Democrats are provoking law enforcement as a political tactic.

You almost have to feel sorry for California Senator Alex Padilla — not that anyone could summon the pity he clearly feels for himself. Mere hours after the senator charged at Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference, at which point he was ushered forcefully out of the room and handcuffed, Israel executed a 20-year plan to take out the Iranian nuclear program and ushered Padilla off the front pages.

You could sense the Democratic Party’s pain. If you couldn’t, a barely noticed Senate floor speech, in which Padilla struggled (as visibly as he could) to restrain tears over the degree to which his treatment is a leading indicator of authoritarianism, conveyed his and his party’s anguish. Within hours of Padilla’s manhandling, Senate Democrats did their best to exploit their colleague’s treatment. They issued video statement after video statement, each more aggrieved than the last, calling the episode an “assault” on the senator and an indictment of government itself. The coordination and speed that typified the party’s responses are suggestive of something other than an organic reaction to unforeseen events in real time.

In his Senate speech, Padilla himself made the subtext of the Senate Democrats’ communication strategy explicit: “If that is what the administration is willing to do to a United States senator for having the [audacity] to simply ask a question,” he said, “imagine what they’ll do to any American who dares to speak up.”

That is what Democrats want their undiscerning audience to think: that the Trump administration will detain and oppress anyone who gets in their way. And yet, the conclusion Democrats want their voters to reach is undermined by the degree to which Democratic lawmakers have gone to absurd lengths and made great spectacles of themselves in order to get themselves arrested in the first place.

That was Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s strategy amid his failed pursuit of the New Jersey Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nomination. It was Representative LaMonica McIver’s, too. Last month, they and other local Democratic officials staked out a local detention facility used to house the Trump administration’s deportation targets, demanding access to it and implying that the conditions behind those walls were an obscenity. Baraka never got access to that facility, although he tried. Brick City’s mayor infiltrated the property, ignored law enforcement’s warnings to vacate, and was eventually handcuffed and removed to a Department of Homeland Security field office.

As a federal official, McIver did have access to parts of the facility that Baraka did not, but she, too, was processed and indicted by a grand jury for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officers outside that facility amid a scuffle that followed Baraka’s efforts to push past security. McIver rejected a plea agreement that would have reduced the charges she currently faces, insisting her ordeal is “purely political.”

If getting arrested is the hot trend of the summer of 2025, we should have expected New York City’s mayoral candidates to eschew the new fashion.

“Do you want to arrest the Comptroller?” one federal agent reportedly groaned yesterday as mayoral candidate Brad Lander engaged in a dramatic gesture so futile it could only have been a publicity stunt.

Lander sought to make a scene at a Lower Manhattan immigration court, where one of the administration’s deportation targets was being processed. There, he locked arms with the migrant in question and refused to let go as law enforcement agents attempted to pull them apart. “I know I will get due process and that my rights will be protected,” Lander said of his imminent arrest. His charge, by contrast, “has been stripped of his due process rights in a country that is supposed to be founded on equal justice under law.”

Everyone is getting what they want out of these performances. The Democratic lawmakers who find themselves in handcuffs get the publicity they seek. The Trump administration officials who are making examples of their political opponents relish the opportunity to demonstrate that they mean it when they maintain that “no one is above the law.” Progressive activists and entertainers (a distinction with less difference every day) enjoy confirmation of their theory that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become under Trump a “modern day gestapo.” Right-leaning political observers get the satisfaction of seeing the left-of-center lawmakers they always thought were contemptuous of civic propriety expose themselves as such, and they don’t mind seeing the instruments of the Trump administration impose discipline on their unruly political adversaries.

But it’s all theater. Indeed, it’s a profoundly cynical game. To some degree, all the parties involved deserve censure for their participation in it, but Democrats deserve far more of it. They are provoking law enforcement as a political tactic. They are promoting and promulgating the notion that the officers who are simply doing their jobs, and without much enthusiasm in the process, are engaged in grotesque acts of political oppression that should be exclusive to authoritarian regimes. They want to find themselves in prosecutors’ crosshairs only so they can claim that they are being subjugated.

There’s no guile to any of this. It is as trite and manipulative an exercise in political performance art as you could imagine. If Democratic activists weren’t so eager to believe the worst of this administration, they might question why their party’s leaders must go to such lengths to incite the response they’ve been told is Trump’s weapon of first resort.