Trump’s ICE horror show is splitting Maga apart – and he’s wavering

Some things are easier to spin than others. It is not that difficult to convince a large number of Americans that the mainstream media is “fake news”, or that the Democratic Party is “woke”. It is eminently possible to persuade people, in the face of fact, that prices are coming down and [the economy](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trump-astonishingly-bad-polling-not-gods-gift-americans-4182228?ico=in-line_link) is booming.

Getting people to deny the evidence of their own eyes, though, is more difficult. Anyone who has seen the harrowing footage of the [slaying of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis](https://inews.co.uk/news/trump-dangerous-lies-minneapolis-ice-alex-pretti-4193280?ico=in-line_link), at the hands of ICE officers, will know what they saw – a man, pinned to the ground by agents and posing no threat to them, is shot ten times in the back.

[Donald Trump](https://inews.co.uk/topic/donald-trump?ico=in-line_link) and those around him are trying every trick in their repertoire to convince at least their own supporters that the killing is justified, was Pretti’s own fault, or was at least the fault of Minneapolis’s Democratic mayor Jacob Frey, or the state’s governor, [Tim Walz](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/family-lives-minneapolis-ice-shootings-alex-pretti-4193147?ico=in-line_link). But those tricks are only taking them so far.

Alex Pretti is just about the worst victim possible for the Trump White House. He was a 37-year-old straight white man, who worked in an intensive care unit treating American veterans.

On the day he was killed, he was legally carrying a firearm – a fact several senior Trump officials tried to use to justify his killing, a tactic that rapidly backfired, given Republicans’ strong support for the right to bear arms and the party’s reliance on political and financial support from the National Rifle Association.

Just a few weeks ago, when [Renee Good was shot dead in her car](https://inews.co.uk/news/what-videos-of-ice-tell-us-4159532?ico=in-line_link), Maga and its media outriders used her lesbianism to other her – with Trump’s Department of Justice launching a criminal investigation into Good’s wife, but not into the man who shot her. So far, they are struggling to find a similar reason to demonise Pretti, though not for lack of trying.

Pretti’s death puts a simple fact in ever more stark relief: when most Americans see pictures and videos of Trump’s occupations of American cities, they hate what they are seeing. This was true when it was Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, and it’s certainly true of the awful pictures appearing daily of ICE activities.

For every white person killed…

Keep up the pressure. Never give up. Never give in. America cannot give in to an authoritarian.

The opinions of the masses do not matter in authoritarian countries. We’re barreling in that direction or we’re already there.

I think the federal response is what is causing SOME Trump supporters to take pause. I believe if Noem et al. had handled it in the usual “let’s wait until all the facts come in before we draw conclusions” kind of way, then Trump fans would be giving them the benefit of the doubt. As usual.

But within a couple of hours of the Pretti execution, Noem and Trump are calling this guy a domestic terrorist who went out guns ablazing, foaming at the mouth like a deranged lunatic. It was bad enough they did that with Renee Good. But in that case it took a day for clear video of the incident to emerge, so poisoning the well against her was more effective. With Pretti, many of us watched the video of his execution before we even heard what Noem et al. were even saying. It is one thing to lie to us before we know what happened. It is quite another to lie to us when we saw with our own eyes what actually happened.

They are so arrogant that they aren’t bothering to dress things up anymore. They are going full Nazi because they feel untouchable at this point. And it is hard to argue that they aren’t. The news cycle will turn soon, and conservatives who have furrowed brows now will go back to thinking everything is OK…and this is just a one-off event and people just need to stop protesting and getting themselves killed.

Good

I’ll believe in that when me shit turn purple and smell like rainbow sherbet.