Trump's shift in Minneapolis is neither a solution nor our salvation.
How do you stop someone from killing someone else? In most societies, we do so with warnings, promises, and contracts. We make laws to make ourselves feel safe. It’s important to feel safe, because reality is terrifying.
In Minneapolis this weekend, we saw reality: a group of men with guns, in a semicircle, firing a barrage of shots into a man’s body lying on the ground. The laws that were supposed to protect Alex Pretti—the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, multiple state and local and national statutes on use of force—failed. Pretti’s death, captured on video from multiple angles, was so shocking that even the Trump administration has been forced to rethink its brutal tactics in the Twin Cities, which for more than a month has been ravaged by an onslaught of federal agents ostensibly conducting “immigration enforcement.”. Gregory Bovino, the cartoonishly fascist figurehead of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations in the Twin Cities, has been removed from his post andIt’s tempting to see these developments as a victory, as the rule of law slowly reasserting itself over a deadly aberration in America’s social contract. Soon, you might think, things may go back to normal. But in Donald Trump’s America, the contract has been rewritten. The conditions that caused Pretti’s death still exist—in Minneapolis, in Maine, in California, in every city and every town where agents of the state carry guns. The goon squads are here to stay, and it’s only a matter of time until they kill again.What this reflects is more than the Trump administration’s vicious immigration policies, but a broader shift in American politics. Inside the West Wing, a terrifying new political ideology is on display, one that says the right to shape, change, and end Americans lives is not granted by a democratic framework of laws, but by a simple equation of who has more guns. This shift was not immediate. During the first Trump administration, the snarl of legal jurisprudence that slowed down many of Trump’s most egregious excesses also lured us into a false sense of comfort that the law still worked, and that the contract still held—and sometimes it did. When Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the system worked. Judges threw out his cases. When rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, they were prosecuted en masse for their crimes. Trump himself was impeached, though never convicted, thanks to the cowardice of a bloc of Republican senators.Upon entering his second term, Trump went for it, not so much testing as smashing through the constraints of legal precedent—. On the border, he saw a chance to test his might: calling in Marines to quell protesters in Los Angeles and increasing the DHS’s purview to arrest, detain, and raid far outside of their preexisting jurisdictions.Minneapolis represents the most stark example of the rule of the gun thus far. During “Operation Metro Storm,” the ominously named federal operation in the Twin Cities, federal agents have shot three people, killed two, and injured dozens with pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear gas, and fists. Until Pretti’s death finally tipped the scales, Noem and other figures in the administration doubled and tripled down on their mandate to use force. Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot Renee Good, the first person killed by ICE in the Twin Cities, currently faces no charges, after the FBI intervened totaunting protesters with threats that they will be next. The men with guns knew the power they held. They knew no one could stop them from killing. And so when Alex Pretti stood up in the middle of the street, filming them with his phone, and intervened to try to help another civilian they had pushed to the ground, they shot him. He had, after all, committed a crime in their eyes: He had resisted the administration’s will. The agents who killed Pretti have not been identified or charged; like in Good’s killing, there, only an internal process overseen by the department that fired the shots. Even if, by some miracle, Good’s and Pretti’s killers are eventually brought to justice, their individual consequences do nothing to subvert ICE’s mandate of force wherever it appears. ICE can afford to discipline or lose an agent or two to mollify public opinion. They have plenty more operating, still, under the same rules of engagement.Under Trump’s new government-by-gun, individuals are presented with a choice between obedience and execution—or at least the ever-present danger of it. And without legal recompense, the only check to this power appears to be other armed men. In Maine, where ICE and other agencies have been conducting snatch-and-grab arrests and targeted harassment of protesters similar to those in Minneapolis, local law enforcement has already staked out a hard line against their excesses, something that Minneapolis’ authorities were slow to do. Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce called ICE’s actions “bush-league policing” in an interview on Sunday, after federal agents mistakenly. This pressure has also changed the situation in Minneapolis, where Gov. Tim Walz has managed to muster a largely tepid show of force from his own military, the Minnesota National Guard, deploying them to the streets in cute reflective vests with donuts and coffee.It’s easy to see those images and miss what they mean. The National Guard is often seen as a friendly force that shows up with bottled water during hurricanes and digs out roads after mudslides. But that’s not what they are: They are armed forces that are ostensibly under the command of a state governor. Their presence on the streets of Minneapolis, orange vests and all, is a show of force by a state military aligned opposite of a federal military. Right now, it’s no more than optics. But lines are being drawn. And things could always get worse. The National Guard and domestic police are not sympathetic forces to many of this country’s marginalized groups. In L.A. and D.C., National Guard troops squared up with protesters themselves, and their orders come from political actors—governors, mayors, and other politicians with their own biases and agendas.One Supreme Court Case Is Most Responsible for Our Oligarchy. It’s Not the One You Think.Soldiers and police, however, are not the only people in America who have guns. As the top levels of our political system wield violence in the open, it’s only a matter of time before people tired of having guns pointed at them may decide that it’s time to have more guns to point back. Communities I have reported on for years are. Online, left-wing accounts and marginalized groups are openly championing the Second Amendment, abandoning arguments for reasonable gun control in favor ofto face a future in which their only defense is through open force. There was nothing to stop ICE agents from killing Alex Pretti, their thinking goes, so the next time it happens someone might as well shoot back. A brutal occupation unrestrained by any notion of fairness or recompense often inspires a violent response, which would plunge our society into circumstances it has rarely, if ever, seen before: widespread violence on the streets and guerilla attacks on federal forces that inspire even more brutal reprisals and repression.It’s still possible to regain control of our society before we get to that point; to organize and protest and document well enough that a better future is made possible before the rule of the gun is all we have left. We’ve seen that approach have some success , in this specific case: The administration’s excesses were so blatant and cruel—and so highly publicized—that politicians on both sides of the aisle were forced to hold them to account. But so far, Trump’s response looks more like damage control than a larger shift in approach. The goon squads are still on the streets, still hauling people into their vans. They will learn from this defeat. They will get better at killing. And unless we find a way to upset the architects of our new political order, they’re almost certainly going to do it
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