Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Bovino is becoming former Commander-at-Large Bovino. I have a hard time thinking it’s because he wasn’t doing exactly what DJT and Stephen Miller want him to do. I suspect Bovino gets the boot because they’ve stumbled into a murder even they couldn’t spin to the non-MAGA middle. Whatever Trump can tolerate, poor ratings have never been on the list.

Indeed, for a president who loves hiring people for being “right out of central casting,” it must pain DJT to send Bovino to the showers. Bovino has the requisite lack of scruples plus the oddly pervasive flair for MAGA vanity that fit the part. I mean, who the hell takes time to get photos like this done?

We won’t even get into the Nazi fashion aesthetic.

Bovino went out on a low note, with condescending remarks about actions and consequences. He was merely reprehensible until this bit’s last sentence.

“When someone chooses to listen to a politician, a so-called journalist, or a community leader that spouts that type of vilification towards law enforcement or anything else… there are consequences and actions there also. I think we saw that yesterday.”

After flipping off two or three other Amendments, he responded to the Pretti murder by blaming it on people using the First. However, as an act of goodwill, I do want to apologize for something. I may have referred to ICE agents as thugs quite a bit lately. That was wrong of me.

A lot of them are goons.

A select few are shitbirds.

And some, I assume, are very fine people.

But to lump them altogether as thugs was hasty and oversimple, and I regret the error.

Bondi’s Overstep
We have known all along that when you get a president who ran for office to stay out of jail, get rich, and deliver retribution to his enemies list, ethics are going to take a backseat. Avoiding impeachment takes a front seat. Which means that manipulating the midterms calls shotgun over almost every policy.

But the missing link remained — beyond creating excuses to intimidate non-white voters ahead of and on Election Day, how does the sort of ICE invasion that Trump dealt Minnesota translate to serving this goal?

Attorney General Bondi gave us the missing piece: You pivot into a shakedown for voter rolls and other data.

The shakedown is the heart of the Trump sensibility, and everything makes so much more sense now. In later-Monday news, it turns out a federal judge has caught on as well. Bondi’s effort to please the boss may be another critical misstep. We should know more before long.

In December, I decided to make my first 2026 post a share of John Donne’s famous poem. Then current events intervened. But in the wake of Pretti’s death and the outpouring of decency and rage, the time seems right again.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Which, finally, reminds me of Bovino and of Peter Gabriel.

Gabriel’s latest release is “I’ve Been Undone,” which opens with a most relatable, “By the heat of the sun, by the sound of a gun, I’ve been undone …”

But the poem also makes me think of Bovino, because the moral of the poem is not, in fact, “sooner or later, I’m going to die, too.” It’s easy to see Jamie Lee Curtis including this little morsel of wisdom in her rant from A Fish Called Wanda, and even easier to see Bovino in Kevin Kline’s smug would-be Übermensch.

Let’s leave the last word to Ms. Curtis.