Leading Republican Pledges Trump Will Crack Down on More Blue Cities

A common left-wing slogan—which pithily summarizes the “imperial boomerang” thesis—is that fascism is imperialism “at home” or “turned inward.” This is typically stated with an implied negative view of both of those things.

In an appearance on Newsmax, Republican Representative James Comer of Kentucky advanced—and endorsed—his own positive twist on that concept. Following Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Comer said the military should be sent to Democratic-run cities to “reduce crime,” leveraging experiences from America’s numerous foreign entanglements since the 2000s.

“We’re gonna support doing this in other cities, if it works out in Washington, D.C.,” Comer said. “And, again, it’s unfortunate, but we spend a lot on our military. Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime in other countries. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that’s what the president is doing.”

“I think this is an experiment that’s probably needed in a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America,” Comer later added. The sentiment echoes Trump’s description of the capital as a testing ground for crackdowns on more cities.

Comer also expressed confidence that President Trump will garner the votes in Congress needed to extend the 30-day takeover. The president has vowed to do so with or without the legislative branch’s approval, but Comer dubiously predicted that Trump’s action in D.C. will be so popular that enough Senate Democrats will be swayed to extend it.

“I think people that represent big cities, which are the Democrats in Congress, they’re going to probably hear from their constituents: ‘Look, that worked in Washington, D.C. Why don’t you vote to allow President Trump to come into Chicago or New York City or Philadelphia and try to combat the criminal activity in their city?’”

On the eve of what President Trump calls a “feel-out meeting” in Alaska with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president seems well aware of a no-cost way to curry favor with Trump.

On Thursday, per the AFP, Putin said the United States is making “quite vigorous and sincere efforts to halt hostilities, end the crisis, and reach agreements that serve the interests of all parties involved in this conflict.” He also dangled the possibility of “long-term conditions for peace … if we reach agreements on strategic offensive arms control.”

Max Seddon of the Financial Times observed that, in buttering up Trump, Putin was seemingly appealing to the president’s long-standing yearning for a Nobel Peace Prize. Last month, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said a Trump Nobel Prize is “well past time,” while citing misleading claims about the president’s foreign policy. On Thursday, the influential Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv reported that Trump recently called Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, “out of the blue” to say “he wanted the Nobel Prize—and to discuss tariffs.”

Lately, several world leaders have played to Trump’s apparent hankering for a Nobel. Leaders of countries such as Pakistan, Israel, Guinea-Bissau, Gabon, Azerbaijan, and Armenia have seemingly caught onto this easy route to the president’s heart.

At the Alaskan summit, Trump is hoping to set a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in motion—though he’s managed expectations, saying, “I think it’ll be good, but it might be bad.” (The president’s promise to end the war on “day one” is now broken by nearly seven months.)

While, as Seddon noted, Putin appears to be dangling a gold Nobel medal before the president, Trump reportedly may offer rare earth minerals in return.

The Telegraph reports that, among other economic incentives, the president is considering giving Russia access to mineral deposits in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, which houses a sizable portion of Europe’s lithium supply. He is also weighing giving Russia opportunities to exploit Alaska’s natural resources, namely in the oil- and gas-rich Bering Strait.

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants attending immigration court violates their due process rights.

In a scathing opinion released Thursday, Judge Dale E. Ho wrote that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in immigration court had turned the procedure into “detention roulette.”

Over the span of 31 pages, Ho wrote that Carlos Javier Lopez Benitez, a 27-year-old from Paraguay, had his constitutional rights violated when he attended court on July 16 in pursuit of asylum.

“Mr. Lopez Benitez appears to be far from alone,” Ho wrote. “His counsel assert that his treatment is part of a ‘nationwide campaign,’ as set forth in an ICE internal memo that has been described in various media reports, which suggests that millions could be swept up in the same way.”

Since May, ICE agents have been arresting immigrants immediately after their immigration court hearings. The strategy has gained nationwide attention in the wake of two high-profile consequences: the indictment of a judge in Wisconsin who allegedly helped an immigrant evade authorities outside her courtroom, and the detention of New York City Comptroller and then–mayoral hopeful Brad Lander, who was attempting to escort an immigrant out of the courthouse.

Ho noted that while the government could not confirm or deny the existence of that policy, they “appear to maintain that they must categorically detain all undocumented immigrants who they believe have entered the United States unlawfully—no matter how long they have been residing in the country since.”

Citing Velasco Lopez v. Decker, Ho further argued that the “suggestion that government agents may sweep up any person they wish” for no reason whatsoever, “so long as the person will, at some unknown point in time, be allowed to ask some other official for his or her release offends the ordered system of liberty that is the pillar of the Fifth Amendment.”

Lopez Benitez’s case may be the new normal in Trump’s America, but it is far from the historical standard. Immigration authorities used to stay away from courthouses, fearing that their presence could disengage people from following procedure and navigating the legal system. But White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s agenda has effectively unrooted that, tasking federal agents with arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—a quota so astronomical that it has forced the agency to find unconventional subjects of detention, including legal residents and even U.S. citizens.

Senator Markwayne Mullin revealed that he actually has no idea who the mayor of Washington even is.

During an interview on Fox News Wednesday, the Oklahoma Republican attempted to excoriate D.C.’s “very racist mayor” for making Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the nation’s capital about race.

“And people may get eyebrows when I raise that, but he is the one that brings in race into the conversation, so he’s the one that’s pointing the fingers at it, and when you point one finger you got three pointing back at ya,” Mullin said. “But for him to say that, and flat out lie to the American people, he knows exactly what’s happening.”

But Mayor Muriel Bowser isn’t a “he” or a “him.” She’s a woman. And she didn’t suggest Trump’s takeover was about race—she’s just Black.

Several people online, including CNN senior reporter Edward Isaac-Dovere, suggested that Mullin might be referring to comments from Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March 2024. Scott accused his critics at the time of being racist. (Spoiler alert, calling someone the “DEI mayor” is racist.)

Clearly, not only do guests on Fox News not have to be experts on the people they want to complain about, but they don’t even have to know what city they’re talking about.

“Crime is not down, the lack of prosecution is down,” Mullin continued. “They don’t allow the prosecuting attorneys to actually prosecute, they’ve taken all the felonies, and they’ve dropped them down to dang near misdemeanors.”

On Monday, Bowser called Trump’s executive action “unsettling and unprecedented,” adding that she wasn’t surprised given Trump’s past rhetoric. It’s unclear whether she meant his echoing of racist narratives about urban areas, or his specific grievances about Washington, of which he has many.

On Tuesday, Bowser struck a stronger tone. “This is a time where community needs to jump in and we all need to, to do what we can in our space, in our lane, to protect our city and to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule, and get to the other side of this guy, and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push,” she said.

The most recent producer price index numbers directly contradict two of Trump’s favorite narratives: that his tariffs won’t lead to significant price increases and that other countries will foot the bill if they do. 

If that was true, the PPI numbers, which track inflation on the producer side, would be dropping. But Trump was lying. The U.S. economy just experienced its largest PPI rise in three years, with a 0.9 percent increase in July. Inflation is rising, and it’s Trump’s fault. 

“So much for foreigners paying tariffs. If they did, PPI would be falling,” RSM chief economist Joseph Brusuelas wrote Thursday on X. “Wholesale prices up 3.3% from a year ago & 3.7% in the core. The temperature is definitely rising in the core. This implies a hot PCE reading lies ahead.”

Prices on fresh and dry vegetables have also risen 38.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Prices on meats, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and eggs are also up. 

Last time Trump got a bad economic report, he fired the BLS commissioner. How will he hide the negative impacts this time? What will the spin be?

“The projected number was 0.2%,” wrote Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Virginia Representative Don Beyer, referring to the 0.9 percent rise. “This isn’t just a huge inflationary increase, it’s an order of magnitude larger than what was expected. And no question at all that it’s being driven by Trump’s tariffs.”

Companies won’t be volunteering to eat this price increase as Trump has wrongly suggested in the past, and other countries certainly won’t either. American consumers should expect the president to lie his way through this obvious economic failure.