Greg Bovino isn’t gone.
Don’t be distracted by Trump’s lies and three-card monte games with immigration. He's hiding something bigger.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Jan 27, 2026
Greg Bovino isn’t gone. They moved him back to El Centro, California. Kristi Noem isn’t gone, and she hasn’t atoned for the vicious, ugly lies she told about Renee Good and Alex Pretti. She’s still canoodling with Corey Lewandowski behind her big desk at Homeland Security in Washington D.C. while an assistant steams her cowboy hat so she’ll look good at her next press conference.
Most importantly, Donald Trump hasn’t done anything more than call the Wall Street Journal and make a few noises that people seem to be hoping will show that he “gets it” about the excesses of his ICE and Border Patrol military cosplay thugs.
He doesn’t get it, not even close. The ICE patrols are still terrorizing the streets in Minneapolis and now Portland and Lewiston, Maine. They’re still “going door to door” looking to deport hard working people who own or have rented houses and apartments, gotten jobs, started businesses, attend local churches, and send their children to public schools. Trump hasn’t backed down. All that he has done is to put a temporary halt to doubling down on his authoritarian push against immigrants. He said they would be “reassigning” some federal agents now operating in Minneapolis. Really? When? How many? What city will they terrorize next?
Why is Trump pretending to change his tune? It’s at least in part because of his tanking poll numbers, which just dipped for the first time below 40 percent on the question of immigration. Only thirty-nine percent of Americans now approve of how he is handling immigration, with 53 percent disapproving.
Trump cares about polls. A lot. It comes from his obsession with ratings when his incredibly stilted and stupid TV show was on the air. What Trump really cares about is keeping some sort of action going full tilt in the foreground, so that his problem with Jeffrey Epstein stays in the background. Shoot some more “drug boats” out of the water. Kidnap another South American dictator. Steam a couple of battleships and a carrier along the shore of Iran. Rattle more sabers at Europe. Impose a few more tariffs. He doesn’t care what the action is, he just wants it churning and distracting everyone from what he’s really afraid of.
It was reported a few days ago that work in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has ground to a halt while everyone who can keep their eyes open are assigned to redacting the millions of new Epstein files that emerged from somewhere. It’s notable that we haven’t even been told where they came from. It’s also notable that the idea that anything with the name “Epstein” attached to it needs to be redacted before it can be seen by the public.
What does this mean? It means at the very least that all those assistant U.S. attorneys and other workers are Xing out the name of Donald Trump and all his friends from the files. They’re supposed to be “protecting Epstein’s victims,” but what they’re really doing is protecting Epstein’s co-conspirators, all the men who benefitted one way or another from their association with Epstein. He either helped them hide money in the Caribbean to dodge taxes, or he gave them free flights on his jet, which they all jokingly called “The Lolita Express,” or he encouraged them to get “massages” that were available in every one of his homes in New York City, New Mexico, Palm Beach, and on Epstein’s private island.
Remember the number of Epstein’s victims? Let’s put it the way it should be reported: Over one thousand underage girls were sexually abused or raped by Epstein, Ghislane Maxwell, and persons associated with those two. Think of it this way: we don’t even know the number of men who were involved in raping and abusing those girls over the decades that Epstein and his co-conspirators engaged in sex trafficking.
So yes, let’s celebrate, if that is the correct word, the snatches of positive news that have recently been reported. It’s good that Bovino is gone. It’s good that Noem seems to have fallen from Trump’s embrace because she is responsible for having turned loose murderous thugs on the people of an American city. It’s good that Trump appears to have realized that his roundup of anyone whose skin is not white has backfired on him with the public.
But it’s not a victory. Not by a long, long shot. The odious Stephen Miller has not been touched by the scandals surrounding the murders of Good and Pretti. The tactics being employed by ICE and Border Patrol are Miller’s. He is the one who has been screaming every day on Zoom calls to increase the number of arrests, to go after any and all immigrants, not just those with criminal records, and to cover the entire campaign with wholesale lies when things go wrong.
Stephen Miller has been cowering in his West Wing office in the White House and the Fort McNair military quarters he has been permitted to occupy since a woman in Northern Virginia walked past his house and looked at his wife in a manner they alleged was so menacing that she has been investigated by the FBI for stalking. And yet it is Miller who’s really running things on the ground in Minneapolis.
It was reported over the weekend that Miller and White House Chief of Staff Susi Wiles are “unhappy” with Kristi Noem and her paramour Lewandowski. Now, isn’t that cute? The White House is leaking tidbits of gossip about little battles within the administration to obscure the fact that Stephen Miller is supervising the beating and gassing and pepper-spraying and, yes, murdering of civilians in an American city.
The lesson for the day: Don’t try to follow how the White House three-card monte cards are moving, watch what’s going on behind the con men running the game. They’re stealing taxpayers blind to pay for the deportation flights and the concentration camps they’re building and the hotel bills they’re paying for the thousands of thugs who wake up every morning in their Holiday Inn Express rooms and put on their masks and costumes and get in their rented SUV’s and hit the streets and start terrorizing the people who live in Minneapolis and Portland and Lewiston, Maine.
And all the while, they’re concealing what Trump is really panicked about: his name appearing on pages of the Epstein files, or even worse, his smiling face appearing in a photo showing girls who are obviously too young to be hanging around with adult men such as Trump and Epstein and the rest of his pals.
We can’t allow smoke and mirrors and tear gas to divert our attention from either the crimes on the ground in American cities or the crimes in the pages of the Epstein files that we haven’t yet seen. These people are hideous criminals in practically everything they do, most especially Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.
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