A Killing in Minneapolis. A Gaslighting From the White House.
Minutes after ICE shot her, the Trump administration had already declared Renee Nicole Good a ‘domestic terrorist.’
What a horrible day. Let’s just get into it. Happy Thursday.
The Demonization Machine
by Andrew Egger
Yesterday, in Minneapolis, in broad daylight, on video, and in front of many witnesses, a masked ICE officer shot and killed an American citizen, a woman named Renee Good, behind the wheel of her car. Within minutes, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin was lying about her.
The victim, McLaughlin said, had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” It had been, she said, “an act of domestic terrorism.” The officer who, “fearing for his life,” fired the shots, she said, “saved his own life and that of his fellow officers.”
Shortly after came the videos showing what actually took place. Good had been blocking traffic with her vehicle when ICE officers approached, demanding alternately that she stop blocking the street and that she get out of her car. One pulled her door handle, at which point she attempted to drive away. In doing so, she turned past another agent standing near the front of her vehicle, possibly clipping him—the angle of the various videos makes it difficult to tell—with the corner of her front bumper. Immediately afterward, as she drove past him, that officer fired into the vehicle multiple times—once through the side of her windshield, then multiple times through her open passenger window.1
Some of McLaughlin’s claims were only arguably lies. It is unsettling to have a vehicle accelerate past you; it is possible that the officer who fired the shots had indeed feared for his life.
The rest of McLaughlin’s statement was pure invention. McLaughlin accused Good of deliberately attempting to run down ICE agents, a statement completely at odds with the clear video evidence. (One video shows Good waving at ICE vehicles to drive around her prior to the incident taking place.) Her accusation that Good was guilty of “domestic terrorism” was an unbelievable, outrageous smear—a baldfaced lie about an American citizen killed by her own government, before her body was even cold on the ground.2
At a human level, I sometimes struggle to grasp the behavior of administration mouthpieces like McLaughlin in moments like this.3 How do these people live with themselves? How is it possible that no part of them is ashamed to put on these miserable, utterly immoral performances in the national spotlight? Have they no conscience? Or barring that, no concern for their own reputation? Or, hell, forget the higher faculties altogether—can’t they even manage a superstitious lizard-brain revulsion against slandering the dead?
But there’s no question that the performance has the desired effect. You’d think it might backfire, telling such obvious, outrageous, immediately debunkable lies. But McLaughlin and her ilk have learned how to manipulate the social media environment in which these stories filter down to the American people.
Yes, there’s many different video clips of the killing; yes, it’s going to go mega-viral on social media. But not everyone will see it all at once. It has to spread organically through the networks. And that means you’ve got the opportunity to get to people first. By putting forward an alternate, fictional account of what happened in Minneapolis yesterday—and doing so before the footage from bystanders without preexisting social-media megaphones had a chance to pick up traction—McLaughlin gave the MAGA infotainment machine something important: a unified spin strategy, ready to be deployed at scale and at speed.
Yesterday, you could see the strategy pay off in real time. Mega-influencers like Eric Daugherty and Nick Sortor uncritically parroted McLaughlin’s story to their enormous audiences. Others used her fictions to malign not just those critical of ICE but the news outlets covering the shooting. Like Michael Duncan, of the MAGA-bro podcast Ruthless, who tweeted of the New York Times’ writeup of the incident: “You have to read 7 paragraphs before you find out the woman rammed ICE agents with her car.” The Times had never reported that. It had merely quoted McLaughlin’s false statement in the seventh graph. But the impression was left that the mainstream press was trying to bury inconvenient facts. “This is why no one trusts the media,” replied radio host Steve Guest.
Soon, Trump himself got in on the act, saying in a Truth Social post that Good was “obstructing and resisting” before she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” “Based on the attached clip,” he wrote inanely, “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” (In fact, the video shows the officer who’d just been supposedly “run over” nonchalantly strolling down the street to Good’s wrecked car immediately after he killed her. Nevertheless, Trump doubled down in a New York Times interview: “She ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”)
To people who’d already seen the footage or read eyewitness accounts in the press—people, in other words, who already had the facts—this spin looked desperate and laughable. But thanks to the nature of algorithmic social media, it’s likely that untold millions of people in their audiences hadn’t gotten the facts at all: This spin was their first encounter with the story. From the jump, then, McLaughlin and Co. had succeeded in making the killing not a set of facts open to various interpretations, but an utterly polarized tangle in which none of the relevant facts were agreed on at all.
It may be politically effective, but that doesn’t make it any less ghastly. In moments of highly charged tragedy like this, where someone is dead at the hands of a federal agent, public officials don’t just have obligations to the victim—they have obligations to the entire public to act in good faith to ensure a prompt and fair investigation takes place. Perversely, by instead circling the wagons around the shooter—whose name, we should note, we still don’t know—the White House increases the conditions of chaos and hostility on the ground, making even more such tragedies likelier in the future.
We should have no illusions about what this strategy means. As Trump and Stephen Miller work overtime to pump more ICE agents and more federal law enforcement into American streets, they are taking no great pains to prevent random, unnecessary violence like this. In fact, at least in the abstract, Trump welcomes it, talking with relish about taking the gloves off law enforcement to teach criminals lessons “in the only language they understand.”
Trump wants ICE and the National Guard in your city. He wants them clashing with protestors. And if a protester gets shot, his administration will move at light speed to call the shooter a hero and the victim a domestic terrorist, while his base hoots along in delight.
Say Her Name
by William Kristol
At 9:28 p.m. last night, almost twelve hours after ICE agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Nicole Good, Vice President JD Vance decided to post about it on social media. Vance’s statement is in a way less shocking than the brazen lies of other administration officials that Andrew discusses above. But in its own way, it’s revealing.
Here’s his first post:
I was struck by two points.
First, Vance doesn’t have the courtesy or the courage to name the woman who was killed, though her identity had been officially confirmed many hours before. Rather than speaking of “this woman,” Vance could easily have written, “You can accept that Renee Nicole Good’s death is a tragedy while acknowledging . . .”
But to Vance, Good was just “this woman.” For reasons I can’t really articulate even to myself, it seems important to me that we not let Vance and the rest of the Trump apparatchiks get away with this.
Renee Nicole Good was 37 years old. Her husband had died in 2023. She was the mother of three children. She described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” You can read a bit about her here, here, here, and here. We can and should learn more about Good and her too short life in the days to come. We should not let her be dismissed as “this woman.”
I was also struck by one word in Vance’s second sentence: “Don’t illegally interfere with federal law enforcement operations and try to run over our officers with your car.” The normal formulation of the second half of that sentence would have been, don’t “try to run over federal officers with your car.” No. For Vance, they’re “our officers.” The Trump administration’s officers. Deployed in battle against non-compliant Americans like Renee Nicole Good.
Which leads to Vance’s second post, two minutes later, at 9:30 p.m.:
Vance wants to tell “every” ICE officer that the “entire administration stands behind them.” So apparently Trump, Vance, and all their hirelings stand behind all the masked and unidentified and untrained ICE officers, no matter what any of them might do, no matter how unjustified or indefensible any of their acts.
I’m just one citizen. But I stand with Renee Nicole Good.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Invading Greenland Would be a Disaster… MARK HERTLING joins SAM STEIN to break down the recent Maduro operation in Venezuela, the challenges of coordinating military and political strategy, and what the United States would actually gain from Greenland.
Taking Venezuela’s Oil Isn’t the Win Trump Claims… His muddled arguments don’t account for four big political and economic realities, observes CATHERINE RAMPELL in Receipts.
No, the Maduro Operation Wasn’t a Blow Against China… Beijing’s actions suggest it really didn’t care about Maduro at all, explains MICHAEL MAZZA.
Venezuela’s Post-Maduro Future Is Still Up for Grabs… The alternative to a democratic transition is a calcified autocracy, writes OFELIA RIQUEZES.
Greenland’s Persistent Predator… Trump keeps threatening, no matter how many times his victims ask him to stop. No doesn’t mean no to the kind of creep Trump is, writes WILL SALETAN.
The Internet is Bullying Sam Stein! It’s been a wild start to 2026, and you won’t want to miss this recap from TIM MILLER, SAM STEIN, and WILL SOMMER.
Quick Hits
MONOPOLY MONEY: Yesterday, in a Truth Social post, Donald Trump made an announcement: Upon reflection, he’d decided that the $1 trillion defense budget he’d been planning to seek was too small. Instead, he said, that number should be 50 percent higher: $1.5 trillion. The reason? Well, we’ve got all this tariff money coming in, and it’d be a shame not to spend it. He wrote:
If it weren’t for the tremendous numbers being produced by Tariffs from other Countries . . . I would stay at the $1 Trillion Dollar number, but because of Tariffs, and the tremendous income that they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past (especially just one year ago during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, the Worst President in the History of our Country!), we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number while, at the same time, producing an unparalleled Military Force, and having the ability to, at the same time, pay down Debt, and likewise, pay a substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country!
Boy, there’s a lot to unpack there! Defense stocks jumped on the news, which is funny given that Trump also posted yesterday a random threat that defense contractors wouldn’t be allowed to issue dividends or do stock buybacks until they built “NEW and MODERN Production Plants” to his satisfaction. Guess it’s clear which of those posts investors think Trump will actually follow through on.
But the best bit is the point about the many uses of tariff revenue, which Trump continues to demonstrate he believes are a bottomless well of cash that can be tapped to easily meet all spending needs. Independent estimates suggest Trump’s tariffs brought in somewhere between $260 and $290 billion for the federal government last year—enough to pay for just over half of Trump’s desired $500 billion increase in his military budget proposal. Trump will need to find the other $200 billion or so somewhere else—not to mention the funds to “pay down Debt” and “pay a substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country.”
POWER AND THE USE OF IT: Stephen Miller was livid. A woman from his neighborhood, a retired gender- and peace-studies professor named Barbara Wien, had been protesting outside his house. At one point, Wien pointed at her own eyes, then at Miller’s wife Katie, who was on their porch, the universal gesture for I’m watching you. But Miller took the gesture as a call to violence, one which—as the Atlantic reports in a remarkable new profile—“he uniquely had the power to punish”:
“You want us to live in fear? We will not live in fear,” Miller said days later, in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. He had gone on the program to discuss the federal response to [Charlie] Kirk’s recent assassination, but although he was focused on “domestic terrorists,” he included doxxing on the list of related offenses. For those familiar with the Millers’ personal lives, it sounded less like he was talking about Kirk’s assassin than about Wien, who’d distributed flyers with his address. . . .
But the legitimate powers of the state repeatedly declined to fully cooperate with the Millers’ attempt to turn their own situation into a catalyst for the sort of crackdown they claimed was necessary. The FBI was initially hesitant to take a major role in the investigation of Wien, prompting the Millers to demand its involvement, according to a person briefed on their efforts. A Democratic Virginia state prosecutor became concerned about the federal involvement in a search warrant on Wien, and sought to narrow its scope. A federal magistrate judge refused to approve federal search warrants, according to a report by Axios. . . .
When the investigation against Wien appeared to stall, Miller’s longtime ally Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee chair, announced that he had opened an inquiry into the Democratic prosecutor in Virginia who had sought to narrow the search warrant and raised concerns about federal involvement.
“This is so cool,” Katie Miller said on social media. “Thank you.”
Days later, the prosecutor said that she would not cooperate with Jordan’s inquiry, because the investigation was ongoing and Congress lacked the ability to intervene in a state law-enforcement matter. There were still some powers of the state that Miller did not control.
Cheap Shots
You can watch the footage here, if you like. It is very disturbing, but not graphic—the officer firing into the car is visible, but not the victim.
In fact, McLaughlin’s claims about the incident weren’t the looniest coming out of DHS. Her boss, Secretary Kristi Noem, gave her own account during a media gaggle that bore zero resemblance to the actual events: “What happened was, our ICE officers were out on an enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle.” But as Noem was in Texas at the time, on a cosplay trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, she has a touch more of an excuse.
For me, this is particularly true in McLaughlin’s case, since I knew her a bit in a former role, when I was a campaign reporter and she was comms director for Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign.
The footage also captured a physician's request to tend to the victim, which ICE agents denied.
I was astonished when I woke up today and the killing in Minneapolis was NOT among the top headlines in NYT digital edition. I felt like Rip Van Winkle. Plus, they keep referring to it as a “shooting”. No; it was a killing. It was state-murder.
My hope is fading that this horror could be a turning point.