A turning point in Minnesota

You can’t just kill people and then lie about the victims.

Photo by Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The central paradox of our time is that the single most important issue on the table — Donald Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and the conservative movement’s indulgence of those aspirations — is by almost all accounts a political loser.

Even as progressive and moderate Democrats have argued ferociously about almost everything for years, we have come to something of a consensus on that, at least.

When Democrats’ rhetoric has turned toward democracy, it’s often not been from a position of strength, but out of a sense of desperation. Joe Biden’s “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech in September 2022 and Kamala Harris’s closing argument from the Ellipse in October 2024 both came when they were down in the polls and desperate to shore up support. But everyone agreed after the November 2024 elections that, going forward, winning would require a strong focus on affordability, whether that sounded like Zohran Mamdani or like Abigail Spanberger.

But obviously the emotional heart of opposition to Trump is not actually about high nominal prices.

It’s impossible to know what the future will hold, but I think Alex Pretti’s death over the weekend forces the argument in a new way, one that is perhaps more persuasive than what we’ve seen in the past.

Coming hot on the heels of Renee Good’s death, it showed an administration that is committed at its core to reckless, violent, deadly behavior. I don’t want to say that the video footage speaks for itself, because if we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that footage never does. But it appears to be plainly inconsistent with the version of events that top officials described on social media and on official platforms.

In both cases, high-ranking government officials in Washington, D.C., have responded immediately by smearing dead civilians as terrorists and, in Pretti’s case, by lying about the sequence of events.

I think the more sensible brand of conservative, like Rich Lowry here, is frustrated that the Minneapolis activist community has tactically out-dueled ICE and the Border Patrol, and has turned the page from a first-order question of immigration enforcement to a third-order question of Donald Trump’s conduct and fitness for office.

But outsmarting your opponents with disciplined behavior is a move that you are allowed to make in politics. It’s Donald Trump and JD Vance and Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller and others in the administration who have chosen to pursue their dispute with the Minnesota state government in this manner. They chose to respond to protests with escalation. And they chose to respond to acts of official misconduct by committing their own acts of official misconduct.

Trump is burning his fortress of support

Because being literal and informative about public policy is closer to my comparative advantage than doing detailed video analysis, I think it’s worth delving into what Lowry is saying in his tweet above.

The official position of the Trump administration is that they need to conduct untargeted, highly disruptive immigration enforcement in Minnesota because Minnesota policy has local jails declining to comply with ICE detainer requests.

I think the blue states that have policies like this in place know that it’s a pretty dicey stand they’ve taken, and they tend to hide the ball somewhat when discussing their position. What you often hear is that local law enforcement has been directed not to take part in immigration-enforcement operations: not to go off their normal beats to assist federal immigration-enforcement officers, and not to ask people about immigration status when they encounter them.

The case for this, which I fully support, is that you don’t want to discourage anyone in the community from cooperating with criminal investigations or reporting crimes. But I also think that extending that principle to the idea that you cannot hold a person who is already in custody and wait for ICE personnel to pick him up seems like a bridge too far. I’d be equally leery of imposing a strict rule that jails must comply with ICE detainer requests, because life is complicated, resources can be constrained in unusual ways, and it’s completely reasonable for mayors and police chiefs to decide that they may have better things to do with their time on any given day. But blanket prohibition of cooperation is an activist demand that arose in Obama’s second term¹ and was adopted in many blue jurisdictions, often without sufficient consideration.

That being said:

• This does not constitute “de facto nullification of federal immigration law” in any way or on any level. Lowry is wildly overstating his case.

• It’s just also not true that non-cooperation with ICE detainers means that the kind of deliberately provocative deployments Trump has made in blue areas is a forced move for immigration enforcement.

• Minneapolis was clearly singled out for a huge surge of enforcement not because of any specific problem with local immigration enforcement, but because Trump wanted to shine a spotlight on the welfare fraud story.

Which is just to say that what we have here is a political stunt, not an immigration-enforcement operation.

One angle that I think has been a bit underplayed is that a number of senior personnel from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis resigned in the wake of the White House’s blatantly abusive conduct following Renee Good’s death (rather than investigate the circumstances of the killing itself in a fair-minded way, the White House ordered an investigation into Good’s widow). And one of the prosecutors who resigned rather than follow unethical and inappropriate orders was Joseph Thompson, the number two prosecutor in the office and the person who actually uncovered the fraud cases.

Part of Governor Tim Walz’s political struggles pre-Good was that not only were the fraud cases a bad look for him, but Thompson was also pretty clearly hinting that there was worse news to come and that weak state policy played a role in the fraud.

One question that I had about this fraud story was to what extent was Thompson on the level versus to what extent was he a partisan operator looking to score political points. In his favor, he was a real professional prosecutor and not some kind of MAGA weirdo. But he did work on Robert Hur’s special counsel team, like a guy who knows his partisan politics. His decision to resign now raises my personal estimation of him.

It also shows that Trump’s effort to spotlight this backfired spectacularly.

On a substantive level, he and his goon squad had nothing to do with uncovering the fraud and are undermining legitimate law-enforcement efforts by driving everyone with a shred of ethics and professionalism out of public service. And on a political level, we’re now not talking about ICE detainees — we’re talking about whether it’s okay to shoot protesters.

I’m told by those in the know that the footage itself does more to move Trump’s numbers than any kind of abstract message about the footage or about immigration or democracy. The people in the streets filming are doing the Lord’s work; people trying to leverage broad outrage about manifest abuses into specific policy demands are probably not. Immigration continues to be Trump’s strongest issue but it’s heading downward as are his overall numbers.

The internal divide

In the hopes that anyone of a more conservative bent might be reading this, I would really strongly recommend the points made by Representatives Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene about the Second Amendment aspect of this situation.

As a human being, I do understand why Border Patrol personnel being asked to operate 300 miles from the lightly patrolled U.S.-Canada border in northern Minnesota and thousands of miles from the militarized U.S.-Mexico border would react in a panicked way to the presence of an armed man among a hostile crowd.

I also, as a pretty standard-issue progressive on this issue, do not think it is wise of the United States of America to make it generally permissible for law-abiding citizens to road around carrying firearms.

But you absolutely cannot just shoot somebody who was lawfully carrying a handgun. And you double absolutely cannot have the top officials of the American government assert that possession of such a weapon is de facto proof of malign intent. These are core pillars of our society, and specifically core pillars of conservative political thought.

It’s worth emphasizing this not in a teasing “by your logic …” spirit but to underscore how outside the bounds of normal politics the Trump administration has taken us.

I do not agree with anyone who made the decision to vote for Trump in 2024 despite January 6, despite pardoning the perpetrators, and despite his boastful claims that he wanted to be a dictator. But I do understand anyone who tells me that they just have a lot of right-of-center policy preferences and so they chose to vote for the candidate who aligns with their conservative principles, despite his flaws.

The willingness of the Trump / Vance / Noem axis to simply thumb their noses at those conservative principles in pursuit of raw power, though, is something that should deeply concern these voters.

Back in December, we had reporting that Noem was deeply at odds with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan. This is in part personal, with each regarding the other as a showboat, and in part seems to be about Noem’s heavy reliance on Corey Lewandowski.

But there’s also a real question of substance here. Homan and ICE Director Todd Lyons apparently want to use ICE resources to deport as many criminals as possible. That would mean focusing enforcement on the most cooperative jurisdictions, minimizing friction and maximizing the number of deportees who’ve done clearly bad things.

It’s Noem, Lewandowski, and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino who’ve pushed for creating these dramatic scenes. Which I bring up not to paint Homan and Lyons for sainthood, but as a reminder that this really is a choice that Trump made.

He has unleashed chaos, deliberately, by choosing to side with the pro-chaos faction of his administration over the advice offered by more seasoned professionals. Contra Lowry, this is not a question of nullification or left-wing self-radicalization; it’s Trump making a choice. And contra the most sweeping policy demands from the left, it’s not that hard to fix: Send the Border Patrol to the border, send ICE to where their work can be done with minimal friction, and if Republicans want to change state policy, they should try to win elections, not promote civil conflict.

Disciplined civil disobedience works

As has been discussed ad nauseam, if I got to puppet master all of progressive politics, this is not the topic I would have thrown our most daring and committed street activists at. But precisely because I’ve been on the other side of some of those arguments, I did want to conclude by acknowledging that the protesters of Trump’s second term have done an excellent job tactically.

One of the most vile aspects of the new administration is that from the start they’ve been pretty clearly seeking a renewal of the kind of violence and looting that we saw in 2020 with an eye toward using it as an authoritarian pretext.

When Charlie Kirk was murdered and the immediate reaction was to try to start censoring late night television and talk about criminal charges against civil society donors with no relationship to the crime, we got a sense of the template. But from Los Angeles to Chicago and now Minneapolis, the people organizing anti-ICE protests have done extremely well to call attention to themselves without creating those kinds of pretexts.

Absorbing abuses from security forces without retaliating in kind is extraordinarily difficult, but it does seem to be working.

I have no idea what Trump will do next, but I think it’s pretty clear that the prudent thing for him to do would be to pull a TACO, just as he has over Greenland, and declare that this enforcement action has been a huge success and that it’s time to redeploy resources elsewhere. Tell Noem she has to focus on this snowstorm, put Homan and Lyons back in charge of immigration, and move on.

In practice, though, we may not get that because the degradation of American democracy does not generate bond market panic in the same way that insane tariff threats do.

The administration may continue escalating the situation in Minneapolis or it may try to pull out and run the play in a new city — perhaps New York — and hope the activists there are less skillful and disciplined.

Either way, it’s largely out of anyone’s hands but Trump’s.

What’s not out of our hands, though, is to remember the lesson that protesting really does work if you stay organized and disciplined. Not just against the Border Patrol, but in general. To the extent that you find backing boring moderate candidates in red-leaning seats to be a little too tedious to meet the moment, attending and organizing marches and demonstrations really is the thing that can be done between election cycles that has a reasonable record of efficacy.

1. CORRECTION: This originally read “Biden’s second term” which of course did not happen.