Most of the obvious reactions to Jack Smith’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday have already been delivered, and I agree with them. It’s hard to imagine what on earth Chairman Jim Jordan—and hearing his whiny, tinny, angry, lying voice awoke involuntary physiological reactions I’d spent years trying to vanquish—and the Republicans thought they were accomplishing. To any non-Kool-Aid-drinking American, they looked ridiculous. Smith was calm. The Republicans were jumping out of their skins competing to get their sound bite featured on Fox News. All they managed to do was to remind people that Donald Trump is a criminal and that in a sane world, the Senate would have convicted him on the second impeachment (the January 6 one) and barred him from holding federal office for life.

I want to focus on one matter I’d forgotten all about. I’m thinking maybe you had too. That’s the question of this second volume of Smith’s report on Trump’s crimes, which focuses not on January 6 but on Trump’s theft of those classified documents he took down to Mar-a-Lago. It was written by Smith and his team back when the investigation was active. It is generally presumed to contain details about the matter that are heretofore unknown. Its release to the public was blocked by—speaking of memories I’d successfully repressed—Florida Judge Aileen Cannon.

I trust you remember her track record here. She tossed the classified documents case in July 2024, ruling that Smith had been improperly appointed to his position as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland. From the moment the case landed on her docket, Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, barely concealed her obvious partisanship in her actions, which brought her some jaw-dropping reprimands from the Eleventh Circuit Court, which employs her. She was a judicial joke.

But she didn’t stop during the campaign. No! Once Trump was safely back in the White House, she ordered, on the second day of Trump’s second presidency, that the Department of Justice could not release the second volume of the Smith report (the first part had been released by Garland’s Justice Department the week before, in the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency).

A couple of nonprofit legal outfits sued. Cannon dragged her feet. She spent 2025 ignoring petitions from the two nonprofits that were seeking to get the volume released. Finally, last November, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit—which, by the way, included one Trump appointee—chastised Cannon’s delays and gave her 60 days to do something.

The 60 days came and went at the beginning of this month, and—shocker—nothing happened. Then, as fate would have it, just this Monday, three days before Smith’s public testimony, the matter of the second volume vaulted back into the news as a lawyer for Trump filed a motion asking Cannon to permanently block the Justice Department, “as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees” (note well: future officers!), from making the second volume public.

Two points here. First, we have the rather odd spectacle of Trump, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney put it on Bluesky, “litigating in his personal capacity against the Justice Department he runs.” But of course the key word in the motion, as noted above, is “future.” If Cannon grants this motion and a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, even that future attorney general won’t be allowed to release Volume II.

Second—about Trump’s lawyer. We’ve seen the basket of deplorables Trump has hired to defend either him or his government in court: Alina Habba, illegally installed as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, who resigned after a court disqualified her; Todd Blanche, still the number two at Justice, famous for his softball interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and for defending moving her to a cushier prison; Emil Bove, who while at Justice ordered the sleazy dropping of all charges against then–New York Mayor Eric Adams, which led to nearly a dozen resignations.

Now we must add to that sorry menagerie a certain Kendra Wharton, who filed this week’s motion to Cannon. Who is Wharton? She was a white-collar criminal defense attorney in 2023 when Blanche announced that she and Bove would be joining Trump’s legal team to defend him against Smith’s charges. Later, when Trump took office the second time, he tapped Wharton to serve as the Justice Department’s senior ethics official. The prior one resigned after he was reassigned to a unit charged with cracking down on sanctuary cities. “Trump ethics official,” one suspects, is all we need to know about her.

So let’s take a step back. Trump took thousands of documents, more than 300 marked classified, with him to Mar-a-Lago in 2021. For months, he rebuffed polite requests by the FBI to cooperate with an inquiry. Finally, they raided the place. Naturally, Trump turned this into a deep-state persecution, and his willing propagandists complied in pushing that lie.

Then the roulette wheel of fate gave the case to the hackiest federal judge imaginable. She tossed the case. And she has spent her time since then making sure that the public never learns any more details about what Trump did. Next up, she’ll surely agree to the motion filed by a lawyer who played a willing role in helping Trump and Pam Bondi wreck the Justice Department.

And even if somehow Cannon denies the motion and Volume II somehow gets released? Well, it’s Bondi who’ll decide how much of it we get to see!

The Epstein files were supposed to be released in full on December 19. Bondi has done nothing. Volume II by rights should have been released some time last year. But Cannon did nothing. This is banana republic democracy, hiding corruption from public view while the president they’re all protecting seeks to destroy NATO and boost Vladimir Putin, and as he sends a quasi-gestapo force of ill-trained goons out into the streets of our cities to shoot people. And doing all they can to play along, as they showed us Thursday, are House Republicans, who’ll never stop debasing themselves in the race to prove to Trump which among them can be most servile.

Next up for the very fine people of Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Maine. President Donald Trump, in his speech in Detroit Wednesday, signaled that the Pine Tree State was in his sights. Why? Well, no doubt partly because he’s never won the state in three tries (although he has carried the rural 2nd district each time, and Maine is one of two states that awards electoral votes by congressional district). But mainly because Maine has something notable in common with Minnesota. Can you guess? Yep: a sizeable Somali population.

“They’re scammers,” Trump said, just putting the plain old racism out there for all to see. “They always will be, and we’re getting them out. In Maine, it’s really crooked as hell, too.” In response, Democratic Governor (and Senate candidate) Janet Mills released a video in which she made her position plain: “To the federal government, I say this: If your plan is to come here to be provocative and to undermine the civil rights of Maine residents, do not be confused. Those tactics are not welcome here.” The key word there, of course, is “residents” (as opposed to “citizens”).

The several thousand Somalis who have settled in Maine since the 1990s are based chiefly in Portland and Lewiston. They’ve been on alert since at least mid-December, when Trump referred to Somalis as “garbage.” Hundreds of Mainers gathered at a December 15 rally in Lewiston to support the Somali population—who were notably absent from the rally because, in the words of one Somali resident, “people were afraid of, ‘OK, what if somebody shoots us, or something happens?’”

As Americans, our minds are trained by involuntary habit to assume, when we see excess and violence, that the government will step in and bring order. Things get a little crazy at a protest, the cops break it up. Yes, there have been times when it’s the cops themselves who incite violence, like in Chicago in 1968. But when that has happened, the state has usually seemed at least a little sorry afterward.

Certainly, there were and always are reactionary forces working to throttle such examinations, and sometimes they succeed. But at least the impulse to investigate has generally been there. Indeed, a government commission appointed after the ’68 confrontations between cops and protesters during that year’s Democratic convention had a staff of 200 conducting thousands of interviews; in its report, it actually used the phrase “police riot.” That’s how things work in the United States—there exists a shared assumption that violence of that sort is undesirable, and that when it happens, some gesture toward accountability is what a democratic society requires.

Well, there existed such assumptions. All that’s out the window now. Now the federal government is the unapologetic bringer of violence. And it’s further important to understand: No amount of criticism, no amount of forensic or video evidence, no poll expressing mass public disapproval will change this. In fact, precisely the opposite. Any and all criticism will just be taken by Trump and MAGA world as further proof that they are right. Evidence will be dismissed and countered with fake “evidence,” like the video Vice President JD Vance trumpeted that purported to show that Renee Nicole Good had it coming. Bad-news polls will be dismissed as fake. The Trumpian state will dig in its heels. The only question Stephen Miller will ask himself will be: How can we turn up the heat?

This is what makes what’s happening in this country today different. The state is the perp. The government is beyond the law. The United States is now closer to Bashar Al Assad’s Syria, or perhaps even today’s Iran, than to anything we recognize as fitting within the understood norms of American history. That’s a pretty big statement, I realize, but it is not an exaggeration.

True—the Trump administration isn’t killing people by the thousands. It isn’t dropping those hideous barrel bombs on its own people. But mentally, psychologically, we as a country are edging in that direction. Until Minneapolis, I would have told you that as bad as Trump is, he’s not capable of ordering ICE agents to shoot people (citizens or not) at random, and that as bad as ICE is, they’d refuse such orders. Now I no longer believe either of those things. This man and his government are clearly capable of mass violence against immigrants and all who support them. It seems only a matter of time now before some of these thuggish ICE agents, under orders from the thug president, shoot some people down.

Remember, ICE is still on a hiring spree. And it’s not simply that ICE is recruiting—it’s how they’re doing it, and what kind of recruits they’re targeting. Earlier this week, The Intercept reported that just two days after Jonathan Ross executed Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security posted a recruiting effort on Instagram using the phrase “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” The background music in the post was a song of the same name by a group called Pine Tree Riots. The song’s lyrics, the story reported, have been cited by extremists and neo-Nazis in the past. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Pine Tree Riots “is a little-known a cappella group affiliated with the Mannerbund, which the [SPLC] has previously listed as a white nationalist group.”

The Pine Tree Riot was an uprising by some New Hampshire colonists against the British in 1772. The Pine Tree Flag has recently been linked to Christian nationalism, and at least one was carried by January 6 insurrectionists. And more recently—just so you know how deeply MAGA marinates in this stuff—an official at the Department of Education had one set up outside his office. It’s also the same flag that was spotted outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s vacation home a few years ago. And now, ICE is using if not the flag itself then the same far-right sentiment it evokes to recruit people to whom it is, after the most minimal training possible, handing masks and Glock 19s.

And Trump himself? Soon, in Minnesota or somewhere, he will invoke the Insurrection Act against the will of local elected officials and send in the military. It’s hard to say where that will lead. But no place good. Again—all evidence that it isn’t working will be rejected as fake, and Americans who disapprove will be dismissed as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase that allegedly describes people like you and me.

We’re the sane ones. The only Trump Derangement Syndrome is that of Trump himself, and his supporters, and it is destroying the country we thought we knew. 

On January 3, four days before the horrific killing of Renee Nicole Good, the Department of Homeland Security put out a press release. The headline bragged: “ICE Announces Historic 120% Manpower Increase, Thanks to Recruitment Campaign That Brought in 12,000 Officers and Agents.”

The statement went on to boast (bolded language in the original): “After receiving more than 220,000 applications to join ICE from patriotic Americans, ICE blew past its original hiring target of 10,000 new officers and agents within a year. In fact, we have more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000. With these new patriots on the team, we will be able to accomplish what many say was impossible and fulfill President Trump’s promise to make America safe again.”

It appears that Good’s executioner—and it’s hard to think of a more apt word for someone who fires three point-blank shots at the head of an obviously unarmed civilian who is trying to drive away—was not one of these “new patriots.” The incident his defenders have taken to invoking, in which he was dragged by a car and ended up with 33 stitches, reportedly happened last June, before the hiring spree. But even that raises the obvious question: If he was injured, if he was “traumatized” by that event, as Vice President JD Vance said Thursday, what in the world was he doing still out in the field?

An investigation may answer that question (or, since it’s going to be led by Kash Patel’s FBI, maybe it won’t). But our common sense, and what we have learned in the last year about these people, tells us that he was still in the field for the same reason that ICE has hired 12,000 people in six months, recruiting specifically for people with an enthusiasm for guns and the military. The Trump administration wants to force showdowns that lead inevitably to what happened in Minneapolis Wednesday.

Take a look at the recruitment social media post that DHS placed on X last August: “Serve your country! Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!”

Let’s break that down. “Serve your country.” OK, nothing objectionable about that. But then we take a very Trumpian-Millerian turn: “Defend your culture.” Who is that aimed at? What set of emotional reactions is that command supposed to fire, and in whom? What “culture,” precisely, is it referring to? And finally, the reassurance that the job is open to practically anyone.

Well, anyone of a certain mindset, that is. On New Year’s Eve, ICE announced that it was initiating a new $100 million recruitment campaign that it referred to as a “wartime recruitment” strategy. The campaign, as The Washington Post put it, will target people “who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.”

Any organization that goes from 10,000 to 22,000 in six months has hired some very unqualified people. If that organization is, say, the Candy Stripers, that might not be much of an issue. But if the organization is one that gives its employees badges and masks and riot gear and SIG Sauer P320 semiautomatic pistols (or maybe a Glock 19, to which the agency began transitioning last year), you’ve got a problem.

That’s exactly what Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski (whose exact role at DHS is the focus of many questions) have done. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill passed last July, you might recall, tripled ICE’s budget, from around $10 billion a year to close to $30 billion. All told, as Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center pointed out last year, the bill “allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting one million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States.” She added that “the largest percentage increase goes to finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.”

It’s clear what all this adds up to. There will be more Renee Goods. And they will all be smeared and trashed by Trump and his followers. Vance said Thursday, as have any number of MAGA-ites on social media, that she was driving right at the shooting officer. Proof of this, they say, lies in the fact that first bullet hole went through........

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