A lot has happened over the past couple of days, and I’m feeling overwhelmed again. But I do want to say something about Pam Bondi’s, um, performance yesterday in front of the House Judiciary Committee. I’ve never before in my life wanted to see someone tarred and feathered as much as I did yesterday.

I understand Trump expressed approval of the debacle, but I’m not sure she did him any favors. Even some voices on the Right were disturbed at what went on yesterday. You may remember Erick Erickson from his RedState days. I take it he’s moved on to cushier venues, but he’s still solidly Right.

When the Attorney General of the United States is asked why she has prosecuted no one related to Jeffrey Epstein and this is her answer, she should be fired or resign. But neither will happen, which is another reason the Democrats are going to have a good election year. pic.twitter.com/IahqskOAHW

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 11, 2026

And Erickson is not alone.

I’ve been idly wondering what sort of career Bondi will have when her current gig ends. They may hire her on Fox News, but I can’t imagine a real law firm or law school hiring her to do anything other than sort mail or make coffee. She is older than I thought she was, though — she was born in 1965 — so maybe she’ll just retire.

But the Department of Justice has effectively been gutted. I understand Bondi has fired more than 230 career attorneys and other employees. At least 6000 more have resigned. And of course these were the best, most experienced people. At the same time, lawyers are not exactly lining up to apply for jobs. The DOJ is getting desperate to hire people. See also Once-Elite DOJ Is Now Desperate For Lawyers, Resorts To ‘Forward This To A Friend’ Recruiting at Above the Law.

And then this happened.

Federal judges selected Donald Kinsella, a veteran litigator, as the top federal prosecutor in Upstate New York to replace a Trump appointee who was disqualified from the role. 

But just hours later, after judges swore Kinsella in during a private ceremony, a White House official fired him.

“Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, [the president of the United States] does,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a social media post. “See Article II of our Constitution,” 

“You are fired, Donald Kinsella,” Blanche added.

Trump keeps trying to appoint unqualified but loyal attorneys to federal prosecutor jobs — think Lindsey Halligan and  Alina Habba. So along with being unqualified they were not properly appointed and confirmed to their jobs, and their prosecutions were being challenged for that reason, along with the many other reasons.

Trump keeps preferring these incompetent wonders over actual lawyers. He wants U.S. attorneys who will do what he wants and bring bogus criminal charges against people he doesn’t like. This is not going well. Yesterday a Grand Jury failed to indict the six senators who made the “don’t obey illegal orders” video. That failure goes to Jeanine Pirro, who is turning into the “failure to indict” queen. I bet she’s sorry she left Fox News. But Trump can’t see that loyalty is not competence, and all of this legal thrashing around makes him look weak.

Further, the firing of Donald Kinsella may not hold up.

The law governing U.S. attorney vacancies at times allows district judges to appoint an official to serve until a vacancy is filled through the normal Senate confirmation process. But it remains an open question whether the president can dismiss those appointed by the federal judiciary.

Peter Shane, a leading constitutional and administrative law scholar at the New York University School of Law, said in a social media post Wednesday evening that he believed Trump’s dismissal of Kinsella was likely unlawful.

So we’ll see what happens. But this brings us to the larger issue of how Trump is his own worst enemy. His second administration is a massive failure already, and most of the nation knows it even if he doesn’t. See also The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore at Strength in Numbers.

In other law-related news, a judge has temporarily blocked the Pentagon’s action against Mark Kelly over the illegal orders video.

In TACO news, ICE Goon Czar Tom Homan has announced the “conclusion” of the immigration operation in Minnesota. He says there will be a “significant drawdown” of federal agents. I’ll be impressed when they’re gone entirely.

Senate Democrats have blocked a DHS funding bill, meaning DHS is likely to run out of funding this weekend.

Trump is losing it. What “It”? The plot, the narrative, the culture war, a big chunk of his base, his political capital, you name it.

See Greg Sargent, Trump Rages at Bad Bunny—and Accidentally Exposes a Big MAGA Weakness. Greg Sargent argues that Trump is losing ground even in places he thought he owned, like the world of pro football. “The president has long regarded pro and college football—the players and fans, at least—as ‘his’ part of the culture,” Sargent writes. But he’s staying away from the Super Bowl. Because of Bad Bunny? or because he was advised he’d be booed?   Greg Sargent continues,

But something deeper is going on here than Trump’s usual lashing out at a critic. This clash hints at a genuine fear on Trump’s part that he’s on the defensive big time in the war over ICE—not just in the political war, not just in the war that’s shedding American blood in the streets, but also in the culture war. Because the battle over ICE has become a culture war all unto itself. And Trump is losing it.

Last October The Gnome declared that ICE would be “all over” the Super Bowl, and only “law-abiding Americans who love this country” would be welcome. Also, too,

When asked if she had “any message to the NFL” regarding the organization naming Bad Bunny as its Super Bowl halftime performer, Noem said, “Well, they suck and we’ll win, and God will bless us and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe. And they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.”

Jeebus, she was threatening the NFL? Anyway, the NFL has said there would be no ICE at the Super Bowl, and I’m not sure what happened to get The Gnome to back down. I turned on the pregame show and I’m seeing people finding their seats in the stadium, and I take it nothing alarming has happened yet. And I haven’t seen a big uprising among football fans about Bad Bunny. There’s been a backlash from MAGA, of course, but probably not the uprising against Bad Bunny that Trump expected.

Sargent goes on to cite recent polls that show approval of ICE is losing ground among voting blocks that Trump thought he owned — rural voters, non-college-educated voters, men aged 18 to 29. They don’t like ICE; they don’t like how the deportations are being handled. See also Trump Is Losing Normies on Immigration.

Now see Josh Marshall, Trump’s Big Loser Energy, and Other Tales From the Annals of Political Messaging. This is about Trump’s threat to nationalize the midterm elections, which he won’t be able to do.

Trump doesn’t want to “nationalize” elections. Before the semi-walkback by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the closest he and his toadies came to explaining what he meant is that he wants Republicans to take over running elections in some 15 places where he constantly loses and where he is upset about losing. This is really the biggest loser energy imaginable. He lost and he’s so stung by it that next time he wants to brings his own refs. Again, that’s just the biggest loser energy imaginable. And what’s motivating all of this is that he’s getting less popular every damn day and it’s straight up killing him. He’s homing in on a massive ego injury in November and he’s lashing out right and left. …And it’s driving Donald Trump completely up the wall.

Great! Let him suffer. Glory in it. And most of all lean into it.

Trump’s supporters are abandoning him. He’s getting less popular. He’s losing. So he wants his Republican friends to start counting the votes. So he can win and feel less sad.

Big loser energy! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Trump is accustomed to being as outrageous as he wants to be and then basking in the approval of his culties and the Republican Party in general, while the libs howl in outrage. But he got spanked by Republicans over the recent Obamas-as-apes video. For them truem believers MAGA has been about cultural warfare more than anything else, but a lot of independents and low-info voters got caught up in it because, you know, illegal alien criminals should be deported and Joe Biden (they think) caused inflation. They weren’t expecting the excesses of ICE and a president utterly out of touch with their concerns while he focuses on building a giant ballroom and getting things named after himself.

The Republican Party expects to lose a lot of seats in Congress in the midterms and don’t see Trump doing anything to turn that around. At some point before November a lot of them are going to have to create some space between themselves and Trump if they expect to have any chance at all of keeping their seats. Meanwhile the Epstein files have got to be eating Trump alive. What will Trump do next? I expect him to get more extreme, more outrageous, because that’s his pattern. I expect him to try to crank up hysteria about some enemy who is causing all our (his) problems.

Meanwhile it seems to me most folks just want a nice normal Super Bowl game to watch with beer and lots of cholesterol-stuffed food and a catchy halftime show and no politics. Which seems to be what’s going on.

Let’s look at some news about Trump reported over the past few hours. The first example is courtesy of Heather Cox Richardson’s February 5 post:

This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

“I needed it for my own ego” is honest, at least, but who actually says that?  Then yesterday CNN reported:

President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally prepared to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project.

But there was a condition: In exchange for the money, Schumer had to agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

Again, not exactly normal. I haven’t heard if Chuck responded. Chuck doesn’t have the authority to rename either Penn Station in NYC or Dulles Airport — which is in bleeping Virginia — anyway.

Then Trump shared an appalling video that depicted the Obamas as monkeys. It was eventually deleted after some Republicans complained about it. Update: The White House is now blaming a staffer for the video. Sure.

Trump continues to make ridiculous claims about how he’s brought down prescription drug prices by more than 100 percent.

Trump is having, or at least allowing, a 22-foot-tall gold statue of himself to be erected in Miami on the site where the US will host a G20 summit later this year. The statue is being paid for by a bunch of crypto bros. However, the sculptor is not letting the statue out of his studio until the bros cough up the balance of what they owe him. And since crypto recently took a dive, that may be a problem. So we may be spared the embarrassment of having world leaders being greeted by “Don Colossus.”

Again, these are stories published over just the past few hours. And I say we’re looking at an increasingly deteriorated mental state. Trump is not what we might call well socialized, but there was a time in his life when he could probably fake being psychologically and socially normal. But that time is over. And I know there have been news stories about his declining mental state going back at least a couple of years, if not longer, but I say he’s getting worse. He has absolutely no filters now.

I got this from TPM:

The Trump administration is retaliating against recently freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family for becoming a poster boy for the brutality of Operation Metro Surge by seeking to end their asylum claims and expedite the deportation proceedings against them, MPR reports.

In short, somebody doesn’t have enough sense to leave well enough alone. Although this might be Miller as much as Trump.

Getting back to the New York tunnel story, the project is expected to have a major effect on rail service, and not just in New York:

The project, known as Gateway, sits at the heart of the Northeast Corridor rail route that runs from Boston to Washington and is the most-used passenger line in the United States. It includes the construction of a new two-track tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey, which are linked by 116-year-old tunnels in such poor condition that trains are often delayed, creating a bottleneck.

Supporters of the project say the new tunnel would be crucial to avoiding a disruption in rail service around New York City that they believe would have drastic effects on the national economy.

So this project isn’t just about doing a favor to New Jersey-New York commuters.  Funding originally was held up because the Administration wanted to be sure there was no DEI hanky-panky going on. But holding up this project so Trump can get Penn Station re-named after him is just nuts.

Meanwhile Trump is still planning to put up some oversized European-style triumphal arch in DC and is looking to gut the Kennedy Center in ways that could ruin it as a performance venue. So what’s keeping him from ordering a nuke dropped on the next foreign leader — or U.S. governor — who pisses him off?

As I understand it, when older people have lost all filters this usually indicates a shrinking prefrontal cortex This is not something you want to see in a POTUS.

Having Trump as president really is like being tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded gun (excuse me if I’ve said that before). And in spite of his crashing poll numbers a whole lot of people are still propping him up and protecting him. In the current Congress he’s not about to be impeached and removed from office for cause. At least there could be a huge grassroots scream for removing him under the 25th Amendment.

So much depends on this year’s midterm elections, so Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections are worrisome. I don’t think he can get away with it. The Constitution gives the president no role whatsoever in how elections are run. But Congress could throw wrenches in the works. The Constitution, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

(Note that when this was written, senators were chosen by state legislators.)

It seems to me that this clause gives Congress power to do a lot of mischief. A pile of case law on the “elections” clause has accumulated over the years, though, so some boundaries probably have been drawn already that I don’t know about. And in such a closely divided Congress I question whether there would be a majority to enact anything. See also the elections clause article at the Constitution Center.

Assuming any attempt to actually nationalize the elections fails, there is another likely result of Trump’s incessant whining and wild claims about how awful some states are at running elections. And that would be to cast doubt on the midterm results and possibly challenge them in court or overturn them by some more authoritarian means. Trump would no doubt love a re-do of January 6 on an even bigger scale. It could get nasty.

What may save us is Trump’s own massive incompetence. His administration is a failure by any measure, and he shows no inclination to change course. The percentage of the electorate that approves of everything he does is now down to about 27 percent, according to a recent Pew poll, and that 27 percent probably represents his true believer base. There’s about another 10 percent of voters who are not sure if they still like Trump or not, and the rest of the country thinks he’s a disaster. He’d have to rely mostly on ICE and other DHS enforcers. But see Federal and State Election Laws Ban Federal Forces from Polling Places at the Brennan Center.

Update: Wrestling fans in Las Vegas don’t like ICE.

In other news — I don’t even pretend to understand crypto. But those of you who are interested might like Paul Krugman’s Is This Crypto’s Fimbulwinter? In Norse mythology, Fimbulwinter is the winter that precedes Ragnarok, the end of all things.

Negotiations over DHS funding appear to be going nowhere. The Democrats came up with a list of demands that seem reasonable to me. And of course a lot of people are furious the Dems just aren’t demanding ICE be dismantled. Next year, maybe. But the Republicans dismissed these demands out of hand, and no further negotiating has taken place, as far as I can tell.

There were two special elections in Texas yesterday. In one, a Democrat won a runoff election to the U.S. House from a deep-blue Houston area district. In the other, a Democrat won a special election for a seat in the Texas state Senate in a district that voted for Trump by 17 points. And it wasn’t close. See G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers:

Texas Monthly describes the district as a hub of far-right activism. In recent years it has swung from “a bastion of Bush-era conservatism into an uncompromising vehicle for their war on ‘woke.'” It was even redistricted awhile back to ensure a four-to-one Republican majority. Note that the quote below was written before yesterday’s election:

Legislatively, the outcome of the race is essentially meaningless: The winner will serve out the remaining term of Kelly Hancock, who resigned his Senate seat in June after being appointed by Governor Greg Abbott to Texas comptroller. A rematch is expected between Rehmet and Wambsganss during the November general election. (The Texas Legislature does not reconvene until January 2027.) But symbolically, one expert said, a Rehmet victory would represent a political earthquake—a stunning rebuke of a movement that has for years used the region as an incubator for far-right policies that are exported across the state and nation. 

“If he were to lose by six points, that’d be worth talking about,” Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at nearby Southern Methodist University, told me. “And if Rehmet were to win? You’d say, ‘Holy shit.’”  

What do you say when the district swung by 22 points? I take it this wasn’t necessarily a rebuke of Trump as much as a rebuke of the far-right Christian nationalist wackjobs that have dominated local government. But I’d say Democrats need to be looking to how Rehmet pulled this off.

As I understand it we are now in a shutdown, but it isn’t expected to last long. Remarkably, Trump called Chuck Schumer last week to initiate negotiations. As a result, most of the spending bill is expected to go to the House tomorrow. It’s expected that the House will vote on it on Tuesday. DHS funding has been held back in the Senate for two weeks for further negotiation. Conditions Dems are expected to push include “unmasking immigration agents, ending their indiscriminate sweeps and requiring them to obtain warrants as well as abide by strict use-of-force guidelines, among others,” according to the New York Times.

The NY Times also reported that before Trump called Chuck,

White House legislative affairs aides had reached out to some of the Democrats who had broken from Mr. Schumer last fall and crossed party lines in a vote to end a record-breaking shutdown. Would they like to attend a listening session at the White House to discuss a potential deal? They all declined.

News stories are calling this deal “fragile,” warning that it would yet break apart. The Dems have to stick together this time. See also the live reporting link at the NY Times.

Update: The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

Update Update: Trump has announced that the [Bleep] Kennedy Center will be closed for two years, beginning in July, for renovations. “I have determined that the fastest way to bring The Trump Kennedy Center to the highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur, is to cease Entertainment Operations for an approximately two year period of time, with a scheduled Grand Reopening that will rival and surpass anything,” The Thing said. Most of the scheduled performers have canceled, although the National Symphony Orchestra and a few other random programs, including a screening of Sleepless in Seattle, were still listed as upcoming. I hate to see what kind of ghastly gilded atrocities he inflicts on the building.

See also ‘Their first instinct was to loot’: how Trump’s acolytes are plundering the Kennedy Center.

Stuff to Read: (In no particular order)

The Atlantic, ‘It’s a Five-Alarm Fire’: The FBI’s search and seizure of material from Fulton County election offices marks a major escalation.

Alexandra Petri, Hey you, hold onto your humanity. You’ll thank me later.

Heather Cox Richardson, January 31, 2026. I have to comment on this one. Stephen Miller posted,

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

HCR compares Miller’s comment to similar comments by antebellum advocates for slavery. But the “labor class” was more than enslaved people from Africa. Beginning in the colonial period and well into the 19th century, a lot of people from the UK and Germany came here as indentured servants and stayed after their contracts ended. Beginning in the mid-19th century Irish escaping the potato famine dominated industrial and construction labor for some time. When California became a state in 1850 there was already a substantial Chinese population there, which continued to grow. Chinese supplied most of the labor to build the intercontinental railroad. And when the bosses ran short of Chinese, they hired Irish.

In the early 20th century Southern and Eastern European immigrants supplied the cheap labor for factories and sweatshops. Nearly all of the 146 garment workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911 were recent Italian or Jewish immigrants.  One of Stephen Miller’s great-grandfathers was a Jew who escaped poverty and oppression in Belarus, landing at Ellis Island in 1903 with $8 to his name. He made a living as a peddler and brought more of his family over.

I should note that European immigrants also imported the labor union movement, which IMO has benefited all of us. And their children who were born here went to public schools and assimilated and were citizens like everybody else. Was this ever a problem? Not that I’ve heard.

U.S. agriculture has a long history of depending on migrant labor from Mexico, going back at least to 1910. During World War II there was such a shortage of farm labor the U.S. ran a formal guest worker program. This program ended in 1964 and was replaced by the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers program, and I don’t know how that works. I’m seeing the ag industry wants significant reforms. But this is one reason we’ve enjoyed an abundance of food at reasonable prices (until recently) here in this country.

Does Stephen Miller seriously know nothing about U.S. history? Maybe he thinks White immigrants are different, somehow, but the Irish and Italian and other immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century faced a whole lot of discrimination for a long time. And by now a lot of ethnic Chinese Americans are more generations removed from China than Miller is removed from Belarus. And Black Americans have been part of U.S. history all along, even though their contributions were long ignored in the history books. But if you treat people fairly and give them opportunities to work and assimilate, most of them will. It doesn’t have to be a problem.

Everyone in media is having a ton of fun trashing the Melania documentary. It’s reported that the film cost Jeff Bezos $75 million to make and $35 million to promote. It has also been widely reported that nobody is buying tickets. A TPM writer watched the film “so you don’t have to,” and wrote,

At the concession stand, I noticed they were selling large commemorative popcorn buckets emblazoned with Melania’s face. It’s part of a massive marketing campaign that brought a distinctly fascistic flavor to city streets, with billboards featuring the first lady’s portrait looming over street corners. Yet, at my screening, this effort to cultivate a cult of personality wasn’t quite taking. When I asked the two women selling snacks if anyone had bought the buckets, I received an emphatic response.

“No — and I hope not,” one of them said, 

Meanwhile Bezos is laying people off at Amazon. I understand Amazon Prime deliveries are getting a bit slower. Lots of Prime items no longer offer free two-day delivery. Four to five days is the norm. Note also that the film has a single digit rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the accompanying reviews are hilarious.

Regarding yesterday’s Epstein document dump — what was redacted, and what wasn’t? The names of alleged co-conspirators were redacted, which is kind of infuriating considering that exposing these people was the whole point. I’m reading the FBI has identified ten co-conspirators, but we still don’t know who they are. Likewise, the names of some federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers were redacted. According to this very helpful Time magazine article, some of these records date to the late 2000s, “when then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta approved a controversial deal that shielded Epstein from federal charges related to allegations of sexual abuse and sex trafficking of minors in Florida in exchange for a guilty plea to state charges.” But Acosta’s name was not redacted.

On the other hand, names of several of the survivors were not redacted. “One survivor, who had identified herself anonymously as “Jane Doe”, told CNN that she has received numerous unsolicited phone calls since her identity was revealed Friday,” per the Time article linked above.

A whole lot of people closely associated with the Trump Administration are named in the files, including Elon Musk. Another is Kevin Warsh, who just got named to be the new fed chair, and Brett Ratner, who directed the Melania movie. I don’t believe the files implicate anything about these people.

Election interference. Nothing worries me more than what Trump might do to interfere with the midterm elections. The New York Times has a good overview of the threat and how to address it.

Millions of pages of Epstein files have just been released. Todd Blanche, who appears to have taken over the role of speaking for the DoJ from Trump’s girl Pam, said the department was releasing 3 million pages, 2,000 videos and some 180,000 images. It’ll take awhile to go through all that, I suspect.

Blanch also announced that the DoJ has begun a civil rights investigation into the execution of Alex Pretti. This is a standard thing after federal agents have killed someone, I understand, although it wasn’t done for the death of Renee Good. And I’m not hearing that the DoJ is going to share evidence with authorities in Minnesota to do their own investigation, so I’m not too excited that justice will be done. The FBI is hanging on to Alex Pretti’s phone, for example. I’ll be surprised if what Pretti was recording before he was killed is ever seen by the public. Kash will have the phone destroyed first.

Maybe there’s a budget deal, and maybe there isn’t. There were reports that Chuck and Trump had agreed the Senate could separate out DHS funding from the rest of the budget bill. That would allow the rest of the budget to be approved and let the Senate argue over DHS reforms for a while. But Lindsey Graham threw a wrench in the works. “He refused to go along with the plan over a House-backed provision that would repeal a law allowing senators to receive cash payouts if they had phone records seized by former special counsel Jack Smith — the South Carolina Republican included,” it says here.

Don Lemon has been arrested for reporting at a protest that broke out at a church service. A federal magistrate judge had previously rejected a criminal complaint against Lemon. But the DoJ says they got an indictment from a Grand Jury. I am not a big Don Lemon fan, but this is obviously an attempt to send a warning to journalists to be careful what they report.

By now even Trump must have realized his march to absolute dominance took a wrong turn in Minneapolis. This doesn’t mean he’s ready to change course. I agree with Greg Sargent that all the media narratives about Trump’s “pivot” and “de-escalation” in Minnesota are so much hooey. He’s making some cosmetic changes — replacing Bovino with Homan, for example — and perhaps will tone down some rhetoric just a notch. But the basic ICE operation in Minnesota will not change. Not yet. Sargent:

Note the problem here. Trump does apparently want to minimize clashes between government security services and protesters. But he doesn’t appear to want those heavily armed government militias to stop doing the things that are causing those clashes in the first place.

What’s really going on here is this: Trump is looking to defuse anger among congressional Democrats for purposes that don’t portend a meaningful shift. An administration official gave away the game to Punchbowl News, admitting that these “de-escalatory measures” are about placating Senate Democrats so they don’t seize this moment to demand restrictions on ICE as part of any government funding package.

From what I’m reading, Senate Dems are still dug in and refusing to pass DHS funding without significant changes. Does this mean a shutdown? The Hill reported this morning that Senate Majority Leader Thune has thrown up his hands and declared the Dems need to be negotiating with the White House over what they want regarding DHS.

The budget bill in question has six parts. Dems are prepared to pass five of those six parts right now, but want DHS funding held back for more work. Thune is refusing to do that. Chuck Schumer “has called on GOP colleagues to work with him to ‘overhaul’ ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which are both funded through the Homeland Security appropriations measure,” says The Hill. So we’ll see who caves.

For the latest on what’s going on in the Senate, see live coverage at TPM. Just half an hour ago Chuck Schumer called for both The Gnome and Stephen Miller to be “removed.”  “It’s outrageous that Kristi Noem still has a job in the administration after federal officers murdered two American citizens in just two weeks,” Schumer tweeted. “Noem is incompetent and she must go. And her boss Stephen Miller must be removed as well,” he said.

Chuck is fired up. I didn’t know he had it in him.

Jamelle Bouie has a marvelous column up now comparing Minneapolis to the Battle of Gettysburg. (I have only one New York Times gift link remaining for the month and am hanging on to it, but if anyone can donate a gift link do put it in the comments.)

Gettysburg was supposed to be the blow that forced the United States to negotiate an end to the Civil War. Gen. Robert E. Lee would demonstrate the superiority of his Army of Northern Virginia — on Union soil, no less — and prove to key European powers that the Confederacy was here to stay so as to push them off the sidelines. The Gettysburg campaign was, in other words, a strategic offensive meant to advance the overall goals of the rebellion if not win the conflict altogether.

What Lee did not anticipate was the iron resolve, the ferocious tenacity, of the Union defenders. 

The history nerd in me loves this stuff. I’d say right now Trump et al. are in a place comparable to Robert E. Lee’s army after the second day of Gettysburg. They’d had some success but had failed to take key positions, in particular the high ground of Little Round Top. And they’d suffered terrible casualties. But they didn’t consider themselves defeated. Then the next day Bobby Lee ordered Pickett’s Charge. After that they considered themselves defeated, and skedaddled back to Virginia. That was July 1863, and the war didn’t end until April 1865. But for the remainder of the war Lee was strictly on defense.

So the question is, what will be Trump’s (or Miller’s) next move? Will he really dial things back in Minnesota? Will he change tactics, perhaps redeploy? Or will he order a Pickett’s Charge? There are a lot of news stories today claiming that Trump has changed course, but I will believe that when I see it. And I haven’t seen it yet.

Do see Quinta Jurecic at The Atlantic, ICE’s No. 1 Ally. That ally would be the Department of Justice. The Attorney General, aka Trump’s girl Pam, is doing everything she can to protect DHS in Minnesota, including blocking any real investigation into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And that much doesn’t seem to be changing.

And today Trump’s girl Pam is in Minneapolis, vowing to stay the course.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is now in Minneapolis, where she says several protesters have been arrested.

“Federal agents have arrested 16 Minnesota rioters for allegedly assaulting federal law enforcement – people who have been resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents,” she wrote on X a few minutes ago.

She said more arrests can be expected.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: NOTHING will stop President Trump and this Department of Justice from enforcing the law,” she added.

So Pam, at least, has raised her sword and is marching decisively toward the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. How many will follow?

This is interesting — when the Trump Administration announced it was sending some ICE personnel to Italy to help with security at the Winter Olympics, Italy objected. “Tens of thousands of Italians have signed petitions demanding that ICE not be allowed at the Games, while opposition lawmakers have demanded that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government deny Trump’s ‘thugs’ entry to Italy.” So word gets around.

See also Clamor is growing in Europe to boycott Trump’s World Cup. Aw, poor baby. And after he got that nice FIFA peace prize. I bet Trump is planning to wear his medal to some World Cup games. But the stadiums may be half empty. I do feel bad for stadium vendors and any businesses hoping to pick up some tourist business from the World Cup. But I don’t feel bad for Trump.

Update: Check out Bruce Springsteen’s new song!

Shortly after Renee Good was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, J.D. Vance claimed that Ross had “absolute immunity” because he was performing federal duties, CNN reported. And for this reason, Ross could not be prosecuted by the state of Minnesota. Vance later appeared to backtrack on that, after this remark was slammed by hosts of legal experts who disagreed. But I’m wondering if the Border Patrol agents who killed Alex Pretti had heard the backtrack.

A couple of weeks ago, writer Adam Serwer appeared on Chris Hayes’s Ms NOW show and said, “Their position is, if you disagree with us, we can kill you.” I was so struck by that I wrote it down at the time. I can’t find a video of that, but earlier that same day Serwer published a piece in The Atlantic in which he wrote,

The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest, and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public. Good’s mother, partner, and children have to cope not only with their unfathomable loss, but with a campaign designed to justify her killing. Their own lives will be subject to invasive scrutiny by the government and its allies, in a search for any derogatory information about Good that might somehow be used to justify her killing. For some, that won’t even be necessary. “I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved,” the Republican lawmaker Randy Fine told the right-wing network Newsmax. …

…The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist.

I recommend reading the whole thing; it’s not long. Among other things, he says Good’s murder was the ninth shooting by an ICE agent since September. I hadn’t realized there had been that many.

As soon as Alex Pretti’s death hit the news, Administration officials, including The Gnome and Stephen Miller (can we call him The Ghoul?), released statements calling Pretti a terrorist. Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” The smears had begun. But the blowback against the smears is even bigger now than it was for Renee Good. Paul Krugman is asking was this a murder too far?

Last week House Dems failed to challenge DHS funding in the current budget bill. (Not that they really tried; see Brian Beutler’s commentary on this; it’s brilliant.) Senate Dems appeared to have been prepared to pass the budget bill also, to avoid another shutdown. But now they appear to be putting up real resistance. They want DHS funding to be removed from the budget bill so they can pass the rest of the budget. But they are refusing to give more money to DHS until ICE and the Border Patrol are overhauled. So far, Republicans are refusing to cooperate.

Even so, Politico is reporting that Trump is feeling a “GOP backlash” over the murder of Alex Pretti. “Republican blowback surged this weekend after Pretti’s killing. Republican lawmakers called for probes into the incident, while others warned that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE risked losing credibility with the public.”

Also,

On Monday, President Donald Trump offered the first hint that the political crisis engulfing his administration would lead to changes on the ground. He deployed border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis, a move viewed by some administration officials and Trump allies as a recognition that the president needed to change course. Homan, Trump said, will report “directly to me.”

“That is intentional,” said an administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Tom needs to be in charge.”

Trump also spoke to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, on Monday and said they “seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” the latest sign that the president may be looking to deescalate tensions. It was a notable change in tone from late Sunday when he asked the governor to “cooperate with the Trump Administration to enforce our Nation’s Laws, rather than resist and stoke the flames of Division, Chaos, and Violence.”

Walz’ office said the call was “productive,” and said the president agreed to look into reducing the federal government’s presence in the state. The White House did not immediately respond to a request seeking to verify the president’s comments.

See also Republican calls are growing for a deeper investigation into fatal Minneapolis shooting of Alex Pretti. I’m also seeing a lot more stories about gun rights activists slamming the Administration over Pretti’s death, especially any suggestion that his being armed was the reason he had to be killed..

I don’t know if Homan is any less of a sociopath than Trump, The Gnome, Miller, and Bovino seem to be. And I think the whole problem with Trump’s “deportation” campaign from the beginning was that he was always less interested in actual deportation than in the optics of it, especially videos of nonwhite people being brutalized and humiliated. but it appears there’s less of a market for that sort of thing than Trump had assumed.

If nothing else, though the Administration has been put on notice that the smear tactics aren’t always going to work. We’ll see if they adjust.

After several hours have passed and several videos have surfaced, we know exactly how federal agents murdered Alex Pretti. Even the stupid New York Post has mostly backed off claiming that agents were forced to shoot Pretti in self-defense, although it’s still implying Pretti deserved to be shot, somehow. (Most recently, they’re blaming the firearm itself.) See video analysis from CNN,

Outside of the Trump Administration and Murdoch Media, there is near unanimity about what happened yesterday. As agents approached Alex Pretti, he was holding nothing but a phone. He did not try to interfere with the arrest they were making. Instead, he tried to come to the aid of a bystander who had been shoved to the ground. An agent sprayed pepper spray toward Pretti’s face. Then agents grabbed Pretti and shoved him to the ground, on his knees. Seven agents surrounded him. One agent struck Pretti several times with a pepper spray cannister. Then an agent pulled a gun that had been holstered on Pretti’s waistband. The agent walked away, holding Pretti’s gun. Pretti was completely restrained — and unarmed — and hunched over on his knees when an agent fired four shots into him at close range. Then another agent started firing. Together they fired at least ten shots. By that time the agent who had taken Pretti’s gun was across the street. And by that time, Alex Pretti must have been dead.

There really isn’t any ambiguity here. The federal agents had no reason to kill Alex Pretti, but they did.

Note that AG Pam Bondi reacted to the shooting by demanding that Minnesota turn over its voter registration rolls, now. Talk about not reading the room.

There has been an unexpected development, which is that a number of gun-rights organizations and activists are objecting to the Administration’s claim that Pretti must have been a bad guy because he was armed with a gun. (See also Gun Rights Advocates Want Answers About the Minneapolis Shooting at NOTUS.) In particular, a comment by U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli to the effect that federal authorities are “highly likely” to be “legally justified” in shooting anyone who is armed has set off some alarms. Their thing for years has been to “normalize” the sight of armed civilians in day-to-day life. And they see themselves on the side of law & order. And y’all probably already know I think this is hooey. But, as I said, it’s an interesting development.

For the perspective of a gun-rights activist, see Minneapolis Is a Second Amendment Wake-Up Call by Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic. Before reading it do note that Harper says a lot of things I find objectionable. The historical record does not support his belief that the “core purpose” of the Second Amendment is “to prevent government tyranny” but to protect the state militias. It was the decision to depend on state militias rather than a standing federal army for defense that was the protection against tyranny. But since the militia was self-armed — members were required to own their own muskets — the Second was written to be sure no authority interfered with the militia being armed. Since we now have a rather formidable standing military, the original purpose of the Second has evaporated.  Further, the Second Amendment has never done a bleeping thing to make the other amendments possible, as Harper writes.  And there is considerable data showing that having an armed population does not reduce crime or otherwise make us safer but just increases the likelihood of getting shot.

Still, Harper’s opinion may be representative of gun-rights activists, including the older ones who were radicalized by Ruby Ridge and Waco. They thought the Trump Administration was on their side. Now, they have doubts. And the Administration needs to learn to keep its propaganda stories straight.

Another interesting development is that, all of a sudden, DHS funding is being questioned again. House Dems failed to challenge DHS funding in the current budget bill and sent it on to the Senate. But now Senate Democrats are in revolt against DHS funding. Even Chuck Schumer has vowed that “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included,” Don’t back down, Chuck.

The long-anticipated mega-snowfall started here in the early morning hours. It appears we’re not going to get the ice here, just snow. And yesterday the weather app was saying there could be two feet of accumulation, but now it’s saying six to eight inches. So I’m hopeful we won’t be snowed in here for very long. But the apartment complex show plough truck — which is parked just outside my apartment — won’t start. It’s 6 degrees outside. Some poor schmuck has been trying all morning to get it started, and failing. But since I’m too poor to own a car, I don’t have to worry about it. Nyah nyah.

Update: At some point another snow plough truck came along and gave the stalled truck a jump. The snow stopped about 5 pm EST, and I understand we got 14 inches. But no ice.