6 minutes: 

Most Americans are completely flabbergasted by the Trump regime’s flat out attack on the state on Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis in particular. Both the city and the state are damn decent people who have earned the term “Minnesota nice” from their fellow humans. 

Yet for some reason the current president has decided that both must pay a heavy price for something. Most of us are scratching our heads wondering what did they do to deserve a reign of terror from their own government. Only one person knows and that is Trump himself. As Trump descends into dementia, maybe he no longer knows. 

I admit I do not know, but I am going to take a stab at it. I believe this is part of his continuing campaign to divert from the Epstein Files and his cover up of those files. Remember that politicians and criminals are most often brought down by the cover up rather than the crime itself. 

Thus, Trump is doing all he can to divert from the Epstein Files. He has many avenues he has used for diversion. Blaming immigrants for any number of crimes and then cracking down on them is an old school right wing play that seems to always work. SoTrump dips into that well once again. 

But in the current case he gets a chance to also extract retribution against one of his opponents in the last election. As another plus to Trump he gets to extract retribution from a state that has never voted for him.  

As if terrorizing Americans, killing them and then further invading the state wasn’t enough, Trump is also diverting attention by invading Venezuela and overthrowing their government. The plus here is stealing Venezuela’s oil. If invading Venezuela wasn’tenough, how about threatening war with Iran?  

Not enough, yet? How about threatening to invade the territory of a fellow NATO member? This could easily end decades long alliances and make the US a pariah in international affairs.  

How about one more – say the investigation of Fed Chair Jay Powell in an effort to bend what is supposed to be an independent agency to follow his orders. 

All this is in some way in related to his desire to keep any discussion of the Epstein Files out of the news. As the Epstein files get covered up, we have compounding cover ups about ICE and Venezuela and Greenland and other behind the scenes actions that may come to bite the US in the ass sown the road. 

As Heather Cox Richardson put it in her newsletter Friday: 

You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota? 

They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme. 

{snip} 

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.” 

As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.