As recently as Monday afternoon, Donald Trump appeared to have backed off his public offensive against Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. The president published a brief item to his social media platform to say he’d just wrapped up “a very good telephone conversation” with the Democratic mayor, adding, “Lots of progress is being made!”

Alas, the detente didn’t last long.

Roughly 24 hours later, Frey issued a public statement, noting that he and Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara had met with White House border czar Tom Homan, and that they had “a productive conversation.” As part of the same statement, the mayor noted, “I also made it clear that Minneapolis does not and will not enforce federal immigration laws, and that we will remain focused on keeping our neighbors and streets safe.”

Evidently, this didn’t sit well with the president, who responded with an online statement of his own on Wednesday morning:

Surprisingly, Mayor Jacob Frey just stated that, ‘Minneapolis does not, and will not, enforce Federal Immigration Laws.’ This is after having had a very good conversation with him. Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!

I’m mindful that Trump has long struggled with the basics of Civics 101, but in the United States, courts have long ruled that the federal government cannot force states to enforce federal laws. Frey’s statement wasn’t controversial in the least: It simply summarized existing law, which the president ought to have at least some familiarity with.

It’s not a “very serious violation of the Law” to operate within the law — and it’s certainly not illegal to acknowledge the basics of the law.

What’s more, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted, Trump’s menacing “playing with fire” warning is “exactly the kind of statement (‘retribution is coming’) that worked against the administration in court earlier this week.”

Frey, who worked previously as an attorney focused on civil rights law, responded to the president’s rant with his own follow-up item. “The job of our police is to keep people safe, not enforce fed immigration laws,” he wrote in a message directed at Trump. “I want them preventing homicides, not hunting down a working dad who contributes to [Minneapolis and] is from Ecuador. It’s similar to the policy your guy Rudy [Giuliani] had in [New York City]. Everyone should feel safe calling 911.”

Ideally, this brief tutorial for the confused president would have ended the exchange, but then JD Vance decided he wanted to keep things going a little longer. “How about federal law enforcement. Should they feel safe calling 911?” the vice president asked. “Right now, they don’t, because you’ve told your police officers not to help them.”

As is too often the case with the Ohio Republican, his claims were misleading. Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney and an MS NOW legal analyst, explained via Bluesky, “There is a big difference between saying state resources can’t be used to enforce [federal] civil immigration policy and local cops refusing to assist [federal] partners in an emergency. Deliberately conflating the two is disingenuous.”

One presumes the vice president, a Yale University-trained attorney, knows this. As the White House returns to its misguided fight against Minneapolis’ mayor, he misled the public anyway.