The Manhandling of Alex Padilla Was a Red-Line Moment for America

But Trump was surely most pleased by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who put all the blame on Padilla and called on the Senate to censure him: “I think that that behavior at a minimum rises to the level of a censure. I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that that is not what we’re going to do; that’s not what we’re going to act.” Note the “at a minimum,” which leaves dangling the insane possibility that Padilla should … what? Just be expelled? Again, the essence of Trumpism is found in those three words.

This is what they do. All the time. Trump federalizes the National Guard and sends in the Marines; he crows that if he hadn’t acted, Los Angeles would have been “completely obliterated.” Think about the scale of that lie, referring to protests in a four- or five-block area in a city of 500 square miles. He told it over and over in various forms, as did Noem and others. The behavior has its precedents in the United States: Southerners accused Sumner of faking his injuries. They argued that the cane was not heavy enough to cause severe injury. Others, more direct about matters, piped up that Sumner deserved a caning every day.

And the right-wing media, like the Southern press in the 1850s, reliably echoed every word Trump, Noem, and the others said. Meanwhile the mainstream media failed dramatically this week by accepting the lazy frame that immigration is a “winner” for Trump. Two polls came out—this one and this one—showing this emphatically not to be the case. The second poll, from Quinnipiac, was bleak for Trump across the board. Only 27 percent of the country supports the big ugly bill. That’s not even all of MAGA America. People are beginning to understand that they indulged themselves last year in some fantasy projection of “Donald Trump.” They’re seeing the real article now, and they’re remembering his viciousness, his ignorance, his incompetence, and his lawlessness.

And it’s going to get worse. Trumpism proceeds by the successive breaking of taboos. Each time a new one is broken, the previous one is normalized, made to look not so bad by comparison. The cuffing of Padilla was a red-line moment. And yet: There’s plenty of reason to worry that in four months, we’ll look back on it as a moment of comparative innocence.