Rick Rosner On, 16: Trump, ICE Detention, Military Culture, and Political Violence

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/07/19

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner about American governance, military culture, immigration detention, media ownership, autonomous vehicles, and political violence. Rosner criticizes testosterone-centred military policy as misplaced in drone warfare, condemns alleged abuses and rising deaths in ICE custody, questions FCC deregulation, and distinguishes driver error from automated-system failure. They also discuss democratic accountability, evidentiary standards, constitutional protections for non-citizens, and the danger of selectively defining terrorism to serve partisan political objectives in public policy.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Would you rather be hirsute or largely hairless in terms of your body, not your head?

Rick Rosner: I would rather have hair on my head, but you are not asking about that. I am not very hairy, especially for a Jewish fellow, and I kind of like it that way. I do not need a pelt.

Jacobsen: Some things you say are funny. This is why you ended up falling into the right career. Your first ten years after high school were spent living creatively, and then you got it right by focusing on that. Carole was probably helpful, too. You found a way to do creative work while having a relatively normal life.

Rosner: Yes, though it has made me lazy in the second half of my life, which is not necessarily the worst thing. I have not taken as many risks in later years.

Jacobsen: Do you think you should?

Rosner: In some ways.

What else? The current leaders of our country continue to be absolute dipshits. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, is promoting what he calls a “High-T Department of War.” The administration has also restricted women’s participation in some combat roles and has emphasized supposedly gender-neutral combat standards that are based on male physical benchmarks.

Hegseth has announced that service members aged 30 and older will receive annual screening for testosterone deficiency as part of their routine health assessments. Younger service members may request testing. Treatment is supposed to be voluntary and aimed at correcting a diagnosed deficiency, rather than increasing testosterone beyond normal clinical levels. The available descriptions do not make clear how the policy will apply to women.

This is one more wrongheaded idea from our jackass secretary of war. There can be legitimate medical reasons to test for and treat testosterone deficiency. But presenting testosterone as a broad measure of military effectiveness risks confusing medical care with a macho theory of combat readiness.

The most technologically advanced conventional war being fought right now is probably the Russia-Ukraine war, not counting cyberwarfare among the major powers, with everybody hacking and propagandizing against everybody else. Ukraine has become a global leader in the large-scale production and battlefield use of military drones. Its forces use drones for reconnaissance, artillery targeting, direct attacks, deep strikes, logistics, and attacks on energy infrastructure.

The wars involving Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran also involve advanced surveillance, precision weapons, drones, missile defence, electronic warfare, and cyber capabilities. However, Ukraine has become the clearest laboratory for mass, relatively inexpensive drone warfare against a large conventional military.

Hegseth and Trump have also pushed for a huge expansion in military spending. The exact increase depends on which budget measure and fiscal year you are comparing. The proposed fiscal year 2027 Pentagon budget exceeds $1 trillion and represents an increase of roughly $234 billion over the previous year, not a straightforward 50 percent increase.

The United States already spends far more on its military than any other country. However, saying that it spends as much as the next 16 countries combined, or that a further increase would exceed the spending of all other countries combined, requires a specific dataset and accounting method. Those comparisons vary according to exchange rates, purchasing power, whether veterans’ programs and nuclear weapons are included, and which countries are counted.

The broader point still stands. The United States can spend staggering amounts of money while remaining tied to slow procurement systems and extremely expensive weapons platforms. Ukraine has had to innovate rapidly, producing and adapting drones at an enormous scale under battlefield pressure. Public figures on daily production and deployment fluctuate, and the figure of 19,000 Ukrainian drones produced every day is not sufficiently established to state as fact. According to Ukrainian estimates, Russia has planned production of on the order of 20,000 FPV drones per day in 2026.

Ukraine has reported inflicting tens of thousands of Russian casualties in some recent months, with drones allegedly responsible for a very large proportion of them. These are wartime claims and should be treated cautiously, but independent analysis agrees that drones now cause a substantial share of battlefield casualties. It would be misleading to directly link a fixed daily casualty figure to a fixed number of drones deployed.

To get back to Hegseth and testosterone, you do not need extraordinarily high testosterone to guide drones, interpret surveillance data, operate electronic systems, manage logistics, or make sound strategic decisions.

There are all these clips of Hegseth bench-pressing heavy weights, doing push-ups, and performing other exercises. That is fine. It is good to be in shape, especially if you are in the military. However, testosterone-replacement therapy for a clinically verified deficiency is not the same thing as taking anabolic steroids to become more aggressive or manly. Presenting high testosterone as a general solution to military readiness is simplistic, medically questionable, and somewhat detached from the actual demands of modern warfare.

It is jackassery. It is like America’s worst frat boy is running the Department of War. In fact, he may be America’s worst frat boy. There have been reports and allegations by former colleagues about Hegseth drinking excessively in professional settings. He also paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her after a 2017 event at a California hotel. Hegseth has said the encounter was consensual, denied wrongdoing, and was not criminally charged. So, it is fair to describe the accusation and settlement, but not to state the alleged assault as a fact.

He is a dude-bro jerk, right? Anyway, enough about him.

Jacobsen: According to Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, detainees at an ICE facility in Texas said that they were beaten and abused, denied adequate medical care, and prevented from contacting family members and lawyers. The Department of Homeland Security denies those allegations and says detainees receive appropriate care and access to communication. What do you make of this apparent impunity at the Texas facility?

Rosner: The Constitution says the government is not supposed to inflict cruel and unusual punishment. Strictly speaking, the Eighth Amendment applies most directly to people who have been convicted of crimes. Immigration detainees are held under civil law, so their protection against abusive treatment comes mainly through the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, along with federal statutes and other constitutional protections.

Those rights do not belong only to US citizens. Many fundamental constitutional protections apply to persons within the United States, including non-citizens, although certain political rights, such as voting in federal elections, are reserved for citizens.

If the allegations are true, then the guards and administrators involved are acting like dickheads. They are being abusive, unprofessional, poorly supervised, or all three. They may also be operating with a belief that they will not face meaningful consequences.

To some extent, the cruelty appears to be the point. Awful people are in charge, and too many of them do not live up to the better angels of what being an American is supposed to mean.

This shit will continue until the people opposing Trump and his supporters gain enough political and legal leverage to stop it.

The midterm elections are on November 3, 2026, which is about 111 days from the time we are having this conversation. Trump is scheduled to give a speech about election security and alleged foreign interference. He is expected to revive claims about vulnerabilities in the voting system and the 2020 election.

He is going to make all sorts of announcements about preventing fraud. A lot of this will be bullshit. US elections are not perfectly administered because no large system is perfect, but Trump’s sweeping claims about thousands of fraudulent ballots changing the 2020 result were repeatedly investigated and were not substantiated.

He cannot accept that he lost in 2020, even though he was president during one of the worst years in recent US history and handled major parts of it badly. It is entirely understandable that millions of people voted against him.

The Constitution gives states the initial responsibility for setting the times, places, and manner of congressional elections, while Congress has the authority to alter those rules. State and local officials administer most elections. The president does not possess a general unilateral power to rewrite election procedures.

We assume Trump will say that Georgia’s two Democratic senators, or other Democratic officials, were elected fraudulently. Whatever particular claims he makes will have to be evaluated against evidence. His broad past claims of outcome-changing fraud have not held up.

The courts may block some of the measures he announces. Others may fall within powers held by federal agencies or Congress, particularly after recent changes in the law governing presidential control of independent agencies. So, it is too sweeping to say that everything he attempts will automatically be struck down.

But that does not mean he will not try a ton of things during the next four months to make voting harder for people likely to oppose him and his policies.

Jacobsen: An NTSB report says that a Tesla driver accelerated into a house in a fatal crash in Texas.

Rosner: I do not draw too many conclusions from an individual accident. We are a large country with hundreds of millions of vehicles, and crashes happen for many different reasons.

In this particular case, the preliminary account says the driver had activated Tesla’s driver-assistance system but then fully depressed the accelerator, overriding it and accelerating to more than 70 miles per hour in a 30-mile-per-hour residential area. So, this does not appear to be a simple case of the car autonomously deciding to accelerate into a house.

Tesla has Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, or FSD, capabilities to some extent, but the current consumer system is still supervised driver assistance, not a fully autonomous driving system. Tesla says the driver remains responsible for the vehicle’s speed and control at all times. People will misuse that technology because some people are fucking idiots. The system itself can also make mistakes, and both driver behaviour and system design need scrutiny when accidents occur.

Alternatively, you can simply have someone manually driving a Tesla who fucks up, as drivers of every other brand do.

Waymo’s driverless taxis operate in Los Angeles and several other US cities. They still have crashes, but available studies indicate substantially lower injury-related crash rates than comparable human-driven vehicles in the same operating environments. One peer-reviewed comparison found about an 80 percent lower rate of injury-reported crashes, not precisely one-ninth the crash rate in every category.

They appear to be pretty fucking safe in the places and conditions where they are currently permitted to operate. On the other hand, they can be frustrating because they drive cautiously, follow programmed rules closely, and sometimes behave in ways that seem overly hesitant to human passengers and other drivers.

If you are behind a Waymo waiting for it to turn left, you might wait a long time because Waymo’s standard for what counts as a safe left turn may be much more stringent than yours.

Jacobsen: Another item in the news: On July 15, FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that the agency would vote on August 6 to repeal the national television ownership cap, which ordinarily prevents one company’s stations from reaching more than 39 percent of US television households. The FCC proposes replacing the cap with a case-by-case review of transactions exceeding 39 percent, approving them only when the agency finds they serve the public interest. The rule has roots in ownership restrictions established decades ago, but the present 39 percent limit dates to congressional action in 2004, so calling it an 85-year-old 39 percent rule would not be precise.

Rosner: Yes. He is a bad guy.

Jacobsen: That raises the question: What does “the public interest” mean to him in this context?

Rosner: He is a bad guy. He was involved in Project 2025, and I suspect that, if the rule is rescinded, the FCC will permit further consolidation by companies whose politics align with the administration.

Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates many local television stations and has a documented history of requiring stations to air centrally produced material, including political commentary and identical promotional scripts read by local anchors. Sinclair’s programming has often been described as conservative, although it would be too simple to say that every local Sinclair newsroom merely broadcasts MAGA propaganda.

What Brendan Carr calls the public interest appears to include allowing traditional broadcasters to grow so they can compete with national streaming and technology platforms. Critics argue that this would reduce local ownership, competition, and viewpoint diversity. Carr’s stated justification is not simply “Let us promote MAGA,” even though I think his broader political agenda aligns with Trump’s.

He is one of Trump’s cavalcade of shitty people.

Most of these people will not suffer serious personal consequences. If we are lucky and work hard, Democrats may regain a majority in the House. They have a chance in the Senate. In 2028, perhaps a Democrat will win the White House. However, even if all that happens, many of the dickheads who did terrible shit under Trump may never face prosecution or any comparable punishment.

That includes officials responsible for immigration detention and enforcement policies under which many people have died. But we have to distinguish among deaths in ICE custody, deaths during enforcement operations, and killings legally attributable to individual agents.

Human Rights Watch reported that 52 people died in ICE custody during the first 500 days of Trump’s second administration, through June 4, 2026. By July 15, at least 22 people had reportedly died in ICE custody during 2026 alone. Separately, people have been killed or have died during immigration-enforcement encounters outside detention. Those categories should not be lumped together as though ICE officers personally killed every person counted.

I do not assume that senior officials or individual officers will be prosecuted. Criminal liability requires evidence about a person’s conduct, state of mind, legal duties, and causal responsibility. It is not accurate to say that agency leaders are probably guilty of manslaughter merely because deaths occurred under policies they administered.

The more likely consequences are political defeat, dismissal, civil litigation, administrative investigation, or congressional scrutiny. Some officials may lose their federal jobs and then go into private industry or lobbying for $350,000 a year. That is often how Washington dispenses punishment: with a better-paying job and a tasteful biography.

Stephen Miller should face rigorous investigation and political accountability for policies that may have foreseeably exposed people to abuse, deprivation, or death. But whether he could properly be criminally prosecuted would depend on evidence establishing a specific offence and his personal legal responsibility. Moral responsibility and criminal culpability are not interchangeable.

You mentioned abuse at an ICE detention facility in Texas. Recent ICE data showed that roughly 71 percent of people in detention had no criminal conviction. That does not necessarily mean they were “innocent” of every legal violation, because some had pending charges, and immigration violations are often civil rather than criminal. It does mean that the large majority had not been convicted of a crime.

A separate analysis of people detained between January 20, 2025, and March 11, 2026, found that about 3 percent had a US conviction for a violent felony, defined in that analysis as homicide, sexual assault, robbery, or assault. That figure does not mean only 3 percent had committed any serious offence, because definitions of “serious” differ, and some detainees had other convictions or pending charges.

So, most people detained by ICE have not been convicted of violent crimes. Many have no criminal convictions at all. That makes abusive detention conditions especially indefensible, but it is more precise than calling every detainee innocent.

I do not expect Stephen Miller to face prosecution merely because the administration changes. That does not mean his conduct should escape investigation or public judgment.

Jacobsen: Next news item. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is hosting an international conference attended by representatives of at least 65 countries. The event is framed around what the administration calls “far-left political terrorism,” with the stated aim of rallying international cooperation against left-wing movements that it says law enforcement and counterterrorism institutions have overlooked.

They are not necessarily speaking for a settled consensus within the United States or among the participating countries. Counterterrorism assessments recognize threats from multiple ideological directions, including jihadist, racially motivated, anti-government, anti-authority, environmental, and left-wing violent extremists.

Historically, US government and congressional assessments have identified white-supremacist and other racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, along with anti-government extremists, as among the most persistent or lethal domestic threats. It would be too broad to say that domestic terrorism is primarily “Christian nationalist,” because that label does not neatly cover all white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, militia, sovereign-citizen, anti-government, or religiously motivated violence.

The concern is that the administration may be elevating “far-left terrorism” as a political category while diverting attention from forms of right-wing and racially motivated violence that have caused substantial harm. There is also a civil-liberties risk if vague terrorism labels are applied to lawful protest, political association, or dissent rather than to people planning or committing violence.

Jacobsen: Right-wing extremists have historically been followed by jihadist extremists and other categories of political extremists, depending on the period and the metric. In some datasets, the first category has substantially outstripped the others. What do you make of this international rally?

Rosner: It is more garbage from the Trump administration. Anybody who looks seriously at the historical statistics knows that a large share of political and terrorist violence in the United States has come from the right.

I was going to say three-quarters, but assigning a single percentage is too simplistic because the answer depends on whether you count attacks, plots, deaths, attempted attacks, or a particular span of years. Historically, far-right violence has been more frequent and more lethal than far-left violence in many US datasets. White supremacist extremists have also caused more US terrorist attacks, plots, and deaths since 2020 than any other ideological category in one recent assessment. But in the first part of 2025, left-wing attacks and plots reportedly outnumbered far-right incidents for the first time in more than 30 years, although they rose from a low baseline and remained below the historical levels of far-right and jihadist violence.

So I would not say, “Seventy percent comes from the right,” as though that were a stable law of nature. The larger historical point is that right-wing violence has often posed the greater domestic threat, while jihadist violence has also produced severe mass-casualty attacks. Left-wing violence exists and should be taken seriously, but singling it out as the neglected central danger looks politically selective.

It is fine to focus on political violence. The government should investigate people who plan or commit violence, whatever their ideology. But focusing specifically on “far-left terrorism” while minimizing right-wing and white-supremacist violence is more shit from America’s shittiest administration in living memory.

I was going to say it is the worst administration since the Civil War, but even that comparison gets messy. The Confederacy was not a presidential administration of the United States. It was an insurrectionary government formed by seceding slave states. We have had corrupt, racist, authoritarian, and catastrophically incompetent administrations before, but the modern Republican Party is certainly competing for the title of shittiest major American political party of the modern era.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.

Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In-Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices.  In-Sight Publishing by Scott  Douglas  Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In-Sight Publishing by Scott  Douglas  Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.