Minnesota was The Moment, Trump was not The Man
The Battle of Minneapolis exposed an American fraud in the White House
By Mark Cromer
It has been twenty months and change since 77 million Americans went to the polls and propelled Donald J. Trump to one of the most stunning political comebacks in modern American history.
Picking up more than 14 million more votes than he had eight years earlier during his first successful political insurgency, in 2024 Trump swept every battleground state and won 2,633 counties to the Democrats’ 427. Trump triumphed in the popular vote tally and he crushed it in the Electoral College.
As that year drew to a merciful close, the Democratic Party’s national machine lay battered, broken and befuddled; reduced, it seemed, to asking if someone got the license plate of the bus that had just barreled over it.
While Trump’s long conquest back to the White House was a stunning turn of events in America, anyone who was vertical, breathing and conscious during the election season knew that his resurgence could be ascribed to one issue alone: immigration.
By the fall of 2024, Americans were reeling on their backfoot from a human tsunami that had swept across the nation’s southern frontier for four years running, a tidal wave of humanity from every corner of the globe that made landfall with devastating impacts in America’s Great Cities and all the way down to her rural small towns.
The path back to the Oval Office for Trump was hardly a conundrum for his campaign. He still had the map he had used in 2016, the year he politically humiliated Jeb Bush and a dozen or so other standard-issue Republicans vying to be the party’s nominee. It was the same map that provided directions to vanquishing his nemesis Hillary Clinton, whose lifelong dream of becoming ‘Madame President’ was subsequently devoured by the fury of a white working-class enraged at being contemptuously dismissed by her as “a basket of deplorables.”
James Carville might have put it simply enough: “It’s immigration, stupid.”
If immigration policy was the North Star of Trump’s 2016 run for president, his 2024 campaign was even more deeply rooted in an explicit vow to stem the tide, close the gates and relentlessly evict most everyone who is in the United States illegally. Trump knew that message would resonate with Americans who were at full boil as they watched border scenes that looked like World War Z and as migrants poured into their communities to receive benefits that were intentionally kept out of reach for citizens.
Trump understood that Americans felt their country was being bum rushed into oblivion and demographically remade into the likeness of a violently chaotic Third World banana republic. He tapped that head of steam by direct and unvarnished declarations—there was no ambiguity in what Trump on the stump promised voters he would deliver—that the keystone of his policy would be mass deportations of migrants illegally present in the nation.
As the summer of 2026 now approaches, Trump’s vow to voters on mass deportations seems as bankable as a Pan Am check written by Frank Abagnale Jr., the real-life grifter famously portrayed by Leo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can.
There is no question that at Trump’s direction border controls were effectively restored and the Biblical-scale stampedes that the Biden administration had orchestrated to accelerate the remaking of America’s demographic to a more politically reliable population was brought to an abrupt end.
To the extent Trump deserves kudos for delivering on the border crisis, one can argue that the applause is deserved, but it remains a bit akin to cheering “bravo” to firefighters for putting out the fire — it’s nice but: that’s what they’re supposed to do. Americans have become so used to rank betrayal by their bipartisan political leadership that they can express outsized gratitude and great relief when a president, in this case Trump, actually performs even a basic requirement of the job description.
Yet if the border is where the real-world results that a majority of voters intended to see implemented were actually realized, throughout the country’s collapsing cityscapes is where they have been stymied and stalled by an invigorated progressive movement and ultimately surrendered by a floundering Trump who is either incapable or unwilling to see a policy of mass deportations through to fruition.
While the administration at first basked in the gaudy displays of ICE agents staged to highlight enforcement measures in one city after the next, a pattern quickly emerged throughout 2025 that saw Trump’s alleged intent for mass sweep-detain-deport operations successfully obstructed by an activist Left that wasn’t as mired in disorienting despair as the White House believed.
In Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago, taskforces of ICE agents would begin escalated immigration enforcement efforts only to be confronted with barrages of street protests designed to disrupt virtually their every move to enforce federal immigration law. Agents were confronted at staging areas and whenever ICE units were on the move they were tailed, chased and blocked by so-called activists.
When agents took migrants into custody, the obstruction often turned into violent assaults. Agents were pelted with bottles and stones as well as targeted with commercial-grade fireworks repurposed as improvised exploding devices.
As ‘the resistance’ fueled dangerous turmoil on the streets, the Democratic Party’s leadership complemented the chaos with an all-hands attack on not only the president and his administration’s policy, but also targeted the men and women of ICE with an unprecedented campaign to horrifically demonize federal agents as Nazi stormtroopers, Gestapo agents and SS death squads.
In the face of this unfolding pattern from the Left, a familiar response from the White House could also be detected: just enough reinforcement would be dispatched to nominally protect ICE agents facing sustained and coordinated attacks, but never enough to immediately make a material difference and decisively end the threat.
In each instance, Trump would pony up enough to escalate the pitched battles on the street, but never double down enough to end them, let alone win them.
Then came the Minnesota Moment.
Operation Metro Surge began in December 2025 as several thousand ICE and CBP agents moved into Minneapolis-Saint Paul, tasked with tracking down and taking into custody migrants illegally living and working in the greater Twin Cities municipalities and surrounding region. The Left was ready for them, from the statehouse on down to dogcatcher.
In Minnesota, the Democrats frenzied determination to prevent enforcement of American immigration law reached its zenith as Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey echoed and escalated the fanatical rhetoric against ICE even as its officers were aggressively confronted, hectored and attacked everywhere on the street.
In no uncertain terms, the standoff over immigration enforcement in Minnesota marked the most consequential showdown between state and local officials and federal authorities since the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s.
Walz, Frey and others were openly calling for mass resistance against a federal administration deploying federal agents to enforce federal law on a national issue for which the Supreme Court has ruled federal supremacy is absolute. For the tens of millions of Americans who voted for vigorous enforcement of immigration law across the board and were disheartened by the half-measures the administration had taken when confronted in other states and cities, the showdown in Minnesota loomed as the juncture when Trump would and could act with unflinching decisiveness.
The table was clearly set. All Trump had to do was deliver. Instead, he choked.
The president did not address the nation from the Oval Office to offer a clear-eyed, coherent and concise explanation of what was at stake for America in Minnesota and on the streets of Minneapolis. He did not state his determination to both enforce the law and ensure that states stay in their governing lanes.
The president did not declare a state of emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy 150,000 combat troops across Minnesota and into its capital civic twins of Minneapolis and Saint Paul to restore order and ensure that ICE and CBP agents had the operational ability to conduct their mission.
The president did not put every other Blue State governor and Big City mayor on notice that such an overwhelming and iron-willed response was what they could expect from the White House if they too decided to ‘fuck around and find out’ by seeking to block enforcement of immigration law.
No, the president instead pulled a classic Trump: he hesitated, he choked, he sounded the retreat and then he declared a victory the likes of which “no one has ever seen before.”
By February, the Battle of Minnesota was over. The fallout was staggering.
Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey scored a massive win that simultaneously humiliated Trump’s voters and electrified progressives from coast-to-coast. With the proof-of-concept for their battle plans now indisputably demonstrated, the Left is prepared for a massive campaign that will effectively eliminate ICE around the nation and with it the last vestiges of immigration law enforcement.
Tens of millions of Americans who voted for the promised mass deportations now understand Trump will not deliver them. The hour has passed, the moment is gone.
Trump’s Made-for-TV showboating aside and despite the Democrats’ equally performative hysterics about roundups, actual deportations in 2025 and 2026 remain roughly where they were nearly 20 years ago. Even if the present figures are tripled or quadrupled, by the end of Trump’s second term the vast majority of migrants illegally in the United States will still be here when he is shown the door.
In fact, for all intents and purposes, the tens of millions of migrants illegally in America will be dug in even deeper into the national landscape and imbued with a sense of imperviousness, perhaps even invincibility. For if they could evade and exhaust the efforts of Trump’s administration, should they really break a sweat or lose a wink over a President Rubio or even a President Vance?
In their minds, the orange ogre will be back under the bridge and his dangerously resourceful imp Stephen Miller is unlikely to be a carryover into any succeeding GOP-held White House, as the Business Class fliers still in the Republican cockpit won’t tolerate it.
In true Trump fashion, he has managed to invigorate the more than 70 million voters who despise his very existence while suffocating the last hope of so many millions of others who dared to believe his ‘this time I mean it’ promises.
Trump surrendered The Land of a Thousand Lakes only to recklessly launch a war with Iran in the same month that has skyrocketed gas prices and all but doomed the GOP’s midterm prospects even as he continues to babble on about a Golden Age and making epic deals and other hallucinatory fever dreams of grandiosity.
In a rare moment of honesty, when Trump was recently asked if he was worried about tanking the Republican Party, he shrugged and finally spoke the undeniable truth: “I don’t care.”
He didn’t feel the need to say the obvious: that goes for America, too.
