Nothing is more important than saving this country. 

Certainly not Mark Zuckerberg’s need for still more billions, and not additional yachts forJeff Bezos’s collection. 

Yet they and their fellow oligarchs apparently beg to differ and continue to enable Trump so as to win his favor or avoid his wrath. 

Zuckerberg’s Meta has been blocking users from sharing links to ICE List, a site that identifies what it believes to be Department of Homeland Security agents — as a way to increase accountability when so many mask their identity.

Bezos totally bent the knee to Trump in a bunch of ways. Most notably, with Amazon’s $40 million purchase of the rights to a fawning “documentary” about — and controlled by — Melania Trump. The rollout has been worthy of a dictator’s wife, with another $35 million for marketing, and a red carpet premiere at the once-Kennedy Center. 

As former Amazon executive and film producer Ted Hope said: “This has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing. How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”

The good news is that the film is at best an embarrassment. Well, actually, it’s an instant cult classic (oxymoron intended), as $8 million worth of MAGAs have already raved that it’s “wonderful … classy … educational,” etc. 

To the eyes of just about everyone else, Melania is so genuinely bad (a 10 percent Rotten Tomatoes score doesn’t happen every day) that in non-MAGA venues like Boston they’ve reportedly tried paying “extras” fifty bucks to sit through it — and it’s still playing to empty houses. Like everything else, apparently, the price of torment is going up.

Already, the South African theatrical release, ahead of the US one, was canceled by the local distributor, who cited “recent developments” — presumably, oh, Venezuela, Greenland, Minneapolis, and such — strongly suggesting that no one with a conscience wants anything to do with the Trumps for obvious reasons. 

Similarly, most of us would rather have nothing to do with the likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, and others who won’t risk even a fraction of their already massive fortunes to do the right thing.  

Regular folks have had enough. According to Rolling Stone, about two-thirds of the documentary crew have asked to not be credited. And no wonder: The Guardian said it didn’t have a single redeeming quality and called it 

[A]n elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

Meanwhile, Bezos is understood to be planning major staff cuts at The Washington Post, which he owns. We’re all panicked about this because the news desk of the Post is such an essential source of information. It’s still doing plenty of solid stories every day, even under the financial and ideological constraints Bezos has imposed since the ascension of King Trump. 

Now, many are wondering whether Bezos even cares about the Post and the quality journalism it is known for — with some speculating he might actually be trying to kill it off altogether as a favor to Trump. 

And there we are. It’s high time these titans be called to account for their self-serving and short-sighted behavior when their countrymen need them to find a conscience. 

Some, including Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have joined other CEOs to criticize ICE — not exactly a stand calling for great courage, given polls showing ICE’s overwhelming unpopularity. But more — much more — is required of these de facto societal leaders. 

We need to pressure them to use their power and influence when it really matters. 

And they don’t seem willing to do that. For example, Tim Cook also joined Amazon CEO Andy Jassy for an exclusive private screening of Melania at the White House. 

Point of ICE? 

The main thing Trump sold his MAGA base on was that the US was being overrun by undocumented foreigners who were committing crimes. It wasn’t really ever just about having undocumented people in this country or their stealing your job. It was always hyped that many of these were bad people, doing really bad things. 

And it still is. With ICE beginning to pivot away from Minneapolis, one of Trump’s favorite broadcasters, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, endorsed this fascist trope, adding, “There’s a lot more criminals out there.” 

Here’s how Trump characterized the immigrants during a January 20 press conference:

They make our criminals look like babies. They make our Hells Angels look like the sweetest people on Earth. … These are some of the most vicious people anywhere in the world. They came from the Congo. The prisons — I know the Congo because I ended the war with the Congo and Rwanda, tough group, very tough group.

But how many murderers and rapists have actually been deported? Since that was the ostensible top priority of this massive, inflammatory paramilitary operation, it seems fair to ask. 

Worst of the Worst

Trump’s DHS has claimed to have deported more than 600,000 persons and “prioritized removing the worst of the worst.”

On June 20, 2025, the White House website featured the names of 16 allegedly violent criminals and provided their pictures, describing them as “only a tiny fraction of the criminal illegal immigrants taken off our streets in recent days.”

These presentations seem designed to create the impression that just about all of those being deported are probably as dangerous as those who were named and depicted. But were they?

I’ve been going through the ICE website, trying to see for myself what DHS means when they say they’re arresting the “worst of the worst.” First, I went to their newsroom, looked under “Latest high profile arrests,” where you have a choice at the bottom: “Enter Search Term(s),” “Country of Origin,” and “State.” 

Without entering any search terms, I just clicked on “Search” and got 20,248 names and faces. Browsing randomly, I saw some bad guys who committed multiple serious crimes — but also found a plethora who did not seem to fit this stereotype.  

For example, included in the “high profile,” “worst of the worst” group were many people guilty of only nonviolent crimes, such as perjury, forgery, conspiracy, mail fraud, larceny, money laundering, failure to appear, DUI, illegal reentry, traffic violations, procuring a prostitute, carrying a weapon, using or selling marijuana. 

I backed out of this overwhelmingly large selection, went back to the newsroom, and looked under “News Releases and Statements,” and came upon a story applauding the “early success” that saw more than 200 “egregious” alien offenders arrested in Portland, ME. 

After a lot of self-congratulation came this proud statement: “Among those arrested in just one week of operations in Maine include” — then 10 names and faces appear — presumably representative of the egregious offenders ICE took off the streets.  

And yet: Only two committed what might be considered “egregious” crimes. As for the other eight, their offenses seem barely worth mentioning: four guilty of DUI; one guilty of DUI, mail fraud, and probation violations; one of assault; one of aggravated assault and cocaine possession; one of domestic violence.

Strange 

Just now, noon Sunday, while checking on links, I tried to go back to the above DHS report from Maine that I’d found yesterday — and it was gone!

The articles in this section (News Releases and Statements) are in reverse chronological order. There’s a story from January 30, then January 27, then… January 20. But what happened to the one from January 24 that contained names and faces of people grabbed by ICE — most of whom committed crimes that could hardly be called “egregious”? 

Fortunately, I was able to find another source for that report, dated January 26. (The arrests were made between the 20th and 24th of the month.) Just more weirdness from a very weird administration.

Among the “Worst”: Americans?

It seems like a good time to remind ourselves that US citizens commit such crimes too, not to mention far worse ones and with greater frequency. Crime statistics consistently bear out the significantly lower rate of criminal activity among noncitizens in America, which makes sense when you consider that the undocumented are the last folks who want to take chances with violating the law. 

Ignoring evidence against its claim that undocumented immigrants represent a vast invasion of violent criminals, the administration is in the process of converting industrial buildings across America — many of them large, open warehouse spaces — into detention centers that together would hold up to 80,000 people. 

Asked about this, Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency “has new funding to expand detention space to keep these criminals off American streets before they are removed for good from our communities.” 

Knowing they don’t have enough actual criminals among the undocumented to fill these 21st-century concentration camps, administration spokespeople sometimes switch to a conflicting message: that the real criminals are, wait for it… American citizens organizing the protests against ICE overreach. 

Much of this unfounded, inflammatory rhetoric comes from an army of recently unknown but now trending influencers that Elon Musk platforms and distributes into the inboxes of millions of X users. Once social media began amplifying the notion that organizing anti-ICE protests was itself criminal behavior, Kash Patel unsurprisingly rushed to say the FBI is investigating. 

But recent events in Minneapolis, Maine, and elsewhere have raised hopes that when Americans realize the whole anti-immigration “surge” has little justification — that it’s a pretext for power flexing and fascist cosplay — plenty of people will be mightily upset. 

And then Trump and his enablers may regret their street-bully tactics. 

Their base doesn’t like federal abuse of individual rights. And they DO like letting people carry a gun anywhere, as Alex Pretti did, legally, when he was pinned down by federal agents and shot. Yet Trump and his fellow Republicans were elected on a platform touting gun rights and hostility to governmental overreach.

The subsequent, continuous shape-shifting on what they stand for underlines the fact that they don’t actually stand for anything but retribution against perceived adversaries, and about winning. 

Meanwhile, as we wait for fence-sitters — and even some of Trump’s less Kool-Aid-drunk base — to wake up and speak out, the opposition, once cowed, is now coming at the would-be autocrat from every direction. 

Just one example: the many bills being proposed across the country at state level that would hobble ICE and put other restraints on overreaching federal agencies. Another is the growing roster of Republican-appointed judges who have had enough. 

And even some legacy media are showing signs of becoming more fight-ready in this extraordinary moment. I’ve noticed how The New York Times has increasingly abandoned its traditional insistence on labeling as “analysis” or “commentary” any forthright journalistic prose that might previously have been considered even slightly subjective. For example, this paragraph, where super-obvious facts are treated simply as… facts: 

Mr. Trump has honed a survival tactic over many years facing criticism in the public eye: He creates diversions to barrel from one news cycle into the next. But in other moments, when he has faced particularly intense — and politically damaging — public outcry, he has taken stock of news coverage and decided to take a different tack, often temporarily.

Indeed, faced with mounting, broad-based criticism, Trump has no way out of this except to continually shape-shift, blame others, backpedal, and — most importantly — create still more distractions.  

One distraction, of course, is to point the finger at others. In the toxic matter of his long and close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Trump has sought to shift attention to Epstein’s relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. They, in turn, have been fighting off a subpoena to appear before a congressional committee. But whereas the Clintons have presented a coherent if self-serving justification for resisting a charade designed to help Trump, Democrats are not unanimously closing ranks. They’re being more savvy about appearances. Thus, a fair number of Democrats joined Republicans in supporting contempt resolutions on both Bill and (to a lesser extent) Hillary. 

It looks like the Clintons will have to own up, show up, and argue in public that they did nothing untoward vis-à-vis Epstein. And maybe that will turn out to be the case. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing here — aside from some Democrats joining Republicans in demanding that a former president answer their questions under oath — is that, when and if Trump leaves the White House, a precedent will have been established that he, too, can be subpoenaed. 

The Supreme Court may have granted him unlimited immunity for his acts in office, but I doubt that includes immunity from having to put himself before Congress at some future date. 

Speaking of immunity, on Friday, within minutes of the DOJ announcing that it had posted millions of new Epstein documents, I did a search and came upon a report containing allegations of coerced sex between Trump and a girl of approximately 13 years old. 

I posted about it on social media, and a short time later that document had been taken down — and then the whole DOJ Epstein portal stopped working. It’s back up and so is the document. I am not going to post it here because it could be untrue. All I know is that such allegations should have been investigated by the authorities at the time, and should be investigated even now. The victims of this alleged abuse deserve nothing less.

It’s the Election, Stupid

We’re all pulled in a million directions. We all have our own ideas about what is most important at any given moment. To some, it is the headlined issue of the day — like the ICE murders in Minneapolis. For others, it is the bigger picture — ongoing existential threats like climate change or nuclear war.

It seems pointless to argue over this distinction. What’s crystal clear is that the immediate issues are the ones that engage public attention at a time when it’s harder than ever to cut through the Internet noise and social-media slop. The existential issues are the hardest to engage the public on — if ultimately the most important. Yet educating people on things that have immediacy is often the best way to get them to care about the “big stuff.”

Because that is inarguably true — and because this is an election year, and a hugely consequential one — I’d argue that it is the election that will matter most — in the short and long run. 

Here’s why: The outcome of this election will come down to a handful of factors. Among them:

• Will enough people be motivated enough to turn out?
• Will everyone who is entitled to vote be allowed to vote, and will their votes be recorded and counted accurately? 
• Will disinformation sway enough people on the margins to change the result? 

On motivation: The swing voters who backed Trump in 2024 seem most likely to regret their vote. Those who opposed him in the past are more exercised than ever. 

So it looks like the Trump forces have only two paths to victory: suppress the anti-Trump vote and trick the voters. Of course, they’re avidly doing both, and supporters of democracy have to pay attention and respond aggressively.  

The game is as perverse as it is diabolical: find ways to put heavy red thumbs on the electoral scales under the banner of “election integrity.” It’s been taking shape since Trump’s post-2020 Stop the Steal campaign, and it’s moving into high gear as the midterms loom and the polls foretell electoral disaster for MAGA and Trump.

We see this in myriad ways. Like having the FBI raid the Fulton County, GA, election office — ostensibly to find proof for Trump’s continuing obsession with the 2020 election having been stolen from him. But more likely to find justification for more messing with elections offices in the 2026 midterms. And in the battle of algorithms, TikTok is allegedly suppressing anti-Trump messages — and X is constantly pushing out pro-Trump disinformation to as wide an audience as possible. 

Tulsi Gabbard — the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) — herself was on the ground in Georgia. And her office as much as admitted that they’re thinking about the next election: “President Trump’s directive to secure our elections was clear, and DNI Gabbard has and will continue to take actions within her authorities, alongside our interagency partners, to support ensuring the integrity of our elections,” the DNI spokesperson asserted.

Singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and other prominent users said that videos they’d posted on TikTok criticizing ICE, as noted by CNN’s Reliable Sources, were stalled in “review” or were receiving shockingly few views. 

And others couldn’t send messages containing the word “Epstein” in direct messages. While TikTok claimed technical glitches, this stinks the same as what I’ve been seeing and reporting on Elon Musk’s X for a long time. 

It is ironic because, as Brian Stelter noted, Trump was elected in part over right-wing perceptions — both real and imagined (based on disinformation) — that they were being prevented from airing their views on Twitter (now X). 

Speaking of Stelter, he was early in noting that Trump’s turnaround on Minneapolis appears to have directly resulted from the president watching Fox News, and seeing a talking head on a favorite show — Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends — calling on him to de-escalate the situation and proposing he send in his border czar Tom Homan. Which is exactly what he did, within minutes after Kilmeade repeated that “advice” for the third time in a morning.

This is a classic example showing how the infowars work: 

Some Fox online personalities gin up the hostility, leading to people like Greg Bovino and Stephen Miller — as well as a small army of anonymous “influencers” — sending messages to MAGA audiences that encourage hostility and brutality. 

The worldview of the people being hired at ICE and other agencies is shaped by such divisive, aggressive disinformation from the top. For instance, Bovino said that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” 

And Stephen Miller said, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with terrorists.”   

Now, even Team Trump has discovered the potential backlash that this roiling of online waters can set in motion — given the far-spreading criticism of ICE’s behavior. CNN reported that the White House had shut down Bovino’s social media access — presumably for that very reason. His aggressive and inappropriate messages and taunts surely served to wind up excitable individuals — including trigger-happy ICE agents. 

Then cooler heads at Fox, pivoting to calm the passions that Fox helped excite, start suggesting that Trump step back. And, often, that’s what he does. 

Fox, of course, is owned by a family of billionaire oligarchs. So we’re back to my original point. 

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‘Melania’, Minneapolis, Moguls, Midterms: Many Battles, One War originally appeared on WhoWhatWhy

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