Commentary: Under Trump, bootlickers are out in force. Minneapolis strengthens us

President Trump has an army of bootlickers that seems to be stretching into the sunset. Many of them go on social media and most of their forces are from bot accounts on X.

Then there’s Bill Essayli. When it comes to saying anything to impress the president with democratic dreams, the former Congressman is a budding All-Star.

Att. Gen. Pam Bondi appointed him as the top prosecutor for the Central District of California in April with the express authority to do the will of Donald J. Trump. His record so far has been incredibly disappointing and strange.

The exodus of prosecutors who didn’t care about his staff’s screaming sessions and violent press conferences. A misdemeanor charge against a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy for excessive force was reduced to a misdemeanor and he tried unsuccessfully to have it dismissed. Looking for cases against people who had the courage to oppose Trump’s deportation that his office eventually dropped, dropped or lost in court due to lack of evidence despite Essayli publicly boasting that they were slam-dunk cases.

This boy can no longer even call himself an American attorney after a judge ruled in October that he was “not legally employed” in this position as he was never officially appointed in the first place. So you’d think Essayli would hear the music and go back to being an irrelevant California legislator, but no! If there’s one thing Trumpworld has shown, it’s that once you kneel down and give the Dear Leader a lick and a shine, you better keep going until your tongue is as dry as Death Valley.

Which leads us to this weekend. And Essayli’s bootlicking-gone-wrong.

On Saturday morning, Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, after a fight with him. He had once tried to help a woman who had been shot down by a government transport official; the policeman assaulted him and he soon collapsed – and shortly after, he was dead. The Department of Homeland Security’s social media website justified the incident by saying that Pretti appeared to be intending to “seek[ing] to cause great harm and to kill many people” because he was carrying a legally registered gun.” He didn’t reveal it to us.” In fact, several videos clearly show Pretti holding what looks like a phone as the agents taunt him.

Although the scene was thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, Essayli it was necessary wagging his tongue – it’s the bootlicker’s way, after all.

“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there’s a good chance they’ll be legally justified in shooting you,” he said in a social media post hours after Pretti’s death. “Don’t do it!” He also shared posts by social media activists Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo who said Pretti, who is an intensive care unit nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, was following “antifa” tactics.

Essayli was quickly slammed on social media by gun rights groups, including the NRA, which has endorsed Trump in all of his presidential races.

It criticized his speech as “dangerous and wrong” on social media, adding that “responsible public voices should expect a full investigation, not to generalize and include law-abiding citizens.”

Gun Owners of America, a more radical group than the NRA, called Essayli’s comments “outrageous,” leading to the first assistant US attorney — because they’re bootlickers. love their articles – complaining about the non-profit “adding words to misrepresent my statement” even though they quoted him directly.

If history looks back at all the cowards, sycophants, apologists, miners, abusers and other criminals that made Trump possible, the bootlickers will have a starring role. A nation that says “I voted for this” – even if this brutality and actions are more Macbeth-like than an American president.

The bootlicker is a universally reviled archetype. Their bread and butter is comforting the most comfortable by tormenting the most miserable. They tried to upstage other bootlickers with even more serious acts of flattery, determined to bring Orwell’s most damning line from “1984” to life: “The team told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their last, most important order.”

The bootlicker’s moral compass is fascinating. Where Big Boss has moved the goalposts, that is where he will kick the ball. If all goes to hell and America descends into totalitarianism, watch out for the bootlicker.

The Trump administration currently has its roster like a bootlicking version of the 1927 Yankees.

In addition to Essayli, you have Stephen Miller, who constantly called Pretti a “murderer” and a “domestic terrorist” on social media as if repeating the insults would make them true. Vice President JD Vance, who described Renee Good, the woman who was shot and killed on Jan. 7 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis after he tried to deport him, “as a deranged leftist.”

Repeating what big bootlickers say is a character trait. Call it the bootlicking trickle-down-effect.

There is a Border Patrol chief in the area, Gregory Bovino, a migra a man a federal judge accused of “perjury” during his impeachment trial over his gang’s actions in Chicago this fall. During a news conference about Pretti’s death, Bovino said the victim appeared to “want to do a lot of damage and to kill a lot of people” — the exact same language used in the Department of Homeland Security’s communications department about the killing. Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also went macaw, singling out Miller for accusing Pretti of “domestic terrorism.”

On Fox News on Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel – the organization that in the past will lead an impartial investigation into what happened to Good, Pretti and other victims. these migrations – told broadcaster Maria Bartiromo that “No one wants to be peaceful from a protest with a gun. That led a skeptical-looking Bartiromo, as liberal as the Spanish Inquisition, to ask, “And how was he using that gun to threaten the Border Patrol?”

A wide-eyed Patel could only say that he believed Noem’s version of events.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks at a press conference Saturday to address the incident in which law enforcement officers shot and killed Alex Pretti while on duty in Minneapolis.

(Al Drago/Getty Images)

These are some of the most prominent, powerful bootlickers currently stumbling in their own deception and desperation.

Space forbids me from quoting all the Republicans who last week were staunch supporters of the 2nd Amendment now saying that Pretti had no right to carry his legally registered gun at a protest even though they cheered for Kyle Rittenhouse when a teenager from Wisconsin was seen carrying an AR-15, which he ended up using to shoot two people who were trying to beat him. There is no evidence that Pretti ever carried his gun during the protest, let alone threatened federal agents with it.

Then there are the bootleggers who cheered the January 6 riots by rebelling against what they see as government oppression, who insist that many of the police officers who were injured that day were deep-state agents. Today, those bootlickers are telling the people who are pushing back against Trump’s police state to respect us.

Listen or die.

The Roman philosopher Plutarch described flattering people in his immortal essay on the matter as “plague in the houses of kings, and the destruction of their kingdoms” “eating up the honorable quarry.” So to Essayli, Patel, Noem and all the other bootlickers in Trump’s orbit, and the unknown forces beyond, I’ll leave you with a warning I saw in a meme that I’m sure Plutarch would endorse:

No matter how much you lick it, the boot will never like you.