Clarence Page: Beware the bully promising a 'soft touch'

For casual observers of U.S. politics, an interview President Donald Trump gave last Wednesday to "NBC Nightly News" might have suggested a change of tone in the federal government's standoff in Minnesota.

Speaking of the brute-force operations federal agents have conducted there rounding up undocumented immigrants in that state, Trump told anchor Tom Llamas: “I learned that maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch. But you still have to be tough.”

To make sense of Trump, it's more important to pay attention to what he does than what he says — because what he says is often misdirection, and is likely to be contradicted by what he says or does a day, a week or a month later.

“We’re dealing with really hard criminals,” Trump told Llamas, adding, “Look, I’ve called the people. I’ve called the governor. I’ve called the mayor. Spoke to ’em. Had great conversations with them. And then I see them ranting and raving out there. Literally as though a call wasn’t made.”

ICE and Border Patrol are not "dealing with" a lot of criminals — which is to say, undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crime in our country — although they have arrested a few. By one estimate, roughly one in 10 arrests made in the Department of Homeland Security's "Operation Metro Surge" has been of a person with a prior conviction. And the conservative Cato Institute estimates that of those arrested in all DHS operations since Oct. 1, 73% have no prior criminal convictions, and only 5% have had a violent criminal conviction.

So it strains credibility to contend that federal agents are in Minnesota to rid it of dangerous aliens. And judging by reports on social media from those involved, ICE and Border Patrol agents have not de-escalated efforts to arrest immigrants and Minnesotans observing and documenting their operations.

Federal agents continue to pull guns on citizen observers, threaten them verbally, rough them up, arrest them and publish their mugshots on social media with the intention of inflicting personal repercussions. All because these citizens engage in constitutionally protected activity that Trump and DHS don't like.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, have strongly condemned Trump's immigration raids, and have called on the president to de-escalate.

Yet the true intentions of the Trump administration can be seen in the letter U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Walz shortly after the shooting death of a second protester, Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis. Bondi told Walz that he could “bring an end to the chaos” by, among other things, turning over the state's voter data to the Justice Department.

How are voter rolls related to immigration enforcement? This is where casual observers of U.S. politics need to start paying attention.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has aggressively sought state voter data, and has sued at least 24 states and territories to get it. Eleven states have complied, but many have resisted, including Minnesota, where complying would actually break state law.

Trump wants desperately to establish that U.S. elections have been plagued by voter fraud, which likely explains the FBI's recent raid on the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center in Georgia, from which they carted away 2020 ballots under the watchful eye of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Trump, you will recall, infamously claimed the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen. And although he and his allies mounted more than 60 lawsuits alleging voter fraud, all of them failed but one, an inconsequential case in Pennsylvania. Yet his supporters went on to storm the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the Electoral College vote from being certified, one the most shameful days in recent U.S. political history.

As I pointed out not long ago, Trump views the 2026 midterms as existential. If he loses the majority in either house of Congress, he faces investigations, roadblocks to govern and possibly impeachment. No surprise, then, that Trump recently said he might not "accept" the midterm poll results. He wants to "nationalize" voting so his federal agencies can control it.

And make no mistake, the midterms are shaping up to be a disaster for Republicans, and they know it. The violence committed in Trump's DHS raids has seriously undercut support for the president and his party in public opinion polls.

Yet Trump and Co. continue their efforts to intimidate, hoping their fortunes will change. For example, the Justice Department recently indicted journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort on civil rights charges after they entered a St. Paul, Minnesota, church to cover a protest against its pastor, an ICE official.

Lemon, a longtime thorn in Trump's side, argues the indictment is a plain assault on his First Amendment rights.

Bullying has been a fruitful strategy for Trump in his second term. He has used every lever of government to amass great personal power and wealth, to cow and extort and threaten people and institutions he has deemed as rivals.

But when he turned on ordinary Minnesotans — and Angelenos and Chicagoans before that — and they stood up and fought back, it forced all of America to confront the possibility that our democracy is slouching toward tyranny and that we too need to stand up.

It's outrageous to think that Americans are fighting our own president — risking arrest, injury and even death — to uphold the basic rights the Constitution grants to all of us. But Trump has plunged us into a needless, destructive national crisis, and it may get a lot worse before it gets better.

(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)