Does Obama Really Think We Can Bargain with Trump’s Terrorist Regime?

Barack Obama’s short Medium statement, “A Wake-Up Call for Every American,” is morally lucid about the symptom—federal agents “acting with impunity,” public narratives “directly contradicted by video evidence,” and an administration that appears “eager to escalate.”

He is also correct that peaceful protest and civic pressure are the only legitimate source of corrective force when state power is misused.

But Obama’s proposed remedy—“reconsider their approach” and “work constructively with Governor Walz and Mayor Frey”—rests on a category error. It treats what is unfolding in Minnesota as a policy dispute inside normal democratic governance: a breakdown in discipline, a failure of coordination, a solvable management problem.

That is the frame you use when you believe the actors across the table still share the same constitutional game, and you are negotiating over tactics.

But we are dealing with a terroristic regime—meaning a governing apparatus that uses intimidation, coercive spectacle, and strategic lawlessness as the method. As such, “work constructively” is not a plan. It is a plea for the regime to stop being what it is.

The murderous events Obama is reacting to are not ambiguous. The question is not whether the situation is alarming. The question is what kind of actor produces it, and what kinds of moves work against such an actor.

That means it is time to apply the Raymond Method...

Pillar One: Regime Security. A regime-security actor does not optimize for public safety, procedural legitimacy, or intergovernmental comity. It optimizes for dominance, deterrence of dissent, and the preservation of its coercive latitude.

In that model, masked agents, intimidation-forward tactics, and an information posture that outruns investigation are not “mistakes.” They are features that increase fear, confusion, and compliance. Obama asks the administration to “impose… discipline and accountability.”  But if accountability reduces the regime’s freedom of action, the regime will treat accountability as an enemy objective.

Pillar Two: Asymmetric Warfare. In asymmetric conflict, the informational battlefield is not ancillary; it can be decisive. The state’s first move is to seize narrative terrain at speed—assign intent, define the victim, define the crowd, define the legitimacy of force—before evidence consolidates and before institutions coordinate.

ABC reports Noem asserting Pretti’s lethal intent while verified videos fail to support that construction.  Reuters reported Noem characterizing Good’s alleged driving as “domestic terrorism,” paired with local officials disputing the self-defense narrative based on video.

This is not merely spin. It is preemptive delegitimation of witnesses, mayors, governors, and protestors—the entire civilian environment—so that any subsequent resistance can be labeled criminal, extremist, or treasonous. In that environment, “constructive cooperation” is a trap: it forces the opposition to act as if the regime is operating in good faith while the regime uses the optics of “coordination” as cover to continue coercion with reduced friction.

Pillar Three: Byzantine Traitor-General. In a traitor-general paradigm, you do not assume shared objectives. You assume the counterparty may be using the forms of governance against you: meetings as delay, commissions as burial grounds, “reviews” as amnesty pipelines, and tactical de-escalation as a reset for the next escalation.

The corollary is minimax: when an enemy makes a move, start from “what harm does this enable?”

Here is what that looks like in real time. On January 27, Reuters reported that the White House, under mounting pressure after two deaths, moved to put Tom Homan in charge in Minneapolis “to ‘recalibrate tactics’ and improve cooperation,” with the stated goal to “scale back, eventually pull out,” and to shift away from broad public sweeps toward more targeted operations.  

Note the logic: not moral reversal, but political damage control—advisers fearing the killing could “derail” the broader agenda. The regime does not bargain because it is persuaded by appeals to values. It bargains when compelled by cost.

That is the decisive critique of Obama’s posture. He talks as if the regime’s incentives can be reattached to legitimacy by exhortation—“this has to stop,” “reconsider their approach.”

But even the administration’s partial tactical reset, as described by Reuters, is framed as preserving the immigration agenda, not restoring constitutional restraint. In a terroristic regime model, the only stable lever is coercive constraint: legal, financial, institutional, and mass civic noncooperation that raises the cost of repression.

The implications are concrete and immediate.

First, “accountability” must be understood as a contested battlefield, not a default outcome. Reuters’ legal explainer underscores how difficult prosecution can be: agents may seek immunity arguments; federal prosecutions have a high bar and are rare; civil suits are constrained by qualified immunity doctrines and other obstacles.

If the mechanisms of accountability are structurally weak, then asking the regime to “be accountable” is rhetoric unless paired with hard constraints that force accountability into existence.

Second, peaceful protest is necessary but insufficient if it remains purely expressive.

Obama praises protests as inspiration and a reminder of citizen duty. In a normal polity, that might be enough to move officials who fear electoral sanction. In a terroristic regime, the state’s goal is to metabolize protest into background noise or to provoke it into disorder so repression can be “justified.”

The winning move is nonviolent escalation that changes the regime’s cost curve: organized labor action, coordinated economic pressure, and institutional refusal to collaborate with unlawful practices. (A general strike is not a slogan; it is the nonviolent analog of siege—economic and legitimacy denial without resorting to violence.)

Third, the “bargaining” frame must be inverted. You do not bargain with such a regime; you bargain against it by setting terms through leverage. Even the current congressional fight illustrates the proper vector: Democrats pressing for guardrails—mask bans, body cameras, force limits, warrant requirements, and explicit rejection of absolute immunity—attached to funding.

That is not polite cooperation; it is constraint by conditionality. The same Reuters reporting notes that ICE can retain other funding streams even during shutdown dynamics, which means pressure must be multi-channel, not symbolic.

Obama is trying to summon a broad coalition by appealing to “core values,” and that has rhetorical utility. But the danger is that his solution implies the crisis is a misunderstanding between levels of government rather than a deliberate method of rule.

When you call a terroristic regime to norms, you lend it the premise that it still inhabits them. The public is then trained to wait for decency to reappear, instead of organizing to force compliance with the law.

This is not a question of Obama’s sincerity. It is a question of his strategic framing. If you misclassify the actor, you choose the wrong moves.

Minnesota is not a customer-service failure inside federalism; it is a demonstration of power under conditions of contested legitimacy—an asymmetric campaign that uses spectacle, intimidation, and narrative preemption to widen the regime’s operational latitude.

The correct response is not to ask for “constructive cooperation.” The correct response is to build a wall of consequences so thick the regime cannot walk through it.

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