Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Melissa Gira Grant: Great to be here. Thanks, Greg.
MGG: We shouldn’t even be here—that’s sort of how I’m looking at it. Like, in a different universe, there would be a unified federal and state investigation into what happened. And so as soon as we saw last week that the FBI was no longer going to cooperate with the local Minnesota and Minneapolis law enforcement, it was a huge red flag that something was coming. They were going to try to cover this up. They were going to try to block any accountability that there may have been built into the system—which for ICE is still very questionable. They weren’t going to let it happen.
The message was very clear that the Trump administration did not want her to become a figure people would rally around. And I think what we are also seeing now from the Department of Justice is they’re sort of raising suspicions—like taking bad tweets about her being a domestic terrorist and now trying to actually pursue that within the Justice Department—[which] is really scary.
GS: It’s really, really bad. And by the way, these prosecutors are resigning. These are serious, hardcore people, right? One of them, the lead guy, is investigating fraud in Minnesota.
MGG: Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. I acknowledge if it’s hard to follow sort of what’s going on with the fraud investigations. I didn’t know that the one that these prosecutors were connected to and the one that Thompson was overseeing started during the Biden era—started in 2022.
And they openly acknowledge it: that it’s about retaliating against Tim Walz, it’s about retaliating against the voters of Minnesota, it’s retaliating against the Somali immigrant community. So I don’t know, best-case scenario, this prosecution—who knows now who’s going to pick it up within the Department of Justice—could go completely sideways and move into this very politicized anti-immigrant, anti-Tim Walz. who’s not even running for governor anymore.
GS: Yeah, for sure. It’s all completely appalling. I want to play some audio of Trump speaking about the anti-ice protests. He derides them as fake. Listen to this.
GS: So let’s take this in two pieces. Note first how he slips in the news that they’re investigating the money sources of these protests. So not only are they criminally investigating the widow of the victim, they’re also investigating the protests against the killing.
MGG: It reminded me of that Antifa roundtable towards the end of last year when Trump had a bunch of right-wing content creators come to the White House and essentially produce propaganda against Antifa, which Christopher Mathias [has] a great piece out [on] right now in The Nation, sort of about the reality of Antifa. And this bogeyman version of it, which has no resemblance to reality—this idea that there’s vast criminal networks of money.
I will say this: Like, they haven’t gotten very far with their, like, Antifa prosecutions. They’re trying to sort of pin that on one incident in Texas involving an ICE officer or an ICE facility, but it’s unclear where that’s going to go.
GS: It really does make sense. Did you notice, by the way, Melissa, how Trump slipped into this kind of scripted white nationalist reverie at the end of the audio we just listened to—talking about how getting rid of fraud by Somalis will allow the “natural energy and native spirit” of the country to emerge?
MGG: I mean, he’s quite open that, you know, the reason that he says ICE is in Minnesota at all right now is because of Somali immigrants. So, like, the racism has been threaded through this from the beginning.
But then I think there’s this much broader sort of narrative. We see it in the DHS official social media account—this idea of “heritage Americans.” That’s what I’m hearing there as well: that we are going to restore this country to the people who rightfully should have it. And conveniently, that means white people. So no Native Americans, no Somali immigrants, of course. And I think that part of the project sometimes gets left out or seems incidental. And it’s not.
GS: Well, in so many ways, Minnesota has kind of become ground zero for the MAGA fascist takeover really, hasn’t it? It’s extraordinary.
People feel like there’s no space to rest or pull away from it. They are doing something that I did not see them do in Chicago and haven’t heard of them doing elsewhere, which is actually knocking on people’s doors, going to people’s residences. That’s incredibly scary.
The government had to walk away from that because they had no case. Chicago felt as bad as it could get. And now Chicago feels sort of like the dry run for what they’re doing to Minneapolis and the scale of it. I don’t know how much longer they can survive and have anything that looks like a normal day-to-day life, the longer this goes on.
And then Trump went on and on about fraud in Minnesota and then concluded in all caps: ‘FEAR NOT GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING AND RETRIBUTION IS COMING.’ Okay, Melissa.
GS: Right, I’ve been to the Twin Cities, and it is absolutely nothing like what they’re saying. And in fact, most people in Minnesota right now, if there’s someone that they want to get the hell out of Minnesota, it’s not whoever the hell Trump imagined that they are. It’s these ICE militias. That’s who they want to get out.
They play some of it now—five years later, going on six years later. And it’s like they’ve created this alternate America that the right-wing ecosystem now lives in. And it sort of doesn’t matter whether they believe it’s real or not. It dehumanizes the actual people in those cities, and it gives them permission to, you know, to speak of them in the racist ways that they do. It gives them permission to knock on their doors and drag them out of their homes. And it gives ICE permission—I think most dangerously—that anything that they do is okay, as long as it’s, like, you know, about this mission of, like, saving these cities.
GS: Well, I’ll tell you: Your point about them being in this bubble where it doesn’t even matter whether what they are talking about is real or not, or even whether they think it’s real… The polling is pretty clear on this.
And Melissa, at the same time as we’re seeing this, Trump and his advisors are fully committed to admitting no wrongdoing or error, blaming the victim, calling the outpouring of popular anger about all this fake, and otherwise just sticking to their story—including the white nationalist scripting. It’s just incredible how out of touch with the country they are on this, perhaps deliberately so.
They’re just telling us exactly what they’re doing, even though the universe they think they’re doing it in, the city they think they’re doing it to, that is detached from reality. But they have no shame and they have no compunction. Right? I don’t usually put much stock in prosecutions of law enforcement officers because they so rarely happen, because they so rarely result in convictions. And when they do, it still can leave these departments intact, doing the same kinds of abuses of power, whether or not that individual was punished.
They don’t care. They can’t be cowed by people saying, How dare you? Like, you’re violating the Constitution. I think then that becomes disorienting for people because you’re like, Well, what do I have to fight with here? Like, what… what, you know, if they’re just like the rule of law doesn’t matter, what do I do?
MGG: And I do wonder if there’s been polling in Minneapolis specifically. I mean, I think we can kind of, like, do a ‘vibes check’ just from the amount of people in the streets [to see] that they continue to be in the streets, that they oppose this. And I think that that’s sort of the answer to, like: Well, if there’s no rule of law, the justice system won’t provide accountability. What is there? There’s that. Right?
I think that if there’s anything here and if the tide is turning against ICE in this national way, I think part of that has to be people looking at what folks in Minneapolis are doing. It’s so obvious that what is happening is wrong, and a huge number of people in that city and in the communities around that city oppose it.
GS: Well, Melissa Gira Grant, you asked: What tools do we have? Well, you just answered that question. The tools we have are showing up, getting in their faces, and filming everything. Melissa, it was really good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
MGG: Thanks, Greg. Take care.
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