Minnesota Is Kicking Trump’s Ass – and He Knows It
Team Trump’s violent siege on Minneapolis is failing and rightfully sickening everyone, from the US public to the manosphere.
Even in the weeks prior to the Trump administration’s killing of two American civilians during its federal siege on Minnesota, the White House’s political shop and chief of staff Susie Wiles had already grown nervous that Donald Trump’s anti-immigration blitzes and the viral videos of their Immigration and Customs Enforcement-led crackdowns were dragging down the GOP’s chances of clinging to power in the 2026 midterms – and shredding their gains with young and minority voters since 2024.
“Polling has been so shitty,” a Trump adviser, who’s familiar with the private data that the president and his senior staff have reviewed recently, bluntly tells Zeteo. But it wasn’t just the polling. In recent months, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, some Trump officials have closely tracked how Trump and his policies – including on ICE raids and immigrant communities – are playing with prominent, MAGA-curious online influencers and podcasters with massive audiences. Some of them, perhaps most famously Joe Rogan, are credited by the MAGA faithful with helping boost Trump with young male voters in the 2024 presidential election.
What the White House saw began setting off alarm bells in Trumpland.
“You could see these guys starting to say: ‘No, thank you,’” a White House official says, citing Rogan and others, adding that it was a strong indicator of which way the wind was blowing. And, in the days since Trump’s immigration agents murdered Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, incidents captured in viral bystander videos, multiple Trump advisers concede that it’s only gotten worse for them. Many of the denizens of the Trump-Vance team, finally, see their policy as a huge “public-relations” problem – to use the bloodless term administration officials refuse to stop using – albeit one with a rising death toll.
The truth is that Minnesotans are winning – and Team Trump has no one to blame but themselves.