Editor’s note: After we recorded this episode, Trump kept raging about protests in Minneapolis. He seethed about jailing Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. He shared video about supposed “anti-ICE anarchists.” And he exploded about Minnesota politicians allegedly wanting criminals in their state, showing his fury over the protests is on full boil.
A few days ago, Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send in the military against protests in Minnesota over the ICE shooting of Renee Good. Then he suddenly dialed it back a tiny bit, but still reiterated the threat. This, even though damning new info shows even more clearly that her killing was entirely unjustified. On another front, Trump just threatened to levy tariffs on countries that don’t go along with his desire to seize Greenland. In this case, he didn’t walk it back, but the coverage it got treated as just Trump being Trump. What struck us about all this is how the insanity of Trump’s threats almost carves a path for more to come, numbing us with the sheer constancy of it. Mark Follman, a writer for Mother Jones, has a good new piece that gets at some of this, talking about how Trump normalizes violence and depravity over time. Mark, good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s just start with Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act. Here’s what he said:
Mark, how seriously do you take that threat and what’s your reaction to it?
And I think the notion that there’s ambiguity in it—I mean, that’s something that he plays with too. And that’s also, I think, intentional. But clearly we’re in an environment right now where there’s escalating tension and violence, particularly in Minneapolis. And this is very much directed at that. And I think it’s quite serious.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, the Insurrection Act, which has been used by 48 percent of the presidents as of this moment, the Insurrection Act also, if you look at it, I believe it was Bush, the elder Bush. He used it I think 28 times. It’s been used a lot and if I needed it I’d use it. I don’t think there’s any reason right now to use it but if I needed it I’d use it. It’s very powerful.
He still made the threat again and all of a sudden this has been recast in the media as “not all that crazy.” What do you make of that?
What is he talking about there? That’s no one’s ever heard anything about that as far as I know. And I think more importantly, he’s toying with the idea, right?
Sargent: And it’s crazy, right? Like, let’s just be clear that invoking the Insurrection Act in this context would be an enormous abuse of power.
People are upset, and rightly so, but there’s not a lot of violence going on there coming at them. And that of course is part of the narrative that the Trump White House is trying very hard to establish, that ICE is under siege, that Border Patrol is under siege from some violent conspiracy, which is part of what I wrote about today in my piece.
But at a very fundamental level, what we’re testing here is whether Trump can essentially inflict heavily armed government militias on local populations, exert violence on those local populations. And then when things get pretty damn tense, use that as the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military. That’s what’s being tested.
There’s a lot of violent arrest and detainment going on. We’ve all seen the videos. And so, of course, there’s going to be chaos and some violence that results from that, but it feels very much like they’re looking for a predicate.
Sargent: Absolutely. It’s as clear as day. So let’s move to a fresh New York Times analysis of the video footage of the Renee Good shooting. It’s very powerful. It went frame by frame. The Times said this: “The visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over.”
Follman: Yeah, I think it was very illuminating in ways that… affirming, I guess, what we could already see from the original or the initial eyewitness video that came out and had gone viral the day of this horrific killing of Renee Good. Clearly it was a dangerous situation, but it was one that I think the agent, the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, put himself into.
I mean, that’s plain as day from the video. Even if the circumstances are tense and murky and complicated in a certain way, I think that what The Times did to really document frame by frame from multiple perspectives is that much more telling in that you can see space between Ross and the vehicle. You can see when the shots are fired exactly as the vehicle’s turning away.
Sargent: It is absolutely damning. And I’m glad you brought up that point about the car being turned away because I thought what this really captured with crystal clarity is you see her looking to the side and turning the car to the right.
Follman: Right, it seemed clear that she was trying to evacuate from the situation, to drive down the street away from the ICE officers. So for the administration to characterize this as her maliciously, violently trying to run over or ram… or to say that she did run over an agent… I mean, this was Trump’s initial response, right? Was that he literally… that she literally ran over the officer. And that’s just obviously a lie when you look at the videos.
None of that’s true. The video is absolutely clear. She doesn’t think she’s doing anything like that. She thinks she’s turning slowly out of the situation. That’s it.
They want to set the narrative instantly and chaotically in order to support a story that they want to tell that may be totally untethered from the reality, but that’s really not the point. The point is the narrative itself. And so that’s why they’re so aggressive and so quickly using these kinds of falsehoods to create a picture of something that didn’t happen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): And I may do that for Greenland too. I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do that. I’ll give you a little.
Follman: Yeah, if you step back and look at this, he’s been doing this kind of tactic for a long time, whether it’s with foreign affairs or domestic politics or anything in between. Some people will look at this and say, Well, this is a negotiating tactic. And there may be some truth to that.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about your piece. It’s very good. People should check it out. You wrote about this interesting dynamic where the threats themselves and the violence almost builds up a kind of permission structure for Trump to get worse and worse. Can you talk about that dynamic?
And there’s a very clear pattern if you go back and look at what he and the others say and what they do in the immediate aftermath, really with an intention, I think, to control the narrative as we were talking about. And one of the things I look at is how this is really a very, I think, distinctive method.
When you see some of the ugliest things he says in these instances, whether it’s the killing of Good or the mass shooting at a church last fall or the killing of Charlie Kirk. They’re trying to establish that it’s all about a far-left radical conspiracy. Whether there’s any truth to that at all doesn’t matter.
And it’s intentional. It’s not unhinged in the sense that he’s acting from no place of control or no place of forethought. I think that’s what’s important here. You can look at it from a standpoint of moral judgment and say, Yeah, that’s crazy. That’s totally unhinged, the stuff he’s saying. But he’s doing it very intentionally by design to create this effect.
I think there’s at this point no way to deny that the Trump MAGA project is really fundamentally about unleashing ethnic hatreds, maximalizing those ethnic hatreds and supercharging antagonisms among Americans, American versus American—violent antagonisms as well. They don’t even try to hide that anymore. Is that an overstatement or not?
That’s maybe a little bit different than saying he wants violence to happen or he’s trying to actively make it happen. But certainly his response to it is not to try to tamp it down. And that in and of itself, I think, is very telling. We can’t read Trump’s mind, but we can watch his behavior, we can watch his language, and look at the pattern of it, which is what I did with this piece.
That’s what they’ve said. There’s been no evidence to the contrary that has emerged in the four-plus months since that horrific tragedy. And yet they’ve established this narrative that there is this vast “radical left conspiracy” in the country that they now have to eradicate.
Sargent: By the way, where is that? I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re actually cracking down on anybody. I wouldn’t want to say this is an empty threat because I think Miller is scouring every corner of the law right now to find ways to put leftists in jail. But there’s kind of a bullshit element to it too, right? Like Miller’s kind of full of shit, isn’t he?
So that would include the way they’ve unleashed ICE and Border Patrol in blue cities and states, right? That if people accept the idea sort of vaguely in the background that there’s this vast radical leftist conspiracy that’s going to go around killing people just because they are MAGA or support Trump, if people buy into that in any way, I think it sort of softens the field for them to do some of these other things they’re doing too with the way that they’re trying to handle immigration and deportation of people in the country.
I don’t know whether Trump really thinks it through that way, but I’m reasonably certain that Stephen Miller very much does. At bottom though, I think Miller clearly wants Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. There’s some video out there that never gets talked about where, and I think this is the only time Miller has been asked this. He was asked a number of months ago: Have you discussed invoking the Insurrection Act with Donald Trump? And he just kind of hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t answer the question.
Follman: I think that’s right. I think that that it is a very serious possibility and something that that Miller and others around Trump perhaps want to see happen, really ultimately, I think, as a furtherance of maximizing his power and his control, this idea of maximizing the unitary executive theory that Trump’s in charge. You know, Congress is no longer in charge, the courts are no longer in charge, no one else has a say, he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants.
Whether or not they’ll take that step, I don’t know. I mean, it is an extreme thing to do and it will cause a lot of knock-on effects and I think unknown effects and they can’t ultimately control what they may unleash if they do that. So hopefully they won’t, but we’ll have to see.
Follman: Yeah, thanks for having me. Enjoyed it.
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