Minnesota Officials Remind Residents Trump Admin’s Aim Is to Provoke

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Jan 07, 2026

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA - JANUARY 5: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a press conference at the State Capitol building on January 5, 2026 in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

In the immediate aftermath of an ICE agent killing a woman in Minnesota on Wednesday, officials urged residents of the state to not take the “bait” and give the Trump administration the justification if wants to create a “military occupation.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) announced Wednesday afternoon that the state had activated its State Emergency Operations Center, a multi-agency response unit that is triggered in the wake of big events. As Minnesota Public Radio noted, it was activated after the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis in 2020. Walz also said he issued a “warning order” that puts the Minnesota National Guard on standby. The precautions are being taken in anticipation of the possibility that protests against ICE’s operation in Minneapolis may grow after Wednesday’s killing, per local reports.

(If you need it, my colleague Josh Kovensky has a piece here on the details of the fatal shooting this afternoon: an ICE agent shot and killed a woman, it was captured on camera, and Department of Homeland Security officials are describing it as an act of self defense. The Trump administration has already begun labeling the woman who was killed as a “domestic terrorist,” despite multiple pieces of video evidence, shot from different angles, that appear to show the woman trying to drive away from the agents. More here.)

Local media reports that protests against the ICE operation and demanding agents leave the city have already broken out in downtown Minneapolis. Trump sent 2,000 ICE agents to Minnesota this week as part of his ongoing immigration enforcement assault across America. Many of the targets of his first year of immigration operations have been blue cities — places whose elected Democratic leadership he wants to punish and where he can send in federal officers and the National Guard to inflame tensions as residents inevitably protest the ICE arrests. The Supreme Court recently blocked Trump from federalizing the National Guard in Chicago, finding the administration’s justification for doing so was insufficient and that it had mobilized the guard in an improper way, so Trump flooded Minnesota with ICE this week as he whips up right-wing frenzy over social service fraud investigations there.

The scene of the shooting Wednesday was not far from where the George Floyd murder took place and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, as well as Walz, urged residents to keep protests peaceful and to not give the Trump administration what it wants — “chaos,” Frey said. It’s a sentiment that Democratic elected officials in blue states and cities around the country have had to embody for months to fend off the kind of federal occupation that Trump appears to be pursuing.

“I feel your anger. I’m angry,” Walz said. “They want a show; we can’t give it to them.”

During a press conference in the wake of the killing, Frey demanded that ICE “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” before urging residents to “meet that hate with love.”

“We are better than a bunch of ICE agents being deployed to cities around the country and ripping apart families and communities,” Frey said. “We’re better than that. We’re going to meet that hate with love.

“We are going to make sure that in this very difficult moment that we do not take the bait that these ICE agents are trying to create and that the federal government — to be clear — wants. They want us to respond in a way that creates a military occupation in our city.”

— Nicole LaFond

Some Republicans Are Concerned About This Greenland Situation

Donald Trump’s (and Stephen Miller’s) new imperial ambitions have put congressional Republicans in a tough spot. Early public polling shows voters not super enthused about foreign adventurism in Venezuela and now, possibly, elsewhere. More substantially, acts of war require congressional approval that the administration is not seeking. And, more ephemerally, it all has a mad king quality that already was very present atop the executive branch.

Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the three Republicans who have been most willing to break with Trump this Congress, slammed the administration’s threat to take Greenland by force during interviews with NBC News today. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leaders John Thune (R-SD), meanwhile, have both insisted that the administration is not to be taken seriously on this topic — only to be contradicted by the administration, insisting that it should be taken very seriously.

A similar dynamic continues to play out with Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who, while a Cuba hawk and thus a Venezuela hawk, does not appear to be a Greenland hawk. He, like Republican congressional leaders, played down Trump’s threats, insisting the U.S. may buy Greenland (as oppose to seizing it), while trying to play it all down as old news. “That’s always been the president’s intent from the very beginning,” Rubio told reporters today. “He’s not the first U.S. president that has examined or looked at how we could acquire Greenland.”

He plans to meet with Danish officials next week to talk it over, he said today.

Trump, famously, likes to keep all options on the table, and likes to find ways to exert maximum leverage. Perhaps that’s all this military talk is truly about. But European officials are very alarmed, which at least gives rise to the possibility that the whole situation is more serious than the secretary of state is letting on.

— John Light

US’s Leaders Opt to Rot Brains

In the months after Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter, a lot of people predicted (or, perhaps, hoped) that his stewardship would be the beginning of the end for the platform. By now we can see that, while it was clearly the beginning of something, it wasn’t the end: Twitter (X) still exists, albeit in a janky and somewhat diminished form. Some users have left. Among those who dug in and stayed are some of the most powerful people on the planet, including the elite of Silicon Valley and the right-wing influencers who make up the Trump administration.

Increasingly, the federal government seems to be performing for X. In the makeshift Mar-a-Lago situation room from which officials monitored the operation to exfiltrate Nicolás Maduro this weekend, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth glowered at laptops while sitting in front of a large screen displaying X. Some of the most brutal actions the administration took in 2025 were immediately turned into content for the platform; ICE and CBP operations at times seemed to be staged specifically so they could become content, with officers provoking and right-wing influencers in tow, cameras held aloft.

Of course, it goes beyond the administration. New York Magazine’s John Herrman noted last week that much of the conversation around AI, the business that analysts believe is propping up the U.S. economy, is also unfolding on X. Many CEOs, researchers and investors in the space are constantly on the platform, Herrman writes, arguing with one another about the direction of their industry amid the steady flow of sludge that makes up the site’s standard fare. (This week’s absurdity is as good an example of that as any: “Elon Musk’s X faces probes in Europe, India, Malaysia after Grok generated explicit images of women and children.”) It feels almost obvious to point out that Silicon Valley’s lurch to the political right roughly tracked with Twitter’s, though it’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg situation.

We have a social media platform that is increasingly dysregulated and niche, but on which the people who shape our world spend a considerable amount of time. In some cases, they tailor their public persona and their actions — and even their governing or business decisions — to impress its right-wing user base. The site, while catering to a smaller and less ideologically diverse audience, has as much power to influence real world events as it ever did, if not more.

— John Light