President Trump and his supporters like to think of their MAGA movement as an unstoppable locomotive. After Border Patrol agents brutally beat, shot and killed Alex Pretti this weekend in Minneapolis, we’re seeing the Trump Train derail in a way it never has.
Already, Border Patrol commander at large Gregory Bovino seems to have been relieved of his post leading a nationwide caravan of cruelty and sent back to his home base of El Centro. Republicans are publicly calling for the removal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and privately freaking out that her Minnesota mess will doom their chances of holding Congress in the 2026 midterms. Trump has promised a “de-escalation” of immigration enforcement actions, and is doing everything possible to stem nationwide outrage over his deportation machine.
But it means nothing if one Stephen Miller remains in the White House. Keeping him in power is like performing surgery and knowingly leaving a cancerous tumor behind.
The hate-filled ghoul has got to go.
The deaths of Pretti, Renee Good two weeks earlier and more and more people on the streets and in detention facilities are the logical outcome of what happens when Miller is in charge of anything. When he is the beating heart of one of the ugliest, most xenophopic and violent periods of immigration enforcement this country has seen.
No one should be so naive to think that Miller is the only dark-hatted villain in that White House — there’s a whole gallery. But he sure makes the strongest case for being the most malevolent, influential force there, a malignancy that poisons everything he touches.
Like the most treacherous toadies from literature — Iago, Wormtongue, Tywin Lannister — Miller managed to shove aside rivals to latch onto his master’s ear and guide him toward more evil. After he served as a role player during Trump’s first administration, the Santa Monica resident’s lifelong bête noires — liberals, DEI, immigration but especially Latinos — have become the focus of Trump’s second term at the expense of issues all Americans care about, like the economy and healthcare and, as Minneapolis starkly showed, human lives.
Trump was never any type of angel, but at least his need for love sometimes tempered his worst instincts — he has expressed sympathy for people who came to this country without papers as kids and even called off raids against farmers, hotels and restaurants for a few days last summer before Miller intervened. The administration has since further devolved into an extension of his worldview, one where might — and white — makes right and all critics must be crushed.
It was Miller who berated ICE field heads in May for not nabbing enough undocumented immigrants and demanded field agents swarm Home Depots and 7-Elevens instead of employing calculated operations, sparking an era of indiscriminate raids that continues. Who pushed Trump to go beyond just deportations and to also seek an end for legal migration and birthright citizenship. Who has championed the neo-Nazi concept known as remigration, which argues for kicking out people whose ancestors came over only a few generations ago and make the United States look like an episode of “Little House on the Prairie” — except with a lot more Nellie Olesons.
Miller saw the same videos of Pretti’s death that everyone else did: a 37-year-old man filming Border Patrol agents with a cellphone, standing between them and a woman whom an agent shoved to the ground, trying to protect her as the two were maced. Miller, like the rest of us, had to see Pretti get gang-tackled by la migra before one of them took his legally registered handgun and two of them shot him dead.
Except Miller came to the conclusion that Pretti was the bad guy, calling him an “assassin” and “terrorist.”
Even as Republican allies were telling Trump he was losing Americans on the issue and supporters like the NRA pushed back against the idea Pretti was asking for his death by carrying a firearm, Miller doubled down, a position aped by Bovino and Noem in news conferences and on social media. Miller has always taken the American people for brainless, heartless chumps lost in a swamp of nostalgia who’ll believe whatever Trumpworld tells them to.
But seeing paramilitary squads kill their fellow U.S. citizens while the economy stalls and the administration treats pillars of our democracy such as the 2nd Amendment and judicial process as inconveniences has revolted legions of Americans, the vast majority whom at least have the rudiments of a conscience, even if Miller does not.
Liberal and conservative polls show the president’s support is cratering across all groups because of ICE’s excesses but especially with independents and Latinos, two constituencies crucial to his 2024 triumph and the future of MAGA. The crisis is such that Trump is now playing … nice. Or, more likely, pretending to be playing nice. He told Fox News that he and two fierce critics, Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, had talked and were now on a “similar wavelength.” Meanwhile, immigration czar Tom Homan — who’s taking over for Noem and Bovino in Minnesota and most likely elsewhere — posted on social media that his meetings with the two “were a productive starting point.”
This week, Miller told CNN — a network that the White House just last month ridiculed as “Chicken News Network” for not having Miller on more — “We are evaluating why the [Border Patrol] team may not have been following” proper protocol in Minnesota.
Oh sure, Stephen Miller — noted aficionado of proper protocols when it comes to bagging brown-skinned immigrants or anyone who happens to be in the way.
Whatever changes occur, if any, in the wake of Minneapolis will mean nada if Miller remains.
At long last, Trump has to realize that over-relying on one sad, twisted man to set so much policy and tone will only end in failure and humiliation. And likely more violence.
Miller’s biggest miscalculation was thinking opponents would be frightened into submission and silence with his deportation blitzkrieg and ordinary Americans would join in. The opposite is happening: More and more people are rising up to film la migra and speak out against their excesses. Pretti was one of them. Friends told the Daily Beast he only joined anti-ICE protests after the killing of Good shocked him into action.
It would be the grandest of ironies if the deaths of white American citizens standing up for their undocumented neighbors was what ultimately torpedoed the career of a xenophobe. It would also be a godsend.
Trump: Your bald-headed lackey has done nothing to Make America Great Again. Let America start to heal from Miller’s metastatic influence, and deport him from the White House for good.
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