Bulwark Takes - Is the Minneapolis Killing an Inflection Point for Trump?

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Bill and Sam discuss the Minneapolis killing and other items from a very eventful week.

Hi there, Bill Crystal here. This is Bullwork on Sunday, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Sam Stein, my friend and colleague, to discuss the events of this week. I mean, I didn't even know where to begin. We were trying to decide what ordered it. What is the most important event of the week? I don't know. Minneapolis, do you think? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So you've been following that one pretty closely discussing it and editing copy on it and so forth. Where do you say? I mean, I guess less the event itself, Tim Miller and others have covered that quite a lot. you did with Tim. What about the political effect of it? Was this a big moment, I guess it's the way to put it, this terrible killing of Renee Good? I think so.

I'm also, I'm very cognizant of the fact that you and I, on this very program at various points, probably have said things are big moments and they feel big in the moment and then you can move on to another big moment. But I think at its core, This is not just like sort of a political moment. It's a really, it's a moment of morality.

It's a moment about our news industry, about how we consume information, how we process it, the extent to which we're willing to justify clearly cruel things. It's been the type of moment that's kind of exposed people in ways, I think, that not every political moment does. I've seen a lot of stuff online that I just, you know, and I'm not, you know, I don't want to be too precious about it, but I've seen a lot of stuff online from people that I,

it just kind of is shocking, the degree to which they've rationalized and justified the state killing of people. And look, I, I, again, I don't want to overstate it because I know there's going to be another moment in a couple days or a week, or whatever. But this one is very clarifying for me, for sure.

No, I think that's well said. I'm struck with that, too. I think Andrew Edgar had a very good piece in morning shots really pretty written quickly after the next, for the next morning, really pointing out the immediate lying and sustained lying and shameless lying from the very top of the Trump administration, obviously, and then picked up by everyone. And it was clearly that was a pre-arranged, so to speak, strategy, right?

that they were going to go out early and blame the victim and ICE did nothing wrong. It was not even a pretense that we have to invest. What a normal police department would have said, right? We'll investigate. He's suspended on paid leave. We're going to provide counseling for him because it's pretty traumatic to shoot someone, normally, you would think, and kill someone. And, you know, we're going to re-evaluate perhaps some of the ways we're doing things.

It's not even a pretense of any of that. No. Yeah. And what's been interesting is, that, I mean, obviously, they have a playbook for this, and there's no pretense. They automatically were going to rush out, accuse this woman of being involved in some sort of nefarious left-wing network, of disrupting ICE operations, of endangering the ICE officer. Surprisingly, they didn't say she was trying to Aragua, because that's usually in the

playbook. But then, you know, it's almost, what stands out is that, so the subsequent video from this officer comes out. And J.D. Vance and everyone else is like, well, this proves that we were right. You know, this adds evidence to the fact that we were right. And to me, first of all, didn't. But secondly, implicit in that is that they recognized that there was more evidence to discover, that there was another element to the story that would add to their understanding of it. And they didn't hold back from blaming her prior to getting all the evidence.

Now, they may say, well, everyone else was rushing to conclusions, we should too. No, sorry. You are the authority figures. You run the state. These are ICE agents. You have an obligation to hold back and to investigate and to be sober-minded and honest about what happened. That's your job.

And they were admitting in that moment that they rushed to judgment. And of course, they would find whatever else came out to confirm their prize, but whatever. That stood out to me. The other thing that stood out to me. I was talking about this the other night with a friend. why was he why was the officer filming this thing? I mean, why was he filming this thing? Under no, I don't know what protocols are,

but I have to imagine that one of the protocols is to not have one of your hands tied up on a camera. And he was filming this thing with one hand, threw a gun with another. And to me, that is just an abhorrent, irresponsible way to go, this. And again, I come back to this. These are the authority figures. These are the people who are making money through taxpayer funds. These are the people who are ostensibly of entrust to enforce our

immigration laws. They have a different obligation along with the political leadership to handle situations like this. And they are failing to meet that obligation. It may be secondary to the loss of life, which is tragic, obviously. But it's really troubling to see the people who you and trust as authority figures act in this manner. And I think that's for me why this is such an important moment and such a clarifying one, too. Yeah, I mean, it's so easy to say, look, we're assembling all the data. We should not rush to judgment. We have confidence that our ICE agents, you know, fine people, they're doing their best, but we also look, as we would always review any incident like this. It wouldn't be very hard to be sort of pro-ice and defend your people, so to speak, at some general

level. Police departments do this all the time. And to say nothing about the victim, they don't know anything about her. But instead, the domestic terrorist and lying about the car and all that, it really, and they were first and said it wasn't as if there was a huge firestorm on the left, and they came at an hour later. They were literally the first ones out. I think people were mostly just shocked by what they had seen. So anyway, I do wonder, I think the ice that all the other videos, some of them older, the people are sort of rediscovering, so to speak, that show this kind of behavior, luckily not usually leading in loss of life, but leading in pretty serious places. And some of them even contemporaneous and some of them even after and some of

them even in Minneapolis itself. And that's the other thing. Something like this happens, don't you say, you know what, we're going to just stand down for 48 hours here in Minneapolis and just make sure there's no, you know, we're not going to make things worse. We're not going to heighten tensions. We're not going to, God forbid, have something else go wrong somewhere. That is just a totally normal thing to do, right? And they did the opposite. We're sending 200 more people. people in it were doing grades out of high school. I don't know what was the sub-school that afternoon, I think. And, you know, really, I mean, the degree in which they, yeah, they're not behaving like

normal law enforcement. Normal supervisors of a law enforcement agency. Well, they think it gets back to the reason why they rushed out their statement from Patricia McGoughlin, the DHS spokesperson. It came before any video surfaced online. It's because they don't view this as a law enforcement operation. They view this as a political operation. And they're going to go in and they're going to dismantle, you know,

dismantle is a tough word and wrong word. But they're going to go in and they're going to disrupt communities. They're going to go after minority communities. In Minnesota, they have this pretext of the fraud investigations that were happening and have been happening for years. But they, you know, they created a great pretext. There's legitimate fraud, but they've hyped it up to an extreme. And so now it's not just DHS that's descending on the state and, you know,

a thousand more ICE agents even after this, Renee Goode shooting and killing. They're attempting to withhold small business funds, attempting to withhold school food assistance and school food assistants, and they're attempting to withhold daycare funds. And it's a wholesale attack on an American city. I mean, that's what it is. Under the pretext of, well, we can't let our tax dollars be wasted on fraud. And it's really, it's surprising to see to the degree that it's happening, just how blatant it is. I mean, they're not even, you know, they're dressing it up in the most flimsy of ways.

But, you know, Minneapolis is really under siege right now. Yeah. I mean, ICE is not responsible for investigating fraud. You know, there are many parts of the federal court. No, I'm not jumping. There are many points. It's true, though. ...to say we're sending 50 special, you know, investigators we have at HHS, you know,

HHS or else were in the Federal Department of Justice to go look at what was going on there. We want to supplement the state's efforts. So it's a totally ridiculous pretext. Just on the politics of it, finally, I do think ICE was already unpopular. I think the immigration issue politically, which obviously helped Trump quite a lot in 2024 and where he has support on the border, had gradually been moving against him partly because the face of it was not enforcing the, closing an open border. ice raids that were often cruel and seemed unnecessary and violent and so forth in major cities.

This certainly, I think, is an exclamation point. I mean, putting it, it's a sad one off. It's a very tragic one on that. So I do wonder where this goes. I mean, I just feel like, I don't know. We have a newsletter coming out tonight on that. I mean, this is what Lauren Egan and Adrian Kioskaryl have written about, which is, you know, the sort of backlash politics to ice.

Not everyone is in the Bill Crystal radicalized camp of a bottle. I will say. More people are getting there. They're finding their way to Bill. But it is a place where people are actually getting more comfortable. I guess the... I mean, the abolish ice thinks a little bit of... But at least radically reform, seek it serious by congressional oversight.

And so that also changed DHS, which seems like an unbelievable... Yeah, I think we should noodle on this, though, because I don't forget where JVL is at, But, I mean, if you believe that ICE has been turned into sort of a, you know, a Gestapa-like, you know, institution that's there to enforce mega politics, and you're a Democrat and, you know, your party gets elected to the White House, I mean, can you, I guess the question is, what, can you actually reform that institution? I mean, what kind of, like, it would have to be, like, a very serious purging, right? Like, that's if you believe that. If you believe that it's just, you know, it's all about the sort of who's giving directives. then maybe you can figure out a way to keep it intact. But, you know, there's other big issues here.

Congressional oversight, can you actually enforce any of this? Because these people don't talk to the Hill. There is a huge funding battle coming up at the end of January. There's not much of an appetite to shut down the government again, especially if they resolve this Obamacare subsidy issue, which it may actually get resolved. We'll see. But there's now a real movement to say, no,

we absent some serious reforms and restraints on ice and the border patrol, we should not fund the government. And I'm not totally sure if Democratic leadership is eager for that one because of the scars of 2024. But these instances that are happening are creating much more appetite for it. And I mean, look, the polling numbers aren't lying. He has seen a drop in terms of the public trust for him. Still one of his better issues, but it's definitely declined since its heights. Yeah, to go negative on that issue of all ones,

that's bad for a job. No, I do that. I personally think the Democrats and Congress, they need to introduce legislation of what a serious reform of ICE would look like for now. Right. Or I love it to say, serious reform of DHS.

It might involve just getting rid of ICE and removing the parts of it that have to remain. They still have to deport, you know, criminal aliens who have created crimes and have someone to pick them up but when they were released from prison and put them out of plane to wherever that was done under Obama, under Biden, under everyone. I mean, it's not a, that controversial part of it. But that they have to give a sense of trying to do it now, I think, partly for the politics and partly to show what they would sort of do in the alternative.

I mean, I think otherwise people like me are going to honestly are going to tweet abolish ICE. I think we're making a point when we do that and try to get people to think hard about it. But they need to be, you know, I guess Chris Murphy's working on legislation on that. I think it's a pretty big, whether they will have the nerves to shut down the government, whether they should. I don't know. That's a whole different issue. But they are.

I think I tweeted this yesterday or two years ago. I would have trouble voting for an appropriation bill that appropriated funds blindly and without any restrictions to the current DHS. I just as a person. I would find that very difficult to cast that. What's the phrase of the horse is out of the barn on that one? It isn't. It isn't. Of course, they gave them hundreds of hundreds of.

They didn't give them that. Those appropriations will be reversed tomorrow. So you want to, you say don't author. The things that we authorize, we are not going to appropriate. It didn't authorize anything. They just gave a blank check to them. And they can now say, you know that black check we were giving? A, we're withdrawing some of it.

Or B, we're withdrawing it unless you have instituted the following. No funds can be used for masks to agents, period. You know, I mean, it's not that. Yeah. I mean, my theory on this is that a lot more action is actually going to happen on the state level, probably first. California, I think, passed some bill that said you can't wear masks. I would be very surprised if other Democratic states didn't follow up on that. I mean, that's just like such a basic thing.

But I think on that, I mean, they're going to try. I think there's a lot. There's genuine issues of whether states can restrict federal law enforcement that way. But it is, I suppose Congress war. Anyway, but I agree there'll be states up to. This will be a big issue to follow in the next week. For sure. Meanwhile, we have Venezuela.

It's hard to believe that was literally that was a week ago, right? I cannot believe that. I mean, it sounds like that was like too much. Is that right? It's after January. A little bit more than a. It was Saturday morning, 11 a.m. So we're speaking Sunday morning at 9 a.m.

So it was eight days ago. And now Greenland. Just extracted a foreign leader eight days ago. It's like page two now. The trade the Democratic opposition and are going to take all the oil. And then we're going right after green. Now Trump is, you know, giving interviews where we're going to do Greenland either the easy way or the hard way. I'm the place that was just even, what, two months ago, kind of a joke about the Greenland thing.

Now the Europeans are having kind of emergency sessions about it as they should. I mean, unbelievable. I mean, I don't know. That also, you had the instinct of Venezuela. It was a big moment with a caveat that all these things are. We think all these things are big moments and sometimes they aren't. I think that's right too. Not so much Venezuela itself, but what it showed about Trump's willingness to go through

with some of these threats on the foreign stage, you know. So I was, maybe I was just crazy, but I just assumed that, you know, sneaking in and snatching a foreign leader. and then saying you're going to occupy a country and run it through you the military and extract its oil and keep it for yourself and then keep on, you know, embargoing everything and killing people in the Caribbean. I thought that would be big. I don't know. But apparently not. No, it's a big deal. And a couple of things that have really emerged over the past few days since we got Maduro out is, one, a real reluctance by the oil companies to go in there. I thought it was an incredibly telling

moment when the CEO of Exxon at the White House in front of Trump. So he knows he needs to butter this man up. This is our president king here. And he says, the conditions are not right to go into Venezuela right now. Now, he did say, I assume that the Trump administration will get them to a good place, but he just said in front of him, we're not going in. And if he's not going in, who is? I mean, the smaller oil shops that are willing to take more risks. So that was one. And then obviously, the other stuff that's happening with Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who is apparently willing to relinquish

her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump in some sort of effort to get him to like Packer politically. A shocking, crass. I can't even describe like how ridiculous the idea is that he would take her Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty egotistical. And then on top of that,

you have this continued kind of neo-eo-euro. imperialism from the administration where it's just like we're going to do whatever we want. The Greenland stuff is the Venezuela stuff. It is. It's the same genre. It's Donald Trump basically saying, I'm going to do what I want on the world stage. I don't care what type of residual impacts happen here. I don't care if the world unites against America.

I don't care if there are trade deals being cut where the United States isn't even party to them. I don't care if I destroy NATO. and we are just sort of like, everyone, I think, is just sort of holding their breath being like, is he serious? Is this going to happen? And if so, what happens in reaction to it? I mean, that's, I'm just waiting. No, no. Well, we all are, well, Steve Rubio, I guess, is meeting with the Danish fraud minister this week.

A lot of stuff seems to be happening behind the scenes. I mean, Greenland's step beyond, I think you'd agree, because, I mean, A, there's no, Maduro was under federal indictment. Sure. It's sort of the Panama president. And Venezuela was a terrible place. many people didn't recognize, many nations hadn't recognized the legitimacy of that government after they sold the 24 election, 2024 election. None of that obtains, obviously, with Greenland or Denmark, a NATO ally.

So the degree of sort of neo-imperialism is actually beyond imperialism. We didn't, most imperial countries didn't go attacking friends. They attacked unoccupied places that were just easy to exploit and weren't either friends or enemies, or they attacked went to places that were sort of controlled by hostile powers to some degree. And so the Greenland thing is really, it will destroy NATO and what he is, honestly. And I don't think, this is one where I do not think general officers will obey that command. Well, I mean, whatever the case of Venezuela and the lack of congressional authorization, which I think is a huge problem.

And indeed, the majority of the Senate now agrees with that. I don't not believe that, I mean, how can you go to war with Greenland and AOL or land troops there without the permission of Denmark without congressional authorization? I mean, and so I don't believe the Joint Chiefs will do it. I mean, I think you were massive resignations for the general office. Yeah, there were a few, there were a few, I'm forgetting, it was a couple of British publications, like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Yeah, caveat, yes, caveat. I'm taking my salt shakers here.

But the implication was that there was angst in the military over the decision to draft these plans for an invasion. And then the other one, I forget which one was, was talking about what might happen within Europe, if they were the telegraph. Yeah, that was interesting. Yeah. And, you know, they were talking about sanctions in the U.S., potentially getting rid of U.S. bases and forcing the closure of U.S. bases in certain European countries. I mean, what are we doing? What is the value? When you look at the ledger and you get the, you sort of add up as this, you know, worth it versus what of the cause? It's just like, mind boggling to me. But yeah. remember. J.D. Vance thinks NATO is a negative. It's not like he's, Trump hasn't thought as much

about it, but the Vance wing of the, of MAGA and I think not just that, gee, we might be damaging something worthwhile like NATO. It's the whole thing. NATO is a part of liberal global ism, and we need to get beyond that. So I think it, no, but I think it really shows how radical, I guess in both cases, I guess the way with ICE and Venezuela slash Greenland, what strikes me, and I'd be curious on your thoughts of this is, it's, I mean, I think there's been a certain assumption, not really on the part of most of us at the bulwark, but I think in the world, including liberal world, that maybe we've seen the worst, there's always going to be kind of a reversion to the mean. He's becoming less popular. There's more pushback, which is true.

And we've, you know, things may sort of stabilize, not stabilize a good place, but stabilized in a sense of like, you know, we're kind of fighting on this level area. Some of us have thought that this, it looks, that was possible, but in fact, the self-radicalizing character of authoritarian movements is also a thing. Oh, yeah. And here we're. And here, we're. which is seeing it in space, don't you think? I'm really struck by that. The degree to which they are doing things

that their friends didn't think they would have done two months ago. Yeah, 100%. We kind of are grasping for explanations for our buddy, Andrew Eger, had an interesting theory that he's kind of, he's got this 35% base that's going to just be with him no matter what. And the issue with that is that it convinces him

he can do insane, radical things. like, you know, invade Greenland and that these people will just say, sure, great, awesome. And so that gives them this kind of and this feeling of... In megalomania, sort of. Yeah, in megalomania. You also have the element here,

which is that I assume he's not running for re-election for a third term, but even if he were, but let's just assume he knows he can't get a third term in office and, you know, he's sort of bored with, he doesn't care for legislation, anyway. So he does things that he wants to do. And that's like from the from the extreme, which is potentially invading Greenland and, you know, sicking ice on an American city to like the surreal,

which is I'm going to actually revamp all of Washington, D.C.'s public golf courses because I want to do it. And it's like, well, no, you can't. I mean, so you're dealing with a lot of like, either sort of like megalomania or boredom or invincibility. And he's just, just having added. But of course, you know, again, I come back to the, it's not like this happens in a vacuum. So Catherine Rampel and was in our internal Slack channel. I mean, she flagged this story about the European Union having this landmark trade deal with South America. I mean, things are happening outside of the United States now.

I mean, there are people, no country can reasonably trust of what we're doing from a diplomatic or economic perspective. I mean, if you want to invest in America, you can't do it because you don't know what the issue is going to be with tariffs. If you want to study in America, you can't do it because you don't know what's going on with student visas. Right. I mean, like, there's so much uncertainty happening here because of his. And I would say because of him and because the administration over which he's presiding, which they put together, is so much more radical. I mean, it's obviously totally incomparable to the first. The first term was a bunch of speed bumps and guardrails, not all of which held, but some of which did.

which generally made it harder for him to do stuff that either he thought he should do or that he would have lunch with Tucker Carlson. And Tucker Carlson thought he should do or whatever. Or as more radical followers thought he should do. We're in the opposite situation now, where the accelerationism, I actually think it's probably coming a little bit from below. And Trump thinks, well, I want to be emperor of the world. So that sounds great.

I'm going to do it until someone stops me and no one's really stopped him yet. So I'm just going to be he loves being a bully and so forth. But I think we can't overestimate how important that sort of accelerationism is, as people focus on Stephen Miller. I did too in the newsletter, and that's appropriate. He is probably the most powerful person in the administration right now. It's not a trivial thing. But there are Stephen Miller's and three-quartered Stephen Miller's

and 125% Stephen Miller's in some cases, two lunatics, all the way down, not all the way. Well, all the way down, yes, at the second and third tier, right? We've written about many of these people in different ways. And the degree to which that just means everything is pushing in that direction. I mean, I was in the Reagan administration and much less important, not a small. central area, education. But, you know, there, that was the typical dynamic. I'd say it's true even of Obama and others, which is, it has sort of ideologues, including in some cases the president himself who wanted to kind of push further. And a lot of people say, well, these two things that we can

try to do, but this one is too much. And the political, the politics won't support this. And this one, the lawyers are going to tell us you can't do. That's the kind of normal dynamic of a movement being in power, getting, changing things quite a lot, but being checked in certain respects. We have the opposite dynamic now, which is more like what happens in authoritarian countries, which is the movement, the movement places its people in who are self-radicalizing and talk only live in a bubble, and then that pushes you further. They get away with one thing. It's like, well, let's just do the next thing. I mean, that really is the history of this. So anyway, I think it's the degree of Let me just pick up very quickly on that because I think it's really a smart insight, which is

very young operative in Republican politics or even a young lawmaker in Republican politics. Or, you know, even a young lawmaker in Republican politics, there's only one template that you know if that works, which is to be a Stephen Miller or to be a J.D. Vance and change your colors or to be a Donald Trump and be a pugnacious bully. And if you look at what happened to their careers, Stephen Miller started as a sort of Jeff Session staff for kind of a backbencher in the Senate who would call reporters at night

and, you know, talk to him about how horrible immigrants were, but no one took him too seriously. He was just this crazed guy. And now he's the most powerful lead in Republican politics. You look at that and he said, that's the career I want. I'm going to do exactly what he did. You look at J.D. Vance, who went from writing Hillbilly Elgy and being on cable news to just basically trading in his character for something mega-ish. And now he's vice president and likely to be the presidential candidate.

You look at that. You say, that's the template I need to follow. So this has a way of compounding. It creates another generation of Republicans who are just going to emulate what they did because that's the path to more power. No, that's well said, though depressing. Yeah. The Epstein, which I guess doesn't, well, I was going to say it doesn't seem. Epstein's crazy, man.

We got talking about this. What about that? I mean, let's talk about it. It's nuts. I mean, I'm just going to say, we, the first, okay, the bill got passed inside. The deadline got hit. They released stuff in two tranches. There were issues with the way they released it. There were redactions.

They lied about it. Issues. They released all the Bill Clinton stuff, yes. But still, we, I think the conventional wisdom on December 24th, I think the second release was like the 23rd or something like that would be okay i guess each week they're going to dribble it out they're going to be jerks about it but each week we're going to see more i mean they seem to be on that path zero since that and no prospect that anything's coming i mean i really think i said this i remember back in december i even i thought i was being a little extreme at some point they're just going to

forget it we're not releasing anymore you know they're not going to pretend have they not gone to that point yet i feel what do you think i mean tell me well so what do you think i i woke up the other day and I was just like, when's the last time they put out any Epstein files? It's not that they don't have them. They've claimed that they have hundreds of lawyers working on getting them redacted. Are they making zero progress? Are they going one document a day? Like, to me, it was just, so I was like, wait a second. They just basically stopped releasing these documents that they're legally required to release, even though they've already said they've got hundreds of lawyers working on this. And they found a million more documents at the estate.

DNY, it is shocking. I mean, genuinely shocking. And they went from saying, well, we're going to get to this deadline to, well, it's a lot to get to, we need a little more time to, oh, my God, we discovered a lot to, hey, stop talking about it. We're working. Like, leave us alone. And we're just supposed to sit back and be like, okay.

I don't know. You would know better than I do. What's the remedy here? I mean, I guess Rokana and Massey are probably working on something, some contempt. But they have the Justice Department's involved in any contempt of Congress stuff. So what's the actual remedy here? There are ways Congress can hold people in contempt without the justice order. They go into a civil court, apparently.

They go into a court, a federal judge, to try to get order. But it's hard. I mean, unless, again, you're willing to threaten cutting off funds for parts of the government and so forth. I think, you know, they're just blatantly ignoring a law. I mean, that is what they're doing, right? Right, right. Yeah, at the beginning it was more like it's going to take us longer than we thought. now it's basically forget it

and you put that together with what's happening some of these other areas and I come back to the ice thing which we began with and maybe we should close with with it. I just, I see the videos

with these people behaving this way. It's so obvious they've been told they should behave this way or at least they can behave this way. I mean, the degree of, of just relishing the bullying and 12 of them with this combat gear and mass

surrounding a, I don't know, a 40-year-old woman in the case of René Good. But that's typically, you know, sounding anyone, a family, someone in a Honda, you know, they're taking their kids somewhere and bullying and intimidating. It's really grotesque if that's happening.

And they are not, there's not even an element of we want to be careful not to have this, not to do this, right? Well, and also now we're really full circle, because we've talked about this in the past, but, you know, hanging over all of this is Donald Trump's pardon power. I mean, he has the ultimate ability to, commute or take away someone's sentence and basically clean their record. And it would be an incredible irony, but also not entirely unpredictable if towards the end of his term,

he issued a blanket for everyone who was involved in a nice operation. You start your term by pardoning all the rioters who attacked the cops. You end the term by pardoning all the cops who attacked the protesters. And that, I mean, I would actually put some money on that happening. It's just we kind of, the semblance of a justice department or justice system, I should say, has really, really gone by the wayside. The only thing that's kind of still there are these district judges who occasionally slapped down in the administration. Like, for instance, we had a ruling that said they cannot, in fact, just cut off child care funding for five blue states. But that's like the smallest stuff of things to feel hopeful about because the actual system of justice in this country has become incredibly perverted.

And it's become perverted because Donald Trump has basically said, you know what, I'm going to go out of my way to help people who I like. I'm going to give them pardons. I'm going to give them preferential treatment. I'm going to stop prosecutions of them. And I'm going to go out of my way to use the Justice Department to go after my enemies. and not just the Justice Department, but as you know, ICE and other agencies and just sick on them.

And I mean, you and I discussed them for that night of January 20th, I think we both, remember, they did a whole bunch of things. You got an inaugurated to give a speech. He did a lot of executive orders in the afternoon. And then the January 6th thing

was sort of pending where people weren't sure how broad it would be. Remember, maybe he wouldn't pardoned the most violent people. Yeah, it won't problem the most violent people. Come on. Across the board that evening.

And I think we talked about it. I know we did. And I think I wrote about it the next morning and you edited it for morning shots. I mean, This is the January 6th administration. And that did turn out to be really profoundly indicative, I guess, of where they were going, which is forget it. You know, we're rewarding our friends and not just reward, you know, people who beat up cops for us.

And now they're. And that's really come home to this week for me. It's like this whole notion. And you see people like Megan Kelly and other commenters being like, well, of course this officer had a right to shoot this woman in her face because he feared for his life. because she was attacking him with her car. And I want to be like, do you hear yourself? Because everything you're saying right now could be applied to any Capitol police officer on January 6th.

I mean, they were being, you know, objects were being whacked with flagpoles. You know, people having their eyes gorged out. They had doors being closed in them. They legitimately have said on the record in congressional hearings that they feared for their lives. Would they be comfortable if they just got up and started you know, shooting wildly at the J6 rioters? Of course not.

We'd find the grotesque. Well, and one police officer did shoot after repeated warnings when this rioter really. And it was very, and I didn't even like, look, that was horrifying to see someone shot. Yes, and that became a massive issue on the MAGA right. And now it's, yeah, now it's, of course, no problem. It's the opposite. But they just in the inability, it's either they willingly just. ignore the contradiction or they aren't able to see it, but either way, it's pretty shocking to me to

watch it happen. It's not a, I mean, as you know, it's not a contradiction if your view of politics as friends and enemies and, you know, anything goes for your friends and nothing goes for your enemies. I mean, so that's where we, I'm afraid we are. Really, this week has been a rather, it's been a big week in that, I don't mean this in some fast way, but in a serious way. I mean, in the sense of we began the sect this year and everything has happened, it's just, for me confirmed how radical how radical the danger how radical the threat is. Go ahead, please.

One very anecdotal, this is like a classically DC observation. So, you know, people can make them for whatever one. My family and I took a drive out to Shannon Doe yesterday because we're going to go get a puppy. Our dog died a couple months ago. We're getting a new one. I wanted to

wait. What breed are you getting? We had a beagle. I will never do a beagle again. We're going to go with a Labradoodle, which is all fashionable now. Very cute. Very fashionable. We're driving into Shandot. It's raining. It was horribly raining yesterday. We pull off on this small town to get to sort of farmland.

And on the corner of the highway, in this pouring rain are like 50 people, just with anti-ice signs, bullhorns, Renee Good, remember her name, that type of thing. And this is a really small town. And this is just like, you know, I'm sure it's just like a thousand people maybe. And they stood there in this really cold rain on the sidewalk right near the overpass. And they were just waiting. And, you know, I don't know. It didn't strike me as a particular. I have to look up the voting.

I didn't strike me as a particular liberal bastion of Virginia. But the fact that they came out and the fact that they decided like they had had enough and that they were willing to just stand there. For no reason. It wasn't like an epicenter of political activity, but they just needed to express themselves. To me, at least on an anecdote level, that seemed to signify something that people are really disturbed by this stuff,

enough to come out in the rain and do that. Yeah, no, that's interesting. I think there were lots of demonstrations. It was pouring in this area. I was thinking myself of going, it was one nearby in Tyson's corner, and I just honestly should have gone. But it was, I think it was boring.

It was horrible weather, yeah. And I also said to myself, as you just said, I mean, it's, you know, it's not like you're protesting outside of some ICE headquarters where it makes a certain amount of sense. You're protesting randomly outside a shopping center, you know. I went, of course, the No Kings thing, but I figure I'm in touch a little bit with some of the organizers. They were pretty surprised. This was totally spontaneous.

That is Renee Good was shot on Thursday, right? So this was a very fast, you know, this was not organized by anyone. Frankly, they did have a website where you could like look as I did to see what's the nearest demonstration. But, yeah, I wonder, I do think a lot of that is now spontaneous. A lot of people are disturbed by this. I think in a way that I think the political conversation sort of ignores. I mean, obviously everyone's on their sides and, you know, DHS running out and doing their whole thing. But I think normies, frankly, look at this and say, that's messed up.

Like, you can't just shoot a woman in her face like that because you feel endangered. And also, he didn't really look endangered. As he's taking, as he's taking phone. With your cell phone camera, you've got to catch this. You know, it's like, if he felt endangered, don't. step in front of the car. I don't have your camera out, you know, things like that. With 10 other ice agents around. This is not a cop who's alone in a terrible neighborhood where he's getting surrounded by possible criminals with guns, right? I mean, that's, no. And the other thing that

when J.D. Vance got up there, he's like, this guy, this guy, you know, three months ago was dragged by a car and he has 300 stitches or something like that. 30 stitches on his leg because of that. Of course he's going to be trigger happy being out there. And I'm thinking, well, why put out there. If you know he had this trauma and you realize he's trigger-happy, what the hell are you doing? You don't lack for ICE agents. You can find someone else. Put him on the desk. Like, why would you put him back out there? That's not a defense. That's an indictment of the decision at ICE. So I think these guys are a little bit high on their own supply when it comes to this stuff. Yeah, I think so. And let's see what happens. I mean, it's anyway, heck of a start to the

air, depressing one, but important. And thank you, Sam, for taking the time Sunday morning to join me here, go off with your family, and I will see you tomorrow morning. Take care. Bye.