President Trump owns the state terror on Minneapolis streets
Don't believe the president's talk of de-escalation in Minnesota — violence against citizens is the inevitable by-product of a war on blue America conducted under cover of immigration enforcement
ICE’s murder of Renee Good earlier this month drew urgently needed national attention to the ongoing federal occupation and brutalization of the people of Minneapolis-St. Paul. That killing made it crystal clear that the Trump regime had targeted the Twin Cities for special punishment well beyond the officially stated reason of a massive immigration crackdown. After weeks of kidnapping immigrants, beating up Americans, and bearing down with martial force on peaceful citizens seeking to expose and document their depravities, the thugs of ICE finally did what President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and advisor Stephen Miller had opened the door for them to do: they carried their state violence to its logical conclusion, and murdered an innocent American for the apparent “crime” of disrespecting an ICE agent.
Yet what followed the Good killing has been even more damning for any objective appraisal of the Trump regime’s means and ends. Rather than pull back and examine what flaws in their procedures had led to the death of an innocenet 37-year-old mother of three, the Trump administration doubled down, both in propaganda and in reality. From the White House podium to the sewers of right-wing media, Good was slandered as a terrorist, as deserving of her fate; rather than investigate the killer, the administration pushed to investigate Good and her wife. The president himself disseminated blatant lies about Good to feed the fraudulent narrative that she was herself a would-be murderess, and that she deserved every bullet she got. The administration took rapid steps to cover up its murder, including by excluding local authorities from participating in any investigation. And with no dissent from the president, Vance broadcast to federal agents that they had immunity in carrying out their duties. In the wake of the Good shooting, such an instruction was tantamount to absolving them from future murders, which to the undisciplined and hateful ranks of ICE and CPB was indistinguishable from a blank check to kill.
Nearly three weeks later — this past weekend — federal immigration agents did in fact murder again. Their victim this time was Alex Pretti, a nurse for the Veterans Administration, who apparently drew the ire of his killers for daring to interpose himself between agents who were assaulting women on a Minneapolis street. Once again, their actions were caught on multiple videos, as they pushed, pepper-sprayed, beat, and then shot a man who had never acted aggressively towards them — who had been a model of peaceful witness and intervention. And as with the Good killing, video evidence provided by observers of the shooting quickly established that the agents had almost certainly conducted a public execution of an unarmed and non-violent man, shooting him in the back approximately ten times.
In the immediate aftermath, the Trump regime’s play was the same as with the Good murder: to lie shamelessly about the circumstances of the shooting so as to present the heavily-armed agents as victims, the slain citizen as a domestic terrorist, and the whole incident as the fault of Democratic elected officials allegedly inciting insurrection against federal authorities in Minnesota. Once again, the eruption of lies was accompanied by blatant efforts to cover up the murder, such as by prohibiting local authorities from access to the crime scene and by seeking to avoid the necessity of preserving evidence.
This time, though, the White House began to sense danger to the president, as reporting quickly exposed virtually all its public remarks about the shooting to be lies, and as a public and political backlash built, and indeed continues to build through the present. Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “nobody in the White House, including President Trump, wants to see people getting hurt or killed in America’s streets,” while Trump remarked in an interview that “we’re going to de-escalate a bit.” Moreover, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino is apparently leaving Minneapolis, where he had overseen operations that led to the recent killings, with Trump sending the corrupt border czar Tom Homan to replace him.
But this pretense of retrenchment should in no way distract us from these essential facts: that President Trump was the one who ordered the federal occupation of an American city; that he green-lighted tactics that led federal agents under his ultimate command to gun down Renee Good; and that he then doubled down on his incitement of hostility towards the people of Minneapolis, giving federal agents a blank check to commit a second murder, that of Alex Pretti. If the first murder was the predictable outcome of a lawless onslaught against Minneapolis-St. Paul, the second murder was the expression of an even more conscious urge to repeat the initial killing.
That the president seems to sense political danger now in no way excuses his deep complicity in crimes already committed against innocent Americans, or his administration’s involvement in covering up both crimes — cover-ups that only compound the president’s complicity in both killings. In fact, Trump’s shuffling of immigration leadership is a tacit admission that the president is indeed the person responsible for federal offenses in Minneapolis. He is now making cosmetic changes not out of a change of heart, but because he wishes to get away with past and future murder.
Nor should the president’s current maneuvering to minimize political damage blind us to the fact that what we’ve seen in Minneapolis is simply a concrete expression of a far broader Trump administration agenda: to replace the rule of law with the rule of presidential fiat, and to crush the president’s and MAGA’s blue state enemies into political and cultural compliance with their reactionary vision for America. Our collective problem is not that Trump is somehow doing immigration enforcement wrong or in a way that is fixable; our problem is MAGA fascism. Meanwhile, the president faces a reverse challenge: his administration’s political violence has provoked a huge backlash instead of placing the American people firmly in his thrall, and he is working now to find a way to stabilize his path to dominance. Trump wants it both ways — he wants to be able to terrorize his “enemies,” but also to evade the consequences (both legal and political) when this terrorization provokes defiance and criticism, as we are seeing now. As has always been fundamentally the case for this hideous man, key to stopping him is holding him accountable for his crimes.
Following the Pretti killing, New York Times columnist M. Gessen warned that what Americans are currently experiencing in the violent actions of the Trump regime is properly understood as state terror — lawless acts that can strike anyone for any reason, government crimes without citizen recourse intended to sow fear in the population and to demonstrate the administration’s omnipotence. But while Gessen is accurate in their description of the administration’s aim and the deep danger of unbridled government violence we all face, it’s also important to understand that events in Minnesota show that we remain in a period of contention, not submission or defeat. Even as the Trump administration has tried to portray and treat Minneapolis residents — both citizens and immigrants alike — as enemies of the state, its attempts at state terror have provoked a surge of public revulsion as the government’s gloves finally came all the way off. Americans may be fearful, but they are also angry; and it is in the interest of those of us who oppose MAGA fascism to ensure that this righteous rage is encouraged, and guides the American majority to fearless, peaceful resistance to the horrors Trump and MAGA would visit on us if no one dared stand up to them.
So as Trump tries to weasel his way out of responsibility for the murders in Minneapolis, a top priority for Democrats must be to hang this murder rap on his sagging, senile shoulders — and on the Republican Party that voted to massively up the budget for immigration enforcement in full knowledge of the brutalities that the Trump administration had vowed to pursue. Political opponents must do what might seem counter-intuitive to more moderate sensibilities — they must now escalate their attacks on Trump and his minions even as the White House gestures at a temporary tactical retreat. A key priority is to hammer away at the idea that the depredations of ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere are simply about immigration enforcement. As we’ve seen in the Twin Cities, immigration enforcement is in fact a Trojan Horse for sending in paramilitaries to beat up American citizens and cow blue state governments into submission; it is the back door for increasingly open war on the American majority.
And key to making such a critique is to draw a straight line between this larger agenda and the murders of Good and Pretti — citizens who were gunned down while engaged in peaceful opposition to the Trump regime’s violent repression. Our odds of securing a free, democratic United States — and our ability to remind Americans of the dire risks of failing in this task — will increase as we pursue justice for these two Minnesotans.
For the sake of our national survival, we also cannot let up in working to dismantle Trump’s means of state terror, beginning with the horror show of ICE and a CBP whose task of border protection has metastasized to encompass internal repression of citizens. As historian Thomas Zimmer writes, “As a matter of democratic self-defense, ICE must not be tolerated. The people responsible for this occupation and the violence Minnesota is suffering – both those who are carrying it out in the streets as well as those who planned and ordered it – must be prosecuted and held to account.”
The horrors in Minnesota, and the accompanying disinformation from the White House and far right, also drive home why it’s so very important for opponents of Trump not just to say that what he’s doing is generically bad, or to focus obsessively on a few particularly outrageous crimes, but also to provide a truthful, comprehensive narrative about Donald Trump and MAGA’s quest to transform the United States into an authoritarian, white supremacist monstrosity. Such a countervailing framework is even more urgent when the story that MAGA is trying to sell us is visibly coming apart at the seams: when the White House tries to tell us that moms in minivans and VA nurses are domestic terrorists, that 50,000 peacefully marching Minnesotans are in fact insurrectionists, that a governor and mayor who call for violent paramilitaries to leave their city are somehow the ones inciting violence. Such a story trips upon the corpses of two citizens executed for acting like true Americans; it is incumbent on the living to ensure that story is shattered into a thousand pieces, and exposed for the collection of fascistic, white nationalist lies that it is.
In a video recorded in response to the Pretti killing, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie drew particular attention to the fundamental illegitimacy of the Trump regime. He pointed to two decisive points: first, that the clear language of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prevents insurrectionists like Trump from holding office; and second, that Trump lacks political legitimacy due to acting without the consent of the governed, and as he aims to dominate and rule over a subordinated citizenry. Bouie is absolutely correct to zero in on the matter of Trump’s illegitimacy, for it haunts his fascistic presidency and lights our path out of the darkness of MAGA dictatorship. But to Bouie’s enumeration of the sources of Trump’s illegitimacy, I would add as well the violence the president has encouraged against American citizens under cover of immigration enforcement. One citizen murder at the hands of his security forces would have been one too many; two should spark a mass repudiation of this fundamentally anti-American president.