David French reviews an argument made by Trump’s evangelical followers: Progressives, by focusing on the suffering of undocumented immigrants, women with unwanted pregnancies, the poor and vulnerable in other countries, and so on have duped Christians into wavering from the necessity to “to do tough, hard things.”
These MAGA advocates argue against “the sin of empathy” and “toxic empathy” (transgressions which were overlooked in the Sermon on the Mount). This is, French suggests, misguided:
The problem inthose cases isn’t with empathy, which is a vital human virtue, but rather in its selective application. Just as we wouldn’t call love a sin because we might be stingy in our love, empathy isn’t a sin because its application is incomplete. Or, put another way, our problem isn’t with too much empathy, but too little. We’re unwilling to place ourselves in other people’s shoes, to try to understand who they are and what their lives are like. It’s hard to talk about this issue without recognizing a fundamental truth of the moment: The attack on empathy would have gained very little traction in the church if Donald Trump weren’t president. He delights in vengeance, and he owes his presidency to the evangelical church. I’ve shared this statistic before, but if you look at 2024 exit polling, you’ll see that Trump won white evangelical and born-again voters by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. He lost everyone else by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent. Given the sharp differences between Trump and every other Republican president of the modern era, in my experience evangelicals are desperate to to rationalize their support for a man who gratuitously and intentionally inflicts unnecessary suffering on his opponents. That’s exactly how empathy becomes a sin.
A banner featuring a photo of Donald Trump and the words “Make America Safe Again” was hung from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington on Thursday in one of the most public signs of the president’s influence over a department that once brought criminal charges against him. The Justice Department has traditionally operated with a degree of independence from the White House. That separation, however, has eroded during Trump’s second term as the Justice Department has gone after his perceived political foes. — Raquel Coronell Uribe and Ryan J. Reilly, NBC News
The separation disappeared on January 20, 2025. Only the banner, celebrating Trump’s thumb on the DOJ and mocking the rule of law, is new.
The lawless, violent chaos unleashed by the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” is aimed ostensibly at rounding up and deporting criminals in the country illegally: the worst of the worst. In fact, the actual aim is — as ordered by Stephen Miller — to maximize the number of arrests and detentions, thus creating fear among both immigrants, whether here legally or not, whether law abiding or not, and among citizens who choose to protest these police state tactics.
I. Three American citizens, each detained in Kavanaugh stops by ICE or CBP, described their experiences for PBS. Here is the text of their accounts (via Amanda Carpenter on Bluesky):
Here is the video of the Americans speaking on PBS News Hour:
II. Millions of Americans have protested Trump’s policies. Since Trump’s decision to occupy Minneapolis, Minnesotans have been in the forefront of protests. In addition to physical violence, threats — both implicit and explicit — directed at Americans by federal agents have become standard operating procedure. During the past two months, agents have added a new wrinkle to their menacing behavior. Using facial recognition technology and monitoring people’s social media, they have begun identifying protesters by name and showing up at their homes (as described in a New York Times story):
Among nearly 100 sworn statements filed in federal court on Friday are more than a dozen accounts … in which federal agents deployed to Minnesota singled out protesters, finding the addresses of their homes and showing up there.
One resident reported following an SUV:
Then, she said, the SUV suddenly turned and sped at her. “I thought the agents were going to deliberately T-bone my car,” she wrote. “Right before it hit me, the unmarked SUV braked hard.” A masked woman leaned out the passenger window and yelled, “Emily, Emily, we’re going to take you home.” She shouted the address where Ms. Beltz lives with her husband and 5-year-old.
III. Whenever Trump’s militarized secret police are called out, the official response is denial, deflection, and slander. The lies keep coming, as in a case that received much media coverage a month ago. This is from the Department of Homeland Security statement posted (with original bold font and italics) the day after the shooting:
At 6:50 PM CT on January 14, 2025, federal law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted traffic stop in Minneapolis for Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis who was released into the country by President Joe Biden in 2022. Attempting to evade arrest, Sosa-Celis fled the scene in his vehicle, crashed into a parked car, and proceeded to flee on foot. The law enforcement officer pursued Sosa-Celis also on foot, caught up to him, and attempted to apprehend him when Sosa-Celis began to resist and violently assault the officer. While Sosa-Celis and law enforcement were in a struggle on the ground, two subjects came out of a nearby apartment and attacked the law enforcement officer with a snow shovel and broom handle. As the officer was being ambushed and attacked by the two individuals, Sosa-Celis got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broom stick. Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life. Sosa-Celis was hit in the leg. All three subjects ran back into the apartment and barricaded themselves inside. ICE successfully arrested all three illegal aliens.
The DHS statement included this as well:
“What we saw last night in Minneapolis was an attempted murder of federal law enforcement. Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms. Fearing for his life, the officer fired a defensive shot,” said Secretary Kristi Noem. “Mayor Frey and Governor Walz have to get their city under control. They are encouraging impeding and assault against our law enforcement which is a federal crime, a felony. This is putting the people of Minnesota in harm’s way.”
Almost immediately, the story began to shift. Details changed. Court reports conflicted with the original story. We’ve seen this again and again. The claims (and reckless lies about domestic terrorism) — as in the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — conflict with videotaped evidence. In some cases DOJ has failed to convince grand juries to issue indictments against immigrants and citizens, while in cases brought to trial juries have issued not guilty verdicts. In this instance, something unexpected happened.
Last week, citing “newly discovered evidence,” the government asked the court to drop all charges against the men accused of assault and further announced that the two agents were being investigated for lying about what led to the shooting.
Or so we’re told. We’ll see what comes of this.
Regardless, this announcement hardly signals an actual change of policy. We learned today that the “FBI formally notified Minnesota officials on Friday that it would not grant them access to evidence from the investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.”
So, in all three shooting cases federal authorities have barred the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from participation in joint investigations and refused to provide access to evidence collected. We haven’t the least reason to trust the Trump administration to pursue justice in these cases.
We do have reason, however, to take heart. Courageous Americans embraced their liberties as guaranteed by the Constitution to push back against an occupation by federal forces equipped for combat. In doing so, they’ve won a small skirmish against an out of control president waging war on his political opponents.
Five-year-old Liam Ramos collared by a federal agent.
Having once told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” Trump has now effectively opened the way for extremist militias—with their signature assault rifles and tactical gear—to antagonize local populations, especially immigrants, as they had in Portland and elsewhere. And indeed, groups of armed men have been roaming the streets intimidating immigrants, violently confronting protesters, and claiming an authority beyond the purview of state or local law enforcement. This time, though, the men belong to the Department of Homeland Security’s mass-deportation teams. Their tactics bear striking similarities to those of the Proud Boys and other militias that showed up in U.S. cities during Trump’s first term. Clad in the same tactical vests, cargo pants, sunglasses, and neck buffs pulled over their faces, some 3,000 federal agents deployed to the streets of Minneapolis with catastrophic results. — Ali Breland, “Meet the New Proud Boys”
It is dawning on an increasing number of Americans, including folks who don’t pay much attention to politics, that something is wrong with this picture. It’s neither normal, nor morally defensible.
Henry Farrell commented at Programmable Mutter on his recent conversation with Ezra Klein, which clarified for him “the connection between the limits to US power in the world, and the limits to the Trump administration’s power inside the borders of America.”
Trump’s signature move is to crush anyone standing in his way — internationally as well as at home — and many people are repulsed by the brutal depravity they observe.
One of the key moments in the fall of the Berlin Wall are these protests that happen in the East German city of Leipzig. These protests get bigger and bigger, and they begin to create a collective understanding that, in fact, the regime is wildly unpopular. Susanne Lohmann, a political scientist, wrote this classic article on this. She argues that the Leipzig protesters seemed like normal people — good, decent people you would like to have as neighbors. The East German propaganda is that these are evil, weird freaks, that these are dissidents, they’re scruffy, they’re whatever. And it’s the fact that these look like normal, ordinary people that actually make this powerful. So I think what we’re seeing in Minnesota is we’re seeing ordinary people. It’s very clear that the people who are organizing, the people who are pushing back are neighbors. They are people who seem like very straightforward, very ordinary Midwestern people, people who are part of the community.
People see that the protesters demonized by a coercive government are “normal people — good, decent people you would like to have as neighbors.” They are not “evil, weird freaks.”
In Minneapolis, the lies and slander spread by Trump’s loyalists in the federal government have collided with what people see with their own eyes.
Gal Beckerman also references what’s normal in his assessment of ICE’s militarized presence in Minnesota. His focus is on the expectation of being free to live an ordinary life. Beckerman refers to this expectation as pre-political, something we expect as a matter of course: the freedom to be ourselves, to live as we choose.
Referencing the protests in Minneapolis, he writes:
The movement that has arisen on the city’s frigid streets is about defending what any reasonable American would call “normal”—the expectation of a life without the threat of violence and coercion.
He elaborates:
The assault by federal agents was an attack on something pre-political, on parts of our communal existence that people, in normal times, take for granted. You should be able to assume that parents, immigrant or not, won’t be ripped away from children. You should assume that people don’t have to hide in their house because their skin is brown or black. You should assume that filming an interaction with the police won’t end in your death. These are all pre-political assumptions, and we hold them not as Democrats or Republicans, but as individuals who just want to live freely.
The Trump administration is aggressively, lawlessly pushing boundaries to deny us and our neighbors the opportunity to live freely.
The miliary occupation of Minneapolis, the brutality and deaths, the family separations and more, are too far from normal to overlook or to shrug off. The lies and smears of Americans pushing back against this federal assault only deepen the depravity.
We want our country back, our neighborhoods. We want to live freely.
