Commentary: Under Trump, the bootlickers have come out in force. Minneapolis cements it

President Trump has a marauding army that rides into the sunset. Many of them are floating around on social media, and the vast majority are almost certainly coming from bot accounts on X.

Then there is Bill Essayli. The former House member is a marauding All-Star when it comes to saying anything to please a president with autocratic aspirations.

Solicitor General Pam Bondi appointed him attorney general for the Central District of California in April with the express authority to carry out Donald J. Trump’s will. His track record so far has been, unsurprisingly, embarrassing and strange.

An exodus of prosecutors who ignore the yelling of their staff and rude press conferences. A felony conviction that a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy turned into a misdemeanor for excessive force and later unsuccessfully tried to dismiss. Charges are being sought against people who dared to protest Trump’s deluge of deportations, his office eventually being downsized, demoted, or lost in court for lack of evidence, despite Essayli publicly praising these as hasty cases.

The man can no longer even call himself an acting U.S. attorney after a judge ruled in October that he was “not lawfully serving” in the position because he was never formally appointed in the first place. So you’d think Essayli would hear the music and go back to being a minor California legislator, but no! If Trumpworld has shown anything, it’s that when you get down on your knees to offer lick-and-shine to the Dear Leader, you better keep doing it until your tongue is as dry as Death Valley.

Which brings us to this weekend. And Essayli’s booze lick gone wrong.

On Saturday morning, Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti after a fight with the gang. He had tried to help a woman who was pushed to the ground by a federal immigration officer; An officer slapped him and he soon collapsed and died a short time later. A social media post from the Department of Homeland Security justified what happened, saying Pretti had intended to “ask for something.”[ing] to inflict maximum damage and decimate law enforcement” because he had a legally registered handgun. But he never brandished it. In fact, multiple videos showed Pretti clearly holding what appeared to be a phone as the agents charged him.

Even though the event was thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, Essayli there was flicking one’s tongue – that’s the marauder’s way, after all.

“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a good chance they will be legally justified in shooting you.” laughed on social media Hours after Pretti’s death. “Don’t do that!” He also reshared posts by right-wing social media influencers Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo, who claimed that Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, was following “antifa” tactics.

Essayli soon came under fire on social media from gun rights groups, including the NRA, which has supported Trump in every presidential race.

Describing his remarks as “dangerous and wrong” on social media, the organization added that “the responsible public should await a full investigation, not make generalizations and demonize law-abiding citizens.”

Gun Owners of America, an even more conservative group than the NRA, called Essayli’s comments “inappropriate,” which led to the appointment of the first assistant U.S. attorney — because looters Love headlines — whining about the nonprofit “adding words to mischaracterize my statement” even though they quote it directly.

When history looks back at all the cowards, sycophants, apologists, enablers, lackeys and other oppressors who made Trump possible, the looters will take center stage. The “that’s what I voted for” tribe – even if it’s atrocities and actions more like those of a Macbeth than an American president.

The bootlicker is a universally reviled archetype. Their bread and butter is comforting the most comfortable by disturbing those who suffer the most. They seek to outwit other looters with more sycophantic flattery, determined to bring to life the most damning sentence of Orwell’s “1984”: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. This was their last, most important command.”

The looter’s moral compass is malleable. Wherever the Big Boss moves the goalposts, he will kick the ball there. If all goes to hell and America turns into a dictatorship, beware the plunderer.

The Trump regime currently has a roster that resembles a bootleg version of the 1927 Yankees.

In addition to Essayli, there’s Stephen Miller, who called Pretti an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” on social media, as if repeating those insults would make them true. Vice President JD Vance described Renee Good, a woman who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on January 7 after she tried to walk away from him, as a “deranged leftist.”

It is a character trait to repeat what the great looters say. Call this the bootstrap drip effect.

There’s the Border Patrol chief in Gregory Bovino the Great. migration The man is a federal judge’s “openly lie“During testimony about his team’s actions in Chicago this fall. At a press conference about Pretti’s death, Bovino, the victim He appeared to “want to inflict maximum damage and slaughter law enforcement”; This was the same language used in the Department of Homeland Security’s original social media post about the murder. Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed Miller, doing a macaw impersonation and accusing Pretti of “domestic terrorism.”

FBI Director Kash Patel, who led an impartial investigation into what happened to Good, Pretti and other victims of terrorism in the old days, said Sunday on Fox News. migration — told host Maria Bartiromo: “No one who wants to be peaceful comes to a protest with a firearm. This led a skeptical-looking Bartiromo, as liberal as the Spanish Inquisition, to ask: “So how was he using that gun to threaten the Border Patrol?”

Wide-eyed, Patel could only tell that he trusted Noem’s version of events.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks at a news conference Saturday to address the incident in which federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti during operations in Minneapolis.

(Al Drago/Getty Images)

These are just a few of the most visible, powerful looters currently stumbling around in their own deception and desperation.

Even though every 2nd Amendment Republican cheered on Kyle Rittenhouse last week when the Wisconsin teenager openly carried an AR-15, the void now forbids me from quoting all the Republicans who say Pretti has no right to carry his legally registered firearm to a protest; he eventually used it to fatally shoot two men who tried to attack him. There is no evidence that Pretti used a firearm during the protest, let alone threatened federal agents with it.

Then there are the looters who applauded the rioters who rose up against what they saw as government tyranny on January 6 and insisted that the dozens of law enforcement officers injured that day were merely agents of the deep state. Today, these looters are telling people who resist Trump’s police state to respect him.

Obey or die.

Roman philosopher Plutarch described those who flatter in his immortal writing we characterize the subject as “the plague in the chambers of kings and the destruction of their kingdoms” who “plundered a noble prey”. To Essayli, Patel, Noem, and all the other marauders in Trump’s orbit and the relatively anonymous legions beyond, I leave you with the warning I saw in a meme that I’m sure Plutarch would approve:

No matter how much you lick, the boot will never love you.