Hiding in the attic in Donald Trump's America | Will Bunch Newsletter

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. On the seventh night of Donald Trump’s long-dreaded second presidency, thousands of joyous Philadelphians poured into the streets. Not for him , of course, but because our beloved Birds had trounced the Washington Commanders in the NFC Championship Game and are headed for New Orleans and another Super Bowl. These Eagles keep showing us what life can be at its very best. Let’s get to work on the rest of it.

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Monday was World Holocaust Day, when global leaders, the dwindling numbers of Jews who survived Nazi concentration camps in World War II, and everyday people honor the memory of 6 million who were killed, and those who suffered, with solemn vows to fight to prevent such an unspeakably awful thing from ever happening again.

The day this year marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of the Nazi’s Auschwitz death camp in Poland, scene of more than 1.1 million deaths, many in its notorious gas chambers. Tova Friedman, an 86-year-old author who was sent to Auschwitz when she was 5, told the dignitaries about a time she was forced to hide among the dead and thought to herself: “Am I the only Jewish child left in the world?”

In New York, the Center for Jewish History opened up a three-month special exhibit that completely recreates the cramped, secret attic annex where the Amsterdam teen Anne Frank hid with her family and other Jews for two years and wrote her famous diary, before dying of typhus in a concentration camp at age 15. It recaptures the place where, 82 years ago this month, Frank wrote: ”Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes ... Families are torn apart: men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.”

In Chicago, terrible things are happening right now, as federal agents and police roam working-class blocks to carry out the initial raids of the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants that new President Donald Trump promised his voters in the 2024 campaign. Once again, people targeted by their country as undesirables are hiding in attics or cowering in basements, hoping to avoid a knock on the door.

In the largely Latino Hermosa neighborhood on the city’s northwest side, a frightened young woman who only gave her name as Melissa told a Chicago Tribune reporter that her parents ran and hid in their attic when agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, were spotted near their home.

“They took our neighbor’s dad,” Melissa told the journalist. “My parents were crying. We are terrified.” This despite the fact that her parents have no criminal record — the supposed goal of the raids that marked the first week of the Trump regime — and have been living and working in the United States for two decades.

Her neighbor was one of 1,179 immigrants taken into custody on Sunday, as swarming teams of agents not just from ICE but other federal agencies swooped into homes — or, in one Atlanta suburb, outside a church — from Miami to Los Angeles and took the apprehended away in handcuffs, toward the eventual goal of shipping them back across the border, often to Central or South America. Although Trump regime officials — reflecting popular opinion — have stressed that federal agents are targeting known felons, NBC News reported Monday that nearly half of those swept up the day before did not have a criminal record.

So it’s no wonder that the thought of a government knock on the door would terrify law-abiding people like Melissa’s parents, who quietly work in essential jobs and pay taxes and have formed the backbone of working-class neighborhoods like Hermosa in cities like Chicago or Denver or Philadelphia. The numbers of arrests might matter to Trump and his minions but what the new POTUS is really seeking to create with the launch of mass deportation is a vibe — an aura of panic and anxiety in Latino neighborhoods.

The president — whose White House journey took off in the 2000s when NBC producers on a so-called “reality show” helped Trump create a very unreal image of business success — is now applying those lessons toward inventing a made-for-TV war on brown-skinned migrants, to thrill and entertain his MAGA base.

CNN reported Monday that officers in at least two agencies involved in the immigration raids were told in memos to wear clothing with large insignias or acronyms so that any action caught on video or in pictures lets the public know they are law enforcement.

Over the weekend, ICE and other agencies then released numerous pictures of their agents scouring neighborhoods or escorting migrants in handcuffs. Access was denied to media who could report independently on the raids yet given freely to an “embedded” pro-Trump mouthpiece, the TV psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw.

Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent wildly and irresponsibly on “optics” to make the situation at the southern border — which has been calm, with unauthorized border crossings at historical lows since last summer — look like a war, with Trump as its generalissimo.

The vaunted 82nd Airborne Division is the vanguard of 1,600 troops dispatched to the U.S. border with Mexico by the commander-in-chief, with his friend, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, sending hundreds more, and with additional reinforcements in the works. Deportation flights to Central America — which have been taking place for years, regardless of which party controls the White House, on civilian planes — now enlisted military aircraft and were also hailed in propaganda photos, even as that switch triggered a day-long diplomatic crisis with Colombia.

The fear is the point, and so, apparently, is the cruelty. The government of Brazil is demanding that U.S. officials explain what it calls “degrading treatment” of 88 of its citizens on a troubled deportation flight on which passengers spent hours in handcuffs and said they were denied water and roughed up when they complained. I fear such horror stories will become routine if the Trump regime truly amps up towards its stated goal: The forced migration of millions.

“Warning lights are definitely flashing if, as is being reported, people without criminal records who’ve lived here for decades have to hide in their attic,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, told me Monday night. “We shouldn’t wait for even worse moments from disgraceful history to repeat before we stand against terrorizing peaceful U.S. residents.” She also said reports that the White House is sending arrest quotas to the agencies carrying out the raids “echo very grim parts of the past.”

Just eight days into Trump’s second term, the terror is real, not just for the hundreds who’ve been handcuffed but for the many more feeling the same impulses as Anne Frank and her family once did, to disappear from view. “Almost nobody is sending their kids [to school] in case they’re taken,” a fearful Venezuelan mother named Amanda, in a New York City shelter, told a reporter for The City. In California’s Kern County, the annual citrus harvest has ground to a halt because migrant farmworkers have already stopped showing up.

The irony of all of this — good people cowering in their attics, praying to avoid getting cuffed and shipped thousands of miles away by camouflage-wearing soldiers — happening on Holocaust Remembrance Day is almost unbearable. Some will surely point out that Trump’s immigration arrests are currently nowhere near the lethal horrors unleashed across Europe in the 1940s. That’s true, but why are we even taking the first immoral steps on that slippery path?

“Auschwitz was at the end of a long process,” the Auschwitz Memorial posted on its Bluesky account yesterday. “It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

“Auschwitz took time.”

Question: Who is currently the leader of the Democratic party? — Jim Mayer (@jmayday.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Jim, I’m glad you asked this, which was initially going to be the focus of today’s newsletter before other current events got in the way. In short, it is absolutely NOT Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose irrelevant social media posts have made him a laughingstock, nor House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has thrown up his hands to say this is God’s will. While these modern-day Neville Chamberlains are beclowning themselves, a few Dems like Reps Jamie Raskin and Jasmine Crockett have been resolute voices for democracy, but one stands out. That would be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In her plainspoken denunciations of outrage over American autocracy, AOC leads the real opposition. I hope that everyone who wants a better America will rally behind her.

Last week’s question about which of Trump’s “dictator on Day One” actions will prove most consequential drew a lot of responses but the vast majority cited two of them: The mass pardon of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and the withdrawal from the Paris climate accords. “He pardoned people who attacked and injured policemen doing their jobs,” wrote Kristina Austlid. Added Joe Yevich: “His denial of climate change, as a rationale for enhanced fossil fuel production and usage, must be regarded as the more nefarious action — one that will have lasting consequences.”

📮 This week’s question: Enough politics! Who is going to win the Super Bowl (and why)? Please email me your answer and put the specific phrase “Super Bowl winner” in the subject line.

The 24/7 swirl of chaos that is a Donald Trump presidency — the frozen grants, the fired staffers — can obscure what seem to be the two defining stories coming out of the White House. One — the focus of this newsletter’s main item — is the shock and awe of deportation raids intended to thrill the MAGA masses. For the 1 Percent — the so-called “broligarchs” of Silicon Valley high-tech who have invested heavily in a Trump presidency — who actually will benefit from the new regime, the big narrative is a race to both make massive profits and also gain even more social control through the new and morally dubious worlds of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, or AI.

The idea that our daily lives as we stumble toward the mid-21st century are going to be organized around AI’s computer-chip driven algorithms is what truly animates the Trump-supplicating billionaires like Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who all have skin in this massive power-and-wealth grab. One of POTUS 47’s first official actions was to throw the weight of the federal government behind an (allegedly) $500 billion AI joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and Japan’s Softbank that would include massive energy-sucking data centers in Texas. What could go wrong?

On Monday, Wall Street threw a bucket of ice-cold water on this billionaire bonfire of the vanities. The source of the coolant was China, and the news that a new venture from there, called DeepSeek, is hitting the market with an AI app that is cheaper and perhaps faster than the American monopoly that’s been the dream of the Trump-besotted broligarchy. Fortunately, a moment of fear that DeepSeek would crash the wider market was overblown, and the financial carnage was largely limited to a handful of overpriced tech stocks, at least for now.

Even though it’s tempting to feel schadenfreude over the world’s worst people taking a big hit to their wallet, we shouldn’t celebrate — and certainly not over the arrival of Chinese tech whose IQ drops to 50 when you ask it what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. What we should do is see DeepSeek as a wake-up call for all of us, over what the heck we are even doing here with this AI space race.

I don’t doubt there are areas like medical research where the new tech will prove useful, even lifesaving. But in the bigger picture, AI also threatens our jobs, our planet with its unquenchable thirst for energy, and ultimately our brains which are fast becoming vestigial organs. Maybe we can start seeing AI as the nuclear bomb of the 21st century — science that can amaze but which also must be contained.

It was exactly five years ago today that Donald Trump, in what proved to be the final year of his first term, staked his claim to the Wildwood boardwalk in a political rally that overtook the iconic working-class Jersey Shore refuge. I was there to write one of my favorite all-time columns (in style at least...not in what it portended for America). I described how I’d watched the crude and politically incorrect T-shirts I’d first seen there in 1989 evolve into the political movement of our time, proudly wearing a “message that fat, dumb, and stupid actually is a way to go through life ... you gotta problem wit’ that?” Read the rest: “Trump in Wildwood: America’s crude T-shirt president hits the boardwalk, finally.”

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