The Opposition Is Winning in Minneapolis
The killing of Alex Pretti has forced the White House to retreat.
As the Department of Homeland Security pulls back a bit in Minneapolis, a federal judge is soon to decide whether “Operation Metro Surge” was ever lawful at all. U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez heard Minnesota’s request for a temporary restraining order against the government yesterday, giving the administration until tomorrow evening to respond to its claims that the “immigration enforcement” operation was in fact an attempt to strong-arm the state and the Twin Cities into adopting policies the White House likes. Happy Tuesday.1
The White House Wasn’t Ready for Alex Pretti
by Andrew Egger
This White House has a playbook for scandal: Always double down, never apologize, and above all attack, attack, attack. So it was nothing less than shocking yesterday when the administration—after two days of utterly shameless lies about the killing of Alex Pretti—slammed on the brakes in an attempt to pivot to a more normie-palatable narrative.
Out, suddenly, were statements like Stephen Miller’s, who called Pretti “a domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” or Kristi Noem’s, who called it a “fact” that Pretti had “committed an act of domestic terrorism.” No longer, apparently, was it the Department of Homeland Security’s position, as the official DHS account tweeted Saturday and Border Patrol mook Greg Bovino later repeated, that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt conspicuously declined yesterday to defend any of these obscene statements. Instead, she reached for a pair of new, less noxious lies: that President Trump was mourning Pretti’s death as a tragedy, and that DHS would conduct a full and fair investigation.
“Nobody here at the White House, including the president of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed,” Leavitt said, adding that “we mourn for the parents—as a mother myself, of course, I cannot imagine the loss of life, especially losing one’s child.”
Trump has said nothing that could be construed as “mourning.” His sole commentary on the shooting was to tweet out a picture of Pretti’s pistol, which he described as “loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go,” before pivoting back to his usual pack of grievances against Minnesota.
But lies or not, Leavitt’s remarks signaled more than just a change in tone. After weeks of treating every new instance of federal violence in Minneapolis as a signal to push the gas pedal down harder, the White House is suddenly easing up. Bovino is reportedly out, relieved of both his command and access to his X account. White House border czar Tom Homan—whom Noem had marginalized in part because he wanted a lower-friction enforcement strategy focused on cooperative jurisdictions and actual criminals—is headed to Minnesota to take the reins.
It seems impossible to state this strongly enough: Pretti left his house on Saturday to do what he could to push back on the federal occupation of his city. Then they gunned him down in the street. It felt like a demonstration of maximum state hubris—that the government’s masked and jackbooted thugs could do what they liked to Pretti or anybody else. But just three days later, the thugs aren’t winning. Pretti is.
For now, at least. All victories against this administration are temporary. It is still headed by a raging, vengeful narcissist and stuffed to bursting with nihilistic shitheels; it’s safe to say they’ll find creative new ways to punish the American people for their own complexes and insecurities before long. But all anyone can do at moments like this is push back, and push back, and push back again.
Lots of people are doing just that. Some are more effective than others. We try here, in our own way, to push back—spotlighting this White House’s crimes and lies, cutting through the thicket of misinformation and manipulation that Trump and his cronies plant everywhere. But it wasn’t reasoned argument that put the regime back on its heels in Minneapolis. The regime knows how to deal with that: Shout louder, drown us out, “flood the zone with shit.”
Some others in Minneapolis are pushing back with destabilizing tactics of their own, tipping over from protest into the frenzy of the mob. Last night, for the second straight night, we saw protesters mob a hotel where they believed federal agents to be staying. This sort of protest doubtless feels good; it’s intoxicating for people terrorized by state power to feel like they’re dishing some unease back. But the regime knows how to deal with that too. They want Americans to see this as a clash between state-imposed order and protester-induced chaos. Encouraging such clashes is part of the strategy.
What they plainly don’t know how to deal with is folks like Pretti, who died in a Minneapolis street, not because he hated ICE, but because he loved his country. He didn’t attack an officer; he put his body between an officer and a woman that officer was attacking.2 It didn’t take long before the White House, for all its power, realized nobody was believing the lies it was trying to tell about him, and was forced to respond to the political pressures created by his death.
The state tried to devour Alex Pretti, and choked on him.
Is ultimate victory over Trumpism possible? Or will it be a constant battle for the rest of history to keep the impulses behind MAGA at bay? Tell us what you think.
Bovino Is Only a Beginning
by William Kristol
It’s good to see Border Control majordomo Greg Bovino’s humiliating forced exit from Minneapolis. But his departure is only one small step for decency and legality. The Border Patrol, in which he was the ludicrously named but murderously malevolent “commander at large,” needs to follow him out of the door. So does Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Removing a fascist talking head from Minnesota is a start. But the shock troops enforcing Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s and Stephen Miller’s fascistic vision on the city streets need to go.
“ICE out” (really ICE and the Border Patrol out) has always been the core demand of the people of Minneapolis. It was the demand of the demonstrators that included Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Indeed, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey reiterated last night after speaking with President Trump that Minneapolis’s “main ask is that Operation Metro Surge needs to end.”
This needs to be the main ask of the Democrats in Congress: ICE and Border Patrol out of Minnesota. And also no more “operation metro surges” anywhere else. No more street operations conducted by violent, lawless, masked government agents with no names on their uniforms and no constraints on their behavior. Democrats should demand an end to this not just in Minnesota but across the nation.
The current position of congressional Republicans is that Congress should appropriate funds for the executive branch, including the Department of Homeland Security, with no expectation or assurance of any change in the policies, practices, or behavior of the Border Patrol and ICE. Democrats should emphasize Republicans’ complicity in everything the Border Patrol and ICE have done—and congressional Republicans’ unwillingness to change anything the Border Patrol and ICE are doing.
So Senate Democrats and the broader democratic opposition need to hold firm. If there are signs of administration nervousness at the collapse of popular support for the mass deportation regime that is so central to their authoritarian agenda, increase the pressure.
One last point: Everyone in the democratic opposition needs to be clear about who deserves credit for what may be at least the beginning of a turning point in the fight against authoritarianism: the people of Minnesota. At a time of elite cowardice and little national leadership, the spontaneous actions of brave men and women in the Twin Cities have made a difference. All of us in Washington can “strategize” and sermonize. But it is the people of Minnesota who have reminded us what, in the defense of liberty, free men and women can do.
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AROUND THE BULWARK
Saving History for the Future at Auschwitz-Birkenau… CATHERINE HERVEY offers a look at how the memorial and museum plans to continue its mission of preservation after the last Holocaust survivors pass away.
Trying to Live on the USDA’s $3 Diet… The Trump White House says Americans can eat healthy meals for about $3 a serving. To test that claim, JARED POLAND tried living on the administration’s guidance for three days. He also speaks with COLLEEN HEFLIN, who studies food and nutrition policy and social welfare policy at Syracuse.
Loneliness is Reshaping America… DAVID BROOKS joins MONA CHAREN to talk about why so many Americans feel unseen, how loneliness and moral drift are reshaping society, and what we lose when human connection is replaced by screens, algorithms, and artificial companionship.
Candace Owens Has a Serious New Legal Headache… There might be consequences to accusing people of abetting murder . . . maybe, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag..
Trump’s Health Claims Are Getting Embarrassing… TIM MILLER is joined by New York magazine Washington correspondent BEN TERRIS to talk about his reporting on Trump’s health and the increasingly surreal way the White House talks about it.
Quick Hits
ROUNDING UP REFUGEES: The White House may suddenly be trying to to give its mass-deportation program a kinder, gentler image. But its policies remain horrifying beyond belief. The New York Times reports on a campaign of terror currently being visited on legal, vetted refugees living in America:
Selamawit Mehari, an Eritrean single mother of three, was starting her day when federal agents showed up at her apartment in St. Paul, Minn., on a recent morning. As her 13-year-old son wailed and her older daughter produced paperwork proving her mother was in the United States lawfully, the agents shackled Ms. Mehari and took her away.
“They didn’t explain anything,” recalled her daughter, Yosan, 21, who described the encounter to The New York Times. “We didn’t understand. We had done everything right.”
The next day, chained at the wrists, waist and ankles, Ms. Mehari, 38, was shuffling up the steps of a plane bound for Texas, tears streaming down her face in the frigid wind.
More than 100 refugees with no criminal record from about a dozen countries have been arrested in Minnesota by immigration agents in recent weeks and flown to detention centers in Texas for interviews, according to lawyers, family members and faith leaders. At least some, including Ms. Mehari, were eventually released in Texas, leaving them to find their own way home.
GO GET THAT SOMALI, PAM: It’s a rule of the road for Donald Trump: If you’re tactically retreating in one area, you’d better make sure you make it look and sound like you’re advancing somewhere else. Just as Trump may be forcing the Border Patrol to take some pressure off Minneapolis, he’s attacking Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar with extra venom.
Trump has never exactly bothered to hide his spleen toward the young, progressive lawmaker: Last week in Davos, he called her a “fake congressperson” who had the audacity to come “from a country that’s not a country, and she’s telling us how to run America. Not going to get away with it much longer, let me tell you.” (Omar, of course, is a U.S. citizen.)
Yesterday, Trump announced that “the DOJ and Congress are looking at ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 million dollars. Time will tell all.”
Would it shock you to learn this evidence-free accusation is salted with totally invented lies? Omar last year disclosed that she and her husband, venture-capital bro Tim Mynett, have between $6 million and $30 million in assets, a jump from 2024 attributable to an increase in the valuation of Mynett’s businesses.
But what is the Justice Department for, if not launching new baseless investigations into Trump’s enemies to calm him down when things aren’t going great elsewhere?
Cheap Shots
Correction, January 27, 2026, 1:23 p.m. EST: As originally published, this newsletter wished readers a happy Wednesday. It’s Tuesday.
If you want to indulge in a little schadenfreude, just imagine the rage of the White House staffers who worked ferociously this weekend to find anything in Pretti’s past with which to smear him—and came up empty.
“Nobody here at the White House, including the president of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed,”
Well, that's big of you.
The evolution of Andrew Egger, now calling people nihilistic shitheels, is fascinating. Love it.