An ICE agent shot a Minnesota woman in the face last week, a killing caught on video by the agent himself and numerous bystanders. Almost immediately, she was defamed by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and others, who added a malicious fabricated tale about the circumstances of her slaying.
Violence and lies weaved together are defining features of Donald Trump’s presidency. The Big Lie — that Trump won the 2020 election — and the conspiracy built around it to undo the results of the 2020 election, led to the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. That was the capstone of Trump 1.
Trump 2 has injected violence (primarily in Democratic-led cities) directed against anyone who stands in the way of Trump’s domestic police force. This militaristic campaign led to the killing of a mother, who had just dropped off her 6-year old at school, shamelessly smeared as a “political terrorist” within two hours of her death at the hands of an ICE agent.
January 6 indictment
First, a look back at Trump 1 with the December 31 release of the testimony of Special Counsel Jack Smith before Congressman Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee. [YouTube video; redacted House transcript.] In this brief exchange the committee counsel poses questions(Q) and Smith responds (A):
Q: Now, people with different views than you can say the Special Counsel’s Office is only interested in prosecuting President Trump because an election is coming up and he is — he’s going to be the Republican nominee. And the special counsel works for a Democratic President, the special counsel works for a Democratic Attorney General. And so the special counsel’s laser focus on President Trump is simply to prevent him from, you know, either being the party’s nominee or being a successful party’s nominee — or, at the very least, keeping him off the campaign trail. How do you respond to that?
A: All of that is false, and I’ll say a few things.
The first is the evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit.
The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit.
So in terms of why we would pursue a case against him, I entirely disagree with any characterization that our work was in any way meant to hamper him in the Presidential election.
I would never take orders from a political leader to hamper another person in an election. That’s not who I am. And I think people who know me and my experience over 30 years would find that laughable.
Q: So did you develop evidence that President Trump, you know, was responsible for the violence at the Capitol on January 6th?
A: So our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it and that it was foreseeable to him.
Q: But you don’t have any evidence that he instructed people to crash the Capitol, do you?
A: As I said, our evidence is that he in the weeks leading up to January 6th created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to State legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware in the days leading up to January 6th that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.
Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it. He instead issued a tweet that without question in my mind endangered the life of his own Vice President. And when the violence was going on, he had to be pushed repeatedly by his staff members to do anything to quell it. And then even afterwards he directed co-conspirators to make calls to Members of Congress, people who had were his political allies, to further delay the proceedings.
Lies and gaslighting by government fiat
On the first day of Trump 2, the president issued blanket pardons and commutations for the whole January 6 crew (folks he called “unbelievable patriots”) as reported by AP on January 21, 2025:
President Donald Trump has pardoned, commuted the prison sentences or vowed to dismiss the cases of all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, using his clemency powers on his first day back in office to undo the massive prosecution of the unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.
Trump’s action, just hours after his return to the White House on Monday, paves the way for the release from prison of people found guilty of violent attacks on police, as well as leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of failed plots to keep the Republican in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot, the Trump administration unveiled a website that rewrote history to fit Trump’s lies.
[Donald Trump as portrayed on his revisionist history webpage.]
On the fifth anniversary of the pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol, the Trump administration created a new page on the official White House website that represented the president’s most brazen bid yet to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 riot with false claims aimed at absolving him of responsibility.
The site blames Capitol Police officers, who defended lawmakers that day, for starting the assault; Democrats, who were the rioters’ main targets, for failing to prevent it; and former Vice President Mike Pence, who rejected falsehoods about the 2020 election, for allowing the results to be certified.
On the same day the White House posted the fraudulent narrative, dozens of January 6 rioters marched in Washington with a list of demands, including financial restitution. Said Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, echoing Trump: “Retribution is what we seek.”
Military occupation of Democratic cities
With his infusion of federal agents — masked, equipped with assault rifles and full military gear — into Los Angeles last summer, followed by the federal takeover of the California National Guard and then the arrival of the United States Marines, Trump launched a war on Democratic cities (led by Democrats put into office by citizens who voted overwhelmingly against Trump). The aggressive tactics of these agencies (celebrated in official government social media posts and emphasized in recruiting pitches) and the disdain of constitutional and legal restraints, belie any pretext of evenhanded justice under the law.
Rather, from the beginning it has been clear that the intent has been to provoke a violent response. As I wrote on June 11, 2025:
The Trump White House … craves a violent confrontation, which city and state authorities are doing their best to ward off. Trump’s actions have escalated the situation, rather than calmed things down. Deliberately. That’s not law and order; this is an authoritarian assault directed at political enemies and at constraints on a rogue White House.
Even if Trump doesn’t get the explosion of violence he is egging on, and the fig leaf of a plausible excuse for violent suppression by the military, he has already damaged the Constitution, federalism, state sovereignty, checks and balances, and the rule of law.
The state sanctioned killing in Minneapolis
First of all, what happened? Watch:
The New York Times provided a clear, simple analysis of the video evidence, posted by an NBC senior reporter on Bluesky:
What did Trump and Executive Branch officials say?
First off, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
[Noem responds in Dallas to Minneapolis shooting. Video on YouTube. Transcript at Minnesota Star Tribune.]
“It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was our ICE officers were out on an enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”
Then the president weighed in:
Noem’s statement is at odds with what we see in the video; it is a blatant lie. Donald Trump’s response on Truth Social is a bunch of blatant lies strung together with additional defamatory rhetoric (nor does the video in his post come close to salvaging what he falsely reports).
The president and his DHS secretary are both spreading lies, while slandering an American citizen who opposed Trump’s militaristic crusade targeting immigrants and political opponents and who should not have lost her life for her views (or apparent panic to escape the scene). There is absolutely no reason to believe, based on what we have seen and learned, that her actions posed a threat to any agent or that she intended to cause harm to anyone.
Noem and Trump cannot be trusted. Nor can Vice President JD Vance, who has outdone himself in pushing to the front of the MAGA pack. As David Frum has observed, “More than Donald Trump, more than Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, more than anyone in ICE’s leadership, J. D. Vance has made himself the lead defender of the killing in Minnesota.”
The vice president, who has (in Frum’s words) always had “a strong whiff of cynical calculation and inauthenticity” about him, has found his comfort zone in spewing fabrications. (Recall his tale about Haitian immigrants eating pets. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”)
Dismissing the video evidence and going on the attack, Vance has called Good “a deranged leftist” who tried to run over the ICE agent who shot her, acting as part of a “broader leftwing network,” and he has accused the press of being part of the conspiracy. “There’s an entire network – and, frankly, some of the media are participating in it – that is trying to incite violence against our law enforcement officers.”
[Y]ou people in the media – not everybody in this room, but many people in this room – have been lying about this attack. She was trying to ram this guy with her car. He shot back. He defended himself.
That’s their story and they’re going to stick with it. They also intend to ensure that there will be no credible investigation to establish what actually happened.
The coverup is coming into place
Last week we learned that the U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis had blocked Minnesota officials from evidence collected on the ICE shooting.
“The investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation,” Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said in a statement.
It had been decided that the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension would investigate Good’s shooting death along with the FBI, but that later was changed by the U.S. Attorney’s office, according to Evans.
This is fundamentally contrary to established practice and procedure, as the FBI website explains in an online FAQ:
If a crime is committed that is a violation of local, state, and federal laws, does the FBI “take over” the investigation?
No. State and local law enforcement agencies are not subordinate to the FBI, and the FBI does not supervise or take over their investigations. Instead, the investigative resources of the FBI and state and local agencies are often pooled in a common effort to investigate and solve the cases. In fact, many task forces composed of FBI agents and state and local officers have been formed to locate fugitives and to address serious threats like terrorism and street violence.
A couple of days ago, we learned that the DOJ experts on police shootings would be blocked from investigating the Minneapolis shooting.
“When you put that together with the state authorities being excluded from even access to the evidence — like shell casings, the car — I don’t have any confidence that a use-of-force investigation is actually even happening when it comes to the death of Renée Good,” said Keith Ellison, the Democratic attorney general of Minnesota.
…
President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem have all declared the shooting justified, despite an investigation not being completed and video footage that challenges parts of their narrative.
Use-of-force investigations are handled within DOJ by the Civil Rights Division, which has shed more than half of its 400 attorneys since the Trump 2 takeover a year ago. The decision to exclude the division’s investigators prompted the announcement that at least six attorneys within the division, most of whom were supervisors, are departing.
This was followed by news that six prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota (including the second in command, Joseph H. Thompson) have resigned.
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
That’s right: DOJ intends to investigate the widow of the woman killed by the ICE agent.
A 37-year old woman died. Killed at the hands of law enforcement. The last words we heard her speak, with a gentle smile, were, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” That’s consistent with her friends and family’s description of her as a devoted Christian.
Yet Trump and Vance and Noem and others in the MAGA camp have directed so much hatred her way. They will not countenance a fair-minded investigation into her senseless death. They are resolute in their determination to besmirch her, her family and friends, and every American who shares her opposition to the twisted version of our country that Trump 2 seeks to impose on us.
The corruption of the Trump regime couldn’t be clearer. Such is the country we live in now. Blaming the victim isn’t enough. Trump and his minions have already decreed her guilt in her own killing. Now to broaden the blame to the victim’s widow. And — as we have seen already — to every American who opposes Trump.