MAGA Melts Down Over Democrat’s Rousing Call to Fight Trump

Trump supporters are freaking out after Illinois Governor JB Pritzker called for mass mobilization to resist Donald Trump.

Pritzker told guests at a New Hampshire dinner full of Democratic activists, officials, and donors on Sunday, “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once.”

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” the Democratic governor said, drawing applause and even standing ovations from those in attendance. 

This did not sit well in Trumpworld. The president’s supporters immediately started clutching their pearls and acting as if Pritzker called for mass anarchy. Tech oligarch and fascism enthusiast Elon Musk called the remarks “crazy” on his X account, reposting video from the “End Wokeness” account, which is likely run by right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec.

Fellow MAGA influencer Benny Johnson accused Pritzker of inciting violence.  

Douglass Mackey, who went to prison for interfering in the 2016 election, went even further, claiming that Pritzker was “essentially calling for civil war against MAGA.”

Catturd, a well-known MAGA online troll whose real name is Phillip Buchanan, called Pritzker “scum.” 

This public freakout over a simple call to activism shows how the right is frightened of even the smallest bit of protest and seeks to criminalize any dissenting speech. MAGA personalities, such as Kari Lake, regularly call for and celebrate political violence, especially when a court case or election doesn’t go their way (and even when it does).  Even Republicans have admitted they’re terrified of the MAGA base’s threats of violence.

Pritzker’s words are much tamer than what conservatives say on a regular basis and are what Democratic voters are looking to hear from their leaders. It seems that the real conservative freakout might be fear over a coming wave of opposition in this country that could result in a loss of power and influence. 

On Canada’s Election Day, the leader of the United States urged the nation’s neighbors to vote for an especially odd third option: choosing Donald J. Trump as their leader.

“Good luck to the Great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st State of the United States of America,” Trump posted on Truth Social Monday.

“No more artificially drawn line from many years ago,” he continued, apparently referring to borders—an issue that he used in three elections to divide Americans while scapegoating immigration as the root cause of America’s social disorder. “Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER. ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE!”

“America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!” he added.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Mexico’s and Canada’s trade deficits with the United States are “subsidies,” rather than indicators that America’s neighbors are purchasing more of its goods than they were selling in return. In 2023, that differential—or deficit—was nearly $41 billion with Canada and $162 billion with Mexico, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The president has also vastly overinflated the reality of the deficits, wrongly asserting that the U.S. is “subsidizing” its neighbors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each. The obvious solution to that problem, per Trump, is to take Canada and its independence, folding it into his increasingly centralized government.

But if Canada did enter the United States (hypothetically), it likely would not bode well for Trump’s ongoing quest for power. An analysis by legal experts who spoke with The Washington Post found that the introduction of Canada into the U.S. government would be a “nightmare” for Trump, adding an additional 53 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives—the vast majority of which would identify as Democrats.

But the likelihood that Canada would allow itself to be annexed as an afterthought to U.S. dominance is practically zilch. Earlier this month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that his country’s cozy relationship with the U.S. had come to an end, and that they would wean themselves off American products and services “at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”

“Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over,” Carney said, shortly after replacing former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Canada’s leader. “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over.”

Carney is facing off against conservative lawmaker Pierre Poilievre, who appears to have modeled himself on Trump, for the prime minister’s office.

Republican Representative Mike Lawler wanted to impose order during his town hall Sunday, but no amount of rule-setting could have spared him from the fury of his constituents.

The New York Republican displayed a list of guidelines outside Clarkstown South High School in West Nyack, New York, where he was hosting his first town hall of the year.

The list required attendees to provide proof of residency in New York’s 17th district, prohibited “shouting, screaming, yelling or standing,” and encouraged them to “be respectful of one another, of staff, and of the congressman.”

But in the end, Lawler still faced tough criticism over his deference to President Donald Trump—often in the form of shouting and insults.

“What are you doing to stand in opposition to this administration? And what specifically are you doing that warrants the label ‘moderate?’” asked one constituent, a video on X showed, as the crowd of roughly 700 people erupted into cheers.

“My record speaks for itself—” Lawler began, sending the audience into raucous laughter and jeers. As Lawler continued to limply defend his supposedly moderate record—ProPublica has found that he voted in line with MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene 81 percent of the time—his constituents refused to quiet their anger.

“Folks, if you want me to answer the questions, let the question be asked, and then listen to the answer,” Lawler said. “If you’re just going to yell back and forth, the time is gonna run pretty quick.”

Lawler told his constituents who had expressed concern about Trump’s escalating trade war and “reciprocal tariff” policy that the president was simply responding to an “affordability crisis.”

“What caused record inflation? Five trillion dollars in new spending in the first two years of the Biden administration is what gave us record inflation,” Lawler said, drowned out by the sounds of booing from the crowd.

Constituents also expressed anger about the president’s inhumane deportations and his attacks on U.S. universities and colleges, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s mounting scandals, and concerns that Republicans were planning to make major cuts to Social Security and Medicaid.

“We’re not cutting Social Security or Medicaid. That is a lie—period!” Lawler insisted, and promised not to support efforts to strip benefits from eligible recipients. But the Republican Party has other plans to drastically shrink the federal match rate for the ACA expansion and shift more financial responsibility to states, and make it easier to gut the SSA.

While the audience was rowdy, they also appeared united. At one point, as Lawler explained that Trump’s tariffs were a response to higher tariffs from other countries and things such as European “price controls” on prescription medications, the audience began speaking in unison.

“Blah, blah, blah,” they chanted, according to a video posted on X.

Lawler was reelected to his seat in November with a whopping 57 percent of the vote. Voters in his district supported the moderate Republican over Democrat Mondaire Jones, but backed Kamala Harris rather than Trump.

The Trump administration is open to arresting Supreme Court judges, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told it on Monday morning.

“You guys arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit judge for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get away,” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Leavitt. “As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?”

“That’s a hypothetical question, again I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at or individual cases. But let’s be clear about what this judge did: She obstructed federal law enforcement who were looking for an illegal alien in her courthouse. She showed that illegal alien the door to evade law enforcement officials. That is a clear-cut case of obstruction,” Leavitt replied.

“And so anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials from doing their jobs is putting theirselvses at risk of being prosecuted, absolutely.”

The Department of Justice on Friday arrested Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan, on charges of obstruction after she allegedly “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores Ruiz, an undocumented immigrant. He was later arrested outside the courthouse.

The Trump administration is showing open and direct hostility toward the judicial branch, identifying any judge who dares to defy them as an “activist judge.” The arrest of Judge Dugan, the numerous court orders ignored by the administration, the eight immigration judges who have now been fired or put on leave, and now, Leavitt’s alarming answer are all clear indications that Trump has no plans to reel back his abuse of executive power.

A sprawling network of Signal group chats involving hundreds of top business executives, Silicon Valley leaders, and journalists, as well as legal and economic analysts, has massively reshaped national politics since the pandemic—in large part thanks to the platform’s disappearing-message function.

“Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens,” Substack author Noah Smith wrote.

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the tech venture capitalist firm a16z and onetime co-author of Mosaic, an early internet web browser, spends “half his life on 100” of these sorts of group chats at a time, one anonymous participant hyperbolized to Semafor’s Ben Smith.*

In a blog post announcing Erik Torenberg as one of a16z’s general partners, Andreessen described the private spaces as having produced a national “vibe shift.” That’s because powerful individuals are less afraid to share what they really think in the closed-circuit digital rooms, according to several sources that spoke with Semafor.

“People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone,” Torenberg told the publication.

Andreessen agreed—telling Torenberg on a recent podcast that they’re having “all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” blaming the public silence on a general air of censorship on major social platforms.

But some of those conversations have straggled away from friendly discourse and into the realm of political influence. Amid the network lies a vast web of right-wing chatrooms bent on keeping Donald Trump in power and vanquishing political dissent from the left.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” conservative culture warrior Christopher Rufo told Semafor. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end—so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo—who has risen to popularity on the right for inventing a fiction that the left has taken over America—had seen the opportunity within the Signal spaces to influence those in power all along.

“I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right,” Rufo said.

With time, dissenters were branded as upstarts suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (sometimes shorthanded to TDS), spawning what are effectively echo chambers: smaller and tighter group chats that have nixed alternative perspectives.

“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,” David Sacks wrote of the popular group chat Chatham House, informing Torenberg that he should “create a new one with just smart people.” Sacks left shortly after sending that message.

That spawned the exit of another three notable figures: Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

* This article previously mischaracterized Mosaic.