Guardian: Throwing their bodies on the gears: the Democratic lawmakers showing up to resist Trump

Republicans may literally own social media platforms, but some Democrats are buying back legitimacy with protests

A flock of Ice agents, some masked, some sporting military-operator fashion for show, smooshed the New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, up against a wall and handcuffed him in the hallway of a federal courthouse in early June, shuffling the mild-mannered politician into an elevator like the Sandman hustling an act off the stage 10 miles north at Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

Like at the Apollo, Lander’s arrest was a show. News reporters and cellphone camera-wielding bystanders crowded the hall to watch the burly federal officers rumple a 55-year-old auditor asking for a warrant.

“I’m not obstructing. I’m standing here in this hallway asking for a judicial warrant,” Lander said. “You don’t have the authority to arrest US citizens.”

“This is an urgent moment for the rule of law in the United States of America and it is important to step up,” Lander told the Guardian after the arrest. “And I think the dividing line for Democrats right now is not between progressives and moderates. It’s between fighters and folders. We have to find nonviolent but insistent ways of standing up for democracy and the rule of law.”

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part,” Mario Savio, a student leader in the free speech movement, a campaign of civil disobedience against restrictive policies on student political activity, said 60 years ago during a campus protest. “You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”

Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, allowed a man to leave through the back doors of her courtroom, allegedly in response to the presence of immigration officers waiting to arrest him. FBI agents subsequently arrested Dugan in her Milwaukee courtroom on 25 April, charging her with obstruction.

The FBI director, Kash Patel, posted comments about her arrest on X almost immediately, and eventually posted a photograph of her arrest, handcuffed and walking toward a police cruiser, with the comment: “No one is above the law.” Digitally altered photographs of Dugan appearing to be in tears in a mugshot proliferated on social media. Trump himself reposted an image from the Libs of TikTok website of Dugan wearing a Covid-19 mask on the day of her arrest.

Three days later …

It’s long read — best to click on the link below and read the article in its entirety.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/30/democrats-trump-resistance

Mirror: Trump removes Martin Luther King bust from White House in latest disrespectful move

Donald Trump has removed Dr Martin Luther King’s bust from the oval office as the president continues to host a right wing “activist” who labelled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake”.

The tribute to the iconic “I have a dream” speech maker that sat front and centre during Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s presidencies has been re-shuffled to Trump’s private dining room, according to Black Press USA. It comes after the controversy over the unseen MLK files.

https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/donald-trump-martin-luther-king-1212605

Alternet: ‘Can’t you just shoot them?’ Inside Trump’s threat to deal with ‘radical left thugs’ in America

“You just [expletive] shot the reporter!”

Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi was in the middle of a live cross, covering the protests against the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy in Los Angeles, California. As Tomasi spoke to the camera, microphone in hand, an LAPD officer in the background appeared to target her directly, hitting her in the leg with a rubber bullet.

Earlier, reports emerged that British photojournalist Nick Stern was undergoing emergency surgery after also being hit by the same “non-lethal” ammunition.

The situation in Los Angeles is extremely volatile. After nonviolent protests against raids and arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began in the suburb of Paramount, US President Donald Trump issued a memo describing them as “a form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States”. He then deployed the National Guard.

‘Can’t you just shoot them?’

As much of the coverage has noted, this is not the first time the National Guard has been deployed to quell protests in the US.

In 1970, members of the National Guard shot and killed four students protesting the war in Vietnam at Kent State University. In 1992, the National Guard was deployed during protests in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four police officers (three of whom were white) in the killing of a Black man, Rodney King.

Trump has long speculated about violently deploying the National Guard and even the military against his own people.

During his first administration, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, former Secretary of Defence Mark Esper alleged that Trump asked him, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Trump has also long sought to other those opposed to his radical agenda to reshape the United States and its role in the world. He’s classified them as “un-American” and, therefore, deserving of contempt and, when he deems it necessary, violent oppression.

During last year’s election campaign, he promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. Even the Washington Post characterised this description of Trump’s “political enemies” as “echoing Hitler, Mussolini”.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation program is deliberately cruel and provocative. It was always only a matter of time before protests broke out.

In a democracy, nonviolent protest by hundreds or perhaps a few thousand people in a city of ten million is not a crisis. But it has always suited Trump and the movement that supports him to manufacture crises.

https://www.alternet.org/national-guard-la-trump