Trump’s menacingly dishonest response to the Minnesota ICE shooting

Renee Nicole Good sat idling in her car Wednesday, observing an ongoing ICE operation. The 37-year-old then attempted to drive away. In response, another ICE officer shot her to death.

It is possible that we still lack some significant context for Good’s killing. But her final moments were recorded by multiple bystanders. And the footage shows that her tires were pointing away from the agent who shot her — and that her vehicle did not run over any part of his body. By all appearances, she posed no significant physical threat to the officer, let alone a mortal one. Yet her life is now over and her 6-year-old child is an orphan.

In the face of these facts, one might have expected the White House to proceed cautiously. After all, the immediate evidence indicated that — at the very least — a needless killing may have occurred. It is in the interest of Trump’s progressive opponents to suggest that senseless violence against American citizens is a natural extension of the president’s immigration policies — such that defending the latter necessarily entails excusing the former. But it’s hard to see how Trump would benefit from promoting that view.

And yet he did.

Hours after Good’s life was extinguished, the president took to social media to deride her as “a professional agitator” who had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”

“Based on the attached clip,” Trump continued, “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

No aspect of this statement is supported by the available evidence. But its last claim is menacing for the flagrance of its dishonesty. Anyone who has watched a video of Good’s death knows that her killer was still standing after she perished. The footage shows him reholstering his gun and, eventually, driving away. Even those who claim to see Good driving at the officer recognize that he did not sustain life-threatening wounds. Trump’s statement is therefore not just a lie but an expression of contempt for the truth. The president is telling us that he is indifferent to what actually happened to Good, and is willing to say anything to aid her killer’s cause.

Even more alarmingly, the administration is allegedly translating these sentiments into official policy: A top Minnesota law enforcement official said Thursday federal officials were denying the state’s investigators access to evidence pertaining to the shooting.

All this is both appalling and frightening. If ICE agents know that they can kill US citizens on video — and still count on the president to lie in support of their freedom — Americans’ most basic liberties will be imperiled.

Trump’s response is also politically mindless. The administration could have declined to take a position on the killing until all facts were known. It could have left itself the option of declaring Good’s killer one bad apple, whose recklessness undermined ICE’s fundamental mission: to keep Americans safe.

Instead, it has chosen to identify its broader ideological project with contempt for the lives of any Americans who gets in its way.

Trump has not always been quite so brazen. It is striking to reread his remarks in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020. Days after a Minnesota police officer kneeled on Floyd’s neck, Trump declared, “All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd. My administration is fully committed that, for George and his family, justice will be served. He will not have died in vain.”

Back then, the president felt compelled to suggest that his vision of “law and order” did not entail impunity for armed agents of the state.

Now, he feels no such obligation.

Perhaps, this is because he knows that he cannot constitutionally run for president ever again; or because he wants federal agents to know that they can commit violence against his adversaries with impunity; or merely because he is an extremely online conservative who lacked the impulse control required to avoid taking sides in the latest culture-war controversy.

Regardless, the president evidently feels he has little to lose by refusing to treat his government’s killing of a young American mother as a subject worthy of solemnity, honesty, or scrutiny. In doing so, he has demonstrated that ICE’s abuses of power stem not from a few “bad apples,” but from an increasingly rotten tree.

Update, January 9, 5:30 pm: This story was originally published on January 8 and has been updated after more footage emerged.