Newsbusters: MSNBC Hosts Lets Guest Smear ICE Agents as Trump’s Lawless ‘Gestapo’

On Saturday’s The Weekend, MSNBC enabled the throwing around of more Nazi references as one guest excoriated ICE as “Trump’s Gestapo,” and another called it Trump’s own “national police” that has no accountability.

The latest demonization came during a discussion of ICE arrests in a Chicago apartment building from a few days ago. Guest and former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone fretted: “We do have this agency now which appears to become — to have become a national police force for the Trump administration, and that’s ICE. This is an agency which is unaccountable to the American people, and, in a democracy, law enforcement agencies must be accountable to the American people.”

Addressing retired Major General Randy Manner, Capehart posed: “Is that the proper use not only of National Guard but of federal law enforcement? Your reaction to that kind of action being conducted in an American city on American citizens?” Obviously, they weren’t all American citizens.

Manner — who was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Guard Bureau — decried ICE as “Trump’s Gestapo” as he clarified that the National Guard was not involved in the raid:

First of all, it’s all wrong — it’s all wrong. Secondly, those were not National Guard — those were not military. It’s very, very important all your listeners understand that, while they were wearing military uniforms, those were not military people. Those, quite frankly, that is Trump’s Gestapo. That’s who ICE agents are. They are lawless, they do not follow the rule of law, and it’s extremely dangerous for for us to have those kind of people with those kind of leaders in our American cities.

This is not the first time…

To the Officers of NBCUniversal News Group: Michael J. Cavanagh, Cesar Conde, Kimberley Harris, Donna Langley, Adam Miller, Craig Robinson, Matt Strauss, Mark Woodbury, et al.

Many of us have watched the slow erosion of editorial standards across the industry, but Saturday’s edition of MSNBC’s “The Weekend” represents something worth your immediate attention—not because of political bias, which is your business decision to make, but because of a fundamental failure in journalistic stewardship.

Let me be direct: Your hosts allowed a guest to characterize federal law enforcement agents as “Trump’s Gestapo” on your airwaves. Not just once in the heat of passionate debate, but deliberately, while discussing an immigration enforcement operation in Chicago. Retired Major General Randy Manner didn’t stumble into the comparison. He deployed it with precision: “Those, quite frankly, that is Trump’s Gestapo. That’s who ICE agents are. They are lawless; they do not follow the rule of law.”

Your hosts—Jonathan Capehart, Jackie Alemany, and Eugene Daniels—let it sail through without a single challenge.

Now, I’m not here to defend or condemn ICE operations. I’m not here to litigate immigration policy or the Trump administration’s approach to enforcement. What I’m here to ask is simpler and more fundamental: When did invoking the Gestapo—the Nazi secret police responsible for implementing the Holocaust—become acceptable discourse on a major American news network?

This isn’t about being squeamish. This isn’t about both-sidesism or false equivalence. This is about maintaining the basic credibility that separates journalism from propaganda. The Gestapo reference isn’t an analysis. It’s not even harsh criticism. It’s rhetorical napalm designed to place your political opponents beyond the pale of legitimate debate.

The problem compounds when you examine the context your hosts provided. Capehart read from a New York Times piece about the Chicago raid, describing drones, helicopters, and stunned neighbors. What he conspicuously omitted—and what your editorial process should have caught—was that the operation targeted members of the Tren de Aragua gang. That’s not a minor detail. It’s the kind of context that transforms a story from “jackbooted thugs terrorize innocent apartment building” to “federal agents conduct major gang operation.”

But here’s what really troubles me: Michael Fanone, the former D.C. police officer turned Time magazine cover subject and CNN analyst, suggested on your air that the Trump administration is deliberately trying to recruit ICE agents who are “willing to engage in violence” and “attracted to the profession because it, you know, at times can allow them to use violence.”

Think about that for a moment. Your network gave airtime to the assertion that a federal law enforcement agency is actively recruiting sadists. Not that some agents might abuse their authority—a legitimate concern about any law enforcement agency. Not that policies might be overly aggressive or poorly conceived. But the recruitment strategy itself is designed to attract people who enjoy hurting others.

This is the kind of rhetoric that ends careers in law enforcement, that paints targets on the backs of federal agents doing difficult work, and that poisons the possibility of good-faith debate about immigration policy. And your hosts treated it as conventional wisdom, nodding along, tossing in softball follow-ups.

I keep thinking about the editorial meetings that must have preceded this segment. Someone pitched a discussion about ICE operations. Someone assembled the guests. Someone wrote the questions. And at no point in that process did anyone apparently say, “Hey, maybe we should establish some guardrails here. Maybe we should push back if someone starts comparing federal agents to Nazi death squads.”

You can argue—and I suspect you will—that these were the guests’ opinions, not MSNBC’s institutional position. Fine. But journalism isn’t stenography. Your hosts aren’t court reporters. They’re journalists with the responsibility to challenge inflammatory rhetoric, demand evidence for serious allegations, and maintain minimal standards of proportionality.

When your network allows guests to deploy Holocaust comparisons without challenge casually, you’re not engaged in brave truth-telling. You’re engaged in audience capture, feeding your viewers the red meat they expect while abandoning any pretense of journalistic independence.

The real tragedy here is that there are legitimate questions to ask about immigration enforcement tactics. There are serious debates to be had about the balance between border security and civil liberties, about the militarization of domestic law enforcement, and about transparency and accountability in federal agencies. But when you let your programming descend into Gestapo comparisons and accusations that ICE is recruiting violent sociopaths, you make those conversations impossible.

You also make enemies of a huge swath of the country who might otherwise be persuadable. The ICE agents conducting that Chicago operation went home to their families. They probably think they’re doing necessary work. Maybe they’re wrong about that. Maybe their tactics are excessive. Maybe their orders are unjust. But they’re not the Gestapo, and characterizing them that way doesn’t advance any cause except ratings among people who already agree with you.

I’ve watched MSNBC evolve over the years from a network that occasionally challenged its partisan instincts to one that seems to have given up on the enterprise entirely. This segment wasn’t an aberration. It was a distillation of a deeper problem: the conviction that righteous ends justify inflammatory means, that the stakes are so high that normal standards no longer apply.

But here’s the thing about abandoning standards: You don’t get to pick them back up when it’s convenient. You don’t get to complain about Fox News’s excesses or partisan talk radio’s toxicity when you’re pumping the same poison into the discourse, just with better production values and a different political valence.

The officers of NBCUniversal News Group have a choice to make. You can continue down this path, treating journalism as just another form of political combat where the only rule is winning. Or you can remember that news organizations have a responsibility that transcends quarterly earnings and audience demographics—an obligation to maintain the minimal conditions for democratic debate.

That means not letting guests call federal agents Gestapo without challenge. It means providing relevant context even when it complicates your narrative. It means treating your audience like citizens capable of weighing evidence rather than partisans who just need their priors confirmed.

Saturday’s segment failed every one of those tests. The question is whether anyone with the authority to change course actually cares.

I suspect you do. I hope you do. Because if MSNBC doesn’t represent something more than Fox News with different politics, then what’s the point? What are you offering the country besides another echo chamber, another rage machine, another accelerant on the fire consuming our capacity for shared reality?

You’ve built a news organization with talented journalists, substantial resources, and real influence. It would be a shame to squander all that on letting guests call federal agents Nazis while your hosts nod along.

The bar can’t get any lower than this. It really can’t.

Respectfully submitted,

Someone who still believes standards matter