The Firehose Isn’t Sustainable

Trump floods the zone with cruelty and distraction, but even the wrestling crowd is starting to chant back.

Good morning! It’s technically morning, but politically it feels like we woke up inside a broken group chat where the federal government is posting racist AI memes at midnight and then insisting everyone stop being so dramatic about it. That’s the theme today: the firehose. The firehose of racism, raids, intimidation, spectacle, and the growing evidence that it is not sustainable. Not morally, not politically, not economically, not institutionally. A country cannot be governed forever by dehumanization and improvisation, no matter how many memes the president retruths before breakfast.

The firehose isn’t just cruelty for sport. It’s also distraction, corruption, frantic flailing, and it’s the governing strategy of a regime that cannot actually solve problems, so it floods the zone with spectacle while the real story keeps crawling back to the surface like a body that won’t stay buried.

Looming behind today’s racist propaganda binge is the one scandal Trump cannot meme away: Epstein. You can practically see the gears turning. How do you move the camera off the files, off the names, off the unanswered questions, off the millions of pages still sealed, off the stink of that network saturating Trumpworld? You flood the zone. Repost an Obamas-as-apes clip at midnight, then let the country spend twelve hours arguing over whether blatant racism is “fake outrage.” You make the story about tone, not truth. When the corruption becomes unavoidable, manufacture a culture war emergency and hope the press chases the shiny object.

But the problem is that the shiny object is also a confession. Trump reposted that video because racism isn’t a side effect. It’s the fuel, his fuel. And when he refused to apologize, “I didn’t make a mistake”, he wasn’t just being psychologically incapable of admitting wrong. Dehumanization is not a glitch, it is a tool. The distraction only works if the public stays willing to be distracted. They aren’t.

That’s part of what’s so striking in Minnesota, where the administration didn’t just unleash ICE and Border Patrol, it managed to do it so brutally, so incompetently, so lawlessly, that even friendly institutions started blinking red.

Courts are issuing furious orders. Judges are openly discussing contempt. Government lawyers are collapsing in public exhaustion. The system is buckling under hundreds of habeas petitions because ICE is detaining people en masse while ignoring precedent and then acting shocked that the Constitution still exists on paper.

One federal judge accused ICE of violating nearly a hundred court orders in a single month. Another wrote that the administration has demonstrated “persistent noncompliance.” And one government lawyer, so burned out she sounded like she was auditioning for a Kafka remake, told the court she almost wished she’d be held in contempt just to get twenty-four hours of sleep. “This job sucks!” she said.

This is the perfect Trump paradox: a clown with a flamethrower, but also a regime constantly stepping on its own cape. The victims are not abstractions. A Border Patrol agent shoots a Chicago woman five times, then texts colleagues like he’s bragging about a bowling score: “Five rounds, seven holes. Put that in your book, boys.” The government’s main concern is not her reputation, not accountability, but whether releasing the texts will “sully” the agent.

A five-year-old asylum applicant in a bunny hat becomes a deportation target. A citizen is branded a domestic terrorist, the charges are dropped, and officials refuse to correct the record.

During a recent hearing discussing ICE atrocities, Representative Robert Garcia did something almost jarringly direct: he held up a poster-sized black-and-white image of Stephen Miller, not as a meme, not as a punchline, but as an indictment.

“There is probably no single person in this government,” Garcia said, “who has done more damage, more harm… than this man.”

In holding up that image, Garcia is publicly naming Miller as the architect.

That’s the trick of the firehose: make the violence feel accidental, make the cruelty feel bureaucratic, make the terror feel like “just enforcement.” But Miller has always been the one turning ideology into machinery, the one converting racism into policy, and policy into raids, and raids into spectacle.

He is the bureaucrat of authoritarianism, the guy who turns dehumanization into a workflow.

This is exactly what Stacey Abrams lays out in Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy in America, podcast in a conversation sparked by one very concrete case: the North Carolina Supreme Court election, where the losing Republican candidate tried to retroactively challenge more than 60,000 ballots after the votes were already cast.

Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with tanks. It begins with paperwork, with “procedures,” with the slow conversion of citizenship into a conditional privilege.

Abrams breaks it down with brutal clarity: voter suppression isn’t one dramatic act. It’s a thousand small cuts. Can you register? Can you stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And then, the one that matters most: does your vote actually get counted?

Because what happened in North Carolina wasn’t a glitch. It was the soft authoritarian move in its purest form: don’t cancel elections. Just make them exhausting and contestable. Make people wonder whether participating is worth the stress, the fear, the hassle, the possibility that someone will simply decide afterward that your vote shouldn’t count.

The militarization of ICE matters beyond immigration for the same reason Abrams warns: you don’t need soldiers at polling places if you can create the specter of intimidation everywhere civic life happens. Masked federal agents with broad discretion become a roaming threat, not just to immigrants, but to democracy itself.

Which brings us to the AP’s quietly devastating point: Epstein revelations have toppled princes, ambassadors, diplomats, top officials across Europe, while U.S. fallout remains strangely muted.

Muted. As if the scandal is being played underwater. Here’s part of why: the American media ecosystem is still too often helping to muffle it.

One independent reporter who has actually been on the ground filming the Minneapolis atrocities has started calling NBC the “National Bullshit Company,” and honestly, it’s hard to improve on the branding. NBC embedded with ICE, blurred agents’ faces, perp-walked detainees, repeated “ICE says” like scripture, edited out the pepper spray, and packaged a paramilitary occupation as a tidy crime-control segment. That is state narrative laundering. Europe topples elites because the press still treats proximity to Epstein as radioactive. In the U.S., the machine is designed to absorb radiation, normalize it, meme it, move on.

Thankfully it isn’t working. During a recent All Elite Wrestling event in Las Vegas, the crowd at AEW Dynamite loudly chanted “Fuck ICE!” before the main event match between Brody King and Maxwell Jacob Friedman, with the chant audible on the live broadcast. The moment was so resonant that even the referee delayed the opening bell so the chant could continue, and the crowd’s spontaneous protest visibly took aback the wrestlers and commentators. This eruption of anti-ICE sentiment reflects how far public frustration over the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics and federal violence has spread into mainstream cultural spaces, and it was captured not in a protest march, but in a Las Vegas arena full of wrestling fans.

While the state strains under the weight of its own authoritarian escalation, it is also torching the economy. Recent economic indicators suggested an economy that isn’t humming so much as wheezing: affordability crushing households, job anxiety creeping upward, and now the speculative froth is sliding too. Crypto, that magical libertarian fantasy where money is vibes and regulation is oppression, is wobbling like a Jenga tower in an earthquake. Katherine Rampell’s point is basic but devastating: when interest rates rise and money isn’t cheap anymore, bubbles don’t float, they deflate. Gold behaves like a safe harbor. Crypto behaves like what it is: a casino with better branding and more criminals.

Speaking of criminals, Trump’s family exposure to these markets isn’t some quirky hobby. It’s part of the governing model: monetize everything, launder influence through opaque assets, treat the presidency like a vending machine that takes bribes in whatever form fits through the slot.

In Minneapolis, the abstract fear of federal overreach has become bloody, visual, and fatal. In early January, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot 37-year-old Renée Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three who was in her vehicle observing a federal enforcement operation, she had dropped her child at school and was part of a neighborhood network monitoring ICE activity when the agent fired three shots into her SUV as it was turning away from him.

Then, on January 24, Customs and Border Protection agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old registered nurse and Minnesota resident, as protests over federal immigration enforcement swelled. Official accounts claimed he approached agents armed; but footage and subsequent reporting show he was not holding a weapon at the moment he was shot, and he was pinned to the ground before multiple shots were fired. His death was officially ruled a homicide by multiple gunshot wounds.

These killings set off intense protests and scrutiny. Minneapolis officials criticized the federal narrative, pointing to widely shared and conflicting video evidence, and demanded accountability. The controversy has been so intense that Homeland Security is now equipping every federal officer in Minneapolis with body-worn cameras, a step the administration says will help clarify events, but one that critics note should have been in place before lethal force was used.

So what do people do with this? The emotional trap of authoritarian politics is that it wants you either terrified or numb. Doomscroll until your brain turns to static, or shrug until atrocity feels like weather. Another raid, another racist post, yet another judge threatening contempt. Just another Saturday.

The goal is normalization through repetition, and the only sustainable answer is refusal. Refusal in the practical, local, civic muscle of democracy that authoritarians hate precisely because it works.

Check your voter registration. Help someone else check theirs. Volunteer locally. Become the person who knows the deadlines, the rules, the polling places, because the regime is betting you won’t. Support the lawyers and organizations fighting in court, filing habeas petitions, forcing the machinery into daylight. Pay attention to the local level, election boards, sheriffs, judgeships, district maps, where democracy is either maintained or hollowed out.

Support independent journalism that shows what corporate media blurs. Talk to each other. Authoritarianism thrives in isolation. It wants you alone in your disgust and exhaustion. But you are not alone. Wrestling crowds chanting “F— ICE,” which is not exactly the Whole Foods brunch demographic. This is the America Trump thinks he’s performing for. The same man who reportedly wants to mark the nation’s 250th birthday with cage fights on the White House lawn is watching the cage-fight audience boo the police state. That chant isn’t a white paper, it’s a damn poll number. It’s the sound of normalization failing.