🛑 Trump Can’t Quit His Failing Campaign of Terror and Murder
The authoritarian president keeps escalating his war at home, but it’s a war he’s losing. In Congress, Democrats voted against Israel in unprecedented numbers while Trump nominees were battered.
On this day in 2002, President George W. Bush announced the formation of what would become the Department of Homeland Security. Concerns about its role in expanding presidential power at the expense of civil liberties have never died down.
Welcome to Thursday. It’s Swin, again. We are enduring yet another week of watching Donald Trump fail at surrendering to Iran in a war he started and promptly lost. Stateside, the president is losing a very different kind of war, even as he ups the body count on our streets.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get into just how badly Trump is eating shit in his war on his own people. Plus, in an astonishing development, a rush of Democrats including Nancy Pelosi (!) voted to cut military aid to Israel, while three Trump nominees were made to sweat through hearings on Capitol Hill.
And there’s more: After Trump’s primetime address tonight, set for 9pm ET, be sure to tune into zeteo.com and youtube.com/@zeteo to hear Mehdi and me break down the litany of lies the president will undoubtedly tell.
‘They Lost the Country’
On Tuesday evening, Zeteo politics editor Andrew Perez messaged me seven words: “His blood is still on the ground.”
Andrew lives in Maine, so he went to Biddeford, where ICE killed a young Colombian man. (We will have more for you on this story soon; watch your inbox.)
His name was Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Before him, there was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Houston, Texas. And now we have a third fatality in just over a week: a 28-year-old man in St. Augustine, Florida, who was apparently killed by a tractor-trailer as he ran from ICE agents.
This is only counting one week of bodies – the ones we know about. And it’s the result of President Trump, his White House policy architect Stephen Miller, and the rest of the administration dedicating the past several weeks to dialing their mass-deportation machine back up to their preferred volume of sadism. After the fierce backlash to the Trump-Vance administration’s siege of Minnesota, the Republican Party hatched a plan to curb at least some anti-immigrant brutality until “after the midterms.” But they couldn’t even muster that. They just couldn’t help themselves.