{"id":1305,"date":"2026-01-07T23:28:51","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T04:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/?p=1305"},"modified":"2026-01-07T23:45:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T04:45:15","slug":"the-killing-in-minnesota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/the-killing-in-minnesota\/","title":{"rendered":"The killing in Minnesota"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They will lie about you and then kill you<\/a> and they will kill you and then lie about you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I don\u2019t mean some ambiguous, imaginary \u201cthey\u201d like the one the right invented and blamed for trying to kill President Donald Trump. I mean an actual they, a they that includes federal officials and federal law enforcement and Donald Trump himself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday was obviously preventable. Confronted by federal law enforcement officers on a snowy street, video recorded from the scene<\/a> shows Good attempting to maneuver between a stopped car and an agent standing near her front bumper rather than face arrest. As the car moved forward, brushing the agent to the side, he drew his weapon and shot her. Good was killed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem offered very different descriptions of Good\u2019s actions. Noem called her a domestic terrorist and suggested that she\u2019d targeted federal officers with her car. Official statements from DHS echoed these claims. Trump shared distant footage<\/a> of the incident on the social media platform he owns, describing with words a scenario very different than what anyone watching videos from the shooting would have seen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Describing Good as part of a \u201cRadical Left Movement of Violence and Hate\u201d \u2014 she was a poet \u2014 the president claimed that she had \u201cviolently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.\u201d Based on the clip, he claimed, it was hard to believe the agent survived. Other footage, though, shows him walking to Good\u2019s car and back to other federal vehicles before being driven from the scene.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s striking about the administration\u2019s response isn\u2019t simply that it\u2019s dishonest. A year into Trump\u2019s second term and a year into this era of unshackled immigration officers, we should only be surprised if their initial presentations hold up under scrutiny. Instead, what\u2019s remarkable about the immediate responses is that they include no statements of regret or sympathy. Hours after a federal agent shot and killed a young mother, the government couldn\u2019t even be bothered to extend its condolences. This wouldn\u2019t have made the effort to impugn Good\u2019s life and actions any better, certainly, but it would at least indicate some sense of humanity. It would suggest that even critics of the administration live lives worth preserving and appreciating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This administration has no interest in offering that impression. Good, by virtue of being in a position of friction with federal agents, became an Other. And Others are not people for the administration and its allies to mourn. They are people to disparage and mock and accuse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The grand theory behind American democracy is that our elected officials hold power with the consent of the governed. This has led past presidents to seek to demonstrate their commitment to even-handedness, to treat those who voted for them and those who voted against them equally, as Americans. There\u2019s an aspect of self-preservation to doing so: the president or his party might need those voters\u201d support in the future. Usually, though, this approach was rooted in the idea that the presidency really was a position centered on the public as a whole. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not how Trump governs. He tends to and cares about only his base, and only as long as his base is enthusiastic about him. He is not an American president but a MAGA president, someone who leads red states with magnanimity and leads blue states like the head of an occupying force. There\u2019s no effort to build consent among his opponents. There is only an effort to redouble his support among his supporters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So he and his team and his allies lie. They take the tragic death of a woman who\u2019d just dropped her 6 year-old off at school and turn it into an obviously false narrative about heroic federal agents fending off a deranged left-wing lunatic. And rest assured that they will continue to do so if need be, just as they decided that Kilmar Abrego Garcia\u2019s life needed to be destroyed because they\u2019d embarrassingly screwed up and deported him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration empowered a federal officer to shoot a woman from close range, reportedly in the head, and then blamed the woman for her own death. They posthumously determined her to be an enemy of the state because they need her to be one in order to keep their supporters from questioning how Trump uses his power. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They will lie about anything else they feel the need to lie about, too, and for the same reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: A vigil in Minneapolis, Jan. 7, 2026. (Chad Davis\/Flickr)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They will lie about you and then kill you and they will kill you and then lie about you.  And I don\u2019t mean some ambiguous, imaginary \u201cthey\u201d like the one the right invented and blamed for trying to kill President Donald Trump. I mean an actual they, a they that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1305"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1311,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions\/1311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}