Sunday Hopium - Working To Ensure Trump Understands There Are Limits To His Power Other Than What's In His "Own Mind"
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Morning all. Sundays here at Hopium are rest days, recover days, do things other than politics days, get ready for a big week of working to rein in ICE kind of day…..
So here are a few Sunday notes from a frozen and snowbound Washington, DC to level set a bit and get us ready for a consequential week ahead……
A few weeks ago, in that infamous NYT interview, we learned this:
President Trump told The Times during a wide-ranging interview last night that he alone was the arbiter of his authority as commander in chief. He brushed aside international law and other checks on his power to order the U.S. military to strike or invade nations around the world.
When asked if there were any limits on his global powers, Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
We’ve talked a lot about that interview here, and how it reminds me of a four year old standing on the top of a bunk bed telling his parents that he can fly, just watch…….
For these words are the words of either a child or a madman. And it’s why I’ve been arguing that the fight ahead of us in the coming days is not just about reining in ICE. It’s about reining in Trump - getting him and his party to once again accept limits, to govern like leaders of history’s most important democracy, and fighting his descent into madness and our descent into tyranny.
This NYT interview, and a similar one given by Stephen Miller on CNN that week, came in those heady days after Trump The MIGHTY and STRONG oversaw a midnight raid that seized Maduro in Caracas. In those heady and warm and lovely days Trump began his next adventure, a dramatic campaign to seize Greenland from the Europeans. And we know how that ended - Trumpian bluster was followed by Trumpian retreat as the Europeans banded together and demonstrated that indeed there were limits to his power other than his “own mind.”
We are now in a similar confrontation, this one over his unleashing of ICE on a civilian population in the US, freeing them from law and limits and decency and just about everything else. In Minnesota DHS/ICE/CBP have been told to operate by Trump-Vance-Miller OUTSIDE of the law, without limits, for there is no law enforcement agency in any democracy, including ours, that trains their officers and agents to completely ignore federal, state, and local law. These 3,000 DHS agents in Minnesota were DIRECTED and ORDERED to operate outside the law in order to terrorize and subdue and punish and convey that in this new world of Trump 2026 THERE ARE NO LIMITS. I can seize GAZA; snatch Maduro in a daring midnight raid; vaporize USAID; levy wildly illegal and idiotic tariffs on any one, any time, depending on what I had for breakfast that day; steal America’s secrets and sell them to others; take unprecedented bribes from foreign actors and enrich myself and my family; jail journalists and other people who annoy me; continue to bury the Epstein files, illegally, to protect me and my many, many friends and senior aides who did unspeakable things to young girls in New York, Florida and on Epstein’s Island.
For I AM MIGHTY, and STRONG, and THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO MY POWER he told us in that New York Times article.
Except there are. The Europeans just showed that there are limits to his power. We’ve been showing that in election after election of all kinds across this country over the past year, including a state senate special election last night in Texas where our candidate was outspent by nearly 10 to 1 and won a +17 Trump district by 14 points……
We’ve seen the limits to his power in Congress’s diligent work to reclaim their power of the purse these past few months, powers unconstitutional usurped by Elon and Vought, by their passing 10 appropriations bills that will make it much harder for Trump to do and spend as he pleases. We’ve seen the limits to the regime’s power on the streets of Minnesota through the extraordinary and inspiring bravery of every day Americans. And we’ve seen the limits to his power in his concession/retreat/capitulation to Senate Dems this week in splitting off the DHS appropriations bills from those other 10 and creating what will be a real opportunity for us to rein in ICE, and establish limits not just on Trump and the regime, but on what may be both the single most cherished manifestation of his vision, and the most dangerous for all of us - the turning of ICE into a terror force unleashed against “invaders” and his political opponents.
I don’t know what we are going to get in these negotiations over the next two weeks. We probably won’t get as much as we all want or need. We should expect that, and not allow what is about to happen to be about disappointment - for that would be a dramatic misread of what’s happening here. For what’s happened in recent days is something that needed to happen if our democracy and freedoms were to be preserved - Congressional Democrats have come to understand that the fight in front us is not just about affordability or restoring the ACA subsides it is about using all of the collective power of the Democratic Party, the courts, free states and cities and towns, to put limits on our out of control and dangerous leader. For simply, he is escalating, and becoming more dangerous; the decline of our democracy and rule of law is accelerating; and thus we must act with far greater urgency to use all the power available to us - as the Europeans did - to rein in not just ICE but Trump and the regime itself.
So we will get as much as we can in the coming days, take the win, and build on it to go get more.
Looking back at the past year our leaders have accepted too much without mounting a muscular enough challenge. We never should have accepted the vaporization of USAID and the killing of 15 million of the poorest people on Earth; his unprecedented and in your face corruption; of Witkoff and Kushner selling out Urkaine, Europe and the West to Russia; of the sending of innocents to a foreign gulag; of these wildly illegal and destructive tariffs; the list goes on and on. Our leaders should have fought each of these illiberal and destructive acts with the same courage, grit, and patriotism as we’ve seen from the people of Minnesota. But it did not happen. And incredible damage has been done.
That’s why this fight to rein in ICE over these next few weeks is so important. Our leaders, the collective leaders of the pro-democracy movement here in the US, must learn to how to fight, every day, with the same resolve, bravery, and strategic intent as the people on the streets in Minneapolis; as the lawyers fighting to return 5 year olds kidnapped from their families; as the protestors gunned down last month in Tehran; as the families freezing in Kyiv; as those Americans who threw off our last Mad King 250 years ago; as Renee Good and Alex Pretti who “gave the last full measure of devotion.”
For as Lincoln challenged previous Americans in a similarly perilous moment we must now commit “to the great task remaining before us……that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THIS EARTH.”
