What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again said his political opponents should be arrested, for no real reason.

This morning, Trump declared on his private social media site that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be "in jail" for "failing to protect" federal ICE agents.

ICE agents in Chicago are not in danger, although a few of its spokespeople have falsely claimed that the Chicago Police Department has refused to answer its calls for protection. In reality, they are responding to those calls. ICE agents claimed on Saturday that a woman following a convoy of their vehicles "rammed" one of them, but body camera footage introduced in an arraignment hearing contradicts that claim. It does show an ICE agent approaching her stopped vehicle and yelling "Do something, bitch," before shooting her five times. 

Chicago residents, however, have been repeatedly put in danger by ICE and CBP "raids," These have increasingly taken the form of simply arresting anyone based on "how they look" in terms of race and skin color, as a Border Patrol official detailed to the city openly admitted to reporters last week. A midnight raid on an apartment building in a mostly Black neighborhood on September 30th saw over 130 people—most of them American citizens—stunned by flashbang grenades and dragged out into the street. Witnesses reported small children being handcuffed, victims being interrogated without legal counsel, and apartments left destroyed.

Trump's demand that Pritzker and Johnson be jailed comes on the same day as reporting confirms that when Trump posted a demand to his social media site that "Pam" find a way to charge former FBI Director James Comey with some kind of crime, he had actually intended to send her a direct message. 

In other words, Trump forgot how to use his own boutique microblogging site and mistakenly broadcast what was supposed to be a confidential (if extremely unlawful) message to his Attorney General. "Truth Social" is a rebranded copy of an open-source social media platform, and its messaging function is not secure against sophisticated attackers. This means that Trump has almost certainly been sending orders to Cabinet officials in full view of foreign intelligence agencies.

Why does this matter?

• Arresting political opponents for any crime or no crime at all is what dictators do.  

• There's no doubt whatsoever that federal agencies are trying to stir up racial violence to give Trump an excuse to directly attack American cities.

• The Constitution is too strong, and Donald Trump is too weak, for this to work.