After burning down Minneapolis, Trump now seems interested in putting out the flames

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to begin taking steps to reduce the heat caused by his siege of Minneapolis, after days and weeks of actively inciting tensions between immigration agents and locals to the boiling point, and demonizing two residents killed by federal forces.

The substance of the apparent turn, highlighted by the upcoming departure from town of an aggressive Border Patrol commander, is limited. Trump’s Justice Department is still fighting a state lawsuit seeking to expel immigration agents from the city, while Trump’s agencies have shown zero interest in seriously investigating the fatal shootings of Renee Bueno and Alex Pretti.

Trump announced that he would send White House aide Tom Homan to the city to monitor the activities of thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, whose presence there has led to the shooting deaths of two US citizens so far this month.

“I’m sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight. He hasn’t been involved in that area, but he knows and likes many of the people there. Tom is tough but fair and will report directly to me,” Trump posted on his social media platform Monday morning.

Three hours later, Trump praised Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, whom he has been constantly insulting for months, for calling him out. “It was a very good decision and we actually seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump posted.

The change would make Homan, who is Trump’s “border czar” but has no formal leadership role in any of the immigration agencies, the public face of the Minnesota deployment, replacing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, whose command has been linked to violent incidents in both Minneapolis and Chicago. Both made public statements after the Saturday morning murder of ICU nurse Pretti in Minneapolis, which were quickly proven to be false.

On Monday afternoon, CNN reported that Bovino and some of his agents were required to leave the city.

Republican allies praised Trump for helping to calm tempers. New York Rep. Mike Lawler told Politico that putting Homan in charge was “a positive step to get the situation under control.”

However, that praise fails to point out that it was Trump himself who, along with his top adviser Stephen Miller, set Minneapolis alight with their incendiary comments in the first place.

“Kristi Noem didn’t come up with the idea of ​​calling protesters terrorists. Trump did,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former Republican Senate aide and now a researcher at the nonprofit group Protect Democracy.

For months, Trump has been accusing Minneapolis and Minnesota in general of harboring thousands of violent criminal undocumented immigrants – the “worst of the worst” – a claim that has often been proven false in specific cases that have been reviewed by federal judges.

After the murder of Good, 37, on January 7, Trump falsely claimed that she had run over the ICE officer who shot her three times. “She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over,” Trump told the New York Times that same day.

Adam Gray via News

On Saturday, after one or more Border Patrol agents shot and killed Pretti, 37, after confiscating the gun he could legally carry, Miller called him a “domestic terrorist,” while Trump quickly posted a photo of a gun. “This is the gunslinger’s gun, loaded (with two extra full magazines!) and ready to go. What’s that all about?” Trump wrote.

“Trump owns illegal ICE operations,” said Carpenter, one of many democracy advocates and authoritarian experts who warned that Trump would rule as an autocrat if he returned to power. “He may move in and replace the people in charge, but he is the one who puts masked federal agents on the streets, issues orders that mischaracterize those who challenge his policies as domestic terrorists, and leads these authoritarian policies.”

Trump’s decision to put Homan in charge continued signs that began Sunday night that he was seeking a way out of a crisis over which public opinion was progressively worsening for him and his party.

White House officials leaked to News that Trump was unhappy with the way Noem and other officials had made the administration look by immediately lying about Pretti’s shooting and labeling him a “terrorist.”

Trump conducted a phone interview with The Wall Street Journal, also owned by Rupert Murdoch, in which he said the administration was “reviewing everything,” a promise that appears to contradict earlier statements by officials that the new shooting would only be investigated by DHS, not the Justice Department, as has been common practice for decades before the start of Trump’s second term.

Later Sunday night, the White House called influential conservative talk show host Erick Erickson, who earlier that day had recommended Trump replace Noem and Bovino with Homan, whose decades with ICE would give him credibility the others don’t have.

“Let Homan take the lead and send Bovino elsewhere,” Erickson wrote at 11:45 a.m.

On Monday, Erickson told News themezone that he knows his idea was relayed to the White House by a friend, prompting a phone call from a senior adviser.

“My sense of things from my call last night is that the president knows changes have to happen, and Miller thinks they should redouble their efforts, but that probably won’t be what happens. For Homan to assert himself and be able to bypass Miller is a sign that Miller is losing the fight,” Erickson said. “I know (Trump) heard from a lot of people outside his listening that Noem, etc., handled it poorly.”

Miller did not respond to a query from News themezone.

Meanwhile, Trump continued to conflate his claims that his deportation policy is designed to expel dangerous criminal undocumented immigrants with wildly exaggerated and false accusations that the anti-ICE protests are somehow connected to investigations launched under Democrat Joe Biden’s administration into fraud in social services programs, particularly by Somali-American immigrants.

“AMONG OTHER THINGS, THIS IS A ‘FINDER’ FOR THE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS THAT HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM THE ONCE GREAT (BUT SOON TO BE GREAT AGAIN!) STATE OF MINNESOTA!” Trump wrote just six minutes after his first post about Pretti’s murder.

Trump has also been lying in recent weeks that he won Minnesota in all three of his presidential elections. “I feel like I won Minnesota three times. I won Minnesota three times,” he said Jan. 9 as a justification for why the FBI would not share information about Good’s shooting with local authorities.

In reality, he lost to the Democratic candidate each time, but the false claim may explain a demand by his attorney general, Pam Bondi, that Minnesota turn over its voter data to the Justice Department as one of the conditions for Trump to end his deployment of immigration agents.

“Compliance with this common sense request will ensure better free and fair elections and increase confidence in the rule of law,” he wrote in a letter on Saturday.