You generally don’t see criminal charges filed against judges at any level of the court system. If it does happen, it’s used to address egregious and constant criminal activity by sitting judges. The most common path towards discipline relies on the court system itself, which allows courts to punish judges for misbehavior and, in rare cases, have them removed via internal processes.
But this is no ordinary US. This is Trump’s United States, where anyone who displeases the man who wishes he could be king is subjected to vindictive prosecutions. What happened to New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey (prosecutions currently paused due to Trump administration fuckery/fuck ups) can happen to anyone.
So here’s what happened to Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan. After being made aware of the fact that DEA and ICE agents were hanging around outside of her courtroom in hopes of arresting migrants who were doing nothing more than reporting for their court-ordered check-ins, Dugan decided to let the migrant whose criminal case she was currently handling slip out a side door, rather than go out the main door and directly into the hands of loitering federal officers.
According to the criminal complaint filed by Kash Patel’s FBI — something he celebrated on X briefly before deleting his post — this meant agents had to move quickly across nearly an additional 50-100 feet to arrest this person. A sworn affidavit by FBI special agent made it clear this was way too much stuff for officers to be doing, especially one with [checks affidavit again] seven years experience as a CPA[??][!!].
The federal government said this added up to obstruction. And it chose to criminally charge Judge Hannah Dugan rather than allow the Wisconsin court system to handle this on its own. There’s precedent for this, of course. The last time a judge faced criminal charges for acts that would normally be handled by the court system’s internal disciplinary procedures was in 2019 during Trump’s first term as president.
Hannah C. Dugan, a Wisconsin state judge, was found guilty on Thursday of obstructing federal agents, a high-profile victory for the Justice Department in a prosecution of a judge who it said was illegally aiding an undocumented immigrant.
Judge Dugan faces up to five years in prison and, as a person who has been convicted of a felony, she is likely ineligible to continue to hold office as a judge in Wisconsin, according to the State Constitution.
This wasn’t the end result of a lengthy investigation or the culmination of numerous complaints against Judge Dugan. This is nothing more than some federal agents bitching that they were momentarily inconvenienced and getting all the vindictiveness they wanted from Trump’s DOJ and Kash Patel’s FBI.
This isn’t over. This conviction can be appealed. And it appears the court handling this thinks there’s a case to be made. Normally, jury guilty verdicts are accompanied by sentencing dates. That didn’t happen here, which seems to indicate the judge handling the case isn’t necessarily convinced Judge Dugan’s actions rise to the level of a federal felony. But no matter how this ends up playing out, everyone should be on notice that Trump thinks “justice” and “revenge” are the same word.
Lindsey Halligan — a former personal lawyer for Trump who specialized in insurance law — was suddenly propelled to the top of the DOJ heap after better, more qualified lawyers refused to engage in Trump’s revenge prosecutions.
The exit of prosecutors unwilling to engage in politically motivated, completely mismanaged prosecutions of Trump enemies like former FBI director James Comey and New York AG Letitia James created a void. Trump, as he always does, filled it with someone he liked, rather than someone who could actually do the job.
This created a lot of problems. Lindey Halligan’s inexperience nearly brought these proceedings to a complete halt during her initial appearance as the newly-not-really-even-appointed US Attorney. A couple of months later, this inexperience is no longer the main thing holding her back. It’s the law of the land.
Presidential appointments — even those made by MAGA god-king Donald Trump — are expected to follow the rules. Halligan’s didn’t. Not only was she never officially elevated from appointee to US Attorney, the amount of time that had passed between the exit of qualified prosecutors and Trump’s hasty insertion of his insurance lawyer took this decision out of Trump’s hands. It was up to the courts to assign a prosecutor. It was no longer a matter of choice for DJT.
A recent order from the court handling both vindictive prosecutions makes that extremely clear. If Halligan hasn’t been legally appointed, she cannot possibly engage in grand jury proceedings, much less try to convert these into federal prosecutions. The cases against Comey and James have been dismissed, albeit without prejudice. But the clock continues to run on those cases and the administration doesn’t seem to have a Plan B to fall back on.
This means quite a bit for Comey. The (bullshit) charges he’s been hit with will soon expire under the statute of limitations. But his defense team isn’t going to sit around and wait for the statute bell to toll. His reps are also attacking the underlying evidence, which was also highlighted by the same judge who declared Halligan wasn’t legally appointed to her position.
Here’s some of what was detailed in a strong judicial rebuke of the administration that was mostly overshadowed by its rejection of Halligan as a legal representative of the Trump government:
Here, the government was permitted to search all of the Richman materials but authorized to seize only evidence related to violations of 18 U.S.C. § 641 (Theft and Conversion of Stolen Government Property) and 18 U.S.C. § 793 (Unlawful Gathering or Transmission of National Defense Information), both markedly different offenses than those with which Mr. Comey is currently charged.
[…]
The government appears to have conflated its obligation to protect privileged information–an obligation it approached casually at best in this case–with its duty to seize only those materials authorized by the Court. This cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment and multiple court orders left the government unchecked to rummage through all of the information seized from Mr. Richman, and apparently, in the government’s eyes, to do so again anytime they chose. The Arctic Haze investigation was closed in September 2021, with no charges filed. The Richman materials sat dormant with the FBI until the summer of 2025, when the Bureau chose to rummage through them again.
First, the government obtained and accessed privileged communications between James Comey and his legal reps. Its rummaging of the contents of seized devices expanded to include evidence of criminal acts other than those Comey was (very eventually) charged with. Finally, the government sat on this “evidence,” choosing only to look at it again four years later, after Trump returned to the Oval Office.
There are a handful of constitutional violations in here, which would be problematic enough without the additional circumstantial evidence that strongly suggests the only reason the FBI would look at this evidence four years after first obtaining it was to satisfy Trump’s demands that James Comey be punished for… something.
This transparent attempt to manufacture charges from evidence seemingly illegally obtained/accessed has led to another loss for the Trump DOJ currently being mismanaged by Pam Bondi and a bunch of lawyers best known for serving Trump’s personal legal interests during his all-too-brief return to the private sector.
A recent order [PDF] from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (known previously for her work with the FISA court) says Trump’s DOJ can’t use this illegally-derived evidence to engage in another attempt at saddling James Comey with a federal indictment. (h/t Josh Gerstein at Bluesky)
First, the judge points out all the things the DOJ hasn’t done:
First, although the Court has been in communication with attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has not yet entered an appearance to make representations on behalf of the Government, and counsel for the Government has not yet been identified.
Second, the Government has not yet indicated who has custody of the material at issue, and neither the Petitioner nor the Court can determine the identity of the custodian until the Government appears in this case. Given that the custody and control of this material is the central issue in this matter, uncertainty about its whereabouts weighs in favor of acting promptly to preserve the status quo.
And this is how this all works out for Comey’s lawyer, Daniel Richman, whose computer was seized, its contents imaged by the DOJ, and apparently searched whenever the DOJ felt like doing so:
The Court concludes that Petitioner Richman is likely to succeed on the merits of his claim that the Government has violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures by retaining a complete copy of all files on his personal computer (an “image” of the computer) and searching that image without a warrant. The Court further concludes that Petitioner Richman is also likely to succeed in showing that, because of those violations, he is entitled to the return of the image under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g).
The word “return” means something in this particular context. While it’s impossible to prevent anyone from making a copy of anything digital they’ve been ordered to “return,” the order makes it clear that even if the government retains its image (rather than destroying it so it’s inaccessible by the government), it will not be allowed to use anything from that image file as evidence in future prosecution efforts against Comey.
If the government is smart, it will perform the “return” (which means destroying its copy of the contents of Richman’s computer). But this government isn’t smart. It’s a confederacy of brutish dunces. And there’s little doubt it’s doing everything it can to find some way to make federal charges against Comey stick long enough to convert its Pyrrhic victory into a viral X post. But for now, the law of the land has control. With any luck, the law of land will protect us from the vengeance of an elected government that has no respect for the people it’s supposed to be serving.
Last night the House passed, and then Donald Trump signed, the funding bill that reopened the government after the longest government shutdown in history. Amazingly, the Republican’s sketchy demands to fill their personal bank accounts with undeserved taxpayer money almost scuttled the deal. But, don’t worry: those Senators got their corrupt boondoggle and they plan to enrich themselves.
The party of pure fucking garbage just keeps being awful. Government employees went without paychecks, families went without medical and food benefits, and no one in the GOP really appeared to care how long an entire nation suffers so long as it got what it wanted.
“Ask not what this country can do for you” is apparently too woke to be considered an aspiration. Under Trump’s GOP, the operative phrase is “Don’t even ask whether or not it can. Make the country do for you and fuckthem if they complain.”
A spending package expected to be approved as part of a deal to reopen the government would create a wide legal avenue for senators to sue for as much as half a million dollars each when federal investigators search their phone records without notifying them.
The provision, tucked into a measure to fund the legislative branch, appears to immediately allow for eight G.O.P. senators to sue the government over their phone records being seized in the course of the investigation by Jack Smith, the former special counsel, into the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
To be clear, legitimate concerns have been raised about warrantless access to Americans’ phone records, especially when the FBI utilizes the NSA’s collections to engage in “backdoor” searches.
But there’s nothing legitimate about what is happening here. Congressional reps have sought carve-outs that only serve themselves and have expressed almost zero concern about how this same warrantless access affects the people they serve.
So, not only have GOP legislators placed themselves above the people they serve by only seeking to exclude themselves from the reality that affects the rest of us, they went further by holding the entire government hostage with a demand that has no business being tacked onto a federal funding bill, and one that only serves to give those eight Senators the freedom to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money.
If they want to give themselves extra privileges, they should have the strength of character to introduce this in an actual bill that would be forced to stand on its own merits (read: lack thereof), rather than force the Democratic party to comply as federal government websites (illegally!) pillory them on a daily basis as the people who are keeping American citizens from collecting paychecks and benefits.
It gets even worse when you look at the details:
Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators for Mr. Smith as he examined efforts by Donald J. Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Each violation would be worth at least $500,000 in any legal claim, according to the bill language. The bill would also sharply limit the way the government could resist such a claim, taking away any government claims of qualified or sovereign immunity to fight a lawsuit over the issue.
This isn’t even about the FBI’s abuse of NSA collections, which would actually be something worth limiting further. It’s specifically and only about eight GOP Senators whose phone records were sought under the Third Party Doctrine — something that few people in the government would attack because that court-created doctrine has proven extremely useful to law enforcement at every level.
But it also adds a payout for those “victimized” by a legitimate investigation into the attack on the Capitol building following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. And guess who these people are:
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.
Yep, it’s the expected collection of boot-lickers. These are people unfit to serve who may see themselves raking in at least a half-million for stroking Trump’s ego and repeating his lies about the 2020 election.
Lindsey Graham has already said he plans to make people pay for having his phone records accessed, which is rich, because Graham has been one of the most vocal proponents in the Senate of giving the DOJ vast and unlimited surveillance powers. Also, when he says “make people pay” he means that you, the taxpayer, needs to give him money because he got caught up in the DOJ’s investigation into the attempted insurrection.
These Senators who have no problem expanding surveillance on you, the little people, also simultaneously are awarding themselves a special provision to sue for your tax money to go straight into their bank account. It’s about as corrupt as it can be. Incredibly, they even screwed over a colleague in the House, Mike Kelly, who was the one member of the House whose phone records were part of the same investigation. The funding bill only allows for Senators to sue over this.
No one else will benefit from this but these eight GOP senators. The rest of the nation can continue to get fucked on the regular.
“The Senators may not like being treated like the rest of America, but these phone-record subpoenas and non-disclosure orders are routine in grand jury investigations at the state and federal level,” he said. “No one has an absolute right to be notified that their call records have been subpoenaed, much less the right to a million bucks if it happens. This provision would not give any Americans other than U. S. Senators these rights.”
Passing a law that only applies to eight Senators, which only serves to enrich them at the expense of the taxpayer seems like a perfect encapsulation of the state of the modern GOP: fuck the little guy and do anything to get money for yourself. The MAGA mantra.
While Speaker Mike Johnson has said that they’ll bring up a separate bill next week to strip this provision, Republicans in the House refused to strip it during negotiations over the funding bill, where it would have actually mattered. What is now likely to happen is that Johnson will allow a vote on a bill next week in a symbolic gesture that will not pass. And Senator Graham and his buddies will cash in.
What a job, when you get to vote yourself the ability to just take a bunch of taxpayer money in response to being investigated.
The FBI is currently flying at half-staff. A bunch of its field agents are now just immigration officers, thanks to this administration’s desire to eject as many brown people from countries south of our border from the US as possible.
But there are enough people left in the FBI to go after the brown people (from the east of us) that every president since the 9/11 attacks has felt comfortable treating as presumptively criminal.
The FBI’s legacy in these cases frankly sucks. Far too many cases involve undercover agents or paid informants doing everything they can to radicalize misguided people into planning terrorist attacks. These efforts have included agents doing everything from purchasing everything needed to carry out an attack to planning the attacks themselves. It’s entrapment but so far no court has been willing to call it that.
This latest case involves a handful of Michigan teenagers. And while the criminal complaint filed against the person the DOJ thinks presents the best case for conviction does include disturbing details like target practice, the purchasing of weapons and ammo, and drone flights over the target, it also includes details that make you wonder what the fuck we’re even doing here.
The lead suspect apparently did nothing worth noting by law enforcement for several years. It was only after he left the Michigan National Guard and started talking about not particularly liking America (an unsurprising turn of events in early 2025). At that point, the suspect was just kind of leaning towards radical Islam.
Rather than approach the person and tell them what they were thinking of doing was not only a federal crime but would destroy the rest of their life, the FBI did what it did best: infiltrate chats and personal messages and provide all the encouragement they could for his unfocused plans for an act of terrorism.
All of that can be read in the lengthy criminal complaint [PDF] filed by the FBI. At almost all times, the only people the suspect was talking to were FBI agents and one of their informants. And, at any point, someone could have tried to steer his disillusionment with America into something more productive and less dangerous. But they didn’t. And the only reason they didn’t is because doing so would have meant one less terrorism-related arrest on the record.
A group of people who allegedly chatted online about an ISIS-inspired attack went to a shooting range with AK-47s, practiced high-speed reloads and made a reference to “pumpkin day,” authorities said. That’s when investigators jumped into action.
Multiple people were arrested Friday when the FBI averted a possible terrorist attack planned for Halloween weekend, Director Kash Patel said.
“Averting” means catching it before it happens and preventing it from happening. It definitively does not mean “spending weeks encouraging someone to do something and then arresting them when they try to do the thing you spent weeks encouraging them to do.” At no point was any terrorist attack in any danger of taking place. The suspect’s primary contacts all worked for the FBI. This is like paying your internet bill and claiming you “averted” a network outage.
Let’s lead off the way CBS News does, because it’s oh so damning. And that’s before it gets to the FBI admitting there’s really nothing to see here. (It also makes it clear the FBI rounded up a handful of teens, who will undoubtedly be tried as adults.)
Five people between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested Friday, CBS News has learned. Authorities say they were inspired by a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard who was arrested in May for allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired attack against a U.S. Army site in suburban Detroit. Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was accused of providing support for a planned attack on the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command facility at the Detroit Arsenal.
One or more members of the group of five young people arrested Friday may have known Said, law enforcement sources told CBS News.
You all see that, right? The charging document for Said contains a lot of conversations he held with people with names like UCE-1, UCE-2, and CHS. (For those not in the know, UCE = Undercover Employee and CHS = Confidential Human Source.) But it contains almost no discussion of his conversations with the other four people who were arrested and have been somewhat cleared of involvement with Said with the FBI’s use of the word “may.”
Here’s more:
The plot, however, was not well formed, and the FBI was monitoring an online discussion about the plot for a period of time. There was no concrete plan for an attack.
To translate FBI speak: “some dude talked a bunch of shit online and we got all heated up about it.”
“Through swift action and close coordination with our local partners, a potential act of terror was stopped before it could unfold,” Patel said…
Translated: we pushed someone into doing something we could actually use to bring federal charges against them. At no point was any attack actually going to take place, much less with the sort of alacrity that might require “swift action.”
Here’s another inadvertently damning statement from the cop shop:
The law enforcement source said an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force member had apparently uncovered two teenagers on an online ISIS chat room in some kind of discussion, but that no real plot materialized.
All of this should severely undercut the FBI’s case against Said and the other teens arrested/detained/questioned during this debacle. It probably won’t, given the courts’ deference to anyone saying hysterical things about terrorism in court. BUT IT SHOULD.
As should absolutely be the fucking case, the zealous legal representation of one of teens arrested is stating that no crime was committed, much less planned — at least not without a ton of law enforcement assistance. The lawyer obviously doesn’t represent Said (who has already been charged) but it definitely tracks with what the FBI and other law enforcement have already admitted about this case: that there was no definite plan of attack and no discernible effort to make sure it was carried out.
Finally, while there are apparently recordings of Said flying a drone over a military armory, the attack would have presumably relied on this hand-drawn map provided by the suspect:
I’m no master criminal, but this visual aid would get me lost far faster than it would get me near my target.
But artistic skill aside, here’s the real problem with FBI “investigations” like these. It’s perhaps overly hopeful to think that FBI agents and employees might just want to have a voluntary, non-threatening conversation about the federal charge/mandatory sentence endpoint of these actions. I will admit that for some people, a law enforcement intervention might just drive them underground and make them more dangerous.
But I cannot see the purpose of FBI agents and informants doing what they can to aid and abet the planning of terrorist attacks. If you have access to these conversations, what’s wrong with simply doing as much lurking as possible and only moving in when they — and they alone — decide they’re done talking and ready to take action?
Sadly, the answer is contained in the news coverage above. If you handle things like adults and don’t engage in entrapment, you don’t make headlines and you can’t argue that you need billions of dollars a year to stay on top of terrorism. But it’s nothing more than blood money — sacrificing other people’s lives and liberty just so you can keep taking home a paycheck.
If there was anyone with any spine, honesty, or morality in the Trump administration, these astounding gaffes would have been headed off. But there’s no one left with any of these traits in the White House, so we get the sort of thing we’re now seeing with increasing frequency: Trump (deliberately or not) forgetting who was sitting in the Oval Office in 2020.
You know the old cartoon representation of the conscience — the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other? When I imagine Trump occasionally having a second thought before speaking/posting, all I see are a bunch of little Trumps on both shoulders waving “GO DONNY!” flags.
President Donald Trump blamed the Capitol riot on former President Joe Biden, claiming that “THE BIDEN FBI” had placed agents in the crowd that had assembled in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6. 2021.
Trump’s post came in the wee hours of Sunday, at 12:38 a.m.
“THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM – DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT”
This is obviously not so, which anyone should immediately know, since it was still Trump’s FBI up until he left office (unwillingly and one insurrection attempt later) two weeks later. Had he just said “the FBI” instead of “the Biden FBI,” he might have been able to make a point, however implausible that point might be.
Instead, he went the other way and blamed the guy who didn’t even have an FBI to call his own while Trump supporters raided the Capitol building in hopes of overturning an election.
But arguments that these statements are deliberate and evidence of 4-D chess fall apart the more often Trump does the same thing. Instead of looking like a mismanaged disinformation campaign, it just looks demented. And I don’t mean colloquially. I mean in the literal, medical sense of the word.
Just in: Documents show conclusively that Christopher Wray, Deranged Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, and other crooked lowlifes from the failed Biden Administration, signed off on Operation Arctic Frost. They spied on Senators and Congressmen/women, and even taped their calls. They cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election. These Radical Left Lunatics should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!
At best, Trump has a legitimate complaint against Christopher Wray (who was heading the FBI in 2020). And by “legitimate,” I only mean he was actually employed by the FBI at the point in time referenced by Donald Trump.
But everyone else was appointed by Joe Biden after he took over as president in 2021. To claim they somehow “rigged” an election is literally insane. Merrick Garland was a federal judge while Trump was in office. Jack Smith was still at The Hague. Lisa Monaco was a Biden advisor during his presidential campaign. The only person who could have conceivably been part of an inside job was someone who was still working for Trump at the time: Christopher Wray.
Trump has already published an enemies list to the White House website. Stuff like this appears to be the venting of his private list of people he doesn’t like. He recognizes some names and gets angry, never bothering to consider relevant details like, say, who was actually in charge of the place when he was apparently getting screwed over by the democratic process.
Back in his first term, there were still enough people around him to help curb these impulses a bit. I mean, no one could really control him when he went off-script but he didn’t spend nearly as much time just blasting disjointed social media buckshot into the void. The people that surround him now perform only two tasks in response to things like these: (1) engaging in massive amounts of spin or (2) just pretending it didn’t happen.
This isn’t healthy. The GOP is almost entirely composed of people pretending to be mad about “woke” stuff while ensuring the garden hose aimed at the authoritarian kudzu never gets shut off. They’re doomed to repeat the past because they learned all the wrong lessons from it. Sooner or later, every authoritarian regime begins eating its own. At some point, they’ll be up against the wall, having sold their souls for the privilege of being executed by their compatriots. And the longer they pretend no one needs to tell Donald Trump “no,” the more inevitable this endpoint becomes.
The “appearance of impropriety” doesn’t bother this administration. It prefers open impropriety, having learned the wrong lessons from Trump’s first term, where most of his worst impulses were somewhat muted by the adults in the room.
There are no adults left. If they haven’t been fired, it’s because they were never invited to participate in the first place. His cabinet is stocked with Fox News commentators. Trump’s personal lawyers are now holding top-level DOJ positions. Another of his lawyers is now an appeals court judge.
The DOJ is bleeding talent. This is deliberate. The Trump administration is divesting itself of everyone but loyalists who view the president as a king, much to the mounting horror of the system of checks and balances, which simply assumed no president would dare to engage in this sort of audacity.
Career prosecutors at the Justice Department do not believe criminal charges are warranted from an investigation seeking to discredit an earlier F.B.I. inquiry into Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, according to people familiar with the matter.
It leaves unclear what political appointees at the Justice Department might do, given the breadth of Mr. Trump’s demands that it pursue people he perceives as enemies. Already, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia overseeing the case, Todd Gilbert, was forced to resign in August because he refused to sideline a high-ranking career prosecutor who found the evidence flimsy, the people familiar with the matter said.
Todd Gilbert seemed like an unlikely target for Trump’s vindictiveness. He was a career GOP legislator before being elevated to the position of US Attorney in Virginia. But he made a fatal mistake: he refused to pretend there was anything to get prosecutorial about when it came to the 2016 FBI investigation into possible election interference by Russia.
Two people better known for their podcast antics than actual investigative expertise (FBI director Kash Patel and his loyal assistant, Dan Bongino) demanded more action on this front. Gilbert refused to play along, resulting in him being fired less than three months after Donald Trump installed him in office.
After reviewing the evidence, Mr. Gilbert told his superiors that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a grand jury investigation, these people said. Frustrated by that answer, aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, blamed a senior career attorney in the office who they believed had swayed Mr. Gilbert: Zachary Lee, a veteran prosecutor with more than two decades of experience involving public corruption and narcotics, among other issues.
[…]
Pressed to further sideline or remove Mr. Lee, Mr. Gilbert refused, these people said. Department officials then informed Mr. Gilbert that he would be fired, and he resigned shortly afterward, posting a GIF on social media with a joke from the movie “Anchorman,” in which the lead character exclaims, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”
This administration knows nothing else but increasingly speedy escalation. It moves fast not just because it wants to break things, but because it’s so often in the wrong it needs to constantly correct course. Anyone who isn’t immediately and usefully subservient is expendable. The pattern will continue until Trump is surrounded only by people willing to indulge his worst impulses without entertaining any of their own second thoughts… or even first thoughts. They’ve installed a king in the Republic, making a mockery of their claims to love America and everything it stood for before they regained power.
As far as the Trump administration is concerned, there’s only one crime worth targeting: not being white.
Despite ICE now being the best-funded federal law enforcement agency and military troops being scrambled to any area of the country that pisses Trump off, ICE is no closer to reaching White House advisor Stephen Miller’s baseline target of 3,000 arrests per day than it was the day after Trump’s second inauguration.
Since this seems to be the only thing Trump consistently cares about (give or take his antipathy towards renewable resources, “transgender for everyone,” and whatever the fuck “woke” is), every federal law enforcement agency is starving itself of resources in hopes of turning this administration’s fascist, bigoted fantasies into reality.
The DHS — under puppy-killing Bratz doll Kristi Noem — has already done its part, shifting pretty much the entirety of its investigative wing into support roles for ICE operations. This happened despite the GOP being collectively (and vocally) convinced anyone straying from binary gender roles is nothing more than a child molester. HSI used to hunt down child predators. Now, it’s decided to throw kids to the wolves while it targets day laborers without criminal records. (Or maybe it just got tired of arresting Republicans and evangelical religious leaders on the regular for their crimes against children.)
It’s one thing for the DHS to do stupid stuff with its own talent. It’s quite another when it begins bleeding into other federal agencies and infecting them with the same “get the brown people” energy that’s made DHS and ICE the repugnant agencies they are.
Personnel data obtained by Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, and shared with the Guardian, suggests the Trump administration has moved 45% of FBI agents in the country’s 25 largest field offices to support the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown. Across all of the FBI’s offices, 23% of the roughly 13,000 total agents at the bureau are now working on immigration, according to Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.
If nothing else, it will probably please Charlie Kirk’s widow to know the FBI is being flown at half-staff. Throwing this manpower at immigration enforcement doesn’t seem to be budging the arrests-per-day needle much. Meanwhile, other criminal investigations are being under-served, which says something much nastier about an already-nasty administration: it doesn’t care about crime; it only cares about rounding up non-white people and removing them from the country.
The only upside given this influx of FBI agents, ATF officers, and DEA personnel is that fewer people are getting caught up in federal law enforcement entrapment schemes (stash house stings, radicalizing people into terrorism arrests, etc.). On the other hand, people who’ve done nothing more than engage in civil violations are being subjected to the combined force of multiple federal law enforcement agencies who have been encouraged — if not explicitly instructed — to engage in biased policing.
And it’s probably even worse than it immediately appears, what with the government’s general unwillingness to be completely honest about its form and functions. Senator Warner says this is probably an under-count:
The data is understating the scale of the reorganization, as the FBI only provided counts for agents who are now spending more than half of their job doing immigration enforcement, according to Warner. The senator’s office said it was likely that more than a quarter of FBI agents’ total hours were now dedicated to immigration, and that in some field offices, more than half of the agents had been redirected to DHS.
The FBI isn’t an anomaly. It’s just another symptom of this administration’s anti-immigrant sickness. The administration pretends this massive surge of immigration enforcement is essential to the nation’s security. And it says this while rerouting actual national security personnel to DHS support roles, compromising what little is left of this nation’s security forces:
The US Department of Homeland Security has shifted hundreds of national security specialists, including cyber personnel, into jobs that support President Donald Trump’s deportations and said it would dismiss anyone who refuses to go along, according to current and former DHS employees.
[…]
Refusing a new role would be considered grounds for termination, according to two copies of letters from DHS human resources seen by Bloomberg News. Mandatory job changes often include disruptive geographic relocations and give affected workers a one-week deadline to either accept or resign, employees said.
A lot is said about the banality of evil and its contribution to authoritarianism. But not enough is said about this administration’s absolute contempt for pretty much anyone who actually works for the federal government. The DOGE purges were never enough. This administration is so banally evil it considers even raising concerns about unemployment or unexpected upheavals of employees’ lives as acts of disloyalty.
Even the most callous of corporations tend to throw a few incentives towards people being laid off and/or expected to immediately relocate (severance packages, relocation assistance). But this government considers anyone outside of Trump’s immediate circle to be acceptable collateral damage, pompously assuming there are millions of similarly qualified people just dying to work for a madman with access to nearly unlimited power.
But beyond the obvious and deliberate disregard for anyone unwilling to toe the line at a moment’s notice is the brain bleed this sort of action initiates. Talent will be leaving, either because they can’t survive the mandatory disruption of their lives or because they’re now being forced into becoming part of an effort that only serves Trump’s basest urges, rather than the good of the nation.
After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from campus.
Bailey seized on the fight as evidence of what he called the Hazelwood School District’s misplaced priorities. He sent a letter to the superintendent demanding documents on the district’s diversity policies and accused leaders of “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.” Bailey argued that the district’s dispute with local police departments over its requirement that officers participate in diversity training — an impasse that resulted in some departments leaving schools without resource officers — had left students vulnerable.
In response, the school board’s attorney said Bailey had misrepresented basic facts: The district employed dozens of security guards at schools where it could not assign resource officers, and even if it did have police officers stationed at the school, those officers would not have handled an after-hours, off-campus fight. Finally, police found no evidence that race played a role in the fight.
The attorney general’s office took no further action.
“He was just trying to get attention,” said school board President Sylvester Taylor II.
The legal skirmish was the kind of publicity-getting move that defined Bailey’s two years and eight months as Missouri’s attorney general before his surprise selection last month by President Donald Trump as a co-deputy director of the FBI, according to experts who study the work of attorneys general.
As Missouri’s top law enforcement officer, Bailey repeatedly waded into fights over diversity, gender, abortion and other hot-button issues, while casting conservatives and Christians as under siege by the “woke” left.
Bailey had pledged at the start of his tenure in early 2023 not to use the state’s open public records law “as an offensive tool” to demand bulk records from school districts in broad investigations — a tactic used by his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator. Still, he made frequent use of cease-and-desist letters, warning school districts that their diversity initiatives or handling of gender and sex-education issues violated the law.
Bailey, who was sworn in to the FBI position on Sept. 15, did not respond to messages left with the FBI’s press office and with James Lawson, a longtime friend who managed his attorney general campaign and served in various roles on his staff.
Bailey’s actions as attorney general, according to legal observers, stood apart from the office’s core, nonpolitical duties: defending the state against lawsuits and handling felony criminal appeals. That work, by most accounts, continued as usual.
His Republican predecessors, Schmitt and, before him, Josh Hawley, also used the position to advance conservative causes, wage fights against progressive ones and raise their national profiles.
During his stint as attorney general, Hawley — like Schmitt now in the U.S. Senate — delivered a speech in which he claimed the elimination of social stigmas to premarital sex and contraception during the 1960s had degraded the treatment of women and promoted sex trafficking. And he fought to uphold state restrictions that threatened to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics four years before Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
In 2022, he joined a small group of conservative attorneys general in withdrawing from the National Association of Attorneys General, a bipartisan group that had long coordinated multistate investigations in cases against industries ranging from tobacco to opioids. In a letter posted to the social media platform now known as X, Schmitt joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen in arguing that NAAG had taken a sharp “leftward shift” and that continued membership was intolerable. Neither Hawley nor Schmitt, through their spokespeople, responded to requests for comment.
Chris Toth, the executive director of NAAG who retired from the organization weeks after the letter became public, said in an interview that the claims in the letter were “completely unsupported by facts.” Republicans, he added, were involved “in every facet of the organization.”
The move reflected a broader shift in how many attorneys general now use their offices — not only to defend their states in court, but to score political points on the national stage. Few have embodied that strategy more than Paxton, who has often been described as focusing on culture war issues as attorney general.
Paxton’s office has said most of the instances when it declined to represent a state agency were due to practical or legal limits — some agencies chose their own attorneys; others were barred by statute. He’s also argued that certain cases would have required reversing earlier positions or advancing claims he viewed as unconstitutional. He’s defended hiring outside law firms, saying his office lacks the resources to take on powerful industries like tech and pharmaceuticals. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.
Bailey, though far less prominent nationally, fit squarely within this mold. Before leaving for the FBI, he spoke openly about protecting Missourians from what he called “woke” ideology and lawlessness from the left.
A former U.S. Army officer, he has often framed his mission in combat terms. In a podcast interview this year, he said that while conservative states generally try to limit the power of their attorneys general to “maximize freedom,” blue states have weaponized their offices.
“I mean, Letitia James in New York has every weapon in her arsenal that her general assembly can give her,” he said in the podcast interview. He said she uses them “to mess with people’s lives, to prosecute President Trump, take him to court in civil law to try to seize his assets and undervalue those assets.”
“Missouri is uniquely positioned because we were so recently a blue state,” he said, “so it’s like a retreating army has left the battlefield and dropped their weapons and we’re picking them up and learning how to use them against them.”
A spokesperson for James’ office said that “any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American” and that it stood behind its litigation against Trump’s business and would continue to stand up for New Yorkers’ rights.
Bailey said in the podcast interview that he supported all efforts to investigate President Joe Biden, his family and his administration, and to uncover what Bailey called the truth behind the COVID-19 vaccine, which he said “seems to not be a vaccine at all.”
Bailey used his office to investigate the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America after it reported that corporate ads were appearing next to extremist content on the social media platform X.
Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump in his first administration, posted that conservative state attorneys general should investigate; Bailey quickly responded that his team was “looking into the matter.” Weeks later, he issued a “notice of pending investigation” to Media Matters and ordered it to preserve records. He later accused the group of using fraud to solicit donations from Missourians to bully advertisers out of pulling out of X, and demanded internal records and donor information under Missouri’s consumer protection law. In a June 2024 interview with Donald Trump Jr., Bailey described the probe as “a new front in the war against the First Amendment” and tied it directly to the 2024 election, accusing Media Matters of trying to silence conservative voices.
Media Matters sued and a federal judge blocked the investigation as likely retaliatory. In early 2025, Bailey dropped the case in a settlement and said he had not found evidence of financial or other misconduct by Media Matters. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.
When Trump was awaiting sentencing after being convicted in a New York court of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star, Bailey asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a gag order on the former president and delay his sentencing until after the 2024 election, arguing the restrictions kept Missouri voters from hearing Trump’s message. The Supreme Court rejected his request in an unsigned one-page order without explanation. A New York judge later postponed the sentencing until after the election, writing that he wanted to avoid the appearance, however unwarranted, of political influence.
Trump could have faced up to four years in prison, but a judge issued an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction in place but sparing him any penalty or fine. Trump said the conviction was a “very terrible experience” and an embarrassment to New York. He is appealing.
Bailey also fought to keep a woman in prison even after a state court judge declared her innocent. Even after the state Supreme Court ordered her release, Bailey’s office told the prison warden to ignore the court’s order. A state court overseeing the case scolded Bailey’s office in a hearing, saying, “I would suggest you never do that.”
Legal experts and other observers of the office said state attorneys general traditionally didn’t act primarily as partisan warriors. Most were focused on defending the state in court and protecting consumers.
Scott Holste, who served as a spokesperson for Jay Nixon, a moderate Democrat who served as the Missouri attorney general from 1993 to 2009, recalls a starkly different approach from Bailey’s. For example, in late September 2008, the top headlines on Nixon’s website focused on robocall rules, lawsuits over mortgage fraud and consumer tips for students.
“We were stridently apolitical in our news releases and in the way we operated,” Holste said. “Our job was to serve all Missourians, not to make political points.”
In the days before the August 2024 Republican primary, two of the three stories featured on Bailey’s homepage targeted the Biden administration over immigration and protections for LGBTQ+ students. The third highlighted a consumer-fraud prosecution.
To his supporters, Bailey is fulfilling campaign promises — a conservative acting like a conservative, said state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson.
Voters see a leader defending their freedoms by fighting policies such as diversity and equity, which they often equate with racism, and mask mandates, which they view as government overreach, Seitz said. “And,” he added, “we have a populist president who appreciates that.”
Toth, the retired head of the national AGs association, traced the shift in how state attorneys general act to the 1998 multistate settlement with the tobacco industry, when nearly every state joined a landmark deal that required cigarette makers to pay more than $200 billion, curb advertising aimed at children and fund anti-smoking campaigns. It also showed attorneys general how much power they could wield.
Over time, the newfound power has raised the profile of attorney general offices across the country, turning them into a springboard for higher office. That higher profile has fueled politicization.
Democratic attorneys general are no strangers to using their offices to fight political battles. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, for example, has filed numerous lawsuits challenging policies of the Trump administration on immigration, environmental regulations and federal funding. While Bonta maintained these suits were based on the law, critics characterized the coordinated legal action as politically motivated resistance.
Dan Ponder, a political science professor at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, said that as the state has shifted to the right, the GOP primary, rather than the general election, is now the real contest for statewide office.
He pointed to actions such as Schmitt opposing critical race theory and reviewing public school textbooks. “That would have been unheard of 20 years ago,” Ponder said, “but now you can’t lose because you’re fighting the quote-unquote good fight.”
Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, said that from the time of Bailey’s appointment to the position in January 2023, he probably had only two audiences. The first were voters he needed to defeat Will Scharf, a candidate already in Trump’s orbit, in the 2024 Republican primary for attorney general.
“And then once he secured his election, then I think his audience was really Trump,” Squire said.
Former Missouri Republican Party Chair John Hancock said voters seemed to reward Bailey’s approach. Bailey got nearly as many votes as Trump and Gov. Mike Kehoe in the 2024 general election — and more than Hawley or any of the Republicans who won the offices of lieutenant governor, treasurer or secretary of state.
“So obviously the work he was doing in that office was supported,” Hancock said. “I don’t take terrible shock when politicians do political things.”
Kehoe has appointed Catherine Hanaway, a former Missouri House speaker and U.S. attorney, to succeed Bailey as attorney general. Hanaway has said she intends to run the office in a different style. She told the Missouri Independent she had more interest in Medicaid fraud, consumer protection and violent crimes.
Her office said she was not available for an interview with ProPublica.
Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF—a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
What happened next should be the biggest story in America.
Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment in her nightgown to find armed agents yelling “police.” She had a gun pointed in her face. She was handcuffed. She was held until 3 AM before being released. Fisher isn’t suspected of any crime. She lives in the building.
Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.
Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”
Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”
Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.
Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.
This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.
And we’ve already moved on to the next story.
Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.
They suffer while evils are sufferable.
And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.
The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself.
The Founders didn’t rebel over abstract principles. They rebelled over specific violations that made daily life under British rule intolerable. And high on that list of grievances was the British use of general warrants—legal instruments that allowed authorities to search anyone, anywhere, without specifying particular suspects or probable cause.
General warrants gave British soldiers the power to enter colonists’ homes, demand papers, detain occupants, and search property based on nothing more than broad authorization to look for contraband or fugitives. You didn’t need to be suspected of a crime. You just needed to be in the wrong place when authorities decided to exercise their power.
The colonists considered this an abomination. It violated what they understood as the fundamental right to be secure in one’s home against arbitrary government intrusion. The rage against general warrants fueled revolutionary fervor and shaped the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.
What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.
This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
And America yawned.
Let me say this clearly: nobody in this country is safe.
The justification for what happened in Chicago? The building was “known to be frequented by” suspected gang members. Not “we have warrants for specific individuals.” Not “we have probable cause to believe these particular residents committed crimes.” But proximity to suspected criminals now means everyone loses their Fourth Amendment rights.
This is collective punishment—the logic of occupation, not policing in a constitutional republic.
And it gets worse.
This is part of a pattern we’re watching unfold in real time. The government is selecting targets—cities, communities, people it doesn’t like—and then deploying federal agents to find crimes. Not investigating crimes and following evidence to perpetrators. Choosing perpetrators and then searching for crimes to justify their detention.
This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.
In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.”
And so far? We’re accommodating.
Federal agents are conducting warrantless mass detentions of American citizens, and the response from most of the country is a shrug. Some actively celebrate it—finally, someone willing to get tough on crime, to do what needs to be done, to stop worrying so much about rights and procedures and just deal with the problem.
This is how it happens. This is how democracies slide into authoritarianism. Not through some dramatic coup or overnight transformation, but through the steady normalization of violations that people are “more disposed to suffer.”
Why are we accommodating this?
The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors—mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.
Because it’s sufferable.
This is the logic that makes tyranny possible.
Every authoritarian regime in history has relied on this same human tendency to accommodate violations of other people’s rights while trusting that “it won’t happen to me.” Every descent into authoritarianism proceeds through exactly this pattern: define an enemy (gangs, immigrants, terrorists, dissidents), suspend normal legal protections in the name of fighting that enemy, expand the definition of who counts as the enemy, repeat.
The architecture is always the same. Only the specific targets change.
And here’s what people still don’t understand: once you normalize the suspension of constitutional rights for one group, you’ve eliminated the principle that protects everyone. Once you accept that the government can detain entire buildings full of people without individualized probable cause because “bad people might be there,” you’ve conceded the logic that makes your own rights contingent on someone else’s judgment about whether your neighborhood, your building, your home might harbor someone the government wants.
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect gang members. It protects Pertissue Fisher, standing in her nightgown with a gun in her face. It protects Alicia Brooks, grabbed at her own door. It protects those children, zip-tied and terrified.
It protects you.
Or it did. Until we collectively decided that protecting those people was too much trouble.
President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. Not that the military should train in Chicago—that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?
This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been… silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil.
Jefferson understood that humans will endure almost anything rather than face the terrifying work of resistance. He understood that experience teaches accommodation, that habit makes tyranny bearable, that people will suffer injustice until the moment it becomes absolutely insufferable.
What he couldn’t tell us—what no founder could tell us—is where that line falls for any particular generation. When does the sufferable become insufferable? When do people finally stop accommodating and start resisting? When does the evil grow too large to ignore?
I don’t know. But I know this: we’re not there yet. And that should terrify you more than anything else in this essay.
Because we are falling now.
Not metaphorically. Actually. The constitutional order that prevents arbitrary government power is collapsing in real time, and most Americans are scrolling past the evidence on their way to something more entertaining.
The wire is breaking. The center cannot hold. And the ground approaches.
You can feel it if you’re paying attention—that sickening acceleration, that sense that things are moving faster than our capacity to process them, that each new violation makes the previous one seem almost quaint in retrospect. Warrantless mass detentions. Children zip-tied. American citizens sorted by race. American cities as military training grounds.
Each accommodation makes the next violation easier. Each shrug gives permission for something worse. Each time we decide that this particular evil is sufferable, we lower the threshold for what becomes acceptable.
This is how it happens. Not all at once, but through a series of choices—individual and collective—to look away, to accommodate, to suffer what seems survivable rather than risk the unknown consequences of resistance.
Jefferson knew. The Founders knew. They built constitutional protections precisely because they understood how easily liberty dies—not through conquest, but through accommodation. Not through force alone, but through the steady erosion of principle that occurs when good people decide that defending rights is too much trouble.
History will not wake you from your ignorant slumber gently.
It will not tap you on the shoulder and give you time to prepare. It will not announce itself with clarity and give you the comfort of knowing exactly when to act.
History wakes us with the impact. With the moment when sufferable becomes insufferable and we realize—too late—that we accommodated our way into something we can no longer escape.
The ground approaches. You can choose to notice. You can choose to care. You can choose to say “this far and no further.”
Or you can scroll past. You can shrug. You can decide this particular evil is still sufferable, that someone else will hold the center, that surely it won’t come to your door.
All experience hath shewn which choice most people make.
But you are not most people. You are you—conscious, capable, still free enough to choose what you will accommodate and what you will resist.
Federal agents detained American citizens without individualized probable cause this week. They handcuffed children. They sorted people by race. They treated an American city like occupied territory.
This happened.
The question isn’t whether it happened. The question is whether you’ll decide it’s sufferable.
Because that choice—your choice, made right now, in this moment—is what determines whether we land or crash.
The ground approaches.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the Fourth Amendment means nothing if we collectively decide it’s too much trouble to defend.
Hold the center. Or watch it collapse.
There is no third option.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” – Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington (1788)
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
After the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the U.S., and “they should be put in jail.”
“The radical left causes tremendous violence,” he said, asserting that “they seem to do it in a bigger way” than groups on the right.
Top presidential adviser Stephen Miller also weighed in after Kirk’s killing, saying that left-wing political organizations constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”
“We are going to use every resource we have… throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again,” Miller said.
But policymakers and the public need reliable evidence and actual data to understand the reality of politically motivated violence. From our research on extremism, it’s clear that the president’s and Miller’s assertions about political violence from the left are not based on actual facts.
Based on ourown research and a review of related work, we can confidently say that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.
Political violence rising
The understanding of political violence is complicated by differences in definitions and the recent Department of Justice removal of an important government-sponsored study of domestic terrorists.
This follows other politically motivated killings, including the June assassination of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. and former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.
These incidents reflect a normalization of political violence. Threats and violence are increasingly treated as acceptable for achieving political goals, posing serious risks to democracy and society.
But different agencies and researchers use different definitions of political violence, making comparisons difficult.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security define domestic violent extremism as threats involving actual violence. They do not investigate people in the U.S. for constitutionally protected speech, activism or ideological beliefs.
Domestic violent extremism is defined by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as violence or credible threats of violence intended to influence government policy or intimidate civilians for political or ideological purposes. This general framing, which includes diverse activities under a single category, guides investigations and prosecutions.
Datasets compiled by academic researchers use narrower and more operational definitions. The Global Terrorism Database counts incidents that involve intentional violence with political, social or religious motivation.
These differences mean that the same incident may or may not appear in a dataset, depending on the rules applied.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security emphasize that these distinctions are not merely academic. Labeling an event “terrorism” rather than a “hate crime” can change who is responsible for investigating an incident and how many resources they have to investigate it.
Right-wing extremist violence has been deadlier than left-wing violence in recent years.
Based ongovernment and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.
By contrast, left-wing extremist incidents, including those tied to anarchist or environmental movements, have made up about 10& to 15% of incidents and less than 5% of fatalities.
There’s another reason it’s hard to account for and characterize certain kinds of political violence and those who perpetrate it.
The U.S. focuses on prosecuting criminal acts rather than formally designating organizations as terrorist, relying on existing statutes such as conspiracy, weapons violations, RICO provisions and hate crime laws to pursue individuals for specific acts of violence.
The State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list applies only to groups outside of the United States. By contrast, U.S. law bars the government from labeling domestic political organizations as terrorist entities because of First Amendment free speech protections.
Rhetoric is not evidence
Without harmonized reporting and uniform definitions, the data will not provide an accurate overview of political violence in the U.S.
But we can make some important conclusions.
Politically motivated violence in the U.S. is rare compared with overall violent crime. Political violence has a disproportionate impact because even rare incidents can amplify fear, influence policy and deepen societal polarization.
Trump and members of his administration are threatening to target whole organizations and movements and the people who work in them with aggressive legal measures – to jail them or scrutinize their favorable tax status. But research shows that the majority of political violence comes from people following right-wing ideologies.
