Pay attention. Trump is trying to convince us that he’s a reasonable man so he can soften the plans by Senate Dems to use the budget process to put new restraints on DHS. He’s playing dumb: “I didn’t know what the people I hired and talk to ten times a day were doing.”
He doesn’t care about Renee Good and Alex Pretti, other than the PR problem they present. He just wanted the victims to be Black, part of his plan to heighten chaos and give him a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act.
During his first term, Barbara Res, who was the VP of construction at the Trump Organization, said he was an obsessive micromanager, and to remember that when he blamed the people who worked for him. “No one does anything he doesn’t want them to do,” she said in an interview.
I remind myself of that, because he has a lot of people working to convince us otherwise.
He will not actually change what ICE is doing. He will only tell them to get better at covering it up.
The danger here is that the Senate Democrats, who hold real power in the budget negotiations over ICE, will fall for it. (Charlie Brown, Lucy, football.) This is the time to contact your senators and stiffen their spine.
Lev Parnas, the shady Giuliani associate who worked on Trump’s behalf for years, but later broke with him over Ukraine, is sounding the alarm.
