Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Ed Luce:

The Trump always chickens out thing works when he meets a force he cannot overwhelm. You cannot overwhelm 70 to 75% of America seeing these videos, hearing blood-curdling justifications for the execution of the kind of American you know would be shoveling the steps outside your house.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Ed Luce. He’s the US national editor and a columnist at the Financial Times, where he writes about US politics, foreign policy, and all things Trump. He joins me to discuss the fatal shooting of another US citizen in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents and why this moment could prove to be an inflection point for the Trump administration. We also discuss the broader pattern of the capitulation on the part of leaders and institutions and what it will take for more of them to speak out publicly against the president. At the end of the episode, I answer your questions about a leaked ICE memo claiming agents can enter a target’s home without a warrant and a farfetched hypothetical about Canada becoming a 51st state and more. That’s coming up, stay tuned. Are we at a turning point? Ed Luce shares his thoughts on why the recent events in Minnesota could be more consequential than we think. Ed Luce, welcome back to the show.

Ed Luce:

Delight to be with you as ever, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

So I called you Ed. And I recall from our last meeting together, our last splendid time on the program, you said you’d rather be Eduardo Luce. Can you remind listeners why Ed Luce is not good enough for you and Eduardo Luce is your aspiration?

Ed Luce:

So it’s two mono syllables. It sounds like sort of Bob Smith. Eduardo Luce just sounds like the kind of guy, attractive, Italian and French women would flock towards.

Preet Bharara:

Many, many lovers.

Ed Luce:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Eduardo Luce probably has too many lovers, right?

Ed Luce:

Yeah, but before any sort of has set racing in people’s heads about my grandiose pretensions, I’m extremely happily married and in firmly deep into middle age.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m glad you cleared that up because otherwise we would’ve been overwhelmed with correspondence. Ed, I said to you before we hit the record button, that I had not expected to talk so much about what I think we’ll probably spend a good amount of time talking about, and that’s ICE and immigration. I want to point out for folks when we’re recording this, this is the afternoon of January 26th. It’s Monday afternoon. That’s important because who knows what will transpire on the topics that you and I discuss between now and Thursday. And if people listen to the podcast sometime later, the world may have altered a bit. Maybe there will have been another shooting. Maybe there will have been a drawdown of ICE agents in Minnesota. There’s some hints of that. Very timely to have you today because you just came out with a column in the Financial Times. May I read the first two sentences of your column?

Ed Luce:

Please.

Preet Bharara:

As governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem launched an anti-drug campaign with the tagline, Meth. We’re on it. You then go on to note ably as you always do. Noem’s message control has not obviously sharpened as Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary. On Saturday, Noem insisted that slain Alex Pretti was brandishing a gun with the intent of attacking officers. Let’s pause there for a moment before we get into the details of the latest killing by ICE agents. Just sort of overall, what do you make about the national conversation about what’s been happening in Minnesota, in Minneapolis in particular? Is this an inflection point? We always talk about inflection points. We always talk about the crossing of lines. How do you think about this and what’s happening?

Ed Luce:

I do see this as a potential inflection point because unlike other things that might sort of outrage, legitimately outrage and instill foreboding into you and I, and people who are sort of on the news the whole time, this is visual. And starting with the Renee Good shooting in early January, which almost three quarters of Americans told an economist YouGov poll they’d seen videos of. Almost three quarters. I’m sure the numbers, I haven’t seen surveys yet, are going to be similar for the Alex Pretti execution. That just is an enormous share of the American public. You don’t get that for Super Bowl, for Oscars, for even the most blockbuster movies. This is an extraordinary number and most people, I think, saw what they saw. Some in their own DHS sort of tweet bubble might have seen what they were told to see. But if you believe other opinion polls, including amongst Republicans showing support for Trump on immigration falling really quite sharply, then I think they saw what we saw, which is hard not to do on both those killings.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I mean, there are two videos now. One with respect to Renee Good, who you mentioned, and now Alex Pretti. And they’re fairly clear, maybe not at first viewing, but as you look at it frame by frame, the New York Times did one for the prior video. They may have done one for the second video. I haven’t seen it. But with annotation and commentary by experts, so you see some people point out things. I would play videos at trial. In criminal cases, you don’t just play the video and sit down. You play the video and you freeze-frame it and you explain to the jury, just look at this gentleman over here, watch what he does in the next 30 seconds, then you hit play and then they know what to focus on. It’s like doing a replay in a football game or in a baseball game, so you have to annotate it a little bit.

And with a minimal amount of annotation on the Pretti video, you see that he was trying to help a woman who’s being a good Samaritan. He is then taken to the ground. So far, that seems incontrovertible, right? He’s aiding somebody, he’s taken to the ground. At no point is he brandishing a weapon, correct?

Ed Luce:

None.

Preet Bharara:

And then, and I didn’t see this in the first few run throughs of the video that I watched over the weekend, but at some point you see that he is disarmed, that an ICE agent takes a gun away from him and he’s being punched in other, from what I understand from experts, bad tactics are being used to immobilize him or render him harmless instead of focusing on his arm, that someone’s punching him. So he’s helped a Samaritan. He’s taken to the ground. He’s being punched. A gun is taken off his person, so he is rendered harmless and armless, I guess. And then he is shot a number of times and killed. Forget Kristi Noem for a second because I’ve seen other ordinary average Americans, MAGA folks, saying that he deserved what he got based on the video that they watched. What is going on with the disconnect between people’s eyes and brains?

Ed Luce:

A lot of tutoring. I mean, so you saw within minutes, I mean, not hours, within minutes, therefore, without having time to consider the videos or the evidence, you saw Trump’s principles and spokespeople from Kristi Noem to Stephen Miller, to Pete Hegseth, to of course Dan Bavino, Tom Homan, and all the border patrol and ICE people. You saw them all saying that this was an attack on federal officers, law enforcement. They described the border patrol agents as this was an attack by, in Stephen Miller’s word, a domestic terrorist.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Where did that come from?

Ed Luce:

And of course, Trump then echoes that on Truth Social. It came from Stephen Miller, that particular language, as indeed he described Renee Good’s car. He called that a terrorist weapon.

Preet Bharara:

The Honda Pilot?

Ed Luce:

The Honda Pilot that was turning really slowly after she’d just said, “It’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” And people see that. So some are tutored to disbelieve their own lying eyes and you cannot overstate the degree to which psychology and perception can be manipulated by repetition. Because I cannot see it through those eyes, I’m trying to look at this through clear spectacles and I think most others have judging by the numbers, by the polls. It is astonishing the ineptitude of an administration that comes out with this line because he’s a nurse. He looks after veterans.

Preet Bharara:

He’s a veterans affairs, was a veterans affairs nurse. But here’s what I don’t understand. Kristi Noem may in fact be an idiot. The evidence is not fully in, but I think by a preponderance is not beyond a reasonable doubt. Stephen Miller is not a fool and he’s not dumb. And he’s been effective for his own purposes in a very significant way, including on border policy, which is separate from what’s going on in Minnesota and some of the large cities in the country. Does he just think everyone else is stupid? Is that his problem? He thinks he can come out and label someone a domestic terrorist and it must be true and he can say false things about a video. And does he assume that other people will just go with his annotation as opposed to their own eyes and the annotations of experts? Or does he think not enough people…

I mean, I’m asking you to be a psychologist for a moment, Ed, because I do think that to understand policy and understand persuasion and to understand what you’re up against, you have to understand the psychology of the people who are doing the things that you are criticizing. And that is not necessarily my expertise. Maybe it’s not fully yours, but I’m taking a gander at it.

Ed Luce:

So two things, and I think it’s a very important question to ask because if you’re going to decode Stephen Miller or Trump for that matter, looking at grand strategy is not the way to do it. That’s sanewashing. Psychology is a much better tool, however imperfect that is from a distance. And I think there are two things to say here. One is do not underestimate the pheromones, the boost that Miller gets from his own world, from One America, from Fox, from the various sort of right-wing presences on the fringe-right internet and the MAGA world in general, from the war room, from all of these outlets, when he says what he says, when he says the really quite brutal things that he says. The approval, the applause, the adulation is a hugely addictive thing. And that can cause even the most sort of skilled political operatives to forget the basic facts of politics, which is it’s the median person out there that you need to convince.

So I think that’s one thing. Don’t underestimate how self-sequestered the MAGA media world is from the rest of the media world. And then the second sort of point is the Dunning Kruger test, which famously is people who overestimate their own intelligence are stupid. And so somebody could be stupid under Dunning Kruger who is actually very intelligent if they think they’re a genius.

Preet Bharara:

So if you’re Stephen Miller in the first term, your agenda has to take into account running for a second term. If you’re in the second term, and this is it for your guy, presumably, then is there an argument or is there an explanatory force to the idea that he doesn’t care actually to expand the adoring crowds and the cheering crowds? He doesn’t care if they constrict and dwindle a bit because he’s on a mission. He believes in his cause, he believes in his crusade, he speaks in terms of crusade. You quote him from the speech last September, which I had largely forgotten about, “Our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve. You are nothing,” speaking of his enemies I guess, me and you among others, “You are nothing, you are wickedness.” And is there some argument that in the second term he doesn’t have to worry about extending political power at the ballot box and he’s purely about his mission and cause?

Ed Luce:

That might be a factor weighing on him, but I don’t think he thinks and the people around Trump think in traditional electoral cycles or 22nd Amendment terms. I think they think in terms of regime change and that to change regime, revolutionaries, the people who make history aren’t looking at focus groups or day-to-day polls. They have a far bigger historic mission and that is to uproot and change society. And I think that’s probably in his head, but he wouldn’t be doing this… Forget the fact that Trump technically can’t run again or if we’re playing by the normal rules, he can’t run again. He’s doing this because the Supreme Court gave Trump near total immunity in 2024, the president in their language, but clearly it meant Trump, and therefore even more of a license to basically preemptively or post-hop pardon everybody. So I think Stephen Miller can act with impunity. I think J.D. Vance can say federal officers, ICE agents can operate with total absolute immunity, I think partly because of that Supreme Court ruling. But you would know this way, way better than I do, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

I think what he meant to say was absolute impunity.

Ed Luce:

Yes, that’s exact description.

Preet Bharara:

And if I were a Trumpist on the other side, I would say that’s what he said, even though the video doesn’t show that. I would say to you, Ed, Eduardo, as the case may be, that no, what J.D. Vance… And that would be the equivalent of my saying, J.D. Vance said on camera they had absolute impunity when that’s not what he said, any event. There’s the moral blameworthiness of what they’re doing, and then there’s the political side of it. And I think for our listenership, there will be a broad consensus about the moral impropriety of what they’re doing and the lying about what’s on videotape and everything else.

And when we talk about competence and incompetence, there’s bureaucratic and executive and administrative incompetence and there’s political incompetence. And these folks are not as politically incompetent as others. I mean, they won twice. Two for three, Trump with the wind at his back named Stephen Miller. How do you think this plays out? We’re recording this on Monday as I timestamped at the beginning of the interview. Just before we started having this conversation, there was a phone call between Trump and Governor Walz in which reportedly Trump talked about drawing down some of the ICE forces there. I saw another comment by someone today noting that they could only count on one hand the number of times in 25 years that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Post all agreed on a policy issue and came out on the same side. So with that swirl of forces, arraign on the other side, how do you think this is going to play out? And you’re going to be tested on it on Thursday when this podcast drops.

Ed Luce:

So I think that public opinion and what you’ve just described with those four publications plays the same role with Trump domestically as the bond markets have played in disciplining him internationally. The Trump always chickens out thing works when he meets a force he cannot overwhelm, and he cannot overwhelm the bomb markets. You cannot overwhelm 70 to 75% of America seeing these videos, hearing blood-curdling justifications for the execution of the kind of American, and I sort of say this as a foreigner who’s been here quite a while in a snow clogged Washington, the kind of American you know would be shoveling the steps outside your house or jump-starting your car if it’s dead. The Renee Goods and the Alex Prettis of this world are universally recognizable American types that we all know and love in our neighborhoods. And I think Trump must have got that.

And therefore my prediction is he will chicken out, he will climb down. And I think the call with Tim Walls, and I think him noticing things like the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce came out categorically with a statement saying they condemned this. The Republican gubernatorial candidate for Minnesota dropped out because he says he doesn’t want to represent a party that does this to innocent civilians. Trump’s not stupid. He can be an imbecile, but he’s got a sort of a visceral intelligence about where things are going, and I suspect he will be climbing down on this issue.

Preet Bharara:

Along these lines, I’m not sure who it was, I read a lot of things today and yesterday, I think it was David French who said, one of the most disconcerting things and saddening things about those videos and about the people who were killed is, I’m paraphrasing here pretty loosely, you can tell they didn’t think they were in danger. They were of a mind they were still living in a certain America where you can have skirmishes and altercations with police in protest, et cetera, but you’re not in danger of being shot to death in cold blood when you’re not armed. Those words from Renee Good, “I’m not mad at you.” The expression on her face does not portray any fear of these armed officials and the same with Alex Pretti, right? He was a good Samaritan who was trying to save someone and that is something that is very sad because there are places where you get immediate advanced compliance of a particular sort because it’s not this country and I would think we don’t want this country to become one of those countries. What do you think of that?

Ed Luce:

I think it’s a very profound and yet simple observation and those are the most powerful. I mean, I wouldn’t normally tiptoe through the minefield of racial differences, but I cannot see an African American in that circumstance being unworried by what law enforcement, armed and balaclava’d law enforcement would be, or a Somali American for that matter, particularly in Minneapolis. But these were the kinds of people who probably have never had any realistic threat of abuse or mistreatment by law enforcement, these law-abiding and white citizens, and they had no idea what was coming, and it’s all the more tragic for it.

Preet Bharara:

And then you have other members of the administration, again, who as a matter of IQ I take it are not stupid. You have Treasury Secretary Bessent saying, yeah, you know what? If you have a gun, you don’t bring it to a protest. And other people have said things like that who are supportive of the Trump administration or in the Trump administration. Have they forgotten about the Second Amendment? Have they forgotten about famous figures from conservative circles who insist upon the right to carry weapons lawfully everywhere they go, including in church, in schools, and at protests? I mean, how does Scott Bessent say a thing like that? Is it just to get out of the interview in that moment, I guess?

Ed Luce:

I mean, Scott Bessent, if he could just sort of know his own interests, should really… I was going to say, should really steer clear of subjects that aren’t within the purview of the US Treasury Secretary, but I have to, as I say it, can’t help recollecting that he should probably stay clear of things that are within the purview of the US Treasury Secretary because he’s tripped over himself on that too. J.D. Vance tweeted out, posted out a story about how he’d recently been in Minneapolis and he was told by border patrol agents that they’d been dining in a restaurant, they’d been doxed and the protesters had arrived and they’d been locked in. And he said, can you imagine how that feels? Or words to that effect. It’s like, seriously, dude, 20 minutes locked inside of a restaurant. Can you imagine how that feels? That doesn’t sound too gross a violation of your rights to me, but that’s his response to this. And again, I think tone deafness.

Preet Bharara:

Well, but this is so interesting to me because they won two out of three times because they did read the public and they read the plights and understood in a way that a lot of Democrats don’t, sorry to say, the plight of forgotten people and left behind people and overlooked people and the flyover folks. And that is one of the elements of successful politics. And here there’s just such an utter misjudgment. It calls to mind… Let me ask you this question. Is this like the separation of families at the border from term one, worse, the same, parallel, totally different? How do you view those two events?

Ed Luce:

I think it’s considerably worse. I mean, that was visually very impactful. I don’t wish to downplay the sort of brutally inhumane methods that were used in Trump’s first term at the border, and they did shock people, but this is a whole different level.

Preet Bharara:

But they had to retreat from that.

Ed Luce:

And they had to retreat from that and yeah, they did retreat from that.

Preet Bharara:

So you predict TACO retreats from this.

Ed Luce:

I predict TACO retreats. I mean, look, if you were to take this objectively, I mean, a majority of Americans believe in border enforcement and deporting violent illegal immigrants, not undocumented immigrants. If that was what an unmasked ICE working in concert with other authorities around the country was doing and seemed to be doing it well and professionally, I don’t think Trump would be having a problem. I don’t think there would be a backlash.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve often had this observation about people who think that they’re leaders in my career as a professional and often say to myself, I’m not sure this applies to the Trump folks because I think they’re much worse than this. But I remember thinking, I won’t name who they are or where I came across them in life, but they were talented people and they were successful and they got to their positions I think in spite of their personalities or parts of their personalities instead of because of them, and I would think you could go so much farther or accomplish 95% of what you want to do if you were just a little bit less of an asshole.

And I don’t mean personally that, and I apologize for cursing, dad, but I mean, take the mile, don’t take 20 miles. And I kind of feel like these folks kind of won a little bit of a PR battle at the border and they took a leading issue for themselves. The leading issue was immigration enforcement and they’ve inverted it. Anyway, I’m going to stop ruminating about why they are not as smart as they thought they were or seem to be.

Ed Luce:

Can I corroborate very briefly your point?

Preet Bharara:

Yes, please.

Ed Luce:

I think President Trump in late November, after the off year elections, when Mamdani won in New York, I think he probably recognized that that skill of Mamdani’s or that quality of his character, which is it’s really hard to demonize somebody who is so nice who looks into the camera, who is smiling and interacting a lot. That’s quiet equality.

Preet Bharara:

Well, speaking as a New Yorker in my law office on Monday, January 26th, after 26 inches of snow fell in Westchester and reading the reports about snow cleanup in New York City and the five boroughs, Mamdani has literally weathered the first test as mayor. And it’s very well-considered lore and a rule of politics in New York that if you can get the streets cleaned up, you’re good as a mayor. And if you can’t, you’re toast as a mayor. And he did it with good cheer. I saw some videos of him joking about how he didn’t wear a hat and people were concerned that his hair froze and he did a couple of videos in advance of the storm showing folks what the snowplows were like and how much equipment we had and how the government was good. Again, the jury’s still out on him overall, but I think the consensus on the snowstorm is very well done. And by the way, someone pointed out all of that, socialism.

Ed Luce:

Yeah, he knows the basics. He knows the basics.

Preet Bharara:

Last point on this, and then we’ve got to talk about Greenland. There is now talk, and this may be moot by Thursday, but there’s now talk of Democrats banding together and not funding DHS, which may cause a partial government shutdown. Is that a miscalculation in the other direction? And talk about defunding ICE, which echoes defund the police, et cetera. How do you think the Democrats are playing this? And obviously it’s much more important than just mere politics, but when you have apparently innocent people who are dead, but how do you think the politics is going to work out on the Democratic side?

Ed Luce:

I made the wrong judgment for the shutdown last year. I thought it was a mistake and it turned out not to be a mistake. So I’m mistrusting my judgment here, but I believe that defunding ICE in these circumstances is a perfectly reasonable thing to hold hostage for government funding, for this sort of three quarters of government funding that’s on the table. Abolishing ICE is something quite different. You need to be talking about, we will fund ICE on the basis of reform. Now, I guess one of the reforms is you are unmasked and possibly unarmed because you should be operating with local law enforcement. We can sort of sketch out various reasonable potential reforms there, but you cannot just wave this through. You cannot let this go. This is un-American and it has to be thrust there and maintained in the limelight as an un-American sort of paramilitary force that could potentially threaten any one of us.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Ed Luce after this. Let’s do a bit of a review of the first year of the Trump second term. I’m not going to ask you, how has it been? Has it been good or bad year one? And I’m sure you’ve been asked a version of this question, but going back to your January 20th, 2025 self who could look ahead and see your January 20th or January 26th, 2026 self, better or worse than you expected?

Ed Luce:

I’m going to say roughly along the lines of what I expected. I mean, I’d read Project 2025. I’d paid attention to what Trump and Vance have been saying. I’m not that surprised.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. What about how the reaction has been from the forces who would oppose his policies and his approach, better or worse than you expected?

Ed Luce:

The November results were better and more encouraging than I expected. The fact that affordability, or that might be a euphemism for something stronger, economic resentment could have served the Democrats so well. That surprised me. The speed with which Musk and Trump fell out surprised me, but most of what’s happened politically has not been a great surprise. It takes a while for people to get their act together. And in this system, you don’t have a leader of the opposition. You have to wait until the presidential nominee is at least leading the primaries or the potential presidential nominee.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to prompt you on something more specific because I will tell you what I think about a subset of what I just asked about. I have been mortified by particular examples and general categories of examples of cowardice on the part of people and institutions and for profit enterprises and not-for-profit enterprises bending the knee and allowing Trump even in failure, even in failure at law firms and otherwise, to be chilled. You quote in a piece a non-political staffer about the ability for former Biden officials to find jobs. Now, they’ll all do fine. They’re bright and talented people, but the principle here is that quietly and without fanfare, many of these people are not being hired, not because they’re not worthy or experienced or talented, but because these institutions are afraid of Donald Trump.

And you quote this staffer as saying, “Every employer says something along the lines of, we’d love to hire you, but it’s not worth the risk.” They offer apologies. Could you comment on what I perceive as a kind of unexpected sea of cowardice in the country on the part of people who don’t want his policies and ostensibly oppose his policies and his approach?

Ed Luce:

I guess you’re right. I mean, this has been a lot worse. There’s been a lot less spine than you would’ve expected. I’m particularly interested in the private sector. Not just the law firms, but the Fortune 500 companies, the US Chambers of Commerce, the business round table, all of whom if you talk to them, which I do, privately are utterly alarmed and outraged. But then I ask, well, when is it that you will reach a tipping point where you’d speak out collectively, link arms and tell Trump publicly what you think? And they all sketch out some future scenario.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I’ll tell you when it is. You know when it is, Ed? January 21, 2029.

Ed Luce:

Yeah. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And you know what? A lot of these folks, they will have plans for reviving their reputations and they’re going to say all the things that they thought and the things that they quietly did so they could remain viable until that guy is out. And you know who’s not going to be applauding them? Me.

Ed Luce:

You’re absolutely right. And then, I mean, by which stage it’s always too late. You speak out when you’re safe. It’s only effective if you speak out when you’re taking some risk. But of course, if you link arms, you are much safer. And Trump’s skill at playing them off against each other, regulatory favors-

Preet Bharara:

Well, because he knows. He wouldn’t articulate it this way because I don’t think he’s a student of philosophy or sociology or anything else, but there’s a collective action problem. There’s a collective action problem because you’re… And particularly, by the way, just to be fair, if you’re a business, you’re a bank or some kind of business, you could say our job is not to be a good citizen. We don’t want to break any laws, and we shouldn’t break laws, but we’re a financial enterprise and risks happen. Sometimes there’s over-enforcement of a certain kind of criminal statute, and we make changes for those reasons, and we do these things even though we don’t think that they’re the right thing, harried and investigated institutions will say. And this is like that. Do you want us to risk our 80 years of existence and we have thousands of employees? And that excuse, it’s not a crazy way to think about it, but that excuse compounded by everyone in that industry allows for moral collapse and allows for the creation of a scenario that is ruinous for all of them ultimately, right?

Ed Luce:

And if the CEO of Paramount or Time Warner or Comcast or whoever singly comes out against Trump or criticizes him, or even Jamie Diamond, we’ve seen, one of the most powerful for JP Morgan comes out individually just by hinting, not even by naming Trump, just by sort of criticizing generally his policies, he will pick you out, single you out, and he will punish you as he’s attempting to do with a DOJ investigation of Jamie Diamond. If you do so collectively through your industry body, like the Chamber of Commerce, well, maybe the president of the Chamber of Commerce will be targeted, but all the members will be collectively behind that, as you saw with the Minnesota Chambers of Commerce. And this is what we’re now seeing the Europeans begin to learn on the geopolitical stage is if you collectively oppose Trump, you are way better off than if you approach him bilaterally and suck up to him.

Preet Bharara:

But these things don’t happen at once, right? People are not all meeting somewhere in the clubhouse and deciding we’re going to collectively oppose Trump. And what I might have expected is you have some folks breaking off and that causes some attrition in his support. I think you and I were discussing this for a moment before we hit the record button. What is going on in the world where I, host of this podcast, have on prior occasions, on multiple occasions, poked pretty acerbic fun at Marjorie Taylor Green, and now I find myself retweeting her. Do you think that her departure from the fold matters in any way? Do you think it’s opportunistic? Do you think it’s bold or courageous in any way? Does it fly in the face of the cowardice I’ve been describing? Is it something else altogether?

Ed Luce:

See, I don’t know what it was originally that prompted her to break with Trump over the Epstein Files. I mean, it could have been that she had been thwarted by Speaker Mike Johnson for leadership positions as other Republican women in the MAGA sort of fold, complain that they’re just sort of potted plants. They’re extras, they’re not given their due. And it might have therefore originated with personal peak, or it might have been some sort of road to Damascus moment where she suddenly thought, Jesus, what is going on here? He campaigned on blowing open the deep state pedophile conspiracy, and here he is covering it up. I don’t know what it was, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. What matters is judging somebody by their actions. And Marjorie Taylor Green, like you, I cannot believe I am saying this, has been and continues to be courageous. Now, she’s not yet been rewarded for it. So I don’t know how many others are going to think, well, that’s an example I’d like to follow.

Preet Bharara:

Even Marjorie Taylor Green, whatever you think of her and the gazpacho police and all of that, Marjorie Taylor Green, I believe, would have enough freaking self-respect and dignity that if someone offered her their richly deserved and duly conferred Nobel Prize, she would say, I’m very flattered. Thank you very much. Let’s take a picture. You go home with your Nobel Prize. Fair?

Ed Luce:

Very, very fair indeed.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. What is going on with the appropriation or annexation or purchase or invasion, those are all the choices, of Greenland?

Ed Luce:

It was remarkable Mark Carney’s speech in Davos, the Canadian Prime Minister’s speech. Because if you’d asked me a year ago, this is the surprise actually. There are a few surprises. I didn’t want to mislead it that I’ve expected everything to happen, particularly in the way that it’s happened, but I would not have predicted Canada as being the middle power, as Carney calls them, being the one to stand up and blow the whistle, just like people are blowing the whistle in Minneapolis neighborhoods. I would not expect Canada, the gentlest, nicest and closest friendliest neighbor that the United States has or any country has ever had for that matter. Therefore, it was all the more powerful for Carney to stand up and say what he said and for him to get a standing ovation and a massive round of applause when he said, and Canada stands with the sovereignty of Greenland and Denmark and that this is a matter internally for Greenland and Denmark, or words to that effect. That got a massive round of applause.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, and I had not appreciated that standing ovations are rare in that forum, quite rare.

Ed Luce:

You’re right. The only two prior ones had been Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Extremely rare, therefore they’re kind of like a black swan. So this was a moment. This was a speech for the ages. This was an inflection point. This is the point where people will say, okay, Trump’s starting to miscalculate the geopolitical game here. We’ve all known for a long time, he does not appreciate the multiplying power and value of alliances, but we didn’t think that the allies were prepared to call him out on that. Now they are and they have along with the markets. And that’s quite a week. That is quite a week. And I should add very quickly, Preet, because this might be my geeky side, but this was the week-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I like your geeky side.

Ed Luce:

When gold shot up. Gold, that hedge against pestilence and war, gold shot up 8% in that week, last week, the highest it’s ever jumped in any week since the 2008 financial meltdown, which in itself was the highest, therefore the highest jump ever. And why? Because people are diversifying away from the United States. It’s not just Mark Carney, it’s the markets.

Preet Bharara:

What’s going to happen with Greenland?

Ed Luce:

He’s TACO’d on that. It might resurface again in a few months, who knows with Trump, but for the time being, he’s been pushed off by the markets.

Preet Bharara:

Why can’t he have Mexico pay for Greenland?

Ed Luce:

With Mexico, I’m certainly more worried that they… They replaced Venezuela as the chief oil supplier to Cuba. So Mexico is in Marco Rubio’s sights because Marco Rubio’s ultimate goal is to liberate the homeland of his parents.

Preet Bharara:

I want to take issue with one observation that you make. It’s not a particularly important one necessarily. And I don’t have the context, but this is from X. Trump’s unique trait is to be terrifyingly dumb and mind-numbingly dull at the same time. So the first part I sort of disagree with because you don’t get elected two out of three times as President United States if you’re terrifyingly dumb all the time. You just don’t. But the second one, none of his supporters think he’s mind-numbingly dumb. And I know a lot of folks who before he became president found him somewhat entertaining and he had a top-rated show. And it’s still the case that when he’s on television, people love watch him or hate watch him. Do you want to withdraw the mind-numbingly dull observation, Ed?

Ed Luce:

Yes, I do.

Preet Bharara:

That was the easiest cross-examination in my entire career.

Ed Luce:

I plead guilty, please, in mitigating circumstances.

Preet Bharara:

You didn’t have to surrender so fast.

Ed Luce:

I was watching his speech in Davos, which did fit that description.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Ed Luce:

It was both terrifying and dull. But as a sort of all-purpose description of Trump, no, that’s not a fitting description.

Preet Bharara:

Can you talk me down from a ledge? Not me, but you say something very, I think, wise and mature in a piece you wrote not that long ago. And you say, even if Republicans lose the House in next year’s midterm elections and fail to retain the presidency in 2028, Democrats will inherit a republic that is bewilderingly different from where they left it. Fair. You cannot step into the same river twice. I don’t fully understand that metaphor, but we’ll move on. The temptation to retain Trump’s methods to turn his lawfare against Republicans and other domestic enemies would be powerful. And first of all, the MAGA folks would say, Ed, you have it all wrong. The Democrats drew first blood. Right? They indicted our guy four times, et cetera, et cetera. I think it’s not quite right. It’s not quite comparable to what he’s doing, to everyone from Lisa Cook to Adam Schiff, to Jim Comey, to many, many, many others.

But I will tell you that in the legal ranks, people are paying attention to who’s doing what, and there are people some of whom I know personally or are otherwise well known, and some are new names and were not well known before, who are so dishonoring themselves and debasing themselves. And at a minimum, if you apply the standards of investigation, the threshold for starting an investigation with full FBI, DHS, you name it, IRS, if you apply their threshold standard of investigation of a person to them, whether dozens of people who are on the dock, talk people down from the impetus and urge to bring all those people before a court of law in 2029.

Ed Luce:

Tactically speaking, let’s say that you’re the Democratic nominee and it’s early 2028, so a few months ago. That person should not be vowing to put Trump in jail.

Preet Bharara:

Agreed.

Ed Luce:

It’s the same principle we have with international war crimes about dictators. Do you want to incentivize the dictator to stay?

Preet Bharara:

But can I say it? How about me? How about me, Ed?

Ed Luce:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Ed Luce:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Ed Luce:

You can.

Preet Bharara:

All right.

Ed Luce:

You can say it. And that person, that nominee who’s never promised it can still do it and have a sort of rote line which is, my attorney general will uphold the rule of law. That’s all. No need to say, we will lock you up. We will lock him up. We will lock her up. Promising to put Trump away and his henchman and henchwomen away is going to make a cancellation of the election a lot more likely.

Preet Bharara:

Well, so first of all, even before we get to 2029, do you think Democrats will attempt to impeach Trump again in the second year of term two? I would say, and I can be called out on this, fool’s errand. I almost don’t care what Trump does. People are not going to like this. You have to hold people accountable, particularly if they don’t have the Senate. There should be resolve not to impeach Trump in the last two years. Do you agree with me?

Ed Luce:

I do. Can I just say one tiny anecdote? On the day in spring 2024, I think it was in April, when Alvin Bragg indicted Trump on the Stormy Daniels related charges, it split them up into 34 to make it sound like a lot of different counts, but it was basically one thing. I was on a well-known TV show that morning. One I go on quite a lot and I love the people there, but-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, Morning Joe is great.

Ed Luce:

Okay. I was trying to tiptoe around naming it. Well, this was a rare occasion where I said something and I said, “I think this is a gross mistake. I think politically this is going to boomerang.” And unanimously I was disagreed with, very politely, but I was unanimously basically overruled and I was off-air quite quickly. That turns out to have been Trump’s biggest single fundraising day in his history. And it’s also, if you look at the polls, the point where he begins to win the 2024 presidential election. Now, there are many other factors involved, Biden, Kamala, all of that, but that was peak Trump day. It was the best day other than his victory on November the 5th of 2024 for Donald Trump. What you’ve just said, I immediately think of that and I agree with you therefore very strongly.

Preet Bharara:

But what’s also so interesting is, I don’t know this for a fact, I believe Tish James had the largest fundraising day she’s ever had the day she got indicted. Mark Kelly is having a pretty good time fundraising, not a good time because I think it’s abhorrent what’s happening to him, obviously. But why are they making martyrs of Democrats in the same way that he believes he was martyred by Democrats?

Ed Luce:

Yeah, it’s odd how Trump doesn’t learn from his own story.

Preet Bharara:

From his own success, from his own good fortune.

Ed Luce:

From his own good fortune.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not even learning from bad fortune. It’s from your own good fortune.

Ed Luce:

And lawfare, lawfare is a central word to explaining Trump’s rebound. It’s a central word, so it’s really puzzling he doesn’t get that, but solipsists are unable to imagine themselves in anybody else’s shoes.

Preet Bharara:

What do you think that second two years will look like if the Democrats win the House back?

Ed Luce:

I think they will win the House, assuming it’s roughly free and fair. And the way to, by the way, insure a free and fair election is have a big margin. Skullduggery is so much easier when the margins are narrow. And last November, the margins were big. That’s the lesson. Have a big margin and it’s really, really hard to overturn, but-

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to order up a big margin.

Ed Luce:

Order up a big margin instantly delivered for you and your friends. But I think the second half will go in some senses conventionally, which is all presidents in their second term and particularly the second half of their second term move more to foreign policy. That’s the reassuring sort of half. The unreassuring half is just how enamored Trump is of this remote control sort of use of his tools as commander-in-chief, abducting Maduro, thinking he can basically annex Greenland. He’s talking again of Carney as a governor of the 51st state, Iran. I mean, the scope for Trump’s sort of pyrotechnics in the second term and the illiberalism that comes with war abroad and conflict abroad always produces backlash and repression at home. That really worries me. It could get very, very destabilizing. And we’re already in a fragmenting Hobsian jungle, this world that Trump’s co-coauthored with reality, but it could get a lot more Hobsian and a lot more predatory. Not could do, will do in the second half of Trump’s term.

Preet Bharara:

You know what my hope is? And it’s sort of the flip side of the cowardice and unprincipled nature of a lot of Republicans who didn’t stand up to Donald Trump because they’re weak and they put their interests first I think before the countries, and they were afraid of Donald Trump’s power, electoral power, campaigning power, et cetera, that as he becomes more and more of a lame duck, and as the world moves on from him in the final two years, their same, and I’m going to use a big word, pusillanimousness or pusillanimity, I don’t know what the noun is-

Ed Luce:

It’s a Panglossian choice of word.

Preet Bharara:

I had to compete. I have to compete with Ed Luce with that great accent. It really pisses me off. I was going to adopt an act. I might do a version of this with a much more erudite accent, but that very weakness of character and lack of adherence to principle will cause them for self-protection purposes to move away from him when it’s right and more popular in their district, and that will further erode his power and influence in the final two years. Is that pie in the sky or not?

Ed Luce:

No, I don’t think it’s pie in the sky. It’s definitely the upbeat scenario, but it’s not implausible.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Okay. I’ll take it. If you had to blurb my thought, if my thought were a book, Ed, I would absolutely put you on the top. It is not implausible. Ed Luce says it is not… It reminds me of I went on TV to promote my book from a few years ago.

Ed Luce:

Which I reviewed.

Preet Bharara:

Which you did review. And I don’t think you said this, but the one reviewer that I cared about more than anyone else was my father. And I said this on a TV show because I mentioned my dad and I think it was Stephanie Rule, an MSNBC or MS Now or MS Later, MS, eventually, whatever. She said, “What’d your dad think?” And I said, “My dad said it was very readable.” And she thought that was a diss, but I know my father and he meant it as a high compliment that it was a book for late… He’s not a lawyer. He’s a doctor by training. And for him, the fact that it was a page turning book and that he found it interesting and readable and enjoyed it was actually a high compliment, but it didn’t sound great. I’m going to view your assessment of my comment just now. It is not implausible to be like my dad’s. It’s very readable.

Ed Luce:

Absolutely. It’s like you ask somebody from England if they’re feeling well and they say not bad. That means I am walking on air.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Well, no, but you would say it because folks with your accent are very droll in this way. I’m not unwell.

Ed Luce:

I’m not unwell.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not totally unwell.

Ed Luce:

There’ve been worse days.

Preet Bharara:

Which means then, yes. I mean, the other thing, I don’t want to get into full commentary on the idioms of people with your accent, but I’m just reminding… We can cut this. I’m just reminded, I just love this story. My college roommate worked after college in London, and he was at his new job for a big pharmaceutical company, and a very smart guy, went out to get an MBA and is an executive. And he said, “I had a great moment the other day at the office when I submitted a memo to my boss at the London office, and the boss said, brilliant. It’s brilliant.” And he said, “I felt very, very flattered by that.” And then an hour later, he was walking down the street and he saw a woman trying to get her dog to defecate on the spot so they could continue on their walk. And so the dog defecated all over the sidewalk and the woman says, “Brilliant. That was absolutely brilliant.” He realized-

Ed Luce:

Sarcasm.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a word with really not a lot of cache in Londontown. So you have to learn these things. I’m getting older and I’m still trying to learn them. Ed Luce, AK Eduardo Luce, thank you again for your insight. As always, pleasure to have you.

Ed Luce:

A real pleasure to be on. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ed Luce continues for members of the Cafe Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, Ed and I discuss why this might be, as he calls it, the mother of all teachable moments.

Ed Luce:

We need to recognize that it is going to get darker and that Trump has no limit.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about a secret ICE memo that could let agents enter homes without a warrant and whether a Canadian could become president if Canada became the 51st state. Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from John. The Associated Press is reporting that immigration and customs enforcement is claiming the ability to forcibly enter American homes without a warrant. Is this legal? And if so, how is it not a violation of the unreasonable searches and seizures clause in the Constitution? John, thanks for the question. I and many others have read the Associated Press report as well, and it’s pretty alarming. According to AP, a previously undisclosed memo dated May 12, 2025 and signed by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has been circulating internally within ICE and used in training, such as that training is.

The memo apparently was not intended for public release, but two whistleblowers have come forward disclosing its contents and describing its unusually secretive handling. So what does the memo say? In essence, it claims that ICE officers may arrest people inside their homes based on an administrative warrant, specifically something called Form I205, warrant of removal/deportation. They also claim they no longer need a warrant signed by a federal judge to enter the home. The memo acknowledges that the Department of Homeland Security has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest people in their place of residence, but says DHS’s Office of General Counsel has now, “Determined that the US Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act and immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.” So presumably, if a person is subject to a final order of removal, which is the last final decision in an immigration case directing a non-citizen to be deported, leave the country, this ICE memo claims that agents can forcibly enter a home and execute an arrest without a warrant signed by a judge.

So the memo appears to be a sharp break from decades of Supreme Court case law interpreting the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment draws its brightest line at our front door. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that absent limited exceptions like consent or emergency circumstances, the government must have a judicial warrant to enter a home. An administrative warrant is not signed by a federal judge. It’s issued within the executive branch, and according to the whistleblower disclosure, it is drafted and signed by an ICE official. So the adjudicator is the very same government agency breaking down a target’s door to make an arrest. We are already seeing courts push back. One reported example involves a Liberian man named Garrison Gibson.

Armed ICE agents broke into his home using a battering ram and arrested him while his wife and nine-year-old child were inside. Four days after Gibson’s arrest, the federal district court judge ruled that ICE agents violated his fourth amendment rights writing, “To arrest him, respondents forcibly entered Garrison G’s home without his consent and without a judicial warrant.” Now, this ruling doesn’t resolve much nationwide, but at least it’s a signal that courts will treat this policy as highly constitutionally suspect.

One additional point, the whistleblower disclosure includes an operational detail that’s quite odd, perhaps disturbing. It claims that the ICE memo was not broadly distributed within the agency, which is what you would expect when there is, as Joyce Vance put it on the Insider podcast, a sea change in policy. Instead, it was shown to some personnel and then taken back, no opportunity to copy it or take notes. As Joyce noted, this reads like an agency that is uncertain about the legality of its own position, or worse yet, knows it’s unconstitutional. My colleagues, Mimi Roca and Perry Carbone wrote about this very issue this week for our Substack. The link to their article is in the show notes of this episode, as well as the whistleblower disclosure document and the accompanying ICE memo. We’ll keep an eye on it, of course.

This question comes in an email from Brian. If Canada becomes the 51st state of the US, would Mark Carney be eligible to run for president? Well, now that’s kind of a fun question. And we state at the outset that Canada is not becoming the 51st state, it is not becoming a territory, it’s not happening, it’s not happening, it’s not happening. But in the interests of talking about the law and some history, you raise a surprisingly tricky constitutional question, which could arise in some other context, I suppose. Now, to indulge the hypothetical, Trump has floated the idea of Canada becoming America’s 51st state a number of times, at times even suggesting economic force could be used to make it happen. So putting aside how absolutely remote the scenario is, let’s assume that Canada is admitted as a US state, not a territory, but a US state, and assume also further that Mark Carney has ambitions to run for President of the United States.

Let’s look at the Constitution. Article two, section one sets out the eligibility requirements for the presidency. We’ve talked about this before. It says that the president must be a natural-born citizen of the United States. That raises the key question here. If the US acquires a new territory or admits a new state, do people who were born there before acquisition automatically become citizens at birth, in effect, retroactively grandfathered in for presidential eligibility? Good question. The Constitution does not define natural-born, and the Supreme Court has never issued a definitive ruling that would resolve every edge case. We’ve had, as you may know, presidential candidates whose eligibility has been questioned, Barry Goldwater, for example, was born in Arizona territory before it became a state and Ted Cruz was born in Canada to only one American parent. But in each of these cases, the legal challenges were either never brought or were dismissed on procedural grounds before the Supreme Court could weigh in.

As a result, there is no Supreme Court precedent squarely resolving your question. So the issue of what happens when citizenship is conferred by Congress during annexation or admission of a new state is not settled. History might give us some clues though. So when Congress granted citizenship to people and acquired territories, for example, Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and others, it has done so very precisely, often drawing clear lines about who qualifies as a citizen at birth and who is just a naturalized citizen. Take Hawaii, for example. The Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900 granted US citizenship to people who were citizens of the Republic of Hawaii at the time of annexation. But only people born in Hawaii on or after April 30th, 1900, nearly two years after annexation were treated as US citizens at birth. Earlier born residents became citizens by statute, not by birthright, and so presumably would not have been eligible to run for president.

So if Congress were to handle Canada in a similar way, it’s unlikely that someone born decades before a state state of admission like Mark Carney would be deemed to be a citizen at birth. And if that were the case, Carney would face a serious hurdle under the natural born citizen requirement in Article two. But let me repeat again, not going to happen. One last note on Mark Carney. As Ed Luce and I discussed in the podcast this week, he gave a pretty remarkable speech at Davos. It’s worth a listen.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Ed Luce. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com. Stay tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig.

The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.