Only two miles separate the streets in Minneapolis where George Floyd and Alex Pretti were killed. Both took place on the asphalt. Both were broadcast to the world. Floyd’s death in 2020 triggered a protest movement that washed through the culture, overturning how the world thought about race and ideas like “equality”. At the time, President Donald Trump spoke to Floyd’s family to express the “nation’s deepest condolences and most heartfelt sympathies” and criticised the policeman who had put his knee on Floyd’s neck. He threatened to send in the National Guard if the local police force could not control the riots but the Democratic governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, called in the troops before Trump had the opportunity.
Six years later, Trump’s response back then looks quaint in comparison to the ruthless relish with which he is presiding over the militarisation of American cities today. Unlike in 2020, his federal forces were already roaming Minneapolis’s streets in masks when Pretti was killed on the morning of 24 January. And it was US Border Patrol, an unaccountable militia beholden to the president’s whims, not the local police force, who killed Pretti. That matters because Trump’s appetite for exercising his power has only grown since his first term. Or, perhaps more accurately, the constraints placed on him by Congress and officials around him are so slack that his appetite for power is unchallenged.
The protests now roiling Minneapolis are centred around something much less ambiguous and polarising than “systemic racism”. They are about the First and Second Amendments – freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. The White House is backtracking on claims that Pretti’s killing was justified because he had a gun. This is uniting the National Rifle Association with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The Democrat city mayor, Jacob Frey, who was heckled in 2020 for not defunding the police, is directing the city’s anger towards an alien federal force.
Trump has always lied his way through the working day. But in his second term, this habit has afflicted his senior officials too. The secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon. Stephen Miller, Trump’s effective prime minister, who was once described to me by a source close to the White House as having the “bedside manner of Himmler”, has portrayed Pretti as an “assassin” who was trying to “murder” federal agents. There is no evidence to suggest either of these statements are true.
These lies have a practical purpose for the administration. They provide a script for Trump’s supporters to launder his tyrannical impulses. They befuddle his opponents in the Democratic Party and the media who must then spend their time refuting the official narrative. They also give immigration officers carte blanche on how to act. The agents know that even if they put ten bullets in the chest of a man lying on the street, the administration will construct a narrative that justifies their pulling the trigger. The pardons for the 6 January 2021 Capitol rioters offered the prospect of effective immunity to those who side with Trump in his war against the constitutional order. But the clearest sign that the administration will intervene to protect their officials no matter what they do are the reports that federal agents have blocked local and state authorities from investigating the killing.
For both sides in Minneapolis, the stakes risk becoming existential. The chance that some pivotal event like 6 January happens and presents yet another destructive moment in the story of American democracy is high. Trump’s decision to send Tom Homan, the deportation chief, who is less keen on pyrotechnic tactics than Noem, to take the lead in Minnesota suggests he knows Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has crossed a line. On 26 January, the Border Patrol commander was ordered to leave the city, and the president claimed the administration was “reviewing everything”.
There has been a sense that Trump’s team is keen for the temperature to soar so that it can cash in on the subsequent chaos. The extension of state power into liberal cities is a way to terrorise the opposition. If the protests descend into the violent riots that we saw in 2020, then expect widespread calls from the Maga movement for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Remember that Trump’s relatively soft line during the Black Lives Matter riots came months before his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Charles Homans has observed in the New York Times that Ice agents, wearing tactical gear and gas masks as they send tear-gas canisters looping through the air, look more like platoons of Marines trying to subdue a neighbourhood of angry locals during the war on terror than men on a law enforcement operation in an American city. For decades, federal police have accumulated the equipment, style and weapons of the military.
As we saw in Caracas, the Trump administration is deliberately blurring the line between the army and police, between home and abroad. The president is governing domestically with the same force that he rules America’s empire as commander-in-chief overseas. The result is a nation that is fast descending to a dark, paranoid and violent place.
[Further reading: Europe must break from America]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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