Trump’s Violent Assault on Minnesota Is an Operation in ‘Reflexive Control’

The Trump administration chose Minnesota as ground zero for an operation that can best be described in the parlance of Washington DC as ‘counter-programming’. That’s shorthand for the use of Government power in an intentionally newsworthy way to change the media narrative away from another inconvenient story.

In this case, they are executing a complex political approach which echoes a sophisticated Russian military strategy called ‘reflexive control’. Developed in the Soviet Union, the primary goal of this strategy is to dominate the information space in order to force your opponent to voluntarily make bad decisions.

When the US Government floods a major city with law enforcement agents, people with cameras on their cellphones are going to be there to oppose the movement, news outlets are going to cover the chaos. Soon after will follow the organizers, the activists, and the provocateurs who amplify these narratives.

Reflexively, the media narrative will move towards this stimulus – and rightfully so – given the Government’s illegal actions.

However, the voluntary bad decision Donald Trump wants to trigger is simple.

He wants for the information space to stop focusing on his sex trafficking cover-up, his trillion dollar healthcare cut to fund equally massive tax cut to his elite political donors, and the White House’s enormous consumption tax levies while dictating by Executive Order the transformation of America’s heretofore strong economy into right-wing socialist paradise for loyal oligarchs.

And that is how the Trump administration is using its counter-programming efforts to achieve reflexive control over the media narrative, the discussions of activists and the broader national conversation about politics.

Trump and his regime are desperate to move away from their cover up of the Jeffrey Epstein files exposing a trans-Atlantic pedophile ring, desperate to deflect from their multiple major policy failures that are economically oppressing hundreds of millions of Americans.

And this is the White House’s only plan.

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Distraction Tactics

What we are witnessing in Minnesota is the deadly use of counter-programming on a level not even seen during the first Trump administration.

Minneapolis is the capital of Minnesota, surrounding the banks of the mighty Mississippi River, part of its thriving Twin Cities metropolitan area including the city of St. Paul lying just to its east along a bend of the river.

Home to about 3.8 million residents, the Minneapolis region holds a global political relevance far greater than the size of its population owing to its concentration of the headquarters of 14 prominent companies in the Fortune 500 from 3M to Ecolab Inc to Target.

Minneapolis is globally known for its notoriously awful relations between police and citizens of color, in the wake of international protests set off by one of its officers’ murdering George Floyd, while his co-workers complicity watched for nine long minutes.

What we are seeing in Minneapolis and throughout Minnesota is nothing short of using the full might of the American federal government’s law enforcement powers to just redirect the national political narrative.

How big has the operation grown?

Recently, I learned from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey – who went viral for saying “ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis” – that the city only has roughly 600 sworn law enforcement officers on its city police force, and the ICE task force occupying the city numbers over 3,000 federal agents.

“Violent crime is already down here,” Mayor Frey explained, noting that as of mid-January that ICE accounted for fully half of the fatal shootings in his city to date this year.

Donald Trump and his allies are desperate to bury major policy weaknesses, like the gutting of $1 trillion dollars in American healthcare funding to deliver $1 trillion dollar tax cuts to their billionaire backers.

Enormous taxes Donald Trump personally imposed upon the American people through tariffs have sparked rising prices.

US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, the head of what is typically an obscure federal agency to most Americans outside the food or farm economy, recently made headlines when she told a news program this gem of a quotation:

“We’ve run over 1,000 simulations. It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla, and one other thing. So there is a way to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money.”

It was revealing.

People in the orbit of Trumpworld, led by the President himself, are robbing the federal Treasury blind while Trump pardons many of the most notoriously convicted fraudsters, sometimes for the second time.

The Trump administration, which is so willing to pluck the leaders of foreign nations out of their beds at night, just as they deport their people using hordes of under-qualified, overpaid recent hires, has an actual policy of asking the American people to shrink their diets while paying for them to abuse power in never before dreamed ways for an American president.

After twelve months of Donald Trump’s second term, where the buying power of regular people in America rapidly eroded in 2025, the elites at Mar-a-Lago obliviously dance the night away at Furry Parties in the middle of winter.

This is the “mass deportation” platform that Donald Trump openly pitched, and right out of the Project 2025 playbook that he falsely swore would not be deployed. Despite the history of 30,000 documented lies from first-term President Trump, the American corporate media gave total credulity to the Project 2025 lie.

Every American took notice shortly after Trump took office, that suddenly the National Guard kept getting deployed onto streets of its major cities, always based upon some flimsy pretext emanating from the White House. First in Los Angeles last June, later in DC, then Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon and New Orleans, Louisiana, then finally Chicago, Illinois.

However, the legal actions which followed came to a head late last year with a rare Supreme Court ruling against the Trump Administration.

Only two of the six members of America’s highest court gave any sort of blessing to keep deploying the military for illegal domestic law enforcement to Trump, the unitary executive whom they blessed with full legal immunity for all crimes.

America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency had a budget of only $6 billion ten years ago, now boosted to an astronomical $86 billion for 2026 thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

So where did this idea originate?

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Project 2025

The number of sworn ICE agents stood at 10,000 when Trump was sworn in only 12 months ago. There are now 22,000 agents and counting, thanks to its large salaries. Television advertisements offer $50,000 signing bonuses which are frequently shown nationally, especially during National Football League games.

In the place of soldiers, now that the agency has staffed up and Trump’s Congressional allies poured more money into immigration enforcement than any other federal agency but the military, he is delivering floods of ICE agents in American cities.

ICE is there to use their law enforcement powers to their legal zenith and far, far beyond in an effort to slake the desire for blood to be spilled on American streets. And they also might occasionally find one or two violent criminals, when they’re not busy executing soccer moms, raiding houses looking for immigrants they’ve already imprisoned or detaining US veterans without probable cause.

For the last month, America’s political center of gravity unexpectedly shifted from the bowels of Washington DC’s agencies which are busily covering up the Jeffrey Epstein Files moving a thousand miles northwest to a state best known for its “Minnesota Nice.”

Or did it?

Well, the truth is that political narratives around Minnesota all started around Christmas-time last year with a right-wing media push. I observed the early seeds of these efforts first hand on the Newsmax cable television network, when they surprisingly questioned me about a relatively minor fraud scheme, because it involved a handful of immigrants from Somalia.

The White House is openly looking to demonize immigrants by ethnic group.

It is not a coincidence that the White House propaganda push about fraud and Somalis coincided with an operation to flood the North Star state with federal immigration enforcement agents.

The overwhelming priority in all of this is for Trump is to reflexively control media narratives, in order to maintain the secrecy of the Jeffrey Epstein files and distract from his policies of cronyism and looting the Government. It seems there is no degree of social disruption he would not be willing to inflict upon a major American city in order to do so.