Monday, January 12, 2026
Do you know what might have saved Renee Good’s life? A
necktie.
Bear with me.
Good’s death was the result of a lack of professionalism
on the part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Whatever silly
shenanigans Good may have been up to before the shooting, the video of the
incident makes it clear that it was the federal agents, not Good, who escalated
the situation to the point at which it became dangerous. Good may have been
guilty of a traffic violation or two, possibly even a misdemeanor, but she did
not set about trying to ram ICE agents, in spite of the obvious lies told by
Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in the case.
What did happen: ICE agents approached Good’s car
bellowing obscenities and giving her contradictory orders, one telling her to
clear the street and the other demanding she “get out of the f-----g car,” with
one of them calling her a “f-----g bitch” after she had been shot in the
head. Good seems to have been complying with one of those demands and not
the other, for reasons that are not difficult to imagine. The contradictory
demands and the obscenities are prima facie evidence of a lack of ordinary
professionalism on the part of the ICE agents, which comes as no surprise: ICE
has abandoned any pretense of high standards when it comes to recruiting,
its most recent classes of officers having been recruiting from the bottom of
the same barrel from which we extract Transportation Security Administration creeps and thieves and corrupt
Customs and Border Protection agents.
The ridiculous mall-commando get-ups in which ICE agents
are costumed are an affront to republican manners: The masks—which should be
forbidden, categorically, to all American law enforcement—symbolically violate
the fundamental promise of public accountability for public servants. The
tactical vests and plate carriers and helmets and the rest of that imbecilic
fantasy dress-up gear is almost always inappropriate, and it is comical in
light of the fact that this particular ICE squad apparently did not have the
tactical acumen to deal with the challenging environment of an ordinary
Midwestern city in a relatively mild January and kept getting their vehicles
stuck in the snow—but I suppose snow is not what one is planning for when one
is dressed for Fallujah.
Allow me to address the ladies and gentlemen at ICE in
what apparently is their mother tongue: Take off the masks and put on a f-----g
tie.
I’ll say this much for Donald Trump: He may be badly
dressed—it is amazing that he can make a Brioni suit look so cheap—but
he almost always is badly dressed like a badly dressed adult. Also
typically dressed as a responsible adult: the American police officer in his
traditional uniform.
That is worth thinking on.
New York City, to take an example, is not an easy place
to police. It wasn’t easy to police during Prohibition, either. And do you know
what was a standard part of the NYPD uniform then and now?
A tie. Yes, NYPD does have its silly goon squads dressed up as though
somebody had just visited an army surplus store with the taxpayers’ AmEx after
watching Red Dawn 47 times in a row, but the standard police gear
includes a tie. In the case of NYPD, it is a clip-on tie for most officers, not
because they are too lazy to master the four-in-hand knot but because these
will come off easily if an assailant grabs one during an altercation. That
demonstrates, among other things, that it is possible for the agents of an
armed law enforcement agency to be realistic about their physical challenges
while also dressing like adults—and dressing appropriately for their public role.
This stuff does get comical. I recall police responding
to a domestic disturbance in my hometown of Lubbock, Texas, with a tactical
team in an armored vehicle, the men dressed up in woodland camouflage—in a town
about 500 miles from any woodland, a place where it is unusual to see more than
four trees within 50 feet of one another. They should have been dressed up as
tumbleweeds or F-250 King Ranch editions or the front of a Whataburger. But they do love their cosplay.
There are reams and reams of psychological studies
confirming that how we are dressed has an effect, sometimes subtle and
sometimes profound, on how we think and behave. We tell our law enforcement
agents that they are “at war,” that they are part of a “war on drugs” or a “war
on crime” or whatever, and incompetent hacks such as Kristi Noem—whose own
weird and pathetic dress-up fetish has been much remarked-upon—tell
them lies about how the people with whom they are interacting are “domestic
terrorists” or agents of a possibly fictitious global cartel. And then we dress
them up like the world’s most slovenly stormtroopers.
And then we are surprised when they act like the world’s
most slovenly stormtroopers.
The jackass who shot and killed Renee Good has gotten
himself into similar situations before, for instance having to get stitched up
after trying to reenact a
T.J. Hooker scene on a moving car and getting
dragged 100 yards. Noem et al. cite that episode as evidence that the agent
must have been legitimately in fear of his life—but it is evidence that what he
is, in fact, is bad at his job. There are a dozen ways police intercept moving
vehicles, and none of them involves being halfway in and halfway out and then
going for an involuntary ride. Likewise, there are a dozen ways for a
professional law enforcement agent to deal with a vehicle blocking a public
street, and none of them involves screaming obscenities at the driver or giving
her contradictory orders. That the ICE agents on the scene do not seem to have
been able to agree among themselves what should be done about the lurking
menace of ... an unarmed woman in a Honda who was poking fun at them ...
suggests very strongly a lack of credible command on the scene.
About those masks: I understand that there are people out
there who do not like ICE agents very much. Do you know who else a lot of
people don’t like? Journalists. I get threats—including death
threats—pretty frequently. Lots of my friends and colleagues get more (and
weirder) threats than I do. If an ICE agent is too afraid to do his job without
a mask, then he should look for a different job doing something safer. Buc-ee’s
is always hiring, though some of these ICE goons would have a hard time getting
hired there, I expect. Buc-ee’s
has standards.
We need to knock off the paramilitary crap when it comes
to law enforcement—not only for aesthetic reasons but for political and moral
reasons. Dress a guy up like a cowboy and he’ll start acting like he’s in Yellowstone.
Dress a public servant up like he’s at war rather than at work and war is what
you’re going to get.
And Furthermore ...
It is a cliché to note that many bullies are cowards at
heart, but the cliché is a cliché for a reason—it is true. It is true of the
ICE agent who shot Renee Good, true of Kristi Noem, true of J.D. Vance, and
true of Donald Trump. And one of the things that bouquet of schmucks has in
common is reflexive dishonesty when threatened with being made to take
responsibility for their actions.
Trump, Vance, and Noem and their minions simply lied—just
flat-out lied—about the ICE agent having been run over by Good’s Honda, and
they lied about Good being, ridiculous as it is even to repeat the words, a
“domestic terrorist” and a “rioter.” Good might very well have broken the law
in blocking the street and working to discomfit the ICE agents ... doing ... whatever they supposedly were
doing ... in Minneapolis. She certainly seems to have been familiar with the
agents, and if they had wanted to see her charged with an offense—possibly a
traffic violation, possibly even a misdemeanor—for blocking the road, they had
her license plate and face and all the evidence they would need to let the
local police come in and do their job. (ICE agents are not regular police
officers and are not authorized to make routine traffic stops—they are
authorized to make immigration stops, including stopping vehicles when
they have a “reasonable suspicion” that there is a person on board who is
illegally present in the United States.) This isn’t one of those colorable
disagreements—the story that Trump, Vance, Noem, et al. are trying to tell—that
Good was a rioter and terrorist who was trying to run down ICE agents—is a lie.
A dumb, easily disproved lie.
But Donald Trump has built a movement on dumb, easily
disproved lies.
Trump is confident that the men under his command can
kill Americans at will, provided those Americans are, as Good was, easily
identified as political and cultural enemies: Good was a woman married to
another woman and (evidently) politically left-wing, tooling around in a
Honda—I suppose if it had been a Subaru, then ICE would have used an RPG. This is the domestic version of what’s been
playing out in Venezuela and in the Caribbean: Trump is confident that the men
under his command can simply massacre people at will, provided those people are
from the darker-skinned and Spanish-speaking part of the world. Trump can offer
preposterous lies to justify this killing, insisting that it is somehow related
to fentanyl overdoses (Venezuela produces no known fentanyl) or possibly to
cocaine smuggling (Venezuela is at most a minor entrepôt for U.S.-bound
cocaine) or ... something! It is worth keeping in mind that in the
lead-up to the attempted coup d’état of January 2021, Trump’s people
retailed even more ridiculous stories about Venezuelan hackers messing with
U.S. election results. (Possibly in cahoots with the North Koreans or Bigfoot
or Elvis.) Trump understands something about his base: They enjoy being lied
to.
As has been made plain by Stephen Miller, the mayonnaise-addicted Walter Mitty of Oswald Spenglers, the Trump movement is
simultaneously a personality cult and a power-worship cult, imagining, as
Miller puts it, a universe “that is governed by strength, that is governed by
force, that is governed by power.” This is, of course, in direct contravention
to the American creed, which holds that a certain universal endowment by the
Creator necessitates limits on even the power of a king—to say nothing of
limiting the arrogations of a temporary officer elected to a four-year term as
chief administrator of one branch of one level of government in a federal
republic.
There is, manifestly, a rhetorical shift under way in
Trump’s circle of sycophants: For years, they all talked
like they’d just watched Glengarry Glen Ross for the 57th time (the movie, of course—theater is for girly men), but now they
talk like sophomores on their third day of Philosophy 101, having read the
SparkNotes version of Beyond Good and Evil. Of course, they’ll retreat
into legalism as soon as you punch one of them in the nose, but that is, again,
typical cowardly behavior. Stephen Miller is not one of those “magnificent
blond beasts of prey” that tickled Nietszche’s fancy—he’s a dork from Santa
Monica in the employ of a jumped-up game-show host who spent half his life in
bankruptcy court. These guys are big believers in rules and norms and that kind
of thing—when they provide a convenient skirt to hide behind.
Knights of chivalry they are not—but gunning down unarmed
women or blowing defenseless boats out of the water is right up their alley.
Economics for English
Majors
When the Trump administration decided that Washington was
going to “run” Venezuela “infinitely”
(I suspect and hope the secretary of energy meant indefinitely), its
addled excuse for a brain trust apparently believed that U.S.-based oil majors
were ready to dive in head first and start doing deals. There is one big
problem with trying to lure U.S. oil companies with a lot of cheap Venezuelan
oil: They don’t really want a lot of cheap Venezuelan oil. U.S. oil production
hit a record
high in 2025, while oil prices are relatively low and have
been trending lower. Of course, it is the case that different producers are
in different positions and have different outlooks, but it is not as though the
ladies and gentlemen of the U.S. oil industry have been running around
Washington complaining that oil prices are too high or that there is too little
of the stuff being produced. Quite the opposite has been the case, in fact: Big
Oil spent the Christmas season complaining about overproduction.
I myself am on the buying end of the petroleum business rather than the selling
end—my Toyota has three hungry cylinders demanding to be fed!—and so, from that
point of view, more production and lower prices are, as the economists put it,
absolutely okey-dokey. For the guys putting holes in the ground, it’s a
different story.
In a world of high-frequency traders and crypto
insta-gazillionaires and such, the oil business—meaning the business of
actually drilling wells and producing crude—moves at a glacial pace, because it
is based on acquiring and holding land. It is an expensive and risky business
to get into, which is one of the reasons the upsides for successful investments
are so lucrative. Donald Trump apparently means to leave the socialists in
power in Venezuela, which means leaving in place the corrupt cronyism that has undone
the Venezuelan economy and merely amending that corruption and cronyism in such
a way as to benefit friends of Donald Trump.
Ask yourself: How many billions of dollars of your own
money would you put at risk in a country with no real property rights or rule
of law based on the business acumen of a serially bankrupt retired game show
host who (probably!) is going to be departing the scene no later than January
2029? How many billions of your own money would you tie up in that country for
10 or 20 years? In what circumstance do you imagine that would be the most
attractive investment opportunity for the kind of large and sophisticated
energy firms that could actually bring Venezuela back online in a big way?
I know these guys like to roll the dice, but oil
investors understand, probably better than almost any other transnational
business interest, how easily and quickly political winds can shift. I do not
like to make a lot of predictions, but it seems reasonable to me that it is
going to be slow going—very slow going—for American oil companies in Venezuela.
Words About Words
To discomfit someone is to defeat them, to thwart
their plans or, by extension, to reduce them to a state of confused
embarrassment. It is a cousin of nonplussed, which describes someone
surprised and confused to such an extent that they are unable to react or
unsure how to proceed. For reasons that probably have to do with that non-
in the first part of the word, nonplussed has come to be used in the
opposite of its correct sense, to mean undisturbed or unimpressed.
Resist the barbarism!
In Other Wordiness
I was very pleased to be included in Frank Bruni’s “Best
Sentences of 2025” in the New York Times. The times being what they
are, it is good to be able to hand down a sentence from which there is no
possible presidential pardon.
And Furtherermore ...
“The election of Maduro was a disgrace,” says President
Donald Trump, “just like my election was a disgrace.” It is rare that I find
myself in agreement with the president. But perhaps he didn’t mean to say it
exactly the way he did.
In Closing
The return of “might makes right” thinking as a
predominating current in American policy is based on an error: The ascendency
of the United States in the immediate postwar era was much more a matter of
“right makes might” than the opposite. The United States chose the right
policies—widening and deepening its practice of liberal democracy, free
enterprise and free trade, and investment in the needful instruments of
military and economic power—because the American people were working from the
right set of values, which you can find spelled out in the Declaration of
Independence and other founding-era documents.
The United States left the Soviet Union, its main
competitor, on the “ash heap of history” not because the United States was a
domineering, self-serving rogue out on some geopolitical version of a
Nietzschean vision quest but because the United States chose the things that
led to prosperity and led the building of the international institutions that
comported with those prosperity-fortifying values. In the post-Cold War era,
the United States radically outperformed the advanced economies of Europe not because
we were running some kind of mafia protection racket on the Swedes and the
Portuguese but because the United States was the place where all the world’s
most creative capital and people wanted to be. Never mind the moral rot at the
heart of today’s right-wing populist radicalism—appreciate, if you can, its
absolute ignorance: U.S.
GDP per capita is half again as much as that of Germany, the economic
leader of those European countries that supposedly have been getting over on
the United States for 50 years. More broadly, U.S. GDP per capita is twice
the average of the European Union. It is also twice (in real terms,
meaning adjusted for inflation) what it was in the 1980s. That is a funny kind
of decline that sure looks a lot like the opposite of decline.
The notion that the United States would be more
prosperous if its leaders acted a little bit more like those of Russia or China
or Turkey or some other second-rate country is pure nonsense. But it is the
regnant article of faith in Washington today.
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