Breaking Points

How the the Minneapolis Crackdown Reveals the Fatal Flaw in Trump's Authoritarian Project

ICE agents raiding a woman’s home with a battering ram in Minneapolis to arrest her husband. They did not have a warrant. Souce: AP News

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Trump administration’s assault on truth, focusing on their effort to sanitize and rewrite the memory of January 6 using all the powers at their disposal. The “big lie,” I argued, was the first and greatest of the MAGA movement’s efforts to assert dominance over reality itself and launder their false narrative into the historical record. Trump’s reelection and the subsequent pardoning of the J6 offenders more or less cleared the way for the right’s victory in this field and set a dangerous yet successful precedent: repeated denial of reality can work. Tragedies and scandals that would have obliterated previous presidencies can be overcome if you never, ever admit fault. Attack, attack, attack. Then wait for the opposition, the media environment, and the wider public to simply accept your version of events, if not from genuine belief then from mere exhaustion.

During the very hours I was writing my last piece, an ICE agent shot and killed an American citizen in broad daylight. This isn’t the first time ICE has used lethal violence in our country, nor even the first time they have shot or killed an American citizen. But it was the first time such an action was caught so openly on video, from so many angles. I need not get into the details—I’m sure everyone reading this has seen the video. This was murder.

But of course, the Trump administration won’t admit that. Instead, they’ve stuck to their playbook and clung to the strategies that have worked time and time again. Never admit fault, always stay on the offensive. Within hours of the shooting, Kristi Noem claimed good was “committing an act of domestic terrorism” and Trump wrote that “the woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator.” Within days, the FBI announced it was taking over investigation of the incident from state officials. Today, Todd Blance, the Deputy Attorney General, indicated the government won’t be investigating afterall, essentially squashing the idea of ICE officer Jonathan Ross facing justice.

Post by @atrupar.com — Bluesky

America's Secret Police

The Trump administration has been seeking an excuse to unleash thuggish violence on blue cities for months now. In LA, they hoped they could mobilize the Marines and Army to do it for them. It didn’t work. In Chicago, they tried similar tactics. While there were certainly acts of resistance against ICE in these cities, I’m not sure a wider crackdown by the government in either area would have been feasible: ICE simply lacks the manpower to widely deploy across neighborhoods in such massive cities. Efforts to get the National Guard and military to do it for them got tied up in courts.

Minneapolis is different, however. It’s a much smaller city, with only about 430,000 residents, and enjoys a large Somali-American community, which makes for an easy target for the right’s racist fearmongering. Because our country is governed by idiots addicted to X (formerly Twitter), a viral video by a right-wing YouTuber “investigating” Somali-run daycares in the city rocketed Minneapolis to right-wing algorithms, in no small part thanks to being reposted by Elon Musk himself.

You might have missed all this if you were tuned in to any media outlet grounded in factual reporting. But on X, on Fox News, on the myriad podcasts of the right, things work differently, and bullshit stories and conspiracism now determine our domestic (and increasingly, our foreign) policy. So you sure didn’t miss “Operation Metro Surge,” where the administration announced the deployment of ICE officers to Minnesota, ostensibly to investigate fraud and deport the immigrants robbing American taxpayers. The only issue: the right-wing media had completely overblown the daycare scandal, and the majority of the Somali community in Minnesota are American citizens, having come as refugees in the ‘90s and started families here.

But the algorithms of X and the news segments of Fox demand flashy clips of tactical violence to satisfy their devoted audiences, especially Dear Leader and his inner circle. So ICE simply resorted to attacking neighborhoods en masse, breaking car windows, tackling suspected migrants (often later released), raiding houses (without warrants), and terrorizing daycare centers full of actual children. It was outside one of these daycares that Renee Good was murdered.

ICE’s transformation under Trump into a group of completely unaccountable and murderous servants of the state, granting them a free hand to exercise violence in American cities, made this not only possible but inevitable. The organization’s massive funding increase via the “Big Beautiful Bill” makes it one of the largest police forces in the world. To increase recruitment, they’ve lowered training periods and done away with basic background checks. The organization has actively sought the recruitment of former Proud Boys, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis. They don’t even try to hide this in their recruiting ads, which fetishize the violence they will inflict on undesirables:

Yes, these are all real recruitment adds. Source

So yes, since their first widespread deployment to blue cities, I’ve assumed it was only a matter of time until they publicly killed someone. And again, they already have. Since 2025, they’ve killed at least four people, including two American citizens. At least 32 people have died in ICE custody (that they admit to). But this was the first time they’ve done it so publicly and so obviously recklessly.

Scrambling for a Narrative

I don’t think anyone but the most devout MAGA followers could watch that video and think the officer was justified. I believe your average Republican voter’s knee-jerk reaction to the footage was not that this was an attempted “terrorist attack.” On conservative forums on Reddit, I saw comments in usually bloodthirsty subreddits that were remarkably tame: “let’s wait for all the facts.”

I get it: it’s got to be uncomfortable to be confronted with such damning evidence that contradicts your whole worldview. For decades, the right has justified the need for firearms in the very event that an overbearing federal government brings violence into American communities. Here is a plain case of a federal officer executing a citizen, an unarmed white mother of three, and the government saying he will face no accountability. Awkward. But to admit that you don’t actually have values, that you just want to see your enemies punished and don’t care if that makes you a hypocrite, is very psychologically uncomfortable for a lot of people. To admit you’ve empowered the very forces you’ve claimed to stand against is uncomfortable. Thankfully, the right-wing media ecosystem is designed to insulate their audiences from exactly this style of critical thinking.

I continue to return to Mike Caulfield’s definition on the purpose of misinformation:

“The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

So it’s precisely because the shooting is so obviously unjustifiable that the administration and right-wing media are working overtime to dominate the narrative. They’re not doing this for liberals’ sake, but for the millions of non-devout Trump voters who were probably uncomfortable seeing the footage. And for the average Americans who aren’t tuned in to politics yet whose social media feeds blew up with coverage of the shooting. “Don’t believe your lying eyes. The officer was in danger for his life. Someone has been coordinating this.” This tactic of denial worked for January 6, which was initially condemned across broad spectrums of the right to a degree that would now be unthinkable. Will it work again?

I think not. If anything, this shows how brittle MAGA is, how weak their grasp is. I watched in the following days as the right-wing media ecosystem desperately sought to find any dirt on Good, the classic “she was no angel” strategy most often invoked against Black victims of police violence. But they’ve been struggling because it seems she really was a great person. The best Jesse Watters could do was that she had “pronouns in her bio” and had a “child from a previous marriage.” Gasp! That she was white, a mother, and an American citizen makes this an even tougher sell for their audience.

JD Vance even smugly posted the video the officer took in the moments leading up to the shooting (filmed not with bodycamera, but with the officer’s handheld phone), claiming it proved the officer’s life was “endangered”. The new footage instead shows Good calmly telling the officer "It's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you" before trying to drive away. In the video you can also hear the ICE agent call Good a “fucking bitch” after shooting her three times in the skull. I’m not sure in what universe this is exhonorating.

This also explains why the administration has sought to depict Good’s murder as more than just one reckless incident, but as part of a larger coordinated attack by the “radical left.” JD Vance alleged that Good trying to drive away from the agents proved she was part of a “the far left who has marshaled an entire movement — a lunatic fringe — against our law enforcement officers”. FBI Director Kash Patel asserted “these protests…they don't magically appear. ... Somebody has to pay for the transportation. Somebody has to pay for the signs.”

This is important: the administration is trying to tie any form of resistance to ICE, even non-violent, as part of a coordinated effort. They cannot admit that average Americans are against their brutal invasions into peaceful neighborhoods and abduction of community members. To do so would be to admit that they are waging war against Americans as well as immigrant communities.

Beyond official statements, coverage on Fox and X have moved on from the details of the shooting and toward the anti-ICE protests at large. Again, we see the dual narrative so often invoked in fascist violence: our enemies are simultaneously disgustingly weak and yet all-powerful. Traditionally, propaganda of this nature plays up supporters’ disgust and feelings of superiority while also catering to paranoia and fear, all to justify a greater need for state violence. In Minneapolis, regular citizens opposing ICE are both sniveling liberal cucks who are constantly triggered and also deep-state operatives being “coordinated” and trained by some nefarious, unnamed force such that our brave ICE officers must operate in constant fear for their lives. But even the blind can see the contrast between the peaceful way the protests are being conducted and the brutal methods ICE is employing against average Americans. Try as they might, the right cannot surface footage of menacing radicals attacking agents...because it doesn’t exist. So they settle for stuff like this:

“Angry mob [regular people in a restaurant] caught on camera [filmed themselves] hurling profanity, demands federal agents leave Minnesota Mexican restaurant [they did because they’re scared]”

Too Fast, Too Obvious

In their desperate need for control, this administration can never admit wrongdoing. That’s why the government has, instead of offering up the agent as a scapegoat, doubled down: announcing the deployment of hundreds of more officers to Minnesota and threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act. Because they cannot admit fault, they have to make a stand in Minnesota. And this is where their weakness is so apparent.

The expansion of ICE into American cities was always about giving Trump the ability to unleash political violence on his political enemies. But so long as they direct this violence toward immigrants, they can operate under the justification that they are fulfilling their legal mandate. But when they kill American citizens in the street, and then the administration bends over backward to defend their right to do so, such excuses become untenable for all but the most radical. I do not believe this is sustainable. Just this week, ICE agents have tear-gassed a car, leading to a 6-month old being hostpitalised. ICE—and by extension the administration—is torching its standing in Minnesota and America at large. Poll numbers show that American opinion of ICE has plummeted in the wake of the shooting. The American voter is notoriously fickle, but even a cynic like me cannot deny the reputational damage being done here. Like going so far as to kick the memorial candles where Renee Good was shot:

This is indefensible, yet MAGA will try its damndest nonetheless.

That’s why in moments like these, it’s important to remember that we aren’t being governed by sinister masterminds. We’re being governed by corrupt idiots whose brains are cooked by the very news channels and algorithms that hype them up. Obviously this isn’t a good thing. Like many of you, I fear the transformation of my country into a fascist or authoritarian state. But then I see how they’re doing it. It’s dangerous, yes. Destructive, often. Subtle, never. The administration’s greatest vulnerability is their inability to admit fault, to course-correct, to show any restraint. They have to double down. They have to escalate.

We’re already one year in and ICE is murdering American citizens in broad daylight. This is where the speedrun strategy reveals its fatal flaw. Fascism typically succeeds when it moves slowly enough that each escalation feels like a minor step from the last, when the public can be gradually acclimated to ever-greater horrors. As I wrote in my piece last year, I worried America was slowly wading across the Rubicon, normalizing this authoritarian moment through sheer numbness. “The frog boils slowly” and all that. But this administration, impatient and algorithmically driven, is trying to crank the heat to maximum immediately.

In their echo chambers of sycophants and algorithms, Trump and his circle have convinced themselves that reality is whatever they declare it to be. But reality has a way of asserting itself, especially when it’s a mother’s blood on the pavement outside a daycare. They want desperately for Americans to forget, to ignore, to not care. Some will. More won’t. And their lack of restraint, their constitutional inability to admit fault or show even tactical patience, means they’ll keep overreaching like this. And that, if nothing else, gives me hope. Because the more they overreach, the more people wake up to the danger.