A year ago today, a bloodied Donald Trump raised a fist to the world and vowed to “fight, fight, fight”.
The world’s liberals slapped their foreheads that a 20-year-old who got 8 shots off couldn’t have got one bullet on the right side of his ear, while the right-wingers rallied to back a candidate who now appeared to have divine protection.
Mugs, hats, t-shirts, bogus claims that it was staged or a Leftist conspiracy all toughened up the “must we?” attitude of Republican voters who one minute saw a twice-impeached, adjudicated rapist, liar, business failure and convicted felon and the next, saw a saviour. The Messianic mutterings of QAnon and the Proud Boys became mainstream voter chow, and a landslide was inevitable.
Trump was always going to win against a rambling, declining Joe Biden – but after dodging a bullet he won bigly, and then set about dismantling the nation’s rules, institutions, economy, and friendships. He has been allowed to by an American people who have yet to notice the bullet hit them, instead.
American politics are slightly more violent than Sicilian weddings, and it is an historical fact that every assassination, attempted or otherwise, serves only to sweep the target to power. Voters everywhere, but particularly in the US, take it hard when their right to choose is threatened. Even more so, when it’s by someone who can’t shoot straight.
Most readers will know what happened next – the blizzard of executive orders, the pardoning of rioters we could all have sworn were in search of a Reichstag fire of their very own. But aside from some limited riots in Los Angeles, many seem unaware that Trump has built a growing private army financed by taxpayer dollars and granted insane powers of arrest and detention.
American exceptionalism has long held that immigrants will ruin the country. Only the native tribes have any evidence to back that up, but the ones who shout it loudest are the whitest, biggest and most amnesiac part of the demographic, and consequently loudest. Their poster boy is Tom Homan, a former police officer promoted to Immigration and Customs Enforcement by Barack Obama but since boosted, via a stint as a Fox News commentator, to being ICE’s intellectual and cultural leader.
He talks about himself in the third person. He advocates picking on parents of children born in the USA with birthright citizenship, because “most parents don’t want to be separated” and you can deport the next generation too. His budget has gone from $8bn to £28bn, and one of his henchmen just instructed deportations with as little as 6 hours’ notice to countries a person has no connection to, and which do not have to be safe.
ICE is now the best-funded agency of the US federal government, and its agents have powers that corrupt cops can only dream of. They can get a warrant without a judge. They can arrest someone for ‘reasonable suspicion’, which is the same as ‘if they fancy it’. They can conceal their identities, making them immune from the sort of lawsuits and scrutiny police officers get. They have tear gas.
The scant limits to their powers are rarely imposed, because their victims are generally deported out of reach of a complaints process. They are, in short, armed paramilitaries with all the powers of hell, coupled with the fervor unique to a job that attracts racists and provides weapons and deniability. The only difference between ICE and the Klansmen slave-hunters who terrorised Harriet Tubman is that, in the 19th century, there was somewhere safe in America to go to.
ICE have, so far, arrested the elected financial controller of New York after he support a constituent in immigration court. They have arrested 57,000 ‘suspected’ illegal immigrants, 71% of whom have been convicted of no crime and more than half not even suspected of a crime. They have deported American children, people with documents and the right to remain, on evidence as flimsy as insisting that papers are forged. Most are denied any meaningful legal representation, and they are predominantly Mexican and South American.
According to Homan, who is determined to lead “the biggest deportation operation this country has even seen” since, presumably, the arrival of smallpox, the extra money will pay for agents, lawyers and judges ( wait, you can buy those? – Ed ), holding pens, and militarised raids on Democrat cities that traditionally protect their migrant workforce. If this isn’t all screaming ‘SS’ at you yet, then you did not pay attention in history class.
The one upside is that ICE arrests are, despite all the above, at an historic low. Sleepy Joe was better at this, and he took a nap every afternoon. But the embarrassing rates are why Homan and others are so vociferously vicious, and why their budget is now big enough to buy several countries a nuclear deterrent and the submarines to put it in. The longer that ICE fails, the more will be thrown at it, and the more its stormtroops will overreach.
Next year Trump faces a test at the ballot box in the shape of the mid-term elections, which could remove his slim majorities in Congress. His approval ratings are below that of Obama and Biden, and keep dipping even below that of his first term. His MAGA fans are riled at Sudden Disappearing Jeffrey Epstein Client List, at the reversal of support for Ukraine, and the continuing presence of Hispanic faces.
Trump’s ear is all better, but his Messiah complex is not. ICE agents have raided schools, arrested leukaemia patients and 9-year-old girls. They are, in effect, a private army tasked with breaking the law, and you can bet your last taxpayer dollar that next year they’ll patrol polling stations in case ‘migrants’ dare to vote. America is headed for a very uncivil war with itself – and now Trump has troops trained to “fight, fight, fight” for his idea of what’s right.
