Miller's Fascist Project Fails

It's not clear exactly where the fallout from Minnesota will land, but no one's talking about the Insurrrection Act this week.

It’s hard to be sure with Trump, because there’s always a new irrational impulse ready to erupt in him, but it seems like he’s choosing to find some way out of the crisis he created in Minnesota. Dispatching Tom Homan, the phone call with Governor Walz, Katherine Leavitt’s hanging Noem and Bovino out to dry in her press conference all point in the direction of trying to change the optics for ICE and redirect the narrative. Trump is aging and often addled, but his basic political instincts are still sound. As with Greenland, Minnesota may provide another occasion to use the TACO label.

Just ending the fucking occupation along with independent investigation of Pretti’s killing would be good news, though far from enough. Beyond that, one might venture to expect that the scenario won’t be repeated, at least not like that.

I don’t have any useful idea of how far Trump may draw back on his war on blue cities, and it may depend partly on whether Stephen Miller joins Noem and Bovino in the doghouse. But it does seem unlikely now that Trump will let Miller try to create the same kind of chaos in New York, Philadelphia or Boston, and maybe things won’t escalate in Portland the way they did in the Twin Cities. Both Trump and Miller are fucking crazy, but Trump must know that Miller has no political instincts whatsoever.

However things play out from here, the actual reckoning for what the DHS has done and become under Trump will probably have to wait until he is gone. And I don’t feel sanguine about how ICE’s tactics may change, if at all. But I do think that what happened in Minnesota demonstrated the limits to what Miller can do to create an opportunity to declare martial law.

Miller’s strategy was always simple and obvious: send federal forces into blue cities to provoke protests and opposition, then use images of civic unrest to justify an escalation in federal response, leading to the federalization of policing in various cities. Floating behind this are the lies embodied in the NSPM-7, which included all sorts of ordinary democratic opposition groups as “domestic terrorists.”

The NSPM along with total control of federal policing and the department of justice provide a legal and practical scope for rounding up people who were simply exercising constitutional freedoms, and with the right sort of chaos might conceivably be used to exert an even deeper level of dictatorial control. I don’t think that plan can work anymore.

In reality, I never really saw this working the way it seems to have done in Miller’s erotic fantasies of power and ethnic cleansing, mainly because the U.S. is too large and various and the sheer size of Trump’s opposition too large to make this sort of authoritarian takeover workable. But Miller, using Noem and Bovino, really did try to make it happen in Minnesota.

The problem for Miller is that the entire strategy depended on the Trump administration’s ability to control the narrative. You could see that in the response to the murder of Renee Good, which worked well enough to dampen the outrage, but only because the video wasn’t very clear—you had to study it to see that it was an extrajudicial killing, not a panicked reaction by the man who said “fucking bitch” as he holstered his weapon again. Trump was getting away with that one, along with all of the other deaths attributable to ICE and DHS at this point.

But the video was entirely dispositive in the case of the killing of Alex Pretti. If you heard what Noem and Bovino were saying and then looked at the videotape that was literally inescapable online, you knew who was lying. No matter of AI-generated misinformation could overcome the basic narrative of a nation’s eyes.

And then it became clear that Alex Pretti was really an extraordinarily good guy, the kind of guy who provides solemn memorial ceremonies for fallen soldiers and unthinkingly leaps to the aid of a woman in danger with no thought for his own safety, just a profound instinct to protect. It is impossible to say anything negative about him and not sound like someone evil or a total tool.

And it was impossible to look at the video and read about Pretti’s life and how things had gone down that day and say anything good about what ICE is doing in Minnesota. Even Republicans couldn’t provide cover, and Trump had no choice but to back off.

It’s the fundamental flaw in Miller’s reasoning—you can’t fool all of the people all the time, not when there is an open internet and cellphones have cameras.

So maybe now we’ve seen the last of this particular authoritarian strategy. Maybe Minnesota is where the fascist wave crested and this is the turning point, at least in terms of Miller’s influence on Trump. This would be a good thing.

Miller is the real fascist in the White House. Trump is different—he wants to be a despot, he wants to be king, but he doesn’t really seem to have an organized conception of the role of governance besides that. His political goals are just personal. Miller, on the other hand, has been working his racist, xenophobic project since adolescence.

Miller was reportedly the strongest voice behind the idea that the U.S. had some sort of “entitlement” to Greenland and that the use of force should be threatened, and that turned out badly for Trump, who had to leave Davos with the TACO label stuck to his back. Now the same thing is happening with ICE and Miller’s authoritarian strategy. Is it possible that Miller’s time is coming to an end?

Probably not, at least not in any public way. The betting is that Noem will take the fall, even though she’s just Miller’s puppet, and I doubt we’ll see much more of Bovino on unscripted television. The best one might hope is that Trump will ease Miller into the background, but it seems just as likely that he depends on his executive officer too much to let him go. It will be interesting to watch, these next few days.

And one last thought. Whether because of a sense of the political need to go on creating distractions from the economy and the Epstein files, or just because Trump is restless and stimulus-seeking, it seems like some new surprise may be in store for us soon. My betting is on some kind of strike in the Middle East, maybe on Iran, now that the Abraham Lincoln carrier group has reached those seas.