After writing my umpteenth explainer of this or that legislative, executive or judicial-branch development of 2025, it hit me there was an obvious pattern that I discussed at New York:

Systemic chaos and confusion have been the reigning leifmotif of the second Trump presidency. If your grasp of the way government is supposed to work is based on Schoolhouse Rock or social studies lessons on “how a bill becomes law,” the last five months or so must have been baffling to you. It’s not an accident, either: Donald Trump’s ways of doing business make the normal business practices of the public sector all but impossible.

Congress has done remarkably little this year other than slowly and erratically tinker on the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. When reconciliation bills were conceived of in the early ‘70s, they were meant to provide some budgetary discipline to Congress. Over time they have become the principle way for majority parties with governing trifectas to enact massive collections of legislation without fear of a Senate filibuster. Reconciliation bills, put simply, are a way to take power from the minority party. They are tailor-made for a president with authoritarian tendencies and largely undivided party support to ram through a vast agenda. And so, unsurprisingly, the 2025 reconciliation bill is bigger and badder than any of its predecessors. During his first term in 2017, Congress packaged Trump’s agenda into two reconciliation bills. This time he insisted on doing everything at once, creating a truly monstrous megabill.

Budget reconciliation bills have their own incredibly obscure and complex set of rules and procedures that confound everyone but a small tribe of budget wonks. There are multiple layers to the development of a megabill, from a budget resolution that sets targets, to “reconciliation instructions” that tell House and Senate committees what to produce in the way of revenues and spending, to all-night Senate “vote-a-ramas” where the minority party gets to offer dozens of symbolic amendments designed to make the majority look bad. Once the assembled bill reaches the Senate, that chamber’s nonpartisan parliamentarian rules on which provisions fail to meet the criteria for inclusion in such bills. Then the majority party will try to put Humpty Dumpty back together by tweaking the offending provisions, or altering other items to make the overall arithmetic work. All this is happening very quickly, and largely behind the scenes. And then the House has to accept changes made by the Senate or the whole wild process more or less starts over.

Figuring out where things stand at any given moment with a reconciliation bill is all but impossible, so people rely on big partisan narratives. To Republicans, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a carefully wrought device to extend and create tax cuts for people who deserve them; to boost national defense and border security spending; to reverse the “open borders” policies of the Biden administration; and to reduce government “waste, fraud and abuse.” To Democrats it’s an abominable reverse-Robin Hood measure to give tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of vulnerable poor and middle-class Americans, whose Medicaid, Obamacare, and SNAP benefits will be slashed. Each party accuses the other of fiscal profligacy. Sometimes Republicans jockeying for leverage in their own caucuses temporarily agree with Democrats and yell and posture, but it’s understood that in the end they will toe the party line. No one will read the final bills that Trump will likely push through the House and Senate. So how can citizens comprehend the consequences until the dust clears and the new laws are fully implemented? They really can’t; it’s all based on partisanship, trust, selective information, and gut instincts. Civics in action it isn’t. And it’s all being done this way because Trump has insisted on making the Big Beautiful Bill a testament to his own power and historical significance.

The chaos in the judicial branch is arguably even worse. Since the Trump administration is determined to expand presidential powers to the breaking point, it is inviting and sometimes initiating litigation in the federal courts on a vast array of issues. In general challenges to Trump’s policies have succeeded more often than not in the lower courts. But many issues will only be resolved when they reach a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, on the final day of that Court’s current term, the conservative majority restricted the ability of lower-court judges to put a hold on the administration’s many power grabs through nationwide injunctions. So more than ever, all roads lead to incredibly high-stakes decisions by the Supreme Court, three of whose members owe their life-time appointments to Trump.

That same Supreme Court, moreover, is increasingly prone to issuing temporary orders with no explanation. This often helps the administration work its will, but leaves a lot of questions unresolved, as the Brennan Center recently explained:

“Today, the justices grant relief in contentious shadow docket cases twice as often as they did just a few years ago. The surge in issuing this relief has coincided with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court.”

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Supreme Court conservatives are trying to hide their tracks on controversial cases. Just this week the Court permitted the administration to resume deporting immigrants to random and often dangerous countries other than their own without a hearing — and the decision was made with no oral arguments and no majority opinion. Who knows what it means in the long run? Those without a law school education and a huge amount of time on their hands will be lost trying to follow it all.

On top of everything else, the Trump 2.0 executive branch has engaged in an incredible amount of secrecy and procedural chaos, all of it making it hard to know what will happen to the federal government and millions of federal employees. Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative may be winding down a bit with its chief’s recent departure from the administration. But the damage it wreaked throughout the public sector via arbitrary mass firings, lockdowns of agencies and programs, refusals to pay invoices, and sheer terror tactics by embedded teams of totally inexperienced data geeks, will live on for years. And anyone relying on, much less working on, federal programs and benefits will be seeing shadow ninjas jumping out of the walls to blow it all up for a long time.

Post-Musk, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has emerged as the real quarterback of executive branch aggressive chaos. The steely Christian nationalist and Project 2025 co-creator wants to shrink the federal government radically. He’s renowned for pursing all sorts of obscure power-grabbing measures that only a handful of people fully understand, including spending rescissions (cancellation of previously appropriated funds, which must be approved by Congress), spending deferrals (delays in releasing previously appropriated funds, which can be overriden by Congress), “pocket rescissions” (deferrals issued just before the end of the fiscal year so that Congress won’t have time to override them), and impoundments (blatant refusals to spend appropriated dollars). It’s all in play.

Top it all off with a powerful president who is famously erratic, and it’s hard to see the road ahead, or even the road underneath one’s feet right now. To understand any given issue you need to know where it stands in the latest version of the budget bill; whether it’s subject to federal court litigation; what the executive branch is doing to undermine the prerogatives of Congress and the courts; and what priorities Trump may choose at any given moment. It’s a lot, every minute of every day, and the relentless chaos fostered by the 47th president continues to defy every single precedent.

As an inveterate defender of the value of public opinion research, I sprang into action at New York when critics mocked pollsters for getting the NYC Democratic mayoral primary wrong:

One of the reasons Zohran Mamdani’s smashing victory yesterday created such a sensation is that public polls (overall) did a poor job of predicting the size and shape of both his and Andrew Cuomo’s coalitions in the Democratic mayoral primary. An average of these polls prepared by Race to the WH showed Cuomo with 36.4 percent of first-choice ballots and Mamdani with 28.6 percent. While nearly all of these polls showed Cuomo being pushed into a ranked-choice battle with Mamdani, and a few (notably the final survey from Emerson College) showed the democratic socialist prevailing in the final calculation, only one public survey, from Public Policy Polling, predicted a first-choice Mamdani plurality. No one provided evidence of a Mamdani plurality so large that his nomination was certain without waiting for the final ranked-choice numbers.

The polling miss will be a source of great joy among those who think polling plays too great a role in contemporary politics — or that would like to get rid of polling altogether. The idea that we should rely on hunches, spin, prejudice, and tiny-sample reporting to get a handle on public opinion rather than trying to measure it objectively strikes me as, to use a technical term, willfully stupid. But partly to rebut polling nihilists, and to promote a better understanding of what polls can and cannot be expected to do, it’s worth a look at why they were wrong in New York. Here, a few reasons:

Polls are snapshots of fast-moving races

This explanation may seem too obvious to require explanation, but highly dynamic multicandidate contests often take shape late in a cycle, when ads and get-out-the-vote efforts have reached their maximum impact in both persuading and mobilizing voters. Polls often can’t capture such trends, which is why we often mystify them with terms like momentum. Only a few pollsters (e.g., Marist, Data for Progress, and Emerson) did multiple surveys, making apples-to-apples comparisons possible. There was clearly a Mamdani trend underway, but its size and durability was hard to nail down.

Primary polling is always shaky

It’s a truism in the political-analysis biz that polling for general elections is typically more accurate than polling for party primaries. The reasons are simple enough: Much of the electoral behavior we see each November is entirely predictable thanks to partisan patterns that recur time and time again and change slowly, if at all. Candidate choice in primaries is far less mechanical and thus is more fluid and harder to capture. So fairly sizable polling errors in primaries are actually normal, not a sign that they are for some reason becoming useless or misleading. You should just add a few grains of salt to any primary poll.

Turnout in a race like New York’s is extremely hard to predict

All polls are based on models that make certain assumptions about the shape of the electorate, which in turn depends on turnout patterns. There’s nothing much more difficult to predict than who will show up for a municipal primary in late June of a non-presidential, non-midterm election year. For all the local and national hype, heavy campaign spending, and genuine excitement associated with the New York mayoral primary, turnout was only about 30 percent. The value of precedents was limited; for one thing, the advent of early-voting opportunities (a relative novelty in New York, where there was no early voting prior to 2019) has added a new variable to turnout and likely helped boost the participation of the younger voters who backed Mamdani so decisively. More fortuitously, the extremely high temperatures that afflicted the city on Tuesday likely depressed turnout among the older voters central to Cuomo’s prospects for victory.

Ranked-choice voting complicates everything

This was only the second mayoral primary conducted under the controversial ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to express second-through-fifth-place candidate preferences, with a postelection calculation eliminating lower preferences until someone wins a majority. While there has been a lot of talk about how RCV might affect who won or lost, it’s equally important to comprehend that the system has a complex and hard-to-measure impact on campaign strategies (especially the cross endorsements that Mamdani used effectively) and how voters process their own decisions, particularly when everyone is still a novice at utilizing RCV. A lot of late-deciding voters were just figuring out how RCV worked, which very likely affected how they responded to polls.

Maybe 2025 is a bad year for pollsters

It’s almost always a bad idea to generalize from any one contest, or any one election cycle, that “the polls” (another generalization) are good or bad. For one thing, they are always useful in providing analytical data, even if they’re “wrong” about predicting winners or winning margins. Some data is better than no data at all. Beyond that core dogma, which cannot be repeated too often, the reality is that polls are more accurate in some election years than others and vary by the type of race involved. Most famously, the 2016 presidential-general-election polls were pretty accurate at the national level but erred decisively in the battleground states that unexpectedly vaulted Donald Trump to the White House. Similarly, 2024 general-election polls were reasonably accurate, but a slight underestimation of Trump’s vote in the battleground states, which tilted all of them into his column, made them seem off. 2020, by contrast, was a “bad” presidential election for polls, in part because the pandemic introduced a lot of uncertainty into turnout patterns and candidate preference alike.

Polling in non-presidential election years is harder to assess because they are less frequent and consistent, and the only “national” numbers predict the overall House popular vote, which is not that tightly related to the number of seats won or lost. But 2022, to cite the most recent example, was a “good” midterm election for polls. There’s no telling what the scattered election landscape of 2025 will ultimately show (there’s no public polling at all in many off-year races), and pollsters are constantly refining their methodologies as well. So the smart thing to do is to wait a beat, or two, or three before making any sweeping judgments about what the New York City results mean for the relevance of polls.

At New York, I wrote a post about Andrew Cuomo and the sort of faux-centrism I believe he represents–the week before the former governor went down to a shocking defeat in the New York Democratic mayoral primary. Maybe I was on to something….

There’s something very familiar to me in the air right now as some Democrats unhappy with the alleged leftist direction of their party aggressively brand themselves as “centrist.” I spent quite a few years, you see, associated directly or indirectly with 20th and early 21st-century Democratic centrism, eventually serving as policy director for the famous Clinton-adjacent Democratic Leadership Council. That organization finally closed its doors in 2011, mostly because its principal goal of making it possible for a Democrat to be elected president had been redundantly accomplished.

The DLC and the politicians associated with it regularly oscillated between two distinct impulses: (1) advancing a positive policy agenda rather than simply defending past progressive accomplishments, and (2) disassociating the Democratic Party from some of the more toxic policy and political habits of the left. Bill Clinton embodied both impulses in his 1992 campaign and subsequent presidency: promoting polices from national service to reinventing government to welfare reform that also helped position him as a “different kind of Democrat,” or as we liked to say, a “New Democrat.”

All along there were people in and around the DLC who weren’t all that interested in policy ideas, but were really into “pushing off the left” as some of us called it, or “hippie-punching” as some critics described it. Some of the hippie-punchers unsurprisingly wound up becoming Republicans or Republican-enabling deal-cutters, including longtime DLC chairman and 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. In any event, the extremism of the 21st-century Republican Party, intensified by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, convinced my kind of DLC Democrats to declare an intraparty truce and work with progressives against the common foe.

Since Trump’s successful comeback in 2024, however, there’s a new era of Democratic intraparty tension clearly underway. And while efforts to bring back some sort of DLC-style institutional presence haven’t born fruit so far, we are definitely seeing the second coming of a breed of centrist Democratic politician who is as interested in “pushing off the left,” almost to the exclusion of any other purpose, as anyone in Clinton’s orbit. Indeed, two of today’s prime examples, Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emanuel, made their bones as Clinton administration figures (the former as HUD secretary and the latter as a key White House staffer). As Ben Mathis-Lilley argues compellingly at Slate, both men embody what he calls centrist “identity politics,” based on positioning and intraparty conflict more than anything positive or tangible:

“[T]here is the tendency of well-to-do Democrats who work in law, finance, management, and the media to become captivated by a certain kind of pugnacious, business-friendly centrist—examples include Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Rahm Emanuel. The Bloombergs and Emanuels win this audience—which includes numerous high-level donors and pundits—by taking shots at the left and extolling their own contrasting commitment to pragmatism and realism. Crucially, their hold on their elite base persists even if, in practice, they turn out to be inept candidates or incompetent managers with few practicable ideas. …

“And no one coasts on reputation for pugnacious realism, in U.S. politics, like Mario Cuomo’s son. Yes, he was forced into resigning in 2021 because a large number of women (including several who worked for him) said he had harassed or groped them; one of those gross interactions even happened on camera. … But let’s not forget that at that time, he was also being exposed for having lied repeatedly about COVID deaths in New York nursing homes and other aspects of his pandemic response. … Extensive reporting by New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister depicted a Cuomo administration that had almost no interest at all in what the actual consequences of its own policies would be, operating entirely as a vehicle for Cuomo’s spotlight craving and feuds with other political figures.”

Cuomo’s “not a lefty” political identity has reached its apotheosis in his current campaign for mayor of New York, in which he has managed to get himself into a virtual two-way race against a young Muslim democratic socialist who has been outspokenly hostile toward Israel’s war in Gaza. “I’m not Zohran Mamdani” appears to be Cuomo’s main message, aside from the personal “toughness” that is supposed to make him an effective battler against the Trump administration.

This last characteristic of latter-day belligerent centrists is key. There are certainly plenty of Democratic politicians who are decidedly not “of the left” — say, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, or for that matter, Joe Biden. But all of these centrist Democrats have more than a passing interest in policies as opposed to positioning, and also are committed to intraparty civility.

Cuomo and Emanuel, on the other hand, enjoy long-standing reputations for being — to use a technical term — assholes. Cuomo in particular has inspired loathing among a wide swath of associates and observers, regardless of party or ideology. In a Democratic Party longing desperately for someone to fight back against the terrifying second Trump administration, mere pugnacity can be advertised as a real asset.

Unfortunately, in the long run, brains matter as much as spine in politics. To effectively challenge the Trump administration, centrist Democrats need a fresh policy agenda and a reputation of competence, not just a willingness to fight. And within the Democratic Party, new ideas and a sense of camaraderie will do more for centrists than calling progressives names. Perhaps the most encouraging sign on the center-left is the emergence of the so-called “abundance agenda,” which combines some specific policy goals for Democrats with an acute but not unsympathetic analysis of how the left has managed to frustrate the ability of government to get things done. It’s interesting that one of the authors who has helped stimulate this debate, Marc Dunkelman (author of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back), was once communications director for the DLC.

In the ongoing emergency of the Trump era, there’s nothing wrong with a robust intra–Democratic Party debate, even if that means an occasional sharp elbow. But those promoting a sort of centrist identity politics of conflict without substance would be well-advised to work harder to identify with the common values and goals that unite Democrats across the spectrum, and to make successful governance rather than ideological positioning the gold standard.

Sometimes you have to look a little deeper than the headlines to understand polls, and I did so at New York this week:

A new Reuters-Ipsos poll provides the unsurprising news that rank-and-file Democrats are displeased with their party’s leadership. The numbers are pretty stark:

“Some 62% of self-identified Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that ‘the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people.’ Only 24% disagreed and the rest said they weren’t sure or didn’t answer.”

Some of the more specific complaints the poll identified are a little strange. “Just 17% of Democrats said allowing transgender people to compete in women and girls’ sports should be a priority, but 28% of Democrats think party leaders see it as such.” This is largely hallucinatory. With the arguable exception of those in Maine, who earlier this year fought with the Trump administration over the power to regulate their own school sports programs, most Democrats in the public eye have given this sub-issue (inflated into gigantic proportions by demagogic ads from the Trump campaign last year) a very wide berth. It’s not a great sign that Democrats are viewing their own party through the malevolent eyes of the opposition.

But beyond that problem, there’s a questionable tendency to assume that changing “the leadership” will address concerns that are really just the product of the party having lost all its power in Washington last November. And to some extent, the alleged “disconnect” between party and leadership is exaggerated by the lurid headlines about the poll. For example, “86% of Democrats said changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority, more than the 72% of those surveyed think party leaders make it a top concern.” That’s not a particularly large gap, and, in fact, there are virtually no Democrats in Congress who are not grinding away like cicadas on the message that Republicans are trying to cut taxes on “wealthy Americans and large corporations.”

The more fundamental question may be this: Who, exactly, are the “Democratic leaders” the rank and file wants to replace? It’s not an easy question to answer. I am reasonably confident that a vanishingly small percentage of Democrats could name the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, despite some media stories about turmoil at the DNC since his election.

According to a recent Economist-YouGov survey, 36 percent of self-identified Democrats had no opinion of the “Democratic leader” closest to actual power in Washington, Hakeem Jeffries, who is very likely to become Speaker of the House in 2027. Of those who did have an opinion, 51 percent were favorable toward him and 13 percent were unfavorable, which doesn’t sound much like a mandate for “replacing” him. In the same poll, Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, had a 48 percent favorable and 28 percent unfavorable rating among Democrats, which is surprisingly positive given the massive negative publicity he earned for botching a confrontation with Republicans over a stopgap spending bill in March. Indeed, the favorability ratios for every named Democrat in that poll are a lot better than you’d expect if the rank and file were really in a “throw the bums out” kind of mood: Bernie Sanders is at 82 percent favorable to 8 percent unfavorable; Pete Buttigieg is at 62 percent favorable to 9 percent unfavorable; Elizabeth Warren is at 67 percent favorable to 12 percent unfavorable; Cory Booker is at 56 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable; Gavin Newsom is at 56 percent favorable to 17 percent unfavorable; and Gretchen Whitmer is at 49 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable.

Democrats obviously don’t have a president to offer unquestioned leadership, but back in the day, losing presidential nominees were often called the “titular leader” of the party until the next nominee was named. Under that definition, the top “Democratic leader” right now is Kamala Harris. Democrats aren’t mad at her, either: Her favorability ratio per Economist-YouGov is a Bernie-esque 84 percent favorable to 10 percent unfavorable. Her 2024 running mate, Tim Walz, comes in at 65 percent favorable and 13 percent unfavorable.

These findings that aren’t consistent with any narrative of a party rank and file in revolt. The source of Democratic unhappiness, it’s reasonably clear, is less about party leaders and more about the party’s dramatic loss of power, even as Donald Trump has asserted the most massive expansion of totally partisan presidential power in U.S. history. No new set of leaders is going to fix that.

Barring a really nasty and divisive nomination contest, the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will become the unquestioned leader of the party, at least until Election Day. Jeffries, as noted, could enormously raise his profile if Democrats flip the House in 2026, and midterm elections could create new stars. Other Democrats could have big moments like Cory Booker’s after his 26-hour speech deploring Trump’s agenda or Gavin Newsom’s during his toe-to-toe messaging fight with the administration over its assault on his state. But in the end, Democrats on the ground and in the trenches won’t be satisfied until their words can be backed up with real power.

 

Keeping up with the norms being violated by the second Trump administration is tough, but I did write about an important one this week at New York:

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller have an arithmetic problem with their mass-deportation initiative. They appear frantic to ramp up deportations. Miller reportedly chewed out ICE brass (“Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”) on the numbers not long before the agency launched its fateful raids in Los Angeles. But at the same time, the administration has been getting major heat from certain industries — particularly agriculture and hospitality — that going after their workforces would be a really bad idea. Indeed, according to the New York Times, Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins lobbied her boss to ease up on farmworkers. Then, suddenly, Trump was expressing a change of heart on Truth Social. He wrote on June 12:

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace. In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”

This wasn’t just loose talk. While border czar Tom Homan denied that any policy change on deportation targeting was underway, ICE itself took the hint, as Axios reported:

“Tatum King, a senior ICE official, sent an email to agency officials nationwide, telling them to ‘please hold on all worksite enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meatpacking plants), restaurants, and operating hotels.’”

So what’s the focus now? Trump made no bones about it in a Truth Social post on June 15:

“[W]e must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!”

There you have it: The president of the United States is very clearly telling his deportation shock troops to wage partisan war on cities that are the “Democrat Power Center,” based on the hallucinatory idea — a MAGA staple — that “Radical Left Democrats” are herding millions of undocumented workers to the polls to “cheat in Elections and grow the Welfare State.” It’s all a crock, but reflects a distinctly Trumpian mash-up of the “great replacement theory” and crime-wave myths. And the targeting of blue cities seems to have already taken place, Axios recently reported, especially in red states where state law-enforcement officials have encouraged maximum cooperation with ICE:

“Efforts to arrest and remove unauthorized immigrants appear most aggressive in five southern states with Democratic-leaning cities, while deeply red, rural states are seeing less activity, according to an Axios analysis. …

“[L]ocal law enforcement agencies in Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia have been most cooperative with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through deals known as 287 (g) agreements. There are 629 such agreements now in place across the country. About 43% of them are in Florida, followed by 14% in Texas and 5% in Georgia.

“The GOP-led state governments in Florida, Texas and Virginia also have made a point of pushing local agencies to partner with federal agents, leading to a series of high-profile, mass raids in those states.”

In effect, Republican state administrations are working with the Feds to come down on Democratic-run cities to scourge immigrant populations. And in blue states like California, the mass deportations feel more like all-out partisan war. Certainly the federalization of National Guard units and planned deployment of Marines to Los Angeles — a place Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called a “city of criminals” that the administration would “liberate” from its “socialist” elected leadership — signaled an armed takeover more than any sort of law-enforcement initiative. And now Trump is making the partisanship behind it all too explicit for anyone to miss or deny. While this overt politicization of mass deportation may please Trump’s MAGA base, it will likely erode his popularity more generally.

For now, Trump-friendly industries in Trump-friendly parts of the country need not worry so much, but all those radical-left hellholes better prepare for the onset of fire and ICE. After all, Stephen Miller has quotas to meet.