It is snowing now here, outside of New York City where I live, and over much of America. The snow is beautiful, but I can only think of the last lines of Joyce’s “The Dead”: “he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and all the dead”. America is very nearly dead, and not with Joyce’s tender devastating rue, but with a devastating state violence and cruelty no living American has ever experienced.
There have not been three weeks since Renée Good, an innocent American citizen caught in the middle of an Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) operation in her native Minneapolis, was shot three times – in her arm, her left breast, and her head – by an Ice agent as she hysterically tried to drive to safety. Though video, taken from several different angles, clearly shows her driving her car away from the agent who shot her, the Trump administration continues to insist that she was a “domestic terrorist” who was trying to kill federal agents with her Honda Pilot, her young son’s toy animals lying half out of her glove compartment.
And now, on Saturday (24 January), there was the equally cold-blooded murder of Alex Pretti. Pretti was a 37-year-old man who worked as a nurse in the intensive care unit of Minneapolis’s VA Health Care System, which is dedicated to caring for veterans. As with the shooting of Good, several videos, from a variety of angles, clearly show that Pretti posed no threat to the heavily armed Ice agents who surrounded him. He had gone to the scene to monitor Ice treatment of immigrants and protesters. He had both hands in the air, one holding his phone as he filmed the situation, the other empty. A born protector it seems, perhaps some sort of wounded sentinel – he lived alone with an “older dog” and touchingly conferred with his father before going to the Ice operation – he came to the aid of a woman protester who had been pepper sprayed in the face by an Ice agent. Something like seven burly agents, armed to the teeth, pounced on him, pushing him to the ground and beating him. One of the agents can clearly be seen taking a gun out of what appears to be Pretti’s belt and holding it in the air. Immediately after that, an agent shoots the defenceless VA nurse in the back, and another agent shoots him nine times. Minnesota law allows people to carry a concealed gun; it is reasonable to assume that Pretti took his with him because he was afraid.
As with Good, Trump and his people fell back on their by-now familiar strategy, dating back to Germany in the 1930s, of repeating a lie until people accept it as truth. Pretti, said Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, “committed an act of domestic terrorism”. Gregory Bovino, the Ice “commander-at-large” – who likes to pronounce “Gestapo” on TV, with an echt “-shtapo”; as in, “we are not the Geshtapo” – claimed that Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement”. It is possible to imagine Steve Bannon, Trump’s de facto Minister of Public Engagement and Propaganda – he is a darling of the liberal media, always ready with metric-popping copy – making index cards for Trump on how to slowly bend democracy to his demented will: demonise, enrage, frighten, lie, inure to violence. That last seems to be what is happening in Minnesota now.
From all reports, the agents who murdered Good and Pretti were veterans of Ice who had been with the agency for many years. It seems implausible, as people are saying, that they fired their weapons as a result of inexperience and a lack of training; as a result of being unprepared for the job they were sent to do. More likely is a different scenario: they are increasingly willing to kill on the slightest pretext. Because the cat is now out of the bag. Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, had it almost exactly right when he said at a news conference yesterday that, with the killings in Minnesota, America had reached an “inflection point”. The country is past inflection. It is speeding toward some sort of tyranny.
The dynamic is now as obvious as the videos of Good’s and Pretti’s murders. Having turned Ice into his very own secret police, Trump and his people are proceeding in stages. First they seemed to pursue only violent criminals who were in this country illegally. Then they expanded to include all undocumented immigrants. Then all immigrants were fair game. And now, having broken the sacred taboo of American police killing American citizens at will, they are, in effect, instructing all Americans to fear for their lives if they oppose the regime’s will. By not apologising, by not investigating, by promulgating, over and over, the very opposite version of what happened, they are signalling, baldly, their intentions to make their lawbreaking the new law of the land.
Shocked and outraged by violence, Americans and the American political establishment will rise up in implacable opposition. Inured to and exhausted by violence, the spirit of opposition will shrivel up and die on the vine of endless indignant editorials, op-eds and commentary: “Yes, we will wait for an investigation, but, please, in the meantime, be reasonable.” Where is Gavin Newsom, the pampered poseur? Where are the other Democratic presidential “frontrunners”? (Kamala Harris at least has an excuse: she has been busy closing on her new $8 million house in Malibu.) Where is the impassioned opposition of Democratic congressmen and senators? They primp and seethe for the cameras on CNN, but they are nowhere to be found on the floor of the House or the Senate, where they should be denouncing, by name, Trump, his cohorts, and the cowardly Republicans who enable them. The Democrats say they are going to make a brave stand and refuse to vote for continued funding for the Department of Homeland Security. That is like making a brave stand and refusing to eat Borscht in order to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.
Americans will be paralysed when, should the Republicans lose the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in the midterm elections this November, Trump declares the elections rigged, imposes martial law while recounts are being interminably done, and dispatches troops – by that point a wearyingly familiar presence in American places – to quell protests. But, then, even if there were to be some sort of civil, peaceful mass uprising, Trump would know what to do. He would simply manufacture another crisis, the liberal commentariat would apply themselves to their navels – Is Nato dead? Is the UN dead? Is the rules-based liberal order dead? Is the special relationship dead? – that crisis would fizzle out, and another would take its place, and so on.
Two things are for certain. These people are geniuses at creating havoc. With them, Goebbels meets PT Barnum. They thrive only in opposition, so they know, in their bones, how to make war on their own societies once they are in power. What is authoritarianism, after all, but a spirit of absolute liberty run amok on just one side? The other certain thing is that, come November, America will face a reckoning more critical than even the Civil War. Trump is obsessed with his election loss, his impeachments, his criminal prosecutions and criminal conviction. His vindictive fury is what drives him. If the Democrats carry the House in November, as they almost inevitably will, they will impeach him, several times over; Trump will never allow himself to be impeached again.
Through the spectacle of their crimes, up to and including killing, Maga are making it clear that, as they say in American gangster movies, “you will never take me alive”. Trump and his regime will never give up power voluntarily. Never. Americans, and America’s European allies, had better start getting that into their heads.
[Further reading: On patrol with Ice-spotters in Minneapolis]
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