SIMON ROSENBERG

 

American People Firmly Behind Drive To Rein In ICE, On The Hill Powerful Stories of ICE's Violence, Greater Focus Needed On The Detention Centers

Paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm EST. We have much to discuss

Simon Rosenberg Feb 4

Morning all. Yesterday Senator Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia held an extraordinary shadow hearing on the Hill, one focusing on the lawless violence ICE has brought to our communities. Many of you watched parts of it live. Below is a link to the full hearing and testimony. The video above is the deeply emotional testimony of Luke Granger, one of Renee Good’s brothers.

Sit down and steady yourself before watching.

This hearing represents a dramatic evolution in how Democrats can bring the harms of Trumpism to the American people. It is the second hearing organized by Senator Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia on the abuses of DHS/ICE/CBP. It took place in a formal Senate hearing room. It had compelling witnesses and searing testimony. It got coverage in the mainstream media and was widely covered by our emerging pro-democracy media ecosystem, including Hopium yesterday. Simply, it was powerful and it broke through. It needs to become a model for how we, despite not controlling Congress, use our bicameral Congressional convening power to bring the harms of Trumpism to the American people this year. It is an example of the how we must innovate, “come together,” and organize ourselves differently and more effectively to meet the moment in year two of Trump’s second term.

Reps Garcia and Ansari - and Stephen Miller - in yesterday’s hearing

Four months passed the legal deadline for adopting the fiscal 2026 budget this terrible MAGA Congress yesterday finally got 10 appropriations bills to Trump’s desk. Most of the government is now funded through September 30th and re-opened - with the exception of DHS. DHS is now operating on a Continuing Resolution (CR) which expires next Friday. If no deal is reached by then DHS will run out of our money and operations across the Department - including TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA - will slow or cease.

Leader Schumer posted this yesterday:

While the words may be simple “abide by the same rules as local police” would fundamentally change how ICE operates across the US. It’s an intriguing new formulation - simple, common sense, hard to criticize. Based on that comprehensive YouGov polling we reviewed last week, and some new polling we’ve received this morning, the public is firmly behind such an approach. The polling also shows how badly Trump-Vance-Miller have lost the big arguments driving their terror campaign.

As we will see in this new data from the pro-democracy consortium, Navigator, Democrats enter the fight over reining in ICE on very, very firm ground:

ICE’s favorability is -22 with the overall public, -37 with independents.

A majority want Miller gone:

Only 24% want to keep ICE as it is. 70% want ICE fundamentally overhauled. Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now.

Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now.

Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now:

Leaders Schumer and Jeffries are having a joint press conference this morning at 1115am where we assume they will be laying their game plan for the next few weeks. You can watch it here.

And while I am content with the current direction of this critical fight, there is one area I think Democrats need to develop more fully, that, for example, you don’t see in any of this Navigator polling - we simply must take on the detention centers, both their current inhumanity and their planned $40b expansion.

I wrote a long piece about this a few days ago, but here’s a recap - if the goal of Trump’s policies are to remove criminal migrants, numbering perhaps between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people, we do not need a vast expansion of detention capacity. What is the purpose of the expansion of detention capacity? Who is going to go in there? Who is the regime actually targeting for removal? For right now they are already targeting millions of LEGAL immigrants for removal, and they have started detaining journalists and people perceived as their political enemies.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the immigrant population in the US today:

While we need more granular polling on how the public feels about removing legal migrants, look at how Americans feel about removing long-settled undocumented immigrants - 65% oppose, only 22% support.

Trump-Vance-Miller are using the false cover story that they are ONLY targeting criminal migrants to create a vast, violent, and dangerous mass deportation regime and domestic American gulags. Simply, we cannot let this happen. There is no support for this in the public, and it must become a goal of our campaign to not just rein in ICE but to roll back the funding of the vast ICE detention expansion, perhaps using that money to replenish SNAP and the ACA subsides Republicans have cut.

The urgency of this part of our fight against ICE became clearer last week when the regime arrested and detained five journalists. If these detention centers get built they will get filled, by migrants, by opponents of the regime, by journalists, by uppity entertainers - by us.

We must also demand oversight, accountability, and a raising of standards in the make shift detention centers already in use. Listen to this testimony from Aliya Rahman in the ICE hearing yesterday. Not only will you be shocked by the story of her arrest, but listen to her describe how detainees were treated in the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. ICE has descended into a dangerous inhumanity, an othering, that we know from history will only bring about greater atrocities. Steady yourself, and watch, listen:

Greg Sargent has a terrific new column in the New Republic this morning, Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Unleashes Fury Even In MAGA Country. Here’s an extended excerpt:

The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.

We’re now learning that this year, ICE plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.

To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.

Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.

Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”

The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:

Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?

• Favor: 35 percent

• Oppose: 64 percent

Note that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline.

But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also opposing deporting non-criminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually okay with such a horror? Apparently it is.

Paid Hopium subscribers will getting together to talk about all this tonight at 7pm EST (register here). And today I am only recommending one action - contact your Senators, your House Member, your Governor, your AG, you state legislative leaders and demand that they fight to rein in ICE (if you want to support our candidates and party committees please head back to yesterday’s post).

However we got here this has become a defining moment not just in reining in ICE and DHS, but in reining in Trump. The Europeans got him to retreat a few weeks ago. It is our turn now. Let’s get to work people and good luck everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Simon

MARTY BARON

 Read former Washington Post editor Marty Baron's full statement about today's cuts:

This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever. Of course, there were acute business problems that had to be addressed. No one can deny that. This is a period of head-spinning change in media consumption. The response to that is necessarily difficult and severely disruptive. Radical innovation is required. The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top —from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands. The owner, in a note to readers, wrote that he aimed to boost trust in The Post. The effect was something else entirely: Subscribers lost trust in his stewardship and, notwithstanding the newsroom’s stellar journalism, The Post overall. Similarly, many leading journalists at The Post lost confidence in Bezos, and jumped to other news organizations. They also, in effect, were driven away. Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction. Many superior journalists will remain at The Post, delivering important work. I expect they will continue to hold power to account, as they have done spectacularly well for decades. They deserve the support of all who believe in quality journalism. I remain personally grateful for Jeff Bezos’s steadfast support and confidence during my eight-plus years as The Post’s executive editor. During that time, he came under brutal pressure from Trump. And yet he spoke forcefully and eloquently of a free press and The Post’s mission, demonstrating his commitment in concrete terms. He often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it. Like many others, I’d like to hear the owner and the publisher he appointed articulate a contemporary vision that offers the prospect of financial stability and growth, demonstrates imagination and creativity, honors the heritage of The Post, shows appreciation for its remarkable staff and signals a firm sense of purpose. It is years overdue.

PORK

 

Your Vote Won’t Mean Shit

Don’t say I didn’t tell you so… ‘cuz I told ya so.

Trevor Stone Irvin Feb 4

Awwww, bless your heart. You thought that because you’re an American citizen, you get to cast a vote that counts. That. Is. So. Cute.

Well, to be fair you used to be able to vote, but those days are gone. The only ones who will get a vote next time around is the Mob boss who is living in the desecrated Offal Office, his consiglieri, Gruppenfuhrer Steven Miller, and maybe the couch fucker J.D. Vance (if he stays away from the furniture). Marco Rubio will not get a vote as he is not tall enough. Of course, Donny, the Port-O-John of Presidents, will cast both Miller’s and Vance’s vote for them. Remember, Good King Donny knows what is good for you, what you need, and how expensive your groceries should be. So, yeah, let him decide what the vote is. We might as well just stay home and watch “Chico and the Gulag” on Fox.

Now, I have told you all this many times, and it is time to get it into your thick skulls that OUR COUNTRY HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY A DICTATOR. I hate being forced to write in all caps, because it is so childish, so Donnyish, but some of you are not paying attention.

Donny Cankles, and the coronary event we are all hoping to see soon, couldn’t have said it any plainer. “I accomplished so much we shouldn’t even have elections in 2026.” Well, there you have it. That doesn’t sound very democratic or constitutional now, does it? Let’s give it a think for a moment. Why would a shitweasel president with the IQ of a cucumber and fewer morals than Jeffery Epstein want to shut down the midterm elections?

Pro Tip: Because he will lose the House and the Senate. And if he loses the House and the Senate, he’ll be a lame, incontinent duck and will likely be impeached with the possibility of removal. Oh my! That do sound wonnerful, don’ it!?

But if the presidential bag of cat turds were to lose in the midterms, we all know that he will scream “FRAUD!” from the mountaintops and go running straight to the band of black-robed fuckmuffins on the Supremely Corrupt Court to give him, Donny the special boy, the win. And I have absolutely no doubt that Alito, Thomass, Gosuck, Kravenaugh, Rob-it, and BareIt would gladly do that because they gave a fuckin’ convicted felon total fuckin’ immunity to fuck this country over six ways to fuckin’ Sunday.

Unfortunately, Donny, the incontinent shit stain with rancid thighs of cottage cheese, feels that may not be enough to guarantee a permanent presidency. So now the chattering monkeys in his head are telling him to “nationalize voting.” Yep, you heard that right. Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states.

Now which 15 states do you think Donny needs to “take over”? It’s multiple choice, take your time.

1) 15 Republican Red States.

2) The new states of California, Greenland, Venezuela, and Canada.

3) 15 states that contain enough intelligent voting Democrats to win a legit election.

If you got the wrong answer, please stop reading now and go kill yourself. The children you have disappointed and your country will thank you.

The New York Times described his desire to nationalize voting like this:

“An aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters.”

“A rhetorical step”??? Likely to raise new worries”??? Really??? That’s all you got?

IT IS AN ILLEGAL, DICTATORIAL TAKEOVER OF THE DEMOCRATIC ELECTION SYSTEM OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, YOU BUNCH OF IGNORANT CLOWN FUCKERS!!!”

(Again, I apologize for the all caps).

What type of horrendously heinous crime would Donald Trump have to commit to the editors of the NYT for them to issue an accurate assessment of what is happening? Take their daughters to Epstein Island? Abduct, torture and murder their parents? Kill their dog? (though dog killing is more of a Krusti Gnome type of thing).

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that he was “joking” and “speaking facetiously.” Until she whispered under her breath, “The fuck he was, no vote for you.”

Last week FBI agents, Tulsi Gabbard, and Trump’s SS shock troops stormed the election center in Fulton County, GA, (a county in which black people are still allowed to vote) and seized ballots and voting records from the 2020 election he lost. Ask yourself why a convicted serial sex abuser and criminal, who has been convicted on 34 felony counts, wants to steal the voting records of an old election he lost.

It’s simple, his childish whittle feeweens have been hurted an’ he’s mad. Just to be clear, the ballots were counted three times and all three times he lost. Then, on a recorded call of bribery, he tried to force Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes that didn’t exist. Even Pinochet knew not to do that.

Tulsi Gabbard, who shouldn’t have been there at all, tried to rationalize her presence by saying, “My presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security including counterintelligence, foreign and other malign influences and cybersecurity.”

Oh yes, it’s those horrible malign influences, called black voters, they are objecting to.

I know this is a confusing and legalistic statement, but I’ll put it in layman’s terms for you.

“I’m gonna steal this shit so we can corrupt the data, toss out any vote marked “Biden,” and make sure the president can claim he won an election he lost and become the official dictator, rather than the de facto dictator, of our newly failed country.”

There, that should clear that up.

Donny the Douche wants to sit down with a double cheese burger and a diet Coke to count the votes a fourth time all by himself. Because he is a very stable genius, we all know that he will “find” those pesky 11,780 votes that still don’t exist and win the election he lost three times. He’ll be so happy when he wins and receives the winner trophy that he gave himself instead of that cheap plastic “nice try loser” participation trophy Slow Joe Biden gave him.

Trumplethinskin told the Times that he regretted not sending out the National Guard to seize the voting machines and change all the Biden votes into Trump votes in 2020. Yeah, that doesn’t sound very legal, but who is stopping the asshole?

And therein lies the problem: No. One. Is. Stopping. Him.

Yes, corrupting nationalizing our voting is going to work out really well for America.

Trump said today, “I could stand in the middle of a voting booth and shoot every democrat in the head and I wouldn’t lose a vote.” Sadly, he is correct, and that is what he is going to do unless we stop him.

Trump has posted on NoTruth social media platform that he wants to go further and get rid of mail in balloting and the use of voting machines. Which begs the question. Just how the fuck does he expect us to vote without mail in ballots or voting machines? By carrier pigeon? Morse code? Or maybe bicycle messenger?

Oh, oh, oh, I get it now! I’m sorry I’m a little slow. He doesn’t want us to vote at all. Got it.

I moved on her....

 

HEATHER

 

February 3, 2026 Heather Cox Richardson Feb 4 Yesterday, the day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes stopped that termination until a pending court case worked its way through the courts. At stake first of all were the lives of about 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010, whom the termination of that status would render undocumented overnight. The impact on their lives would also affect their families, friends, and employers. Also at stake, though, is Trump administration officials’ rejection of both facts and the rule of law on which the United States was founded in order to advance their white nationalist ideology. As Judge Reyes explains, Congress established Temporary Protective Status in 1990 to change previously haphazard executive decisions about whether to receive immigrants from disaster-stricken countries that left recipients unclear about their immigration status. In its place, Congress created “a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics.” It established criteria and a process for designating a country under TPS, accepting applications for immigration under TPS, and reviewing that designation periodically to determine if that designation should be extended. The system leaves to the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to evaluate those extensions. And yet, the judge explains, Secretary Noem ignored the process and the criteria, instead relying on ideology. On December 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.” Noem’s statements echo those of President Donald J. Trump, who referred to Haiti as a “sh*thole” country and tried to end TPS for people from Haiti beginning in 2017. During the 2024 campaign, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats,” and “eating the pets” of people who live in Springfield, Ohio. He insisted he would revoke Haiti’s TPS designation and send immigrants “back to their country.” Five Haitian TPS holders sued to stop the administration from ending their protected status, claiming Noem ignored the legal procedures because of her “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes says Noem did indeed ignore the law and that it “seems substantially likely” she did so because of her white nationalist ideology, noting that Noem has terminated all twelve TPS designations that have reached her desk. But, as Reyes points out, the facts simply don’t match their ideology. TPS holders participate in the workforce at the exceptionally high rate of 94.6%. Far from being “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” the plaintiffs in the case challenging Noem’s decision are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a toxicology lab assistant, a college economics major, and a registered nurse. When Noem claimed that it was “contrary to the national interest” to permit about 350,000 Haitian immigrants to stay in the country until it is safe to go back to Haiti, Reyes noted, she characterized them as criminals without any actual evidence. She also ignored the public’s interest in the fact that Haitian TPS holders pay $1.3 billion a year in taxes, and that through their work in sectors that are desperate for laborers, they add about $3.4 billion to the U.S. economy annually. They are deeply embedded in their communities, and tearing them out would shatter families and worksites. “There is an old adage among lawyers,” Reyes wrote as she decided against the Trump administration. “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither…, she pounds X ([formerly known as] Twitter). Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.” In the conflict between reality and white nationalist ideology, reality appears to be gaining ground. Americans do not like federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol terrorizing their streets, detaining children, and shooting American citizens. As G. Elliott Morris noted in Strength in Numbers on Sunday, a new Fox News poll shows that Americans support Democrats over Republicans on a generic ballot at higher percentages than they have since the survey began: 52% of the vote for Democrats to 46% for Republicans. That 52% for Democrats is the highest support recorded for either party; Democrats hit the poll’s previous high in October 2017 at 50%. Morris notes Democrats are “firmly in ‘wave’ territory” for November’s elections. Republicans are trying to regain support by seeming to back off their extremism, although they are not backing far: not a single Republican showed up for a public forum held today in Washington, D.C., by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) and other Democrats on ICE violence. At the hearing, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot five times by federal agents, told her story; so did Aliya Rahman, another U.S. citizen detained by ICE; and so did the brothers of U.S. citizen Renee Good, killed by federal agents. Representative Garcia showed a picture of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is a key instigator of the ICE attacks, and said: “There’s probably no single person in this government [who] has done more damage…and more harm to people across this country, immigrants and U.S. citizens…than this man right here, and it’s our job…to hold him responsible for the crimes that are happening to United States citizens.” A new Data For Progress poll shows that 51% of American voters think Miller should be removed, while only 33% think he should not. But lawmakers have at least had to adjust their actions to acknowledge the fury of American voters at the behavior of federal agents. Today the House passed the budget to fund the government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was funded only for two more weeks to give Congress time to hash out terms for funding the department that Democrats will accept. Republicans had been clear they did not want to separate out DHS funding. Ultimately, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) had to accept the separation in order to prevent a long-term shutdown, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got enough Republicans to go along that the measure, without DHS funding, passed. Trump signed it later in the day. As of yesterday, the head of the “Weaponization Working Group,” created in the Department of Justice on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office to punish the people Trump insisted had weaponized the legal system against him, has been removed. Right-wing lawyer Ed Martin had been a leader in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and had claimed those convicted for crimes relating to that attempt had been unfairly prosecuted. Once in power, he had turned the department’s resources toward prosecuting those Trump perceived to be enemies, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. So unpopular has it become to be associated with Trump that an attempt to distract from plummeting ticket sales and artists’ boycotts after he took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and put his name on it may be behind Trump’s Sunday night announcement he is closing the venue, claiming it needs two years of renovations. As voters turn against the administration, Trump is openly working to rig the 2026 election to guarantee Republicans win. On Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with 700 boxes of ballots, tabulation tapes, and other election-related material from the 2020 election. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that the warrant came from Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Albus should not have had anything to do with a raid in Georgia, but Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Bondi appears to have appointed Albus a special assistant to the attorney general, giving him the ability to operate across the nation. Elias points out that this gives Albus dramatic power over future elections. The raid was significant not just because the FBI took the ballots Trump has complained about for years—ballots that have been counted three times—but also because Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was there. The DNI has no law enforcement role in our system; she is supposed to coordinate and oversee the agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. At first, officials tried to suggest she was there by chance, but yesterday William K. Rashbaum, Devlin Barrett, and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that she met with some of the FBI agents who had conducted the raid. During the meeting, she reached Trump on her cell phone and he spoke to the agents himself. David Laufman, who served in the Justice Department in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told the New York Times reporters: “It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will.” Then, yesterday, Trump told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, who has gone back to podcasting, that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. This is bonkers. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016. He said to Bongino: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally, and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked and the county votes, we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots? You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But, you know, like the 2020 election. I won that election by so much.” Although the Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states, at a bill signing in the Oval Office today, Trump doubled down on his call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.