Opinion | ‘We Should Be Cleareyed About What’s Happening Here’


We have U.S. troops from red states deployed on the streets of blue states over the objection of people’s elected representatives. Those troops are ostensibly there to defend the government’s paramilitary force that now lands Black Hawk helicopters on Chicago apartment buildings in the middle of the night and drags people out who are citizens and legal residents and children, half-naked, screaming and crying, who have committed no crimes. They just — there was a priest who was praying outside an ICE facility, and it was on video, and they just shot him in the head with a pepper ball. He was doing nothing. He was a priest. He was praying. Like, we might not want American politics to be about this, but American politics is about this. The Trump administration has decided to make American politics about this, and they have used the federal government to make sure that American politics is about this. Am I surprised that the median voter, that the average American isn’t as concerned about this as they are about their own premiums? No, of course not. Because if it’s not happening in your city, and if it’s not happening in your apartment building, and you’re not paying as close attention to the news as political junkies like us, you are of course going to care more about your premiums. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. And that doesn’t mean that if we let this slide and we just ignore it, that Trump is going to stop at deployments in Portland and Chicago. Remember, people thought maybe he would stop at deployments in Los Angeles and D.C. and then he realized, I guess, that he didn’t get the reaction he wanted. And now Chicago seems like the one city where he is getting more of the reaction that he wanted, because ICE’s tactics have been so militarized and so aggressive. And so the question is, we get to 2026 and the midterms and are there troops stationed by the polls? Are there paramilitary ICE agents running around the streets around the election? And do we have faith that if the results are close and that if there was some kind of problem at the polls and there was intimidation or like that, everything is going to be OK? I don’t know. I hate being like the doomer person, and I don’t like getting people alarmed unnecessarily. And I don’t think we should be alarmed, but I think we should be cleareyed about what’s happening here. And what it’s going to take to stop it. It is possible. People being dissatisfied with the way that Trump is running the economy, the tariffs, cost of living, everything else is enough to just win us the midterms comfortably. But that is a bet that we’re taking.

‘The Ezra Klein Show’

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