Even as Malcolm Nance made his weekly appearance on The Stephanie Miller Show Wednesday morning and predicted that individuals would be getting hurt, citizen Renee Nicole Good was murdered by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. The part that was of major interest to me (at 2:30) is when Nance says that Putin could not have trained a better agent than Trump. (6:48 – note the last minute is advertising):

It almost seems cosmic. As former spy and best selling author Malcolm Nance discusses the Felon in the White House on Stephanie Miller Wednesday, the Trump administration commits murder under the guise of maintaining civil tranquility. Trump has been using the excuse that there is an “emergency” as a cover to invade American cities and to, in effect, wage war on those who live there.

What is the “crime” that people in cities have committed? They vote for Democrats in far higher numbers than Republicans. Therefore to Trumps increasingly fevered brain they are enemies of his and therefore by extension they are enemies of the US. Trump sees anyone who is not allegiant to him as a traitor. Our founders knew that unchecked power quickly led to terror, brutality and dictatorship.

Evidence shows from day 1 of this administration that Trump has been focused on doing whatever his administration could do to instigate an incident that would give him an excuse to have a big show of force and literally take over the running of a city. He had specific cities he targeted and obviously Minneapolis was high on his list.

While there have been some safeguards to keep an executive from doing some very blatant actions, Trump and his henchmen found a sort of a loophole by using immigration enforcement as a backdoor to push a quasi-military force into the cities. The force they are using are ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Patrol).

There seems to be little restraint on ICE and CBP. Something that commentors don’t seem to be saying is that ICE and CBP have become a de facto private army for Trump to control via the Department of Homeland Security and his toady Kristi Noem. As Thom Hartmann noted in his Thursday newsletter, the founders were aware of the desire to accrue power and tried to stop it before it started:

Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.

Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.

Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.

The first 10 days of 2026 have been gawd awful ramping up on the dictator-like policies inagurated in 2025. Now it seems like Trump and his henchmen (especially Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem) have latched onto a direction. Now it seems like full speed ahead with policies that will wrap all power into the presidency while Trump himself steal massive fortunes – such as stealing Venezuelan oil where he gets the proceeds.

According to what Malcolm Nance said above, we have passed the line and Trump has accrued the powers of a dictator. He has a personal army and is waging wars within the country in cities. At the same time he is waging war against democrats where ever they hold power, especially at the state level. His illegal withholding of appropriated funds from democratic led states is clearly illegal, yet he simply ignores the law as he wages his war.

As 2026 progresses, I believe we can expect Trump and his henchmen to ramp up the violence, the illegal acts and another aspect of his consolidation of power, his international policies based in the philosophy of might makes right.

Trump’s personal army (9 minutes):