The Minnesota War Zone Is Trump’s Most Trumpian Accomplishment

The President and his advisers have called those opposing them in Minnesota radical lunatics, domestic terrorists, and outright insurrectionists. Do they expect us to have already forgotten that, on Trump’s first day back in the White House, he pardoned more than a thousand actual insurrectionists who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf, in a vain effort to block his 2020 electoral defeat? On Tuesday, barely an hour after urging demonstrators in Tehran to “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!,” Trump issued a call for retribution against the “anarchists and professional agitators” protesting him in Minnesota. By Wednesday, he’d walked back his pledge of assistance to the protesters in Iran. “Help is on its way,” he’d said. But it wasn’t. The violent confrontation that Trump craves most is the war at home, against the enemy within. It’s not his only goal, though. Trump himself has told us another: “RETRIBUTION.” I know it doesn’t make any sense; it’s hard to see why the President would bear a grudge against an entire state. But grievances drive Trump, and he has one against Minnesota. “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times,” he said last week. “I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state-a corrupt voting state.” The fact that these claims are ridiculous-Trump never even won as much as a full forty-seven per cent of the vote there, in any of the three Presidential elections in which he ran-does not make this any less of a grave threat. Is the President capable of exacting revenge over a lie? Of course he is. Late last year, Reuters documented at least four hundred and seventy targets of retribution whom Trump has singled out since returning to office. Nearly a hundred prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have been fired or forced out for working on cases against Trump or his allies, or because they were alleged to be too woke. Roughly fifty people, businesses, or other entities have been threatened with investigations or penalties for opposing Trump. The White House itself has directly issued at least thirty-six orders, decrees, and directives targeting at least a hundred specific individuals and entities with punitive actions. More than a hundred security clearances have been revoked from those on his enemies list. And all that was only by the end of November. A year ago, there were still those who believed-or at least hoped-that Trump’s explicitly stated vow of a second-term Presidency focussed on revenge and retribution was just more bluster. How wrong they were. In a speech on Wednesday night, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz , argued that what is happening in his state right now is “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.” The state has sued to stop it, but a federal judge has not yet granted an injunction, and legal experts are skeptical that the case will succeed. In the meantime, Walz described a situation...

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