social medium

Though we’re solidly into 2026, a trend has emerged on social media: Reminiscing on the year 2016.

Through throwback posts, people have been traveling back to the year when dog and flower crown Snapchat filters, Instagram eyebrows, the mannequin challenge and the Chainsmokers were everywhere.

But why, you may ask? On social media, 2016 is remembered as the last carefree era, a time when people posted whatever they wanted without overthinking it, when folks actually danced at parties instead of pointing their phones at the DJ booth to “capture content.”

2016 also brought many cultural milestones to L.A., from Kobe’s final game to the rise of selfie culture to all things Issa Rae. In the spirit of nostalgia, we’ve rounded up 16 moments that bring us back to that time. So let’s crank up Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” album and take a ride down memory lane, shall we?

WASHINGTON — President Trump moved quickly this week to negotiate with Democrats to avert a lengthy government shutdown over Department of Homeland Security funding, a sharp departure from last year’s record standoff, when he refused to budge for weeks.

Some Republicans are frustrated with the deal, raising the possibility of a prolonged shutdown fight when the House returns Monday to vote on the funding package. But Trump’s sway over the GOP remains considerable, and he has made his position clear at a moment of mounting political strain.

“The only thing that can slow our country down is another long and damaging government shutdown,” Trump wrote on social media late Thursday.

The urgency marked a clear shift from Trump’s posture during the 43-day shutdown late last year, when he publicly antagonized Democratic leaders and his team mocked them on social media. This time, with anger rising over shootings in Minneapolis and the GOP’s midterm messaging on tax cuts drowned out by controversy, Trump acted quickly to make a deal with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

“Trump and the Republicans know that this is an issue where they’re on the wrong side of the American people and it really matters,” Schumer told reporters Friday after Senate passage of the government funding deal.

Crisis after Minneapolis killings

Senators returned to work this week dealing with the fallout from the fatal shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers, as well as the killing of Renee Good in the city weeks earlier.

Republicans were far from unified in their response. A few called for the firing of top administration officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House chief of staff for policy. Most GOP senators tried to strike a balance, calling for a thorough investigation into Pretti’s killing while backing the hard-line immigration approach that is central to Trump’s presidency.

But many agreed that the shootings threatened public support for Trump’s immigration agenda.

“I’ve never seen a political party take its best issue and turn it into its worst issue in the period of time that it has happened in the last few weeks,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said. “Some things have to change.”

Democrats quickly coalesced around their key demands.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said there “was unanimity” around core principles of enforcing a code of conduct for immigration officers and agents, ending “roving patrols” for immigration enforcement actions and coordinating with local law enforcement on immigration arrests.

It helped that Trump himself was looking for ways to de-escalate in Minneapolis.

“The world has seen the videos of those horrible abuses by DHS and rogue operations catching up innocent people, and there’s a revulsion about it,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said.

“The White House is asking for a ladder off the ledge,” he added.

The painful politics of shutdown

Republicans are also trying to promote their accomplishments in office as they ready for the November midterms and the difficult task of retaining control of both chambers of Congress.

But the prospect of a prolonged shutdown shifted attention away from their $4.5-trillion tax and spending cuts law, the centerpiece of their agenda. Republicans had hoped the beginning of this year’s tax season on Monday would provide a political boost as voters begin to see larger tax refunds.

Republicans are also mindful of the political damage from last year’s shutdown, when they took a slightly larger portion of the blame from Americans than Democrats, according to polling from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

“The shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans,” Trump told Republican senators at the White House in November.

On a practical level, this funding standoff threatened to destroy months of bipartisan work, including long hours over the holiday break, to craft the 12 spending bills that fund the government and many priorities back home.

“We saw what happened in the last government shutdown in regards to how it hurt real, hardworking Americans,” said Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I don’t want that to happen again.”

A two-week funding battle begins

The agreement reached this week, if passed by the House, would avoid a prolonged shutdown and fund nearly every federal department through the end of the budget year in September. But it would not resolve one of the most difficult issues for Congress and the White House: Homeland Security funding.

Instead of a full-year deal, funding for the department was extended for just two weeks, giving lawmakers little time to bridge the deep divides over immigration enforcement.

Democrats are pressing for changes they say are necessary to prevent future abuses, including requiring immigration agents to wear body cameras, carry clear identification, end roving patrols in cities and coordinate more closely with local law enforcement when making arrests. Many Democrats also want tighter rules around warrants and accountability mechanisms for officers in the field.

Those demands have met stiff resistance from Republicans. Some are opposed to negotiating with Democrats at all.

“Republicans control the White House, Senate and House. Why are we giving an inch to Democrats?” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) wrote on social media.

Republican senators said they would take the fight to Democrats by introducing their own bills, including restrictions on “sanctuary cities,” to show their support for Trump’s policies. That term is generally applied to state and local governments that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

“We’ve let the issue get away. We’re not leading. We’re trying to avoid losing rather than winning,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who held up the spending bills until Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agreed to give him a vote on his sanctuary cities bill at a later date.

Thune acknowledged the difficulty of the next two weeks, saying that there are “some pretty significant views and feelings.”

“We’ll stay hopeful,” Thune told reporters about the upcoming fight. “But there are some pretty significant differences of opinion.”

Cappelletti and Groves write for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

Actor John Leguizamo, a longtime vocal critic of President Trump and his administration, says he’s showing a section of his social media following the door amid the federal government’s relentless crackdown on immigration.

The “Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge!” acting veteran, who is Latino, on Wednesday issued a brief and blunt Instagram video message to followers who also support the immigration agency. “If you follow ICE, unfollow me,” he said in his post.

“Don’t come to my shows, don’t watch my movies,” he added. Leguizamo, an Emmy winner, captioned his post: “Abolish ice!”

The actor-comedian, also known for the “Ice Age” films and cult classic “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” is among the Hollywood stars vehemently speaking out against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents amid recent killings. An ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good earlier this month in Minneapolis, where Border Patrol agents on Jan. 24 shot and killed Alex Pretti. An off-duty federal immigration agent fatally shot Keith Porter Jr. in Northridge on Dec. 31. They are among the 20-plus people who have died in a wave of aggressive immigration operations launched by the Trump administration last year.

Fellow actors also using social media to speak out against ICE and other federal immigration agents are Pedro Pascal, Mark Ruffalo and Ayo Edebiri. Musicians including Olivia Rodrigo, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Billie Eilishand Tyler, the Creator have also condemned federal officers.

White House border policy advisor Tom Homan said Thursday during a press conference that street operations in Minneapolis would wind down if agents were allowed into local jails instead and asserted the federal government was not backing down on its aggressive immigration agenda.

“We are not surrendering our mission at all,” he said. “We are not surrendering the president’s mission of immigration enforcement: Let’s make that clear.”

Staff writers Malia Mendez and Jenny Jarvie contributed to this report.

President Trump has an army of bootlickers that seems to stretch to the sunset. Many of them creep around on social media and almost certainly legions of them come from bot accounts on X.

Then there’s Bill Essayli. When it comes to saying anything to please a president with autocratic dreams, the former Assembly member is a bootlicking All-Star.

Att. Gen. Pam Bondi appointed him as the top prosecutor for the Central District of California in April with the explicit mandate to do Donald J. Trump’s will. His record so far has been unsurprisingly embarrassing and outlandish.

An exodus of prosecutors who didn’t care for his staff screaming sessions and boorish press conferences. A felony conviction against a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy for excessive force that he reduced to a misdemeanor and then unsuccessfully tried to have dismissed. Seeking charges against people who dared protest Trump’s deportation deluge that his office eventually reduced, dropped or lost in court due to lack of evidence despite Essayli publicly boasting they were slam-dunk cases.

The guy can’t even call himself acting U.S. attorney anymore after a judge ruled in October he was “not lawfully serving” in the position since he was never formally appointed in the first place. So you’d think Essayli would hear the music and go back to being an inconsequential California legislator, but no! If there’s one thing Trumpworld has shown, it’s that once you’ve knelt to offer the Dear Leader a lick-and-shine, you better keep it up until your tongue’s as dry as Death Valley.

Which leads us to this weekend. And Essayli’s bootlicking-gone-wrong.

On Saturday morning, Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti after they gang-tackled him. He had tried to help a woman shoved to the ground by a federal immigration officer; an officer maced him and he soon collapsed — and shortly after, was dead. A Department of Homeland Security social media post justified what happened by saying Pretti seemed intent on “want[ing] to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” because he was in possession of a legally registered handgun. He never brandished it though. In fact, multiple videos showed Pretti clearly holding what looked like a phone as agents swarmed him.

Even though the incident was thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, Essayli had to flick his tongue — it’s the bootlicker way, after all.

“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” he snickered on social media hours after Pretti died. “Don’t do it!” He also reshared the posts of right-wing social media influencers Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo who claimed Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, was following “antifa” tactics.

Essayli was soon getting smacked around on social media by gun rights groups, including the NRA, which has endorsed Trump in all his presidential races.

A sign is raised in support of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at a candlelight vigil during a peaceful protest at the federal building in Los Angeles on Saturday.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

It blasted his rant as “dangerous and wrong” on social media, adding that “responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

The Gun Owners of America, a group that’s even more conservative than the NRA, called Essayli’s comments “untoward,” leading to the first assistant U.S. attorney — because bootlickers love their titles — to whine about the nonprofit “adding words to mischaracterize my statement” even though they directly quoted him.

When history looks back at all the cowards, sycophants, apologists, enablers, henchmen and other miscreants that made Trump possible, the bootlickers will have a starring role. The “I voted for this” tribe — even when this is cruelty and actions that are more those of a Macbeth than an American president.

The bootlicker is a universally reviled archetype. Their bread-and-butter is comforting the most comfortable by afflicting the most afflicted. They try to top fellow bootlickers with even more obsequious acts of flattery, hellbent on making the most damning line of Orwell’s “1984” come to life: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

The bootlicker’s moral compass is malleable. Wherever the Big Boss has moved the goal posts, that’s where he or she will kick the ball. If all goes to hell and America devolves into a rank dictatorship, beware the bootlicker.

The Trump regime currently has a lineup of them that’s like the bootlicking version of the 1927 Yankees.

In addition to Essayli, you have Stephen Miller, who kept calling Pretti an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist” on social media as if repeating the slurs would make them true. Vice President JD Vance, who described Renee Good, a woman shot and killed on Jan. 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis after she tried to drive away from him, as a “deranged leftist.”

Repeating what the big bootlickers say is a character trait. Call it the bootlicking trickle-down-effect.

There’s Border Patrol chief at large Gregory Bovino, a migra man a federal judge accused of “outright lying” during depositions over the actions of his team in Chicago this fall. During a news conference about the death of Pretti, Bovino claimed that the victim looked like he “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” — the exact same language used in the original Department of Homeland Security social media post on the killing. Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also impersonated a macaw, parroting Miller by accusing Pretti of “domestic terrorism.”

On Fox News on Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel — the agency that in ye olden days would be leading an impartial investigation into what happened to Good, Pretti and other victims of la migra — told host Maria Bartiromo that “No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm. That led a skeptical-looking Bartiromo, who’s about as liberal as the Spanish Inquisition, to ask, “And how was he using that handgun in terms of threatening Border Patrol?”

A wide-eyed Patel could only say he trusted Noem’s version of the events.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a news conference on Saturday to address an incident where federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti during operations in Minneapolis.

(Al Drago / Getty Images)

These are just some of the most prominent, powerful bootlickers stumbling right now on their own deceit and desperation.

Space prohibits me from quoting all the Republicans who last week were stalwart 2nd Amendment fans now saying Pretti had no right to carry his legally registered firearm to a protest even though they cheered on Kyle Rittenhouse when the Wisconsin teen showed up at one very openly carrying an AR-15, which he ended up using to fatally shoot two people who tried to assault him. There’s no evidence Pretti ever handled his firearm during the protest, let alone threatened federal agents with it.

Then there’s the bootlickers who cheered on the Jan. 6 rioters for rising up against what they saw as government tyranny, who insist the dozens of law enforcement officers injured that day were just deep-state agents. Today, those bootlickers are telling folks pushing back against Trump’s police state to respect it.

Obey or die.

The Roman philosopher Plutarch described flatterers in his immortal essay on the subject as “the plague in kings’ chambers, and the ruin of their kingdoms” that “prey upon a noble quarry.” So to Essayli, Patel, Noem and all the other bootlickers in Trump’s orbit, and to the relatively anonymous legions beyond, I’ll leave you with the warning that I saw in a meme that I’m sure Plutarch would endorse:

No matter how hard you lick it, the boot will never love you.