Well, well. Tomi Lahren, the right-wing pundit who built a career on “final thoughts” segments designed to own the libs, has looked around at the party she championed and reached a conclusion the rest of us arrived at years ago: the GOP is an “utter embarrassment.”
Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsOn Monday, Lahren posted on X that Republicans have “failed us so dismally” that working families are now turning to socialism just to survive. On Tuesday, she went further, asking her MAGA followers point-blank: “Why should we vote for Republicans in November?” Mass deportations aren’t happening, she fumed. Republicans haven’t done “jack shit outside of a tax cut extension.” Even Susan Collins, the perpetual moderate shield the GOP hides behind, got name-checked. “Vote Republican, get Democrat policy anyway,” Lahren wrote.
She’s not wrong about the failure. She is catastrophically wrong about what the failure is.
Angus King (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsLahren’s rage is directed at the GOP for not delivering enough cruelty. She wants mass deportations. She wants the “Save America” agenda. She’s furious that DHS would rather “appease CNN and MSNBC” than crack down harder. Her grievance is that the machine isn’t grinding fast enough.
Here is what the machine is actually doing. On July 7, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old man who was not the person they were trying to apprehend. On Monday, in Maine, ICE agents shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, also not their intended target. In St. Augustine, Florida, a 28-year-old man was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer after he ran from federal agents. Three dead. None were the people ICE came for.
AnthonyTheGuy (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsICE reportedly told its agents to pause vehicle stops after these killings. A bare-minimum acknowledgment that something had gone