Anti-American Breitbart Covers for john 'mcconnell' thune II jr's Defunding of ICE
At approximately 2am this morning, Senate Majority Leader john thune walked onto the Senate floor and passed by unanimous consent a bill funding every component of the Department of Homeland Security except Immigration and Customs Enforcement. No debate. No recorded vote. No fingerprints. Just thune, a quiet floor, and a country that had been watching airport security lines for six weeks and wanted it to stop.
The story Breitbart ran: TSA agents are getting paid. Trump signed an executive order. The shutdown is ending. Good news.
The story Breitbart did not run: thune defunded ICE.
the smokescreen
The 42-day shutdown was not Democrats sacrificing to protect ICE defunding. It was Democrats manufacturing public pain to give de-minimis-thune the cover he needed to do what he was always going to do. TSA workers not getting paid, airports backing up, the optics of visible government failure landing on Trump's second term: that was the mechanism, not the stakes. The Democrats were not holding out. They were providing a service.
When Trump issued the executive order to restore TSA pay, the left called it a cave. It was nothing of the sort. It was Trump removing the visible pain from a wound that thune and the Democrats had opened together for exactly that purpose. The smokescreen had already done its work. The unanimous consent passed. ICE funding was stripped. And the plausible alibi, "we had to end the pain for Americans," was already written and ready to go.
thune did not cash in leverage. There was never any leverage to cash in. The shutdown was the Democrats' economic terrorism, deployed not to win a fight, but to create the conditions under which thune could lose one gracefully, on schedule, with a humanitarian excuse already printed and distributed. Democrats got their outcome. thune got his outcome. One hundred million Americans woke up this morning less safe and with no idea it happened.
de-minimis-thune, china, and what was in those packages
In 2016, thune voted to raise the de minimis import threshold to $800. This is the loophole that allowed Shein, Temu, and an effectively unlimited volume of Chinese direct-to-consumer shipments to enter the United States duty-free, uninspected, and untracked. Every tariff wall Trump has built has this hole in it. thune helped cut it.
The economic damage is documented and severe: American manufacturers undercut, domestic textile and electronics industries hollowed out, Chinese state-subsidized goods flooding the market below any price a law-abiding American competitor can match. That much is known.
What is not known is everything else that moved through that channel. A billion packages a year, each one below the threshold that would trigger inspection. Fentanyl precursors distributed across ten thousand small shipments, each individually beneath notice. Radioactive material, spread thin across a hundred thousand packages, no single one triggering a scan. Aerosol components. Chemical precursors. Biological material. Who knows. That is precisely the point. The threshold was engineered to produce exactly that answer: who knows. tianjin-thune didn't just hand China a trade subsidy. He may have handed them an uninspected logistics corridor into the American interior, and the volume that moved through it, over a decade, at that scale, is a question that has never been seriously asked in public.
appointed to prevent the fix
The filibuster is the lock on the door. Remove it and the SAVE Act passes. Voter ID passes. Election integrity legislation passes. Everything the left has blocked for a decade on the 60-vote threshold becomes possible. thune knows this with perfect clarity. "That's not going to happen," he said, when asked about changing the threshold. Not reluctantly. Not with apology. With the flat, bored confidence of a man who has been placed in that chair for one specific purpose and has no anxiety about performing it.
You do not become the most anti-MAGA Senate Majority Leader of a MAGA supermajority by accident. You get there because the people who needed that door locked made sure you got the job. thune's disagreements with Trump are not ideological friction. They are job performance. He disagreed with nationalizing elections. He rejected the 2020 challenge without hesitation. He blocked the filibuster reform. He defunded ICE by unanimous consent at 2am. Each one of these is not a lapse. It is a deliverable.
Fixing elections was the play. It was the right play when it was first laid out in September 2015, it was the right play every day until January 20, 2017, and it remains the only play that actually closes the loop. thune's entire reason for existing in that seat is to make sure the people who know this can never act on it.
breitbart hid it from the base
Conservative media downplaying uncomfortable stories is not news. You run it small, frame it as complicated, let it die on page six. That is normal and expected and everyone in the game understands how it works.
What Breitbart did last night was different in kind, not just degree. They published an AP wire story about TSA pay on the night their Senate majority leader defunded ICE by unanimous consent. Their base, people who have been chanting "fund ICE" as a first principle since 2018, woke up to a syndicated feel-good story about airport workers getting their checks. That is not spin. That is not optics management. That is the base being actively hidden from the news by the outlet they trust most to show it to them.
Andrew Breitbart's entire project, the reason he built the thing, was that the conservative base was being lied to and managed and hidden from news by institutions that claimed to represent them. He named the specific mechanism. He named the specific damage. He built a site to stop it. The site that carries his name ran an AP wire story about TSA pay while thune defunded ICE at 2am. This is not an oversight. A story this significant, on a night this consequential, does not get filed as syndicated wire by accident. Someone decided. Someone looked at what thune had done and decided the base should not know.
That is not Breitbart being sloppy. That is Breitbart doing to its readers exactly what Andrew Breitbart spent his life fighting against someone doing to them.
As I said in 2016, before the 'SAVE' act existed: the SAVE act will never pass.
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