The Smear Reflex

By Michael Warren

Friday, January 30, 2026

 

The Trump administration may be learning the hard way that its de facto policy of shooting your mouth off first and asking investigatory questions later is providing diminishing returns. Tricia McLaughlin, the ubiquitous spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, is a case in point.

 

On Wednesday, Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney asked McLaughlin whether the Trump administration is standing by the phrase “domestic terrorist” to describe Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old Minneapolis nurse who was shot to death during an incident last weekend with Customs and Border Protection officers. That was how McLaughlin’s boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, described Pretti’s actions during a Saturday press conference shortly after the shooting. It’s also what White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti that same day in a snippy post on X.

 

It wasn’t just that one phrase. Miller also referred to Pretti as an “assassin” in two posts, one of which was reposted by Vice President J.D. Vance. Gregory Bovino, at the time the commander-at-large of the Border Patrol (and who has since been relieved of that post), said in a press conference hours after the shooting that “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” An official DHS statement from Saturday repeated the same phrase.

 

But a few days later, after multiple video angles of Pretti’s death indicated he had been disarmed and was not an active threat to law enforcement, that initial reaction from so many administration officials seemed woefully out of step with the facts and public opinion—not to mention President Donald Trump himself, who on Tuesday declined to back up his administration officials’ rhetoric.

 

“I haven’t heard that, but certainly he shouldn’t have been carrying a gun,” Trump said when asked whether he agreed with the statements that Pretti was a domestic terrorist and assassin. “But hey, look, bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident.”

 

So in her Wednesday interview, McLaughlin parried the question about whether it was still right to call Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” She blamed “reports from CBP on the ground” and a “chaotic scene” for the initial, and clearly false, statements from her and other administration officials. When Varney pressed her again whether she would use the phrase “domestic terrorist” again, McLaughlin demurred.

 

“I think that we have to really have the investigation be leading the way on this, Stuart, and again, the early statements that were released was based on a chaotic scene on the ground, and we really need to have true, accurate information to come to light, and so again, Homeland Security investigators are leading that with the FBI supporting,” she said.

 

It was the closest anyone in Trump’s administration has ever come to saying what law enforcement and government officials have known for generations: The less you say before all the facts are known, the better. That’s true on practical and moral terms—government officials shouldn’t lie or make claims not backed up by the fullness of evidence, and they have a responsibility to the people they serve to be truthful. But keeping quiet until the full story is known is a self-defense strategy, and it’s also a way to avoid embarrassing top leaders and undermining the public’s trust in those officials when new information undercuts the initial reaction.

 

That’s why it’s standard protocol for all law enforcement agencies to decline to speak about ongoing investigations, even if it is often a convenient excuse for public officials to avoid commenting on controversial incidents. But the Pretti situation is hardly the only recent law enforcement-related controversy in which officials have needed reminders about this basic concept.

 

In May 2020, for instance, the initial statement from Minneapolis police described the death of George Floyd as a “medical incident” occurring after officers had handcuffed him. “Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress,” read the statement. The reality—as video footage from both nearby security cameras, officers’ bodycams, and cellphone footage from eyewitnesses showed—was that Officer Derek Chauvin had kneeled on Floyd’s neck for several minutes before he went unconscious. Floyd was pronounced dead an hour later, and two separate autopsies found that the compression on his neck caused his death, though they differed on the specifics, such as whether Floyd asphyxiated or whether drug intoxication contributed to his death.

 

The initial reaction from police, which made no mention of the continuous pressure on Floyd’s neck that was so evident from the videos swirling around the internet, helped contribute to the outrage online over the police’s treatment of Floyd. The fury prompted citywide and eventually nationwide protests over police brutality against black people.

 

That was nothing compared to the inaccurate and incomplete statements about what happened following the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, from officials as high ranking as Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott and other state and law enforcement officials gave conflicting information in multiple press conferences in the days following the shooting in which 19 children and two adults were killed. Both the governor and the director of the state’s Department of Public Safety, Steven McCraw, claimed a school resource officer had confronted the gunman and engaged in a firefight with him, a story that a McCraw deputy would soon after admit was wrong.

 

“It was reported that a school district police officer confronted the suspect that was making  entry. Not accurate. He walked in unobstructed initially,” said Victor Escalon, a regional director for the public safety department, two days after the shooting. “He was not confronted by anybody. To clear the record on that."

 

Worse, however, was Abbott’s initial praise for law enforcement’s overall response to the shooting. “The reality is, as horrible as what happened was, it could have been worse. The reason it wasn't worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do,” he said in a press conference hours after the shooting. “They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.”

 

Amazing courage? As more information came to light, it became clear the officers initially on the scene showed no such thing. Law enforcement had acted neither quickly nor properly to deal with an active shooter, remaining outside of a classroom for minutes while the shooter continued to kill victims. Two days after the shooting, at another press conference, an angry Abbott blamed a law enforcement briefing for the bad information. “I am livid about what happened,” he said.

 

These sorts of misstatements and incomplete accounts are embarrassing, frustrating, and detrimental to public trust. But what makes the Trump administration’s own premature responses to last week’s shooting in Minneapolis so particularly galling is the brazen dishonesty. Officials like Noem and Miller made their false assessments about Alex Pretti not with bad information or poor judgment of initial facts but as part of an irresponsible public-relations effort to shape the narrative.

 

These public figures, who wield the power and authority of the federal government, asserted facts about Pretti’s motive and intent they could not have possibly known at the time they spoke out. In fact, nearly 24 hours after Pretti’s shooting and long after multiple eyewitnesses published videos from different angles showing Pretti had been merely holding a cell phone and helping up a woman pushed down by federal agents, FBI Director Kash Patel was still suggesting, on national TV, that Pretti had “attacked” law enforcement.

 

The walkback from the administration since—the removal of Greg Bovino from Minneapolis, the detente with state and local officials in Minnesota, the anonymous finger-pointing in the press—is a tacit acknowledgment that this was a screw-up. But will anyone in the Trump administration learn the lesson?