Round-up: Is the Resistance back? Trump and Iran. About that ICE reversal.

Analysis of the week's events

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Is the Resistance back?

It’s not clear exactly how many people turned up to the No Kings Day protests across the United States last week, but estimates put it at somewhere between four and six million people. That would make the protests bigger than the Women’s Day marches in 2017 and the second largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

And more generally, there has been a massive amount of political protest across the U.S. since January - over 15,000 protests, compared to about 5,000 in the first year of Trump’s first term.

So how do we square this with the narrative that the anti-Trump opposition is in disarray and there’s little mass resistance to his regime?

In some respects, the United States has become a country with a highly centralized and national political culture. In large part this stems from the dominant orientation of the media - it focuses on what happens in Washington, D.C. and tends to slight events elsewhere.

And there’s no denying that in Washington, D.C., at least, the anti-Trump resistance - the Democratic Party - is in disarray. It is still reeling from its defeat last year and it lacks a clear leader and message to move forward with.

That’s not at all unusual for a party which just suffered an election defeat. Usually, the losing party has a few years to get its act together before it has to face the midterms. And the swinging pendulum of public opinion means it can count on doing well in those as long as it just shows up.

This time is different. The Trump regime is moving quickly to undermine the rule of law, and it won’t be surprising if it soon sets free and fair elections in its sights. Just hanging around and waiting is not an option - action is needed now.

That’s where the protests come in. While the media has been busy focusing on the head-in-the-sand attitude of national Democrats, public anger has been building. Americans are coming out in their communities to oppose Trump much as you would hope they would.

Spotted at a No Kings protest in Europe. No treats for tyrants!

And who exactly are the people coming out? There’s no survey to tell us, but anecdata indicates that they skew older and middle aged, female, and normie lib. This might be a demographic that also skews “cringe” in the eyes of some, but they’re also reliable, high-propensity voters. Nor are they known for scoring an own goal by mixing a spot of rioting in with their protests. They’re the people who drove the blue wave of the 2018 midterms and Biden’s victory in 2020.

If the Democrats want a path back to power, they could do much worse than taking their cues from the No Kings movement. It’s the tip of the spear right now, and that spear is pointing towards effective resistance and electoral victory - exactly where the Democrats need to be going.

Trump and Iran

Trump can’t seem to make his mind up about Iran.

After looking like he was steadily moving towards military action last week, Trump now says that he’ll decide whether to do it or not “in the next two weeks”. The New York Times had this funny observation:

“Within the next two weeks.”

That is when President Trump now says he will be ready to make his decision about bombing Iran or not. This new timeline was offered by the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at her briefing Thursday afternoon. But as she read the president’s statement aloud, some in the room couldn’t help but feel that this new time frame sounded a little … familiar.

As almost everyone in Washington is by now aware, “two weeks” is one of Mr. Trump’s favorite units of time.

Asked eight weeks ago if he could trust Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump replied, “I’ll let you know in about two weeks.”

Tax plans, health care policies, evidence of conspiracy theories he claimed were true, the fight against ISIS, the opening of some coal mines, infrastructure plans — all were at one point or another riddles he promised to solve for the public in about two weeks.

In this case, there are a few reasons why Trump might be putting things off:

1. He hopes that Iran is going to feel threatened enough to engage in diplomacy;

2. This is a ruse designed to lull the Iranians into a false sense of security before a strike;

3. He hopes the Israelis are going to take care of the problem themselves somehow, although how they would take out the Fordow enrichment facility is unclear;

4. Delay means more time to reposition military assets into the region and for Israel to degrade Iran’s capabilities, making any Iranian blowback easier to deal with;

5. He is paralyzed by indecision and doesn’t know what to do;

6. Some combination of the above.

It’s worth remembering that in 2019, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran - only to literally call the planes back while they were en route. George W. Bush used to revel in the title of The Decider, but Trump is more like The Undecided.

It’s a good thing that Trump is taking his time rather than rushing into what could be a catastrophic escalation. But his apparent indecision also makes him easy for Benjamin Netanyahu to play.

Netanyahu specializes in boxing the United States into a corner and forcing it to act in accordance with his wishes. And if Trump keeps vacillating, I’d expect him to do so once again - for instance by killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or taking some other dramatic escalatory step.

Two weeks is a very long time, and I expect something dramatic to happen before then, whether Trump wants it to or not.

About that ICE reversal

Last week, Trump announced that immigration raids would no longer target workers at farms and hotels - industries that rely on undocumented labor.

Then, a few days later, ICE apparently reversed the policy. The raids are back on.

This episode tells us a couple of things. The first is that the Trump regime acknowledges on one level that undocumented immigrants do make a contribution to American society. They’re not, contrary to much of the regime’s propaganda, all violent criminals and terrorists. Most are hardworking people raising families and paying taxes. Many are doing labor that Americans don’t want to do.

The second thing it shows us is that Trump is not completely insensible to the political and economic blowback from his deportation plans, even if he’s still torn about which way to go.