BEE GONE cover
The United States has had 47 Presidents. To the best of my memory, we have never had one who thrives on chaos and seeks to create it. Now we have one who is a divider, not a uniter. One late night host dubbed Donald J. Trump the King of Chaos.
Trump’s admiration for strong men (Russian, Turkish, North Korean) seems to know no bounds. His decisions ever since Trump 2.0 seem to be marching orders straight from Moscow. Nearly every one of the decisions from tariffs to ham-handed ICE deportation raids have been lauded on Russian state TV. Almost none of them have enhanced our standing in the world or made us more stable in any way.
I covered some of Trump’s rallies in 2016. I had covered every presidential caucus run in Iowa since 2000, but Trump’s rallies were the end of that, for me. It no longer felt safe. Crowds were encouraged to display hostility towards the Press, which is one of the first things a would-be dictator will attempt to do. Transparency, which the fourth estate provides via journalists staying on top of the story, is one of democracy’s safeguards. There are documented instances, at Trump rallies, when he would urge the crowd to turn against the press present. After the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, press was singled out for abuse.
I came home from a Trump rally at the Davenport (Iowa) fairgrounds in the election of 2016 and announced that I was going back to reviewing movies. I was threatened only because I wore a Press badge.
Why?
“This isn’t fun any more,” I told my spouse.
It was not long after this that the Democrats moved their first-in-the-nation caucus voting to South Carolina, anyway, which meant Iowa would be All Republican, All the Time. That made the caucuses much less meaningful (and definitely less fun).
A New Political Era?
According to New Yorker writer Wallace-Wells, the recent Minneapolis assassination of one elected official, and the attempted assassination of another, confirm the arrival of a new political era, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic.
But is this threat of violence really new? I would submit that the expectation and the fear of political violence are, indeed, endemic, but this is not a “new era.” It’s more prevalent, perhaps, but it has been around seemingly forever.
For me, the fear of violence at a political rally, after sixteen years of attending them routinely without incident, was driven home in 2016 during the campaign for Trump 1.0. That was nearly ten years ago. The encouragement of such bad behavior started with Donald J. Trump—a man known for plenty of bad behavior of his own.
Gabby Giffords
There have been incidents involving violence or threats of violence at political gatherings before. On January 8, 2011, United States Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 others were shot during a constituent meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Casas Adobes, Arizona, in the Tucson metropolitan area.
Six people were killed, including federal District Court Chief Judge John Roll; Gabe Zimmerman, one of Giffords’s staffers; and a nine-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green. Giffords was holding a meeting called “Congress on Your Corner” in the parking lot of a Safeway store when Jared Lee Loughner drew a pistol and shot her through the head at point-blank range before proceeding to fire on others.
I’ve recently written about the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy. Certainly we all remember presidential assassinations going all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. Such political violence peaked, in my lifetime, in 1968, following JFK’s death in Texas on November 22, 1963. But it is most definitely true that political strife can turn deadly.
Trump’s effect on rising tension is to throw more lighter fluid on the fire. Not only does he not try to calm political turmoil. Instead, he seems to thrive on chaos, something that has been a hallmark of other autocratic dictators.
MINNESOTA MURDERER
Vance Boelter
The man suspected of killing a Minnesota lawmaker and wounding another was taken into custody after a two-day search. Vance Boelter was arrested Sunday evening, June 17, after two days on the loose following the shooting of former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark. The couple were killed in their Brooklyn Park home early Saturday, June 16, 2025, in that northern Minneapolis suburbs. Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were injured at their Champlin home, about 9 miles away. Only good police work kept the tragedy from becoming much worse.
THE TRUMP EFFECT
The job of the Minnesota police could not have been helped by the fact that the past decade has seen the rise of an unstable environment around politics and law enforcement—one that arguably worsened on January 6th. On that date, MAGA faithful stormed the Capitol and Donald Trump celebrated the vigilantes who attacked the Capitol police force as “warriors.” Later, Trump pardoned the miscreants doing time for their decision to take the law into their own hands. There was little apparent thought or selectivity given to the pardons, which can also be said of ICE raids, immigrants deported, and DOGE targets. It’s always a poorly-thought-out and poorly executed slipshod undertaking, another hallmark of Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. We have become a kakistocracy.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, dubbed the Minnesota shootings a dangerous trend in the June 17th “New Yorker,” specifically cited the impersonating of law enforcement officers. Said Wallace-Wells, “A new political era has arrived, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic.”
While I do not disagree with Wallace-Well’s statement, I do disagree that this is “a new political era.” We’ve been experiencing deaths of political figures in the United States all the way back to the Civil War era (Lincoln, again). What is “new” about the incidents, however, is that now we have a President who seems to revel in mayhem. One of his MAGA followers even posted inappropriate remarks following the Saturday killings, because that is what good MAGA followers do: glorify violence and seize any opportunity to repeat lies that their fearless leader has convinced them of using social media.
THE TRAGEDY
Around 2 A.M. on Saturday morning, operators manning emergency lines in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin, according to a police report, got a call from someone who said that a masked man had come to their home “and then shot their parents.” When police and medics arrived, they discovered that the victims were a Democratic state senator named John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who were alive, but badly injured.
A sergeant from the nearby city of Brooklyn Park, who had helped respond to the call, asked officers from his jurisdiction to check on the home of the Democratic state legislator Melissa Hortman, who was until recently the state House speaker. According to the Brooklyn Park police chief, Mark Bruley, when the officers arrived, at about 3:35 A.M., they saw a “vehicle that looked exactly like an S.U.V. squad car.” The vehicle was parked in the driveway with its emergency lights on. The front door was open. The officers saw a man dressed like a cop firing into it; he killed Hortman and her husband, Mark. The officers fired at the shooter—since identified as Vance Boelter, a fifty-seven-year-old evangelical Christian and MAGA Trump follower. A website of Boelter’s said that he was an ordained minister.
Boelter had a scattered work history. He had recently been employed by local funeral-service companies and also was trying to launch his security business, but a close friend of his said that his back-and-forth trips to Africa exhausted him, financially, and made steady employment and a steady income difficult. Boelter ran back into the house and escaped for close to 2 days. He was arrested on Sunday evening. He has been charged with federal murder, which carries the death penalty.
Impersonating an Officer
Who Boelter is, and the exact nature of his objectives and perceived grievances, may ultimately be less noteworthy than whom he pretended to be. Boelter’s motives aren’t yet clear, though he possessed what police have suggested may have been a target list of seventy individuals, many of whom are Democratic politicians. Just tonight (June 21st) a young man (25-year-old Trenton Abston) attempted to confront the Mayor of Memphis with a taser. The Mayor lived in a gated community with security, but Abston climbed over a brick wall to reach the Mayor’s door. The Governor of Michigan was also the target of a foiled kidnapping attempt.
A state legislator summoned to his or her door well after midnight may be wary about opening it, but he or she may be less reluctant if the person on the step is uniformed and there’s a cop car parked on the street. As it turns out, Boelter was driving an S.U.V. that he had outfitted for his security business. He made the deliberate decision to leave the emergency lights on.
It was very smart of the real Brooklyn Park police officers to suspect what was happening. Their quick reaction saved lives. At a news conference on Monday, June 16th, authorities in Minnesota revealed that Boelter had visited at least two other homes between Hoffman’s and Hortman’s. No one was home at one, and he seemed to have been scared away at the other.
ICE in Action
The politicization of law enforcement has acquired a new dimension during the immigration crackdowns. The Trump Administration has allowed its agents to disguise their identities or affiliations so that it is often unclear to detainees whose custody they are in, or under what authority. In Boston, in March federal agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student who had co-written a pro-Palestine op-ed in a campus newspaper. The agents were in plain clothes and masked.
Recently the White House deployed seven hundred marines to Los Angeles, purportedly to help quell the protests against immigration raids. Photos spread of them detaining a protester. Catherine Rampell, of the Washington Post, reported last week on an immigration raid targeting a landscaper working outside a boutique home-design business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Agents showed up in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even give the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting. In the piece, Rampell spoke to the business’s co-owner, Linda Shafiroff. She said, “It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something.”
In each of these circumstances, the federal government is asking ordinary people to trust that those wearing uniforms are acting on behalf of the public, while also allowing them to shroud their identity and their mission, and pushing the boundaries of what law enforcement can do. It is hard to imagine a scenario more perfectly engineered for exploitation.
In February, a man wearing an ICE jacket at the Conservative Political Action Conference, outside Washington, D.C., admitted to a podcaster that he had no affiliation with the agency, but said of his jacket, “It’s $29.99 on Amazon. I would recommend buying a small, if you’re my size.”
In Philadelphia, police sought a man who had entered a car-repair shop wearing fake security apparel. He yelled “Immigration!,” which caused some employees to scatter. He then proceeded to tie up a worker and rob the business. By the end of March, the fake-ICE situation had grown sufficiently common in Southern California that the Los Angeles Times ran a feature titled “ICE impersonators and other scammers are on the rise: How to protect yourself.”
Some of these impersonators are scamming for money. Others, especially those harassing migrants, may be expressing solidarity with the President’s political aims. The leaky membrane that Trump has established between law enforcement and his own agenda does a disservice to the officers, many of whom are simply trying to do their jobs. It also makes their work more dangerous. The more lawless the government is, the easier it is for lawless individuals to impersonate officers. Also, the more likely it is that citizens will doubt that the real officers actually represent a legal authority.
This is a recipe for generalized mistrust. For citizens to know who an armed federal agent really is, and what authority he is operating under, should be part of even the most basic commitment to transparency. At a minimum, courts and politicians should pressure government agents to disclose their identities during raids and detentions, and to clarify where their authority begins and ends.
In California’s Central Valley, as immigration raids peaked, school attendance reportedly dropped by twenty-two per cent. Immigrants are frightened to keep appointments, attend church, or show up at work, in some cases, for fear the Steven Miller/Stephen Homan heavy hand of the law will be deployed in the same manner it was in throwing an elected member of Congress, Senator Padilla, to the floor and handcuffing him, because he attempted to ask Homeland Security Chief Kristy Noem a question at a public meeting.
On Saturday, at an anti-Trump No Kings protest in Salt Lake City, Utah, a man reportedly appeared to be crouching behind a wall, while carrying what looked like an AR-15-style rifle. Several armed people whom the police referred to as “peacekeepers” providing security for the protest—though whether this role was official or self-assigned was under investigation—pulled their own weapons and yelled. One fired at the man, managing to disarm him but killing a bystander.
SPILL-OVER EFFECT
Demonstrators in Davenport protested both the autocratic behavior of DJT and his ICE raids.
Sadly, the trickle-down theory that Republicans love, is in play again in the behaviors to which Trump has affixed his seal of approval. It is okay to discriminate against homosexuals, women, transgender individuals and people of color, because that is what attacks on DEI sanction. Anti-Semitism is up while evangelical group support the man who, right now, has put us on the verge of WWIII and unleashed Elon Musk and DOGE on nearly every government institution, ruining them and the careers of the public servants employed there.
Other Examples of Trickle-down Tump Deterioration
I am old enough to remember when air travel was a delight. You actually dressed up to eat your TV-dinner style entrée onboard. Then planes began to be hijacked, 9/11 happened, and now we all dread the TSA steps that bad behavior has doomed us to endure in order to fly at all.
In much the same vein, outdoor concerts were once great fun. Until they weren’t. People who remember the slaughter in Las Vegas at an open air concert think twice. It isn’t even safe to attend a Fourth of July Parade in broad daylight anymore. We learned that after a Fourth of July parade in a Chicago suburb.
Trump is, slowly but surely, undermining trust in elected officials and in government institutions that have functioned well for 250 years, but which are now struggling to function at all. (Some have been eliminated by presidential fiat.)
Trump’s Legacy
Trump’s legacy to America, among many things, is most damaging in regards to undermining good behavior, civility, trust in institutions and our leaders and the press (in addition to non-stop crass commercial capitalization while in (and off of) the Oval Office.)
The emoluments clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8) has been completely disregarded. The Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution is actually two clauses that restrict federal officials, especially the President, from receiving gifts, payments, or other benefits from foreign or domestic sources without Congressional consent. These clauses are designed to prevent corruption and undue influence on government officials by foreign powers or other entities.
Charging supplicants to attend his Mar-A-Lago bash recently and his unabashed greed in asking for a new Air Force One plane during his recent Middle East trip are just the tip of the iceberg. In Trump 1.0 foreign dignitaries knew that they should stay at Trump’s hotel if they wanted to do business with the executive branch. DJT has come out with tennis shoes, Bibles, with bitcoin and cheap gold cell phones, further sullying the office of the President of the United States. Why is Congress allowing this?
“The times, they are a-changing” and, so far, that is not a good thing.
