First Draft: Reforming Trump's Gestapo?
As Congress weighs guardrails for Trump’s fascist military police, lawmakers vote to allow themselves to overturn the president’s tariffs.
On this day in 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured his friend Harry Whittington while quail-hunting in Texas. Bizarrely, it was Whittington who later apologized to Cheney, and not vice versa.
Good morning! Andrew Perez, Zeteo’s senior politics editor, here, addressing ‘First Draft’ readers for the first time. I help cover the Trump administration’s daily horrors, which happen nonstop, as you know.
In Washington, DC, this week, Congress is debating a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security – or weighing what Donald Trump’s fascist paramilitary force should look like, and the extent to which it should be reined in, if at all.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Republicans want ICE to continue breaking into people’s homes without real warrants, Trump White House aide Peter Navarro encourages Americans to get used to bad jobs numbers, House Republicans can’t keep blocking votes on Trump’s tariffs, and Canada reels after one of the deadliest mass shootings in the country leaves nine dead.
How Much Fascism Is Too Much?
Less than three weeks ago, masked federal agents were filmed as they executed an ICU nurse and ICE legal observer in the streets of Minneapolis, in what should be the defining image of Trump’s second presidency. Will it be? Will that gruesome scene change anything at all?
Alex Pretti’s killing last month was the second time in a matter of weeks that the Trump administration’s masked secret police were caught on video murdering a US citizen in Minnesota. Footage of the incident circulated widely, instantly obliterating the lies the Department of Homeland Security told about the shooting, and further diminishing Americans’ support for Trump’s immigration policies and his violent occupation of Minnesota.
In the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s murder, Democrats secured a deal in which Congress split off discussions about long-term funding for the Department of Homeland Security from a bill to fund the rest of the government. DHS funding will expire later this week, and Democrats and Republicans are now hashing out what kind of guardrails, if any, should be imposed on Trump’s fascist paramilitary force. There has been little progress on this front.
The guardrails proposed by Democrats represent an effort to “reform,” rather than eliminate, Trump’s Gestapo. The 10-point plan from Democratic legislative leaders would limit, to an extent, the degree to which the administration can trample over everyone’s rights in the US as guaranteed by the US Constitution.
The debate over these’ proposed guardrails only exposes how ill-equipped the opposition party is to challenge Trump’s authoritarian project, the Beltway media’s inability to convey what’s unfolding before their eyes, and how extreme Trump’s actions have already been.