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.
