From Venezuela to Minneapolis, Protest Matters—Keep It Up!

Running a news weekly as I do, it’s always interesting to watch the narrative around developing stories that I might comment on as a journalist change quickly over days or even hours. Such is the case with two big national and international stories of great interest to many American citizens and residents this week: the capture of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro by the US military under orders from President Donald Trump and the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent (now identified as Jonathan Ross) in Minneapolis.

As more information pours in, both stories are changing by the minute at this point. We’ve seen the White House excitedly claim credit for a successful military action in Venezuela on Saturday that may turn out to have been more of a diplomatic and intelligence “win” than anything else, but the Senate just advanced a bipartisan measure to invoke the War Powers Act to block Trump from “using military force ‘within or against Venezuela’ unless he gets prior approval from Congress.”

Does the Senate vote mean that Trump, his administration, and their oil company cronies aren’t getting what they want from the country with the world’s largest oil reserves? No, they probably are for the time being, but it’s fascinating that five Republican senators crossed the aisle to vote with 47 Democrats, including conservative Dems like Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, to attempt to restrict presidential power. A clear result of public pressure on the pols to rein in executive authority.

After the tragic Minneapolis shooting, the immediate reaction of tens of thousands of people there and around the country, including here in Boston, was to get out in the street to protest. And Trump has been immediately and roundly condemned for being far too quick to declare the fatal shooting of a person who may have had nothing to do with the small anti-ICE protest on a residential block to be some kind of act of self-defense by an armed government agent against a “professional agitator.” On Thursday, Trump already began backing off his rhetoric under pressure from the public, the press, and the evidence of multiple videos from the scene to lamely say that the shooting victim “behaved horribly.”

I suggest that readers who are unhappy with the Trump administration get out in the streets and protest as often as possible.

Does this mean that anyone has a perfect understanding of either event at this juncture? No. Is every protest acting on the most solid information available. Also no.

But do I think that people protesting presidential overreach in the name of democracy are right to listen to their instincts about the actions taken by the US military in Venezuela and ICE in Minneapolis at the behest of the Trump administration?

Absolutely yes.

Such protest, as usual, is all over the road politically and otherwise. It’s messy. It’s emotional. It gets some things wrong or even misses forests for trees at times. Yet it’s the right thing to do. And it is working. Trump and his allies have not consolidated unlimited power. Far from it. The MAGA movement is fragmenting and the administration is under pressure from many directions.

In such an environment, the president needs as much of the public on his side as possible—with polls showing his popularity has been on the downswing for months.

So I suggest that readers who are unhappy with the Trump administration get out in the streets and protest as often as possible. Your actions won’t solve all of our fragmented nation’s problems and won’t make the Democrats into an actual opposition force. But they may well stop the US from becoming a tinpot dictatorship like the ones previous governments have forced on so many other countries in the Americas and create openings for the construction of a genuinely democratic opposition movement.

Which would be as good an outcome as we might hope for at the moment.

The original version of this article ran on January 8, 2026 at BINJ.News