The Minneapolis revolt tells us this: even in Trump’s America, the people have power too
Aditya Chakrabortty
[…] power doesn’t belong only to the powerful. Just look at the disarray inflicted on Trump, head of the world’s sole superpower, by Minneapolis, a city with barely more people than Croydon.
After months of resistance by Minnesotans, the president’s immigration chief,
Gregory Bovino, has been forced out of the city. Trump’s head of homeland security, Kristi Noem, faces either the
sack or impeachment. Key members of his team are
tearing strips off each other.
[…]
Trump doubtless expected the same in the icy midwest. Instead, his troops faced a nonviolent fightback. Tens of thousands across Minneapolis and Saint Paul turned out week after week to protest, even when it was so cold, wrote one reporter, that he couldn’t take notes: “The ink in my pens had frozen.” Despite the state executions that have been all over the world’s news, despite being teargassed and assaulted, ordinary Minnesotans still turned out.
When others went into hiding rather than face the immigration gangsters, their neighbours made sure they got food and supplies. And yet others acted as ICE-watchers, monitoring the violence and barbarism of armed thugs whose salaries come from US taxpayers. Many have kept on their civic duties despite the killing of Renee Good, a poet and mother who ICE employees shot in the face then called a “











”; and Alex Pretti, a nurse executed by a gang of seven agents, apparently for holding up a phone.
These two ordinary people were murdered by their own government, then slandered by it. Their corpses were tagged as “domestic terrorists”. Their fellow Minnesotans have been attacked as an “
organised illegal insurgency” by Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of Palantir. […] But an insurgency this is not, not when mums tooting whistles are battling masked men toting guns,
paid up to $50,000 just for signing up to ICE; not when a smartphone camera is wielded against teargas; or when hecklers are handcuffed and hauled off.
[…]
As [EH Carr] wrote, “The historian belongs not to the past but to the present”. All of us will one day form the raw material of history; we will all belong to the future. That should change how we act now.
After months of community resistance, the president backed down. Leadership from below succeeded when politics as usual failed, says Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty
www.theguardian.com