Morning Joe Crew Rips ICE ‘Gestapo Raids’ As A ‘Distraction’ From Trump Enriching ‘Billionaire Cronies’

Morning Joe analyst Anand Giridharadas ripped President Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown as a “shock and awe” form of “distraction” while “ignoring what regular people need” to line the pockets of his “billionaire cronies.”

The scathing take came during the show on Tuesday as host Jonathan Lemire shared that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was live-tweeting an operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) teams on a location in New York City.

Noem, confirmed into the role on Monday, shared a video of officers arresting a “criminal” and warning that “dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.”

Reacting to the news, Giridharadas began by commending Trump for having seen that the electorate felt vulnerable and “under-served” by current leaders, and that gave rise to the current policy.

Here’s what I think the real tipping point is, and will be the thing that I would say Donald Trump deserves most praise for, is that he intuited in 2016 and then again in 2024, that there was an emotion out there among many, many people, a feeling undefended, a feeling unseen and unheard by the system, a feeling defenseless against chaos and entropy, and that political emotion was underserved, was under-recognized by those of us in the media, was underserved by the Democratic Party, was underserved by his own different flavor of Republicans, and he was able to see that people wanted to be advocated for.

Now, I have every quibble with every actual thing he wanted to do to advocate for them. But he he won for a reason. He won because he was able to see that when you start having gestapo raids in America and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about…

Continuing, the guest explained that instead of advocating for “regular people,” the Trump administration was engaged in a “bread and circuses” ploy.

We are moving very, very far from the president worrying about what regular people need, right? He is distracting people with this flurry of activity. But none of this, none of these images you’re seeing are going to make your life better.

None of these things, contrary to popular belief, have anything to do with the still high price of eggs. None of these things will make it easier to start a business. None of these things will make it easier for people to get the education they need, change their lives, leave their kids better off.

This is all a distraction, shock and awe, as you said earlier, so that Donald Trump can do one thing and you saw it at the inauguration telegraph to you and enrich his billionaire cronies, enrich his oligarch friends. That is what he is actually doing when he’s not busy releasing his crypto coins. And all of this is sort of bread and circuses for people to stare at while he’s robbing you from the back.

Watch above via MSNBC.