Background Briefing: January 26, 2026
The Trickle Down Effect of Trump’s Lawlessness and How Ice is Undermining Professional Policing
We begin with the trickle down effect from the lawless presidency of Donald Trump who has valorized insurrectionists and pardoned scammers and fraudsters to the extent that his private army of ICE thugs have been given immunity to break the law. Joining us to discuss how ICE and CBP are undermining professional policing in this country and undoing decades of engagement of police in better serving minority communities is Tom Nolan who was a city of Boston police officer for 27 years, his last 10 years as a uniformed lieutenant and shift commander in the patrol division. He has been an Associate Professor in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Boston University, the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, Merrimack College, and Emmanuel College. He was a Senior Policy Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in Washington DC and is the author of Perilous Policing: Criminal Justice in Marginalized Communities.
Similarities Between Hitler’s Brown Shirts and Trump’s ICE
Then we explore similarities between Hitler’s Brown Shirts and Trump’s ICE and speak with Benjamin Carter Hett, a professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Burning the Reichstag, Crossing Hitler, Death in the Tiergarten, and The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic How Hitler Took the World Into War. His latest book is The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War and he has an article at Foreign Affairs, “The Power of Grievance: What History Reveals About Authoritarianism’s Animating Force.”