Leviathan Kills
ICE kills another U.S. citizen without cause.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is currently in the Gulf region of the Middle East, mostly giving talks about the current WTF geopolitical moment in the world. If the goal was to escape the awful weather currently engulfing much of the United States, the trip was well-timed.1
Unfortunately, while one can leave the United States, one cannot escape news about the United States. The New York Times reported out the latest gruesome, needless death in Minneapolis:
Federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, at about 9 a.m. Central time on Saturday morning. A video shared with The New York Times by an eyewitness and her lawyer, as well as other video footage posted on social media, documents the violent scene, where agents appear to fire at least 10 shots in a span of only five seconds.
The footage seems to contradict the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the event, which the agency said began after the victim approached the federal agents with a handgun and the intent to “massacre” them.
The Times goes on to note that “at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds,” at Alex Pretti. So there’s that.
I don’t think I have much to add beyond what I have already written. As I noted last week:
The killing of Renee Good was appalling and unjustified. The videos of additional ICE actions are horrifying. Their behavior confirms prior news reports showing that as the Trump administration has attempted to double the size of ICE, they are hiring people who receive less training, perform well below prior standards, and have not been completely vetted.”
Just replace Renee Good’s name with Alex Pretty’s and it pretty much holds.
Similarly, this part from my Foreign Affairs article with Elizabeth Saunders remains on point:
Trump’s world view is closer to Hobbes’s understanding of anarchy than that of the realists. Although most realists think of Hobbes as part of their intellectual tradition, his vision of order extended deeper into the domestic realm than most realists care to go. He famously described anarchy as a war of “all against all,” in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Less well known is his belief that for a commonwealth to survive in such a brutal world, a sovereign has to be able to exercise nearly unconstrained power at home. Hobbes disdained any separation of powers or any domestic agglomeration of power outside the sovereign himself….
Trump has also taken steps to eliminate domestic constraints on his power. During his first term, Trump chafed against a number of domestic bulwarks against his impulses and policy preferences: Congress, the judiciary, and even the so-called adults in the room within his own administration. In his second term, however, Trump has ignored, bypassed, or bulldozed over any legal or institutional restraints. With little in the way of opposition from Congress or the Supreme Court, he has declared ten different states of emergency during his first year in office on matters as varied as energy, immigration, and the International Criminal Court, actions that enhance the power of the executive. He has enacted a tariff regime of dubious constitutional provenance in an attempt to remake the global economy and rebuild the U.S. manufacturing sector. He has deployed federal officers and National Guard troops in cities in direct defiance of local leaders’ wishes to accelerate his mass deportation campaign. He has fired and attempted to fire executive branch officials previously believed to be independent from presidential prerogative. He has weaponized the Department of Justice to pursue his political vendettas. And he has assaulted the foundations of national power, slashing funding for scientific research and diplomatic expertise.
Yeah, that all still definitely holds.
My only other point is that the politics of this moment seem critical to the ongoing debate about whether the United States is still a constitutional democracy. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been discussing Trump’s effect on American democracy for quite some time: here, here, here, and here. It looks like some further discussion is warranted.
Speaking for myself, I continue to remain optimistic that whatever damage the U.S. system has taken, American authoritarianism is a long, long way from being consolidated. Trump’s actions are extremely unpopular and even in-the-bag Republicans are acknowledging this fact. Today is a day when Nemik’s manifesto from Andor rings true.
But it’s a long way between today and January 2027.
Please feel free to craft your own (likely more coherent) thoughts about this issue in the comments.
Is it worth the guilt I will feel for leaving my family behind in the cold and snow? No, probably not.
Normally, when a policy becomes deeply unpopular a politician will weigh its appeal to his base vs. the overall political cost and will usually find some way to pull back or seem to. But Trump's immigration policy is no longer primarily about immigration, if it ever was -- it's about power and physical force and creating opportunities for him to use more physical force to seize more power. The chaos ICE is causing is a plus -- it will give him the excuse he's wanted for years to use the Insurrection Act to subdue blue cities. I keep thinking about how vastly the ICE + CPB presence outnumbers the actual police forces of the Twin Cities -- by about three to one. We see horror, he sees a test case.
One sentence explains Trump's domestic & foreign policy: the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. And let's remember how that turned out.