By Jonathan Chait
Sunday, January 25, 2026
On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared,
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t
lose any voters.” That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical
expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him. Ten years and
one day later, his administration’s agents shot a disarmed man on the street in
full view of the public. Perhaps we should have taken him not only seriously
but also literally.
The dynamic Trump observed is that he had created a bond
with his supporters that no outside facts could break, even something as
blatant as a cold-blooded killing on an American street. And that is the nub of
the crisis into which we have plunged over the past decade. All politicians
spin and distort to some extent, of course. Trump’s innovation was to grasp
that, because the conservative movement had trained its devotees to ignore
mainstream media and rely completely on information supplied by its own loyalists,
his ability to control his supporters’ perceptions effectively had no limit.
And because his supporters would believe anything, he could do anything.
After Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed
Alex Pretti in Minneapolis yesterday, the Trump administration immediately
branded him a “domestic terrorist.” The specific allegation it employed to
support this hyperbolic charge was that, because Pretti was carrying a firearm
while filming and then clashing with agents, he intended to massacre federal
officers. Even if that were true, it still would not remotely justify the fact
that, according to multiple videos of the incident, agents shot Pretti after
they had pinned him to the sidewalk and disarmed him.
Until very recently, conservative rhetoric has valorized
gun ownership as a bulwark against tyrannical government, to the point of
fetishization. Conservatives defended Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero for bringing a
rifle to a chaotic protest in Wisconsin during the summer of 2020, as well as
armed bands of protesters who marched into state capitol buildings during the
COVID lockdowns.
For Trumpists to infer homicidal intent from the exercise
of a right they have fetishized is a Fifth Avenue–level mental reversal. Their
view of the Second Amendment turns out to be no different from their view of
the First: one whose protections apply exclusively to themselves.
The administration’s immediate use of the terrorist
label should be understood not just as a hyperbolic accusation of intent but as
an umbrella term it applies to political opposition generally. “There is a
large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” White House
Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has written. “It is well organized and
funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and
attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to
dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
Miller wrote that message in October. His
definition of terrorism does not require imputing specific motives to
protesters who own a gun or, like Renee Nicole Good, drive a car. He has called
forth state power on a scale that is coming to resemble the piecemeal extension
of martial law. The more abusive the power of the state, the more angry people
will become, which the administration then uses as a pretext to crack down
harder.
The administration’s allies, not all of whom wish to
directly endorse summary executions, have played along with his logic, treating
protesters’ reaction to the crackdown as though it were its cause.
“For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim
Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply
trying to do their jobs,” the National Rifle Association
wrote in a statement yesterday. “Unsurprisingly, these calls to dangerously
interject oneself into legitimate law-enforcement activities have ended in
violence, tragically resulting in injuries and fatalities.”
“The Left is in a cycle of constant
self-radicalization—the resistance to ICE creates the predicate for tragedies
that are used to justify ever-more resistance and the demand for the de-facto
nullification of federal immigration law in Minneapolis,” National Review’s
editor in chief, Rich
Lowry, wrote on X.
In reality, Minnesotans are taking to the streets to warn
passersby of ICE’s actions and to record them because, as multiple reporters
have documented,
federal immigration agents appear to be routinely violating the law. Democratic
Party leaders in the state have urged residents to record activity in order to
produce a record of these acts. That is why Pretti was holding his phone, not
his gun, when he intervened to protect a woman being tear-gassed by CBP agents,
who then killed him.
The phone, not the gun, is the weapon the administration
fears. The phone produces evidence of its agents’ misconduct, which is what the
administration seems determined to destroy. Officials’ insistence that citizens
who record agents are provoking violent retribution is a justification for what
is becoming a very literal war on truth.
If Trump himself, and not just one of his agents,
actually shot somebody on the street, we can guess what would happen. He would
call the victim a terrorist. His allies would say the victim had provoked their
own death and blame Democrats for inciting the violence. A decade ago, Trump
intuited at some level that the end point of his power to command the minds of
his followers would be a killing on the street. What was once seen as a joke
has attained the status of a prophecy.
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