Today Donald Trump proved yet again that he is nothing short of a stone-cold racist. He reposted a message on social media that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. That's really all you need to know about it, other than the fact that (for once) it was so unbelievably offensive that, hours later, it was deleted. The White House blamed an unnamed "staffer," to which Black voters everywhere responded: "Yeah, right." Trump's hatred for the Obamas is well-known, of course, but even some Republicans complained at this latest racist outrage from Trump.

Of course, this wasn't the only outrage from Trump this week, just the most recent and most racist. There were plenty of others in the competition for the "outrage of the week" gold medal. So far, the one that is leading in the standings is Trump's new push to "nationalize" elections and have the Republican Party "take over the voting." In related news, the F.B.I. raided Fulton County's elections department and confiscated all the ballots from the 2020 presidential election, because Trump still cannot face the hard, cold fact that he lost that election. Now that all the ballots are in Trump's weaponized Justice Department's hands, look for an upcoming announcement that they have "found 11,780 votes" for Trump, as he had requested long ago. Welcome to Banana Republic America, folks!

This week, one government shutdown ended while the next one got teed up. The House passed the bill the Senate had passed last week, which will fund everything in the government except the Department of Homeland Security (which contains ICE). The D.H.S. funding only got extended until next Friday, and Congress has until then to come up with a deal. Democrats are demanding changes to ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies, which are pretty obviously needed right now.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a letter that outlines the Democrats' list of demands, all of which seem entirely appropriate and in a sane world would be considered not only reasonable but downright unobjectionable. Previously, a bill to make such changes probably would have gotten bipartisan support and may have even been introduced by a Republican. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were the ones adamantly against "jack-booted federal agents" (who may or may not be flying around in unmarked black helicopters). But these are not normal times, and that script has been flipped.

Nowadays, every American can see for themselves what out-of-control federal agents are doing in their name, paid for by their tax dollars. The thuggish brutality is on full display, which certainly strengthens the Democrats' arguing position. Masked men in full combat gear with weapons designed for the battlefield are roaming American cities in packs and attacking not just suspected immigrants but also any American citizen who dares to be offended by such totalitarian behavior.

Democrats didn't create this wave of revulsion against ICE, they are merely riding it. Watching American citizens being executed in cold blood by anonymous masked federal agents with a "shoot first, ask questions never" attitude sickened and outraged a large majority of the public. When Donald Trump ran on deporting "the worst of the worst," few expected that would include a 5-year-old boy wearing a Spiderman backpack, to state the obvious. Now that Trump's immigration crackdown has been revealed for what it truly is, the public recoils in horror. Democrats are seen as trying to fight back -- for the Constitution and for basic human rights.

Republicans, of course, are on the other side of those issues. So another shutdown next week is a very real possibility, except that this time it will only be D.H.S. who sees their funding end (the rest of the government is now funded through the end of the fiscal year).

You'd expect in the midst of such a political crisis for it to pop up in Saturday Night Live skits, and to see "ICE out" pins proliferating at the Grammys, worn by pop stars. But things have gotten so bad that the United States Olympic team had to rename their own "shared athlete hospitality area" in Italy, because they had previously chosen to call it the "Ice House." That obviously now has connotations they didn't want, so they're now calling it "Winter House" instead. During a recent winter storm, FEMA was told by its D.H.S. bosses to avoid using the word "ice" in their warnings, and instead say things like "freezing rain" -- so they wouldn't have to deal with memes based on government warnings that "Ice is making the roads dangerous" and whatnot.

Donald Trump has realized what a losing issue this is for him politically, which is a good sign. Whenever Trump wants to put something behind him, he is usually open to cutting a deal to get the whole thing off the front pages. And he's made a few moves in that direction so far. Trump personally told immigration agents not to get involved with the protests, which is a definite shift in tone from the top. He also turned over the immigration besiegement of Minneapolis to Tom Homan, who is seen as less of a thug than the people who previously had been the face of the operation. Which is ironic, as that SNL skit pointed out:

Look, I'm Tom Homan, OK?... I'm the "separating families at the border" guy. I'm the "on film taking a $50,000 bribe" guy -- and y'all are making me look like the upstanding reasonable adult in the room! That's crazy!!!

Kristi Noem announced this week that all agents in Minneapolis would be provided with body cameras "effective immediately," and by week's end it was announced that 700 of the occupying officers (out of a total of 3,000) were being sent home. That's not a full retreat, but it does show that Trump is aware of how much this is hurting him in the public eye. If he felt confident of public opinion, he never would have made any of these moves, obviously.

Meanwhile, ICE is trying to buy up warehouses across the country to turn them into detention centers (or as some might call them, "concentration camps"). Localities are actually beginning to push back against these moves, when they realize what is happening. Who wants an ICE human-misery facility in their own town, after all?

Federal judges, both in Minnesota and elsewhere, are beginning to get seriously annoyed at ICE's tactics and their blatant refusal to obey court orders. One of these rulings -- a short one -- was so witheringly dismissive of the lies, misrepresentations, and willful ignorance displayed in court (on the issue of that 5-year-old boy's detention, in fact) that the New York Times took the time to annotate it to point out how scathing each passage of it truly was. But the feds keep right on lying, no matter how unbelievable these lies are. ICE recently turned over a man in their custody in Minneapolis to a hospital and told the doctors that his injuries were because he "purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall." Even the nurses knew they were lying, since he had multiple fractures and bleeding in his brain, in several different places. So now they're just lazily using the language of a common wife-beater in an attempt to cover up their own unchecked brutality.

One Justice Department lawyer was pushed to the breaking point by all of this, and was summarily fired for telling the truth in court. She had been buried by having 90 cases assigned to her and just snapped when the judge asked why his court orders in some of these cases had just been flatly ignored:

In an extraordinary outburst, the prosecutor, Julie T. Le, told a judge during a hearing on Tuesday in Federal District Court in St. Paul that she and her colleagues in the local U.S. attorney's office were completely overwhelmed by the number of cases they had been forced to handle because of the White House's widespread immigration sweeps in Minnesota. At one point, she sardonically told the judge that she would welcome being held in contempt of court because it would allow her to get a good night's sleep.

Ms. Le's painfully personal remarks came as the judge, Jerry W. Blackwell, was grilling her about why she and other prosecutors had ignored his orders in five separate cases to free immigrants he had determined were illegally detained by federal agents.

"What do you want me to do?" Ms. Le asked the judge at one point. "The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need."

"Fixing a system, a broken system," she went on, "I don't have a magic button to do it. I don't have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have."

She went on to express her own exasperation and frustration with trying to make sure the judicial orders were obeyed:

"The system sucks, this job sucks," Le reportedly told Jerry Blackwell, federal judge in the U.S. district court covering Minnesota, during a hearing focused on the federal government's failure to comply with court orders concerning immigration detention. "I wish you would just hold me in contempt [of court] so I can get 24 hours of sleep," Le reportedly said, added separately: "It takes 10 emails from me for a release condition to be corrected. It takes me threatening to walk out for something else to be corrected."

It's gotten to the point where local police in Chicago are now being told to document any aggressive or potentially illegal behavior they see from ICE agents in their streets. D.H.S. is now also using "administrative warrants" (translation: no judge's signature required) to legally harass United States citizens they don't like, including one person who merely wrote a letter to a judge in support of a person who was at risk of deportation. We are slowly slipping into being a police state, which is why Democrats are finally fighting back.

Trump, meanwhile, has his own priorities to take care of. Which apparently includes continuing to slap his own name on everything in America that he thinks he can get away with. There is a huge tunnel project between New York City and New Jersey whose funds are being held up by Trump, and it should surprise no one to learn that Trump's price for freeing up the funding was to get both Dulles Airport and Penn Station (only one of which is even in New York City) renamed after him. This is precisely how petty Trump is, folks.

Speaking of the depths of Trump's pettiness, he went into a snit this week because pretty much every performing artist worth seeing is cancelling their scheduled dates at the Kennedy Center, now that Trump demanded to slap his own name on the building too. This list has grown so long it even has its own Wikipedia page now, in fact. Faced with plummeting ticket sales and the continuing and growing wave of artists refusing to perform there, Trump abruptly announced that the Kennedy Center will be closing its doors after July 4th for two whole years, so that it can be "renovated." This might mean Trump tears the entire building down, knowing his approach to such "renovations" (see: the former East Wing of the White House). Or maybe he'll just completely gut the interior and rebuild it as yet another monument to Trump's tacky and cringeworthy "style" design choices (see: the tawdry gilded additions to the Oval Office, done in classic "cheap brothel" style). This sudden announcement took everyone at the Kennedy Center by complete surprise, naturally, since it was nothing short of another Trumpian tantrum.

It all adds to our growing belief that any Democrat running for president in 2028 would boost their chances by including a plank in their campaign platform that promises to undo all this blizzard of bad taste. Promising to tear down whatever tacky palace Trump erects as his new White House ballroom and restoring the Kennedy Center to its dignity and grandeur seems guaranteed to get a lot of voter support, don't you think?

We have two candidates for this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award, and it was a close call because both were impressive in their own way.

The runner-up (who will have to settle for an Honorable Mention award) was Senator Elissa Slotkin. Here's the story, in case you missed it:

Sen. Elissa Slotkin has refused to voluntarily participate in a Justice Department investigation over a video she and five other Democratic members of Congress recorded late last year that urged U.S. troops to resist unlawful orders from the Trump administration.

In a Thursday letter to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro reviewed by The Washington Post and first reported by the Associated Press, Preet Bharara, an attorney for Slotkin (Michigan), defended the senator's decision and said the message that Slotkin and the other Democrats shared was "uncontroversial and incontrovertible."

"As a former member of the intelligence community, and current member of Congress with oversight of those communities, Senator Slotkin felt duty-bound to ensure those individuals understood that the law not only allows, but requires them, to refuse an illegal order," Bharara wrote.

Slotkin released a video this week explaining why she told Pirro to go pound sand, where she said that her lawyers had cautioned her to "just be quiet, keep my head down, and, hopefully, this will all just go away." She refused to take that route, as she explained:

But that's exactly what the Trump administration and Jeanine Pirro want -- they're purposely using physical and legal intimidation to get me to shut up. More importantly, they're using that intimidation to deter others from speaking out against the administration. The intimidation is the point, and I'm not going to go along with that.

Her legal team met with two lawyers from Pirro's office and afterwards Slotkin's lawyers stated that Pirro's team: "could not articulate any theory of possible criminal liability or identify any statute they were relying on or that could have been violated." Which is why Slotkin refused to take part in such an obvious textbook example of the weaponization of the Department of Justice.

But this week had an even more impressive Democrat in the headlines. Last weekend a special election was held in Texas. Democrats won a U.S. House seat that they were expected to win, which cut Speaker Mike Johnson's GOP majority down to the slimmest margin imaginable (he can now only afford to lose one GOP vote and still muster a majority of the chamber). But it was the state-level election that made the biggest political news:

In an upset that rattled Republicans in Texas and beyond, a Democrat decisively won a state legislative special election on Saturday in a district around Fort Worth that President Trump carried by more than 17 percentage points just over a year ago.

The Democrat, Taylor Rehmet, a local union leader and first-time candidate, defeated the Republican, Leigh Wambsganss, by double digits -- 57 to 43 -- in the historically conservative district.

The contest to fill a State Senate seat had been closely followed by national leaders from both parties as a barometer of potential Republican struggles in this year's midterm elections.

That is a 31-point swing in the vote, in a district Republicans had held for decades. Which is pretty darn impressive, you've got to admit. Even more impressive is how much Republicans are freaking out about the result, as they look towards the midterm elections in November. Democrats, meanwhile, are filled with glee at the news. For the far-reaching nature of his victory, Taylor Rehmet's stunning upset in his race makes him the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week, in our opinion.

[The online Texas state senate site has not listed Taylor Rehmet yet (he represents the 9th district), so you'll have to wait to officially let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

There were a few minor questionable things Democrats did last week, but we find that none of them rise to the level of the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award, so we're putting it back on the shelf once again until next week.

Volume 827 (2/6/26)

We've got another mixed bunch of talking points this week, and we couldn't even fit in one about how we could be at the dawn of a new nuclear arms race (we wrote about the expiration of the last nuclear arms limitation treaty yesterday, if anyone's interested). So let's just dig in and get right to them, shall we?

   Outraged

This is an old favorite of ours, we have to admit.

"You know, there's a political bumpersticker slogan that is so well-written that it continues to be relevant, even though the first time I saw one was decades ago. And never has it been more true than today. It says: 'If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.' These days, as Trump and his goons pile up outrage upon outrage, it's getting harder and harder for anyone not to notice it all. Some of us pay attention to all of them, but most everybody has been forced to pay attention to the worst of it, by now."

   ICE just ignores their own rules

This hasn't really been a part of the whole conversation, but it should be.

"You know, while Democrats try to write some rules to rein in ICE, what nobody seems to be addressing is that they already have rules -- they're just flat-out ignoring them. Just like every other police agency in this country, they have a handbook which lays out what is allowable and what is not. It's called the 'ICE Firearms and Use of Force Directive,' and the officers who shot Renée Good to death violated so many of the rules this handbook contains that it's hard to even count them all. So I hope Democrats keep this in mind while negotiating ICE reforms next week. Because creating rules for the use of force won't matter in the slightest if ICE agents are allowed to just flat-out ignore such rules."

   That pesky Fourth Amendment

Republicans are already pushing back on Democrats' demands, but their position is awfully hard to defend. So point it out!

"Republicans seem upset that Democrats are demanding that all federal agents fully comply with the United States Constitution. They are pushing back on a demand that judicial warrants must be in place before ICE breaks down doors of private houses and floods in with military weapons drawn and ready for use, without a judicial warrant. How can they even argue for this? For this to be allowable tactics for federal agents to use would require that Republicans pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the current Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights. For all those sanctimonious Republicans who used to make a big deal out of carrying a copy of the U.S. Constitution with them at all times, I would direct them to read it again -- especially that pesky Fourth Amendment."

   Still a sore loser

Trump is the "greatest of all time" when it comes to sore losers, that's for sure.

"Donald Trump is openly suggesting that he might just 'nationalize' the upcoming midterm elections. He thinks that Republicans should be in charge of the entire process of counting all the votes. And if anyone thinks he is 'just kidding,' for Pete's sake he is still trying to steal the 2020 presidential election -- you know, the one that he lost? He just grabbed all the 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia and keeps promising that any day now he'll produce some sort of evidence to back up his extended sore-loser tantrum about losing. It's been five years now and Donald Trump still can't face the fact that sometimes voters vote for Democrats. Which is what makes all his threats about the midterms so frightening."

   Send in the paratroopers!

Trump isn't even the worst on this subject.

"Steve Bannon -- who used to be a close Trump advisor but thankfully no longer is -- is going further than Trump on how the midterms should be conducted. He not only wants to flood all the voting places in blue states and cities with ICE agents -- to intimidate possible Democratic voters -- but he openly called for 'not just ICE' but that Trump 'call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne [Divisions] on the Insurrection Act.' We're nine months away from the midterm elections and already the MAGA lunatics are calling on Trump to flood the polling places with Army paratroopers. Because that's the America they want to live in, folks."

   It was all a lie!

Better late than never... Marjorie Taylor Greene is not mincing words these days, since she has broken herself out of the Trump personality cult in a big way. Here is just some of what she had to say in a YouTube interview this week (all of which pretty much any Democrat could agree with):

MAGA is, I think, people are realizing, it was all a lie. It was a big lie for the people.

. . .

I care about the fact that my kids, who are Gen Z, will never be able to afford life. That whole generation, they probably won't be able to buy a house. They can't afford health insurance. They can't afford car insurance. Most of their jobs are going to be replaced by A.I. Like, that's the stuff I care about.

. . .

People watching Fox News, every day, 24/7 with their volume turned all the way up in their living room and it's so loud that you can’t hear anything else? Those are the baby boomers and God bless them, those are my parents' generation. I love so many of the baby boomers, but they are the most brainwashed generation because they eat that crap, like, they just eat it up all day long. They're spoon-fed the propaganda on TV.

   Dying in darkness

This last one is just sad. This is a newspaper that once took down an American president by exposing his crimes to the public, after all.

"Did you see that the Washington Post laid off 300 journalists this week? This was the same week that a slobbering wet kiss of a documentary about the First Lady was released after Jeff Bezos -- the Post's owner -- paid over $75 million to create it, with $28 million of that going right into her own pocket. So Bezos isn't exactly hurting for money or anything. The Post, however, has gone from being a respectable news outlet to being nothing short of an apologist for everything Trump does. Their editorial board pieces are so laughably bad these days they put Fox News to shame. Subscribers have been leaving in droves, ever since Bezos refused to endorse a candidate in 2024 and then announced that the paper was going to strive to be Trump-friendly. Years earlier, he came up with a new motto for the paper which still exists in their masthead: 'Democracy dies in darkness.' This is nothing short of a joke these days, and it really should be replaced with a more appropriate motto: 'Will the last reporter to get fired please turn the lights out as they go.'"

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground