We're Winning
The resistance strikes back
Friends, I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re winning.
Authoritarians don’t panic when things are going their way. They consolidate. They slow down and pretend nothing is happening.
They don’t reshuffle chains of command in public, humiliate their own cabinet secretaries, or start walking back “domestic terrorist” accusations within forty-eight hours. They don’t yank sidelined hardliners back into the spotlight and insist they now report directly to the president unless something has gone badly, visibly wrong.
That’s how you know what’s happening in Minnesota matters.
Donald Trump’s sudden announcement that he is sidelining Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino, and parachuting Tom Homan into Minneapolis to report directly to him, is not a show of strength. It’s a confession. It is the sound of an administration that thought it could brutalize a city into submission discovering that brutality has consequences — political ones, legal ones, and moral ones.
The people of Minneapolis did not comply with Trump’s fascist takeover. They refused — and now Trump is flailing.
This is what the resistance looks like when it works.
That’s why Bovino is now leaving Minneapolis with his tail between his legs and taking a number of his ICE thugs with him. Last night, The Atlantic reported that Bovino “has been removed from his role as Border Patrol ‘commander at large’ and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.” Though it is unclear if Bovino really does stand to lose his job, it is obvious that he is no longer Trump’s golden fascist.
On Sunday, Noem and Bovino stood before cameras and branded Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” deploying the laziest, most dangerous reflex in the modern authoritarian playbook: if the public is horrified by what you did, redefine the victim as an enemy of the state. Stephen Miller, the architect of this fascist regime, seemingly implied that anyone who opposed the government’s actions was a “domestic terrorist” and called Pretti an “assassin” and a “would-be assassin.”
To be clear: Pretti was not brandishing a weapon. He was not threatening anyone — unless you are an authoritarian who is threatened by an iPhone filming you. He was recording and witnessing a bunch of armed thugs trying to oppress his neighbors. He was doing the thing Americans have been told for generations is their right and their duty.
By Monday morning, Todd Blanche was already trying to sand down the edges of that accusation, walking it back just enough to stop the bleeding without admitting fault. That whiplash — from “terrorist” to “well, maybe not exactly” — wasn’t driven by conscience. It was driven by pressure. Legal pressure and media pressure, yes, but mostly public pressure — the kind that only exists because we refused to look away.
By Monday afternoon, Trump’s mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt piled on at the White House press briefing. She refused to defend Noem and Miller calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” simply saying that she “has not heard the president characterize Mr. Pretti in that way.” When asked whether Miller should apologize for his rhetoric, Levitt declined to stand by him.
The cracks are spreading, fast.