The fatal flaw in Donald Trump's scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

A masked ICE agent aims his automatic weapon at a woman journalist filming an Operation Midway Crackdown raid in Chicago.

It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word. They don’t hide under the table. They eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

– Jean-Paul Sartre

  • The fatal flaw in Donald Trump’s scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

  • The initial story from ICE was that 30-year-old Marimar Martinez was part of a “convoy” of cars in the Brighton Park neighborhood of southwest Chicago, which was trailing ICE vehicles for half an hour, ramming them with their cars and trying to force them off the road.

At one point, a DHS official later claimed, Martinez aimed an automatic weapon at the ICE agents, who, fearing for their lives, responded by shooting Martinez repeatedly.

But once again, the government’s story unraveled once the body cam footage was released. Videos from ICE cameras, as well as Martinez’s own Facebook livestream, show Martinez following the ICE vehicles, while frequently honking her horn.

Contrary to the allegations made by DHS, at no point does the video show Martinez, a US citizen with no criminal record, turn her car toward the ICE vehicles. Instead, the footage captures the ICE agent swerving his white Chevy Tahoe into Martinez’s Nissan SUV, forcing her to a stop.

There’s no evidence that Martinez pointed a weapon at the ICE agent. Rather, the ICE agent can be heard on the recording almost begging Martinez to give him a reason to shoot her: “Do something, bitch!” he says as he exits his car and seconds later unloads a volley of shots at Martinez, hitting her seven times.

This is the latest episode of ultra-violence in Trump’s Operation Midway Blitz, where ICE agents have killed and brutalized Chicago residents for reasons that later turned out to be bogus.

Three weeks ago, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez was shot by an ICE agent after dropping his daughter off at pre-school in Franklin Park, a suburb west of Chicago. ICE originally said that Villegas-Gonzalez was shot after he tried to run over an ICE agent, who DHS claimed had been severely wounded. But the video of the incident recorded the voice of the officer grazed by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car saying his injury was “nothing major.” Another video showed that Villegas-Gonzalez was driving away from the ICE officers, not toward them. DHS tried to smear Villegas-Gonzalez as a dangerous criminal with a “history of reckless driving.” But a new report by NBC News Chicago shows that he had never been convicted or even charged with a crime.

Marimar Martinez works at a local school. She has no criminal record and is highly regarded by her colleagues, employers and neighbors. After being shot, she managed to drive her SUV to a nearby oil service station. She parked the Nissan, now perforated with bullet holes, in the lot and staggered into the office, where the manager of the shop tried to stanch the flow of blood with those ubiquitous blue towels common at gas stations.

On a recording of his call to 911, the manager can be heard saying, “Send somebody quick because this lady is bleeding profusely. I mean, it was instant puddles.”

When the paramedics arrived and began to treat her wounds, a bullet fell out of her arm and onto the floor of the office.

The FBI and ICE trailed the ambulance to the hospital, where Martinez was arrested before she’d even been fully treated by ER doctors. A few days later, Martinez was charged with felony assault on a federal law enforcement official.

But at her arraignment, Federal Judge Heather McShain denied the government’s demand that Martinez be held without bail, ruling that her lack of criminal history and ties to the community persuaded her to release Martinez pending trial, a pretty stern rebuke to the government’s inflated theory of the case.

  • ICE agents handcuffed and detained Chicago Alderperson Jessie Fuentes inside a hospital emergency room this week, after she had demanded they share a warrant for a man they detained inside the hospital, who was reportedly injured during a chase. She was later released. Fuentes: “I went over to the hospital and I simply asked the ICE agents if they had a signed judicial warrant for the individual that they were trying to detain inside of the emergency room. No one was harassing the ICE agents. In fact, the only person harassed in that situation was me. I was handcuffed and shoved twice up against the wall for simply exercising my right to advocate for my constituents.”

  • David J. Bier: ”You can’t enjoy a cup of coffee in Chicago without armed federal agents storming out and tackling you. This used to be a free country. We will become one again. Don’t give up hope, and don’t let them trick you into thinking this is normal.”

  • Chicago priest Father Michael Pfleger on the real purveyor of violence in America:

The state of emergency is in America, not Chicago. And it’s birthed from this president and his administration. Dr. King said he could not raise his voice against the violence of the oppressed without first speaking clearly to the greater purveyor of violence, his own country. And those are my words to you, Mr. Trump. Before you dare speak about any violence in Chicago, look into your mirror and address the violence coming from the White House, the violence of cutting SNAP, which will cut 2.4 million in food access, put 360,000 Illinoisans at risk by taking food off their tables, address the violence of cutting Medicare and Medicaid by $500 million, reducing access to doctors, and threatening the closure of hospitals and nursing home facilities through the state of Illinois, literally putting Americans in life and death situations. Some Americans will die because of your Medicaid cuts.

  • Greg Bovino, the spiked-haired, camera-hungry, roving chief of Border Patrol told CNN that his immigration agents can detain people without a warrant or probable cause if you look panicked when you see a Border Patrol agent, perhaps you look scared, perhaps your demeanor changes, perhaps you’re gripping he steering wheel so tightly I can see the whites of your knuckles. There’s a myriad of factors that we would look at to develop articulable facts for reasonable suspicion.”

  • According to a report by CBS News, ICE has been making fake 911 calls and filing false police reports in Chicago. At least one of the 911 calls was made to harass reporters who were filming outside the ICE holding facility in Broadview, Illinois. The call claimed that a group of people was “tampering with the entrance gate” to the jail. Broadview police Chief Thomas Mills said the ICE calls were “bogus” and “disturbing.” Mills claims that the call about the gate was just one of several false 911 calls the department has received about fake threats to the facility from ICE in the past couple of weeks. This is the same facility where ICE agents have repeatedly attacked journalists, including hitting them with ICE vehicles, shooting rubber bullets at them and spraying them with chemical agents, including a CBS reporter on Sunday.

  • Shooting unarmed priests in the head at close range with pepper bullets is now as America First as apple pie…

Still from a video of an ICE agent shooting Chicago Pastor David Black, a Presbyterian minister, in the head.

  • Talk about anti-Christian violence…

  • In response to these incidents, Federal Judge Sara Ellis has issued a restraining order barring DHS from using riot control weapons “on members of the press, protestors, or religious practitioners who are not posing an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer or others.”

  • Trump: “If a Governor can’t do their job, we will. The Insurrection act has been used before.”

  • Pete Hegseth wanted to make sure he was “just following” Trump’s orders before he dispatched the 82nd Airborne to “war-ravaged” Portland, so he had his deputy, Patrick Weaver, text Stephen Miller for written confirmation: Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there.”

  • More signs the South finally won the Civil War: Troops from the slave state of Texas are now being sent to occupy Abe Lincoln’s Illinois. It’s Reconstruction in reverse.

Washington Post, belatedly confirming original reporting from weeks ago by Cato’s David Bier: “Nearly a quarter of FBI agents across the country are currently reassigned to immigration enforcement. The large number of reassignments reflect a vast reshaping of the agency and could put other priorities at risk.”

  • Stephen Miller: “All that bullshit is done, it’s over, it’s finished. The gangbangers that you deal with — they think they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are.”

  • Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-NC) defended Trump’s deployment of troops to Portland and Chicago:

I don’t think it’s wrong for members of the administration to characterize places like Chicago and Portland as war zones when they are putting up stats of about 50 murders a weekend.

There have been 58 murders in Portland all year as of Oct. 1.) While this summer, Chicago experienced the fewest murders since 1965.

  • Chicago priest Father Michael Pfleger on the real purveyor of violence in America:

The state of emergency is in America, not Chicago. And it’s birthed from this president and his administration. Dr. King said he could not raise his voice against the violence of the oppressed without first speaking clearly to the greater purveyor of violence, his own country. And those are my words to you, Mr. Trump. Before you dare speak about any violence in Chicago, look into your mirror and address the violence coming from the White House, the violence of cutting SNAP, which will cut 2.4 million in food access, put 360,000 Illinoisans at risk by taking food off their tables, address the violence of cutting Medicare and Medicaid by $500 million, reducing access to doctors, and threatening the closure of hospitals and nursing home facilities through the state of Illinois, literally putting Americans in life and death situations. Some Americans will die because of your Medicaid cuts.

  • California Attorney General Bob Bonto on Trump’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act: “The InsurrectionAct requires a violent rebellion trying to take over the government that does not exist, doesn’t exist in Portland, DC, Chicago, L.A., anywhere. But they like the power that these emergency laws provide to them…And so they lie about the factual circumstances to try to justify the power. But they’re inventing facts.”

  • A new Reuters poll shows Trump’s approval rating slumping to 40% and that 58% of Americans oppose using the US military for domestic law enforcement. A more ominous way to read this poll, however, is that more people (42%) support deploying federal troops into cities to crush political dissent than support Trump!

  • Call Alex Jones! We’ve found the Crisis Actor…

  • Oregon’s attorney general Dan Rayfield on the federal court ruling blocking Trump from sending troops into Portland:

The judge had an opportunity to hear all the facts from both sides, and the best that the federal government could do was present facts from Trump’s own social media. We’re using real facts in a courtroom, and that’s why the judge sided with us. Trump just doesn’t get to make things up. You actually have to have real facts if you want to put the military on the streets of our cities.

  • Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on the National Guard troops deployed to Chicago:

They brought blackhawk military helicopters and more than 100 agents in full tactical gear, even though it was supposedly a very dangerous and important mission, they brought dozens of cameras and set them up so that they could film their attack on the building in HD.

  • What’s stopping JB Pritzker and Tina Kotek from deploying the national guard of Illinois and Oregon to stop ICE from violating the civil liberties of citizens, residents, tourists and journalists in their states? In the view of Jefferson, Madison, and George Mason, state militias were meant to be a deterrent against the standing armies of a militarized state.

  • Jeet Heer: “The GOP caved. The Dems caved. Wall Street caved. Big Law caved. The Ivy League universities caved. The DOJ and FBI caved. The media caved. At America’s moment of crisis, the only ones who stood strong were the furries.”

+++

  • What Nixon and his plumbers did in secret, ultimately leading to his ouster from office once exposed, Trump is doing in open view and defying anyone to stop him and hold him to Constitutional account. According to Reuters, the Trump administration is preparing a crackdown on liberal political groups that will utilize the FBI, DHS, IRS and Treasury and Justice departments. Meanwhile, he’s ordered his Justice Department to initiate revenge prosecutions for his political enemies, securing indictments against James Comey and Letitia James. With more to come…

Trump: Comey’s a dishonest guy. All I have to do is…I mean I have nothing to do with the case. I just say, good luck…

Reporter: But you called on Pam Bondi to prosecute him…

Trump: No, no. I don’t call on anybody. But you know what? I’m allowed to do that if I wanted to do that. But Comey’s a crooked guy. He has been for years.

  • One of the first Turning Point USA events after the death and apotheosis of the Modern-Day St. Paul…

  • RFK Jr: Children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol.

Trump: There’s a tremendous amount of proof or evidence. I would say as a non-doctor, but I’ve studied this for a long time.

RFK Jr: Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at 8 months pregnant — she’s an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School — and she is saying ‘F Trump’ and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta. The level of Trump Derangement Syndrome has now left the political landscape and is now a pathology.

  • Why did Dominion Voting Systems suddenly settle their billion-dollar defamation suits against Sydney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and One American News for repeatedly slandering the company over the 2020 elections? The company was recently bought by Liberty, an election tech firm owned by Republicans.

  • In a 100-page opinion, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals says it is easy to determine unequivocally that the Trump administration’s view of birthright citizenship has no basis in fact or law.

  • Demonic sexual performances? You can’t get better advertising than that, Bad Bunny…

  • Evangelical pastor Kim Robinson of the Sozo Ministry said God revealed to her that Charlie Kirk was rewarded with a horse ranch in Heaven and presented her with a vision of “Charlie riding on a horse, with Jesus.”

+++

  • Axios on the possibility (inevitability?) that a bust of the over-inflated AI bubble will collapse the entire economy before AI collapses the atmosphere…

  • Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: “Becoming profitable is not in my top 10 concerns.” Now, he tells us…

  • Deutsche Bank: “The AI bubble is the only thing keeping the US economy together.”

  • The Trump administration’s bizarre contention that increase in electric utility rates is being driven by renewables is completely undermined by the federal government’s own statistics. According to the Energy Information Administration:

Among the 22 states that drew higher-than-average shares of their power from wind and solar, 17 had below-average electricity prices in June.

  • Since 2020, US electricity prices have increased from an average of 0.13 S per kilowatt hour to 0.19 S per kilowatt hour. Increases in electric prices since 2020:

Maine: 67% California: 64% Pennsylvania: 45% New York: 44% Ohio: 43% Oregon: 41% Missouri: 41% Illinois: 40% Florida: 36% Oklahoma: 35% Wyoming: 34% Georgia: 33% Montana: 32% Washington: 31% Texas: 30%

  • Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, and are expected to triple the demand by 2028.

  • From 2017 to 2024, the number of data centers in the U.S. increased from 318 to 5,208.

  • Creating an AI video requires more than 10,000x the computing power of a Google search.

  • Even so, 37 states have now granted tax exemptions for data centers, including ones owned by Google, Meta and Amazon. CNBC found that “one Microsoft data center in Illinois received more than $38 million in data center sales tax exemptions but created just 20 permanent jobs.”

  • Curtis Sliwa at Crain’s candidates forum in NYC on the threat of AI:

In the business community, they’re saying, you know, ‘It’s coming, there’s nothing you can do, it’ll actually create jobs. Create jobs? You better tell the millennials and the Gen Z that, because they’re in fear that the American dream that they will be promised is dissolving right in front of them.

  • Fortune: More Americans are now facing long stretches of unemployment than at any time since the height of the pandemic.

  • Redfin reports that 24% of Americans are cancelling plans for major purchases as a consequence of the shutdown.

  • New York Federal Reserve: “The average perceived probability of finding a new job after losing one has dropped to 44.9%, the lowest point since the survey began in 2013.”

  • According to Fortune, farm bankruptcies are soaring due to cratering crop prices.

  • At least 486,000 people now live full-time in an RV in 2025, according to NBC. That’s more than twice as many as in 2021.

  • 44% of US homeowners and renters are struggling to afford their regular rent or mortgage payments.

  • Fox Business News’s Stuart Varney:

Roasted coffee prices are up 22% in the past year. There’s a 50% tariff on coffee from Brazil. That’s the nation’s biggest coffee supplier. Take a look at this bag right here. The container that bag came in is costing this coffee shop $68,000 more than it did over the summer, so he had to pass some of that along to customers.

  • Morgan Stanley Research says the US dollar has lost 10% of its value this year and estimates the U.S. currency could lose another 10% by the end of 2026.

  • According to an internal proprietary estimate by the Carlyle Group, fewer than 17,000 jobs were created in September.

  • A Hollywood executive told Variety that the Ellisons tapped Bari Weiss to run CBS News because of her appeal to the billionaire class:

She plays to an audience of 200 people. It just happens to be that that audience is made up of people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Ackman. The superrich fucking love her. She’s funny, she’s smart and she’s aligned with their politics.

+++

  • Since the year 2000, nearly 78% of the planet has set new records for all-time maximum monthly temperatures. At least 38% were set in the last five years alone.

  • The Energy Department has added “emissions” and “climate change” to its banned words list. Too bad George Carlin isn’t around to expound upon the 1,723 words you can’t say in the Trump Administration…

  • Chinese electric vehicles, which are priced thousands of dollars less than US and European models, now account for more than half of all global EV sales,

  • Carbon offsets are a corporate scam that hasn’t worked and never will work. Stephen Lezak, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Smith School:

We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale. We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed.

  • The latest evidence that the ocean ecosystems are dying: Since June, around 400 marine mammals have washed up sick or dead on California’s Central Coast since June from leptospirosis, toxic algal blooms and a collapsing food chain. These numbers, records though they are, are almost certainly a vast undercount, since most of the deaths go unnoticed.

+++

  • At least 500 hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics are now closing or at risk of closure because of the Trump/GOP bill that guts health care funding, according to a new report from Protect Our Care.

  • Meanwhile, Trump terminated funding for Supplemental Security Income/Social Security Disability Insurance Outreach, Access and Recovery (SOAR), a program that helped poor people access federal disability benefits and prevent homelessness.

  • The Americas region (Mexico, Canada and the US) is now at risk of losing its “measles-free” status, as vaccination rates drop and measles outbreaks continue to rise. which requires that when an outbreak takes place the country must get back to zero cases within 12 months. The deadline expires at the end of this month for Canada, while the United States has until January and Mexico until February. All three countries are at risk of missing the deadlines.

  • A new study by the National Council on Aging and U-Mass Boston found that “Low-income people over 60 years old die an average of nine years earlier than high-income older Americans. Generally, middle-income older Americans are also dying younger than wealthier people. About 15% of seniors with annual household incomes of roughly $60,000 died during the four-year study period, compared with about 11% in households with incomes of around $120,000.”

  • According to research by the Harvard Medical School, patient deaths increased in the emergency rooms of hospitals after they were acquired by private equity firms, with even additional deaths occurring per 10,000 visits relative to hospitals that were not acquired by private equity.

+++

  • I still haven’t heard from Ben Cohen about his welcome, but still unauthorized appropriation of “DOPE: the Department of Pentagon Excess” from my Roaming Charges column in April. There’s still time to make a conscience-cleansing donation to the CounterPunch fund drive, Ben, and a dispensation will be swiftly rendered.

  • Jesse Watters: “Men who are high-value men like Stephen Miller take risks, they’re brave, they’re unafraid, they’re confident, and they’re on a mission. And they have younger wives.”

Just how young are those wives, Jesse? Release the Epstein files!

  • Speaking of those Epstein files…

CNN: Pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell — is that something you’re open to doing?

TRUMP: Who are we talking about?

CNN: Ghislaine Maxwell

TRUMP: I haven’t heard the name is so long. I can say this — I’d have to take a look at it … I will speak to the DOJ

CNN: She’s convicted of child sex trafficking

  • The campaign slogan for Trump’s idol Andrew Jackson’s 1828 presidential run was: “Vote for Jackson who can fight; not JQ Adams who can write.” Explains a lot.

  • Trump once again gloated incoherently about droning small watercraft in the Caribbean:

We call them the water drugs. The drugs that come in through water. They’re not coming. There are no boats anymore. Frankly, there are no fishing boats. There are no boats out there period, if you want to know the truth. Does anybody go fishing anymore?

Trump has now illegally killed (murdered) at least 17 people in fishing boats in the Caribbean and still can’t cite any legal authority for doing so.

  • In an interview with the NYT’s rightwing columnist Ross Douthat, Douglas Wilson, the Christian nationalist pastor with ties to Pete Hegseth, who wants to turn the US into a theocracy, refused to denounce stoning as a punishment:

  • Hegseth and Trump are both serial adulterers.

  • Indiana Senator Jim Banks on why the entire Hoosier state should be gerrymandered into Republican districts, even though most of the state’s largest cities: Indianapolis, Gary, South Bend, Fort Wayne, Evansville and Bloomington are solidly Democratic:

They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map.

When it comes to political intelligence, Banks makes former Indiana Senator Dan Quayle seem like a veritable Montesquieu in comparison.

  • Hung Cao, the newly appointed Under Secretary of the Navy, rose to MAGA prominence by claiming that Wiccans had taken over California and were bringing “a lot of witchcraft to the state.” Ahoy, midshipmen, you’d better pick up every stitch…

  • On Sunday, South Beach’s Rainbow Crosswalk, specially designed to blend with Miami Beach’s historic Art Deco architecture, was ripped up on the orders of Gov. Ron DeSantis because it celebrates the existence of groups of people he feels deeply insecure about being around.

  • AOC trying out some new material:

I think there are two things that are happening at once: One, there absolutely is an unprecedented abuse of power, destruction of norms, erosion of our government and our democracy in order to prop up an authoritarian style of governance.

  • As Mamdani rode a Citibike in front of Cuomo’s apartment, a woman yelled, “Communist!” He turned to her, smiled and said, “Cyclist!”

  • On the same day, Andrew Cuomo told the Crain’s political forum that he would literally “beg” companies to come to New York if elected mayor, confessing that in the past he’s told companies: “ Come back, I’ll offer you incentives… I’ll find whatever you need.”

  • The political affiliation of Twitter’s user base went from +37 Democrats in 2021 to +14 Republicans in 2025.

  • The Wall Street Journal reports that “former President Joe Biden is having a less lucrative post-presidency than what he’d expected, owing to his advancing age, unpopularity and limited speaking engagements.”

  • MAGA pastor Joel Webbon on Black people who denounce America’s history of racist oppression: “Stop being a little boy. You’re whining and crying about something that’s ultimately your fault.”

James Cameron: “In Star Wars, the good guys are the rebels, they’re using asymmetric warfare against a highly organized empire, I think we call those guys terrorists today.”

George Lucas: “When I did it, they were Vietcong. That was the whole point.”

The Second Coming of Waylon Jennings’s voice, which would kick some MAGA ass today, if only his body had returned with it…

Booked Up What I’m reading this week…

Shadow Ticket Thomas Pynchon (Viking)

Our Grief is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror Jeremy Varon (Chicago)

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley Jacob Silverman (Bloomsbury)

Sound Grammar What I’m listening to this week…

Songbird Waylon Jennings (Son of Jessi)

Worldwide Snooper (Third Man )

Vibrations at the Village: Live at the Village Gate Rashaan Roland Kirk (Resonance)

A Cardinal Rule of the Act

“Some have contended that it was America’s love of pie-throwing that led the nation to develop the atomic bomb. This may or may not be true, but certainly it does help explain the country’s current panic over the possible proliferation of the bombs to unfriendly nations: it’s a cardinal rule of the act that one custard pie leads to another, and he who throws one must sooner or later face one coming from the other direction.” – Robert Coover

The post Roaming Charges: United States of Emergency appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed