President Trump peered over the brink at the mayhem in Minneapolis this week – and quickly pulled back.
What was increasingly being seen as his personal anti-migrant goon squad had shot and killed two protesters – one a poet, the other a nurse – in as many weeks, causing widespread revulsion way beyond his usual Left-wing critics.
The President’s personal approval ratings, already shaky, took a further dive. Even loyal Republicans were recoiling at the excesses of a poorly trained paramilitary force, unaccountable and out of control.
Party grandees, already reconciled to losing the House in November’s mid-term elections, began to worry about losing the Senate too.
Calls to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), purveyors of the shoot-to-kill approach, hitherto emanating only from the activist Left, became more widespread. Trump’s hard line on illegal migrants, which had helped re-elect him in November 2024, had suddenly become a liability.
The President had only himself to blame for the predicament he now found himself in. He had unleashed the dogs of war, revelling in a use of force which was now repelling a clear majority of Americans.
Moreover he had surrounded himself with out-of-their-depth lickspittles – Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, Kash Patel at the FBI, Greg Bordino at Border Control, Stephen Miller at the heart of the White House – who thought the way to curry his favour was to be even more Trump than Trump.
The President’s personal approval ratings, already shaky, took a further dive this week after the protests in Minneapolis
‘Ordinary, not particularly political Americans who I speak to are genuinely worried that rights they’ve always taken for granted are now in jeopardy’
So they smeared those who had been fatally shot (and any witnesses who dared contradict their version of events) as ‘domestic terrorists’ and ‘assassins’ out to ‘massacre’ federal agents. Without, of course, a shred of evidence – and no concern about pre-empting official inquiries in which they’d be crucial participants.
But then they had no intention of allowing state or local law enforcement to investigate the behaviour of ICE, whose agents had been assured by them that they enjoyed ‘absolute immunity’ to act with impunity, even down to defying court orders. Nor did they have much regard for the Constitution.
Indeed Americans saw it was being assailed on all sides. Depicting demonstrators and those who witnessed the protests as criminals undermined their first amendment rights to free speech. Searching homes without a warrant, which ICE is prone to do, breaches the fourth amendment’s protection against random incursions into people’s homes.
Ironically, for an administration which fetishises gun ownership, even the second amendment’s right to bear arms was under threat.
The nurse killed by ICE carried a concealed gun. He had a licence for it, never tried to reach for it in his fatal scuffle with ICE and had been disarmed before he was shot ten times.
But Trump officials claimed, wrongly, he had no right to carry a gun to a protest (pro-MAGA protesters have often carried not just handguns but semi-automatic assault rifles). Cue the Trump administration, bizarrely, on the wrong side of the powerful gun lobby.
Trump watched all this and read the runes. Wiser heads in the White House, such as his chief of staff Susie Wiles, urged a change of tack.
Trump had caught the knack of retreating the week before when he backed off from his threats to annex Greenland, an issue on which he’d overplayed his hand.
Now he back-pedalled in Minneapolis, where he’d also overplayed his hand.
Noem and Bordino were sidelined, told matters in Minnesota’s biggest city were no longer their concern.
Bridges were rebuilt with the state’s governor (Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s rather useless running mate in the 2024 presidential election) and even the city’s Left-wing mayor.
Tom Homan, the experienced border tsar who served under Barack Obama, was sent to Minneapolis to dampen things down and restore a degree of professionalism to federal operations there. ICE agents are being withdrawn as the round up of illegal immigrants is de-escalated. The killings are to be properly investigated.
Homan has promised to concentrate on removing only ‘the worst of the worst’. This was the original plan. It is a sign of the random, cavalier nature of ICE’s activities that only 5 per cent of those detained have been convicted of violent crimes (for whose deportation there is widespread support).
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Border Force agents with nurse Alex Pretti after he was shot in Minneapolis
The Left, which was increasingly well-organised in countering ICE in Minneapolis, naturally regards Trump’s withdrawal as a victory. Some fear it is no more than a tactical retreat, that Trump still hankers after imposing paramilitary force on recalcitrant Democratic states and cities that refuse to bow to his will.
This is a fear that goes well beyond the Trump-hating Left. Ordinary, not particularly political Americans who I speak to are genuinely worried that rights they’ve always taken for granted are now in jeopardy.
The indiscriminate mass removal of migrants has instilled concern among law-abiding Americans that they are at risk of being swept up in a general descent into more autocratic ways, as Trump lives out his strongman fantasies.
Foreigners sense it as much as Americans, which is why fewer are going to America. Flying regularly back and forth across the Atlantic last year I noticed more empty seats than usual. The figures bear this out.
Foreign visitors to the US fell 6 per cent last year on 2024, a trend which is gaining momentum: advance bookings in the second half of the year were down 12 per cent from Germany, 9 per cent from Spain and only a little less from the UK.
Travellers are nervous about American unrest on their TV screens and fear unpredictable treatment at US passport control. Maybe the World Cup will force America to be more welcoming again.
These fears – at home and abroad – may be overblown but they are no less real. They mark something of a watershed in Trump’s second term. A clear majority of Americans – 55 per cent – have turned against him and his government. He is polarising public opinion more than ever.
But in between the Trump haters and the MAGA zealots he is losing independents, moderate Republicans and Hispanics – the coalition of voters that returned him to the Oval Office for a second term.
Even MAGA is disillusioned with his penchant for foreign adventures. It all suggests that, in terms of public approval, we are past peak Trump. The administration looks that bit more cowed, more humbled than it ever has.
A wise President would proceed from now on with more caution when it comes to domestic affairs, as he is now in Minneapolis. But that is probably not Trump’s way. The bigger risk is that he becomes an old man in a hurry (and he has seemed frailer these past months), anxious to have his way, settle scores and wreak revenge on his supposed enemies before he loses control of Congress in November.
Even as his forces were retreating from Minnesota this week he was calling for the arrest of Obama, spreading baseless accusations of the former president being involved in espionage and even a coup to reverse Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016.
Nor has he forgotten how he was supposedly ‘cheated’ out of victory just over five years ago.
He’s tasked Tulsi Gabbard, his national intelligence director and a notable nutjob in an administration overpopulated with them, with rooting out the voter fraud he still claims, against all the evidence, cost him the 2020 election.
It was also revealed that Trump has filed a $10billion lawsuit against his own Treasury department and tax collectors over the leaking of his tax returns in 2020. ‘Highly unusual’ was how one White House aide put it to me yesterday. ‘No President has ever tried to extract $10billion from US taxpayers for his personal gain.’
It is this Trumpian politics of bread-and-circuses that detracts from more important matters that could rebound to his credit.
The US economy is going gangbusters, with growth accelerating in every quarter of last year and reaching an annual rate of over 5 per cent by the last quarter — growth which European leaders can only dream about. Productivity growth is booming way above European levels too.
Yet Trump gets little credit, partly because he doesn’t talk about it enough (and when he does he exaggerates) and partly because he gives short shrift to voters’ legitimate concerns about the cost of living.
Likewise, crime is dropping dramatically. The latest figures from the country’s 40 biggest cities show all categories of major crimes – murders, violent assaults, burglaries, carjackings – down by double digits. It is expected that the latest homicide rate will be four in 100,000, making it the lowest since records began in 1900.
But, again, Trump gets little credit, partly because he’s too busy depicting Democrat-run big cities as cesspits of crime and lawlessness for most folk to be even aware of the wider picture.
It’s not even clear Trump is that interested in domestic politics any more. Like many presidents into their second term, he seems more absorbed by foreign affairs.
Fresh from removing Venezuela’s dictator (only to replace him with another dictator prepared to do Trump’s bidding), the President has now assembled a large armada and other military assets within striking distance of Iran.
Exactly why is not quite clear. During the recent unrest Trump warned the tyrants of Tehran he would strike them hard if they violently repressed the demonstrators. The tyrants proceeded to massacre their own people on an unprecedented scale. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, were killed, many others remain incarcerated and tortured in barbaric prisons. Trump did nothing, largely because he didn’t have the military assets in place to carry out his threat.
The Left, which was increasingly well-organised in countering ICE in Minneapolis, naturally regards Trump’s withdrawal as a victory
Now he has. But the cities of Iran are quiet again, cowed by the brutality of the repression.
It is far from certain that US attacks on regime leaders and assets would rekindle rebellion. Trump has also changed tack. His latest statement makes no mention of demonstrators but says US attacks can be avoided if the regime negotiates away its nuclear bomb capabilities. Which is strange since Trump has consistently claimed US bombers destroyed them last June.
Washington cynics ruefully remark that it suits Trump to replace headlines about federal executions in Minneapolis with bombing the mullahs in Iran. Yesterday more Epstein files were rushed out, a useful diversion. I would not go as far as to claim a US armada is now parked within striking distance of Iran for the same reason. But as one source close to Trump said to me this week: ‘It’s certainly convenient.’
As would be the fall of communism in Cuba – and that is on the cards. ‘Cuba will be falling pretty soon,’ predicted the President on Tuesday. To hasten its fall Trump has threatened penal tariffs on any country exporting oil to Cuba. That essentially means Mexico, since Trump has already turned off the Venezuelan oil tap.
Trump had caught the knack of retreating the week before when he backed off from his threats to annex Greenland, an issue on which he’d overplayed his hand
Cuba needs 100,000 barrels of oil a day to keep the lights on and its industry powered. It produces 40,000 barrels per day from its own resources. The 40,000 barrels it got from Venezuela is no more. The 20,000 from Mexico is already down to 3,000 even before Trump’s latest threat. It will run out of enough oil next month.
Cuba is hurtling towards economic collapse. The communist dictatorship has never looked more vulnerable. Its demise would allow Trump to claim he’s succeeded where every president since John F Kennedy has failed. What follows in Havana, of course, is another matter. If Venezuela is the Trump template then it could be another dictatorship.
There are those who think Trump should be more worried about unrest closer to home. The prospect of another US civil war is routinely raised, often by the extremes of Left and Right who would seem to relish it, and just as routinely it never happens. Nor will it. America has been through much worse and survived: 2026 is not 1861 (when the American Civil War broke out).
ICE are amateurs compared to the police violence routinely meted out in the segregated South for 100 years after the Civil War, which only lessened after the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s. Violence was much worse in the race riots of the 1960s than anything we’ve seen in Minneapolis.
In August 1965, 34 were killed when the Watts area of Los Angeles exploded in unrest. Two years later 43 died in the Detroit riots.
This is not to deny that America is a troubled country with much to be troubled about. But it’s always darkest before dawn.
The decline of the Trump presidency is probably already under way. If it ends with a whimper and disappointment rather than a celebratory bang that will embolden more moderate Republicans to reassert themselves, which in turn will encourage the Democrats to remain in the mainstream rather than strike out to the Left.
A return to the American politics we knew before Trump is not on the cards. But America need not be condemned indefinitely to the current craziness. The rot is setting in for Trump and MAGA. Mainstream Republicans and Democrats need to be on hand with fresh and compelling ideas to replace them.
Amid all the patriotic outpourings that will greet America’s 250th anniversary this year, that is the real task at hand.