The President’s Biggest Challenge Yet
The Resistance has finally made itself known in Donald Trump’s second administration. In Minnesota, the president is facing perhaps the most difficult conundrum of his second administration. Enraged anti-ICE protestors are being egged on by a group of hardcore, professional activists to stop federal agents from enforcing immigration law in the state.
The Resistance has rolled out a full-orbed digital campaign that has seemingly overshadowed the growing fraud scandal in the North Star State. They’ve successfully mobilized social media, active Signal chats, and the various megaphones in the legacy media and the influencer class to spread their message.
On the ground, an archipelago of radical groups (including Communists and socialists), nonprofits, leftist attorneys, and Democrats from Minnesota and elsewhere, along with hapless Republicans, have created a toxic situation. The tactics of insurgency and guerrilla warfare have once again overtaken neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul, just as they did during the Summer of Floyd in 2020.
Kyle Shideler lays out the stark choice that confronts Minnesotans: “[Y]ou’re either with the government or with the revolution.” Groups like Minnesota ICE Watch are aiming to undermine all resistance to their aims, which is mostly coming from the federal government, and forcibly take territory as their own. “The message being sent is that the self-styled revolutionaries are the real authority in the streets of Minneapolis,” Shideler notes.
One chief tactic of anti-ICE activists is roping people such as Renee Good into left-wing groups like Minnesota ICE Watch, which describes itself as bringing together “collective groups of people that can combat class enemies in a way that is militant, uncompromising, and continues to bring people into the struggle.” These professional activists are fomenting a color revolution by training soccer moms and low-level political protestors to wage direct action, including arson, assault, and sabotage, on targets.
And it looks like they’ve been successful in turning the public against the Trump administration. Though polls show that the public still supports removing illegal immigrants in principle, Trump’s unpopularity has been on an uptick. Pollster G. Elliott Morris highlights some alarming numbers: the president’s approval on immigration has dropped 18 points since taking office last January. Even worse, support for abolishing ICE among Americans has increased by 50 points since September 2024.
The mounting problems regarding implementation of the president’s deportation agenda, along with political implications for the midterms, were likely partly why the president sent border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota earlier this week.
Trump and his top officials are trying to make inroads with Governor Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and Attorney General Keith Ellison in a move that could potentially not only help undermine sanctuary cities in Minnesota but also drive a wedge between key Democratic politicians and their increasingly radical base. These are the options for Minnesota Democrats: stop protecting illegal immigrants, or face continued pressure from the federal government. This is an art-of-the-deal strategy the president has used to good effect in the past.
Trump also needs to consider one major potential complication: Will these actions deflate his base, which could view this as capitulation rather than a change in tactics? The view that the Trump administration has essentially conceded the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul to the Democrats is a difficult one to refute.
A better comms strategy, however, would help blunt potential blowback. Of course, illegal immigrants need to be removed from the country, a point Homan himself has reiterated after coming to Minnesota. Nabbing illegals who are already in jail, a strategy the administration is implementing in the state, means that fewer agents will be needed there. But the administration must broadcast on every available media channel that such changes don’t mean they are reneging on one of the president’s central goals: fixing the country’s immigration woes.
Stubbornly clinging to the specific strategies that were overseen by less-than-competent officials like Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem would’ve been unwise. Though Democrats will always be outraged when a single illegal alien is deported, handing your sword to your political enemies to run you through is something else entirely.
This was evident in DHS’s former communications strategy, which was uneven at best. Noem calling Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who was looking to “massacre” law enforcement officials raised the stakes to too high a level. Pretti doesn’t have to be viewed in those embellished terms to have put himself and law enforcement in a bad situation.
A just-released video shows Pretti (his family has confirmed his identity) on January 13th screaming at and getting into scuffles with law enforcement agents, breaking a rib in the process. He also kicked out the lights of a law enforcement SUV as it was driving away. Pretti hardly looked like the Gandhi-esque character portrayed by his family and the media.
The popular myth of the civil rights era principle of nonviolent resistance has given way to open, sanctioned violence. But this was already apparent during the movement’s heyday among top leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that it “cannot be taken for granted that Negroes will adhere to nonviolence under any conditions.” After all, claimed King, “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” The professional activists in Minnesota seem to be following King’s charge.
There’s a case to be made that the Trump administration should focus the bulk of its efforts on breaking up the GOP-to-big-business pipeline by pushing Congress to make E-Verify mandatory across the nation. But Republicans have slim majorities in the House and Senate, so they’d have to break from conventional thinking and adopt more risky measures, such as tossing out the Senate filibuster altogether. Though this seems somewhat unlikely given the current character of congressional Republicans, it has a better chance of success than trying to cobble together a supermajority in the coming elections.
Pointing out the Trump administration’s missteps in Minnesota, however, should not be equated with calling Trump a sell-out who has betrayed the MAGA movement and the country. Too many on the online Right have sunk to this kind of hyperventilating posting that makes them seem impotent and the movement on the verge of spinning apart. Whatever issues he may have, Trump is the only person who can fix the regime-level issue of immigration at this moment. Turning on him right now would be mindless and politically suicidal.
This is not helped when right-wing grifters reported earlier this week that the Trump Department of Justice withdrew requests to issue arrest warrants for Don Lemon and other protestors who stopped a church service in St. Paul. Such posts are intended to gin up political inaction due to cynicism. But as the intrepid account America First Insight pointed out, an appeals court rejected the emergency arrest warrants for Lemon and others because the DOJ has not first attempted to file a grand jury indictment—the court had no problem in principle with Lemon being brought up on charges. But you wouldn’t know any of this by perusing the accounts of those looking to stoke endless outrage, thereby increasing their monthly payments from X.
Such accounts look even worse when Don Lemon was in fact arrested early Friday morning. It seems that the plan trusters have been vindicated on this score.
Another related problem can be seen in the common tactics utilized by the prominent voices of establishment conservatism. There’s a proliferation of moralizers, self-described “principled” columnists, and coffee shop regulars who write what passes for serious political commentary. Instead, individuals like Special Forces Warrant Officer Eric Shwalm—Americans who have taken on hard tasks and have put real skin in the game—should be listened to. We should stop reading the scribblers who haven’t broken a sweat in the past five years and start investing time in people with real-life experience and the scars to show for it.
To successfully counter the activists and anarchists in Minnesota, the FBI needs to continue its investigation into anti-ICE Signal chats, following gumshoe reporting by Cam Higby and Andy Ngo. Democrats like Minnesota State Representative Alex Falconer and former Walz campaign strategist Amanda Koehler, who has been identified as an administrator on the Minnesota ICE Watch Signal chat group, need to be brought in for questioning.
Law enforcement should also look at American-born billionaire Neville Roy Singham, who currently lives in Shanghai. As Fox News has reported, Singham runs a network of Communist and socialist nonprofit organizations that are behind some of the key protests in Minnesota and elsewhere. One such institution is the People’s Forum, a New York City nonprofit he has backed since 2017. BreakThrough News, a propaganda arm of the People’s Forum, helps spread news of shootings and other activities that are designed to make law enforcement look like stormtroopers.
Congress should take up additional initiatives, such as hiking up taxes even further on remittances and banning banks from allowing illegal aliens to open accounts, which would mean taking on some of the main planks of the 1986 immigration law that Ronald Reagan signed into law. Also, an influx of more immigration judges is needed, as well as even more border patrol and ICE agents. Perhaps a new program can be started for American citizens where they can serve as deputy ICE or Border Patrol agents for one weekend a month, akin to the National Guard. Creative solutions are needed right now because America’s enemies will not stop until every vestige of the America that once was is gone forever.
