"The Senate and the White House are suddenly in the middle of the most serious political crisis of.....Trump’s second term"

Everyone needs to be calling Congress today - they need to hear from us. Need to be aggressive, ambitious, and as brave as the people of Minnesota this week my friends!

Morning all. The DC insider press is full of stories this morning about Congressional Republicans frustrated/worried/panicky about the incredible mess their madman-in-chief has made of things.

Here’s Politico, Inside The GOP Anxiety On Minnesota:

But it’s not just Dems pushing for some sort of reaction: Plenty of Republicans are deeply uncomfortable about what happened on Saturday, and not just the awful incident itself but the administration’s immediate reaction. Strikingly, the anger we’ve grown accustomed to from regular Trump critics like Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was joined by murmurings from others about the need to change of course.

New names for the mix: Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — who has until now largely avoided criticizing the president — called for a joint investigation into the shooting. Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) demanded “a prioritized, transparent investigation.” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) — hardly a centrist liberal — advised the president to pull ICE out of the highly inflamed situation in Minnesota. Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) called for congressional hearings. And there were more.

Off the record, plenty more Republicans were feeling queasy, especially with polls showing declining public confidence both in ICE and in Trump’s broader approach to immigration. “Many of us wonder if the administration has any clue as to how much this will hurt us legislatively and electorally this year,” one House Republican tells POLITICO’s Meredith Lee Hill.

And Dasha has more: “For weeks, I was hearing from Republican lawmakers, Republican operatives, that hey — if Democrats want to do this whole anti-ICE thing, go for it. Historically immigration has been a Republican issue and we would love to see Democrats try,” Dasha said on today’s Playbook Podcast. ”I don’t hear that same argument in this moment. What I’m hearing from Republicans is that they are very frustrated that this administration has taken an issue … that was a total goldmine for Republicans politically, and are losing the plot on it.”

For Fox sake: There’s concern too from officials inside the administration itself — in particular with the rush by senior officials like DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and White House policy chief Stephen Miller to pin all the blame on the deceased. Check out this from Bill Melugin of Fox News: “I’ve talked to more than half a dozen federal sources involved immigration enforcement, including several in senior positions, who all tell me they have grown increasingly uneasy & frustrated w/ some of the claims & narratives DHS pushed in the aftermath of the shooting.”

Sample quotes: Some of these sources have described DHS’ response to the shooting as “a case study on how not to do crisis PR.” One said they are so “fed up” that they wish they could retire. Another said “DHS is making the situation worse,” and another added that “DHS is wrong” and “we are losing this war, we are losing the base and the narrative.”

So could the White House change course? “President Trump fielded dozens of calls over the weekend from administration officials and senators,” WSJ’s Xavier Martinez reports, “with some worrying that public sentiment has turned against the administration’s immigration-enforcement actions. Some of the president’s aides have come to see the increasingly volatile situation in Minneapolis as a political liability and believe the White House should be looking for an off-ramp, according to administration officials. However, others in the administration believe that ending the current efforts in Minneapolis would be a capitulation to the left.”

Here’s the Axios homepage right now:

Here’s Punchbowl News, The shutdown cometh:

The Senate and the White House are suddenly in the middle of the most serious political crisis of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The deadly shootings this month by federal agents of two Minneapolis residents — Renee Good and, on Saturday, Alex Pretti — have sparked a nationwide furor that’s causing even some Hill Republicans to call for a full investigation and congressional hearings.

It’s also less than a week before the deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security and several other major departments and agencies, including the Pentagon. A partial government shutdown would begin on Friday night if the impasse isn’t resolved.

Saturday’s horrific shooting — and the Trump administration’s handling of the aftermath — galvanized Senate Democrats, who quickly united on a strategy to block the six-bill FY2026 funding package unless the DHS funding, which includes ICE, is stripped out and renegotiated. This would require the House to vote again. And that’s a serious problem since the chamber is on recess all week.

A big shift? House and Senate Democrats want fundamental changes to how ICE operates in cities around the country. Trump and top administration officials have, up until now, shown few signs of changing course in his nationwide immigration crackdown.

However, Trump told the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey Sunday night that the Pretti shooting will be reviewed and the Minnesota-focused ICE surge will end “at some point.” Inside the administration, there’s a stark realization that the Minneapolis shootings have been catastrophic politically, and they’re losing ground on an issue that Republicans have dominated.

“At some point we will leave,” Trump said of the huge ICE operation in Minnesota, which began in the wake of a massive welfare scandal involving Somali-affiliated organizations. “We’ve done, they’ve done a phenomenal job,” Trump added.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are pressing ahead with the six-bill funding package — for now.

Yet Senate Democrats are even more steel-spined than they were during the fall’s record-setting government shutdown. Democrats believe pushing back against Trump’s increasingly harsh immigration crackdown is a winning position that most of the nation will agree with.

“I didn’t think anything could unite us more than health care did. I was wrong,” a Democratic senator told us after a caucus-wide conference call Sunday night.

In a sign of the shifting dynamics, the White House and Senate Republicans have reached out to Senate Democratic leaders in an attempt to head off another shutdown. Democrats say the GOP has yet to offer any acceptable solutions.

In Democrats’ view, the Senate can pass everything else and renegotiate DHS. Remember that the One Big Beautiful Bill included tens of billions of dollars for DHS anyway, so ICE is flush with cash. However, a DHS shutdown would impact FEMA and the Coast Guard as well.

It’s too early to say how this new impasse could play out. Trump is calling for Congress to end “sanctuary cities” via legislation, something that isn’t going anywhere in the Senate.

The real issue right now is that Democrats aren’t going to vote for DHS funding in any form. So even a short-term stopgap funding bill that includes DHS is probably out of the question.

Importantly, this larger funding package also has billions of dollars in earmarks for lawmakers from both parties and chambers. Additionally, beyond DHS, the five other FY2026 bills include tons of Democratic priorities, especially on the domestic side. No one wants to let this massive bill stall.

The real challenge is the clock. The Senate is in session today for procedural reasons, but the snow has pushed the first votes of the week to Tuesday. Without a time agreement, the initial procedural vote on the funding package wouldn’t be until Thursday.

The House is out of session until Feb. 2 — three days after the funding deadline. If the Senate does anything other than pass the six-bill package as-is — which is extremely unlikely — the measure would need to go back to the House.

A time agreement is necessary in the Senate to pass any version of the package before Friday, which gives Democrats even more leverage.

One option is to demand votes on whether to retain each individual title of the bill. In this scenario, if all 47 Democrats vote to scrap the DHS funding bill, GOP votes would be needed to do so. At this point, it’s not clear that there’d be any. Even the Republicans who have expressed concern about Saturday’s shooting haven’t gone as far as calling for the DHS funding to be separated out and renegotiated.

Inside Dems’ rapid shift. Consider how quickly things changed. Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was saying there wouldn’t be a shutdown and that the bipartisan funding negotiations were going well. Seven Democrats voted for DHS funding in the House despite massive pressure from the party base.

Even as of Friday, when several Senate Democrats had already come out in opposition to the DHS funding bill, leadership aides in both parties believed Republicans would be able to pick off enough Democrats to pass the funding package.

We mention all of this to underscore how different this shutdown fight is from the last one. Democrats spent months laying the groundwork for the October-November shutdown to make it all about health care.

For this one, Democrats are messaging around it on the fly. Senate Democrats united quickly behind the hardline strategy. Even Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Angus King (I-Maine), who loathe shutdowns and broke from the caucus on the last one, support Schumer’s stance.

The House. House Republican leaders haven’t considered bringing the chamber back into session. What you’ll hear from Republican leaders is that they have done their job and the Senate needs to pass their bill.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

This morning a leading Republican candidate for Governor in Minnesota, Chris Madel, withdrew from the race. Read this, it’s an incredible moment in Republicans just no longer being willing and able to defend the indefensible:

Republican Chris Madel made a stunning exit from the Minnesota governor’s race on Jan. 26, saying he cannot support the national GOP’s “stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”

In a surprise video announcement, the Minneapolis attorney said he supported the originally stated goals of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operation in Minnesota, including the deportation of undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records, but the effort has “expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats.”

“United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong,” Madel said.

Madel, who launched his campaign on Dec. 1, quickly rose from a relative political unknown to a top contender for the GOP nomination. He won over many GOP activists with the communication skills he developed as a trial attorney and his status as a political outsider. He was consistently finishing in the top three in straw polls of GOP activists, in a crowded field of about a dozen candidates for governor.

His comments come as some other Republicans in Minnesota and Washington have started to distance themselves from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state. Madel said ICE’s Operation Metro Surge will be a political liability for any candidate running statewide this fall.

“National Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota,” he said.

Madel said it’s unconstitutional to weaponize criminal investigations against political opponents and for ICE to raid homes with only a civil warrant.

He launched his campaign for governor as a staunch defender of law enforcement and had recently provided legal counsel to Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.

To see how hard this next moment of accountability is going to be for Trump-Miller-Vance-Bovino look at this disgusting, despicable, panicky post from Trump this morning:

So, we need to be loud today everyone. CALL YOUR SENATORS AND REP. Demand courage. Demand that ICE leave Minnesota and that it be reined in. Now. Demand that it follow the law, and that rule of law be restored in the US. Demand that our elected representatives obey their oath and defend our Constitution and our democracy. CALL YOUR SENATORS AND REP, CONTACT THEM ANY WAY YOU CAN. Congress must feel us today. It is essential.

I just did wrapped up a conversation with Norm Eisen and Jen Rubin over the at the Contrarian. I will be sending it along in a bit. Here’s my big insight today, consistent with what we’ve been discussing at Hopium these last few weeks….

Clearly after a bad Epstein-filled close to 2025 Trump made a decision to escalate - not distract - but escalate. When attacked, when he feels weak and powerless, he escalates as a way of feeling STRONG and MIGHTY again. And what he then did was to escalate in Minnesota, escalate in Venezuela, escalate in Greenland and against the Europeans. The “success” of the Maduro seizure emboldened them. Trump, Miller, and Vance all said publicly they no longer believed the any law - domestic and international - applied to them. Vance told the world that DHS-ICE agents had “absolute immunity,” as if something like that could ever exist in a democracy. Trump made aggressive moves to seize Greenland from Europe/NATO. Vance went to Minnesota after the killing of Renee Goode and defended ICE’s lawlessness in a press conference full of extraordinary lies and misrepresentations.

But then Europe organized themselves, exercised their collective power, and Trump retreated on Greenland, humiliating himself to the world in the process. It was a huge, devastating moment for the regime. Then their DHS agents, emboldened by Vance’s claim they had absolute immunity, murdered another civilian in the street, shooting him 10 times - 10 times - at point blank range, after removing his weapon.

My main point here is that the two officials of the regime driving these lawless attacks on Europe, the international order, and the American people are JD Vance and Stephen Miller. They are the ones driving these insane policies through the regime, and then defending them in public. As we seek accountability, and seek to remove regime officials doing clear material harm to the world we need to focus on these two. Noem, Bondi, Bovino, Homan are all middle managers. The strategists driving this recent escalation, one that encouraged Trump to embrace this dangerous, illiberal path, and then defended it once he did, are Vance and Miller.

They are responsible for the overreach in Europe, and the humiliating retreat. They are responsible here for the wild overreach of DHS and ICE, and what appears to be another imminent, humiliating regime retreat - if we learn from the Europeans, and exercise our collective power against the regime as effectively as they did last week.

Friends, this is a very, very important week for our politics. A week to be offense, aggressive, ambitious - so now, make your calls and……

Let’s Get To Work People!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Winning The Midterms - Support Our Candidates

• Hopium’s Winning The House Campaign (2026) - $93,600 raised, $250,000 goal (new stretch goal) - Donate to all four endorsed House challengers with one click | Learn More | Enjoy our new conversations with Christina Bohannan (IA-01), Mayor Paige Cognetti (PA-08), Jo Mendoza (AZ-06), and Janelle Stelson (PA-10)

• Mary Peltola For Alaska Senate - $22,100 raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer and learn more. Amazing start everyone!

• Winning Ohio - $41,400 raised, $250,000 goal - Our new campaign splits contributions evenly among Sherrod Brown, the Acton/Pepper ticket, and the Ohio Democratic Party. Donate today and help us turn this critical 2026 battleground blue! | Watch my conversation with David Pepper, who does a great overview of the opportunities we have in Ohio this year. Note a generous donor has sent $21,000 worth of Hopium-infused contributions directly to the candidates which are not included in on-line goal tracker.

• Roy Cooper for NC Senate (2026) - $70k raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Enjoy my conversation with Gov. Cooper and a new, terrific one with NC Dem Party Chair Anderson Clayton

• Jon Ossoff GA Senate (2026) - $115k raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Enjoy my inspiring conversation with Senator Ossoff

Expanding The Senate and Electoral College Maps, Winning In Red States and Red Places (2026-2032)

• Hopium’s Audacious Expansion Fund - $338,100 raised, $500,000 goal (new stretch goal) - Join our new campaign to expand our map by investing in the Democratic Parties of Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Maine, and Texas. Many thanks to two generous Hopium community members who have audaciously donated $10,000 to each of our five state parties

3 Campaigns Where We’ve Hit Our Goals, But Are Still Active - We have three campaigns where we’ve hit our goals but that folks can still participate in - Ken Martin’s New DNC, Anderson Clayton and the North Carolina Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party of Minnesota (DFL).

We got the following note from Cynthia this week. She is one of the 3,000 Hopium subscribers in Minnesota:

I am a Minnesotan and cannot adequately express the depth of my gratitude to Simon for this conversation with Richard and organizing this fundraiser and to each person that donated. My heart is full and tears are running down my face. Thank you to everyone who has supported and spoke up for Minnesota in any way and pushed back against ICE and DHS anywhere.

This is the absolutely the most unsafe I’ve ever felt where I live. It far exceeds anything I’ve experienced, and I am white. It affects my decisions every time I go outside. I continue to call my reps and work with my friends and my partner to offer mutual aid, get training, and help others. My neighborhood has been quiet and we’re looking for more ways to help others in more affected areas. We are attending the Solidarity Mobilizations this coming Tues and next: https://www.mobilize.us/surj/event/885616/

I attended an excellent online event with Indivisible this week about the caucuses, plan to attend myself, and have gotten 2 more people to go already, with more on my call list.

I went to the annual art sled rally this weekend. It is one of my favorite events of the year! So much laughter, fun, and delight. Thankfully, there wasn’t ICE presence during the event that I’m aware of. Look for the Minnesota 2026 art sled rally on YouTube if you haven’t seen it yet!

Why We Must Invest Early, Now, And Not Wait - In three new essays (here, here, here) I discuss how one of the ways we win the 2026 midterms is by providing early support to our candidates and parties to allow them to staff up, be loud, define the terms of the debate now, before the inevitable onslaught on AI slop, Russian disinfo, and Trumpian lies funded through bribes and corruption wash across the land.

The midterms could be won or lost in these next few months - not in the fall of 2026 - and we need be fighting now with everything we got.

Winning The Big Arguments With Trump, Defend Our Democracy

1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Five-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our now five part agenda:

1. Stand with Ukraine and our European allies, and far more forcefully challenge Trump’s traitorous efforts to sell out the US and the West to Russia; demand Congress rebuke/issue a no confidence vote on his new threats to seize Greenland and his new, dangerous European tariffs;

2. Congress must stand forcefully for rule of law in the Caribbean and the Pacific - these illegal strikes must end; no war can be waged without Congressional approval; there must accountability for those who have broken the law, and the US must withdraw from Venezuela and cease other threats to violate the UN Charter and the sovereignty of other nations

3. Roll back Trump’s terrible, illegal tariffs that are re-igniting inflation, driving up prices, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to working people, hurting small businesses and farmers, reviving tyrannical “taxation without representation,” and alienating governments and people throughout the world. To put America on a sounder fiscal course due to the enormous deficits brought by Trump’s 2025 tax cuts we should reverse the cuts to the wealthy and corporations

4. Defend our democracy, rule of law, and our liberties by blocking the expansion of ICE; restoring due process for immigrants across the country; vigorously defending the 1st Amendment; warring against his outrageous targeting of his domestic political opponents; ending the use of the military on our streets and the dangerous occupation of our cities; stopping the unprecedented regime corruption; and by forcing the Administration to finally comply with Congress end the rancid cover up of the Epstein crimes.

5. Fight Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; reverse - not delay - the cuts to the ACA, Medicaid and our clean energy investments; support and co-sponsor the Stand Up For Science/Rep. Haley Stevens effort to remove Robert Kennedy from HHS.

Keep working hard everyone, and I remain so incredibly proud to be in this righteous fight with all of you - Simon