https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/chicago-ice-jb-pritzker-trump-stephen-miller-rcna238264
This week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi [Bimbo #2] Noem staged a bizarre photo op in Portland that appeared designed to bolster President Trump’s effort to deploy Oregon’s National Guard against ICE protesters in the city. [Bimbo #2] Noem stood on a rooftop observing protesters below, and MAGA influencers hailed it as a moment of extraordinary heroism against a powerful, implacable enemy. “[Bimbo #2] Noem just stared down violent Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” one wrote.
Alas, it turned out there were only a few protesters milling around far in the distance, including one man in a chicken suit. Intense online mockery ensued, and this buffoonish display is now at the center of a good New York Times piece, which details how the White House is relying on MAGA media personalities to spread the deceptive impression of a city in large-scale civil collapse.
However, the Times piece commits one misstep: It keeps describing those MAGA personalities as “provocateurs.” In fact, they are propagandists. Mainstream news outlets appear uncomfortable wrestling with the degree to which pro-Trump media figures practice propaganda undertaken in bad faith toward expressly instrumental ends. We need them to get past that.
This may seem like a churlish objection given that the Times piece is well reported and informative. But this euphemistic “provocateur” language risks diminishing the force and quality of the paper’s own reporting. The piece notes that federal and state law enforcement have reported that protests there are small-scale, and nothing like the civil breakdown depicted by Trump to create a rationale to federalize Oregon’s National Guard (that’s temporarily blocked in court). Then it reports this:
But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape” — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself.
The piece also refers to “dueling versions of reality.” But this isn’t a case of one side genuinely seeing things one way (as “comparative calm”) and the other side genuinely seeing them differently (as a “hellscape”). It’s a case of one side (law enforcement, local journalists) trying to faithfully depict what’s really happening, and the other side (MAGA) concertedly lying about it to serve corrupt ends that are comprehensively, even intentionally disconnected from facts on the ground.
One influencer, for instance, accuses the Portland police chief of “allowing violent terrorists” to “run the city,” which is horseshit of the highest order. The Times piece quotes another MAGA personality suggesting that right wing agitators might be handing out flags and trying to bait protesters into burning them.
Other MAGA figures have described the city as a “war zone” and “under siege by antifa” or “fallen to antifa” and even in a “state of open insurrection.”
Indeed, as Media Matters documents, the gap between what MAGA media are portraying and what local press is reporting (the protests are mostly small and peaceful) has grown to enormous proportions. As one reporter put it, many protesters are “in pajamas, sharing pastries, throwing a frisbee, and playing board games.”
The point is not that there are zero examples of leftist protesters getting violent—as the Times notes, a handful of leftists are getting prosecuted for just that. Rather, it’s that none of this remotely matches what Trump and MAGA are conjuring into being.
The word “provocateur” doesn’t do justice to any of this—and we don’t mean to pick on the Times here, as that euphemism is constantly used elsewhere, too. “Provocateur” implies that all this is akin to plucky showmanship—political theater designed to needle, satirize, provoke, and entertain, as opposed to manipulate and deceive.
Some of these personalities probably do see themselves, to some degree, as putting on a show. But the broader aim of all this agitprop is far uglier. Trump has employed a form of state propaganda that may be unrivaled by any presidency in modern memory, and these MAGA influencers are generating material for that vile effort.
This is partly about producing endless online content to keep the MAGA base well-fed. Noem has chroniclers around her capturing her every move: When she gazed down on the man in the chicken suit, several depicted her as bravely confronting antifa mobs, even though the man stood with a few other people hundreds of feet away.
But the absurdity of this episode doesn’t diminish how sinister and carefully elaborated much of this propaganda truly is. When ICE raided an apartment complex in Chicago, where Trump is also trying to deploy various National Guards, state propagandists produced a slick video portraying it as a heroic operational triumph against a dangerous, determined, dug-in enemy. Stephen Miller declared that the complex was “filled” with Tren de Aragua “terrorists.”
Yet as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, all of two people were identified as possible members of the gang, per CNN. While some others reportedly had criminal histories (some just involving drug possession), surely that doesn’t justify a massive hypermilitarized operation that terrorized scores or hundreds of people (the building has 130 units) and dragged children into the street.
If Miller were being honest about his true project, he’d forthrightly admit that he consciously intends all this as deliberate propaganda. It’s geared toward establishing unlimited discretion for Trump to simply invent emergencies with an eye toward vastly expanding presidential power. Miller wants Trump to bulldoze the courts into surrendering on fact-finding, into granting him quasi-absolute authority to declare into existence—merely by fiat—the conditions needed to justify whatever law enforcement or domestic military operation that Trump (i.e., Miller) launches next, including ones targeting Americans.
If inflicting these operations on civilian populations incites violence in return, from Miller’s perspective that’s surely all the better. Asawin Suebsaeng reports for Zeteo that Trump advisers are nudging him to invoke the Insurrection Act if necessary to circumvent judicial checks on these authorities. That’s plainly what Miller hopes for.
Yet the conventions of political reporting today are poorly suited to capturing this naked use of sheer pretexts and the bottomless bad faith they rely upon.
Headlines in the Times, for instance, regularly fall short in just this way. They treat Trump and his administration’s stated rationales as things they authentically believe, whether it’s the claim that Harvard violates students’ civil rights to justify his state crackdown on academic freedom … or the insistence that Portland is under siege from domestic terrorists to justify deploying the military there.
In these cases, casual readers will have zero inkling that these are bad-faith pretexts as opposed to genuinely held positions. The media needs to find new tools to convey these basic realities.
Propagandists are not “provocateurs.” Trump’s stated grounds for his abuses of power are not actual reasons, they are pretexts created for purely instrumental ends. And Kristi [Bimbo #2] Noem did not “stare down” mobs of antifa terrorists in Portland. That’s because there isn’t any serious network of organized leftist violence in the United States, no matter how loudly Miller shrieks otherwise. Grasping how committed MAGA is to such industrial-scale deceptions is critical to getting this broader moment right.
https://newrepublic.com/article/201669/kristi-noem-chicken-suit-maga-implodes
Hundreds of protesters have poured onto Chicago’s streets to condemn President Donald Trump‘s decision to send Texas National Guard troops into the city.
On Wednesday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Texas National Guard troops were headed to protect the Broadview ICE facility.
Later that evening, a military spokesperson told the Associated Press the Texas National Guard troops who had arrived in Chicago were protecting federal property in the city.
Though the total number of National Guard troops in Chicago is unclear, a mission summary from the U.S. military said there would be 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard and another 300 from the Illinois National Guard.
Locals responded to the National Guard’s incursion into the city by marching through downtown Chicago. The city’s mayor and the state’s governor have vehemently opposed the Trump administration’s plan to send troops to the Chicago area.
The protest was broadly opposed to Trump’s immigration crackdowns and his decision to send troops into the city.
“We can stand up for people that can’t stand up for themselves,” Jinah Yun-Mitchell, 59, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “The rule of law is falling apart, so we all need to do something to make sure that it doesn’t keep going in this direction.”
Another protester, who declined to share his last name to protect himself and his family, told Block Club Chicago that he was marching for people he personally knows who have been detained by ICE.
“In my community where I teach, there’s kids not coming to school for a month at a time because they’re scared of what can happen to them,” he told the outlet. “I’m overwhelmed with blinding anger and depression for the people who are being affected.”
He said ICE agents “shot my friend in the face” with non-lethal rounds during another demonstration at an ICE facility.
The gathered protesters made their message to Trump and the masked federal agents clear, chanting: “Donald Trump, you stupid clown; ICE ain’t welcome in this town.”
Trump has justified sending troops to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, by insisting that federal immigration agents need protection in the wake of a shooting that killed two detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas. Trump is not sending the National Guard to Dallas, where the shooting actually occurred.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has moved to block the National Guard deployment, and a ruling on that request is scheduled for Thursday.
Pritzker called the military deployments “Trump’s invasion,” and Trump called for Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be jailed.
“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE Officers! Governor Pritzker also!” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Johnson said he was “not going anywhere” and that he would “stay firm as the mayor of this amazing city.”
Pritzker wrote on X that Trump was sprinting toward “full-blown authoritarianism.”
“Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” he wrote. “Masked agents already are grabbing people off the street, separating children from their parents. Creating fear.”
The president has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act if the courts rule that his use of the National Guard is illegal.
“If I had to enact it, I’d do that,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.”
As the decision looms, the National Guard and those opposing Trump in Chicago are taking to the streets.
Earlier on Wednesday, Alderman Jesse Fuentes — who was handcuffed by a federal agent on Friday — spoke to the gathered protesters.
“As your alderperson, not just of the 26th Ward because every Chicagoan matters, I will make sure that we utilize every legislative tool at our disposal to slow ICE down to protect our neighbors,” Fuentes said, according to Block Club Chicago.
President Donald Trump raged late into the night, sharing a misleading poll graphic that claimed more than half of voters approve of his performance in his second term.
The president posted an image previously circulated by the White House, which asserted he had a 57 percent approval rating instead of the verifiable number of 49 percent.
The source listed in the graphic was Rasmussen Reports. At the time of Trump’s repost, Rasmussen’s daily tracker showed his actual approval rating at 47 percent, not 57 percent, according to the pollster’s official website.
The last time Trump’s Rasmussen approval rating came close to 57 percent was Jan. 23, just three days into his term, when the pollster recorded it at 56 percent.
White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast on Wednesday, “President Trump and his policies are wildly popular with the American people.”
When previously contacted, the White House referred the Daily Beast to Rasmussen posting the claim on X that Trump’s “single overnight approval for last night” was 57.11 percent.
Included in Rasmussen’s post was Trump’s White House portrait and a congratulatory message to White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino on his engagement.
Rasmussen did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast asking how it arrived at that number, why it wasn’t listed on its daily tracking poll, or the definition of an “overnight approval rating.”
Trump also amplified other controversial posts. He logged onto Truth Social to reshare a post in which he promoted an unproven link between autism and the pain reliever Tylenol.
In an all-caps rant, he claimed in that post that pregnant women should avoid taking acetaminophen “UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY” and to avoid giving it to young children “FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON.”
The medical community and officials including Senate Majority Leader John Thune have raised concerns over the claims. Trump did not cite evidence to support his claim.
Trump also posted what appears to be a letter from the 1960s by former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. It seems to reference an episode mentioned in a History.com article the president also shared, which describes President John F. Kennedy’s decision to federalize the Alabama National Guard to halt Gov. George Wallace’s blockade of the University of Alabama in 1963.
It comes as the Trump administration embarks on an aggressive new crime crackdown, pushing to expand federal law enforcement operations in major cities and deploy the National Guard to urban areas.
“My goal is very simple. STOP CRIME IN AMERICA!” Trump added in another post.
In a scathing critique of President Donald Trump, Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday accused the Republican president of deploying National Guard troops to the Democratic cities of Chicago and Portland based on fixations that stem in part from his being mentally impaired.
“This is a man who’s suffering dementia,” Pritzker said in a telephone interview with the Tribune. “This is a man who has something stuck in his head. He can’t get it out of his head. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t know anything that’s up to date. It’s just something in the recesses of his brain that is effectuating to have him call out these cities.
“And then, unfortunately, he has the power of the military, the power of the federal government to do his bidding, and that’s what he’s doing.”
The governor’s comments came as National Guard troops from Texas were assembling at a U.S. Army Reserve training center in far southwest suburban Elwood and Trump’s administration was moving forward with deploying 300 members of the Illinois National Guard for at least 60 days over the vocal and legal objections of Pritzker and other local elected leaders.
The Trump administration has said the troops are needed to protect federal agents and facilities involved in its ongoing deportation surge and has sought to do much the same in Portland, Oregon, though those efforts have been stymied so far by temporary court rulings. A federal judge in Chicago is expected to hold a hearing this week over the legal effort by Illinois and Chicago to block the deployments, which Pritzker and other local officials say is not only unnecessary but a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits the use of U.S. military assets from taking part in law enforcement actions on domestic soil.
During the interview, Pritzker — who has been one of Trump’s harshest critics and is a potential 2028 presidential Democratic candidate — said the courts will play an integral role in challenging Trump’s efforts in Illinois and across the nation.
“We’re not going to go to war between the state of Illinois and the federal government, not taking up arms against the federal government,” Pritzker said. “But we are monitoring everything they’re doing, and using that monitoring to win in court.”
Pritzker also said he has not had any conversations with his staff or other Democratic governors regarding a so-called soft secession, a political and legal theory that has grown during Trump’s second term in which Democratic states would gradually withdraw their cooperation with the federal government, including withholding financial support, without formally leaving the Union.
“Preparing for and going to court with the law on our side and winning in court is important,” he continued. “It is the most important thing that we can do legally. If there are people who are suggesting there are things that we should do that are illegal. I would suggest to you, we’re not going to do those things.”
But even as the governor said he was counting on winning in the courts, Trump was openly exploring options to circumvent them.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president reiterated that he was considering employing the two-century-old Insurrection Act to get around legal court orders that would deny him the ability to deploy National Guard troops to cities such as Chicago and Portland over governors’ objections.
“It’s been invoked before,” Trump said of the law, which the Brennan Center for Justice said has been used 30 times, starting with President George Washington, to quell the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.
Trump says he’d consider Ghislaine Maxwell pardon and mentions Diddy in same breath as Epstein pal: ‘Have to take a look’
The Insurrection Act is an exception to Posse Comitatus and allows a president to deploy the military to “suppress rebellion” or “insurrection” when enforcing federal law becomes “impracticable.”
Past Supreme Court rulings have given the president broad discretionary powers to decide if conditions have been met to invoke the Insurrection Act, but it has left the door open for judicial review to determine if a president invoked the law “in bad faith” or in going beyond “a permitted range of honest judgment.” And the actions of the military, once invoked, are also subject to judicial review.
The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was by President George H.W. Bush during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, with the support of California Gov. Pete Wilson. It also was used in Chicago in 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson to curb rioting over the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with the backing of Mayor Richard J. Daley and acting Gov. Samuel Shapiro.
But the last time it was invoked over the opposition of a sitting governor was in 1965 when Johnson used it to federalize troops to protect civil rights marchers in Montgomery, Alabama, over the objections of segregationist Gov. George Wallace.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously invoked the act in 1957 to order the Arkansas National Guard to stand down from its orders from Gov. Orval Faubus to prevent the segregation of Little Rock’s public schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Eisenhower also deployed the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to protect Black students attending classes.
As Pritzker has sought to counter Trump on nearly every front, he has joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in threatening to leave the bipartisan National Governors Association because the organization hasn’t spoken out against Trump’s National Guard mobilizations.
In the Tribune interview, Pritzker noted how nearly all 50 state governors at the time signed on to an April 29, 2024, letter to then-President Joe Biden’s administration opposing the military’s push in Congress to forcibly transfer Air National Guard units performing space missions into the U.S. Space Force without the governors’ consent.
Among those who signed were then-GOP South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who now heads the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, overseeing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and Border Patrol.
“Well, I’m somebody who likes to reach out and do things in a bipartisan fashion, and I’ve attended NGA events and had friendly relationships with some Republican governors in the past, and the NGA has an important role. But not if it’s unwilling to stand up in this moment and speak on behalf of states’ rights the way that it always has,” Pritzker said. “So I don’t know how I can trust that the NGA actually does stand up for the states with Republicans in charge, apparently they’re just going to do Donald Trump’s bidding.”
Pritzker also continued to defend the process and timing of the Illinois attorney general’s office in filing a lawsuit to halt the National Guard activations, which wasn’t filed until Monday, two days after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo about the Illinois National Guard deployments. This is despite Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul knowing for weeks that Trump had threatened to send the military to the streets of the Chicago area.
“You have to understand legal proceedings. In order for you to bring a lawsuit of any sort, you have to have what’s called ripeness. It has to be ripe. That means there has to be some action that’s taken to demonstrate that the wrong is being effectuated,” said Pritzker, calling any questions about the timing of the suit “a false avenue to follow.” “Just because someone says they’re going to call out the National Guard to do this in Illinois, until they do, you can’t file suit.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gov-jb-pritzker-says-president-233400557.html
