Trump Is Now Framing His Blue State Retribution Campaign as Some Sort Of Deliverance

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Nicole Lafond, Layla A. Jones, and Emine Yücel

Jan 13, 2026

*WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 09: U.S. President Donald Trump takes questions from members of the media. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)*

‘Fear Not’

The Trump administration is continuing to escalate in Minnesota.

It has mobilized thousands of ICE agents to carry out its occupation of Minneapolis, and this week is sending still more. An ICE officer shot and killed a mother of three there last week, and the Trump administration has smeared her as a “domestic terrorist.” The administration has, today, sparked a slew of high profile resignations from career federal prosectors over its decision to cut Minnesota authorities out of DOJ investigations into the shooting and by pushing to investigate the woman’s widow. It also has seized on legitimate fraud investigations in the state to justify freezing $10 billion in congressionally-approved federal funding for child welfare programs in Minnesota and four other blue states, a directive a federal judge promptly blocked.

The ways in which the Trump administration is carrying out its immigration enforcement agenda — attempts at shock and awe and provocation, aimed at protestors and people of color — are demonstrative of how closely it is intertwined with another top goal of the president’s second term: retribution. Specifically, looking for ways to exert control over the blue pockets of America that he believes to be populated by his political enemies. Blue state governors and mayors have always fallen into that category, whether he has personal beef with the elected Democrat or not. It’s something we’ve been discussing since Trump began federalizing the National Guard early last year to clamp down on the protests and unrest that he created with his ICE operations in blue cities like Los Angeles and Chicago last year.

In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump made his “retribution” objective explicit, and spun his administration’s plans to clamp down on First Amendment rights and his withholding of federal funding as some sort of deliverance for the “GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA” from their duly-elected leaders.

“Minnesota Democrats love the unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing because it gets the spotlight off of the 19 Billion Dollars that was stolen by really bad and deranged people,” he wrote, inflating the figure by an order of magnitude. “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

Hours later, he alluded to more potential attempts to freeze federal funding for municipalities or states that have sanctuary policies in place to provide services to undocumented immigrants.

The “RETRIBUTION” is upon us, alright.

— Nicole LaFond

The Irony of Prosecutor Joseph Thompson’s Resignation in Minnesota

The federal prosecutor behind the prominent Minnesota social services fraud investigations resigned Tuesday, reportedly due to the Trump administration’s push to investigate the widow of Renee Good, the woman killed in Minnesota by ICE agents last week, according to the New York Times.

Joseph Thompson is a career prosecutor appointed by Trump to help lead the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Minnesota after Thompson’s prosecution of Minnesota fraud rings during Biden’s administration, including investigating the Feeding Our Future group at the heart of the ongoing fraud scandal in Minnesota. At least five other attorneys resigned along with Thompson Tuesday.

Thompson’s resignation seems like an ironic self-own for the Trump administration which latched on to Thompson’s legitimate legal investigations to advance its own anti-immigrant political aims. At a time when you’d think the Trump administration would want to laud his work, just weeks after he announced an investigation into the theft of potentially more than $9 billion federal dollars, Thompson chose to step down rather than carry out the Trump administration’s directives to weaponize the rule of law. The Times reports:

Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.

In the process, the administration has now lost its star resource for accomplishing its purported top goal: “rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.”

A quote from Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara to the Minnesota Star Tribune summarizes the contradiction of Thompson’s actual work in Minnesota, versus the administration’s cartoonish takeover and subsequent violent immigration enforcement.

“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this [immigration enforcement] isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” O’Hara said.

— Layla A. Jones

Bipartisan Senate Group Punts Release of Plan to Address Expired Obamacare Subsidies

The bipartisan group of senators who have been negotiating a health care plan to revive the expired Affordable Care Act subsidies will punt the release of their legislative text until the last week of January — after the previously scheduled, upcoming Senate recess.

“We have to make sure we get it right,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) said Tuesday morning, per Politico.

The group had previously indicated they would release a plan sometime this week.

The punt comes less than a week after the House passed a Democratic-led bill that would revive the expired Obamacare subsidies for three years. Seventeen House Republicans, who are largely in a vulnerable position in the upcoming midterms, rebelled against President Donald Trump and House GOP leadership and joined all House Democrats to pass the bill, seemingly in an attempt to save face with voters.

The Senate is unlikely to take up the bill with a simple three year extension which is why a bipartisan Senate group has been negotiating for months on the issue. Though negotiations continue, the urgency around the issue — which Democrats relied on during and before the recent historic shutdown — has dampened significantly, especially after the subsidies expired at the end of 2025.

Moreno told reporters that the bipartisan group would continue their meetings in order to iron out the details of the proposal, adding that the senators who have been negotiating need to “make sure that everybody’s all set with all the framework elements, see if there’s any still areas of angst we still have to resolve.”

One sticking point for the negotiations are reportedly on how to address the amendment that mandates federal funding can’t cover abortions.

— Emine Yücel