Anti-ICE sentiment could spark a democratic rebirth, or doom us further

If we still lived in a rational democracy, the masked thugs in Trump’s ill-trained paramilitary force would be in full retreat.

By wide margins in multiple polls (CNN, Quinnipiac, Economist/YouGov, Data for Progress), Americans say the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis was not justified, that ICE is making the cities less safe, and that it needs to be reined in or even abolished. The public backlash is so fervent, according to a new Associated Press poll, that Trump’s approval rating on immigration has cratered. Trump arguably won in 2024 on the perceived strength of his hardline immigration stance, but now the AP says that only 38 percent of Americans support the way he’s handling the issue. A landslide 61 percent give him thumbs down.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokesliar, declared the other day that immigration “remains among his best polling issues,” but sane observers know better. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, says “the Renee Good story has broken through” – at Trump’s expense – “in a way other stories have not.” In focus groups, she talks to “ardent fans of the president,” some of whom now believe that his anti-immigrant aggressiveness has “gone too far.”

Perhaps you’ve heard about the Minneapolis couple that made the mistake last Wednesday of driving their SUV down the wrong street – “wrong” only because members of Trump’s Sturmabteilung were busy doing their thing. The presence of ICE had drawn protestors; ICE responded with flash-bang grenades and tear gas, ignoring or not noticing the trapped couple had their six kids in the SUV. It filled with smoke, and three of the kids required hospital treatment – including the youngest, six months old – because they could barely breathe.

Even hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan – one of Trump’s biggest ‘24 boosters, named by the Wall Street Journal as “the country’s most important swing voter” – is repulsed by MAGA’s boots on the ground. Renee Good’s death “just seems like all kinds of wrong to me,” he said in his studio the other day. “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people – many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them. Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

Gestapo…he said it, not me.

And of course, that’s what we’ve come to – thanks to a voting plurality that chose to commit national suicide and usher in a goonocracy.

It’s nice that people en masse have woken up and remembered (perhaps too late) fear and terror are not core American values, and a case can even be made that Rogan’s epiphany is somewhat analogous to Walter Cronkite’s 1968 on-air announcement Lyndon Johnson was wrong to wage the Vietnam war. LBJ quickly realized when he lost Uncle Walter, he was politically doomed. Today, if this were a just world with at least a shred of democratic decency, Trump would heed Rogan and dial back the madness.

But here’s the big problem: Authoritarians don’t care what their peasants think.

I know it sounds melodramatic to say we’re living on a knife’s edge, but reality trumps the natural instinct to ignore and deny. Thanks to the lavish funds supplied by last summer’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the mass recruitment of ICE goons continues apace, and Trump seems to be thirsting for any excuse to send in the military to wage domestic war under the Orwellian guise of imposing peace, while lying with each inhalation of oxygen about Minneapolis and everything else.

So what can we the people do to salvage what we’ve always loved about this country, what we long took for granted? The only rational option is to push back peacefully in the street, demonstrating that indeed there can still be strength in numbers; to inspire the jelly-legged congressional Democrats to reattach their spines; and to vote massively for renewed checks and balances in the November midterms – braving the inevitable MAGA efforts to obstruct the vote counts and cry foul in the aftermath.

It’s been 10 years of havoc. On election night in 2016, my late wife stayed up til dawn tallying the returns, in the futile hope that Trump’s first win would not stand. That morning she told me, “This is not the country I thought I lived in.” She didn’t live to see his second win. Her father had fled fascism for America in the late 1930s, and to her it was an article of faith that we were the good guys. She would be aghast today, but her feet would be on the street – mindful, as the people of Minneapolis well know, that silence is surrender.

The Germans kept their heads down. We have three centuries of tradition to tap for rebellious inspiration. We owe it not only to ourselves, but to the everyday patriots who’ve passed on.

Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com