Trump has an unpopular new message for Americans
In the wake of the murder of Renee Good at the hands of ICE officer Jonathan Ross on January 7, the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers, and ICE officials have taken the position that the American people must accept Trump’s rule by force or face death. Its unofficial motto: Live without freedom or die.
“It was extremely disrespectful to law enforcement,” President Donald Trump said Sunday when asked whether Ross used appropriate force when he killed Good. “The woman and her friend” – here Trump seemed to be referring to Good’s wife – “were very disrespectful to the authorities…The authorities should not be in a position where they have to put up with these things.”
Good’s death, in Trump’s view, was not the result of the threat she may have posed to Ross, as other members of his administration initially argued. Instead, Trump says, they killed her because she was disrespectful.
Some Republican lawmakers echoed this message in much more explicit language.
“The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you follow them and then you can keep your life,” Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) said on Newsmax on Jan. 7.
“If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they attempt to repel foreign invaders from our country, you will get what’s coming to you,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said on Newsmax on Jan. 8. “I don’t feel bad for the woman who was involved.”
In this worldview, expressing a position that differs from that of the government also justifies greater violence by law enforcement.
Illustration: Kelly Caminero/News themezone; Photo: Getty Images
“There will be more bloodshed unless we tone down the hateful rhetoric,” White House border czar Tom Homan said on News on Sunday. The hateful rhetoric he was referring to was apparently not the officer calling Good a “fucking bitch” after shooting her in the head. “To say this officer is a killer is dangerous,” Homan said.
This message has clearly reached ICE officers in Minneapolis and has enabled, over the past week, escalating threats against residents.
“Did you not learn from what just happened?” an enraged ICE officer yelled at a legal observer following his vehicle in the days after Good’s death.
In another incident, an ICE officer approached a woman filming ICE agents detaining someone and also asked her, “Haven’t you learned from the last few days?” He proceeded to take the phone from her hand, handcuffed her and abused her until she passed out, according to the video and an interview with the woman on KCCO radio.
“Is this how you want to die with a fucking bullet in the skull?” she said the officer told her when she was handcuffed.
Patty O’Keefe, a U.S. citizen arrested and detained after following an ICE vehicle, which is not a crime, said agents taunted her with Good’s death.
“The ICE agent who had pepper sprayed my car’s vents said ‘you guys have to stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,’ word for word, talking about Renee Good. Which filled me with absolute rage and shock that you could say that to one of her neighbors,” O’Keefe told Minnesota Public Radio.
Needless to say, it is not illegal to protest, follow, film, or insult a law enforcement officer. The basic right is literally enshrined in the Constitution. But the message reaching from the top of the federal government to officials on the ground is clear: deliver or die.
This rhetoric from the Trump administration, its allies and federal immigration agents is intended to define the new boundaries of who is protected by the law and who is not, who is excluded from the body politic and who is not.
Adam Gray via News
Exclusion has played a role in defining American democracy since its inception. From the beginning, blacks and Native Americans were excluded from the rights and privileges of the Constitution and the political community, whether by law or custom. This exclusion anchored and defined the freedoms that white men enjoyed. The Constitution also explicitly sought to exclude certain issues (specifically, slavery) from consideration at the national level.
But in the 1960s, those exclusions began to break down with the success of the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent movements for the rights of women, Native Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community. Suddenly, all issues were on the table.
A violent reaction to this opening of the political community is at the heart of the conservative movement that found, in Trump, its Caesar.
Trump even recently publicly disparaged the Civil Rights Act, which in the 1960s prohibited discrimination against marginalized groups. “White people were treated very badly,” he told the New York Times this week in response to a question about the landmark legislation. “I think at the same time, it accomplished some wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people: People who deserved to go to college or get a job couldn’t get them. So it was reverse discrimination.”
What we are seeing in Minneapolis, and in all of the Trump administration’s policies, is an attempt to restore exclusions about who is part of the American community and who is not. But this time those excluded are not defined only by their identity, but also by their political affiliation. If you are a Democrat, liberal, progressive, socialist, leftist, or otherwise opposed to Trump, you are not in compliance and are therefore subject to abuse, harassment, extortion, and in extreme cases, death.
José Luis Magaña via News
A person like the Good, then, is not worthy of his humanity or his life. Instead, she is a “paid agitator,” a “domestic terrorist,” a “deranged leftist,” a person “with pronouns in her bio,” part of “organized wine mom gangs” that impede ICE officers, or a “wealthy urban liberal white woman (HORRIBLE).” Far-right influencer Matt Walsh made the connections between past racial exclusions and why Good should be subject to arbitrary force very clear.
“This lesbian firebrand gave her life to protect 68 Somali IQ scammers who don’t give a shit about her,” Walsh said. “The most shameful and humiliating end a person can face.”
In other words, she was a race traitor.
All of these dehumanizing and othering identifiers seek to cast Good and all those protesting Trump’s occupation of the Twin Cities into a state of exclusion. They get what they deserve for what they believe and who they defend.
Some Trump allies were clear about this even before he won re-election. Conservative propagandist Jack Posobiec published a book in 2024 called “Unhumans,” which defined liberals and the left as uncivilized barbarians bent on murder. The message is clear: conservatives must violently suppress this threat. Vice President J.D. Vance enthusiastically endorsed Posobiec’s book.
At the height of the 2024 election campaign, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that shepherded the Project 2025 plan for the second Trump administration, made the same argument that Trump and his allies make now about on-the-ground interactions with immigration agents more broadly.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it,” Roberts said.
The problem for conservatives is that their effort to enforce unfreedom at gunpoint is unpopular. It may feed its enthusiasts who are also online, but the American public at large is don’t buy any of this.
That doesn’t mean they will stop. Failed authoritarian governments sometimes see greater repression as the only way out of their potential downfall. But the people of Minneapolis are showing that they still have the power to claim their freedom.
To take the words of a person protesting in Minneapolis immediately after Good’s death: “You can’t kill us all.”