Trump Publishes Enemies List To White House Website, And It’s Just Democrats Speaking The Truth
God, what I wouldn't give for another Nixon administration. Sure, it was corrupt and built from the ground up to punish the opposing party for being the opposing party. But that administration was limited and restrained by things like competent oversight, a functioning court system that wasn't constantly undermined by five justices who want to do all of their work on the shadow docket where they're not obliged to explain their reasoning to the public, and a president who actually knew enough to resign, rather than face impeachment.
What we have now is the perfect storm of capitulation. While having checks and balances that actually function as intended wouldn't necessarily have prevented Trump from using Whitehouse.gov as his personal blog, it might have encouraged those working for him to do what they could to curb his worst impulses.
None of that remains. And so we get this sort of thing on pretty much a daily basis: a full-page rant from the nation's sorest winner, declaring anyone who has ever criticized his racist goon squad d/b/a Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Masked ICE agents roam the streets, targeting anyone whose skin doesn't look white enough, grabs them off the street without identifying themselves or telling people why they're being kidnapped, and vanishes them into a constantly rotating set of ICE facilities, depriving them of their due process rights, family contact, and, in some cases, basic living necessities like food or bathing facilities.
People are right to criticize ICE for doing what it does in the way that it does it. Immigration enforcement does not need to be handled this way to be efficient. But when the president's favorite ghoul (Stephen Miller) is demanding 3,000 arrests per day and a nation of bigots continues to cheer Trump on, only the worst, cruelest version of ICE is possible. Understandably, people react to this hideous behavior in the way they should be expected to react. And that's all it takes to get placed on Trump's literally official enemies list.
Here's how the administration leads into its hit list of Democratic politicians (emphasis in the original):
The carnage in Dallas, Texas - where a maniac with ANTI-ICE" ammo gunned down an ICE field office in an attack clearlytargetedat ICE personnel - lays bare the deadly consequences of Democrats' unhinged crusade against our border enforcement.
Democrats have spent years vilifying ICE as fascists," the Gestapo," and slave patrols," inciting a1,000% surgein assaults on agents and a wave of Radical Left terror. Their words aren't just reckless - they're a battle cry for violence.
Never mind the fact that the gunman managed to kill/injure more immigrants than ICE officers - something that might suggest immigrants were the real target, no matter what investigators claimed to have found scrawled on some unused bullets. And never mind the fact that Trump loves fascism if he gets to be the guy doing it, and would definitely love to have a Gestapo of his own to enforce his will. The concepts embodied by this version of ICE are all of things they're being described as, which Trump now claims (using a particularly meaningless statistic) will result in violence against... well, encroaching fascism and Gestapo-esque tactics?
If you want to read the full list of official White House enemies, go ahead and click through. But it's nothing you haven't seen before, even as recently as last week when the DHS did the same thing because people weren't being deferential enough to the thuggery that makes up ICE's daily activities.
And, of course, everyone on the list is a member of the Democratic Party, which means this is also partisan bullshit and, sadly, another indictment of the complete cowardice of the GOP, which also includes supposed libertarians" like Rand Paul who can't be bothered to vehemently attack egregious government overreach when it's Republicans wearing the jackboots.
To read the list is to ask where's the lie?" Modern day Gestapo." Secret police." Authoritarian." Thugs." Rogue agency." Terrorizing communities." Vile and beyond cruel." Tearing communities apart." Racial profiling." And so on.
These phrases are enough to get politicians like Tim Walz, Gavin Newsom, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, Hakeem Jeffries, JB Pritzker, and a long list of others added to Trump's enemies list. No one here did anything wrong. All they ever did was describe what they were seeing, using the best available analogies. ICE and Trump haven't changed their tactics, which strongly suggests both entities actually believe these terms are compliments, but are at least still socially aware enough to realize that it would be bad to embrace these descriptions publicly.
Trump says the things said by these people are a battle cry for violence." If only that were true. So far, the opposition party has generated little more than ineffective bleating and strongly worded letters in response to the very real and present threat of a fascism. And that is doing as close to nothing as is humanly possible while in positions of political power and we all know what doing nothing tends to result in.