On MS NOW today, columnist Philip Bump broke down when talking about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis. “I have a six year old,” he said. “And…seeing the image of the stuffed animals in the glove compartment of her car—really emotional for me and…what I take away from this is, for me that’s the thing that stands out: that this was a family that could have been like mine.”
Bump went on to emphasize that “there are a lot of situations, a lot of incidents that have involved ICE, have involved the government over the course of the past thirteen months in which there is resonance for other families in similar ways,” but what he hit on in his first reaction to Good’s killing was the one the administration must fear most of all. Good was a white, suburban mother, whose ex-husband told reporters she was a Christian stay-at-home mom, and Bump is a white man.
President Donald J. Trump’s people see that demographic as their base. If it turns on Trump, they are politically finished, as finished as elite southern enslavers were when Harriet Beecher Stowe reminded American mothers of the fragility of their own childrens’ lives to condemn the sale of Black children; as finished as the second Ku Klux Klan was when its leader kidnapped, raped, and murdered 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer; as finished as the white segregationists were when white supremacists murdered four little girls in church in 1963.
Evidence that President Donald J. Trump has sexually abused children would likely be enough to crater his political support from this group, making it no accident that the administration is openly flouting the law that required the full release of the Epstein Files by December 19, 2025. The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of those files, and many of them were so heavily redacted as to be useless. In a court filing on Monday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “substantial work remains to be done” before it can release them all.
But there is no hiding the murder of Renee Good, captured on video by several witnesses as it was. And so the Trump administration is working desperately to smear Good and to convince the public that, contrary to widespread video evidence, the federal agent put in place by the Trump regime shot her in self-defense.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and Trump himself have all insisted that their false narrative is true. Media Matters for America compiled a timeline showing how the Fox News Channel first told viewers that Good had tried to ram officers whose vehicle was stuck in a snowbank, then moderated their language as video appeared, and then, by the evening, parroted the administration’s talking points.
Today, in a press conference on the shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance made even more extreme statements, claiming—all evidence to the contrary—that the woman shot in Minneapolis was part of a “left wing network” and that “nobody debates” that she “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.” In fact, among those who “debate” Vance’s version of events are the journalists at the New York Times, who today published a slow-motion analysis that demonstrated conclusively that the vehicle was turning away from the officer when he opened fire.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt increased the attack on Good even more today by saying: “The deadly incident that took place in Minnesota yesterday occurred as a result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country, where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.”
The administration appears to be trying to make sure their narrative will get an official stamp of approval by silencing a real investigation. Today, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), a statewide criminal investigative bureau in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has shut its officials out of the investigation into Good’s death. The FBI will no longer allow the BCA to “have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” The BCA has, it said, “reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.”
Law professor Steve Vladeck commented sarcastically: “This is *definitely* how you behave when you’re trying to bring every resource to bear, rather than trying to cover up the unlawful behavior of your own personnel.”
The FBI is housed within the Department of Justice (DOJ), which is run by Trump loyalists Bondi and Blanche, and as Vladeck suggests, there is appropriate concern that it will not conduct a fair investigation. In an illustration of how Trump has tried to stack the DOJ, today U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ruled that John Sarcone, Trump’s temporary nominee as acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, does not hold that position lawfully. For Sarcone, as for four other U.S. attorneys, Trump has ignored the law to keep his loyalists in control of key Department of Justice offices, where they have targeted people Trump considers enemies. Although judges have said five of Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys are in office illegally, at least three have refused to step down.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty issued a statement saying that her office is “exploring all options” to ensure that a state level investigation of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good continues.
Today Trump appeared to settle into his new role as an American dictator. He announced plans to make the ballroom for which he bulldozed the East Wing of the White House even bigger: despite a longstanding norm that additions to the White House—the People’s House—have a lower profile than the main building, Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported today that Trump is now planning for his ballroom to be as tall as the White House. Trump’s architect also said they are considering adding a one-story addition to the West Wing colonnade that runs alongside what used to be the Rose Garden. White House director of management and administration Josh Fisher also said that administration officials plan to renovate Lafayette Square, north of the White House.
And Trump told New York Times reporters David E. Sanger, Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs that as commander-in-chief, he has only one limit on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He claimed he gets to determine what is legal under international law, and seemed to stretch that authority to domestic affairs, too, saying that he was already considering getting around a possible decision by the Supreme Court that his tariffs were unconstitutional by simply calling them licensing fees and that he could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops in the U.S. if he “felt the need to do it.”
Meanwhile, Hamed Aleaziz and Madeleine Ngo of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is sending more than 100 Customs and Border Protection agents and officers from Chicago to Minnesota after yesterday’s shooting.
This afternoon, federal immigration agents shot and wounded two people in Portland, Oregon. According to Claire Rush and Gene Johnson of the Associated Press, the shooting took place outside a hospital where the two were in a car. Portland mayor Keith Wilson and the City Council asked ICE to end operations in the city during a full investigation of the incident.
Democrats have spoken out loudly against Trump’s grab for dictatorial powers since he took office, and today some Republicans began to push back as well.
Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), the leading sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the DOJ to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. “Put simply,” they wrote, “the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act…. [W]e do not believe the DOJ will produce the records that are required by the Act.”
Last month, House Democrats launched a discharge petition to force a vote to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years. Frustrated that Speaker Johnson would not take up such a measure, four Republicans signed the petition to force it to the floor. Today, seventeen Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 230–196. It now heads to the Senate.
The Senate also pushed back today.
Senators voted to advance a bill that would stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. The vote was 52–47 with five Republicans joining all the Democrats to move the measure forward. Republicans killed a similar measure in November, but Trump’s enormously unpopular incursion into Venezuela and threats against Greenland prompted five Republicans to reassert congressional authority over military action. CNN called it “a notable rebuke of the president.”
The five Republicans voting for the bill were Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Todd Young of Indiana. Immediately, Trump posted on social media that the five “should never be elected to office again.” By reasserting the power of Congress, he wrote, they were “attempting to take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”
The Senate also unanimously approved a resolution to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In March 2022, Congress passed a law approving the plaque and requiring that it be installed, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused and the Department of Justice has complained that because the plaque lists departments and not individual officers, it does not comply with the law.
On this year’s fifth anniversary of the January 6 attack, the Trump administration blamed the police officers themselves for starting the insurrection, making the Senate’s vote appear to be a pointed rebuke of the president. In response to Trump’s calling the rioters “patriotic protesters” retiring senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) called the January 6 rioters “thousands of thugs” according to reporter Scott MacFarlane.
Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has agreed to let the plaque hang in the Senate until the Architect of the Capitol—the federal agency that maintains, operates, and preserves the U.S. Capitol—determines its permanent location.
Today, as there were yesterday, there were protests against ICE around the country. Tonight, as there were last night, there are vigils for Renee Good.
President Trump declared on Wednesday evening that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality,” brushing aside international law and other checks on his ability to use military might to strike, invade or coerce nations around the world.
Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
President Trump said his administration was taking steps to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizenship, with a particular eye for those of Somali descent.
President Trump said on Wednesday evening that he expected the United States would be running Venezuela and extracting oil from its huge reserves for years, and insisted that the interim government of the country — all former loyalists to the now-imprisoned Nicolás Maduro — is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary.”
“Only time will tell,” he said, when asked how long the administration will demand direct oversight of the South American nation, with the hovering threat of American military action from an armada just off shore.
Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Not sure whether to burst out laughing...or shudder in fear.[/b]
PARIS — France will delay this year’s Group of 7 summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the White House on June 14, two officials with direct knowledge of G7 planning told POLITICO.
Paris had previously announced that this year’s gathering of G7 leaders would take place from June 14 — which is both Flag Day in the U.S. and President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday — to June 16 in Evian-les-Bains on the shores of Lake Geneva.
But Trump in October announced that the White House would host a “big UFC fight” on June 14. Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White told CBS News Thursday that the logistics of the event have been finalized. White said the event will gather up to 5,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House.
The G7 will now run from June 15 to June 17.
[...]
President Donald Trump and members of his Cabinet have made a case for acquiring Greenland that’s so simple, even self-evident, it seems hard to refute: U.S. national-security interests in the Arctic are just too important to ignore. Not taking over the autonomous territory of Denmark would “give up the Arctic to China, to Russia, and to other regimes that don’t have the best interests of the American people at heart,” Vice President J. D. Vance declared last March during a visit to the Pituffik Space Base, on Greenland’s northwest coast.
Five years ago, Congress had a similar sense of alarm about Russia and China’s head start in exploring and potentially developing one of the world’s last great untapped regions, with its rich minerals, abundant (if icebound) seas, and strategic location almost connecting the continent of Europe with the northernmost reaches of the Americas.
The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act called for the creation of the Arctic and Global Resilience Policy Office at the Pentagon, which was set up in 2022. The office produced the Defense Department’s 2024 Arctic Strategy, dedicating Washington to increased Arctic defense capabilities, expanded collaboration with allies on Arctic security, and strengthened military readiness for Arctic operations.
The administration’s intense interest in acquiring Greenland, by force if necessary, might appear to be a natural outgrowth of the Pentagon’s work. Instead, it’s a clear repudiation of it. Not only has the demand for Greenland infuriated the same European allies on which the Arctic strategy depends, the Pentagon office itself has been quietly shuttered. In sum, even as the administration says it needs Greenland to advance U.S. security interests in the Arctic, it has closed the office set up to advance U.S. security interests in the Arctic.
The Arctic was a crucial strategic front in the Cold War, the shortest route for potential missile strikes and bomber flights. The United States and the Soviet Union maneuvered submarines in the region, competing for dominance at the top of the world.
A Cold War–era agreement allows Washington broad authority to conduct military operations on Greenland. The agreement, signed by Denmark and the United States in 1951, allows the U.S. to “construct, install, maintain, and operate” bases across the island, station personnel, and set the terms of “landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operation of ships, aircraft, and water-borne craft.” Pituffik is the only current U.S. base.
As warming seas open new shipping routes and enable access to natural resources, the United States and its adversaries are again scrambling for position in the Arctic. China released a white paper in 2018 that declared itself a “Near-Arctic State,” using this characterization to assert its interests in the region. In 2020, Russia set a 15-year time frame for a set of aspirations in the Arctic, including the establishment of sovereignty over its northern sea route, the revitalization of Soviet-era military bases, and the creation of new commercial-shipping infrastructure. Russia has grown its fleet of icebreakers and other vessels needed to navigate the Arctic’s challenging conditions, and the Russian navy has held joint drills in the region with China, an ominous development for the United States.
The Pentagon’s Arctic office, in its short life, brought together agency leaders on policy planning to ensure that the government had the communication, intelligence, and surveillance tools for effective deterrence alongside allies with regional know-how. When Trump returned to power early last year, his team discussed restructuring the office, but the plans never materialized. It took too long to get leadership into place, especially Elbridge Colby, who wasn’t confirmed as undersecretary of defense for policy until April.
The office began a slow-motion demise as it shed personnel who were never replaced, three former U.S. officials told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. Around the time of the government shutdown last fall, the office effectively ceased to exist. The office’s website now leads to a 404 - Page not found! message. Some of the office’s functions have been moved to other parts of the government, but the number of people working on these issues at the Pentagon has been reduced by almost three-quarters, one of the former officials said. The office’s closure has not been previously reported.
One of the former officials we spoke with said the office was politically vulnerable because it was a creation of the Biden administration and focused in part on responding to climate change. The Pentagon has canceled climate-related programs and sought to weed out contracts and initiatives that even use the word climate. Last spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media that his department “does not do climate change crap.”
The policy office’s demise also reflects Trump’s interest in hemispheric dominance. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, in a statement, said that the office had not been shut down but rather “restructured to better align with the president’s priorities,” with work parceled out to the office of the assistant secretary responsible for homeland defense and the Americas. That puts strategy for U.S. interests around the North Pole together with Venezuela, the Panama Canal, and the Gulf of Mexico. The Pentagon last summer also shifted Greenland from U.S. European Command, responsible for Europe and Russia, to Northern Command, responsible for North America. An administration official told us the closure of the policy office was designed to achieve greater efficiency and noted that there is still an inter-agency team working on Arctic issues.
Meanwhile, Trump has yet to fill the role of ambassador-at-large for Arctic affairs, a position created in 2022 at the urging of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who represents Alaska. Trump did, however, name Jeff Landry, a political ally and the governor of Louisiana, as special envoy to Greenland. Trump justified the appointment by recalling the Louisiana Purchase—the acquisition from the French of territory including land from 15 current states and two Canadian provinces, in 1803—and said Landry had approached him about the job. “He’s very proactive,” Trump told reporters. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told us Greenland would be “better served” if it were protected by the U.S.
In unveiling the Arctic strategy in 2024, senior Pentagon officials stressed international cooperation. Amanda Dory, at the time the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, argued that engagement with allies “underpins the whole document and is foundational to our approach to the Arctic.” She saluted “like-minded and highly capable allies” including Denmark, Norway, and two Arctic nations that were new NATO members, Finland and Sweden.
One former U.S. official based in an allied Arctic nation told us these partnerships were the best U.S. asset in the region. “We had great partnerships that were giving us everything we could ask for in the Arctic,” he said. “Going at it alone, we’re not the strongest power in the Arctic. So we gain less by behaving like a hegemonic power than we gained by working with the partners that were there.”
But recently, those alliances have been severely strained, if not broken. Trump’s repeated insistence on obtaining Greenland has prompted a furious reaction from European governments. In the long run, that may leave Washington less able to counter Russian and Chinese maneuvering in the Arctic—if that was indeed Trump’s aim in the first place. The president recently told The Atlantic that Greenland is “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships” (a claim that former officials described as unsupported by evidence), but the administration’s National Security Strategy, issued at the end of last year, seemed to shy from competition with U.S. adversaries in favor of maximizing economic gains. The document envisioned “strategic stability with Russia” and called for a “genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing.” It made no mention of the Arctic.
It is not possible to revoke a Nobel Peace Prize. Neither Alfred Nobel’s will nor the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation mention any such possibility.
According to the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, § 10, “No appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regard to the award of a prize”.
None of the prize awarding committees in Stockholm and Oslo has ever considered to revoke a prize once awarded.
As a matter of principle, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will not comment upon what the Peace Prize Laureates may say and do after they have been awarded the prize. The Committee’s mandate is restricted to evaluate the work and efforts of the nominated candidates up to the moment it is decided who shall be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for a given year.
A Nobel Prize can neither be revoked, shared, nor transferred to others. Once the announcement has been made, the decision stands for all time.
This does not prevent the Committee from following the future endeavours of laureates closely, even though it expresses neither its concerns nor its acclamation.
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
"Russian and Chinese destroyers and submarines operate all over Greenland."
Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone.
The video shows Ross getting out of a vehicle and walking toward a red SUV where Good sits in the driver’s seat. Sirens blare as he walks toward her. She smiles at him and says: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” As Ross walks alongside the car, she repeats: “I’m not mad at you.” As he reaches the back of the vehicle, another person, presumably Good’s wife, Becca, says: “Show your face.” As he begins to record the vehicle’s license plate, the same person says: “That’s okay, we don’t change our plates every morning,” referring to stories that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) switch out plates to make their vehicles hard to track. “Just so you know, it’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.” Ross’s camera pans up to show the person recording him on her cell phone.
She continues: “That’s fine. U.S. citizen. Former f*cking veteran.” As she walks to the passenger-side door, she looks at him and says: “You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”
Another officer approaches the driver’s side of the vehicle and says to Renee Good: “Out of the car. Get out of the f*cking car.”
As the passenger calmly reaches for the passenger-side door handle, the police officer on the driver’s side again says: “Get out of the car!” Other videos indicate that he had then put his hand into the car and was trying to open the door. Good quite clearly turns the wheel hard away from the police officers to head down the street as the passenger yells: “Drive, baby! Drive! Drive!”
Someone says “Whoa!” as the car moves down the street. Ross’s camera shows his face and then sways—remember, he has been filming all this on his phone. There are three shots and the houses on the side of the street swing back into view on Ross’s camera, indicating he did not drop it. As the car rolls up the street, Ross says, “F*cking bitch!” just before there is the sound of a smash.
What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.
As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”
The release of this damning video as an attempted exoneration reminds me overwhelmingly of the release of the video of the murder of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in February 2021 in an attempt of one of the murderers to prove they had acted in self-defense.
In that case, the district attorney for that circuit told police that the video showed self-defense and declined to prosecute. When the story wouldn’t go away, one of the murderers apparently thought that everyone else would agree that the video exonerated the killers. His lawyer gave the video to a local radio station. The station took the video down within two hours, but the public outcry over the horrific video meant the killers were arrested two days later. A jury convicted them, and they are now in prison, two for life without possibility of parole, one for life with the possibility of parole after 30 years, when he will be about 82.
In the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the murderers and their protectors were clearly so isolated in their own racist bubble they could not see how regular Americans would react to the video of them hunting down and shooting a jogger.
In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking bitch” after he killed her.
The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.
This is the larger meaning of federal agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in U.S. cities. While they are attacking primarily people of color, the message they carry is directed at all Americans: you must do what the Trump administration and its loyalists demand.
Another recording from the past few days shows a federal agent walking toward a woman recording him. She tells him: “Shame on you.” He answers: “Listen. Have you all not learned from the past couple of days? Have you not learned?” She responds: “Learned what? What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?” He begins: “Following federal agents….” and he knocks the phone out of her hand. Hours after Good’s death, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem appeared in Manhattan behind a podium emblazoned with the words: “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.”
After doubling down on their false narrative, the administration pulled 200 Customs and Border Patrol agents from a crackdown in Louisiana to send them to Minnesota, where administration officials already had deployed 2,000 federal agents—more than three times the number of police officers in Minneapolis. There they are cracking down, apparently indiscriminately. Yesterday, Gabe Whisnant of Newsweek reported that ICE has detained four members of the Oglala Lakota Nation, a federally recognized tribal nation of the Indigenous peoples who were in North America long before European settlers arrived.
In November, as Sarah Mehta of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted at the time, the administration replaced almost half of ICE leaders across the country with Border Patrol officers. Border Patrol, a subagency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is the agency responsible for acting on President Donald J. Trump’s policy of taking children from their parents during his first term, and it remains at the center of complaints of cruelty, racism, and violation of civil rights. This is the agency led by Greg Bovino, and the one behind the attack on a Chicago apartment building led by agents who rappelled into the building from a Black Hawk helicopter.
Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.
On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim.
This afternoon, Kyle Cheney, Ben Johansen, and Gregory Svirnovskiy of Politico reported that the day after Good’s murder, Noem quietly restricted the ability of members of Congress to conduct oversight of ICE facilities. The policy came out in court today after ICE officers denied Democratic Minnesota Representatives Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, and Kelly Morrison entry to a detention facility in Minneapolis. Last month, a federal judge rejected a similar policy.
Trump and his allies have singled out Minnesota in large part because of its large Somali-American population, represented in Congress by Omar, a lawmaker Trump has repeatedly attacked, from a population Trump has called “garbage.” As Chabeli Carrazana explained in 19th News, shortly after Christmas, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video that he claimed showed day care centers run by Somali Americans were taking money from the government without providing services.
The video has been widely debunked. In 2019, a state investigation found fraud taking place in the child care system and charged a number of people for defrauding the state. After that, the state tightened oversight, and state investigators have conducted unannounced visits to the day cares Shirley hit in his videos, where they found normal operations. Shirley claimed fraud when the centers would not let him in, but child care centers lock their doors and obscure the windows for the safety of the children, and would not let a strange man inside the facility to videotape.
But Trump used the frenzy to justify cutting $10 billion in antipoverty funding to five states led by Democrats—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—only to have a federal judge block his order yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promptly announced she was withholding $129 billion in federal funding from Minnesota, alleging fraud. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison responded: “I will not allow you to take from Minnesotans in need. I’ll see you in court.”
When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”
Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Protesters took to the streets today across the United States to lament the death of Renee Good and demand an end to ICE brutality. At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported that ICE’s approval rating has plummeted in the past year, from +16 to -14. The day ICE agent Ross shot Renee Good, 52% of Americans disapproved of ICE while just 39% approved. In February, 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable opinion of ICE, while today 40% do. There is, Morris notes, “a growing and intense, angry opposition to [ICE] across America.”
Since his election in May as the first American pope, Leo XIV has become a political and temperamental counterweight to an incendiary American president.
A face-off between the two most prominent Americans on the world stage was inevitable, if only for the contrast between President Trump’s blustery inconstancy and Leo’s soft-spoken yet firm dignity. The pope is “neither quiet nor shy — if he has something to say, he will say it,” in the words of his eldest brother, Louis Prevost, a Trump devotee whom the president has hosted in the Oval Office and at Mar-a-Lago.
Indeed, after Mr. Trump sent forces to seize the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the pope declared that Venezuela’s “sovereignty” must be guaranteed along with “the rule of law enshrined in its Constitution.” Leo had already urged the United States not to follow through on threats against Venezuela and criticized the administration’s military buildup in the Caribbean. He also repeatedly lamented the treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities and called on American clergy members to be vocal and active on the issue, which they have been.
But rather than viewing Leo’s statements as one half of a mano-a-mano between pope and president, they may be better seen as the articulation of a post-Trump global order, one informed by universal values and institutional norms rather than tribal and individual self-interest. Leo is not looking for a fight with Mr. Trump; he is looking past him. When he challenges the president’s policies, he does so as an American-born pope recalling the American-inspired system that Mr. Trump is dismantling — one that values statesmanship over gamesmanship, the common good over national conquest and common decency over jingoist bullying.
In early December Leo met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and said he would like to visit the country, which has suffered a yearslong assault from Russia. Hours later, he criticized the Trump administration’s peace plan: “Trying to reach a peace agreement without including Europe in the discussions is not realistic,” he said. “The war is in Europe.”
Soon after, in remarks that could have been aimed at the MAGA movement, Leo told European politicians on the center-right that “the mark of any civilized society is that differences are debated with courtesy and respect.” He later told diplomats that honesty is the greatest virtue in “an international context plagued by prevarications and conflict” and he blasted the “war of words armed with lies, propaganda and hypocrisy.”
Throughout the Christmas season and into the new year, Leo continued to call for a world based on old ideals, pushing for “the strengthening of supranational institutions, not their delegitimization.” He lectured civic leaders on how to be responsible public servants. On Christmas he urged world leaders to pursue peace through dialogue — even as Mr. Trump was launching military strikes on Islamic militias in Nigeria, ostensibly to protect Christians.
In his state of the world address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican on Friday, Leo delivered his most thoroughgoing defense of postwar multilateralism, calling the rule of law “the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”
“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” the pope said. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”
Leo obviously has no hard power to deploy and his is not a nostalgia for a durable yet flawed Pax Americana. But his voice, with its American accent, is filling a void. During Leo’s first international papal trip last fall, to Turkey and Lebanon, he showed himself to be a classic American internationalist speaking in a classically Christian register. La Croix’s Vatican reporter Mikael Corre noted that the trip was marked by “the exact opposite of the diplomacy we now associate with the United States: no hyper-personalization, no show of force, no shocking announcements or thunderous slogans.”
Since Benedict XV tried and failed to stop World War I, popes have sought to address the global political reality in which they have found themselves. In the 1980s the Polish pope, John Paul II, helped Ronald Reagan hasten the end of the Soviet empire, but he was at a loss in navigating the cultural and political upheavals that followed. His successor, Benedict XVI, elected in 2005, was an inward-looking theologian whose focus was “less diplomacy and more Gospel,” as one Vatican reporter put it. That left the papacy adrift internationally and internally.
Francis, the Argentine pope elected in 2013, provided a powerful rhetorical and moral language that could stand up to the noisy demagogues and populist nationalism that emerged during his papacy, an era he framed as “a third war, one fought piecemeal.” The solution, Francis said, would be “artisanal” or “handcrafted” peace between individuals and among communities.
Pope Leo has brought an even more insistent focus on peace. His vocabulary evokes Pope John XXIII’s Cold War-era encyclical addressed to “all men of good will" and its focus on human rights and interstate relations, and a pragmatic sensibility that recalls the founders of Europe’s unification, Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer, all devout Catholics. His worldview is also informed by decades of living in Peru and his global travels as head of the Augustinian order to which he belongs, and by the input of the cardinals from around the world who almost certainly elected him in part because he epitomizes the America they miss.
Will it make any difference? Mr. Trump and his Catholic allies in the administration thought nothing of criticizing Pope Francis, and they don’t appear too interested in heeding Leo. “I haven’t heard any statements from the pope,” Mr. Trump told Politico last month before going on to sing the praises of the pope’s brother Louis. Mr. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, a Catholic, has also dismissed Leo’s view on the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine as too “Eurocentric.”
The Catholic Church, it is said, thinks in centuries, and Pope Leo is unlikely to worry about such pushback. He is a fit 70-year-old who could potentially set a papal record as the oldest pope to die in office, outlasting another Leo, Leo XIII, who was 93 at his death in 1903. Donald Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, has three years left in his second term and faces political headwinds that has conservatives talking about a post-MAGA vision for the Republican Party. Of course, even three more years of Mr. Trump could do incalculable damage not only to the United States but to the global commonwealth.
When Leo was elected, there were regular references to the first pope to take that name, Leo the Great, who served in the fifth century amid the declining Roman Empire. As barbarian armies swept across Europe, that first Pope Leo led a delegation to northern Italy to meet Attila the Hun and his invading forces. Leo’s holiness and diplomacy (perhaps aided by a menacing vision Attila was said to have had of SS. Peter and Paul brandishing swords) is credited with persuading Attila to turn back and spare the Italian peninsula.
But a more apt parallel* for our current circumstances might be the legend of Leo’s meeting three years later, in 455, with Gaiseric the Vandal outside Rome. On that occasion, it is said, Leo was able to persuade the barbarian king only to spare several large churches so that thousands of Romans could find sanctuary from the ensuing devastation. In the aftermath, Leo and his successors were able to rebuild city and society.
Catholicism has a knack for preserving the best of the past to help seed a better future. Today’s Leo may be the surest guardian of a legacy that America, and the world, will desperately need.
*Speaking of "apt parallels" I would guess that Trump's response to this would be similar to that of Stalin, who, when advised of the Vatican's attitude on European problems, inquired with a sneer: “And how many divisions does the Pope have?”
Trump Hints at Next Targets After Shocking Invasion
The president warned the Colombian president that he needs to “watch his a--.”
