Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish & David Dayen
“Executives who lobbied for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which enabled the immigration terror in their state, now want everyone to believe they are on the people’s side.” (01/28/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/01/28/minnesota-ice-trump-ceo-big-beautiful-bill-alex-pretti/
Source: RealClearPolitics
by Kathleen Enright
“By many measures, we are living in one of the most divisive moments in our nation’s nearly 250-year history. Disagreement has hardened into mistrust. Americans are trading blame. As we saw in Karl Zinsmeister’s recent op-ed, even the deeply American commitment to charitable giving is increasingly under scrutiny. With mistrust distorting perceptions of philanthropy, a concerning narrative is taking hold. This narrative, visible in Zinsmeister’s piece and elsewhere, holds that the generosity we disagree with is inherently suspect, even illegal. A clear-eyed view of how charitable foundations work helps put the debates about the sector in the proper context.” (01/28/26)
Source: Antiwar.com
by William D Hartung & Tom Engelhardt
“Trump’s rush to war in Latin America is a phenomenon that, until recently, seemed long over. Its revival should raise multiple red flags, given the history of Washington’s failed efforts to install allied governments through regime change. (Can you spell Iraq?) In fact, given this country’s lack of success with such attempts since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it’s a good bet that regime change in Venezuela will not end well for any of the parties concerned, whether the Trump administration, the new leaders of Venezuela, or the people of our two countries.” (01/28/26)
Source: CounterPunch
by Nick Licata
“Trump, through his appointed Secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense, has converted ICE into a militarized agency that operates more like a private police force than a public one. In fact, ICE agents are not trained to act as police because they cannot legally enforce local laws that police are trained to enforce. However, a federal statute (8 U.S.C. § 1357) allows them to arrest anyone who commits a federal offense in their presence or for whom there is probable cause to believe they have committed a federal felony. Neither condition concerns immigration status.” (01/28/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/28/ice-as-paramilitaries/
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“The idea of political unity has long been a popular trope and slogan in politics. ‘He’s a uniter, not a divider’ is a sentiment that many American politicians like to cultivate about themselves. Over many centuries and across many jurisdictions we encounter the claim that unity is a political virtue, and that anything that ‘divides us’ must therefore be condemned. Some even label opposition to unity as a type of treason. So, it makes sense that political unity is often the language employed by those who seek to enhance and increase the power of the state.” (01/27/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/we-can-have-unity-or-we-can-have-freedom-we-cant-have-both
Source: Independent Institute
by Craig Eyermann
“President Donald Trump recently celebrated the first anniversary of his second term in office, the first two-term President since Grover Cleveland to not serve consecutive terms. When he was sworn in on January 20, 2025, the U.S. government was almost four full months into its 2025 fiscal year. With that being the case, there wasn’t much he could do to alter the U.S. government’s fiscal situation through September, the end of its 2025 fiscal year. In January 2025, the Congressional Budget Office projected the U.S. government was on track to spend $7.028 trillion during its 2025 fiscal year, while collecting $5.163 trillion in taxes. The federal government was set to rack up an annual budget deficit of $1.865 trillion.” (01/27/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/01/27/fiscal-trends-trump-first-year/
Source: spiked
by Fraser Myers
“Voters want the law enforced, fairly and consistently. They want criminal elements removed from their communities. But when it appears, fairly or not, that agencies like ICE have themselves become sources of disorder or lawlessness, it is entirely understandable that public opinion will turn. The killings of two citizens have not been the only outrages. In Minnesota this past month, immigration officers have arrested a five-year-old child, and were filmed pepper spraying a man they had already detained. Last week, they wrongfully arrested a US citizen at gunpoint, searched his house without a warrant, and led him out on to the streets in his underwear, in sub-zero conditions. This aggressive, confrontational approach – by masked-up heavies – may appeal to the diehards, but it shocks ordinary folk who would otherwise support robust border control.” (01/27/26)
Source: Fox News
by Jonathan Alpert
“After my Wall Street Journal opinion piece, ‘Is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ Real?’ was published, the response was immediate and intense. Some readers thanked me. Many were furious. I was accused of excusing Donald Trump, minimizing harm and betraying my profession. Some messages were hostile. A few crossed into threats. What struck me wasn’t the disagreement itself, but how quickly disagreement turned into fury. Simply questioning the idea was enough to set people off. That reaction stayed with me, because it reflected something I had already been seeing in my clinical work. Over the past decade, one psychological pattern has quietly become dominant in American life. It cuts across education, geography and socioeconomic status. I would even go so far as to call it the defining pathology of our political era: a state of chronic political anxiety in which outrage becomes habitual and threat becomes the default lens.” (01/28/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/therapists-warning-trump-didnt-break-america-permanent-outrage-did
Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“When Kristi Noem was — what? informed? reminded? — that her meeting with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un, which she reported in a prepublication manuscript of her memoir, never happened, this did not ruffle her sang-froid. She placidly said that the ‘anecdote’ about the meeting would be ‘adjusted’ before the book was published. Today, Noem, a former member of Congress and former governor of South Dakota, is secretary of Homeland Security, under whose supervision Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates. There are, however, many reasons, beyond Noem’s nature, that multiplying millions of Americans do not and should not trust ICE.” (01/27/26)
Source: Chasing Liberty
by Jeff Charles
“When Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on January 24, the Trump administration immediately launched into damage control mode. But instead of being honest about what happened, top officials — from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to FBI Director Kash Patel to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — did what every government does best: They told lie after lie to justify killing an American citizen. Video evidence, witness testimony, and investigative reporting have exposed these lies one by one. And the pattern is clear: these people will say anything to protect federal agents who kill civilians — whether it is true or false.” (01/27/26)
https://www.libertychasers.com/p/the-trump-administrations-lies-about