A Makeshift Shrine and a City on Edge
Sam Stein's dispatch from the Alex Pretti memorial in Minneapolis is the strongest section of this Bulwark newsletter, and it works because Stein lets the scene do the talking. He does not editorialize about what the memorial means. He describes it, and the meaning arrives on its own.
The physical details accumulate with quiet force. A nurse's uniform pinned to a wall. Post-it notes from schoolchildren. An American flag hanging limp. Stein writes that the memorial occupies just "a slab of street, no longer than two parking spots, blocked off by traffic cones and tape." That smallness is the point. A life ended in an ordinary stretch of road, and the people who live nearby are left to reckon with what that means for their own ordinary lives.
Flowers are strewn across the sidewalk, some falling onto the pavement. There are posters and signs and mementos. A nurse's uniform with a stethoscope looped over it has been affixed to a wall, with "Freedom is not free -- Alex Pretti" written in black marker on the front.
The reporting on how the killing has reshaped daily life in Minneapolis is where the piece gains real weight. One Uber driver, a Somali American citizen, told Stein he had been pulled over three times since the killing. Another resident had begun volunteering to form human barricades around crosswalks to protect children walking to school. The children, he said, sometimes feared that he might be an ICE agent in disguise.
These experiences are now part of the well-understood pattern of life in a city under ICE occupation. The psychic effects, though, are harder to describe.
Stein profiles Micah Stewart, a 22-year-old who hitchhiked from Washington state after seeing video of the killing on his phone. He now sleeps at the memorial site most nights.
He told me that Pretti's friends and relatives have come by to see it. But they do it with no fanfare, not wanting to be noticed.
There is a counterpoint worth raising. Stein's account is sympathetic and vivid, but it is also a snapshot of one community's experience during an acute crisis. Whether the ICE drawdown in Minneapolis represents a lasting shift or a temporary tactical retreat remains an open question. The residents Stein interviews do not seem optimistic, but neither can anyone say with certainty what comes next.
Tariffs After the Supreme Court
Andrew Egger's analysis of Trump's response to the Supreme Court striking down his Liberation Day tariffs is sharp on the psychology and thin on the economics, which is probably appropriate given the subject matter. The central insight is simple: Trump would rather impose worse tariffs under shakier authority than accept any limit on his power.
Trump is Trump, and deep in his belly he believes two things: Tariffs are goodgreatwonderfulbeautifulmagicalstrong, and nobody fucking tells me what to do.
Within hours of the Court's decision, Trump announced a new 10 percent global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The next day he raised it to 15 percent, the statutory maximum. Egger notes that these tariffs can last no longer than 150 days without Congressional approval, a detail that matters more than the rate itself.
The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used.
The European Union reacted predictably. Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament's trade committee, called it "a clear breach of the deal we had agreed." Egger argues that the whipsawing uncertainty hurts businesses more than any single rate, and he is right about that. But there is a harder question he does not fully engage: whether the Court's decision, by forcing Trump onto narrower legal ground, actually constrains him in practice or merely changes the label on the same policy impulse.
Quick Hits Worth Noting
The newsletter's quick-hit items cover a lot of ground. The most consequential is the Justice Department's campaign against lawfully appointed interim U.S. attorneys. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has fired two interim prosecutors selected by federal judges, stating flatly that "judges don't pick U.S. attorneys, POTUS does." This is, as Egger notes, in direct contradiction of existing law.
If they can't stop the judges from picking new interim U.S. attorneys, they'll just fire the new selection as soon as it's made -- within a few hours, in one case.
The logic is straightforward brute force. If the administration cannot win on legal grounds, it will simply refuse to accept legal outcomes. Whether this produces a constitutional confrontation or just a slow erosion of prosecutorial independence depends on whether anyone with standing pushes back hard enough.
On Iran, the newsletter highlights the tension between Trump's "mission accomplished" rhetoric after Operation Midnight Hammer and special envoy Steve Witkoff's new warning that Iran is "probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material." Those two claims cannot both be true, and the shift in tone suggests the administration is laying groundwork for further military action.
Witkoff's willingness to drop the "mission accomplished" rhetoric for warnings about ongoing threats from Iran are among the clearest signs yet that Trump is serious about the possibility of new strikes against the country.
The Netflix and Warner Bros. item is the most entertaining, in a grim sort of way. The Ellisons discovered that Trump's favor is less valuable than Trump's enmity toward your competitor. Laura Loomer spotted an opening, and Trump bit.
Bottom Line
This is a newsletter that covers several major stories in a single edition, and the quality is uneven in the way newsletters tend to be. The Pretti memorial dispatch is genuine reporting -- the kind of on-the-ground work that justifies a subscription. The tariff analysis is competent but familiar. The quick hits are useful for keeping score in an era when the number of simultaneous constitutional conflicts can be hard to track. The Bulwark's consistent thread across all of it is that norms are not breaking in isolation. They are breaking together, and the cumulative effect is what demands attention.