The latest as I write this on Thursday is that Kash Patel’s FBI has decided it won’t allow Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to work with it on the case. That means state authorities won’t have access to “case materials, scene evidence, or investigative interviews.” What the general public learns about the killing will remain entirely under the control of people who work for Donald Trump. Fancy that.
You can tell a lot about someone’s politics in 2026 by how they feel about the killing of Renee Good and the White House’s reaction to it.
Common sense.
I’m too poor of a lawyer to offer a thoughtful legal analysis of the shooter’s criminal jeopardy, especially since we don’t know what happened before the events in the video. But as a matter of common sense, it’s very hard to justify the second and third shots.
One can rationalize the first shot, perhaps, as the result of a mistaken but reasonable belief that Good was about to rev her engine and mow the agent down. If you go that route, though, you’re forced to explain why he positioned himself in front of the SUV in the first place. That’s a no-no according to former and current DHS officials, and terribly foolish as a tactical matter. What are the odds that shooting a driver who’s intent on hitting you and bearing down from a few feet away will stop the vehicle before impact?
Shooting a suspect to stop them from fleeing is also a no-no per standard police procedure. It might be warranted if they pose a serious threat to the public, but popping off rounds at a moving target on a city street carries obvious risks of collateral damage. Besides, police are supposed to use deadly force only to neutralize a suspect’s use of deadly force. You don’t get to kill the bad guys in cold blood to spare yourself the hassle of having to chase them.
I don’t know what conclusion one can draw from the videos except that, at best, the agent panicked and shot at Good the second and third times on an impulse to keep her from driving away and, at worst, he wanted to plug her because she scared him by pointing her SUV at him for a split second.
Other common-sense questions present themselves. Why did the first agent immediately try to open the door on Good’s car instead of giving her a chance to comply with his command to exit? Cops are usually understandably cautious about approaching drivers whom they intend to confront. If I were her, I too might have panicked and tried to drive away had a masked, angry, kitted-out fed surprised me by suddenly trying to breach my vehicle.
By what authority did ICE agents approach Good’s SUV to begin with? She wasn’t committing an immigration offense, which is supposed to be their jurisdiction. If she was blocking the street, local police could have been called to remove her—although she wasn’t, as I noted earlier. She tried to wave the silver pickup around the front of her car, only to have the agents get out and walk up on her instead.
Why didn’t they let the doctor try to revive Good? Did they fear he might succeed and she’d be a witness against them, or were they merely on a power trip in protecting their “turf” from intruders?
If the shooter did nothing wrong, why didn’t he hang around and account for his actions to city investigators instead of getting out of Dodge? Any municipal cop in America would be pilloried for leaving the scene after he shot someone.
The hard truth is that, apart from its negligible libertarian faction, the right has always had a blind spot about police brutality. GOP Rep. Wesley Hunt wasn’t announcing some creepy new Trump-era strain of thought on Thursday when he sneered that “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” That’s been the de facto position of many rank-and-file Republicans for decades, one that resurfaces whenever a cop kills someone dubiously. They’ll tell you that it derives from their sympathy for police in having to make impossible split-second life-and-death decisions, but “obey or die” comes straight from the darkest part of the dark authoritarian id.
If you’ve ever wanted to know how the president became so fantastically popular in what was supposedly a small-government movement, start there.
For some righties, then, defending ICE’s authority to kill Good is less a matter of serving Trump than of reinforcing the law-and-order ethic that the police are entitled to brutalize or kill you if you make trouble for them, lawfully or not. Dealing daily with society’s most dangerous degenerates grants members of law enforcement a nearly irrebuttable presumption of self-defense in using lethal force, supposedly. Once Good partially blocked that street, the officers who needlessly confronted her and then even more needlessly fired a few rounds as she fled were destined to receive every benefit of the doubt and then some from the Republican base. She knew the traffic rules. They told her to get out of the car. She chose to be an outlaw. Obey or die.
There is, however, another faction of the right that really does take that old law-and-order impulse in a creepy new direction. It’s one thing to reflexively defend the agent who shot Good as doing a tough job under tough circumstances, but it’s quite another to treat the victim as some sort of undesirable who deserved killing. Which, in so many words, is how the administration is spinning this.
Self-defense.
Here’s how Kristi Noem described the incident you’ve now seen with your own eyes. Good’s conduct was “an act of domestic terrorism,” she told reporters. ICE agents “were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly, and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him.”
Tricia McLaughlin, spokesman for DHS, claimed in a statement that “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Unsurprisingly, the president’s comments were even further removed from reality. “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
I think libertarian writers Radley Balko and Julian Sanchez have it precisely right. In slandering Good and gaslighting the hell out of Americans about the shooting, Trump and his deputies aren’t earnestly trying to convince anyone that the ICE agent acted appropriately. By lying so brazenly when video evidence of the truth is freely available, they’re signaling—to the public and especially to ICE—that they intend to support the agency’s renegade tactics with flimsy excuses no matter how indefensible they are. Federal agents can kill political undesirables as needed and “know that their president, vice president, and the entire administration stands behind them,” to borrow the words of heir apparent J.D. Vance.
That’s the logical endpoint of the culture of impunity I mentioned earlier. ICE agents disguise their identities as a matter of course, seemingly uniquely among federal officers. DHS also has a “systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities with detentions, arrests, and violence,” the Cato Institute’s David Bier recently reported, “and agents have already chased, detained, arrested, charged, struck, and shot at people who follow them.” The administration has done everything it can, including weakening hiring criteria dramatically, to communicate that it won’t hold the agency to professional standards of law enforcement. It wants a rogue secret police agency staffed with aggressive Trump sympathizers, one that will eventually go “door to door” in search of enemies.
Almost by definition, a force like that will be granted the greatest of leeway by its superiors when it employs deadly force—and will behave accordingly. Yesterday’s shooting is the ninth by ICE since September; my strong suspicion is that the pace will increase rapidly over the next three years.
The administration’s reaction also explains why Wesley Hunt’s “obey or die” admonition about cops should apply to Renee Good but surely not to Ashli Babbitt, who was “murdered” by a police officer when she tried to breach the House chamber on January 6, 2021. Good worked against the right, Babbitt worked for it. Killing an undesirable is a legitimate use of force, martyring a Trumpist foot soldier isn’t. Perfectly fascist, but also perfectly coherent.
Look around at right-wing media and you’ll find hints that Good got what she deserved not merely because of what she did but because of who she was. “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” Erick Erickson tweeted, asserting that ICE has a right to defend itself from violent ”progressive whites.” Last night Fox News host Jesse Watters made a point of noting in his introduction to a segment on the shooting that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet … with pronouns in her bio” who “leaves behind a lesbian partner.”
Yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse, who was famously acquitted after claiming self-defense in the fatal shootings of two people during the 2020 riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, nodded at the possibility of unrest in Minneapolis over Good’s death by tweeting, “After thinking about it, should I travel across the state line to Minnesota?” He punctuated that with a laughing emoji, which was appropriate. The postliberal dream of killing leftist undesirables with impunity is a joyful one; he lived it and so have a few others in Donald Trump’s GOP, and now Good’s shooter is living it too.
When the president tweets that the agent who plugged her was acting in self-defense, he’s not necessarily making a legal argument. Self-defense is the core conceit of postliberalism, the idea that all manner of right-wing ruthlessness is morally justified as a defensive response to left-wing radicalism. Never will you hear Trump or his apologists confess that their power grabs are motivated by power lust. They’re always a matter of repelling someone else’s affront—taking back the oil that Venezuela supposedly stole from us, overturning the election that Democrats supposedly stole from him, imposing draconian tariffs on allies to undo the supposed unfairness of trade deficits. Even seizing Greenland, we’re told, is necessary for national defense.
Self-defense, it turns out, conveniently entitles you to do pretty much anything and everything you want to do. Even if, sometimes, that means killing people.
The thing itself.
Republicans straining to absolve Good’s shooter are overlooking all of this political context, deliberately and dishonestly. Your main reaction to a fascist president going full Orwell to absolve his secret police force after it has killed a protester should not be, “I dunno, maybe the first shot was justified?”
That’s why I said earlier that you can get a sense of someone’s politics from where they land here. Zeroing in narrowly on the legality of the shooting will be how anti-anti-Trumpers spin it, having it both ways as usual by declining to forthrightly defend the president while aligning themselves with him anyway by parrying left-wing criticism of what happened. Whereas celebrating the shooting, overtly or obliquely, with variations of “that’s one less lib we need to worry about” will be the province of true-blue MAGA psychopaths.
Last night entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand drew a provocative picture of Trump’s recent moves on foreign policy by connecting a few dots. The president, he noted, has just called for a massive increase in the Pentagon’s budget, is threatening to annex neighbors’ territories, has proclaimed his very own imperial doctrine, and is withdrawing from international organizations. When the New York Times asked him in an interview if he sees any limit on his global powers, he answered, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“Any student of history would tell you: All the lights are blinking scarlet red,” Bertrand observed of that pattern. “At this stage we’re not even watching warning signs anymore. We’re watching the thing itself, in motion.”
That’s how I feel about the White House’s response to the Minneapolis shooting. We’ve reached the point already, still not quite one full year into this nightmare, where everyone understood instantly yesterday that there’s no chance the agent who killed Renee Good will face federal justice even if the facts clearly show what he did was unlawful. It’s not even a matter of Trump pardoning him; it’s unthinkable at this point that Pam Bondi’s rotten, servile Justice Department would prosecute him for killing an undesirable. The main role of the DOJ in this incident, per the FBI kicking state police off the case, will be to shield the agent from accountability under Minnesota law rather than ensure it.
The thing itself is in motion. Wake up.
