Will Trump Work Himself Into a Shoot Versus Illinois Governor?

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U.S. President Donald Trump dramatically escalated his administration’s conflict with Illinois’ top Democratic elected officials this week.

First he deployed hundreds of National Guard troops (some from Texas) to Chicago, Illinois. Then he called for the arrest of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Both Illinois officials responded defiantly on social media, as seen below.

Trump is also threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act.

He’s already issued the alarming National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 as reported by Ken Klippenstein.

My question is: Are any of these people serious?

Trump is clearly intent on making an authoritarian power grab and is likely trying to bait political opponents into Quixotic acts of resistance.

ICE agents in Illinois have been caught committing “jackbootery” as NC posted on Tuesday.

The Democrats seem oblivious to the nature of kinetic reality and incapable of going beyond ineffectual rhetoric and lawsuits, so far.

The legal angle is egregiously pointless and impotent given the corrupt courts in the Trump 2.0 era.

But what if things escalate out of anyone’s control?

What if Trump or the Democrats “works themselves into a shoot?”

A work is everything that happens within the fictional world of wrestling. Everything you see on TV during a WWE show is a work and, with the advent of social media, more and more of what fans read from wrestlers on Twitter or Instagram is also a work. The thing about a work is that the goal is to elicit a response from the audience. When a wrestler is “working” in the ring they want the live audience to cheer them if they are a “babyface,” or good guy, and boo them if they are a heel.
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A “shoot” is something real or legitimate. It breaks the fictional world of the work. It’s something not part of the show or part of the character.

…wrestling fans want to get worked. Since the 1990s, most wrestling fans know that the WWE is scripted entertainment and that the performers in the ring are working together to tell a story through their matches. In short, we all know it’s a work. This has made it a lot harder for wrestlers and wrestling companies to work the fans and get the responses they want from them. The companies need those responses because it’s the emotional response and enjoyment of getting caught up in the show, in the work, that makes fans spend money. Getting worked is also the fun part of wrestling for fans. They want to get sucked into the fictional world of the show. Wrestling companies need to work the fans and the fans want to be worked.

American political partisans want to get worked.

We want to take our minds off the enshittification of our shared reality by imagining that we are on the verge of a definitive national political cataclysm, but the reality is no one living has any idea what such a thing would entail.

The latest tomfoolery

https://t.co/bVKM0nAR83 pic.twitter.com/wGjIVlXmAg

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 8, 2025

Pritzker put out a statement on Sunday as well:

“This evening, President Trump is ordering 400 members of the Texas National Guard for deployments to Illinois, Oregon, and other locations within the United States. No officials from the federal government called me directly to discuss or coordinate.

“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion. It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops. ​

“I call on Governor Abbott to immediately withdraw any support for this decision and refuse to coordinate. There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation. ​

“The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props. This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded:

I fully authorized the President to call up 400 members of the Texas National Guard to ensure safety for federal officials.

You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it.

No Guard can match the training, skill, and… https://t.co/7SUk9XlMBn

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) October 6, 2025

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke up too:

This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested. I’m not going anywhere. pic.twitter.com/MQdHtzis3t

— Mayor Brandon Johnson (@ChicagosMayor) October 8, 2025

Trump has previously deployed forces to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Is the clampdown already here?

Tucker Carlson, who’s recently been mixed up in “the political blender” due to his opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, goes full Christian Nationalist and endorses Trump’s ICE antics in his latest video:

Why is America moving towards civil war?

For the same reason all countries that wind up in civil war get there because the differences between their population between people within their borders becomes too great to bear.

People decide I have nothing in common with people who live near me and I don’t want to live near them anymore. In other words, diversity difference is actually intolerable to most people. Not necessarily racial diversity, though sometimes that too, but diversity of all kinds.

It is not our strength. In fact, it is without question our weakness and it has always been. If you have nothing in common with your wife, do you have a stronger marriage? No. Of course, your marriage falls apart. And the same is true for countries.

And the truth about the United States is that on every level, beginning with a demographic level, the American population has less in common with itself, with one another than ever before.
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So if you want to prevent a civil war, figure out what everybody or at least the bulk of the people in your nation have in common and emphasize that. And so what would that be in our case? Hard to know.

In fact, at this stage, really the only realistic hope for national unity is spiritual revival. Is a place where most Americans wake up to realize that God exists and created every single person in the United States of America. And that’s what we have in common, our humanity.

Not because our common humanity is meaningful by itself, but because our common humanity comes from God and we’re created in his image. And only when people truly realize that will they hesitate before killing each other.

We hope that comes soon, but in the meantime, there is a step that the government at all levels, federal, state, and local, can take to restore at least a sense of calm in the midst of rising chaos.
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So out of chaos comes what? Democracy, spontaneous order. No. Imposed order. Dictatorship. Of course, each and every time that’s what happens out of chaos. People beg for a strong man. There’s always someone willing to oblige. And that’s exactly what they get. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get unless some kind of order is restored. Which is another way of saying restoring order is not a step toward totalitarianism. It may be the only way to prevent it, but we need to do it now.

Trump and his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller are believed by some to be deliberately provoking confrontation as a pretext for further authoritarian measures.

Thomas Edsall expressed that view in The New York Times:

Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition.

Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten businesses with bankruptcy, the criminalization of free speech and the blackmailing of corporate America into obedience.

Two days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Show to describe in great detail how the administration plans to deal with its domestic opponents: “We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

For Trump and his allies, recent developments, including the government shutdown, the indictment of James Comey and the assassination of Kirk, are openings to escalate the attack on institutions and programs identified with liberalism and the Democratic Party. For the MAGA right, any crisis is an opportunity. In fact, every crisis is.

Miles Taylor, Department of Homeland Security chief of staff for part of Trump’s first term is among the “it’s a set up” chorus:

I co-wrote Trump’s first anti-terrorism plan in 2017-18. He’s not trying to stop “left-wing” terrorism. He is staging it.

His troop deployments are a false flag — meant to provoke a response in order to justify harsh crackdowns.

This is now very obvious.

— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) October 7, 2025

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) took to the Senate floor to “explain Trump’s plan”:

1. Turn the justice system into a political witch hunt operation that punishes critics for free speech and immunizes loyalists for actual criminality.
2. Use government power to compel the media to tell only the regime’s narrative and to silence critics.
3. Use the military to perform political intimidation in places with high levels of opposition to the regime.
4. Seize control of Congress’s spending and tax powers to use those powers to reward loyalists and punish opponents.
5. Rig the rules and the information. Tilt the election playing field your way and destroy the idea of truth.

Murphy, who seems to be running for President, wrapped with a hopeful, and peaceful, plan to resist:

Step 5 of the plan:

Rig the rules and the information. Tilt the election playing field your way and destroy the idea of truth. pic.twitter.com/q5hxc0E8aI

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 8, 2025

As Tom Neuburger wrote yesterday:

“The American Hard Right has never, ever been stronger. The feast is before them, all laid. They have the presidency. They have Trump, a master intimidator, and so they have Congress (look up “men fit to be slaves”). They have Roberts and most of his Court. They have power of the purse at last, and crime without price. They act like kings. They have a timid pretend opposition, so tied to their money and privilege they’re afraid to offend (by which I mean piss off their donors).

And the people, the last obstacle? They’re outraged, true, but they don’t rush to the streets in a way that disrupts the state.

Can Trump really pull it off?

In her introduction to Neuburger’s piece, Yves was basically skeptical of Team Trump’s ability to pull off a clampdown, but she warned that “this team, if nothing else, is possessed by hubris. So they could well try a much bigger power grab backed by force. Even if it fails, the damage could still be vast in human and institutional terms.”

Will Schryver has long been a skeptic of the current administration’s ability to pull off a crackdown:

I want to emphatically reiterate that I am convinced an authoritarian federal government could not long sustain a totalitarian crackdown on "dissent" in America.

It would be a human, material, and logistical challenge beyond their capacity.

But that doesn't mean they won't try.

— Will Schryver (@imetatronink) September 22, 2025

There are also those in the national security apparatus who say they plan to resist including Brigadier General Alan R. Gronewol, “Oregon’s top military leader” who testified on September 30:

Speaking before a state Senate subcommittee, Brigadier General Alan R. Gronewold told legislators that before deployment, the two companies of soldiers would be trained in “protective crowd control.” That training is now up in the air as Gov. Tina Kotek on Tuesday ordered troops to go home after a federal judge ruled over the weekend that Trump had no authority to call them up.

Gronewold said Guard soldiers serve two purposes: “One, to defend America, and two, to protect Oregonians. And so by serving in this mission, they will be protecting any protesters at the ICE facility.”

However the prospects for organized resistance are dim as Aurelian convincingly argued recently when discussing some recent unrest in France:

…the fundamental problem faced by ordinary people today trying to influence those in power. A minimum degree of consensus and organisation is necessary if anything is to be achieved, but consensus and organisation don’t just appear magically: they have to be developed and practised. In the past, opposition political parties and trades unions often provided the basis of this organisation: as far as anyone can see, Mélenchon and other political figures primarily used last week’s protests to further their own interests. For all that the Internet was supposed to bring people together (and the Gilets jaunes which we’ll get to in moment could not have happened without it) the Internet doesn’t promote consensus or organisation automatically: indeed, there’s some evidence that it’s a divisive force in such cases.

It’s worth recalling how this kind of thing would once have been organised, say in the 80s or 90s. Protests in those days were articulated around two main pillars: organisations and community. Last week’s protests would have been organised by the trades unions and the Socialist or Communist parties (OK, often in competition with each other) and would have been professionally organised, with synchronised demonstrations, massive rallies addressed by political leaders, banners, flags, hand-outs and articulated demands with lots of media coverage. It might not have achieved an enormous amount in the end, and there would certainly have been a performative element, but it would not have been damp squib like last week’s episode.

This doesn’t bode well given the rapidly building technological advantage ICE has over the American citizenry, via 404 Media:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.

The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice.
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The new documents provide much more detail about the sort of location data ICE will now have access to, and why ICE chose to buy access to this vast dataset from Penlink specifically.
“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” the document reads. The agency said that the issue with other companies was that they required analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources,” which increased the chance of missing “connections between online behaviors and physical movements.”

I’m tempted close with a quote from Yasha Levine, but I’ll make it the penultimate point as it’s a bummer:

We are all too far removed from issues that matter most to us and have no power over the forces that govern our lives. And so everyone’s political energies are directed into the Spectacle — to bear witness, to rage, to comment, to learn, to obsessively read, to mock, to argue with people on line. In fact you could say the lack of political power is inversely proportional to the amount of time we spend in the Spectacle. The Spectacle gives us the illusion of power…of doing something…of projecting our will and being into the world.

On a slightly more hopeful note, I’ll quote Ian Welsh from 2019 who presciently predicted the impact of drones on modern war (as confirmed confirmed just this week by Haig Hovaness for Naked Capitalism by Haig Hovaness for Naked Capitalism) and argued they were a weapon for the weak:

Governments may force drone registration and so on, but they are an easy, cheap tech to make with off-the-shelf parts. Currently, they can’t be stopped easily by conventional militaries, and it will be impossible to harden all targets against them in the perceivable future. They will make both terror attacks and assassinations quite simple.

I always thought the US was foolish for developing this technology. They made it happen much faster than it would have otherwise, and while initially it was (and still is) useful to them, in the end it will be a technology that terrorizes them and other powerful governments.

That last is just by way of pointing out that it’s never been 2025 before, the United States has never been what it is before, and there is absolutely no way to predict the outcome of a full-on civil conflagration in America except that it will be dreadful and we’ll all wish it never happened.