The battle in Minneapolis looked anything but fair. One side had thousands of heavily armed and well-paid – if barely trained – masked fighters, and the backing of the entire federal government behind it. The other had whistles, hand-warmers and camera phones.
And yet it’s the people of Minneapolis who appear to be emerging as the winners from their standoff with the Trump White House, and the thousands of officers from ICE and Border Patrol sent into their city.
Following the senseless killings of two locals – Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the public backlash became too much for Donald Trump to ignore. After weeks of escalation, on Monday the administration backed down. Trump himself called Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.
Border Patrol officers are being withdrawn from the city. Crucially, Trump’s personally appointed “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino has been demoted back to his old job in California, reportedly cut off from his social media accounts, and is expected to retire imminently. The White House, though it will inevitably claim otherwise, is backing down.
The people of Minneapolis have been teargassed, beaten and arrested. They have seen neighbours who are immigrants kidnapped in the street. Two of them have been killed. But their mobilisation has not been for nothing: they made it impossible for the rest of America to ignore what was happening to them, and most Americans hated what they saw.
People sometimes turn to despair when discussing Trump’s second term, speaking as if a dictatorship is inevitable. Trump has the FBI, CIA, ICE and the federal government behind him, they note. He is the commander-in-chief of the US military, and has replaced several of its top generals. The Supreme Court is in his pocket. Sometimes commentators talk as if American democracy has already fallen.
Minneapolis has reminded everyone that the game isn’t over – at least, not yet. Trump cares about public opinion, especially among his own supporters and base – when Maga influencers started breaking with him on ICE, he took notice. Republicans in Congress still care about public opinion, too, especially with midterm elections still on the way. American democracy may still be in crisis, but declaring victory for Trump at this stage is premature. The views of the American public do matter, for now.
It is still far from clear whether Minneapolis has merely won a reprieve, or whether a real change of tactics will follow. Trump is balancing the wishes of hardliners within his White House – a faction led by his closest adviser Stephen Miller, followed by homeland security secretary Kristi Noem – who deeply want mass deportations, and everything that goes with that. They will surely push, in a few weeks’ time, for another showdown in another Democratic-controlled city. There are already rumours the administration is eyeing up Philadelphia for such purposes.
Others in the White House, though, want this issue to be less visible. They are happy the southern border is “closed” and they have no issue with mass removals if they happen quietly and outside the headlines – but they don’t want the huge public fights that Miller and co so clearly relish, if only for reasons of political self-preservation. That faction has been losing every battle through 2025, but now seems to have caught an advantage.
Trump is volatile and mercurial. In his second term, he often seems to simply parrot the view of whoever he spoke with most recently – a state of mind that suits Miller, who works just a few feet away from the Oval Office.
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What happens next will depend upon who is still around to brief Trump. If Bovino is the only man to lose his job after Minneapolis, another showdown in another city feels inevitable. If Noem or perhaps even Miller follows Bovino out the door, that becomes much less likely. Trump wants to be loved, ideally by all of America (if not the world), but at least by his base. Anyone who he sees as standing in the way of that will find their job in jeopardy, and fast.
No one should get too excited at Trump’s climbdown. He is still the President, and he will continue his attempts to trample over the Constitution, norms, and all decency. But at a time when even his opponents have despaired that Trump was unstoppable, normal residents of Minneapolis working together – with very little political help or backup – have shown the opposite is true.
Whether it is just a brief reprieve, or a lasting change of direction, the people of Minneapolis have shown that the Trump machine can be stopped – and they’ve provided the playbook for others to use. If that’s not a win, then nothing is.
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