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police state
Trump Is Experimenting With Police-State Tactics
In cities large and small, his masked agents are now kidnapping local people, holding them without access to family or lawyers.
Jun 17, 2025
After only six months in office, the Trump regime has lost popular support to an astonishing degree. According to a June Quinnipiac poll of U.S. registered voters, how well is Donald Trump managing his job as president? 54% disapproval. His handling of immigration, 54% disapproval; the economy, 56% disapproval; trade, 57% disapproval; universities, 54% disapproval; Russia-Ukraine war, 57% disapproval.
Despite his dismal ratings, the president is urging the Senate to enact another hugely unpopular proposal (“One Big Beautiful Bill Act”), which would restrict Medicaid, end health insurance for 7 million families, and eliminate food assistance for 40 million low-income people, including 16 million children.
Politically, this is nuts. The president’s popular support is already in “loser” territory and yet he’s pushing to pass a new law that will cost him even more support, just 17 months before an election that will decide control of the House of Representatives. What is going on?
Trump does seem to be running police-state experiments in smaller cities now, perhaps to get us all used to his methods for intimidating and dominating local people.
Leading up to the 2024 election, Trump said many times that, if he won, his supporters would never have to vote again because the system would be “fixed.” He has refused to back down from this strange stance.
Trump has also said several times that he may run for a third term as president, in direct violation of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. “There are methods you could do it,” he told NBC News on March 25, 2025. When asked to reveal more about those “methods,” he responded simply, “No.”
Last week in Los Angeles, we witnessed Trump toying with methods for keeping himself and other Republicans in power indefinitely.
Since taking office in 2017, Trump has tested various crisis proclamations, declaring a “national emergency” 21 times (8 of them in 2025), far more than any president before him.
Using his favorite issue—immigration—last week, Trump provoked a confrontation in Los Angeles to create a crisis: He sent masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into LA without judicial warrants to kidnap hundreds of working people, put them in chains, imprison them in the basement of a federal building without food or water, and deny them contact with family or lawyers. Real police-state stuff.
Then, predictably, hundreds of Angelinos took to the streets in protest. City officials (mayor and chief of police) insisted repeatedly that they had the situation well under control, but Trump insisted on manufacturing an emergency. The president declared that the enormous City of Los Angeles (area: 498 square miles, population: 3.8 million) would be “burned to the ground” and “completely obliterated” if he didn’t act to “liberate” the city from the “Migrant Invasion” of “Illegal Aliens and Criminals.” Next, without consulting the governor or the mayor, he mobilized 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to take over police functions. Then, predictably, street protests intensified.
At a press conference, Kristi Noem, secretary of Homeland Security, contradicted the president. She explained matter-of-factly that the purpose of Trump’s troops was to overthrow local elected leaders, or, as she put it, to “liberate” Los Angeles from its “socialist” leaders, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson reported June 9 that, as popular opinion has turned against Trump, he has become decidedly more authoritarian: “There is no doubt that as their other initiatives have stalled and public opinion is turning against the administration on every issue, the Trump regime is trying to establish a police state,” Richardson wrote.
This raises a question: Does Trump have the resources to send ICE into cities all across the country to create “emergencies” that then “require” the president to send in the military, to take over the basic functions of local and state governments?
This brings us full circle, back to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (“The BBB”), that Trump and his Republican friends are so eager to enact into law.
The BBB provides more than a $100 billion of new money for immigration crackdowns like the one in Los Angeles: $75 billion in supplemental funding for ICE to expand enforcement in the nation’s interior; another $45 billion for expanding adult immigration detention; an additional $14.4 billion for ICE transportation and removal operations; $10 billion more to hire more ICE agents; plus $2.4 billion to reward local law enforcement for participating in ICE activities—a total of $146.8 billion in new money for ICE to repeat its invasion of Los Angeles in dozens more cities simultaneously.
Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum argues that events in Los Angeles were Trump’s dress rehearsal for creating a police state, which could unfold in three steps before the midterm election in November 2026:
Step 1: Use federal powers in ways to provoke some kind of made-for-TV disturbance—flames, smoke, loud noises, waving of foreign flags.
Step 2: Invoke the disturbance to declare a state of emergency and deploy federal troops.
Step 3: Seize control of local operations of government—policing in June 2025; voting in November 2026.
“If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control,” Frum writes.
Trump does seem to be running police-state experiments in smaller cities now, perhaps to get us all used to his methods for intimidating and dominating local people.
On June 11, Washington Post reporter Catherine Rampell described the arrival of six unidentified masked men into Great Barrington, Massachusetts (population: 7,245), with “guns hanging all over them.” The burly men were “dressed as though they had parachuted into a war zone,” claiming to be ICE agents. They arrived in unmarked cars, some with out-of-state plates. When asked by local businesspeople to identify themselves, they refused to offer identification, or arrest warrants, or the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting. Instead, they accused their questioners of promoting lawlessness. The men then snatched up a gardener, stuffed him into the back seat of a car, and drove away. The kidnapped gardener is rumored to be imprisoned in an ICE detention facility near Boston, but Rampell has tried to locate him without success.
No one knows whether the six kidnappers in Great Barrington were actually ICE agents. They may have been some other brand of federal secret police, or they may have been “a ragtag vigilante group arbitrarily snatching brown-looking people off the street,” Rampell writes. In any case, they served to terrify local people and send the message that no town is safe from Trump’s new Los-Angeles-style tactics.
After enough experiments have shown Trump that he or his vigilantes can dominate any city he chooses, what comes next? A full-blown nationwide police state? To make America great again, establish martial law, suspend civil liberties, enhance state surveillance, further weaken judicial oversight, and suppress dissent by force?
These would be surefire “methods” for getting an unpopular president “elected” a third time, the Constitution be damned.
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Attack on Padilla Proves We Are Living in an Early-Stage Police State
Dictators can’t be dictators without first cowing the people, terrifying even elected officials, and asserting their absolute and unlimited power to use violence any where, any time, and under any circumstances they choose.
Jun 14, 2025
We’re now living in an early-stage police state.
After California Sen. Alex Padilla was assaulted for saying, “I’m Senator Alex Padilla and I have question for the Secretary,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary and notorious puppy murderer Kristi Noem went on Fox “News” and lied to the American people, saying that he hadn’t identified himself, she didn’t know who he was, and that he was “lunging into the room.”
The violence inflicted on Padilla was the point. And it’s being celebrated in real time by MAGA, Fox, and the Trump administration.
After all, dictators can’t be dictators without first cowing the people, terrifying even elected officials, and asserting their absolute and unlimited power to use violence any where, any time, and under any circumstances they choose.
“We are not going away,” Noem said in a snarling comment that provoked the question from Padilla. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor [Gavin Newsom] and that this mayor [Karen Bass] have placed on this country.”
For the record, the job of the federal government is not to “liberate“ cities from the leaders they themselves have elected. That’s what Russian President Vladimir Putin did when he forced all the elected governors of the Russian states (oblasts) to resign and replaced them with men he had appointed. Even suggesting it is deeply and profoundly un-American.
This is the Trump administration once again nakedly asserting that they are above the law, are committed to acting without ethical or moral restraint, and that they have no obligation to honor the constitutionally-defined oversight role of members of Congress. That they are intent on running a dictatorship here in America, not a democratic republic.
They have arrested and are prosecuting a member of the House of Representatives who was simply doing her job at an immigration detention center. They are ignoring explicit orders by federal judges and the Supreme Court. They are literally disappearing people, including American citizens, off the streets of our cities. And now they’ve taken an United States senator to the ground.
This is not what the people who fought and died to create and sustain this country had in mind.
The genius of the Founders was Montesquieu’s idea of three branches of government with checks on each other’s power. It’s essential to democracy.
President Donald Trump (second branch) has been trashing judges (third branch) and has now violently attacked a congresswoman and a U.S. senator (first branch). He’s spitting on the graves of the Framers of our Constitution.
And to emphasize their ignoring the Constitution and its requirement that both Congress and the courts can exercise oversight of the president, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said:
The courts should have no role here. There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process.
Similarly, they refuse to respect the right of American citizens to protest that’s laid out in the First Amendment, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Trump came right out and said that if anybody in Washington, D.C. tries to protest his birthday parade, he will meet them with violence:
For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force. Very big force!
That wasn’t a threat against vandals or even people who might try to disrupt Dear Leader’s birthday celebration: It was a threat against people who may “protest.”
This echoes the behavior of Hitler’s goons in the early 1930s as they set out to violently intimidate anybody—particularly members of Parliament—who may challenge him. Or Bull Connor as he bloodied protestors in Birmingham in the 1950s and 1960s.
Under Trump and Noem, federal agents have been given carte blanche to use violence against nonwhite people (it’s probably no coincidence that Sen. Padilla is a brown-skinned son of Mexican immigrants), including kidnapping them in broad daylight and sending them to foreign concentration camps with no access to due process whatsoever.
Noem could easily have taken the senator’s question, or just said, “I’m happy to meet with you after this press conference.“ Instead, she chose escalation and violence, which is why Democrats are calling on her to resign.
Right now the only people who can stop America’s descent into tyranny are the Republicans in the House and Senate. If just a small handful grow a spine, Trump could be stopped in his tracks.
Now, in response to the violence Noem and the FBI directed against a U.S. senator, the professional propagandists at Fox “News” are peddling rationalizations and repeating Noem’s lie that she didn’t know who Padilla was. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino issued a statement “thanking” the men who beat Padilla to the ground. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) implied Padilla was trying to inflict violence on Noem and called for him to be censured by the Senate.
It appears that Republicans are circling the wagons, defending the assault on Padilla, Trump’s illegal infliction of armed troops on the streets of Los Angeles over the objections of the governor and mayor, and his and Noem’s efforts to stir up trouble in California that they can then exploit Reichstag Fire-style.
Are there any John McCain Republicans left? Any patriots who revere the Constitution and respect the rule of law? Any who are willing to call out Trump’s brutal dictator-inspired corruption and excesses?
The question is an urgent one, because right now the only people who can stop America’s descent into tyranny are the Republicans in the House and Senate. If just a small handful grow a spine, Trump could be stopped in his tracks.
Will it happen? History suggests that massive public opinion holds the answer to that question. It ended, for example, both the presidency of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.
As Abraham Lincoln famously said in his debate with Stephen Douglas:
In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces judicial decisions.
Saturday will be this era’s most visible expression of public opinion. Stay tuned and stay peacefully active.
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Make No Mistake, Trump Is Turning the US Into a Police State
The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is a blatant attack on the civil liberties without which there can be no meaningful democracy for anyone. Our dark days are getting darker by the moment.
Mar 12, 2025
“America, this republic, this democracy in which we are, is a living thing which cannot be contemplated or categorized, like the image of a thing I can make . . . . It is not and never will be perfect because the standard of perfection does not apply here. Dissent belongs to this living matter as much as consent does. The limitations on dissent are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and no one else. If you ‘try to make America more American’ . . . you can only destroy it. Your methods, finally, are the justified methods of the police, and only the police.” —Hannah Arendt, “The Ex-Communists,” Commonweal (March 20, 1953).
Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish immigrant, wrote the above words at the high point of McCarthyism in 1950’s America. It took courage for her to publish these words. For, as her biographer, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, reports: “The attorney general of the democracy in which she was living had made a speech three days earlier in which he announced that 10,000 citizens were being investigated for denaturalization and 12,000 aliens for deportation as ‘subversives.”
Indeed Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blucher, was a former communist who was especially vulnerable to the threats of the Attorney General, Albert Brownell. As Blucher himself had written in a letter to Arendt about Brownell’s revival of the harsh McCarran-Walters Act: “The acceptance without opposition of the dreadful new immigration bill has demoralized the best people here, so much so that the forces of the Left, which never really were put in motion, are stunned . . . It seems that one can now deprive someone of citizenship with a simple denunciation . . . And how soon these ‘Born American’ people could become a Master Race.”
That was then, and this is now.
Last weekend, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil Mahmoud, a Columbia University graduate student, living in campus housing, who has been one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. Mahmoud is a Palestinian who was born in Syria, who has been in the U.S. on a student visa, is currently holding a green card, and is married to a U.S. citizen. There is no evidence that he has ever engaged in a violent act. He was apparently arrested in accordance with the Trump Executive Order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” signed on January 29, 2025, and also in connection with the recently announced State Department “catch and revoke” policy, which employs AI tools to locate, detain, and deport international students considered to be pro-Palestinian and thus, by definition, “anti-Semitic.”
This is not about Hamas or Palestine or Israel or antisemitism. It is about the crackdown on dissent. Period.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly acknowledged the action, announcing that “we will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” [It must be noted that a U.S. federal judge has just ordered a temporary halt to Mahmoud’s deportation. But it must be noted only parenthetically, because the halt is only temporary, and Mahmoud remains in ICE custody, and if there is any domain where the Trump administration can be relied upon to stick to its metaphorical—and actual—guns, it is this one.]
The arrest of Khalil is a major escalation in a “New Campus McCarthyism” that has beset U.S. higher education for at least the past two years. It follows hard on the Trump administration’s cancellation of over $400 million in Columbia University grants and contracts, and preceded by one day Tuesday’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Education has sent letters to 60 universities “under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”
At the same time, what we are now experiencing is more than an attack on academic freedom and university autonomy. It is nothing less than a wholesale assault on constitutional democracy itself, by an authoritarian administration determined to “Make America Great Again,” the Constitution, and democracy, be damned. The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is a blatant attack on the civil liberties without which there can be no meaningful democracy for anyone. As columnist Michelle Goldberg put it in the New York Times, “This is The Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare.”
That this arrest and the policy behind it is being justified by this administration–with its Nazi-saluting “DOGE” head and neo-Nazi supporting Vice President and “fine people on both sides” President–as a defense of Jews is beyond cynical. And that many Jewish leaders apparently support this arrest is simply deplorable. For Trump clearly has no real interest in either Jews or Arabs, and is quite content to disrespect the former while trolling the latter, as he did on Elon Musk’s X, posting “Shalom, Mahmoud” above a caption that read: “ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of @Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.” Trump followed up with an even more threatening Truth Social post:
We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.
But even more ominous was a statement Trump posted last week:
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
This is not about Hamas or Palestine or Israel or antisemitism.
It is about the crackdown on dissent. Period. Foreign “agitators,” American “agitators,” it makes no difference.
And while it involves the Education Department’s financial intimidation and punishment of universities, it also involves the coercive power of the federal government—through Homeland Security, Justice, and even Defense—to arrest those among us, regardless of their citizenship status, who engage in “anti-American” behavior as defined by Donald Trump, in other words, those who oppose what Trump is doing.
This should surprise no one. For Trump promised exactly this, in pretty much every speech he gave on the 2023-24 campaign trail, but never more directly that in his too-easily forgotten 2023 Veteran’s Day Speech:
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream. . . the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.
Trump is now doing what he promised. And all too many Americans are either excited that he is doing so or merely blasé about their president’s proud decision to literally take a torch to the U.S. Constitution.
Martin Niemöller’s famous saying has been quoted so many times that it is a veritable cliché. All the same, the sentiment it expressed is as true now as it ever was, and it is especially appropriate to note that it is featured on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Museum:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The arrest of Khalil Mahmoud is an offense to every citizen of the United States, and it sets a precedent that endangers us all.
Trump is turning the United States into a police state.
Are the tattered and tarnished instrumentalities of democracy still at our disposal sufficient to prevent him from succeeding? And if we do not exercise them now, how much longer will they even persist?
Our dark time is getting darker by the day.
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