It’s Election Day, and boy, do we have election coverage for you: Tim, Sarah, and JVL will kick off our election night broadcast at 7:00 p.m. EST on Substack, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.
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Tim → ’ → Substack
Sam and the rest of the Bulwark team will carry us through the night as results come in across the country.
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results → carry → country
Trump’s Downfall Started in Minneapolis
by Andrew Egger
So here we are at last.
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we → start → Egger
After two years of Donald Trump’s Washington—the idiocy, the cruelty, the malice, the bullying, the bigotry, the hubris, the state violence, the monomania, the cowardice—it’s finally time for the president to make the first payment on the bill.
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president → ’ → bill
Barring a catastrophic polling error (and when has that ever happened?), Americans seem set to deliver a colossal rebuke to Trump, who stormed into office last year ready to crack heads and is now doddering out the last days of his trifecta ranking asses.
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who → bar → asses
Trump’s disastrous Middle East war fractured his coalition and doomed the country to a year (or more!) of terrible economic vibes.
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war → fracture → vibes
A week into the war, Trump’s approval rating was sitting north of 42 percent; it’s been slumping lower ever since.
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it → sit → percent
Nothing makes price-conscious Americans reach for their pitchforks like spiking energy prices.
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Americans → make → prices
But I think that the turning point in Trump 2.0 actually came a little earlier.
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point → think → Trump
The thing that convinced Trump he needed to beat a retreat on a core part of his domestic agenda was his fiasco in Minneapolis.
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he → convince → Minneapolis
It’s only been a year, but it’s already easy to forget just how big a part large-scale state violence against Democratic protesters played in Trump’s plans in 2025.
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violence → ’ → 2025
Over and over, the White House launched remarkable provocations against blue cities and states, from Los Angeles to Portland to Washington, D.C.
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House → launch → Washington
These actions weren’t just intended to cow Democratic leaders.
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actions → intend → leaders
They were intended to stoke deliberate conflict between militarized agents of the state and people on the ground—conflict that Trump and MAGA could then repackage as content for their base.
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Trump → intend → base
Amid Trump’s many simultaneous assaults on the norms and laws that restrain the presidency, this content served a specific rhetorical purpose.
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content → restrain → purpose
In videos of riots and clashes with protesters, Trump’s government represented the forces of order, while those who opposed him were the forces of chaos.
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who → represent → chaos
The law, Trump’s violence argued, wasn’t some bunch of buzzkill rules dorks and eggheads used to rein in great men like him.
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violence → argue → him
As I wrote last October:
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I → write → ?
Trump goes out of his way to start conflicts.
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Trump → go → conflicts
He wildly exaggerates the horrors of daily life in blue cities.
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He → exaggerate → cities
He sends the National Guard in a shock-and-awe show of force into those same places.
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He → send → places
In the protests and clashes that result, he tells them the only way they can err is by pulling their punches.
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they → result → punches
You’ve got to teach these criminals, he says, the only way they understand.
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they → get → way
They spit, you hit.
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you → spit → ?
And “criminals” are whoever Trump says they are.
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they → say → ?
When he ordered ICE into Minneapolis, Trump was just following the natural progression of this plan.
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Trump → order → plan
But the plan quickly met disaster.
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plan → meet → disaster
ICE’s clownishly brutal occupation of the city spurred ever-increasing organized resistance from locals, who tracked ICE vehicles and made their job consistently irritating and difficult—blowing their cover by following them with blaring horns and shrieking blowing whistles, organizing deliveries of groceries and other materials to terrified immigrants wouldn’t have to risk leaving their homes, and so on.
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job → spur → homes
And videos of irritated agents lashing out at annoying but law-abiding and peaceful protesters started to turn public sentiment against the occupiers—even before things went catastrophically wrong.
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things → lash → occupiers
And then came the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
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deaths → come → Good
More than anything else, these two instances of shocking police violence against peaceful protesters turned the tide.
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instances → turn → tide
Trump and Co. wanted a constant feed of videos of police administering street justice to hooligans; instead, Americans’ social platforms were suddenly full of videos of deadly violence dealt against—in Pretti’s case—a man who had literally tried to peacefully place his body between an agent of the state and the woman he was roughing up.
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he → want → state
MAGA’s propaganda machine tried feverishly to smear these two dead Americans as domestic terrorists and would-be cop killers.
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machine → try → terrorists
But no one was buying it, and soon even they had to admit it.
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they → buy → it
Not long after, the White House announced an about-face: They were heading out of Minneapolis.
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They → announce → Minneapolis
From now on, federal immigration enforcement would focus on the red cities and states that would cooperate with less fuss.
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that → focus → fuss
I don’t mean to oversell this.
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I → mean → this
It isn’t as though Trump et al. have gotten significantly more careful about the violence the state wields: Others have died at the hands of DHS agents this year, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine this summer.
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Others → get → Maine
And, as our Adrian Carrasquillo reported last week, Good and Pretti’s families have never gotten accountability from the officers who killed them.
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who → report → them
But Minneapolis’s resistance still achieved something extraordinary: At a time when Trump seemed at his strongest and they seemed at their weakest, they managed to throw him off his violent agenda simply by standing up nobly as individuals and as a community against his designs.
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they → achieve → designs
…and 84 more, not listed.
The Aporia
