Minnesota, Today And Tomorrow

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Minnesota’s current and future seems to be all about ICE and the possible use of the Insurrection Act, at least from this perspective in a suburb of St. Paul, MN. If you look at Howard J. Bashman’s How Appealing blog[1] for Friday, January 16, 2026, among many other entries is this:

“Trump Backs Down on Insurrection Act as Democrats Take the Offensive; Officials denounced the Trump immigration crackdown in Minneapolis at an unofficial congressional hearing, while the president said he no longer saw a need to send in military forces”: Jazmine Ulloa of The New York Times has this report.

Praveena Somasundaram of The Washington Post has an article headlined “What could happen if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act in Minnesota; Protesters have clashed with federal immigration officers in Minneapolis since Jan. 7, when an officer fatally shot 37-year-old Renée Good.”

And Madlin Mekelburg of Bloomberg News has a report headlined “What to Know about the Insurrection Act Trump Wants to Invoke.”

Posted at 8:32 PM by Howard Bashman

These are factual articles, at least that was the nature of the WaPo article, so I’ll supply the speculation. What does President Trump risk if he were to invoke the Insurrection Act?

  • Loss in the Courts. The President has a record of failure in the Courts when it comes to ICE, such as the  recent order to remove troops from Illinois, resulting in removals from not only Illinois, but Oregon and California. He suffered a loss of prestige by that order, and decided to stem the bleeding, I think.
  • Hard refusal to cooperate by the military. Attempting to order the military, which can be both National Guard and regular military, runs the risk of a refusal to deploy. After all, the US military is not composed of foreign mercenaries, but of Americans who, hypothetically, are being ordered to confront and possibly harm fellow Americans; in the case of the National Guard, fellow Minnesotans. The temptation to refuse the order, even to suddenly resign en masse, must be considered by Trump and his team. If this scenario were to occur, the damage to the Trump Administration’s prestige would be colossal, and the subsequent polls would be catastrophic.
  • Soft refusal to cooperate by the military. Suppose such an order was issued and obeyed, but the military spent most of its time in coffee shops and not on patrols or frightening citizens. An ineffective deployment is not as damaging to Trump as a refusal to obey orders, but it’s still undesirable and may have more long-term damage, adding to a reputation of being ineffective.
  • Mutiny. If the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, chooses to classify such an order as illegal, Trump might be arrested, or even killed, if Caine chooses to take the risk of a shootout and/or losing at court-martial. I am not familiar with the General, and so cannot offer an assessment of probability. The hit on Trump’s prestige, however, would be immense, as his prestige does have some dependency on dominating others, even if only fourth-raters like AG Bondi, staffer Miller, etc, and a mutiny would be a failure of that dominance. While dying in a mutiny may have some appeal to Hollywood Trump, President Trump would realize that the termination of his time in office via arrest or violent death would do more damage to his reputation, which may be his most highly valued attribute.

Based on the above, using the Insurrection Act may not be an attractive option, although as a threat it’s useful, right up until it’s shown to be an empty threat. The President may have tromped down a path with a lose-lose terminator, but we shall see.

While he waits to see if Minnesotans can be frightened into obedience – seems unlikely – Trump’s once again trying to use the Department of Justice to personally threaten Mayor Frey of Minneapolis and Governor Walz (D-MN), who was candidate for Vice President in the 2024 Presidential Election.

The Justice Department is planning to issue subpoenas for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as part of an investigation alleging that the two Democratic leaders are impeding federal law enforcement officers’ abilities to do their jobs in the state, two people familiar with the matter confirmed Friday.

The subpoenas, which are without recent precedent, escalate an already bitter political battle between the Trump administration and state officials following the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an immigration officer last week. That shooting happened amid a surge of federal immigration officers in the state ordered by President Donald Trump. [WaPo]

For some context, here’s The Hill’s quote of Governor Walz’s reaction.

“Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin,” Walz said in a statement obtained by The Hill’s sister network NewsNation. “Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic. The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”

Repetitive use of this tactic lessens its propagandistic value with each use. The first couple of times, yeah, maybe there’s smoke and a hidden fire. But after several uses and Trump’s widely known vindictive nature, we know the smoke is coming out of Trump’s ass, if I may be so vulgar.

As a side note, I do suspect Minnesota is a target not only because Walz was on the Democratic ticket in 2024, but called the GOP “weird”:

“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room,” Walz said in a TV interview last month.

The message started with news interviews and eventually spread like wildfire across social media with the help of young Americans. The simple terminology of labeling the other side as “weird” or “odd” is not revolutionary or sophisticated in American politics but represents a new framing for Democrats who have spent the last eight years trying to defeat Trump and Trumpism by personifying him as the greatest threat to democracy. [AP]

Trump has spent a lot of time being friends with his base, and labeling him and his Party as weird is perceived as an attempt to drive a wedge between them. Over the top retribution, as a warning to others, is only natural for Trump.

Let’s finish up with Erick Erickson and his superficial attempt to condemn Minnesotans:

ICE agents are swarming Minneapolis because the local and state governments have not just refused to cooperate with federal deportation efforts, but have provided safe havens for illegal aliens. According to the federal government, over 75% of those deported have existing criminal records. In Minneapolis alone, the federal government has rounded up illegal aliens from Mexico, Laos, Burma, Somalia, and elsewhere who were charged with rape, child abuse, manslaughter, murder, and other crimes. The local government refused to hand over even those people.

These scenes are not happening in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and other red states. ICE is in those states and deporting people, But those states are cooperating with ICE. Partisans in blue states have decided it is virtuous to protect illegal aliens, regardless of the length of their rap sheets. Believing the cause righteous and herself virtuous, Renee Good entered the fight to stymie ICE. After her death, her partner screamed out, “You used real bullets?”

The answer is because the deportations are not a game or virtue signaling. ICE has detained and deported dangerous criminals who shoot guns at law enforcement agents and, tragically, because Donald Trump is President, Renee Good decided to defend those illegal aliens against her own government and died.

Ironically, in the paragraph previous to these, Erickson complains Beyond the tragedy of a press we can no longer trust for truth … and then asks, as quoted above, for implicit belief in the pronouncements of various government entities, those of Mexico, Laos, Burma, Somalia, as if they have long histories of absolute honesty.

When we know that’s not true. For all we know, each vicious criminal was an honest citizen who simply fell afoul of a government official in their home country, who then filed falsified charges and condemned them. A bribe seals the deal, eh?

Add in how many national emergencies, the Mendacity Machine’s[2] daily output of lies, the silly yapping of White House deputy chief of staff, the Epstein Files debacle, plus familiarity and reports of American citizens being arrested and held, explorations of reverting citizenship, and does it come as any surprise that there are protests of the clumsy ICE agents?

All that said, Biden’s policy on immigration and the southern border was not congruent with American attitudes, but that’s not a surprise. The theoreticians of the Left appear to be operating with broken models of reality that are nearly as bad as those of the Right.

My advice to Minnesotans is this: Patience. Peaceful protests. Don’t run around in a frenzy as if ICE were foreign mercenaries, because they’re not. They’re fellow Americans. That each side points at the other and proclaims they have ruined America is evidence that both sides have grown arrogant and intolerant, and we need to figure out how to drag both sides out of that particular pit of Hell.

This is not Japan waiting for the one big victory to win the war, this is a thousand cuts and, if I may say it, constant self-assessment. There’s a reason for the political abyss, and it’s not all The other side is stupid, as many progressives assume. Mistakes are made by both sides, enhanced by arrogance and intolerance, and read with fear and horror by independents, the holders of political power these days.

But Special Elections, you cry? The Left’s pudding was revealed 2020-2024, the Right’s pudding in 2025. Both have often revolted the independents. Long-term winners will be those who acknowledge and correct their errors.

Such has ever been true; the arrogant are the losers.

1 “The Web’s first blog devoted to appellate litigation.” It’s devoted to links to articles on appellate litigation.

2 In case you have not yet encountered the phrase Mendacity Machine, it’s a reference to the man who can’t open his mouth without spewing a lie, President Trump.

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About Hue White

Former BBS operator; software engineer; cat lackey.

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