Every authoritarian regime throughout history has employed a roving band of armed thugs who operate outside the law to enforce its strongman’s will. Caesar had his Praetorian Guard, Francios Duvalier had his Tonton Macoutes, Hitler had his Gestapo.

Donald Trump has ICE. ICE is functionally a paramilitary organization, armed and empowered to harass citizens, brutalize opposition, and murder people who get in their way. Like any paramilitary apparatus, its chief aim is to strike fear in the population. It does this not only through feats of violence, false imprisonment, and kidnapping but also by repeatedly showing us it can’t be held accountable for its actions. ICE agents can seemingly do anything they want, and no one is allowed to stop them: They know it, and they want us to know it.

When we look at the historical record, the horrifying reality of these thug paramilitaries is that they do not naturally melt away when the strongman is finally deposed. They stay on. They align themselves with the next strongman, or the strongman who wants to overthrow the republican government that deposed the previous strongman. The next guy in office tends to want to keep them around anyway, because having a terrorist apparatus able to operate outside the law is something that leaders of nations consistently find useful.

These paramilitaries can be dismantled, but only when the people demand it, over and over again, and refuse to support any politicians or regimes who would keep them in place. ICE can be stopped, but we do not elect people to power who actually want to stop ICE; we tend instead to elect people who want to “fund” ICE, control it, and use it for their own purposes. And that is why we fail.

ICE must be abolished, root and stem, by the next Democratic administration. As a stopgap, it must be defunded by the current collection of Democrats, should the party take power in the upcoming election. ICE is the one true litmus test for an incoming post-Trump administration. The Democrats will likely not be inclined to do this. Again, paramilitary thugs have their uses to leaders the world over, and Democrats are traditionally afraid of looking “weak” on immigration or actually dismantling the tools of the enemy. Democrats, if they’re going to do this, must be forced to do this, by the people whose support they seek.

Current Issue

January 2026 Issue

I’ve liked to think of myself as a single-issue voter, with that issue being Supreme Court expansion. But no longer. Abolish ICE, or GTFO of my primary.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The arraignment of kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro was one of the most pathetic days I’ve witnessed in a US court—and I don’t even speak Spanish, so I couldn’t fully appreciate how unlawful the whole proceeding was. Cristian Farias does speak Spanish.
• Emboldened by the invasion of Venezuela, chief Trump ghoul Stephen Miller has set his sights on Greenland. If you placed a bet in 1949 that Greenland would be the issue that broke NATO, you’d be about to have more money than Elon Musk.
• Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth is trying to demote former Navy captain and astronaut—and current senator—Mark Kelly because Kelly keeps telling members of the military not to commit war crimes.
• Judge Hannah Dugan, who was convicted in December of obstructing an ICE arrest in her courthouse, resigned her position. She is a hero. The conviction makes her more of a hero, in my eyes.
• Most years, I write an article about Chief Justice John Roberts’s year-end report on the judiciary. The report is usually substanceless but nonetheless an interesting insight into where Roberts’s mind is at. This year, it’s very clear that his mind is buried deep in the sand. He’s essentially Kevin Bacon at the end of Animal House shouting “All is well” as chaos breaks out around him.

Inspired Takes

• Harvard has gotten a lot of good press for standing up to Trump. But that shouldn’t obscure the fact that it has absolutely failed to defend the academic freedom of those who oppose the genocide in Gaza. Gregg Gonsalves explains the university’s latest capitulation in The Nation.
• Whenever people laud someone’s “work ethic,” I kind of reflexively turn up my nose. I’ve never really been able to explain why I have such disdain for the phrase, and have suspected it’s just because I’m lazy—but no! In The Nation, Nick Juravich explains the “bleak history of the American work ethic.” My slothfulness is now a considered decision. 🙂
• One of this country’s truly indispensable journalists, Radley Balko, interviewed fired immigration judge George Pappas. Pappas said “the law has failed us,” and “the courts are dead.”

Worst Argument of the Week

I’m not going to bother to tell you, as some no doubt will, that George Conway isn’t a “real” Democrat. Sure, Conway is a lifelong Republican and essentially a founding member of the Federalist Society. Sure, he switched parties and moved from Bethesda, Maryland, to run in the Democratic primary to replace Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, but… whatever.

What even is a “real” Democrat these days? A party that consistently embraces wannabe Republicans like Joe Manchin and Elissa Slotkin, that regularly gets bumfuzzled by straight-up liars like Kyrsten Sinema and John Fettermen, and that operates under the feckless and borderline complicit leadership of Charles Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries can hardly stand on intellectual or political purity. Conway is as much a “Democrat” as most of them these days. He’s a guy who’d rather make strongly worded television appearances than take radical action. He wants to reassemble the institutions Trump has smashed instead of smashing the institutions that make Trump possible. He wants to go backward, to a time before Trump, instead of boldly going forward. Oh, he’s a Democrat all right.

And not just any Democrat. Conway represents the very worst of what today’s Democrats have to offer. His signature issue is “not Trump.” His fame is based on being a Republican who was against Trump while married to a Republican working for Trump. His positions would be banal if not for the family melodrama and the fact that so few Republicans had the basic human decency to stand up to the cretin taking over their party. He exists as a television personality because TV executives are desperate for Republicans who can maintain a veneer of respectability—or, at least, they were before they gave up and put Bari Weiss in charge.

Democrats who offer nothing beyond “Orange Man bad” are the lowest-common-denominator politicians these days. Conway takes the calculation to its irreducible conclusion. Everybody knows he stands against Trump, but do people know what he stands for?

I do. Conway is basically one of the founding members of the Federalist Society. He first joined one of their boards in 1984. He’s not Leonard Leo, but he’s worked closely with the Republican judicial Svengali over the decades. There is not a single Republican on the bench that Conway has objected to: not the sexual predator Clarence Thomas or alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, not the anti-abortion stalwarts John Roberts and Sam Alito, not the stolen-seat installations Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett. Conway was there for all of them, and most of the Republican judges appointed to the lower courts too.

Conway’s no longer an active member of the Federalist Society (though I don’t know if he still goes to their parties and fundraising dinners; it’s not like I’m invited over to see). His 2018 FedSoc splinter group “Checks and Balances” apparently went nowhere. But despite this apparent break, Conway is one of those “Never Trumpers”—like Nicole Wallace or the entire staff of The Bulwark—who keep their criticisms focused more on Trump than on the Trump-loving Supreme Court they helped create. While he recently said that the Supreme Court has become “intoxicated with its power,” Conway is, for my money, among the people running for office who can be trusted least to take away power from a court he spent a lifetime helping to create.

Conway is good on TV. He should stay there. Being wrong about everything for your entire life until yesterday is a good credential for television. It’s a terrible credential for leadership. I have no problem accepting Conway as a Democrat, but I have a huge problem accepting that Conway is the best Democrats can offer.

What I Wrote

• First I wrote about the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, as I was pretty sure that the kidnapping of a foreign leader at gunpoint was the most flagrantly illegal thing the Trump administration would do this week.
• But then I witnessed ICE execute a woman in her car, as she tried to drive away, so I wrote about that as well.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Over the holiday break, I rewatched all of the Lord of the Rings movies. I was struck, once again, by one of the most famous scenes in the three films—the one where Frodo says, “I wish none of this had ever happened,” and Gandalf responds, “So do all who live to see such times. But it is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us.”

I usually find this scene empowering. This time I found it to be full of shit. As I ponder what to do with the awful time given to me, my intrusive thoughts tend toward, “How best to die while fighting this regime?” But the reality is that most of us will not have a choice on how or when the Trump regime will martyr us.

Renee Good did not wake up one morning and decide she was ready to die opposing Trump. She just reacted as a decent person would when the bad people came to do bad things in her neighborhood.

On this most recent Lord of the Rings rewatching, I identified most with Meriadoc Brandybuck (one of the three hobbits who join Frodo on his quest). Merry didn’t set out like Gandalf to organize regime change. He wasn’t charged like Frodo to destroy the evil power. He just… tried to help his friends, and understood that if he didn’t try, his entire community would be destroyed. When Merry is at the Entmoot (the meeting of powerful but long dormant tree-creatures), literally screaming at the trees to do something, I felt like he was me talking to Democrats in Washington.

“I’m a hobbit, and I know I can’t save Middle-Earth. I just want to help my friends” turns out to be my New Year’s resolution.

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