Raw Story

President Donald Trump's cascading failures in the Iran war — from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to the collapse of his regime-change fantasy — stem from a single fatal flaw: the president doesn't actually believe other people have agency, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argued Wednesday.

And that leaves him vulnerable.

"Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds," Bouie wrote, calling Trump "without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office."

The result, Bouie argued, is an administration that keeps getting blindsided by entirely predictable consequences of its own actions, from public outrage over DOGE, to backlash over the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to Iran's decision to close the Strait of Hormuz and retaliate against Gulf state allies.

None of it, according to Bouie, was planned for.

Trump appears to have expected Iran to fold the same way Venezuela did earlier this year, a "replay fantasy" that has since crashed into a more complex reality, Bouie wrote. That has left him trapped in an "escalation spiral," in which the president has no choice but to keep doubling down when one approach fails.

Bouie pressed the question of why the White House fails to see what others could easily predict.

"This gets to the real problem. Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him," he wrote, slapping the president with the label of a "consummate narcissist."

Trump's flaw is an opportunity for opposition, Bouie added. He is "a weak and deeply unpopular president," who also happens to be "cursed with a kind of blindness," wrote Bouie. That means he cannot see that his "opposition is real," and won't see it when it acts, Bouie concluded.

The liberal voting rights outlet Democracy Docket exposed a pattern of extreme anti-voting and conspiracy theorist beliefs by Chad Bianco, the pro-Trump sheriff of Riverside County, California, who is currently running for governor.

Bianco is currently in a high-profile clash with California state officials after he seized 650,000 ballots from the Proposition 50 referendum, which established a new mid-decade congressional map to draw out five Republicans in retaliation for GOP efforts to do the same to Democrats in Texas. Even some Republican leaders in the state have condemned his actions.

But Bianco's seizure of ballots, evidently to try to investigate baseless allegations of fraud, is part of a broader pattern of his disdain for democracy.

"'That’s why some people should never be allowed to vote,' the sheriff wrote Wednesday in response to a commentary video about the Iran war on the social media site," said the report. This "wasn't an isolated incident," the report said, as "Over the past months, Bianco published numerous comments and posts on social media promoting false claims that elections are rigged and Democrats rely on illegal voters to win races."

Among other things, Bianco also claimed that Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office,” and that “Non citizens can vote, you can vote for someone else even if they are dead, people can vote multiple times with different names.”

There is no evidence to support any of this; all of these things are illegal and have been prosecuted in the rare cases they have occurred.

Bianco, who has been characterized by opponents as having one of the worst crime-solving records and some of the deadliest jails in California, is a former member of the Oath Keepers paramilitary and is affiliated with the "Constitutional Sheriffs" movement, a fringe group that believes God delegates divine legal authority to sheriffs to overrule federal law they disapprove of. In 2024, this group was preparing a scheme to block Democrats from taking power if they won the election.

The Trump administration has initiated deportation proceedings against 34 former military members over the past year and arrested 125 others for immigration violations, representing a dramatic reversal of previous policies that shielded service members and their families from enforcement action.

Federal data obtained by The New York Times reveals that immigration authorities also placed 248 relatives of former military members into deportation proceedings after the Trump administration rescinded Biden-era guidance giving service members preferential treatment in immigration enforcement decisions.

The shift marks a significant departure from longstanding practice. The Biden administration and prior administrations made military service members and their relatives lower priorities for detention and deportation, particularly when criminal convictions were involved.

The policy change directly contradicts military recruitment pledges. U.S. military recruiters continue promoting citizenship pathways for immigrant service members and promising temporary protection for their family members. Green-card holders joining the military have historically accessed expedited citizenship processes, and relatives can apply for temporary permission to remain in the country.

However, federal data shows the number of green-card holders applying for citizenship after military service declined significantly during Trump's first term. Currently, nearly 27,000 active duty immigrants and about 20,000 reserve and National Guard members serve in the military, with 115,000 immigrant veterans in the broader veteran population as of 2022.

Family members of service members now fear applying for temporary protection benefits, concerned that such applications will target them for deportation.

A prominent case illustrates the policy's impact. Sae Joon Park, a Purple Heart recipient who served in Panama in 1989, self-deported to South Korea in June despite living in the United States since childhood. After struggling with PTSD and drug addiction following his service, Park had fought earlier deportation orders and was allowed to remain in the country on the condition he avoid further legal troubles. An immigration officer nonetheless informed him in May 2025 that he faced deportation unless he left voluntarily.

Lawmakers have criticized the policy as both ineffective and disrespectful to service members.

"Donald Trump's way of thanking our veterans for their service is by targeting and deporting them and their families," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

The Department of Homeland Security defended the policy, stating that no one should be exempt from immigration law consequences. The agency did not respond to questions about whether any detained veterans were ultimately deported.

Stephen Miller encouraged Texas Republican state legislators to challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent

The White House deputy chief of staff views GOP-led state legislatures as a workaround to get anti-immigration laws on the books that wouldn't need to pass through the gridlock in Congress, especially as Republicans at this point appear likely to lose their House majority and possibly the Senate, reported the New York Times.

“He sees conservative states like Texas and Florida can be partners with the federal government,” said state Rep. Tom Oliverson, chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus. “We can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.”

Miller met with Texas Republicans for more than four hours and demanded to know why the GOP-dominated legislature had not passed a bill to restrict public school funding to children who are citizens or are “lawfully present in the United States," which would break a precedent set in 1982 by a ruling in Plyler v. Doe that found states must pay for elementary school education for children regardless of their immigration status.

“There’s a lot of people that believe that that ruling has some pretty faulty logic associated with it,” Oliverson said. “He challenged us, and he encouraged us, and he asked us to partner with him."

Miller's proposal, if passed into state law, would cut education funding for an estimated 100,000 students out of more than 5.5 million schoolchildren in the state, the Times reported. It appears to be intended as a model for other red states to follow, according to the report.

"[It seems to be an effort from the White House to pressure lawmakers into passing extreme immigration policies that don’t reflect the needs of our state," said state Rep. Ramon Romero, a Democrat and the chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

Miller led off the meeting, which included Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, with a loyalty test that landed awkwardly, according to Oliverson.

"Do we have a RINO problem in Texas?” he said, using an acronym for “Republican in name only” that is used by conservatives to disparage party moderates.

“There was no answer — it was just uncomfortable silence,” Oliverson said.

Friends,

The Wall Street Journal — hardly an outpost of left-wing propaganda — reported on the results of an investigation conducted by the Journal’s Hannah Critchfield and her team.

I’m summarizing it below because it deserves your attention.

Critchfield and her team found that 279 people have been accused online by the Trump administration of assaulting federal ICE and Border Patrol agents, and more than half of these people — 64 percent — are American citizens.

Of the 181 American citizens that the Trump administration has accused of attacking federal ICE and Border Patrol officers, close to half have never been charged, and none have been convicted at trial. But the public charges alone have caused them significant harm.

The investigation

The Journal’s team analyzed more than 200 videos associated with allegations of assault against ICE and Border Patrol agents, using both police body camera footage and bystander recordings from social media. Many of the videos cast doubt on the federal government’s claims that agents were assaulted.

The Journal also reviewed more than 100,000 posts on X, posts made in the last year by accounts linked to government agencies and senior government officials.

Each time the government identified a person on a post, the Journal tracked that case through the legal system to see what charges were brought, under what statute, whether the charges were later modified, and what happened to the person in the case.

One of the cases they investigated was that of Sydney Lori Reid, a 44-year-old veterinary assistant in D.C. and a U.S. citizen.

In July, Reid went to a jail to witness an immigration enforcement action. Federal officers had gone there to arrest two migrant men, and Reid said she felt a duty to document it.

As Reid began videotaping, an agent grabbed her and pinned her to a wall. Reid was then surrounded by several federal law enforcement officials. One of them was an FBI agent wearing a face covering and an FBI vest. Two others were ICE officers, dressed in plain clothes, plaid shirts, and khaki pants.

Reid was handcuffed and told she was being arrested for interfering with their operation. Videos reviewed by Critchfield and her team cast doubt on the agents’ claims.

Reid was then placed in a government vehicle and transferred to federal custody. Like many American citizens who wind up in the crosshairs of DHS, she was accused of assault.

The government alleges she assaulted an FBI agent on the basis of scrapes on the agent’s hands, but the scrapes occurred in the process of putting handcuffs on Reid.

The government later charged Reid with felony assault of a federal official, a charge punishable with up to 20 years in prison — a serious federal charge that’s being applied far more broadly now than at any time in recent history.

When Reid was being arrested, she dropped her phone, but the phone was still recording. An agent picked up the phone and put it into the same vehicle that she was riding in on her way to detention.

One officer says: “We’re at the D.C. jail. We’re at the D.C. jail. We have an agitator in custody for ...”

Reid was handcuffed in the backseat. You can hear agents going back and forth about exactly how Reid had assaulted them. First, it was a raised knee, then an elbow.

Another officer: “Yeah, it appeared that there was an elbow that was ... When she was resisting, but she definitely interfered. So we have interfering and I’m going to get ...”

One of the ICE agents called her a stupid female as he was talking to a colleague: “Hey brother, are you good? I have to return to 1D and process this stupid female now that I f---ing don’t want to process her.”

Reid was held by federal authorities for roughly two days. She wasn’t allowed to make a phone call during that time.

In the aftermath of her arrest, prosecutors tried to indict her, but that needed to be done through a grand jury, and the grand jury declined to indict her. They tried again before another grand jury, which also declined to indict her. Then they went back to a third grand jury, which declined to indict her.

This is almost unheard of. It showed both the resistance from the public to charge her based on the evidence and the government’s determination to bring charges in this case.

Prosecutors ultimately charged Reid with misdemeanor assault of an officer, a lesser offense that doesn’t require going through a grand jury. Reid was acquitted of that misdemeanor charge at trial.

The Trump Administration’s Strategy

Critchfield and her Journal team found that the push to charge more people for assaulting federal officers — as happened to Reid — is an administration-wide strategy.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and her Department of Justice have pledged to prosecute these cases aggressively. From the very beginning of Bondi’s tenure, starting on her first day in office, she issued a flurry of memos, including one that encouraged prosecutors to aggressively investigate any instances of violence against law enforcement or obstruction of law enforcement.

Gregory Bovino, then the head of Border Patrol, directed his agents to arrest anyone who touched them. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders all the way to the top, everybody fucking gets it if they touch you. You hear what I’m saying?”

In addition to an increasing number of prosecutions, the Department of Homeland Security has been using social media to exaggerate these alleged attacks, often with a warning to the public: “Don’t be like this person. If you behave in this way, we will come for you.” And they have posted people’s pictures and their full names, seeking to make an example out of these people even before they’re convicted of a crime.

This happened to Reid. A week after she was arrested, her mug shot and name went up on the official ICE account on X, along with the fact that she’s based in Washington, D.C., and a post that said, “Assault an officer or agent get arrested. It’s not rocket science.”

ICE also publicly alleged that Reid assaulted federal agents on behalf of two alleged international gang members.

The Purpose of This Strategy

The Journal’s investigation makes clear that the purpose of this strategy has been to intimidate and silence Americans who might otherwise protest what ICE and Border Patrol are doing.

ICE publicly describes many of these protesters as rioters, agitators, thugs, and terrorists.

Here’s Vice President JD Vance speaking of Renee Good’s death:

“I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers.”

And here’s then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on the death of Alex Pretti:

“This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism, that’s the facts.”

Renee Good was in her car when she was killed. Critchfield and her team found that federal government officials have accused 32 U.S. citizens of intentionally using their vehicles as weapons. DHS considers a vehicle to be a deadly weapon, justifying the use of force. Of those 32 drivers, only one pleaded guilty to an assault charge. Three had their cases dismissed; the rest were never charged.

The Journal investigation found that in most cases where citizens were accused by the government, the outcome was similar to Reid’s.

181 citizens were accused by the government on X of attacking federal officers, but close to half of them were never even charged at all. When people were charged, more often than not, the cases fell apart. Either they were acquitted or found not guilty at trial.

Fifteen people mentioned in government posts pleaded guilty before going to trial. Ten of whom pleaded guilty for lesser offenses than what the government initially charged them with.

Videos have often played major roles in contradicting the government’s case. Critchfield and her team viewed videos that repeatedly cast doubt on the government’s allegations. Protesters were often called violent rioters or professional agitators and accused of making physical contact in some way with agents, but video footage often showed immigration agents being the first to lay their hands on demonstrators.

The Journal found that most of the government’s assault allegations against American protesters posted on X were unsubstantiated. Even federal prosecutors themselves acknowledged that in some cases, the evidence to back up these charges wasn’t there.

Federal prosecutors across the nation told Critchfield and her team that they are facing intense pressure to charge demonstrators and bystanders with crimes even when video evidence contradicts what officers initially claimed about what occurred, or in situations where they wouldn’t normally pursue federal charges.

The costs to those who are arrested are substantial. Even in cases where the person is exonerated, they must still deal with posting bail, securing defense attorneys, and taking days off from work to appear in court. In more extreme cases, people are doxed online and face death threats.

Reid says she’s been more hesitant about engaging in political speech, even though, as she put it, “Those are our rights as U.S. citizens and they’re being stifled.”

Conclusions

The Journal’s investigation concluded that:

“U.S. citizens are caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive government campaign to detain and demonize detractors, including by calling them terrorists, rioters, and agitators. The Department of Homeland Security, which was created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against U.S. citizens.”

By putting a public bull’s-eye on Americans whom the government accuses of assault, the Journal also found that the Trump administration is chilling First Amendment expression:

“People who had been accused publicly by the federal government of assaulting federal officers … are less likely to participate in protests and less likely to put themselves in situations where their name might be tracked…. There is a real pressure to crack down and send a message to people who the government views as perceived dissenters, even if video contradicts what agents have initially claimed happened.”

Again, let me remind you that this comes from The Wall Street Journal.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org