President Donald Trump’s apparent decision to de-escalate in Minneapolis was not driven by some kind of realization that he had caused too much harm. He was compelled to retreat because Minneapolis residents’ confrontations with his de facto secret police laid bare for the nation — and even his own party — how extreme his immigration agents’ behavior had become.
Minneapolis activists’ highly organized efforts forced Trump to incur political costs for his behavior and, in the process, illustrated the importance of resisting Trump’s authoritarian maneuvers instead of trying to passively ride them out. Every time a city shrugs and allows Trump to fabricate a reason for sending the military or militarized federal officers to a city, he succeeds in another trial run for more extreme political suppression in the future. But when Americans draw lines in the sand, they thwart his tests of our limits and lay out a path for how to protect our freedom.
People in Minneapolis could’ve taken this lying down. They didn’t. Robert Worth’s excellent report in The Atlantic sketched out how, while the movement was leaderless, it still produced in sum “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest.”
This is a preview of Zeeshan Aleem’s latest column. Read the full column here.
|
