a member. To have a real-world understanding of what ICE has been doing makes calls for its reeducation land in the ears with a cloddish thud. These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorizing people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches. They abduct people. They abduct children. They use children to abduct other people. They shot a woman in the face. They tear-gassed a car of children. They grabbed an elderly man from his house and dragged him outside in his underwear in the freezing cold simply because he wasn’t white. They detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all away.

Here’s a disturbing fact: When Minneapolis parents started putting stuffed animals on their dashboards so that kids could identify safe cars driven by the volunteers assigned to ferry them safely home from school, ICE started doing the same thing. What I’m trying to say is that ICE—from Secretary Kristi Noem down to the lowliest desk jockey—really, really has a fixation on abducting children. This is irredeemable beyond measure.

ICE misrule isn’t happening because someone skipped a meeting during their onboarding process. This is a deeply ingrained and incurable corruption—not that anyone at ICE wants to be “cured.” ICE agents already receive comprehensive training, which they comprehensively ignore. In the latest instance, we’ve learned from a whistleblower that agents have claimed the right to break into homes without a judicial warrant, directly countermanding their vaunted legal training. No one can or should trust a retrained version of this agency. A root-and-branch teardown is in order. Mass firings are in order (I guess the leakers and whistleblowers can stay in some capacity). The clawback of billions of dollars is in order. Damnation, in every sense of the word, is in order.

One of the problems with the argument that this mob of sickos can be retrained into something sane and decent begins with the fact that people misconstrue what ICE actually is and does. Searchlight’s statement, for instance, assumes that ICE is performing the task of enforcing immigration law. But ICE is not an immigration enforcement agency. It’s a rotted tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people. A real immigration enforcement agency would be operating in places like Texas or Florida, which have large numbers of undocumented immigrants, and not Minnesota, which has relatively few. It also wouldn’t be targeting Minnesota’s Somali population, most of whom are American citizens and thus not subject to immigration enforcement. In addition, a real immigration enforcement agency would have a decent working relationship with local law enforcement. As Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley recently explained, ICE is impeding Twin Cities cops from doing their jobs—and harassing them to boot.

The road back to a competent, humane, and lawful immigration enforcement agency necessarily begins with the elimination of the agency that’s absorbed all the money to perform those tasks while putting it toward an army of jackbooted thugs who harm innocent people. Don’t want to call this “Abolish ICE”? That’s fine, I’m invested in action, not slogans. Whatever gets us to the point where we’re firing all of the paramilitaries doing enforcement and removal operations, re-vetting all the people doing laptop jobs so that we can fumigate the agency of all its cryptofascists, and perhaps housing the enforcement agency at the Justice Department, alongside a bunch of other lawyers and bureaucrats working on immigration and naturalization processes—some kind of Immigration and Naturalization Service, maybe?—would do the trick.

Retraining ICE isn’t just a stupid idea from an intellectual or moral perspective. It’s also really bad politics. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that for the first time, a bare majority of respondents—46 to 43 percent—were in favor of abolishing ICE. But what’s more important, from the perspective of Democrats, is that 80 percent of Democrats were in favor of it. That puts “Reform ICE” at the business end of an electoral shellacking. The wine moms Democrats need to win anywhere aren’t having it with going soft on Trump’s hoodlums. If you bring a timid, half-measure response on ICE to the people whose bonds to one another have been forged in the fires of protecting their own neighbors from state violence, I promise: You will eat no small amount of shit.

It’s no wonder that a pretty broad swath of Democratic officials, from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, have reached the correct conclusion that ICE is beyond redemption. Here we have a simple example of people who have seen what this agency is all about and understand what needs to be done. To be out here making the case that an outlandishly malevolent gang of brownshirts can be reformed will require a lot of explaining. And when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

The salient fact is this: What most of us see in ICE are people who are not fit to serve in any governmental capacity, many of whom should probably be in jail for serial violations of citizens’ constitutional rights and lawless corporal violence on the residents of major American cities. If you want sane and effective immigration enforcement that doesn’t shame the nation on a daily basis—well, ICE is standing in the way of that. They are a force for misrule. I’m not going to entertain the stupid notion that any of ICE’s current workforce can be meaningfully reeducated, and neither should you. It’s like suggesting a rabid dog can be retrained.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

For as long as Donald Trump has deployed his ICE brownshirts in the “Democrat” cities he so despises, Americans have been out in the streets, confronting his masked goons and making sure the rest of the world sees what’s going on. One of the first witness videos I saw was in Washington, D.C., in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where my father grew up. A woman espied three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents loitering in the area, harangued them, ran them off their roost, and then followed them around until they finally piled in their car and drove off.

ICE confrontations have necessarily evolved since then, as agents have become more wantonly violent. The New Republic has been chronicling the community response to ICE, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. But one thing we haven’t done, and which I feel compelled to do, is simply say this: I think the people risking their lives and livelihoods to protect their neighbors are the best of us, and I feel like we all owe them a debt of gratitude.

I’m thankful for all the people who’ve filmed ICE agents slipping and falling on Minneapolis’s icy streets. Fascism is more a set of aesthetics than it is a legible system of political beliefs, so it actually matters that we make fun of these jabronis—humiliation pushes our lines forward. Creativity is needed, as well. I’ve thrilled to the sight of Minnesotans gathered outside the hotels harboring these hoodlums, banging on drum kits late into the night. And ordinary citizens seem very composed and ready to protect their city. One especially inspiring sight came this week when ICE agents pounded on the door of the Wrecktangle Pizza shop in Minneapolis’s Lyn Lake neighborhood: There’s a “tweet tweet” blast on a whistle, and suddenly scores of people swarm the sorry ICE agents and run them off.

While we should be rightly delighted by these sights, they might be occluding a darker part of this story. The murder of Renee Good has engendered a righteous fury in the people of Minneapolis, but if my friends there are any guide, it’s also sparked genuine sorrow and spiky, persistent fear. People that I know normally to be rocks of confidence are communicating a despair that I’ve never heard them express.

In my group chats, I’ve been told about restaurant workers who’ve disappeared from their workplaces. Those friends of mine with kids have had to go to exhausting lengths to protect them. One told me about how his daughter’s preschool had to close because the Methodist Church that hosted it was tipped off that ICE would be executing a raid on its property that day—the day of the church’s food pantry. And the reason ICE was rumbling Wrecktangle Pizza, I was told, was because the chain raised $85,000 to help area restaurants cope with the strain of their agents’ presence in the city. ICE knows who the most vulnerable Minneapolitans are, and also the ones who’ve done them the most damage, and they are targeting both, with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and the tacit permission of the Trump administration to terrorize.

Minneapolis truly can be likened to a city under siege from a foreign threat. As The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported, the Trump administration’s plans to deploy as many as 3,000 ICE or Customs and Border Protection agents to the Twin Cities would make the occupying force “equivalent to five times the manpower of the Minneapolis Police Department.” Moreover, they report, it would be “close to the total headcount of sworn officers among the region’s largest 10 law enforcement agencies and equals nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents.”

This is an important side of the story to tell for many reasons, not the least of which is that ICE cannot deploy enough people to put every American city in check. So for the moment, Minneapolis is really taking it on the chin for most of the rest of us. The reason the streets of my own dense liberal enclave are not ringing out with shouts and whistles is because Trump’s “day of reckoning” isn’t being fought here—yet. When this fight does come to our own neighborhoods, we will have Minneapolitans—like the Chicagoans, Portlanders, Los Angelenos, and Washingtonians before them, among others—to thank for cheering our hearts, deepening our knowledge of how to fight back, and making these ICE deployments more costly.

The people of the Twin Cities feel isolated and alone; local officials have lamented that they are literally outgunned, and politicians in Washington have offered little respite beyond the occasional galaxy-brained idea. We owe a debt to the people of this besieged city. We should take some time to comfort friends and loved ones who are under fire. We should share their stories, good and bad, widely, with an eye toward building a repository of evidence that a future federal government can use to prosecute lawless ICE agents and those who gave them marching orders. In the meanwhile, to everyone putting your bodies on the line in this fight, you have my thanks. And to the ICE agents out there causing violence and mayhem, let me say—from the heart—get fucked.

For those interested in ways to help the people of Minneapolis, there are a number of organizations to which you can donate. Unidos MN has been helping to train Minneapolitans to observe and report on ICE activity and run the city’s rapid response hotline. Take Action MN is constructing a hub for mutual aid groups in the city. Families Helping Families has organized 120 parents to do grocery and rent relief, student transportation, school patrols, and more. Isaiah is a multiracial organization of faith communities that has organized rallies to remember Renee Good. There are a number of national civil rights organizations operating in the city, including the Immigrant Defense Network, the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee. There are a number of legal aid organizations, as well, including the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, and the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

I think Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch has summed up the past week in American life more succinctly than I ever could: “We are going to look back fondly on 2025 as ‘the sane year’” of Trump’s second term.

Here’s where we left off in 2025: Trumpism isn’t working, ordinary people are being crushed under the wheels of elite impunity, the cost of everything is going up, the administration either has no answers for it or doesn’t care, and the president is deteriorating before our eyes, dogged by obvious health concerns and the slow-rolling Jeffrey Epstein affair. And as the year drew to a close, it looked for all the world that the president—an inveterate telegrapher of his own punches—was about to launch a regime-change war in Venezuela.

When the news finally came, on January 3, that the invasion had begun, it was even more chaotic and loopy than one might have imagined. The U.S. has abducted a head of state on cocaine-trafficking charges, an offense that would not seem to warrant either military intervention or the wholesale destabilization of a state. Trump has given the strong impression that the objective was the plunder of Venezuela’s oil, but that makes very little sense from either a business or an economic perspective—and, in a weird move for an “America First” movement, it will seem to require a pillage of taxpayer money to finance. Meanwhile, the administration’s tantrums have already moved on to other targets—Greenland and Mexico among them.

Just as the nation was contending with the possibility of going to war with another country, one of Trump’s ICE goons gunned down a Minneapolis woman in cold blood. The context of this crime cannot be shorn from all the other aforementioned ones. Everything is connected: Trump’s war machine is seizing territory for his mass deportation scheme (that was another goal in Venezuela); his goons plunder the country’s mineral resources with one hand while abducting our friends and neighbors off the streets with the other (some of them to be sent to Venezuela, presumably). It’s a vertically integrated autocracy—tearing a hole in the heart of the American civic fabric while funneling wealth to his plutocratic masters.

As Trump withers in his dog-wagging fugue, casting about for sundry distractions to occupy our attention while his administration fails to deliver peace, prosperity, or liberty to the American people, the rest of us can cut through the confusion: This administration is a criminal enterprise, first and foremost. These are impeachable offenses, plain as day. They must be treated as such. And a recent report from NOTUS finds that a number of Democrats seem to share this view.

Let’s dispense with the obvious: No, there are not enough votes to convict Trump in the Senate. And it’s a heavy enough challenge to get articles of impeachment out of the House—though the passing of California Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa has shrunk Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority to 218–213, leaving us on the cusp of tantalizing possibilities. But the salient point is this: Given the devotion of Trump’s cult in Congress, there’s no way an impeachment effort will end with the removal of the president.

Do it anyway. The rule of law is meaningless if you only take it up when it’s easy. The point of doing the right thing isn’t to merely experience the catharsis of success—it’s to assert standards, uphold values; to acknowledge the existence of moral authority and answer its call for redress courageously. Trump’s lawlessness has to be opposed, if only because the times demand it. This being an election year, Democrats are in need of some simple ideas on which to anchor a national campaign. “The president is a degenerate criminal, and if you send enough of us to Washington we will bring the madness to an end” is a message Democrats should be sending. Even if an impeachment effort hits the skids, it will signal to voters that Democrats have the political courage to defend our values.

Even a doomed-to-fail impeachment effort offers Democrats some distinct advantages. Remember: Democrats are in a content-creation war with the Trump regime. The news media thirsts for conflict and controversy; Democrats going all in on an impeachment effort sets the table for a feeding frenzy. Frankly, the fact that this is never getting to the Senate for a trial should free Democrats from having to strictly tether a case to statutory realities or tailor it to the austere sensibilities of doddering senators. There’s no reason an impeachment effort can’t be a kaleidoscopic panoply of Trumpian misdeeds presented with an eye toward capturing tabloid headlines.

Regardless of whether Democrats want to pursue the formal impeachment process, the larger idea—to hinder the Trump regime by calling attention to misconduct and lawlessness—is critical to Democrats’ messaging in this election year. Their campaign should be a thorough indictment of the president, the dismantling of his credibility, and the exposure of his every misdeed. Criminality is the Rosetta Stone that translates the Trump presidency, and as I’ve said before, the Democratic leaders of the future should be ready to speak fearlessly about putting the members of this lawless cabal in jail.

So let the prosecution of the president begin today. And if the Democrats, bolstered by that message, win back the House in the November midterms, then they can impeach him in earnest next year. Even Trump himself wouldn’t expect anything less.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

As longtime readers may recall, I’ve always wondered if Donald Trump truly intended to win the 2016 election. Howard Stern asked him why he wanted to take the world’s hardest job when he “only had about 10 good years left before he ‘starts to drool’ on himself”—which now seems pretty prophetic. Weeks into his first term, Trump was already giving melancholy interviews about how he missed his old life. It really seemed that his first presidential run was a goof that went sideways, to the detriment of all of us.

But as for his effort to reclaim the Oval Office? I’ve never wondered why he wanted back in. The second time out, he ran on a combination of desperation to avoid jail, a desire for revenge, and unmitigated avarice. He pretty much ran on a platform of looting the country and punishing his perceived enemies. With the gift of immunity from the Supreme Court, he spent the first year of his second term taking bigger swings at double-dealing, committing more brazen acts of corruption. There are far too many examples to do an exhaustive, let alone authoritative, list of crimes. But these are the ones that stuck with me particularly in a year of misrule.

The UAE crypto bribe: It’s not every day one of TNR’s staff writers gets to compare a scandal to Teapot Dome, but that’s how Tim Noah described the shady dealings that went down between Trump and his shadowy backers from the United Arab Emirates, who—in what’s been characterized as the largest cryptocurrency transaction in history—made a $2 billion stablecoin purchase in World Liberty Financial, which is essentially the president’s personal crypto slush fund. With quid like that, you knew that a sizable pro quo was to come. Sure enough, Trump permitted the UAE to import a larger quantity of U.S.-produced AI computer chips than it was allowed under the Biden administration. Simple enough scandal to understand, right? Well, as Noah later noted, the business press seems to not get it.

Plane and simple corruption: So, it’s kind of hard to do the whole “nothing to see here!” routine when the nothing is a luxury 747 that your Qatari friends want to off-load on the president. Trump tried to sell this gift as the new Air Force One, a generous gesture in return for all the money the United States has spent providing security for our nominal Gulf allies. The plane became the subject of a long-simmering dispute, as Democrats have attempted to block it from being used as Air Force One. Regardless, as Alex Shephard noted, the debasement in this arrangement exceeded the mere quid pro quo: “Trump wants to be treated as a king, and Qatar is playing ball.”

Death of USAID: Russell Vought, Elon Musk, and their wrecking crew of DOGE bros spent the first half of the year visiting destruction upon the civil service; the damage done is something we’ll all be feeling for a long time. But the most damnable part of their legacy may be the dismantling of foreign aid agencies like the United States Agency for International Development. A Boston University study found that the agency’s demise had “already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” “We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” wrote the Harvard School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.

Bombs over Latin America: It’s giving Wag the Dog, if you ask me. The administration, seemingly hot to bring back neoconservative military conquest, soft-launched its latest regime change war in Venezuela by making indiscriminate attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific waters off of Central America. These attacks, all undertaken without a jot of congressional oversight and on the dubious premise that the boats were packed with fentanyl bound for the United States, were murderous on their own. But the news that the military was ordered to strike an already stricken boat in a “double tap” attack to kill any survivors has raised the specter of war crimes—and in a way that even many Republicans don’t seem ready to countenance.

Trump’s Binance buddy gets a pardon: Changpeng Zhao began this year the disgraced former CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, having done prison time for, as the Biden DOJ put it, “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program,” violating the Bank Security Act, and allowing money to flow freely to a host of bad actors, including “terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers.” But Zhao, having forfeited the right to run Binance, wanted back in. So he used his connections to Trump’s family and inner circle to secure a pardon that would let him run the show again. In return, Zhao showered his attention on World Liberty Financial—using Binance’s leverage to enrich Trump’s private crypto fund. TNR’s Tim Noah was positively apoplectic about the shady arrangement.

Chips to China: Speaking of Tim Noah and apoplexy: It’s probably not great that one firm, Nvidia, has come to possess such godlike, market-moving power. Its outsize importance to the global economy had Noah fingering it as one of the major pillars to crumble, when he gamed out a potential Trump stock market crash back in October. Trump’s been doing what he can to boost Nvidia’s fortunes, however: This year, the president broke with long-standing national security tradition and announced that he was permitting the firm to sell its H200 chips to China. As The New York Times’ David Sanger noted, the deal—the fruits of “intense lobbying” from Nvidia CEO and White House gadfly Jensen Huang—raised a basic question: “If the chips that power the most advanced technology can be sold to the United States’ chief technological, military and financial competitor, where is the new line drawn?” That’s probably the least of Trump’s concerns, however: The deal also guaranteed that “25 percent of all the revenues from the sales would go to the United States,” in yet another case of this administration’s affection for fascist corporatism.

The continuing January 6 crime wave: Every once in a while, I like to check in with the people who were given presidential pardons by Trump for their crimes of sacking the U.S. Capitol and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election by force. Here’s one who killed a person in a drunk-driving incident. Here’s another. Here’s the guy who plotted to kill the FBI agents who investigated him for the Capitol riot. Here’s the alleged child molester who tried to buy his victim’s silence with fictitious “January 6 reparations” money. Here’s another alleged child sex predator who at least made no claims about pending reparations. Here’s a man arrested for allegedly threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries. Here’s the guy who’s inexplicably not yet been arrested for stalking and threatening Jamie Raskin. What’s this? Another alleged child sex predator? This guy who was arrested for absconding with “industrial copper wire valued at tens of thousands of dollars” seems quaint by comparison. Anyway, there are scores of these repeat offenders, so I think we can all agree that these pardons were a spectacular idea.

ICE’s war on U.S. citizens: The administration has coupled its turning loose of January 6 criminals on our streets with the incessant plucking of law-abiding citizens off those same streets. An October report from ProPublica brought the gory details: “More than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests,” including 20 instances in which citizens “reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer.” As I wrote around the same time, Trump shares (dis)credit with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In his concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, Kavanaugh etched his name into infamy by contending, “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.” As ProPublica’s Nicole Foy wrote, this “is far from the reality many citizens have experienced”:

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

The ultimate symbol of Trumpian corruption: The fact of the matter is that the White House actually could use a ballroom. But what it’s getting, in the form of Trump’s teardown of the East Wing to make way for his planned monument to his bottomless ego, is something that ably sums up the despicable nature of this presidency and its cronies. As TNR’s Matt Ford wrote in a lengthy jeremiad on the topic, “The raw spectacle of Trump tearing a hole in the White House to hang out with his rich friends is already a potent symbol of his presidency.… At every level, the entire project may be the perfect summation of what his administration has been like for the country.” Perhaps the one good thing about the ballroom is that Democratic presidential contenders can compete with one another over who will tear it down best.

I could go on like this: And I probably should. But I would go on forever. There’s Signalgate, the firing of numerous inspectors general, and the extortion campaigns against businesses, universities, and Big Law firms. Robert F. Kennedy’s deadly anti-vaccine policies are a mass-casualty crime in the making. We’re building concentration camps and shipping people to gulags. We’re threatening Canada and Greenland. Trump’s tariffs are ruining Christmas. He stole $230 million for himself. And the only reason I haven’t mentioned l’affaire Jeffrey Epstein until now is that it’s been so ever-present in our lives that I don’t actually need to remind you about it.

But the biggest scandal of all is something Trump didn’t create. It’s this country’s piss-poor legacy of holding the powerful to account—a major factor in both Trump’s rise to power and the foundation of the era of elite impunity in which we are all mired. So whether your favorite Trump scandal made the cut here or not, keep its memory close, nurture your fury, and seek out the future leaders who will not shrink from the task of holding Trump and his enablers accountable for their howling criminality—who will push the envelope to bring retributive justice when their time in power comes.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here. Power Mad will return in 2026.