Everyone is talking about the murder in Minneapolis, so I guess I’d better weigh in. My point here will be Trump’s incremental creep of outrage. He engages in some outrageous behavior, faces no consequences, and so is emboldened to creep to the next stage. When he faces no consequences for one action, that action becomes the new norm and sets the stage for the next outrage, raising the new norm a notch further.
Take Venezuela. First, he murdered the fishermen in international waters. No consequences. New normal. Then he murdered the survivors of his bombing. Outrage, but no consequences. Next, he pirated two oil tankers and stole the oil. New normal. Then he went into Venezuela, bombed the city, killed over 100 people, and kidnapped their president. No consequences. New normal. You can see that he will be emboldened to some new outrage: invade Greenland? Fully invade and occupy Venezuela? Attack Cuba or Columbia? And when he gets away with that, he will proceed to the next stage of normality.
Bombing Caracas. A police action to arrest a suspect?
Now for ICE: he started with the deportation, with no due process, of mostly undocumented immigrants to that Salvadoran torture gulag, and got away with that; Next, he set up his own horrible concentration camp at Alligator Auschwitz. (A lot of people thought that was shut down, but it wasn’t. It’s still operating, run by the state of Florida rather than the federal government.) Next, he started detaining and deporting US citizens, and children with cancer, at the same time that SCOTUS was declaring that he could detain and deport anyone who LOOKED like an illegal.
Next, ICE started beating up and manhandling its detainees. At least 31 died in detention in 2025, according to Reuters.
Numerous reports from detainees, human rights advocates and lawmakers have denounced the horrible conditions people face inside immigration detention centers.
New normal. Finally, ICE has murdered an innocent US citizen in cold blood. Outrage across America, but no consequences, as Congress and MAGA sink to this new normal. The ICE murderer will probably go Scot free. That will lead to the next incremental creep.
The next step may be the murder of multiple protesters. It almost happened in Portland, where two protesters were shot but not killed. Of course, ICE and Trump will claim ‘self-defense’ and that the protesters were radical leftist Antifa terrorists. Mike Johnson, JD Vance, and Congress will defend that view, and Trump will proceed to the next level of outrage. Eventually, I see something like the following:
Some critic of Trump, say, Zohran Mamdani, will be detained by ICE agents, who will provoke some sort of confrontation as an excuse to murder Mamdani (in ‘self-defense’, of course). Or it might be Gavin Newsom, or James Comey, or Letitia James. And Mike Johnson and MAGA will applaud all of this, waiting for the next escalation.
Here’s a final thought: I notice that ICE agents wear uniforms that say “Police – ICE”. They are not police and do not have the authority of the police. Is this not an illegal ploy to intimidate people into believing they must take orders from ICE agents? An ICE agent ordered Good to get out of her car. She did not have to follow his illegal order, but the ‘Police’ tag was designed to intimidate her into doing so.
