Police State, Soft Launch

Eight protesters, a chicken suit, a hospital shackle, and a regime that wants your money to make it permanent.

Good morning! I woke up this morning with the distinct feeling that we’re being governed by a stage show that keeps slipping into a police procedural, only the cops are off-script and the suspects are us. The week’s centerpiece was Trump’s ANTIFA roundtable, a production so drenched in fearmongering it needed a towel. They cycled through the usual catechism, “insurrection,” “terror,” “anarchists”, as if repeating the words often enough could substitute for evidence or law. It’s the governing model of this regime: rallies masquerading as strategy, television slots dressed up as public policy, and a White House that treats language like a baton to bludgeon civil society.

Enter Stephen Miller, who shuffled onto CNN to deliver the money line: the president has “plenary authority…” and then promptly froze like a screensaver. Not lost, not disconnected, just blinking, breathing, and suddenly out of runway. Here’s the part they hope you won’t notice: Title 10 confers no such “plenary authority.” It’s a phonebook of specific, bounded powers over the armed forces. If a president wants troops on U.S. streets or to federalize a state’s Guard, he has to hook into an actual statute, think the Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C. §§ 251–255) with its predicates and even a required proclamation to disperse, or the narrow call-up power (10 U.S.C. § 12406). Otherwise, the Posse Comitatus Act bars the Army and Air Force from domestic law-enforcement roles. In short: no magic wand, no blank check, no “because I said so.” Miller waved at Title 10 like it was a grimoire; the law reads more like a rulebook. The edit suite later sanded off the awkward bits, because of course it did. But the point remains: they’re field-testing the rhetoric of monarchy on live TV and counting on the chyron to do the heavy lifting.

Back in the real world, Kristi Noem took her turn at the roundtable mic to spin Portland into a dystopian war zone and to imply local cops were laughing and applauding when ICE was “threatened.” The actual police logs read like haiku from a very bored beat cop: “Very low energy.” “Nothing much to note tonight.” “Mostly sitting in lawn chairs.” Ten people here, eight there, the occasional man in a chicken suit. It wasn’t a siege until the President announced one, and then, shocker, the crowd swelled. Even a Trump-appointed judge took one look at the facts and hit pause on the troop deployment, calling the White House narrative “untethered.” You could almost hear Noem’s storyline deflate like a parade balloon. I’ll have more about this roundtable spectacle posting later today.

And if you want a raw glimpse of how this culture-war cosplay translates on the ground, look at Bayron Rovidio Marin in Los Angeles. Agents raid a car wash, he’s injured, and then he spends thirty-seven days in a hospital bed under guard, at times shackled, without charges, hidden under a pseudonym like a prop in a disappearing act. No private conversations with doctors or counsel, interrogations while medicated, and a judge eventually forced to remind federal agents that the Constitution isn’t optional. DHS responded by calling the judge “activist,” as if due process were a partisan hobby. If you’re keeping score, that’s the police-state part: secret custody, no charges, contempt for the court that catches you. The regime doesn’t need a midnight knock at the door when it can put a man in blackout status in a county hospital.

A bit of breaking news informs us the stage show is wheeling the star off for a “routine yearly checkup” at Walter Reed… six months after his last “routine yearly checkup.” The White House says Trump will pop into Walter Reed on Friday while he’s there to “meet the troops,” then maybe jet to the Middle East. That’s their script. The record shows he already had an “annual” in April, and the new visit arrives after weeks of odd, tightly managed appearances and a summertime disclosure of leg-swelling (chronic venous insufficiency) and hand bruising, conditions his doctor waved off but hasn’t meaningfully updated. The fact pattern is simple: two “yearlies” in half a year, thin explanations, and a president whose public schedule keeps shrinking as the shutdown drags on.

The comms misfires around him aren’t helping the “all is well” vibe. Photographers caught Secretary of State Marco Rubio scribbling a giant note, “you need to approve a Truth Social post”, and sliding it to Trump during the ANTIFA roundtable so the boss could announce the Gaza “first-phase” deal first on his own app. It read like kindergarten governance, and the pictures are the pictures.

Worse, the Wall Street Journal reports Trump recently meant to privately message Attorney General Pam Bondi to “go after” James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James, but he posted it publicly instead, then scrambled to clean it up. Officials told the Journal he thought it was a DM. That isn’t a diagnosis; it’s a documented blunder that spotlights the merger of presidential whim and prosecutorial power, and the sloppiness of the apparatus executing it.

Two things can be true at once: diagnosing anyone from video clips is reckless, and the public is owed clear, consistent facts when the person wielding the Insurrection-Act megaphone and musing about “plenary authority” is also scheduling a second “annual” physical during a shutdown he is stoking. Title 10 is not a magic wand, real domestic troop use lives in specific statutes like the Insurrection Act, bounded by the Posse Comitatus Act, and when a White House leans on emergency theater at home while going opaque on the basics, that’s exactly how a police state stops being a metaphor and starts becoming muscle memory.

Then we’re told to look at the statesmanship abroad. Trump proclaimed a “first phase” Gaza deal, dangled hostages-for-withdrawal, and promised something “everlasting.” Cue the music, summon the envoys, and hand Jared a pen for the photo. I want to believe in relief for Gazans and the return of hostages as much as any sane person with a pulse. Yet the scaffolding creaks: no agreement on disarmament, no consensus on who governs, coalition partners in Israel threatening to light the whole thing on fire, and Hamas insisting it still expects a role. It’s a ceasefire on a 72-hour timer wrapped in the rhetoric of forever. The spectacle travels well; the structure does not. Performing peace and performing power use the same lighting.

Which brings us to the case the political class keeps telling you doesn’t exist. Tara Palmeri resurfaced the long-ignored “Katie Johnson” lawsuit, the pseudonymous Jane Doe who, in 2016, accused Donald Trump of raping her at Epstein’s townhouse when she was 13. He denies it. The suit was filed three times and dropped amid threats right before the election; the press dutifully moved along. One of her attorneys, Cheney Mason, seasoned, establishment, not a fringe YouTuber, broke a decade of silence to say there is “no doubt in my mind she told the truth,” citing days of interviews and investigators he hired. He does not know where she is now, or if she’s even alive. That’s the weather system surrounding the Epstein files: survivors stalked by private eyes, media outlets laundering denial into dismissal, and a political apparatus that treats sunlight like a biohazard.

No accident, then, that Speaker Mike Johnson keeps running the congressional calendar like a shell game and that Rep-elect Adelita Grijalva still hasn’t been sworn in. The headcount matters, the vote matters, and the longer the files stay out of reach, the safer a lot of powerful people feel. If you squint, you can see the connecting tissue: the same crowd that chants “insurrection” at a dozen protesters with lawn chairs also calls judges “activist” for enforcing habeas and pretends there’s “nothing to see” in an archive of kompromat that could end careers from Palm Beach to Parliament. Power defends power, and it uses procedure the way a cop uses tape.

We’re told not to worry about the edges fraying at home because Big Things are happening overseas. We’re told to fear the teenagers in black hoodies, not the men with badges who can disappear you under a fake name in a public hospital. We’re told the President can go full-plenary under Title 10 on a vibe and a chyron. This is how police states don’t arrive: not with a closed fist at first, but with a wink, a press hit, and a clever edit. Normalize the raid, exceptionalize the rights, and criminalize the critics; then, when the shock wears off, do it again tomorrow a little harder.

For the record, and I know I am repeating myself, the American system wasn’t designed for a president acting in bad faith. The framers assumed ambition would counteract ambition, not that a leader would use the Constitution like a pickpocket uses a crowd. Our defenses were built for disagreements about policy, not a movement that treats law as décor. So you get a shutdown that starves data from the public, a cabinet that sneers at judges, a propaganda loop that calls eight protesters with a Bluetooth speaker a “siege,” and a legal team road-testing the language of absolute power. Rallies replace strategies; spectacle replaces governance; and the gap between “law enforcement” and “state force” shrinks to a hair.

And yet, because this is still America, the record keeps poking through. The Portland logs. The TRO in Los Angeles. The lawyer who put his name on a vanished client and still says, flatly, she told the truth. The families in Israel and Gaza praying for a real peace that doesn’t evaporate after the cameras leave. The citizens who understand that if the government can shackle a man to a hospital bed with no charges, it can do it to anyone. The people flipping off cops from lawn chairs who refuse to call themselves insurgents just because the President needs a word to wave around.

In the end, the question isn’t just whether we can survive another week of this spectacle. It’s whether we should keep bankrolling it. What does it mean to “fund the government” when the government is being run like a traveling show that keeps slipping into a police procedural, only the badges point inward? We have a White House that road-tests the vocabulary of monarchy on cable hits (“plenary authority”), a Homeland Security shop that hides an injured man in a county hospital under a fake name until a judge pries the handcuffs off, a cabinet chorus that turns eight Portland protesters and a chicken suit into “insurrection,” and a Speaker slow-walking a member’s swearing-in to avoid a vote on releasing files that could embarrass the powerful. Add the late-breaking flourish: a president scheduling his second “annual” physical in six months, using the troops as backdrop, while his staffers scrawl crib notes in Sharpie and scramble to explain away posts that read like private directives accidentally shouted through a bullhorn.

Federal workers are props when they’re not hostages to a shutdown. Judges are “activists” when they enforce habeas. Words like “insurrection” and “plenary” are not descriptions; they’re permissions. And every time we let the permission language stand, the muscle memory of a police state gets stronger: more blackouts in hospitals, more raids sold as “routine,” more edits in the control room to make the malfunction look like mastery.

So here’s the closing argument. If appropriations are a moral document, and they are, then we have to decide whether we’re funding public service or underwriting state abuse. Do we pay for a government that shreds due process and smears its own workers as saboteurs when they follow the law? Do we underwrite a communications machine that edits reality while it drafts the next proclamation to disperse? Or do we draw lines with our voices, our votes, our unions, our lawsuits, our FOIAs, our insistence on daylight, lines that say: no troops on our streets without statutory predicates, no secret detentions in hospital rooms, no procedural games to bury the Epstein files, no more pretending Title 10 hides a crown?

Act now. Call it what it is. Demand receipts before another dollar buys another performance. A democracy funds the things it wants more of. Let’s be very clear what those things are, and what they are not.