No Kings, No Crowds, No Clue

While Trump paraded past empty bleachers and ICE stormed blue cities, millions marched, and one delusional gunman hid in a cornfield. Guess who looked like the threat?

Good morning! The largest manhunt in Minnesota history ended not with a dramatic shootout or a cinematic standoff, but with a soggy man in a cornfield surrendering to a swarm of drones and ditch-crawling SWAT teams. Vance Boelter, the man accused of assassinating Democratic House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and wounding another state senator and his wife, was found Sunday evening after two days of terror and speculation. His car abandoned, his cowboy hat ditched in a field, Boelter emerged not as a mastermind but as a radicalized, debt-ridden evangelical security contractor who once led a fake company and now stands accused of multiple counts of politically motivated murder. Authorities recovered multiple AK-47s, handguns, a ballistic vest, and a hand-scribbled hit list targeting Democratic politicians and Planned Parenthood locations.

Boelter, we now know, was a devoted Trump supporter. Friends say he spiraled after failed business ventures, consumed by financial anxiety and conspiracy-fueled rage. He dressed as a police officer to carry out his attacks, reportedly drawing inspiration from Trump’s rhetoric about “liberating” cities from liberal rule. It worked exactly the way stochastic terrorism is supposed to work: deny responsibility, light the fire, walk away whistling. On Sunday morning, while Minnesotans reeled, Trump called Governor Tim Walz a “grossly incompetent person” and said nothing, nothing, about the targeted killings. And why would he? His administration had already gutted the DHS office tasked with preventing precisely this kind of violence. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), designed to interrupt radicalization before it turned deadly, was stripped to the studs, reduced from 45 full-time staff to “a handful,” in the words of its former director.

But why fund community violence prevention when you can fund ICE raids in blue cities instead? That’s the latest strategy, anyway: punish resistance with repression. As protests swell outside ICE facilities, the Trump administration is flooding sanctuary cities with immigration agents and federal force, ramping up deportations, and—true to form—deploying weapons-grade tear gas banned by the U.S. military in the 1990s. In Portland, one nurse was shot in the face with a rubber bullet. Protesters reported vomiting and burning sensations from clouds of “green gas” identified as hexachloroethane, a toxic substance that lingers in soil, lungs, and waterways. Local police, meanwhile, are clearing driveways for ICE agents. In a sanctuary city.

The list of cities being targeted reads like a roll call of Democratic governance: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., with tactical ICE “response teams” now staged or active in each. In some places, National Guard troops and Marine units are also assisting federal agents, under what officials call “crisis integration protocols.” In English: the gloves are off.

Make no mistake, this is Project 2025 in action. The Heritage Foundation’s 920-page authoritarian blueprint calls for the dismantling of federal programs not aligned with “national interest”, read: border enforcement and cultural conformity. CP3, the violence prevention unit dismantled earlier this year, was a casualty of this purge. In its place: militarized ICE raids, propaganda about “illegals,” and executive orders that treat sanctuary cities as insurgent zones.

Under Project 2025, agencies like DHS and DOJ are to be fully subordinated to presidential will, with career civil servants fired and replaced by loyalists. They restructured police coordination across jurisdictions, bypassing governors and mayors. The government reframes resistance as rebellion. And federal force becomes the preferred tool of social discipline, not just law enforcement.

So when Trump sends ICE into cities that dared to protest his parade, he’s not just being vindictive. He’s operationalizing a policy framework designed to punish dissent and expand control. It doesn’t matter that it violates local laws, or poisons neighborhoods. It’s not about public safety, it’s about political domination, sold under the same banner: “restoring law and order.”

Project 2025 doesn’t just permit these actions, it institutionalizes them. It envisions a president with unchecked control over agencies like ICE and DOJ, immune from state resistance, and free to criminalize protest under the guise of “public order.”

Over in a field of wet flags and emptier bleachers, the rest of the country was treated to a very different kind of collapse: Trump’s long-hyped Flag Day birthday parade, a $50 million flex intended to conjure North Korea and Bastille Day, fizzled into a sad loop of creaky tires, limp salutes, and demoralized street vendors muttering, “Nobody is buying Trump gear.” The most-watched clip of the entire event was ambient tire noise. Vendors tried to unload MAGA hats while tanks rolled past hollow crowds. It was supposed to project dominance, instead it projected decay.

Trump, furious about the turnout, mocked online by Canadians, Russians and Americans alike, and widely panned for wasting taxpayer funds on what one pundit called a “fossil fuel cosplay”, spiraled into one of the most bizarre public meltdowns of his post-indictment presidency. First, he declared that the absence of rain on his birthday proved climate change was fake: “They said 100% chance of rain. Didn’t rain. So how can they predict 100 years out?” Then, he posted a series of increasingly unhinged social media declarations directing ICE to raid what he called “Democratic power centers” to stop “transgender for everyone.”

He ordered ICE to launch the largest mass deportation operation in history, citing New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago as targets. “ICE officers are herewith ordered by notice of this truth...” read one post, and yes, it actually said that. There was no phone call to the Minnesota governor, no public condolences, just fascist cosplay and deranged ramblings.

Meanwhile, Trump landed in Alberta, Maple MAGA country, for the G7 summit, fresh off blocking new sanctions on Russia and mumbling about making deals with Iran while missiles fly across the Middle East. He told reporters, “Sometimes they have to fight it out,” as if international war is a bar fight. And when asked how trade deals were going, he responded, “We just send them a letter telling them how much to pay.”

Back home, the Abrego Garcia case continues to expose the rot at the core of this administration. A blistering new sanctions motion filed by Garcia’s legal team accuses the DOJ of defying a unanimous 9–0 Supreme Court ruling, lying under oath, suppressing documents, and publicly defaming a man they were legally required to return to the United States.

A court ordered the government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia after his illegal expulsion to El Salvador. Instead, they staged a procedural ambush, rerouting him to face unrelated charges in Tennessee, while doing everything possible to avoid compliance with federal court orders. The motion lays bare what the court itself has already described as deliberate obstruction and bad faith litigation tactics. And now, Garcia’s attorneys are asking the judge to make it hurt.

Among the most explosive requests? That the court compel Trump loyalists like Pam Bondi to turn over their phones, personal devices, and communications on the grounds that the DOJ has forfeited the right to be trusted as a steward of its own discovery. Bondi, along with figures like Kristi Noem, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller, appears repeatedly in Exhibit D: a 100+ item dossier of public statements vowing that Garcia would “never return” to the U.S., statements made even as the courts were ordering the exact opposite.

The motion asks the court to accept a series of adverse inferences: that the U.S. government not only failed to act, but actively colluded with El Salvador to keep Garcia in custody. That it never took steps to reverse the illegal deportation. That it withheld documents intentionally because those documents would confirm everything Garcia’s legal team has alleged. And perhaps most damning of all, that senior DHS officials may have committed perjury in depositions.

We are looking at a test of whether the judiciary has any power left when the executive branch treats the rule of law as optional. And if the court grants even a fraction of these requests, including the appointment of a special master, civil contempt charges, and retroactive daily fines, this could become a landmark case in constitutional accountability.

Even now, the administration’s allies are still trying to spin it. JD Vance, in one particularly dystopian quote now immortalized in the motion, said, “Not everyone gets due process. That depends on how much time and money we have.” That’s not just a misstatement, it’s a damn mission statement, delivered by a man one heartbeat from the presidency who apparently skimmed the Constitution the way most people skim a terms-of-service agreement.

So yes, the week was bleak. A gunman stalked elected officials. A federal parade flopped. ICE brought chemical warfare to city streets. And at an international summit, America’s president once again proved he’s more interested in adoration than alliances.

But millions of people said “no”, loudly, proudly, and collectively. The No Kings protests weren’t just symbolic, they were historic, record-setting and defiant.