If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Donald Trump took to social media and wrote a post featuring every greatest hit from his grievance playlist, your answer arrived this weekend, because the president unleashed the full wrath of his racist, xenophobic rhetoric in a new Truth Social post. A post that makes the stuff we had to deal with in his first administration seem downright restrained in comparison.
Ever since the unlawful killing of Renee Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis, the country has been in an uproar, with protests against Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown happening in several major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and of course, Minneapolis.
And the president’s response? Well, he massively escalated the situation by deploying an additional 1,000 CBP agents to Minnesota, and this was on top of the 2,000 ICE agents that were already present in the area.
There have been mass demonstrations taking place in Minneapolis to protest ICE’s dubious and often violent methods, and Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deal with them. So far, the president’s only contribution to the whole mess he helped create has been to call the people of Minneapolis “thugs and anarchists,” “highly paid professional agitators,” and “violent rioters and domestic terrorists,” and he isn’t done by a long shot.
Trump once again took to Truth Social late Sunday to defend ICE and wonder, genuinely wonder, why the Minnesotans are fighting this fascistic takeover of their communities.
“ICE is removing some of the most violent criminals in the world from our country, and bring [sic] them back home, where they belong,” he wrote. “Why is Minnesota fighting this? […] The thugs that are protesting include many highly paid professional agitators and anarchists. Is this really what Minnesota wants?”
When in doubt, just keep lying
One of Donald Trump’s established demagogue techniques is to repeat the same buzzwords over and over again. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. Or so they say, and so Trump believes. If you keep calling citizens “highly paid professional agitators” (and always, always in that same order) or throw around words like “terrorists” ad nauseam, well, the least it will accomplish is to make sure the MAGA base is conditioned to accept an aggressive crackdown somewhere down the line.
But it didn’t end there. The piece de resistance came in the form of Trump once again regurgitating the debunked conspiracy theory that Rep. Ilhan Omar “married her brother” to get citizenship. This racist smear, which originated in far-right cesspools and has been dismissed by every credible news agency, apparently seemed perfectly reasonable for an official presidential statement. At this point, this isn’t just misinformation, but a deliberate choice to spread racist attacks against a black Muslim congresswoman.
At the end of the day, Trump’s obsession with Minnesota isn’t random. The state represents everything MAGA finds threatening. It’s diverse, progressive, and refuses to go don without a fight when it comes to Trump’s increasingly authoritarian policies.
Minnesota will survive Trump’s tantrums. The question is whether American democracy will too.
Published: Jan 18, 2026 06:00 pm