New York City, to take an example, is not an easy place to police. It wasn’t easy to police during Prohibition, either. And do you know what was a standard part of the NYPD uniform then and now? A tie. Yes, NYPD does have its silly goon squads dressed up as though somebody had just visited an army surplus store with the taxpayers’ AmEx after watching Red Dawn 47 times in a row, but the standard police gear includes a tie. In the case of NYPD, it is a clip-on tie for most officers, not because they are too lazy to master the four-in-hand knot but because these will come off easily if an assailant grabs one during an altercation. That demonstrates, among other things, that it is possible for the agents of an armed law enforcement agency to be realistic about their physical challenges while also dressing like adults—and dressing appropriately for their public role.
This stuff does get comical. I recall police responding to a domestic disturbance in my hometown of Lubbock, Texas, with a tactical team in an armored vehicle, the men dressed up in woodland camouflage—in a town about 500 miles from any woodland, a place where it is unusual to see more than four trees within 50 feet of one another. They should have been dressed up as tumbleweeds or F-250 King Ranch editions or the front of a Whataburger. But they do love their cosplay.
There are reams and reams of psychological studies confirming that how we are dressed has an effect, sometimes subtle and sometimes profound, on how we think and behave. We tell our law enforcement agents that they are “at war,” that they are part of a “war on drugs” or a “war on crime” or whatever, and incompetent hacks such as Kristi Noem—whose own weird and pathetic dress-up fetish has been much remarked-upon—tell them lies about how the people with whom they are interacting are “domestic terrorists” or agents of a possibly fictitious global cartel. And then we dress them up like the world’s most slovenly stormtroopers.
And then we are surprised when they act like the world’s most slovenly stormtroopers.
The jackass who shot and killed Renee Good has gotten himself into similar situations before, for instance having to get stitched up after trying to reenact a T.J. Hooker scene on a moving car and getting dragged 100 yards. Noem et al. cite that episode as evidence that the agent must have been legitimately in fear of his life—but it is evidence that what he is, in fact, is bad at his job. There are a dozen ways police intercept moving vehicles, and none of them involves being halfway in and halfway out and then going for an involuntary ride. Likewise, there are a dozen ways for a professional law enforcement agent to deal with a vehicle blocking a public street, and none of them involves screaming obscenities at the driver or giving her contradictory orders. That the ICE agents on the scene do not seem to have been able to agree among themselves what should be done about the lurking menace of … an unarmed woman in a Honda who was poking fun at them … suggests very strongly a lack of credible command on the scene.
About those masks: I understand that there are people out there who do not like ICE agents very much. Do you know who else a lot of people don’t like? Journalists. I get threats—including death threats—pretty frequently. Lots of my friends and colleagues get more (and weirder) threats than I do. If an ICE agent is too afraid to do his job without a mask, then he should look for a different job doing something safer. Buc-ee’s is always hiring, though some of these ICE goons would have a hard time getting hired there, I expect. Buc-ee’s has standards.
We need to knock off the paramilitary crap when it comes to law enforcement—not only for aesthetic reasons but for political and moral reasons. Dress a guy up like a cowboy and he’ll start acting like he’s in Yellowstone. Dress a public servant up like he’s at war rather than at work and war is what you’re going to get.
And Furthermore …
It is a cliché to note that many bullies are cowards at heart, but the cliché is a cliché for a reason—it is true. It is true of the ICE agent who shot Renee Good, true of Kristi Noem, true of J.D. Vance, and true of Donald Trump. And one of the things that bouquet of schmucks has in common is reflexive dishonesty when threatened with being made to take responsibility for their actions.
Trump, Vance, and Noem and their minions simply lied—just flat-out lied—about the ICE agent having been run over by Good’s Honda, and they lied about Good being, ridiculous as it is even to repeat the words, a “domestic terrorist” and a “rioter.” Good might very well have broken the law in blocking the street and working to discomfit the ICE agents … doing … whatever they supposedly were doing … in Minneapolis. She certainly seems to have been familiar with the agents, and if they had wanted to see her charged with an offense—possibly a traffic violation, possibly even a misdemeanor—for blocking the road, they had her license plate and face and all the evidence they would need to let the local police come in and do their job. (ICE agents are not regular police officers and are not authorized to make routine traffic stops—they are authorized to make immigration stops, including stopping vehicles when they have a “reasonable suspicion” that there is a person on board who is illegally present in the United States.) This isn’t one of those colorable disagreements—the story that Trump, Vance, Noem, et al. are trying to tell—that Good was a rioter and terrorist who was trying to run down ICE agents—is a lie. A dumb, easily disproved lie.
But Donald Trump has built a movement on dumb, easily disproved lies.
Trump is confident that the men under his command can kill Americans at will, provided those Americans are, as Good was, easily identified as political and cultural enemies: Good was a woman married to another woman and (evidently) politically left-wing, tooling around in a Honda—I suppose if it had been a Subaru, then ICE would have used an RPG. This is the domestic version of what’s been playing out in Venezuela and in the Caribbean: Trump is confident that the men under his command can simply massacre people at will, provided those people are from the darker-skinned and Spanish-speaking part of the world. Trump can offer preposterous lies to justify this killing, insisting that it is somehow related to fentanyl overdoses (Venezuela produces no known fentanyl) or possibly to cocaine smuggling (Venezuela is at most a minor entrepôt for U.S.-bound cocaine) or … something! It is worth keeping in mind that in the lead-up to the attempted coup d’état of January 2021, Trump’s people retailed even more ridiculous stories about Venezuelan hackers messing with U.S. election results. (Possibly in cahoots with the North Koreans or Bigfoot or Elvis.) Trump understands something about his base: They enjoy being lied to.
As has been made plain by Stephen Miller, the mayonnaise-addicted Walter Mitty of Oswald Spenglers, the Trump movement is simultaneously a personality cult and a power-worship cult, imagining, as Miller puts it, a universe “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” This is, of course, in direct contravention to the American creed, which holds that a certain universal endowment by the Creator necessitates limits on even the power of a king—to say nothing of limiting the arrogations of a temporary officer elected to a four-year term as chief administrator of one branch of one level of government in a federal republic.
There is, manifestly, a rhetorical shift under way in Trump’s circle of sycophants: For years, they all talked like they’d just watched Glengarry Glen Ross for the 57th time (the movie, of course—theater is for girly men), but now they talk like sophomores on their third day of Philosophy 101, having read the SparkNotes version of Beyond Good and Evil. Of course, they’ll retreat into legalism as soon as you punch one of them in the nose, but that is, again, typical cowardly behavior. Stephen Miller is not one of those “magnificent blond beasts of prey” that tickled Nietszche’s fancy—he’s a dork from Santa Monica in the employ of a jumped-up game-show host who spent half his life in bankruptcy court. These guys are big believers in rules and norms and that kind of thing—when they provide a convenient skirt to hide behind.
Knights of chivalry they are not—but gunning down unarmed women or blowing defenseless boats out of the water is right up their alley.
Economics for English Majors
When the Trump administration decided that Washington was going to “run” Venezuela “infinitely” (I suspect and hope the secretary of energy meant indefinitely), its addled excuse for a brain trust apparently believed that U.S.-based oil majors were ready to dive in head first and start doing deals. There is one big problem with trying to lure U.S. oil companies with a lot of cheap Venezuelan oil: They don’t really want a lot of cheap Venezuelan oil. U.S. oil production hit a record high in 2025, while oil prices are relatively low and have been trending lower. Of course, it is the case that different producers are in different positions and have different outlooks, but it is not as though the ladies and gentlemen of the U.S. oil industry have been running around Washington complaining that oil prices are too high or that there is too little of the stuff being produced. Quite the opposite has been the case, in fact: Big Oil spent the Christmas season complaining about overproduction. I myself am on the buying end of the petroleum business rather than the selling end—my Toyota has three hungry cylinders demanding to be fed!—and so, from that point of view, more production and lower prices are, as the economists put it, absolutely okey-dokey. For the guys putting holes in the ground, it’s a different story.
In a world of high-frequency traders and crypto insta-gazillionaires and such, the oil business—meaning the business of actually drilling wells and producing crude—moves at a glacial pace, because it is based on acquiring and holding land. It is an expensive and risky business to get into, which is one of the reasons the upsides for successful investments are so lucrative. Donald Trump apparently means to leave the socialists in power in Venezuela, which means leaving in place the corrupt cronyism that has undone the Venezuelan economy and merely amending that corruption and cronyism in such a way as to benefit friends of Donald Trump.
Ask yourself: How many billions of dollars of your own money would you put at risk in a country with no real property rights or rule of law based on the business acumen of a serially bankrupt retired game show host who (probably!) is going to be departing the scene no later than January 2029? How many billions of your own money would you tie up in that country for 10 or 20 years? In what circumstance do you imagine that would be the most attractive investment opportunity for the kind of large and sophisticated energy firms that could actually bring Venezuela back online in a big way?
I know these guys like to roll the dice, but oil investors understand, probably better than almost any other transnational business interest, how easily and quickly political winds can shift. I do not like to make a lot of predictions, but it seems reasonable to me that it is going to be slow going—very slow going—for American oil companies in Venezuela.
Words About Words
To discomfit someone is to defeat them, to thwart their plans or, by extension, to reduce them to a state of confused embarrassment. It is a cousin of nonplussed, which describes someone surprised and confused to such an extent that they are unable to react or unsure how to proceed. For reasons that probably have to do with that non– in the first part of the word, nonplussed has come to be used in the opposite of its correct sense, to mean undisturbed or unimpressed. Resist the barbarism!
I was very pleased to be included in Frank Bruni’s “Best Sentences of 2025” in the New York Times. The times being what they are, it is good to be able to hand down a sentence from which there is no possible presidential pardon.
“The election of Maduro was a disgrace,” says President Donald Trump, “just like my election was a disgrace.” It is rare that I find myself in agreement with the president. But perhaps he didn’t mean to say it exactly the way he did.
Elsewhere
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here.
You can buy my other books here.
You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here.
In Closing
The return of “might makes right” thinking as a predominating current in American policy is based on an error: The ascendency of the United States in the immediate postwar era was much more a matter of “right makes might” than the opposite. The United States chose the right policies—widening and deepening its practice of liberal democracy, free enterprise and free trade, and investment in the needful instruments of military and economic power—because the American people were working from the right set of values, which you can find spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and other founding-era documents.
The United States left the Soviet Union, its main competitor, on the “ash heap of history” not because the United States was a domineering, self-serving rogue out on some geopolitical version of a Nietzschean vision quest but because the United States chose the things that led to prosperity and led the building of the international institutions that comported with those prosperity-fortifying values. In the post-Cold War era, the United States radically outperformed the advanced economies of Europe not because we were running some kind of mafia protection racket on the Swedes and the Portuguese but because the United States was the place where all the world’s most creative capital and people wanted to be. Never mind the moral rot at the heart of today’s right-wing populist radicalism—appreciate, if you can, its absolute ignorance: U.S. GDP per capita is half again as much as that of Germany, the economic leader of those European countries that supposedly have been getting over on the United States for 50 years. More broadly, U.S. GDP per capita is twice the average of the European Union. It is also twice (in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation) what it was in the 1980s. That is a funny kind of decline that sure looks a lot like the opposite of decline.
The notion that the United States would be more prosperous if its leaders acted a little bit more like those of Russia or China or Turkey or some other second-rate country is pure nonsense. But it is the regnant article of faith in Washington today.
